Bridget

People will stare. Make it worth their while → Valentino | Pre-Fall ‘15

I am literally obsessed with these dresses. I’ve been thinking about the space ones all week.

fake-tumlbr:

vice-of-virtue:

doctormemelordmd:

fangirling-so-hard-rn:

nowyoukno:

Now You Know (Source)

Crows are scary
They

• use tools
• Can be taught to speak (like parrots)
• Have huge brains for birds
• like seriously their brain-to-body size ratio is equal to that of a chimpanzee
• They vocalize anger, sadness, or happiness in response to things
• they are scary smart at solving puzzles
• some ravens stay with their mates until one of them dies
• they can remember faces
• SIDENOTE HERE BECAUSE HOLY SHIT.  They did an experiment where these guys wore masks and some of them fucked with crows.  Pretty soon the crows recognized the masks = douchebag.  But the nice guys with masks they left alone.  THEN, OH WE’RE NOT DONE, NO SIR crows that WEREN’T EVEN IN THE EXPERIMENT AND NEVER SAW THE MASK BEFORE knew about mask-dudes and attacked them on sight.  THEY PASSED ON THE FUCKING INFORMATION TO THEIR CROW BUDDIES.
• They remember places where crows were killed by farmers and change their migration patterns.

Guys I’m really scared of crows now.
(q) 

Yeah but have you seen this 

YEAH! THEY ALSO PLAY FOR NO EVIDENT REASON OTHER THAN FUN AND THEY LOVE THE SNOW!
Crows are seriously the coolest birbs ever.

well, feeling the need for entertainment also kinda indicates intelligence, so. 

btw i have seen them playing in the snow for no reason many times. i loved it when they found a slope covered entirely in ice and started sliding down it together repeatedly.

today with you

I usually balk at the words "solo project" because it frequently means a dude who's tired of band drama and wants to record acoustic songs for shits and giggles. That's not the case here. Pelican Movement is the solo project of Kevin McMahon, the producer extraordinaire who runs Marcata Studios in New Paltz, New York. He's worked with Titus Andronicus, Swans, the Walkmen, and Real Estate. It only makes sense that his solo project is fantastic.

This track, "Light Like Before," is off of an upcoming split seven-inch with New Paltz natives Battle Ave. It's spacey, and if you listen to it at work you may find yourself sleepwalking out of the office to go home and cuddle with your cat. You've been warned.

Preorder the split here.

Baseball. Apple pie. The Simpsons.

There are few cultural artifacts that are more universal in American culture than The Simpsons, the ubiquitous animated program and longest-running sitcom in U.S. history.

The series isn't just known for its longevity but its depth as well. Despite giving rise to a variety of foul-mouthed animated offspring — Family Guy in particular comes to mind — the FOX series has always displayed an appreciation for culture and, in turn, sought to critique the idiosyncrasies of American culture. At its prime, the series was so sharp that a whole catalogue of academic works have been devoted to unpacking the nature of the Simpsons' role as a mirror for American life. 

The series' reverence for literary creativity was on full display this week when the it paid tribute to the victims of the Jan. Read More

"Women became the metaphor for mother nature as wild and sexual thing exploited" ~ Hannah Yata

Read more: https://beautifulbizarre.net/2015/01/08/the-beautifully-imperative-world-of-hannah-yata/

After going viral on Tuesday, mail order vengeance site ShipYourEnemiesGlitter.com was a resounding success. And how could it not be? For about $8 you could have an envelope full of glitter anonymously sent to a person you despise. However, it was a bit too successful, prompting founder Mat Carpenter to beg people to stop patronizing his start-up.

According to Business Insider, Carpenter posted to Product Hunt claiming “Hi guys, I’m the founder of this website. Please stop buying this horrible glitter product — I’m sick of dealing with it. Sincerely, Mat.” Talk about being locked up in a sparkly prison of your own design.

Most people would be thrilled about their business literally racking up thousands of orders within a day of launching, but not Carpenter. In fact, he’s ready to be rid of the whole damn thing.

ShipYourEnemiesGlitter with 1m visits, 270k social shares, $xx,xxx in sales, tonnes of people wanting to order. 24 hours old. For sale.

— Mathew Carpenter (@matcarpenter) January 14, 2015

The payment section of the site now states, “Purchasing has been temporarily suspended. You guys have a sick fascination with shipping people glitter. We’ve received all orders & working through them. There was a tonne so be patient.”

It sounds like what was intended to be a side gig took over all of the founder’s free time, forcing him to spend every waking moment with the thing he hates most – glitter. Sounds like the ending to a “Twilight Zone” episode.

Perhaps an enterprising investor will seize on the opportunity to purchase a successful business. It certainly sounds like vengeance is recession proof.

In the meantime, anyone seeking to anonymously ruin someone’s day with an upsetting mail order package can always look into Shit Express.

The singularity is nigh, and Elon Musk isn’t taking any chances.

The SpaceX and Tesla Motors founder has gone on record as believing that that artificial intelligence could eventually become sentient. (Or at least self-improving, if not self-aware.) And when that happens, humans could face the kind of robot uprising that keeps sci-fi nerds awake at night.

Now Musk is showing that he means business, donating $10 million to the cause of keeping AI subordinated under human command.

