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Percy, sometimes when a god loves a woman and loves her very much, he turns himself into a dolphin and… well, if I remember correctly with your mother, a whole lot of barnacles, and…
This isn’t right. I haven’t done this in like a thousand years, so sorry if I’m a little rusty—this is kind of new to me too. I remember when my father Cronus gave me the “Talk.” He picked me up and said, “Son,” and then he ate me. The rest I had to figure out for myself after Zeus freed me from Dad’s stomach.
I’m sure you’ve noticed that as your demigod powers have developed, other things have developed too. You’re growing hair in unfamiliar places, you’re sweaty all the time, and you’re overwhelmed by an urge to swim back upstream to the place that you spawned. Changes all over, especially in… personal areas. And don’t worry, you’ve got nothing to worry about down there. Not only am I the God of the Sea, I’m also the God of Horses, if you know what I mean.
You may start feeling strange and unfamiliar feelings about other girls or boys your age, or maybe even an especially fetching lobster. Maybe, you’ll see someone special at camp, they won’t be that into you, but you start chasing them anyway, they run away, and right before you catch them, they turn into a tree. Trust me when I say it’s happened to everybody. You might even feel an overwhelming urge to kill your father and have sex with your mother. Don’t worry. That’s perfectly normal too.
It’s also not uncommon for boys your age to start experimenting with their bodies. You should know that that is totally normal, as long as you do that in private, and never, and I mean never, “finish the experiment” in the shower. That drains straight into the ocean, and that’s where Daddy works, okay?
I know that you’ve probably heard some of this stuff before. You may have already seen a couple of things on an older boy’s amphora and wondered, “What’s he doing to her?,” or much more likely, “What’s he doing to him and that other guy and also that dude who’s half-goat?”
Well, let me fill you in. There are a lot of different ways to have sex. There’s the “Nemean Hydra,” the “Reverse Nemean Hydra,” and “Cerberus-y Style.” That last one’s complicated, you need six people. The “Atlas.” That’s where you’re on the bottom and the entire world is on top. There’s the “Trojan Whores,” where you show up in a giant wooden horse and let them do all the work for you. Then there’s LXIX. Of course, don’t forget the “Homer,” which is just oral.
The most important thing is that you practice safe sex. A condom is a great way to prevent unplanned pregnancy and protect you from sexually transmitted diseases, like crabs, clamydia, and HPV. We’ve all got to do our part to prevent the spread of Haddock Papillomavirus. Honestly, I wish they’d been teaching more of this stuff back in my heyday; it would’ve gotten me out of a lot of trouble. It’s hard to deny that a kid’s yours when he can move water with his mind.
I’m sorry if this seems rushed. It’s just that every second that I’m here talking to you, a turtle gets its head stuck in a six-pack ring—lots of oceans out there—but I’m here for you if you have any questions. You know that your mom and I love you, no matter what kind of creep you turn out to be, because that’s how it’s going to play out, like genetically speaking. I come from a long line of pervy weirdos, and compared to your mom, I’m kind of a prude. That girl’s dirtier than the Exxon-Valdez—but that’s beside the point.
OK. Good talk? Good talk. Cool, buddy, I’ll see you next summer. Remember, I’m always just a prayer away. It’s a wild, wet, wonderful world out there, with many fish in the sea. And again, most importantly, don’t masturbate in the shower.
Minton represented a former wife of a Sears Roebuck executive and obtained a settlement arguing that she contributed economically to their 39 year marriage and deserved appropriate compensation.
Is this an important book? I would say so. Conceptually, this is the type of material that should be covered in a general public library collection. Calculating value of a homemaker might be 40 plus years out of date, but this was a huge change in how women were viewed in a divorce settlement. For librarians, context is important. As a help for someone going through a divorce in 2022, this isn’t going to be as helpful as a more up to date reference. For students of women’s rights, this book definitely has a place for historical significance.
