Bewarethewumpus

Author : Bob Newbell

Captain “Jet” Connors of the Planetary Alliance and his sidekick, Cadet Lackey, burst into the secret base of operations of their archenemy, Dr. Sinistral. The evil madman barked German-accented orders at the robots who flanked him. “Destroy them, my mechanical minions! Destroy Jet Connors and Lackey!”

The lumbering automatons’ advance toward the trim, muscular heroes in their form-fitting spacesuits was cut short when Jet and Lackey leveled their atomic disintegrator pistols at the machine men and fired. The robots collapsed to the floor, the vacuum tubes visible through the transparent bubbles in their heads went dim. Dr. Sinistral was too stunned by the quick defeat of his guards to put up much of a fight. Jet felled him with a single punch.

“Lackey, contact Commander Gernsback and let him know we’ve secured Sinistral’s base. I’m going to look around.”

After informing the Commander of the Rocket Patrol of the situation, Lackey joined Jet in Sinistral’s lab. Along one wall were several recharging alcoves designed for the mad scientist’s robots. Lackey thought it curious that there were no robots in any of the alcoves. He was struck by the enormity of the odd chamber at the center of the room. “Jumpin’ Jupiter, Captain, what is that?”

“That, Lackey, is a time machine. I found the blueprints for it on that desk. And look at that chalkboard over in the corner of the room.”

Lackey walked over and examined the chalkboard. On it were parallel horizontal lines, the top line marked “Prime Timeline” and the bottom one “Altered Timeline”.

“Captain, what does it all mean?”

“Lackey, Sinistral’s plan was to destroy the Planetary Alliance by changing the past.”

“Roarin’ Rockets, Captain, how?”

“By sending his robot henchmen back in time to destroy certain inventors and technologies so there’d be no solar system-wide Planetary Alliance. Look at that chalkboard again. Atomic rockets, flying cars, ray guns, space colonization. He was going to erase them all from history. He was even planning to have his robots self-destruct after they’d completed their missions in the past so no one could use their advanced technology to get history back on track.”

Lackey rested his hand on his semi-automatic pistol in its holster. “Good thing we stopped him,” he said. “Just imagine a world with no Moon base and no space stations.”

“Yep,” replied Connors. “If we’d gotten here just a minute or so later, Project Apollo would have been deleted from the history books.”

Connors and Lackey exchanged glances. “How did we get talking about the old space program?” asked Officer Lackey.

Connors looked around the room. Trash and drug paraphernalia were everywhere. The chatter from a mindless daytime talk show played loudly on the TV. The house smelled of pot and urine. Connors shook his head. “I don’t know,” he said.

A siren screamed in the distance. Two police cars joined their own cruiser parked out in front of the house.

“Well,” said Connors, “let’s get the paperwork knocked out on this.”

Lackey sighed. He looked at the three disheveled suspects sitting handcuffed on the floor. He looked at the squalid, filthy room. Another day, another meth bust, he thought. “Let’s grab some lunch when we’re done here,” said Lackey.

“Not fast food,” said Connors who looked down at his large belly. “Doc’s been after me about my weight. Blood pressure and cholesterol are up, too. Sometimes I wish we just had food pills like in those old sci fi stories.”

 

The mob is back in town, and there's only one hero that can get to the bottom of it. Ever wonder what would happen if you dropped John Shaft into the world of Minecraft? Why, you'd get this blaxpoitation Minecraft parody by MachinimaPrime, of course.

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UPD: We have received a number of proposals that we are discussing right now. Chances are high that public The Old Reader will live after all

Since we launched first public version almost a year ago up until March 2013 we have been working on The Old Reader in “normal” mode. In March things became “nightmare”, but we kept working hard and got things done. First, we were out of evenings, then out of weekends and holidays, and then The Old Reader was the only thing left besides our jobs. Last week difficulty level was changed to “hell” in every possible aspect we could imagine, we have been sleep deprived for 10 days and this impacts us way too much. We have to look back.

