I was all shitfaced-hammered-that's 2 count-em 2, empty bottles of Bulliet Bourbon on the floor next to me (no excuse for prowess or the lack thereof on the instrument) and I was using the internal features of a Fuji finepix S1000 cheapo digicam for the recording...ambient light, wasn't shooting for perfection-My only goal was to make it through the verses with my voice as damaged as it is....Open tuned to D, this tune was originally recorded by James Arnold, who had a singular left-handed slide style yet unmatched after over 80 years, I can't even begin to approach his level of panachy on the axe-Thanks for the props

It's a dead joke, kicked into submission not unlike the tired comedy of SNL since the untimely death of Phil Hartman-It's also the singularity which launched my own campaign against tired, sophomoric potty-humor(somes' funny, yours geeks the heads from squirrels) here on the VS and the "winning personalities" of her stalwart adherents coveting such anal-expulsive personality traits...

A vote for a cat fart is a vote for de-evolution!

The internet as a medium is neutral about whether or not you switch your focus from cat videos to panda attacks to Ron Paul every 3 seconds. If you so choose, you can just as easily concentrate on one singular point of interest on the internet for "a few minutes" (or a few hours), allowing your brain to "learn something" and transfer from your short term to your long term memory.

This guy is the 2000's versions of all the parents in the 60's, 70's, and 80's yelling at their kids to drag their asses outside and DO SOMETHING instead of sitting around watching the boob tube all day.

Sorry, but those are lame and old excuses. The Soviets were doing the exact same thing too, why do you singular blame carving up of nations on the west? More than that, there has never been a time in all of human history when that was not happening. Before the British empire it was the Romans, before them it was the Egyptians, along the middle of that was mohammad and his crews attempts at their own empires.

I'm not willing to excuse atrocities and crimes because of earlier atrocities and crimes. The Sunni on Shia and Shia on Sunni violence predates America by a few centuries anyways, and it does nothing today to dissuade, prevent or even retaliate against the West. It is vile and far beyond what is seen by proponents of any other major religion.

One third of people pronouncing a name correctly is not a tiny minority. What proportion of people incorrectly use "data" as singular? Does this majority make it right?
The format was named by someone, and we should respect that. People here may be tempted to refer to Dag as "Dawg", but that's not right...
..or is it?

P.S. ..I don't really care about any of this.

Simple as fear. It is not only a wonderful experience it is also very terrifying. Psychedelics, if that is even what it is, have been ostracized by society, for whatever reason, politics, philosophy, culture, people making OSs due to their inspiration since the 60s. DMT was known about back then, but not widely known about, back then it was super rare. Getting the main ingredients would have been a pain and required going to South America.

Now that the ingredients are not difficult to get, thanks to the digital information system, more and more people are seeing what this thing is. And many of them that take enough come back with stories right out of a Phillip K Dick novel, or information that seems so New Agey, frequencies, cymatics, fractals, entities, etc, it is too weird or difficult for people to even want to look at this as something more than a really crazy drug and look into what it is doing to the brain. This has been done to small extents in providing details into which serotonin receptors DMT is affecting. What is clear is that one would have to take HUGE amounts of mushrooms to get to what this state is, if it is even possible. This takes a person there in two seconds then ten minutes, you are back. How is it possible?

By all means, I would LOVE for this to be studied by science ; then the Singularity would be right around the corner, mann...JK.

Thanks for the clarification. I'm not to upset disagreeing over interview protocol. I am just of the opinion that interviews shouldn't always be conducted without challenging the interviewee's positions and statements. I believe on egregious enough statements it is in fact the interviewers job to push, and in proportion to the statements. That's where I feel this interview was weak.

That said, I 100% believe that interviews that completely accept and just hear out the subject's positions have their place. It's one of the things the VICE guys do best and what makes them, IMHO one of the singular best news sources out there today.

Idiot Savant.

Very interesting. We need to figure out how to teach these guys how to talk. I'd wager it would make an interesting conversation. Would be pretty cool if humans caused a sort of chimpanzee singularity.

Then again, perhaps its their extraordinary ability at tasks like this that also prevent them from learning language. Maybe we should try giving them magic mushrooms?

Nah, what I mean is this isn't a matter of fails / wins. That implies plural. This is a singular win / fail.

If anyone wants to read more about Stephen and LGBTQIA youth, here is the NYT article.

The New York Time's

Generation LGBTQIA

By MICHAEL SCHULMAN

Published: January 10, 2013

STEPHEN IRA, a junior at Sarah Lawrence College, uploaded a video last March on We Happy Trans, a site that shares "positive perspectives" on being transgender.

