I would totally live here.

Ken Sparkes » Blog Archive » Maison Bulle: "Pierre Cardin’s outrageous bubble house, originally designed by Antti Lovag, near Cannes."

How this doesn't cause deep and abiding shame in every American is beyond me.

More at the link.

Tetsubo Productions - Wherein There Are Not Words For My Disgust:

"Human Rights Watch, in coordination with several other human rights watchdog groups, released a report this week on the 39 people they believe the United States has "disappeared" into secret captivity. Bad enough that the United States is doing this, but Hilzoy at Obsidian Wings notes that the even worse crime is that included in the list of 39 are young children...

Consider the case of Col. David Hogg, who took an Iraqi general's family hostage in order to force his surrender. And that was something about which they were only to happy to tell the public. ("We violated the Geneva Conventions! That's AWESOME") Seymour Hersh has stated repeatedly that he's aware of worse things happening to kids in Iraq and of which classified records exist, and knowing Hersh, he's probably right.

What I can unfortunately understand is why this is happening...

They simply believe the moral high ground to be for wimps who don't want to fight dirty, and they are the worst - the worst - kind of cowards. And that's why there are missing kids now."

"Why should I pretend to be one person for eight hours a day and someone else entirely for the rest?"

Truth.

Twentysomething: Raunchy old photos will be part of the revolution » Brazen Careerist by Penelope Trunk:

"Social networking sites are blurring the lines between personal and professional life. There is no reason these lines should not be blurred. Most young people lead very healthy social lives, and because of these websites much of our social lives are online. When you live your personal/social life online there is no escaping who you are and what you do. It may be scary to people not accustomed to the openness of the Internet, but as far as I’m concerned, it’s a refreshing. Why should I pretend to be one person for eight hours a day and someone else entirely for the rest?

...The whole idea of our lives being available for public display is actually pretty cool. Think about it. If the world already knows what we do in our spare time and we are all able to be completely open about our interests, thoughts and ideas without fear of retribution or not being hired then we can bring our whole being to work everyday.

...The more young people enter the workforce the less risk there is that someone will Google them to look for bad behavior. Human resources leaders don’t have the time to sleuth. But also, there just aren’t enough perfect little angels in the world to go around.

I urge everyone: Let’s leave all of our pictures up on whatever social networking sites we use. What we do on the weekends is just as much apart of our lives as our day jobs. Don’t be afraid of your boss seeing a risqué photo of you and don’t be afraid to talk a little business at the bar. The sooner we get past this personal and professional juggling act, the sooner we can see real change in the workplace."

Jay Z, Linkin Park, Eminem and Dr Dre

Yeah, it may lack the social relevance I was waxing rhapsodically about in the last post, but this Numb/Encore remix is tight as fuck.

When hip-hop really mattered.

"America has a very serious problem..."

"Hey yo, here's the situation - idiocy...
Nonsense, violence, not a good policy...
...I don't understand the difficulty people...
Love your brother, treat him as an equal..."

Self Destruction - The Stop the Violence Movement



We're All in the Same Gang - The West Coast All Stars



Jesus... I'm getting old and nostalgic and wishing for the chance to re-do the last 20 years knowing what I know now...

It took me a long time to figure this out.

...and having to play the "officer" role in the military certainly didn't accelerate my learning curve any. I finally figured it out, I think, mostly living in VA.

But the sectioning and partitioning off of various aspects of your life, relegating certain behaviors and certain attitudes to specific locales and circumstances accomplishes nothing except lead that slow, long march into frustration and multiple personality disorder.

Unless you WANT multiple personality disorder. In that case, go for it. [Think of all the new experiences you could have...]

Twentysomething: Why I don’t want work/life balance » Brazen Careerist by Penelope Trunk:

"This whole notion of needing to separate work and life implies that your career, which takes up about 75% of your day, is something you simply try to get through so you can go home and do what you really enjoy for the other 25%. What a terrible way to live.

