Free download of samples made from a collection of broken instruments.
The Broken Instruments Sample Pack is a free download of Found Sound Nation's favorite sounds from the Symphony for a Broken Orchestra Project.
John Lee on Twitter: "Some things that Milton Glaser said to my SVA class."
Some things that Milton Glaser said to my SVA class, which I still think are good. In no particular order:
- It should be impossible to be in the arts and not be generous
- One of art's highest functions is to prevent ppl from killing each other.
- Fame & money are corrosive, and you need to recognize this early
- Art is a survival mechanism
- Make ppl feel like they have something in common; that they aren't alone
- Every artist should view themselves as citizens, not illustrators, designers etc.
- Drawing is one of the only times he sees things that are 'real'
- It's one of the rare experiences that he creates for himself. "The noise disappears"
- Drawing shows your brain
- Drawing expressively and evocatively is harder than drawing realistically
- Artists don't say "where do I begin?" They've already began.
- Drawing is in the realm of the miraculous. It's a miraculous occurrence.
- The most modest of subjects can come alive in a drawing
- What is the distance between what you see, and what you draw?
- ALL my work is personal work. The only boundary is how I determine how it's used.
- You get nothing but problems when you do work that conflicts w your integrity.
- In any design problem, your client has needs, your audience has needs, but you also have needs
- You attract what you do
- Everything is connected and has an effect on the world.
- There is no such thing as coincidence
- Whether you like it or not, your work is ABOUT social responsibility
- Don't overprotect. Share your vision at all times
Curated directory of the best free resources and tools for non-technical entrepreneurs. Packed with the best discount codes for your favourite online tools.
Tiara Darnell: Can White Portland's Fragility Handle a Megaquake? (PDX Monthly)
Nope. But here we are anyway.
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Collectively, your “allyship” of convenience hasn’t served Black America. Even if you see yourself apart from them, you are cut from the same cloth as Amy Cooper, Tom Cotton, and the folks who stand on the 1st amendment to provide platforms for their voices without thinking through the consequences of your actions. Your silence because you’re afraid of what your family, colleagues, or regular group of brunch friends will say is your complicity. Your quiet, gullible optimism that if you work to “fix” racism then the discomfort you feel in being confronted about it will go away is your tacit consent to targets put on Black lives everywhere.
Acknowledge it away—your white privilege—but it will always be a tool you can employ at will as a weapon against Black people or a tool to shield your own transgressions. Defund the police? Yes and defund and disinvest in yourselves. Liberal, conservative—whatever. You are superspreaders of a sickening power none of us can wholly break free from.
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Your greatest challenge as individuals is, and in perpetuity will be, to hold yourself accountable and to teach your children to do the same. Your everyday actions and inactions are threads in the larger narrative playing out right now in cities and towns here and around the world.
Whether you’re a white Portlander or a white person anywhere else (yes, even those of you with Black partners, children, or other family members), start on the most granular level. To borrow a term from the lexicon of pandemic, be your own contact tracer: investigate how your inner thoughts and your past and present interactions with the Black people you encounter in your everyday life upholds the values of white supremacy and the white dominant status quo.
Open source, experimental, and tiny tools roundup
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This is a list of smaller tools that might be useful in building your game/website/interactive project. Although I’ve mostly also included ‘standards’, this list has a focus on artful tools & toys that are as fun to use as they are functional.
The goal of this list is to enable making entirely outside of closed production ecosystems or walled software gardens.
Taylor Lorenz: ‘Challenge Accepted’: Why Women Are Posting Black-and-White Selfies (NYT)
A representative from Instagram said that the earliest post the company could surface for this current cycle of the challenge was posted a week and a half ago by the Brazilian journalist Ana Paula Padrão. Others have noted that women in Turkey began sharing black-and-white photos recently to raise awareness about femicide.
Though the portraits have spread widely, the posts themselves say very little. Like the black square, which became a symbol of solidarity with Black people but asked very little of those who shared it, the black-and-white selfie allows users to feel as if they’re taking a stand while saying almost nothing. Influencers and celebrities love these types of “challenges” because they don’t require actual advocacy, which might alienate certain factions of their fan base.
