Zackc43

Kelsey Campbell-Dollahan: " there's still no perfect way to care for sufferers of dementia and Alzheimer's. In the Netherlands, however, a radical idea is being tested: Self-contained "villages" where people with dementia shop, cook, and live together—safely."

This bears repeating.

At its heart the GOP has two basic camps – business conservatives who bankroll the party and social conservatives/theocons who staff it.

OK, the leadership has its infestation of grifters and opportunistic idiots but the above rule pretty much covers the network of voters, volunteers and money that the grifters and idiots need to keep the game afloat. You can understand every major intraparty conflict in light of this simple rule. The social cons always want to sieze every chance to push their minority, gay, immigrant etc. – hating agenda one more yard down the field. Now business cons do not always oppose the social agenda. In some cases, sure. Take immigration for example. Business desperately needs cheap labor who can’t read the OSHA signs on the wall while social cons desperately hate and fear anything different from them. Immigration is the GOP’s Centralia, PA: a simmering danger zone that goes quiet for a while but cannot ever be made safe and threatens to consume any foolish politician who ventures there in flames and poison gas. Democrats have no such problem because neither side is particularly frantic about it. The pro side would be happy to see some movement in the right direction most people who feel all that strongly against it vote Republican. Unions have their own opinion of course, and that might become a problem some day when they get their political mojo back.

In other cases the Chamber o’ Commerce takes the moderate side in GOP civil wars mostly because the GOP can’t cut taxes for the rich if they spend all their capital on suicidal vendettas. Arizona fits neatly into the this category. Business interests figured correctly that the mess would complicate their financial prospects in AZ and give a significant tailwind to the party of Elizabeth Warren, so they yanked Jan Brewer’s leash and saved another windmill the trouble of knocking don Quixote off his horse.

If you want my opinion, and I feel pretty good about prognosticating after taking the right side of Peak Wingnut, I think Arizona represents the last surge of a receding tide in America. More watered down attempts to pass the same bill have already failed in three states and Ohio just bailed on theirs after Brewer’s veto denied them cover. Desperate, poorly thought out plays like this are a classic sign that a side knows it is losing. Call it political hyperinflation: when your currency is getting less valuable by the minute you rush to spend it any damn way you can before the entire wheelbarrow won’t buy a pack of cigarettes.

***Update***

When Mississippi bails on the social cons, you know the gay haters are holding a wooden nickel.

It's abundantly clear that Astros bullpen coach Craig Bjornson is the Face of MLB. But he deserves to be the face of so much more.

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Over five seasons, viewers were introduced to some of the most compelling characters in TV history. Take our quiz to see who matches your personality.

This has got to be the best lede of all time. And a great article, too. Caitlin Flanagan, writing about fraternities, law, liabilities, and corruption in the Atlantic magazine:

One warm spring night in 2011, a young man named Travis Hughes stood on the back deck of the Alpha Tau Omega fraternity house at Marshall University, in West Virginia, and was struck by what seemed to him—under the influence of powerful inebriants, not least among them the clear ether of youth itself—to be an excellent idea: he would shove a bottle rocket up his ass and blast it into the sweet night air. And perhaps it was an excellent idea. What was not an excellent idea, however, was to misjudge the relative tightness of a 20-year-old sphincter and the propulsive reliability of a 20-cent bottle rocket. What followed ignition was not the bright report of a successful blastoff, but the muffled thud of fire in the hole.

"The Dark Power of Fraternities" [The Atlantic]

Worthwhile project: "Disappointing Moments In Cleveland Sports Coloring Book." [Kickstarter, h/t Same Sad Echo]

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Americans: we love paying more for less

by David Atkins

Now that Comcast is apparently going to be merging with Time Warner, net neutrality is dead, and vertical integration is all rage, it's worth remembering the glorious benefit Americans are getting from all this free market magic:



Yep. Higher prices, worse service. USA! USA!

And no, this isn't just because we're a bigger country and service to rural areas is bad. We also pay more money for slower Internet in big cities, too.

Why is this? Doesn't standard economics dictate that free markets provide greater competition and lower cost?

Well, yes--in theory. There are many and very large wrinkles in the classical economic model, but in a perfectly efficient market where manufacturing the product is easy, and the public has the option not to buy the product or to substitute other products, that can and does work. For instance, it's hard to overcharge for toothpaste or apple juice. They're pretty easy to make, and if one company overcharges for them someone else will make it cheaper or people will find a substitute. A free market in toothpaste or apple juice will generally provide a better product at lower prices than a centrally planned market will (provided that government regulation exists to ensure that those products are produced safely and actually contain the advertised ingredients.)