I wholeheartedly believe that my life has a purpose. My purpose is to be successful, genuinely happy and to make a difference in this world somewhere along the way. Not a single one of these values can take a backseat to another. The balance doesn’t work, we already know this. I don’t want to choose. I want a blended life.

...There is no need for me to keep work life and home life separate. The majority of week nights you can find me in front of the computer chatting with a friend, watching TV and messing around with MySpace or Facebook. I may as well send out an email or finish up a work briefing at the same time. When I told my friend about this post, he said, “Work/life balance? That doesn’t even make sense.”

Think about it, he is absolutely right. I would never dream of saying I want a Family/Life balance or I want a Friend/Life balance. Is work so terrible that people don’t want to consider it a part of their lives? I sure hope not, because if that’s the case than the next fifty years of my life are going to suck!

The lines between work and life have been blurred for years. I have decided to embrace this fact and work on the best blend for my life... In the meantime my peers and I will keep searching for this blended life, while everyone else continues to run in circles failing to achieve their so-called balance. "

"The Nine Biggest Myths of the Workplace" by Penelope Trunk.

Explained in more detail at the link... but I liked this a lot. Things to remember if I ever get back into a regular "workplace."

How to Change the World: The Nine Biggest Myths of the Workplace by Penelope Trunk:

"1. You’ll be happier if you have a job you like.

The correlation between your happiness and your job is overrated. The most important factors, by far, are your optimism levels and your personal relationships. If you are a pessimist, a great job can’t overcome that...

2. Job-hopping will hurt you.

Job hopping is one of the best ways to maintain passion and personal growth in your careers...

3. The glass ceiling still exists.

The glass ceiling is over, not because people crashed through, but because people are not looking up. Life above the glass ceiling is 100-hour weeks, working for someone else, and no time for friends and family. And it’s not only women who are saying no to the ladder up: Men are as well. People want to customize success for themselves, not climb someone else rungs. So if no one is climbing to the top, the glass ceiling isn’t keeping anyone down.
4. Office politics is about backstabbing.

5. Do good work, and you’ll do fine.

For one thing, no one knows what the heck you’re doing in your cube if you’re not telling them. So when you do good work, let people know. It is not crazy to toot your own horn--it’s crazy to think someone will do it for you...

6. You need a good resume.

7. People with good networks are good at networking.

8. Work hard and good things will come.

Everyone can put in a seventy-hour week. It doesn’t mean you’re doing good work. So here’s an idea: Make sure you’re not the hardest worker. Take a long lunch. Get all your work done early. Grand thinking requires space, flexibility and time...

9. Create the shiny brand of you!

There is no magic formula to having a great career except to be you. Really you. Know who you are and have the humility to understand that self-knowledge is a never-ending journey. Figure out how to do what you love, and you’ll be great at it. Offer your true, good-natured self to other people and you’ll have a great network..."

Cory Doctorow Speaks Wise.

You Can't Stop The Signal.

Comment is free: See no evil?:

"There's an inverse correlation between the regulation of speech and the freedom of a society. Trying to filter the internet is ridiculous and dangerous.

People say bad things online. They write vile lies about blameless worthies. They pen disgusting racist jeremiads, post gut-churning photos of sex acts committed against children, and more sexist and homophobic tripe than you could read - or stomach - in a lifetime. They post fraudulent offers, alarmist conspiracy theories, and dangerous web pages containing malicious, computer-hijacking code.
It's not hard to understand why companies, government, schools and parents would want to filter this kind of thing. Most of us don't want to see this stuff. Most of us don't want our kids to see this stuff - indeed, most of us don't want anyone to see this stuff.

But every filtering enterprise to date is a failure and a disaster, and it's my belief that every filtering effort we will ever field will be no less a failure and a disaster. These systems are failures because they continue to allow the bad stuff through. They're disasters because they block mountains of good stuff. Their proponents acknowledge both these facts, but treat them as secondary to the importance of trying to do something, or being seen to be trying to do something. Secondary to the theatrical and PR value of pretending to be solving the problem.