The truth is, during last 5 months we have had no work life balance at all. The “life” variable was out of equation: you can limit hours, make up rules on time management, but this isn’t going to work if you’re running a project for hundreds of thousands of people. Let me tell you why: it tears us to bits if something is not working right, and we are doing everything we can to fix that. We can’t ignore an error message, a broken RAID array, or unanswered email. I personally spent my own first wedding anniversary fixing the migration last Sunday. Talk about “laid back” attitude now. And I won’t even start describing enormous sentimental attachment to The Old Reader that we have.

We would really like to switch the difficulty level back to “normal”. Not to be dreaded of a vacation. Do something else besides The Old Reader. Stop neglecting ourselves. Think of other projects. Get less distant from families and loved ones. The last part it’s the worst: when you are with your family, you can’t fall out of dialogues, nodding, smiling and responding something irrelevant while thinking of refactoring the backend, checking Graphite dashboard, glancing onto a Skype chat and replying on Twitter. You really need to be there, you need to be completely involved. We want to have this experience again.

That’s why The Old Reader has to change. We have closed user registration, and we plan to shut the public site down in two weeks. We started working on this project for ourselves and our friends, and we use The Old Reader on a daily basis, so we will launch a separate private site that will keep running. It will have faster refresh rate, more posts per feed, and properly working full-text search — we are sure that we can provide all this at a smaller scale without that much drama, just like we were doing before March.

The private site?

Accounts will be migrated to the private site automatically. We will whitelist everybody we know personally, along with all active accounts that were registered before March 13, 2013. And of course, we will migrate all our awesome supporters and people who donated to keep the project running (if you sent us bitcoins, please get in touch to get identified). Later this week your account will get a distinct indication whether it will be migrated to the private site or not. If you see that message and believe that it’s wrong, or if all your friends are getting migrated and you are left behind — please, drop us a line.

Give me my data!

You will have two weeks to export your OPML file regardless of our decision. OPML export link is located at the bottom of the Settings page — use the top-right menu to get there. All posts that you saved for later by using Pocket integration will obviously remain in your Pocket account.

But you could…

For those who would like to start the usual “VC, funding, mentor” or “charge for the damn thing” mantras — please, spare it. We’re not in the Valley where it might be super-easy, and, after all, not everyone wants to be an entrepreneur. We just love making a good RSS reader.

We really want The Old Reader to be a big and successful project, with usable free accounts. But this is not possible to achieve with what we have, so unless someone resourceful takes over the project and brings it to the next level, it is not gonna happen. We had over 2 000 new registrations after the blackout last week. This is amazing and sad at the same time.

If anyone is interested in acquiring The Old Reader and making it better, we are very open and accepting proposals at hello@theoldreader.com. We would be waiting for them for two weeks, supporting and maintaining The Old Reader as usual. Please don’t write us if you don’t have resources to maintain a site used by tens of thousands of people every day, or if you don’t know how you would improve The Old Reader. And please spare our time if you just want to buy the domain name and park a bunch of silly ads there — it’s not going to happen.

We value our community very much, and we will either pass the project to somebody who we know is going to take a good care of it, or we will switch it to private mode.

What next?

From one point of view, it’s not a big deal: “RSS is obsolete”, nobody died, we don’t owe anybody anything, you name it. Also, there are a lot of good readers around to choose from, a large part of them is smaller than The Old Reader and had not experienced growing pains of 80 000 daily active users in no time. But for us, it’s heartbreaking.

I will finally get back to work on my small studio — Bespoke Pixel — which has been run by my awesome partner all this time. Dmitry will keep being bright young software developer, making scalable and beautiful projects. Our team will stay together, and will keep working on making the private version of The Old Reader awesome.

We feel great responsibility for the project. We’d rather provide a smooth and awesome experience for 10 000 users than a crappy one for 420 000.

Sorry, each and everyone if we failed you. You are an incredible, supportive and helpful community. The best we could possibly hope for.

