[MUSIC] Five music links: Rouge, David Bowie, Taylor Swift, Dixie Chicks, maps

• Dangerous Minds looks/u> at obscure 1970s glam punk band Rouge, from Japan.
• Dangerous Minds points readers to the excellent David Bowie fan comic, the biographical “The Side Effects of the Cocaine”.
• Taylor Swift made a wonderful donation to the Regent Park School of Music.
• I do agree with Anne T. Donahue at CBC Arts Mthat country music needs more of the innovative challenges brought by the Dixie Chicks.
• CityLab shares a playlist of songs dealing, in one way or another, with maps.

[BLOG] Some Friday links

• Architectuul takes a look at “infrastructural scars”, at geopolitically-inspired constructions like border fences and fortifications.
• Centauri Dreams notes what we can learn from 99942 Apophis during its 2029 close approach to Earth, just tens of thousands of kilometres away.
• D-Brief reports on the reactions of space artists to the photograph of the black hole at the heart of M87.
• Dangerous Minds shares the first recording of Frank Zappa and Captain Beefheart.
• The Dragon’s Tales notes that Germany has begun work on drafting laws to cover space mining.
• Gizmodo reports on what scientists have learned from the imaging of a very recent impact of an asteroid on the near side of the Moon.
• io9 makes the case that Star Trek: Discovery should try to tackle climate change.
• Joe. My. God. notes that Verizon is seeking a buyer for Tumblr. (Wouldn’t it be funny if it was bought, as other reports suggest might be possible, by Pornhub?)
• JSTOR Daily reports on a 1910 examination of medical schools that, among other things, shut down all but two African-American medical schools with lasting consequences for African-American health.
• Language Log asks why “Beijing” is commonly pronounced as “Beizhing”.
• Simon Balto asks at Lawyers, Guns and Money why the murder of Justine Ruszczyk by a Minneapolis policeman is treated more seriously than other police killings, just because she was white and the cop was black. All victims deserve the same attention.
• Russell Darnley at Maximos62 shares a video of the frieze of the Parthenon.
• The NYR Daily responds to the 1979 television adaptation of the Primo Levi novel Christ Stopped at Eboli, an examination of (among other things) the problems of development.
• Peter Rukavina is entirely right about the practical uselessness of QR codes.
• Daniel Little at Understanding Society points readers towards the study of organizations, concentrating on Charles Perrow.
• Window on Eurasia notes the argument of one Russian commentator that Russia should offer to extend citizenship en masse not only to Ukrainians but to Belarusians, the better to undermine independent Belarus.
• Arnold Zwicky shares photos of some of his flourishing flowers, as his home of Palo Alto enters a California summer.

[NEWS] Five Internet links: Geocities, Livejournal, Tumblr, Quora, predictions

• CityLab takes a look at Geocities, one of the first online platforms for websites, looking at how it tried to create and maintain online neighbourhoods.
• Ars Technica looks at the promise–sadly unfulfilled–of pioneering blogging platform Livejournal. It really could have been a contender.
• Think Progress notes, more than a month after the purge by Tumblr of NSFW blogs, the far right remains active there.
• This Huffington Post India article looks at the rising presence of pro-Hindutva answers put forth by Indian users on Quora.
• Ars Technica notes that researchers can now, even if you do not actively participate on social media, predict what your content would likely be.

[NEWS] Six links about the decline of Tumblr (#tumblr)

• Slate notes that the example of LiveJournal, a popular social networking site that went under when its owners cracked down on fandom, should concern the owners of Tumblr.
• Hornet Stories notes</u that the crackdown on NSFW work on Tumblr will impact LGBTQ people disproportionately.
• Nathalie Graham at the Stranger notes what the crackdown on NSFW content on Tumblr might indicate about the future of the Internet, among other things.
• Sean Captain at Fast Company looks at the desperate efforts of archivists to preserve some 700 thousand NSFW Tumblr blogs for posterity.
• This Wired article looks at alternatives to Tumblr, like Dreamwidth and Pillowfort. Each is promising but each lacks some of the specific advantages of Tumblr.
• My own Tumblr, incidentally, is A Bit More Detail. It will still be online: I still find it useful, and do not find a need to abandon this community as I did LiveJournal.

