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As Twitter continues to figuratively kneecap itself by limiting tweet views, Meta is hustling to bring its Twitter rival to reality. A listing for an app called Threads was spotted on the iOS App Store with an estimated release date of July 6th. In May, a report said the microblogging service was nearing completion and could be out as soon as the end of June. While an end-of-June launch didn't quite happen, the app could arrive when Twitter users are more willing (and maybe even eager) to finally jump ship.
Twitter boss Elon Musk announced at the weekend that verified accounts — which translates to paying users — can read 6,000 posts daily, while non-paying users can only read 600. He said the website is adopting the measure to "address extreme levels of data scraping [and] system manipulation."
From both the app listing and rumors, we’re expecting Threads will migrate your followers and circles from your existing Instagram handle, ensuring you should have an active timeline right from the outset. That is, if you’re an Instagram user.
– Mat Smith
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Amazon is offering a $5 credit when you buy a $50 eGift card for Prime Day
Blue Origin is planning to open new launch sites outside the US
Tidal is increasing its HiFi plan to $11 per month
The best mobile microphones for 2023
Since smartphones started eating casual photography’s lunch, camera makers have focused on devices designed for very specific uses. Action cams provide sharp, fluid video. Compact cameras target both tourists and vloggers. And DSLRs are available at some of the best prices we’ve seen. Then there are mirrorless cameras, which continue to improve their autofocus and video. And that’s where some guidance helps. Whether you’re a creator looking for just the right vlogging camera, an aspiring wildlife photographer or a sports enthusiast, we’ll help you find the perfect camera to match your budget and needs.
Remember the early days of the AI hype train, when everyone spent their time making stupid images using text prompts? If you want to recapture the nostalgic haze of, uh, late 2022, Picsart has you covered. The popular image editor just launched an AI-powered animated GIF generator, calling the tool its “most unhinged” platform yet. Type a bunch of nonsense into the chat box, wait a minute or so and marvel at your “chaotic and eccentric” creation. The platform’s integrated into the regular Picsart app and is available for iOS, Android devices and on the web.
If you've been having trouble using Twitter recently, you aren't alone — the service has been having issues since it started limiting the daily number of posts users could view. Although many of the platform's issues stabilized over the weekend, TweetDeck remains broken unless users switch to the beta version of the list aggregator. Now, Twitter is gearing up to solve the issue by making that beta version of TweetDeck the main version. According to Twitter Support, the feature will become exclusive to Twitter Blue subscribers in the near future, noting that "in 30 days, users must be Verified to access TweetDeck."
There really is an HBO show on Netflix. All five seasons of Issa Rae's highly acclaimed comedy-drama series Insecure are now streaming on Netflix in the US. Even more HBO shows are on the way, too. Band of Brothers, The Pacific, Six Feet Under and Ballers are also coming to Netflix as part of the deal, the company told Deadline. Meanwhile, Netflix users outside the US can stream True Blood on the service.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/the-morning-after-metas-instagram-linked-twitter-rival-could-arrive-this-week-111508536.html?src=rss
Threads
Screenshots of the iPhone screen showing a new app called Threads by Meta.
It is currently held, not without certain uneasiness, that 90% of human DNA is ‘junk.’ The renowned Cambridge molecular biologist, Sydney Brenner, makes a helpful distinction between ‘junk’ and ‘garbage.’ Garbage is something used up and worthless which you throw away; junk is something you store for some unspecified future use. (Rabinow, 1992, 7-8)
In the bioscience lab near Tokyo where I did my ethnographic study, the researchers taught me how to do PCR experiments. This was before Covid when almost everyone came to know what PCR was, or at least, what kind of instrumental information it could be good for.[1] The lab was working with mouse models, although I never got to see them in their cages. But the researcher I was shadowing showed me how to put the mouse tail clippings she collected into small tubes. She hated cutting tails, by the way, and preferred to take ear punches when she could. She told me that she didn’t like the way the mice wiggled under her hand, as if they just knew. But at this point anyway, the mice are alive in the animal room and she is only putting small, but vital, pieces of them into a tube to dissolve them down (mice becoming means), to get to the foundation of what she really wants.
I’ve still got the protocol that I typed up from the notes I made with her in the lab. Step 1 was: “Add 75 ul of NaOH to each ear punch tube (changing tips as I go).” The changing pipette tips part was really important to avoid haphazardly spreading around DNA, I learned. I also had to make sure the clippings were at the bottom of the tube and submerged. She said I could flick the tubes with my finger to get the “material” to fall down to the bottom and she showed me how to do it. I also, she cautioned, always had to be very careful of bubbles, but more flicking could help there and by making sure I didn’t put the pipette too far down into the solution. Then we would spin the tubes in the vortex (which I always typed as VORTEX for some reason), add some other reagents, and put it all in the “PCR machine,” but that is not at all its technical name.[2] Then we would usually go with all the others to the cafeteria for lunch.
In writing this now, I couldn’t remember what “NaOH” stood for so I had to ask the internet. And as I looked back over this protocol, and these practices I was just barely learning to embody before the pandemic sent us all home, I realize that they must have settled back in my mind somewhere, just as the material-ness of the lab which anchored them for me has receded like a shrinking lake in a drought summer. But what I do hold on to is what the researcher taught me about the importance of repetition and focus, for a kind of purity of practice, and the diligence to make materials—whether of mice or of sodium hydroxide—do what they ought to do.