All the love,
Elena Bulygina and Dmitry Krasnoukhov

Actor Patrick Stewart demonstrates how to effectively remove pesky weeds from your home garden.

Over the weekend, a Swedish sociology professor revealed on Twitter that he will be nominating Edward Snowden for a Nobel Peace Prize.

Pow!

Whee!

Taylor Mali (1965-) is a an American slam poet who has been part of four winning teams at the National Poetry Slam competition. What Teachers Make is Mali’s most well-known poem and was born out of an actual dinner conversation he had. You can view Mali performing the poem in this video and more of his work on his YouTube channel. The poem was also the title of a book Mali wrote: What Teachers Make – In Praise of the Greatest Job in the World. Mali worked as an English, History and Math teacher for nine years and continues to be an advocate for teachers all over the world.

I thought this poem would make a good follow-up to last week’s Erica Goldson graduation speech. While the system might not be perfect, teachers are the unsung heroes of the education system and I have nothing but praise and respect for the profession. Teachers can make all the difference – having a mediocre one can really damage a student’s potential, but the right one can inspire a child to greatness.

I’m really honoured that a lot of teachers have told me they use Zen Pencils comics in the classroom. It’s something I never planned on happening and is such a thrill. It also makes perfect sense – I would have paid way more attention to poetry and history if they were taught with the aid of cartoons. If you’re one such teacher (or a student on the receiving end), then please share how you use them in the comments.

UPDATE: I’ve been in touch with Taylor Mali and he has kindly given me permission to make this available as a print. He also will be donating his share of the profits to The Atlantic Center for the Arts, where he is currently teaching poetry. Taylor even told me that he has used the comic as a slideshow while performing the poem – which is pretty freakin’ awesome!

- Taylor Mali’s official website.
- Thanks to George for submitting the poem.
- Zen Pencils is on GoComics! My archives will be updating regularly on the biggest comics website in the world, where you can also read the entire archives of hundreds of famous comics such as Calvin & Hobbes, Dilbert and Peanuts. It’s really an honour to have my work alongside these legendary strips, especially Calvin & Hobbes, which is my all-time biggest influence and inspiration. There’s also a great GoComics app you can download so you can read all your favourite strips on your phone or tablet.

BUY THE PRINT

You know what else should be a SyFy original movie? This.

In response to the stock market crash of 1929, the Banking Act of 1933, also known as the Glass-Steagall Act, put up a wall between commercial banking and investment firms. That wall stood for more than 60 years until it was torn down by the 1999 Gramm-Leach-Bilely Act, which allowed commercial banks to reap huge profits, but also resulted in financial institutions that were so large that, had they failed, they would bring down the entire economy with them. So when those banks began to crumble following the collapse of the housing bubble, we taxpayers were left with little option but to bail them out while our federally insured deposits were put at risk. Thus, Senator Elizabeth Warren from Massachusetts has introduced legislation that would reenact the regulations that were stripped away 14 years ago.

To make no bones about the nature of the bill, Sen. Warren has titled it the 21st Century Glass-Steagall Act [PDF], and states clearly in the introduction that the legislation is intended “To reduce risks to the financial system by limiting banks’ ability to engage in certain risky activities and limiting conflicts of interest, to reinstate certain Glass-Steagall Act protections that were repealed by the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act, and for other purposes.”

The bill already has a bipartisan group of co-sponsors in Arizona Republican Sen. John McCain, Sen. Maria Cantwell (D-WA), and Sen.Angus King, an independent legislator from Maine.

In simple terms, the new Glass-Steagall Act would separate banks with FDIC-insured savings and checking accounts from “riskier financial institutions” like investment banks, insurers, hedge funds, and private equity firms.

The bill also specifies what activities are considered the “business of banking” to prevent national banks from engaging in risky activities, and bars non-banking activities from being treated as “closely related” to banking. In the decades leading up to the end of Glass-Steagall, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency had allowed the divide between traditional banking and investment banking to be blurred by institutions who claimed that things like credit default swaps were simply part of the business of banking and not securities.

