Author: Mita

October 24 2019

Soundfield -How A Tribe Called Red Blends Pow Wow with Electronic Music (feat. Iron Boy) – YouTube

Jenny Odell, How to Do Nothing – XOXO Festival (2019) – YouTube

Computer games designed as stories are much simpler. They don’t do much on their own. They don’t have missing parts. They are a missing part. What they become is entirely up to the user. And it is in this becoming that games-as-stories differ from games-as-systems. They may not be very significant by themselves, but they have limitless potential for growth. As they become part of the human who interacts with them.

If games-as-systems are big machines that allow you to play a little cog, then games-as-stories are little cogs that want to find a place in the big machine that is the user. The system-machines require the cog to change and adapt, to try and become as perfect as itself. The little stories-cog does not change ever. But when it becomes part of a user-machine, it causes changes in that machine. And these changes know no boundaries.

Of cogs and machines

October 4 2019

Canadaland’s The Commons podcast is doing a series of the Family Dynasties of Canada. The first episode of the series was about the Stronachs and the latest is about The Irvings.

In Defense of Bad Flags – Vlogbrothers – YouTube

Five Years of Tech Diversity Reports—and Little Progress | WIRED
Other companies don’t release their attrition numbers, but a 2017 report from the Kapor Center found it to be a big problem across the industry. That report surveyed over 2,000 tech employees who left their jobs, and found many people of color felt they had unfairly been passed over for a promotion or faced stereotyping. A recent survey by diversity nonprofit Girls Who Code revealed that many women who applied for internships at tech companies said their interviewers asked inappropriate or gender-biased questions. Others reported being flirted with, dismissed, or demeaned.

September 29 2019

Learn music theory in half an hour (YouTube) – now I can better understand Adam Neely videos as well as those by Nahre Sol

Enough: The Architecture of Degrowth | Oslo Architecture Triennale
Inspired by these transformed venues of Oslo, Enough inhabits their robust existing building fabric and creates new institutions of degrowth: The Library, The Theatre, The Playground, and The Academy. These institutions promote sharing our resources, imagining alternatives, freedom to play, and democratic education; all issues central to transitioning to a future free from the growth imperative.

The Library celebrates sharing, de-commodification, and democratisation of goods and ideas in a welcoming heart of a community.

The Theatre reveals the constructedness of our world that invites participants to question reality and actively explore generating alternatives.

The Playground initiates a deeper game of exploring and listening to the city reclaiming the streets as a site of joyful and thoughtful experimentation.

The Academy offers a platform for discussion and research to battle injustice and extraction

What the smartest people do on the weekend is what everyone else will do during the week in ten years – cdixon blog

Women in tech facts [pdf]
FEMALE RETENTION: What are the rates of attrition for technical women? According to a study by the Center for Talent Innovation:• Eighty percent of women in SET report “loving their work” (Hewlett, Sherbin, with Dieudonné, Fargnoli, & Fredman, 2014). • Yet 56 percent leave their organizations at the mid-level points (10-20 years) in their careers (Hewlett et al., 2008).As Figure 1.5 illustrates, female attrition is higher in technology than in science and in engineering. In all cases, the quit rate for women is higher than it is for men. In the high tech industry, the quit rate is more than twice as high for women (41 percent) than it is for men (17 percent) (Hewlett et al., 2008).

September 26 2019

I’m your summer girl — HAIM (YouTube)

Untitled Goose Game (HONK) – lovely use of Transport font

YouTubers React to Experimental Music – featuring the work of Maryanne Amacher ‎– Sound Characters (Making The Third Ear) – 1999 https://vimeo.com/88559973

Ask Polly: ‘My Fear of Climate Change Is Eroding My Sanity!’

O whatever God or whatever ancestor that wins in the next life
And it begins to dawn on you that the stories were all myths and the epics were all narrated by the villains and the history books were written to rewrite the histories and that so much of what you thought defined excellence merely concealed grift. [ht]

September 11 2019

P-values Broke Scientific Statistics—Can We Fix Them? SciShow

Why exercise is hard – Minute Earth

Set up to fail: Why women still don’t win elections as often as men in Canada We found women are more likely than men to find themselves running in hard-to-win ridings and to get less financial support. And it appears that this year’s federal election will be no exception.

The Statue of Liberty was created to celebrate freed slaves, not immigrants, its new museum recounts