The present is sticky.  The Long Now became the Long Right Now, somehow. This is not what we had in mind when we philosophised about atemporality, but it's probably what we deserved.

Describing the creation of Superorganism's songs, Orono Noguchi says, "It usually starts with us listening to music and talking about music, art, and all kinds of stuff in the kitchen. Then, one of us would come up with a very basic idea for a song. We'd then send the file back and forth among the group and add on some random ideas that we have. We'd keep working on it until we have a final product."[9] "We've got the guy making the videos downstairs, mixing in the other room, [and] singing going on [elsewhere]," Harry says in regards to their live-in studio. "We've created this kind of warped version of a pop production house."[1]

Alexander replied: “I find that incomprehensible. I find it very irresponsible. I find it nutty. I feel sorry for the man. I also feel incredibly angry because he is fucking up the world.”

Spells are nothing but poems intended to write something new on the face of reality.

it also turns out that neural networks and data mining in general are really good at reinforcing the prejudices of their programmers, and embedding them in hardware. Here's a racist hand dryer — it's proximity sensor simply doesn't work on dark skin! Engineers with untested assumptions about the human subjects of their machines can wreak havoc.)

Amazon.com : You're annotated out there. Gibson: Yeah it's sort of like there's this nebulous extended text.

In the '80s and '90s--as strange as it may seem to say this--we had such luxury of stability. Things weren't changing quite so quickly in the '80s and '90s. And when things are changing too quickly, as one of the characters in Pattern Recognition says, you don't have any place to stand from which to imagine a very elaborate future.

Well, I worried about that. I sometimes don't like to confess how little I know about these things when I start them, but I'm starting to admit to myself that the less I know at the beginning probably the better it's going to go.

“You got numbers on your phone of the dead that you can’t delete,” he yelps as the music notches up to a panic. “And you got life-affirming moments in your past that you can’t repeat.”

a sly but genuine love of just how much music can shape a human being’s identity.

Josie and the Pussycats, both the film and the soundtrack, continue to influence people who do not identify with the aggressively male music world. Even before this reissue, female-identifying musicians have discussed how revolutionary it was for them to see women in a mainstream platform.

It was bell hooks, I believe, who wrote “For in dreams we all drive Camaros.” I might be wrong about that. But it is a great quote and a great summer dream.

Nobody is until they are.

She gets her hooks into you by being witty and dirty, and then drags you off somewhere dark and thoughtful and hard to laugh at.

In many ways, it’s precisely this union of science and magic that needs to be bottled and tirelessly cultivated if VR is to win the favor of mass audiences.

Drained late last century by declining tax revenue and selective civic neglect, Oakland boasts a constellation of seemingly derelict warehouses, storefronts, and churches. Within many of their shabby exteriors, however, are places of creative invention and possibility. These homes and venues—known by cryptic names rarely recorded in the press—cradle scenes that slip between categories; they’re where as-yet-unnamed subcultures gestate. For non-conforming bodies harassed and abused at other clubs, they’re sanctuaries.

If "social memory" can be defined as "how and what social groups remember," then digital culture, as Richard Rinehart and Jon Ippolito point out, changes both the how and the what of social memory.

It's like getting really drunk at a party and spilling your guts in front of everyone and feeling incredibly great and cathartic about it, and then waking up the next morning and realizing what a complete fool you made of yourself."

“You have to realize that people can change in a lot of different ways,” she explained, “especially when they are far away from home and they are asked to make some difficult choices and do hard things.”

Even some of the world's largest companies live in constant "fear of Google"; sudden banishment from search results, YouTube, AdWords, Adsense, or a dozen other Alphabet-owned platforms can be devastating.

“There’s no malice in any of our approach, there’s no maliciousness, at all. We want to be one with them, we want to be their friends, but we also want to kill them. So it’s hard, it’s a fine line between murder and love.”

I am not a punk. I don't understand Gorilla Biscuits or Youth of Today. The hardcore kids hate me. I am alone at night and I can barely breathe, the weight of so much anger and shame crushing my lungs.

