turbine

glitterbubbles: orangeismyfavoritecolor: robot-heart-politics: ...

Wed, 10 Mar 2010 18:15:00 -0500

orangeismyfavoritecolor:

robot-heart-politics:

equalitopia:

TV shows with gay characters could lose Florida tax credits

A new bill being considered for Florida could mean that television shows or films with gay characters within them that are shot in the state could miss out on vital tax credits because they are not deemed “family friendly”.

Current state law grants tax credits on productions considered “family friendly” - with no smoking, sex, nudity or profane language.

The proposal by Republican Rep. Stephen Precourt of Orlando would expand the field of disqualified productions as those that include any “exhibit or implied act” of nontraditional family values and gratuitous violence.

Stephen Precourt told the Palm Beach Post that shows with gay characters were not “the kind of thing I’d say that we want to invest public dollars in”.

This is HORRENDOUS. “Family friendly?!” Seriously, the things they already taxed are behaviors like smoking, sex, nudity….how do “gay characters” fit in there? This is out of control…I think that some really wealthy person (since they would be able to pay this proposed tax) should start a show that is 100% focused around gay characters. That should get people to shut up….They should tax this Florida Rep dude for being so stupid…

Fuckin’ a, Florida. You’re doing it wrong! This is why (among other reasons) people make fun of us. We’re already having enough trouble attracting business, and now you want to put up more roadblocks? How about regulating predatory creditors, fly-by-night insurance companies, established insurance companies who couldn’t run their own books, and environmental polluters. And how about deregulating race, gender, sexual orientation. How about you lay off making people feel shitty for who they are and work harder on making them proud to be Floridians. Lord knows we need all the help we can get.

http://davebc.com/post/439452313/entitled-bullshit

Wed, 10 Mar 2010 15:57:00 -0500

http://davebc.com/post/439452313/entitled-bullshit:

chartier:

“Here’s my point: businesses don’t get to pick the timetable for when their preferred model takes a permanent dirt nap. It’s insane to me that these business’s fans see this so much more clearly than the actual stakeholders do. The fans want desperately to see these places stay alive and many, like me, pay tons of actual cash every month or year to support that.”

—

kung fu grippe: Entitled to Care

Bullshit.

Most people don’t give a crap about where they get their laughs or information, so long as it’s free. “Because so many things on the Internet are free, everything else should be free.” They don’t want to see ads, don’t want to donate, won’t subscribe, don’t want to click something to magically generate a free penny that goes into a tip jar. In fact, there seems to be a growing collective distaste for the idea of you making money at all.

I admire Mr. Mann for spending tons of cash on the things that he loves. I often do the same. Most people don’t and—thanks to the current culture of the Internet—won’t.

This isn’t about some brave new world of change, and it’s not a revolutionary new business model that “old media” is trying to kick, scream, and blindly run away from. It’s pure, nihilistic, fucking entitlement.

Some people get to make great stuff on the Internet and make a name for themselves. Someone in a position of power gets a glint in their eye, and then these people get offers to speak around the country or get a job at an established company doing what they did in their garage for free. That’s awesome for them. Truly.

But what works for some people, or even some companies, doesn’t work for others. The only revolution here is that people are turning a blinder eye in greater masses than ever to this essential fact of life.

It’s entitlement, and it’s bullshit.

Merlin’s points aren’t entirely bullshit. David’s aren’t either.

People enjoy free things. The sense of entitlement comes when people complain about the things they get for free. I don’t know how many times I’ve heard people complain bitterly that some piece of free software won’t do x, y, or z for them. I imagine Merlin has done it. Though rather than just bitching, he went ahead and wrote a nice email to the software’s developer suggesting an upgrade. Now Instapaper syncs with the Kindle.

That’s the way things work, right?

This is the crucial piece I see missing from all the back and forth about ads and RSS feeds and customers and magazines and publishing. Yes, businesses don’t get to choose when their current model takes a permanent dirt nap (Mann, 03/10)—wouldn’t it be interesting to see an impermanent dirt nap?—but I think they should be allowed the opportunity to experiment with various business models. We folks on the front lines of the Internet revolution (totally hate myself right now), become complacent, I think, because we’ve been in this space for a long time. Like any person doing the same thing for a while, we forget what it was like first entering the space. We forget our own mistakes or, because they occurred on a stupid Diaryland blog, they didn’t make a bit of difference because no one saw.

