Steve Dyer

bundibird:

sleepy-ocean-girl:

sabrecmc:

Chris turning red and thinking bad thoughts, lol.  Me, too, buddy.

Well that’s one hell of a face journey

My fav part is that you’ve got Evans going on this face journey of delighted gutter thoughts, and then there’s Hemsworth, just nomming away nonchalantly like he hasn’t just made his buddy plunge suddenly and unexpectedly into nsfw mental image land

The post What if sleep was a commodity? appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

Cher paid a visit to James Corden on The Late Late Show last night and joined him for one of his favorite games, Spill Your Guts or Fill Your Guts, which requires participants to either answer a difficult question or eat something really nasty.

On the menu for Cher was Stargazy pie (a Cornish pastry dish made of baked sardines with eggs and potatoes), dried caterpillar, a cow tongue, a deep fried candy bar (that ain’t bad), a scorpion, a haggis, a fish and chips smoothie, and a thousand-year-old egg.

Cher was asked two difficult questions and chose the food both times. The first question was with regard to a statement she had made that Tom Cruise was one of her top 5 lovers. Corden asked her to name the other four.

Her second question was even more difficult: say something nice about Donald Trump.

Watch:

The post Cher Will Devour a Cow Tongue Before She’ll Say Anything Nice About Trump: WATCH appeared first on Towleroad.

xenitesunite:

this is a fucking mood

In this video, 70 people from 70 different countries from all over the world show how they count money in their respective countries. Fascinating and more than a little mesmerizing after a while. I wonder why these different techniques developed the way that they did… (via digg)

stream:

Hannah Gadsby: Nanette (2018)

wesleygasm:

LUPITA NYONG’O
Chopard Secret Night during Cannes Film Festival at Chateau de la Croix des Gardes in Cannes, France | May 11, 2018

A reader writes:

I work in a legal office. I am the assistant but I sit in an open area outside my boss’s office. I wear business casual clothing and shoes. However, my feet get uncomfortable in the shoes. I often take my shoes off and go barefoot. They’re under the desk for the most part, but occasionally people will have to look at my computer. Is it improper to take your shoes off in the office? I’d like to walk from my desk to the copier with no shoes on.

I sympathize because I prefer to live my entire life barefoot.

But in most offices — not all, but the majority — walking around barefoot will come across as way too casual and unprofessional. Also, a lot of people find it gross. (I went looking for data on this and came across a reference to a 2012 survey that found that more than 40% of people feel offended when colleagues take off their shoes at work.)

But under your desk? If no one can see your feet under there, go for it. If someone comes over to look at your computer, though, it’s more polite to slip your shoes back on.

Basically, if anyone is likely to see you at work, stay fully clothed and shod.

can I go barefoot at work? was originally published by Alison Green on Ask a Manager.

What would you do for three million rubles and a lifetime supply of Burger King Whoppers? If the answer is "Have the baby of a random professional soccer player I met during the World Cup," you just missed out on the chance of a lifetime. Because Burger King Russia was just offering such a promotion, and has had to cancel it, because for some reason, people thought a "burgers for broodmares" promotion was a tad sexist.

The company -- which we must imagine does not employ many women in their PR department -- posted the promotion this week on VK, the Russian version of Facebook.

Via CBS:

"As part of its social responsibility (campaign), Burger King is offering a reward to women who get impregnated by football stars," said Burger King.

"Every woman will get three million rubles (around $45,000) and a lifetime's supply of Whopper burgers. Women who manage to get the best football genes will ensure Russia's success in future generations."

The post ended with a call: "Go ahead! We believe in you!"

I don't know what their word for "impregnated" is, but I can't imagine this sounds any better in the original Russian. There probably is not a language in which a fast food chain can offer you hamburgers for getting pregnant and have that not sound weird.

As it turned out, Russian women did not want to have soccer babies for burgers, and a social media firestorm erupted, causing Burger King (Burger Tsar?) to cancel the promotion. So now if you have some rando's soccer lovechild, you get NOTHING.

