I saw Paul Hetherington‘s modern townhouse at Brickcon last year and was immediately impressed by the elegant artistic style of the creation. There is a fully detailed interior along with working light fixures. Take a look at more photos on Flickr to see different angles of the building, each offering a new visual aesthetic.
Before the video emerged, there was a standard story in the media about the shooting of Walter Scott.
Police in a matter of hours declared the occurrence at the corner of Remount and Craig roads a traffic stop gone wrong, alleging the dead man fought with an officer over his Taser before deadly force was employed.
How many “traffic stops gone wrong” have there been? It seems to me that every traffic stop for speeding, broken tail lights, or unfastened seat belt that ends in a hail of gunfire should be regarded as a crime by the person with the gun, even if it is a police officer. A badge shouldn’t be a license to kill.
The story does have some worthwhile information to add about the victim, though.
Friends and family members said they believed Scott was on Remount Road on Saturday morning to buy parts for the Mercedes he recently purchased.
They described him as an avid fan of the Dallas Cowboys. He loved to dance and sing, his loved ones said, and proposed last week to his longtime girlfriend.
They speculated about whether a set of rims he had installed on the car subjected him to profiling and struggled to find any explanation why he would have run from police.
“That doesn’t sound like Walter,” said family friend Nicole King. “I don’t understand. These police keep shooting people, but nobody’s got a gun. It just doesn’t make any sense. I don’t care what anyone says. Walter was a good man. No one can take that away.”
There’s your explanation for the broken tail light. Imagine being stopped for running basic chores in your life. Imagine that the cop stopping you has already decided your life is worth less than the price of a possible ticket. Imagine realizing that your life is in the hands of an armed psychopath, and running away. Imagine being gunned down because a cop thinks it’s important to not let you get away with having a broken tail light.
I can’t imagine living like that.
Fuck me. People are raising money…for the cop who shot a man in the back.
An Atlanta-based group calling themselves "Culture Fight" quietly removed an online campaign they posted Tuesday that they called the "Michael T Slager Defense Fund," which they claimed in Twitter posts would "put Al and Jesse in their place." The campaign had been online for less than two hours before it was withdrawn. The group claimed in another tweet that it was shut down because of "too much hate from the black comm," insisting they only wised "fair and competent’ representation for Slager.
At least two other groups had posted GoFundMe pages soliciting funds for a legal defense for Slager by late Tuesday night.
America is a racist nation.
It was April 4th! Well, that’s OK- since it IS Rats, It’s Monday after all. Enjoy this selection of Ratso Photos, as seen on Bored Panda.
Luke.stirlingEven with evidence like this. It's not going to be enough. Because there's just no way any police force, especially in the US, will admit that it's the system that's wrong. At most, they'll hang this one 'rotten apple' out to dry, ignoring the systemic rot, root and branch.
So familiar. A police officer claims a black man struggled with him for his weapon, and then the officer had to shoot him to protect himself.
Only problem with the story: a passer-by recorded the incident on his cell phone. The reality was that the black man was running away, the officer fired 8 shots into his back, and then threw his taser onto the ground next to him to fake the evidence of a struggle, in full view of his fellow officers. The video is horrific: after shooting the guy, he’s lying on the ground motionless, and Officer Michael Slagger walks over, yells at him to put his hands behind his back, and cuffs him.
He’d been hit 5 times. He was dead. There was no attempt at resuscitation.
The police killed a man in cold blood, and lied about it.
So, so familiar.
The dead man, Walter Scott, had been stopped for a broken tail light.
You know what? Fuck the police. They are disgracefully screwed up.
I’m awake too early to leave for the airport but too late to go back to sleep, so as long as I’m up, some additional thoughts on the recent Hugo-related drama.
* I’m feeling increasingly sorry for the nominees on the Hugo award ballot who showed up on either Puppy slate but who aren’t card-carrying Puppies themselves, since they are having to deal with an immense amount of splashback not of their own making. And to this you may say, well, but the Puppies maintain that everyone on their slate was notified, so they knew what they were getting into. But as it turns out, we know that at least some of the people on the Puppy slates weren’t contacted before the nominations came out — see Andromeda Spaceways In-flight Magazine on this — so this is not a 100% sure thing.