There are some sites clearly not worth saving. If Huffington Post went dark tomorrow, I wouldn’t bat an eye. Yet, no one seems to be creating a blueprint for saving the ones worthwhile. Or maybe they are, but they’re keeping it to themselves in hopes they’ll get some money for it when the publications become really desperate.

I wrote about this before and recommended two different models for online and print, each of which seem viable at this point. Maybe the ideas are silly. I haven’t spent a lot of time thinking about this sort of thing until recently, but it’s becoming increasingly important to me for reasons that for now must remain my own.

Maybe it’s time for many of the old publishing houses to close up shop and for the established writers to strike out on their own. I mean, Roger Ebert could probably do okay without the Sun Times and might not even have to sell backstage passes to his RSS feed. Still, I think this would damage journalism, and as a craft it can’t take much more. A certain type of investigative journalism—a type we see less and less these days—benefits greatly from a well-funded newsroom. It allows reporters the luxury to follow leads and get facts straight. It allows for research conducted at the required pace, not on some slip-shod, gotta-be-done-yesterday Internet timeline. Young writers also benefit from a well-funded newsroom. A well-funded newsroom can afford to pay established writers enough to keep them around, and new writers can benefit from traffic coming into the site or publication for the established writers. Maybe established folks like Ebert can strike out on their own and pay or offer other incentives to new writers to help keep the practice alive. And maybe investigative journalists can begin Kickstarter campaigns to help fund the long, dark months they must spend without content while working on a complex story. I’m not certain. I’m not that bright. But a lot of people ‘round these Tumblr parts seem really smart and could probably come up with some rather elegant solutions if they’d concentrate less on how people are doing it wrong and concentrate more on explaining exactly how to do it right.

GPOYW - SXSW: a Greg Turner field guide edition

Wed, 10 Mar 2010 15:19:16 -0500

GPOYW - SXSW: a Greg Turner field guide edition

"We feel so righteous when we buy organic food or a compact fluorescent bulb or a Prius that our..."

Wed, 10 Mar 2010 14:33:57 -0500

“We feel so righteous when we buy organic food or a compact fluorescent bulb or a Prius that our internal moral cup runneth over. According to this model, which is called compensatory ethics, people have an inner sense of how morally virtuous they need to feel to support their self-image. If a few actions (including espousing actions for other people) are enough to justify how we like to think of ourselves, then we do not need to perform any additional virtuous actions. It’s as if we accumulate moral points for ethical actions, and having accumulated “enough” we are free to act amorally, or even immorally. That’s why reminding people of what wonderful humanitarians they are causes them to give less to charity.”

- Begley, on the ethical pitfalls of green living. (via newsweek)

The problem with consumption-as-morality.

(via newleft)

"Faulkner, never one to do things halfway, made extravagant use of standard modes of reentry in New..."

Wed, 10 Mar 2010 13:48:53 -0500

“Faulkner, never one to do things halfway, made extravagant use of standard modes of reentry in New Orleans, not merely geographical and perhaps sexual modes, not merely alcohol, but also a regular repertory of disguises. In the Vieux Carre he made appearances as a wounded veteran with swagger stick and a bogus steel plate in his head, a hard drinking pre-hippie vagrant Left-Bank type –and wrote Mosquitoes, a not very good novel. It took the ultimate reentry, the return –he had to go home- to write The Sound and the Fury. Even then, he had to “be” a farmer on the side. Later he made the grandest Southern reentry of all, as a Virginia horseman.”

- Walker Percy in Lost in the Cosmos, discussing what he called reentry: the difficulty we face in returning to ordinary reality after transcendent experiences. That transcendence is not sustainable is one of the catastrophes of human consciousness: one evolutionary function of the mind is to attend with heightened awareness to what is novel while codifying our reactions to it so it no longer remains so but becomes, rather, rote, unconscious. This aids in survival, but diminishes all experiences over time so that no joy, no lust, no drug, no thrill remains as vivid as when first experienced.

(Note: this, too, involves the machinery of memory; whether and how memories of an event are made tells us as much as our perceptions do of how we experienced it).