A project by the Everytown for Gun Safety organization.
The Gun Violence Archive is an online archive of gun violence incidents collected from over 7,500 law enforcement, media, government and commercial sources daily in an effort to provide near-real time data about the results of gun violence. GVA is an independent data collection and research group with no affiliation with any advocacy organization.
The Gun Violence Archive is an online archive of gun violence incidents collected from over 7,500 law enforcement, media, government and commercial sources daily in an effort to provide near-real time data about the results of gun violence. GVA is an independent data collection and research group with no affiliation with any advocacy organization.
Blair Stenvick: One Year After Titi Gulley’s Death, Her Family Is Left With the Same Questions (Portland Mercury)
The bodies of other Black people have been found hanging in trees in the last month in California, New York, and Texas. In those cases, police have also declared the cases to be suicides. But the deceased’s family members tend to disagree, noting that the image of a Black person hanging from a tree has a specific context rooted in the United State’s history of racist lynchings. Gulley’s story is often mentioned alongside the more recent incidents, prompting people to reach out to Robinson.
“Since George Floyd died, a lot of people have been hitting me up,” Robinson said. “Trying to ask questions and giving me information… It’s just been one person after another.
That renewed attention in Gulley’s case has also resulted in a new wave of donations to a GoFundMe Robinson initially set up to cover her child’s funeral costs last year. Robinson said she now plans to use those funds to establish a cash reward for relevant information about Gulley’s death, and to place a billboard on Southeast 82nd Ave—one of the last places Gulley was seen alive—asking for information.
“I think the best way to get help with what’s going on—because I can’t get help from the police department—is to just start raising money,” she said.
Ashley Fetters: What to Ask Instead of ‘How Are You?’ During a Pandemic (The Atlantic)
Everyone’s doing badly. We need better questions to ask.
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Tannen is partial to “What am I interrupting?” as a conversation starter for phone calls. Meanwhile, Butler recommends “Are you still holding up okay?,” which can work as a succinct check-in before moving the discussion to other matters: It tacitly acknowledges the circumstances but nudges the respondent toward a succinct yes-or-no (or “More or less!”) answer. In my own conversations, I like to go with “What’s your day been like so far?,” which moves the long-term circumstances into the backdrop and asks for only a small, trivial morsel of information.
But with close friends and family, especially, continuing the mutual charade of “I’m fine, thank you” can seem pointless when both sides know that neither of them is fine. These settings are where “How are you?” belongs these days: where the asker is prepared for an honest answer.
Sean O'Neal: Terry Riley turns an R&B ditty into 20 minutes of madness (AV Club)
Riley was particularly interested in the way playing the same patterned phrases against each other can create a disjointed rhythm and unusual harmony (a technique he would apply to some of his more familiar, more formal minimalist compositions like 1964’s ‘In C’). So when the owner of a Philadelphia disco—clearly still addled from watching Riley perform an all-night concert of alto-sax feedback—commissioned him to compose a “theme” for his nightclub, Riley took the opportunity to apply that process to something a little more club-friendly that he could totally fuck with.
Thread by @MicahHerskind: A common (& understandable) question: "what's the alternative to prison? What will replace it?"
A common (& understandable) question: "what's the alternative to prison? What will replace it?"
Making a thread because I’m tired of answering individually. The short answer: there isn't ONE alternative, and the question fundamentally misunderstands what abolition proposes.
And the followup thread: https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1228784188054286337.html
Phil Hawksworth: Using Trello as a Super Simple CMS (CSS-Tricks)
Sometimes our sites need a little sprinkling of content management. Not always. Not a lot. But a bit. The CMS market is thriving with affordable, approachable products, so we’re not short of options.
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Sometimes, though, it’s nice to use a really simple tool that anyone updating content on the site is already familiar with, rather than getting to grips with a new CMS.
I like Trello a lot for managing ideas and tasks. And it has an API. Why not use it as a content source for a web site? I mean, hey, if we can do it with Google Sheets, then what’s to stop us from trying other things?
Alex Zielinski: Hall Monitor: Fair Weather Wheeler (Portland Mercury)
Now that the federal police have retreated from the front lines of Portland’s nightly demonstrations, Mayor Ted Wheeler has returned to demonizing those protesting police brutality.