It’s a ritual as time-honored among teenagers as prom or drinking too much and crashing your parents’ Corolla into the window of a Mexican restaurant—glossy catalogs from colleges arriving by the dozen each spring. Aside from the faint odor of kiwi bubblegum vape smoke, Woodmont College’s catalog,Welcome to Woodmont College, is superficially not unlike the others. But there’s no school quite like Woodmont College (no longer “university” due to a court order). And every page of its catalog is proof of this uniqueness, whether it’s touting the college’s low rate of scorpion infestation or celebrating its faculty’s various facial tattoos. The best part? You can order your own copy of Welcome to Woodmont College and learn for yourself why U.S. News and World Report has hailed the school as “a singular educational experience for young people searching for neglect of the arts and aggression by townies.”
Comedy writers Mike Sacks and Jason Roeder are your guides to Woodmont College—its missteps, its glories, its unsupervised quicksand pits—and we’ll be sharing bonus content from this e-book all week long to help herald its publication.
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There’s never been a better time to tell the world about Woodmont College. Our campus is finally disinfected, our skeeviest instructors have been transferred to our international satellite schools, and the toilets in our residence halls now have their own individual handles—say goodbye to the master control flusher atop the ziggurat on the main quad!
But how best to tell the Woodmont story? How best to convince unremarkable students from well-to-do backgrounds that their parents’ money has a home at our institution? Sure, we’ve plastered our name all over the vomit bins at the Competitive Eating Olympiad, as well as on the missile launchers at North Korea’s platinum jubilee military parade. But that’s just branding, and, quite honestly, it feels a little stale. It’s a new day for Woodmont and we needed a fresh way to get the word out about our almost-accredited institution.
Then we realized we didn’t need a public relations department at all; our best mouthpieces are the students who entered Woodmont College and, much to our surprise, were eventually pinched out the other side as graduates.1 So we permanently locked the public relations team out of their offices after a fire drill, and decided to let our proud alumni speak for themselves.
Emma Turpin ’18 “I loved the lack of attention. I was at Woodmont for four years, and not one time did anyone ask a single thing of me except to help track down the provost, who had gotten hooked on PCP again and fled campus with some axes. And it wasn’t just me looking for him; they had the whole student body out there in the swamp.”
Marc Wong ’99 “Sure, the skills I acquired at Woodmont helped me excel in my future career of tying up the judicial system with nuisance lawsuits, but it was the personal connections I made that I cherish most. My first year, I was lucky to meet people from all over the world, although most dropped out due to the infamous ‘Woodmont polyp’ outbreak of ’96. (Or was it the one in ’97? ’98?) Thankfully, many of my professors became personal friends of mine, and to this day, I still see them when they show up at my home semi-nude and sobbing in the middle of the night begging for money.”
Tabitha Douglas ’00 “I’ll never forget the faces of Woodmont, like my sophomore-year roommate, who ran an unlicensed blood bank out of our dorm’s mini-fridge. Or the dean of students, who walked around campus with a stolen Burmese python around his neck. We found out it was stolen when the actual owners confronted him on stage during commencement. It completely upstaged the speech from the showrunner of Dharma and Greg.”
William Shakespeare ’03 “After seventeen years of the annoying jokes about my name, I did some research and found a school where no one would get the reference.”
Jaylen Bailey ’14 “I consider it a privilege to have never been carried away by the enormous hawk that nests atop the Woodmont Interfaith Chapel and Erotic Piercing Mega-Boutique. It did get my roommate, though. RIP, Todd. The school gave me an automatic 4.0 GPA and a loaner iPad for two weeks, however, so that was pretty sweet.”
Milo Dodds ’04 “Woodmont will test you all right. But if you make it through, you’ll be one of the few who can say at a job interview that you can work in total darkness and take a punch from a chimp.”
Carlie Siegel ’19 “When I graduated, a lot of potential employers told me my Woodmont education was ‘worthless’ or ‘an insurmountable barrier to earning a living wage.’ Fortunately for me, as an alumna, I had overnight access to Woodmont’s Career Center. Their VHS library is mostly vintage pornography and stuff I think was stolen directly from Jack in the Box’s HR, but it was really helpful. After all, I was ultimately hired by Woodmont as an adjunct professor and now get paid in half a bowl of uncooked rice each day. Thanks, Woodmont!”
1 Rumors that Woodmont has graduated a dog are false. The animal was detected and expelled midway through its junior year.