Musk made his contribution to the Future of Life Institute, which says its mission is to “mitigate[ing] existential risks facing humanity.” Musk said he was making a donation to “keep AI beneficial” and released a statement with the cash. From TechCrunch:

“Here are all these leading AI researchers saying that AI safety is important”, said Elon Musk in the statement, referring to this letter originally put forward by FLI founder and MIT professor Max Tegmark. “I agree with them, so I’m today committing $10M to support research aimed at keeping AI beneficial for humanity.”

While the idea of an artificial intelligence singularity has always sounded laughable to the mainstream, Elon Musk is probably smarter than any of us. After all this is a guy who, when asked in a Reddit AMA how he was able to fit the engineering details of electric car innovation, space travel and solar power into his brain at the same time, demurred by saying, “My context switching penalty is high and my process isolation is not what it used to be.”

Right. So if this guy is worried about the robot uprising, we probably all should be.

Then again, maybe our new robot overlords will have an idea for how to turn back the rising sea levels, which we are apparently failing at even worse than we thought.

[Source: TechCrunch]

Today, Sony released firmware 6.61 for the PlayStation Portable. Um. What?

Read more...

Elon Musk tweeted that he'll be building a 5-mile Hyperloop test track probably in Texas. Say whaaaaat?!

Read more...

The language of health and disease, the language of treatment, is a language we don't ever really know. We hope we'll pronounce the words right.

I was on a hospital gurney in a hallway, and I'd been there, confused, for hours. I was wheeled out there after a CT scan on my abdomen.

Am I okay, I'd asked the CT technician. She looked down at the floor.

"You're going to die," she said.

And then, animated, "Just kidding! The doctor will see you in the hall."

She patted me on the shoulder. That's the kind of person she was.

I was there after being assaulted by my boyfriend...

KEEP READING >>

So long, Google Glass. Or at least as we know it.

Read more...

Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being

Submitted by joss17.

You can't really help who you're attracted to, but what if the person you're the most attracted to ever happens to be a blood relative? Like your father? Such was the case for an 18-year-old woman who dropped some real talk about her now two-year relationship with daddio in a recent interview. BUCKLE UP, somebody's getting their deepest assumptions challenged!

Read more...

In today's Tweet Beat, Nancy Grace continues to be terrifying, wise words from Missy Elliot and I think we all want to vacation like Beyoncé.

Read more...

"The wizards are driving me insane. I've almost lost it completely." [ more › ]

A South Pasadena graduate student is refusing to follow health officials' orders to be quarantined after her sister contracted measles linked to Disneyland. [ more › ]

"OK, we need to take that belt off. We don't want to tourniquet it," the 9-1-1 dispatcher told the caller. [ more › ]

3D painting, Alea Meade

There are days in Los Angeles (even rainy ones, occasionally!) when you just want to chill out inside, get crafty, get in shape or play a game. [ more › ]

The guy who popularized the drink in the U.S. is planning on opening his very first Bulletproof Coffee shop in Santa Monica in February. [ more › ]

On Wednesday evening, two mountain climbers — Tommy Caldwell and Kevin Jorgeson — completed a 19-day-long ascent of the Dawn Wall of the El Capitan rock formation in Yosemite National Park.

In succeeding, they became the first people to ever free climb the 3,000 foot route — considered by many climbing experts to be one of the most difficult climbs in the world.

Whew! Caldwell and Jorgeson embrace atop El Cap's #dawnwall pic.twitter.com/krbgENstsv

— Jane Lee (@JaneJaeLee) January 15, 2015

Free climbing means that ropes and other equipment are used to protect against falls, but can't be used to help the climbers move upward. There are nearly 100 different routes up El Capitan, but Caldwell and Jorgeson specifically chose to attempt the Dawn Wall, an extremely smooth granite rock face, that, in some places, has razor-sharp finger holds as small as pebbles.

Scroll up the sheer face of the Dawn Wall in Yosemite. http://t.co/2ctKvtIvaj pic.twitter.com/Yfc9aLJKyR

— NYT Graphics (@nytgraphics) January 12, 2015

This was the duo's third attempt on the Dawn Wall: they were stopped in 2010 by a storm, and in 2011, Jorgenson broke his ankle when attempting a particularly difficult move — one that required him to leap sideways off the rock and land several feet away.

Secret trick from climbers @tommycaldwell1 & Kevin J. Superglue! http://t.co/WwZs1qwsn0 @coreyrich #dawnwall pic.twitter.com/lbRUvSA14d

— NatGeo Explorers (@NatGeoExplorers) January 13, 2015

This year, they began on December 27, so that cold temperatures would limit sweat and allow them to grip the rock more easily. They also climbed at night, with headlamps, so the sun doesn't heat the rock.

Climb of the Century: Two Men Attempt Historic Free Ascent of El Capitan http://t.co/huColhh5mY pic.twitter.com/YuRCvzJsJK

— Album Crafters (@AlbumCrafters) January 13, 2015

The pair have set up a hanging tent about one-third of the way up the wall. After each night's climb, they used ropes to descend down to it, slept, ate, and then hoisted themselves back up to the spot each left off at previously.

The climb is made up of 32 pitches — sections of the route that are roughly equal in length to a single climbing rope. During training, Caldwell and Jorgeson successfully climbed each pitch in isolation (that is, getting hoisted to the beginning of it), but this was the first time they — or anyone — free climbed all 32 pitches in succession.

Further reading: Explore the New York Times' interactive map of the Dawn Wall