eu 2016/679

Just days after going into effect, two internet giants, the Daily Dot reports, are facing suits in the billions for failure to comply with the GDPR, for as characterised by the Austrian privacy and consumer-rights advocate who brought the complaint despite eighteen months to prepare themselves for the new standards (imagine had they not just flaunted the coming change or indeed how different the world might be today had the regulation gone into force upon passage) still are offering users only an all-or-nothing means of opting out, which is no choice at all and contravenes the spirit of the regulation.
The companies responded predictably with continued commitments to the GDPR’s provisions and how privacy-protections are built into every stage of the user-experience. While many websites seem to have put together some wearying slap-dash boilerplate message in a last-minute, reactionary fashion—even the biggest ones with an established presence in Europe, many smaller services that harvest visitors’ data directly or indirectly—especially second-tier news-outlets have simply gone dark for Europeans until such time as they can be reasonably assured (and thus safe from legal consequences) that their accessibility isn’t afoul of the law.

time & temperature

Coudal Partners’ fresh signals direct our attention to this rather gorgeously designed and presented global weather service called Ventusky, founded in 2006 and headquartered in Plzeň. Available also as an app, the dynamic forecasts are fully customisable and there a lot of aggregated meteorological data to sift through and recombine.

conflation

Much as a meme is an elemental unit for the transmission for a particular idea or phenomenon—a cultural analogue for the notion of a gene or some defined inheritable trait—a mytheme (or mythème first proffered by ethnographer Claude Lévi-Strauss) is the fundamental measurement of commonality in terms of a trope or archetype across received folkloric traditions. The intended intersection of the arc of narrative and the characters of The Tempest (1610) with Forbidden Planet (1956) or Heart of Darkness (1899) with Apocalypse Now (1979) are a few examples with many more threads to be teased out by structurally analysing the stories that strike us a universal.

museet

Hyperallergic reports that the curatorial staff of the Munch Museum of Oslo have digitally archived and made available to the public over seventy-six hundred paintings and sketches of Edvard Munch (previously). This ambitious and comprehensive catalogue of the artist not only includes the museum’s own collection, revising many works that had not been on display for years if ever, but also sought to capture the holdings of other museums and those works in private hands.