Giphy

As disturbing as all of that sounds, this campaign was actually supposed to be a response to some incredibly messed up statements from Communist Party Parliamentarian Tamara Pletneva, who was going around telling women to make sure they didn't bang any of them dang foreigners at the World Cup, lest they end up raising children of a different race. Bringing up the fact that the 1980 Moscow Olympics led to some Russian women getting knocked up by foreigners, Pletneva said:

"It's the children who suffer... and have suffered since the Soviet era. It's lucky if they're the same race (as the mother) but if they're of another race, it's worse."

Yes, she actually said that. On a radio show.

So, the Burger King thing was meant to be more of a "Nevermind that weird Pletneva lady's nonsense! We're not racist! Go have some World Cup babies! We bet those babies will be AWESOME!" kind of thing, but definitely failed in that regard. Because no matter which way you go with it, there is never a good way to tell a woman what to do with her vagina. Telling women not to fuck soccer players because they might have babies of a different race is creepy, but so is "go bang some soccer players and if you get knocked up, we will give you all the hamburgers!"

Also, how would they have confirmed the soccer sperms?

Whether you are a government official or a fast food chain, it's best to stay out of it.

[CBS]

chicks:

pixelrey:

Lupita Nyong’o performing “Whatta Man” on Lip Sync Battle

blueboyluca:

Bob Ross gets it.

ladysstark:

preach:

preach:

ruinedchildhood:

preach:

preach:

“Why are you hungry didnt you JUST eat?”

Avengers, but Steve is trying to get everyone to eat healthier

A reader writes:

I need some advice on how to deal with working with a coworker that drives me absolutely insane. This lady is by far the most annoying, rude, and unprofessional person I have ever had the displeasure of working with.

You know how they say if a shark stops moving they will die? Well that’s my coworker, but with talking. Our cubicles are right across from each other and every morning before I’ve even had a chance to put my bag down, she is in my cubicle bitching about her morning or telling me some story about her kid. I try to sneak in and avoid saying “good morning” because I don’t want to set her off, but it’s like she’s got Spidey senses. Whenever she starts with one of her stories, I just go on about my business and completely ignore her, or I give her a blank stare. I honestly think she doesn’t care that I have no interest in anything she has to say because I have tried everything to get her to leave me alone:

• There was a moment when we first started working when I completely lost my cool and told her to stop talking and get out of my cubicle. To which she responded, “Oh, okay. But I’ll be back later!”

• I specifically bought those giant Beats headphones in an effort to prevent her from talking to me. But that did not stop her. She still knocked on my cubicle wall or desk or waved her hand next to my face to get my attention. Once I took off my headphones she would start telling me a story about her cats or something equally as random!

• I will tell her if I’m not interested in a topic, but then she just starts her ramblings like, “I know you’re not interested in baseball, but let me tell you about the game last night.”

• If I tell her I’m really busy and keep my back towards her, she will not walk away until after she has finished telling her story.

To make matters worse, we sit near two supervisors’ offices. Not only does she talk a lot, but she is so loud and is constantly swearing. Our supervisory team has sent out emails about appropriate office conversations and language, but it just doesn’t get through to her. I have asked to move cubicles, citing the fact that I feel unproductive, but my requests have been denied, twice. (It’s a corporate thing, I guess. Others have asked to move and their requests have been denied as well.)

Aside from the non-stop talking and swearing, there are other things that bother me about her. For instance, she will straight up yell at anyone (coworkers, programmers, supervisors) if they point out a mistake she’s made. If I am asked to work on a special project she will stop by my cubicle several times a day to stare at my computer screen and go, “What’s this? What are you working on? Well, I’m sure glad I don’t have to do anything like this!” She also has a tendency to come into work sans bra (which she points out to everyone!) and wearing pajama pants and holey hoodies. We work in a government building, for crying out loud! This lady is in her thirties. Why can’t she act like an adult?

I really like my job and have no interest in leaving, but I just don’t know what to do anymore! The days she is not here are like a breath of fresh air. Please help me!

I wrote back and asked: Does she do this to everyone else too? Is there anyone who seems to have found a way to successfully fend her off?

