Writer/director Amy Seimetz's darkly, darkly comic meditation on the contagious nature of anxiety and paranoia plays with horror conventions while refusing to embrace the genre's pulpy pleasures.
(Image credit: Neon)
from Arts & Life : NPR https://ift.tt/3gbtlU5
via IFTTT
Yiyun Li's new book — about a woman looking back on her life by annotating the diary of her late ex-lover — plays with both Vladimir Nabokov's Pale Fire and Li's own previous work.
(Image credit: Random House)
from Arts & Life : NPR https://ift.tt/2BKQ0HQ
via IFTTT
Of all the PC components, few require more care and attention than a hard drive. We’ve all heard the admonishments to defragment drives, and clean up junk files to keep all our 1s and 0s sparkling. No matter how well you care for it, however, at some point that drive is going to fail. Sometimes you can hear it coming, sometimes it happens suddenly in the middle of a project, and other times it just refuses to boot one morning.
Whatever way your hard drive meets its end, it’s a certainty you’ll see it happen if you use a PC long enough. Hard drives are complicated little devices. The primary components are the magnetic platters that contain the data, as well as the head that reads and writes the data.
There is a lot of detail amassed in the CNN analyst's book that even Trump investigation junkies won't have seen, much having to do with behind-the-scenes strategizing and negotiating by lawyers.
(Image credit: Doubleday)
from Arts & Life : NPR https://ift.tt/2X8PTgP
via IFTTT
A new documentary chronicling the formation, rise and break-up of the iconic group hits all the familiar Behind the Music beats, but does so with a bracing, clear-eyed candor.
(Image credit: Cassy Cohen/Showtime)
from Arts & Life : NPR https://ift.tt/2XdUE8F
via IFTTT
Thunderbolt 3 based eGPUs have been around for many years, offering the ability to plug a full desktop-class GPU into a laptop. Theoretically it’s an appealing idea, especially if someone is using an older laptop that has a perfectly fine CPU to handle games, but the GPU is long in the tooth. But there are some drawbacks.
In this video I talk about my experiences using an eGPU over the past 4 months to play 10 of the biggest games from the past couple of years. Each game was tested in four different ways, and below are the specs of the equipment I used—all of which is covered in the video.
As you can see in the video, the 2070 Super inside this eGPU offered higher frame rates than the GTX 1650 in the XPS 15 in almost every game. The 8-core Core i9-9980HK was also able to perform with higher clocks for longer periods, because it didn’t have to share cooling with the GTX 1650. The improvements would be even more dramatic on older laptops with out-of-date video cards.
Tears of milk weeping down an arm; enlarged nipples, swollen and sore; baby’s lips puckered and expectant. Sophie Harris-Taylor reveals breastfeeding in its many variations: the mess, the pain, the frustration, the joy. One mother expresses her nipples’ exhaustion — her tongue-tied newborn constantly sucking; never satisfied. Another, clutching a breast-pump to her dribbling chest, confesses the sense of inadequacy at being unable to breastfeed. These are the realities of a process presented as joyous — a moment of connection between mother and child. Of course, breastfeeding can be this, but, it can also be hideous — exhausting, painful, and lonely. “This stage of motherhood is an emotional roller-coaster,” says Harris-Taylor, who recently gave birth to a son. “I wanted to reveal some of that and explore the range of emotions in both mothers and their babies.”
Images and text compose her resulting series MILK: an honest depiction of breastfeeding via several women’s varying experiences of the process. Harris-Taylor’s own experiences motivated the work. “Before having my son, I, like many other women had an idealised but perhaps unrealistic expectation of breastfeeding,” she continues, “the images I had seen tended to represent breastfeeding in a generic and non-informative way.” Her work does the opposite. In it, different mother’s divulge their most private reflections on the process — to open up the conversation and show other women that they are not alone.
Below, several of the women Harris-Taylor photographed share their experiences.
“The images of breastfeeding I have seen always show the baby lying peacefully in the mum’s arms, feeding away, serenely. Other mums in my antenatal group say their babies will feed for 45 minutes to an hour. Raya doesn’t feed like that. She always wants to be up and active and we often feed just a few sucks at a time here and there as she clambers over and around me — milk spraying over everything in the vicinity as she pulls away just as my milk lets down.”
“You can go to every lactation class, read every book, have super-long, teat-shaped, perfect nipples and it can still be bloody difficult. The feeling of failure that I couldn’t get breastfeeding to work and had to exclusively pump for almost three months. I made myself sick with bladder infections, mastitis and nipple thrush. I imagined myself as some earth mama that would breastfeed her baby until six months and beyond. I’ll probably always feel guilty that I wasn’t able to do that.”
“The fact that I made every little squishy roll on her body! That it is a secret thing between us, which I can’t put in words to anyone else. That sometimes when she looks at me when she’s feeding it’s like the first time she’s seen me. and that slow blink and smile is the best thing ever. I love that even if I haven’t packed a giant nappy bag, I can still feed her, it’s just the two of us.”
“Nova had tongue-tie for the first eight weeks, which made breastfeeding very tedious for me. He would feed for very long periods and never seem satisfied afterwards. I was constantly questioning my ability and supply, as well as dealing with sore nipples, exhaustion and overall discomfort. I built a negative relationship with the whole thing that is hard to break even though things are better after his tongue tie surgery.”