This is a problem for us all, and the awkwardness of moving between euphoria, transformation, and joy and the tedium of reality, with its traffic, gas pains, and wrinkled shirts explains why popular media usually chooses one or the other realm and stays there. Percy catalogs with special amusement, however, some of the methods artists in particular must use to achieve transcendence —abstraction from immanent, banal reality— and then navigate their return from it. The entire section recalls Kierkegaard’s discussion of the aesthete’s reliance on rotation and repetition in lieu of deeper metaphysical or moral commitment, which is fitting.

It’s also quite funny to think of Faulkner in such terms. See here for an illustration of the transcendence-reentry problems facing Kafka and the casual music listener.

(via mills)

“Connection” by Elastica

Wed, 10 Mar 2010 13:02:52 -0500

“Connection” by Elastica

“Big Time Sensuality” by Bjork

Wed, 10 Mar 2010 12:17:54 -0500

“Big Time Sensuality” by Bjork

youroldarchenemycatwoman: love. Creep Radiohead From a certain...

Wed, 10 Mar 2010 11:32:52 -0500

youroldarchenemycatwoman:

love.

Creep

Radiohead

From a certain time and so, so perfect.

The face-time theorem

Wed, 10 Mar 2010 10:47:09 -0500

bobulate:

As I sprint through my inbox toward Austin later this week, I have an observation about how issues get resolved:

Note:
This is by no means a prescription (or a real theorem for that matter), but an observation and a nudge for more people to meet in person more of the time.

If distance among people is greater than X miles + question Y cannot be resolved by email, than email results in more email.
(Cost of time: medium-high, emotional cost: high. Duration: endless)

If distance among people is less than X miles + question Y cannot be resolved by email, than email results in in-person meeting.
(Cost of time: medium, emotional cost: low. Duration: short)

Variables

Additional people in CC

Additional people in BCC

Standing meetings

Inertia

Theorem

If, after multiple threads, issues are unresolvable via non-face means, meet in person. While the hurdle of meeting face to face seems higher, the time and emotional costs are ultimately lower. Face-time saves time.

I love this equation. By the same measure, many of the text messages in my phone’s outbox are simply, “I think I should call you now.”

“Ready to Go” by Republica

Wed, 10 Mar 2010 10:33:53 -0500

“Ready to Go” by Republica

merlin: THE SUGARCUBES - “Birthday” Remember on the next...

Wed, 10 Mar 2010 09:47:52 -0500

merlin:

THE SUGARCUBES - “Birthday”

Remember on the next album, when the dude starting rapping? Those were crazy times.

News flash

Wed, 10 Mar 2010 09:02:45 -0500

marco:

A popular blog truncated its RSS feeds to boost site pageviews. It’s like last week, when The Atlantic changed to partial-content RSS feeds. And that was like every other week, when some publisher did something that some readers didn’t like to make a few more cents.

I dislike the intrusive advertising on Salon, so I don’t read Salon. I dislike Michael Arrington, so I never read anything on TechCrunch (even when they write about me or my products) and have taken technical measures to ensure that I never even land there accidentally and give them whatever tiny profit that one pageview is worth. I don’t like the timebombed, Unicode-breaking Clickability print-friendly view for New York Magazine, since I like reading NYMag-length pieces in Instapaper and Clickability doesn’t work well in it, so I just don’t read NYMag’s articles. I don’t like Ars Technica’s paginated articles, but since I don’t want to pay for a subscription, I just read every page separately, give them all of their separate-page ad views, and save each page to Instapaper if I want to read them that way.

One reaction I’ve never had is to think that I deserve anything from these publishers.

Valid point: [Publisher] should consider doing it some other way because this will alienate some readers.

Invalid point: [Publisher] should do it my way because all content deserves to be free/ad-free/full-RSS/single-page.

I see a staggering amount of entitlement every day in the form of arguments and blog posts like the latter.

We don’t deserve anything. Publishers can do whatever they want. If you don’t like it, don’t send them nasty emails or browse their sites with ad-blockers: just don’t support them. Don’t read their content, don’t link to them, and don’t talk about them. Since money’s not usually involved, vote with your attention and read elsewhere.

