Posted without comment, except for my photoshop of him infested with mind-controlling Leucochloridium paradoxum gastropod eyestalk parasites:

....Actually, throughout my life, my two greatest assets have been mental stability and being, like, really smart. Crooked Hillary Clinton also played these cards very hard and, as everyone knows, went down in flames. I went from VERY successful businessman, to top T.V. Star.....

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 6, 2018

Read the rest

goodbye.domains is an obituary column for the domain names that you, after years of squatting, now accept will never be put to use and which are, furthermore, worthless.

I just let neverie.com lapse. "Neverie" was the title of the first novel I wrote as a teen, in the genre of trash fantasy. I'd imagined that I might one day edit and publish it, hence the domain. But I won't. Goodbye, neverie.com.

Goodbye Domains [via Dean Putney, who retired deansli.st] Read the rest

Lily Cole is a famous actress, model, and recipient of a double-first class degree in Art History from Cambridge University. How dare they appoint her a partner of the Brontë Society, formed to honor the creative heritage of the Brontë sisters, rants Nick Holland.

If you don’t know Lily Cole, and you’d be in the majority, she is described as ‘a model and social entrepreneur’ (whatever that is). I am unfortunate enough to have encountered Lily before as a few years ago I had a front row seat of a new play about Helen of Troy at Manchester’s Royal Exchange Theatre. Lily had the title role, and the play was so bad that it is the only one I have ever walked out of at the interval. If the acting was bad, and believe me it was, the dialogue was even worse – one line in particular was of such clunking ineptitude that it has remained with me forever: ‘women smell my power, men smell like sex’. It was when Lily delivered this line with all the passion of the announcer at Piccadilly station that I began longing for the train home. This was, quite simply, the worst play I have ever seen, and the writer of it? Simon Armitage, the incumbent creative partner at the Brontë Parsonage Museum

Holland, declaring his intention to leave the society, was slammed as a snob.

“I’m sorry that some people have felt angry about it or against it,” Brontë scholar Samantha Ellis told the Guardian.

John Worboys is a cab driver thought to have sexually assaulted at least 100 victims and convicted on 19 counts in 2009. But he's getting out of jail after only 8 years, having nailed it as his first parole hearing.

He was convicted of one rape, five sexual assaults, one attempted assault and 12 drugging charges.

As well as being ordered to serve at least eight years, Worboys was given an indeterminate sentence, meaning he could be kept in prison as for as long as he was deemed to remain a danger to the public.

In 2010 Worboys had an appeal against his conviction thrown out by the Court of Appeal, where Lord Justice Moses labelled his offences as "appalling".

They didn't even bother to tell his victims.

The chairman of the Parole Board has apologised "unreservedly" after some victims of sex attacker John Worboys were not told about his release.

Nick Hardwick said hearing the decision must have been "horrible" for the women but the board was "confident" 60-year-old Worboys would not reoffend.

Former black-cab driver Worboys is believed to have carried out more than 100 rapes and sexual assaults on women.

One lawyer, quoted by the BBC, calculates his sentence as one month per sexual assault. Read the rest

Sebastian Tomczak, who blogs his fascination with sound and technology at little-scale.blogspot.com, reports that "My ten hour white noise video now has five copyright claims!"

The culprit appears to be YouTube's hapless and hostile contentID system, which automatically matches portions of different videos, makes stupid conclusions about intellectual property, then invites corporate customers to "claim" and monetize other people's work as their own.

My ten hour white noise video now has five copyright claims! :) pic.twitter.com/dX9PCM1qGx

— Sebastian Tomczak (@littlescale) January 4, 2018

Owning white noise today are "White Noise Sleep Therapy", "El Muelle Records", "Rachel Conwell" and "Silent Knights." Read the rest

Michael Wolff's book about Trump, featuring treason accusations from former ally Steve Bannon and reports of the president's dementia, is being released early. Fire And Fury: Inside The Trump White House can be bought immediately at Amazon.