[BLOG] Some Thursday links

• Anthro{dendum} considers ways to simulate urgency in simulations of climate change.
• Bad Astronomer Phil Plait considers what could possibly have led to a Mars crater near Biblis Patera, on Tharsis, having such a flat bottom.
• Caitlin Kelly at the Broadside Blog gives readers some tips as to what they should see in New York City.
• Centauri Dreams notes some of the early returns sent back by the OSIRIS-REx probe from asteroid Bennu.
• The Crux notes the limits of genetic determinism in explaining human behaviour, given the huge influence of the environment on the expression of genes and more.
• D-Brief suggests that the rapid global dispersion of the domestic chicken, a bird visibly distinct from its wild counterparts, might make an excellent marker of the Anthropocene millions of years hence.
• Bruce Dorminey notes that Comet 46 P/Wirtanen is set to come within a bit more than eleven million kilometres of the Earth next week, and that astronomers are ready.
• L.M. Sacasas at The Frailest Thing suggests that the Internet, by exposing everything, makes actual innovation difficult.
• JSTOR Daily takes a look at the innovative art of early 20th century Expressionist Charlotte Salomon, a person not only groundbreaking with her autobiographical painting series but linked to a murder mystery, too.
• Anne Curzan writes at Lingua Franca about what she has learned in six years about blogging there abut language.
• Sara Jayyousi writes at the LRB Blog about her experiences over time with a father imprisoned for nearly a decade and a half on false charges of supporting terrorism.
• Marginal Revolution shares Tyler Cowen’s argument that Macron’s main problem is that he lacks new ideas, something to appeal to the masses.
• Sylvain Cypel at the NYR Daily argues that Macron, arguably never that popular, is facing a Marie Antoinette moment, the Yellow Jackets filling the place of the sans culottes.
• Drew Rowsome rightly laments the extent to which social media, including not just Facebook but even Tumblr, are currently waging a war against any visible sex in any context.
• Starts With A Bang’s Ethan Siegel explains how, in 2019, astronomers will finally have imaged the event horizon around the black hole Sagittarius A* at the heart of the Milky Way Galaxy.
• Window on Eurasia reports on polls which suggest that young Belarusians are decidedly apolitical.

[NEWS] Five LGBTQ links: #ScienceDaddy, Tumblr, Pride Toronto, Canadian Pride Citation, SF leather

• them interviews</u. Troy Lee Hudson, the engineer working on NASA’s InSight Mars who has gone viral as #ScienceDaddy, letting him talk about Mars and about being an out scientist.
• Stefanie Duguay at The Conversation writes about how the new Tumblr ban on NSFW content will harm young LGBTQ people, by depriving them of community and information.
• Rinaldo Walcott at Daily Xtra makes the case for downsizing Pride Toronto to better fit community needs and desires.
• The Canadian federal government has created a new Canada Pride Citation, available to present and past LGBTQ employees of the federal government, including many who were persecuted for their sexual orientation. Global News reports.
• them reports on how gentrification in the leather community in San Francisco impacts the wider city.

[NEWS] Five links: Tumblr, Lough Foyle, giant snails, Gillian Genser, Tell el-Hammam

• VICE’s Motherboard suggests that the crackdown on anything NSFW on Tumblr can be blamed on the expanding power of the Apple Store, one element of its indiscriminate sanitization of the Internet.
• Garrett Carr at 1843 Magazine takes a look at Lough Foyle, the northern Irish bay that will become part of a hard border come Brexit.
• Giant African snails, Sarah Laskow suggests at Atlas Obscura, have spread so widely in recent centuries thanks to humanity that the presence of their shells might well be a noticeable marker of the Anthropocene.
• At Toronto Life, sculptor Gillian Genser tells the heartbreaking story of how she was poisoned by the heavy metals contained in the mussel shells that she used as raw materials for a sculpture.
• Evan Gough at Universe Today reports the claim of some archaeologists that, 3700 years ago, the city of Tell el-Hammam was destroyed by a meteor that exploded above it with the force of a large nuclear warhead. Inspiration for Sodom and Gomorrah?

[NEWS] Five LGBTQ links: Judy Garland, The Kids in The Hall, The Wire, Tumblr, TV

• JSTOR Daily considers the question of whether the movie A Star Is Born made Judy Garland a gay icon.
• Daily Xtra shares a first-person account telling the truth about how The Kids in The Hall gave young queer audiences an idea that escape is possible. (It was for me.)
• This Daily Xtra account shares one watcher’s account of learning to accept being black and gay by watching The Wire.
• Tumblr, Daily Xtra notes, is still a powerful platform that allows queer people to meet.
• We really should, as this VICE interview notes, be watching more queer TV.

[NEWS] Five sci-tech links: moon landers, opioids, Fitbit, Tumblr and Twitter, Mars soil

• D-Brief looks at the new moon landers being discussed at NASA.
• Vox notes the shortage of organs available for transplant in the United States is being eased by the donations of young people who overdose on opioids.
• Lisa Carver at The Conversation notes the potential pitfalls that would come from insurance companies wanting their clients to wear fitness trackers like Fitbit.
• This article at The Outline praising the advantages Tumblr has over Twitter makes a few good points.
• Universe Today notes that imitation Mars soil is now for sale.

[FORUM] What social networking sites are you active on?

Two weekends ago, I had to reset the passwords on my different social networks. My E-mail had somehow become compromised, and my Facebook was briefly used to post spam in a single discussion group, so everything had to be changed, immediately.

I had to go to Facebook; I had to go to Livejournal, that site that started everything; Google+ and my linked accounts at Blogger and YouTube had to go; Tumblr was followed by Instagram and then by Flickr; my Twitter and LinkedIn, more peripheral than not, had to be changed. Even the Dreamwidth that is basically a backup for Livejournal, and the other sites (Quora, Goodreads, Yelp) that are functionally closely linked to Facebook, had to be changed.

What about you? Where are you active?