Amazon has a program where 0.5% of your purchases can be sent to Planned Parenthood of San Antonio. (Or any of a large number of charities; I arrived here due to the recent difficulties PP has in Texas.)
The catch is that you need to go to smile.amazon.com for the charity referral to activate. After signing up, I immediately let two large orders process without remembering to start from that URL.
Here are instructions that will automate everything…
First
Sign up at smile.amazon.com. Pick a charity of your choice, which could definitely be Planned Parenthood of San Antonio, or the ACLU, but I’m sure there are lots of other good options.
Chrome
- Click here for the Smile Always extension. Click the blue Add to Chrome button.
- There is no step 2.
Safari
- Click here to download the SJMulder URL Rewrite extension.
- If Safari doesn’t automatically install the extension, open your Downloads folder and double-click URL Rewrite.safariextz
- Navigate to Safari / Preferences in the menu, pick the Extensions tab, and select the URL Rewrite item on the left.
- In the first two inputs…
- Source URL: https://www.amazon.com
- Destination URL: https://smile.amazon.com
- Click Enable URL Rewrite. You’re done.
Firefox
- Click here for the Redirector extension. Click the green Add to Firefox button, then click the Install button.
- A new crooked arrow icon should be in the top right of your toolbar. Click it, and choose Edit Redirects
- Click Create New Redirect…
- Description: Amazon Donations
- Example URL: https://www.amazon.com/herpderp
- Include Pattern:
(https?:\/\/)?(www\.amazon\.com)([\/\w \.-]*) - (important: make sure there are no trailing spaces before or after this string, that has to be exact)
- Redirect to: https://smile.amazon.com$3
- Pattern Type: Regular Expression
- If you did everything right, the Example Result will read https://smile.amazon.com/herpderp
- Click Save
Now go spend, you filthy consumer whore, spend like there’s no tomorrow.
The thing about this is that sculptures like these in art history were for the male gaze. Photoshop a phone to it and suddenly she’s seen as vain and conceited. That’s why I’m 100% for selfie culture because apparently men can gawk at women but when we realize how beautiful we are we’re suddenly full of ourselves…“You painted a naked woman because you enjoyed looking at her, put a mirror in her hand and you called the painting “Vanity,” thus morally condemning the woman whose nakedness you had depicted for you own pleasure.” ― John Berger, Ways of Seeing
[Internet Explorer for Mac] was a lifeboat back in the late ’90s — a browser with reasonable performance and high-quality rendering and strong support for web standards. But it would sometimes wedge your entire machine. It was like browsing with a stick of dynamite that could go off at any moment. — Daring Fireball
Oh lord do I have a story about that.
Back in 2001, I moved to Portland with the notion that I’d get a job as an in-house developer in a graphic design firm. At the time, “web development firms” were outputting ugly garbage, and so I reasoned that good work would be more likely to come from professional designers teamed up with programmers. I think this vision has proven itself correct, though the model would be new firms cofounded by designers who were “born into” the Internet era — print-era design studios mostly wound up in the same rut that all other print media stayed stuck in… regardless…
For several months I cold-called and knocked on doors of firms all over Portland. I showed up with a laptop computer, an printed resume with a URL to an online resume and portfolio, and a sales pitch for why their firm needed an in-house developer. These pitches were met with universal bewilderment. I didn’t get a single call back.
My savings dwindled, I got very hungry and very depressed, and then a couple airplanes slammed into a building and the entire world went crazy for a year.
I eventually found a front-end job at a shipping company, and they had a few Macs in the corner for browser testing. Did I mention I was a Windows guy at the time? OS X had yet to be released, the Macs of that day were garbage.
One day I found myself wondering how my portfolio site ran on Macs, and learned that a CSS glitch in MSIE Mac would cause the entire computer to flatline.
I recalled all those meetings, casually noting Macs on all the desks, and thinking nothing of it. For months, I had been approaching design firms with a URL that was crashing their computers and leaving non-saved work unrecoverable. A stick of dynamite indeed.