I stopped being precious with everything, and I’m applying that to my life and the music that I make and the comics that I make. I don’t believe anymore in the hype machine or the strategy. I believe that you make something and then you share it. There’s no reason to wait.

Are the Killjoys the heroes? If you want to look at it in a nihilistic 15-year-old point of view, watching A Clockwork Orange for the first time, I guess you could see them as the heroes. Are Better Living Industries (BLI) really the bad guys? Who’s the bad guy? I feel like The Girl just wants to hang out with her cat.

They knew that the story mattered; that people in the real world looked up to Superman, even though he was fictional, and could thus be persuaded to use him as a moral compass

By treating particular identities as “subject matter”instead of facets of personhood – by claiming that queer characters can “distract” from a central story, as though queerness is only ever a focus, and not a fact – you’re acting as though the actual living people with those identities have no value, presence or personhood beyond them.

Identity is the micro level: the intimacy of self-expression coupled with the immediacy of belonging.

But fandom without limits makes Team Internet vulnerable.

This kind of dynamic -- between a digital influencer and a fan -- has become commonplace in the “Team Internet” community. Over the last few years, dozens have come forward to share stories of creators who have had inappropriate relationships with those who see them as bona fide celebrities.

Rather than write a story true to the character or true to his situation, I wrote a puzzle piece to fill in negative space that didn’t need filling in. I don’t know WHAT WE GOT out of it in the end, and in terms of practical advice, if I can’t answer WHAT DO WE GET out of a story, then I don’t have a story.

PWJ #4 feels like I have stolen the entire Spider-Man Rogues’ Gallery to make them Do Weird Shit because I love them and no one can stop me.

less is more in a pitch. Imagine your editor on their most busiest day, on a day when all of their projects are seemingly on fire and due at the printer by lunch time, and then imagine that YOUR email is the one that comes in their inbox. A page. TWO pages at the most for a pitch. Unless they tell you otherwise.]

Continuity – the strict adherence of prior texts and their treatment as sacrosanct records – paralyzes comics all too often. It punishes new readers by their virtue of being new. It rewards trivia over opening up the world and blazing new trails. It cuts the pie into smaller pieces instead of making the pie bigger. It builds barriers and creates gatekeepers. And it’s really hard to write well.

There's also the political. I was always bothered by the fact that the first person singular pronoun is capitalized in english - i always thought it was quite self-righteous. Or, as Douglas Adams noted, "Capital letters were always the best way of dealing with things you didn't have a good answer to." Ever since i was a kid, i was told that the world does not revolve around me, yet our written culture is telling me something entirely different. Why not capitalize 'we' or 'they'? (Yes, i love the work of bell hooks.)

It’s another example of “male as default”—the idea that men are a ”neutral” category, with women in a separate, non-default, and markedly different one.

One major example of gender differences in VR is that women are far more susceptible to VR-induced nausea.

There are technical, scientific, and cultural factors that are instructive in exploring why humans, and Earth as currently constructed, aren’t well-suited to having a universal language.

So here’s a more rounded picture of millennials than the one I started with. All of which I also have data for. They’re earnest and optimistic. They embrace the system. They are pragmatic idealists, tinkerers more than dreamers, life hackers. Their world is so flat that they have no leaders, which is why revolutions from Occupy Wall Street to Tahrir Square have even less chance than previous rebellions. They want constant approval–they post photos from the dressing room as they try on clothes. They have massive fear of missing out and have an acronym for everything (including FOMO). They’re celebrity obsessed but don’t respectfully idolize celebrities from a distance. (Thus Us magazine’s “They’re just like us!” which consists of paparazzi shots of famous people doing everyday things.) They’re not into going to church, even though they believe in God, because they don’t identify with big institutions; one-third of adults under 30, the highest percentage ever, are religiously unaffiliated. They want new experiences, which are more important to them than material goods. They are cool and reserved and not all that passionate. They are informed but inactive: they hate Joseph Kony but aren’t going to do anything about Joseph Kony. They are probusiness. They’re financially responsible; although student loans have hit record highs, they have less household and credit-card debt than any previous generation on record–which, admittedly, isn’t that hard when you’re living at home and using your parents’ credit card. They love their phones but hate talking on them.

