Above the fold

"IN A STRANGE TWIST of evolution, the influenza virus seems to have endless capability to reinvent..."

Fri, 10 May 2013 13:04:36 +1000

“IN A STRANGE TWIST of evolution, the influenza virus seems to have endless capability to reinvent itself, infecting waterfowl, swine and humans over and over again with great power and destructive force.”

- A more transparent battle with bird flu (via bizarretwist)

newsweek: A Brooklyn Heights playground was renamed to Adam...

Sat, 04 May 2013 10:41:38 +1000

newsweek:

A Brooklyn Heights playground was renamed to Adam Yauch Park today, in honor of the dearly departed Beastie Boy.

[via]

ironstring: did anyone notice there’s a movie coming out called the wolverine when there was...

Thu, 02 May 2013 18:16:04 +1000

ironstring:

did anyone notice there’s a movie coming out called the wolverine when there was actually a movie called wolverine three years ago and it starred the same actor and it looks like he’s playing a very similar character

isn’t that weird

worstpanda: Stove People

Wed, 01 May 2013 21:22:31 +1000

worstpanda:

Stove People

hystericalqueen: jordancameron: kendrawcandraw: Finally done!...

Wed, 01 May 2013 21:19:56 +1000

hystericalqueen:

jordancameron:

kendrawcandraw:

Finally done! One of my last projects for my senior portfolio, I drew the top female emcees (at least from late 90s - today) as tarot queens.

oh my goddess

Denis Altman on Mark Latham

Mon, 29 Apr 2013 15:12:00 +1000

Denis Altman on Mark Latham:

Mark Latham rose to the leadership of the Labor Party unexpectedly, lost the 2004 federal election, retired to sulk from the sidelines, and has done s…

"I’m not against Anzac Day, as such, and there’s nothing wrong with remembering...."

Fri, 26 Apr 2013 13:59:25 +1000

“I’m not against Anzac Day, as such, and there’s nothing wrong with remembering. It’s what we’re not remembering, or never knew in the first place, that is worrying. We should be looking to understand, not merely remember.”

- Lest we forget what?

The Revolutionary Incomprehensibility of 'Game of Thrones'

Tue, 23 Apr 2013 18:49:13 +1000

The Revolutionary Incomprehensibility of 'Game of Thrones':

barthel:

This is not a complaint, or not exactly a complaint. Game of Thrones is a series I look forward to with excitement and watch with enjoyment, but its approach to adapting novels for the screen is much different than what we’ve seen in the past. Despite the way many TV shows have begun to use the 13-22 hours of airtime they’re given each season to tell longer stories, the time commitment and narrative expectations for novels are just much different than they are for TV and movies. (Novels don’t need to end each chapter with a major event, for instance, while TV shows very much do lest they be charged with not being consequential enough.) As such, almost every screen adaptation of a novel or series of novels has decided to cut major parts of the original story. Chunks were left out of the respectful-to-a-fault Harry Potter movies, and even the four hours Peter Jackson got for each movie in the Lord of the Rings trilogy had to cut whole sequences. Other times, things are recombined and invented wholesale, as with the addition of Galadriel and the far increased presence given to Radagast in The Hobbit, or the way the movies in Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight trilogy bowdlerized bits and bobs of several story arcs from Batman comics over the years. In all cases, the strategy was the same: selectively borrow from the source material in order to make the story work within the constraints of the new medium.

Game of Thrones, however, seems to be doing something different.

I admit that I often don’t know what’s going on while watching Game of Thrones, but argue that this is because it’s taking a bold new approach to adapting long works of fiction.

Tumblr is incredibly

Tue, 23 Apr 2013 18:44:50 +1000

langer:

We’re incredibly proud of our partners’ creativity and have been constantly amazed by how well these creations can fit into our Dashboards.

We’re incredibly excited to announce the launch of the new Tumblr app!

Dialogue about these behaviors is incredibly important and online communities can be extraordinarily helpful to people struggling with these difficult conditions.

Online dialogue about these acts and conditions is incredibly important; this prohibition is intended to reach only those blogs that cross the line into active promotion or glorification.

We’re incredibly sorry and appreciate your patience with us tonight.

Through their monthly events, the NY Tech Meetup has given countless startups support from an incredibly welcoming and encouraging community.

So today we’re incredibly proud to launch our Polish translation, making Tumblr available in nine languages!

Incredibly wealthy felines who stack cheese.

We’re incredibly humbled and grateful for your empathy and generosity.

An incredibly comprehensive guide to everything music at SXSW from a local, with band reviews and party fliers for the music portion of the festival.

This year’s conference is going to be the best yet, and we’re incredibly happy to be able to take part.