Because what captivated me about these initial PCR steps was what appeared to me to be the profound transformation they wrought (of course, I am not the first person to say so)—from fleshy ear punch to silt DNA multiplied in a clear plastic tube, with just a little bit of chemicals and some repetitive cycles of heat—but even more, how this transmutation had the potential to fail in one way, or for one reason, or another. How difficult it could actually be to get the materials, and even the researchers themselves, to do what they ought. Once, I used some unknown solution instead of water because it was on a shelf in an unmarked bottle close to where the water, which I later supposed had gone missing, was usually kept. Once, I didn’t remember to change pipette tips. Or the sense in my hands of precisely what to do next and properly would simply begin to unravel. When we had to throw the tubes in the trash, the researcher comforted me by telling me about a time when her mind wandered for just an instant while pipetting and she lost track of which tube she had last filled with reagent. A minor momentary mistake that grows, and can even burst, into a huge error in the downstream. She taught me that sometimes, if I lifted the tubes to the light to examine their volume of liquid, I might be able to get back on track.[3] Other times the PCR machine might not cycle its heat properly. One machine was already considered to be of questionable working order but the lab didn’t have the funding to replace it. We didn’t know about its full potential for failure until we got all the way through to the very last stage of the process and discovered we had to go back to the beginning with new clippings.
The researcher and I classified these particular (wait, was that water?) experiments-in-the-making as failures because they missed the mark of their intentions. Their purposefulness, decided in advance by the goal of genotyping these mice, was also appended to other purposes, specifically to cultivate a living gene population that the researchers needed for other more central concerns. Trashing the experiments that deviated from this intentionality, although it could be costly, was a seemingly simple decision. After the PCR melt and the second half of the experiment, the electrophoresis machine either “read” back the base pair numbers we were looking for, or those numbers were just wrong and we’d made an obvious mistake. Or worse, everything collapsed into inconclusiveness and we needed to repeat the experiment anyway.[4] In this case, deviation from expectation, and therefore from usefulness, was what pushed experiments to a kind of failure, beyond which point they could not, in this context at least, be so easily reclaimed.
But what does something like “junk” have to do with mice ear punches, chemical transmutation, and mundane laboratory failures? Garbage experiments are routine in scientific practice after all. But as any scientist might tell you, failure can be its own kind of productive; in the least, as a way to learn the value of steady hands, and how to recognize water by smell, or its necessity as a control in genotyping—to become a “capable doer,” as one scientist told me. But beyond these mundane errors, some scientists argue that failures of a particular kind can break open old ways of thinking and doing, although what that failure is, and can be, is variously classified:
Science fails. This is especially true when tackling new problems. Science is not infallible. Research activity is a desire to go outside of existing worldviews, to destroy known concepts, and to create new concepts in uncharted territories. (Iwata, 2020)
I wish “failure” were the trick to seeing and moving beyond the limits of current knowledge. Is that what Kuhn said? I think that paradigm change requires making a reproducible observation that does not fit within the existing model, then going back to the whiteboard. But I don’t think these observations are very well classified as a failure. If failure = unexpected result of a successful experiment/measurement, then I can agree. (Personal communication with laboratory supervisor, 2020)
Failure has more potential than we might often recognize, where an instinct to trash can instead push to new beginnings. Just as Rabinow described Brenner’s description (1992), failure is like junk, those materials or states that are in-the-waiting—waiting to be actualized, reordered, and reclaimed as meaningful, valid and valuable, even if we don’t yet know how or why. Junk is, in this way, more than matter “out of place,” although it may land there interstitially. If “[d]irt is the by-product of a systematic ordering and classification of matter, in so far as ordering involves rejecting inappropriate elements” (Mary Douglas, 1966, 36), then junk is garbage and failure and decay, and even breakdown, on the precipice of being made anew. After all, without intentionality or purposefulness and other values, there can be no garbage, or failed and failing experiments and paradigms, in the first place.
Consider an example that seems categorically different from scientific experiments: inventory management in role-playing videogames. In Diablo 4 (2023), any item picked up from downed enemies or collected in the environment can be marked as “junk” and then salvaged by visiting an in-game merchant. These bits of amour and other gear reappear in your inventory afterwards as junk’s constitute materials, useful again for crafting and building up new things—strips of leather and other scraps as well as blueprints for better stuff. In Fallout 4 (2015), the “Junk Jet” gun lets you repurpose your inventory instead as ammo, anything from wrenches to teddy bears, which can be shot back out into the world and at random adversaries, where you might later be able to pick them up again, if you want. Managing encumbrance in Skyrim (2011), on the other hand, is a task of drudgery and tedium. Almost every item in the game world is moveable, each with its own weight calculation, and can be picked up and stored even accidentally, until your character is weighed down to the point of being unmovable. But the game is designed to make you feel that there is always the possibility that some magical potion, random apple, or 12 candlesticks, might just come in handy for a future encounter, a book that you might really read later, leading to a hesitancy to trash anything. In turn, every item brims with, as yet undiscovered, use-value. As Caitlin DeSlivey argues: “Objects generate social effects not just in their preservation and persistence, but in their destruction and disposal” (2006, 324). And certainly this is true when, over-encumbered deep inside a dungeon, I agonize over which items to drop, in order to move again, in order to continue to collect more—or laugh as I spray the world with cigarettes and telephones.
A decaying dog, reanimated by something that is not supposed to be there. (Image by Sarah Thanner, used with permission)
For me then, junk is a way to look for when and where particular boundaries of the useful or valuable—and even the clean and functioning—are “breached” (Helmreich 2015, 187), and then reordered. Although Helmreich is speaking to scientific experimental practices and their organizing ideologies, his insight is useful for junk’s attention to those very breaches: “moments when abstractions and formalisms break, forcing reimaginations of the phenomena they would apprehend” (185). Of course, junk DNA itself has experienced this very kind of breaching—more recent scientific research demonstrating its non-coding role is actually not without usefulness (c.f. Goodier 2016)—(re)animating it for future use. And although DeSilvey is describing vibrant multispecies-animated decay within abandoned homesteads, like Helmreich, she points to junk’s transformative potential. We just have to dig through rotted wood and insect-eaten paper, or virtual backpacks and books, to find it.