She talks to me the most. I think it’s because we started on the same day, so we have that ~connection~. But she will find another target on days I’m not there. I can always tell who her victim for the day is because I will get a text from them that says, “Thanks for leaving me with crazypants.” Occasionally she will get to work early and bother whoever is there at that time.

The only person she completely ignores is the office grump. (This man will not acknowledge anyone, shuts the door on you even if you are two feet away, never attends an office party, etc.) But I could go an entire day without saying a word to her and she would still be in my cubicle.

I’m generally a nice person and my boss jokingly calls me “troublemaker” because it’s the complete opppsite of who I am. But I feel like this lady’s attitude is slowly changing my mentality and it’s killing me!

This sounds horrible.

You’re probably hoping for a way to get her to leave you alone that doesn’t (a) require you having to be rude or (b) end in her hating you. I don’t think there’s a realistic solution that will give you (a), and there might not be one that gives you (b) either.

If you want to get her to stop, you’re going to have to say and do things that are going to feel rude to you. That’s not your fault — it’s hers, for putting you in a position where that’s the only thing that will work.

There’s a glimmer of hope in this detail from your letter: “There was a moment when we first started working when I completely lost my cool and told her to stop talking and get out of my cubicle. To which she responded, ‘Oh, okay. But I’ll be back later!’” Her response there was obviously ridiculous, but if I’m reading this correctly, she did in fact leave.

You need to do much more of that and much less of this: “Whenever she starts with one of her stories, I just go on about my business and completely ignore her, or I give her a blank stare.” I totally get why you’ve resorted to those options, but they’re not effective in getting her to stop. (They should be! But they’re not.)

So, here are your strategies going forward:

* Be very, very blunt with like when you snapped at her. That doesn’t mean yelling at her — you still need to be reasonably professional — but you can absolutely say “I need you to stop talking and leave my cubicle.” Followed by, if necessary, “STOP TALKING. I’m working.” That is going to feel incredibly rude — because it would be with anyone else. But it’s not with her; it’s the only thing that gets through to her. (Frankly, I’d argue you’d even be doing her a favor by being so blunt, because she’s clearly not picking up softer signals that are in her best interest to pick up on.)

* Keep wearing your giant headphones. If she knocks on your desk or waves her in front of your face, say to her, “I’m working and cannot talk” and turn back to your work. If she keeps trying, say, “Please email me. I am busy right now.” Keep the headphones on. If there’s a fire, someone else will tell you.

* If she says something like “I know you’re not interested in baseball, but let me tell you about the game last night,” say this: “You’re right, I’m not, and I need to focus on work so I cannot have you talking to me right now” and then turn back to your work. If she continues anyway, use the “I need you to leave” advice above.

* If you do all this and she keeps talking, stand up, look her directly in the eye, and say, “I told you I am working and I need you to leave. Please go now.”

(This is the rudest advice I’ve ever given, and it’s making me uncomfortable! But you’ve tried everything else, and so your choices really are to take this approach or to live with what’s happening.)

You could also try a more big-picture conversation with her, although I don’t have any idea if it will work because she’s clearly not playing by rules any of us are familiar with. That would sound like this: “Jane, I’m really busy with work and I cannot get my job done when you keep coming over to talk to me. I need you to stop chatting with me during the day — not just sometimes, but completely. It’s interfering with my ability to do my work. So from now on, if you come over to chat, I’m going to cut you off and ask you to leave. I’m sorry if that feels rude, but it’s the only way I can get my job done.”

If you do that, though, you have to really commit to cutting her off every time after that, because otherwise you’ll be training her to believe that you don’t really mean it.

Also, this is bad enough that you should be talking to your boss about it. As in: “I’m having a real problem with Jane continually trying to socialize with me while I’m working. It’s multiple times a day, and I’ve told her directly many times that I can’t talk and she needs to leave, but she just keeps talking. It’s affecting my ability to focus on my work, and I’m at my wit’s end. Since I’ve been quite direct and she’s ignoring me, is it possible for you to intervene?”