"Due to unprecedented demand," the book about President Trump's White House by Michael Wolff will be released Friday, four days ahead of schedule, according to the book's publisher. The announcement comes hours after President Trump's personal lawyer issued a cease and desist letter over "Fire and Fury: Inside Trump's White House" to Wolff and Wolff's publisher, Henry Holt and Company. Wolff, too, confirmed the early on-sale date on Twitter.

Wolff provides a wealth of new details about the chaos in the Oval Office. Among the revelations: -- What President Trump’s staff really thinks of him -- What inspired Trump to claim he was wire-tapped by President Obama -- Why FBI director James Comey was really fired -- Why chief strategist Steve Bannon and Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner couldn’t be in the same room -- Who is really directing the Trump administration’s strategy in the wake of Bannon’s firing -- What the secret to communicating with Trump is -- What the Trump administration has in common with the movie The Producers

Evidently, Trump's threats were to no avail.

Previously: Bannon: Trump Jr and Kushner meeting with Russians was "treasonous" Read the rest

Jennifer Boylan reflects on the death and life of companions in Inside of a Dog

This summer, I took Indigo for one last walk. She was slow and unsteady on her paws. She looked up at me mournfully. “You did say you’d take care of me, when the time came,” her eyes said. “You promised.”

Photo: Jennifer Boylan Read the rest

Wired published an article about txt.fyi, the minimalist publishing "platform" I made: "Write something, hit Publish, and voilà: your deathless prose, online. "

But here’s the thing: txt.fyi has no social mechanics. None. No Like button, no Share button, no comments. No feed showing which posts are most popular. Each post has a tag telling search engines not to index it, so it won’t even show up on Google. The only way anyone will see it is if you send them the URL or post it somewhere. ... So, does antivirality actually affect what people do and say?

You could load an image up in Photoshop, reduce the color depth and fiddle with the pixel diffusion slider a bit. Or you could get Pixatool, a brilliant app completely dedicated to tuning pixelated images to the finest and most authentic details. Line and contrasts are rendered so well there's often an uncanny suggestion of hand-drawing, and the dithering smokes what mainstream painting apps offer.

It's $30, with a free-of-charge demo version. There's more examples. Artists are sharing their work with the #pixatool hashtag.

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Steam 250 lists the best-rated games ever on Steam, but its hidden gems page lists uses an absolute weighting that exposes little-played titles with few negative votes. First impression: bullet hell shooter fans know what they want, and they get it. Pictured here is Yorkshire Gubbins, the 25th-best-rated game on Steam, "a collection of incomprehensibly daft comedy adventures" set in the climate-challenged English county of that name. Read the rest

The introductory sequence of Bright is enchanting: signs and street art in Los Angeles that describe a world where the races of historical high fantasy stuck around into the present day to become the mocked or honored subjects of political graffiti.

But once characters start talking, this geeky cool evaporates into a mediocre buddy-cop movie. The swirling fantasy tropes are a trash gyre on the seas of racial allegory.

Bright's contemporary LA is also anchored in the past, all sterotypical gang violence, decrepit public services and despotic crime lords. At the top of society are elves, whose fortified enclaves echo South African apartheid more than Jim Crow. At the bottom are orcs, an underclass repressed due to their former allegiance to a long-defeated Dark Lord.

In the middle is humankind, whose own internal racial consciousness and strata are supposedly absent or muted in the world of Bright—but whose humans constantly exhibit our world's racial conscioussness and strata.

When star Will Smith's character kills a verminous bat-like fairy, for example, he declares that "Fairy lives don't matter today." The "today" warps a quip into darker territory: it suggests that fairies are sentient enough for there to be a slogan opposing the moral insignificance of their lives and that he is sick of hearing about it. Smith apparently ad-libbed the line, and offers a similar one later, telling an Orc to get his "Shrek ass" out of the way.

Imagine the cultural signifiance of Shrek in the world of Bright! Read the rest

Ciara Burkett is making wonderful voxel computers and such; bookmark their Ello page for more. [via Jay Allen]

Above, an Apple ⫻. Here's a Compaq portable:

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President Donald Trump has lashed out at Steve Bannon, his former campaign manager and White House strategist, following Bannon's suggestion that a Trump Tower meeting with Russians was "treasonous" and "unpatriotic."