In the breakneck six-and-a-half-minute monologue - hair tousled, sitting in a wood-paneled dorm room - Stephen exuberantly declared himself "a queer, a nerd fighter, a writer, an artist and a guy who needs a haircut," and held forth on everything from his style icons (Truman Capote and "any male-identified person who wears thigh-highs or garters") to his toy zebra.

Because Stephen, who was born Kathlyn, is the 21-year-old child of Warren Beatty and Annette Bening, the video went viral, garnering nearly half a million views. But that was not the only reason for its appeal. With its adrenalized, freewheeling eloquence, the video seemed like a battle cry for a new generation of post-gay gender activists, for whom Stephen represents a rare public face.

Armed with the millennial generation's defining traits - Web savvy, boundless confidence and social networks that extend online and off - Stephen and his peers are forging a political identity all their own, often at odds with mainstream gay culture.

If the gay-rights movement today seems to revolve around same-sex marriage, this generation is seeking something more radical: an upending of gender roles beyond the binary of male/female. The core question isn't whom they love, but who they are - that is, identity as distinct from sexual orientation.

But what to call this movement? Whereas "gay and lesbian" was once used to lump together various sexual minorities - and more recently "L.G.B.T." to include bisexual and transgender - the new vanguard wants a broader, more inclusive abbreviation. "Youth today do not define themselves on the spectrum of L.G.B.T.," said Shane Windmeyer, a founder of Campus Pride, a national student advocacy group based in Charlotte, N.C.

Part of the solution has been to add more letters, and in recent years the post-post-post-gay-rights banner has gotten significantly longer, some might say unwieldy. The emerging rubric is "L.G.B.T.Q.I.A.," which stands for different things, depending on whom you ask.

"Q" can mean "questioning" or "queer," an umbrella term itself, formerly derogatory before it was appropriated by gay activists in the 1990s. "I" is for "intersex," someone whose anatomy is not exclusively male or female. And "A" stands for "ally" (a friend of the cause) or "asexual," characterized by the absence of sexual attraction.

It may be a mouthful, but it's catching on, especially on liberal-arts campuses.

The University of Missouri, Kansas City, for example, has an L.G.B.T.Q.I.A. Resource Center that, among other things, helps student locate "gender-neutral" restrooms on campus. Vassar College offers an L.G.B.T.Q.I.A. Discussion Group on Thursday afternoons. Lehigh University will be hosting its second annual L.G.B.T.Q.I.A. Intercollegiate Conference next month, followed by a Queer Prom. Amherst College even has an L.G.B.T.Q.Q.I.A.A. center, where every group gets its own letter.

The term is also gaining traction on social media sites like Twitter and Tumblr, where posts tagged with "lgbtqia" suggest a younger, more progressive outlook than posts that are merely labeled "lgbt."

"There's a very different generation of people coming of age, with completely different conceptions of gender and sexuality," said Jack Halberstam (formerly Judith), a transgender professor at the University of Southern California and the author, most recently, of "Gaga Feminism: Sex, Gender, and the End of Normal."

"When you see terms like L.G.B.T.Q.I.A.," Professor Halberstam added, "it's because people are seeing all the things that fall out of the binary, and demanding that a name come into being."

And with a plethora of ever-expanding categories like "genderqueer" and "androgyne" to choose from, each with an online subculture, piecing together a gender identity can be as D.I.Y. as making a Pinterest board.

BUT sometimes L.G.B.T.Q.I.A. is not enough. At the University of Pennsylvania last fall, eight freshmen united in the frustration that no campus group represented them.

Sure, Penn already had some two dozen gay student groups, including Queer People of Color, Lambda Alliance and J-Bagel, which bills itself as the university's "Jewish L.G.B.T.Q.I.A. Community." But none focused on gender identity (the closest, Trans Penn, mostly catered to faculty members and graduate students).

Richard Parsons, an 18-year-old transgender male, discovered that when he attended a student mixer called the Gay Affair, sponsored by Penn's L.G.B.T. Center. "I left thoroughly disappointed," said Richard, a garrulous freshman with close-cropped hair, wire-framed glasses and preppy clothes, who added, "This is the L.G.B.T. Center, and it's all gay guys."

Through Facebook, Richard and others started a group called Penn Non-Cis, which is short for "non-cisgender." For those not fluent in gender-studies speak, "cis" means "on the same side as" and "cisgender" denotes someone whose gender identity matches his or her biology, which describes most of the student body. The group seeks to represent everyone else. "This is a freshman uprising," Richard said.

