“Writers who can remember freedom”
“We will need writers who can remember freedom”: Ursula K Le Guin at the National Book Awards
Ursula K. Le Guin was honored at the National Book Awards tonight and gave a fantastic speech about the dangers to literature and how they can be stopped. As far as I know it’s not available online yet (update: the video is now online), so I’ve transcribed it from the livestream below. The parts in parentheses were ad-libbed directly to the audience, and the Neil thanked is Neil Gaiman, who presented her with the award.
Thank you Neil, and to the givers of this beautiful reward, my thanks from the heart. My family, my agent, editors, know that my being here is their doing as well as mine, and that the beautiful reward is theirs as much as mine. And I rejoice at accepting it for, and sharing it with, all the writers who were excluded from literature for so long, my fellow authors of fantasy and science fiction—writers of the imagination, who for the last 50 years watched the beautiful rewards go to the so-called realists.
I think hard times are coming when we will be wanting the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we live now and can see through our fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies to other ways of being, and even imagine some real grounds for hope. We will need writers who can remember freedom. Poets, visionaries—the realists of a larger reality.
[ click to continue reading Master Le Guin at parkerhiggins.net ]
#DRONEBONING
The first porn film made by drones is here and it is NSFW
#DRONEBONING // FEATURING TAGGART AND ROSEWOOD // NSFW from GHOST+COW FILMS on Vimeo.
Today in what a time to be alive, we present the first pornographic movie filmed by drones.
Without the sex Drone Boning would be a three-minute eerily beautiful compilation of landscapes. With the sex, it’s an eerily beautiful three-minute long compilation of landscapes featuring occasional nudity/penetration.
“I’m staring at her nipples because I am afraid they are about to come onto my plate.”
Sophia Loren Finally Explains That Infamous Side-Eye Photo With Jayne Mansfield’s Cleavage
Too Many Cooks In The Credits
Endgame of Thrones
Google’s Answer to Game of Thrones
The leaves have fallen from the trees and winter is on the way and here I sit at my computer with chills running down my spine. Not from the cold but from the possibilities that one of Google’s latest announcements could have on the field of marketing and public relations.
Endgame: The Calling is a series of sci-fi novels being written by author James Frey and a project that he has challenged Google’s off-shoot company, Niantic Labs to help turn into a marketing juggernaut. Their goal is to turn this story about 12 teenagers that compete from around the globe in a high-stakes competition; into the starting point for something amazing. John Hanke, the head of Niantic Labs, goes on to explain:
To understand how they could accomplish this we have to look back a few years to Niantic Labs last project, Ingress. Ingress was created as a real world battle between factions to control portals in cities across the globe. People chose their faction, met their new community and worked together to go out into the real world to participate in a giant global game unlike any other before it.
The Chair Man
Amazon Books .book
Amazon Wins Right To Sell .Book Domain Names
The online retailer pays up to $10m at a private auction for the right to control and sell domains ending in .book.
One of the online retailer’s massive fulfilment centres
Amazon has won the right to sell domain names ending in .book after beating off competition from eight other companies including Google.
It is understood to have paid up to $10m (£6.3m) at a private auction, just days after shelling out $4.6m (£2.9m) for .buy – but it was beaten to the rights to .cloud by Italian company Aruba.
Other top-level domains settled in recent days include .dog, .live, .online, .tennis and .chat.
The two remaining domain name extensions due to be auctioned off by 19 November are .dot and .apartments.
The auctions are a result of a decision by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (Icann) – which governs domain names.
Pink Power Ranger Groupies Rejoice!
Amy Jo Johnson Performs Street Concert in Pink Power Ranger Costume
One of the Power Rangers is taking to the streets to fight for underfunded indie movies everywhere.
Amy Jo Johnson, the Pink Power Ranger herself, delighted fans in Toronto Friday when she rocked the Canadian city in her character’s iconic outfit as a thank-you to fans who helped her fund her upcoming film The Space Between.
Johnson, who wrote, directed and stars in the film, asked fans for $75,000 to help bring her work to life. That amount was handily met, and there’s still just under two weeks left in the campaign. So Johnson performed a mini-concert in costume as a thank-you to fans, which apparently included a cameo from Batman, as documented on Johnson’s Instagram.
