Kate Bush - Love and Anger - Official Music Video (by KateBushMusic)
realized my favorite Kate Bush song has changed over the years depending on how close I am in age to when she wrote it…. Wuthering Heights ->Running Up That Hill -> Love & Anger ….
looking forward to finally appreciating King of the Mountain when I’m 50
AW: It is. Twitter is my city, my favorite city. I can talk to anybody I want to. And anybody who wants to talk to me will get my response. They know me better than their relatives or my relatives. There’s so much imagination there; a lot of times it’s just like poetry. You just read one sentence, and you sense this kind of breeze or a kind of look. It’s amazing.
— Ai Wei Wei
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Fifty-two stories high, city noises fade and vistas expand. Chicago, June 1967.
Photograph by James L. Stanfield, National Geographic
that is chicago.
(via ayjay)
A twenty-minute drive later, through relatively featureless desert, our visit to “Afghanistan” began with a casual walk down the main street, where we were greeted by actors trying to sell us plastic loaves of bread and piles of fake meat. Fort Irwin employs more than 350 civilian role-players, many of whom are of Middle Eastern origin, although Ferrell explained that they are still trying to recruit more Afghans, in order “to provide the texture of the culture.” The atmosphere is strangely good-natured, which was at least partially amplified by a feeling of mild embarrassment, as the rules of engagement, so to speak, are not immediately clear; you, the visitor, are obviously aware of the fact that these people are paid actors, but it feels distinctly odd to slip into character yourself and pretend that you might want to buy some bread. (via BLDGBLOG: In the Box: A Tour Through the Simulated Battlefields of the U.S. National Training Center)
After 666 comments, a friend of mine was kicked off Metafilter. That was ten years ago. He told me his old screennames over drinks a while back, and I spent the rest of the evening reading the archived posts. As “Settle” and later, “Kettleblack” he was often “cryptic and awkward,” …
Sir Arthur C Clarke (by jonwy)
Sir Arthur C Clarke talks to Martin Kavanagh and Hari Kunzru at Heaven club, at megatripolis, the underground club ( Charing X London ) 31 May 1996. Sir Arthur was speaking from his home in Sri Lanka via a portable satellite phone (and dish), which had been transported to him by Adrian Clint, of the mega-t crew. Pretty apt considering he virtually invented the satellite. There was a power cut in Sri Lanka at the time and Adrian was using Sir Arthur’s back-up generator. Bear in mind this was organised by a nightclub event in the early days of the internet, everything was cutting-edge and the budget was close to 10 pounds GBP. Organised by Martyn Kavanagh who ran the ‘Virtualitea room’ a pioneer of the internet and certainly the first person to ever put a computer + internet forum in a club. - mega-t) Thanks to Hari Kunzru from Wired magazine at the time.Sir Arthur was speaking at the time of writing his book 3001.
RIP Sir Arthur C Clarke.
i don’t want to pretend to be guillotined but Oculus for Google Street View would be nice
One of the most moving pieces on everyday cyborg life I have ever read is Sharon Lehner’s essay “My Womb, the Mosh Pit,” which we published in Sexuality and Cyberspace. In fiercely intimate detail, Sharon described how she was introduced to, made familiar with, and ultimately separated from the fetus of her unborn child, entirely through sonogram images. Certain moments of that story—for example, the nurse’s declaration that Sharon’s fetus had a penis that was “standing like the Statue of Liberty”—still resonate with me as examples of the power of gender performativity. Others, such as Sharon’s lament that she was “mourning the death of an image,” remind me of cyborg theorist Sandy Stone’s comment that asking whether mediated identities are real is similar to “asking where the flame goes once a candle is blown out.”
In 1994, I joined a New York City–based text-only bulletin board called Echo, which at the time was unique in having a large percentage of women as users. In 1996, with Echo founder Stacy Horn, I co-edited a special issue of the journal Women and Performance, entitled “Sexuality and Cyberspace: Performing the Digital Body.” In that journal, I co-wrote an essay with a transgendered woman named Kaley Davis, who was having more luck passing as a woman offline than online.
In everyday life, her clothing choices, hair styles, and body shape made the switch from Ken to Kaley unmistakable. Online, Kaley was—like the rest of us—nothing more than the words she typed on the screen. Because she had joined Echo as Ken, users—particularly female ones—were reluctant to accept her as the woman she now claimed to be.
