DNA Lounge: Wherein we got a very nice profile in The Bold Italic!

I love this article. It's a great snapshot of the club and some of the many people who make it what it is, and why we're still doing this!


Stefanie Doucette: Is San Francisco Losing Its DNA?

What hits you first is the wall of color  --  flamingo pink, neon green and electric blue. When your eyes adjust, you can see the solid black poster frames, corralling decades of concert memorabilia packed tightly together like the people on the dance floor in the next room over. There's no hierarchy to the posters  --  Prince is up there, but so are ones for The Coup, Imperative Reaction, Go Betty Go and The Dollyrots. Obscure artists get equal real estate on the wall. This wall is a shrine to the 32-year history of DNA Lounge, an institution among San Francisco clubs. [...]

With seven bars and a labyrinth-like layout of performance space, there's room for everyone here. Ariel, the floor manager, describes the cultural diversity among her hardworking staff  --  queer, straight, black and white, ranging from Mohawked punk-rock kids to super-fashionista girls. Formerly a graphic designer and an avid patron of DNA Lounge's "Death Guild", Ariel eventually made the switch from regular to employee. "They say if you come here often enough, eventually you'll be offered a job," said an anonymous patron who chimed in during our conversation. It's an environment where it's easy to get to know each other, where the regulars are family.

I felt I'd achieved a level of acceptance on par with the regulars last Tuesday at their Valentine's Day "Cyberdelia" event: a Hackers screening and '90s dance party complete with a skate ramp. A girl in a yellow fishnet shirt came up to me while dancing and asked, "Can I join you? You girls are dancing hard. I came here with boys, and all they want to do is talk about tech."

I would be remiss were I not to take this opportunity to remind you all that you can help us keep the lights on by contributing to our Patreon.

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An annotated digest of the top "Hacker" "News" posts.

n-gate:

  • Functional programmers, realizing that their entire discipline is rendered inconsistent and useless the instant it is faced with herculean tasks such as "I/O" and "users", finally admit for the record that it's better to do literally anything else when these tasks arise. Satisfying termninology like 'free monad' and 'applicative functors' are bandied about as Hackernews tries to decide if you want imperative nougat with functional candy shell, or functional fruit filling with a flaky imperative pastry surrounding it. Nobody stops to wonder if the functional wizardry compiles to imperative code, or whether the processor gives a shit if your source code looks good in LaTeX. One Hackernews admits he doesn't know what these people are jabbering about; all users in agreement are ritually downvoted. In accordance with federal law, someone asks how this compares with Rust.

  • A spammer posts his bullshit, the 21st-century equivalent of motivational speaking, only with fewer ticket sales and more ebook download links. A Hackernews shark attack ensues as everyone realizes it is finally on-topic to desperately plead for any possible scrap of advice on how to actually make money. Not discussed: how to start a startup without ruining anyone else's life.

  • A webshit, based on his hobby project, decides that the entire web advertising market is a lie. He's right, but for the wrong reasons. Hackernews trades tips on convincing themselves their entire industry isn't a sack of bullshit.

  • People hired to look at terrible shit forty hours a week tend to go crazy. Hackernews decides this must be why cops are all assholes and that the solution is more cops. One Hackernews suggests just hiring perverts.

  • The New York Times -- world's leading authority on San Francisco -- tells us that San Francisco is a microcosm of America. Hackernews spends equal time telling each other how to donate money toward fixing problems and telling each other that donating money will not fix any problems. Nobody realizes Hackernews users are the problem, including the New York Times.

  • A leisure studies major vomits a couple thousand words of dime-store evolutionary psychology. Hackernews seizes on the opportunity to delude themselves into believing that their crippling anxiety and ever-increasing depression are what makes them better than you.

  • Hackernews is concerned that stupid poor people might not realize they are less alive if they choose to entertain themselves instead of working ceaselessly unto death. The behavior of children is held up by the childless as an example for us all. Some dipshit thinks running his website is akin to preagricultural survival. Dimly, a few Hackernews users experiment with the idea that money and public acclaim are not the only route to happiness, but this heresy is drowned out by the relentless insistance that being rich is the only way to experience joy.

  • An idiot posts to Medium a rambling narrative regarding the importance of his phone app. Hackernews maintains the only way to be sure your shit is right is to host all of your own communications tools. Google Analytics silently notes which citizens have been contaminated with toxins inimical to surveillance capitalism. The machine sleeps.

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Mixed messages

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1Password Watchtower

I didn't know this existed! Just the other day I was wishing that this existed, and it turns out it already does.

1Password Watchtower

Watchtower identifies website vulnerabilities and alerts you when one is found. Website vulnerability information is refreshed daily to verify items in your vault. 1Password downloads the information and checks it locally against your Logins. Watchtower will list Logins associated with sites which have (or had) known vulnerabilities.

Sadly, my list of passwords that should be changed is of the "there goes my afternoon" magnitude.

