signal boost: lj servers moving to russia
from http://vass.dreamwidth.org/1858363.html via browngirl

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Signal boost
For people who don't follow [site community profile] dw_maintenance and might not know:

You know how LiveJournal's been owned by a Russian company for years? Well, they've just moved the servers from California to Russia, and banned a lot of users along the way. (Some of whom, particularly Russian and Ukrainian users, have decamped to Dreamwidth, a move complicated by the fact that a lot of Russian ISPs have Dreamwidth blocked.)

So any server errors on LiveJournal might be because of the move. (The outages on Dreamwidth were not connected at all: there was a configuration error, which is now fixed.)

This is your periodic reminder to consider where your data is hosted, who owns the servers and where their business is located, and what the political situation is in those places.

Closing comments here because I am not up for discussing this with strangers.

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"it could have been any one of us"
A poignant, heartfelt response to the recent devastating fire in Oakland

And yet for many of us, these spaces are what have kept us alive. In a world that demands its inhabitants to be a certain way, think a certain way, or live a certain way, we gravitate to the spaces that say: Welcome. Be yourself. For the tormented queer, the bullied punk, the beaten trans, the spat-upon white trash, the disenfranchised immigrants and young people of color, these spaces are a haven of understanding in a world that doesn’t understand — or can’t, or doesn’t seem to want to try.

https://ww2.kqed.org/arts/2016/12/04/it-could-have-been-any-one-of-us/

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broken by design

"When you’re designed against, you know it," says Ocean Howell, who teaches architectural history at the University of Oregon. [...] "Other people might not see it, but you will. The message is clear: you are not a member of the public, at least not of the public that is welcome here." The same is true of all defensive architecture. The psychological effect is devastating.

https://www.theguardian.com/society/2015/feb/18/defensive-architecture-keeps-poverty-undeen-and-makes-us-more-hostile

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crossing the streams
Kate McKinnon sings Hallelujah in character as Hillary Clinton

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her loss
I've by and large stuck to my resolve to post political stuff to facebook (where you're welcome to follow me if you aren't already) and twitter (likewise), but this is a really beautiful piece, and more moving than political.

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/projects/cp/opinion/election-night-2016/her-loss

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rip leonard cohen
10 great leonard cohen covers

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finally!
lj gets a like button!

http://news.livejournal.com/151114.html

edit: i cannot actually see it anywhere, perhaps because i am not using an s2 style. but i'm still abstractly happy it exists.

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from the people suck dept

But in this contentious election season, the extreme right has a problem with Chobani: In its view, too many of those employees are refugees.

As Mr. Ulukaya has stepped up his advocacy — employing more than 300 refugees in his factories, starting a foundation to help migrants, and traveling to the Greek island of Lesbos to witness the crisis firsthand — he and his company have been targeted with racist attacks on social media and conspiratorial articles on websites including Breitbart News.

Now there are calls to boycott Chobani. Mr. Ulukaya and the company have been taunted with racist epithets on Twitter and Facebook. Fringe websites have published false stories claiming Mr. Ulukaya wants “to drown the United States in Muslims.” And the mayor of Twin Falls has received death threats, partly as a result of his support for Chobani.

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/01/business/for-helping-immigrants-chobanis-founder-draws-threats.html

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microcosmic

In 2013, researchers first revealed evidence that the water has been cut off from the surface for as long as 2.7 billion years. Now, they’ve taken the next crucial step, showing that the water comes with its own self-sustaining life-support system, like a space capsule that has been out of contact with Earth for eons but is still perfectly livable.

Even more tantalizing, the team reports indirect evidence that the water is inhabited by some form of life that has yet to be identified. The life would be microbial in nature, but potentially separated from life on the surface for so long that it’s practically alien, persisting in the depths of Earth’s crust with neither sunlight nor atmospheric oxygen to rely on.

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/technology/science/ancient-water-from-northern-ontario-mine-may-harbour-alien-life/article32540885/

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doing it right

While San Franciscans argue over how much warning the city should give to homeless people before clearing tent encampments, Oakland is trying another strategy entirely: Keep the camps in place for weeks or months and make them move livable.

