Personalised flapjacks from Dan Hogan for @helloimfreddie and me! (Taken with instagram)

I’m a little confused about this new Spotify player malarkey. It’s essentially just a link through to Spotify as it has to open the application to play the track. Go on, try it and you’ll see!

Maybe it’s not worth all the hype…

P.S. I love Noah Gundersen

shortformblog:

• $77 million earned per Instagram employee (whoa guys)

• 7,600 number of current employees at Kodak, a bankrupt company which inspired Instagram’s style
• 13 number of current employees at Instagram, which started in 2010 and was iPhone-only until last week source

» A sad…

girlfriendmagazine:

Books make us happy…

They certainly do.

Absolutely amazing little video about a secret bookstore in New York City. I want to go there! I want to go and explore the world!!

Found it here: http://www.openculture.com/2011/07/a_secret_bookstore_in_new_york_city.html

Gorgeous song, gorgeous poster.

A lovely weekend in London

I love making new friends. I’m excited to make this one a best friend.

warbyparker:

Identity Crisis by Mason Phillips.

Just great.

bookshelfporn:

“The Brain” is a 14,280 cubic-foot cinematic laboratory where the owner, a filmmaker, can work out ideas. By Olson Kundig Architects.

I want this more than anything!

colin:

(via 138 Years of Popular Science | blprnt.blg)

Pretty but looks pretty hard to read too!

Absolutely in love with this guy’s music. He’s just Incredible.

Go and buy his music here: www.noahgundersen.bandcamp.com

I particularly love the track ‘Garden’

Very interesting article for all the KONY 2012 followers!

visiblechildren:

For those asking what you can do to help, please link to visiblechildren.tumblr.com wherever you see KONY 2012 posts.

UPDATE: Facebook has blocked this blog. Complain here and post on Facebook about visiblechildren.tumblr[dot]com instead. 

You do not need to ask my permission to share this. Please link it widely.

I do not doubt for a second that those involved in KONY 2012 have great intentions, nor do I doubt for a second that Joseph Kony is a very evil man. But despite this, I’m strongly opposed to the KONY 2012 campaign.

KONY 2012 is the product of a group called Invisible Children, a controversial activist group and not-for-profit. They’ve released 11 films, most with an accompanying bracelet colour (KONY 2012 is fittingly red), all of which focus on Joseph Kony. When we buy merch from them, when we link to their video, when we put up posters linking to their website, we support the organization. I don’t think that’s a good thing, and I’m not alone.

Invisible Children has been condemned time and time again. As a registered not-for-profit, its finances are public. Last year, the organization spent $8,676,614. Only 31% went to their charity program (page 6)*. This is far from ideal, and Charity Navigator rates their accountability 2/4 stars because they haven’t had their finances externally audited. But it goes way deeper than that.

The group is in favour of direct military intervention, and their money funds the Ugandan government’s army and various other military forces. Here’s a photoof the founders of Invisible Children posing with weapons and personnel of the Sudan People’s Liberation Army. Both the Ugandan army and Sudan People’s Liberation Army are riddled with accusations of rape and looting, but Invisible Children defends them, arguing that the Ugandan army is “better equipped than that of any of the other affected countries”, although Kony is no longer active in Uganda and hasn’t been since 2006 by their own admission.

Still, the bulk of Invisible Children’s spending isn’t on funding African militias, but on awareness and filmmaking. Which can be great, except that Foreign Affairs has claimed that Invisible Children (among others) “manipulates facts for strategic purposes, exaggerating the scale of LRA abductions and murders and emphasizing the LRA’s use of innocent children as soldiers, and portraying Kony — a brutal man, to be sure — as uniquely awful, a Kurtz-like embodiment of evil.” He’s certainly evil, but exaggeration and manipulation to capture the public eye is unproductive, unprofessional and dishonest.

As Christ Blattman, a political scientist at Yale, writes on the topic of IC’s programming, “There’s also something inherently misleading, naive, maybe even dangerous, about the idea of rescuing children or saving of Africa. […] It hints uncomfortably of the White Man’s Burden. Worse, sometimes it does more than hint. The savior attitude is pervasive in advocacy, and it inevitably shapes programming. Usually misconceived programming.”

