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- DWP orders man to work without pay for company that let him go | Society | The Guardian – A man who was let go at the end of a temporary job has been ordered by the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) to work for the same firm for six months without pay.
- Dear Griff Rhys Jones: if you don’t like tax, why not move to the Central African Republic? – Fleet Street Fox – Mirror Online – You’d have to be a complete idiot to leave a country where many of the citizens give you lots of cash and you live in great comfort, writes Fleet Street Fox
- shapeless, I’ve had a lot of people ask why I’m retracing… –
- Miles Davis Albums From Worst To Best – Stereogum – Ranking a catalog the size of Miles Davis’ is an impossible task. There are so many lavish boxed sets, live releases, compilations issued during his hermit period, etc., that in order to make this article at all manageable, major cuts had to be made before it could even be begun. So here’s how this is going to work: I chose studio albums only. But to truly understand Davis’ catalog, there are a bunch of essential live releases, including Live-Evil, In Concert: Live At Philharmonic Hall, Dark Magus, Agharta, Pangaea, and The Bootleg Series Vol. 1: Live In Europe 1967. So consider the 30 albums below a starting point. There’s so much more.
- A Report on Damage Done by One Individual Under Several Names | Laura J. Mixon – Friends, the tl;dr of this very long, comprehensive, analytical report is that up-and-coming John W. Campbell nominee Benjanun Sriduangkaew (who is also rage-blogger Requires Hate, who is also several other internet personalities including Winterfox, pyrofennec, acrackedmoon, and others) (oh yes, the list goes on), is VERY BAD NEWS.
- Cat Trap – Trends Addict – it's a cat trap Billy — and you're already caught!
- Women Rise in Sci Fi (Again) – The Atlantic – Like the fighters she wrote about, Hurley says that female science-fiction writers are often forgotten. “It’s always Asimov and Hineline,” she says. “You don’t hear about Russ or LeGuin. And there are very particular ways that people talk about it. One of those is by saying ‘well she did it, but it wasn’t really science fiction,’ or ‘her husband has a big impact.’”
- 179 RR Accountability and Diversity with Meagan Waller – DevChat.tv – a treasure trove of insights and info about unconscious biases , diversity, employment, culture, tech, and more.
- Inktober 2014 – Imgur – A daily ink drawing of Reddit's movie title typos.
- Guy writes chilling post about being a stalker – I would love to believe this is fiction (oh god, I so very much want this to be a really bad writing assignment or something) but he even tags the post as "Real Life". I can't. Brittain has absolutely no idea what he's done to this poor woman and casts himself as a downtrodden romantic hero instead of a deeply disturbing stalker. It's a frightening look at the mental hoops a stalker jumps through to rationalize their behavior.
- Richard Brittain Violently Assaults Book Reviewer – In an update to the "Guy writes chilling post about being a stalker" story that I truly wish hadn't been real, Richard Brittain was arrested recently for tracking down a woman who panned his book, going to her workplace and beating her over the head with a bottle of wine.
- The Complicated Appeal Of Black Metal – While black metal is considered to be by and for the deeply misanthropic — “true” black metal, by definition, is satanic — in the past decade its popularity has grown extensively, crossing over from die-hard “kvltists” to a centrist, mainstream indie-rock audience that would have never otherwise cared about a metal scene.
- Kap nâh jòh!!! Haagse striptekenaar Marnix Rueb overleden!!! – Marco Raaphorst –
- The Scientific 7-Minute Workout – NYTimes.com –
- Various – Beat The Bands Of Modern Dance (Vinyl, LP) at Discogs –
- 72 Hours of #Gamergate — The Message — Medium –
- Confessions of a white Oxbridge male – FT.com – Like the communist rulers in 1989, we white Oxbridge males cannot defend our dominance with arguments. Most of us know we didn’t get here through individual brilliance. Perry is wrong when he says, “Default Man will never admit to, or be fully aware of, the tribal advantages of his identity.” I’m very aware of those advantages. That’s why, although I currently have a decent job at a good newspaper, I feel very little sense of achievement. My dad went to Cambridge. I was born to be a minor establishment functionary. That’s also why I’m not desperate for my children to join the establishment. What would it prove?