"This is not advocacy to reform or transform any system," said Wheeler, speaking at a Thursday news conference, where he condemned the previous night’s protest outside the Portland Police Bureau's (PPB) East Precinct, claiming that the demonstrations are no longer about racial justice and police accountability.
“The conversation we are having right now is keeping us from the important work of racial justice, equity and comprehensive and thoughtful reform,” Wheeler said about the protests.
Yet it was just two weeks ago that Wheeler stood among the same group of protesters, inhaling plumes of tear gas and decrying the actions of federal police outside the city’s federal courthouse. It appears that defending his citizens from police brutality is only a priority when it’s not his own police force swinging batons at nonviolent protesters.
When camouflaged federal officers shot tear gas and impact munitions at Portlanders, Wheeler quickly severed PPB’s ties with federal law enforcement agencies and went on national TV shows to decry the feds’ “unconstitutional” tactics, and applaud his city’s uprising against police violence.
But now that the nation’s attention has shifted away from Portland, Wheeler’s back to trusting law enforcement’s incendiary narrative about these demonstrations without considering the experiences of protesters and observers on the ground.
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Wheeler instead used his platform Thursday to elevate the voices of police officers, city staff who believe their exhaustion from working months of protests is a bigger concern than the public’s right to oppose their years of disproportionate abuse against people of color.
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“We’re protesting to defund the police and invest in the community,” said Hester, whose voice is raspy from leading nightly protest chants. “And we haven’t seen that yet. It’s pretty simple, this isn’t over until we achieve that.”
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Wheeler mentioned Trump’s campaign tactics Thursday, but he didn’t mention another re-election campaign headed to the November ballot: His own. Like Trump, Wheeler is using these protests as a way to gain political points, not an opportunity to question if the reforms he’s comfortable with are what
Portlanders are actually asking for.
Each morning, Wheeler receives a briefing from PPB leadership about the previous nights’ protests, which inform his understanding of a movement meant to dismantle the police force. He’d do well to start giving the same type of attention to the people calling for change.
Since 2015, The Post has created a database cataloging every fatal shooting nationwide by a police officer in the line of duty.
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Although half of the people shot and killed by police are white, black Americans are shot at a disproportionate rate. They account for less than 13 percent of the U.S. population, but are killed by police at more than twice the rate of white Americans. Hispanic Americans are also killed by police at a disproportionate rate.
Craig Silverman and Ryan Mac: Facebook Fired An Employee Who Collected Evidence Of Right-Wing Pages Getting Preferential Treatment (Buzzfeed News)
On July 22, a Facebook employee posted a message to the company’s internal misinformation policy group noting that some misinformation strikes against Breitbart had been cleared by someone at Facebook seemingly acting on the publication's behalf.
“A Breitbart escalation marked ‘urgent: end of day’ was resolved on the same day, with all misinformation strikes against Breitbart’s page and against their domain cleared without explanation,” the employee wrote.
The same employee said a partly false rating applied to an Instagram post from Charlie Kirk was flagged for “priority” escalation by Joel Kaplan, the company’s vice president of global public policy. Kaplan once served in George W. Bush’s administration and drew criticism for publicly supporting Brett Kavanaugh’s controversial nomination to the Supreme Court.
Long-time nuclear waste warning messages are intended to deter human intrusion at nuclear waste repositories in the far future, within or above the order of magnitude of 10,000 years. Nuclear semiotics is an interdisciplinary field of research, first done by the Human Interference Task Force in 1981.
Parker Higgins: Microsoft Won't Fix TikTok's Problems (Vice)
A real solution lies not in banning TikTok or transferring its ownership to Microsoft, but in reevaluating the relationship between social media users and the platforms we create.
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The app may collect too much data about users, but that's true of every other app users are likely to have on their phones. That data may end up in government hands, but we've known since at least the earliest Snowden revelations in 2013 that data stored with major American tech companies was also vulnerable to government capture. And while it's possible that TikTok could subtly shape its users timeline to push some secret agenda, we also know that YouTube and Facebook algorithms have been doing the same, intentionally or otherwise, for years. TikTok may censor some valuable speech or cut users off without due process or a clear appeal, but so does Amazon.
