A Bitter Red Pill

Palestinian observer status bid voting breakdown: The NO votes

Thu, 29 Nov 2012 16:26:18 -0700

theuppitynegras:

thelefthandedwife:

thepoliticalnotebook:

Canada

Czech Republic

Palau

Nauru

Micronesia

Marshall Island

Panama

US

Israel

SHOCKING

Fuck every country on this list

CANADA STOP

This whole Islamophobia thing you’ve been doing is getting real tired, Canada. Get your shit together because I’m moving back next month and there’s gonna be hell to pay.

So actually it’s our pro-hard-on-for-Isreal Conservative government that’s speaking for us. Yes we elected them, but there are some things they stand for that I’m pretty sure a lot of us don’t agree with.

…Actually I KNOW there are things they are doing that portray us in a way contrary to the way we would like to be seen.

"If you do not tell the truth about yourself, you cannot tell it about other people."

Sun, 18 Nov 2012 11:07:31 -0700

“If you do not tell the truth about yourself, you cannot tell it about other people.”

- Virginia Woolf, writer

"If people [reelect Obama] then I’ll support our president, whoever’s elected. More..."

Tue, 06 Nov 2012 15:23:19 -0700

“If people [reelect Obama] then I’ll support our president, whoever’s elected. More importantly, somebody’s just gotta smack the fuck out of Congress and get them to start working together, and put this bullshit aside and get this country back on track.”

- Kid Rock, musician

[ABP: Amen, brother!]

Best. Halloween. Card. Ever.

Wed, 31 Oct 2012 14:44:45 -0600

Best. Halloween. Card. Ever.

"The irony is that the two presidential candidates decided not to speak about climate change, and now..."

Mon, 29 Oct 2012 13:41:20 -0600

“The irony is that the two presidential candidates decided not to speak about climate change, and now they are seeing the climate speak to them [with Hurricane Sandy]. That’s really what’s happening here. The climate is now speaking to them—and to everyone else.”

- Mike Tidwell

"I was a kid in the street robbing houses, doing drugs, heading for crime. I got to go to school..."

Mon, 22 Oct 2012 16:08:08 -0600

“

I was a kid in the street robbing houses, doing drugs, heading for crime. I got to go to school everyday and play my trumpet in my junior high, and it gave me something to believe in.

Music is the voice of God, man. It’s the thing that keeps us together. It crosses every boundary that exists. Every boundary. I’m talking about boundaries to other dimensions beyond ethnic, economic, social-economic and every boundary.

Music brings us together. Music is the voice of the people. Music is love. Music saved my life.

”

- Flea, musician

"Psst, Blizzard. You didn’t sell 6 million copies of Diablo 3 because Diablo 3 was great. You..."

Tue, 21 Aug 2012 13:27:00 -0600

“Psst, Blizzard. You didn’t sell 6 million copies of Diablo 3 because Diablo 3 was great. You sold 6 million copies of Diablo 3 because Diablo 2 was great.”

- Thirdrail1, via comment on GameSpot.com article

Photo

Thu, 16 Aug 2012 16:21:52 -0600

Pray for humanity.

Mon, 13 Aug 2012 17:43:40 -0600

Pray for humanity.

"The fact is, we are not the center of the market, and haven’t been for a long time. Three..."

Wed, 25 Jul 2012 20:39:24 -0600

“The fact is, we are not the center of the market, and haven’t been for a long time. Three decades ago, the personal computer industry was built on the backs of technology enthusiasts. Every product, every ad was created to please us. No longer. Technology must now work for everyone, not just ‘computing enthusiasts.’”

- John Siracusa, Ars Technica associate writer

"Here’s what being offended is: it’s a phony sense of empowerment. People have lost this..."

Thu, 12 Jul 2012 15:05:00 -0600

“

Here’s what being offended is: it’s a phony sense of empowerment. People have lost this ability to go, ‘Wow, I didn’t like that, that bothered me. I won’t watch that again.’ People have lost the ability to just not like something and walk away. People now feel that if they object to something, nobody else should enjoy it either. It’s because we’ve seen enough people say they’re sorry, we’ve seen enough people fired where people now feel that, ‘if I’m offended, I voice my offense, people have to listen to me.’

