It has been a very long and unlikely week.

Last Thursday Nick and I got on stage at Kinetik and played the best set either of us have ever played — a 50 minute performance, but it’s the last five that everyone’s talking about.

We had a message we wanted to deliver, and we did it. And a week later, the conversation about it is still going strong. It’s funny, before Nick and I went on stage we were talking about what could happen. We thought maybe a few people might get behind it. We also thought maybe we might get booed off stage. Worse yet, we thought maybe no one would notice or care.

Seven days, hundreds of shares, and 10k+ views later, people are still talking about misogyny and racism in industrial music. We’ve had hundreds of people get in touch to tell us how much they appreciate what we did. I’ve lost count of the number of women who’ve told us that this kind of imagery is exactly why they left the scene. And if I told you how many people (men and women alike) cried when they spoke to us about it, you wouldn’t actually believe me.

So, it’s a week later. The message is as clear as I could make it. Andy and Thomas have both said their piece on it. There have been articles, interviews, and editorials. And people are still talking about what it all means. About sexism, about racism. About art, communication, and community.

What does it say about our scene, that this resonates so strongly with so many people? What does it say about the conversations we haven’t been having? And what will happen if more people continue to say: We demand better.

I hope we’ll get to find out.

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(…or, Why I Haven’t Answered Your Email Yet.)

1: Leslie

Leslie, with whom I spent almost a decade attached at the hip, nearly died a couple of years ago when a couple of her vertebrae collapsed. She was in the hospital for a long time, and surgeries and months of intravenous antibiotics left her severely immunocompromised. A couple of weeks ago I got a call saying that she contracted an infection which went septic. Her heart valves were infected, her liver and kidneys were in serious trouble, and she was in a coma, on life support.

After a couple of days of her getting worse, I packed a suit, made a few phone calls to people who needed to know, and headed to Ottawa. The first few days were brutal. A lot of sitting around with other friends of hers and talking. A lot of thinking about what the funeral would look like. Much to everyone’s surprise and great relief (including the doctors), things slowly started getting better.

Leslie’s illness (and my visit) also coincided with the Zaphod Beeblebrox 20th anniversary week, which means that I filled in for Leslie as a guest DJ for the 20th anniversary edition of Industrial Strength Tuesdays. I’ve been part of Tuesdays for about ten of those 20 years, but it was really fucking tough to be in that booth without Leslie.

All told, I was in Ottawa about a week before I headed back home.

2: Graham

A few days after I got back to Toronto, I got the call that Graham had died. (My bag from Ottawa was still packed, suit untouched.)

I don’t even know how long I’ve known Graham. I met him at the first couple of 2600 meetings I ever went to, which means it was a loooong time ago. Mid to late 90s. We were teenagers. Not only does the cafe we had them at (Cafe Wim) not exist any more, but neither do the next two cafes it moved to after the first one closed.

The meeting I remember most vividly from those early 2600s (aside from the meeting where I was congratulated by Graham and Mike on how my ‘Hack of the Year’ had hit CNN and thinking “CNN. Well, I’m going to jail.”) is when we ran a telephone line from our table at Cafe Wim down to the payphone in the basement. We stripped the payphone wiring with a lighter, got some alligator clips, and one hastily assembled beige box later we were ringing up the payphones at the 2600 meetings happening in California or wherever the fuck it was we called. They couldn’t understand Paul’s accent (“No, I said Canada. CANADA! WE’RE CALLING FROM CANADA! WHERE SANTA LIVES!”) and Graham took the handset and became our ambassador for the rest of the meeting.

But the reason losing Graham is excruciating isn’t because we were hackers. It isn’t because we were going to the same raves as teenagers, or DJing the same raves a few years later. It isn’t because of the roadtrips we took, or the terrible movies we watched, or the fact that we always had each other’s backs when one of us was calling someone out for sexism/racism.

This is why losing Graham is excruciating: When you put all of those things together, when you’ve shared so many important and formative environments, you end up with the rarest of friends — someone who understands you. Not just someone who understands what’s important to you, but someone with an intuitive sense of who you are, someone shaped by the same things that shaped you.

