For a while this blog had stalkers in the form of copycat blogs, maintained by intrepid souls who thought... not sure, exactly. One of them tried to summarize the posts every day, but that got tiring so by the end it was just "July 2 - He hates Facebook, July 3 - More Facebook, July 5 Facebook blah blah." (Another blog disappeared entirely except for the ominous words "Don't trust him." As in -- he has opinions.)
Eventually the entire new media world moved to Facebook and it became irrelevant what any blogger thought. Rhizome.org opined that one simply had to use the portal for global theoretical discourse, and in fact they hoped one day to be technically adept enough to preserve chunks of this branded argumentation for posterity.
Pockets of FB hate still exist, however. Some of the noise comes from right wingers, who think Zuckerberg is a liberal and is suppressing them. A few on both the right and the left continue to object to the site's privacy quagmire.
So for today's Facebook blah blah here is the libertarian-inclined Liberty Blitzkrieg with a post titled Facebook Just Got a Whole Lot Creepier, with links to stories about people receiving friend recommendations from lists that were supposed to be confidential, such as a therapist's patients. Read, and then get back on Facebook to discuss!
tom moody
but she's all we've got
The Clinton Foundation sleaze is finally percolating up to the media's attention. From a Boston Globe opinion column:
This week, the Associated Press reported that half the people outside of government who met with Clinton as secretary of state donated to the Clinton family charity. Also, a judge ordered the State Department to fast-track a review of 15,000 previously undisclosed e-mails the FBI discovered during an investigation of Clinton’s e-mail server. Both stories contradict what Clinton has told the public: that there is no connection between her work as secretary of state and the Clinton Foundation, and that she turned over all her work-related e-mails to the State Department in 2014.
No wonder leading Democratic Senate candidates, like US Representative Ann Kirkpatrick in Arizona and Governor Maggie Hassan in New Hampshire, are reluctant to vouch for Clinton’s trustworthiness on camera.
There is a documentary called Clinton Cash that covers foundation maneuvers, narrated by Peter Schweizer and based on his book of the same name. You might be inclined to blow it off as the latest right wing clintonconspiracymongering, but it's pretty much in line with the critique coming from the center-left (such as the Clinton Foundation Timeline).
Here's a three part review by Nina Illingham of the movie that gives ample reasons to be skeptical of the source while still waving at the stench emanating from Clinton World. Just because the wingnuts are paranoid doesn't mean Bill and Hill aren't working the dark side. Illingham writes:
There is also a curious, off-beat leftist tone to the film as Schweizer repeatedly comes back to the idea that the Clintons are actively professing to help the disadvantaged globally, but are instead actually preying on devastated countries for massive profit and political power. As the author details human rights violations, the swindling of natural resources from the poor for the benefit of brutal oligarchs and the unconscionable murders that donors to the foundation have helped facilitate – it’s hard not to get the sense that Schweizer actually cares about these horrible crimes; as much or perhaps even more than he cares about tearing down a powerful Democrat on the verge of the presidency.
Update: Lauren Weinstein pounds the podium about AP's "half the people outside of government" statistic. This is how it works: if it looks like the AP cooked its numbers, Clinton diehards will howl and thus keep attention off the main story. Possibly Weinstein hasn't seen the Clinton Foundation Timeline website or Clinton Cash and is still living the 1990s "media is so unfair to the Clintons" scenario. He should be happy that the Foundation is finally in the news; people should know what they're voting for.
mostly OK gif history from popular mechanics
You probably already know much of this stuff from a history of GIF animation in this month's Popular Mechanics -- yes, that Popular Mechanics...
...but it's worth a read. It gets the tech details and web politics of GIF usage mainly right without going too near the Duchampian, Barthesian "art" aspect -- the closest it comes is a consideration near the end of a Reddit whiz's "carefully crafted" movie loops.
As for the web politics, the piece is an extended infomercial for Giphy (pronounce it with a hard G and feel good about yourself) as a solution for cross-platform GIF delivery. The idea is you have this persistent animation filetype that works across browsers in a world dominated by "social" companies that want to keep you in their walled gardens, with their own proprietary video-delivery methods. Giphy aspires to be the go-to "cloud" storage place for GIFs that preserves them in their native format but also transcodes them so the social giants can all access them. Once GIFs have a reliable central location where they can be created, stored, and tweaked, people will stop saving them to their individual devices. Then, the GIF as a free-floating entity will finally shrivel up and die -- there will only be Giphy. There are still some awkward copyright issues to be worked out, as in, those GIFs you thought you were perma-linking might be suddenly replaced by YouTube-like take-down notices.
One thing I learned was that Nick Hasty, who was Rhizome's tech guy for a while, is now Giphy's tech guy. He's quoted with some old school fervor about what makes GIFs great but I doubt anyone else at Jiffy (or their tech backers) cares about any of that. Hasty says:
GIPHY believes in the experiential magic of viewing an infinitely looping series of images. While we have encoded all our GIFs into the most popular video formats and make those available on our site, the fact that GIFs play everywhere, can be copied and pasted, dragged and dropped, and don't force you to open a different interface or app for viewing, make them a better choice for what we're doing than any alternative formats.
They're changing GIF consumption in order for it to stay the same, or something. Monetize me, baby.
(hat tip EP)
you will be enjoying this
Apologies for the blinking, usually try to avoid it, but when hate is pure desperate measures must be taken.
I suppose if you use the browser address bar for search you never have to see the main Google search page with its aggressively insipid daily theme drawing. Trust me, it's bad and needs to be destroyed, improved, or in the above case, both.