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wolfliving · 3 years

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A Stacey Higginbotham manifesto

*One doesn’t see those very often.

7 principles for regulation in the IoT era I give about 10 talks a year to various organizations, which gives me the chance to think broadly about trends or holes in the IoT ecosystem that I keep stumbling over in my reporting. Earlier this summer, I gave one at the WiSec security event, and it was one of the scariest experiences I've ever had. After all, these people were researching security flaws in the IoT. They were experts. They wanted me to talk about how normal people evaluated risks in the IoT and what steps people were taking to protect themselves. Setting aside the question of whether or not I'm a good representation of normal people, the talk gave me time to think about the challenges that the IoT, in a world of federated and highly distributed computing, brings, and where regulators might need to step in. I provide seven of those ideas below. And I would love to speak with more people about their thoughts and ideas, too, as I'd like to dedicate more coverage to these issues in the coming months. 1. Define consumer rights for software disguised as hardware: Connected products live in a grey area between hardware and software. This leads to a lot of conflicts and uncertainties for consumers when companies pull the plug on a cloud-based service, rendering a physical device useless. Or when companies change their software terms and conditions, changing how a device might operate. The most recent example of this was Peloton changing the software on its Treadmill product to prevent consumers from using it without a paid subscription. Peloton has since backed off that idea. This lack of clarity around the rights associated with software wrapped in a hardware shell is also behind the "right-to-repair" regulations, and behind the lawsuits filed by consumers when companies pull digital content. The confusion mostly hurts consumers, and so as it becomes more difficult to buy unconnected products, Congress needs to codify basic rules of ownership to protect consumers. I'd also welcome the FTC getting more involved in setting rules as opposed to waiting for egregious acts by companies and then fining them. 2. Rethink the Fourth Amendment for the digital era: In the U.S., the Fourth Amendment protects the rights of citizens "to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures." Centuries of case law have helped define where citizens can expect protection from police search and seizure, but new technology and tools mean we need to lay down clear rules around how police departments access data from public and private devices and when they need a warrant. We should also provide more assistance to citizens who find themselves pulled into an investigation. In some cases, the only notice they might get that their cell phone location data or some other data about them has been swept up in a warrant or subpoena is an email from the tech provider that gave up the information. From that point on, the burden is on that person to figure out why their information was targeted and what they should do. They often have only a short window to address this. 3. Penalize private entities for leaking data/require rapid disclosure: This has less to do with civil liberties and more to do with the outsized harm that can come to a consumer from a data leak. Companies should face penalties for insecure practices such as using production data in tests, leaving unencrypted personal data in unlocked cloud instances, and more. When data breaches are the result of poor security practices, companies are negligent, and should have to pay for that. On the disclosure front, the sooner someone knows their data or passwords have been compromised, the sooner they can fix it. Right now, the administration is discussing a rule that forces companies to tell the public they have been breached within 24 hours. That feels pretty fast; I think a 3-7 day window would be fine. 4. Build auditing authority into existing government agencies to test outcomes: This principle is to address the claims of bias or a lack of transparency in AI. We are embracing the use of AI as a tool in many aspects of people's lives, from deciding who gets bail to using facial recognition to make arrests. I'm not against these tools, but I do think that every government agency needs to have an auditing agreement in place to both show how the AI makes decisions and to lay out justifications for the biases that will undoubtedly show up. There's no such thing as an unbiased algorithm; all algorithms are designed to prioritize some data over other data to achieve a result. Audit committees need to be able to assess those results and see if they meet the current policy goals. 5. Provide GDPR-style rules to help consumers control their data: We still don't have a good federal law to help consumers control how their data is used. California has the California Consumer Privacy Act, which is a start, but we need a federal law to help consumers opt in to sharing their data, to offer them chances to evaluate the data a provider has about them, and to force the provider to correct or delete that data as needed. We should also create laws that dictate what data can be used and how companies can discriminate against consumers based on their data. Consumer data will be out there, so it's imperative we figure out how companies can use it. 6. Ensure data can be corrected/expunge childhood data: I mentioned the ability to correct data as part of a federal data law, but I think it's important enough that we should pull it out on its own, especially because having inaccurate data on a person could materially affect their life. Think about all the poor people who are erroneously included on the federal government's No Fly List. The risks of a company sharing incorrect data expand as we use AI and data so computers can make decisions about people. I also think that kids should have the opportunity to eliminate their data when they turn 18, giving them a clean slate. This is harder said than done, however, because of that pesky digital ownership question. If my kid wanted to eliminate all the photos of her from the web, she'd have to ask me to dump my photos of her that are in Google's cloud or hunt down friends who have shared pictures of her on Facebook. Whose rights matter most in that situation? I think Google's latest policy decision around kids, which removes images of kids under the age of 18 from Google image search, is a good start. Ironically this is a private company taking action on issues relating to kids on the Internet because other countries have instituted new regulations. Giving kids the chance to be kids without having it haunt the rest of their lives is important, especially given that their images are increasingly caught by cameras in private and in public. 7. Rethink current forms of identity and create layers of identity: This is a tough one, but I think it's worth a big discussion. We're in the middle of granting access to our faces, our fingerprints, and even our palm prints to private companies as a way to authenticate ourselves to computers. But these forms of ID can get stolen and potentially misused. There's also no clear indication for consumers when to use a great password and when to use a fingerprint, for example. Given the potential for misuse and the confusion about the potential for harm, I think the government should be educating and maybe implementing some kinds of rules around when a password is sufficient and when you should be asked for, say, an iris scan. It should also put in place rules around how companies store the most sensitive of these identifiers to force those that gather this information to treat it like it matters.

#Stacey Higginbotham #IoT

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firelord-frowny · 3 years

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I’ve talked a little bit about how at least one ~negative aspect~ of white supremacy/racism that impacts white people is that it can be SO DIFFICULT to avoid being Accidentally Racist over something that really shouldn’t have been that deep, and WOULDN’T have been that deep if not for the pervasiveness of white supremacy in america, and this bit about the lil country band Lady Antebellum and the controversy surrounding their name illustrates that pretty well, I think:

The band members have always said that the band's name was chosen arbitrarily, complaining about the difficulty of choosing a name. Inspired by the "country" style nostalgia of a photo shoot at a mansion from the Antebellum South, they said, "one of us said the word and we all kind of stopped and said, man, that could be a name"[40] and "Man that's a beautiful Antebellum house, and that's cool, maybe there's a haunted ghost or something in there like Lady Antebellum."[41] Haywood concluded, "[We] had a lady in the group, obviously, and threw Lady in the front of it for no reason. I wish we had a great resounding story to remember for the name, but it stuck ever since."[40] The name was always controversial, with a critic in Ms. Magazine writing in 2011 that the band's name "seems to me an example of the way we still — nearly 150 years after the end of the Civil War, nearly 50 years after the Civil Rights Act; and in a supposedly post-racial country led by a biracial president — glorify a culture that was based on the violent oppression of people of color".[41][42]

On June 11, 2020, joining widespread commercial response to the George Floyd protests,[41] the band announced it would abbreviate its name to its existing nickname "Lady A"[43] in an attempt to blunt the name's racist connotations.[1] The band members stated on social media that, never having previously sought the dictionary definition of the word "antebellum", they now consulted their "closest black friends and colleagues" so that their "eyes opened wide to the injustices, inequality and biases black women and men have always faced and continue to face every day. Now, blind spots we didn't even know existed have been revealed."[44] Fan response was mixed, with many decrying virtue signaling or even disparaging the protests.[41]American Songwriter said, "Given that the world knows what that A stands for, to many this change does little more than add extra insult to this ongoing injury."[45]

The next day, it was widely reported that the name "Lady A" had already been in use for more than 20 years by Seattle-based African American activist and blues, soul, funk, and gospel singer Anita White. The band again admitted ignorance of any prior use, which White called "pure privilege". Interviewed by Rolling Stone, White described the band's token acknowledgement of racism while blithely appropriating an African American artist's name: "They're using the name because of a Black Lives Matter incident that, for them, is just a moment in time. If it mattered, it would have mattered to them before. It shouldn't have taken George Floyd to die for them to realize that their name had a slave reference to it. It's an opportunity for them to pretend they're not racist". A veteran music industry lawyer observed that such name clashes are uncommon due to the existence of the Internet.[46][47] The band members contacted White the next week to apologize for having inadvertently co-opted and dominated her name,[48] saying that the Black Lives Matter movement had inspired them to a collaborative attitude. They nonetheless required retaining the same name, though she believed dual-naming is inherently impossible.[49]She said "We talked about attempting to co-exist but didn't discuss what that would look like"[48] because the band members would not directly respond to that explicit question three times during the conversation or in two contract drafts. She soon submitted a counteroffer that either the band would be renamed, or that her act would be renamed for a $5 million fee plus a $5 million donation to be split between Seattle charities, a nationwide legal defense fund for independent artists, and Black Lives Matter.[49]

On July 8, 2020, the band filed a lawsuit against White, asking a Nashville court to affirm its longstanding trademark of the name. The press release read: "Today we are sad to share that our sincere hope to join together with Anita White in unity and common purpose has ended. She and her team have demanded a $10 million payment, so reluctantly we have come to the conclusion that we need to ask a court to affirm our right to continue to use the name Lady A, a trademark we have held for many years."[50]

On September 15, 2020, White filed a counter-suit asserting her claim to the Lady A trademark and rejecting the notion that both artists could operate in the same industry under the same brand identity. She is seeking damages for lost sales and a weakened brand, along with royalties from any income the band receives under the Lady A moniker.[51][52]

Like????????? this REALLY didn’t need to be a thing.