You should encourage your coworkers to have this same conversation with their boss and/or Jane’s boss. Every time they vent to you about Jane, suggest they talk to the person who can actually help — their manager.

The venting, by the way, is probably making this worse, since it means that even more of your time and mental energy at work is taken up by thinking about Jane. If nothing else, you might be happier if everyone cut that out or at least pulled way back on it.

And speaking of your own mental health, stop caring about all the pieces of this that don’t directly impact you — like her yelling at other people and what she’s wearing. There’s enough of this that does affect you that you need to deal with that there’s no point in taking on the rest of it too.

Good luck, and I wish you much silence.

my coworker never stops talking — and I mean NEVER was originally published by Alison Green on Ask a Manager.

No use sugar-coating it: the federal government of the United States of America now has a policy of taking children away from their families when they attempt to enter the US to request political asylum from violence & hardship in their native countries. These children and their parents are placed into concentration camps. The government is doing this as a deterrent for further immigration and for political leverage.

But Mr. Miller has expressed none of the president’s misgivings. “No nation can have the policy that whole classes of people are immune from immigration law or enforcement,” he said during an interview in his West Wing office this past week. “It was a simple decision by the administration to have a zero tolerance policy for illegal entry, period. The message is that no one is exempt from immigration law.”

Texas Monthly interviewed Anne Chandler, the director of a nonprofit that focuses on helping immigrant women and children. She spoke about what the zero tolerance policy means:

TM: So, just so I make sure I understand: the parents come in and say, “We’re persecuted” or give some reason for asylum. They come in. And then their child or children are taken away and they’re in lockup for at least six weeks away from the kids and often don’t know where the kids are. Is that what’s happening under zero tolerance?

AC: So the idea of zero tolerance under the stated policy is that we don’t care why you’re afraid. We don’t care if it’s religion, political, gangs, anything. For all asylum seekers, you are going to be put in jail, in a detention center, and you’re going to have your children taken away from you. That’s the policy.

Children and their parents are being held in private jails¹ built and operated at the US government’s behest.

Colleagues at a government-contracted shelter in Arizona had a specific request for Antar Davidson when three Brazilian migrant children arrived: “Tell them they can’t hug.”

Davidson, 32, is of Brazilian descent and speaks Portuguese. He said the siblings — ages 16, 10 and 6 — were distraught after being separated from their parents at the border. The children were “huddled together, tears streaming down their faces,” he said.

Officials had told them their parents were “lost,” which they interpreted to mean dead. Davidson said he told the children he didn’t know where their parents were, but that they had to be strong.

“The 16-year-old, he looks at me and says, ‘How?’” Davidson said. As he watched the youth cry, he thought, “This is not healthy.”

Yesterday, some reporters were allowed a brief look inside one of these jails in Texas:

Inside an old warehouse in South Texas, hundreds of children wait in a series of cages created by metal fencing. One cage had 20 children inside. Scattered about are bottles of water, bags of chips and large foil sheets intended to serve as blankets.

One teenager told an advocate who visited that she was helping care for a young child she didn’t know because the child’s aunt was somewhere else in the facility. She said she had to show others in her cell how to change the girl’s diaper.

The traumatic effects of being kept away from parents are deep and long lasting. Dell Cameron shares his story of being separated from his parents as a child.

The trauma came from being separated from parents, who I knew were out there, and when I saw them, would tell me they were doing everything to get me home. But it took years. Hope is what I lost as a child. It was destroyed by the state.

When on occasion my dad was allowed to visit, watching him leave utterly destroyed me. I mean, I’d fly into insanity. I would pick up things and smash windows once his truck drove around the corner. Then I’d be punished, very harshly.

When I was 10 or 11 I got out. I was in custody for damn, most of my childhood. It was impossible to acclimate. I didn’t fit anywhere. I had no comprehension of freedom, as my dad’s step kids understood it. I didn’t understand I could walk outside without permission… for months

When this Guatemalan woman and her son tried to enter the United States, they were separated and she was sent back to Guatemala while her 8-year-old son remains in one of the camps in the US. This is going to do unimaginable harm to this child, not to mention to his mother and everyone else in the family.