It’s a really weird self-centered attention-seeking device people use. So I never buy the offense. … I think 90% of it is a lie. People say, ‘I don’t like stereotypes.’ Bullshit. You don’t like negative stereotypes. People don’t mind positive stereotypes. People don’t mind positive assumptions. It’s only negative assumptions about them. So their outrage is so arbitrary. And I’m embarrassed for us as a free society that we actually want people punished for saying things we don’t like. The liberals are bad and the conservatives are bad. The liberals say things like ‘Well, that’s homophobic, that’s racist.’ And the conservatives say things like, ‘You’re attacking our religion. You’re attacking family values.’ Both sides are equally fraudulent when it comes to supporting unpopular speech. It’s easy to support popular speech. We’re supposed to stick up for things that do bother people. The rest of us are supposed to rally around and defend people’s rights to say what they want to say.

”

- Jim Norton, comedian

"I’m not impressed by the quality of the conversation on either side of [the science vs...."

Fri, 18 May 2012 14:55:27 -0600

“

I’m not impressed by the quality of the conversation on either side of [the science vs. religion] controversy. There’s better religious thought, and there’s better scientific thought, and they don’t engage.

There are people who, for one reason or another, have a bad experience with religion. They drop out at the age of 12—this seems to be characteristic of most of religion’s major critics. And then they spend the rest of their lives attacking a 12-year-old’s conception of religion. Part of the responsibility certainly does lie with religion, because the people who claim it often don’t do it any justice at all.

On the other hand, there’s an idea of science which is not serious. A notion of science which presents itself as all-knowing, all rationalizing, when in fact the best science has always engaged with mystery. With the possibility of error. And the whole complexity of how human beings can know what they know, and so on.

Science is very alert to error, excited by it, pleased by it! If someone can reverse some important position that science has taken, a thrill passes through the scientific community. That tends not to be the way that it’s represented. So I think there’s something tacky, and sort of below the dignity of both sides, in the controversy that’s going on now.

”

- Marilynne Robinson, writer

"I wish I could organize a trip of Tea Party activists and take them to Haiti, so they could see what..."

Tue, 15 May 2012 08:39:51 -0600

“I wish I could organize a trip of Tea Party activists and take them to Haiti, so they could see what happens if they have a country with no government.”

- Earl Kessler, urban-disaster consultant for USAID

"‘Information terrorist’ – what a funny concept. That you could terrorize someone with..."

Mon, 14 May 2012 08:33:00 -0600

“‘Information terrorist’ – what a funny concept. That you could terrorize someone with information. But who’s terrorized? Is it the common people reading the newspaper and learning what their government is doing in their name? They’re not terrorized – they’re perfectly satisfied with that situation. It’s the people trying to hide these secrets, who are trying to hide these crimes. The funny thing is every email database that I’ve ever been a part of stealing, from Pres. Assad to Stratfor security, every email database, every single one has had crimes in it. Not one time that I’ve broken into a corporation or a government, and found their emails and thought, ‘Oh my God, these people are perfectly innocent people, I made a mistake.’”

- Christopher Doyon aka “Commander X”, member of Anonymous

Photo

Wed, 09 May 2012 13:20:00 -0600

Tiananmen Square, China - June 5, 1989

Moscow, Russia - May 8, 2012

Apple doesn't appear to be committed to highlighting content that's Mastered for iTunes

Tue, 08 May 2012 18:06:27 -0600

Apple recently introduced content Mastered for iTunes (MFiT) on the iTunes Music Store, but they certainly aren’t going out of their way to make it easy for consumers to identify which albums are part of the program and which aren’t.

Originally they added an MFiT section where they advised users to “keep checking back as [they] add more music that is mastered specifically for iTunes”. Unfortunately, they haven’t been doing a great job of keeping it updated. It doesn’t appear to have changed since it was first unveiled, otherwise it would have included this week’s release of Keane’s new album, Strangeland and last week’s Norah Jones new album, Little Broken Hearts.