Also, let me suggest that when Brad Torgersen (or whomever) went off notifying people of their presence on the slate, he probably did not lead with “Hi, would you like to be part of a slate of nominees whose organizers whine darkly and incessantly about the nefarious conspiracies of the evil social justice warriors to infiltrate all levels of science fiction, and which will also implictly tie you and your work to at least one completely bigoted shitmagnet of a human being?” Rather more likely he played up the “we’re trying to get stuff on the ballot we think is cool that doesn’t usually get on it” angle and downplayed, you know, that other stuff.
And you might think, well, how can you miss that other stuff? The short answer to that is that, as difficult as it might seem, not everyone actually spends a lot of time following the Hugo and the controversies therein. It was, until very recently, kind of an insider sport. So it’s possible to have missed this stuff and/or not fully grasped the implications of it until after the awards came out. Not for me, clearly, and possibly not for you. But it is possible.
It’s difficult to miss them now, of course. But this increases my sympathy for these nominees. The whole reason the Puppies are so transparently covetous of the Hugos is that they are a big deal in a (relatively) small community. So imagine being part of this community, being told that you’ve gotten a Hugo nomination, and then finding out that there’s this metric load of toxicity around it, manufactured by the people who got you the ballot — or at least claim that they did.
It’s easy to say, well, they should just withdraw. Speaking as a past Hugo nominee, I’m here to tell you that the emotions around that decision are likely not to be that simple, especially because at least some of that work and some of those people are (in my opinion) deserving of the sort of recognition the Hugos offer.
Thus the irony of this being an excellent year not to be on the Hugo ballot, because you get to pass on the entire shitshow around it. To be clear, some of the nominees affirmatively signed up for a shitshow, hoped for a shitshow and are now reveling in the shitshow that’s happening. That’s their karma. Give some thought to the ones who didn’t sign on for it, or might have not fully realized that it was coming. I think of them as the human shields of the Puppy campaigns. Personally, I’m cutting them a bit of slack.
* Matthew Foster, husband of the late and missed Eugie Foster, has a nice two-part recap of the Puppies situation (1, 2) and the personalities involved on the Puppies lists, and makes a cogent observation about the Puppy assertion of a SJW cabal, which is that it’s complete nonsense:
Eugie and I were acquainted with, or friends with most of the people the Puppies point out as leftist leaders. We were both directors at Dragon Con, just about the biggest genre convention around, and know the organizers of many other conventions. Eugie was a Nebula winner, female, and Asian American. Trust me Puppies, if there was an organized society or just a clique working against you, we’d have been in it.
Yes, this. The entire paranoid theory of a social justice warrior cabal is predicated on the rather narcissistic hypothesis the Puppies have that those they see having opposing political and social view spend countless hours thinking of ways to thwart politically conservative writers and keep them off award ballots, for reasons.
Speaking as someone who the Puppies have a rather disturbing hate-boner for (yeah, I know, think how I feel about it) and who is certainly a high poobah of whatever cabal they imagine: Honestly, who has time for that? I’m busy enough! Thwarting the careers of people I don’t know or care about is not actually high on my list of things to do, be they conservative or otherwise. The idea I am going to take any time out of my schedule to do that is ridiculous. I barely have time for people I like.
But look at these statistics that show — show! — that Scalzi and Charles Stross gamed the Hugos! (Yes, this is an actual thing.) Dudes. You give me soooooo much more credit for personal industry, and also, you don’t know how to read the numbers. I mean, I get it: When you want to do something obnoxious in furtherance of your own personal agenda, you want to be able to say other people did it first; when you want to front a slate of nominations with an explicit sociopolitical goal, you want to assert that you’re just doing what other people have already done. You want to posit bad behavior to rationalize your own, as if other people being assholes excuses you being one, too. But there is no SJW cabal, and this is on you.