On a brisk Tuesday night in November, about 40 students crowded into the L.G.B.T. Center, a converted 19th-century carriage house, for the group's inaugural open mike. The organizers had lured students by handing out fliers on campus while barking: "Free condoms! Free ChapStick!"

"There's a really vibrant L.G.B.T. scene," Kate Campbell, one of the M.C.'s, began. "However, that mostly encompasses the L.G.B. and not too much of the T. So we're aiming to change that."

Students read poems and diary entries, and sang guitar ballads. Then Britt Gilbert - a punky-looking freshman with a blond bob, chunky glasses and a rock band T-shirt - took the stage. She wanted to talk about the concept of "bi-gender."

"Does anyone want to share what they think it is?"

Silence.

She explained that being bi-gender is like manifesting both masculine and feminine personas, almost as if one had a "detachable penis." "Some days I wake up and think, 'Why am I in this body?' " she said. "Most days I wake up and think, 'What was I thinking yesterday?' 

"Britt's grunginess belies a warm matter-of-factness, at least when describing her journey. As she elaborated afterward, she first heard the term "bi-gender" from Kate, who found it on Tumblr. The two met at freshman orientation and bonded. In high school, Kate identified as "agender" and used the singular pronoun "they"; she now sees her gender as an "amorphous blob."

By contrast, Britt's evolution was more linear. She grew up in suburban Pennsylvania and never took to gender norms. As a child, she worshiped Cher and thought boy bands were icky. Playing video games, she dreaded having to choose male or female avatars.

In middle school, she started calling herself bisexual and dated boys. By 10th grade, she had come out as a lesbian. Her parents thought it was a phase - until she brought home a girlfriend, Ash. But she still wasn't settled.

"While I definitely knew that I liked girls, I didn't know that I was one," Britt said. Sometimes she would leave the house in a dress and feel uncomfortable, as if she were wearing a Halloween costume. Other days, she felt fine. She wasn't "trapped in the wrong body," as the cliché has it - she just didn't know which body she wanted.

When Kate told her about the term "bi-gender," it clicked instantly. "I knew what it was, before I knew what it was," Britt said, adding that it is more fluid than "transgender" but less vague than "genderqueer" - a catchall term for nontraditional gender identities.

At first, the only person she told was Ash, who responded, "It took you this long to figure it out?" For others, the concept was not so easy to grasp. Coming out as a lesbian had been relatively simple, Britt said, "since people know what that is." But when she got to Penn, she was relieved to find a small community of freshmen who had gone through similar awakenings.

Among them was Richard Parsons, the group's most politically lucid member. Raised female, Richard grew up in Orlando, Fla., and realized he was transgender in high school. One summer, he wanted to room with a transgender friend at camp, but his mother objected. "She's like, 'Well, if you say that he's a guy, then I don't want you rooming with a guy,' " he recalled. "We were in a car and I basically blurted out, 'I think I might be a guy, too!' "

After much door-slamming and tears, Richard and his mother reconciled. But when she asked what to call him, he had no idea. He chose "Richard" on a whim, and later added a middle name, Matthew, because it means "gift of God."

By the time he got to Penn, he had been binding his breasts for more than two years and had developed back pain. At the open mike, he told a harrowing story about visiting the university health center for numbness and having a panic attack when he was escorted into a women's changing room.

Nevertheless, he praised the university for offering gender-neutral housing. The college's medical program also covers sexual reassignment surgery, which, he added, "has heavily influenced my decision to probably go under the Penn insurance plan next year."

PENN has not always been so forward-thinking; a decade ago, the L.G.B.T. Center (nestled amid fraternity houses) was barely used. But in 2010, the university began reaching out to applicants whose essays raised gay themes. Last year, the gay newsmagazine The Advocate ranked Penn among the top 10 trans-friendly universities, alongside liberal standbys like New York University.

More and more colleges, mostly in the Northeast, are catering to gender-nonconforming students. According to a survey by Campus Pride, at least 203 campuses now allow transgender students to room with their preferred gender; 49 have a process to change one's name and gender in university records; and 57 cover hormone therapy. In December, the University of Iowa became the first to add a "transgender" checkbox to its college application.

"I wrote about an experience I had with a drag queen as my application essay for all the Ivy Leagues I applied to," said Santiago Cortes, one of the Penn students. "And I got into a few of the Ivy Leagues - Dartmouth, Columbia and Penn. Strangely not Brown.

