Friday, November 1, 2013

Zoom Shot: Serena Williams’s Vibrant Wimbeldon Nail Art

Serena Williams has long paved the way for controversially glamorous takes on a court woman's style; today was no different. As she smashed her way to third round victory over her teenage opponent, France's Caroline Garcia, Williams went for subtle rebellion, adding neon orange bloomers, Nike wristbands and sneakers with matching checks.

Yet, a Williams tennis ensemble wouldn't be complete without her signature nail art — this time, a tangerine manicure with a different design on each digit. And, of course, one how can she play in that accessory: a stack of diamond rings. They help with her serve.


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NYU Law Student Is Making Ruth Bader Ginsburg a Meme

Thanks to some legendary quips, retorts, and sass during this week's Supreme Court proceedings, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg has earned herself her very own Tumblr shrine, created by NYU Law student and longtime RBG fan Shana Knizhnik.

"On Monday and Tuesday, my Facebook feed was abuzz with reactions to the disappointing decisions that had come out as well as RBG's amazing dissenting opinions, and a friend of mine from law school posted the hashtag #notoriousRBG on one of his posts," she told the Cut. "This gave me the immediate idea to start the Tumblr, and the rest is history."

NotoriousRBG is just the latest in a string of epic power-women Tumblr tributes, including Beyonce Art History, Fuck Yeah, Hillary Clinton, Texts from Hillary, and Lean In. Will the Tumblrization of powerful women ever stop? No? Great.

The two-day-old Tumblr has been overwhelmed with submissions, many of which highlight things we never knew about the Justice. She has an affinity for dainty lace gloves; there's a soon-to-be published comic book about her life: Female Force: Ruth Bader Ginsburg; and this T-shirt is for sale. At least, until it sells out.


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Sceptre's Android-powered Sound Bar 2.1 makes any TV smart

Sceptre Turns your Big Screen HDTV into a Smart TV with a Sound Bar 2.1 with Android™

Sound Bar 2.1 with built-in subwoofer and Android Ice Cream Sandwich 4.0 enables users to connect to the internet and download apps from Google Play Store

City of Industry, CA – June 27, 2013 – Sceptre, superior manufacturers of world class LED and LCD HDTVs and PC displays, unveils the SB301524W Speaker Sound Bar 2.1 with built-in subwoofer, Android platform and Wi-Fi connection to turn your ordinary HDTV into a smart TV through plug and play technology, enabling users to access movies, music, apps and games.

Sceptre's newest Sound Bar 2.1 includes Android's interactive media operating system to create the perfect entertainment atmosphere with the support of Wi-Fi and Android Platform. With the Android OS, users can access the Google Play™ Store to download thousands of songs, games, movies and apps to enhance their TV experience.

The SB301524W Sound Bar 2.1 incorporates a variety of technologies and components to produce room filling surround sound, including a 35W subwoofer with passive radiator, SRS WOW HD™ audio technology and dual front facing speakers. SRS WOW HD, developed by DTS technologies, improves the audio by widening the sound field, raising the vertical sound image and retrieving lost audio information during the mixing process to create a more natural surround sound experience.

Elegantly designed to complement HDTVs 42-inches and above, the SB301524W sound bar features a trendy touch sensor control panel to easily adjust volume, preset modes or sound sources, an auto-dimming LED screen that displays current settings and a remote control compatible with multiple Sceptre HDTVs. It is also the ideal replacement for expensive and bulky surround sound systems, eliminating unsightly wires, expensive adaptors and the need to have a separate subwoofer.

"The Sound Bar 2.1 with built-in subwoofer and Android Platform turns your traditional HDTV into a Smart TV at a fraction of the cost," said Cathy Chou, Sceptre's vice president of operations. "Our newest addition to the family of sound bars not only enhances your HDTV experience, but also brings people closer by giving you access to the same applications as a computer, including Skype, Facebook, Instant Messenger and more."

