“The photo I was going for of the perfect dive, flawlessly straight, with no splash required not only me to be in the right place and get a very lucky shot but also for the bird itself to get it perfect.”
“I would often go and take 600 pictures in a session and not a single one of them be any good.”
“I never really stopped to think about how long it was taking along the way as I enjoyed doing it but now I look back on it I’m really proud of the picture and the work I put in.”
“I remember my grandfather taking me to see the kingfisher nest and I just remember being completely blown away by how magnificent the birds are.”
look, i’m happy to be the q to your bond, but crime pays. technologically-assisted mystery solving? costs. you wanna play find the crappy radio broadcast, momma’s gonna need a few things from radio shack.
The first plane of Syrian refugees headed for Canada touched down in the country late Thursday, and Prime Minister Justin Trudeau was on hand to welcome the arrivals. Just a few hundred had landed, but Canada is on track to accept many, many more.
Makes me want to be Canadian.
Reading through the #WelcomeToCanada tag made me want to cry, I’ve never been so proud, so pleased, so relieved.
This new Prime Minister, I like him. Keep him for a bit, will you, Canada?
Jackson Galaxy explains why everything can seem to be going fine and cuddly when your cat suddenly turns mean.
What he calls the “finger nose” actually works great for scratching too, if you go slow and are observant your cat will guide you to where they want skritches, for how long they want them, then where next, just like someone saying “Ohhh, up a little. A bit harder.” and will love you for it!
Lots of people ask why cats do this! Let’s let the expert speak.
This particular moment in Star Trek is actually quite important. A lot of people don’t realise that understanding something is not the same as approving of something. This particular episode (A Taste of Armageddon) had a civilization where war was fought on computers instead of on the battlefield and instead of people dying in combat they would send the calculated amount of “casualities” into a camp to die. Kirk is outraged completely by this and rightly should be, but Spock is not so overtly disapproving. He understands why they might think their solution is better for their civilization and takes the time to think about why they are doing it. Even though he can understand why, he still believes it is wrong for them to be doing it.
There is a separation between understanding something and approving of something that a lot of people seem to miss.
There is a separation between understanding something and approving of something that a lot of people seem to miss.
THIS THIS FOR THE LOVE OF EVERY GOD THIS.
It drives me batshit insane, too. I just got hit with the “understanding it means you’re FOR IT” bullshit in a political argument elsewhere, and the subtext - as always! - is that unless you’re for it, you shouldn’t try to understand it, because it’s Evil and understanding that is Wrong.
I hate that so very much I can’t even begin to even. And I don’t think it’s just “a lot of people.” At least in what passes for political discourse in the US, for example, it’s most people.
I have a whole theory about the fundamentalist cultural takeover of the GOP that gets into why - it’s a definitional part of that culture for reasons involving scriptural interpreation- but I won’t belabour that here. It’s just crazymaking.
The reverse (inverse?) is also true– a lot of people in arguments will yell “you just don’t understand!” if you disagree. (I’ve been guilty of that myself, honestly.)
Why would the Republicans want to get rid of ISIS/ISIL? It's pretty much their last strategy for success. Hell, the Koch brothers are probably funding them.
“Republicans have no more of a strategy for the Islamic State than anybody else. Here’s a list of things to watch out for when candidates are talking about their “strategies”:
1. We need a leader who leads, with leadership. This idea is expressed in various ways; in this case, Cruz starts explaining how he’d fight the Islamic State by saying that “We didn’t win the Cold War until we had a president who stood up and led…” Another way of putting it is, as Marco Rubio and others have said, that Obama lacks the proper “sense of urgency” about the problem. But that’s not a strategy, it’s a feeling. Saying “I’ll feel differently than Obama does when I’m in the Oval Office” doesn’t tell us anything about what a candidate would actually do.
2. Bomb the hell out of them. This sounds strong and resolute, but it’s important to keep in mind that we’ve been bombing pretty much every target we can find. According to the Air Force, as of the end of November we had dropped 31,873 bombs and missiles in this operation. It’s true that the military has taken care not to kill significant numbers of civilians, which is a challenge because the Islamic State controls a number of cities. In theory we could just “carpet-bomb” those cities, as Cruz proposes (he says “carpet-bomb ISIS,” but when it’s pointed out to him that they’re located in cities, he evades the question of whether he actually wants to carpet-bomb cities), but that would be extraordinarily counter-productive, not to mention morally abominable and probably a war crime. And yes, despite what Republicans would have you believe, we are bombing their oil facilities. So “Bomb them, but, you know, more” isn’t a strategy either.”
I’m re-reading Order of the Phoenix at the moment, and can we just take a minute to appreciate Fleur Delacour?
