As you walk through modern life, you might need a no-nonsense voice to guide you away from self-pity, doubt, and the secret rites of blood donation volunteers. In By Crom! artist Rachel Kahn imagines that she is in constant consultation with the pulp hero Conan the Cimmerian.
    
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This ingenious technique for safeguarding books from falling in the bathtub was invented by redditor Crash-From-Space's 8-year-old daughter. The suction cup came from the plumbing aisle at Home Despot.
Never drop a book on the bath again. My 8 year old daughters invention. (imgur.com) 
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This is from an April 7th game between the Capitals and the Tampa Bay Lightning but it is tremendous and we are sharing it.
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Every great political blast—the storming of the Bastille, the taking of the Winter Palace, the March on Washington—is set off by a very private fuse: the contest for rights and standing in the family, the factory, and the field. Politicians and parties talk of constitution and amendment, natural rights and inherited privileges. But the real subject of their deliberations is the private life of power.And here's this week's Weekly Standard (h/t David Atkins)
[A] case can be made that the welfare state has competed with the family for primacy from the beginning. It’s a point exquisitely if unintentionally illustrated by the Obama reelection campaign’s infamous “Julia” website, which showed the beneficent state stepping in to do at every stage of life what used to be done by competent families: babysitting, educating, influencing romantic decisions, caring for someone in old age.Can it be any plainer?
Raw propaganda aside, some serious thinkers have also remarked over the years on the zero-sum game that is the power struggle between family and state. Plato, for one, understood that the only sure way to make children reliable instruments of his Republic was to separate them from their families at an early age. British author Ferdinand Mount argued in a 1992 book that the family “is a subversive organization. . . . Only the family has continued throughout history and still continues to undermine the ‘State.’ ” Tocqueville, Mount pointed out, also grasped this fundamental antagonism between family and state; witness the great Frenchman’s observation that “as long as family feeling is kept alive, the opponent of oppression is never alone.”
Looking away from theory and toward the public square, it’s also plainly true that the welfare state has interrupted the organic bonds of family in ways too numerous to count. As Milton Friedman once observed of Social Security, “The voluntary transfers [from young to old] strengthened the bonds of the family; the compulsory transfers weaken those bonds.” And certainly it’s the welfare state that has effectively bankrolled via many programs the expensive pan-Western fallout of the sexual revolution: the unprecedented levels of divorce, family breakup, out-of-wedlock births, and other trends that have turned the modern state into an inefficient but all-encompassing substitute for a man of the house.
In sum, statism has been an engine of family destruction—and vice versa. All of which leads to a contrarian thought: Might the dark ages of the welfare state end in a family renaissance?
If the welfare states of the West finally do implode, it’s hard to think of any institution but the family that could step into that vacuum. When politics forces the truth that taking care of one’s own is less ruinous than having the state do it, it’s just possible that personal choices could come to reflect that fact.
Friday is brought to you by Queen Amy.
Today the Dungeon Bastard released an awesome video about gender and gaming.
The person was seeking advice on how to break some of the men in the group of the habit of playing women. It starts of with a general question of why someone would want to play a character of another gender and then goes on to how he wouldn't mind but the other players are playing women poorly.
Bill Cavalier's answer starts off simple, "Who cares?"
In my experience, gender often gets handled in a strange way in our community. As Dungeon Bastard posted with his Facebook share of the video, "Playing a 3-foot tall gnome-like creature with an insatiable appetite and hairy feet? -Not weird at all. Playing the opposite gender? WHAT'S UP WITH THAT!" I see similar things like this quite often. We play in a world with magical fireballs, dragons, floating land masses, swords with their own ego and motivations, but women still need to be physically weaker than men or things are off and our suspension of disbelief ruined. We can roleplay a dwarf poorly, but when it gets to be a man playing female character, it's something that must be stopped?
The reason I love the Dungeon Bastard is because it's important to point out that it doesn't really matter. When we frame it like it's a weird thing for a man to want to play a female character, it can send an unwelcoming message to others. When we are willing to suspend our disbelief and the physics of the world for things like magic or dragons, but not for a person who wants to play a stronger than real life female character, it sends a poor message about what we think is important.
