The view from my apartment this morning: “We outnumber him! Resist”
oh :((((
I get annoyed when people call the Anish Kappor vs. Stuart Semple thing a “petty art squabble.”
There are so many important technological applications for better light absorbing black paint besides just painting. NASA uses super light absorbing black to make better telescopes and more sensitive light sensors [source] [source]. Darker black paint can be used to make better cameras, film/video projectors, movie theaters, etc., etc. Black paint has a ton of applications beyond just being another pigment for eccentric rich painters to use.
By copyrighting the darkest black paint so that only he could use it, Anish Kapoor was denying the public access to new technology.
ETA: People in the tags have pointed out that “he only copyrighted it for art use, so it’s still available for industrial applications.”
Here’s the thing – “available for industrial applications” basically means “available to corporations.” It basically means that only the people with the right paperwork and the right legal status and the right amount of capital have access.
What about ordinary citizens? Teenagers with technical hobbies, or amateur inventors working out of their garages? They can’t afford to hire a team of lawyers just to get one jar of a perfectly safe new technology, and they shouldn’t have to.
When you say “it’s available for artistic use” what that means in legal terms is that any ordinary private citizen is allowed to use it for any purpose they want without having to jump legal hurdles.
Stuart Semple’s “petty squabble” is making a statement that 1) everyone should have the right access new technology, not just the eccentric rich and 2) any eccentric rich fuck who would try to deny the public their right to new technology is a sucking leech on society and deserves public ridicule.
Gross porn blogs:
What is it about my page that entices you? I’m not interested! Get lost!
The bots are using tumblr to scam Google.
Let’s say someone is looking for porn and they put “wife caught her husband cheating,” into Google. There are a lot of porn sites (and some news sites) with that title. So Google has to decide which order to show them in, because most of the time, people pick something off the first few pages of Google.
Google wants to have the very best “wife caught her husband cheating” (or whatever else you search for) sites on the first page of the search. Google has several ways to try and decide which site are the best, but one of them is that it looks at how popular it is by seeing how many other websites link to it. If a lot of other sites are linking to it, it was probably useful to them, so Google will put it on the front page.
So if I’m a sleazy pornsite owner, I could create like a thousand websites and make them all link to my “wife caught her husband cheating” site, and act like a whole bunch of different websites thought it was pretty great. They’d be like “xdfgt .com”, “xdfgy .com”, “xdfgh .com,” just nonsense addresses nobody else was using, or whatever. I’d try to make Google think my site was awesome, because all these other websites are linking to it.
But Google has already caught on to that. Google would know “xdfgt .com” was a crappy fake website, because nobody else is linking to “xdfgt .com”. Any website that is only linked to by crap websites is also crap, as far as Google is concerned. Google won’t put it on the first pages of search results.
So instead let’s imagine the sleazy pornsite owner creates a thousand fake tumblrs instead, like “xdfgt.tumblr .com” and “xdfgy.tumblr .com” and “xdfgh.tumblr .com” and just puts one or two posts on them to add links to the “wife caught her husband cheating” porn site. Google can still tell those tumblrs are crap websites, because nobody else is linking to them. But the difference is … on tumblr, the sleazy pornsite owner can make your website link to him.
Let’s say your tumblr is “mostlyaestheticandfunny.tumblr .com”. If “xdfgt.tumblr .com” likes one of your posts, there’s link on your blog to “xdfgt.tumblr .com.” Somewhere on “mostlyaestheticandfunny.tumblr .com” it will say “xdfgt liked this” with a link from your blog to “xdfgt.tumblr .com.”
Google’s bot looks at “mostlyaestheticandfunny.tumblr .com” and it sees that your blog is a good website. People are linking to it (talking to you or reblogging from you), you write like an actual human being, you have nice pictures, you update sometimes, you aren’t a bot. So Google decides your blog isn’t a crappy scam website. Then it sees the link to “xdfgt.tumblr .com” and it thinks “oh hey, a nice website with good stuff written by a real human linked to this “xdfgt.tumblr .com” I guess maybe “xdfgt.tumblr .com” is a decent website too.”
Then it looks at “xdfgt.tumblr .com” and it sees the link to the porn site with “wife caught her husband cheating”, and it says, “well, I guess that “wife caught her husband cheating” site is a good site. I know that because there’s a good site linking to it here at “xdfgt.tumblr .com.” I know “xdfgt.tumblr .com” is a good site because “mostlyaestheticandfunny.tumblr .com” linked to it, and I know “mostlyaestheticandfunny.tumblr .com” is a good site because it is updated and writes like a real person and people talk to it and link to it.”
