Month: August 2017

👓 Kill Process or How I discovered the IndieWeb (finally) by Lars Peters

Read Kill Process or How I discovered the IndieWeb (finally) by Lars Peters (Lars Peters)
I'm currently reading the book Kill Process by William Hertling. It's about murder, privacy, hacking, high tech surveillance and data mining. The book is great and I can recommend it to everybody who likes tech thrillers. Hertling gets the technical background and hacker stuff of the story really good together. Angie, the heroine, works at Tomo, the largest and quasi-monopoly Facebook-like social network as a database programmer. Part of the story is her ambition to create an alternative to the centralized privacy nightmare the Tomo service became. So she decides to do something about it and plans to build a distributed, federated social network of networks. She also meets and joins with people familiar with the IndieWeb concept. That's when I was reminded of how good the idea really is.
Includes a recommendation for my article…

🎧 This Week in the IndieWeb Audio Edition, July 22nd – 28th, 2017 | Marty McGuire

Listened to This Week in the IndieWeb Audio Edition, July 22nd - 28th, 2017 by Marty McGuire from martymcgui.re
Audio edition for This Week in the IndieWeb for July 22nd - 28th, 2017. This week features a brief interview with Johannes Ernst recorded at IndieWeb Summit 2017. Music from Aaron Parecki’s 100DaysOfMusic project: Day 85 - Suit, Day 48 - Glitch, Day 49 - Floating, Day 9, and Day 11 Thanks to everyone in the IndieWeb chat for their feedback and suggestions. Please drop me a note if there are any changes you’d like to see for this audio edition!

Thanks for the kind words about the Introduction to the IndieWeb article Marty!

🎞 Step Up Revolution (Summit Entertainment, 2012)

Watched Step Up Revolution from Summit Entertainment
Directed by Scott Speer. With Kathryn McCormick, Ryan Guzman, Cleopatra Coleman, Misha Gabriel Hamilton. Emily arrives in Miami with aspirations to become a professional dancer. She sparks with Sean, the leader of a dance crew whose neighborhood is threatened by Emily's father's development plans.
I caught the tail end of Napoleon Dynamite and then found myself getting sucked into the next movie in the VH1 rotation.

This didn’t have the heart of the original, but had a cheesy enough plot to keep me engaged. And somehow they got Peter Gallagher to show up for it as well.  It was a bit reminiscent of the schmarminess of Breakin’ 2: Electric Bugaloo.

I also managed to write about 2,000 words while watching it too, so at least I was productive.

Step Up Revolution movie poster

👓 If SoundCloud Disappears, What Happens to Its Music Culture? | New York Times

Read If SoundCloud Disappears, What Happens to Its Music Culture? by Jenna Wortham (New York Times)
The platform offered a public space with monetization as an afterthought. Now it could simply be deleted.

What does it mean if someone can delete hundreds and thousands of hours of sound culture overnight?

Jace Clayton, musician and the author of Uproot: Travels in 21st-Century Music and Digital Culture
in If SoundCloud Disappears, What Happens to Its Music Culture? in the New York Times

 

📺 Linguist and Cognitive Scientist George Lakoff on Tavis Smiley (PBS)

Watched Linguist and Cognitive Scientist George Lakoff from PBS
The esteemed academic discusses Trump supporters who stay faithful to him even when he works against their material best interests and well-being.

Dr. Lakoff does a solid job of dissecting Trump’s communication style and providing some relatively solid advice to journalists and media outlets who aim to disrupt what Trump is attempting to accomplish. The discussion of morality and its role in our political system, albeit brief, was incredibly interesting.

In the last third of the interview, Lakoff provides an interesting reframing of much of the public/private case that Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson make in their recent book American Amnesia.

Apparently there is another interview Smiley’s done with Dr. Lakoff. I can’t wait to watch it. I certainly would have appreciated an extended hour or two of their conversation.

I can see people like Jay Rosen and Keith Olbermann appreciating these interviews if they haven’t seen them.

This was so solid that I actually watched it a second time. It may also be time to dig into some of Lakoff’s other writings and research as well. Some of it I’ve read and seen before in general terms, but it’s probably worth delving into more directly.