I think I’m trying my best to rip off good movies and put it in comics.

I wanted to record civil breakdown by degrees ... it's not all at once, it's not, you flip a switch and suddenly people are dog-eat-dog and regard everything in a Darwinian, animalistic way. I think that it starts subtly ... you walk into a restaurant and the maitre d' does not see you to your table, but just waves at it. Or doormen no longer carry groceries for the elderly. It's that little.

“Starting from a place of 'I don’t have biases' is never helpful.” It’s not necessarily the gender of an engineer that matters, it’s that engineer’s ability to consider perspectives outside their own.

When design solutions address the symptoms of a problem (like sleeping outside in public) rather than the cause of the problem (like the myriad societal shortcomings that lead to homelessness), that problem is simply pushed down the street.

Because I am interested in complicating your definition of maleness and of boyhood. I was born into that shitty town, maleness, full of broken ideals and misplaced machismo and repression and there are some good people stuck living there. They are not in charge. They did not build it.

Shawn and Cory and Tom are three of my best friends in the universe, they know me better than I know myself, and I met them online, thirteen years ago, on an Animal Crossing message board. Like, what the fuck is that? That’s beautiful.

We were all about authenticity, but we were also brilliant fabulists. We were the first generation to really be born into the internet. Everybody had sixteen fake accounts on every website. It used to be so easy to lie — all you had to do was log onto the Neoboards and post a message that said “hi im hilary duff” and voila, you were Hilary Duff, at least for the next three hours. I had a sock account that was supposedly my French friend Lucie. I would have two-way “conversations” with myself that I just ran through Google Translate, and nobody ever busted me. We were kids; we were catfishing before catfishing was a thing. Nobody knew how to investigate anything.

We were thirteen, fourteen, and we were reaching into this shimmering expanse, and other girls were reaching back. They could be across the world or in the next town over, and they were just like us.

the response is always, "What is the LGBT community going to do about this?" But the LGBT community doesn't run the schools where queer kids are being bullied, raped, and abused. The LGBT community can't shut down those "houses of worship" where LGBT kids are abused spiritually and their straight peers are given license to abuse them physically. The LGBT community doesn't parent the vast majority of LGBT kids. So the question shouldn't be, "What is the LGBT community going to do about this?", but rather, "What is the straight community going to do about this?"

Boy George turned 55 this year, an age so many men of my generation—friends who taught me to feel proud when I proclaimed "I'm gay"—never lived to see. The world needs smart, mouthy, middle-aged queers.

The statutes invented by humans are fixed into a shape of a new nature under which we must simply live. Those who for whatever reason fall outside of it are apparently fair game to be cast away, and the illegal and brutal practices they are subject to in the informal economy are justified.

Within the workings of the informal economy bullying and violence is rife. The harshness of these conditions, and the sword of damocles of deportation, is precisely why this labour is so cheap, and so many businesses opt for it. Bullying makes workers subservient, and scares them away from industrial organising (although there are now amazing unions now fighting for workers in these sectors - the IWGB, IWW, and UVW.) It is not just those businesses that do well out of this exploitation. It makes things cheaper for everyone, and oils the cogs of the whole economy. Many people are happy to reap this work’s benefits without ever taking responsibility for the suffering it causes. 

“You’re giving me dumpster sorceress,” one of my friends says. I look a mess, to be honest. But that’s OK. New York is never bigger than it is on nights like these, when the streets are empty but the lights are on. There’s plenty of time. There’s plenty of space.

The thing is, I don’t really present as myself. I mean that in a way that goes beyond my clothing. Presentation is the way I talk, the way I walk, the way I act, the things I admit to liking, the people I surround myself with, the way I won’t hold hands with a guy in public. I present as a negotiation between myself and the space around me, a compromise between vibrancy and violence. It’s a compromise queer people around the world make every day. Flamboyancy means drawing attention to yourself. Being openly queer draws attention to yourself. Attention means they see you, and when they see you, they can hurt you.

