After a successful Kickstarter campaign, several years' worth of the wonderful webcomic Strong Female Protagonist has been collected in a book called Strong Female Protagonist Book One, and the story is now available in a single, powerful draught. Cory Doctorow reviews a comic that has a lot more to say about justice than the typical superhero story. Read the rest

When cops are fired or forced to resign for malfeasance, chances are they walk straight into another law enforcement job -- in LA, the Sheriff's Department operates a revolving door between its police force and its notoriously corrupt jails, transferring its worst police offers into its custodial service. Read the rest

The DC force plans out how much stuff they'll steal from the public through the corrupt "asset forfeiture" program years in advance, almost as though they don't rely on crime to seize assets, but rather just arbitrarily grab stuff from people and sell it to pay their bills. Read the rest

aspiringdoctors:

Dying.

The Planetary Glass Set comprises ten glasses (one for each planet, plus one each for Pluto and Sol) representing the bodies of our solar system, very very very loosely sized to express their relative dimensions. Read the rest

Two months after Darrien Hunt was shot in the back and killed by Utah police, surveillance video that captured the moments before his death has been released. Read the rest

Follow @RubenBolling on Twitter and Facebook.

And "prove your virtue"* by joining the Tom the Dancing Bug subscription service, the INNER HIVE! "You'll feel good!"*

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*Disclosure: these quotes actually apply to NPR pledges. (more…)

(Continued) could be the 1 good cop. Even white, male cops are entitled to innocent until proven guilty and the due process of a grand jury. He shouldn’t have to pay for the sins of others. And likewise, although there r many innocent black youth harmed by the police, this might not b one of those cases. Mike Brown just robbed a store, assaulted the clerk, and was high on drugs. The witnesses that testified to him attacking n charging the officer were also black. Plz hold off until more is known

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KNOW YOUR FACTS, KNOW THE TRUTH:

"MYTH: Wilson stopped Brown because he was a suspect in a robbery.

FACT: Wilson did not know Brown was a suspect in a strong-arm robbery that happened moments before the shooting, according to Ferguson Police Chief Tom Jackson. Wilson stopped Brown and his friend for walking in the middle of the street, Jackson said.

MYTH: Autopsies tell us EXACTLY what happened when Brown was shot.

FACT: Police say Brown struggled with Wilson inside his police car, then reached for Wilson’s weapon. Brown’s family and some witnesses say Wilson killed Brown as he raised his hands in surrender. Multiple pathologists say the autopsy performed by the St. Louis County medical examiner and the pathologist hired by Brown’s family could support either version.

Pathologists say forensic science alone can’t determine whether Wilson justifiably shot the teen.” [x]

Yes, Mike Brown had pot in his system BUT THAT DOESNT JUSTIFY HIS MURDER jesus. i have pot in my system right now, probably. do you have any idea how long pot stays in your system? if you’re a frequent user it can stay in your system for 7-30 days. even if he’d smoked an hour before he was shot, it doesn’t make a difference to me. 

saying he had “drugs in his system” are specific words used to vilify an 18 year old boy. 

^ “Reflective of the county’s racial make-up, which is 70 percent white, but not of Ferguson’s, which is about two-thirds black.” [x]

“For 104 days, the police have lied and said Mike Brown was killed 35 feet away from Darren Wilson’s SUV. It was actually 148 feet.

This distance is essential to the defense and how Darren Wilson must demonstrate that he “reasonably feared for his safety.” At the point in which Mike Brown ran half a football field away, how reasonable is it for an armed officer to fear anyone?” [x]

“Six different witnesses on the scene claimed that Mike Brown was shot at repeatedly from behind before he turned around, faced Darren Wilson, verbally surrendered, and put his hands in the air. Wilson, having already shot at Mike Brown at least six times while he fled, then fired off a barrage of four quick shots at the surrendered Brown he was looking at face to face, killing him on the spot.” [x]

The Prosecutor rigged the system (video)

“The Missouri prosecutor overseeing an investigation into the fatal shooting of 18-year-old Michael Brown has deep family roots among police: his father, mother, brother, uncle and cousin all worked for St. Louis’ police department, and his father was killed while responding to a call involving a black suspect.” [x]

Ferguson grand jurors are not barred from following news about Ferguson but are only allowed to use evidence they’ve seen in session to reach a decision 

OTHER RELEVANT READINGS:

Ferguson isn’t about black rage against cops. It’s white rage against progress.