I don’t have much in my experience to compare that feeling to. It’s a bit like how I feel about my siblings. It’s more like when I read about people who have been through a disaster (or a war, or a cult, or…) and they describe the experience of running into someone who has been through the same disaster/war/cult/whatever. They’re a kind of family, because they understand so much about each other.

Graham was that kind of family. We understood so much about each other. And I’m having a hard time coping with the idea of a world where I don’t share with someone the experiences that Graham and I shared.

3: Jairus and Joshua

I don’t believe bad things come in threes. Still, I said to Audra when I got back from Graham’s funeral that even though I didn’t believe bad things came in threes, I was still anxious, I was still waiting for the other shoe to drop.

A couple of days later, it did:

Please consider this your notice to Terminate the Tenancy at the End of the Term for Landlord’s Own Use as per the Ontario Residential Tenancies Act. Once you vacate the premises, we will be renovating the property and moving in after the work is complete.

Now I get that it may seem weird for me to post about having to move in the same category as people dying and almost dying, but if I’m going to be honest here, I actually find moving more stressful than people dying and/or almost dying. I’m not being hyperbolic, either. I can’t deal with things that threaten the security of my living situation. All of my life’s most-stressful-events involve my living situation being threatened. (I was going to add an exception for ‘being kidnapped as a child’ before I realized I should probably pencil that in under ‘security of living situation’ anyway.)

So now we’re looking for somewhere new to live.

Postscript

I don’t want to write an entry that is all doom and gloom, so I’ll end with this:

Every day this week, I have eaten my lunch outside in the sun, reading. Spring is here.

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I just got a friendly call from Brian Topp’s campaign! I wasn’t expecting much, but it was a shitshow right from the start.

First the dude told me that Brian was the only “pan-canadian” candidate. When I asked him what pan-canadian meant, he said “um, I’m not sure…” — #scriptfail

I said I was concerned about Topp, because he doesn’t have any elected political experience. The dude then proceeded to tell me that Mulcair “wants to move the party to the right”. When I asked him why he thinks that, he said Mulcair “wants us to become right wing”. I asked him again what he was basing that on, and he put me on hold.

A minute or two later, someone else picked up the line to tell me about how Mulcair doesn’t support the NDP policies which will prevent rich bankers from being taxed less than their secretaries, and how terrible Mulcair’s environmental policies are compared to Topp’s.

I mentioned that I thought it didn’t go well when the Liberals elected someone to opposition leader who hadn’t had political electoral experience. They helpfully pointed out that Peggy Nash’s experience as an MP (“only 3 years, not even a full term”) didn’t give her the experience at the top of the party that Topp had! That (former NDP President) Nash “doesn’t have a lot of experience with party brass”, and how you don’t need to be particularly well-qualified to be an MP anyway.

After pointing out that Peggy had been party president (“You might be right about that, I’m blanking right now…”) I said I wasn’t interested in voting for someone who was running such a negative campaign against other candidates (“Well I’m just a volunteer, I don’t know everything…”), and they tried the jedi-mind-trick tactic of saying that Topp would never stoop to Harper’s level and run a negative campaign.

It would be comical if it wasn’t really, really important.

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How Knitting Behind Bars Transformed Maryland Convicts:

In late 2009, Lynn Zwerling stood in front of 600 male prisoners at the Pre-Release Unit in Jessup, Maryland. “Who wants to knit?” she asked the burly crowd. They looked at her like she was crazy.

Yet almost two years later, Zwerling and her associates have taught more than 100 prisoners to knit, while dozens more are on a waiting list to take her weekly class. “I have guys that have never missed one time in two years,” Zwerling says. “Some reported to us that they miss dinner to come to class.”

Zwerling, 67, retired in 2005 after 18 years of selling cars in Columbia, Maryland. She didn’t know what to do with her time, so she followed her passion and started a knitting group in her town. No one came to the first meeting, but the group quickly grew to 500 members. “I looked around the room one day and I saw a zen quality about it,” Zwerling says. “Here were people who didn’t know each other, had nothing in common, sitting together peacefully like little lambs knitting. I thought, ‘It makes me and these people feel so good. What would happen if I took knitting to a population that never experienced this before?’”

