The fellow narrating is so charming. Slow to get started, but it gets interesting quite quickly.
#This is some serious business.
(via Angry Robot) #Fuck yes! “In his incendiary new documentary, master filmmaker Raoul Peck envisions the book James Baldwin never finished.”
(via kottke) # [1]there’s a Muslim kid in Kansas who has already written the schematic
for the robot that will steal your job in manufacturing,
and that robot? Will also be gay, so get used to it
This poem is good.
#Anil Dash’s advice for Twitter is pretty much perfect—except he doesn’t mention adding me to their board of directors.
#Today I learned a lot of iconic photographs I know of Wong Kar Wai films were shot by photography Wing Shya. I don’t know why I assumed they by his cinematography Christopher Doyle as well.
(via Haran) #Because it’s a bad idea? Yes. Zappos used to be ranked as one of the best places to work. In 2015 it lost a third of it’s work force.
#Shima sponsored a Syrian family with some people in our area, and they are still stuck in Jordan, like several of the families mentioned in this article. The process feels a bit glacial. This story is super heart warming, though.
#“What of this? This bed is soft and fine.”
Cugel voiced a question: “What is the reason for the massive iron grillwork above the bed? What if it fell during the night?â€
“Cugel, this is sheer pessimism! You must always look for the glad things in life! Have you noticed, for instance, the vase of flowers beside the bed!”
— Cugel’s Saga, Jack Vance.
#“Intellectual†has two common definitions—the first is the kind of person you hear getting interviewed on NPR about a Big Idea, the second, used by people like Marx, is any kind of economic actor who gets paid to do brainstuff rather than hard labor, like a plumbing engineer. The point of “Nerd” is to keep these two kinds of intellectuals separate, because together they are fucking dangerous. When Ta-Nehisi Coates is writing Black Panther comics and demanding reparations after documenting decades of housing discrimination?—capitalism does not want that shit.
CommentI have worked in 60 countries, covered wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and spent much of 2014 living inside West Africa’s Ebola zone, a place gripped by fear and death. What I experienced in the Philippines felt like a new level of ruthlessness: police officers’ summarily shooting anyone suspected of dealing or even using drugs, vigilantes’ taking seriously Mr. Duterte’s call to “slaughter them all.â€
28 November 2016, late at night
What a crazy movie. Green Room feels like something they’d screen at Midnight Madness. (I’m willing to bet they did.) The less you know about the film the better. There is a punk band. There are some neo-nazis. Shit gets real. There are lots of familiar faces in the cast. (Most notable for me was Alia Shawkat who plays Maeby on Arrested Development.) I really liked the film. You should watch it.
Plot twist! I honestly didn’t see this coming from Tory.
#I know we’ve been calling people nazis for like the last 60-70 years, but this is some full on nazi shit.
#9 November 2016, early evening
There was a time when the underlying theme to my site might be best described as, “Fuck Americaâ€. Bush was in power and the country was consistently terrible. Obama was elected and things were better, but the country still sends robots to kill people in Pakistan and has 100s of people suffering through Kafkaesque imprisonment in Guantanamo.
When Bush was elected I decided I’d never visit the states again, which I kept up until my trip to New York 11 years later in 2011 to visit my friend Mezan. That was the last time I went back. I had no desire to go back before the election. I have even less so after the election.
There is lots to say about last night, but at the end of the day we learned that if you put full on racism on the ballot Americans will support that whole hog. I really underestimated how far you could get running as a white supremacist in America. Foolishness on my part, really.
If there is one thing in this world
That you can depend on
That you can bet your last dollar on
It’s the ignorance of the American people
— The Sign by Nujabes feature Pase Rock
If you love Kottke.org then you can support his site financially once again. 11 years ago (!!) he ran a membership drive that was pretty forward thinking and met with a lot of people calling him crazy and lazy.
CommentThese commercials from Egypt are amazing.
#13 October 2016, evening time
Holy shit: can you go a whole year only watching superhero movies? Probably. Deadpool was a strange film, a nice change of pace from your typical superhero movie. In many ways it’s a send up of those films and a very formulaic repetition of those films. The film is probably most notable for being so aggressive about breaking the 4th wall. (There’s a joke in the film about how it breaks the 4th wall so much.) The film is very violent and crude. There is nudity and swearing and all of the good stuff. The hot courtesan from Firefly plays the love interest in the film. This movie is well worth watching.