Saying there’s no cabal is just what a cabal member would say! Well, yes.
* Continuing the personal aspect of this, it’s been noted by several that the Puppies have a rather unseemly interest in me: I’m accused of creating my own slates (I didn’t), of gaming the Hugos in some manner (I haven’t) and Redshirts is used as an example of how the SJW cabal is secretly controlling the Hugo voting, because how else could a bestselling, widely-liked book by a well-known author who had nine previous Hugo nominations and a Campbell Award possibly have taken an award in a popular contest? It beggars the mind, people. The idea that this particular book, by a straight white male, that might not even pass the Bechdel Test, is somehow the perfect vehicle for an SJW cabal Hugo win is its own case study in just how poorly constructed the logical underpinnings of the “SJW Cabal” hypothesis really are.
These accusations are generally accompanied by a rather lot of spittle, enough so that people are beginning to mock the Puppies for it; the best joke of this I’ve seen comes here, in a comment on a File 770 post (the post, appropriately enough, speaking of paranoid hypotheses having no relation to reality, about a Puppy assertion that Terry Pratchett never being nominated for a Hugo shows how the system is gamed being undermined by Pratchett turning down a Hugo nod in 2005):
Q: How many Sad Puppies does it take to change a light bulb?
A: 100, one to change the bulb and 99 to say, “Gosh, I hope this makes Scalzi’s head explode!”
I think it’s pretty evident why I’m a poster boy for Puppy hate: The primary drivers of the Puppies (Beale, Correia and Torgerson) don’t think warmly of me for their own personal reasons, I have politics and social positions they oppose, and I strongly suspect the fact I have a successful career in science fiction confounds them, which is, among other things, why they and other Puppy partisans spend so much time trying to assert that I don’t actually sell any books, and so on.
I’m a useful target for them, in other words, and someone they can use to whip up their partisans: Scalzi’s the problem! There’s no way Scalzi could be successful without a shadowy conspiracy! He’s been doing what we’re doing all along! A victory for the Puppies will make Scalzi weep salty tears! And off they and their lackeys go, to the comment threads and to Twitter, to use me as justification, in so many ways, for the stupid and tiresome things they do. Not just me and not just my work, mind you. The Puppies have a full enemies list. But on that list, I’m top five, easy.
I have no control over this, although I do find the Puppy version of me interesting. He appears to simultaneously live in a volcano lair, evilly stroking a cat whilst planning the next SJW pogrom against the valiant writers of pure and true science fiction, and also lives on the streets, giving handjobs for a nickel and raving how he used to be somebody. I should like to meet this John Scalzi; I would give him a hot cup of soup and a warm jacket, and then ask him if I could borrow his laser cannon.
Be aware that me writing about their obsession about me will be viewed as proof that it is really me that has the obsession, hah ha! I’m also aware that some people think this is a thing where the Puppies and I are two sides of a coin. Again, not much I can do about that, except to say I didn’t make the coin or be asked to be put on a side. If I’m on the enemies list, fine. Just ask why it is I’m on the list, and for what reasons. And ask what that says about the Puppies.
“Not quite what you were expecting, right?”
The Oracle’s turn to the camera breaks the fourth wall and pokes fun at the expectations of both Neo and the audience. Her unassuming racialized and gendered presence underscores that a Black woman -like her - is omniscient, important, and present in a science fiction film.The intended effect of her statement to the spectators of the film, reveals a racist blemish on the multicultural, progressive, post-human, post-race narrative of United States culture- that due to the many preconceived notions about Africana people, there is very little expectation for a person of African descent to appear in science fiction worlds or to exist in position of reverence for white characters, and by extension a white audience. The representation of an Africana woman in a futuristic environment instills a feeling of discomfort and ironically, disbelief, to the mainstream science fiction viewer.