Her first thought was to bring knitting to a men’s prison, but she was turned down repeatedly. Wardens assumed the men wouldn’t be interested in a traditionally feminine hobby and worried about freely handing out knitting needles to prisoners who had been convicted of violent crimes. Five years passed before the Pre-Release Unit in Jessup accepted her, and Knitting Behind Bars was born. “I [wanted to teach] them something that I love that I really believe will make them focus and happy,” Zwerling says. “I really believe that it’s more than a craft. This has the ability to transform you.”

The men were reluctant at first, complaining that knitting was too girly or too difficult. But Zwerling assured them men had invented the craft, then gave them a five-minute knitting lesson she swears can teach anyone. Suddenly, Zwerling says, the men “found the zen,” and got hooked. Now, every Thursday from 5 to 7 p.m., they come to class, leaving their crimes and the hierarchies of prison life behind.

They started by knitting comfort dolls, which they gave to children removed from their homes because of domestic issues. Then they moved on to hats for kids at the inner-city elementary school many of the prisoners attended, Zwerling says. “If you look at them, they’re covered with tattoos, they’re rough looking, and many of the young guys don’t have all their teeth,” she says. “But it doesn’t feel rough. They’re very respectful and grateful and very happy to knit.”

The prison’s assistant warden, Margaret Chippendale, believes the men involved with KBB get into trouble less often. “It’s very positive because you can see when you go into the room, the dynamics of their conversation; very calm, very soothing,” Chippendale says. “It radiates even when they leave the room and go out into the institution.”

Richy Horton, 38, served almost four years at the Pre-Release Unit and reluctantly joined KBB about 6 months before he was released. “I was like, I’m not going to that thing,” Horton says. “And then I went, and you were actually speaking to real people. People can’t really understand [that in prison] you’re completely separated from anything normal or real in the world. You’re always told what to do and when to do it, so to have people come in and treat you like a human being means so much. They came in and they were like my mom.”

Horton and the other men formed deep friendships with Zwerling and her fellow volunteers, Sheila Rovelstad, 61, and Lea Heirs, 58. “They tell us their stories and dreams,” Zwerling says. “And some of them lie to us. They don’t want us to know the really terrible things they did.”

Each week the men eagerly await the women’s arrival, then promptly get to work. “It takes you away a little,” Horton says. “You have to watch what you’re doing, otherwise your stitches will become loose or tight or you’ll skip stitches. It almost makes you feel like you don’t have to be anything. You’re all sitting there knitting. You can just be yourself.”

Horton was released from prison last December and now works in construction. He believes his involvement with KBB helped him get out of jail and onto parole, showing the parole interviewers his small but positive effort to help the outside community. He continues to keep in touch with the women of KBB and is currently knitting a beaded scarf. “They’re not normal people,” Horton says of Zwerling, Rovelstad, and Heirs. “They’re almost like saints.”

To donate to Knitting Behind Bars, visit their Etsy shop, or contact Lynn Zwerling at lynnzwerling@verizon.net.

Photos courtesy of Lynn Zwerling

Via the Baltimore Sun

(Via fragmentsshoredagainstmyruin)

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The Government of Canada has released their long-awaited social media guidelines, titled “Guideline for External Use of Web 2.0“, and oh my god it is a complete disaster. Just like the infamous Common Look and Feel for the Internet 2.0 standards, these new guidelines are so heavy that they handcuff the public service.

Now, I developed the social media guidelines at the Bank of Canada, and was responsible for getting the Bank onto Twitter, Flickr, and such. So I know how hard it is to do this kind of work in these kind of institutions. And while I’m not going to do a point-by-point breakdown of the twelve-thousand word document, we’ll take a look at some highlights.

The language of the document is terrible. Really, totally, inexcusably terrible. A case study in design-by-committee terrible. Let’s take the “Benefits of use” section:

Government of Canada departments are encouraged to use Web 2.0 tools and services as an efficient and effective additional channel to interact with the public. A large number of Canadians are now regularly using Web 2.0 tools and services to find information about, and interact with, individuals and organizations. For many Canadians, Web 2.0 is increasingly becoming a primary channel for sending, receiving and generating information. Because of the participatory nature of Web 2.0, it can help facilitate interactive and rapid communication and engagement between government departments, their partners and their clients, with some common uses including:

• Recruitment;
• Risk and emergency communications;
• Services to the public;
• Stakeholder outreach and education;
• As a collaborative tool; and
• Consultation.

