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procedural salt flats, mountains, forests

The point isn’t that all the boilerplate should be inherently unenforceable. Most of it is pretty benign. “This is the address to which you should address your billing dispute.” “We really can’t promise that our network is so robust you can run a hospital or nuclear submarine on it. So please don’t try.” “In case for some reason you were confused, the trademark ‘Verizon’ is not yours, even though it’s stamped on your phone.” But sometimes there’s something nasty in there. Forced arbitration clauses. Class action waivers. Undisclosed charges (or whatever it is that makes AT&T think it can just tack on a few dollars in extra charges every month to pad its bottom line). There’s really nothing an individual consumer can do about any of this. Anyway, two points. 1. The Consumer Financial Protectin Bureau is really important to curb the worst of these abuses. 2. Let’s not blame people for “agreeing” to things that they didn’t actually agree to in any meaningful way.

The computers we have today are not bicycles. Instead we’ve got something more like a car for the mind. Which, you know, does get you around and is easier and more comfortable than a bike. But at what cost? When we decided that America would be a place for cars, we signed ourselves up for urban sprawl, air pollution, car crashes, and oil wars. And even on a human scale, cars are as much liabilities as they are assets — I’m sure we’ve all known people working terrible jobs to keep their junker running so they can get to their terrible job.

We spoke to some of our favorite bot-makers about their favorite Twitter bots — their own, and made by others in the #botALLY community — to surface some lesser-known projects worth following.

Immersing yourself in Art Angels is like being inside a vibrantly hued video game — a joyride down Rainbow Road. But for every moment that Boucher let us into her world, there’s another when she’s receding from view, lost in a private reverie, humming to amuse nobody but herself. And thank God, because this is the strange charm I was scared her music might lose as it sought and found a larger audience. “If you’re looking for a dream girl,” she sings with a hard-won assertiveness on the final track, “I’ll never be your dream girl.” Grimes still makes superhero music for introverts, fight songs for people who did not realize they were strong until the perfect song came along and told them so.

Garden of Delete is unlike anything that Daniel Lopatin has done, in terms of technique, mood, or scope. It is denser than his previous albums, by several orders of magnitude. It is more varied, and it is funnier—scarier, too. The album carries with it a risk of whiplash that's as potent on the 15th listen as on the first.

One of the most notable and striking differences between Art Angels and its Top 40 kin is that these are not love songs. The album is an epic holiday buffet of tendentious feminist fuck-off, with second helpings for anonymous commenters and music industry blood-suckers. Her conflicted, vertiginous relationship with the fast fame that followed Visions seems to have led her to a place of DGAF liberation.

We expect women to perform a specific kind of resilience: they must loudly and spectacularly demonstrate that they have overcome patriarchal oppression. Noisy feminism is both a new gender norm for women to embody and a tool white supremacy uses to scapegoat non-white men for lingering sexism.

At 14:57:44, SilverFox316 wrote: Back from 1936 Berlin; incapacitated FreedomFighter69 before he could pull his little stunt. Freedomfighter69, as you are a new member, please read IATT Bulletin 1147 regarding the killing of Hitler before your next excursion. Failure to do so may result in your expulsion per Bylaw 223.

Drawings of animals and plants.

Explore Internet Archive Book Images's 5,328,417 photos on Flickr!

Resources for creating Twitter bots.

Some bot resources.

We all have to work towards making inclusion an ordinary occurrence. Rather than wonder about how to adequately represent exactly 17% colored people in an image that only has three people in it, chill out and drop some extra color in there. You are neither atoning for hundreds of years of continued injustice, nor creating institutionalized racism against white people. You’re just making the world a little friendlier for the many, many people alienated by their media. Don’t overthink it, just go for it.

In this debate (which I guess it is now), the participants actually agree on the basic principle that: you should support a woman over a man for president provided that her views aren’t really bad. The only thing we disagree on is whether the proviso at the end of that principle is satisfied here. I think Hillary’s actions and views about the poor are so egregious that they should disqualify her from our support (especially where there is a better candidate out there). Others don’t think they are egregious enough to warrant disqualification.