Geofence and reverse keyword warrants are some of the most dangerous, civil-liberties-infringing and reviled tools in law enforcement agencies’ digital toolbox. It turns out that these warrants are so invasive of user privacy that big tech companies like Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo are willing to support banning them. The three tech giants have issued a public statement through a trade organization,“Reform Government Surveillance,'' that they will support a bill before the New York State legislature. The Reverse Location Search Prohibition Act, A. 84/ S. 296, would prohibit government use of geofence warrants and reverse warrants, a bill that EFF also supports. Their support is welcome, especially since we’ve been calling on companies like Google, which have a lot of resources and a lot of lawyers, to do more to resist these kinds of government requests.
Under the Fourth Amendment, if police can demonstrate probable cause that searching a particular person or place will reveal evidence of a crime, they can obtain a warrant from a court authorizing a limited search for this evidence. In cases involving digital evidence stored with a tech company, this typically involves sending the warrant to the company and demanding they turn over the suspect’s digital data.
Geofence and reverse keyword warrants completely circumvent the limits set by the Fourth Amendment. If police are investigating a crime–anything from vandalism to arson–they instead submit requests that do not identify a single suspect or particular user account. Instead, with geofence warrants, they draw a box on a map, and compel the company to identify every digital device within that drawn boundary during a given time period. Similarly, with a “keyword” warrant, police compel the company to hand over the identities of anyone who may have searched for a specific term, such as a victim’s name or a particular address where a crime has occurred.
These reverse warrants have serious implications for civil liberties. Their increasingly common use means that anyone whose commute takes them goes by the scene of a crime might suddenly become vulnerable to suspicion, surveillance, and harassment by police. It means that an idle Google search for an address that corresponds to the scene of a robbery could make you a suspect. It also means that with one document, companies would be compelled to turn over identifying information on every phone that appeared in the vicinity of a protest, as happened in Kenosha, Wisconsin during a protest against police violence. And, as EFF has argued in amicus briefs, it violates the Fourth Amendment because it results in an overbroad fishing-expedition against unspecified targets, the majority of whom have no connection to any crime.
In the statement released by the companies, they write that, “This bill, if passed into law, would be the first of its kind to address the increasing use of law enforcement requests that, instead of relying on individual suspicion, request data pertaining to individuals who may have been in a specific vicinity or used a certain search term.” This is an undoubtedly positive step for companies that have a checkered history of being cavalier with users' data and enabling large-scale government surveillance. But they can do even more than support legislation in one state. Companies can still resist complying with geofence warrants across the country, be much more transparent about the geofence warrants it receives, provide all affected users with notice, and give users meaningful choice and control over their private data.
A shooting that injured three women in a hair salon this week may have been a hate crime and could be linked to two other recent shootings at businesses run by Asian Americans, Dallas police say.
Since the game now runs on some 20 different platforms, I’m often asked “which version is the best?” Well, the simple answer I usually give is, “the best version is the one that runs on your favorite platform!” So if you’re an Apple guy, the Apple version is best, if you’re a Commodore guy, then the Commodore version is best, and so on. And that generally holds true. In fact, the C128 version is my personal favorite.
But, what if you weren’t familiar with any vintage platforms and you were just interested in trying out the game? Or maybe you have multiple vintage systems and you’re not sure which one of those is the best experience for this particular game? That being the case, I have ranked them all here for you from best to worst, based on my own experience and opinions. Only mostly-finished or finished ports are listed.
Here’s a comparison video showing all 18 versions.
That being said, I think the game is enjoyable on all platforms, and sometimes you have to take some context in mind. For example, the PET is rated towards the bottom. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t a great game for the PET. In fact, I think it’s one of the best. It’s just hard for a PET to compete with an Amiga, for example.
Sega Genesis
Commander X16
Super Nintendo / Super Famicom
MS-DOS (VGA+AdLib)
Commodore Amiga
Sony PlayStation Portable
MSX
Enterprise 128
Commodore 128
Commodore 64 REU
Atari 7800
Commodore Plus/4
Commodore 64
Apple II
MS-DOS (CGA+PC Speaker)
Oric 1 / Oric Atmos
Atari 800
Commodore PET
Commodore VIC-20
Sinclair ZX-Spectrum
Some of those were tough to decide. Some people may even disagree. For example, the Plus/4 vs. the C64 version. The C64 has better music, and some of the graphics look better. But the Plus/4 has a better intro screen and better map. So, it’s kind of a tie. Same with the C128 and C64-REU version. They’re virtually identical. The C128 wins because it has faster disk access and dual-monitor support. The VIC-20 and PET version just about tie as well. The VIC-20 has color, which is huge. But the PET has a larger player area, more maps, more easter eggs, and of course a live-map.