“Since core provisions of the Glass-Steagall Act were repealed in 1999, shattering the wall dividing commercial banks and investment banks, a culture of dangerous greed and excessive risk-taking has taken root in the banking world,” said Sen. McCain in a statement. “Big Wall Street institutions should be free to engage in transactions with significant risk, but not with federally insured deposits. If enacted, the 21st Century Glass-Steagall Act would not end Too-Big-to-Fail. But, it would rebuild the wall between commercial and investment banking that was in place for over 60 years, restore confidence in the system, and reduce risk for the American taxpayer.”

Sen. Warren concedes that recent efforts to rein in banks’ risky actions have been fruitful, but she contends that the nation’s largest banks still present a hazard to the economy.

“The four biggest banks are now 30% larger than they were just five years ago,” says the Senator, “and they have continued to engage in dangerous, high-risk practices that could once again put our economy at risk. The 21st Century Glass-Steagall Act will reestablish a wall between commercial and investment banking, make our financial system more stable and secure, and protect American families.”

Our most blasphemous poster yet.

*professor hands out final* *its a single piece of paper that reads: what if sonic fought mario* *you start sweating profusely*

— tiny doge (@tinydoge) April 4, 2013

My guess is Trina and Ronnie don’t have a lot of other friends.

Have you watched Star Trek Voyager? Me neither.

Just a reminder: new SFAM Wallpapers are still available! I’ve put up two new wallpapers on our pay-what-you-like wallpapers page. If you can, please chip in a dollar or two or five and download any or all of these wallpapers for use on your desktop computer. Your contributions help keep me and my family in business!

SDCC is quickly approaching. I’ll post details on Friday but I’ll be at the Dumbrella  table — 1337 —  in our usual spot.  I’m going to have all sorts of stuff including about 50 advance copies of Goats IV: Inhuman Resources! Get ‘em while they last.

There it is, the object of your affection — a nice big juicy steak, ready for your wholehearted consumption and gustatory devotion. So you pick you your fork in your left hand, the knife in the right, cut a nice piece of it… and then you probably switch your fork to your right hand. Take a deep breath: That’s wrong.

This, all according to the Europeans, Slate relays in a very interesting and lengthy look at the cut-and-switch maneuver many Americans practice at the dinner table.

Europeans keep the fork in their left hands after sawing with the knife in their right, something I happen to also do and was once told by a friend made me look “quite Continental” (really she called me pretentious and laughed). But it turns out that it was the Europeans who first popularized this switcheroo, and we Americans only copied it to be, well, cool at eating.

Back when we were in the infancy of our Americanness, we wanted to be more like the French. And right around the early 18th century, it became popular in France to lay the knife down after cutting and move the fork to the right, in line with the medieval tradition of showing someone you weren’t about to stab someone with that knife.

The French were going against the established grain by doing so, it turns out. See, in the days of yore when forks and knives first came on the scene, diners emulated the kitchen staff who would use the fork to steady a large hank of whichever beast was being butchered and use the dominant (usually) right hand to cut the meat.

While it’s unclear why the French decided to go rogue, it could be that they had so much fancy food to eat at high society dinners that using the right hand was just easier for transporting delicacies.  Fork-traveling move could also be seen as a prejudice against the left hand, as any lefty will tell you it’s a hard row to hoe when most everyone else is a righty.

In any case, France switched back to the no-switchbacks mode of dining somewhere in the mid-1800s while we Americans kept on shoveling food in the same way because that’s how we eat, and no one can tell us otherwise.

So what should we take away from this? Well, it is a free country — if you don’t mind the extra time it takes to cross that fork over, I say eat however you want. Whatever gets the food from the plate to your mouth sounds fine by me.

For more on intense history of knifing and forking, check out Slate’s investigation in the source link below.

Put a Fork in It [Slate]

George Orwell's 1946 essay A Nice Cup of Tea is a rationing-era masterpiece of beverage geekery. Orwell sets out 11 iron-clad principles of tea-brewing (four of which he considers ""acutely controversial"), including an injunction against teabags or "other devices to imprison the tea" ("one can swallow tea-leaves in considerable quantities without ill effect"). My British wife thoroughly approved of this 65-year-old wisdom, and she should know.