Junk merges failure, trash, and decay with the processual and everyday negotiation of culturally meaningful and policed categories: garbage, scraps and waste, but also “breakdown, dissolution, and change” (Jackson 2014, 225). Although Steven J. Jackson describes the ways these last three are fundamental features of modern media and technology, an anthropology of junk collects and extends these processes into broader techniques and social practices. Junk can help us see connections criss-crossing symbolic and material breakage and disintegration. It helps us see in/visibility of the dirty and diseased, not as a property of any material or technological object alone, but as also always in coordination and collaboration with the ways they are imagined and invested—and more, always enmeshed in variously articulated forms of power.
If infrastructures like computer networks, for example, become (more) visible when broken (Star 1999), it is not their brokenness or decay in an absolute sense that reveals them, but the way their state change defies our everyday and embodied expectations—the way they push against normativity. We may be just as surprised to find things in good working order.
Metal becoming wood in “animation of other processes” (DeSilvey 2006, 324). (Image by Sarah Thanner, used with permission)
Bit rot after all, has just as much to do with the made-intentionally-inoperable systems that force the decay, or really uselessness, of data (Hayes 1998), as it does with any actual mold on CD-ROMS and other corruptions of age and wear. In fact, digital information or technological and material infrastructures don’t become broken, just as they don’t become fully ever fixed either. Breaks and breaches are hardly so linear. Instead, these are “relative, continually shifting states” (Larkin 2008: 236). This view may be in contrast to Pink et al.’s suggestion to attend “to the mundane work that precedes data breakages or follows them” (2018, 3), but not to their entreaty to follow those everyday practices of maintenance and repair, and even intentional failure and forced rot. This is not simply because data and other material practices like PCR experiments may fail under given conditions or focused intentions, perhaps as a result of a momentary distraction or a faulty machine—or in the case of programming, because debugging is actually 90% of the work, as one bioinformatician told me. Indeed, software testing in practice goes beyond merely verifying functionality or fixing bugs and broken bits of code, but helps to define and make “lively” (Lupton 2016) what that software is, and can do, and can be made to do in the first place (Carlson et al. 2023). Along the way, as a generative process, testing, tinkering, and fixing have social effects (DeSilvey 2006) which are external to, but always in extension of, broken/working materials themselves (Marres and Stark 2020).
More importantly, perhaps, broken things can be used, as Brian Larkin argued in relation to Nigerian media and infrastructures, as a “conduit” to mount critiques of the social order (2008, 239)—to call attention to inconsistency and inequality, and to demand or remodulate for change. To see this resistance at work demands a collating of junk practices. As Juris Milestone wrote in his description of a 2014 American Anthropology Association panel, “What will an anthropology of maintenance and repair look like?”:
Fixing things can be both innovation and a response to the ravages of globalization—either through reuse as a counter-narrative to disposability, or resistance to the fetish of the new, or as a search for connection to a material mechanical world that is increasingly automated and remote.
Junk’s transformative potential asks us to see removal and erasure, or in Douglas’ terms “rejection,” as always coupled to these reciprocal practices: rebirth, repair, repurpose, renewal. In this way, junk shows us the way decay, even technological corruption, is less a “death” than a “continued animation of other processes” (2006, 324).
But if junk describes a socio-cultural ordering system concerned with practices of moving materials—even ideas and people—into and out of categories of value and purposefulness, it must also contend with the vital agency of other material and microscopic worlds, which just as easily unravel out or spool up regardless of human presence, intention, and desire. Laboratory mice in fact are particularly disobedient, they hardly ever behave as they are supposed to—just as cell cultures in a lab are finicky and fail to grow to expectations, and junk ammo from the Junk Jet has a 10% chance of becoming suspended in mid-air, becoming irretrievable.[6] If we repurpose sites or moments of breakdown to resist configurations of power, then materials themselves are also always resisting what they ought to do or become.[7] This is the draw of the things in which we are enmeshed, where we are always extending, observing, destroying and deleting. If junk is the possibility, under particular cultural expectations and desires, for things to be pushed or cycled across such thresholds, and also, of making and unmaking these, it also must contend with the things themselves—with what we see in a corroded mirror, looking, or not, back at us.
A woman in a corroded mirror, disappearing and extending. (Image by Sarah Thanner, used with permission)
Although junk may be over-bursting in its use here as a metaphor, I argue it can still usefully be used to stitch growing anthropological attention to material decay, breakage, and deviation together with tinkering, maintenance, and repair—across locations, states, practices and materialities. Granted, “manifesto” is also a too decisive word to attach to this short piece. Too sure of itself. But this post is also an attempt to challenge the understanding of what it means to be (academically) polished and complete. I use manifesto here mostly tongue-in-cheek, while still holding to the idea that any argument has to begin in small seeds, and start growing from somewhere.
My thinking about junk began years ago with Brian Larkin’s attention to breakdown (2008). More recently, I found DeSilvey (2006) by way of Pink et al. (2018); and Jackson (2014) from Sachs (2020); and Hayes (1998) from Seaver (2023). This lineage is important because I am not inventing, but building. These ideas are also bits and tears of conversations with Libuše Hannah Vepřek, Sarah Thanner and Emil Rieger, and very long ago, Juris Milestone. But everything gets filtered first through Jonathan Corliss.
This research has been supported by the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science’s Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research (C) 20K01188.