[ click to continue reading and support Amy’s film at People.com ]
Weebles Wobble
Full Fathom Five Fiction Contest
Full Fathom Five Digital Hosts Fiction Writing Contest
By Maryann Yin
Full Fathom Five Digital, an eBook imprint headed by A Million Little Pieces author James Frey, is hosting a fiction contest. One grand prize winner will receive $10,000.
The judges intend to name four finalists; those participants will be offered a guaranteed publishing deal. Depending on the quality of the submissions, the organizers may present a publishing contract to non-finalists as well.
Only manuscripts that contain 50,000 words or more will be accepted; writers can turn in either original unpublished stories or self-published books. A deadline has been set for November 30, 2014. Follow this link to learn about all the rules.
Video Games Are Good
from The San Jose Mercury News
Blasting away enemies in video games boosts brain’s learning
Blowing away enemy soldiers and aliens may be good for the brain, as researchers have found that fast-paced action video games improve a player’s learning ability.
People who play video games such as Activision Blizzard’s “Call of Duty” are better able to multitask, perform cognitive tasks such as rotating objects in their minds and focus and retain information better than non-players, said Daphne Bavelier, a research professor in brain and cognitive sciences at the University of Rochester in New York. They also have better vision. The reason is the games help people learn, even those who aren’t regular players.
“People who play action video games get better much faster,” said Bavelier, who has a joint appointment at the University of Geneva in Switzerland. The skills are seemingly unrelated to each other and hard to practice, she said.
The study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, explains the diverse benefits that stem from faster learning. The insights from the study may be used to improve education or to help people with strokes or other brain injuries.
Players were better able to predict what was coming next, even when they were asked to identify patterns that had nothing to do with the game. Non-gamers also improved after researchers assigned them to play a game like “Call of Duty” for as long as two hours a day, five times a week for two months. The benefits lasted as long as a year.
Insomniac
Pasquale Rotella: “When People Read My Book About SFX It Will Blow Their Minds”
You could say that Pasquale Rotella is America’s answer to ID&T founder Duncan Stutterheim. In 1992, the same year that Duncan threw his first party in Zaandam, Netherlands, Pasquale organized his first illegal rave in Los Angeles. Just like ID&T, Rotella’s Insomniac Events has grown into a dance empire in the last twenty years, organizing events for hundreds of thousands of people.
Yet there’s an important difference between the two: ID&T is now part of SFX, and Insomniac is part of Live Nation – two competing music giants, both intent on world domination in the dance scene. During Amsterdam Dance Event a few weeks ago, we talked to Rotella about his role in LA’s rave scene, his plans to bring Electric Daisy Carnival to Europe, and his book that will come out in May.
THUMP: When did you start organizing events in LA?
Pasquale Rotella: There was already a lively underground warehouse scene in LA in the late 80s. But when the riots happened in 1992, the police started shutting down all the illegal parties. Most of the promoters that remained were really shady. Sometimes they’d print flyers for fake parties, where you had to drive two hours to get there, only to find out that there was no party. The only parties that were still going were a few grisly afterparties where drugs like crystal meth entered the scene.
It had lost its shine. I missed the vibe of the old raves. But then I went to England and got really inspired. When I came back to LA, I threw my very first rave. My second rave, Insomniac, was exactly how I had pictured it. It was an illegal rave in a warehouse on the infamous Crenshaw Blvd. That was known as a really bad neighborhood, but the party was amazing. I decided to turn Insomniac into a weekly event, and after that it really took off. At first we’d have about 300 people there, but that quickly grew to 12,000 every week.
Sam Jaeger To Lumen
Sam Jaeger To Star In TNT Pilot ‘Lumen’
As Parenthood is wrapping its six-season run on NBC, original cast member Sam Jaeger is segueing to a new drama project. He has been tapped for a lead role in the TNT drama pilot Lumen, written by Chris Black and directed by Joe Johnson.
