Reposts – Page 23

Avengers, MCU, Game of Thrones, and the Content Endgame

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In the future, media organizations might have to do away with the “film” and “TV” tags entirely, if indeed there are media organizations as we currently think of them.

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Based on my own experience chronicling both art forms, I’m increasingly convinced that film and TV started merging a long time ago, before most of us were aware of what was going on. Some of us have accepted the change. Others are in denial about it. But as my grandfather used to say, there’s no point trying to close the barn doors after the horses have already escaped.

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Matt Zoller Seitz

Interesting article summarising the ongoing changes to the concepts of what we consider “film” versus “television” and the increasingly blurred distinction, and an exploration of how that’s embodied by phenomena like Avengers: Endgame and the final series of Game of Thrones. Spoilers about the former and about the first three episodes of the latter, obviously.

remysharp comments on “Bringing back the Web of 1990”

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Hi @avapoet, I’m the author of the JavaScript for the WorldWideWeb project, and I did read your thread on the user-agent missing and I thought I’d land the fix ;-)

The original WorldWideWeb browser that we based our work on was 0.12 with screenshots from 0.16. Both browsers supported HTTP 0.9 which didn’t send headers. Obviously unintentional that I send the `request` user-agent, so I spent some painful hours trying to get my emulator running NeXT with a networked connection _and_ the WorldWideWeb version 1.0 – which _did_ use HTTP 1.0 and would send a User-Agent, so I could copy it accurately into the emulator code base.

So now metafilter.com renders in the emulator, and the User Agent sent is: CERN-NextStep-WorldWideWeb.app/1.1 libwww/2.07

Thanks again :)

remysharp (MetaFilter)

I blogged about the reimplementation of WorldWideWeb by a hackathon team at CERN, and posted a commentary to MetaFilter, too. In doing so, some others observed that it wasn’t capable of showing MetaFilter pages, which was obviously going to be the first thing that anybody did with it and I ought to have checked first. In any case, I later checked out the source code and did some debugging, finding and proposing a fix. It feels cool to be able to say “I improved upon some code written at CERN,” even if it’s only by a technicality.

This comment on the MetaFilter thread, which I only just noticed, is by Remy Sharp, who was part of the team that reimplemented WorldWideWeb as part of that hackathon (his blog posts about the experience: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5), and acknowledges my contribution. Squee!

Episode 25: ON CONSENT AND CUDDLING with my daughter Des

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My 17 year old daughter generously sat down with me to talk about consent — her personal experiences with it, humor of it, nonverbal versions, and how to respond to rejection. We talked about her thoughts on the Dear Boy Who Likes My Daughter episode, how she perceives my romantic relationships, what makes a good cuddle partner, and being resourceful after trauma. There’s laughing and crying and lots of proud mama.

Sexplanations Podcast

I’ve been gradually catching up on Dr. Doe‘s Sexplanations podcast; I’m up into the 30-somethings now but my favourite so far might have been episode 25, which presents a very authentic and raw look at Lindsey and her daughter Des’s thoughts on sex, romance, and consent. Adorable.

A poem about Silicon Valley, assembled from Quora questions about Silicon Valley

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Why do so many startups fail?
Why are all the hosts on CouchSurfing male?
Are we going to be tweeting for the rest of our lives?
Why do Silicon Valley billionaires choose average-looking wives?

What makes a startup ecosystem thrive?
What do people plan to do once they’re over 35?
Is an income of $160K enough to survive?
What kind of car does Mark Zuckerberg drive?

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Jason O. Gilbert (Splinter News)

Guess that sex act #CONTENT

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DarkSquidge (YouTube)

My 12th favourite and my 27th favourite YouTubers just did a collaboration and it’s brilliant. Also: I totally knew seven out of the twelve terms Dr Doe brought to the table and would have been able to guess at least one more (as well as, of course, knowing what TomSka meant by his British slang), so this video made me feel clever.

Lyme Regis To Limekilns: A 500-Mile Lime-E Adventure Across The UK

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It all started out as a joke.

Last year, Robin Varley and his friend Sergio thought it would be an amusing challenge to pedal the 50-odd mile gap between Brixton and Brighton using only London’s colloquially-named Boris Bikes. The trip lasted just over 10 hours, including a brief photo op with Gatwick police, and set the pair back a modest sum of 40 GBP.

This year Robin enlisted the help of fellow adventure-seeker Magnus Mulvany, and while the duo kept the alliterative theme of the campaign they opted for a significantly more daunting circuit.

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Lime Bikes

You heard about it here first, probably, but here’s Lime Bikes’ write-up of Robin and Magnus’s adventure.

