Russian Sledges

“the emergence of the “Ameritrash” rebellion that sought to reclaim older hobby game styles and genres from the Eurogames tyranny of much of the membership at Boardgamegeek.com”

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Cracked LCD- A Brief History of the “Dudes on a Map” Genre | nohighscores.com

why does everything in games have to become a war

just because you like wargames doesn’t mean you get to make everything a wargame

A brief list of misused English terminology in EU publications [PDF] is a fascinating look at the emerging dialect of English that is emerging out of the EU bureaucracy, in which odd bureaucratic language has to be translated from and to many languages. It's a good window into concepts that are common in one nation's bureaucratic tradition, but not others':

Dispose (of)
Explanation: the most common meaning of ‘dispose of’ is ‘to get rid of’ or ‘to throw away’; it never means ‘to have’, ‘to possess’ or ‘to have in one’s possession’. Thus, the sentence ‘The managing authority disposes of the data regarding participants.’ does not mean that it has them available; on the contrary, it means that it throws them away or deletes them. Similarly, the sentence below does not mean: ‘the Commission might not have independent sources of information’, it means that the Commission is not permitted to discard the sources that it has.

Example: ‘The Commission may not be able to assess the reliability of the data provided by Member States and may not dispose of independent information sources (see paragraph 39)46.’

As Bruce Sterling says, "I would not expect 'Brussels English' to get any closer to grammatically correct British English; on the contrary I would expect it in future to drift into areas of machine translation jargon, since that’s a lot cheaper than hiring human translators who are as skilled as the author of this document."

Web Semantics: Brussels English

North Korea's coach, Kim Jong-Hun, received tactical advice during matches from Kim Jong-Il himself using mobile phones that are not visible to the naked eye. [Tim Hartley / BBC]

A crop of surprisingly non-terrible new clothing-related books has given the lie to my earlier direness about style writing. Foremost among these pop rocks for the jaded palate is Fuck Yeah Menswear: Bespoke Knowledge for the Crispy Gentleman, the book version of the notorious tumblr site fuckyeahmenswear, edited by Kevin Burrows and Lawrence Schlossman. To change analogies in mid-stream, this book is, as Pauline Kael wrote of the first Star Wars in 1977, “like getting a box of Cracker Jack which is all prizes.”

I confess that, not having read fuckyeahmenswear’s tumblr, I may be lacking in crispiness, whatever that is. But unlike the publication of the I Can Has Cheezburger book, this book does not inspire the reader with embarrassment for its source. Reading Fuck Yeah Menswear the book mixes the flush of self-recognition with the novelty of seeing various internet tropes and memes committed to print.

Interest in men’s fashion has become mainstream enough and widespread enough that the rise of a blog satirizing the assorted Internet-sanctified themes and brands making up what’s now known as “#menswear” was inevitable. I for one feel lucky that fuckyeahmenswear does it so sharply and well, though. Still, one needn’t be familiar with the #menswear world to recognize, laugh or cringe with each new page of this book.

Fuck Yeah Menswear includes essays on men’s fashion touchstones such as the importance of denim or the rise of the heritage brand, along with sections on Internet men’s style archetypes, and guides to the preferred #menswear brands, supposed essential men’s garments and the hierarchy of labels for each article of a man’s wardrobe. Each of these has its epic moments: the archetype section skewers each subculture, from the preps and their joyless cousins the trads (who I had still held out hope might turn out to be someone’s elaborate online joke) to the goth ninja (I laughed out loud, one of my best e-friends is a goth ninja of the Fūma clan). The guide to essentials lands a masterful strike of literary dim mak in hitting each of the essential items of clothing with a tongue-in-cheek preciosity that’ll make your toes curl; and I had to retrain my facial muscles to get the smirk off my face after learning that the hierarchy guide (from “wealth” to “baller” to “poor”) dismisses Brooks Brothers (for shirts), J. Crew (trousers) and Allen Edmonds (shoes) as “poor.” For in the solipsistic, echoing virtual world of today’s postmodern Walter Mittys these classifications take on extra relevance and resonance as some of the most frequently mentioned, coveted and most of all, derided brands.

Derision is one of the low-denomination currencies of Internet forums: easy to acquire and to wield based on hearsay, received wisdom, or a simple willingness to outspend one’s virtual peers for more aspirational, more exclusive, labels. And in capturing that derision, Fuck Yeah Menswear shines most of all outside these organized sections, in the interspersed photos of #menswear preciosity with accompanying poetic, creatively imagined inner monologues, soliloquies or dialogues glistening with put-downs, name-checking and nicknaming celebrities and status brands that are generally meaningless to people outside the #menswear community (Boglioli, Nick Wooster, Brunello Cucinelli, the Sartorialist…).

