V.w.verweij

Czech online mapping portal Mapy has an interesting new 3d option. The beta version of Mapy 3d allows you to explore some of the Czech Republic's gorgeous historic centers in glorious 3d. The 3d map includes controls to adjust the altitude and direction of your view. It even includes a neat 'helicopter' option that rotates your view around the map center. The locations where the beta 3d view

This nonprofit connects conflict minerals coming from the Democratic Republic of Congo to electronics users around the world.

What to do about all that CO2 emitted when you make cement? Inject it back into the stuff and turn it back into limestone.

She will be released along the northern Minnesota and Wisconsin border. [ more › ]

Due to a lack of funding, this is likely to be the last year of Filmfest DC. Here's what you should (probably) check out. [ more › ]

To kick off Awesome Con, hundreds of people attempted to break the Guinness World Record for the largest gathering of people dressed as comic book characters in a single place. [ more › ]

Three of the dogs died "allegedly at the hands of the defendant," while the location of five dogs is unknown. [ more › ]

by Maria Bustillos

Adventure Time is a smash hit cartoon aimed primarily at kids age six to eleven. It’s also a deeply serious work of moral philosophy, a rip-roaring comic masterpiece, and a meditation on gender politics and love in the modern world. It is rich with moments of tenderness and confusion, and real terror and grief even; moments sometimes more resonant and elementally powerful than you experience in a good novel, though much of Adventure Time’s emotional force is visually evoked—conveyed through a language of seeing and feeling rather than words.

The heroes of Adventure Time—a boy in a white helmet named Finn, and his shape-shifting mutant dog/adopted brother, Jake—spend their days fighting evil, playing games, saving (and, sometimes, dating) princesses, learning secrets, and exploring their half-ruined home world of Ooo, as well as other worlds and dimensions. They possess a blind optimism that is as clueless as it is comforting: Whether they are fighting a swamp giant, trapped in a garbage-strewn cave or testing the super-spicy instant bath serum in the palace of Princess Bubblegum, they are (almost always) brave and kind; they want to have fun and they mean no harm. Finn and Jake are also full of a magical quality that real children have—of resilience, and of seeing the world as if for the first time.

These heroes are as fallible as can be—they’re quite capable of displaying selfishness, impatience and thick-headedness—but their essential good nature always wins out, if not their wisdom or their power to set things right. They mess up a lot, in fact, and their errors and imperfections aren’t magically erased at the end of each episode. At one point they accidentally create the conditions whereby a monster is able to extinguish all life in the universe with a wish; this idea scared me halfway out of my wits and into a curled-up ball under the covers. But it all blindly, clumsily gets set halfway-right again, leaving a host of potentially terrible consequences in the uncertain future: The show often produces a relieved, tender and half-frightened sensation, along with shock, pleasure and laughter.

Adventure Time’s dozens of characters are complex in a way that is rarely seen on television for adults, let alone children; each seems to inhabit his own world. In E.M. Forster’s memorable phrase, they are round characters, “capable of surprising in a convincing way.” Lumpy Space Princess is a lovable but ghastly teenager, tediously obsessed with her old boyfriend, the unprepossessing Brad; she treats her well-meaning parents very shabbily. Marceline the Vampire Queen’s father is present just enough to make it impossible for her to ignore or forget his cruelty and selfishness—qualities she has inherited, to some degree. Princess Bubblegum is afflicted with intellectual arrogance and an inability to anticipate the dangerous consequences of her scientific experiments.

The Ice King is a tragic figure—to my mind, the hero—of Adventure Time. He is a danger to himself and everyone else, subject to unpredictable rages and fits of violence, but he will break your heart. He is forever trying to marry a princess or make a friend, but it never, ever works out, he can only push the thing he desires out of reach by the very force of his longing. Despite being a furious half-crazy blue cartoon villain, he is entirely human; he is ridiculous, needy and sad; he is oneself.

“I identify with him more than any other character,” said Adventure Time's creator Pendleton Ward, chatting offhandedly in the writers’ room at the studio in Burbank, where we had gathered with the show’s key writers and producers.

“But not in terms of, like, trying to capture women….” said Adam Muto, the show's co-executive producer.

“Oh, yes!” Ward said stoutly. Then, after the laughter subsided: “No, no, no, I mean… not capture, literally kidnapping women…. Just like, living alone and having to talk to your pet.”



Read the rest at this story's permanent home: The Hole Near The Center Of The World.