I have to disagree on the point of email. If something matters enough to you, send an email, but be polite. If they’ve changed something and you don’t like it, send an email letting them know, but do your best to explain why you felt the old way was better. Or, explain you like the old way, but try to help them make the new way better or more effective.

Also? If someone’s doing something in a way you particularly like, email them too. Many folks don’t understand Web traffic or analytics or log files or any of that stuff. They do, however, understand clear, cogent letters sent electronically or via USPS. Those letters enable them to make decisions about future changes or to decide that things work well just the way they are.

I agree that you probably shouldn’t visit sites with ad blockers on without tossing them at least a couple bucks every couple months. And I do agree with Marco’s assessment that many people have settled into a ridiculous sense of entitlement for absolutely no good reason.

I disagree, however, with the effectiveness of closing yourself off. This idea of “I’ll ignore it,” is ineffective and has allowed for everything from bad business decisions to an endangered Darwin in the Kansas public school system.

Be smart, be nice, but be vocal. It’s the only way anyone will ever understand what you’re thinking.

“Losing My Religion” by REM Suck it, Time Warner

Wed, 10 Mar 2010 08:33:45 -0500

“Losing My Religion” by REM

Suck it, Time Warner

“70 Million” by Hold Your Horses Holy crap I love...

Wed, 10 Mar 2010 08:20:00 -0500

“70 Million” by Hold Your Horses

Holy crap I love this video. Catchy song, too!

(via Your Monkey Called)

youmightfindyourself: Damn…wish someone would make a fake...

Wed, 10 Mar 2010 07:02:15 -0500

youmightfindyourself:

Damn…wish someone would make a fake documentary about me.

I knew guys like this back in the day.

“We Are Going to be Friends” by White Stipes Thank...

Tue, 09 Mar 2010 20:50:51 -0500

“We Are Going to be Friends” by White Stipes

Thank you, Tumblr pals. Bees’ knees and etc.

Three things we like to encounter in novels

Tue, 09 Mar 2010 15:50:56 -0500

magicmolly:

•Descriptions of field labor

•Descriptions of nervous cures

•Descriptions of cottage-rehabilitation

There are fields in my novel, but no field labor. Also lots of drinking, but few cures or rehabilitation.

Waterboarding for dummies

Tue, 09 Mar 2010 14:22:40 -0500

Waterboarding for dummies:

kateoplis:

Internal CIA documents reveal a meticulous protocol that was far more brutal than Dick Cheney’s “dunk in the water”.

Interrogators pumped detainees full of so much water that the CIA turned to a special saline solution to minimize the risk of death, the documents show. The agency used a gurney “specially designed” to tilt backwards at a perfect angle to maximize the water entering the prisoner’s nose and mouth, intensifying the sense of choking – and to be lifted upright quickly in the event that a prisoner stopped breathing.

The documents also lay out, in chilling detail, exactly what should occur in each two-hour waterboarding “session.” Interrogators were instructed to start pouring water right after a detainee exhaled, to ensure he inhaled water, not air, in his next breath. They could use their hands to “dam the runoff” and prevent water from spilling out of a detainee’s mouth. They were allowed six separate 40-second “applications” of liquid in each two-hour session – and could dump water over a detainee’s nose and mouth for a total of 12 minutes a day. Finally, to keep detainees alive even if they inhaled their own vomit during a session – a not-uncommon side effect of waterboarding – the prisoners were kept on a liquid diet. The agency recommended Ensure Plus.

The CIA’s waterboarding regimen was so excruciating, the memos show, that agency officials found themselves grappling with an unexpected development: detainees simply gave up and tried to let themselves drown. The agency’s medical guidelines say that after a case of “psychological resignation” by a detainee on the waterboard, an interrogator had to get approval from a CIA doctor before doing it again.

Can you do me a favor?

Tue, 09 Mar 2010 09:13:46 -0500

I feel like such a schmuck for asking, but could you recommend my KitchenSoujourn tumblog, Amuse Bouche, this Tumblr Tuesday?

http://kitchensojourn.tumblr.com/

In essence, it’s all the little food-related items I run into during the day that just aren’t substantive enough for the my Kitchen Sojourn blog.

I’d really appreciate it.

Errant

Tue, 09 Mar 2010 04:54:45 -0500

My favorite word, pages 196 - 232.

Good thing I have this red pen.