At my first opportunity, I bought a $400 G3 iMac for personal testing, and after OS X rolled out found that I preferred using a slow, shitty computer with a rocking OS (and Camino) over a hotrod PC with Windows, but that’s another story…
A good friend of mine recently conducted a fun survey — he asked people why they thought digital was disruptive (I don’t know if he will ever publish the results as this was an internal project at a consulting company). My own answer to that is simple: digital is disruptive because zero marginal cost takes us into a world of abundance when all of our economics, politics and business practices are rooted in scarcity.
Making this flip runs counter to what we have come to treat as ground truths on par with the laws of physics. We say things like “people need jobs“ as if they were the same as "objects fall to the ground.” We have been conditioned to accept behaviors such as consumerism and financial indebtedness as rooted in human nature. The full disruption from digital will not be realized until we open ourselves up to a much broader conception of what is possible and why we are here.
… thus the techno-utopianism of Star Trek and the Culture. When you accept that the rules of supply and demand get suspended in the digital era, the obsolescence of jobs is just connecting dots.
Douglas Adams is the best when it comes to describe characters
they need to teach classes on Douglas Adams analogies okay
“He leant tensely against the corridor wall and frowned like a man trying to unbend a corkscrew by telekinesis.”
“Stones, then rocks, then boulders which pranced past him like clumsy puppies, only much, much bigger, much, much harder and heavier, and almost infinitely more likely to kill you if they fell on you.”
"He gazed keenly into the distance and looked as if he would quite like the wind to blow his hair back dramatically at that point, but the wind was busy fooling around with some leaves a little way off.”
"It looked only partly like a spaceship with guidance fins, rocket engines and escape hatches and so on, and a great deal like a small upended Italian bistro.”
"If it was an emotion, it was a totally emotionless one. It was hatred, implacable hatred. It was cold, not like ice is cold, but like a wall is cold. It was impersonal, not as a randomly flung fist in a crowd is impersonal, but like a computer-issued parking summons is impersonal. And it was deadly - again, not like a bullet or a knife is deadly, but like a brick wall across a motorway is deadly.”
And, of course:
"The ships hung in the sky in much the same way that bricks don’t.”
“Mark Knopfler has an extraordinary ability to make a Schecter Custom Stratocaster hoot and sing like angels on a Saturday night, exhausted from being good all week and needing a stiff drink.”
I read some absurdly good science fiction books this year. Like escaping a draught. (Yes, pedants, a few of these are over a year old, but they’ll be new to most people because honestly who even reads anymore.)
My favorite book(s) of this year was Jeff Vandermeer’s Southern Reach trilogy. Mesmerizing language, creepy, cryptic, inscrutable. I’ve read the first volume at least 6x this year. Also the covers (individual volumes, anthology, the foreign editions) are all excellent.
Southern Reach prompted me to finally check out his Ambergris books, which I had been putting off for years. Not perfect, but each is really trés in its own way.
The Last Policeman trilogy by Ben Winters. The books are crime/police-procedurals set in a world mere months away from certain annihilation by asteroid. Kind of a science fiction answer to Camus’ The Plague — a brutal examination of how civilization might grapple with certain extinction. But funny! The protagonist is an awkward and relatable, clumsy but insightful guy. I was surprised that sequels were written (does everything have to be a trilogy?), but each is gripping. The “world” is interesting and deep enough to keep returning to (while it lasts).
Blindsight by Peter Watts. Imagine if the Nostromo was crewed by transhumans — a person whom has deliberately-induced multiple-personality disorder, a situational translator whose brain is half-computer, a literal vampire — and the Alien was designed by David Lynch in Mullholland Drive-mode instead of Geiger. I’ve never read a book that was so simultaneously frightening and intellectually challenging. (this book is a few years old, prolly brought to my attention by recent sequel Echopraxia)
Walead Beshty’s FedEx Sculptures series(2005 - present).
Walead Beshty constructs glass vitrines that are the exact dimensions of a FedEx box, and he then places the glass boxes into a FedEx box and ships it to the exhibition site. The glass sculptures then show the wear and tear of its travels through “space and time.”. This cracked surface is supposed to represent a record of the sculpture’s “hidden life” as though the sculpture were an exposure of a photograph. The FedEx boxes the sculpture is delivered in then becomes the base for the artwork. Beshty then gives the sculptures a title which consists of a record of the journey the box took to arrive at the exhibition.