Elaborately lauded though they are, there’s no point in or need for quibbling with the particular brands Fuck Yeah Menswear ranks and celebrates. Whether, for instance, the “wealth” suit should be “Savile Row Bespoke” and not a maker prized by the Internet for being even rarer and more expensive like Liverano or Rubinacci bespoke is beside the point. Fuck Yeah Menswear records that certain fanatic, thoughtless received wisdom known as groupthink, presumptions and prejudices that accrete based on thirdhand repetition and that lack of empiricism that means that all experience, now, is becoming virtual. So Fuck Yeah Menswear’s rogues gallery of favorite shops will ring true with many readers even if we have never been to Atlanta and Sid Mashburn or to New Haven and J. Press: punters have already visited all of these new opium dens in the pipe dreams of forum threads, magazine articles and blog reviews.

Carefully contrived for an imagined and virtual public of potential fashion bloggers and forum participants and throwing out intentionally obscurantist keywords like “sprezz” and “trad,” Fuck Yeah Menswear brings out the self-involved, incestuous cultishness of internet men’s clothing subcultures despite their uneasy balkanization of the past decade, Fuck Yeah Menswear is at its best arrested on these images, their subjects apparently unaware of the evanescence of their own interest (surely interest men’s clothing will become uncool again soon now that everyone is talking about it and I can go back to being mildly eccentric again), unpacking superficiality for the yearning that we all seek for the acceptance of a broader community that understands and shares our tastes, along with the status cravings most of us won’t admit to.

“Citation needed”, most commonly rendered as ^{[citation needed]}, is a common editorial remark on Wikipedia, which has become used to refer to Wikipedia in wider popular culture.^{[citation needed]}

Link

The Guardian

Pope Francis completes contentious canonisation of Otranto martyrs The Guardian Pope Francis has canonised more than 800 15th-century martyrs who were killed after refusing to convert to Islam – a delicate and arguably unwelcome ecclesiastical move he inherited from his predecessor Benedict. The "martyrs of Otranto", whose identities ... Pope Francis canonises hundredsThe Hindu New Catholic Saints Include a Colombian NunNew York Times Pope Bestows Sainthood on Italians Massacred by OttomansVoice of America BBC News -Telegraph.co.uk -CNN International all 41 news articles »

• Hand-knitted wool jumper by Rei Kawakubo

• Retailer: Comme des Garçons, 1982

A simple little JS based calculator to figure out exactly what data storage and retrieval on Amazon Glacier will cost. Just imagine if Amazon had something this useful.

It really gives a feel for how much retrieval priority changes the cost. Sure, storing 1TB of data on Amazon Glacier would only cost me about $10/mo. Retrieving that data will cost between $1200 and $600. I always factor in the retrieval costs. Otherwise, I'm just paying a monthly fee to delete my data.

Forget putting up four walls and a roof; these homes use the stony walls of natural and human-made caves to shelter their inhabitants from the storm. Check out these incredible rocky homes, from ancient cave dwelling to modern house, to the buildings that may have inspired J.R.R. Tolkien's Hobbiton.

Read more...

Even a blind pig can find an acorn, and even HuffPo occasionally has something worth seeing, like this video:

NASA has released a three-year time-lapse video of our star, compiled from incredible images captured by the Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) spacecraft.

The time-lapse compresses about two images a day into a few minutes. And don’t miss these highlights in the video above (time-marked by NASA): a partial eclipse by the moon at 0:30, a flare at 1:11, and the brief appearance of comet Lovejoy at 1:28. [JAC note: these incursions are quick, so watch carefully!]

NASA’s SDO has filmed the sun since spring 2010, providing breathtaking images. So think of this latest video as a “best of” reel, complete with stirring background music.

The music? According to the YouTube site, it’s “”A Lady’s Errand of Love,’ composed and performed by Martin Lass” (his website is here).

[Image: "The ice is up taller than the cottages and homes," we read. "It kind of dwarfs them." Photo and quotation via the Winnipeg Free Press].

Several houses were destroyed, the Winnipeg Free Press reports, after "a massive ice floe rose out of Dauphin Lake" in central Canada. One local homeowner described the ice's arrival as "so powerful that it plowed though his two-storey home, pushing furniture from one bedroom into another. It pushed the bathroom tub and vanity into the hallway."

This kind of reverse-Titanic moment occurred just as the gentleman had sat down to watch TV: "Then he heard the ice coming."

In fact, one wonders, if this were to become an annual event, how houses might be adapted to account for it, similar to John McPhee's descriptions of the altered suburbs of Los Angeles, where garage doors have been repurposed to let mountain landslides pass safely through. You pop open some doors and shutters, or deploy emergency stilts, and the ice slides quietly by, your lakeside home unviolated.