To enhance the overall experience, Sceptre offers an optional smart remote control that replicates the functionality of a traditional mouse and keyboard. The SB301524W sound bar can be easily wall-mounted using only two screws and is currently available for $299.99 at Walmart, Amazon, Tiger Direct, Sears, K-Mart and NewEgg.


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Imgur launches meme generator, fuels your procrastination even more

Imgur Releases Meme Generator to Empower Content Creators Worldwide

Brace yourselves: Memes now created directly on Imgur

SAN FRANCISCO––JUNE 26, 2013––Today, memes come home. In the past, memes have been created elsewhere on the Internet, then uploaded to Imgur for rabid fans to consume and share. Today Imgur announces its own Meme Generator, handing control over the process to its users, and making meme creation easier and more streamlined than ever before. Now, creating, saving and sharing memes can happen directly on Imgur!

To create and share memes via the Imgur Meme Generator, please visit http://imgur.com/memegen.

"Our community has been asking for an Imgur meme generator for a long time, so we hope they're as excited about this new meme generator as we are to deliver it to them," says Alan Schaaf, Founder and CEO, Imgur. "It just makes sense that as more content is hosted and shared on Imgur, we continue to hand over content creation tools to our community. We can't wait to see what they come up with."

A popular meme creation tool was recently banned from Reddit over vote manipulation charges, which escalated the Imgur community's clamor for the company to release a tool of their own. Little did the Imgurians know that the company had Meme Generator in the works. In fact, the tool itself had long been finished, and was merely awaiting integration into the larger site. Even amidst its mobile app launch, the Imgur team launched into action over the weekend, pulling an all-nighter Sunday in order to pull it all together.

"Our community made it clear that this had to be done as quickly as possible, so we committed to doing whatever it took," said Schaaf. "This was no small task – our engineering team rocked it."

Although the build demanded a monumental effort against a tight timeframe, the timing is ideal. Many smaller sites have the basic tools to create memes, however none can do so at the scale that Imgurcan with its audience of more than 80MM users.

Schaaf's goal with Meme Generator is similar to when he first built Imgur: To go beyond reproducing a commodity product by creating something that would stand out in a crowded market against many similar competitors. "When I look at other products I naturally think of ways to improve upon what already exists. We applied that approach to the development of Meme Generator, and built something we think is better than anything currently available elsewhere."

Imgur's Meme Generator features a simple user interface that's more flexible than other tools. Users drag and drop text boxes while the text auto-fits and re-sizes automatically. Additionally, users can choose from templates of all the most popular memes, or upload and create new memes from scratch. Meme Generator will also feature a Memes Gallery to browse and engage with the most viral memes, and remix memes created by other users.

To download and use Meme Generator today, please visit http://imgur.com/memegen.


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Rick Perry: Wendy Davis Is Proof Women Don’t Need Abortion Rights

At a National Right to Life conference yesterday, Texas Governor Rick Perry said State Senator Wendy Davis's remarkable life story is proof American women don't need their right to an abortion. Think Progress has a video of the remarks.

"Who are we to say that children born into the worst of circumstances can't grow to live successful lives? In fact, even the woman who filibustered the Senate the other day was born into difficult circumstances. She was the daughter of a single woman, she was a teenage mother herself. She managed to eventually graduate from Harvard Law School and serve in the Texas Senate. It is just unfortunate that she hasn't learned from her own example that every life must be given a chance to realize its full potential and that every life matters."

Looked at another way, it's extremely fortunate Davis hasn't leveraged her own example to make health care decisions for all women. But Perry's cool with making that choice for her as well.

Here's some Wendy Davis nail art that might make it feel better, courtesy Austin Texas's Nails Y'all.


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Sean Parker Is a Honeymoonster: A Guide to Post-Wedding Bridezillas

Yesterday, Facebook mogul Sean Parker published a 9500-word essay on TechCrunch debunking criticism of his $10M wedding in Big Sur. Contrary to media reports that portrayed him as a forest-destroying egomaniac, Parker writes, his wedding was "beautiful," "tasteful," "enchanted," and "epic." He invokes fairy tales, God, and J.R.R. Tolkien. He uses the phrase "unparalleled beauty." He also uses the phrase "imbuing the moment with a feeling of supernatural bliss."

