Disqus - Latest Comments for smadin

Re: Coffee Break: The Greatest

Scott Madin — Wed, 04 Dec 2019 10:00:21 -0000

Kenny Rogers - "The Greatest"
Cat Power - "The Greatest"
Michelle Williams - "The Greatest"
Sia - "The Greatest"

Re: The End of This Road

Scott Madin — Fri, 16 Aug 2019 08:32:03 -0000

Thanks for everything, Liss. What, as I believe the kids say, a long, strange trip it's been. This site—your writing and all the contributors, the community, the friends I've made, and even the missteps and tough times we've had along the way—have meant a lot to me over the past decade and a half, and done a lot to shape and sharpen my thinking.

Re: Hahahahahaha

Scott Madin — Wed, 01 Jun 2016 22:09:59 -0000

> YOU WIN MASSACHUSETTS. You win.
hell yes we do.

Re: Ink

Scott Madin — Thu, 12 Nov 2015 20:21:18 -0000

I got this one in September, while I was down in Raleigh for the Hopscotch music festival; it's the core of a type of amplifier circuit, on my right inner forearm. Very simple (cribbed from Wikipedia, in fact), but I really like how it looks. Still planning on some more elaborate work.

Re: Blue and Black? Or Gold and White?

Scott Madin — Fri, 27 Feb 2015 10:33:44 -0000

I see one black llama and one white llama being chased by some cops.

Re: Shooting at Chapel Hill

Scott Madin — Wed, 11 Feb 2015 14:34:54 -0000

Also, my friend Aaron Bady (@zunguzungu on Twitter) wrote this morning at The New Inquiry about the very particular phrasing CNN used in their article on the shootings, and how "neutral"/"objective"-sounding language actually conveys an idea that the victims were to blame for their own deaths.

Re: Shooting at Chapel Hill

Scott Madin — Wed, 11 Feb 2015 14:15:21 -0000

Following up on @eastsidekate's point, it also seems to me that the simplistic "parking dispute" narrative effectively leverages ableism to exculpate a culture of white supremacy, male violence, racism, and Islamophobia.

[CN: ableist terms] That is, if the received narrative is "He killed three people, in their home, at some remove of time from the precipitating incident, over a dispute about parking," the immediate question is "parking? why the hell would anyone commit three premeditated murders over parking?" And the sensible response to that question is "probably it was about more than just parking," — but the quick, easy, comfortable answer, the one American culture and media representations tend to encourage us to gravitate toward, is "well, he must have been 'crazy'! no 'sane' person would do that!"

And if he's "crazy", well, that's the end of it, right? "Crazy" people don't have reasons for what they do, goes the story, so it's both needless and fruitless to inquire any further about what led to these murders. "Crazy" man "snaps" over parking, kills three, terrible tragedy, no connection to anything else, no way it could have been predicted or prevented or, now, learned from. So very sad. Now let's all go back to talking about how great American Sniper was.

Re: Quote of the Day

Scott Madin — Tue, 03 Feb 2015 15:30:24 -0000

@Melissa McEwan yeah, definitely. Antivax hucksters encouraging and profiting off layer upon layer of fear.

Re: Quote of the Day

Scott Madin — Tue, 03 Feb 2015 15:25:11 -0000

"It's the worst shot," she said, with tears in her eyes. "Do you want to wake up one morning and the light is gone from her eyes with autism or something?"

This makes me so angry. This woman has been so badly lied to, and by enough convincing-sounding hucksters, that she genuinely believes these completely false things, and is prepared to do her own children great harm based on those lies. She's terrified and anxious, and her children may suffer badly, and it's so completely needless, and it's all calculated to boost profits for unethical quacks.

Re: On Louie. Again.

Scott Madin — Wed, 04 Jun 2014 11:09:31 -0000

@aphra_behn
by "rumors about the Colorado incident" @xian probably means the "blind item" that was posted on Gawker some time back (I think a year or two ago, maybe more?) alleging that a male comedian widely lauded for his feminism had sexually assaulted two young, less-well-known female comedians after inviting them to his hotel room. Hints in the article strongly suggested it was CK, and separately a Gawker writer or editor (as I recall) confirmed on twitter that it was in fact about him.

Re: Programming Note

Scott Madin — Wed, 07 May 2014 18:41:01 -0000

Happy almost-birthday!

Re: Question of the Day

Scott Madin — Tue, 06 May 2014 19:13:33 -0000

The Galapagos Affair: Satan Came to Eden, a really fascinating and well-done documentary on three families of Germans who settled (not all together) on the island of Floreana in the Galapagos in the late 1920s-early '30s, and the discord and intrigue that followed.

Re: In the News

Scott Madin — Thu, 10 Apr 2014 12:31:40 -0000

More on Heartbleed: Security expert Bruce Schneier wrote about its severity at his blog, and provides a link to a small web app which will test any site for the vulnerability.

Re: The Wednesday Blogaround

Scott Madin — Wed, 02 Apr 2014 16:30:23 -0000

Recently — right after the annual Game Developers Conference in San Francisco — several independent game developers (including an IRL friend of mine, Zoë Quinn) went to LA to participate in what was originally pitched as something of a documentary, but which transformed into a more standard reality TV show, about indie game development, and in particular, "game jams".