The Royal Mile, Edinburgh, Scotland
Ирония судьбы |
Уфимская полиция |
Фэйсбук
ВКонтактик
Основной Твиттер Спам Твиттер
ОдноклассникиVictor Puzur’s “Trempel” clothes hanger transforms ordinary industrial cardboard tubing into elegant space-saving hangers that perfectly support the shoulders of your shirts, jackets and sweaters as well as accessories like scarves and belts. Each is created by cutting the cardboard tubing at an angle and inserting a pop-rivert with a standard hook. The sculptural result is recycled, reusable art for your closet!
Designer: Victor Puzur
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(An Artistic Eco-Twist on the Hanger was originally posted on Yanko Design)
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I am frankly exhausted with all the stories of people buying item X with food stamps that some folks fear they really should not be buying, where X is everything from liquor to twinkies.
People are either adults or they are not. I don't think our act of charity towards them gives us the right to be their mother. I am all for consolidating all the zillions of existing niche government benefits programs into one single EITC or similar income-floor program. Then people spend their money however they hell they want -- if they screw up and spend on unwise things, well that is their business.
I used to have this argument all the time with my New England liberal mother-in-law. Interestingly, in this argument, we would both call the other arrogant. I would say she was arrogant for assuming she knew better than other adults how they should spend their own money. She would call me arrogant for assuming that people without my background and education could make quality decisions for themselves.
Since this is my blog, I will grab the last word here. If we were talking about having the poor choose between a number of exchange-traded derivatives, I could concede her point. But we are essentially talking about what to buy in a supermarket. We force everyone through 12 years of public education. The Left pretty much gets to determine what that education encompasses. If adults are leaving that system and still can't be trusted with their own money, then why are we even bothering?
NEW YORK — Dressed in reflective yellow construction gear while working under the cover of darkness early Monday, a small group of artists installed a tribute to NSA-leaker Edward Snowden in a Brooklyn park.
The Snowden bust stands atop a column at the Prison Ship Martyrs Monument in Fort Greene Park, a site built to honor more than 11,000 American prisoners of war who died aboard British ships during the American Revolutionary War.
See also: The 10 Biggest Revelations From Edward Snowden's Leaks
The location is no coincidence.
Speaking to Mashable on the condition of anonymity, the artists said they chose the spot because it is "loaded with significance and meaning and reverence of others." It positions Snowden, they said, "as a continuation of a story that began at the beginning of this country" — one represented in the plight of the captured Americans.
A sculpture of Edward Snowden stands atop a column in Brooklyn's Fort Greene Park on Monday, April 6, 2015.
Image: Aymann Ismail/ANIMALNewYork
Image: Aymann Ismail/ANIMALNewYork
"We feel that Snowden's actions really continue that story," said the artists. "It is built upon a set of ideals to live freely, not be confined or surveilled or monitored by your government. You can’t have freedom of expression to pursue liberty if you feel like you're doing it under a watchful eye."
The three artists — two of whom who planned the idea while a third created the "museum-quality" sculpture itself — spent the better part of year on the project.
Their hard work paid off: Animal New York's Bucky Turco, who exclusively documented the installation Monday morning, said it looks so official that "over a dozen people walking their dogs passed by the new bust on Monday morning without noticing the unsanctioned piece."
While they originally considered other locations to install the sculpture — Belvedere Castle was one of them — they felt the Martyrs Monument offered them the best chance to convey the ideals that Snowden's revelations are all about.
"It gives the whole thing so much more meaning," they said. "It’s not just about Snowden. It’s about the ideals that he was trying to work towards and push others to care about." The monument to the POWs, "who were fighting for the same ideals that Snowden is fighting for" gave them a bridge to make their case.
"This is a guy who some of the traditional mass media has portrayed as a traitor, or a terrorist, and the very same thing would have been said about these POWs in the Revolutionary War times," they said. "But with 200 years of perspective, we realized they were fighting for something all of us are very grateful for. We hope it will shift people’s perceptions, or open their eyes, that there could be a different story than what they’e been told."
While others have created Snowden statues before, they've primarily been mobile installations. The sculpture that now stands in Fort Greene Park is permanent — or at least until the Parks Department removes it.
