Jesus, I’ve been living rent-free for a year and a half, but this woman? THIS WOMAN IS THE MASTER!
Category Archives: Culture
I’m Not Sure There’s a Workable Path for Professional Online Writers
I don’t think it’s as bleak as this article makes it seem, but yes, I’ve worked for $15 an article and had editors complain that I got paid that much. Which is one reason I work for myself now.
by Freddie deBoer
So it won’t surprise anybody to learn that I really, really don’t like Buzzfeed.
Sometimes, when I consider the Buzzfeed phenomenon, I think I’m living in some sort of fictional satirical world where Buzzfeed is a symbol of how far media can fall. It’s like living in a Douglas Copeland novel. Buzzfeed’s particular brand of lowest common denominator clickbait, their “14 Giraffes Who Totally Look Like Steve Buscemi,” their “25 Things Only People from [Insert Geographical Area Here] Understand,” their “Which of Fat Cat’s Minions from Chip’n’Dale’s Rescue Rangers Are You?” quizzes, their corpsefucking glurge, sitting side-by-side with their “branded content” like “12 Most Crunchtastic TV Moments Brought to You by Frito Lay,” subsidizing imperial stenographer Rosie Gray’s smears of Max Blumenthal (an actual journalist), powered by an aggregation model that comes pretty close to plagiarism even when it doesn’t devolve into the serial copy-and-pasting of Benny Johnson…
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“Artists” stealing from Artists – Sad News at 100 Braid St Studios
That’s just horrible. Some asshole who can’t make it as an artist broke into a collective studio and helped himself to the art supplies. Also a computer and printer.
Report from HOPE X: Surveillance, Snowden, Stratfor and Surprises
Well, this was ironic. We sent a correspondent to cover the Hackers on Planet Earth conference. Guess what happened to him? Well, read on…
HOPE X, which took place in New York this past weekend, is one of the premiere events of the hacker calendar. The Cryptosphere correspondent Douglas Lucas was there, presenting on a panel, schmoozing over sushi, sneaking into the press room, and … but that would be telling!
Thursday
On my Thursday flight to the tenth Hackers on Planet Earth convention, half-asleep and writing my part for the Project PM panel, I wondered what this article—which I’m writing on the plane back—would report. Figured the weekend would be a thorny mix of “total surveillance NSA surveillance is a dire emergency wracking ruin on humanity RIGHT NOW” and passing out business cards.
The plane trip back, by the way, is enlivened by an email from an editor, asking why my latest article was doing so well on social media. Turned out WikiLeaks had tweeted the link. So, that was…
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Technological Imperialism: Nastaliq vs Google and Apple
Our very first Op/Ed from author and poet Ali Eteraz on the casual censorship of Google and Apple vs language and identity
We are very happy to inaugurate our Opinion column with this piece by Ali Eteraz on the casual censorship of Big Technology, and its effect on language and identity.
I’m a Bay Area based writer who has gotten fed up with the disregard that Google and Apple have shown to the languages of hundreds of millions of people, especially Persian, Punjabi, and Urdu. That is at least 200 million people, if not more.
Basically, Apple & Google both treat these languages as “Arabic.” Even though Urdu has twelve more letters than Arabic, Apple thinks that Urdu speakers can use the Arabic keyboard.
Imagine your foreign phone maker expecting you to write without a letter as ubiquitous as E.
That’s what Apple demands from Urdu and Punjabi speakers. As for Google, it’s imposing an Arabic Naskh Script on these languages, which have traditionally been written in a cursive cascading script called…
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raincoaster 