They’d had a plan: Elsa Johana Ortiz Enriquez packed up what little she had in Guatemala and traveled across Mexico with her 8-year-old son, Anthony. In a group, they rafted across the Rio Grande into Texas. From there they intended to join her boyfriend, Edgar, who had found a construction job in the United States.

Except it all went wrong. The Border Patrol was waiting as they made their way from the border on May 26, and soon mother and son were in a teeming detention center in southern Texas. The next part unfolded so swiftly that, even now, Ms. Ortiz cannot grasp it: Anthony was sent to a shelter for migrant children. And she was put on a plane back to Guatemala.

“I am completely devastated,” Ms. Ortiz, 25, said in one of a series of video interviews last week from her family home in Guatemala. Her eyes swollen from weeping and her voice subdued, she said she had no idea when or how she would see her son again.

As the federal government continues to separate families as part of a stepped-up enforcement program against those who cross the border illegally, the authorities say that parents are not supposed to be deported without their children. But immigration lawyers say that has happened in several cases. And the separations can be traumatic for parents who now have no clear path to recovering their children.

Vermont Congressman Peter Welch recently visited a “processing facility” (the scare quotes are his) and declared it to be “nothing short of a prison”.

I just exited a border patrol “processing facility” known as the “icebox.” It is nothing short of a prison.

I saw chain link cages full of unaccompanied children. They sat on metal benches and stared straight ahead silently

And I met a woman named Reina who was being extorted in Guatemala. She traveled 14 days with her 13 year old daughter and turned herself in at the border for asylum.

She hasn’t seen her daughter in two days and didn’t know where she was. No one had told her that her daughter had been taken to a shelter.

Today, the United Nations high commissioner for human rights called for the US to stop the practice of separating children from parents.

The United Nations’ top human rights official on Monday entered the mounting furor over the Trump administration’s policy of separating undocumented immigrant children from their parents, calling for an immediate halt to a practice he condemned as abuse.

United States immigration authorities have detained almost 2,000 children in the past six weeks, which may cause them irreparable harm with lifelong consequences, said Zeid Ra’ad al-Hussein, the United Nations high commissioner for human rights.

He cited anobservation by the president of the American Association of Pediatrics that locking the children up separately from their parents constituted “government-sanctioned child abuse.”

“The thought that any state would seek to deter parents by inflicting such abuse on children is unconscionable,” Mr. al-Hussein said.

If you’re feeling helpless and powerless about this (and I admit that I very much do), Slate and The Cut have listed some ways that you can help the families and children involved and fight for a more humane policy for those seeking a better life here in America.

Photo above by Getty photographer John Moore.

Update: From ProPublica, Listen to Children Who’ve Just Been Separated From Their Parents at the Border.

The desperate sobbing of 10 Central American children, separated from their parents one day last week by immigration authorities at the border, makes for excruciating listening. Many of them sound like they’re crying so hard, they can barely breathe. They scream “Mami” and “Papá” over and over again, as if those are the only words they know.

The baritone voice of a Border Patrol agent booms above the crying. “Well, we have an orchestra here,” he jokes. “What’s missing is a conductor.”

Holy hell.

Update: Drs. Margaret Sheridan and Charles Nelson writing for the NY Times about a study they conducted that shows how adversely family separation affects children.

As members of a team of researchers who have investigated the impact of separating children from their parents during early childhood, we were struck by another aspect of this news: In an effort to increase security, the Trump administration has hit upon a policy that we know is actually likely to increase delinquency and criminality among these children in the future. While trying to protect American citizens, the administration may be placing them in greater jeopardy.

If we have learned nothing else in the past 50 years of research on child development, it is that children do best in families and that violating this norm has terrible effects.

1. Many news organizations are using the words “facility” or “shelter” but that terminology implies that people are free to leave, which they are not, and this definitely isn’t sheltering. These are jails and concentration camps (so says a women who wrote a history of concentration camps) and I will refer to them as such. Language is important.↩

A bisexual Virginia woman’s grandmother has gone viral on Twitter because of a simple gesture that showed her acceptance of her granddaughter’s sexual orientation.