Redditor AJ192 took this spectacular shot of a lightning during last night’s fireworks in Rio Rancho, New Mexico.

[Warning: video may be disturbing to watch]

28 or more people received minor to severe injuries on Fourth of July night when fireworks exploded sideways, shooting into the crowd at an Independence Day celebration in Simi Valley, CA. The incident happened just two or three minutes into the pyrotechnics show.

One witness shot a video, above; you can hear him screaming, "Run! Run!"

The Los Angeles Times reports that "Police Commander Stephanie Shannon said there is no indication of foul play and that the explosion appears to be an industrial accident." [via @nycjim]

Marco Arment:

RSS represents the antithesis of this new world: it’s completely open, decentralized, and owned by nobody, just like the web itself. It allows anyone, large or small, to build something new and disrupt anyone else they’d like because nobody has to fly six salespeople out first to work out a partnership with anyone else’s salespeople.

That world formed the web’s foundations — without that world to build on, Google, Facebook, and Twitter couldn’t exist. But they’ve now grown so large that everything from that web-native world is now a threat to them, and they want to shut it down. “Sunset” it. “Clean it up.” “Retire” it. Get it out of the way so they can get even bigger and build even bigger proprietary barriers to anyone trying to claim their territory.

Well, fuck them, and fuck that.

Lockdown [marco.org]

"Thomas Paine, the voice of the American Revolution, trumpeted that a patriot saves his country from his government. What you have done and are doing has awakened congressional oversight of the intelligence community from deep slumber; and, has already provoked the introduction of remedial legislation in Congress to curtail spying abuses under section 215 of the Patriot Act and section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. You have forced onto the national agenda the question of whether the American people prefer the right to be left alone from government snooping." Read the full letter published by Edward Snowden's dad, addressed to his son. [www.guardian.co.uk]

[Video Link] Yesterday, Drug Policy Alliance's executive director Ethan Nadelmann debated former DEA Chief Asa Hutchinson about marijuana legalization at the Aspen Institute. If you don't want to watch the full hour-long debate, just watch Nadelman's awesome rant.

Geeks! The Trial of the Clone App is half off for a limited time!

As a Nintendo game, it's no surprise that Animal Crossing: New Leaf contains some form of control over what you can name your characters. What is surprising, though, is how extensive the list of blocked words is.

The obvious culprits are, well, obvious, from curse words to copyrighted terms, but when alientonx tried to get around them with what for most will be an obscurity, he hit the same wall.

The name he entered for his character was "Santorum".

Now, that's a real name. Most prominently it's the name of Rick Santorum, who a decade ago was a Senator at the centre of a controversy over his comments linking gay sex to pedophilia and bestiality.

As a response to this, a campaign was begun - created by columnist Dan Savage and helped along by The Daily Show's John Stewart - to turn the name into a slang term meaning "the frothy mixture of lube and fecal matter that is sometimes the byproduct of anal sex".

It worked. If you google Santorum now, the top result is the Wikipedia page for the "poop lube" campaign.

I'm kind of impressed this is even a thing in the game. We often think of departments like localisation being the domain of a handful of people, but in Nintendo's case, I like to imagine entire floors of people, furiously scouring the internet for every word in existence, in any language, that could even remotely be linked to a controversy.

And as we can see here, doing a damn good job!

I tried to name a character Santorum and [Reddit, via Tiny Cartridge]

Does Rick Santorum Really Have a Google Problem? [New York Mag]

"You not only shouldn't be afraid, but do not be afraid."

Glenn Greenwald conferenced in to the Socialism 2013 conference in Chicago, to speak about Edward Snowden's leaks about the NSA's surveillance program. Introduction by Jeremy Scahill, author of Blackwater and Dirty Wars, and Sherry Wolf, author of Sexuality and Socialism. [Video Link]