And one thing I think black folks and other poc need to chill out with is dismissing any white person’s attempt at Being Better in how they move through a white supremacist world in a way that seeks to undo or at least not exacerbate white supremacy. I can TOTALLY believe that, in their white ignorant bliss, this band really did choose their name without realizing for a moment that it might leave a fucked up taste in some people’s mouths. Honestly like... antebellum IS a cool sounding word lmfao and if it wasn’t so heavily associated with slavery-era america, i’d wanna name something antebellum, too!

And like, yes, it’s true that it ~shouldn’t have taken george floyd’s death~ for anyone at all to suddenly decide that they want to go a little bit out of their way to denounce or at least not seem to promote racism in some small way. But it did. And it does. And every fucking time there’s a gross act of violence and injustice acted out on a person of color in front of the world, there’s always going to be a brand new white person out there who Sees The Light for the very first time. That doesn’t mean their new perspective isn’t genuine, and it doesn’t mean it happened All Of A Sudden. If anything, it was something they’d been thinking about for a long time, but didn’t know how to address it, or what to say, or who to say it to, or how to talk about it in their own community. OBVIOUSLY that problem is WAY LESS BAD than, ya know, actually experiencing racism, but it’s still a real thing that some white folks go through, and being mad about it isn’t going to make it NOT a real thing. it shouldn’t have taken george floyd’s death. it shouldn’t have taken trayvon martin’s death. it shouldn’t have taken the instatement of one of the most vile human beings to ever assault the face of the earth for This Person or That Person to finally want to make a positive and public change, BUT IT DID. It always does. That, unfortunately, is How It Works.

And so, this band adjusts it’s name in an effort to not seem hostile. OBVIOUSLY it’s not a grand show of solidarity. OBVIOUSLY it’s not meant to convince anyone that they’re Super Amazing White People Who Will Stop At Nothing For Racial Equality. It was literally just a small, simple gesture. They’re just modifying their image, because they were no longer comfortable with knowing how that word makes a lot of people feel. Bc like... let’s be real: probably a solid ZERO of their fanbase would have given a shit if they’d just left the name as it was. Nobody who’s going to a Lady Antebellum concert was pouting about the name. And if anything, they prolly stood a better chance of LOSING fans for ~being politically correct~ than gaining fans for changing their name to something less annoying.

And it JUST SO HAPPENS that the slight lil adjustment they made to their name steps on the toes of an existing artist, and it JUST SO HAPPENS that this artist is black, and is also an ACTIVIST in social and racial justice.

Oops.

And so, obviously people don’t interpret it as an honest mistake. Instead, it’s a result of white privilege. And I mean like??? ok, maybe it is. But I ALSO had never heard of Anita White until I read this fucking wiki page lmfao. So like... my ignorance isn’t due to no white privilege on my part. Maybe it’s a consequence of a white supremacist culture that wouldn’t glorify her and celebrate her and put her name everywhere... but that’s a different thing from privilege.

So now not only are the bands efforts to adjust to a world that’s becoming more aware of racial injustice being dismissed as disingenuous or too-little-too-late, but now they’re ALSO being accused of Using Their White Privilege to trample all over an artist they’d never heard of.

i DO think that after finding out the name was already taken, and after talking with her about it and determining that she wasn’t interested in sharing - as is her right - they should have just said “ok, sorry, thanks for talking with us about it” and picked something different. i think it’s kinda ridiculous that they think they should sue her and i think she’s HELLA right for suing their asses right back, and I hope she gets her damn money.

But I’m also cognizant of how emotionally/psychologically upsetting it can feel to have to just Change Your Name after so many years of living with it. It makes sense that despite their desire to adapt and choose a new name that doesn’t make people cringe, they still want to try to hold on to the feeling that THEY associated with their own name. “Lady A” seemed like a happy medium: They can remain Who They Are while also showing that Who They Are is someone who’s not trying to glorify a disgusting era of history. But if “Lady A” isn’t an option... what’s left? What else could they call themselves that wouldn’t feel like a totally new, alien identity??

So, I understand how, on an emotional level, they want to fight to keep it.

But uh. They really need to just Be Sad about it and let it go. Just consider it one of the small, upsetting sacrifices that white folks may sometimes have to make as we ALL struggle and stumble through this fuckin long-ass road of Making The World Less Terrible For People Of Color, and move on.

But yeah, like.

It’s fucking ridiculous that this was even an issue, and it was only an issue because of racism!!!!! If white supremacists didn’t manufacture a culture that oppresses people of color and glorifies the pre-civil-war era SPECIFICALLY for the good ol slavery, then perhaps people could wax poetic about the artistic and environmental aesthetic of that era without it being assumed that they Must Be Racist. Bc like??? idk if yall know this lmfao but i LOVE????? colonial american music. like, the kind of stuff with that Ashokan Farewell vibe. I think it sounds beautiful. And i really fuckin love the black spiritual music that was developed in that time. and i think so much of the architecture and fashion was so???? Nice. Just pleasant! But I can’t even get myself to fully enjoy it because of all the fuckin connotations that have been stuck to it.

A band should be able to name theirself a name without it being such a goddamn fucking cultural crisis.

But they can’t! And it is!

Thanks, White Supremacy!

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sally-mun · 5 years

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🔥+ Preboot Archie!

I think we can all agree that Preboot!Archie is quite a rabbit hole to descend. I first picked up the Sonic comics when it was still in its original mini-series, and I had thought that nothing could break my bond with those books… Then the Pender Nation came.

I made myself give up as the Dark Ages were setting in, and honestly the comic books haunted me for a VERY long time, if just because I knew what a cesspool they’d become. It literally hurt to think about them in most instances, especially knowing that it was the only continuity left for the SatAM characters that I loved so much. What’s worse is that I’d encountered LOTS of people that judged SatAM harshly based on a bad impression made by the comics, and that fueled me to actually hate the comic series for a pretty long time. Coincidentally, this also became a ‘bond’ of sorts that I thought would never be broken.

When Flynn took over the comics, I was really annoyed because I still wanted nothing to do with them, but I kept hearing about them non-stop from my friends – and I was getting really, REALLY upset at the fact that they all kept trying to get me to read them again. I was really offended at the idea because, at least the way I viewed it at the time, the Archie comics were responsible for so much damage that I not only didn’t think they COULD be rehabilitated, but I didn’t think they deserved to be, either. It was a very, very, VERY long time before I was won back over, and it was largely due to @fini-mun and @thegeoffhershqueen. Unfortunately, by the time I had come around and managed to see the beauty that had managed to emerge from the years of accumulated shit, the lawsuit was already in motion. I didn’t really get to enjoy the comics in a contemporary sense for very long before the reboot got rushed onto the scene.

Y’know, my nose is actually getting tingly writing about this. In a way I still feel the… betrayal, I guess? of my relationship with these damn books. I guess you could say I fell in love with them, only to get hurt by them a short time later, twice. Although at one point in my life I’d have said good riddance, that it’s not worth the stress, that I’d rather just stick to my sect of the fandom over here where it’s quiet, etc…. In truth, I am glad that I gave them another chance and that I got pulled back in, even if it was just for a short while. The work that Ian Flynn did on the comics healed me – and I mean that literally. When I mentioned earlier how the comics ‘haunted’ me, it manifested in weird ways that would constantly get in the way of otherwise normal things, which I won’t bore you by detailing. I started hating having certain topics come up in conversation and would immediately remove myself. I hated – hated – certain characters and had a difficult time knowing my friends didn’t, because it almost felt like they were siding with the kid that was picking on me. My inability to handle the existence of the comics caused a LOT of problems between me and my friend group (seriously, I’m sure they could tell you hours of horror stories if you asked them). The Flynn era of the comics changed -all- of that. Every single issue I’d previously had eventually evaporated, one by one.

That little window of time in between Flynn taking the helm of the comics and Penders shattering them once and for all is always going to be incredibly special to me. I’ve never cared about a story the way I did about that one, and for all I know, maybe I never will again. Sure I was invested in the stories and characters themselves, more than I can properly express, but I also value that those comics helped me heal some mental scars and helped repair some rifts with older friends, as well as allowed me to befriend new ones that I can’t imagine I would’ve ever been comfortable around before then. I ultimately became a better and happier person. I felt like I’d been set free from all the toxic attitudes that’d been instilled in me before. Maybe that’s why I ultimately have such a difficult time moving on without proper closure. Rather than the slow death I saw approaching the first time around, this time the comics were suddenly ripped away – and for absolutely no good reason. It honestly still hurts to think about it.

#legit cried a little writing this #Archie Sonic #preboot Archie #elias-mun

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pip-the-enby · 6 years

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Today (19th September) marks the one year anniversary of me falling in love with Ghost. Now admittedly, as I’ve stated before, I had heard of the band around 2011/12 and really enjoyed the aesthetic of the band with the whole Nameless Ghouls and a demonic anti-pope. But I never really listened to the music back then.

Cut to 1 year ago, and whilst listening to some Fleshgod Apocalypse, my brain randomly tells me “you need to listen to Ghost”. So, I ask my dad to put on one of the songs, which happened to be Square Hammer. I immediately fell in love with the music and the music video itself, and of course Papa III. Later that night I listened to Square Hammer again, followed by Cirice and boy, did I get a shiver down my spine.

A couple of days later I ended up accidentally buying a Era 3 Ghoul mask on amazon, on my nan’s birthday, and it turned up on my birthday. Not only did I fall in love with Papa 3, I started crushing on Mr Stomping Queen himself, Omega too. A little while after that I heard about the lawsuit and that, and discovered unmasked pictures of Tobias and Martin, pre Ghost, and some during then on Tumblr. And holy crap, I have never crushed on two musician crushes so much! I also got into Magna Carta Cartel too and UGH, Martin and Tobbe can sing me to sleep.