[1] PCR stands for polymerase chain reaction. It is an experimental method for duplicating selected genetic material in order to make it easier to detect in secondary experiments.
[2] Thermal cycler, for anyone interested. Also, just to note, but for the purposes of this retelling, I gloss over the most detailed part in writing so simply: “add some other reagents” and later, “after the PCR ‘melt’ and the second half of the experiment.”
[3] I wrote in my protocol notes, as an (anthropological) aside to myself: “K. stressed that the amount of liquid in this case doesn’t have to be super accurate, but that this is rare in science experiments. When I tried it for the first time, I almost knocked over all the new tips and also the NaOH solution which can cause burns! Yikes~)”
[4] Inconclusiveness includes an unclear or unaccounted for band in the electrophoresis gel, which is seen in the machine’s output as an image file.
[5] The images in this post are part of the artistic work of Sarah Thanner, a multimedia artist and anthropologist who playfully and experimentally engages with trashing and untrashing in her work.
[6] Fallout Wiki, Junk Jet (Fallout 4), https://fallout.fandom.com/wiki/Junk_Jet_(Fallout_4)
[7] Here, I also gloss over (new) materiality studies, Actor Network Theory, etc. which have linages too long to get to properly in this small piece.
Carlson, Rebecca, Gupper, Tamara, Klein, Anja, Ojala, Mace, Thanner, Sarah and Libuše Hannah Vepřek. 2023. “Testing to Circulate: Addressing the Epistemic Gaps of Software Testing.” STS-hub.de 2023: Circulations, Aachen Germany, March 2023.
DeSilvey, Caitlin. 2006. “Observed Decay: Telling Stories with Mutable Things.” Journal of Material Culture 11: 318-338.
Douglas, Mary. 1966. Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo. London: Routledge.
Goodier, John L. “Restricting Retrotransposons: A Review.” Mobile DNA 7, 16. https://doi.org/10.1186/s13100-016-0070-z
Hayes, Brain. 1998. “Bit Rot.” American Scientist 86(5): 410–415. http://dx.doi.org/10.1511/1998.5.410.
Helmreich, Stefan. 2015. Sounding the Limits of Life: Essays in the Anthropology of Biology and Beyond. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Iwata, Kentaro. 2020. “Infectious Diseases Do Not Exist.”「感染症は実在しない」あとがき. Retrived May 9, 2020, https://georgebest1969.typepad.jp/blog/2020/03/感染症は実在しないあとがき.html.
Jackson, Steven. J. 2014. “Rethinking Repair.” In T. Gillespie, P. J. Boczkowski, & K. A. Foot (Eds.), Media Technologies: Essays on Communication, Materiality, and Society. Cambridge: MIT Press. Pp. 221-239.
Lupton, D. 2016. The Quantified Self: A Sociology of Self Tracking. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Marres, N, Stark, D. 2020 “Put to the Test: For a New Sociology of Testing.” British Journal of Sociology 71: 423–443. https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-4446.12746.
Milestone, Juris. 2014. “What Will an Anthropology of Maintenance and Repair Look Like?” American Anthropological Association Meeting.
Pink, Sarah, Ruckenstein, Minna, Willim, Robert and Melisa Duque. 2018. “Broken Data: Conceptualising Data in an Emerging World.” Big Data & Society January–June: 1–13. https:// doi:10.1177/2053951717753228.
Rabinow, Paul. 1992. “Studies in the Anthropology of Reason.” Anthropology Today 8(5): 7-8.
Sachs, S. E. 2020. “The Algorithm at Work? Explanation and Repair in the Enactment of Similarity in Art Data.” Information, Communication & Society 23(11): 1689-1705. https://doi:10.1080/1369118X.2019.1612933.
Seaver, Nick. 2022. Computing Taste: Algorithms and the Makers of Music Recommendation. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Star, Susan Leigh. 1999. “The Ethnography of Infrastructure.” American Behavioral Scientist 43(3): 377–391. https://doi:10.1177/ 00027649921955326.
If you've been having trouble using Twitter recently, you aren't alone — the service has been having issues ever since it started limiting the number of posts users could view each day. Although many of the platform's issues stabilized over the weekend, Tweetdeck remains broken unless users switch to the beta version of the list aggregator. Now, Twitter is gearing up to solve the issue by making that beta version of Tweetdeck the main version, announcing on Monday that it has "launched a new, improved version of Tweetdeck."
We have just launched a new, improved version of TweetDeck. All users can continue to access their saved searches & workflows via https://t.co/2WwL3hNVR2 by selecting “Try the new TweetDeck” in the bottom left menu.
— Twitter Support (@TwitterSupport) July 3, 2023
Some notes on getting started and the future of the product…
Despite officially launching, this "new" Tweetdeck still calls itself the "Tweetdeck Preview" while in app, and users still need to opt-in to using it in the menu of the original Tweetdeck interface. Even so, switching to the new interface does indeed restore basic Tweetdeck functionality for users that rely on its list aggregation features. Twitter says the process should be fairly straightforward as well, promising that saved searches, lists and columns should carry over instantly. Although Twitter says that the updated preview build should now support Twitter Spaces, polls and other features that were previously missing, it notes that Teams functionality is currently unavailable.
Twitter hasn't officially announced that it's retiring the old version of Tweetdeck, but in a thread discussing the issues a Twitter employee suggested the change would be permanent, stating that they were "migrating everyone to the preview version."