We’re incredibly confident in our ability to scale to serve all of the visitors to your awesome blogs.

We hit an incredibly difficult problem with the way the Queue processes handle their publishing step that forced us to unwind and rewrite a big chunk of our publishing routine.

We’re incredibly moved by the events happening across North Africa and the Middle East, especially the recent images, videos and commentary we’ve seen on Tumblr about Egypt.

We want you to know that we’re still right in the thick of the most comprehensive re-architecting our infrastructure has ever been through, and while you might still hit some bugs or errors this month, our incredibly capable team is working 24/7 to keep your blogs fast and stable.

But please always know that we truly care about your work as much as you do, and we have an incredibly capable team working incredibly hard to take good care of it.

Heather Peterson gets to make incredibly cool stuff all day and get paid for it.

And we’re incredibly honored that Time Out featured us in their lineup of the best places to work in New York City!

Four new incredibly special themes have joined Tumblr’s Premium Theme Garden!

But it does take advantage of Tumblr’s publishing tools to make it incredibly easy to build a portfolio.

And finally, despite the mess, it’s incredibly tempting to jump into a huge pile of snow whilst yelling “Cowabunga, dudes!”

Last week we had the honor of showcasing a few of the incredibly talented filmmakers on Tumblr.

To deal with the overwhelming volume of content that makes most real-time search incredibly unwieldy, we’ve developed a clustering engine that lets you quickly filter the 650,000 new Tumblr posts created every day, based on likes and reblogs.

Not only are these guys remarkable developers, they have an incredibly inspiring vision for building consumer products, and we couldn’t wait to start working with them on the next suite of Tumblr/iPhone features.

The Tumblr team worked incredibly hard to pull this together.

Is the world made of plastic? Is the city buryin dreams?

Tue, 23 Apr 2013 13:30:09 +1000

When did you stop getting 'excited' about movie premieres?

Wed, 17 Apr 2013 13:37:58 +1000

"Craft beer now accounts for about 2 to 2.5 per cent of total beer manufacturing."

Tue, 16 Apr 2013 10:42:32 +1000

“Craft beer now accounts for about 2 to 2.5 per cent of total beer manufacturing.”

- Brewers set to begin beer trademark battle: ABC News

Photo

Sun, 14 Apr 2013 10:27:49 +1000

You tell them, Glenda Jackson. Standying up to Tory toadies on...

Thu, 11 Apr 2013 14:15:03 +1000

You tell them, Glenda Jackson. Standying up to Tory toadies on the vile Thatcher.

#nofilter sunset #cloudcrew

Sun, 07 Apr 2013 17:39:02 +1000

#nofilter sunset #cloudcrew

wwwtxt: A “lemming” is a little character that gets dropped into a hostile cave environment....

Sun, 31 Mar 2013 16:38:34 +1000

wwwtxt:

A “lemming” is a little character that gets dropped into a hostile cave environment. ☯90DEC

kentballs: one of the latest twitter trends coming out of Japan...

Sun, 31 Mar 2013 16:26:51 +1000

kentballs:

one of the latest twitter trends coming out of Japan is for young school girls to take photos with their friends doing poses and power moves from anime series like Dragon Ball Z.

"We want to balance the budget and cut government spending, not because they lead to better social..."

Thu, 28 Mar 2013 14:16:41 +1000

“We want to balance the budget and cut government spending, not because they lead to better social outcomes, but just because.”

- Tim Dunlop: The Drum.

Wracky Wednesday

Wed, 27 Mar 2013 14:32:15 +1000

Wracky Wednesday

We are better than this

Mon, 25 Mar 2013 12:19:00 +1000

I’ve often seen Australian politics aficionados get particularly excited when foreign media cover our politics stories, but the analysis and depictions is largely filtered through our Canberra press gallery anyway, so I’m suspicious of any suggestion that it offers a new or fresh insight. In particular, this Guardian opinion piece mainly seems to suggest that politics is just a matter of implementing this or that neoliberal economic policy, which I wholeheartedly reject.

If there is a reason that foreigners are surprised at our revolving-door leadership culture, it’s a simple one to explain: people in the UK, Canada, the USA, and most other places have their political leaders elected by a broader base than just MPs. It’s a change to the ALP that is well past due and one that I personally am renewing my commitment to fight for.

Saying perceptions and feelings are important in politics isn’t novel in any way, but it’s something that bears repeating.

It surprises me sometimes that people who strongly identify as left-leaning progressive types seem to have strong positive feelings towards Paul Keating, when he considers taking the ALP to the right on economics his single greatest achievement.

