Kyle Brown-Watson: Archive

“Fiction is dead, long live Fiction.” —The Millions: Long Live Fiction: A Guide to Fiction Online

Feb 23, 2010

Play

Feb 23, 2010

“I think in Europe, movies are made like a commodity, and then sold as art. Here, I have the feeling, they are made as art, and sold as a commodity.” —Christoph Waltz on Replacing Nicolas Cage in The Green Hornet and Learning to Love the Paparazzi — Vulture

Feb 19, 2010

“

Google and Facebook’s entire business model is based on the notion of “monetizing” our privacy. To succeed they must slowly change the notion of privacy itself—the “social norm,” as Facebook puts it—so that what we’re giving up doesn’t seem so valuable. Then they must gain our trust. Thus each new erosion of privacy comes delivered, paradoxically, with rhetoric about how Company X really cares about privacy. I’m not sure whether Orwell would be appalled or impressed. And who knew Big Brother would be not a big government agency, but a bunch of kids in Silicon Valley?

The problem with buying things with your privacy is you really don’t know how much you’re paying. With money, five bucks is five bucks. But what is the value of your list of friends? If it’s not worth much, your membership on Facebook may be the deal of a lifetime. If it’s incredibly valuable, you’re getting massively ripped off. Only the techies know how much your info is worth, and they’re not telling. But the fact that they’d rather get your data than your dollars tells you all you need to know.

” —Lyons, on Buzz, etc. (via newsweek)

Feb 19, 2010147 notes

Feb 19, 2010337 notes

“We mistook style and ethnicity – an advertising tactic pioneered by the United Colors of Benetton and Calvin Klein – for progressive politics and genuine change.” —Chris Hedges: Zero Point of Systemic Collapse | Adbusters Culturejammer Headquarters

Feb 19, 2010

“producing inoffensive, corporate-penned, vanilla-bean love-story family-friendly made-for-mainstream-radio music that won’t offend a single person. and won’t make anybody laugh, won’t make anybody think, won’t make anybody wonder, won’t make anybody talk, and won’t change anybody’s life.” —http://blog.amandapalmer.net/post/396762227/evelyn-evelyn-drama-drama

Feb 18, 2010

breakitdownaliya:

I couldn’t agree more with this article more. SG isn’t a feminist movement, or revolutionary. It’s porn, plain and simple, but markets it self as something empowering for women. Now, I have no problem with porn at all, but don’t sit there and try to tell me that you’re some amazing movement when your site is nothing more than a bunch of naked chicks who happen to color their hair and have tattoos and peircings (and we know how edgy that still is today…). I don’t think alt-porn is a bad idea at all, but, competitor site, Burning Angel, has a much better idea of what they’re doing. BA admits straight up that it’s JUST (alt)PORN, nothing more. They’re not parading around some high flying feminist flag. They’re just a site with naked punk rock chicks. They also play on the fact that porn is funny. Porn isn’t meant to be empowering, it’s something for dudes to whack off to, or for people to laugh at.

After reading this article, and hearing all about who runs the site, it just fueled my hate for that site a little bit more. So, SG, stop pretending to be a revolution and just show us them tattooed titties!

Feb 16, 20103 notes

“We think we are the doctors. We are the disease.” —Chris Hedges: Zero Point of Systemic Collapse | Adbusters Culturejammer Headquarters

Feb 14, 2010

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Feb 14, 2010

“’d like to see people actually get angry about the quality of the material that they are having shoved down their throats. It can’t be good for us. And I would like to see people responding to that by basically following the old maxim that if you want a job done right you do it yourself.” —Alan Moore: Comics Won’t Save You, but Dodgem Logic Might | Underwire | Wired.com

Feb 14, 2010

postpunk:

Recording engineer and producer Iain Burgess, a native of Weymouth, England, died yesterday in France. According to his close friend and disciple Steve Albini, Burgess died from a pulmonary embolism, a complication of the pancreatic and liver cancers he’d recently been diagnosed with.

In 1993 Burgess opened his own studio, Black Box, in La Dionnaie, France, located in the countryside of the Anjou region, but he’s best known in Chicago for the work he did in the late 80s as a control-room accomplice to postpunk bands like Naked Raygun, Big Black, and the Effigies. His aesthetic—walloping, aggressive, heavy on room sound—helped put the local underground scene on the international map. He continued to make sonically bold records at Black Box, including albums by Shellac, Nina Nastasia, and Uzeda. Condolences go out to his family and friends.

Feb 13, 20107 notes

“There’s a breathtaking arrogance about sneering at someone’s leisure reading choices, and it smacks of a Victorian exhortation to self-improvement. Inevitably, it’s often accompanied by not having read the despised work but holding an opinion anyway, and seldom having spoken to the readers of media fiction.” —— Karen Traviss Science Fiction and Fantasy Author —

Feb 12, 2010

Or, privacy is only "dead" for certain dudes in Silicon Valley who, coincidentally, make things like Buzz

melissa:

I use my private Gmail account to email my boyfriend and my mother.

There’s a BIG drop-off between them and my other “most frequent” contacts.

You know who my third most frequent contact is?

My abusive ex-husband.

Which is why it’s SO EXCITING, Google, that you AUTOMATICALLY allowed all my most frequent contacts access to my Reader, including all the comments I’ve made on Reader items, usually shared with my boyfriend, who I had NO REASON to hide my current location or workplace from, and never did…

Oh, yes, I suppose I could opt out of Buzz — which I did when it was introduced, though that apparently has no effect on whether or not I am now using Buzz — but as soon as I did that, all sorts of new people were following me on my Reader! People I couldn’t block, because I am not on Buzz!

Fuck you, Google. My privacy concerns are not trite. They are linked to my actual physical safety, and I will now have to spend the next few days maintaining that safety by continually knocking down followers as they pop up. A few days is how long I expect it will take before you either knock this shit off, or I delete every Google account I have ever had and use Bing out of fucking spite.

Fuck you, Google. You have destroyed over ten years of my goodwill and adoration, just so you could try and out-MySpace MySpace.

- Harriet Jacobs

Feb 12, 201048 notes

Feb 11, 2010190 notes

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Feb 8, 2010

Feb 8, 2010283 notes

Kyle Brown-Watson

March 2010

2 posts

February 2010

21 posts