I can feel my eyes sliding off the screen every time I try to read that. For comparison, let’s look at the benefits section of the UK gov’s guidelines, titled Engaging through social media:

Good use of social media can help government to better understand, respond to and attract the attention of specific audiences. It enables real two-way communication with people in the places where they are already engaging with their interests. Social media can:

• increase government’s access to audiences and improve the accessibility of government communication;
• enable government to be more active in its relationships with citizens, partners and stakeholders;
• offer greater scope to adjust or refocus communications quickly, where necessary;
• improve the long-term cost effectiveness of communication;
• benefit from the credibility of nongovernment channels;
• increase the speed of public feedback and input;
• reach speciic audiences on specific issues; and
• reduce government’s dependence on traditional media channels and counter inaccurate press coverage.

Look at the difference here. The GoC doc talks about how these tools can help facilitate interactive and rapid communication and engagement; the UK doc talks about helping government to better understand and respond. These are worlds apart.

There’s also virtually no guidance on actually communicating with the public. The UK guidelines list these “basic principles”:

• Be credible. Be accurate, fair, thorough and transparent.
• Be consistent. Encourage constructive criticism and deliberation. Be cordial, honest and professional at all times.
• Be responsive. When you gain insight, share it where appropriate.
• Be integrated. Wherever possible, align online participation with other offline communications.
• Be a civil servant. Remember that you are an ambassador for your organisation. Wherever possible, disclose your position as a representative of your Department or Agency.

From this list, you get a strong sense of what social media communications should look like. You get a sense of the voice that government wants to have, of their desire to respect public spaces. They want to actively encourage constructive criticism, which is mindblowing. The closest we get in the GoC guidelines is something along the lines of

When using Web 2.0 tools or services for official use, compliance with relevant legislation and Treasury Board and departmental policies is required. The appendixes of the TBS Guideline for External Use of Web 2.0 provides specific advice as to how to comply with existing legislative and policy requirements governing interactions with external audiences through Web 2.0 tools and services and should be followed at all times.

Riveting! But by far the worst offenses committed by the GoC guidelines aren’t the pervasive use of unenthusiastic robot language, the craaaazy length, or even the likely-to-be-totally-unmanageable requirements for handling social media use in both official languages. It’s how much work it is to get involved in social media under these guidelines. Here are some of the steps you need to take if your government department wants to use The Web 2.0. I am not making these up. In fact I have edited them down to make them less bulky and crazy-sounding.

• Develop an overall departmental strategy for social media which takes into account business value, governance structures, recommended procedures, and lessons learned by other departments.

• Develop rules of engagement which outline moderation criteria, response time expectations, intellectual property, privacy, accessibility and official languages notices (which include links to the corresponding legislation), and consequences for violation of the rules of engagement.

• Provide legal counsel with information about the proposed use(s) including information about the Web 2.0 initiative’s oversight plan, the particular Web 2.0 tool or service under consideration and the relevant terms of use.

• Designate a senior official accountable and responsible for the coordination of all Web 2.0 activities as well as an appropriate governance structure. It is recommended that the Head of Communications be the designated official. This designate should collaborate with departmental personnel who have expertise in using and executing Web 2.0 initiatives, as well as with representatives from the following fields in their governance structure: information management, information technology, communications, official languages, the Federal Identity Program, legal services, access to information and privacy, security, values and ethics, programs and services, human resources, the user community, as well as the Senior Departmental Official as established by the Standard on Web Accessibility.

• Develop a plan with input from departmental communications advisors which outlines:

  1. Business drivers
  2. How this use is aligned with overall project objectives
  3. Delineation of roles, responsibilities and accountabilities;
  4. Considerations of the target audiences
  5. The authorities for project ownership and approval
  6. A risk assessment and management plan;
  7. A communications plan to:
     1. Outline the expected nature of the interactions;
     2. Respond to stakeholders when responses are critical
     3. Ensure that messaging aligns with GoC themes
  8. Allocation of appropriate human, technical and financial resources
  9. Training required to ensure that personnel understand how to use Web 2.0 tools within the government policy framework
  10. An approach for program evaluation
  11. A proposed timeline for evaluation
  12. A continuous improvement process

   

• …and in case you’re thinking about paying a few bucks to get that Flickr Pro account up and running, a contracting risk assessment must be undertaken for each initiative that has a cost associated with it.