The idea is to provide basics such as trash cans, portable toilets and regular cleanup services while the city tries to devise a long-term shelter program before shutting down the camps for good.

http://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/Instead-of-clearing-homeless-camps-Oakland-is-9981956.php

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on bullshit jobs

But rather than allowing a massive reduction of working hours to free the world’s population to pursue their own projects, pleasures, visions, and ideas, we have seen the ballooning not even so much of the “service” sector as of the administrative sector, up to and including the creation of whole new industries like financial services or telemarketing, or the unprecedented expansion of sectors like corporate law, academic and health administration, human resources, and public relations. And these numbers do not even reflect on all those people whose job is to provide administrative, technical, or security support for these industries, or for that matter the whole host of ancillary industries (dog-washers, all-night pizza deliverymen) that only exist because everyone else is spending so much of their time working in all the other ones.

http://evonomics.com/why-capitalism-creates-pointless-jobs-david-graeber/

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books: death's end, infomocracy, necessity

• Can't remember the last time I've anticipated a book release as much as the third book in the "Three Body Problem" trilogy, and, I'm happy to say, it did not disappoint. Looking back at the series, book 2 was definitely my favourite of the three; the only book I can think of that blew me away similarly was "Startide Rising". Book 3 started off fairly weakly, but got very intense towards the end. Don't want to say anything spoilery about the actual plot and events, but if you like the "human motes in a very large cosmos" feel of Clarke, Brin and Baxter you should definitely not miss this series.
  
  
• Also, I can't remember if I've recommended Malka Older's "Infomocracy" on here before, but if you haven't read it, do. Here's a great review by Annalee Newitz. It's one of my favourite sfnal subgenres, exploring ways information technology can help power a renaissance in grassroots democracy and community/tribe building[1], and it goes into more depth than most such stories I've read. Looking forward to the next two books of this one too.
  
  
• Another "book 3" I've been anticipating was Jo Walton's "Necessity", book 3 in the Just City trilogy. The series had a really intriguing premise; the Greek goddess Athena decided to collect her followers from across the time stream and transport them to pre-eruption Thera, to found a city that put Plato's Republic into practice. Book 3 took the story in a whole new direction (I can't say "unexpected" because it was foreshadowed by the end of book 2), and delivered a nicely satisfying ending to a lot of story arcs, while still leaving the overall sense of an ongoing narrative. I can see her returning to write further stories in the same universe if she wants to - she's left room for it.
  
  [1] and if people have other recommendations I'd love to hear them; thus far the best recent one I've read was Karl Schroder's short story "Degrees of Freedom", in which a group of First Nations people take their country back from a corrupt Canadian government.

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a matter of perspective
Lovely drawing technique - an artist attaches a string to his drafting board for perfect two-point perspective guides.

https://www.reddit.com/r/oddlysatisfying/comments/54a9nu/using_a_string_to_draw_in_proper_twopoint/

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of saving the world and unintended consequences
I reread this every so often; it's a really good reality check when people talk about saving the world in one go

https://newrepublic.com/article/120178/problem-international-development-and-plan-fix-it

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magicavoxel
https://ephtracy.github.io

Fun little voxel art creator.

Found via this great article on voxels and computer graphics in general.

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pure genius
http://www.cyclingweekly.co.uk/news/latest-news/bike-manufacturer-reduces-delivery-damage-70-per-cent-printing-tv-box-285180

For some reason, bicycles in big cardboard boxes have a tendency to get dropped, bashed or crushed by delivery companies, which has spurred Dutch manufacturer Vanmoof into action to find a solution.

What did they do? Instead of putting a picture of a bike on the box they printed a picture of a large flatscreen TV instead and saw instances of delivery damage drastically reduce.

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the great british takeoff
Eggs and Flour announce they are to leave Great British Bake Off

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game du jour: coloretto
http://www.marquand.net/coloretto/msindex.html

Fun abstract strategy game.

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primitive
Lovely project - reproduces a picture using primitive shapes. Check out the project page for some examples, and https://twitter.com/PrimitivePic for many more.

here is an animated gif of the process being applied to the mona lisa

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the magic of childhood
this is both sad and sweet. redditor has fond memories of comfort food they had as a kid; turns out for their parents it was desperation food when they were out of everything and waiting for payday.

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