Image: Google Maps
The artists said they hope the city will considering leaving the sculpture where it is — they said it was designed specifically for its current location, so it "feels organic" and doesn't ruin the "vibe and the flow" — though they recognize that's probably not going to happen.
Ideally, for the artists, the city would preserve the statue and make it accessible to people, allowing New Yorkers to continue the conversation that began when Snowden leaked batches of NSA documents to Glenn Greenwald.
In a statement, they appealed to the city to "embrace and protect" the piece, much like the Wall Street Bull:
NYC has a long history of welcoming artists and the challenging discourse their works usher in. In keeping with this tradition, we hope New York will embrace and protect this piece, much as when the “Wall Street Bull” was granted a permanent public home after its guerilla placement. Even though it's already on it's way towards being removed, the possibility exists for the city to make the piece available for public viewing in a sanctioned way. Our additional hope is this gift has brought a renewed cultural relevance to the space, inspiring more visitors to ponder the sacrifices made for their freedoms and their responsibility to ensure our liberties last long into the future.
"If you look at history, the people we honor with statues now — certainly the people rebelling against the British rules — were criminals one day," the artists told Mashable. "Now they're heroes."
"We’re wondering if on the long arc of time Snowden will be considered a hero, too."
Update 11:45 a.m. ET: Instagram user Justine Williams says park rangers had already removed the "Snowden" sign from the monument. We've reached out to the Parks Department to see if they have plans to remove the sculpture, too.
Update: 12:30 p.m. ET: Vine's Jeremy Cabalona has video of NYC Parks Department workers covering up the Snowden statue with a blue tarp.
Update: 12:45 p.m. ET: A spokeswoman for New York's Parks Department tells Mashable they are "currently looking into" removal of the sculpture.
Update: 2:40 p.m. ET: The Snowden sculpture has been removed and the NYPD is on it.
Have something to add to this story? Share it in the comments.
What is it that the authorities do not understand about what it means to be human? Humans cannot be perfect. Humans cannot see all. And yet, in cases like this — a 4 year old with autism wandering away from the home without his mom’s knowledge — we seem so ready, even EAGER to blame the parent. The story, as reported by KETV 7 in Omaha, is simply this: The child wandered off. When his mom realized he was missing, she went out to search for him. Meantime:
911 dispatchers received a call around 8:15 p.m. Thursday about a child standing on the corner of Northwest Radial Highway and Hamilton Street. The child had been there about 10 minutes with no adults nearby, according to a police report.
The child was unable to tell police where he lived or the names of his parents.
At 8:33 p.m., 911 received another call from a woman reporting her 4-year-old autistic son was missing.
According to the police report, officers went to the woman’s home.
Now she has been cited for suspicion of neglect.
As for the child, that he ended up at a street corner should come as no surprise. Apparently “wanderings” by kids with autism are fairly common (see this piece), and often the children are drawn precisely to the most dangerous places: bodies of water and busy streets.
I can’t even imagine how many challenges the families of kids with autism face. Facing a suspicious and unforgiving legal system should not be one of them.
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A family with a child with autism should not have to endure an unforgiving legal system.
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Submitted by: Unknown
Luke.stirling"As long as people are free and inspired to innovate – and as long as input and output prices are free to adjust to changes in supply and demand – the economic supplies of even the most ‘fixed’ and ‘nonrenewable’ resources will expand."
The words of someone who has studied far more economics than basic science. One of the biggest problems for the future of the human race is that there are a lot of smart people with significant influence who are fundamentally ignorant of the nature of the universe we live in. Scientific and technological innovation solves some problems, but it cannot solve all of them. The Earth is not that big a place, and while the global ecosystem is fairly robust, that doesn't mean it's going to keep being able to support human beings (any at all, let alone 7+bn) indefinitely. Adherence to an economic system that completely denies this reality is a sure fire guarantee that we'll sooner or later cause our own extinction, and take a lot of other species along with us.