November 2017, I heard about MCC debuting in London and brought a ticket to see them live. Fast forward to the 10th March this year, and damn that was such an amazing and intimate gig. Martin and Arvid are absolute sweethearts, and I finally got to meet Emma after being Tumblr friends for months, and her friends Olivia and George. Then came the Chapter 1, 2 & 3 on Ghost’s YouTube, and I had my heart ripped out of my chest when I saw Papa 3 die, but Copia immediately put it back into place, hehehe.... what? I love my precious Rrrat King!

Then I hear Rats for the first time in May, and I cried like a baby. Got Prequelle on deluxe CD and Limited Edition Vinyl to take to meet Copia on the 5th June, where I met Lisa and finally met Kim, Tami and Clara. I started crying while waiting in the queue, and almost blubbered when saying hello. He almost broke character telling me it’s ok. I did end up crying like a baby afterwards though, but it was worth it.

Cue hearing that Ghost were gonna be haunting the Royal Albert Hall on the 9th September back in July and I actually said I’d sell my soul just to see them. My friend George got me a ticket (as he was on O2). Don’t worry I paid him back! It was so lovely to be with friends and not at a comic con too!

Anyway what I’m basically trying to say is, thank you Ghost, and Magna Carta Cartel for that matter, for being there at the right time and place for me, your music has helped a lot over the past year. Also if I hadn’t of gotten into both bands, I wouldn’t have some of the loveliest people on this planet as friends, and to an extent, extended/ adopted family!

Nema

#personal #bandom #ghost

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benvantasopinions-blog · 6 years

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I Have An Opinion On - Slipknot’s Discography from Worst to Best Slipknot is a band that’s been around since the “golden” era of nu-metal, and they’ve somehow outlived a huge amount of bands to show up from the genre’s rise and fall from popularity, and in that time they’ve mostly kept the same lineup from the first album onwards, with notable changes coming after the death of bassist Paul Gray and the departure of drummer Joey Jordison. I enjoy all of Slipknot’s material to varying extents, and to this day they have released five studio albums, with none of them being objectively bad. This ranking, as always, is my personal opinion and is (mostly) based on personal enjoyment. #5 - ALL HOPE IS GONE (2008) When the absolute best songs on one of your albums come from the special edition, you have a problem. While still being a good album, All Hope Is Gone is a disappointment for many reasons, most of them stemming from the band’s transition to a groove metal sound. While most of the singles off of this album, such as “Psychosocial”, “Dead Memories”, “Sulfur”, and “Snuff”, are great songs, and the two tracks on the special edition, “Child of Burning Time” and “’Til We Die”, definitely being the best on the album, none of the deep cuts really hit home except for maybe “Gematria (The Killing Name)” and “Butcher’s Hook”. Most of the deep cuts here bleed into one another to a point where they lose individuality, and something like that is surprising to hear from a Slipknot album. It doesn’t help that, from what is known according to interviews with the band themselves, the recording process and production of this album was an absolute mess. It’s not bad, but it’s definitely weak, and that’s mainly the reason I just don’t come back to this album all that much. BEST TRACKS - Gematria (The Killing Name), Sulfur, Psychosocial, Dead Memories, Butcher’s Hook, Snuff, and Child of Burning Time + ‘Til We Die off of the special edition. WORST TRACKS - Gehenna, Wherein Lies Continue, and All Hope Is Gone. #4 - VOL. 3: (THE SUBLIMINAL VERSES) (2004) It’s weird, this might be the Slipknot album I’ve listened to the most, and yet the remaining three besides this all seem to outclass it. Vol. 3 is the band’s first true exploration of different metal styles, with this album leaning a lot towards alt metal, while still being rooted in Slipknot’s nu-metal beginnings. I enjoy this album a lot, but the band’s other material really just outshines it. There are some fantastic songs here though, with big singles “Duality”, “Vermilion” and “Vermilion Pt. 2″, and the Grammy winning “Before I Forget” all being great, but deep cuts like “The Blister Exists”, “Opium Of The People”, “Pulse Of The Maggots”, “The Nameless”, and personal favorites “Circle” and “Danger - Keep Away” (although the Full-Length Version on the special edition is the best version of the song) are all classics in their own right. While there are a few songs that are weak compared to the rest of the track-listing, this is definitely a solid and consistent album. BEST TRACKS - The Blister Exists, Duality, Opium Of The People, Circle, Vermilion + Pt. 2, Pulse Of The Maggots, Before I Forget, The Nameless, and Danger - Keep Away (I prefer the Full-Length Version on the special edition). WORST TRACKS - Prelude 3.0, Welcome, and The Virus Of Life. #3 - SLIPKNOT (1999) From this point onwards, this gets a lot harder. Slipknot’s three best albums are all very close for me, but personally, Slipknot’s debut self-titled album just has to get the bronze medal. Considering the amount of reissues and tracklist changes this album has gone through due to lawsuits and other reasons, I will be judging this album based off of the first 16 tracks on the 10th Anniversary version, which includes both “Me Inside” and “Purity”. With that being said, there’s a huge argument for this being the #2 or even the #1 spot. From the opening track composed of Charles Manson interview samples and onwards, this album is back to back chaos and brutality, with no soft songs to be seen, unlike the band’s later works. The two singles “Wait And Bleed” and “Spit It Out” are classics, but this album’s deep cuts are the real strength here, so much so that damn near the entire album could make the BEST TRACKS list. It’s a wild fucking ride from start to finish, and an amazing debut by what would quickly become one of the biggest metal bands around. BEST TRACKS - (sic), Eyeless, Wait And Bleed, Surfacing, Spit It Out, Tattered & Torn, Purity, Prosthetics, No Life, and my personal favorite Scissors. WORST TRACKS - 742617000027, and then Only One, Eeyore, and Me Inside, which aren’t bad at all, just weak compared to the rest. #2 - .5: THE GRAY CHAPTER (2014) A perfect blend of Slipknot’s heavy and melodic sounds used throughout their career, .5: The Gray Chapter has cemented it’s place in the #2 spot. While I do enjoy Slipknot and this album around the same amount, .5 just barely edges it out due to the technical aspects it possesses. All of the singles on display here are gold, from the lead single “The Negative One” to personal favorites like “Killpop” and “Custer”, and even the opening track “XIX” are all amazing in their own ways. The deep cuts here are among some of the band’s best, with the combination of “Goodbye” and “Nomadic”, the closing track “If Rain Is What You Want” on the standard edition, and even the surprising lead vocal performance of Shawn “Clown” Crahan on “Be Prepared For Hell” is nice. This album is the perfect cross of Slipknot’s trademark anger with the technical and melodic moments they’ve had throughout their career, and it’s definitely worth a listen, especially if you weren’t so hot on it the first time you heard it. BEST TRACKS - XIX, Sarcastrophe, AOV, The Devil In I, Killpop, Goodbye, Nomadic, Custer, The Negative One, If Rain Is What You Want, and Override off of the special edition. WORST TRACKS - Skeptic and maybe The One That Kills The Least. #1 - IOWA (2001) How ironic is it that Slipknot’s darkest album would shine to the top of their discography? Iowa is the band’s heaviest and least melodic album, and it fucking rips you apart from start to finish, but damn, is it an amazing thing to witness. Straight from the utterly off-putting and disturbing opener “(515)”, you know that this album is gonna fuck you up, and it absolutely delivers through 14 tracks of unrivaled fury. From singles like Grammy-nominated “Left Behind” and “My Plague”, to deep cuts like “People = Shit”, “Disasterpiece, “The Heretic Anthem”, “Gently”, “Skin Ticket”, “New Abortion”, and the absolutely haunting and heavy, yet somehow subdued and calming closing title track, this album is flawless and is definitely worth a listen. Give it a spin, but don’t be surprised if freaks you out. BEST TRACKS - IT’S SLIPKNOT’S IOWA. ALL OF ‘EM. WORST TRACKS - NONE OF ‘EM.

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recentanimenews · 4 years

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Hi Score Girl, Vol. 1

By Rensuke Oshikiri. Released in Japan by Square Enix, serialized in the magazine Big Gangan. Released in North America by Square Enix Manga. Translated by Alexander Keller-Nelson.

I admit that at first I did not get the double meaning in the title – before reading the manga, the reader might think that ‘Hi’ is a simple affectation, sort of like saying ‘U’ instead of you. But as you get to know the two leads, with each chapter beginning with Haruo running into Akira in one arcade store or another, you get the impression that it’s also meant to be “Hi, Score Girl!”. Because these two can’t get away from each other – at first by accident, and gradually as the book goes on by choice. They come from completely different backgrounds, but are united in their need to escape their daily lives, and also their skill in any number of games. What’s more, the series clearly takes place in 1991, and so this is also a massive nostalgia-fest for the games of that era – especially Street Fighter II. Those who read other manga (Hayate the Combat Butler) may be surprised that the titles and characters are uncensored. Well… there’s a lawsuit behind that. But it all worked out in the end.

Both kids are twelve years old, though the end of the volume implies there may be a small timeskip coming. Haruo is your standard loser kid with bad grades – in fact, ludicrously bad grades… given his skill at games and his excellent analysis of other people, I have to assume these zero tests are exaggerated for comic effect. Disliked by most of the class, his sole respite is the local arcade (yes, remember, it’s 1991… though he does have a small game system at home). There he plays games… mostly Street Fighter but you will see others as the volume goes on. And meets Akira, a rich girl in his class beloved by everyone. Why is she playing Street Fighter II? Why is she so GOOD at Street Fighter II? She’s not about to tell him, as she doesn’t speak. The manga is not clear about this, but I think it’s meant to be inferred that she CAN speak, but does not because that’s the way this manga rolls. That’s fine, for although she’s supposed to be a stoic little princess, Haruo brings out the worst in her… and also, eventually, the best.

