Cary

ninjas-in-a-box:

dyzzyah:

artsyartichoke:

*Psst*  Trans exclusionary feminism is poop feminism pass it on  

Besides agreeing with the specific message of this comic, I also tend to agree with any feminism that comes with a guitar solo.

that was cute

One possession I use the crap out of are these Bose noise-canceling headphones. Over a year ago the cable began to fray near the minijack prong, and here you see my inelegant solution:

That's your standard plumber's PTFE tape, the stuff you wrap over the threads of a pipe before you fit the connection. That tape too is starting to fray, so I've been poking around for something else to use and came across this: Bondic Liquid Plastic Welder.

This stuff sounds nuts. It's something like two-part epoxy, except Part 2 is the LED light on the back of it. You basically squirt liquid plastic out of the nozzle, then hit it with the UV light to cure it. Even more impressively, the resultant weld can be shaped after curing. Check this out:

I like the way the tool is designed; it looks like you'd be able to apply the stuff with precision. At $25 a pop it's quite a bit more expensive than a tube of glue, but it seems a helluva lot more versatile. Any of you have experience using this?

We Need Syriza in Illinois

When a millionaire governor decrees austerity, it’s time for the left to step up.

Jane McAlevey February 16, 2015

The new governor of Illinois, Bruce Rauner, is a hedge fund manager whose salary last year was $60 million. He spent $65.9 million—including $27.6 million of his own money—buying his last election, and he’s about to introduce an austerity program that will make most folks in Illinois think they are living in austerity-wracked Greece, with less idyllic weather. While he’s generating national headlines by trash talking unions, he is quietly taking a scalpel to every important social program in the state, starting with an Illinois program that subsidizes high-quality childcare for 160,000 low-income kids. Instead of extending a small tax increase that passed the Illinois legislature in 2011, staving off a crisis, he’s letting the increases expire. Rauner is methodically manufacturing an economic crisis for his state, one that will let him do what he has long been set on doing: shrink the government and squeeze the 99 percent.

...

Rauner hopes to smash labor in Illinois so that he can take a baseball bat to it nationally.

...

...

More than a few statehouse types have been wondering aloud for weeks what Gov. Bruce Rauner is up to with his almost daily attacks on organized labor.

Just what, they ask, is the end game here?

His people say that the governor feels “liberated” since the election to speak his mind about a topic that stirs great personal passion in him. He played up the issue during the Republican primary, then all but ran away from it in the general election, including just a few weeks before Election Day when he flatly denied that “right to work” or anything like that would be among his top priorities.

Yet, there he is, day after day, pounding away at unions, demanding right-to-work laws, vilifying public employee unions as corrupt to the point of issuing an executive order barring the distribution of state-deducted employee “fair share” dues to public worker unions such as AFSCME. The dues are paid by people who don’t want to pay full union dues.

Some top Democrats believe that Rauner may be setting them up for a grand bargain this spring. Democratic lawmakers most certainly are going to freak out when Rauner presents his draconian budget. Rank-and-file members undoubtedly will demand some sort of tax hike to prevent draconian cuts to their cherished programs. Rauner eventually could say he’d agree to additional revenues in exchange for passage of his economic package.

...

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In the November [1982] election, the Illinois AFL-CIO endorsed [Adlai] Stevenson [III] against [Jim] Thompson. But the incumbent received crucial backing from several individual unions after Stevenson suggested things like replacing unionized highway workers with prison inmates.

Thompson defeated Stevenson by just 5,000 votes. His speech and a sharply divided labor movement were crucial to his success—even though Ryan, whom the unions despised, had become his running mate.

After the election, Thompson signed a bill to legalize collective bargaining for state employee unions. He interceded in contract negotiations to break an impasse, and the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees endorsed his 1986 re-election bid, followed quickly by an AFL-CIO endorsement.

Every governor since then has learned the Thompson lesson: Keep state workers happy.

Well, every governor except the current one...

Bernard Schoenburg: Rauner administration hires three from Illinois Policy Institute

Posted Feb. 11, 2015 at 10:00 PM

KRISTINA RASMUSSEN, executive vice president of the Illinois Policy Institute and its associated organization, Illinois Policy Action, recently issued a statement of congratulations to three people hired away from the organization by the administration of Gov. BRUCE RAUNER.

BRIAN COSTIN of Buffalo Grove, who was Illinois Policy's director of government reform, has been named policy director for Lt. Gov. EVELYN SANGUINETTI. He also worked in government relations for the Heartland Institute in Chicago. He's being paid $80,000 annually.

JANE McENANEY of Chicago, who was government affairs manager for Illinois Policy, is now director of legislative affairs for the Illinois Department of Revenue. She spent five months working in the campaign headquarters of the MITT ROMNEY presidential bid in 2012 and earlier was a staff assistant to U.S. Rep. PAUL RYAN, R-Wis., in Washington. She's being paid $75,000 annually.

DONOVAN GRIFFITH, who was Illinois Policy's manager of government affairs, is legislative liaison to the Illinois Environmental Protection Agency. He was earlier government relations program manager for the Evanston-based American Massage Therapy Association and was a legislative analyst for Illinois House Republicans. He was campaign manager for a winning House race in 2010 of now-state Sen. SUE REZIN, R-Morris. He's being paid $75,000 annually.

"Each of us advances the cause of liberty in our own special way," Rasmussen said in her announcement. "For some of our amazing team members at the Illinois Policy Institute and Illinois Policy Action, that means taking on a new challenge to improve government from the inside out."

"We are honored that the new administration is looking to our team for talent," she added.

...