This is honeymoonster behavior.

The honeymoonster is social media’s sequel to the bridezilla. Though its origin is difficult to trace, bridezilla appears to have entered the lexicon in the mid-nineties to describe a woman behaving monstrously during the planning and execution of her wedding. The earliest print reference appears to be a 1995 Boston Globe article about bridal greed: "She also cautions brides-to-be about turning into Bridezilla, the name wedding consultants bestow on brides who are particularly difficult and obnoxious." Bridezillas reach their peak on wedding day, but like mayflies expiring at dusk after a day of noisy mating rituals, they expire when the night ends. After that, the conventional wisdom goes, they're just cranky wives.

But modern weddings have a second life online. They are photographed, Instagrammed, and posted on Facebook for admiration, discussion, nostalgia, and gawking. Wedding website templates at The Knot and My Wedding offer mechanisms for distributing pictures after the party. And so a new genre of wedding-adjacent divas have emerged. Let’s call them honeymoonsters—newlyweds who want to manage their weddings after they're over.

Bridezillas control what you do at a wedding; honeymoonsters control how you document it. (They may ban electronics entirely.) Bridezillas enforce wedding hashtags; honeymoonsters force deletion of tagged material they don't like. Bridezillas terrorize wedding planners; honeymoonsters terrorize the videographers, photographers, and scrapbookers. Honeymoonsters go to great lengths to trash the dress. They pose for morning-after boudoir photos.

Sean Parker helped engineer the invention of social media, so he is both cause and effect of honeymoonster culture. He is the mother of all honeymoonsters.

Image management is more complicated for a public figure than it is for the rest of us, but according to Parker, the dilemma exists on a continuum of relative digital celebrity. "One of the most salient themes of our ceremony and also of our vows was the notion of 'sanctuary,'" Parker writes. "Such a place is increasingly difficult to find in our technologically supercharged and hyper-connected world." For those "cursed with celebrity or notoriety," the effect is "only exaggerated." (For the sake of expediency, let's not dwell on the tortured self-portrait embedded in those statements, tantalizing as it may be.) "We chose a setting for our wedding that was a literal expression of our search for sanctuary: a place that was safe, private, and intimate," he writes. "We didn’t court attention – quite the opposite, we asked guests to check their cell phones and cameras at the door." Nevertheless, he planned a multi-million wedding that involved fake ruins and a settlement with the California Coastal Commission, and his essay contains photos and descriptions of the ceremony, all available for public consumption. His angst isn't only about attention. It's also about control. Sanctuaries, after all, are only safe when they are controlled to keep out predators and the profane.

Parker faced an abnormal level of wedding backlash, but the pursuit of control drives non-celebrity honeymoonsters, too. Check out the rationale from this "Cellphone/Camera Ban" discussion at The Knot:

The bride wants to edit how her guests "enjoy the moment" (preferably with visible tears of joy) as well as how they will look in the professional photographs she commissions (no cellphone facial obstruction). She's not against attention; reception Instagramming is fair game, as long as the images are properly tagged. She wants to influence when and how people pay attention to her, both in the moment and when they look back.

Wanting to remember your wedding a certain way is not inherently monstrous. Nor is the post-facto pursuit of privacy. Both are reasonable desires and can be indulged healthily. But when your post-wedding triage approaches the length of the Epic of Gilgamesh, consider taking a break. The wedding is over. It served its purpose. You are now married. You probably even had fun! "Our wedding day was a beautiful dream come true," Parker writes. "After all the stress of the preceding 19 days, the wedding itself went off without a hitch. Afterwards we were excited to run away on our honeymoon and forget about everything." But he could not. Some toxic combination of
wedding stress, digital feedback loops, and social anxiety had driven him to madness. He had become a honeymoonster.


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