Every morning, Kim Casipong strolls past barbed wire, six dogs, and a watchman in order to get to her job in a pink apartment building decorated with ornate stonework in Lapu-Lapu City. The building towers above the slums surrounding it—houses made of scrap wood with muddy goat pens in place of yards. She is a pretty, milk-skinned, 17-year-old girl who loves the m...
The Bot Bubble: Click Farms Have Inflated Social Media Currency | The New Republic
9 years
Richard Braggs, Casipong’s boss, sits at a desk positioned behind his employees, occasionally glancing up from his double monitor to survey their screens. Even in the gloom, he wears Ray-Ban sunglasses to shield hi...
The Bot Bubble: Click Farms Have Inflated Social Media Currency | The New Republic
10 years
Richard Braggs, Casipong’s boss, sits at a desk positioned behind his employees, occasionally glancing up from his double monitor to survey their screens. Even in the gloom, he wears Ray-Ban sunglasses to shield hi...
The Bot Bubble: Click Farms Have Inflated Social Media Currency | The New Republic
10 years
On Wednesday, Electric Literature unveiled a short story, by science-fiction fabulist Charles Yu, with its own futuristic twist: digital annotations, courtesy of the close-reading behemoth Genius. “Hero Absorbs Major Damage” chronicles the epic quest of Hero and his magical band through 256 battles, at the end of which they will face “the final boss” and their destiny. Using Genius software to...
Genius and Electric Literature team up to annotate fiction with Yu's Hero Absorbs Major Damage.
9 years
The problem with Gruber’s criticism is that Lando never really actually had a choice. Vader was far more powerful than he was; taking a chance on a deal was the best of a bunch of bad options. That, I think, is the case with most publishers when it comes to Facebook.
The Facebook Reckoning | stratechery by Ben Thompson
9 years
... platforms they don’t control. But Facebook isn’t just another platform. It’s dominant in a way no other platform is, which makes it understandable that publishers might be weighing the cost-benefit — or control-benefit — analysis differently than it does for, oh, WhatsApp or Snapchat.
Facebook wants to be the new World Wide Web, and news orgs are apparently on board » Nieman Journalism Lab
9 years
I’ll have more to say about this later this week, but in general, the idea of distributed content argues that publishers should be more comfortable putting their content on platforms they don’t control. But Facebook isn’t just another platform. It’s dominant in a way no other platform is, which makes it understandable that publishers might be weighing the cost-benefit — or control-benefit — analysis...
Facebook wants to be the new World Wide Web, and news orgs are apparently on board » Nieman Journalism Lab
9 years
9 years
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Continuing El-P’s absurd claims to “badassness” in the previous verse, Mike claims to be the worst thing imaginable: crack cocaine, which seriously caused unprecedented destruction in inner-city communities in the 1980s and 90s.
But then he gets less serious, punning on crack as “ass crack” and claiming he’s so bad that he would kick a lion in the ass. These lines are also an excellent example of chiasmus, created via the subsequent homonyms “lyin'” and “lion.”
also the I am Crack I ain’t lyin is a reference to eri c Clapton’s song cocaine