As if spurred by the news of Hall & Oates suing a breakfast cereal company for illegally using a pun on their name, Neil Cicierga has created a Hall & Oates/Metallica mashup for the ages, “I Can’t Enter That (No Sandman).” It’s brutal and smooth.
"When you hear whites say: ‘get over it,’ ‘slavery was a long time ago,’ ‘my family didn’t own slaves, ‘the Jews owned the slave ships,’ ‘your own kind sold you into slavery,’ and other sentiments like these, know these are the most common excuses these devils will use in attempts to not accept responsibility for and make restitution for their kind’s generational race crimes. Know today that these are unacceptable racist statements reparations offenders use in support of their kind’s historical racial terrorism.”
"Whites who make statements like these are just as racially terroristic as the whites who dehumanized and terrorized our ancestors during the slave trade and even in this - the post Trans Atlantic slave trade era. Most often, these are the kinds of whites you will have to defend yourself against in a reparations protest."
i feel like the violent femmes are like the magnetic fields in that you can own one album and it's essentially like owning all the albums but it's all really good so whatever.
Violent Femmes fans will have reason to celebrate on April 18 because the alt-rock band is releasing the first batch of new tunes since 2000’s Freak Magnet.
On Record Store Day, the band will drop Happy New Year, a four-song EP, which was recorded on… wait for it… New Year’s Day in Hobart, Tasmania. To commemorate the special event, the disc will be appropriately available on champagne-colored vinyl.
The first single from the EP is called “Love Love Love Love Love” and it’s gloriously tragic. Written by Los Angeles singer/songwriter Jake Brebes, the song is an ode to more traditional times of romance and courtship, as explained by the samba-style beat and nostalgic lyrics.
In case you’d like to hear Brebes’ version for a side-by-side musical comparison, listen below.
What’s kinda funny about the band’s first new song in 15 years is how similar the lyrical structure is to Violent Femmes’ 1983 hit “Kiss Off.” Both tracks use math as a way to organize heartbreak, which is both hilarious and oddly pragmatic.
While Violent Femmes continue to work on even more new material, make sure catch them this summer when they head out with Barenaked Ladies and Colin Hay on a cross-country tour.
5-Jun-15 – Columbus, OH @ LC Pavilion
6-Jun-15 – Cleveland, OH @ Jacobs Pavilion at Nautica
7-Jun-15 – Toledo, OH @ Toledo Zoo Ampitheatre
8-Jun-15 – Cedar Rapids, IA @ McGrath Amphitheatre
10-Jun-15 – Denver, CO @ Red Rocks Park and Amphitheatre
12-Jun-15 – Red Wing, MN @ Treasure Island Resort & Casino Island Events Center
13-Jun-15 – Milwaukee, WI @ BMO Harris Pavillion
14-Jun-15 – Council Bluffs, IA @ Stir Cove
16-Jun-15 – Chicago, IL @ FirstMerit Bank Pavilion
17-Jun-15 – Indianapolis, IN @ Farm Bureau Insurance Lawn at White River State Park
19-Jun-15 – Cincinnati, OH @ PNC Pavilion
20-Jun-15 – Detroit, MI @ DTE Energy Music Theatre
21-Jun-15 – Salamanca, NY @ Seneca Allegany Event Center
23-Jun-15 – Pittsburgh, PA @ Stage AE
26-Jun-15 – Portland, ME @ Maine State Pier
27-Jun-15 – Uncasville, CT @ Mohegan Sun Casino Arena
28-Jun-15 – Philadelphia, PA @ The Mann Center for the Performing Arts
29-Jun-15 – Boston, MA @ Blue Hills Bank Pavilion
1-Jul-15 – New York, NY @JBL Live at Pier 97
2-Jul-15 – West Windsor, NJ @ Mercer County Park Festival Grounds
3-Jul-15 – Solomons, MD @ Pnc Waterside Pavillion
4-Jul-15 – Raleigh, NC @ Red Hat Amphitheater
8-Jul-15 – Charlotte, NC @ Uptown Amphitheatre Charlotte
10-Jul-15 – Boca Raton, FL @ Sunset Cove Amphitheater
11-Jul-15 – St. Augustine, FL @ St Augustine Amphitheatre
12-Jul-15 – Atlanta, GA @ VZW Amphitheatre at Encore Park
13-Jul-15 – Nashville, TN @ The Woods at Fontanel
15-Jul-15 – Dallas, TX @ Verizon Theatre at Grand Prairie
18-Jul-15 – Las Vegas, NV @ Boulevard Pool at The Cosmopolitan
19-Jul-15 – San Diego, CA @ Cal Coast Credit Union Open Air Theatre
21-Jul-15 – Los Angeles, CA @ Greek Theatre L.A.