The artstyle is a little odd, which lends itself well to amusing faces, especially from Haruo, who gets punched in the face, kicked in the balls, hit by a car multiple times… he’s basically there to get beat up. But he’s an understanding kid at heart, despite his jealousy about gaming scores, and rapidly understands that Akira’s intense drive to do arcade gaming masks a very lonely girl whose home life is pretty much rigid and arranged for her. The two slowly bond, as she brings him things from school when he’s home sick (and then plays on his home system) and the two are dragged with their classmates to an amusement park (and get so absorbed in games they lose everyone else… which, trust me, is a good thing). They even explore what turns out to be a haunted arcade. Sadly, by the end of the volume, just as we’re seeing burgeoning tween love, she’s moving to America, and flies away. But not before a tearful airport farewell. The end!

…OK, not the end, there are nine more volumes. The preview implies Haruo will move on to middle school (somehow… I assume you can’t get held back in elementary school) and meet a new girl who seems to really like him. That said, I assume Akira will be back. In the meantime, enjoy this sweet and funny ode to the arcade games of yore.

By: Sean Gaffney

#Anime #News #Manga Bookshelf

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radioleary-blog · 6 years

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Donald Trump vs. Herbert Hoover vs. Back to The Future Part III

Okay, he’s the worst ever. President Trump is the worst President we’ve ever had, in my lifetime at least. To find a President that could even compete with Trump for the title of worst President ever, you’d have to get in a time-traveling Delorean and go back about a century. But I wouldn’t recommend you do that, some say that time-traveling in a car powered by a flux capacitor can possibly lead to Parkinson’s disease, especially if you do it for three movies. But the evidence for that is...shaky. Hey, why did those ‘Back To The Future’ films successively get so much worse? Couldn’t producer Robert Zemeckis just get in the Delorean and go forward in time to read the godawful reviews? If only Biff Tannen had stolen a movie guide instead of a sports almanac, he could have saved Universal Studios the 40 million dollars it spent making ‘Back To The Future Part III’. Wow, what a disaster! You know, I recently saw an ad for some network TV show where a team of intrepid multi-culti adventurers go back in time to save the Hindenburg from exploding, but I think ‘Back To The Future III’ may have been the bigger disaster. Yes, the Hindenburg was terrible, sure, but it all happened pretty quick. Whereas ‘Back To The Future III’ has a running time of two hours! Two hours of watching Teen Wolf and the stoner from Taxi yuk it up in the old West. “Oh, the inanity!”

You probably don’t even remember the movie. That's understandable, it’s a normal human response to block out cinematic traumas like that. To access those repressed bad-movie memories you’d need years of psychotherapy and hypnotic regression. Or basic cable. First of all, who would take a time machine and go back to the Old West? Nobody in their right mind, that’s who. Not even Dr. Who. It was about as bad a place and time as there was. All you could get in the Old West was syphilis or a gunshot wound. The Old West was even worse than Kanye West, he’d probably only give you one of those things.

If you could time travel to the far off future, why would you go back and watch a prospector fall down an abandoned mineshaft? You can watch Leonardo da Vinci paint the Mona Lisa, or you could go watch two drunk cowboys shoot each other for cheating at cards. Actually, that still happens quite often. No time travel necessary, just a bus ticket to Reno.

That’s why I don’t get this Westworld. That’s the place you want to re-create and populate with robots? I could think of dozens of better robot theme parks. Here’s one, how about Hugh Hefner’s Playboy Mansion circa 1974? Hanging out with James Caan, a metric ton of cocaine, and every aspiring centerfold on the west coast sounds like a lot more fun than sitting in the middle of a train robbery shoot-out. Where am I, Chicago? But that’s just me, I guess. Want another great robot idea? How about a robot theme park of the cast of Seinfeld. That would be awesome! I would so go, we’d all go! And they’d all be there, not just Jerry, George, Kramer, and Elaine, but everybody. Mr. Pitt. Tim Watley. Jackie Chiles, Lloyd Braun, Kenny Bania, and of course, Uncle Leo. The bubble boy and Izzy Mandelbaum. “Mandelbaum! Mandelbaum!” Let me know when they build it and I will date the robot Sue Ellen Mischke, the bra-less woman who caused a car accident. She may not be real, but they’re spectacular! Serenity now!

But I digress.

As I was saying, no one would time travel to the Old West.

If somebody actually had a time machine, the conversation would go something like this: “Hey, I have this time machine, and it’s all gassed up with bananas peels and deadly radiation or whatever the hell it runs on, where do you think we should go?”

“We can go anywhere in time? How about we check out a Jimi Hendrix concert! Let’s go see Jimi’s legendary set at Woodstock! Or the Fillmore East, 1970, that’s maybe his best concert ever! C’mon! Hendrix!! Either that or maybe we go back in time and check out Jesus! I’d be cool with that, too, either Jesus or Jimi Hendrix! Which one do you want to go see?”

“Well, I don’t know about you, but I don’t think I’m worthy to be in the presence of God. So let’s go see Jesus.”

The amazing things you could see with a time machine would blow your mind. You could go see the Great Pyramids of Giza when they were brand new, and still under warrantee. Back when they still had that new Pyramid smell. The Pyramids don’t smell so good today, now the place really Sphynx. That joke never gets old, right? Don’t Tut-Tut me. It’s like they say, mo’ mummy mo’ problems.

You could go back and see who built Stonehenge...the Druids? The Picts? Or was Stonehenge a natural formation, like the face on Mars, and Mount Rushmore.

You could go back in time to see the dinosaurs just before the comet hit, and watch them climb into their dinosaur space-ships and fly off to populate other worlds. The dinosaurs that stayed behind were either wiped out or forced to live underground, until they were discovered by Marshall, Will, and Holly on Saturday mornings in the Land of The Lost.

The spacefaring dinosaurs, over millions of years, eventually became the Gorn, a very tough race of outer-space reptilians. But they got their lizard asses kicked in about 40 minutes by Captain James Tiberius Kirk, and single-handedly. You can say what you want about William Shatner being a complete diva and an asshole to work with, but the man kicked ass and saved the galaxy about a hundred times, and he did it all without a raccoon. As far as I’m concerned, Captain Kirk earned the right to cut scenes from the other cast members just to pad his own lines. Live long and fuck ‘em.

But I digress. I really, really digressed.

What was I talking about? Oh yeah, this damn Back to The Future III, it’s kind of haunting me, how bad this movie is. It’s a shame the time-travelers from that TV show couldn’t go back in time and save the time-traveler’s movie franchise. And what is it with time-travel being so popular on television all of a sudden? When did that happen? On TV right now, there is the time-travel show I was talking about, NBC’s Travelers. Also, Fox has Making History, Hulu has 11.22.63, The CW has Legends of Tomorrow, Syfy has 12 Monkeys, and Comedy Central has Time Traveling Bong. And I already mentioned BBC’s Dr. Who. That’s a whole lot of time travel goin’ on! There’s no way there’s enough time in the day for a person to watch all these time-travel shows, you’d actually need to use a time machine to see them all. Or a DVR, I guess.

But I digress. Stop me before I digress again. I think this blog is about politics.

Oh yeah, Donald Trump is the worst President ever.

To find another President as bad as Trump, you’d have to go back at least as far Hoover. Herbert Hoover, that is, not J. Edgar Hoover. It’s easy to confuse the two of them, the Hoovers. But where Herbert Hoover liked to address the public, J. Edgar liked to wear a dress in public. And where Herbert Hoover’s dam looked good, J. Edgar looked damn good. But much like the Hoover vacuum cleaner of that era, both of these guys completely sucked.

Was Herbert Hoover worse than Trump? Let’s compare the two men:

Herbert Hoover was orphaned at an early age. He worked hard to found his own business and became a multi-millionaire. Donald Trump? He was born with a silver spoon up his ass and inherited his multi-millionaire dad’s real estate business. He then went on to bankrupt casinos, screw over independent contractors, and force people to humiliate themselves for jobs on national TV. Oh, and he’s good at firing beauty pageant winners if they gain a few pounds, then ridiculing them in the press. Hmm. it’s close, but I think I gotta give round 1 to Hoover.

Herbert Hoover was Stanford-educated, he was an engineer. But Trump must be smarter, after all, he had his own Trump University! And if it was a phony university like the fake news says, tell me how come all those students went on to earn millions of dollars? Oh, that’s right, it was a 25 million dollar class-action lawsuit settlement he paid out to avoid having his orange ass dragged into court. Round 2, Hoover.

Herbert Hoover built Hoover Dam, one of the greatest structural engineering feats in human history. But then again, Donald Trump built a huge pyramid scheme. So, I’d call this round a draw.

Before Herbert Hoover was President, he was in charge of enormous, complex relief operations in Europe during and after World War I. He served two Presidents as Secretary of Commerce, under both Warren G. Harding and Calvin Coolidge. Before Donald Trump was President? He was in charge of enormous, complex challenges like making Lou Ferrigno and LaToya Jackson make bagels and peddle them on the streets of Manhattan. Trump’s biggest executive decisions were made sitting in a boardroom with Dee Snider, Meatloaf, Joan Rivers, Sinbad, and Dennis Rodman. Who, sadly enough, would make far better cabinet secretaries than the ones he actually chose. Seriously, who do you think has more experience dealing with North Korean ‘weebles-wobble-but-they-don’t-fall-down’ dictator Kim Jong Un: Rex Tillerson or Dennis Rodman? Think about that one. Here’s a hint: it’s the guy with 11,954 rebounds. Dennis Rodman is the only person Trump knows who has actually sat down with ‘Lil Kim’ Jong Un, and he fired him. Now I don’t think I would trust the Worm to handle the North Korea situation by himself, but if he had Jordan, Pippen, and the rest of the 1995 Chicago Bulls with him, we’d have an NBA franchise in Pyongyang by now. And war would have to wait at least through the playoffs. Round 4, Herbert Hoover.