The amount of work you need to do to open a Twitter account is unreal. It’s enough work that you will need to spend time and money to figure out how much time and money it’ll take to do. You can’t try out a YouTube account to see if it’s useful for your content, or put up a Facebook page to see why people are interested in your project. This process is so heavy that the only initiatives which will make it to production are the ones that the public was already tired of five years ago.

Canada is so far behind other countries in our use of web technologies and social media that it is actually embarrassing. How long will it be before we have something like 10 Downing or We The People? And how can we expect to grow web expertise within our government when we’re making it impossible to experiment with social media tools?

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3eanuts:

November 9, 1981 — see The Complete Peanuts 1979-1982

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3eanuts:

November 9, 1981 — see The Complete Peanuts 1979-1982

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Vitamin pills can lead you to take health risks:

In the study of risk perception, people talk about “the licensing effect”: when you take a vitamin pill, for example, you think you’ve done something healthy and wholesome, so you permit yourself to eat more chips and have a cigarette. It sounds like a nice idea, but a bit vague.

Two new experiments put flesh on these bones.  Firstly, researchers took 74 undergraduates who were daily smokers, and divided them into two groups at random. The first group were given a dummy pill, a placebo, and were told just that: you’re in the control group, taking a dummy pill, with no active ingredient. The other participants were in the vitamin pill group: you’ve been given a vitamin pill, they were told.

But in fact, the researchers had lied. Everyone in the study got the same dummy pill, with no active ingredient. Half of them thought they’d had a health-giving vitamin pill, because the intention was to see whether people’s health behaviours change if they think they’ve had a nice, healthy vitamin pill.

After the pills, they were given a survey to fill out. The results were startling. Firstly, people who thought they’d had a vitamin pill gave different answers on the survey. These featured questions from the excellently titled Adolescent Invulnerability Scale (which has been reasonably well validated elsewhere), such as “Special problems, getting an illness or disease, are not likely to happen to me”, “I’m unlikely to be injured in an accident”, and so on. People who thought they’d had a vitamin pill rated themselves as generally more invulnerable.

The results for  smoking  were more worrying. There’s no doubt smoking is bad for you. There’s also no doubt the motives and justifications for smoking are complex. But people who thought they’d had a vitamin pill were 50% more likely to have a cigarette – 89% compared with 62% – and that result was highly statistically significant.

(Via neuropsy)

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“The magnificent Skulls design reflects Barbara’s mischievous side…”

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A little over fifty years ago, US Marshals escorted a six-year-old Ruby Bridges to her first day of class, where she became the first black child to attend an Southern all-white elementary school. A new teacher named Barbara Henry was brought in, as all of the school’s existing teachers refused to work as long as a black child was in attendance. That walk to school was the subject of a Norman Rockwell painting, The Problem We All Live With.

A little over a month ago, Ruby got the chance to visit the painting at its new home, just outside the Oval Office.

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A letter to Canadians

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The Future is Friendly

(via nevver)

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“People act like the Seventies and the Eighties were this Golden Age because it was the dawn of punk and hardcore. But hardly anybody was into that. It was maybe the only thing that made the Eighties bearable, but for everybody who was into Dead Kennedys or Minor Threat, there were another 50,000 people who’d much rather listen to the Eagles or Saturday Night Fever. That’s what we were up against. And those of us who’d gotten a whiff of how wild and cool the Sixties were, to see it all get dumbed down and mellowed out and sold back to us at twice the price in the Seventies before punk happened, that was a horrible heartbreak. Right when we were coming of age, the acid’s no good anymore and all you’re presented for music is soft rock and disco. No wonder punk happened!”

– Jello Biafra

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May 9, 1957. From Five decades of Bay Area bathing suits.

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“Negro boys on Easter morning.”

Southside Chicago, 1941.

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“I could end the deficit in 5 minutes. You just pass a law that says that anytime there is a deficit of more than 3% of GDP all sitting members of congress are ineligible for reelection.”

