Keep playing just as long as there’s no freedom involved…

Well riding on the tails of recent reports of Microsoft pandering to the Chinese government by censoring “sensitive” words such as “democracy,” “freedom,” and “human rights” on its blog service, Rebecca MacKinnon has written an article criticizing US tech companies for their work with the Chinese [...]

The Service Employees International Union is compiling a petition to TV execs, urging them to make “more realistic” reality tv, and has launched its own blog about class and reality tv. This might be justifiable, but it’s also just absurd.

BIG BROTHER GIVES BUM DIRECTIONS: “This is not the usual rant about how satellite images are an Orwellian plot to keep us all under constant surveillance… No, I’m as paranoid as the next guy, and I have no use for the rampant proliferation of surveillance cameras. No, the part of me that’s outraged is [...]

to clarify my earlier post, i would like to simply indicate that the hourlong streaming web broadcast offered up by amy goodman and the good folks at democracy now is perhaps the only reasonable source of televised news (that i know of) other than the rather obvious example of jon stewart’s [...]

unreasonable, but DAMN fucking cool.

knitting machine

(where do i get me a knitting excavator or two?)

Courtesy of the Center for Tactical Magic, a performance collective “highly trained in the principles of magic, ninja-ism, art, investigation, and critical theory.” Let me simply defer to the group’s own description of the jacket:

“Fifty Secret Pockets – Endless Possibilities! At the earliest stages of research, it became apparent that [...]

These videos are simply too expensive, frankly.

Sharper Image catalogs used to be full of cool stuff a boy could get excited about, like nightvision binoculars, or a hideous $5000 injection-molded lifesize Superman, but now everything they sell “ionizes” in one way or another. Thanko (of Japan, duh) has outdone SI by offering a $39 unit that purifies [...]