I mean seriously, who the fuck does Boudreaux think he is by calling out "affordable air travel" as a good thing in a statement supposedly refuting fixed constraints of the environment? Does he even have the slightest inkling of how harmful that is? Every time I encounter these kind of arguments, I end up having a bad day. I try to keep some emotional distance from the mess we live in. But stupidity like this, stated with such confidence and arrogance erodes that protection, and I spend the rest of my day working hard to forget how awful the future truly looks if you're will to look past the current generation.
Here’s a letter to a correspondent:
Mr. Chap Oxley
Dear Mr. Oxley
Thanks for your e-mail. I don’t share your worry that “land’s natural fixed supply” means that population growth poses a “grave hazard.”
While I agree that efforts to create land out of water-covered areas won’t yield much extra land, I disagree that land is fixed in supply. It is not fixed, at least not economically.
Most obviously, skyscrapers and other multi-storied buildings increase land’s economic capacity. On the mere two acres of land occupied by the Empire State Building, the number of people who work simultaneously is upwards of 3,400 – roughly 100 times the number of people who could work on only the surface of those two acres of Manhattan.
Land’s economic capacity expands also in other, less obvious ways. The same acre of land that in 1950 annually yielded 25 bushels of wheat has, economically, become two acres of land by today annually yielding 50 bushels. So the creation and improvements of tractors and other farm machines increase the supply of land. Likewise with the creation and improvements of fertilizers, pesticides, and genetically modified seeds and livestock.
Yet another innovation that effectively increases the supply of land is refrigeration: by preserving food longer, refrigeration turns any given physical yield from land into an increased economic yield - which is economically identical to increasing the physical amount of land. Ditto for transportation improvements that get food to consumers faster (and, hence, fresher) and with less damage and loss.
One more example: modern computers. By keeping the demand for paper lower than otherwise, computers increase the supply of land relative to the demand for pulp-yielding trees. And by enabling people to meet by teleconferencing, the amount of land devoted to supplying surface transportation effectively grows relative to the demand for land used for surface transportation. (Of course, the supply of land is also increased by affordable air travel.)
The economic supply of land, like that of any other resources you can name, is not a physical phenomenon. As long as people are free and inspired to innovate – and as long as input and output prices are free to adjust to changes in supply and demand – the economic supplies of even the most ‘fixed’ and ‘nonrenewable’ resources will expand.
Sincerely,
Donald J. Boudreaux
Professor of Economics
and
Martha and Nelson Getchell Chair for the Study of Free Market Capitalism at the Mercatus Center
George Mason University
Fairfax, VA 22030
the stereotype that women talk more than men is infinitely amusing to me because men are literally incapable of shutting the fuck up
i hope this post gets popular enough that i hurt a man’s feelings
It’s not a stereotype it’s a proven fact you femanazi piece of shit.
lmao there it is
You wanna talk proven facts? This shit’s been done, son: researcher Dale Spencer in Australia used audio and video tape to independently evaluate who talked the most in mixed-gender university classroom discussions. Regardless of the gender ratio of the students, whether the instructor was deliberately trying to encourage female participation or not, men always talked more—whether the metric was minutes of talking or number of words spoken.
Moreover, men literally have no clue how much they talk. When Spencer asked students to evaluate their perception of who talked more in a given discussion, women were pretty accurate; but men perceived the discussion as being “equal” when women talked only 15% of the time, and the discussion as being dominated by women if they talked only 30% of the time.
Spencer’s conclusion, if I may parahprase: you only think we talk too much because you’d rather we were silent.
Don’t fuck with me, asshole, I’m a scientist.
I am constantly, incessently thinking about this study
So, say someone makes a show set in Victorian London. There are no characters of color on the show.
Someone watches the show and says, “Hey, why is everyone on this show white?”
The creators of the show, rather than accepting responsibility for 1. choosing the setting of the show in the first place or 2. their own casting choices, say, “Hey! That’s just historically accurate, there WERE no PoC ‘back then’!!”
Basically, it’s about trying to pass the buck onto “history” for creative choices they made. Like: “OH, I didn’t WANT to exclude anyone, but I HAVE to be loyal and accurate to the true history!”
