Sophianotloren

gayerthanthefourthofjuly:

[Chris Traeger voice] This was LITERALLY my favorite moment.

Seven-year-old Liam Porter of Augusta, Georgia was presented with a 3D-printed prosthetic arm modeled after Star Wars Imperial Stormtroopers when he emerged from a theater at Regal 20 Cinemas. Members of the 501st Legion of costumed Stormtroopers presented Porter with the arm designed by E-Nabling the Future, along with a matching helmet and made the seven-year-old a commander in the organization.

images via The Augusta Chronicle

via The Augusta Chronicle, Boing Boing

In “Playing with Power” by Los Angeles-based filmmaker Ava Benjamin, Dillon Markey, an animator for the Adult Swim stop-motion animated series Robot Chicken, shows off the hacked Nintendo Power Glove he uses to help animate scenes. The number pad has been outfitted with a new circuit board for capturing shots and playing back frames, a set of tweezers have been attached for manipulating character eyebrows, and a speaker has been hidden toward the front of the gaming peripheral that says “fuckin’ awesome” when fist-bumped.

via Vimeo Staff Picks

image by Daniel Angione

emoji.ink is a new interactive site that allows users to use emojis as stamps to draw pictures. The interface has options to switch emojis and the size of each to create different shapes and colors. Pictures can be as elaborate or simple as users make them. Daniel Angione showed off how detailed drawings made with emojis can be when he posted an impressive drawing he made of Smaug, the fearsome dragon from The Hobbit, using emoji.ink.

Here is the proud logo of Laughing Squid drawn using three different emojis:

image by Rebecca Escamilla

via Daniel Angione

Lawyers, Guns and Money is proud to interrupt your usual string of lazy link with one-liner posts insightful longform essays with an impassioned missive from someone back in the news, an alleged former governor of Massachusetts and professional fundraiser and robotic talking-points spouter. Enjoy!

Gosh, my friends, it sure seems like only yesterday when we were on our way to a crushing victory over the, ah, dark forces of Barack Obama, under whose leadership America’s once-bright future has, um, dimmed, leaving us staring into a bla–

Uh, well, you understand where I’m coming from. “Ann” and I to this day often sit down with our five boys — Tagg, Fritz, Spork, Clog, and (annoyed grunt) — and ask ourselves what happened. They’re growing boys, as you know, and they’ll often scarf down one of “Ann’s” special treats, like unflavored pudding or mayonnaise on white bread. Clog likes his bread toasted, but “Ann” says the shards of toast “feel like machetes” when she tries to swallow it, so it’s plain white bread for us.

I can assure you that our internal campaign figures and computer numbers and whatnot guaranteed a “Mitt” Romney victory — my top advisers assured me of such every time their direct deposit payments hit their checking accounts, and I’m sure they were right on the money. But I suppose some things will have to remain a mystery, like, for example, the exact percentage of our income that “Ann” and I have paid in taxes over the past several years. Only God and Saul, our Israelite accountant, will ever know for sure.

At any rate, while “Ann” and I have made no final decisions about what would be my first real attempt at winning election to the presidency (my first race was merely dabbling, and you’ll recall that my last attempt at the office was undertaken largely against my will, so these should not be counted), I can assure you that we will not be swayed by the opinions of Jennifer Robins at the Washington Post. I plan spend the next few months asking ordinary Americans what I can do to help make their lives better. I’ll go from corporate boardroom to corporate boardroom, from country club to $50,000 a plate gala dinner, to hear from regular folks.

“Regular folks.” Ha! They’re adorable! Many of them, I would imagine, don’t even have elevators for their cars! I guess you’re taking the stairs, Mr. Aston Martin! Oh, gosh, I’m almost giddy today!

These are people who realize that, under a “Mitt” Romney presidency, there would be no ISIS, and Vladimir Putin would know his place. People would be more physically appealing, cancer would surrender to our doctors, and everyone would win the Powerball. That’s the kind of leadership you’ll see from President “Mitt” Romney, and it would be unfair to the American people to deprive them of my own gifts simply because Robert Jefferson at the Washington Post has some problem with me attempting what, again, would really be my first run for the presidency, or political office of any kind, really.

Rest assured that once I have interacted with other human beings in regards to my future plans, I will inform you of same in a timely fashion. Thank you my friends, and God Bless the United States of America!

Mitt “Mitt” Romney

JFK campaigning in 1960.

The kid with the gun looks very bored.