So anyway, there you have it. Even though the game was originally designed on the PET, there are more than a dozen other platforms which now play the game better than the original.
Since the game now runs on some 20 different platforms, I’m often asked “which version is the best?” Well, the simple answer I usually give is, “the best version is the one that runs on your favorite platform!” So if you’re an Apple guy, the Apple version is best, if you’re a Commodore guy, then the Commodore version is best, and so on. And that generally holds true. In fact, the C128 version is my personal favorite.
But, what if you weren’t familiar with any vintage platforms and you were just interested in trying out the game? Or maybe you have multiple vintage systems and you’re not sure which one of those is the best experience for this particular game? That being the case, I have ranked them all here for you from best to worst, based on my own experience and opinions. Only mostly-finished or finished ports are listed.
Here’s a comparison video showing all 18 versions.
That being said, I think the game is enjoyable on all platforms, and sometimes you have to take some context in mind. For example, the PET is rated towards the bottom. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t a great game for the PET. In fact, I think it’s one of the best. It’s just hard for a PET to compete with an Amiga, for example.
Sega Genesis
Commander X16
Super Nintendo / Super Famicom
MS-DOS (VGA+AdLib)
Commodore Amiga
Sony PlayStation Portable
MSX
Enterprise 128
Commodore 128
Commodore 64 REU
Atari 7800
Commodore Plus/4
Commodore 64
Apple II
MS-DOS (CGA+PC Speaker)
Oric 1 / Oric Atmos
Atari 800
Commodore PET
Commodore VIC-20
Sinclair ZX-Spectrum
Some of those were tough to decide. Some people may even disagree. For example, the Plus/4 vs. the C64 version. The C64 has better music, and some of the graphics look better. But the Plus/4 has a better intro screen and better map. So, it’s kind of a tie. Same with the C128 and C64-REU version. They’re virtually identical. The C128 wins because it has faster disk access and dual-monitor support. The VIC-20 and PET version just about tie as well. The VIC-20 has color, which is huge. But the PET has a larger player area, more maps, more easter eggs, and of course a live-map.
So anyway, there you have it. Even though the game was originally designed on the PET, there are more than a dozen other platforms which now play the game better than the original.
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If you’ve ever wondered how you’d fare in the stressful circumstances of a failing spaceship, new space survival simulation gameTin Can helps you find out. Soaring through space in the titular Tin Can, a tiny escape pod full of failing systems, you must manage your power resources and shift components around in an attempt to keep yourself alive until you can reach safety.
Forced to evacuate from a colony transport ship, you are left drifting in your pod with no sign of rescue. Much like popular space gameFTL: Faster Than Light, you must now decide which systems are crucial for your survival at any one time. Can you afford to switch off the emergency lights to make sure the oxygen generator stays up and running? Is it okay to disable temperature control to ensure that the radiation shielding is solid?
Your character, controlled from a first-person perspective, will suffer what developer Tin Can Studio describes as ‘real medical symptoms’ as a result of problems aboard the ship, rather than relying on heath bars to determine your current status. A lack of oxygen, for example, will make the player breathe faster and will also cause your vision to blur and your movements to slow until you eventually lose consciousness.
“Conservatives are lashing out at President Joe Biden for allegedly sending baby formula to ‘illegal’ babies instead of U.S. citizens amid a nationwide shortage.” — Newsweek, 5/12/22
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It is a melancholy sight, to the people of this great nation, to see grocery store shelves, Amazon.com shopping carts, and all other manners of retail outlets completely sold out of baby formula. And as Republicans, we can think of nothing more outrageous than the Biden administration diverting approximately 0.001% of the country’s supply of baby formula to feed the babies of migrants who cannot acquire baby formula themselves because we have detained them at the border against their will indefinitely. Thus we can think of only one way to resolve this shortage in a manner that puts America first instead of last:
We must let the migrant babies starve to death so that we can turn them into baby formula.