...The most enthusiastic customers for this technology are repressive governments, such as Syria, China, and the United Arab Emirates, regimes that cheerfully jail their citizens for thinking the wrong thoughts and uttering the wrong words...

The same companies that supply the world's torturers and totalitarians are also supplying our schools, workplaces, and cities. I edit a popular website, Boing Boing, that is widely censored by these firms. One firm, SmartFilter, regularly classifies us as "adult" because less than one per cent of the tens of thousands of posts we've made over the years feature thumbnail-sized nudes, including Michelangelo's David (Smartfilter maintains that any page containing David's willy is a "nudity" page).

...These firms are profiteers, waxing rich on the fears of the free world and the oppression of totalitarian states. They operate without transparency and without accountability...

There's an inverse correlation between the regulation of speech and the freedom of a society. In the new global world of censorware, we all live on Syria's internet, China's internet, filtered by companies whose first priority is to ensure that Beijing is happy with its work."

Pic via http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Internet_map_1024.jpg

Hippies Versus Punks.

Why is it when you're young you're stupid and when your old you're soulless and you forget everything about ever being young?

There's not a lot of love in the Haight - Gutter punks roam where, 40 years ago, flower children protested the war in Vietnam. - Los Angeles Times:

"From his second-floor apartment at the counterculture crossing of Haight and Ashbury streets, Arthur Evans watches a new generation of wayward youth invade his free-spirited neighborhood.

The former flower child was among the legions of idealistic wanderers who migrated here during the Vietnam War to "tune in, turn on and drop out."

But Evans, who has lived at the same address for 34 years, says he has never seen anything like this crowd, who use his flower bed as a bathroom and sell pot outside his window.

They're known as gutter punks, these homeless kids with dirty dreadlocks and nose rings, lime-green mohawks and orange spray-painted faces, who panhandle with cardboard signs that riff on their lifestyles. "Please Help Us Get Un-Sober," one reads. Another: "Please Give Us Weed, Beer or Money."
...Evans, 64, says they should get help, clean up or go home.

"I used to be a hippie. I wore beads and grew my hair long," he said. "But my generation had something these kids do not: a standard of civilized behavior."

[Okay, this stupidity cannot pass. How does this guy not remember, realize or comprehend that every criticism of the "hippie" culture by the mainstream, during and since, has been that they aren't civilized, they're dirty, anarchic and hedonistic and selfish and spit in the face of "real" civilization. So to say "we had civilized behavior" is the worst kind of lying about the obvious. Denial is powerful. - Rob]

...But a lot of ex-hippies-turned-homeowners are weary of the youthful intruders. They want the Haight to adopt a more mature demeanor, just as they have.

..."I'm sick of stepping over gangs of kids, only to be told 'Die, yuppie!' A lot of us were flower children, but we grew up," said Robert Shadoian, 58, a retired family therapist. "There are responsibilities in this world you have to meet. You can't be drugged out 24/7 and expect the world to take care of you."

...Many are blue-collar misfits fleeing broken homes, sexual abuse, parents with drug and alcohol problems. Some are addicted to crack, heroin and other hard drugs. Proud to live on society's fringes, they rely on a tribal closeness for survival, resisting contact with outsiders.

[But on occasion, good stories come out of it all.]

...Sarah Thibault is a suburban outcast. She was raised in Colorado, where her father went to prison and her mother went on welfare when Sarah was 12.

The straight-A student began ditching school and doing drugs. One day, a boyfriend said, "Let's go to Haight-Ashbury."

"It sounded good. I was idealistic," she said. "I believed the '60s attitude, when people were intentionally kind to each other."

What she found when she arrived in 1999 was decidedly different. The only people who were kind to her were other homeless people.

For years, she bought and sold drugs, using so much heroin that her health began to fail.