The woman, named Lexie, shared a photo of her grandmother ironing her bisexual pride flag, tweeting: “I got up this morning to get ready for #DCPride. My grandma walked into my room, looked at my bi flag, and said, “Oh, this needs to be pressed out!” Such a simple gesture, but it holds so much love and meaning for me.”

I got up this morning to get ready for #DCPride. My grandma walked into my room, looked at my bi flag, and said, “Oh, this needs to be pressed out!” Such a simple gesture, but it holds so much love and meaning for me. pic.twitter.com/stiD3vg5vs

— Lexie (@lexie_galaxie) June 9, 2018

She later spoke more about her: “It took me years to come out to her out of fear that she would see me differently, but nothing changed. She said, ‘Okay, that’s fine.’ She taught me to love and accept all people, and she has always been supportive of me.”

And shared another photo:

WOW this is blowing up so here’s another picture of my grandma because I want the world to see how beautiful she is! Show her some love! Happy pride y’all pic.twitter.com/PytLQtipoo

— Lexie (@lexie_galaxie) June 9, 2018

The post A Grandmother is Going Viral on Twitter Because of a ‘Simple Gesture’ of Love for Her Bisexual Grandchild appeared first on Towleroad.

For The Atlantic, Sarah Rich writes about how stifling masculinity can be for some children and their parents.

As much as feminism has worked to rebalance the power and privilege between the sexes, the dominant approach to launching young women into positions that garner greater respect, higher status, and better pay still mostly maintains the association between those gains and masculine qualities. Girls’ empowerment programs teach assertiveness, strength, and courage — and they must to equip young women for a world that still overwhelmingly favors men.

Last year, when the Boys Scouts of America announced that they would begin admitting girls into their dens, young women saw a wall come down around a territory that was now theirs to occupy. Parents across the country had argued that girls should have equal access to the activities and pursuits of boys’ scouting, saying that Girl Scouts is not a good fit for girls who are “more rough and tumble.” But the converse proposition was essentially non-existent: Not a single article that I could find mentioned the idea that boys might not find Boy Scouts to be a good fit — or, even more unspeakable, that they would want to join the Girl Scouts.

If it’s difficult to imagine a boy aspiring to the Girl Scouts’ merit badges (oriented far more than the boys’ toward friendship, caretaking, and community), what does that say about how American culture regards these traditionally feminine arenas? And what does it say to boys who think joining the Girl Scouts sounds fun? Even preschool-age boys know they’d be teased or shamed for disclosing such a dream.

While society is chipping away at giving girls broader access to life’s possibilities, it isn’t presenting boys with a full continuum of how they can be in the world. To carve out a masculine identity requires whittling away everything that falls outside the norms of boyhood. At the earliest ages, it’s about external signifiers like favorite colors, TV shows, and clothes. But later, the paring knife cuts away intimate friendships, emotional range, and open communication.

Rich talks about her young son’s current penchant for wearing dresses and wishes there was room in society for activity like that.

What I want for him, and for all boys, is for the process of becoming men to be expansive, not reductive.

Reading this, I thought about the amazing one-step process for getting a bikini body I read recently: “Put a bikini on your body.” It’s not perfect and this is a lot to ask of society, but perhaps an analogous definition for masculinity is that when a man or boy does something, that’s masculine.¹ Chugging a beer is masculine. Wearing a dress is masculine. Being brave is masculine. Crying is masculine. Playing sports is masculine. Not playing sports is masculine. Comforting a friend whose team lost before celebrating with his team is masculine. Anything and everything is masculine. You might argue that broadening the definition of the word to this degree diminishes its power to denote anything meaningful. And you’d be right, that’s the point.

1. Correspondingly, when a woman or a girl does something, that’s feminine. And when someone who identifies as, for instance, genderqueer does something, that’s genderqueer. Playing sports is feminine, wearing a dress is genderqueer, etc.↩

Read more...

