October 2018

Fractalized Nyan Cat

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nyanfract

[hooktube] video (detail of screenshot)

RA (via email): theres a guy on youtube ... manipulating parameters in fractal software. i went to his channel last night and he posted a 'test' of some sort of new texture feature in his software and used the nyan cat in the background as the texture. the end result feels particularly interesting, its a very weird mash up i think.

i should also add ... if you look at his other videos, they are all kind of serious, or he has demos being really helpful teaching how his workflow is. this 'cute' vid kind of caught me by surprise, more so than if the channel was filled with nothing but like funny or silly stuff.

TM (reply): Agreed the mash-up of (trivial) cat and (ominous) 3D borg cube is interesting. The cat improves with all the flipping and spatial permutations. And yes let's hope he doesn't do another 20 like that (with various meme videos).

The nyan cat in the background is blurry (probably enlarged in Firefox!) and then returns to something closer to its original resolution as it shrinks and grows. I suppose fuzzy pixels are needed for the sake of the 3D illusion.

corporate ownership of meme sites

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Like the blogosphere, meme sites are a legacy of the previous decade that were essentially eclipsed by the big corporate "social" silos. In other words, you could experience the meme on "social" without having to go to an originator, or originating aggregator. So the meme sites lost momentum as destinations. (This wasn't the only reason: add uniform boring corporate redesigns and simple exhaustion of the original target audience.) In any case, it makes sense that these old sites would become "properties" that some Silicontrepeneur would try to squeeze "value" from. For the morbidly inclined, the current landscape is confusing, though.

Here, "eBaum's WORLD" is listed as a portfolio company of Literally media:

literallymedia2

What, no funnyjunk or somethingawful?

Clicking the first Literally link takes you to eBaum's WORLD, which shows another company, Viumbe LLC, as owner:

ebaumviumbe

The Viumbe page lists eBaum as a property:

viumbe

So is Viumbe a Literally subsidiary? Is eBaum in transition between owners with dated website info? Or is Literally the "old" owner? Inquiring meme ghouls want to know.

Update: A reader emailed with some answers!

Peter's bonus pays Paul's minimum wage

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Amazon raising its minimum wage was an obvious ploy to reverse the growing realization that the company is The Devil, and it left critics struggling with "yes that's great but..." arguments.
Then this news came out: Amazon eliminates monthly bonuses and stock grants after minimum wage increase (The Verge):

Amazon garnered praise for raising the minimum wage for its hourly workers to $15 yesterday, but the widely-publicized move also came at the expense of monthly bonuses and stock options. The company explained its decision to shift to a new stock purchase program in the announcement blog post yesterday, citing that hourly employees preferred the “predictability and immediacy of cash to RSUs,” or restricted stock units, but the post doesn’t mention the loss of monthly incentives, which Bloomberg reported earlier today.

Several Amazon warehouse employees have criticized the move, stating they would actually be losing thousands in incentive pay. Currently, warehouse workers get two shares of Amazon stock when they’re hired ($1,952.76 per share as of writing), and an additional stock option each year. After the changes take effect, the RSU program will be phased out for stocks that vest in 2020 and 2021, and it will be replaced with a direct stock purchase plan by the end of next year.

An Amazon warehouse worker told The Verge via email that the news was devastating to fulfillment employees, many of whom depend on their RSU and VCP (variable compensation pay, a performance-based monthly bonus program) incentives on top of their hourly wages. VCP incentives, which are dependent on good attendance and hitting productivity targets, could get Amazon workers an 8 percent monthly bonus, and a 16 percent bonus during the peak November and December seasons.

Perhaps some of the reluctant praise would have been stanched if this sneaky maneuver had been better known.