I think we can stop right there. It’s a K.O. at the O.K. corral. Move over, Herbert Hoover, there’s a new worst President in town.

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ethelbertpaul444-blog · 6 years

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A Landmark Legal Shift Opens Pandoras Box for DIY Guns

Five years ago, 2 5-year-old radical libertarian Cody Wilson stood on a remote primary Texas gun range and plucked the provoke on the world’s first fully 3-D-printed gun. When, to his aid, his plastic invention fired a. 380 -caliber bullet into a berm of grease without jamming or explosion in his hands, he drove back to Austin and uploaded the blueprints for the pistol to his website, Defcad.com. He &# x27 ;d propelled the site months earlier along with an anarchist video proclamation, declaring that gun control would never be the same in an age when anyone can download and photograph their own pistol with a few clinks. In the days after that first test-firing, his firearm was downloaded more than 100,000 experiences. Wilson impelled the decision to go all in on development projects, stopping out of rule academy at the University of Texas, as if to fortify his belief that technology annuls regulation. Cody Wilson, the founder of Defense Distributed, plans to create the world’s largest storehouse of digital grease-gun enters . div> Michelle Groskopf The law caught up. Less than a week eventually, Wilson received a letter from the US State Department demanding that he take down his printable-gun plans or front trial for flouting federal exportation powers. Under an obscure established of US regulations known as the International Trade in Arms Regulations( ITAR ), Wilson was accused of exporting weapons without a license, just as if he &# x27 ;d shipped his plastic handgun to Mexico rather than lean a digital account of it on the internet. He made Defcad.com offline, but his advocate told him that he still potentially faced millions of dollars in fines and years in prison simply for having reached the document available to overseas downloaders for a few dates. “I thoughts my life was over, ” Wilson says. Instead, Wilson has invested the past year on an unlikely job for the purposes of an revolutionary: Not simply defying or skirting the law but making it to tribunal and changing it. In doing so, he has now not only demolished a law threat to his own highly controversial gunsmithing campaign. He may have also opened a brand-new age of digital DIY gunmaking that farther erodes gun control from all the regions of the United States and the world–another step toward Wilson &# x27; s guessed future where anyone can make a deadly weapon at home with no government oversight. Two months ago, the Department of Justice softly offered Wilson a agreement to outcome a lawsuit he and a group of co-plaintiffs have haunted since 2015 against the United States authority. Wilson and his team of advocates focused their legal dispute on a free speech contend: They pointed out that by forbidding Wilson from announcing his 3-D-printable data, the State Department was not only flouting his right to bear arms but his right to freely share information. By blurring the line between a handgun and a digital record, Wilson had also successfully blurred the lines between the Second Amendment and the First. “If code is speech, the constitutional negations are evident, ” Wilson explained to WIRED when he firstly launched the lawsuit in 2015. “So what if this system is a grease-gun? ” The Department of Justice &# x27; s surprising village, reaffirmed in field records earlier this month, basically abdicates to that arguing. It promises to change the export domination powers encircling any weapon below. 50 caliber–with a few exceptions like fully automatic weapons and uncommon firearm patterns that use caseless ammunition–and move their regulation to the Commerce Department, which prevailed &# x27; t try to police technical data related to the shoots posted on the public internet. In the meantime, it pays Wilson a unique license to write data related to those weapons anywhere he chooses. “I consider it a rightfully magnificent happen, ” Wilson adds. “It will be an irrevocable part of political life that guns are downloadable, and we helped to do that.” Now Wilson is constructing up for lost time. Later this month, he and the nonprofit he founded, Defense Distributed, are relaunching their website Defcad.com as a repository of firearm ideas they &# x27; ve been privately creating and compiling, from the original one-shot 3-D-printable pistol he fired in 2013 to AR-1 5 chassis and more tropical DIY semi-automatic artilleries. The relaunched locate will be open to user contributions, too; Wilson hopes it will soon be used as a searchable, user-generated database of basically any firearm imaginable. A few of the digital frameworks Defcad.com will host, from the first 3-D printable grease-gun known as the Liberator to every tiny ingredient of an AR-1 5. A few of the digital examples Defcad.com will host, from the first 3-D printable handgun known as the Liberator to every tiny constituent of an AR-1 5. A few of the digital mannequins Defcad.com will host, from the first 3-D printable firearm known as the Liberator to every tiny ingredient of an AR-1 5. A few of the digital models Defcad.com will host, from the first 3-D printable firearm known as the Liberator to every tiny component of an AR-1 5. A few of the digital representations Defcad.com will host, from the first 3-D printable grease-gun known as the Liberator to every tiny ingredient of an AR-1 5. All of that will be available to anyone anywhere in the world with an uncensored internet connect, to download, modify, remix, and hatch into lethal artilleries with tools like 3-D printers and computer-controlled milling machines. “We’re doing the encyclopedic manipulate of rallying this data and putting it into the commons, ” Wilson says. “What’s about to happen is a Cambrian explosion of the digital material related to firearms.” He proposes that database, and the inexorable progression of homemade artilleries it helps make possible, to serve as a kind of bulwark against all future gun control, expressing its futility by making access to artilleries as pervasive as the internet. Of course, that assignment seemed most relevant when Wilson firstly embarked fantasy it up, before a political party with no are willing to rein in America’s gun death epidemic viewed button of Congress, the White House, and likely soon the State supreme court. But Wilson still considers Defcad as an answer to the resurgent gun control advance that has emerged in the wake of the Parkland, Florida, senior high school shooting that left 17 students dead in February. The potential for his new site, if it runs as Wilson hopes, would also go far beyond even the average Trump supporter’s smell in shoot freedoms. The culture of homemade, unregulated guns it promotes could oblige weapons available to even those people who basically every American agrees shouldn’t possess them: felons, children, and the mentally ill. The arise could be more specimen like that of John Zawahiri, an emotionally agitated 25 -year-old who went on a shooting spree in Santa Monica, California, with a homemade AR-1 5 in 2015, killing five people, or Kevin Neal, a Northern California man who killed five people with AR-1 5-style rifles–some of which were homemade–last November. “This should frighten everyone, ” mentions Po Murray, chairperson of Newtown Action Alliance, a Connecticut-focused gun control radical created in the wake of the mass opened fire at Sandy Hook Elementary School in 2013. “We’re delivering regulations in Connecticut and other the countries to make sure these weapons of campaign aren’t get into the paws of hazardous beings. They’re working in the opposite direction.” When reporters and critics have repeatedly pointed out those potential consequences of Wilson &# x27; s work over the last five years, he has argued that he’s not seeking to arm crooks or the absurd or to cause the deaths of innocents. But nor is he moved fairly by those possibles to give up what he hopes could be, in a new era of digital manufacturing, the triumphing move in the battle over access to guns. With his new legal win and the Pandora &# x27; s box of DIY artilleries it opens, Wilson says he &# x27; s eventually fulfilling that operation. “All this Parkland stuff, the students, all these dreams of’ common sense handgun reforms &# x27 ;? No. The internet will be represented guns, the firearm is downloadable.” Wilson reads now. “No amount of applications or die-ins or anything else can change that.” Defense Distributed operates out of an unadorned building in a north Austin industrial park, behind two black-mirrored openings celebrated simply with the circled letters “DD” scrawled by someone &# x27; s digit in the dust. In the machine shop inside, amid pilings of aluminum shavings, a linebacker-sized, affectionate designer identified Jeff Winkleman is moving me through the painstaking process of revolving a grease-gun into a collecting of numbers. Winkleman has placed the lower receiver of an AR-1 5, the ingredient that serves as the core formulate of the rifle, on a granite table that &# x27; s been gauged to be perfectly flat to one ten-thousandth of an inch. Then he arranges a Mitutoyo height gauge–a thin metal probe that slips up and down on a towering metal stand and measures vertical distances–next to it, poking one margin of the enclose with its probe to get a baseline learn of its own position. “This is where we get down to the brass tacks, ” Winkleman speaks. “Or, as we call it, the gnat &# x27; s ass.” Winkleman then slowly rotates the guage &# x27; s rotary handle to move its probe down to the edge of a minuscule opening on the side of the gun &# x27; s make. After a pair scrupulous taps, appropriate tools &# x27; s display reads 0.4775 inches. He has just quantified a single line–one of the innumerable dimensions that define the shape of any of the dozens of component of an AR-1 5–with four decimal targets of accuracy. Winkleman &# x27; s responsibility at Defense Distributed now is to repeat that process time and time again, merging that multitude, along with every measurement of every cranny, chink, surface, fault, cheek, and bank of a rifle, into a CAD model he &# x27; s assembling on a computer behind him, and then to repeat that obsessively comprehensive model-building for as countless firearms as possible. That a digital manufacturing firm has opted for this absurdly manual process might seem counterintuitive. But Winkleman insists that the analog calculations, while infinitely slower than modern tools like laser scanners, cause a far more accurate model–a kind of gold master for any future replications or mutations of that weapon. “We &# x27; re trying to set a precedent now, ” Winkelman adds. “When we say something is true, you utterly know it &# x27; s true.” One room over, Wilson evidences me the most impressive brand-new doll in the group &# x27; s digitization toolkit, one that arrived merely three days earlier: A room-sized analog artifact known as an optical comparator. The maneuver, which he bought used for $32,000, resembles a kind of massive animation X-ray scanner. Defense Distributed’s optical comparator, a room-sized machine the group is consuming to alter physical grease-guns to collects of digital estimations . div> Michelle Groskopf Wilson residences the body of an AR-9 rifle on a pedestal on the right side of the machine. Two mercury lamps project neon dark-green ray of light onto the enclose from either line-up. A lens behind it bends that light within the machine and then programmes it onto a 30 -inch screen at up to 100 X amplification. From that screen &# x27; s mercury radiate, the operator can map out points to calculate the artillery &# x27; s geometry with microscopic loyalty. Wilson turns through higher magnification lenses, then concentrated on a series of minuscule banks of the frame until the remains of their machining look like the cover motions of Chinese calligraphy. “Zoom in, zoom in, enhance” Wilson jokes. Wilson’s first controversial innovation was to demonstrate how digital folders could be converted to physical, lethal artilleries . div> Michelle Groskopf He now identifies an opportunity to cripple gun control with the opposite tactic: digitizing as many weapons as is practicable and procreating the folders available to gunsmiths . div> Michelle Groskopf Turning physical artilleries into digital files, instead of vice-versa, is a new subterfuge for Defense Distributed. While Wilson &# x27; s society firstly gained reputation for its invention of the first 3-D printable shoot, what it “ve called the” Liberator, it has since predominantly moved past 3-D print. Most of the company &# x27; s operations are now focused on its core business: making and selling a consumer-grade computer-controlled milling machine known as the Ghost Gunner, designed to allow its owner to etch artillery parts out of far more sturdy aluminum. In the largest apartment of Defense Distributed &# x27; s headquarters, half a dozen millennial staffers with whiskers and close-cropped hair–all resembling Cody Wilson, in other words–are busy construct those mills in an assembly line, each machine capable of skirting all federal gun control to churn out untraceable metal glocks and semiautomatic rifles en masse. The staff of Defense Distributed: proportion startup, area advocacy radical, component armed rebellion . div> Michelle Groskopf For now, those mills produce only a few different firearm encloses for weapons, including the AR-1 5 and 1911 handguns. But