– Warren Buffett

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So guys who work for either a) high-powered women, or b) men who are in what are perceived as “women’s jobs,” are viewed as less manly, and this impacts both their social standing and earnings potential. There’s a price to be paid for being a trailblazer; for men, there’s also a price to be paid for working for one.

Unfortunately, this isn’t surprising if you think about it for a minute. Still total garbage, though.

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A few things.

1. I have started a new amazing gig, which is keeping me very busy. Details soon.
2. I am still in the process of moving, and am living out of boxes in the interim. Moving Day #2 is June 29th. Any Toronto volunteers will be cherished and/or fondled.
3. My internet access at home has been down for a week, and I’m way behind on email. Please don’t be offended if I haven’t replied.
4. As of today I haven’t DJed in 4 weeks, which is the longest I’ve gone without DJing in almost ten years. I might start podcasting to scratch the itch.
5. It took me A Very Long Time, but my Toronto phone number is (647) TROUBLE. How amazing is that? The answer: Quite.

More to come!

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sacha (by sadhu)

via spiritguide

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The most sanctimonious of our newspapers solemnly intoned that “women need to take to the streets to condemn violence, but not for the right to be called ‘slut’ “. But it was not heeded. The women (and men) who are set to prance the streets of dozens of cities in underwear and fetish gear for weeks to come will be taking liberties. That’s where liberation begins.

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nevver:

Tattoo You

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Announcement.

I am leaving the fair city of Ottawa at the end of May.

I was born here, I spent my formative years here, and I’ve been back eight years or so now. I’ve been here more than anywhere else in the world, and I live about a ten minute walk from where I was born. I’m returning to Toronto, in the hopes of being closer to rare family members I want to spend time with, and in search of web communications work that doesn’t require bilingualism.

I’ve parted ways with my employer, given my notice to my landlord, and have started the search for a June home base in Toronto while looking for work and a July 1st apartment.

I love this city, and I will be back eventually. It might be five years, ten years, or twenty years — in the meantime there are streets to explore, and adventure to be had.

Forward.

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Penguin

(via nevver)

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This fantastic figure, displayed in the Saint-Étienne church in the city Bar-le-Duc in France, once held the heart of its subject— René de Chalon, Prince of Orange—in its raised hand, like a reliquary. The prince died at age 25 in battle following which, depending on which story you believe, either he or his widow requested that Chalon portray him in his tomb figure as “not a standard figure but a life-size skeleton with strips of dried skin flapping over a hollow carcass, whose right hand clutches at the empty rib cage while the left hand holds high his heart in a grand gesture” (Medrano-Cabral) set against a backdrop representing his earthly riches. Alas, the sculpture no longer contains Chalon’s heart; it is rumored to have gone missing sometime around the French revolution.

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Seoul tears down an urban highway and the city can breathe again:

Fast-forward to 2001. As Dr. Hwang said, “some crazy people got together” and dreamed up the project. Hwang developed a traffic model to see what would happen if they took out what was considered a vital traffic artery carrying 168,000 cars per day. In the model, he included adjustments to other streets and increased transit to see if Seoul could survive without the freeway.

The results of the model surprised him: not only could it work, but it would actually improve travel times in downtown Seoul.

(Photo by Christian Senger)

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Fall Out

(via nevver)

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The Dream is Over, April 4, 1968

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The sun, partially obscured by the Earth.

The photo was taken by NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory, during its eclipse season – a period of the year when the satellite slips behind Earth for up to 72 minutes of every day.

(via fuckyeahspace)

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The Loneliest Whale in the World.

In 2004, The New York Times wrote an article about the loneliest whale in the world. Scientists have been tracking her since 1992 and they discovered the problem:

She isn’t like any other baleen whale. Unlike all other whales, she doesn’t have friends. She doesn’t have a family. She doesn’t belong to any tribe, pack or gang. She doesn’t have a lover. She never had one. Her songs come in groups of two to six calls, lasting for five to six seconds each. But her voice is unlike any other baleen whale. It is unique—while the rest of her kind communicate between 12 and 25hz, she sings at 52hz. You see, that’s precisely the problem. No other whales can hear her. Every one of her desperate calls to communicate remains unanswered. Each cry ignored. And, with every lonely song, she becomes sadder and more frustrated, her notes going deeper in despair as the years go by.