In Lumen, the famous author of a best-selling series of fantasy books suddenly disappears, and a family of four finds themselves transported to the mystical alternate world that inspired her work. Jaeger will play Michael Hartman, the stepfather of 16-year-old Charlie whose obsession with finding the author thrusts his family into the surreal world of Lumen.
Lumen hails from TNT Original Productions, Steven Spielberg’s Amblin Television, Full Fathom Five and ABC Signature Studios, with Johnson, Black, Amblin’s Darryl Frank and Justin Falvey as well as Full Fathom Five’s James Frey and Todd Cohen exec producing. Filming begins January 12 in New Zealand.
American Gothic
CBS is developing a family sudser with Amblin TV and former “Good Wife” scribe Corinne Brinkerhoff.
Brinkerhoff is set to write the script and exec produce, as part of her overall deal with CBS Television Studios. Amblin TV’s Justin Falvey and Darryl Frank and Full Fathom Five’s James Frey and Todd Cohen are set as exec producers.
Not to be confused with the Eye’s 1995 series of the same name, “American Gothic” follows a prominent Boston family, struggling to redefine itself after a chilling discovery implicates their recently deceased patriarch in a series of murders spanning decades, all while under the mounting suspicion that one of them may have been his accomplice.
I Spy With My Default Eye
A Creepy Website Is Streaming From 73,000 Private Security Cameras
by
It shouldn’t be so easy to peer into a stranger’s bedroom, much less hundreds of strangers’ bedrooms. But a website has collected the streaming footage from over 73,000 IP cameras whose owners haven’t changed their default passwords. Is this about highlighting an important security problem, or profiting off creepy voyeurism—or both?
Insecam claims to feature feeds from IP cameras all over the world, including 11,000 in the U.S. alone. A quick browse will pull up parking lots and stores but also living rooms and bedrooms. “This site has been designed in order to show the importance of the security settings,” the site’s about page says. But it’s also clearly running and profiting off ads.
Susan Sollins (Art21) Gone
Susan Sollins, a Creator of PBS’s ‘Art21’ Series, Dies at 75
Susan Sollins, an art curator who took avant-garde exhibitions to small communities across the country and produced an award-winning PBS television series aimed at demystifying and popularizing contemporary art, died on Oct. 13 at her home in Rye, N.Y. She was 75.
Ms. Sollins first came to public attention in the 1970s as a founder of Independent Curators Incorporated, a small nonprofit organization that produced traveling art exhibitions — “a museum without walls,” as she called it — featuring both renowned and emerging contemporary artists.
She and her co-founder, Nina Castelli Sundell, who died in August, curated or coordinated hundreds of exhibitions over the next two decades, introducing new ideas and revisiting old ones — Pop Art, Conceptualism, Deconstructivism — for audiences in small cities and university towns throughout the Western Hemisphere and Europe.
The project for which Ms. Sollins is best known is “Art21,” or “Art in the Twenty-First Century,” a four-part series about contemporary art and artists that PBS generally broadcasts every two years. Now in its seventh season, “Art21” presents artists discussing themselves and their work in an unmediated way. Ms. Sollins conducted the interviews from behind the camera but was never heard in the finished documentaries.
She and a partner, Susan Dowling-Griffiths, began working on the project in 1997. It was first broadcast in September 2001.
Is it real pork?
This Is How McDonald’s Actually Makes Its Infamous McRib Sandwiches
If there is one thing we know about people who eat fast food, it’s that they like to know exactly how that pile of delicious hot garbage is made.
Actually, no. That’s not correct. We do not want to see how Taco Bell puts Flamin’ Hot Fritos into their burritos; all we care about is the fact that they are there at all.
But McDonald’s has this whole new video series that teaches its customers all about how the food is made. Mostly it’s just a big initiative to prove NO PINK SLIME HERE. The company recently showed the step-by-step process that goes into making a hamburger patty, but the newest video is truly something special.
It’s the origin story of the McRib sandwich. It’s like Batman Begins, but starring the fast food item that sort of looks like a rack of ribs in BBQ sauce but tastes like pudding?