Michael Brown, Police Violence, And Why It’s So Hard For Victims To See Justice

When The Media Treats White Suspects And Killers Better Than Black Victims

Everything You Need to Know About the Ferguson Grand Jury

MY OPINION THAT IT’S INJUSTICE ISN’T UNFAIR. IT’S UNFAIR THAT MIKE BROWN WAS UNARMED AND YET STILL SHOT AND KILLED. 

that’s all.

To the eternal whine of the superannuated free-range SF geek ("dude, where's my jet pack? Where's my holiday on the moon? Where are my food pills? I thought this was supposed to be the 21st century!") can be added an appendix: "and what about those L5 orbital space colonies the size of Manhattan?"

Well, dude, I've got your L5 colony right here. In fact, they turned it into a vacation resort. I just spent a day checking it out, and I'm back with a report.

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As William Gibson remarked, the street finds its own uses for things: he might have chosen to generalize the observation by noting that if a thing is big enough and fantastic enough, people and the bizarre hominid hive intelligences called corporations will come together in groups to make a use for it, even if the use they find is nothing like the function it was designed for.

Big-ass L5 space colonies as envisaged by Professor Gerard K. O'Neill in his book The High Frontier turn out to be both economically and biologically questionable. To be fair, it's not entirely his fault: he took NASA's early-1970s estimates of Space Shuttle flight rates as gospel—one flight per week, costs around $1M/ton delivered into orbit—back when they were selling it as a "space truck". At which point, hauling 50,000 tons of hardware and 10,000 workers into orbit to build a gigantic factory town churning out gigawatt range solar power stations using materials mined from the lunar regolith and positioned where they could transmit microwave power beams down to Earth 24x7 sounded like it should cost about as much as the 350-odd tons and 6 astronaut crew of the ISS. And as a solution to the 1974 oil shock, it seemed like a good idea. If we ever do get space trucks like that, it might be time to dust off those concept drawings and go for it. But in the meantime ...

The 1990s were a time of wild commercial optimism, driven by the end of the cold war, rapidly burgeoning public access to the internet, and deregulation of financial and banking controls. All of these came with an eventual crash and an ugly hangover in the following decade, but at the time funds managers poured money into whatever high-tech startup sounded good with a cocaine high. Roton, the fully reusable surface-to-orbit helicopter, got funding. VCs lined up to pour money down the rat-hole that was Netscape Communications in the hope that they could sell a web browser (while Microsoft were giving theirs away for free). And in Germany, a bunch of very serious engineers did their best to take us back to the Gernsback Continuum by setting up CargoLifter AG, with the goal of developing the CL160, a gigantic cargo airship with a payload capacity of 160 tons and a 550,000 cubic metre lift volume. (For comparison: the Hindenberg, the largest airship ever built to date, had a payload of 90 passengers and crew, their luggage, and another 10 tons of cargo. Lift volume: 200,000 cubic metres.)

All these ventures came adrift, but not before they built extraordinary things. CargoLifter AG in particular bought the defunct Soviet air force base at Brand-Briesen Airfield, 50km south-east of Berlin: and before they ran out of cash they build a gigantic airship hangar. I use the word advisedly. The hangar at Brand-Briesen, known as the Aerium, is one of the world's largest buildings: The only larger buildings are the Boeing Everett works, the Airbus A380 super-jumbo assembly hall, and a Target distribution warehouse in Washington state. (It's 360 metres long and over 100 metres high: so large you could fit a Nimitz class super-carrier inside it.) It was a suitably ambitious plant for what was essentially a plan to build an aircraft with a cargo capacity even greater than the Antonov An-225 Mriya, with vertical take-off and landing thrown in as a bonus. And so, when CargoLifter AG went bankrupt in 2004, having completed the hangar, it should be no surprise that someone, somewhere, sat up and said to themselves, "hey, we could use that!"