Hey folks, looks like the recent changes have broken the legacy TweetDeck, so we're working on migrating everyone to the preview version
— Ben (@ayroblu) July 3, 2023
Although switching to the new version of Tweetdeck potentially resolves the issue, many legacy users may still find themselves without access to the power-user tool in the near future. According to Twitter Support, the feature will become exclusive to Twitter Blue subscribers in the near future, noting that "in 30 days, users must be Verified to access Tweetdeck." It's unclear if that change will be applied to all users in early August, or if all users will have a 30-day trial of the new Tweetdeck before being prompted to subscribe.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/twitter-launches-new-tweetdeck-as-the-old-version-breaks-down-231939160.html?src=rss
Twitter Issues
FILE - A sign at Twitter headquarters is shown in San Francisco on Nov. 18, 2022. Thousands of people logged complaints about problems accessing Twitter on Saturday, July 1, 2023, after owner Elon Musk limited most users to viewing 600 tweets a day — restrictions he described as an attempt to prevent unauthorized scraping of potentially valuable data from the site. (AP Photo/Jeff Chiu, File)
For Slate, Stephen Lurie covers what’s known as Dawn to Dusk to Dawn, an ultramarathon in which participants run as many laps as they can around a 400 meter track in 24 hours. “D3,” as it’s known, takes place in Pennsylvania and is one of the oldest 24-hour races in the world. This past May, it attracted 36 participants aged 16-82.
Most people do not run. Most people who run do not run long distances. Most people who run long distances do not run extremely long distances. And most people who run extremely long distances do not decide to do so on a 400-meter track for 24 hours straight. But this year, at least 36 people did, enough to fill the high school track field in Sharon Hills where D3 was held in mid-May.
Ask Me Anything (AMA) has been a Reddit staple that helped popularize the social media platform. It delivered some unique, personal, and, at times, fiery interviews between public figures and people who submitted questions. The Q&A format became so popular that many people host so-called AMAs these days, but the main subreddit has been r/IAmA, where the likes of then-US President Barack Obama and Bill Gates have sat in the virtual hot seat. But that subreddit, which has been called its own "juggernaut of a media brand," is about to look a lot different and likely less reputable.
On July 1, Reddit moved forward with changes to its API pricing that has infuriated a large and influential portion of its user base. High pricing and a 30-day adjustment period resulted in many third-party Reddit apps closing and others moving to paid-for models that developers are unsure are sustainable.
The latest casualty in the Reddit battle has a profound impact on one of the most famous forms of Reddit content and signals a potential trend in Reddit content changing for the worse.
Scandinavian design is most often associated with a minimalist aesthetic, one emphasizing natural materials as a carefully considered employment of form following function. Wood often plays prominently, as does a subdued palette meant to evoke nature’s colors, with metal only used sparingly as accents. It’s all pretty much the antithesis of the PC gaming aesthetic and ethos, where gaming rigs tend to lean strongly into gaudy LED-illuminated showmanship.
Now imagine if Alvar Alto or Arne Jacobsen as an avid gamer today, and if they put their creative genius towards designing their very own gaming machine for their COD or Minecraft addiction. You might very well see something similar to Fractal Design’s North and Terra PC cases.
Fractal’s North is available with either a mesh or tempered glass side panel design. Either option includes two 140mm fans to keep air flow performance at a maximum within, while wood and metal combine into a handsome mid-century presence on the exterior side.
Fronted tastefully with a real oak or walnut paneled face, embellished with a faux leather tab, and sleek steel or brass detail buttons and ports, Fractal’s North PC case stood out enough from the crowded realm of audaciously outfitted PC gaming designs to earn the Gothenburg-based company a Red Dot Design Award 2023.
An integrated pull tab allows for easy access into the case for maintenance or upgrades.
Fractal’s Terra is a similarly conceived approach to PC gaming, featuring a smaller case option made with anodized aluminum panels and a CNC-milled, FSC-certified solid walnut front face.
Three front USB ports, including one USB 3.1 Gen 2 Type-C with fast charging support and speeds up to 10Gbps, are available on the exterior; seven bridgeless expansion slots within maximize the customization and upgrade options down the line.
Noting hardware upgrades play prominently in the PC gaming experience, North has designed the Terra case to be easily accessible from the side and top using an integrated tab.
An aluminum power button and two USB ports for connecting devices are integrated into the walnut wood detailing. The sum of the design makes it an ideal aesthetic candidate for a living room media PC or gaming machine connected to a home theater system.
Founded in 2007 in Sweden, followed by Fractal Design outposts opened in Dallas and Taipei, Taiwan, the company has distinguished itself by designing gaming accessories aimed at PC customers seeking an understated presence on their desktop. The company’s North and Terra cases epitomize this understated aesthetic displaying an almost architectural attention to detailing.
Fractal Design’s North PC case retails for $140 here, while the Terra PC case is available for $180 here.
This post contains affiliate links, so if you make a purchase from an affiliate link, we earn a commission. Thanks for supporting Design Milk!
Wikipedia is moving to the CC BY-SA 4.0 license, from the old version it's used for years. What's the difference? It means that other v4-licensed material can be added to Wikipedia verbatim, it's written with international law in mind, it has simpler attribution requirements, and is easier for laypersons to read and understand. — Read the rest
Over the last few days, Twitter not only stopped showing tweets unless you're logged in, but also started capping the number of tweets users can read each day ("rate limiting") — ostensibly due to "data scraping," according to Elon Musk. Those actions are starting to have an impact elsewhere across Twitter's ecosystem, with many users reporting that Tweetdeck (a power-user version of Twitter) no longer works. In addition, Google Search is reportedly showing up to 50 percent fewer Twitter URLs due to the logged-in requirement, Search Engine Roundtable reported.
