Luke.stirling

Both. Read the rest

Two recent Storify pages provide some fascinating insight on how this group came to conceive of "gamer" as a fictional "ethnicity" with a persecution complex (from Katherine Cross), as well as on how the cultural norms of Chan-style boards drive this perplexing clash with the realms of people's real working and social lives (from A_Man_in_Black). Read the rest

Keurig's dumbass coffee-pod DRM tries to prevent your machine from brewing pods that don't come from Keurig, but you can defeat it in seconds with a single piece of tape. Read the rest

Jon Hall built five incredible planes this year. To commemorate that, he just posted this montage. Somehow we dropped the ball and only posted one of them here. That lapse has now been rectified. Here they are, all together in their breath-taking awesomeness.

Jon’s planes are truly works of art. So smooth, so seamless, so beautiful. He does paint some of them and uses custom stickers, which probably irritates somebody, somewhere. But he does it so well, I feel it just adds to the “realism” and makes the suspension of disbelief that much easier.

Crimson Storm

R-16 Vindicator

F49A Patriot

S-15 Vulture

He-98 Halberd

Amy Barnes was jailed and held in solitary in 2012 when she called out "fuck the police" as she bicycled past Cobb County cops who were questioning a suspect by the roadside. Read the rest

I've never done any "best of" posts, so this year, I'm gonna! Hold on to your hats, wrecky minions, 'cuz I'm about to unleash my personal favorites from over six years and 10,000 wrecks, throughout the rest of the month. Enjoy!

- Jen

*****

When a card just isn't enough.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Now for extra fun, go back and read all these imagining they're from the same person, TO the same person, over the course of a single weekend. That's like the next Adam Sandler movie script, writing itself.

 

Thanks to Ian S., Casey H., Sara W., Kris K., Rachel B., Michelle B., Andrew C., Brooke J., Micah C., & Adam Sandler, who I'm sure will be sending me a fruit basket.

*****

Thank you for using our Amazon links to shop! USA, UK, Canada.

A reader writes, "The USB Armory is full-blown computer (800MHz ARM® processor, 512MB RAM) in a tiny form factor (65mm x 19mm x 6mm USB stick) designed from the ground up with information security applications in mind." Read the rest

AP Works's Trick Mat is a placemat that mimics spacetime curvature; no word on whether or how it can be purchased, alas (though you could probably make a pretty good disposable facsimile with an inkjet printer and some vector-art software). (via Super Punch)

Spain's insane new compulsory fee for quoting news stories has shut down Google News there -- and will prevent any new news search-engines from emerging to replace it. Read the rest

This is what gender ideology looks like:

That’s The Walking Dead’s Rosita Espinosa with newly shaven armpits.

This is also gender ideology at work: the privileging of an idea of gender over real life or, in this case, realism.

The Walking Dead’s producers go to great lengths to portray what a zombie apocalypse might be like. They are especially keen to show us the nasty bits: what it really looks like when dead people don’t die, what it looks like to kill the undead, and the evil it spawns in those left alive. It’s gruesome. The show is a gore orgy. But armpit hair on women? Apparently that’s just gross.

If gender ideology had lost this battle with realism, we’d see armpit hair on the women in Gilligan’s Island, Planet of the Apes, The Blue Lagoon, Beauty and the Beast, Waterworld, Lost, and The Hunger Games – but we don’t. (Thanks to Ariane Lange at Buzzfeed for the whole collection and to @uheartdanny for the link.)

At least Rosita could conceivably have a razor. How do women supposedly shave their armpits on deserted islands? Did the Beast slip Belle a razor, you know, just as part of his controlling personality? And maybe some persnickety women would continue to shave even if they were lost in purgatory, but Riley in Alien? Come on.

Our interest in realism only goes so far. Armpit hair on women is apparently one of its limits.

Cross-posted at Pacific Standard.

Lisa Wade is a professor of sociology at Occidental College and the co-author of Gender: Ideas, Interactions, Institutions. You can follow her on Twitter and Facebook.

(View original at http://thesocietypages.org/socimages)

More narcissism.

Students who think they're being taught by women give lower evaluation scores for those teachers than students who think they are being taught by men -- no matter who was actually teaching them. Read the rest

Tom the Dancing Bug, IN WHICH we introduce the Paleolithic Diet Craze: THE PLIO DIET!! "If you survive, you're fit!" Read the rest

Today is the 66th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

Why not become a Patron of the Blasphemous Arts? Book shop here

This is why earplugs were invented. 

99.8% of the $735 million paid out by in 9,225 large-city police misconduct settlements came from tax revenues; 0.2% was paid by the officers who committed the infractions. In more than 80 small/mid-sized cities studied, police officers contributed nothing to settlements for their misconduct. Read the rest

New submitter stephenpeters writes The AdNauseam browser extension claims to click on each ad you have blocked with AdBlock in an attempt to obfuscate your browsing data. Officially launched mid November at the Digital Labour conference in New York, the authors hope this extension will register with advertisers as a protest against their pervasive monitoring of users online activities. It will be interesting to see how automated ad click browser extensions will affect the online ad arms race. Especially as French publishers are currently planning to sue Eyeo GmbH, the publishers of Adblock. This might obfuscate the meaning of the clicks, but what if it just encourages the ad sellers to claim even higher click-through rates as a selling point?

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2-shane-s:

I thought that only the bag of chips was knitted so I was like lmaoo fucking idiot bird got owned then I saw that the bird was knitted as well then I realized I was the fucking idiot bird getting owned

The term “enhanced interrogation” was coined by the Nazis…or Verschärfte Vernehmung, in the original German.

You know what was done with the Nazis who supported these kinds of evil acts after the war, right? So when is the Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld/etc. trial before an international tribunal?

We might as well start wearing black and putting skulls on our caps. The Senate Torture Report (it’s chilling that we even have to have a “torture report”) has been released, and it’s just full of the evil crap the CIA has been doing.

Detainees were deprived of sleep for as long as a week, and were sometimes told that they would be killed while in American custody. With the approval of the C.I.A.’s medical staff, some C.I.A. prisoners were subjected to medically unnecessary “rectal feeding” or “rectal hydration” — a technique that the C.I.A.’s chief of interrogations described as a way to exert “total control over the detainee.” C.I.A. medical staff members described the waterboarding of Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the chief planner of the Sept. 11 attacks, as a “series of near drownings.”

Couple that with the discovery that the CIA was fucking incompetent, kept poor records of what was done, held 26 detainees without cause, and tortured poor schmucks who had committed no crime, but was arrested “solely as leverage to get a family member to provide information”. Thanks, GW Bush and Cheney, for cheerfully approving horrors.

And the end result?

At no time did the CIA’s coercive interrogation techniques lead to the collection of imminent threat intelligence, such as the hypothetical ‘ticking time bomb’ information that many believe was the justification for the use of these techniques.

Fuck you, Sam Harris, you incompetent amoral hack, smug apologist for monsters.

my-teen-quote:

baby animal posts daily

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An excerpt from Linda Tirado's 2014 book Hand to Mouth: Living in Bootstrap America lays out some of the ways that being poor costs more than having a comfortable income -- it's more than having to pay for high daily rents in a motel because you can't afford first-and-last. Read the rest