Sitting in the parked car at 11:15 on Friday night after the coop, not going home, and listening to the New Sounds on the radio because I never get to just to new and weird music anymore, and I used to love doing that.

That research that IKEA did now makes sense, the one that found that many Americans see their cars the favorite rooms of their homes and more private places than pretty much anything, pathetic but true that it is.

The guy at the coop tonight, a filmmaker, apparently, told me of the time he worked with Werner Herzog, and how he is exactly the same way in real life as in the movies, and how he told him a story of when he was in the Amazon and someone on his team got bit by the most venomous snake in the world (cue German accent), and if you don’t administer antidote in 15 minutes after the bite you die – and how they had some indigenous people working with them, and someone had a chainsaw, and just like that he chopped off his foot to save him. The morale of the story – always be prepared for anything including snake bites.

Then we packaged more Roiboos tea and wrapped some more cheese, then we cleaned up, mopped the floors and went home. Friday night at the coop.

The smartest recent joke I’ve heard at the intersection of sex and politics does not seem at first to be particularly sexual or political. In her debut special, a half-hour on Comedy Central released last month, Emmy Blotnick, a 30-year-old rising star who writes for “The Late Show With Stephen Colbert,” describes the shock of realizing that many of her favorite songs, including ones from Britney Spears and Taylor Swift, were written by the Swedish producer Max Martin.

This one man, she concludes, taught her what “it means to be a sexy woman.” If not for him, she joked, she would never have tried on a halter top. How does this man know exactly what she wants to hear? She researches the question and says that she found an interview with one of his colleagues who said, to understand what women want, every month, “we read Cosmo.”

Blotnick appears stunned, calling Cosmopolitan magazine “the worst representation of women in the world,” adding: “For most of my life I’ve been doing a bad impression of a middle-aged Swedish guy doing a bad impression of an American garbage woman.” With the befuddlement of a narrator from a Philip K. Dick novel who just woke up to realize everything she thought was true was false, she says, “My life is a lie.”

3 Savvy Comics Who Shine Where Sex and Politics Intersect – The New York Times (via stoweboyd)

I wish somebody well known would write a sci-fi book, and someone famous in Hollywood would make a big-budget movie or TV series about how we discover that there is a civilization-ending 5km sized asteroid on track to hit Earth in 30 years in 2048, with 95% probability, and how we do absolutely nothing about it because it turns political.

In the movie, nobody in power wants to raise taxes or sacrifice growth, so they start focussing on the 5% chance that it might miss us and bring “asteroid skeptics” as “balanced counterpoint” to all other scientists, and then someone gets elected on saying that the asteroid itself is a myth by the Chinese and grant-grabbing NASA in a plot to slow our growth and stifle business investment. Most people get tired of all of this and continue to go about their business, study business management and brokerage accounting, enjoy beaches, skiing and gadgets and make babies.

In the movie, among other things, the government releases a detailed study on the anticipated effects of the asteroid impact on the day after Thanksgiving – and everyone is so used to living with the maybe yes maybe not end of the world in 30 years that nobody cares and just goes about their business shopping and making Christmas plans.

The movie should end on the day prior to the impact, with everyone indifferently going about their daily business as always.

olena:

I’m leaving @flickr. Here’s why:
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If you haven’t checked on your #Flickr account in a while, you should do so before 2019. If you’re on a free account with over 1000 images or videos, they may be deleted in February.
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You might already know Flickr was acquired by Smugmug not long ago, taking over from Yahoo. Naturally, new mgmt means changes. I’m not going to summarize here; head over to the Flickr landing page and check out their new rules for free vs paid accounts. Also worth reading: @fastcompany’s updated article about the changes, which mentions that previously-uploaded CC images will remain intact.
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Some people think this is a good change. Evidently, Flickr’s previous 1TB/account offering was unsustainable. But, I’ve had a free account for over 10 years and while I concede that services have to make money somehow, the impending deletion of years of content still feels like a slap in the face. (Especially MacAskill’s presumptuous opinion of who can afford to “pony up” a $50 annual fee based on what we shoot with.) There are plenty of other, more useful storage & gallery options out there, so I’ll be downloading my shit and going.
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Another reason: personally, I hate subscription-based plans. I honestly feel like they’re a bit predatory: with all of the various subscriptions one can have, it’s too easy for them to rack up and easy enough to forget one. Holes in a boat. If I’m going to subscribe, it has to be easy to stop and useful enough to start at all. I’d also prefer to stay within a multi-purpose ecosystem, like Google’s.
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You might find you like the new proposal. This is just a PSA for those who haven’t logged in in a while. https://ift.tt/2QKj44A

in case anyone has a sizable Flickr presence, and haven’t heard about it, here’s a good summary of why you might want to leave it soon.