And that is why gender-based attribute caps, penalties, and bonuses can be harmful. It's not about whether or not there are real life physical differences in strength. It's because by including them in a game we create, we're saying that that thing is really important about a real life thing, in this case gender. So important that we can't possibly play the game without having the mechanics enforce one particular vision of a fantasy world. It breaks my suspension of disbelief and fun to say, "I can imagine a world in which I can cast a fireball but I can't imagine a world where a woman can be just as strong as any man."
So, thanks, Dungeon Bastard, for pointing out the arbitrary nature of these things. Now let's kick some ass and have fun!
By the way, if you love Dungeon Bastard's advice as much as I do, you might want to check out his Kickstarter, The World's Worst Dungeon Crawl!
Redditor Ventachinkway caught a photo of a homeless man conducting a clever exercise in behavioral economics disguised as an inquiry into the levels of spontaneous generosity as determined by religious creed or lack thereof.
When I passed him he proudly announced "The atheists are winning!" (i.imgur.com) (via Glinner) 
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Did you lose your head? The crew team of Poughkeepsie, New York's Marist College spotted this seven foot sculpture floating in the Hudson River last week. The men's crew head coach described the scene as "something out of a post-apocalyptic movie.” They dragged it to shore but nobody has called to claim it. (Poughkeepsie Journal)
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Zackc43"Charm City trivia: There once was an island off Pier 6. The entirety of Harbor East rests on man-made land. An inlet of Middle Branch washed as far inland as Hanover and Warren streets in South Baltimore."
Have you ever wondered what drove acclaimed writers, philosophers and musicians like Ernest Hemingway, Jean-Paul Sartre and Glenn Gould? After reading Slate's excellent series on the daily rituals of great artists, I suspect it might be coffee — although a comprehensive list would also need to include alcohol, amphetamines and very little food.
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Dungeons & Dragons has numerous editions and hundreds of sourcebooks and adventures — and most of them are out of print. But now, Wizards of the Coast has opened up a treasure trove of classic reprints and digital books.
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Zackc4313 out of 13; better than 93% of the public.
Feeling science-savvy? Take Pew Research Center’s 13 question Science and Technology Knowledge Quiz and see where you stand against a representative sampling of Americans.
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Need a screening tool for signs of Churnalism? Head over to the Sunlight Foundation's newly launched plagiarism checker app that can run any piece of text against its extensive database of U.S. press releases, RSS feeds and Wikipedia entries for possible overlaps.
Submitted by: Unknown (via Sunlight Foundation)
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| from quietlyscheming on spoonflower.com |
Note: Dean ran across this link, and we’ve been batting it around the office all morning. Here’s an example, then click the image to see the full tumblr. – Chris A.
Zackc43Don't even try to understand it, it's beyond everything.
George R.R. Martin, author of the popular fantasy series-turned-HBO-boob-and-dragon-extravaganza Game of Thrones, is a big fan of the New York Jets. Like many Jets fans, he is not happy that his team just traded all-pro cornerback Darrelle Revis to the Buccaneers, and so he took to his blog to vent.
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I was sorry to read yesterday of the death of children’s and young adult author E.L. (short for Elaine Lobl ) Konigsburg. She’s best remembered for her 1967 novel—one of two published that year—From The Mixed Up Files Of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler, about siblings who run away to live in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, memorably bathing in the fountain at the cafe, sleeping in an antique bed, and treating themselves to lunch at the Automat, a kind of restaurant I dreamed of eating at for years afterwards. But as much as the running away details of Mixed Up Files are memorable, much of what I love about both it and A Proud Taste For Scarlet and Miniver, Konigsburg’s less-read book about the life of Eleanor of Aquitaine, is the way both books gave girls and young women credit for intellectual curiosity, and trusted them to handle big emotions and ideas, like whether or not it matters that a piece of art is by Michaelangelo, or what it means to build a good marriage.