She felt invisible. "When you're a kid on the street, people don't see you, they don't acknowledge you," she said. "The only connection you have is with other homeless kids. No matter how tired, hungry or lonely you are, people just pass you by."

Now 25, Thibault works at the Homeless Youth Alliance, a storefront outreach center that offers a no-questions-asked refuge from the streets.

She greets drop-ins, some suffering from hacking coughs, others reeking from days without bathing. The street kids raid the center's refrigerator like college students home on spring break. One recent day, a teen devoured a bowl of cereal with a Swiss Army knife spoon as others dozed on couches."

The mainstream bites.

Mixed martial arts move into the "mainstream" sports culture of the US has had one overwhelmingly positive impact - some of the hardest working athletes in professional sports are finally being paid more commensurate with their efforts. The rest of it - ignorant sportswriters writing trite articles and more and more marketing aimed at the lowest common denominator "new" fan who has no idea about the ground game or submissions or anything other than blood and knockouts. *End Rant*

Fightlinker » Blog Archive » I hate the mainstream:

"You know, I was a happier person back when ‘The Mainstream’ left MMA the fuck alone. At least then I didn’t have to hear the opinion of every shmuck sports columnist who had a bit of space to fill at the bottom of their spelling bee writeup. But what’s worse than these retards are the idiots who are trying to cash in on the MMA demographic; people so out of touch they honestly don’t have a clue who we are or why we watch the UFC. There’s no better example of this than the big Hostel tie in at UFC71.

For those not in the know, Hostel is one of those new breed horror flicks in the vein of Saw that goes for really in-your-face violence. However, the Hostel series is different because it really concentrates on the sadistic psychological and physical torture / murder of women.

...And what kind of market do they think would go for this sadistic ultra-violence? Oh, mixed martial arts fans! They get off to people beating eachother up, so of course they’ll jump at the chance to watch a naked woman get butchered like cattle."

New Hampshire kicks ass.

If only it wasn't so cold, I'd be tempted to move there.

Reason Magazine - Hit & Run > Live Free, and Maybe Die When You're Hurled Through the Windshield:

"Last week the New Hampshire legislature once again rejected a law requiring people to wear seat belts. New Hampshire is the only state that has not passed a seat belt law, preferring to forgo the federal funds that reward such legislation. A state senator who voted against the bill explains: "The citizens of New Hampshire don't like to be told by anyone else what to do. It preserves New Hampshire's way of not succumbing to the bribes of the federal government and New Hampshire's belief that every adult can make his or her own choices in life.""

Can I get an amen?

Overheard in the Office | Jesus: The Way You People Treat Each Other, I Hate You All!:

"CSR, sighing at computer: Jesus hates me. [Alarmed when notices customer] I didn't mean that.
Customer: No, it's okay. He probably does.

1400 Apalachee Parkway
Tallahassee, Florida"

Japan, you beautiful, crazy bastard.

Japan Today - News - Man wearing schoolgirl's 'sailor' uniform busted trying to steal women's underwear:

"A 24-year-old man was arrested Monday for stealing women's underwear in Kagoshima, police said Tuesday. He was wearing a schoolgirl's 'sailor' suit and was barefoot at the time of his arrest, police said."

Maybe too honest?

Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal:

Rank the Seven Deadly "Sins."

From the one you're most susceptible to, to the one you're least susceptible - a slightly diversionary mind experiment.

Sloth
Gluttony
Lust
Envy
Greed
Wrath
Pride

In hindsight, how they ever got people to believe these were all sins is beyond me. I'd still rank sloth and gluttony as "bad" [my personal failings, of course] but you can totally make the others work for you.

Remember kids, as religion teaches us, being human is bad. Very, very bad. Sigh...

The geekiest way to deal with Jehovah's Witnesses.

Hi Marvin!

Home on the Strange: Who Is Your Savior?



Fanfic... indeed.