And everyone just accepts that as if it’s true, and as if that is a good reason to make a show that consists entirely of white people.
This is about dodging accountability in that they chose a setting they assumed would have only white people in it, and then made that true. And that has happened so many times that the myth just keeps perpetuating itself. Rather than consulting actual history or demographics, they base this idea on TV shows, books and movies that have already recreated some version of “Victorian London” that contains nothing but white citizens (in much the same way the citizens of supposed “New York City” in countless sitcoms are inexplicably white); media from ten years ago, 20 years, 50 years, and so on.
That establishes the context. Now, the facts.
Black London: Life Before Emancipation by Gretchen Gerzina (1995)
A glimpse into the lives of the thousands of Africans living in eighteenth century London.
The UCL Equiano Centre has an Interactive Map with information about various Black Londoners 1800-1900.
Photograph of John Archer, Mayor of Battersea, South London. England, 1913
When he was elected Mayor of Battersea, John replied to press speculation about where he might have come from with the remark that he had been born - “in a little obscure village in England probably never heard of until now - the city of Liverpool”. He went on to declare - “I am a Lancastrian bred and born”.
Characteristically pugnacious, but he had been stung by reports which, guessing wildly, said that he had been born in Rangoon or somewhere in India. He was actually part of the already well-established black population in Liverpool.
Lady Sarah Forbes Bonetta, goddaughter to Queen Victoria herself.
London is and was a vastly multicultural and diverse city. Even before the 1800s and photography, surviving artworks depict a massively diverse populace:
Here’s a link to the British Library’s resources on people of Asian descent living in Britain. The history of the Chinese community in London goes back for centuries.
You also have:
Sailors of South Asian origin (known as Lascars) based out of London, for the most part:
I could keep going.
But the point I’m making here is that claiming your whitewashed media is somehow “historically accurate” is total bunk.
If someone creates something that has nothing but white characters, it is that way because they CHOSE to make it that way. There is every opportunity and every reason to create media with characters of color in it, and trying to blame history for whitewashing is about dodging accountability.
“It’s tempting to go to the throat of the volcano to get the data, because if you do you’re a hero … It’s a battle between your mind and your emotions. If your emotions win out, you can get yourself in a lot of trouble.” -Ken Wohletz
Just a short while ago — on Monday — I shared with you the story of volcanic lightning in (mostly) pictures, with a longer explanation over here. Little did I know that earlier that night, Colima volcano in Mexico had begun erupting. And when it did, world-class astrophotographer César Cantú just happened to be there to capture it.
As the smoke, ash, cloud and soot filled the skies thanks to the volcanic eruption, night began to fall. And when it did, the eruption intensified even more, with fountains of lava flowing out of the mountain’s peak.
The earliest stages of a volcanic eruption tend to be the hottest, most chaotic, and to also spew out the greatest amounts of ash and soot.
It’s these very conditions, where you have the combined factors of:
that you’ve got the greatest chance to capture a volcanic lightning strike.
With his long-exposure photography techniques, with his equipment, his experience, and his skill in framing and compositing shots, Cesar was able to do exactly this.
The image above is actually just a single-frame from the long-exposure image displayed prior to that, which you can see from the identical shape of the lightning strike. (Like snowflakes, no two are identical.)
But the best shot he captured? That was an up-close masterpiece of the most spectacular strike the Colima eruption put on display.
Completely spectacular, so much so that his video composition is worth another look. As far as I know, it’s the first time-lapse video of a volcanic eruption that showcases the incredible phenomenon of volcanic lightning!
We’ll be back with our regularly scheduled weekend post tomorrow, but in the meantime, I couldn’t resist sharing this with you. Hope you enjoyed it just as much as I did!
A post that brilliantly explains why “Men’s Rights Activists” are misguided and why the oppression that men face in our culture is not a result of “misandry” but of misogyny.
“You’re fighting for the right to contain and control misogyny, and direct it back at women, where you think it belongs.”
And there it is.
Damn.