The post Is surfing the internet dead? appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

Oh shit. You better buckle the fuck up for this one. Something truly fucked-up must have just happened, because every suspect in this lineup is a little boy in a sailor suit licking a big lollipop.

Read more...

striffyisme:

striderai:

forwhateveryouwant:

imagine-sebstan:

thenightling:

woodelf68:

moneysltd:

moldyfingers:

termytheantisocialbutterfly:

libertarirynn:

Are you telling me that the Teletubbies have, canonically, fucked? Because I am very uncomfortable with that information.

Um wat

turns out they’re called the tiddlytubbies and they have names

most likely umby pumby is la la’s kid and duggle dee is po’s. Yellow and red make orange, so Po and La La got together to have Ruru. 

Nin is purple, so that one is Tinky Winky’s. Dipsy’s is Daa daa because they’re both green. but look at daa daa’s antenna. seems a bit similar to la la’s no? la la and dipsy had some shit on the side.  

po, that other cheating fuck, had ping with tinky winky because ping is pink and that’s suspiciously similar to red and purple. also check out that fucking antenna. same as tinky winky’s. can’t hide the facts. po and la la were cheating on each other and now they have a shit ton of kids to pretend aren’t theirs. 

tinky winky and dipsy also aren’t innocent in this. the actual color of mi mi is an aqua green. green and blue. dipsy and tinky winky had mi mi AND they probably had Baa too. they had TWO KIDS and they’re off getting some tubby custard on the side. 

scandals galore in that damn superdome. 

A diagram for everyone who does not understand either. I found that the only pairs who had not had children together according to the above were Po and Dipsy, and Tinkywanky and Lala. Coincidentally Po, Lala and Tinkywanky all have children with only one confirmed parent. Considering the amount of cheating going on here, its quite likely that these children were the product of these pairs which have supposedly not boned. The suspected parents of these children have been indicated with dotted lines. An orgy happened here.

I’m just gonna…reblog this without comment.

…. 

*Stares*

…Why?

If I’m cursed with this information, you have to be too.

Bold of you to assume it was cheating and they weren’t all in on it together

god damn it this is the poly rep we deserve

Are we all just going to over look the fact you’re calling them Tinkywanky?

drawsshits:

The post American dams in the 19th century appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

(A version of this story is an excerpt from this week’s Noticing newsletter. You can read more about Noticing here.)

In a rare interview, Italian author Elena Ferrante observes that between corruption, poverty, violence, fear, and the deterioration of democracy, “today it seems to me that the whole world is Naples and that Naples has the merit of having always presented itself without a mask.” The world of Ferrante’s novels is the world in which we’ve all been living; the rest of us are just catching up to what Neapolitans have known all along.

It seems you could make a similar case for The Onion in the time of Trump: the world was already absurd and buffoonish, and now it’s taken off its mask. It does make telling jokes a touch more tricky. Editor-in-chief Chad Nackers explains the site’s approach, admitting that the writers’ job would probably be easier if Hillary Clinton had been elected.

What strikes me is how much he attributes to the site’s changes over the years isn’t to the administration, but to the atmosphere, which has changed since the days of Bill Clinton (and not just because of who’s been elected since).

When I started, there weren’t really too many humor sites. There definitely weren’t any humor news sites. A lot of times, nobody else was going to get their comment out as fast as we were going to get it out, by virtue of us having a website. Now it almost seems like on Twitter there are people who are professional comedians who are online all day. A story breaks and they’re making jokes about it.

Andy Baio recently posted a link that shows you your Twitter timeline as it would have looked ten years ago if you followed all the same people that you do today. For me, at least, it’s amazing how different the tone is — even in the middle of an historic election, in the early stages of an enormous economic meltdown, there’s a lot less politics, a lot less sniping, and a lot more diaristic writing. It’s not necessarily better; it’s just very different. And all of those things were happening then — it’s just that Twitter wasn’t understood as the venue where every stance was to be articulated, every statement was to be critiqued, and every line was to be drawn. There were fewer people around, it was a lot more homogenous, and far fewer people were paying attention.

