★★★ Panhandlers were out on Broadway. There was no pretending that the heat was pleasant, nor was it too unpleasant to go around in. The clouds gathered but didn’t succeed in pulling together; when they were at their maximum, it was tempting but misguided to turn off the air conditioner. The children, on a balance bike and two-wheeled scooter, were willing to go take the old red-and-chrome tricycle to Goodwill, and were almost willing to ride all the way back. After dinner, it really was time to shut off the air and open the window, as a furious ember glow swelled behind the apartment towers.

by Caleb Garling

IndieDeveloper is trying to change the color of the ground to something that’s more red. He’s not succeeding; it is still very green. “I don’t fucking understand,” he says. “That didn’t do shit. Oh my god I’m getting so fucking mad right now. It is seriously pissing me off.” He’s tabbing and moving through code so fast that my screen becomes a manic strobe of code and pixels.

IndieDeveloper is building a game called Dungeon Looter, a Legend of Zelda-like overhead quest, where your character walks around collecting stuff while dodging bad guys and doing adventure-y things. A few minutes later, IndieDeveloper is still on the hunt for the rogue color controller. “It feels darker but it’s really not,” he says. “Is it darker?” He moves closer to the screen. “No it’s not! It’s not fucking changing!” Fifteen people are watching, but no one is offering assistance in the chat bar. The only other noise on the video stream is IndieDeveloper’s techno music, which is calm and soothing, the tones sharp and exact; you can almost detect the value of each note on a grid.

Finally, IndieDeveloper makes a change, and the ground and walls in the game tint crimson. He starts singing along to the music, mimicking the beeps and boops. But now there’s a small time gap between his keystrokes and when the dungeon looter actually changes direction. “It’s laggy as shit,” he says. “Why is it so laggy?”

This is Livecoding.tv. The easy, startup-to-startup analog is that it’s like Twitch, the live video-game-streaming platform recently acquired by Amazon for a billion dollars, but for coding. The service, founded in August of last year by Jamie Green and Michael Garbade, broadcasts hundreds of simultaneous livestreams a day, allowing anyone to peer over the shoulder of developers performing all things code, from creating silly games to re-organizing complicated databases. (It is basically against the rules to have a startup that occupies a small, dedicated niche without a plan to at least attempt to scale it a billion users in order to generate the kind of exponential returns that investors today seek, so Green, accordingly, says that the site will eventually be “Twitch, but for education.”) The core of why Livecoding works as a concept, though, is that much of building software is situational, conditional, and experiential — an elaborate problem-solving exercise where there are sometimes hard, right or wrong answers, but more often, there are good solutions and others that are merely less so — so there’s always a reason to watch.

For non-coders, Livecoding is a peek at (alleged) modern literacy. Coding is creating and vetting logic, an unending puzzle that can induce insanity and euphoria, often concurrently. It’s layers and layers of cluttered windows, file directories and under-construction renderings of a product. It’s troubleshooting, swearing, slamming soda, pounding beer, alt-tabbing, blog skimming, StackExchange and random forum hunting — someone must have had this same question, right? It’s seeking help because coding is better as a team sport, until it isn’t because everyone else is fucking up your shit. And on Livecoding it’s a lot of sitting and watching a guy — it’s almost always a dude — assembling a cryptic tapestry of words, punctuation and numbers that underpin software, just like what you’re using right now.

But like any social network, coders are incentivized to develop their own aura, their own environment. How do you stand out? What information do you offer? What experience do you provide? When I catch Pyro666, he’s coding shirtless with inspirational orchestral tunes; Jennifer answers questions about JavaScript with infectious enthusiasm (verbally, not over chat); and mess_84 of the Ukraine blasts American blues while building a page in HAML. Teachers or performers, they expose their talents for public consumption, creating another tile of one’s Internet #brand.

A coder from Porto Alegre, Brazil, named chocsx, has his camera fixed downward, at a backlit keyboard, so that you can’t see his face, only a grey hoodie. He’s been coding for five years, and PHP is his favorite language. According to his profile, this is his favorite line of code: me = new Person(); while(me.awake()){ me.code(); }. His total viewer tally is at more than thirteen hundred (and counting), which is better than par, but by no means a chart-topper. Electronic music provides the soundtrack — airy synth that makes you think of sunrises or moments of redemption in cheesy movies. He checks his phone, then tabs through lines of PHP, Javascript, and CSS, then tabs to someone’s blog, which seems to explain how to write code for a certain rendering or styling of a webpage. He searches for “Motivation music,” and chooses the first result, called “Epic motivational music mix.” It is the 1,528,172nd play. The first song is called “Stand and Fight.” It’s inspirational, symphonic, and chocsx’s hands move a little faster. He consults another blog. He copies and pastes some code. He checks Caniuse.com, a site that documents what browsers support what front-end technologies. The music gets too motivational, too heavy, and I turn it off.

