Feed the Mermaids!
The Coney Island Mermaid Parade Is In TroubleFans of the annual master class in strategic shell and sequin placement that is the Coney Island Mermaid Parade can help keep the 35th annual event afloat this year: organizers confirmed today that they are crowdfunding to make sure the June 17th parade can go on.
The fundraising campaign, dubbed Feed the Mermaids, will help cover the cost of logistics and security, as well as city permits, insurance, porta potties, tents, and trucks, according to the nonprofit arts organization Coney Island USA. As of this writing, $396 of the requested $50,000 goal has been raised.
Coney Island USA, which also operates the Coney Island Circus Sideshow, Burlesque at the Beach, and the Coney Island Museum, experienced some "fairly serious financial crisis events" in recent months, according to director James Fitzsimmons. The parade has operated at a loss for years, and this year is facing higher permit and insurance costs. The organization's core staff of five people was let go this past winter.
"This past season it was just me on payroll -- deferred payroll," Fitzsimmons told Gothamist. "It's unfortunately the side effect of running an arts institution."
The Mermaid Parade crowd-sourced funds once before, for the 2013 parade following Hurricane Sandy. According to Fitzsimmons, his organization never fully recovered financially. Denny's, an independent ice cream stand, used to rent space at Coney Island USA's 1208 Surf Avenue headquarters. It was destroyed in Sandy and has not been replaced.
Asked if the parade will go on if funding falls short, Fitzsimmons said he couldn't say for sure. "That's always a possibility," he said. "There is enough push regarding the parade that will make this work, but it could leave us with larger financial problems."
You can donate here.
I only made it to the Mermaid Parade once, but it was awesome.
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"This Red Band Trailer For A $100M House Makes Me Want To Be A Socialist"
Well, WONDER NO MORE, for this has happened:
Yes, the above is a "trailer" for Opus, a $100 million "state of the art dream home" currently for sale in Los Angeles. We "wanted to do something really high art," a spokesperson for the home told LAist in reference to the short film. The house has Roberto Cavalli flooring, a 15-seat curved screen theater with JBL Synthesis Audio, two massive bars -- one of which has a "Winestation" that preserves and dispenses glasses with the exact amount and temperature desired -- a gourmet show kitchen with an iPad-controlled coffee machine, Longhi doors in suede and embossed leather, and a separate catering/event kitchen.
The video begins with a shot of the giant, looming "O" that stands in front of the house, presumably in reference to Opus, the home's name [...] JK! The "O" irrefutably stands for "orgasm," which is what a human being would have every minute of every day if they had $100 million to spare on a sex home.
Previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously.
Fembot Factory
Blood of the Harpy: Great Moments in Product Labelling
Image Synthesis from Yahoo's open_nsfw
Yahoo's recently open sourced neural network, open_nsfw, is a fine tuned Residual Network which scores images on a scale of to on its suitability for use in the workplace. [...]
What makes an image NSFW, according to Yahoo? I explore this question with a clever new visualization technique by Nguyen et al.. Like Google's Deep Dream, this visualization trick works by maximally activating certain neurons of the classifier. Unlike deep dream, we optimize these activations by performing descent on a parameterization of the manifold of natural images. This parametrization takes the form of a Generative Network, G, trained adversarially on an unrelated dataset of natural images. [...]
Not surprisingly, the results of the optimization are clearly pornographic.
Synthesizing Pareidolia [...] This explains the phenomena above, as the SFW neuron gets excited on the sight of rolling hills and running brooks, and the excitations of NSFW correlate with, well, pornography. The classifier takes in both these expert opinions, and combines them democratically [...] Since most pornography does not take place with a Thomas Kinkade painting in the background, this is a fair heuristic for most real world problems. But what happens if we try to excite both neurons simultaneously?
Concert, NSFW:
"What happens if we try to excite both neurons simultaneously", indeed.
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Nth Wave Feminism
Kaleidopr0n