Just imagine that massive mammal, floating alone and singing—too big to connect with any of the beings it passes, feeling paradoxically small in the vast stretches of empty, open ocean.

(via erickimberlinbowley)

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film-grain:

Painters on the cables of the Brooklyn Bridge, October 7, 1914.

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Charles Schulz’s Peanuts comics often conceal the existential despair of their world with a closing joke at the characters’ expense. With the last panel omitted, despair pervades all.

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I shut the lights off at the Bromo Seltzer Arts Tower in Baltimore last night, but it’s not so easy in a large landmark like the tower, where there are five completely separate timers and control mechanisms, spread out over twenty-two stories, so my Earth Hour started at 8:25, 8:29, 8:35, 8:38, and 8:42 and ended with a similar spread. The worst part was that the mechanical timer for the lights in the clock faces is a brutal heavy brass steampunk-looking thing that I taped up with eight layers of tightly-bound duct tape, and it still managed to break loose early and restart the clock lights at some undetermined time without my intervention.

Seeing as I was on the verge of fainting from climbing the last seven floors on steep ladder/stairs, I opted to stay on the roof of the tower, 288 feet over Lombard and Eutaw Streets, for the duration, and watched the city going on its way around me. No other large building killed their lights, alas (particularly the old Baltimore Trust Company tower/Bank of America building, our only real rival for pride of place on the skyline, the brightly-lit SOBs), making me wonder if people would just assume some kind of electrical failure was involved and blame the facility manager (me). The air was clean and brisk and the sky as full of stars as you can expect in Baltimore, so I put on my mp3 player and a nice playlist of mid-seventies funk and spent an hour dancing over the disco-ball tabletop of the city, surrounded by helicopter fireflies.

Fire trucks came and went, in one case racing to a fire in West Baltimore that I could see clearly from my vantage point, and the Shock Trauma helicopter lifted off from the hospital below to rescue someone, and the funk kept on keepin’ on. Almost at the end, a single police helicopter buzzed the tower, catching me in the twitchy blue-white light of the perp-spotter beam, and a stern voice barked out of the beating cacophony of the churning blades—

“What are you doing?”

I shrugged and yelled back, “I’m dancing!”

I’m sure they didn’t hear me, but they buzzed off nonetheless. I grooved along till 9:29, then switched over to “One More Night” by Can and started the long, slow climb back to earth.

- sonascope’s earth hour contribution, MetaFilter

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yerawizardharry:

An unexpected side-effect of the flooding in parts of Pakistan has been that millions of spiders climbed up into the trees to escape the rising flood waters.

Because of the scale of the flooding and the fact that the water has taken so long to recede, many trees have become cocooned in spiders webs. People in this part of Sindh have never seen this phenomenon before – but they also report that there are now less mosquitoes than they would expect, given the amount of stagnant, standing water that is around.

It is thought that the mosquitoes are getting caught in the spiders web thus reducing the risk of malaria, which would be one blessing for the people of Sindh, facing so many other hardships after the floods.

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claytoncubitt:

I fight evil, Brooklyn

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(via destroyangels, jessiglehart)

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“The best thing about Kate Beaton’s internet celebrity was watching all the miserable stalker nerds go from wanting to fuck her to hating her because she told them to stop being so creepy and gross.”

– “Women are like children” – Scott Adams, creator of Dilbert (via 3liza)

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Little-known fact: The first computer programmers were all women. ENIAC was programmed by Jean Bartik, Marlyn Meltzer, Kathleen Mauchly Antonelli, Betty Snyder Holberton, Ruth Lichterman Teitelbaum, and Frances Bilas Spence.

Bartik and her colleagues debugged every vacuum tube and learned how to make it work, she said. Early on, they demonstrated to the military brass how the computer worked, with the programmers setting the process into motion and showing how it produced an answer. They handed out its punch cards as souvenirs. They’d taught the massive machine do math that would’ve taken hours by hand.

what is this thing you humans call... love?