Apparently somebody has been sending me confused hatemail. xD  I didn’t notice because it got buried amidst all the Escher Girls mail I get every day.

It took me a while to figure out what they’re talking about.  They got me mixed up with a totally different blogger that I reblogged. xD  So that’s why they’re accusing me of making up having a black eye (this is about that woman who actually get headbutting for trying to stop a guy from abusing his girlfriend but people on tumblr keep claiming she’s lying without fact checking it themselves). -_-

They might also have forgotten to turn off anon for one of their messages. >_>  Or there’s a bunch of people who all can’t tell who actually wrote a post and who is doing a reblog, which is kinda scarier actually.

Anyway, dear rando anon, you have the wrong person.  Also, don’t harass the right person either, because the incident actually did happen (as per the above link, google the name if you want more news results.)  Next time, check the facts, that includes on “debunk” posts you read claiming something is fake. :]

(Sigh, I just checked the notes: http://ami-angelwings.tumblr.com/post/73933732967/siryouarebeingjudged-shiningplaygroundeyes  the debunk post without the corrections that came after is still being spread around as fact -_-  And of course, people are again, not actually fact checking the thing themselves, just taking it as fact because either a) they want to believe it’s true or b) they were suckered in by the dramatics.  Please, if you see this being spread around, point out to people that it actually did happen, there’s news articles about the aftermath and the trial.

Also here’s my post again about the dangers of believing internet detectives and the belief that you can tell somebody is lying by “common sense” actions: http://ami-angelwings.tumblr.com/post/56640050561/i-guess-im-officially-the-defender-of-the-evil)

Edit: Another thing that’s really worrying about all the notes going “IT’S SO OBVIOUS IT’S FAKE” or “I CAN SEE THE MAKEUP USED TO FAKE IT” is the Emperor’s New Clothes thing going on.  It’s real, but because they were told it’s fake, they all see the “fakery”.  :\ 

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In 1974, photos taken by NASA’s Earth Resources Technology Satellite were composited together to create the first-ever image of the contiguous United States taken from space.

A giant photo map of the contiguous 48 states of the United States, the first ever assembled from satellite images, completed for NASA by the U.S. Department of Agriculture Soil Conservation Service Cartographic Division. The map is 10 by 16 feet, is composed of 595 cloud-free black-and-white images returned from NASA’s first Earth Resources Technology Satellite (ERTS-1). The images were all taken at the same altitude (912 kilometers: 560 miles) and the same lighting angle. The images were produced by the spacecraft’s Multi-spectral Scanner System (MSS) in Band 5, or the red portion of the visible spectrum, during the period July 25 to October 31, 1972.

via Flowing Data

The NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory robot VolcanoBot is being used to explore volcanoes and could help explain eruptions and other aspects of a volcano’s geology. VolcanoBot 1 has been tested in the Kilauea volcano in Hawaii, and a smaller and lighter version, VolcanoBot 2, is being developed.

The VolcanoBot was developed by JPL postdoctoral fellow Carolyn Parcheta and her advisor, robotics researcher Aaron Parness. The robots could one day be used to explore volcanoes elsewhere in the Solar System.

images via NASA/JPL-Caltech

by uaiHebert

Horror comedy is a hard trick to pull off.  For a good example, consider the very short web animated series Llamas with Hats.  

Each episode is very short (circa 1:20) and very simple.  One llama asks the other llama about what hes been up to.  The results are pithy, almost entirely dialog-driven, and increasingly horrific.

Try the first one for starters:

"Caaaaaarl...."

(thanks to Steven "Not responsible for the meat dragon" Kaye)

red-lipstick:

Louis Moe (Norwegian-Danish, 1857-1945) - Opus 2600 Bear And Death, 1900    Etching

photo by Annie Atkins

Dublin-based graphic designer Annie Atkins has found a unique niche for her talents–she specializes in graphic design for filmmaking. Perhaps her most high-profile gig to date was as lead graphic designer for The Grand Budapest Hotel, the 2014 comedy film by Wes Anderson. The film was set in a fictional country, which meant that Atkins had to create a dizzying array of props–money, newspapers, and postage stamps, to name a few. Atkins has posted some of the props she designed on her Instagram account. She discusses her work with Wes Anderson in this Creative Review interview.

photo by Annie Atkins

photo via Creative Review

photo via Creative Review

photo by Annie Atkins

via Instagram Blog

redirisheyes:

I wish I could trust people the way he trusts science.

beamkatanachronicles:

jumpingjacktrash:

helloyoucreatives:

You are never alone with a good book. This charming campaign is from Grey Tel Aviv. Via Taxi 

no wonder my room is always a mess. i’ve got whole armies camping in here while i sleep.