A review of Ann Leckie’s ‘Imperial Radch’ trilogy. Central to Leckie’s trilogy is how important it is to feel a sense of control over one’s identity and how being recognized is a precondition for having power. These themes are not exclusive to one particular time or place, of course, but Leckie taps acutely into the feelings (and fears) that drive current American politics and movements for change. One of the chief pleasures of the trilogy is just how many wrongs Breq tries to make right and how committed she is to making incremental progress even when problems become fraught and complicated. Breq’s actions are underscored by her profound grief, anger, and shame that give way, even if just a little bit, to the solace and hope she finds in her crew and her makeshift family of A.I.s. The end of Ancillary Mercy is satisfying because it is so very un-Radchaai: diverse, messy, and honest. “In the end,” Breq realizes, “it’s only ever been one step, and then the next.”

On translation Ann Leckie's ‘Imperial Radch’ series: What is clear in all of these responses is that by examining the notions of ‘neutral’ and ‘feminine’ in grammar and gender through the lens of translation, we reveal their complexity – and some of their possible futures in languages, in both literature and speech.

The Wave Organ is a wave-activated acoustic sculpture located on a jetty in the San Francisco Bay. Sound is created by the impact of waves against the pipe ends and the subsequent movement of the water in and out of the pipes. The sound heard at the site is subtle, requiring visitors to become sensitized to its music, and at the same time to the music of the environment. The Wave Organ sounds best at high tide.

Welcome to birdWalker, a website of birding photos and trip reports by Bill Walker and Mary Wisnewski, California birders based in Santa Clara County. We've been collecting our trip reports since 1996, we have now recorded 857 trips and 784 species.

Ever wonder what's running under the hood here at CSS-Tricks? Well, it's been a while since we last shared the WordPress plugins used here on the site, and

Black people on American shores have always been seen as innately criminal. This assumption of criminality traces back beyond before the very birth of this country. Even after Americans won their independence in the Revolutionary War, blacks who tried to escape from or fight their way out of enslavement were seen as thieves, stealing their own bodies from someone else.

It started out as a routine missing persons case. But by the time the internet was done with her, Elisa Lam had become a macabre celebrity, a conspiracy magnet—and the inspiration for a TV series.

People like to talk about how Dilla had the best "ear" in hip hop, and they're totally right. Listen to full beat again and listen to just the bass part: it's a legitimate, brand-new bassline that wasn't in the original song. Listen to that transition between guit_lo and string_bass_1: there's a syncopated bass note right at the end of guit_lo and then bam, it segues right into that higher note (maybe a fifth interval? I suck at music theory). And you can't get that just by chopping things up randomly, even if you select good samples.

Pandora dominates this dismal, depressing, unpromising market completely, and it will continue to do so until Congress fixes the pre-1972 sound recordings issue. The next time you have a fleeting thought about how internet radio sucks, and could be better—well, now you know what’s to blame. It’s copyright. (You can always blame copyright).

Perhaps it was just as well, then, that the exhibition did not include a Sallman painting familiarly known as "Sputnik Christ." Painted in the late 1950's, it shows a monumental Jesus standing atop Earth, his figure extending into outer space, with planets, meteors and satellites whizzing by.

If police can’t do their jobs without violating the constitutional rights of black people, then we must question the institution of policing rather than the protesters who expose its transgressions. … In the end, the “Ferguson Effect” lacks factual basis. It took months of nationwide unrest, a litany of shocking videos and detailed reports of police violence to convince the nation that policing in America needed to be fundamentally changed. The fact that a theory lacking evidentiary support could be so hastily endorsed by some of the nation’s foremost institutions speaks to the enduring power of the belief that aggressive policing is the only way to keep black communities safe. This notion, applied exclusively to black communities, is exactly what needs to change.

Critic Noah Berlatsky examines what Quentin Tarantino's use and imagining of Johnny Cash's music means.

This text is a transcript of a presentation I have given on October 9, 2015, at the CityCode conference in Chicago. … Why do we code?

Talk given on September 14, 2015, at the FREMTIDENS INTERNET conference in Copenhagen, Denmark. There are a few guiding principles we should follow in any attempt at regulating the Internet.

Talk given on September 9, 2014, at the HOW Interactive Design conference in Washington, DC. I think it's time to ask ourselves a very designy question: "What is the web actually for?" I will argue that there are three competing visions of the web right now. The one we settle on will determine whether the idiosyncratic, fun Internet of today can survive. Vision 1: CONNECT KNOWLEDGE, PEOPLE, AND CATS. Vision 2: FIX THE WORLD WITH SOFTWARE Vision 3: BECOME AS GODS, IMMORTAL CREATURES OF PURE ENERGY LIVING IN A CRYSTALLINE PARADISE OF OUR OWN CONSTRUCTION (Vision 1 is the right one.)