So basically the porn bots are using the fact that you have a good blog to make themselves look better and to try and trick Google’s bot into thinking they’re very popular and it should put them at the top of its list when people search Google for porn.
It’s really annoying! It would be really nice if the people running tumblr figured out a way to not be free advertising for every sleazy porn site on the internet
hey wow thats actually really useful! and its written in a way that i (a bird with no knowledge of the wizardly internal workings of a website) can understand!
Omg! I was wondering why in the hell I’ve been inundated with porn follows lately I’ve been like wtf!! 😲
Oh wow. So basically it’s better to block them instead of ignoring them?
That’s why I do @zhora-salome I block them immediately!
Well this is informative.
River & Donna
I just had a moment of fridge horror. In SITL/FOTD, River knows who Donna is and what happens to her. And the look on her face, and the quaver in her voice, just got a lot more excruciating for me. Because River knows exactly what it is like to have your memories stripped from you, your identity forcibly shaped by others. And she can’t do anything to save Donna from that.
I can only imagine how River reacted when the Doctor told her what he did to Donna. I hoped she slapped him well into the next century.
I wrote a fic about River doing exactly that several years ago. It was inspired by River’s FotD line, “Not one line, don’t you dare!” But until this post I never really thought about River’s heartbreaking reaction about Donna’s fate in the context of her own abusive and traumatic childhood with Kovarian and The Silence. Which in turn gives even more gravity to her “Not those times! Not one line, don’t you dare!”
okay so in psychology years ago we learnt that it’s common for companies to put women in charge when there’s a predicted downfall so that they could be all ha see women suck at being in charge. and I just find it interesting how the UK is gonna have a female PM right after Brexit so like years from now people are gonna be like “the country saw some of its worst years under a woman” when it was men that fucked it up and then ran
Glass cliff
Holy shitThat’s fucked up.
The Fort McMurray Fire is more than you think
It’s strange seeing non-Canadians sharing posts about the Fort McMurray wildfire, because all the posts I’m seeing are just about how it’s big. And yeah, it is big. But this is also such a politically charged place.
The government does not allow the First Nations people living on the land to do their traditional controlled burnings to manage natural fuel build-ups, nourish the forest, and protect people. They haven’t allowed it since like the 40s. They will arrest elders. This means that when the forest burns, it’s explosive.
Back before it became poor taste, Fort McMurray was called Mordor. It’s a boom town pretty much owned by Suncor and Syncrude (and a handful of others), who hire loads of desperate maritimers to work extracting poison in the tar sands. The area has become a gash on the face of the earth, one of the most carbon heavy industrial projects we’ve ever seen.
Canada went back on the Kyoto Accords because the tar sands were more important to us than the health of the planet.
The Albertan and Canadian governments doubled down on the tar sands again and again. All of their eggs in this basket. When the global oil price went down, Alberta was rocked with unemployment and the Canadian dollar plummeted. This fire has the industry shut down right now, and we don’t know what will happen with so much of the workforce displaced, and supportive infrastructure damaged. The city doesn’t have electricity any more, the water isn’t safe to drink.
For the nearly 80,000 people currently evacuated who don’t know what’s going to happen, this is terrible.
For all Canadians, especially those in poverty who already struggled to afford food with a lower Canadian dollar because everything’s imported, this is terrible.
For all of humanity, this has been caused by global warming (unfathomable heat and unbelievably dry winter) and it will worsen global warming. The boreal forest of Canada is massive and one of the biggest carbon-to-oxygen converters in the northern hemisphere. These fires will continue. It’s only May.
Does the loss of resource extraction mean they’re going to go harder in different regions? In BC, activists are doing all we can to resist fracking and further displacement and disenfranchisement of First Nations people, but the pressure has never been so intense. They want pipelines in the north to bring fracked gas to ship out from salmon estuaries through narrow rocky waters to sell to China. How many eggs will the government put in that basket? What happens when a ship inevitably has an accident, and the fracked gas explodes? What happens if everything goes as planned, and the global temperature just keeps rising? This will impact all of us, no matter what.
So yeah. The fire is big. But it’s bigger than you think.
‘Sleepy Hollow’ Shocker: Series Star Exits After Major Twist
‘Sleepy Hollow’ Shocker: Series Star Exits After Major Twist
Sources tell THR that Beharie had been unhappy and was actively
trying to exit the series for quite some time. The character, sources
say, was originally supposed to be killed off during the midseason
finale but insiders are said to have gotten cold feet.Holy shit
of course she was fucking unhappy the show treated her like shit… i love you nicole beharie ;_;