For a lot of users (including Engadget), Tweetdeck effectively stopped functioning, just showing a spinning wheel above most columns. That may be because a bug in Twitter's web app is sending requests in an infinite loop, effectively creating a "self-DDOS" (distributed denial of service), Waxy reported. As researcher Molly White tweeted, that effect is multiplied in Tweetdeck for anything other than the "Home" column, as it keeps "repeatedly retrying 404s," she wrote.
twitter's self-DDoS is worse with tweetdeck 💀 pic.twitter.com/krcLhjnsA2
— Molly White (@molly0xFFF) July 2, 2023
It's possible to at least get your columns to show up by using a new beta version of Tweetdeck, as Engadget's Matt Brian tweeted. However, those columns are still subject to the rate limits (800 tweets for non-Twitter Blue subscribers), and so most users will stop seeing new tweets shortly after Tweetdeck loads.
On top of that, Google Search may be showing up to 50 percent fewer Twitter URLs following Musk's move to block unregistered users. Using the site command, Search Engine Roundtable's Barry Schwartz found that Google now has about 52 percent fewer Twitter URLs in its index than it did on Friday. It's still showing recent tweets in the Search carousel, but normal indexing seems to be broken at the moment. "Not that a site command is the best measure, but... Twitter is down [around] 162 million indexed pages so far since this change," Schwartz tweeted.
There's no confirmation that the "self-DDOS" theory is accurate, but a post from developer Sheldon Chang (on Mastodon) indicated that shutting off anonymous access to Twitter may be playing a role in the issues. Twitter has promised that the login requirement and rate limiting are "temporary," but has yet to give a date for eliminating those restrictions.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/twitters-apps-are-breaking-following-elon-musks-decision-to-cap-tweet-rates-125028807.html?src=rss
FRANCE-TWITTER
The twitter's logo is pictured on screen reflected by mirrors in Mulhouse, eastern France on May 30, 2023. (Photo by SEBASTIEN BOZON / AFP) (Photo by SEBASTIEN BOZON/AFP via Getty Images)
Earlier this week, reports began surfacing that Valve was refusing to publish games with AI-generated art and other content. Over the weekend, the company finally commented on the matter. In a statement shared with IGN, Valve spokesperson Kaci Aitchison Boyle said the company is not trying to “discourage the use of [AI] on Steam.” Aitchison Boyle attributed the confusion to Valve “working through” how to account for the technology in its existing review process, which is a “reflection” of current copyright law.
"Our priority, as always, is to try to ship as many of the titles we receive as we can,” Aitchison Boyle said. "We welcome and encourage innovation, and AI technology is bound to create new and exciting experiences in gaming. While developers can use these AI technologies in their work with appropriate commercial licenses, they can not infringe on existing copyrights."
Aitchison Boyle added that Valve has been refunding submission credits to those who ran afoul of the company’s current rules on account of their game’s use of AI-generated content. It’s not surprising to see Valve attempt to get ahead of what is quickly becoming one of the thorniest issues in tech. We’ve already seen generative AI create headaches for the music industry. In April, for instance, streaming services like Spotify and YouTube spent the better part of a week responding to a copyright claim from Universal Music Group after someone uploaded a viral AI-generated Drake song to their platforms.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/valve-wont-publish-games-that-feature-copyright-infringing-ai-assets-204703804.html?src=rss
Valve Steam Deck
Valve Steam Deck
Twitter has begun aggressively limiting how many tweets users can view per day. On Saturday afternoon, Elon Musk said the company would restrict unverified accounts to reading 600 posts per day and new accounts to only 300 tweets daily. Meanwhile, Twitter will allow verified accounts to read 6,000 posts each day. For most people, that means, short of paying for Twitter Blue, they can spend about a minute or two on Twitter before encountering a "rate limit exceeded" error. Less than two hours later, Musk said Twitter would "soon" ease the limits to 8,000 for verified accounts and 800 for those without Twitter Blue.
To address extreme levels of data scraping & system manipulation, we’ve applied the following temporary limits:
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 1, 2023
- Verified accounts are limited to reading 6000 posts/day
- Unverified accounts to 600 posts/day
- New unverified accounts to 300/day
Musk claimed the "temporary" limits were put in place to address "extreme levels of data scraping" and "system manipulation." The day before, Twitter began preventing people not logged into the site from viewing tweets. Like the usage limit, Musk has claimed the login restriction will only be temporary and was put in place in response to data scrapers. "Several hundred organizations (maybe more) were scraping Twitter data extremely aggressively, to the point where it was affecting the real user experience," Musk said Friday. He later claimed "almost every company doing AI" was scraping Twitter to train their models. "It is rather galling to have to bring large numbers of servers online on an emergency basis just to facilitate some AI startup’s outrageous valuation," he said.
Musk did not say what "new" means in the context of an account, nor did he say how long Twitter plans to restrict users in the way it's doing so currently. He also didn't state if viewing ads counts against a user's view limit. Either way, the restrictions severely limit the useability of Twitter, making it difficult, for instance, to verify if a screenshot of a tweet is authentic. A cynical view of the situation would suggest Twitter is trying to find ways to squeeze every bit of money it can from its user base. In March, the company introduced API changes that could cost some organizations as much as $42,000 a month. However, that move and the introduction of Twitter Blue don't appear to have offset the advertising revenue Twitter has lost since Musk's takeover. Limiting how many tweets, and by extension ads, users can see is unlikely to make the company’s remaining clients happy.
— jack (@jack) July 1, 2023
TWITTER-MUSK/
A view of the Twitter logo at its corporate headquarters in San Francisco, California, U.S. November 18, 2022.
As part of my annual mid-year review, I always take a look at the blog statistics and see what type of content readers have enjoyed. The five posts featured here are the ones from 2023 that either received the most traffic and/or comments (relative, of course, to how recently some of them were posted). In terms of overall popular content, our posts on Hierarchies of Fountain Pen Friendly Paper, Picking a Workhorse Pen, and Fountain Pen Inks for Everyday Writing continue to be popular among T.G.S. readers, especially those new to fountain pens.