I walk into the dressing room. I try it on. I love it. It’s not the me I’d dreamt of in rural Oklahoma — the me I could have been if I had been allowed to grow up uninterrupted — but it’s a baby step in the right direction.

But this was before Facebook. It was before we all started merging our online and offline lives. The internet hadn’t gone corporate; websites were ephemeral things. Your friendships on a site existed only within the space of that site; if you lost one, you lost the other.

But the Braxe/Falke and Dählback joints here are so flimsy, that vocoder'd out Makuziak futuro-disco bullshit so obnoxiously tongue-in-cheek, I can't imagine anybody really psyched to hit up his neighb Fixed or Making Time party to try out his new Diesel hightops on the dancefloor.

Fuck You, I'm Stealing Home: A baseball themed band that toured the coast playing primarily basements and selling matchbooks with our name on them. The oddity of the theme alone helped move some serious units.

Aftermath: My first band when I was 12, named after the fourth Rolling Stones' (our biggest and practically only influence) album (Aftermath), and also because we rehearsed after math (well, school).

New York City Rhythm: Just straight up ripped off the title of a Barry Manilow song. At this point I was starting to become proud of the fact that I had no shame in admitting I liked what some might refer to as the more shameful side of AM Gold. 

When everything’s connected and nobody’s responsible for the consequences, what happens?

Marvel has always been political. Captain America started fighting Hitler and the Nazis before the USA entered the War. Fantastic Four fought the Communists. Captain America fought, then resigned because of Nixon. The Invisible Girl became The Invisible Woman, you had a character actually called The Black Panther from a fictitious, idealised African country.

”The underlying philosophy of the Black Power movement,“ writes Fryer, ”was to encourage Blacks to accentuate and affirm black culture and fight the claims of black inferiority.” The adoption of “black” names is consistent with other cultural changes—like “natural hair"—prompted by the movement. African Americans wanted to distinguish themselves from whites, and naming was an easy means to the end.

adget design is a pretty well-known boys’ club, a field where male engineers design products with other men in mind, rarely considering the way the needs, anatomy, or lived experience of women might change the way a product should work. It’s not uncommon to hear stories of how male engineers forgot to factor in the smaller size of women’s hands and wrists, or the way female fashion doesn’t always include a pocket.

This experience of male internet commenters infiltrating what is meant to be female or neutral online space isn’t unique.

Uber is synonymous with its “surge pricing” policy—when cars are scarce and rides in high demand, users are warned that the cost of a ride may be much higher than normal. It’s then up to them whether to pay the premium or find another way to get where they’re going.

The showdown in Austin highlights a paradox for cities and citizens as peer-to-peer platforms like Uber and Lyft extend their operations. Their wide-reaching outreach campaigns mimic the style of local politics, waging attacks and appealing to and seeking our support as “constituents.” But in practice, their actions don’t necessarily represent our best interests.

The locals refer to Tepito as the Barrio Bravo, the fierce neighborhood, for its reputation of criminality involving counterfeit goods, robbery, and drug selling.

The arrival of quantified self means that it's no longer just what you type that is being weighed and measured, but how you slept last night, and with whom.

Luca thinks this racial discrepancy is driven largely by unconscious bias—the hidden associations we have that affect our behavior without us realizing it.

Luca and his colleagues found requests with African American sounding names were roughly 16 percent less likely to be accepted than their white-sounding counterparts. They found discrimination across the board: among cheap listings and expensive listings, in diverse neighborhoods and homogenous neighborhoods, and with novice hosts as well as experienced hosts. They also found that black hosts were also less likely to accept requests from guests with African American-sounding names than with white-sounding ones.

the reason "hard-working Americans" — the quotes underscoring the euphemism — don't really rock with Hillary Clinton is a sense that some of the concerns she's championing are, if not anathema to them, then at least not theirs.

There are real reasons, both historical and contemporary, that can make stepping outside in your free time while black or brown a politically charged move.