Many of the more weak-willed amongst you may balk at the idea of depriving immigrant children of life-sustaining nourishment, letting them die, and then grinding their corpses into some sort of nutrient-rich paste that could be mixed with cow or almond milk into makeshift baby formula. But I ask you, is taking the fruit of human labor from poor countries in order to sustain our own not already what our country has been doing for centuries?
Would it not be more expedient to simply cut out the middlemen of CIA-backed coups, climate change, and multinational resource extraction conglomerates, and just start pounding dead Black and Brown kids into protein powder? Isn’t maximizing efficiency the goal of every market economy?
Remember that babies are made out of baby, so what better way to fix this situation than to feed babies with the remains of other babies who we let perish simply because of their nationality and skin color? This plan also has the secondary benefit of reducing the number of migrants entering the country, because every baby we dissolve into vitamin-filled kid-liquid is one more baby that will never enter this country without papers. That’s what we call killing two birds with one stone, or as we’d say, feeding two babies with one darker, poorer baby.
The question liberals should be asking isn’t “is it ethical to melt dead babies into baby-ade?” It’s “is it ethical not to melt dead babies into baby-ade?” Progress in America is famously a zero-sum game, which means that impoverished children in detention centers not dying of starvation are the real reason your local Wegmans in Scranton, Pennsylvania, doesn’t have any baby formula left. So given their culpability in all of this, it seems only fair to make those kids in cages suffer the consequences by transforming them into nourishment for the infants who made the right decision to be born here. The blame lies squarely on those foreign youngsters rather than the formula manufacturer who spent all their money on stock buybacks instead of sanitation improvements.
Some of you have pointed out that this whole shortage could have been avoided if it weren’t for the fact that three companies control 90% of the baby formula market. But regulating the free market with robust antitrust laws runs directly counter to our laissez-faire capitalist principles which have served us so well up to this point other than a handful of devastating economic recessions, speculative bubbles, and supply-chain related inflationary shocks. So rounding up some kid cadavers and turning them into nutritious baby-fodder seems like a pretty reasonable substitute for any lasting regulatory changes.
As the party of family values, we care about all kids as long as they’re the way kids should be: straight, cisgendered, white, and born in the US but not Puerto Rico. That’s why we can think of no better way to take care of our nation’s neonates than by feeding them the mutilated flesh of other newborns whose lives we already viewed as expendable.
Of course, if anyone in the detention center is pregnant, we will wait until they have carried their babies to term before snatching them away and turning them into bambino-feed. After all, we’re the pro-life party.
Submitter: In the 1980s, my mom worked for Tiger Beat and Right On! magazines and parlayed into a gig writing books about music and TV stars for Sharon Starbook, which included this illustrious tome.
Holly: It’s alive and well. (Not “well,” exactly, but it’s still out there!) Worldcat lists 19 holding libraries. 19 of you have some weeding to do. I’d love to see some interior shots of this book, though. If anyone wants to send some, I’ll update the post!
Another day of upper-80s and low-90s across the area on Thursday. And much more to come. The U.S. Drought Monitor update was released yesterday. It did show slight improvement in and north of Houston, mostly in the Brazos Valley. However, drought classified as “extreme” (level 3 of 4) continues to expand now across Matagorda County and portions of Brazoria and Wharton Counties.
Drought is creeping in from the south, as all of Matagorda and portions of Brazoria & Wharton Counties are considered to be in “extreme” drought. (NOAA)
I expect this will expand a little bit next week and then, depending on how next weekend goes, possibly even more the week after. The weather pattern across Texas continues to look abnormally hot for mid-May and also quite dry. Soil moisture continues to dry out, especially in coastal and south Texas this month. We still have time to stave off a potentially bad drought situation in Texas for the summer, but we really need a system or two to come through and give us a widespread rain. Perhaps there is some hope next weekend or beyond, but as Eric noted yesterday, our confidence in that occurring is not particularly high. So it goes.
Today through Sunday
Some slightly drier air has allowed us to turn a good bit cooler this morning, with lows in the 60s. It actually feels…nice? Whatever the case, it likely won’t last more than a few hours. The Friday through Sunday period will just be sun, sun, sun. Lather up with the SPF-a-lot and try to keep cool this weekend. Look for highs in the low to mid-90s and lows in the 70s. Each subsequent morning heading into next week looks just a little warmer and a little more humid. Certainly not as pleasant as this morning. We’re firmly into June/July-type weather.