So here's what happens. One morning you get up early in your hotel or apartment in Berlin. You collect your swimming gear, flip-flops, beach towel, and sundries. Then you wrap up warm, because of course it's November in Prussia and while it's not snowing yet the wind has a sharp edge to it. You head for Zoologischer Garten station (or maybe the Ostbahnhof if you're on that side of the city) and catch a train, which over the next hour hums through the pancake-flat forests and villages of East Germany until it stops at a lonely (but recently modernized) platform in a forest in the middle of nowhere.

You're wondering if you've made some sort of horrible mistake, but no: a shuttle bus covered in brightly colored decals depicting a tropical beach resort is waiting for you. It drives along cracked concrete taxi-ways lined with pine trees, past the boarded-up fronts of dispersal bay hangers and hard stands for MiG-29 interceptors awaiting a NATO attack that never came. The bus is raucous with small children, chattering and screeching and bouncing off the walls and ceiling in a sugar-high—harried parents and minders for the large group of schoolgirls in the back of the bus are trying to keep control, unsuccessfully. Then the bus rumbles and lurches to a standstill, and the doors open, and you see this:

It's hard to do justice to the scale of the thing. It's one of those objects that is too big to take in at close range, and deceptively small when viewed from a distance. It's like an L5 space colony colony that crash-landed in on the West Prussian plains: a gigantic eruption from the future, or a liminal intrusion from the Gernsbackian what-might-have-been.

And inside it—I'm going to go with stock photographs because, alas, I was too busy enjoying the saunas to go back to the lockers and fetch my camera until after sunset (at 4pm, around this time of year)—it's, well ...

Welcome to Tropical Islands, Germany.

You can get the history from the wikipedia link above: in a nutshell, the Zeppelin hangar was bought from the liquidators by a Malaysian resort operator, who proceeded to turn it into an indoor theme park. They stripped off a chunk of the outer cladding of the hangar and replaced it with a high-tech greenhouse film: it's climate-controlled, at 26 celsius and 64% humidity all year round. (That's pretty chilly by Malaysian standards, but nice and comfortable for the German and Polish customer base.) There's an artificial rainforest, with over 50,000 plants and a 5km long walking trail inside. There are about a dozen different saunas, hot tubs, and a swimming pool complex: there's a 200 metre long artificial beach with sun-loungers for you to work on your tan wrapped around an artificial tropical lagoon—a 140 metre swimming pool with waves. There are bars, shops, restaurants, hotels, even a camp ground for tents: and of course the usual beachside resort song and dance show every evening.

If you want to see it from above, a pair of helium balloons with wicker gondolas wait to waft you the length of the hangar for a guided tour: like the CL160 these aerostats are never destined to leave their hangar, but they're probably more profitable.

Tropical Islands is the mother of all water parks, with a separate play area for the kinder while the teens and adults discreetly down their pina coladas or Erdinger weissbiers in the thatch-roofed bars overlooking the beach. It's safe, and clean, and organized and curated and manicured to within an inch of its life. It's got that Malaysian high concept futurist vibe going, combined with German thoroughness and attention to detail, for an experience that's pretty much what you'd expect if Disneyworld opened a park in Singapore, only with fewer dire declarations of death to drug smugglers. It is in short thoroughly enjoyable if you're in Berlin and for some reason decide you want a relaxing tropical beach-side day out in an environment that's barely less artificial than an L5 space colony.

And then the real world—the panopticon future we never asked for but somehow ended up with all the same—intrudes.

