Where you been?
Pitchfork: Daily Music News: “J. Mascis and Lou Barlow will perform together under the Dinosaur Jr. name for the first time in 15 years.”
Pitchfork: Daily Music News: “J. Mascis and Lou Barlow will perform together under the Dinosaur Jr. name for the first time in 15 years.”
A digital puff of marijuana, for example, temporarily slows the action of the game like a sports replay. Taking an Ecstasy tablet creates a mellow atmosphere that can pacify aggressive foes. The use of crack momentarily makes the player a marksman: a "crack" shot.
But using each drug also leads to addiction, which can lead to blackouts that cost the player inventory and to demotions or even expulsion from the police force, which halts progress in the game. In measured doses, the substances can make a tough challenge easier, but the makers of the game say it is possible to play without using the drugs at all.
The New York Times > Technology > Circuits > Where a Puff of Marijuana Is the Ultimate Power-Up
O'Reilly Network: Remixing Culture: An Interview with Lawrence Lessig
I was at the World Social Forum, but much of what was going on at the World Social Forum was related to Brazil's leadership in spreading free software and free culture. So the free software movement has exploded in Brazil, led in part by the government, which is increasingly using free software in its own work and requiring it for much of the government's coding work. The free culture movement is being pushed in Brazil largely because of the culture minister, Gilberto Gil, who envisions a future where an increasingly large proportion of the content in Brazil is made available to the world via Creative Commons licenses.
Now the strategy in both cases is to increase wealth in Brazil. The view of free software is that it's far better for Brazil if the technology industry is trained in the skills needed to build and modify and extend free software than if they're trained in the skills of how to implement a patch for the latest Windows virus. That's about technology self-sufficiency.
And in the free culture context, Brazil is eager to have their music spread broadly to increase the demand for Brazilian musicians. They have a project to create a huge archive of Brazilian music licensed under Creative Commons licenses, which will encourage people to get access to it and share it for noncommercial purposes and remix it.
It's perhaps the most exciting place in the world right now for these issues. They're extremely well-educated and committed people there. And the movement is fundamentally political. It's a mix of all kinds of people from Brazil--I mean, particularly young, but all sorts of young people. Men and women, people who have a technical background, people who don't--all of whom are demanding a cultural and technological future for Brazil that is not dependent on someone else. That's the essential feature in both the software and culture contexts. They want a future where they're not dependent on Microsoft and a future in which they're not dependent on rich copyright holders in the United States.
Speaking of Faith | Brother Thây: A Radio Pilgrimage with Thich Nhat Hanh
Forcibly exiled from his native country, Thich Nhat Hanh is currently visiting Vietnam for the first time in nearly forty years. In 2003, Speaking of Faith took a radio pilgrimage with Vietnamese Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh at a Christian conference center in a lakeside setting of rural Wisconsin. Here, Nhat Hanh discusses the concepts of "engaged Buddhism," "being peace," and "mindfulness" with host Krista Tippett.
"He'd done his work," Winkel Thompson said, adding, in Hunter Thompson's own words, "He was a road man for the lords of karma."
Rocky Mountain News: Family says writer didn't kill himself out of desperation
I'm told that this is the place to get burritos in Boston, and indeed possibly the finest burrito this side of the Mississippi.
Only a handful of major-station radio gems remain on the dial anywhere in the country, stations that still fly their flags of ragged independence like beacons in a wasteland of sameness and blandness and endless replays of Beyoncé and Eric Clapton and Sting, while the FCC stands behind them all like a psychotic nun with a giant ruler and a deep scowl and callused nipples.
Mark Morford is big on podcasting, too.
The Duchess of Northumberland’s controversial poison garden has been officially opened.
Why did the Greenland Norse prefer to starve rather than copy the ways of the Inuit? How did the Anasazi fail to notice that by squandering their piñon on structures, they were eliminating a precious food source? And how do we, in this 21st-century global village, continue to live in denial about impending climate change, something every credible climatologist has confirmed?
Judith Lewis: What Did the Last Easter Islander Say as He Chopped Down the Last Tree? "Jared Diamond, The best-selling author of Guns, Germs and Steel, asks whimsical questions with grave answers. In his latest book, he turns his attention to the collapse of civilization."
Arthur Magazine issue 15 is available as a free pdf: Meditation as a subversive activity; Jessica Yu talks about her Henry Darger documentary; "Hotel and Farm" by Ben Katchor and a special feature with lots of other comics; new columnist Douglas Rushkoff; Ian Svenonius has a conversation with the Secret Service. Ok!
Tagwebs, Flickr, and the Human Brain (by Jakob Lodwick)
Tagging, as seen on Flickr and other sites, allows you to organize things in a way that makes sense to your brain. You may also notice that tagging photos on Flickr is the first time that organizing something has made perfect sense.
This is fantastic and reminds me of the eternal golden braid, but I'm a little bit worried that this guy's mind is about to turn inside out like Robert Pirsig's did.
He was arguably the best breaking-news editor of his generation. He had incredibly sharp instincts about the real news angle of any story. He was a writer's editor as well and made substantial improvements to a story without changing the writer's voice or tampering with the style. Rather, he would get the writer to make the changes the story needed and then he would organize the rewritten prose logically so that it really flowed.
Lucien Carr was one of several fascinating real-life characters, like Neal Cassady, Carl Solomon, and Herbert Huncke, who became legendary through their association with the Beat writers. Lucien holds a special position here: he introduced Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg and William S. Burroughs to each other.
When I consider that a good deal of my time is spent running applications like Disk Defragmenter, Scandisk, Norton AV, Windows Update and Ad-Aware — none of which are available for the Mac platform — it doesn't make sense for me to "switch" to a Mac at this time.
Spring wildflowers of the Pohick Stream valley
I printed my writer's tips on one side of a sheet of paper and a .pdf map of Middle Earth on the other. It is perhaps the single most useful piece of paper ever printed. I can mock my friends' extensive use of the passive voice and their barbarously bad use of adverbs and then diagram the battle of Minias Tirith with a single piece of paper.
If you wash dishes by hand, here's a tip that will make cleanup go much quicker: rinse the dishes in the hottest water you can manage. If your heater is, like mine, set too high, that scalding water will drip off and evaporate like nobody's business.
(I picked this up reading the section on washing dishes in Cheryl Mendelson's Home Comforts because our dishwasher broke.)
As Apple keeps innovating, its challengers keep competing like engineers, thinking that advantages in storage capacity or battery life can make silk purses out of ugly, hard-to-use sows' ears of machines.
The first thing to do is carry a notebook and during quiet times or as the thought occurs to you, compile a list of anything that really interests you.
Reason: Gabbo Gets Laid. 2004: The Year of Puppet Sex (Thanks, Thatcher!)
For me, the defining moment of the year came when the Motion Picture Association of America required Trey Parker and Matt Stone to trim a few seconds from a sex scene in their marionette movie Team America: World Police. Even in its reduced state, the sequence probably set a record for explicit puppet-on-puppet sex.
I am doing 43 things.
I wasn't depressed about having to work on the day before the day before Christmas, but then I got on the bus which was totally empty and then I got on the train and saw all those sad bastards having a terrible Thursday. Now I'm feeling sorry for myself.
Detainees at the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, were shackled to the floor in fetal positions for more than 24 hours at a time, left without food and water, and allowed to defecate on themselves, an FBI agent who said he witnessed such abuse reported in a memo to supervisors, according to documents released yesterday.
FBI Agents Allege Abuse of Detainees at Guantanamo Bay (washingtonpost.com)