Still, Kony’s a bad guy, and he’s been around a while. Which is why the US has been involved in stopping him for years. U.S. Africa Command (AFRICOM) has sent multiple missions to capture or kill Kony over the years. And they’ve failed time and time again, each provoking a ferocious response and increased retaliative slaughter. The issue with taking out a man who uses a child army is that his bodyguards are children. Any effort to capture or kill him will almost certainly result in many children’s deaths, an impact that needs to be minimized as much as possible. Each attempt brings more retaliation. And yet Invisible Children funds this military intervention. Kony has been involved in peace talks in the past, which have fallen through. But Invisible Children is now focusing on military intervention.

Military intervention may or may not be the right idea, but people supporting KONY 2012 probably don’t realize they’re helping fund the Ugandan military who are themselves raping and looting away. If people know this and still support Invisible Children because they feel it’s the best solution based on their knowledge and research, I have no issue with that. But I don’t think most people are in that position, and that’s a problem.

Is awareness good? Yes. But these problems are highly complex, not one-dimensional and, frankly, aren’t of the nature that can be solved by postering, film-making and changing your Facebook profile picture, as hard as that is to swallow. Giving your money and public support to Invisible Children so they can spend it on funding ill-advised violent intervention and movie #12 isn’t helping. Do I have a better answer? No, I don’t, but that doesn’t mean that you should support KONY 2012 just because it’s something. Something isn’t always better than nothing. Sometimes it’s worse.

If you want to write to your Member of Parliament or your Senator or the President or the Prime Minister, by all means, go ahead. If you want to post about Joseph Kony’s crimes on Facebook, go ahead. But let’s keep it about Joseph Kony, not KONY 2012.

~ Grant Oyston, visiblechildren@grantoyston.com

Grant Oyston is a sociology and political science student at Acadia University in Nova Scotia, Canada.

*For context, 31% is bad. By contrast, Direct Relief reports 98.8% of its funding goes to programming. American Red Cross reports 92.1% to programming. UNICEF USA is at 90.3%. Invisible Children reports that 80.5% of their funding goes to programming, while I report 31% based on their FY11 fiscal reports, because other NGOs would count film-making as fundraising expenses, not programming expenses.

On the train, going through Greenwich last night. 

Taken with Instagram.

Just playing around with my Apogee One. I love having a good audio interface for recording. This needs tidied up all round and I’m not even sure what it is yet but I thought I’d post it anyway!

It ain’t easy to play guitar with this broken elbow!

wildandpeaceful:

(via Plural)

artpixie:

What Are You Doing New Years Eve? by Zooey Deschanel and Joseph Gordon-Levitt (by hellogiggles)

Love this!

Muphry’s law is an adage that states that “if you write anything criticizing, editing or proofreading, there will be a fault of some kind in what you have written.” The name is a deliberate misspelling of Murphy’s law.

New Ray Bans. :D

So I haven’t updated the blog since October. Bad Daniel! I’ve been EXTREMELY busy! The big news is I have a banjo, the band are on a temporary hiatus, my job is still going well and I’m running for Vice President of Communications at my Students’ Union next year.

Basically it’s a £19,000 a year post that you have to be elected into by the student body. It would be amazing to get but it’s an awful lot of work. Either way I’m not that bothered because I had plans for after uni anyways.

I’m struggling on with my workload, trying not to take on too many side projects. That’s why I’ve called a pause on the band because none of us really have the time at the minute. I’ll still be writing music and playing solo gigs but I’ll only be playing with the band every once in a while.

I’ve been doing copious amounts of design work both in and outside of work which is awesome for my portfolio but I need to keep thinking about my degree. The design work is visible for all to see on my portfolio site:

www.danielduke.me

I’ve also just redesigned this as I got a Flavors premium account which is awesome.

I’ll keep posting up some of the work I do that I like the most on this blog and all the little updates and ponderings that were here before. If you look below you’ll see my wonderful new banjo! Oh yes, and I’m aiming to have 3000 words of my dissertation done by tomorrow so I’ll keep you posted.