Brendan Howell @praxeology@post.lurk.org
Joined Jun 2020
They should have a second place for the Nobel Prizes where they give an award to somebody who never finished their PhD or some big grant application or whatever, because instead they changed like 1000 poopy diapers or took some office job to pay the rent or they took care of their aging parents etc.
Brendan Howell
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how men participate in violently protecting a/the state and/or capital or a geopolitical advantage point against kind people 👇🏼
RT @gtratwar@twitter.com
@poemproducer@twitter.com @franakviacorka@twitter.com The masked OMON get paid 7-8 times the regular salary (now funded by stolen Russian pension money, to be paid back by Belarus working people...).
For money these criminal thieves do everything!
Brendan Howell
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When your whole justice system survival depends on one 85 year women then there is something wrong with your "justice". #ruthbaderginsburg
Brendan Howell
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I want to talk about algorithms on social media. Specifically about how mastodon and the Fediverse often write on their presentation page or feature list about how they "don't have algorithms" because they display posts in chronological order.
👇A thread
Brendan Howell
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On social platforms and the death drive:
This article makes the very surprising and convincing argument that systemic racism is one of the causes of traffic jams (sorry NYT):
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/08/14/magazine/traffic-atlanta-segregation.html
Brendan Howell
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20th century composers & racism
Let's talk about Steve Reich a moment. The Guardian recently quoted him as having said something racist about 50 years ago. His official reply is that he didn't remember making the comment, but he supports racial equality and let's not forget he wrote "Come Out" about police brutality and the Harlem 6. This is a denial and not an apology, for comments that were made half a century ago.
Around the time of the Cuban Missile crisis, Reich went ot Golden Gate park and got excited by a street preacher, who he recorded. The man was preaching about Noah's Ark. Reich recorded him and made a piece called "It's Gonna Rain", which is a piece about the preacher but also about nuclear war.
It's a good piece, well-executed. However, there is something othering about how he approaches the preacher's voice which is reflected in comments he made to friends about the timbres of the voice. Also, it seems problematic to assume that it was Reich who created the allusion to current risks of the world ending, when, in fact, this is a thing that evangelical preachers often do. I would call the piece and the discourse surrounding it problematic.
However, the tape phasing he discovered while doing the piece was clearly a very useful and interesting process.
Hell is other peoples HTML.
(well the hariball of JS that makes it really)
"We might also want to think about the fact that while the specialists/professors – those who know about art – are predominantly employed on fixed-term contracts, everyone in the administration is tenured. Thus, the administration becomes the permanent staff who come to represent stability in the schools and, eventually, embody institutional memory too. "
Pretty cutting long read about how art schools in the Nordic countries were rationalized into a hot mess with fancy buildings and endless bureaucracy:
https://kunstkritikk.com/the-end-of-art-education-as-we-know-it/
Brendan Howell
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thread: share a screenshot of the earliest wayback machine capture of your personal website
My printer is running low on red toner and it makes Mark Zuckerberg look even less human than usual.
Brendan Howell
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The 20th German #BigBrotherAwards will be streamed live this Friday starting 18 CEST (17 BST, 16 UTC).
English live translation will be provided by the famous @SebaLis@twitter.com.
Be sure to tune in:
https://bigbrotherawards.de/stream
/c
Brendan Howell
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«We cannot have a society in which, if two people wish to communicate, the only way that can happen is if it's financed by a third person who wishes to manipulate them.»
— Jaron Lanier
Vinyl outsells CDs for the first time in decades.
https://pitchfork.com/news/vinyl-outsells-cds-for-the-first-time-in-decades/
Brendan Howell
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"Mit vereinten Gärten" ist ein Netzwerk von Hobbygärtner*innen die mit einem #Citizen #Science Ansatz unter realen Feldbedingungen
gemeinsam neue #Bio Sorten züchten helfen - jede*r im eigenen #Garten.
Aktuell werden alte Sorten von #Salat mit einer Toleranz gegenüber #Mehltau gezüchtet.
"Der Vorteil solcher toleranten Sorten ist eine langfristige und nachhaltige Nutzung bei fairem Saatgutpreis ohne Patente"
Du kannst dich jetzt anmelden um 2021 mitzumachen: https://www.mit-vereinten-gaerten.org/#c158
Brendan Howell
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If anyone on here in based in the Greater Birmingham Area (Alabama, not England), please let me know.
I want to start a Free Software User Group for the area. The meetings would be casual and online, and once there are no significant health risks I would be open to in-person meetings.
You don't have to use any specific libre OS. You could be a GNU/Linux user, a Parabola BSD user, a ReactOS user, or a Haiku user. Everyone is welcome.
And of course, it's friendly to queer folks, PoC, etc.
There's an interesting review in the NYT (sorry!) of a book about the Simulmatics Corp. a 1960s forerunner to Big Data - complete with a mix of BS salesmanship and scary behaviorist sociopathy.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/15/books/review/if-then-jill-lepore.html
Brendan Howell
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Former Facebook data scientist Sophie Zhang on the massive amount of "inauthentic activity" used for political purposes on the platform.
Brendan Howell
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Let's pretend you could use something else than #git, or git would have suddenly vanished from the face of the earth. Which DVCS alternative would you pick? #mercurial #darcs #fossil 🤔 