(For those who don't know, a game jam is an event, sometimes in a single location but often open to participants all over the world, where participants have a limited time — 72 hours is common, but some jams are 24 or 48 hours, or a week, or a month, or zero hours — to create a videogame, or sometimes a card or board or other kind of game, from scratch, using whatever tools they have at their disposal. Game jams are often organized around a theme, and are usually non-competitive affairs, where everyone participates for the fun of making things collaboratively. Brendan Keogh, an Australian video game journalist, covered a 48-hour jam for Ars Technica back in 2011.)

This project, run (nominally — we'll get to that) by "new media" content network Maker Studios' YouTube imprint Polaris, ended up entitled "GAME_JAM", and is rumored to be Maker's most expensive single venture yet. And it completely fell apart, with the indie devs walking off set, within about a day of production starting.

Jared Rosen was the only journalist on set, and his thorough and blunt account is at IndieStatik. (Rosen endangered his own job by writing that piece, though it appears Polaris have decided against firing him.) Zoë is contractually constrained from writing directly about the incident, but described some of her feelings and thoughts in the aftermath at her main blog and on her Tumblr. Adriel Wallick and Robin Arnott, two of the participants who did not sign the contracts and are thus free to speak candidly wrote about their experiences as well: Wallick's at her blog and Arnott's at his. Finally, Rami Ismail, Wallick's partner and one half of the game studio Vlambeer, who was not a participant but provided informal advice to the devs who were involved, wrote up some notes about dealing with contracts in situations like that one.

Re: Bipartisan Farm Bill Heads to the President's Desk

Scott Madin — Tue, 04 Feb 2014 19:20:35 -0000

Oh cool, those embedded totally out of order (at least in my browser). Thanks, Disqus! Anyway, the point is SNAP is 2% of the US budget and 0.4% of the US GDP, so any claim that that's where we need to look if we want to get our spending under control is absurd on its face, and gives away that spending is not something they're concerned about in any serious way.

Re: Bipartisan Farm Bill Heads to the President's Desk

Scott Madin — Tue, 04 Feb 2014 19:17:52 -0000

Even if we conceded that cutting spending ought to be a priority* in a "jobless recovery" where nominal unemployment is still around 7% and U6 (unemployed job-seekers, discouraged job-seekers, and the underemployed) around 13% (source: http://www.cnbc.com/id/1013..., it's telling (and enraging) where these soi-disant budget hawks look to cut. I looked up some numbers real quick and yelled about this on twitter earlier today (hopefully Disqus embeds these correctly):

https://twitter.com/ScottMa...
https://twitter.com/ScottMa...
https://twitter.com/ScottMa...
https://twitter.com/ScottMa...
https://twitter.com/ScottMa...
https://twitter.com/ScottMa...
https://twitter.com/ScottMa...
https://twitter.com/ScottMa...

*spoiler: it should not.

Re: In the News

Scott Madin — Mon, 16 Dec 2013 11:56:34 -0000

The wonderful Mallory Ortberg at the wonderful The Toast has her own, much superior version of the Douthat column.

Re: Filibusted

Scott Madin — Fri, 22 Nov 2013 10:19:19 -0000

I think, at least in recent (say, the past thirty years or so) Republicans have been much more effective at obstructing nominations via filibuster than Democrats have; "Dems won't be able to stop odious right-wing nominees by filibustering them" is technically true, but...when was they last time they did, even when they could?

Re: Quote of the Day

Scott Madin — Fri, 01 Nov 2013 17:53:19 -0000

Apprive

Re: Shutdown Update: The Deal Has Been Struck

Scott Madin — Wed, 16 Oct 2013 14:24:32 -0000

• Reopen government and fund it through 15 January 2014.
• Push the debt ceiling deadline back to 7 February 2014

Can't wait to have this all happen again in three months! that'll be swell!

Re: The Friday Blogaround

Scott Madin — Fri, 04 Oct 2013 17:31:32 -0000

Atrios notes a post over at Kos, wherein Philip Diehl, former US Mint director and Treasury chief of staff, who co-authored the law authorizing the government to mint commemorative platinum coins in any denomination, lays out precisely why that law absolutely allows for the $1-trillion-platinum-coin solution to the debt ceiling "crisis", despite all the wailing that such an idea isn't "serious".

Re: Wednesday Blogaround

Scott Madin — Wed, 02 Oct 2013 14:54:25 -0000

[CN: extreme misogyny, rape culture, "pickup artistry"]: Dissent has a piece on how "Roosh", a relatively famous "PUA" writer, discovered to his dismay that his manipulative, predatory, rapist bullshit doesn't work in a society that makes concerted efforts to reduce gender and economic inequality.

Re: Question of the Day

Scott Madin — Tue, 01 Oct 2013 19:37:41 -0000

I have a lot of books, music, video games, movies...
My favorite "traditional" pieces of visual art are my Phineas X. Jones prints. I have The Unfathomable Octophant, Western Tentacled Jay, Squid Can't Win, Buntacles, and The Impossible Octophant. I love his style.

Re: Sure

Scott Madin — Wed, 18 Sep 2013 11:45:36 -0000

a purported joint effort between MRAs - fucking MRAs and feminists

that's kind of darkly hilarious, given how similar TERF and MRA claims about trans people sound.

Re: Open Thread

Scott Madin — Thu, 12 Sep 2013 11:21:54 -0000

General reminder: please include appropriate content notes on comments discussing subjects likely to be upsetting or triggering to fellow Shakers.