A great hero of the copyright wars is @realdjbc, AKA Bob Cronin, creator of the amazing groundbreaking #Beastles mashups, a virtuosic combination of the Beastie Boys and The Beatles:

djbc.net/thebeastles/co…

1/
Cronin's new project is VERY different. He's hosting a Youtube channel starring a dad-joke-cracking tennis-ball puppet called The Dennis Ball Show.

2/
We recorded an episode last month that was nominally about my new book but swiftly became a discussion of the Haunted Mansion.



3/
In fact, we talked for so long that we shot past his self-imposed length cap and so the signature Dad Joke segment was relegated to a second, short coda episode:



4/
It's 2020. Everything is terrible and on fire. But the world still turns, and remains full of extraordinary things, like a chance to talk to a tennis-ball puppet wielded by an illegal art pioneer about history's greatest dark-ride followed by hot lashings of dad jokes.

eof/

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More from @doctorow

17 Oct
High-stakes tests are garbage, pedagogically bankrupt assessment tools that act as a form of empirical facewash for "meritocracy."

1/ Image
They primarily serve as a way for wealthy parents to buy good grades for their kids, since expensive test-prep services can turn even the dimmest, inbred plute into a genius-on-paper.

2/
All of this was true before the pandemic. Now it's worse. Most of us meet the plague and ask, "How can I help my neighbor?" But for sociopaths, the question is, how can I turn a buck in a way that only stomps on the faces of poor people who don't get to hit back?

3/
Read 19 tweets
17 Oct
On Thursday, I posted a fond recollection of @realdjbc's groundbreaking Beastie Boys/Beatles mashups, "The Beastles," which are in the canon of Beatles mashups along with The Grey Album.

pluralistic.net/2020/10/15/exp…

1/
But there's another canon they belong to: the canon of Beastie Boys mashups, which goes beyond classics like BC's own "Intergalactic Robots" (Kraftwerk vs Beasties):

soundcloud.com/bootie-dragon-…

2/
It's a canon that's still growing in 2020! There's straight up novelty tracks like Kevin Miller's Beachstie Boys (multitrack plumbing of the odd coincidence of rhyme structure between "I Get Around" and "Fight For Your Right to Party"):



3/
Read 5 tweets
16 Oct
Today's Twitter threads (a Twitter thread).

Inside: Ferris wheel offices; UK to tax Amazon's victims; Amazon returns end up in landfills; and more!

Archived at: pluralistic.net/2020/10/16/luc…

#Pluralistic

1/ Image
Tonight's Attack Surface Lecture: ​​SciFi Genre with Sarah Gailey and Chuck Wendig
eventbrite.com/e/cory-doctoro…

Full schedule: read.macmillan.com/torforge/cory-…

2/ Image
Ferris wheel offices: Well-ventilated, unbeatable views, sub-par toilets.



3/ Image
Read 20 tweets
16 Oct
The @CBC hid GPSes and wireless cameras in Amazon returns to see what happened when Canadians sent their Amazon purchases back for refunds. Amazon claims it processes these returns responsibly, either restocking them or selling them to third-party jobbers.

1/ Image
That matters: 30-40% of online purchases are returned (it's <10% for physical retail).

But those returns largely end up being destroyed. In just ONE facility, between one and five TRUCKLOADS of Amazon returns are shredded, mostly for landfill.

cbc.ca/news/canada/ma…

2/
Two thirds of the items that CBC bugged were destroyed.

The returns that DID make it back into peoples' hands travel hundreds, even thousands of kilometers before that happened.

3/
Read 4 tweets
16 Oct
Imposing penalties on cheating monopolists is hard and must be done with care, lest the companies turn new rules into a competitive advantage - rules they can afford to follow, but which their smaller customers cannot.

1/ Image
For many years, Big Tech maintained the fiction that their digital sales were consummated somewhere in Irish-adjacent high seas or possibly in a basement in Lichtenstein and thus sales-tax exempt. This let Amazon sell books for 20% less than its non-cheating UK competitors.

2/
To fix this, the EU created a rule requiring digital retailers to collect two non-contradictory pieces of personally identifying info on each purchaser (including non-EU customers) to determine where they were for tax purposes.

3/
Read 14 tweets
15 Oct
Today's Twitter threads (a Twitter thread).

Inside: Dystopia as clickbait; Trail of Mars; Bride of Frankenstein and the Monster; The Passenger Pigeon Manifesto; Bricked Ferrari; The Dennis Ball Show; and more!

Archived at: pluralistic.net/2020/10/15/exp…

#Pluralistic

1/ Image
Tonight's Attack Surface Lecture: ​​Intersectionality: Race, Surveillance, and Tech and Its History with Malkia Cyril and Meredith Whittaker app.gopassage.com/events/cory-do…

Full schedule: read.macmillan.com/torforge/cory-…

2/ Image
Dystopia as clickbait: Chris Brown on uncozy apocalypses.



2/ Image
Read 18 tweets

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