#gandalf you fucker stop stealing all the covers

auxcorduroys:

who the fuck runs the mr. clean page

90seyecandy:

me in PE class

kiokushitaka:

megashedinja:

when did smut writers decide that a good synonym for penis was member like fuck outta here my dick ain’t a regular at sams club

it was shakespeare

orevet:

turnoffyourtelevision:

loveyourchaos:

tyleroakley:

Groundbreaking diversity, to be quite honest.

I feel so empowered.

wut the??????????

bittersiha:

ariverisariver:

This is genius.

wE BROKE THEM

marxvx:

when you like someone so much you actually listen to the music they send you

Read more on MAKE

glamoramamama75:

Where there’s a will…

rememberyourbones:

This is me:

I’m the girl who got headbutted. You might recall this incident from a few years back with either a feeling of support and the urge to high-five me, or an intense dislike because I’m mad feminist, hell-bent on making up stories to demonise men. If you are not familiar with the story, I will give you the short version; I saw a man attacking his girlfriend and I stepped in to stop him, resulting in him headbutting me after a lengthly confrontation where he threatened to have me killed. The man was prosecuted. I made a post about it on my personal blog which had about two hundred followers. The post gained a monumental amount of attention, but a couple of months later, someone decided to ‘prove’ that I had made all of it up. I was the centre of an online witch hunt for months. I was threatened, bullied, laughed at and shot down whenever I tried to offer a rebuttal. I wasn’t too bothered, because the man had been sent to prison and I stayed in contact with the young girl who was very grateful that I had stepped in. It didn’t matter to me that a few thousand people thought I had made it up; I knew the truth, the police knew the truth and my friends and family knew the truth. I stopped using my blog and ignored all the mad comments.

But it continued. It snowballed dramatically. Before I go on, I can assure you that this happened. I promise. You can Google my name, Laurie Malyon, and you are one click away from finding numerous articles very clearly stating my attacker’s sentencing.

I’ve put up with comments and threats for almost two years now, and whilst everyone around me tells me to ignore it I can no longer sit back and watch people slander me on the Internet. I realise that I am utterly powerless in changing the opinions of 500, 000 people who are too lazy to spend five seconds doing some research on Google, but I’m going to give it one last go before I stop talking about this godforsaken controversy forever.

I did a good thing. I am proud to say that. I stepped in when many others would not have. It’s very easy to see something like that and pray that someone else stops it so you can remain a bystander, but there was no one else around to stop it when I saw it and I’ll be fucked if I’m ever going to sit by and watch somebody be harmed intentionally at the hands of someone else. I am still in contact with the girl. I see her perhaps once every two months, and she still thanks me every time she sees me. I helped her out of a situation that everyone was too scared to help me out of when I was her age. I stepped the fuck up.

The comments I have received about the situation make me very, very upset. I am a human with real feelings and I can read everything that people write. I’m put to shame on feminism blogs that read the ‘debunking’ post and didn’t think to research it. They say that I’m giving feminism a bad name by lying. They say that I’m an attention whore. They say that I’m an idiot for claiming to have stepped into a domestic situation because that can often make it worse. They ask if I’ve ever even heard of a domestic situation. They tell me I deserve to be in a domestic situation for lying. They say that I’m ugly. They say the amount of makeup I wear in my photos is silly and I look like a slag. Now forgive me if I’m wrong, but isn’t that absolutely negating the entire point of feminism? As a well educated and practising feminist, it is not the comments from men saying that they’ll ‘give me a real black eye’ that upset me, it’s the comments that are hateful and shaming from my fellow sisters.

A lot of people speculate (because I’m a loony feminist) whether or not I’d have stepped in if it were a woman beating a man. Of course I would have. Violence is violence and I completely agree that anyone attacking anyone should be stopped. Twisting it into this and challenging me on it creates even more diversion from the real issue. Why the hell are people trying to pick so many holes in my story? Was it really that difficult to believe that I was a normal girl, on her way to work, who simply stepped in when I saw someone in need? Why have I been questioned and scrutinised for two years? Surely the anger shouldn’t have been directed at me for posting about it, but towards the man who succeeded in assaulting two young women, entirely unprovoked?