Towards an Information Operations Kill Chain

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Cyberattacks don’t magically happen; they involve a series of steps. And far from being helpless, defenders can disrupt the attack at any of those steps. This framing has led to something called the “cybersecurity kill chain”: a way of thinking about cyber defense in terms of disrupting the attacker’s process. On a similar note, it’s…

Bruce Schneier

Bruce proposes a model to apply the cybersecurity kill chain to the problem of thwarting information operations of the types that we’re seeing day-to-day in the cyberwar landscape. Or at least, to understand it. Interesting reading, but – and call me cynical – I don’t know if it’s possible to implement some of the kill-stops that would be required to produce a meaningful barrier.

Follow-up: I found two identical packs of Skittles, among 468 packs with a total of 27,740 Skittles

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Possibly Wrong

Applied mathematics at its… best? After predicting statistically that it would take 400-500 packets of Skittles before you’d expect to find the same permutation of colours, an experiment finds empirical backing for this answer at pack number 464.

Somebody get the Ig Nobel Prize folks on the line.

Why do people choose frameworks over vanilla JS?

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This week on Twitter, Maxime Euzière asked why people choose large frameworks over vanilla JS. There are quite a few reasons. Some of them are really valid. Many of them aren’t. Here are the ones I see most often (with commentary). Vanilla JS is harder. No, it’s often not. Modern vanilla JS has taken many…

Go Make Things

Like many people who were already developing for the Web when Javascript first reared its (ugly) head, I would later be delighted when libraries like Prototype and later jQuery would arrive and start doing the “heavy lifting” for me. Not having to do DOM parsing or (especially) Ajax the “long way” (which was particularly long given the workarounds that needed to be done for cross-compatibility) was a huge boon and made it possible for me to write applications that I wouldn’t otherwise have been able to.

But in recent years, I’ve really been enjoying “vanilla” JS. As a language, JavaScript has really grown-up lately, and with modern (and evergreen) browsers dominating the landscape, everybody benefits from these new features relatively soon after they become available. Of course, it’s still important to see any JavaScript as a progressive enhancement that not everybody will experience, but it’s still true, now, that the traditional barriers to writing excellent code in the language are rapidly evaporating.

I no longer add jQuery to a project as a matter of course (and in fact I think it’s been over a year since I deliberately added it to a new project), and that’s great.

Escape Room [NSFW]

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@TailsteakAD (Twitter)

Regular readers will know already that I’ve been a huge fan of comic author Tailsteak, ever since Ruth, many years ago, introduced me to his work. I’m particularly enjoying Forward, his latest webcomic: so much so that in an effort to work around its lack of an RSS feed I accidentally stole unpublished work from him earlier this year (oops!).

He announced yesterday his new secondary Twitter account, @TailsteakAD (the “AD” is for “After Dark”) and was delighted from the very top tweet onwards:

TailsteakAD: For the record, just because an artist makes erotic work, or even has a dedicated adult-themed account, that in no way implies that they have any desire whatsoever to receive your unsolicited sexual messages or images. I mean, *I* want'em, but other artists might not. — That’s the spirit.

Anyway: a short while later I found a 20-page comic he’d made called The Escape Room: read it on Twitter or via Threadreader. It might be exactly the comic you’ve always been looking for, assuming that the comic you’ve always been looking for combines B/D, gay sex, and escape room puzzle mechanics. NSFW, obviously.

Suddenly I feel like the escape rooms I go to aren’t quite as good as I thought.

We’re moving from Stage 2 to Stage 3 polyamory

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At last week’s Rocky Mountain Poly Living conference in Denver, Leanna Wolfe — a poly anthropologist and sexologist active in the movement almost since its birth in the 1980s — spoke on what she called the three historical stages of polyamory in Western culture.

Her Stage 1 was mostly male-centric (my paraphrase). She described it as running through the Oneida Colony and other utopian communities of the 19th century through the free-love beliefs and attitudes that exploded in the 1960s.

Stage 2 has been what we call the modern poly movement: strongly feminist in its origins and growth, born in the mid-1980s and running until more or less now. Its founders, organizers, media spokespeople, bloggers, podcasters, book authors and opinion leaders have been mostly women (the ratio by my count is about 3 to 1). Its ideology has been gender-egalitarian, communication-centric, and consent-based since before consent culture was a thing. Like Stage 1, Stage 2 has been something of a counterculture that sees itself apart from mainstream society.

The current Stage 3 is the mainstreaming of consensual non-monogamy (CNM) in its many forms, including polyamory, into the general culture. This shift is well under way and bodes to take over the conversation in coming years — for better and for worse, as I’ve been speechifying about since 2008.

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Poly In The Media

Does this make those of us who’ve been doing polyamory for ages “poly hipsters”?

Out of the ordinary: getting digital…

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The Bodleian Digital Comms team is no stranger to developing out of the ordinary content. Want to represent all of the varied and gruesome deaths in Shakespeare in a fun and engaging way? We’re on it!