Ultimately, arguments that TikTok is “worse” than the major U.S.-based social media networks assume that users are at the mercy of tech firms no matter what. The only question is whether the invisible hands shaping the code you run and the content you can see are based in San Francisco or Beijing.
That's too limited a view. Once you realize that TikTok suffers from the same kinds of problems as the other social media platforms (along with a dash of presidential ego-bruising and a scoop of xenophobia), it's clear that a real solution lies not in banning the software or transferring its ownership to Microsoft, but in reevaluating the relationship between social media users and the platforms we create, more broadly.
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When you strip away the vague invocations of “the Chinese” and a general distaste for Gen Z politics, the criticisms of TikTok that remain are the ones that apply to Facebook, to YouTube, to Twitter, even to Amazon and Google Search and others. The way out is not by changing the name of the service or the country of its operator, but by empowering users to avoid that kind of platform subjugation in the first place.
Lois Beckett: Anti-fascists linked to zero murders in the US in 25 years (The Guardian)
As Trump rails against ‘far-left’ fascism, new database shows leftwing attacks have left far fewer people dead than violence by rightwing extremists.
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American white supremacists and other rightwing extremists have carried out attacks that left at least 329 victims dead, according to the database.
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Daily interpersonal violence and state violence pose a much greater threat to Americans than any kind of extremist terror attack. More than 100,000 people have been killed in gun homicides in the United States in the past decade, according to estimates from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. US police officers shoot nearly 1,000 Americans to death each year. Black Americans are more than twice as likely to be shot by the police as white Americans, according to analysis by the Washington Post and the Guardian.
Irena Sendler was without doubt a very courageous woman who repeatedly risked her own life to save hundreds of Jewish children from the Warsaw ghetto during the German occupation of Poland in World War 2 - and there is certainly nothing wrong with commemorating her heroism.
However, what should immediately be obvious about this particular "tribute" is that it contains a lot of information about Sendler that is completely wrong. It also turns into an agenda-driven attack on Al Gore and Barack Obama, as well as questioning the credibility of the Nobel Peace Prize (early versions of the chain letter only mentioned Gore, but Obama was thrown into the mix after he became US President).
Elliott Young: Trump just adding fuel to fire set by Portland’s Democratic leaders (Houston Chronicle)
It’s not just protesters who are getting abused by the Portland police. The Department of Justice entered into a settlement agreement with the city in 2014 because of its unconstitutional policing of people with mental illness, including the beating to death in custody of James Chasse. Last year, 60 percent of the people killed by the Portland police were suffering a mental health crisis. Half of arrests and half of use-of-force incidents in the past few years are of homeless people. And Black Portlanders continue to be subject to traffic stops and searches at wildly disproportionate rates.
So, when the mayor of Portland poses as the leader of the Resistance, it causes us to pause. While we do oppose federal agents in our streets, the real danger we have been facing in Portland since long before Trump’s election has been the local police.
Mike Baker: Federal Officers Hit Portland Mayor With Tear Gas (NYT)
The mayor of Portland, Ted Wheeler, was left coughing and wincing in the middle of his own city Wednesday night after federal officers deployed tear gas into a crowd of protesters that Mr. Wheeler had joined outside the federal courthouse.
Mr. Wheeler, who scrambled to put on goggles while denouncing what he called the “urban warfare” tactic of the federal agents, said he was outraged by the use of tear gas and that it was only making protesters more angry.
“I’m not going to lie — it stings; it’s hard to breathe,” Mr. Wheeler said. “And I can tell you with 100 percent honesty, I saw nothing which provoked this response.”
He called it an “egregious overreaction” on the part of the federal officers, and not a de-escalation strategy.
“It’s got to stop now,” he declared.
But the Democratic mayor, 57, has also long been the target of Portland protesters infuriated by the city police’s own use of tear gas, which was persistent until a federal judge ordered the city to use it only when there was a safety issue. As Mr. Wheeler went through the crowds on Wednesday, some threw objects in his direction, and others called for his resignation, chanting, “Tear Gas Teddy.”