"But even these measures cannot keep pace with the demands of incoming students, who are challenging the curriculum much as gay activists did in the '80s and '90s. Rather than protest the lack of gay studies classes, they are critiquing existing ones for being too narrow.

Several members of Penn Non-Cis had been complaining among themselves about a writing seminar they were taking called "Beyond 'Will & Grace,' " which examined gay characters on shows like "Ellen," "Glee" and "Modern Family." The professor, Gail Shister, who is a lesbian, had criticized several students for using "L.G.B.T.Q." in their essays, saying it was clunky, and proposed using "queer" instead. Some students found the suggestion offensive, including Britt Gilbert, who described Ms. Shister as "unaccepting of things that she doesn't understand."

Ms. Shister, reached by phone, said the criticism was strictly grammatical. "I am all about economy of expression," she said. "L.G.B.T.Q. doesn't exactly flow off the tongue. So I tell the students, 'Don't put in an acronym with five or six letters.' "

One thing is clear. Ms. Shister, who is 60 and in 1979 became The Philadelphia Inquirer's first female sportswriter, is of a different generation, a fact she acknowledges freely, even gratefully. "Frankly, I'm both proud and envious that these young people are growing up in an age where they're free to love who they want," she said.

If history is any guide, the age gap won't be so easy to overcome. As liberated gay men in the 1970s once baffled their pre-Stonewall forebears, the new gender outlaws, to borrow a phrase from the transgender writer Kate Bornstein, may soon be running ideological circles around their elders.

Still, the alphabet soup of L.G.B.T.Q.I.A. may be difficult to sustain. "In the next 10 or 20 years, the various categories heaped under the umbrella of L.G.B.T. will become quite quotidian," Professor Halberstam said.

Even at the open mike, as students picked at potato chips and pineapple slices, the bounds of identity politics were spilling over and becoming blurry.

At one point, Santiago, a curly-haired freshman from Colombia, stood before the crowd. He and a friend had been pondering the limits of what he calls "L.G.B.T.Q. plus."

"Why do only certain letters get to be in the full acronym?" he asked.

Then he rattled off a list of gender identities, many culled from Wikipedia. "We have our lesbians, our gays," he said, before adding, "bisexual, transsexual, queer, homosexual, asexual." He took a breath and continued. "Pansexual. Omnisexual. Trisexual. Agender. Bi-gender. Third gender. Transgender. Transvestite. Intersexual. Two-spirit. Hijra. Polyamorous."

By now, the list had turned into free verse. He ended: "Undecided. Questioning. Other. Human."

The room burst into applause.

Correction: January 10, 2013, Thursday

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction: An earlier version of this article and a picture caption referred incorrectly to a Sarah Lawrence College student who uploaded a video online about being transgender. He says he is Stephen Ira, not Stephen Ira Beatty.

Source NYT

Fair Use

Neil should play Portal.

Personally what interests me about the future of videogames is the prospect of more advanced AI. Seems that the goal of games for a while has been life like graphics and proper physics. We're getting pretty close there, but it still leaves us with a rather empty virtual world. I'd be much more interested in creating a virtual ecosystem complete with all forms of life, both simple and complex that are all able be autonomous. The rise of parallel processing/multiple cores might make this sort of thing a reality, as well as more realistic AIs. Hell, maybe the technological singularity will emerge from game development...

I believe you, @gorillaman. If those sentences read the same to you, then they read the same to you. It IS hard for me to understand how that can be true because my experience is radically different, but that is my problem, not yours.

I'm sure it is a generational thing (although I know that there are young men and women who are careful with their language, so it isn't JUST me and my generation. You made some pretty sweeping statements about the whole world, as if the way you experience things is the standard. Gotta disagree with you there. And your use of "we" does seem a tad bit ... over-reaching.) It blows my mind how things have changed in the past 40 years. I grew up with arguments about whether it was okay to call an author who happened to be a woman an "authoress." Can you imagine? Making the act of writing a book gender-related? That word is gone. As is "poetess." And very few women were reporters -- if they wanted to work for a newspaper, they were mostly relegated to the "women's section" where the news was all about society events and recipes. It was even labelled "women's section." It was a different world, and I do NOT miss it.

I too would love it if gendered nouns and pronouns went away. I just learned that until relatively recently, it was proper usage to say "their" instead of "his" as the gender neutral version. And it was a woman who worked hard to change it (I guess it bugged her that a singular subject would have a multiple pronoun, or whatever the grammar terms are.) I'd love to go back to "them" and "their".