> 17 year old Fleur hears about a dangerous contest which will threaten her life and involve her having to leave her home country, alongside her beloved little sister, for a year. Her response is “sign me the fuck up”, but in French.
> 18 year old Fleur spots handsome 25 year old redhead talking to Harry Potter, decides she’s having that one, files this information away for later.
> 18 year old Fleur survives the tournament and returns home to France. Less than four weeks after graduating school, still 18 year old Fleur is back in Britain, taking a job in a bank to improve her English, where she is reacquainted with the aforementioned 25 year old redhead.
> 18 year old Fleur wastes no time in securing ‘private lessons’ with Bill Weasley.
> 19 year old Fleur visits her now-fiancé’s family for the summer, putting up with their blatant dislike of her because this is about Bill.
> 20 year old Fleur is disgusted at the idea that she’d love her fiancé any less for a few scars.
> 20 year old Fleur risks her life to get Harry Potter the heck outta Dodge.
> 20 year old Fleur marries that still-hot redhead, dammit, and fuck Voldemort for trying to interfere.
> 21 year old Fleur distracts Harry and Remus so that the Weasleys may reunite privately.
> 21 year old Fleur survives the Battle of Hogwarts
We all need to appreciate Fleur a little more, is what I’m saying. She got shit done.
Honestly, Blindsight is an amazing book. It may well be the most IMPORTANT fiction book I've read this decade. Took me four readings, plus a reading of the sequel to actually have a good grasp of what the hell happened, and what it meant. It's a lot of work, and it's totally worth it.
I’m a sucker for space stories. I love ‘em: being out there among the stars, colonizing worlds, travelling FTL, encountering new life forms, fleeing from said life forms. The sci-fi writers that get me the most excited, however—the ones that separate the space wheat from the cosmic chaff—are those who back up their ideas with plausible science, thereby bringing the stars within reach. So it should come as no surprise that I find Peter Watts’s Blindsight so effing awesome.
At its core, Blindsight is a tale of first contact. It’s got everything you could want: a ship named Theseus that “eats” ions to churn them into manufactured matter, an AI captain that keeps its own council, a crew of genetically and mechanically altered transhumans, and an all too believable and terrifying alien anomaly, aptly named Rorschach (the likes of which haven’t been encountered since Clarke’s Rendevous with Rama).
Ironically, however, the element of Watt’s brilliance that truly shines for me is much more terrestrial in nature. Sort of.
Jukka Sarasti is the leader of Theseus’s crew. He’s highly intelligent, calculating, and intimidating. Probably because he’s a vampire. And before you get all agog about vampires in space, that’s not the part that I found exciting. It’s the vampire himself, specifically Watt’s conception of him.
In the story, Sarasti is not some mythical monster with magical powers. Rather, he is an offshoot from our family tree. Around 700,000 years ago, a subspecies diverged from our genetic line, distinctly different from Neanderthals and sapiens: homo sapiens vampiris. Elongated limbs, pale skin, canines, extended mandible. The works. Along with superior hearing, they’ve evolved extra types of cones in their retinas that provide quadrochromatic vision (i.e. infrared eyesight).
If you don’t believe it, just check out the impressive mini-dissertation included in the appendix that serves as a “Brief Primer on Vampire Biology.” The whole take is a re-conception of vampires as predators, not monsters. Like a cross between a shark and a chess grandmaster. Watts’s biological twist on an old archetype is literally hair-raising. And his background in biology provides both a hair of believability and credibility. (He holds a BS, an MS, and a PhD.)
The most fun part is how Watts takes everything you know about vampires and retrofits it all with a sound, scientific explanation. In developing a radically different immunology, vampires exhibited a stronger resistance to prion diseases (you know, the ones you get from cannibalism). So, that’s how they can eat people. Awesome.
Somewhere during their evolution, vampires “lost the ability to code for y-Protocadherin Y,” a protein they desperately need. Guess who’s the only the viable production source? So, that’s why they eat people. Perfect.
While human prey is a prolific food source, it is a slow-breeding one. As anyone who’s studied basic ecology knows, if predators’ dining habits outstrip its prey’s mating habits, they run out of food. Quickly. In order to sustain their food source and themselves, vampires developed a knack for hibernating (think more lungfish than bear). These periodic respites gave the human population time to, well, repopulate. Or as the vampires saw it, restock the shelves. Hence, vampires affinities for long naps, in dark quiet places.