I am not taking it any more. I am not remaining silent whilst people call me names and post about how I deserve to die. I am sick to the back teeth of being branded a ‘whore’ by feminists who aren’t really feminists if they’re using a word associated with slut shaming when nothing about my story even mentions anything sexual. I am fed up with being told by men that they’d rape me then give me a black eye with their dicks and how no one would believe me if I tried to get them arrested because I’m that mad man-hating feminist who lied about being headbutted.

I’m trying to undo all the unfair comments with this post. I’m speaking out to the 3.6 million of you who have read about the situation, whether I was portrayed as a do-gooder or a liar. I am asking you to share this so that I can attempt to clear my name. I understand that the post has spread like wildfire throughout the Internet in it’s entirety and that it’s unlikely I will get any kind of redemption from this, but even if this makes 100 people believe me I’ll feel a little happier about the whole situation.

I’d like to thank the masses of you who believed me and who have offered me your kindness and support from the start, and I’d also like to mention that the chap who ‘debunked’ my original post is on my side. He deleted his blog and apologised to me over a year ago. We went out for a burger to talk it over. We cool.

http://www.westerndailypress.co.uk/prison-man-headbutted-young-mum-broke-nose/story-17648167-detail/story.html

http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/good-samaritan-mum-headbutted-by-thug-1495221

http://www.thewestonmercury.co.uk/news/court/man_sentenced_after_head_butting_stranger_1_1751023

There’s 3 newspapers about the incident.  Mind you, I’ve seen posts that don’t care even when confronted with this, claiming that newspapers lie anyway, and DID YOU SEE THE TUMBLR POST BY SOME RANDO!?

Some people are just never going to be convinced.  Proof that this is real will just be more evidence of the conspiracy.  This is just like 9/11 truthers or moon hoaxers. :(

I’m spreading this around because trying to fight back against the tidal wave in this case is something that resonates with me, because I’m a rape survivor, and watching how easily people are to believe “Sherlock Holmes” “debunking” of something that actually happened, scares me so much.  So much of that original post (now removed, because even the person who wrote it recognized he was wrong) came from the idea that everybody has to act the same way, that logical construction is more important than actual fact and truth. As long as it sounds logical, it must be logical, rather than logic having to be based on fact, and that your reasoning must incorporate new facts you learn.  And for a lot of people reading that debunk, they’re not doing it. :\  Even when SHOWN that it happened, they continue to insist it didn’t because a) they want to believe it didn’t b) the logic sounds so nice and sweet to them because they’ve been taught by TV & fiction that "conviction by contradiction" is how criminals are discovered.

Life is not a TV show, it’s not a children’s detective book.  In an Encyclopedia Brown book, somebody putting toppings on a hot dog in the wrong order means they’re guilty, in real life people eat their hot dogs with all sorts of weird toppings.  In that debunk, nobody would ever fold up a court summons.  In real life people fold up all sorts of important documents all the time, how else do you carry them home in your purse or pocket?  It’s really dangerous to use this sort of “everybody acts the same all the time” logic to decide whether things actually happened or whether people are lying.

As I said in an earlier post defending Laurie, after I was raped I made a blog post telling people what a good time I had at my rapist’s house.  Why?  Because I was in shock, I didn’t want to believe what happened, I had already told my friends I was excited to visit him, they were so excited and happy for me, I was ashamed, I didn’t want to let them down, he was someone I really loved, I didn’t want to let him down, I didn’t want to accept what happened. And yes, that doesn’t make sense, but that’s what I did.  By the “logic” of Encyclopedia Brown & Sherlock Holmes, obviously I’m lying about being raped.  Who does THAT!?  Why would somebody who was raped tell people afterwards that she had a good time?  CONTRADICTION.  GUILTY.  Come Sally Watson, we will away!

Except, like Laurie, it happened.  It’s real.  All the internet logic in the world won’t make it not real. 

Theory has to give way to reality.  If you think a bruise doesn’t work the way her photo looks, then you should change what you think you know about bruises once you find out that it happened (you should probably also actually research this rather than taking it on the word of some dude online), rather than doubling down and insisting the newspapers are lying. 

Anyway, I want to boost this again because the debunk is still being passed around as truth.  It’s really sad to me how quick people are to believe it without fact checking, and also how they’re like ‘OBVIOUSLY THAT BRUISE IS FAKE, I CAN SEE THE MAKE UP’ after reading the debunk.  It really is The Emperor’s New Clothes. :(

Please reblog this, and also if you see the debunk pop into your dash, link them to the news articles showing it’s real (though for some nothing will ever change their minds. :\ )