- Head Nurse: Conclusions.** – Conclusion the first: The first reaction on the part of everydamnbody has been to blame the nurses. From the first inkling that Mr. Duncan's diagnosis was missed to the news that a second nurse was infected, the director of the CDC and the administration of Presbyterian Dallas have pointed to the RNs as the weak links in a chain.
- In The Second Year : Storm Jameson –
- A Month Soon Goes, Storm Jameson | It Doesn’t Have To Be Right… – Storm Jameson was prolific and successful, writing around sixty books between 1919 and 1976 – fiction, criticism, biography and history. None of her books appear to be in print now. At least two of her novels, In the Second Year (1936), set in a fascist Britain, and Then We Shall Hear Singing (1942), about a Nazi invasion of an invented country, qualify as science fiction although I’m not aware of them being claimed by the genre.
- New Statesman | Attention, #NaNoWriMo Fans: No One Cares How Your F***ing Novel Is Going – Because one of the most boring things in the world is watching a person write. They do not move. Their google searches are tedious; they google synonyms for words they just made up. If you ask a novelist how they wrote their book, it’s always “I researched a bit and then I didn’t get out of my pyjamas for properly ages.” That’s it. There was probably an exiting moment when a blob of apricot jam fell off a bit of their crumpet and they had to suck it out of the lapel of their dressing gown to avoid having to wash it properly. That’s it.
- Five Ways To Respond To A Negative Review: A Helpful Guide! « terribleminds: chuck wendig – Go punch a punching bag. Write in your bedside Twilight Sparkle diary. Go fire off an email to an author or artist friend and be all like AHHH DID YOU SEE THIS REVIEW (and if that author is truly a friend that author will say, yeah, yeah, that sucks, the reviewer sucks, but hey don’t get cuckoo bananapants, maybe go have a drink, go for a run, eat a cupcake, something, anything, calm thyself because this shit happens all the time).
- The Liberal Democrat approach to campaigning: the history and debunking some myths – Most notably, far too many accounts of British political campaigning are written without noticing how dramatic 1997 was, not just in terms of a Labour landslide, but also in terms of the impact of constituency campaign tactics. Fail to understand what happened in 1997 and why and you not only fail to understand British political campaigning but also, closer to home, fail to understand the roots of more recent events involving Chris Rennard.
- The Argument That Saved Paris by Ian Buruma | NYRblog | The New York Review of Books – This much is known: Nordling did meet von Choltitz several times, mainly to arrange the release of French political prisoners, and to negotiate a truce (threatened by the Communist resistance as much as by German zealots). We also know that von Choltitz, however aristocratic in his comportment, had been a very ruthless character, responsible for the destruction of the center of Rotterdam in May 1940. Worse that that, in 1942 his regiment flattened Sevastopol, and von Choltitz faithfully carried out orders to “liquidate” the Jewish population. He was a perfect illustration of the complicity on the eastern front of German army officers with the Nazi genocide, a shameful fact that has only recently been acknowledged in Germany.
- Intocht Sint Nicolaaas in Amsterdam in 1935 – YouTube –
- Killer whales living with bottlenose dolphins demonstrate cross-species vocal learning – Now, University of San Diego graduate student Whitney Musser and Hubbs-SeaWorld Research Institute senior research scientist Dr. Ann Bowles have found that killer whales (Orcinus orca) can engage in cross-species vocal learning: when socialized with bottlenose dolphins, they shifted the types of sounds they made to more closely match their social partners. The results, published in the Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, suggest that vocal imitation may facilitate social interactions in cetaceans. Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2014-10-killer-whales-bottlenose-dolphins-cross-species.html#jCp
- Dust – Lightspeed Magazine – Very late at night, when the buzz of drill dozers has died out, I can hear her breathing. I know that sounds crazy. I don’t care.
- SSLv3 goes to the dogs; POODLE kills off protocol – Over the past week, rumours were circulating about a new vulnerability in SSLv3. No details were widely available until today and now we have POODLE, the 'Padding Oracle On Downgraded Legacy Encryption' attack. The attack, specifically against the SSLv3 protocol, allows an attacker to obtain the plaintext of certain parts of an SSL connection, such as the cookie. Similar to BEAST, but more practical to carry out, POODLE could well signal the end of SSLv3 support.
- Tricia Sullivan and Shadowboxer – Imgur –