“Steve Bannon has nothing to do with me or my Presidency. When he was fired, he not only lost his job, he lost his mind. Steve was a staffer who worked for me after I had already won the nomination by defeating seventeen candidates, often described as the most talented field ever assembled in the Republican party.”

Trump continued, “Now that he is on his own, Steve is learning that winning isn’t as easy as I make it look. Steve had very little to do with our historic victory, which was delivered by the forgotten men and women of this country. Yet Steve had everything to do with the loss of a Senate seat in Alabama held for more than thirty years by Republicans. Steve doesn’t represent my base — he’s only in it for himself.”

In a new book, former Trump campaign manager and presidential strategist Steve Bannon is quoted as saying contacts the campaign had with Russian agents before his involvement were “treasonous” and “unpatriotic,” singling out a meeting attended by the president's son and son-in-law.

The meeting was revealed by the New York Times in July last year, prompting Trump Jr to say no consequential material was produced. Soon after, Wolff writes, Bannon remarked mockingly: “The three senior guys in the campaign thought it was a good idea to meet with a foreign government inside Trump Tower in the conference room on the 25th floor – with no lawyers. They didn’t have any lawyers.

“Even if you thought that this was not treasonous, or unpatriotic, or bad shit, and I happen to think it’s all of that, you should have called the FBI immediately.”

Bannon went on, Wolff writes, to say that if any such meeting had to take place, it should have been set up “in a Holiday Inn in Manchester, New Hampshire, with your lawyers who meet with these people”. Any information, he said, could then be “dump[ed] … down to Breitbart or something like that, or maybe some other more legitimate publication”.

Bannon comparing Breitbart, his own media outlet, to "other more legitimate publications" is something of a buried lede. But it's not as if anyone's pretending otherwise.

A telling moment of candor by a leading member of Trump’s team, but don’t be fooled. Bannon and other populist nationalists will learn from Trump’s worst mistakes and be more clever, but their philosophies will remain every bit as dangerous and vile.

The iMac Pro starts at $5k, but only it comes in Space Gray, Apple's closest offering to black. The same's true of its peripherals, which are not sold separately. If you like, you can buy a Space Gray set on eBay for $1,525 -- with an hour of bidding to go. [via @mathowie]

Only the Keyboard, Mouse and Trackpad. These are the dark ones that come with the iMac Pro and cannot be bought any other way. Unused. I already have a preferred keyboard/mouse combo I chose to use for my configuration and won't be needing these.

Or, just get a perfectly-decent Matias knockoff for $100. (Amazon)

Update. SOLD for $1525, with no further bids. Read the rest

Have you read "Grand Design", Ed Piskor's remix of the X-Men's epic history? You must, even if you're not into Marvel's legendarium, because it's amazing work. Not just a more engaging distillation of the characters and their history than the movies, either. With Ed's style and wit, it's like something from a parallel world where the X-Men were alt comics. Truly uncanny!

When you’re taking 8,000 pages of material and turning it into a 240-page story, there isn’t an infinite amount of room for exposition and character stuff. So it’s Piskor style. It’s documentarian...

I come from hip hop, and in hip hop, the core of everything is sampling. I have an ego into the stratosphere, no doubt. But I also recognize that if Neal Adams draws the Sentinels flying into the sun, that is such a beautiful, mind-bending composition…how can I compete with that? Most of the comic is my doing my interpretation of things. Whenever there’s an iconic moment, it’s an iconic moment. I might pay very close homage to that. Sampling is hip hop, and I’m hip hop to my core. Just because I’m working on a different comic doesn’t mean I stop having that kind of mind.

Even if you think about the work I did in issue #1 with Magneto on the cover where he’s levitating and power is gravitating from his hand, I just scanned in a piece of wood so I could get the wood grain to look like a warped magnetic field. It’s the same thing.

Math student Carl Størmer acquired a hidden camera in 1890, and put it to use on the streets of Oslo.

The results are close to 500 secret images that show a wide range of people in a casual, relaxed state. Working like a paparazzo, Størmer would greet his subjects and then snap away as they approached. Friendly salutations and suspicious glances play out across his work, serving as some of the first examples of street photography.