But commodities like healthcare and the Internet are different. They're absolute necessities bordering on human rights, for which there is no substitute. They're enormous and impossible for an underdog to produce at a lower cost. And they're easy for ruthless corporations to monopolize and vertically integrate for exploitative, rent-seeking purposes absent government intervention.

Allowing a "free market" in such commodities isn't free at all. It's insane. It's guaranteed to produce monopolies, high prices and terrible service. Which is exactly what we have in American healthcare and American internet: the world's freest, and therefore worst and most expensive, markets in essential services.

The mark of a sophisticated mind is to understand that some solutions work in some cases but not in others. It's the mark of an idiot to think that the same model will work in all cases.

People who think "free markets" work in healthcare or the Internet are just as functionally stupid about economics as the most hardline Communist who thinks that the government should exercise full control of the toothpaste market. Most of the world understands by now that the second guy is a dangerous fool. But we're at a weird point in history where the first guy undeservedly has more credibility. He shouldn't--and he won't for long.


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This is very European:

No Swiss fighter jets were scrambled Monday when an Ethiopian Airlines co-pilot hijacked his own plane and forced it to land in Geneva, because it happened outside business hours, the Swiss airforce said… But although the co-pilot-turned-hijacker quickly announced he wanted to land the plane in Switzerland, where he later said he aimed to seek asylum, Switzerland’s fleet of F-18s and F-5 Tigers remained on the ground, Swiss airforce spokesman Laurent Savary told AFP.

This, he explained, was because the Swiss airforce is only available during office hours. These are reported to be from 8am until noon, then 1:30 to 5pm.

As you may recall, later this year Switzerland will hold a referendum on whether to purchase 18 Saab Gripen fighters to defend Swiss airspace from 8am until noon, then 1:30 to 5pm.

Earlier this morning, I summed up each presidency in one tweet. They are collected here.

Kelsey Atherton undertook a similar project, also worth reading.

Nigel, a Scottish forensic artist, did this facial reconstruction job on a bottle of Crystal Head Vodka, yielding up a glimpse of how the grotesque crystalline monsters whose skulls are harvested by the Crystal Vodka people might look.

Crystal Head Vodka Forensic Facial Reconstruction

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This is a little informal survey of 5 questions designed to sample what genre fans expect from the fictional worlds they interact with. For simplicity's sake I am limiting the examples to film. There are no wrong answers. It is a merely an attempt to see if any one dominant aesthetic emerges when it comes to these questions.

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It's been some time since we've had Baron Davis in our lives, and that is unfortunate because Baron Davis is awesome. Here Davis teams up with Steve Nash in a video detailing his "efforts" to return to the NBA. You will laugh at this.

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Everybody wants to recapture the glory days of 80s movies these days. Everywhere you look, they're remaking 80s classics or paying homage to the motifs of the Reagan era. But there's still something about the 80s that remains unique and special. Here are 10 things movies were good at in the 80s that they struggle at today.

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Patrick Farley, a wonderful comics creator whose work we've been covering for more than a decade, has taken to Twitter to show off his Zbrush recreations of the monsters from the original Dungeons and Dragons Monster Manual. (Thanks, Stefan!)

How very Sochi of things not to work properly. Good thing nothing like this happened in Vancouver.

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matriarch-dacey:

adamz3r0:

rpgprotip:

notoriouskaitlynn:

ktshy:

typette:

danedear:

imironmanandyouarenot:

Hobbit genderbend cosplay by Alexander Turchanin

everything is women and nothing hurt.

nooo they’re so cute

*drops coffee* Where’s my cosplay troop at!!?!

This makes me so happy.

So pumped on these babes! I love these cosplays

The one with the flute (Nori? Dori?) is spot-fucking-on.

Aaahhhhhhh

Dungeons & Dragons, that ground-breaking role-playing game, celebrates its 40th anniversary this year.

Specifically, the game's big "4-0" comes this month. It was in January of 1974 when the game's co-creator, Gary Gygax, officially announced in a newsletter that "the Lake Geneva Tactical Studies Association has now released its set of fantasy campaign rules (Dungeons and Dragons)." In that announcement, Gygax invited folks to drop by his Lake Geneva, Wisconsin, home some Sunday afternoon to experience Dungeons & Dragons themselves.

But lo, those four decades ago, when D&D first debuted, no one knew what to make of it. D&D was intended to be a new twist on traditional war games. New, because "role-playing" games as a category did not exist. Newcomers found D&D to be weird and complex and confusing and trippy. You want me to "play" a dwarf fighter named Frowndorf? You want me to tell you how my hobbit thief is going to kill the gang of orcs? These dice have how many sides? WTF?

But to those who were intrigued, the “Huh?"s of doubt quickly turned to “Hey, this is fun.” No one guessed Dungeons & Dragons would be revolutionary.