I wonder often how future historians will think about this time (you know, with the usual grisly caveat that people survive to do history in the future): how much of today’s ugliness, violence, and corruption they will think of as an aberration of one man, or one family, one political party, one social media network, one television network, etc.

Or will they see it as an interlocking, self-contradictory system, all of which had a history, and all of whose parts shaped and enabled what happened — hopefully, good and bad things. I mean, even the people who’ve argued that the coup has already happened can’t agree on whether it began with the election, with Congress, or some time long before.

Maybe the future historians will be better at disentangling these things than we are. Or maybe we’re just all hopelessly tangled.

Hello, it is I, once and future Kottke.org guest editor Aaron Cohen. In the years since my objectively wonderful and technically perfect stints posting skateboarding and BMX videos here, I opened an ice cream shop in Somerville, MA called Gracie’s Ice Cream. As an ice cream professional and Kottke.org alumni, I’m not qualified for much except for writing about ice cream on Kottke.org (and posting skateboarding and BMX videos which I will do again some day). Now that I’ve mentioned Kottke.org 4 times in the first paragraph per company style guide, let’s get on with the post.

At aiweirdness.com, researcher Janelle Shane trains neural networks. And, reader, as an ice cream professional, I have a very basic understanding of what “trains neural networks” means [Carmody, get in here], but Shane recently shared some ice cream flavors she created using a small dataset of ice cream flavors infected with a dataset of metal bands, along with flavors created by an Austin middle school coding class. The flavors created by the coding class are not at all metal, but when it comes to ice cream flavors, this isn’t a bad thing. Shane then took the 1600 original flavor non-metal ice cream flavor dataset and created additional flavors.

The flavors are grouped together loosely based on much they work on ice cream flavors. I figured I’d pick a couple of the flavor names and back into the recipes as if I was on a Chopped-style show where ice cream professionals are given neural network-created ice cream flavor names and asked to produce fitting ice cream flavors. I have an asterisk next to flavors I’m desperate to make this summer.

From the original list of metal ice cream flavors:
*Silence Cherry - Chocolate ice cream base with shredded cherry.
Chocolate Sin - This is almost certainly a flavor name somewhere and it’s chocolate ice cream loaded with multiple formats of chocolate - cookies, chips, cake, fudge, you name it.
*Chocolate Chocolate Blood - Chocolate Beet Pie, but ice cream.

From the students’ list, some “sweet and fun” flavors:
Honey Vanilla Happy - Vanilla ice cream with a honey swirl, rainbow sprinkles.
Oh and Cinnamon - We make a cinnamon ginger snap flavor once in a while, and I’m crushed we didn’t call it “Oh and Cinnamon.” Probably my favorite, most Gracie’s-like flavor name of this entire exercise.

From the weirder list:
Chocolate Finger - Chocolate ice cream, entire Butterfinger candy bars like you get at the rich houses on Halloween.
Crackberry Pretzel - Salty black raspberry chip with chocolate covered pretzel.

Worrying and ambiguous:
Brown Crunch - Peanut butter Heath Bar.
Sticky Crumple - Caramel and pulverized crumpets.
Cookies and Green - Easy. Cookies and Cream with green dye.

“Trendy-sounding ice cream flavors”:
Lime Cardamom - Sounds like a sorbet, to be honest.
Potato Chocolate Roasted - Sweet potato ice cream with chocolate swirl.
Chocolate Chocolate Chocolate Chocolate Road - We make a chocolate ice cream with chocolate cookie dough called Chocolate Chocolate Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough, so this isn’t much of a stretch. Just add chocolate covered almonds and we’re there.

More metal ice cream names:
*Swirl of Hell - Sweet cream ice cream with fudge, caramel, and Magic Shell swirls.
Nightham Toffee - This flavor sounds impossibly British so the flavor is an Earl Gray base with toffee bits mixed in.

I laughed for a minute straight at the cover of GQ’s comedy issue. Nicely played. (via taffy brodesser-akner)