The most creative and downright genius revamping (sorry, I couldn’t resist) Watts creates is the “Crucifix glitch.” Yes, in the world of Blindsight vampires hate crucifixes, but not for the reason you’re thinking. It has nothing to do with his Holiness. Remember when I said vampires have advanced eyesight and whatnot? Well, there’s a downside to that. Vampires are natural creatures that evolved for thousands of years to maximize their perception and pattern matching abilities (it helps with hunting). There are two problems with this: 1) with evolution, neutral traits become fixed in small populations; 2) there are no right angles in nature. So vampires developed a glitch. When the synapses that process vertical and horizontal stimuli fire at the same time, across a large enough visual field … vampires have grand mal-like feedback seizures. So with a little Euclidean architecture, humans took the upper hand and stamped vampires out into extinction.
In this fantastic story, Watts makes vampires real and subsequently, scares the bejesus out of me. And yes, I do know that I’ve ignored the looming question: if vampires are extinct, then how did Sarasti end up on a space ship in the future? For that answer, you’re going to have read Watts’s terrifyingly plausible tale.
Joshua V. Scher is a recent transplant from New York City to the Hollywood hills, where he is continuing his transition from writing for the stage to the screen, both theatrical and television. His film, I’m OK, is in postproduction and slated for a festival run in 2016. The cinematic adaptation of his play The Footage was developed by Pressman Film. Scher collaborated with Joe Frazier and Penny Marshall’s Parkway Productions on the Joe Frazier biopic Behind the Smoke. He also worked with Danny Glover and Louverture Films on Scher’s original TV pilot, Jigsaw. His works for the stage include Marvel, Flushed, and Velvet Ropes, as well as the musical Triangle. He holds a bachelor’s degree with honors in creative writing from Brown University and a master of fine arts degree in playwriting from Yale University. Here & There, out now from 47North, is his first novel.
clint barton is the kind of guy who can hit a fly from 100m away with a bow and arrow but if you yell think fast and throw something at him he will not catch it and it will hit him in the face
Fun fact my boyfriend plays this game called Magic the gathering at this comic book store and I started going with him and we noticed that the other guys started saying really sexist and offensive things around me since I’m the only girl so he immediately took me home and taught me how to play so now I go there to play and beat all of them.
They spend thousands of dollars on decks to win and I picked out cards that my boyfriend already owned and made my own deck and go there and win one guy literally threw his deck in the trash and walked out of the store screaming
*sigh* manbabies
DESTROY THEM
Oh I did. I won first place in a commander tournament as the only woman playing out of 10 other men and no one congratulated me and all the piss babies tried everything they could to say I didn’t actually do the legal infinte combo that wiped out the entire pod. And then proceeded to whine for the rest of the night. I LIVE FOR THIS GUYS. 💀 valar morghulis 💀
LMFAOOOO yes. Destroy them
My favorite thing are all the “post buster” comments on this post. A couple made from blog titles with “anti feminist” in them or icons of my little ponies.
let’s just walk through a few scenarios presented shall we?
“That didn’t happen!” I’m sorry were you present? Am I talking to one of the boys I beat?
“We don’t even know what OP’S deck is like!” All mana black with mikaeus the unhallowed as my commander with 3 infinite combos I use regular including: mikaeus the unhallowed / triskelion, sanguine bond / exquisite blood, bloodchief ascension / mindcrank.
“No one would throw away a 1000 dollar deck.” This guy’s deck was nowhere near that amount and he has extreme anger issues and proceeded to quit playing magic after that.
“You can’t just randomly pick cards and win!” I didn’t? I chose from my boyfriend’s previously owned cards (he’s been collecting since 1994) and built my own winning deck. I lose a lot but only to my boyfriend.
“This is so fake you made this up for notes! You’re so right. Considering there are hundreds of stories backing up the behavior I witness on a regular basis, and the hundreds more of backlash from the anti-feminist sector of the MTG community, I totally made it up. I just love punishing myself so much after I win tournaments and get mocked for it by man babies or other women who base their self worth on the praise of misogynistic men in the nerd community.
There is close to 175 thousand notes on this post supporting a feminist MTG community. I’m sorry that pisses you off so bad but I’m not sorry whatsoever. You are only proving the facts on this post making it so much more real.
Mee hee hee you go girl.
Also props to your boyfriend for having your back in teaching you what you wanted to know, rather than trying to tell you “oh just ignore them” or “oh boys will be boys” or suggesting you just not go there anymore. He sounds like a keeper.
OK, I just want to say I love librarians, and I love libraries. But point number one, let's not pretend that librarians don't get paid. And for gods' sakes, please lets not pretend that libraries don't need money.
And point number two: Google can be very limited in how it can help, and librarians still exist, and are going to continue to exist because of that. But I've worked in the business office of a major library, and I'm going to tell you right now, when I need to know how to get the conditional formatting in Excel to work the way I want it to, the librarian who had this sign hung up in her cubicle was the LAST person in the world I would ever ask.