The liberty-based Illinois Policy group clearly shares some views with Rauner, whose family foundation has donated at least $625,000 to it since 2009.

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An ad for the Omega Seamaster Aqua Terra (via Jewelry Trade Resources)

The Saudi artist Ahmed Mater is suing watchmaker Swatch for using one of his works to sell a luxury timepiece. The ad, hawking the Seamaster Aqua Terra by Omega — which Swatch owns — is a perfect copy of an image from Mater’s Magnetism series, with a watch in the place of the black cube that occupied the center of the original photo. The artist is suing the Swiss watch company in Paris’s high court, Le Figaro reported, based on an original article by Le Quotidien de l’Art.

Mater’s image of thousands of iron particles swirling around a central cube, from a series created in 2012, was intended to symbolize the annual pilgrimage of Muslims to the Kaaba shrine in Mecca. “Magnetism, however, gives us more than simple simulacra of that Ancient House of God,” wrote author Tim Mackintosh-Smith. “His counterpoint of square and circle, whorl and cube, of black and white, light and dark, places the primal elements of form and tone in dynamic equipoise.” That combination of formal elements apparently proved irresistible to Omega.

The company originally approached Mater to ask his permission to use the image for its advertisements. No formal contract or agreement was signed permitting use or modification of works from the Magnetism series, but, according to court papers, Mater gave permission for the use of the images on the condition that Omega buy two pieces from the series and donate them to a museum. Omega never did this.

Ahmed Mater, “Magnetism (Photograuve) III” (2012) (image courtesy the artist)

But, as Swatch spokesperson Bastien Buss told Le Figaro, Omega’s version of the image has no bearing on the meaning of Mater’s work. It serves only “to tout the merits of the anti-magnetism of an Omega model. For the first time in the history of watchmaking, a watch resists magnetic fields stronger than 15,000 gauss.” A gauss is a unit of measurement used to quantify the strength of a magnetic field. With its Seamaster Aqua Terra, Omega achieved a major innovation in watch design, a level of resistance to magnetic fields that has eluded watchmakers for decades. “That’s exactly what we show with the metal particles that cannot get any closer to the watch, demonstrating its magnetic resistance,” Buss added. “In every reference manual, anti-magnetism is illustrated in a similar manner.”

According to Le Figaro, the artist, however, is not only upset that his work was put to commercial purposes without his permission, but fears that the unauthorized use of his work may have more far-reaching consequences than artfully visualizing the principle of anti-magnetism. Namely, Mater is concerned that the transformation of a work charged with religious symbolism into a celebration of consumerism — with iron particles that formerly represented devout Muslims now symbolizing worshipers of luxury goods — could spell trouble in his home country of Saudi Arabia, where the image could be taken as a satire of religion and blasphemy is a punishable offense.

Hyperallergic reached out to the artist for comment but has not received a response.

sexygeriatrics:

pandabearjayy:

shots2thesky:

pandabearjayy:

Who didn’t realize he was gay? ❤️

Who is that? 😓😍

MAN KICKED OUT OF SAUDI ARABIA FOR BEING TOO HANDSOME

ILLEGALLY HANDSOME GUY AND HIS ILLEGALLY HANDSOME BOYFRIEND

Gustavo Ortiz liked when his fat girlfriend sat on his face. But one day she got distracted by eating and almost killed Gustavo. He thanks Saint Pancras because he survived. He promises to moderate his fetishes.

I think myword.io finally looks good on a phone.

Albert Moore, A Garden 1869. The Tate Gallery is hosting an event in their 1840’s room in which you can submit your own GIF inspired by these paintings.

Happy Valentines Day

dbvictoria:

A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night

The first Iranian Vampire Western ever made, Ana Lily Amirpour’s debut basks in the sheer pleasure of pulp. A joyful mash-up of genre, archetype, and iconography, its prolific influences span spaghetti westerns, graphic novels, horror films, and the Iranian New Wave.

The Marines Are Building Robotic War Balls

Establishing a beachhead on enemy-held turf is historically one of the most dangerous jobs in warfare, just ask Achilles. But the robotic age may make it slightly less so.

A research team from Stamford, Conn. has developed an amphibious drone that they are currently testing with the Marines. The GuardBot is a robot ball that swims over water at about 4 miles per hour and then rolls along the beach, at as much as a 30-degree incline and 20 miles per hour.

They said war balls.  

“Coition, or sexual union, may be compared to a fit of epilepsy.”

Read more of Dr. James Ashton’s Victorian era sex guide, and remember, never have sex on a full stomach.

The Adventures of Prince Achmed by Lotte Reiniger (1926). The oldest surviving animated film in history.

bogleech:

mousathe14:

ninetynineno:

gifsboom:

Video: MorpHex MKI

Make a robot that knows how to resist being turned off, that’s a great idea.

It appears after decades of films and literature about how to not have robot overlords… We proceed to say “Screw that noise.”

finally we’re using robots just to frighten and confuse small children, our destiny as a species has been realized

Part One here.

"Certain damp crevices were of great interest to them; other damp crevices were carefully avoided. There appeared to be little logic behind the distinction, but there it was all the same."

"Hands that had very recently been used to pet a cat were now inserted inside another human being's vulnerabilities."

"Although both parties were close enough to one another to be heard using only a very quiet voice, they both insisted on speaking to one another quite loudly, preferring vague and meaningless vocalizations over specific words. Had they used words familiar to the both of them, things might not have become so confusing."

"Fluid was produced in three chief areas, but consumed in only one."

Read more Erotica Written By An Alien Pretending Not To Be Horrified By The Human Body at The Toast.