“My image of breastfeeding before I had personally done it was one of oneness and serenity — something that would naturally unfold majestically, like a rose blooming in the comfort of its garden. Fast forward six months and multiple feeds since giving birth, I can truly say it is not so!”
“I think that women in the West encounter more difficulties breastfeeding because we do these things in isolation, rather than in a community. If breastfeeding wasn’t mostly done behind closed doors, we’d be more exposed to it and therefore more prepared. I don’t think society makes adequate public spaces for breastfeeding, either. I’ve had to pay for tea to sit in a cafe when Oki is hungry and we are out. Sometimes I think we are made to feel that breastfeeding is a public inconvenience rather than a natural necessity.”
Magic: The Gathering is a popular collectible card game that's been around for years. But it can be an expensive hobby, and it thrives on in-person play. The pandemic has knocked players for a loop.
(Image credit: Josh Reynolds/AP)
from Arts & Life : NPR https://ift.tt/33a4T1C
via IFTTT
Oman’s landscape sparkles. Golden sand envelops endless desert, vertiginous cliffs plunge into turquoise sea, and beaches curl and bend along the winding coastline. These are the landscapes that Ryan Debolski felt compelled to capture when he relocated to the Arab state, however, it was the huddles of men congregating along the shore who ultimately drew him in. Clusters of bodies sweating, swimming, and conversing beneath the burning sun. “Naturally, I am an introvert,” reflects Debolski who moved to Oman’s capital Muscat upon receiving a Fulbright fellowship to pursue the project, which culminated in his latest photobook, Like. “It took a lot for me to build up the courage. I observed for a while, and, eventually, had the courage to approach a group and have a conversation: there was a mutual curiosity because I was also on the beach and had a camera.”
The men were migrant labourers who compose a considerable portion of Oman’s population, hailing from countries in Asia and Africa; significantly, India, Bangladesh, and Pakistan. The beach provided a refuge — a respite from the scorching heat, relentless work, and claustrophobic living conditions. As Jason Koxvold, an artist founder of independent imprint Gnomic Book (publisher of Like), articulates in the essay that accompanies the publication: “In this regard, the beach offers one of the few settings in which these men can find agency in anything other than a commodity.”
Debolski’s subjects frolic — they cavort amid rolling waves, and move onshore: sketching the sand, courting a snake escaping the surf, playing, fighting, relaxing. More introspective shots feature — a moment gazing out to sea, or meditatively into the camera. So too do images intimating at the lives from which these men seek momentary respite: a mechanical arm nuzzles a nest of rocks, unsullied tarmac winds through the desert, an avalanche of rubble emerges from the back of a lorry.
It is on the beach that these men forge connections and at leisure, they defy an environment, which would render them inhuman: cogs in a relentless machine of labour. Debolski too defies the dehumanisation of these men. His photographs are not those we associate with migrant workers, rather, he depicts his subjects in a manner redolent of the visual language of glossy, fashion magazines. Whatsapp messages accompany the uncaptioned images: revealing Debolski’s exchanges with his subjects that intimate at the deep yet transient connections formed, and, in the words of Koxvold, that “the workers are aware of their exploitation, and entertain ideas of moving to other work sites or countries where their work might be better compensated”.
Together, image and text provide an insight into the experiences of these men, beyond the poor working conditions, which have come to define them in the public imagination. Like ends with an almost empty Coca-Cola bottle discarded on the sand. The label reads ‘BFF’ (Best Friends Forever): an emblem of migrant workers’ in Oman — disposable labour to their employers; significant individuals to one another.
Photoshop Shapes are vector images that you can size up or down without degrading the image quality. The best thing about using Shapes is that it saves you time. For example, few people can draw a perfect circle (especially with a mouse). If you click, drag, and draw a vector image, as opposed to drawing them by hand with one of the pen tools, you can draw a Custom Shape in mere seconds.
You start by selecting the Shapes tool. The default is the rectangle shape, so look for a square on the toolbar, (currently seventh icon from the bottom between the Path Selection and the Hand tool). You can choose from the Rectangle, Rounded Rectangle, Ellipse, Polygon, Line, or Custom Shape tools.
Just like your PC or Mac, a lot of what ails your Android phone can be fixed with a simple restart. Laggy navigation, crashing apps, and system quirks can be cleared easily that way. But some maladies need more than a restart. Here’s how to remedy those peskier problems.
Bluetooth devices won’t connect
If you own an Android phone—especially a Pixel or a Galaxy—you’ve encountered this: The Bluetooth device that you were using yesterday simply won’t connect anymore. You could try toggling the Bluetooth switch, but even if that works it’ll likely be a temporary fix.
IDG
If your Bluetooth devices are constantly refusing to connect, try clearing out the cache.
Mattel has released iterations of presidential Barbie since 1992, and this year she has a whole campaign team. In an exclusive interview, those women discuss why Barbie has never won the White House.
(Image credit: Barbie website)
from Arts & Life : NPR https://ift.tt/3gclMg1
via IFTTT