Defense Distributed’s technologists imagine a future where their milling machine and other digital fabrication tools–such as consumer-grade aluminum-sintering 3-D printers that they are able book objectives in metal–can attain essentially any digital grease-gun factor materialize in person &# x27; s garage. Most of Defense Distributed’s organization work on the group’s central generator of revenue: building gun-making computer ascertained milling machines “ve called the” Ghost Gunner Michelle Groskopf A Ghost Gunner can finish an AR-1 5 lower receiver, the central part of the rifle’s formulate, in a few hours. Defense Distributed has sold close to 6,000 of the machines . div> Michelle Groskopf In the meantime, selling Ghost Gunners has been a profitable business. Defense Distributed has sold approximately 6,000 of the desktop inventions to DIY gun supporters throughout the country, mainly for $1,675 each, webbing millions in gain. The fellowship hires 15 beings and is already outgrowing its North Austin headquarters. But Wilson says he &# x27; s never been interested in coin or structure a startup for its own reason. He now claims that the entire enterprise was created with a singular destination: to heighten enough fund to income his legal crusade against the US State Department. After his advocates originally told him in 2013 that his occasion against the government was hopeless, Wilson fired them and hired two brand-new ones with knowledge in export restraint and both Second and First-Amendment law. Matthew Goldstein, Wilson &# x27; s solicitor who is focused on ITAR, says he was immediately firmly convinced of the merits of Wilson &# x27; s primacy. “This is the case you &# x27 ;d bring out in a rule clas route as an unconstitutional law, ” Goldstein replies. “It ticks all the check boxes of what contravenes the First Amendment.” When Wilson &# x27; s busines teamed up with the Second Amendment Foundation and wreaked their lawsuit to a Texas District court in 2015, they were supported by a collection of amicus briefs from a shockingly wide-reaching faction: Controversies in their praise were submitted by is not simply the libertarian Cato Institute, the gun-rights-focused Madison Society, and 15 Republican members of Congress but too the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press. When the reviewer in the case provided for nonetheless scorned Defense Distributed &# x27; s request for a initial injunction that would have immediately allowed it to sustain writing shoot documents, the company plea, and lost. But as the instance proceeded toward a rule on Defense Distributed &# x27; s first amendment debate, the government astonished the plaintiffs by suddenly offering them a agreement with basically everything they required. It even offer back $40,000 of their law costs and paperwork costs.( Wilson said today &# x27; s still exclusively about 10 percent of the $400,000 that the plaintiffs devoted .) Goldstein replies the rules of procedure and evidence may have had as much to do with ITAR reconstructs originated during the course of its Obama administration as with the gun-friendly Trump administration that made over the contingency. But he doesn &# x27; t rule out that a brand-new regime may have helped tip the balance in the plaintiffs &# x27; indulgence. “There &# x27; s different administration at the helm of this agency, ” Goldstein mentions. “You can glean your own conclusions.” Both the Department of Justice and the State Department declined to comment on the outcome of the case. With the rule change their acquire involves, Defense Distributed has removed a law menace to is not simply its project but an entire online community of DIY gunmakers. Websites like GrabCAD and FossCad once host the thousands of grease-gun patterns, from Defense Distributed &# x27; s Liberator pistol to printable revolvers and even semiautomatic weapons. “There &# x27; s a lot of contentment in doing things yourself, and it &# x27; s too a method of expressing support for the Second Amendment, ” illustrates one prolific Fosscad contributor, a West Virginian serial founder of 3-D-printable semiautomatics who goes by the pseudonym Derwood. “I &# x27; m a republican. I corroborate all the amendments.” But up to now, Derwood and basically every other participant on those platforms gambled prosecution for flouting exportation dominates, whether they knew it or not. Though enforcement has been rare against anyone less vocal and visible than Wilson, many online gunsmiths have nonetheless obscured their identities for that reason. With the most open and purposeful database of handgun files that Defcad represents, Wilson guesses he can create a collect of registers that &# x27; s both broader and more polished, with higher accuracy, more detailed simulates for every factor, establishing machinists all the data they need to draw or remix them. “This is the stuff that’s may be required for the creative work to come, ” Wilson says. In all of this, Wilson hears biography repeating itself: He points to the so-called Crypto Wars of the 1990 s. After programmer Philip Zimmermann in 1991 released PGP, the world &# x27; s first free encryption program that anyone could use to stymie surveillance, he extremely was threatened with an accusation for contravening export rules. Encryption software was, at the time, treated as a munition and placed on the same vetoed export ascendancy roster as firearms and weapons. Merely after a fellow cryptographer, Daniel Bernstein, sued the government with the same free-speech disagreement Wilson would use 20 years later did the governmental forces drop its investigation of Zimmermann and spare him from prison. “This is a specter of the old-time stuff again, ” Wilson alleges. “What we were actually campaigning about in courtroom was a core crypto-war problem.” And following that analogy, Wilson quarrels, his legal winning conveys gun blueprints can now spread as widely as encryption had now been that earlier legal crusade: After all, encryption has now flourished from an underground interest to a commodity introduced into apps, browsers, and websites racing on billions of computers and phones across the globe. But Zimmermann takes edition with the analogy–on ethical if not legal feet. This time, he points out, the First Amendment-protected data that was legally treated as a artillery actually is a artillery. “Encryption is a defense technology with humanitarian helps, ” Zimmermann replies. “Guns are merely be useful for killing.” “Arguing that they &# x27; re the same because they’re both made of fragments isn’t quite persuasion for me, ” Zimmermann remarks. “Bits can kill.” After a safarus of the machine shop, Wilson precedes me away from the industrial gale of its milling machines, out the building &# x27; s black-mirrored-glass doors and through a grassy patch to its back entrance. Inside is a far quieter vistum: A large, high-ceilinged, dimly fluorescent-lit storehouse space filled with half a dozen sequences of gray metal shelves, primarily covered in a seemingly random collect of volumes, from The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire to Hunger Activity . He proudly points out that it included the entire list of Penguin Classics and the entire Criterion Collection, close to 900 Blu-rays. This, he tells me, will be the library. And why is Defense Distributed build a library? Wilson, who cites Baudrillard, Foucault, or Nietzsche at least formerly in essentially any speech, certainly doesn &# x27; t thoughts the patina of erudition it gives to what is essentially a modern-day gun-running running. But as usual, he has an ulterior motive: If he can get this room verified as an actual, official public library, he &# x27; ll open another beings collect of existing firearm data. The US armed maintains records of thousands of the specs for thousands of firearms in technical manuals, stored on spools and reels of microfiche cassettes. But simply federally approved libraries can access them. By improving a library, ended with an actual microfiche observer in one corner, Wilson is angling to access the US armed &# x27; s part public archive of gun data, which he eventually hopes to digitize and be incorporated in Defcad.com, too. To manipulated a technical loophole that hands him access to armed artilleries records, Cody Wilson is also constructing a library. He proudly observes it will include the part Criterion Collection on Blu-ray . div> Michelle Groskopf “Ninety percent of the technical data is once out there. This is a huge part of our overall digital uptake approach, ” Wilson supposes. “Hipsters will come here and check out movies, independent of its actual intent, which is a stargate for absorbing ancient legion technical materials.” Browsing that movie collect, I nearly trip over something large and hard. I look down and find a granite tombstone with the words AMERICAN GUN CONTROL engraved on it. Wilson explains he has a plan to embed it in the soil under a tree outside when he gets around to it. “It &# x27; s maybe a little on the nose, but I think you get where I’m going with it, ” he says. Wilson has the intention to immerse this tombstone by his library’s acces. “It’s maybe a little on the nose, ” he declares . div> Michelle Groskopf Wilson &# x27; s library will serve a much simpler role, too: In one corner stands a server rack that will host Defcad &# x27; s website and backend database. He doesn &# x27; t rely any hosting companionship to hampered his controversial folders. And he likes the optics of storing his crown jewel in a library, should any change of his legal lucks result in a raid. “If you want to come get onto, you have to attack a library, ” he says. On that subject, he has something else to show me. Wilson draws out a small embroidered medal. It depicts a cherry-red, dismembered appendage on a lily-white background. The forearm &# x27; s side grips a twisted sword, with blood dripping from it. The mark, Wilson asks, formerly operated on a pennant above the Goliad Fort in South Texas. In Texas &# x27; change against Mexico in the 1830 s, Goliad &# x27; s castle was taken by the Mexican government and became the locate of a pogrom of 400 American prisoners of struggle, one that &# x27; s far less widely recollected than the Alamo. Wilson lately required a full-size flag with the sword-wielding bloody forearm. He wants to make it a new type for the working group. His interest in the icon, he clarifies, dates back to the 2016 ballot, when he was convinced Hillary Clinton was set to become the president and lead a big crackdown on firearms. The flag of Goliad, which Wilson has adopted as a brand-new type for his group. He suggests you translate it as you are able to . div> Michelle Groskopf If that happened, as Wilson tells it, he was ready to launch his Defcad repository, regardless of the outcome of his dispute, and then attack it in an forearmed stalemate. “I’d call a militia out to defend the server, Bundy-style, ” Wilson articulates calmly, in the first overt mention of projected armed violence I &# x27; ve ever heard him fix. “Our merely option was to build an infrastructure where we had one final suicidal duty, where we dumped everything into the internet, ” Wilson answers. “Goliad became an inspirational happening for me.” Now, of course, everything has changed. But Wilson announces the Goliad flag still resonates with him. And what does that murderou arm token mean to him now, in the period where Donald Trump is president and the law has surrendered to his will? Wilson worsens to add, explaining that he would rather leave the puzzle of its abstract unscathed and open to interpretation. But it doesn &# x27; t take a degree in semiotics to see how the Goliad flag suits Defense Distributed. It reads like the logical proliferation of the NRA’s “cold dead hands” slogan of the last century. In point, it may be the perfect badge not just for Defense Distributed &# x27; s operation but for the country that produced it, where pistols result in tens of thousands of deaths a year–vastly more than any other highly-developed person in the world–yet groups like Wilson &# x27; s continue to perform more progress in undercutting gun control than lawmakers do in advancing it. It &# x27; s a flag that represents the essence of brutal extremist creed: An arm that, long after blood is spilled, refuses to let go. Instead, it exclusively tightens it grip on its weapon, as a question of principle, forever. More Great WIRED Stories Our own Andy Greenberg made an untraceable AR-1 5 in the place, and “its easy to” This $1200 machine causes anyone make a metal shoot at home This monstrous invasive heyday can give you third-degree feelings The Pentagon &# x27; s dream squad of tech-savvy soldiers PHOTO ESSAY: The annual super-celebration in Superman &# x27; s real-world residence It’s season you learned about quantum estimating Boeing’s proposed hypersonic aircraft is really really quick Get even more of our inside dollops with our weekly Backchannel newsletter Corrected 7/10/ 2018 2:30 EST to be recognised that the first 3-D printed shoot employed. 380 -caliber ammo , not. 223 -caliber .* Related Video Culture I Concluded an Untraceable AR-1 5′ Ghost Gun’ In My Office WIRED elderly scribe Andy Greenberg positions brand-new homemade gunsmithing tools to the test as he tries three ways of constructing an untraceable AR-1 5 semi-automatic rifle—a so-called “ghost gun”—while skirting all gun control laws. Read more: https :// www.wired.com/ narrative/ a-landmark-legal-shift-opens-pandoras-box-for-diy-guns / http://dailybuzznetwork.com/index.php/2018/07/29/a-landmark-legal-shift-opens-pandoras-box-for-diy-guns/