I’d say it’s because he is perceived as a “successful” left-wing/progressive PM, but that’s questionable based on the evidence. Sure, he won in 1993. But Keating was always more popular with journalists than he was with the public and for most of the time he was PM he was singularly unpopular.

The social policies he forwarded for which he can fairly be called progressive were either reversed or stalled during the Howard government years, with perhaps the exception of “engagement with Asia”, which seems to me to be mostly about economics anyway and not about reshaping Australia’s domestic institutions and culture. The word ‘multiculturalism’ has been steadily disappearing from government documents for at least ten years now.

He might have a perception as a “good economic manager” but again this is hard to square with people who self-identify as left wing. I suppose the Keating government’s welfare and taxation policies were to the left of the current ALP government’s, but I don’t think that is the motivation for pro-Keating enthusiasm.

As far as I can work out, his popularity exists largely because of perceptions and feelings. He made not have actually succeeded in reshaping Australian society and culture, but he certainly aggressively tried to do it, and that’s admirable. That bred loyalty and enthusiasm on the part of Labor people. It certainly inspired me in my early teens as my political identity began to form.

I’m talking about Keating because I think to understand the recent Labor leadership stoush you need to understand not (just) policy, but feelings and perceptions.

Everyone agrees that what happened in the Labor caucus last week was truly awful.

I think a lot of people I know are happy that Gillard is still leader. Gillard inspires some people in a similar way, I think, that Keating did; not so much because of achievements but because of a perception.

The first woman PM, first atheist PM, first unmarried and childless PM has had to deal with truly appalling misogyny in the Parliament, in the press gallery, and among a very broad group of Australians. She has always faced it in an inspiring way. She has had to deal with a full-scale onslaught of hate and abuse in so many different fields. She has had an extremely daunting task as PM of a minority government with a restive caucus. And she’s handled that determinedly.

When it comes to policy, I find it hard to understand why people with a genuine commitment to social equality, as opposed to a simple-minded enthusiasm for whatever any person with “ALP” next to their name puts forward, can celebrate. Attacks on refugees, attacks on single mothers, a flabbergasting failure by Gillard to support gay marriage out of claimed personal conviction; even if you have low expectations for progressive change delivered by the ALP you have to be disappointed. And I say this as someone who is still a member and will still campaign for Labor.

A few years ago I said that despite the terrible 2010 election campaign, the change in leadership was not a mistake. I was wrong to say that. The coup was a terrible mistake. Even people who like Gillard personally must agree that the way it was done and who it involved has caused all of us terrible and lasting grief.

I think Kim from LP is right: essentially the problematic aspects of the Gillard premiership can’t be swept under the carpet. Having overthrown a first-term for the first time in history, the Gillard government has not delivered us with much that would justify that move.

Even aside from policy grounds, there’s another problem too: Gillard is screamingly unpopular, and you can’t just blame “Rudd destablisation” or a misogynist media, even though both those things are important. You can see no clearer example of this than the patronising way the government tries to communicate with voters.

Gillard did break her promise not to implement a carbon tax; that was a terrible promise, and never should have been made, and was only made in the first place because global warming was being treated as a PR problem rather than a genuine moral crisis. Chalk that one up with “stopping the boats” and “delivering a budget surplus” as a flippant triangulation that ended up causing the ALP much more long term pain.

Kevin Rudd’s process management was bad. Yes, we all agree. We could see that with the spectacularly awful coup attempt, with its distinctive pairing of Kevin Rudd’s spectacular self-regard with Kevin Rudd’s dithering. I am more than sympathetic with the fury and disappointment this latest leadership coup attempt has provoked – it was truly disgraceful. But it can’t simply be all a matter of Rudd’s ego; a very large proportion of caucus members are, quite justifiably, worried about losing their seats due to this government’s ineptness. The media didn’t invent the story; it’s true. I am tired of people making excuses for the 2010 campaign as well; anyone who think that Karl Bitar’s perfectly devised campaign only fell over because of “Rudd leaks” has got rocks in their head.

Arguments about how bad Rudd’s “kitchen cabinet” system was lack credibility when the leadership change left 50% of that kitchen cabinet (Gillard and Swan) in more senior roles than before. Rudd’s single worst decision was to abandon the ETS rather than fight a double dissolution election. But he made that terrible decision at the urging of Swan and Gillard, the people who exploited Rudd’s subsequent drop in popularity to knife him in secret using the backing of right-wing factional operatives. Rudd wasn’t grandstanding when he said his overthrow meant a lurch to the right; it was true.

Where does that leave us? Thoroughly angry and disappointed at the lot of them, for the most part. But I will still support Labor and still fight to win, because this party, I continue to believe, is better than this.