Trying to figure out which albums are mastered for iTunes is tricky business since they don’t appear to have any consistent location/way of telling users that the album they’re looking at is mastered for iTunes. Sometimes it’s in the album’s iTunes Notes section:

Other times it’s advertised solely in a banner on the store’s Music homepage:

That banner is ambiguous, though. Is just the new album mastered for iTunes? Or were those $6.99 catalogue albums ALSO recently mastered for iTunes? (In this case, the copyright information for their previous albums appears to match the years of release, so I must assume they have not been remastered.)

Even more frustrating is when they add an album that has no description, nor MFiT icon. When you get to an album like this, your only way of deducing that it was recently remastered is by looking at the year listed in the copyright information. (Because we all know how much everyone checks that out.)

When Apple first released iTunes LPs they went out of their way to make sure consumers knew they were looking at an iTunes LP—it was indicated with the telltale badge/icon in the top-right corner of an album’s page:

Why is it that they aren’t adopting a similar approach for MFiT? If album pages are the responsibility of labels/artists, I’m sure Apple imposes rules/guidelines as to what information is required on said pages. Why isn’t this a requirement for all MFiT content?

In which Goti proves himself witty

Fri, 20 Apr 2012 16:01:36 -0600

Goti: It's not that I don't care. Contrary to popular belief, I don't wake up every morning with the mindset of offending anyone deliberately. I just have a slightly morbid sense of humor. Life (and death) is too serious not to take the time out to laugh at one, the other, or both once in a while.

Eric: "Contrary to popular belief, I don't wake up every morning with the mindset of offending anyone deliberately." Mind=blown. I actually--literally--imagine you waking up in the morning, looking at yourself in the mirror and psyching yourself up for a big day of being offensive: "What can I do today that tops yesterday?"

Goti: Nope. I wake up in the morning, kick all the hookers out, eat some dead babies for breakfast, floss my teeth with used sumo diapers and put on my pants one leg at a time just like everybody else.

"Record labels have a very strong voice when it comes to arguing for their particular business model,..."

Wed, 18 Apr 2012 22:42:00 -0600

“Record labels have a very strong voice when it comes to arguing for their particular business model, which is in fact out of date. The result is that laws [like SOPA, PIPA and ACTA] have been created which make out as if the only problem on the internet is teenagers stealing music. The world is bigger than that. The internet is bigger than the music industry. The economic impact of the internet is bigger than the music industry.”

- Tim Berners-Lee (inventor of the Internet)

Ouch.

Thu, 12 Apr 2012 15:36:10 -0600

Ouch.

"You know, when I was 15, 16, 17-years-old, I spent five hours a day juggling, and I probably spent..."

Wed, 11 Apr 2012 12:44:04 -0600

“

You know, when I was 15, 16, 17-years-old, I spent five hours a day juggling, and I probably spent six hours a day seriously listening to music.

If I were 16 now, I would put that time into playing video games. The thing that old people don’t understand is—you know if you’ve never heard Bob Dylan, and someone listened to him for 15 minutes, you’re not going to get it. You are just not going to understand. You have to put in hours and hours to start to understand the form, and the same thing is true for gaming. You’re not going to just look at a first-person shooter where you are killing zombies and understand the nuances. There is this tremendous amount of arrogance and hubris, where somebody can look at something for five minutes and dismiss it. Whether you talk about gaming or 20th century classical music, you can’t do it in five minutes. You can’t listen to The Rite of Spring once and understand what Stravinsky was all about. It seems like you should at least have the grace to say you don’t know instead of saying that what other people are doing is wrong.

The cliché of the nerdy kid who doesn’t go outside and just plays games is completely true. And it’s also true for the nerdy kid who studies comic books and turns into this genius, and it is also true for the nerdy kid who listens to every nerdy thing that Led Zeppelin put out. That kind of obsession in a 16-year-old is not ugly. It’s beautiful. That kind of obsession is going to lead to a sophisticated 30-year-old who has a background in that art form.

It just seems so simple, and yet I’m constantly in these big arguments with people on the computer who are talking about, “I would never let my kid do this and this in a video game.” And these are adults who when they were children were dropping acid and going to see the Grateful Dead.

I mean, the Grateful Dead is probably shitty music. It’s impossible—it’s theoretically impossible to make a video game as bad as the Grateful Dead. I throw that out there as a challenge.

”

- Penn Jillette (illusionist, comedian)