Claudia, the main character of Mixed Up Files, first earns our respect for the gift of logistics she applies to running away. She lifts train tickets, picks her younger brother as a runaway companion because he has managed to stash away a reasonable supply of travel money, and figures out a way to make sure the two of them don’t get caught by Met security guards (this is all in an age before pressure sensors and electric alarms). But what ultimately makes her admirable, and what wins her the respect of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler, a wealthy art collector, is much more ephemeral. During Claudia’s time living in the museum, an overpoweringly beautiful statue of an angel goes on display, and becomes a phenomenon. Part of the curiosity is inspired by the fact that it’s not entirely clear whether the statue was produced by Michaelangelo. But Claudia becomes obsessed by the question, and she and her brother track down Mrs. Frankweiler in search of answers.
Once they do, the older delivers one of the most valuable lessons on education anyone could give to children. “I think you should learn, of course,” she tells Claudia, who doesn’t want to go back to school, feeling that her experience on her own has been more valuable than any education. “And some days you must learn a great deal. But you should also have days when you allow what is already in you to swell up inside of you until it touches everything. And you can feel it inside of you. If you never take time out to let that happen, then you just accumulate facts, and they begin to rattle around inside of you. You can make noise with them, but never really feel anything with them. It’s hollow.”
Claudia’s adventure, in other words, isn’t about breaking her free from her school and family and friends. It’s about learning what you do with a grade-school education, with intellectual curiosity, and with the drive to make a life for yourself that’s full of beauty and experience. She learns that she can stay hidden from museum guards, but also that she can see important things, and make herself seen by the people, like the wealthy and powerful Mrs. Frankweiler, she needs to listen to her. But Claudia also learns that there’s no point in having insights if you don’t have someone to share them with, or in seeing yourself as special if you hide yourself away rather than engaging with people, even if those people are your parents. It’s a story about finding your place within society, rather than expecting that there’s something better out there if you run away to find it.
Similarly, A Proud Taste For Scarlet And Miniver is as much a subversion of fantasy conventions as Game of Thrones is, but with its lessons drawn straight from history, and aimed straight at a young adult audience. Told from multiple perspectives from heaven—a place that smart, interesting people have a tendency to need to earn their way into, and which involves hilarious culture clashes depending on when people get there—Eleanor’s life gets examined toughly, but compassionately, by everyone from her mother-in-law to the knight who protected her for years. Eleanor is revealed to be woman who loved the gaiety of court life and drove her first husband to a massacre, then proved unable to live with him after he became extremely pious in repentance, and who found initial happiness with her second husband, only to become alienated from him when she gets involved in the question of how to manage their sons together, and to see many of them die in ugly ways, often related to the battles they sought out as established ways to prove themselves heroic, worthy men.
Konigsburg trusts readers who might have showed up expecting a princess story to stay through an antihero tale. And she trusts children to handle ugly details like arrow wounds and burned-out cities that weren’t just an accidental byproduct of chivalric culture, but integral to it. Eleanor emerges as a smart, restless woman—somewhat like Claudia, in fact, particularly given her taste for beauty—who has to take moral responsibility for the damage she caused in life, but still is tremendously likable.
In a way, Konigsburg’s writing illustrates the tragedy of young adult fiction, particularly for girls. When you’re young, female characters get to be enormously complex, and are given a tremendous amount of agency—sometimes, they’re responsible for the fate of their entire societies or worlds. But as they age, women get diminished roles in almost all genres except romantic comedies, reduced to sidekicks for superheroes or wives who get in the way of antiheroes’ fun. We already have Claudia’s counterparts on film and television in girls like Sally Draper, Hermione Granger and Arya Stark. What we need more of is fully realized adult women with their own agendas like Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler, more restlessly energetic Eleanors.
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WORTH SEEING!
Watch Patton Oswalt Improvise an 8-Minute ‘Star Wars’ Filibuster for ‘Parks and Rec’ | Splitsider
From Public Policy Polling: "Do you believe that shape-shifting reptilian people control our world by taking on human form and gaining political power to manipulate our societies, or not?"
Do 4%
Do not 88%
Not sure 7%
(Via The Atlantic Wire)
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Zackc43Holy shit...
Feeling a little blue? Well the Motivational Megafauna want you to turn that frown upside-down and learn to love yourself. And if you happen to recall which one is a Procoptodon and which one is a Smilodon tomorrow, they will be simply delighted.
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