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usnewsaggregator-blog · 6 years

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Trump's Sinister Attacks on CNN

New Post has been published on https://usnewsaggregator.com/trumps-sinister-attacks-on-cnn/

Trump's Sinister Attacks on CNN

Days before the Thanksgiving holiday, the U.S. Department of Justice released its complaint against the proposed AT&T-Time Warner merger. The complaint is a history-making document. It announces a return to long-discarded approaches to antitrust, and argues that these old ways have regained relevance in the digital era.

The Justice Department’s arguments for this rediscovery are sophisticated and even compelling—so much so that they raise a retrospective question: If this big merger of content creators and content carriers is banned as anti-competitive, why was the previous big merger of Comcast and NBC Universal permitted? The issues raised by AT&T-Time Warner were also presented by Comcast-NBC. What has changed between then and now?

Then, the morning after Thanksgiving, President Trump tweeted his latest and most outrageous attack yet on CNN, a unit of Time Warner.

.@FoxNews is MUCH more important in the United States than CNN, but outside of the U.S., CNN International is still a major source of (Fake) news, and they represent our Nation to the WORLD very poorly. The outside world does not see the truth from them!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 25, 2017

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These are ominous words. Inside the U.S., CNN’s reporting is protected by the First Amendment and the courts. Outside of the country, U.S.-affiliated journalists do ultimately depend on the protection of the U.S. government. Trump’s tweet is a direct attack on those international journalists’ freedom and even safety. Trump is inviting rogue regimes and other bad actors all over the world to harass CNN journalists—or worse. Trump’s words inspired this lament from General Michael Hayden, former director of the National Security Agency and the Central Intelligence Agency.

If this is who we are or who we are becoming, I have wasted 40 years of my life. Until now it was not possible for me to conceive of an American President capable of such an outrageous assault on truth, a free press or the first amendment.

— Gen Michael Hayden (@GenMhayden) November 26, 2017

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Trump’s animus against CNN raises a searching and troubling question. What if the Department of Justice is doing the right thing for the wrong reason? Or what if the president’s personal determination to silence a critical media institution—or, worse, to force its sale to an ally like Rupert Murdoch—explains the sudden pivot in the Department’s antitrust philosophy?

From the 1930s through the 1980s, antitrust lawyers worried a lot about vertical integration: companies that owned everything step of production from mine to showroom. In 1948, the Department of Justice won a case forcing the major movie producers to sell their chains of movie theaters.

The Supreme Court decision in U.S. v. Paramount Pictures incidentally destabilized the careers of many “B”-movie actors who had until then enjoyed steady, predictable salaries under the old studio system. The shock jolted one of those actors, Ronald Reagan, from his former New Deal liberalism to burning rage against an over-intrusive federal government.

And indeed, the old concern with vertical integration did become progressively more intrusive. In the 1960s, makers of car radios brought a spate of lawsuits to stop carmakers from selling cars with radios preinstalled. Could cameras be sold with film? Insulin together with the infusion apparatus? How could an economy innovate if every product upgrade required government approval? Just think of how much of the office equipment of the 1980s—calendar, camera, calculator, dictionary—comes bundled in a modern phone!

When Reagan reached the presidency in 1981, he oversaw the reinvention of antitrust law. The new thinking on antitrust—most powerfully expressed in Robert Bork’s 1978 book, The Antitrust Paradox—denounced the old concern with vertical integration. The Justice Department, Bork argued, should zealously police mergers between companies that competed directly against one another: horizontal competition, in the argot. What happened up and down the product chain should be left to Mr. Market to decide. The Comcast-NBC deal was approved by that logic.

Unnervingly, however, the uses of market power we confront in the 2010s are look a lot more like the old motion-picture studios trying to control every inch of film content in their theaters than like car-radio makers trying to force consumers to buy two products at a higher price instead of one convenient bundle of car and radio at a lower price. Facebook seeks to seize for itself all the value created by its users. Companies like Comcast hope to use control of the content consumers want to extract purchases of content consumers want less. TimeWarner, the DOJ fears, hopes to extend this grasp to the emerging mobile world: maintaining the high profits of the old cable industry even as Americans sever cable’s physical cords.

As social media emerges as the nation’s, and the world’s, true public square, hard questions arise about its owners claims to be mere platforms. Does Facebook really have no duty to police advertisers who request, “No blacks, please?” Can Twitter stand aside as its platform is used for harassment and threats?

The deregulated, post-industrial world of the 1980s and 1990s seemed to banish old fears of industrial concentration. The world of Google, Facebook, and Amazon looks a lot more like the world dominated by U.S. Steel and General Motors. Suddenly, formerly antique antitrust ideas again seem relevant to our time.

Only … is that really what’s going on?

From The New York Times, July 5, 2017.

White House advisers have discussed a potential point of leverage over their adversary, a senior administration official said: a pending merger between CNN’s parent company, Time Warner, and AT&T. Mr. Trump’s Justice Department will decide whether to approve the merger, and while analysts say there is little to stop the deal from moving forward, the president’s animus toward CNN remains a wild card.

On the campaign trail, Trump repeatedly denounced the merger, as he also attacked Amazon, the company founded by Jeff Bezos, owner of The Washington Post. Bruised by the Post’s reporting, Trump delivered this threat to Sean Hannity in May 2016: “[Bezos] thinks I’ll go after him for antitrust. Because he’s got a huge antitrust problem because he’s controlling so much, Amazon is controlling so much of what they are doing. He’s using The Washington Post, which is peanuts, he’s using that for political purposes to save Amazon in terms of taxes and in terms of antitrust.”