Entry is ticketed: you pay the basic entry price at a turnstile and in return you're issued with a band with an RFID chip in it, like a blank-faced plastic wrist-watch. You tap it against the turnstile, and go in. The changing rooms are first: your transponder has a number on it, and this is the number of your locker. To enter the sauna area (€10 extra for the day, or thereabouts) you go through another turnstile with a contactless reader. To pay for food at the restaurants, or a temporary tattoo at the tattoo parlour, you tap on a reader. Or drinks. Or a newspaper. They've abolished cash: you can leave your wallet safely in the locker—until it's time to leave, and then you settle up the balance on your transponder at an unmanned ATM, deposit it in an exit turnstile, and leave.

Of course there's a down-side. You can imagine a hapless tourist, buying entrance with their credit card, not realizing that their issuer's mainframe will decide their card has been stolen: they enter, and like Charlie on the MTA they can never leave. Trapped forever, unable to pay the robot it's exit fee, they live feral lives trapped in the interstices of a tropical future ...

But that's just a harmless fantasy compared to the real down-side. Every turnstile you go through, every drink you buy, every experience you request, can be logged and tagged with your unique ID. Yes, you can pay cash for everything: but the resort operators still know that someone entered the sauna area then, 42 minutes later, proceeded to Bar number four and bought a pint of Erdinger Alkoholfrei. And there are cameras. They've actually made wearing a tracking tag a rewarding experience. Of course it's entirely voluntary, keeping count of entrants and exits can be justified as a safety measure, and it saves you from having to carry cash around in your swimsuit ... but, but, tagging!

After you stop spluttering with indignation, you realize that it's an inevitable part of this package. Hell, Disney do it too, don't they? And now your imagination cuts loose. Let's imagine ourselves in that bright future of space trucks and (relatively) cheap orbital access, of hard-hat construction crews building out our solar future at the L4 and L5 libration points. They'll live in space colonies, derived from Bernal spheres or O'Neill cylinders, for it's too expensive to commute from Earth's surface to orbit even with fully reusable spacecraft as cheap to operate as airliners, as long as we rely on chemical fuels. These habitats will be comfortable, long-duration homes ...

... And they're going to be as artificial as, and even more vulnerable than Tropical Islands. If someone goes nuts and tries to blow a hole in the wall of the fourth largest building in the world, well, there are evacuation routes into the car park. The failure modes for space colonies are much deadlier, so the panopticon paradise with tracking devices and cameras everywhere seems to be pretty much an inevitable corollary of such an environment. So, too, are climate control and the curation of space. The Aerium is cunningly filled with distractions and diversions, until the 5km rainforest walk seems unexceptional, even though it's folded into a space less than 300 metres long: it's as twisted and knotty as your intestines. Long-duration orbital colonists will need a sense of space: many of the same techniques—lots of interrupted sight lines, branching routes and creative environmental features—will almost inevitably be deployed. Everyone's going to be under surveillance the whole time, behaviour monitored for signs of stress. Any children are going to be shepherded, lovingly but firmly, away from harmful things like airlock doors and plumbing, protected by doors that refuse to open for the unauthorized and robots that offer alternative, more attractive diversions for the fractious and bored or merely curious.

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So: I had a good time visiting the L5 simulator at Brand for my regular scheduled glimpse of our future in the off-world colonies. But I happen like novelty swimming pools, artificial beach resorts in giant geodesic structures, and spas with clothing-optional saunas. I can even kind of cope with omnipresent surveillance and being tracked everywhere: that's the real spirit of the age. I wasn't expected to strap myself into a spacesuit and go outside into the chilly darkness with its weird smell of gunpowder, diesel fumes and barbecue, working in an environment as deadly as the deep ocean. The surveillance was of the most anodyne kind, monitoring my spending and how much time I spent in each feature: not looking for tangible signs of stress with gentle but draconian enforcement waiting in the wings. And at the end of the day I could put my clothes on, pay up, and catch the train home. From L5, the best you can hope for if you can't handle it any more is that they'll lock you in a capsule with an oxygen bottle and some ration packs and fire you, screaming, at the Earth.

