Category: Culture, Art, & Media

Why is it only the libertarians who fantasize about space these days?

our species hasn’t been around terribly long, in the grand scheme of things, and if we’re honest with ourselves, most of us haven’t exactly been doing our utmost to better the world we live in.

my general feeling is that our fondness for dystopian narratives is a pretty nasty indulgence, especially for those of us who live mostly comfortable lives, far-removed from the visceral realities of human suffering. … Immersing ourselves in narratives where 99% of the characters are totally selfish also engrains a kind of fashionable faux-cynicism that feels worldly, but is in fact simply lazy. I say faux-cynicism because I don’t believe that most people who profess to be pessimists truly believe that humanity is doomed, at least not in their lifetimes, or in their particular geographic purviews … telling yourself that everything is awful, and nothing can be fixed, is a marvelously expedient way to absolve yourself of personal responsibility. There is, happily, nothing about an apocalyptic worldview that obligates you to give up any of the comforts and conveniences that have accrued to you as a consequence of global injustice; and you get to feel superior to all those tender fools who still believe that a kinder world is possible! It’s a very satisfying form of moral escapism.

We have come to view utopian narratives as inherently hokey, and preachy. But dystopias are, of course, their own form of preaching; they are preaching another hypothesis about humanity, which, due to moody lighting and oblique dialogue, has an entirely undeserved appearance of profundity, and the illusory farsightedness of a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Make utopias popular again. Fictional narratives are a huge factor in shaping our expectations of what is possible.

Source: The Regrettable Decline of Space Utopias | Culture & Politics | Current Affairs by Brianna Rennix

Every top 5 song, from 1958 – 2016, so we can stop arguing about when music was still good

Source: How Music Evolved: Billboard’s Hot 100, 1958 – 2016

 

Yet another amazing “visual essay” by The Pudding and Polygraph:

Some ideas are too complex to discuss with prose alone. We use code, animation, and data visualization to explore topics that, otherwise, might get lost in a 10,000-word story.

There are two main ways of representing graphics on computers: vector and raster. Vector graphics describe the image with mathematical equations, usually representing things such as lines, curves and shapes. Raster graphics instead describe the image as an array of color values that are positioned one after the other into a grid pattern. The second distinction in computer graphics is between representing 2D and 3D space.

the reason why I explained the vector/raster, 2D/3D nature is that on our modern displays, every graphics type eventually ends up being displayed as a 2D raster image.

The reason we care about this in a pixel art magazine is that we can use these types of transforms to create modern styles of pixel art that use art assets from non-pixel art quadrants.

Source: Pixels and voxels, the long answer – Retronator Magazine – Medium

Due to data flukes, private homes are being besieged by the game’s players.

Without giving his consent or having any forewarning, Sheridan’s property had become a virtual neighborhood landmark. … Sheridan is not the only person who awoke one morning to find his home had been transformed into an enormous Poké-gym. … His property has effectively been augmented by a digital beacon—a distinction that sends about 75 strangers to his front yard everyday. For him, Pokémon Go’s use of geo-data seems like a standard example of an easy engineering fix having massively unintended consequences.

“What Niantic did is they collected a lot of data and then they radically shifted the context in which that data was used,” he said. “I’m not sure I can say whether it’s right or wrong, but it makes me feel really squishy. All these people—there’s the potential for some of these locations to be flooded with strangers overnight.”

Source: Where Did Pokémon Go Get Its Map From? – The Atlantic

Source: The Increasing Problem With the Misinformed (by @baekdal) #analysis

about the rise of the misinformed using some really interesting data, as well as the threat to freedom of the press

while the publishing side of things is undergoing tremendous changes, so is the journalistic and editorial side. The old concept of creating a package of news was designed for a public that we assumed was uninformed by default, but this is no longer the case.

The public is no longer uninformed. They are misinformed, and that requires an entirely different editorial focus. … Now your focus must be on explaining the news instead.