Strikingly, Trump had little to say about anti-competitive trends elsewhere in the economy. The banking industry underwent a huge consolidation during and after the financial crisis. The share of deposits held by the top 10 banks jumped from 30 percent in 2000 to 46 pecent in 2010. The top 10 held 36 percent of loans in 2000; 50 percent in 2010. The overwhelming majority of that concentration is explained by mergers: an average of 150 per year over that decade.

Monopolization even in information economy does not interest him so long as the monopolizers refrain from reporting on him in ways he does not like. Trump has had nothing negative to say about Facebook or Google. He reserved his antitrust energy exclusively for the companies connected to the Washington Post and CNN. That’s fishy.

Likewise it’s fishy that the assistant attorney general for antitrust who filed the objection to the AT&T-TimeWarner merger saw “no problem” with it in a television interview before he joined the Trump administration. Something changed his mind after he took office.

The most sinister explanation of the change is that Trump’s anti-CNN animus inspired the Department of Justice’s intervention.

But here’s a second explanation, rather less sinister but in its way as disturbing. The career Justice Department staff wanted to move against the AT&T-TimeWarner merger because of reviving concerns about vertical integration and market power in the Facebook-Google-Amazon era. Their wish may well have been blocked under a more normal Republican president with more conventional conservative Bork-influenced views of antitrust. Trump’s determination to strike at CNN, however, opened an opportunity for a more aggressive approach. In other words, we could be looking at a federal enforcement action that is simultaneously credible in its substance—and also enabled by malicious motives.

In the litigation over the Trump travel ban, courts cited Trump’s tweets as evidence that he had exceeded his proper powers. Historically, presidents have wielded large discretionary power over the entry of aliens into the United States. They can exclude any category or subcategory of aliens for any reason. In one case, the Supreme Court upheld an exclusion of an alien even when the executive offered no reason at all. But Trump’s tweets avowed a deliberate intention to exclude people on the basis of religion. He had demanded a “Muslim ban” during the campaign and he reiterated his “ban” terminology as recently as November 24. Confronted with this repeated actual notice of discriminatory intent, the courts reacted by imposing new limits on long established powers of the presidency.  

What will they do as the TimeWarner litigation moves forward—and the president’s virulent comments are entered into evidence? Otherwise legal governmental actions can be tainted as illegal and unconstitutional if done for improper reasons.

Donald Trump is a president with a unique lack of respect for constitutional rights, the rule of law, and the independence of news media. That disrespect shadows every measure of his administration—and haunts the debate we need to have about rethinking antitrust in this age of digital monopoly power.

Original Article:

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how2to18 · 6 years

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IT’S 1989. You’re in the middle seat of a Chevrolet Astro minivan, flanked on either side by your screaming siblings. Dad is driving. Oh god, he’s air-drumming on the wheel to “Smoke on the Water.” Again. You look down and see your backpack and your heart swells just a little because a device in that bag is your ticket out of here. Janine K gave you a mixtape of songs by The Cure and said they would change your life. The cassette is already in the Walkman deck. You pop on headphones, press play, and crank up the volume. Hello, freedom.

It’s hard to remember a time before we had the option to curate the playlist of our own minds. We are simply accustomed now to experiencing music in this deeply personal, albeit solitary, way. We disappear into headphones, stream a song via smartphone from the intangible, infinite web, creating a sonic landscape that mirrors our mood. We walk around the grocery store in Beyoncé-land.

But that wasn’t always the case. In her new book Personal Stereo, Rebecca Tuhus-Dubrow analyzes two major shifts in perspective associated with the 1979 birth of the first solo listening device, the Walkman. First, music becomes a personal experience, and second, music becomes immersive, a means to override — or even negate — the sounds of one’s immediate environment. Listening to music in private was not a new concept, of course, nor was the ability to take music on the road (à la the boom box). However, the idea of making the private experience of music a public phenomenon was groundbreaking. In that sense, the Walkman redefined music: it was a revolutionary tool that offered listeners a new kind of freedom. Music technology today still riffs on the basic concept of the Walkman, only now we have digital access to nearly every recorded song.

To set the stage for the Walkman’s rise, Tuhus-Dubrow takes us to postwar Japan, in a ramshackle office with a leaking roof. Two men are working with umbrellas over their desks. Their names are Masaru Ibuka and Akio Morita, the founders of Sony and eventual fathers of the Walkman. Personal Stereo is the wild story of the ingenious brotherhood of Ibuka and Morita, of Japan’s ascent from financial ruin to the second largest economy in the world, and of the subsequent pushback from the United States against Japanese-made products. It’s also the story of the “Me Generation” of the 1970s, as well as the exercise craze of the ’80s, and all the anxiety and nostalgia implicit in the beginning and end of an era.

Personal Stereo is the latest entry in Bloomsbury’s “Object Lessons” series, which focuses on the hidden lives of ordinary things. The short book is divided into three chapters — “Novelty,” “Norm,” and “Nostalgia” — which together trace a narrative arc that mirrors the lifespan of a zeitgeist technology turned obsolete. Sub-sections within each chapter have evocative titles like “Trapping sound,” “Remember Pearl Harbor,” and — my personal favorite — “Home taping is killing music.” (One can almost hear record label executives in the age of digital streaming laughing out loud at that last title.) Tuhus-Dubrow illuminates a web of stories connected to the Walkman, her references as ubiquitous as its users. She takes us to a mountain in wintry Switzerland where Andreas Pavel, who would later win a lawsuit against Sony, played music for his lover on his jerry-rigged personal stereo while the snow fell silently around them. She quotes Tom Wolfe and Allan Bloom, along with her own buddy who had his Walkman stolen. After finishing Personal Stereo, I found myself wondering about the secret lives of every object around me, as if each device were whispering, “Oh, I am much so more than meets the eye.”

The most haunting theme Tuhus-Dubrow treats is contemporary nostalgia for analog technology. In 2015, the National Audio Company reported the best year of cassette sales since 1969. Thurston Moore, formerly of Sonic Youth, claims he only listens to music on cassette, and many artists today elect to release music exclusively on tape. Questioning her own nostalgia, Tuhus-Dubrow tackles the murky issue of why consumers would hold on to this outdated technology. Why commemorate an obsolete device? Tuhus-Dubrow suggests we are nostalgic for the Walkman not because it reminds us of a particular time and place, or an early taste of freedom, nor because it was pivotal in defining the spirit of an age, but because we may secretly long for boundaries in a world of limitless access. Perhaps we crave the singular focus that the Walkman’s simplicity forced on us: listen to this one Pearl Jam tape all the way home, because that’s all you’ve got. Tuhus-Dubrow speculates that we miss the time when we could actually touch music — when we had to fumble with a wonky device through a maze of fast-forwarding, rewinding, fast-forwarding again until the click: that sweet spot somewhere mid-tape, the beginning of our favorite song.

As with most generation-defining forms of technology, consumers had conflicting opinions about the Walkman. Because of the newfound personal freedom it offered, the Walkman was considered a threat, antisocial and amoral. “Walkman’s Oblivion” was likened to the escape of taking drugs or dissociating into a film-like hyper-reality. People who chose to withdraw into the private world of their personal stereos, hips gyrating down the street to invisible music, were labeled selfish, hermetic, or just plain crazy. “The history of technology,” Tuhus-Dubrow writes, “is in part the story of normal people starting to do things that used to be considered signs of insanity.” The Walkman’s origin story is as curious as the slew of contradictions surrounding its reception. This little device was seen as simultaneously a quintessential symbol of the United States and everything that’s wrong with the country, a tool both of laziness and of hyper-productivity (think: exercise craze), as well as a ubiquitous symbol of style and status.

Tuhus-Dubrow is a master researcher and synthesizer. It would appear that she has left no Walkman-related stone unturned. That said, if I could request a hidden bonus track to Personal Stereo, I would wish for more of her insightful musings on the mixtape, a phenomenon responsible for more excited swooning, long-shot lyrical (mis)interpretations, and make-out sessions than any other music delivery mechanism. Surely there is a connection to be made between the Walkman’s redefinition of music as personal and the art of curating a music mix specifically for your crush. If the Walkman had never come into being, would it have occurred to us to select and organize songs with such uniquely personal intention? Tuhus-Dubrow does touch on a mix of her own creation, including a stellar lineup of R.E.M. and Beat Happening, but it would be fascinating to read more of her thoughts on the subject. Then again, maybe I’m just feeling nostalgic for Janine K’s mix of The Cure, the one that truly set me free.

In July 2012, for approximately 45 seconds, I erroneously believed that I owned New York City. This brief moment accompanied a runner’s high, as I jogged alone along the Hudson, earbuds blasting “Empire State of Mind” by Jay-Z and Alicia Keys. Sure, the exercise-induced endorphin rush contributed to my delusion, but the truth is I couldn’t have approached that moment of ecstasy had it not been for the ability to disappear into my personal stereo. At the time, I never would have credited the Walkman for my elation, but thanks to Tuhus-Dubrow, an elegant, engaging storyteller who unpacks complex social and political concepts with clarity and panache, I know better now. Personal Stereo is a joy to read.

Carissa Stolting is the founder of Left Bank Artists, an artist management company based in Nashville, Tennessee. She is a contributing poet to the podcast Versify, a publication of PRX, The Porch Writers’ Collective, and Nashville Public Radio.

The post Zeitgeist to Obsolete: Rewinding the Walkman’s Inverted Cinderella Story appeared first on Los Angeles Review of Books.

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