Never before had a game asked players to assume roles of individual characters and jointly imagine the world where those adventures would take place. With D&D, you don't beat your fellow players, you cooperate. Sure, there were war games with miniature figurines and maps. But here was a game that said that there's no "win"—there's just the ongoing story, and the next adventure.

I first played D&D back in the 1970s and 1980s. Like millions of mostly male and young American proto-geeks, I too got sucked into the game's vicarious derring-do and heroics, playing wizards and warriors —idealized versions of myself — who wielded incredible power, acquired cool stuff, killed nasty monsters, cast spells, and inhabited fantastical places.

Today, deep in the digital age, I'm happy to report that the game still exists. In fact, the new edition of D&D's rules is slated for release this August. And only now, as a 47-year-old who still plays the game, can I appreciate why Dungeons & Dragons still matters in 2014.

To be sure, there's lots to say about how D&D was a game-changer and eternally influenced geek culture. Much has been said about how the game practically cemented the foundation for the modern video game industry. D&D pioneered concepts like avatars, characters, and levels. It measured armor, health, and personal attributes numerically—hence, my elf's 17 charisma makes him hotter (and a better leader) than your 11 charisma loser. Each iteration of D&D, and its many copycats and variations, also made ubiquitous that "dungeon crawl" experience that so many electronic games—from Doom, Quake and Myst, to World of Warcraft, Halo, Portal and Call of Duty—have all employed to such addictive effect. D&D also encouraged the popularization of Tolkien and fantasy. Dress-up "cosplay" and story-based live-action role-playing came from roots steeped in D&D. The game inspired the first interactive fiction.

Like a 3rd level Spell of Suggestion, D&D generated subtle repercussions through the culture. The role-playing game opened new pathways for creativity, new ways for kids and young adults to entertain themselves. The game led a DIY, subversive, anti-corporate revolution, a slow-building insurrectionist attack against the status quo of leisure time and entertainment.

The conceptual space that D&D organized was infinite. Suddenly, for kids who "got" the game and understood how it worked, options for "play" were no longer limited to basic board games such as Risk or Monopoly. The game “board” was limitless. This game was played with words scribbled on character sheets, and books, even as its world existed largely in your head. Like a new movement in theater or literature, D&D invented not only a venue for homegrown storytelling, but a new game genre: the role-playing game.

The lesson of Dungeons & Dragons has always been this: make your own entertainment. By sitting around a table, face to face, and arming yourself with pencils, graph paper, and polyhedral dice, you can tap into what shamans, poets and bards have done all the way back to the Stone Age. Namely, the making of a meaningful story where the tellers have an emotional stake in the telling, and the creating of a shared experience out of thin air.

To go on this new adventure, you don't absorb a movie or TV show passively, on the couch, or merely "read" a book. Nor are your options for “interacting” with a fantasy experience limited to collecting merchandise or playing with action figures. Best of all, the essential quality of this unique, narrative gaming experience can't be co-opted as commercial entertainment. Role-playing games like D&D are a way to experience unstructured free time while imposing upon it a structure, a story.

The rules books are guidelines, not stone tablets. Don't agree with how much damage a long sword should do, as listed in The Dungeon Master's Guide? Make up a new rule. If you want more of this swords and sorcery world, the tools are there to build addenda and archipelagoes yourself. Try that with Clue or Stratego. D&D became not just entertainment, but an art form.

Along the way, D&Ders like me learned about stuff. We discussed hit dice and saving throws, ballistas and halberds. We studied, without encouragement from our parents or teachers, arcane subjects such as architecture, history, languages, and statistics. I learned how to draw and map. I learned battle tactics, how to bargain, how to empathize and negotiate with those not like me—be it undead kings or jocks. And a lot of introverted, socially-inept kids found friends and fellowship. I got socialized, and I learned how to be a leader. Bored and dissatisfied with my real life, I created a more exciting one, again and again, where I got to save the day and have agency.

The tools of D&D gave me permission to imagine a better me, and a better story for myself. They gave me the courage to imagine a different future. And taught me how to change myself. Not happy with lowly Level 1 Ethan, I worked hard to level up to my better, stronger, faster level 17 version today.

As a result of the many millions who logged countless hours with their Monster Manuals in dungeons dark and deep—with nary an iPad, iPhone, or screen in sight—Dungeons & Dragons created a generation of dreamers, do-ers, and writers. Would-be actors and historians and programmers flocked to the game. Those who "got" D&D were people who were curious about the workings of the world—but also other worlds.