Could it rain this weekend? Yes, if you’re lucky, you may see a shower or downpour, particularly on Saturday. I’m not expecting miracles, but don’t be too shocked if you see a passing shower or two.
Monday through Thursday
Each subsequent day looks to get just a little hotter. We’ll be firmly into July/August-type temperatures by midweek with highs likely in the mid-90s, if not hotter in some spots. Lows will be in the 70s, if not the upper-70s. And we continue to look sunny.
Forecast high temperatures for next Thursday remain very, very hot for May. (Pivotal Weather)
There’s just no meaningful relief in sight. A shower or two is possible on a day or two here or there, but again, you would be fortunate to see that.
Next weekend & tropics?
We continue to at least see hints of change coming next weekend. That could be via a cold front or passing disturbance that brings a day or two of higher rain chances. We’re not confident in exactly what it is we see just yet, but most models show at least some kind of change in things for a couple days. I’m not sure it will be quite enough to tilt the scales toward meaningful, lasting change though, as most models bring heat right back after that system exits.
I’ll close by saying that there have been a few social media accounts pushing out model data that shows a rogue tropical storm or hurricane in the Gulf on like forecast day 15 or so. Models (this one in particular, the GFS) generally do show these early season “scareicanes,” but they essentially never come to fruition, at least as shown. While, yes, we could always get tropical activity in the Gulf in late May, it would be highly unlikely to see a significant storm this early. Your best bet is tune that nonsense out. We’ll let you know if anything looks like it could realistically impact our area. It does not at this time.
2. The women are sisters. Both the twelve-year-old and the eight-year-old belong to one of them, and the other is the “fun” aunt.
3. In a secret CIA experiment gone awry, two plucky orphans have been injected with a serum that has given them the ability to melt anything by staring at it intently. The women are brilliant but hapless government scientists charged with protecting the children from threats at home and abroad by masquerading as sisters.
4. The short-haired one is the frigid but clever first wife of a wealthy coal magnate; the long-haired one is the second wife. The children belong to Short-Hair, but the coal magnate has threatened to cut them off if they don’t make Long-Hair, a respected journalist with a filthy secret, feel like one of the family.
5. One has matured with such grace that even though they both look approximately the same age, one of them is the other’s mother and the children’s grandmother.
6. They are spinster teachers, and these children are the elementary and middle school winners of the diversity and inclusion essay contest, and the grand prize is dinner at Applebee’s.
7. Short-Hair is holding all of them hostage.
8. They are BFFs, and their husbands are at home watching The Big Game, while the women get themselves and the kids out of their hair for just one goddamn night already.
9. Deep in the Circinus galaxy, yesterday, an explosion violently disrupted the trajectory of an alien vessel, which crash-landed behind the Jiffy Lube across the street. Fearful for their lives, the aliens took on human forms to avoid being detected.
Robert Triggs, writing for AndroidAuthority: In 2022, there's now a multifaceted argument in favor of a new approach to smartphone manufacturing. One which focuses on long-term support for both hardware and software. Core to this line of thinking is that smartphone hardware has hit a plateau. From the mid-range to flagships, hardware is now more than powerful enough to last several years without going obsolete. The days of rampant year-on-year improvements are long gone, whether you're looking at bleeding-edge performance, cameras, or battery life. This isn't to say we don't yearn for those yearly gains, but they no longer suddenly mark older models for obsolescence even if they materialize. As such, modern smartphones deserve long-term software support above and beyond semi-annual security patches.
Not to mention the increasingly compelling sustainability and right-to-repair arguments regarding raw materials and e-waste. It's increasingly hard to justify the production of throwaway electronics built to last just a handful of years. Simultaneously, sky-high prices and a squeeze in the cost of living have cast new light on the need for easier access to repair programs and spare parts. Not forgetting the popularity of refurbished handsets. Long-term support doesn't have to be an unprofitable venture for smartphone manufacturers either. Official repair channels bring in revenue over time, and it's possible to factor long-term support into the retail price of a handset. Then there's the whole avenue of hardware-as-a-service to explore.
Miami Vice Scrapbook