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So A Nazi Walks Into An Iron Bar: the Meyer Lansky Story

Great Moments in Nazi Punching:

The German American Bund was formed in 1936 to promote the causes of Nazi Germany in the United States. It was open to Americans of German descent, provided they could prove they had no black or Jewish ancestry. These guys were openly Nazis, like, not even the kind who think they can hide behind fake irony and shitty frog memes. Their flag was a swastika shooting out of an iron cross. So: fuck these guys entirely. [...] They dissolved shortly after Pearl Harbor, when being openly a Nazi temporarily went out of style in the US, and everyone tried to pretend there hadn't been a 25,000 member organization of Americans dedicated to helping Hitler win.

The German-American Bund had a lot of meetings in areas with high immigrant (read: Jewish) populations. One of those places was New York City. Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia affirmed that Nazis were allowed to meet, and were entitled to police protection, but he made sure the cops guarding their meetings were mostly black or Jewish. So that was... passive aggressive. But then there was another local political figure: Judge Nathan D. Perlman.

Judge Perlman, who was -- no shit -- Jewish, did not care for Nazis. This led him to reach out to one of the most powerful Jewish guys around: Meyer Lansky. Judge Perlman, as you might expect, hadn't done Meyer any favors in the past. He had for example helped to end Prohibition, the repeal of which, while generally extremely popular, wasn't great for the Meyer Lanskys of the world, who had been making bank off illegal booze. But when Perlman met with Meyer after the rise of the German American Bund, they ended up getting along pretty well. Perlman was like "I want you to disrupt meetings of Nazis" and Meyer was like "excellent, on it," and Perlman was like "hang on I'm not finished" and Meyer was like "sorry" and Perlman was like "I will pay you and give you legal assistance, should anyone get arrested. The only condition is, don't kill anyone." With what I can only imagine to be the world's greatest eye roll, Meyer said "Ugh fine, I won't kill anyone. Also, I don't want your money."

And then he went to work. [...]

These attacks went on for over a year. Journalist Walter Winchell would praise the attacks from the air, and pass on information to Meyer about where and when the Nazis would be meeting. Life got pretty dangerous for Nazis in New York City.

In the meantime, Meyer Lansky and Bugsy Siegel also TRAINED other people to fight Nazis, which, come on, can you just imagine Meyer Lansky and Bugsy Siegel training young antifa in the early 30s? I love it. I'm picturing a lot of newsboy caps and comments like "no no not like that, my bubbe (ofblessedmemory) punches better than that, you grip the brass knuckles like this."

This also seems like a good time to mention that Lucky Luciano, Meyer's definitely-not-boyfriend-I-don't-know-why-you-would-think-that, offered to send some of his guys to help with this, but Meyer told him, "thanks, but no, this needs to be a Jewish fight."

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Wilma! Where'd you put my electric drill!

The animation on the linked page is longer and higher quality, but once a GIF has been posted to Twitter, embedding it becomes unpossible. I couldn't find the original.

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Open Sorcery



The Rothschild Code: The World in 2017
A Spell to Bind Donald Trump and All Those Who Abet Him

A Spell to Bind Donald Trump and All Those Who Abet Him (version 2.0) To be performed at midnight on every waning crescent moon until he is removed from office. The first ritual takes place Friday evening, February 24th, at the stroke of midnight. This binding spell is open source, and may be modified to fit your preferred spiritual practice or magical system  --  the critical elements are the simultaneity of the working (midnight, EST -- DC, Mar-a-Lago, and Trump Tower NYC time) and the mass energy of participants.

See below for the upcoming dates. Some lodges/covens are doing a variation of this as a group working, while a number of solitary practitioners are planning to connect and livestream via Facebook, Twitter, and other social media.

What license, though? Are there unit tests, or a validation suite?


Update, Feb 28: I am still awaiting the status report / post mortem on this project, but in the meantime, here's a critique of the spell from someone whose research seems totally legit: The Rite Stuff:

Binding? That's it? Look, if you're facing down a fascist, you can't fret so much about your personal karma. You've got to hit hard and damn the consequences, because a man's gotta do what a man's gotta do.

Really, wicca is the wrong approach for a job like this. Wicca is nice-nice magic. Wicca is for girls.

I think we need something stronger, like Enochian magic. This system was devised by John Dee (mage to Elizabeth I and likely inspiration for Prospero in The Tempest) working in tandem with Edward Kelly, a fascinating rascal who may also be the secret creator of the Voynich Manuscript.

According to Dee, the mightiest of devils is Choronzon, the Dweller in the Abyss, The Demon of Dispersion; his sigil is to the left. Aleister Crowley and his assistant Victor Neuberg (a poet associated with Dylan Thomas) summoned Choronzon in a famous rite conducted in 1909, outside the desert town of Bou Saada in Algeria.


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Vysoká pec Golem


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Fembot Factory

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Scene missing! A video in this post has disappeared. If you know of an accessible version of this video (search), please mail me so that I can update this post.
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A Comprehensive Guide To Navigating Parallel Dimensions


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