Why CFC Aerosols Were Banned
Robot Robot
City Worker Gets 20-Day Suspension for Using Robot Voice to Answer Phone
Thinkstock
NEW YORK CITY — A longtime city Health Department worker was suspended 20 days without pay for answering customer-service calls in a robot voice.
Ronald Dillon, a computer specialist for the agency’s IT help desk who assists co-workers and the public with tech-related problems, repeatedly channeled his inner Siri by talking in a “deliberately robotic fashion” when he fielded calls — despite his boss telling him to stop, according to an Office of Administrative Trials and Hearings decision.
Representatives for the Health Department said during a disciplinary hearing before Administrative Law Judge Kara Miller that Dillon talked in the phony voice on at least five occasions between February and April 2013.
Miller’s decision says that during the hearing the Health Department played a recording of Dillon speaking to a customer in a “slow, monotone and over-enunciated manner” and saying, “You have reached the Help Desk. This is Mr. Dillon. How may I help you?”
His droid imitation was apparently good enough to fool callers.
One confused customer who spoke to Dillon later called back and told another Health Department worker that she thought “there was a new automated answering system and had hung up when she heard ‘the robot’ answer the phone because she needed to speak to a human about her issues,” the decision says.
Endgame Straits
End game in mind
The latest book from James Frey and Nils Johnson-Shelton will keep readers busy deciphering the codes within, writes Stuart Danker
ENDGAME: The Calling is the latest novel by authors James Frey and Nils Johnson-Shelton. The duo have numerous bestselling titles between them, namely A Million Little Pieces and I Am Number Four (Frey), and the Full Fathom Five series (Johnson-Shelton).
I recently had the opportunity to interview Frey in conjunction with the launch of his book. “Yeah, there are writers who tend to procrastinate. I do it sometimes. But to get going again, I just keep reminding myself that writing is also a job, and I have to work like everyone else,” he tells me.
He works on the premise that a few pages a day is all he needs to be happy with, and it is a pretty effective method, seeing as how he’s just put another book on the shelves.
For someone whose works have been adapted to visual media, Frey confides that he doesn’t always write with the intention of having his books translated for the silver screen. “The book is always the most important thing. I’ll never know if something will get made, so you have to assume the book will live only as a book.”
Endgame: The Calling takes readers on a journey through myriad cultures and places. Suffice to say, it would have entailed a huge amount of research to get things right. Frey credits the web as his source of research, saying that writing this book would not have been possible without the use of the Internet. As someone who combines more modern forms of media and marketing with traditional print, Frey definitely knows how to utilise the Internet to its maximum potential.
Happy Halloween
Good clown, real clown, funny clown
Clowns are not scary
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NEW YORK (MYFOXNY) – Fox 5 continues to receive reports of scary clowns popping up all over New York City: in movies and television shows and at Halloween parties near you. Now, the World Clown Association wants you to know who the real clowns are.
“How we doing? How we doing?” a clown wearing a red hat, baggy yellow paints and a matching vest covered in stars and drama masks said in greeting as we approached his home.
Good clown, real clown, funny clown, call College Point’s Cido the Clown what you like. But when you see his red nose, painted cheeks and over-sized shoes pedaling right for you on a tiny bicycle (which he demonstrated for us), he asks you not run away in terror.
“I can’t possibly be an evil clown!” Cido said, screwing up his face into a grimace. “I try to make my face angry and you’ll still laugh.”
The World Clown Association, for which Cido serves as Mid-Atlantic director, wants the rest of us to distinguish between real clowns like Cido who try to make us laugh and horror clowns like Pennywise from Stephen King’s “It” who try to make their creators some money.
“You walk in a room and people say: ‘It! Here comes It!'” Cido said. “Well, you know what? There are clowns out there that make me scared. I look at them and I’m like: ‘Wow.'”
Endgame Gold Reveal @ Caesar’s Palace
Woo-hoo!! Orgy-Chat Is Back!
The dream of the ’90s is alive in Facebook Rooms
Ah, the 1990s: The grunge music, the overabundance of flannel, the anonymous chat rooms you explored on your 28.8 dial-up modem. Facebook is reviving at least one of those blasts from the past with its new standalone chat app, Rooms.