There are still kinks in the service. Developers tend to work on big monitors; if your viewing window isn’t as big as theirs (like my laptop), the text will be small, blurry, and largely useless unless the livestreamer takes the time to stop, highlight and explain. But the last thing many coders want to do is break focus, a state so many try so hard to achieve. The sidebar offers chat, though many developers prefer answering questions via Skype, so that their cursor never leaves the code. The cameras that provide the experience sit at different points in every developer’s room. Some position the camera straight on, so you feel like you’re Facetiming; some have a camera perched at an angle, up, to the side, so you feel like you just happen to be walking past their desk; and others eschew a camera all together.

Buttonsz, a British developer, enjoys the collaborative coding. He livestreams regularly at 9 PM GMT, Monday through Friday, and at 8 PM on Sundays. He and four other coders want to build a game based on a piece of literature. They estimate that this will be a ten-day project, but they are easily distracted: Buttonsz drinks a Beck’s as they discuss whether “crisps” and “potato chips” are the same thing; a baby cries in the background of someone’s Skype channel. Then they try to get a coder into a HipChat room and ask his name in real life. “I don’t know if he has a real name,” someone says.

At last, they focus. Buttonsz encourages viewers to suggest features. They agree that they need a storyline people know, so that the game’s concept is easy to communicate. One coder, xmetrix wants to make a game out of Atlas Shrugged. The problem — one of many — is that Atlas Shrugged isn’t in the public domain, and Rand died in 1982. “Somebody should have killed her off sooner,” someone says. “Mean,” Buttonsz laughs. They settle on The Picture of Dorian Grey.

But they’ve taken too long: Nearly six thousand people have viewed the channel, but, the livestreamers notice, only thirteen are watching right now.

After Uber crushed the De Blasio administration when it feebly attempted to halt the service’s explosive growth in New York City, a customer wrote to the company to ask about the F U T U R E. Fortunately, customer service representatives are standing by to answer any of your questions and concerns about the machines or, presumably, anything else.

The full email exchange below.

M (Uber)
Jul 25, 10:18

HI L,

Thanks for writing in. I know this may be a concern but not right now. The important thing is providing jobs for people who needs it the most in this industry. It may take a while before automated cars become a standard.

If you have more questions, I’m here to answer any you might have.

M
help.uber.com

L
Jul 23, 11:14

What will happen the “10,000” jobs created when all cars become automated?

On Thu, Jul 23, 2015 at 1:52 PM, Uber NYC wrote:

Your voice was heard and it made a difference.

THANK YOU
We want to thank you for your support in keeping Uber — and NYC — moving.

As NYC Deputy Mayor Shorris said, we have “agreed to maintain [our] approximate current rate of growth” and we look forward to welcoming thousands of new driver partners onto our platform to support the 100,000 new riders trying Uber in New York City each month for the first time.

The terms of the agreement with Mayor de Blasio’s administration and the City Council are to collaborate on a transportation study, and work together on ways to continue expanding economic opportunity, mobility, and transportation access across the city. New drivers will continue to be able to join the for-hire industry, and partner with Uber.

This is great news for all New Yorkers, including Uber riders and drivers. Your voice made it possible.

Emails

49,239 emails were sent to City Hall and the City Council

Tweets

18,623 people made their voice heard on Twitter. In the last 24 hours alone 9,292 people tweeted using the hashtag #UberMovesNYC

New Riders

Over 35,000 New Yorkers signed up as a new Uber rider over the past 7 days, setting a new record in NYC

We’d also like to thank all the elected officials who opposed the proposed cap legislation:
NYS Governor Andrew Cuomo, NYC Comptroller Scott Stringer, US Congressman Hakeem Jeffries, US Congresswoman Carolyn Maloney, Brooklyn Borough President Eric Adams, Bronx Borough President Rubén Díaz Jr., State Senator Adriano Espaillat, State Senator Rubén Díaz Sr., State Assemblyman Michael Blake, State Assemblyman Marcos Crespo, State Assemblyman Luis Sepúlveda, State Assemblyman José Rivera, State Assemblyman Victor Pichardo, City Council Member Antonio Reynoso, City Council Member Robert Cornegy, City Council Member Annabel Palma, City Council Member Andy King, City Council Member Ben Kallos, City Council Member Eric Ulrich, City Council Member Fernando Cabrera, City Council Member Dan Garodnick, City Council Member Vanessa Gibson, City Council Member Maria del Carmen Arroyo, City Council Member Steve Matteo, City Council Member Inez Dickens

Uber Technologies Inc.
1455 Market Street San Francisco, CA 94103

—

by Lindsey Weber

Thousands of teenagers mobbed the Anaheim Conference Center this weekend during VidCon, the annual conference that celebrates online video and the young people who make it (as well as the young people who watch it).