I disagree with you that my "radical" version is unsound. I acknowledged that the cultural significance has changed in the past 40 years. However, I dare say you would not go up to a 35 year old black man who is a stranger to you and call him a boy to his face. Although if you do it, I would love to hear the results. We would need a sample of more than one, right? -- you might get a polite person, after all!

If you try this experiment, I urge you to avoid a Southern accent and turn the "boy" into a two syllable word.

As to your question -- "What do you think is the #1 reason 'girl' as a synonym for 'woman' is in more common usage than 'boy' for 'man'?" -- you wouldn't accept my answer, I fear. It hasn't changed in 40 years. I hear things you don't, right? I am happy to tell you, if you really want to hear. I am afraid what I say will just cause you to scoff.

I would love to hear your answer to that, though. Why is that? Why is it okay to casually, consistently, overwhelmingly call a grown woman a girl, but we don't do that to men? Why the difference? What is gained from that word substitution? What is lost?

And why is sometimes okay to use "girl" and "boy" for grown men and women? I do it all the time. Boys' night out, girls' night out -- those are just fine with me.

Personally, I would love to see the word "guy" get ungendered. I have a very butch Lesbian friend who HATES it when a group of women is called "guys." I can't stand the word "gal" -- don't know why. It is just... ancient and stodgy. I love being out with the guys, but lord save me from being out with the "gals".

I do wonder about this part of your attempt at this experiment -- "words come up ... in the wrong contexts." I don't understand what that means. It is a simple list of rules. You hear the word "man", change it to "boy." You hear the word "girl" applied to anyone age 20 and older, you change it to "woman." If you are adventurous, you use those words when talking. How can there be "wrong contexts"? That is exactly the experiment, isn't it?

Any way this plays out, I really appreciate you engaging me on this. This is the most fun I've had with this topic EVER. And I really appreciate hearing from a different generational perspective. I'm letting it percolate and I can feel things shifting a bit.

You make a fine point. I only wish we could be curious AND remove moral judgement about it all (so much of the gender classification talk falls into this trap it seems). Me? I'm more fascinated by how this guy thinks he's found the perfect mate....she/he could be a dolphin for all I care. I don't think I'm completely alone in that more singular fascination...it just somehow seems to be perverted by questions that don't really have any relevance to the subjects of such matters...the anatomy of his chosen partner is largely moot...to him it seems and to me. I was expressing a desire for it to become so for everyone else.

>> ^dag:

Unless we rewire our brains at a limbic level - I don't think we'll ever stop thinking and talking about this stuff - because it involves sexuality. That's what we're here for. We've evolved to find sex endlessly fascinating.>> ^bigbikeman:
shrug . Can't wait til nobody feels the need to figure it out. We're well past the point where prolific and abundant reproduction is a necessary part of our survival as a species...and....we have other problems.
They're happy with each other. Unless you want to drag some kind of puritanical/biblical morals into it, that's pretty much a wrap imho.

>> ^KnivesOut:

@shinyblurry so you're being divisive by disagreeing with Obama. You should stop being so divisive. You're being divisive by disagreeing with me. You should stop being so divisive.
It's pretty simple: the President said he would work to defuse the partisan politics that were/are tearing our country apart. The Republicans said "No" and took their ball and went home. So he was left with an unfulfilled "promise". It's ridiculous to hold him singularly accountable for attempting to negotiate with religious zealots and morons, and failing to break their dead-lock of stupidity.
Yes, it's amusing that simpletons like yourself can't comprehend the actual nuances of bipartisanship in government.


The fact is, he didn't even try. He used the supermajority in congress to do whatever he wanted, in direct contradiction to his promises. It's a character issue, but you handwave it because you hate republicans and it doesn't matter to you how he treats them. I also wonder if it's possible for you to go more than one post without using abusive ad hominem attacks.

@shinyblurry so you're being divisive by disagreeing with Obama. You should stop being so divisive. You're being divisive by disagreeing with me. You should stop being so divisive.

It's pretty simple: the President said he would work to defuse the partisan politics that were/are tearing our country apart. The Republicans said "No" and took their ball and went home. So he was left with an unfulfilled "promise". It's ridiculous to hold him singularly accountable for attempting to negotiate with religious zealots and morons, and failing to break their dead-lock of stupidity.

Yes, it's amusing that simpletons like yourself can't comprehend the actual nuances of bipartisanship in government.