Littler-known fact: Many of the first computers were also women! In the days before ENIAC, ‘computer’ was a job, not a machine, and thousands of women were recruited by the US Military to do ballistics research to supply weapons trajectories to soldiers and bombardiers. Top Secret Rosies, a documentary about WWII’s female computers, was released last month.

Erickson’s documentary focused on women plucked from high schools and colleges to work at the University of Pennsylvania in the 1940s. They moved into dorms and apartments and went through a rigorous introduction to ballistics calculations in order to do the job. It paid well, and the women were close. They played bridge, shared dinners and danced together in the university gardens when the war in Europe ended.

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Day 08 – A moment, in great detail:

It was snowing now, light flakes betraying the morning sun’s promise of spring. I took a long moment in the doorway before I joined the crowd, fifty people moving in a hundred directions. To work. From work. To a friend’s home. To pick up the baby. To start a new job. To break up with their lover. To light the fireplace at home.

I feel insulated, now. The crowd protects me from the snow, the snow protects me from seeing anything too far away, and anything too far away doesn’t exist in any meaningful sense anyway.

I duck into a coffee shop for caffeine and quiet reading. I’ve spent so many hours of my life here, but it’s somehow different now, and there isn’t a flicker of recognition in the faces of anyone who looks up. I’m still insulated by the snow, by feeling like you’ve come home and found some other family watching your TV and eating off your plates.

I make my order and open the book to page one. It’s a beautiful place to be — fresh coffee, crisp pages, a new story in a familiar setting.

Toronto.

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alexsegura:

Hey, @agent_m — check it: The Original Godzilla (via MONSTER BRAINS)

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mohandasgandhi:

“An individual who breaks a law that conscience tells him is unjust, and who willingly accepts the penalty of imprisonment in order to arouse the conscience of the community over its injustice, is in reality expressing the highest respect for the law.”

Martin Luther King Jr.

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Day 07 – Your best friend, in great detail:

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catchyasacactus:

Ashley Wood is an Australian illustrator who has an interesting technique which combines traditional painting, digital photography and graphic software. He’s also quite a busy guy, working on the Official Metal Gear Solid comic and creatign works for major companies like Dreamworks, Random House, Marvel Comics, Warner Bros. and Konami.

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You may recall how I ballsed up Christmas.

Audra and I decided to have a new year’s do-over.

I made breakfast in bed, we gave each other gifts, and had pretty much the greatest time that two people can have.

This is the singing bowl she gave me (like her, it is amazing):

2011 is going to be a great year.

…

During the solstice, a handful of us tried to watch the eclipse, but were thwarted by cloud cover. I’m not big on arbitrary holidays, but I love the solstice, and I love eclipses. Astronomical events bring me a kind of clockwork peace; a reminder that no matter how hard we might fuck things up, everything’s going to keep going. The solstice is when I think about what I’ve done in the last six months, and what I’m going to do in the next. A starting point and a finish line.

Eclipses are incredible, regardless of what kind they are. We are very lucky, on this island earth. Do you know how rare total solar eclipses must be, out there across the stars? They’re not a perfectly normal, common effect of planetary motion, like a sunrise, or the waxing of a moon. It just so happens that our sun is 400 times bigger than the moon, and 400 times further away. That’s why the disk of the moon covers the body of the sun almost perfectly, letting us see the corona. And in a few hundred million years, the moon will have moved far enough away from the earth that there will never be another eclipse.

Before then, remember to look up.

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I don’t know how to deal with Christmas. Aside from some great hangouts with great people, the entire thing is just a disaster, and it’s still a better-than-average year. Every time it comes around, I think “well, maybe it’ll be alright this time”, and then it’s just catastrophe after catastrophe.

Usually it’s at least someone else’s fault. Family crisis, funeral, hospitals, cops, whatever. This year it was all me. I spent yesterday evening and today with Audra, and I’m so stressed out about the possibility of having a terrible fucked-up holiday that I have managed to:

• Fuck things up with regards to receiving presents
• Fuck things up with regards to giving presents
• Fuck up her boxing day breakfast making
• Fuck up our boxing day post-breakfast pre-hangout plans
• Fuck up her boxing day post-hangout evening plans

Fuck.

…

A head full of noise and muscles singing like high-voltage wires; all I want for Christmas is to sleep until spring.

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