The app, released Thursday and currently only available for iPhones, lets users create private chat rooms to post text — just like the good ol’ days — along with photos and videos, in a nod to the Instagram generation.
Rooms was developed by Facebook Creative Labs, but you wouldn’t necessarily know it’s a Facebook product just by looking at it — you don’t need a Facebook account to log in, just an anonymous user name and an optional email address.
Users are able to create a room based on the topic of their choosing (but come on, we all know it’ll be used mostly for sex chats); choose a theme, colors and presentation; invite guests; and moderate content.
BT TORONTO – James Frey on Endgame: The Calling
U.S. Government Prepares for “Endgame”
U.S. Gov Prepares For “Endgame” Nightmare Scenario?
By Susan Duclos / Allnewspipeline.com
We have all seen headline after headline about a variety of current events which make it seem like the MSM is reporting what is occurring, but these events are being reported separately without any attempt whatsoever to connect the dots of what we are seeing. The previous reports include the US government purchasing 160,000 specially made Ebola HAZMAT suits; Small towns receiving orders for body bags and HAZMAT suits; and Barack Obama’s presidential executive orders, specifically ones dealing with “quarantines.”
More recent reports include, but are not limited to; The creation of Ebola SWAT teams; The US military begins its Ebola “rapid-response teams; The Veterans Administration setting up Ebola wards in Puerto Rico expecting an influx of Ebola patients, Tampa Bay area VA hospitals training for Ebola cases; Mandatory quarantine measures in New York and New Jersey for high risk travelers from Ebola infected zones; and Chris Christie hinting that mandatory quarantines will soon be nationwide.
Zaouli de Manfla, centre-ouest de la Côte d’Ivoire
It Is A Great Day For America
Here Comes Honey Boo Boo Canceled by TLC
Joey Skladany/TLC
Here Comes cancellation for Honey Boo Boo. E! News can confirm TLC has pulled the plug on the reality series following former kid pageant star Alana “Honey Boo Boo” Thompson and her family. The news comes after reports that Mama June (June Shannon) was dating a convicted child molester.
“TLC has cancelled the series Here Comes Honey Boo Boo and ended all activities around the series, effective immediately,” the network said in a statement. “Supporting the health and welfare of these remarkable children is our only priority. TLC is faithfully committed to the children’s ongoing comfort and well-being.”
MORE: Mama June speaks out about alleged relationship
Mama June posted the above video on Facebook confirming TLC will not produce any more episode of Here Comes Honey Boo Boo and thanking fans for their support. She also reiterates claims that she is not dating Mark McDaniel.
Summoning The Demon
Elon Musk: ‘With artificial intelligence we are summoning the demon.’
Tesla chief executive Elon Musk has warned about artificial intelligence before, tweeting that it could be more dangerous than nuclear weapons. Speaking Friday at the MIT Aeronautics and Astronautics department’s Centennial Symposium, Musk called it our biggest existential threat:
I think we should be very careful about artificial intelligence. If I were to guess like what our biggest existential threat is, it’s probably that. So we need to be very careful with the artificial intelligence. Increasingly scientists think there should be some regulatory oversight maybe at the national and international level, just to make sure that we don’t do something very foolish. With artificial intelligence we are summoning the demon. In all those stories where there’s the guy with the pentagram and the holy water, it’s like yeah he’s sure he can control the demon. Didn’t work out.
Musk was so caught up on artificial intelligence that he missed the audience’s next question. “Sorry can you repeat the question, I was just sort of thinking about the AI thing for a second,” he said.
Original Liberace Korla Pandit
Before there was Liberace, there was Korla Pandit (literally). Korla Pandit had a daily afternoon music TV show in LA back in the 1950s where he played his unique percussive style of Hammond organ while mystical cloud projections passed in the background and the camera focused in on his dreamy hypnotic eyes.
So dreamy & hypnotic, in fact, that wealthy women started sending him really expensive gifts, like grand pianos. Rumors began to circulate that Pandit was actually hypnotizing women thru the TV & the concern got so great that the station cancelled him & he was replaced by an up & coming pianist – Liberace.