We manage almost all of the Libraries’ public facing digital ‘stuff’, from our main websites to social media and digital signage. When we tot it all up, it’s over fifty websites, a similar number of blogs, the full range of social media platforms, more than twenty digital screens, a handful of interactive experiences a year, plus…well, not actually a partridge in a pear tree, but there are unicorns in arks.

From ambush to war crimes, a chance to delve into death in Shakespeare’s works, and to think about how it differed from the reality

Whatever the platform, our team’s focus is on finding ways to engage the Libraries’ audiences — whether students, researchers, tourists or those around the globe who can’t actually visit in person — with our work and our collections.

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Bodleian Libraries (Medium)

G7 Comes Out in Favor of Encryption Backdoors

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From a G7 meeting of interior ministers in Paris this month, an “outcome document“:

Encourage Internet companies to establish lawful access solutions for their products and services, including data that is encrypted, for law enforcement and competent authorities to access digital evidence, when it is removed or hosted on IT servers located abroad or encrypted, without imposing any particular technology and while ensuring that assistance requested from internet companies is underpinned by the rule law and due process protection. Some G7 countries highlight the importance of not prohibiting, limiting, or weakening encryption;

There is a weird belief amongst policy makers that hacking an encryption system’s key management system is fundamentally different than hacking the system’s encryption algorithm. The difference is only technical; the effect is the same. Both are ways of weakening encryption.

Bruce Schneier

The G7’s proposal to encourage encryption backdoors demonstrates two unsurprising things about the politicians in attendance, including that:

They’re unwilling to attempt to force Internet companies to add backdoors (e.g. via legislation, fines, etc.), making their resolution functionally toothless, and
More-importantly: they continue to fail to understand what encryption is and how it works.

Somehow, then, this outcome document simultaneously manages to both go too-far (for a safe and secure cryptographic landscape for everyday users) and not-far-enough (for law enforcement agencies that are in favour of backdoors, despite their huge flaws, to actually gain any benefit). Worst of both worlds, then.

Needless to say, I favour not attempting to weaken encryption, because such measures (a) don’t work against foreign powers, terrorist groups, and hardened criminals and (b) do weaken the personal security of law-abiding citizens and companies (who can then become victims of the former group). “Backdoors”, however phrased, are a terrible idea.

I loved Schneier’s latest book, by the way. You should read it.

Avengers Endgame: The Marvel Cinematic Universe explained

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Rachel Foley (BBC News)

Who’s for a rewatch of the entire Marvel Cinematic Universe, in the “correct” order, before Endgame? No?

The thinking behind this infographic (and in particular the shuffling of Ant-Man and the Wasp behind Infinity War) is like an even bigger, possibly-nerdier variant of the kind of thinking that lead to Star Wars – Machete Order.

Robin Varley is fundraising for Campaign Against Living Miserably

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Remember ‘Conquer The Twatts’?

No!?

Fair enough – well last year Magnus, our good friend Sergio and I hitch-hiked from Brick Lane (London) to Twatt (Orkney, Scotland) 766 miles way. We did it in 32 hours thanks to the generous nature of the people that helped out – including drivers, a pilot and a ferry service (thanks again, you amazing humans!!).

We raised 4 x our intended amount and arrived back in London with time to spare and, frankly, a hankering to do it all over again.

So like Shackleton, Fiennes and Thomas Stevens before us, on the 19th April 2019 Magnus and I – dressed in lime green morph suits – will depart Lyme Regis, Dorset on Lime Bikes (Google them, they’re awesome) For Limekilns, Scotland – 500 miles away (sadly Sergio won’t be joining us for this one)

As with last year, we’re raising for the Campaign Against Living Miserably.

Unlike last year we’re working in association with Lime Bike, who have given us their full support for this trip – so a massive thank you to Conor and the UK team for endorsing us two idiots!

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Robin Varley (JustGiving)

Ruth‘s brother, whom you may recall me writing about during Challenge Robin I and Challenge Robin II (and the impact the weather had on it, and on me), our New Year’s ascent of Ben Nevis, or my ill-fated bet that he couldn’t jump a river, is on his latest adventure. Following in the footsteps of his effort to conquer the Twatts (which I shared previously), and reminiscent of his cycle to Brighton on a Boris Bike, he’s once again raising money for the Campaign Against Living Miserably with an outrageous adventure well-worthy of your support.

This time around, he and his friend Magnus are riding Lime e-bikes from Lyme Regis, which is almost as far South as you can get in mainland UK, to Limekilns, which is on the “other” side of the Firth of Forth (where the wildlings live). Like Challenge Robin II, there was a fuck-up with the trains and I had to drive him from Oxford to Lyme Regis, but at least I got to find a couple of geocaches while I was down there (one, two).

Anyway: you can follow his adventure via Instagram, but what you really ought to do is go donate money to the cause: or if he’s heading broadly your way: offer him a bed for the night so he doesn’t have to kip in a tent while his batteries charge in the nearest friendly pub.