22-Jul-15 – Saratoga, CA @ Mountain Winery Concerts
24-Jul-15 – Boise, ID @ Idaho Botanical Garden
25-Jul-15 – Portland, OR @ Edgefield Concerts on the Lawn
26-Jul-15 – Seattle, WA @ Marymoor Concerts
Do you like to be comfortable? Are you an asshole? Then boy do we have the garment for you. It's the world's first vape/hoodie combo, and Fred Durst just bought eight.
oh my god the abject misery by pro gg people due to this is astounding
Last night, Tim Schafer of Double Fine Games hosted the 15th annual Game Developer’s Choice Awards to a room full of his peers at the Game Developer’s Conference (GDC) in San Diego. Of course, it would be pretty difficult to make jokes and celebrate the gaming industry without at least mentioning the, ahem, sea lion in the room, and Schafer did so pretty spectacularly. How do we know this? Because all the prominent Gamergaters are losing their shit and calling him a racist. Welp, this oughta be good.
If you’re not able to view the video, here’s what he did: rather than poke fun at Gamergate himself, he created a sockpuppet account—using a literal sock puppet, of course—to make all the jokes for him, which resulted in this bit when he began to speak about visual art in gaming:
Sock: How many gamergaters does it take to make a single piece of armor?
Schafer: Oh, god, I don’t know.
Sock: Fifty. One to do the modeling, one to do the materials, and forty-eight to tweet that it’s not your shield.
Okay, so it’s definitely not the best joke (and Schafer’s puppet voice is terrible), but at least it works purely on a strictly linguistic, wordplay-centric sense. Armor? Shield? Get it?
But many Gamergaters were not happy about the use of their #NotYourShield hashtag, with which people of color, LGTBQ people, and women tweet about how they like Gamergate so those who are against the movement on the grounds that it behaves pretty unfairly to those kinds of people are clearly being disingenuous. (Hey head’s up, we aren’t.) It wasn’t just offensive to them—it was hate speech. And they sure did let the Internet know about it.
Tim Schafer SPECIFICALLY went out of his way to engage in hate speech against minorities, alternate gender identities, and sexualities.
By the way, the “Not Your Shield” campaign, despite attracting some real marginalized people who truly believe in the “ethics in game journalism” angle, was reportedly conceived of as a way to deflect genuine criticism from those who specifically got into the movement as a way to spew hate at Zoe Quinn.
Meanwhile, one of the panels that Zoe Quinn spoke at earlier this week literally required a police presence—which is almost unheard of at GDC—because of all the death threats she’s gotten since Gamergate began. So, yeah. Forgive me if I’m not grabbing my pitchfork for Schafer just yet.
But enough about my angry mob gear. What do you all think of the joke, friends?
In a crowded session at this year's Game Developers Conference, Brian Moriarty, author of the 1990 adventure game Loom, delivered a post mortem on the game to a packed audience in San Francisco. At the end, he said that he is eager to make a sequel and named the three studios he would be willing to collaborate with on the game.
Throughout the presentation, Moriarty became emotional many times about the years he spent on the Skywalker Ranch working with the Lucasfilm Games SCUMM engine, and with the audio engineers at Skywalker Ranch to create the unique and musical experience that became Loom. He went on to talk about the fan mail he still receives, to this day, from people in the industry or who hope to one day make games that were...
Sony is letting select PlayStation 4 owners beta test the system's upcoming firmware, version 2.50, according to apparently leaked emails sent to PlayStation MVPs. The update will supposedly bring with it a long-awaited feature: the ability to put the PS4 into rest mode without shutting down games and applications.
According to an alleged screenshot of a leaked email from Sony, some PS4 owners will be able to beta test version 2.50 of the system's firmware if they opt-in. Selected PlayStation MVPs will apparently receive a message via PlayStation Network and a voucher to download the beta system software by March 9.
Other features supposedly coming in the new PS4 firmware include the option to delete PlayStation Trophies with zero...
Heroin overdose deaths are skyrocketing. From 2011 to 2013, these deaths nearly doubled from about 4,400 to more than 8,200.
There are a few theories for why this is happening. One is that addicts are moving from painkillers to heroin after a crackdown on prescription drug abuse. Another is that cultural shifts massively influence drug use. The first theory shows how the war on drugs can have negative side-effects, and the second shows why the drug war is so hard to truly win.
1) Addicts are moving to heroin from painkillers
These can relieve pain, but they're dangerous — especially when paired with other drugs. (Education Images / UIG via Getty Images)
Prescription painkillers and heroin are both opioids — and some evidence suggests that the drugs might be interchangeable for addicts.
When prescription painkiller deaths began to rise through the 2000s, state and federal officials went after "pill mills" in which doctors and pharmacists provided painkillers unscrupulously or for non-medical purposes. Federal officials also increased restrictions on many opioids through the scheduling system, and encouraged the development of abuse-resistant pills that can't be snorted or injected as easily. The idea was to cut off the supply of painkillers at the source by halting an abundance of faulty prescriptions.
This seems to have worked: prescription painkiller deaths have leveled off at around 16,000 after increasing for years, from around 8,500 in 2003.