I think that racism and sexism, even when they're naive, are racism and sexism. The result is the same.

It’s just up to making sure you work as well with the art as you can, and with the story, to build up the right amount of emotions that people should be feeling.

But with certain contrasts, like pushing the background back, and then, through blood, basically bringing you through from panel to panel, and then maybe putting blue in the background or something of another panel, you’re really flowing through the violence of the scene by using these key colors, these narrative colors that are very, very instrumental

The fact that we joke about it documents an acceptance of a culture of abuse online. It helps normalize online harassment campaigns and treat the empowerment of abusers as inevitable, rather than solvable.

It’s fitting that our modern fiction about AI should go hand in hand with horror-laced tales about men’s failure to correctly estimate women.

“The time we were opened to that world is when we talk to other bands. People who are great people, amazing musicians. Then they release a new song, and I’m like, ‘That’s not them. I’ve been on tour with them for months, that’s something they would not do. That’s where we’ve seen it the most, honestly.” When it is suggested those artists drank the Kool-Aid, Joseph adjusts the metaphor, replacing “drank” with “served.” “They weren’t given a choice. They were painted into a situation where they were going to get shelved or a plug was going to get pulled, by people in control who think they know [what works].”

The money is an investment for opportunity. You paid for a live audience and the hope that this entertainer will make your dreams—whatever they are—come true and nobody is going to stop you, not even the artist themselves.

I long for a country that not only accepts, but celebrates bad decisions and low-key alcoholism and calls it ‘going to college.’

I'm not really attracted to art that is "good" because of the artist's technical prowess. That might be because, at this point, it's just too easy to buy good equipment and make a really aesthetically sound portrait of someone or capture a beautiful landscape. I think we're kind of saturated with well-crafted photography and well-crafted writing, so sometimes the stuff that's really good but lacks craftsmanship is actually the most interesting, refreshing, and powerful.

As you get older, if you’re wise, you eventually stop trying to impress strangers who will probably turn on you anyway. You learn that you can still have good things and fun experiences.

According to Badu, phones can enhance our ability to communicate deep desires across oceans, but they can also jumble our meaning with static or frustrate with busy signals and voicemail. As an extension of ourselves, phones can be heartbreaking, lustful, smart, dumb, noisy, distracting, powerful.

For the sixteen-track album, the band invented fifteen fictional personas, each with its own sound, aesthetic, and backstory that draw from different decades of club culture. Genres range from Studio 1 reggae to indie rock, under pseudonyms like Burning Phlegm, White Virgins, and Noah's Dark.

“Last Friday, I took acid and mushrooms/I did not transcend, I felt like a walking piece of shit/in a stupid-looking jacket.”

But even if being in PUP sounds like a living nightmare for Babcock, it’s all he’s got. Gig or no gig, he’s waking up most mornings on the floor with more apologies than dollars in the bank, coming to the same conclusion over and over again: that voice in my head telling me I’m a loser was right all along.

This is only just beginning, but I think it's safe to say we're back in the Scottish Political Singularity, with a disturbing undercurrent of violent jingoistic xenophobia down south -- the Scottish divorce from Englandshire won't be uncontested or fault-free either -- and meanwhile the smirking fascist in the corner is hoisting his pint glass and humming "tomorrow belongs to me."

Twixters put off life choices because they can choose from a huge array of career options, some of which, like jobs in social media, didn’t exist 10 years ago. What idiot would try to work her way up at a company when she’s going to have an average of seven jobs before age 26?

“I am very used to seeing things where the cliché is the parent doesn’t understand. Most of my friends, their parents are on social and they’re following them or sharing stuff with them,”

The Internet has democratized opportunity for many young people, giving them access and information that once belonged mostly to the wealthy.

What is the difference between an energetic Sunday morning at church and the rapturous hours of dawn spent at the club? To him, they both aspire to the same physical and experiential ends.

“People will want to study the labels that were put on tapes, or the tape stock, or the plastic case,” says Gary, who specializes in American history. “All that stuff tells a story about how it was produced and where it came from that future scholars will want to grapple with in some fashion.”