Many thanks for all your support and readership! For additional installments of our 2023 Mid-Year Recap, check out this post on my own personal favorite posts (with minimal overlap), as well as the favorite new product releases from the Curated Shop.
Workhorse Pens: Considerations and Pitfalls of High Capacity Pocket Fountain Pens. It’s extremely interesting to me that this particular post is among the most popular new content from the first six months of the year. The TWSBI Diamond Mini and Vac-Mini, as well as smaller Opus 88 pens, get very little attention, generally in favor of their larger counterparts. TWSBI at least has started paying some attention to the Diamond Mini, with the recently released Mini AL Grape.
Schon DSGN Full-Size Fountain Pen with Monoc Nib. Well, this is timely, because Schon DSGN announced recently (and posted pics last night) that they are working on anodized versions of their in-house Monoc nib. These look absolutely stunning. Follow them on Instagram to learn more and see what might be coming down the pipeline!
Ark of Pens (Guest Post from R.B. Lemberg). We had an outstanding response to the first T.G.S. Guest Post in a while, where R.B. went through their personal pen collecting story and discussed how they came to the hobby and collecting in general.
Triangular Grip Pens: Love ‘em or Leave ‘em? Nontraditional fountain pen sections are a love/hate proposition. Either people love the added structure intended to “guide” their fingers into writing position, or it simply doesn’t work for them. Personally, I’ve come to appreciate the slightly rounded triangular shape of the TWSBI ECO-T, and the Safari and AL-Star have never bothered me all that much. I never could use those molded “pencil grips” though….
Fountain Pen Basics: Five Best Practices for Fountain Pen Users. This post sparked the most comments, all of which I enjoyed reading! Everyone uses and cares for their pens in different ways - there really is no “right” or “wrong” way (other than anything that results in a puddle of ink in your bag, pen case, or pocket). I’ve made an effort to do more “Fountain Pens 101-style” posts, since I know we have a lot of readers who are coming to fountain pens for the first time this year!
The Gentleman Stationer is supported entirely by purchases from the T.G.S. Curated Shop and pledges via the T.G.S. Patreon Program. We greatly appreciate your support! If you’ve been considering the Patreon, now is a great time to join, as we are preparing to launch a new exclusive fountain pen release, and are in the middle of the Patrons-exclusive “Gently Used” sale.
This extraordinary profile of Clarence and Ginni Thomas—he a Supreme Court justice, she among other things an avid supporter of the January 6 insurrection—is a masterclass in everything from mustering archival material to writing the hell out of a story:
There is a certain rapport that cannot be manufactured. “They go on morning runs,” reports a 1991 piece in the Washington Post. “They take after-dinner walks. Neighbors say you can see them in the evening talking, walking up the hill. Hand in hand.” Thirty years later, Virginia Thomas, pining for the overthrow of the federal government in texts to the president’s chief of staff, refers, heartwarmingly, to Clarence Thomas as “my best friend.” (“That’s what I call him, and he is my best friend,” she later told the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol.) In the cramped corridors of a roving RV, they summer together. They take, together, lavish trips funded by an activist billionaire and fail, together, to report the gift. Bonnie and Clyde were performing intimacy; every line crossed was its own profession of love. Refusing to recuse oneself and then objecting, alone among nine justices, to the revelation of potentially incriminating documents regarding a coup in which a spouse is implicated is many things, and one of those things is romantic.
“Every year it gets better,” Ginni told a gathering of Turning Point USA–oriented youths in 2016. “He put me on a pedestal in a way I didn’t know was possible.” Clarence had recently gifted her a Pandora charm bracelet. “It has like everything I love,” she said, “all these love things and knots and ropes and things about our faith and things about our home and things about the country. But my favorite is there’s a little pixie, like I’m kind of a pixie to him, kind of a troublemaker.”
A pixie. A troublemaker. It is impossible, once you fully imagine this bracelet bestowed upon the former Virginia Lamp on the 28th anniversary of her marriage to Clarence Thomas, this pixie-and-presumably-American-flag-bedecked trinket, to see it as anything but crucial to understanding the current chaotic state of the American project. Here is a piece of jewelry in which symbols for love and battle are literally intertwined. Here is a story about the way legitimate racial grievance and determined white ignorance can reinforce one another, tending toward an extremism capable, in this case, of discrediting an entire branch of government. No one can unlock the mysteries of the human heart, but the external record is clear: Clarence and Ginni Thomas have, for decades, sustained the happiest marriage in the American Republic, gleeful in the face of condemnation, thrilling to the revelry of wanton corruption, untroubled by the burdens of biological children or adherence to legal statute. Here is how they do it.
In celebration of Pride, Artsy happily presents the Artsy Impact Auction: Artists for Pride, benefiting the Ali Forney Center. New works by a diverse group of emerging and established artists will be bid on through June 29th at 12 pm EST. TM Davy, Didier William, Jo Messer, Kyle Meyer, Kate Pincus-Whitney, Erin M. Riley, Emma Kohlmann, Caitlin Cherry, Elizabeth Glaessner, Jordan Nassar, Haas Brothers, Vickie Vainionpää, Leilah Babirye, Darryl Westly, and Nedia Were have come together in allyship to support the cause by way of sharing their talents.
Vickie Vainionpåå, Soft Body Dynamics 111, 2023
Ali Forney Center’s mission is to protect LGBTQIA+ youth from homelessness and to empower them with the tools needed to live independently. Through this partnership, the auction will directly support the critical care, direction, education, and career services that Ali Forney Center offers to these at-risk homeless youth.