But when many addicts lost access to their painkiller prescriptions, they seemed to turn to heroin. A 2014 study published in JAMA Psychiatry backed this point, suggesting that addicts switched to heroin because it's relatively cheap and accessible in the black market. And during the past few years, heroin deaths spiked to more than 8,200 in 2013, from around 2,000 10 years before.
This doesn't necessarily mean that cracking down on prescription drug abuse was the wrong move. Keith Humphreys, drug policy expert at Stanford University, explained in February that no policy is ever going to stop all drug use. The objective, instead, is to minimize the harm of drugs. For instance, if cracking down on pill mills helped stop a rise in tens of thousands of deaths from painkiller overdoses, but led to a few thousand deaths from heroin, that's still a potential net gain of thousands of lives saved.
"There's always choices," Humphreys said. "There is no framework available in which there's not harm somehow. We've got freedom, pleasure, health, crime, and public safety. You can push on one and two of those — maybe even three with different drugs — but you can't get rid of all of them. You have to pay the piper somewhere."
2) Culture influences drug use
Heroin is often injected. (Spencer Platt / Getty Images News)
Sometimes drug use is driven by cultural shifts, not policy.
Baby boomers in their late teens and early 20s reportedly used nearly every drug — with the big exception of painkillers — at much higher rates than similarly aged millennials, although millennials are using drugs at higher rates than the generation born in the 1960s through 1970s.
What explains these differences? Part of the answer is cultural shifts. The 1960s and 1970s were huge for counterculture movements, when baby boomers were at the prime age (late teens and early 20s) for recreational drug use. But Generation X, which followed the baby boomers,saw the negative effects of widespread drug use, particularly cocaine and heroin, and built a bigger stigma toward such drugs. Some millennials seem to have shrugged off those lessons, taking up marijuana, heroin, and prescription painkillers at elevated rates.
The sway of cultural shifts is one reason the war on drugs will never fully eradicate substance abuse, although different policies, including those that focus on rehabilitation and harm reduction instead of criminal prohibition, might minimize the negative effects of drugs and the illicit market surrounding them. The idea, drug policy experts like Humphreys say, is to find the right balance of policies, instead of hoping for a panacea that will likely never come.
ok i was wrong with the 24 hours estimation, "The incident has raised more concerns about flight traffic at Santa Monica Airport, with an advocate for closing the airport pointing out, "Santa Monica is unique in the nation because it has dense neighborhoods next to an airport." - clearly this person never looked at a map of long island
11-year-old Liam Scholes hasn't read Fifty Shades of Grey and he hasn't seen the movie. In fact, he probably just wanted to dress up as the iconic character because it's an easy costume (you just wear a suit and pout a lot). But administrators at his school in the UK decided that the costume was inappropriate and banned him from all World Book Day activities and photos.
Nine-year-old Marissa Streng came up with the Puff-N-Fluff bag. To dry her pug, Mojo, after a bath, after a swim, after coming in from the rain, after any time she preferred not gagging and retching to inhaling the ripe must of wet dog. I hate you, Marissa Streng. You're probably rich enough now to move out of your mama's house as a 4th grader, and I can't even do it as a 28th grader.
The Puff-N-Fluff dog dryer is basically a big piece of fabric with four elastic leg holes and head/tail openings for fitting over your pooch like a doggie raptor costume. Once in place, drawstrings at the head and tail close any remaining gaps. From there, owners place any standard hair dryer into the opening of a flexible hose at the base of the Puff-N-Fluff bag and fire it up. According to Streng and her collaborators (i.e., Mom and Dad) the hours of waiting for a wet dog to dry are now reduced to minutes.
Let's take a look at the video to see this ingenious dryer in action.
Wow. What I would like to see now is a video of someone trying to use the Puff-N-Fluff on their cat.
Another dog grooming pro tip: Once your pet has been Puff-N-Fluffed dry, my mama recommends cutting its hair with a Flowbee, which is what she used to user our our shih tzu, Domino, may he rest in peace.
London electronic duo AlunaGeorge will return to L.A. this spring, performing at one of our favorite venues! Back for the first time since 2013, AlunaGeorge will headline an all-ages show at the Masonic Lodge at Hollywood Forever Cemetery on Thursday,...
“All good people love pussy,” says Franny Divine, the mind behind the Catnip Club, Hollywood’s newest monthly club night and first feline disco. Divine, a self-identified “cat lady,” drew not only from her love of felines but also from parties in London, where she's from, and club sensations like Studio...
Sitting on 10 acres of open desert, the Noah Purifoy Museum is a walk through one artist's world. [ more › ]
As much as humans might appreciate not having to drive or fly through fog, this is bad for coastal ecosystems and plants. [ more › ]
Actor Harrison Ford was described as "fine" after he crashed his World War II-era single-engine plane in a golf course in Venice yesterday afternoon. KTLA spoke to a source close to Ford's family, who said, "He’s fine, has a few gashes." His son, Ben Ford, confirmed over Twitter last night, "Dad is ok. Battered, but ok! He is every bit the man you would think he is. He is an incredibly strong man." [ more › ]
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