At VidCon, if you’re not texting your friends to see which panels they’re attending (jk teens don’t attend panels), you’re posing for a selfie with one of the many Internet celebrities roaming the Con halls. (Imagine nearby Disneyland, but instead of Donald Duck, it’s a 16 year old who goes by “Lohanthony”.)

If you’re not doing that, however, you’re probably charging.

“Speaking of books… Sorry, but I put the Wikipedia pages in for Novels, as well as Fiction, and also Literary Criticism, Literary Theory and also Literary Modernism, just because it seems like it would be really agonizing if everyone had to go through all that again.

I hid Poetry and French New Wave inside the entry for Anarchy, which obviously is right after Alcoholics Anonymous and Ambivalence but before Aorta abdominalis. I was getting kind of weird and emotionally jumbled at the end, please don’t make a big deal out of this!!!”

10. Detective says, “These contracts… there are signatures all over them.”

9. Man tells son, “I will always love you.” Son: “K.”

8. Man says, “That’s one off the bucket list: a Mexican standoff with actual Mexicans.”

7. Man tells ex-wife’s rapist, “You have no idea what you cost me.”

6. Man says to another man he’s threatening, without a trace of irony, to “see if I’m whistling Dixie.”

5. Woman tells another woman, “I just don’t understand why you work so hard to be alone.”

4. Man says of ex-wife’s rape, “You used my wife’s fucking tragedy to get me to do something.” The pun is unintended.

3. Following a tense supervised visit, man proves he is a fit parent by snorting so much cocaine and drinking so much liquor that he tears open his own shirt to feel his heart, then calls his ex-wife, who he is battling for custody, to tell her that “she wins.”

2. Man tells ex-wife to never, under any circumstances, tell their son about the time she was raped because he “shouldn’t have to know.”

1. The cause of the chip on a woman’s shoulder turns out to be that she was, of course, sexually abused as a child.

★★★★ The sun had gone over to being hot again. Wiffle ball in the driveway by the dumpsters made it to the bottom of the second inning before the catcher resigned and wandered off. A laughing gull was whooping it up on the neighboring roofline. A little bike-riding was essayed; the three-year-old tipped his over and got up unhurt but complaining about the scorching pavement. Down at the beach, in the last hours of lifeguard coverage, the waves were mild and the seabirds exultant. Sun suffused the pale green water, while new swells rose from darker cloudshadow farther out. An osprey flew straight shoreward with heavy wingbeats, clutching a fish so whole and huge and still it might have been picked up from the seafood counter. A pair of pelicans flapped by. Gulls dropped toward the waves in the middle distance and were lost from view. The air was slightly cooler than the water as one back-floated and tried to direct the mind from the unseen depths to the cheery clouds above. A dangling foot found soft sand, the waves having carried the body back to the populated shadows — and a few dozen yards south, to judge by the beachside houses. After dinner, the lowering sun shone straight through the open sides of the trolley, casting shadows of the passengers’ heads out beside the roadway. The grass median looked like astroturf. The trolley floated semi-quietly and some small but distancing height above the usual point of view, rendering the quiet back streets an absorbing spectacle. It was nearly impossible to attend to the mobile phone: The three-year-old called out fireplugs and mailboxes as he spotted them, and the smell of pines came in. The matching faded whiteness of the clouds and the moon diverged, the clouds going pink and the moon acquiring its glow.

by Rachel Stone

SEATTLE, WA: I’ve lived in Seattle since college. When I moved here, I believed I could become someone out here, among the fishmongers and the culture and the coffee. I found love; I started a zine. But after learning about the Cascadia subduction zone, I realized that I didn’t want to live through an earthquake that will destroy the entire Pacific Northwest, including my favorite coffee shops. So I wave goodbye to all that, and pack my bags to California.

LOS ANGELES, CA: The city feels different, but it’s growing more familiar. I find myself an alright sublet situation in Mid-City, lease a car for the first time, and zoom across the wide expanse of roads. But I learn about California’s uncontrollable wildfires and how they are only becoming more dangerous in the growing drought. I tuck my copy of The Road in my suitcase and head north.