I love this.
got your wabi sabi right here bitches
corporate memes have graduated to the ‘cropped screencap of twitter’ aesthetic to sell sandwiches and I need everyone to please write this down in your meme history field guide notebook
This is not nothing.
I think we overemphasize the difference between corporate and non-corporate social media posts, because we forget that while high-paid executives often approve the posts or the general strategy, usually the writing is done by young consultants, freelancers, or employees who are generally more savvy or “typical” users. I bet the adoption of amateur techniques is often uncalculated, but simply lags, the way office fashion lags behind street fashion. The screencap aesthetic is just casual Friday.

My favorite book(s) of 2014 (thus far but tough to beat) is Jeff Vandermeer’s Southern Reach Trilogy. It’s less of a trilogy than one novel serialized into three volumes over the course of the year, which I think is an effective publishing strategy as its kept me on the edge of my seat all year. (Incidentally I have read the first volume, Annihilation, eight times, Authority at least three, and the final book Acceptance twice, and it all convinced me to go back and read the Ambergris books which I’ve been putting off for like eight years.)
I won’t bother to leave a review, as better critics than myself have covered it at length, but I wanted to leave a note about this brilliant animated GIF of the three covers, which I suspect was made by the cover designer Eric Nyquist. Sweet bonus for a delightful set of weird fiction covers.
* Also dig these Spanish edition covers by Pablo Delcán
Headline 2: Man accused of killing roommate asked Siri where to hide the body
One-bit posters designed on a 1984 Mac – in 2014. We’re four designers based in London. Silkscreen posters available for sale soon.
Flap du jour: Ubisoft announced that they’re cutting female player characters from multiplayer in an upcoming Assassin’s Creed game, citing that a female character would’ve necessitated more than 8,000 new animations recreated on a new skeletal structure.
That’s a pile of horseshit. The reason why is a matter of priorities.
I’m reminded of a story about the original release of Final Fantasy 14, which featured flowerpot models that had as many polygons as player characters. Someone needed to take that modeler by the shoulders, give them a good shaking, and explain (loudly) that a playable framerate trumps a stupid flowerpot.
A “triple-A game” (that is, a game whose budget is in the same range as Hollywood movies) requires the following factors:
- It must be fun to play.
- It must be visually impressive.
- As a mainstream phenomenon, it must appeal to a broad spectrum of players.
The first point is vital and doesn’t need to be expounded upon.
The second point is the least important. The games industry is awash with beautiful, boring bombs. It should definitely look good but not at the sake of being fun (again, the flowerpots).
The third is overlooked and vital. A mainstream game needs to sell bazillions of copies. It needs to appeal to players across every ethnicity, and more importantly every gender (FIFTY FREAKING PERCENT of the population).
This isn’t to say that all games should have male/female options. Story-driven single-player games don’t apply — Tomb Raider is about a woman, that’s intrinsic to the story. (But I say that with the caveat that half of story-and-character-driven games should have female protagonists!)
But games where the player is effectively inserting themselves into the story — RPGs, MMO’s, any multiplayer game where an avatar is created — this isn’t a feature, it’s a base requirement and should go without saying.
If making a playable game means you can’t have bazillion-polygon-count flowerpots, you have to make simpler flowerpots. If you don’t have the resources to build two 8000-animation player character models, then make two 4000-animation player character models. Appealing to players is more important than dick-waving next-generation animation capabilities.
—
P.S. Speaking of Ubisoft, back in the nineties I thought for sure that an eventual Prince of Persia sequel would be made called Princess of Persia. This seems like the most obvious idea ever, why hasn’t it happened?
Urban outfitters is ripping me off with the help of a party named ‘Bambam’. This is taken from my original work tryypyzoyd. I’m furious. PLEASE SHARE TO HELP.
http://www.urbanoutfitters.com/urban/catalog/productdetail.jsp?id=30672646&parentid=BRANDSThanks so much to anyone who reblogs this post!
Ripping off trixel art!