Anyway, this is the future, folks. It's built from the bones of the past, it's unevenly distributed, and it's already here. And while it's an interesting place to visit, I'm not sure I'd want to stay.

(The title is, of course, a tribute to Jack Womack's extraordinary historical post-apocalyptic novel of the same name.)

bapgeek2geekbap:

kyssthis16:

archatlas:

The Colbert Report 11.19.14

You see how she explained how race is a social construct (it is) while ALSO SAYING THAT RACISM EXISTS AND IS FUCKED UP? You see how she did that? Don’t mistake this for colorblindness because it clearly isn’t.

I’ve seen so many folks of all races (mostly White people) on FB saying this is an validation of colorblindness and I’m just like DID YOU JUST STOP LISTENING AFTER THE FIRST SENTENCE OR WHAT?! 

I need these Animal Crossing notebooks ⊟

Everyone is such a cutie in this picnic scene! Kicks, Reese, Cyrus, Isabelle, and all you other villagers: I miss you all and will return to you one day, promise.

Artist Renee sold these notebooks today at Anime Destiny. She will put up extras/preorders online eventually. You can follow her Tumblr here.

BUY Animal Crossing: New Leaf ($24.57 right now!), upcoming games

by Jazmine Hughes

Everything that could've been said has been said; everything that could've been done was avoided. Last night, Michael Brown was put on trial for his own murder. You will hear me repeat this a lot: what age is a black boy when he learns he's scary? Millions learned last night.

Let's focus on the good. Mike Brown was 18 years old, freshly graduated from high school. He was funny, silly, quiet and respectful, a gentle giant. He liked to take selfies. He liked to rap, and there is not a goddamned thing wrong with that. He is gone, but we cannot forget him.

If you are angry, like me, here are some things you can do. First and foremost, always and forever, register to vote. There is no excuse. You can contact your local representatives to implore them to require body cameras on every cop. You can sign petitions like the ACLU's against racial profiling, or Change.org's to protect communities from police violence. You can donate: organizations like Black Lives Matter and Operation Help or Hush are on using social media to garner change, the National Lawyer's Guild is providing legal support to protestors, and the Ferguson library will remain open today even though schools are closed, to provide solace and shelter.

Keep thinking about Michael Brown. Keep thinking about Trayvon Martin, about Oscar Grant and Tamir Rice and Sean Bell, about so many others. Keep thinking about all those little black boys who never made it home, about all the little boys who are afraid to leave. But do more than think: do. "Let's not just make noise," as Brown's family has implored us. "Let's make a difference."

3 Comments

revitiligo:

standardreview:

magnacarterholygrail:

durgapolashi:

Eartha Kitt speaking truth to power at a 1968 luncheon at the White House hosted by Lady Bird Johnson which resulted in Kitt being blacklisted in the US for nearly a decade.

let it be known that on January 18th, 1968, Eartha Kitt stood in a room full of white women at The Women Doers Luncheon, GOT IN LADYBIRD JOHNSON’S FACE, and told her that the government was sending the best of the youth off to be shot and killed and, in not so many words, that THAT was the reason the youth were rebelling. She ALSO stopped President Johnson after he made a statement claiming that mothers should be responsible for stopping their kids from becoming criminals and asked about “the parents who have to go to work, for instance, who can’t spend time with their children as they should”. It was brushed off by LBJ who only mentioned the funding for day care centers put in place by the recently passed Social Security bill, and then more or less said that the women at that luncheon should figure it out for themselves.

She was blacklisted, but she defended every word she said that day. 

gifs via

Black women continue to be great

Photographer Daniel Schaefer captures the grief, anger, and resolve of demonstrators who took to the streets of Manhattan after the announcement that the police officer who killed unarmed black teen Michael Brown would not be indicted. Read the rest

thechristmaspatch:

Hyperbole and a Half - The Motivation Game

this is too accurate for me right now

ruthannereid:

oroxine:

poyzn:

There is someone out there for everybody.

