March, 2016

How “The Big Short” was Made: Credit Derivatives

If you’ve watched The Big Short, then you may believe you understand all there is to the last financial crisis. The movie was very good at explaining some of the financial assets that cause the Great Recession. By now the terms mortgage-backed security and CDO are easy to throw about, and…

Development must be participatory

We are living in an age when it is simpler than ever to have direct conversations with people all over the world. This extends even to previously ‘inaccessible’ communities in countries that many in Canada and the U.S. want to support in the form of development projects. It has become…

Undergrowth

Things Change. The bad, and the good. Nightmares are made of the last time she said she loved you, lips that don’t curl up at the edges reaching eyes that seem cold you’re overreacting stop overreacting you’re imagining things don’t be so paranoid. You tried not to see it coming…

Karma Police

  As part of the “72-hour film” competition at the Fokus Film Festival, Ben Koring, Chris Colton, and Nicholas Lepage crafted the film “Karma Police.” The film was nominated for the Audience Choice and 72 Hour Film Award categories, and went on to win each. Guiding their work was the competition’s theme,…

Sampling, Plagiarism and the Cycles that Drive Music Creation

Music seems to (almost) always evolve at a rapid and frightening rate. From the psychedelic revolution of the 60s, to the formation of hip-hop, to the recent popularity increase of electronic, music is destined to morph in unexpected ways. Despite this, music also seems to relish the past and not…

Hacking Away at Tech’s Borders

Think about the word “hackathon”; what comes to mind? Probably an image of people huddled over their laptops, illuminated only by the bluish light from their screens, typing at superhuman speeds made possible only by a constant stream of energy drinks. This is not entirely inaccurate, but it’s not close to correct, either. We have a tendency to see our hypothetical “hackers” as technology specialists– but we fail to see such traits in ourselves. Their milieu can appear to us instead only as an exclusive niche. Why is that?

Millennial Poetics 1 - Marco F

    To to have a child? to become vegetarian? to stop buying shit to start fighting and questioning to create, every day, to communicate to describe the world, to describe our time, mighty times, metal has turned into a synthetic electronic mega bass that angrily pumps and drills into…

The Rise and Fall of Socialism

In the wake of the Great Recession, America has become increasingly socialist out of necessity. The time has come for the Europeans to follow suit and borrow policies from their capitalist comrades in order to bail out their sinking, or at least partially submerged, socialist economies.