[Image: "This is nothing you can predict," one homeowner said. "There’s nothing you can do to prevent this." Photo and quotation via the Winnipeg Free Press].

The photos also show what it might look like if an ice age were to kick off again in the North American suburbs, with massive walls of ice simultaneously crushing houses from all sides and bursting them from within, like Caspar David Friedrich's Sea of Ice crossed with an unpublished novella by J.G. Ballard.

[Image: The Sea of Ice by Caspar David Friedrich].

The Great Plains of America filled with jagged labyrinths of ice, their peaks and troughs littered not with the timber of shipwrecks but with the split wooden frames of abandoned houses.

(Thanks to Lawrence Bird for the tip! Randomly related: Floating islands gone wild.)

This printed cotton furnishing textile was intended to be used for curtains or draped around walls (a form of interior decoration advocated by William Morris), or for loose covers on furniture. This is one of Morris best-known designs. He based the pattern and name on the thrushes which frequently stole the strawberries in the kitchen garden of his countryside home, Kelmscott Manor, in Oxfordshire. Despite the fact that this design was one of the most expensive printed furnishings available from Morris & Co., it became a firm favourite with clients.

room42:

Hayao Miyazaki rain, which means that every frame was hand-drawn

The Couturier Crowd 5.

Christian Dior, 1957.

schaumann:

Maison Martin Margiela glass heels (literally Cinderellas glass slippers)

The prototypical Serif and Sans Serif typeface style distinction in Korean has traditionally used the names Myeongjo (명조체/明朝體 myeongjoche) and Gothic (고딕체/고딕體 godikche), respectively. But, in 1993, the Republic of Korea (South Korea) Ministry of Culture, in an attempt to standardize typographic terms, recommended the use of Batang (바탕 batang) and Dotum (돋움 dotum) as the proper names for these two typeface styles.

At the time the Ministry of Culture recommendation was made, which was a period when printing was the most common use of fonts, Batang was meant for body text, and Dotum was for display or emphasis purposes. Mobile devices have provided a new use for Dotum, because its lack of serifs provided superior readability on mobile devices with smaller screens that necessitated smaller point sizes, and the original rationale for these new names seems to no longer apply.

From what I can tell, Korean type foundries have not embraced the Batang and Dotum names, and have actually resisted their use. What probably didn’t help was the fact that Microsoft released TrueType fonts with these exact names, with no additional qualifiers: Batang and Dotum. In other words, it seems that Microsoft’s use of these names polluted their chance at more widespread use, because they were treated as typeface names, not typeface style names.

In closing this brief article, I am curious about what our blog readership thinks about this particular issue. I welcome any and all comments.

South End strolling.

After I posted the photo of the tortoise on a leash in the Back Bay, Kate Terrado reported she'd seen - and photographed - the lady and the tortoise in the South End last week. Hopefully, that bag isn't for cleaning up after the tortoise because, well, yeesh.

Original Source

via

“I don’t know of anything in juniper that would cause people to be depressed,” Stewart told me by e-mail, “and it’s important to remember that the dosage of any particular alkaloid (active chemical ingredient) in a plant would probably be very low by the time it gets into a cocktail.” Stewart said, however, that orris (“the root of Iris pallida, a fairly common garden iris”), another ingredient found frequently in gin, is a common allergen. “So people who say they are allergic to gin because of the juniper may actually be reacting to the orris.” Sadness is not known to be among its effects.

National allegory Germania suppressing the leopard of discord and rebellion with her foot. Part of the National Monument to Bismarck in Berlin.

maraid posted a photo:

somelaceandpaperflowers:

getawildlife:

Harvest Mouse on Berries (by Daniel Trim)

Top Editors Abruptly Leave Village Voice - NYTimes.com:

Will Bourne, who became editor last November, and Jessica Lustig, the deputy editor since January, met with the staff at 11 a.m. on Thursday to announce their departure. In a phone interview, Mr. Bourne said that Christine Brennan, executive editor of Voice Media Group, had told them to lay off, or drastically reduce the roles of, five employees on the 20-person staff. Rather than carry out the cuts, he and Ms. Lustig resigned and left immediately, in the middle of closing next week’s paper.

Japanese funeral home Nishinihon Tenrei wanted to create an ad that would break from the traditional funerary colors of black and white while still presenting a respectful image of their services. Tokyo-based ad agency I&S BBDO came up with this life-sized skeleton, celebrating the life of the departed through pressed flowers.

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Chances are, this is how you will be spending the rest of your day. Google Earth Engine is an incredible satellite tour through the recent history of our planet, showing year-by-year images from 1984-2012. Watch as cities expand, glaciers retreat, and seas vanish in a matter of decades.

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