Today, we're proud of how sophisticated and immersive electronic games have become. But D&D beats digital hands down. Video games are limited to what the programmers can program. In D&D, the virtual game board and the place where is all takes place was always the players' collective imaginations, huddled around a table in a living room, den, or basement, fueled not by venture capital or terabytes, but Mountain Dew, Doritos, and banter.

D&D is still my springboard into dreaming. Me and four other guys, all in our forties, embark upon these imaginary adventures on Sunday nights. How can I give this up? I leave my computer behind and dip into an amorphous, enigmatic current of magical thinking that humans rarely swim in: something epic and unknown. The other night, my character, Renn, revealed to his compatriots that he is not fully human, but a half-elf in hiding. In a world where elves are outlawed, this is not only a plot complication, it's a big deal for my character, his group, my group, game, the world.

We need D&D and role-playing more than ever. If for no other reason than to help us take back our creativity, our storytelling mojo, from the things that take them from us: Hollywood, publishing, even social media.

Just choose your enemy, roll a 20-sided die to hit, and then, tell us what happens next.

sticksandsharks:

have some more old filler stuff as I scramble with exams this month.

The Adventurer Alphabet, something I started around a year ago and never finished. Messy and missing a handful of letters, but I still somewhat like the idea behind it. Might revisit and re-stylize this some day.

Everything they have to say is pretty much exactly right.

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Here's an oral history of the Baltimore Stallions, the star-crossed proof that America can do Canadian football better than Canada.

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This Colorado catering company's bad luck wasn't the unfortunate typo. It was having it spotted by a professional copy editor.

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Everything about this is fantastic. Hell yes, First Lady of the United States.

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BREAKING: It's racist to say anything negative about Richard Sherman.

— John Podhoretz (@jpodhoretz) January 20, 2014

We just got set back 500 years...

— Andre Iguodala (@andre) January 20, 2014

It's worth heading over to Deadspin for a moment and checking out both Greg Howard's penetrating piece on the reaction to Richard Sherman and Samer Kalef's aggregation of the racist bile directed his way. Podhoretz was responding to a tweet he sent out asserting that Sherman was a "role model for today's Taliban youth," presumably because ... I actually don't know. And neither did Podhoretz who deleted the tweet and claimed it was just a joke. The tweet from Iguodala just makes me sad, mostly because it reflects a rather ancient strain of thought in black America that holds that men like Richard Sherman are the reason we can't have nice things. 

A few points of biography: Richard Sherman is a the son of sanitation worker and teacher. He finished second in his class in high school and then went to Stanford. He graduated from Stanford with a 3.9 GPA. Here is how Sherman describes his introduction to the school:

 "I was with kids from prestigious private schools, and they were drawing comparisons between Plato and Aristotle," says Sherman. "A lot went over my head. I hadn't even read The Iliad yet. I had to check out all these books just so I could know what everybody was talking about."

Here is what Richard Sherman is doing now:

Beverly and Kevin now live in a well-landscaped community in Compton, but she still works for Children's Services and he still drives his truck every morning at 4 a.m., a Seahawks sticker plastered across his helmet. Their home is wallpapered with pictures of their children: Richard, Branton and 22-year-old Kristyna, who runs a hair salon out of the Shermans' garage. (Seahawks receiver Sidney Rice is a client.) The first photo you see, upon opening the front door, is of Richard's commencement ceremony at Stanford.

Across the street lives an English teacher from Dominguez named Michelle Woods who charters a bus every spring break for Dominguez students to visit colleges throughout California. "Most of them think Cal State is their only option," she says. When Sherman was at Stanford, he made sure the bus swung by Palo Alto, and he led the tours himself. "I'm here; you can be too," he told the group every year as he advised them on classes and grants.

Here is how Sherman describes himself:

I'm an awkward guy. People used to tell me all the time, You're not from here. And that's the way I felt, like somebody took me from somewhere else and dropped me down into this place. I was strange because I went to class, did the work, read the books and was still pretty good at sports. If you're like me, people think you're weird. They pull you in different directions. But those people aren't going where you're going. I know the jock stereotype—cool guy, walking around with your friends, not caring about school, not caring about anything. I hate that stereotype. I want to destroy it. I want to kill it.

I don't think this is what people think when they see Sherman trash-talking. There's some weird notion in our society  that holds that trash-talking is for the classless and stupid. I don't know what it means to be "classless" in an organization like the NFL. And then there is the racism from onlookers, who are incapable of perceiving in Sherman an individual, and instead see the sum of all American fears—monkey, thug, terrorist, nigger.

And then there is us, ashamed at our own nakedness, at our humanity. Racism is a kind of fatalism, so seductive, that it enthralls even its victims. But we will not get out of this by being on our best behavior—sometimes it has taken our worse. There's never been a single thing wrong with black people that the total destruction of white supremacy would not fix.