Nedia Were, The Black Swan, 2022
We had the opportunity to speak with Simon Haas of the Haas Brothers, who have their Fairies Witherspoon piece featured in Artists for Pride (seen in the lead image). “This piece is from a body of work we call Fairy Berries. Each of these pieces is a little like a Faberge Egg, small and ornate,” said Simon. “These pieces are little meditations – they take a really, really long time and a steady hand, and the resulting piece is an opulent little world of its own.”
Kate Pincus Whitney, Gertrude Stein and Slice B Toklas Muss
“A lot of the work we make is playful, but an equal amount of it is intensely process-based. When I am doing beadwork or making process-intensive projects like this I am very much in a meditative state of mind,” Simon shared. “This kind of work is almost necessary for me and my mental health.
Leilah Babirye, Lady Nabuuso, 2016
Measuring 10 1/4 × 4 1/2 × 4 1/2-inches, Fairies Witherspoon is hand thrown and slip trailed porcelain detailed with gold lustre and brass plate. The underside is stamped with “HAAS BROTHERS 2020”, and it’s accompanied by a Certificate of Authenticity signed by Nikolai and Simon Haas.
Kyle Meyer, Unidentified 91a, 2023
“Being gay myself, and having experienced first hand the challenges that come with that, it is really meaningful to me to be able to support my community. I can’t imagine the added difficulty of facing homelessness caused by or made more difficult by being LGBTQIA+. This is a truly important cause, particularly in this time of increasing intolerance.” Simon went on to add that he plans to “continue being a vocally out gay man and advocating for others in my community. It is so important that we make ourselves heard and support each other in our fight for equality. The LGBTQIA+ community is not a monolith, we are a collection of communities, but by coming together and advocating for each other we can accomplish so much more than we could on our own.”
Jo Messer, Show up whenever, 2023
To learn more about Artsy Impact Auction: Artists for Pride or place a bid, visit artsy.net.
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In this gorgeous essay for Vittles, the poet Seán Hewitt recalls weekend nature walks in England and his grandfather’s lessons on the wonders of foraged food. Inspired by the abundant hawthorns in Dublin’s Phoenix Park, Hewitt writes about making his own hawthorn gin.
When the hawthorns were all done and the gin was in the jar, I put it into the cupboard, then checked on it every week, turning it, watching the colours darken. Now I’ve learned to leave it in peace, and I don’t turn it that often anymore. I just bide my time until December when, on some foggy, cold evening – when it feels like winter has begun – I take it out of the cupboard.
The main difference between sloe and hawthorn gin is that, where sloe gin is fruity and sweet and mixes well with tonic or soda, hawthorn gin is like a dark sherry, perfect for winter. It has a velvety texture, a rich smoothness. I also like that, unlike sloe gin, you can’t buy it anywhere, so hawthorn gin becomes a secret, shared thing between friends, a preservation of summer pulled into winter.
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[1] This multimodal content, due to technological limitations, may not be accessible to all. If the multimodal experience is not accessible to you, please visit the text based version for visual and audio descriptions and full-text transcription or listen to the audio narration:
Audio Narration by Kara White
[2] On mobile devices, we suggest viewing the page in landscape mode and selecting “Distraction Free Reading” in the top-right corner.
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Ballestero, Andrea, and Brit Ross Winthereik, eds. 2021. Experimenting with Ethnography: A Companion to Analysis. Experimental Futures: Technological Lives, Scientific Arts, Anthropological Voices. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Ingold, Tim. 2018. Anthropology: Why It Matters. Medford: Polity Press.
Law, John. 2004. After Method: Mess in Social Science Research. International Library of Sociology. London ; New York: Routledge.
Fans of American football remember well the rise and fall of Adam “Pacman” Jones, but not many expected to see him bounce back. Zak Keefer delivers my favorite kind of redemption feature in this profile of Jones, who’s now mentoring the sons of his late friend and teammate Chris Henry. The story starts with Jones’ tears; it might end with yours.
“Y’all need to uproot and move up here with us,” he urged Loleini Tonga, the boys’ mother. “We’ll help you out.”
So that’s what they did. Pacman Jones, once the NFL’s cautionary tale for reckless behavior, made Chris Henry’s family part of his own. They moved in with him in Cincinnati, where he drives the boys to school and picks them up after practice, where he trains them in the offseason, where he pushes Slim’s two sons the same way he once pushed their father, passing on the lessons learned from the opportunity they both almost threw away.
“I’ll tell you this,” Jones says, getting a bit heated. “I’ll be damned if these kids make the same mistakes I did.”
No, it’s not the first time a national magazine has sent a writer thousands of miles to write a cover-the-waterfront story about the largest state in the U.S. But with California more of a symbol than a state, Joe Hagan manages to coax a few sharp edges out of the well-worn trope, combining marquee politicians with some surprising characters (comic Shang Yeng, Abbot Elementary writer Brittani Nichols, a firearm instructor to the stars) to help compensate for the most eye-roll-inducing dinner party ever committed to print. A commendable piece of macro reporting that’s sure to infuriate everyone.
Octavia E. Butler was asked, seven years after the publication of her uncannily predictive 1993 novel, Parable of the Sower, whether her visions of an environmentally ravaged Los Angeles, circa 2024, where the elite barricade themselves in walled fortresses surrounded by poverty-stricken encampments of drug addicts and illiterate poor, was something she really believed would happen.
“I didn’t make up the problems,” replied the writer, who grew up in Pasadena. “All I did was look around at the problems we’re neglecting now and give them about 30 years to grow into full-fledged disasters.”
FreshRSS 