SAN FRANCISCO, CA: I love the feeling of money moving through my hair, but when I learn that the drought might mean I die of thirst, I move again.

JACKSON HOLE, WY: The rent here is nothing, and the valley is perfect inspiration for my zine-writing. I drive to Yellowstone for weekend excursion, only to discover the supervolcano lurking beneath the national park. Ryot.org tells me that, if it were to blow, which it might, it would kill around eighty-seven thousand people in the immediate explosion, spread a ten-foot layer of ash into the air; the resulting combination of sulfuric acid in the earth’s atmosphere would plunge the world into a volcanic winter, so I head east.

WATFORD CITY, ND: In Watford, I’m safe from volcanoes, wildfires, and drought; I’m nowhere near hurricane territory and no one would attack this small of a city with chemical weapons. But then I heard some neighbors talking and apparently your new property is right on top of shale, which means I’m squarely in fracking territory, which means, according to the New York Times, I could enjoy contaminated, radioactive water, methane gas explosions, and earthquakes caused by deep injection wells, and that just won’t do.

PHOENIX, AZ: I find myself in a desert metropolis. I take to wandering around Echo Canyon Park and feel my sense of place restored, only to be dashed again when I learn of the looming megadrought. Fortunately, I hadn’t even stepped outside of the car.

CHICAGO, IL: I move back to the Midwest, even though I promised myself not to. My mother is happy, though, and I figure that before the world is plunged into chaos I could at least give her that. When I learn that when water scarcity will soon grip the United States and freshwater sources like Lake Michigan will probably become dangerously contentious in wars over resources, I don’t move. When I learn that Illinois is squarely in Tornado Alley, I stick around. When I find out that the Midwest has its own mega fault line, the New Madrid Seismic Zone, that might not fracture anytime soon, but if it did it could create unprecedented and catastrophic damage across the region, I decide it might be better to observe from elsewhere.

IOWA CITY, IA: Potential death by corn blight. I move again, and abandon my zine.

MINNEAPOLIS, MN: Potential death by polar vortex. I move again.

MONTGOMERY, AL: Potential death by extreme heat, which will probably morph into drought. I move again.

MIAMI, FL: Potential death by flesh eating bacteria. I move again.

CHARLESTON, SC: Potential death by massive, seventy-foot tsunami that could occur if the volcano Cumbre Vieja erupts and breaks into the Atlantic Ocean. I think I miss Seattle

FARMINGTON HILLS, MICHIGAN: The last safe town in the entire United States. There are few natural disasters. The population is small. My grandparents live here, as will Detroit-via-Williamsburg expats. But it’s starting to get a little too crowded.

by Adrianne Jeffries

2005: My best friend and I decided to get dinosaur tattoos. Me: raptor, inside of right wrist, in white. Her: brontosaurus (RIP) [or not?], somewhere inconspicuous, in black outline. We decided to think about it for a year and then get them if we still wanted them. I still do.

2007: I told my electronic musician boyfriend of two years half-jokingly that I wanted to get his stage name tattooed on my back and tried to get him to draw it on for me. He hated it. Three years later, he cheated on me, with a fan.

Around the same time, I decided it would be cool to have an anti-tattoo. I would get a tattoo of a date. When people asked me what the date signified, I would say, “It’s the date I got the tattoo.”

That same year, one of my friends had a bad breakup and tried to kill himself in the dorms. He took all his pills (and he had a lot of pills). He stumbled into another person’s room and they called 911, then he went to the hospital and they fed him a bunch of coal. I was thinking about him the next day at work and that’s when I started drawing this outline of a little black heart on my left hand between the thumb and forefinger. I still draw it sometimes and I feel like I wouldn’t mind if it were permanent.

2010: I move to New York City. I would write reminders on the inside of my wrist in pen or Sharpie. “Mail.” “Laundry.” Some tattooed friends noticed it and told me I should tattoo the words “to do” in cursive above the place where I usually wrote the reminders. We drew it and it looked really cute. Not long after I was actually physically in a tattoo parlor on St. Mark’s Place (called “WHATEVER TATTOO”) and I still couldn’t pull the trigger.

2015: A friend had temporary tattoos (nothing special, but they were 8-bit, left over from an event that had to do with video games) and I stuck a pair of cherries on my foot and the words “GAME OVER” on my forearm. The foot tattoo was hideous but the arm text looked neat. Someone told me I should get it as a real tattoo. I enjoyed looking at it.

20??: Two-year semi-permanent tattoos are invented. I get so many.

Photo via Instagram

by Hallie Bateman and Josephine Livingstone