It just might be a goose.

you don’t understand the miracle this goose is NICE

So true. :)

By now, everyone probably knows that sitting all day at your desk can pose some health risks. And so the standing desk craze was born—promising hundreds of calories burned per day, and all kinds of miracle cures to boot.

With specialized standing desks costing well over $1,000, it’s not surprising that people soon figured out a hack to make a version on the cheap, using a table and a shelf from the Swedish furniture behemoth IKEA to cobble together a sturdy upright setup for around $30.

But even the most fervent standing desk proponents have pointed out that standing stationary all day, without sitting breaks, can cause some unpleasant side effects—meaning a standing-only desk isn’t ideal.

To address that problem, IKEA is now selling a desk designed to seamlessly switch between sitting and standing. The Bekant desk—which runs from $149 for its basic model to $916 for its “workstation”—offers an affordable option to people who want to avoid sitting all day but also don’t have the stamina or emotional resolve to emulate the Queen’s Guard at their desks.

Watch the Bekant in action:

There are a number of other standing desks on the market, but most are much more expensive than the Bekant or require manual adjustment. All Bekant models are adjustable between 25 5/8″ and 33 1/2″, which should comfortably fit most human beings.

Soothing piano music sold separately.

scrapscallion:

When we talk about androgynous fashion, we usually mean female-presenting people in outfits that incorporate or echo menswear. One seldom sees male-presenting people doing the same with womenswear, at least in the mainstream.

I think some of that must be a side effect of the privileging of traits, roles, and characteristics associated with masculinity over those associated with femininity—a woman in masculine-associated roles or clothing is moving in the direction of higher status and increased social privilege, at least implicitly; a man in feminine-associated roles or clothing, lower. We associate women in menswear with freedom and assertion; men in womenswear with deviation, grotesquerie, and parody.

How fucked up is that?

whitegirlsaintshit:

I don’t even want Darren Wilson’s head. Honestly, he’s a pawn in something bigger than him. He can rot in hell or hiding or wherever. What I want is for everyone to stop questioning the anger, the frustration, the heartbreak, and the validated feelings of sorrow of black people. Stop pretending to empathize with us. Stop pretending to understand our sadness, our feelings of worthlessness, our feelings of hopelessness, and our wanting to be valued as humans. When I talk about race and the way I feel against white supremacy, and you tell me it’s because I’m jealous, you’re damn right. I’m jealous that I can’t even be seen as worthy of living in a society that was built against me in all ways possible. So fuck you if you want to know why I’m whitegirlsaintshit.

OH MAN. BAHFest videos coming soon.

“Imagine if DC had the courage to do to Wonder Woman what Marvel did with Thor, by heightening the culture clash between an Amazonian and modern Americans. Imagine how much fun you’d get if she was routinely confused by the casual sexism of our culture!

Imagine how much joy it would give audiences if, because she comes from a matriarchal culture, she didn’t know how to behave in traditionally feminine ways, and how much fun it would be to see how that challenges people. Hell, just imagine if she saw every bit of rude sexist behavior as a challenge to fight her, because she doesn’t have the framework to understand that’s just how it is.

Instead, we’ll probably get like one or two mildly feminist moments before she recedes into a character that is supposed to be strong but also non-threatening. In real life, a woman who has never known sexism in her life would be totally threatening to nearly everyone. There is no way they are going to have fun with that, though.”

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Amanda Marcotte, Don’t get too excited about a Wonder Woman Movie (via autisticbobsaginowski)

"a woman who has never known sexism in her life would be totally threatening to nearly everyone."

(via veliseraptor)

Things I Did Not Know I Needed Until Right This Second: this

(via thedatingfeminist)

Wouldn’t it be great if someone else made a faux WW movie along these exact lines?  Or at the very least, wrote a book about a character raised in such a culture who comes to ours and the shock?  I’d read it!

Courtney shared this story from Super Opinionated.

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What is costing your country most?

a-laluna:

couldn’t not reblog this.

Courtney shared this story from Super Opinionated.

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POW!

[tedbrogan]