3 Comments

The post How "Adventure Time" Came To Be appeared first on The Awl.

by Alex Balk

Oh thank God: "For those who didn't get to sample the meaty menu item, KFC is offering one more chance: Starting April 21, the Double Down will return to the fast-food chain." In case you have forgotten, the definitive review of that, uh, foodstuff, appeared here four years ago.

1 Comments

The post Gimmick Returns appeared first on The Awl.

by Alex Balk

"The more beards there are, the less attractive they become—giving clean-shaven men a competitive advantage, say scientists in Sydney, Australia. When 'peak beard' frequency is reached, the pendulum swings back toward lesser-bristled chins—a trend we may be witnessing now, the scientists say."

1 Comments

The post The Great Debeardening appeared first on The Awl.

Organization that cared for the snowy owl now has a new patient. [ more › ]

Since launching in February, Instacart "has grown its user base by 15 times," according to a release. [ more › ]

This week’s Pet(s) of the Week are two pups who share a house and the names of Norse gods.

Here’s what Thor and Loki’s owner had to say about her divine dogs:

Thor, a Lab/Pit, mix was adopted about seven years ago from the Lost Dog and Cat foundation during one of their adoption days at the PetSmart. He was the only child for a while, but then became the big brother to two additional members to the family (our children who are now 4 and 2). He’s been a great running buddy for mom and, although he is skittish to new things, is a very sweet and gentle dog.

As a puppy he loved to pee all over the place and chew up ONLY mom’s things, but thankfully has outgrown that phase. He is a very needy dog and will lay his head on your lap for attention, and if that doesn’t work, he will lick you to death. He maybe 7 but he still acts like a 1-year-old lab.

In comes Loki, the newest member to the family, a Newfoundland Lab mix that we recently adopted from AWLA. He is the calmest puppy I’ve ever met, and though we are still definitely working on house training, everything else he has gotten down pat.

He loves his belly to be rubbed and to roll around in leaves and dirt and absolutely loved the extended snowy winter days. To add to the chaos of poor Thor’s simple life, not only does he have two kids that love to bug him he now has a puppy to keep him on his toes. Needless to say everyone is getting a workout for a few hours in the household which leads to very quiet nights. We are lucky to have adopted them into their forever homes.

Want your pet to be considered for the Arlington Pet of the Week? Email office@arlnow.com with a 2-3 paragraph bio and at least 3-4 horizontally-oriented photos of your pet.

Each week’s winner receives a sample of dog or cat treats from our sponsor, Becky’s Pet Care, along with $25 in Becky’s Bucks. Becky’s Pet Care provides professional dog walking and pet sitting services in Arlington and Northern Virginia — “Quality Service from a Trusted Friend.”

The 66-million-year-old bones of a Tyrannosaurus rex arrived today at the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History, where preparations are now underway to create a dinosaur and fossil hall. [ more › ]

If you have any animal/pet photos you’d like to share please send an email to princeofpetworth(at)gmail(dot)com with ‘Animal Fix’ in the title and say the name of your pet and your neighborhood. Your photos will go into the queue (usually 3-4 weeks wait) and will be posted in the order I receive them. If you’ve already entered your pet and would like to do so again – that’s no problem – just space the entries out a bit. Please try to send horizontal photos 640×480 (medium size on your iphone) if possible.

“This is Radar, terror of Brightwood.”

“I told you to take 495, the NJ Turnkpike SUCKS!”

“This is Murphy from Logan Circle excited for his evening walk in his poncho!”

Four Arlington emergency responders were honored with Crisis Intervention Team awards earlier this month for handling emergencies with mentally ill patients.

Arlington County Police Officer James Joy was named Officer of the Year, Deputy Jeffrey Nowak was named Deputy of the Year, Officer Samuel Sentz was honored with the Intervention of the Year and Emergency Communications Technician Shanika Stewart was named Dispatcher of the Year.

Joy was recognized for three incidents as examples of his work responding with compassion and responsibility for patients struggling with mental illness. In one of those cases last April, Joy responded to a call for trespassing and, upon finding out the suspect was a military veteran suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder and going through a divorce, Joy contacted the Wounded Warrior Project, which helped the veteran get the proper care.

Nowak was honored for responding to a December crisis in the Arlington County Detention Center in which an “actively psychotic and delusional” inmate started banging his head against his cell wall. Nowak, according to the Office of Emergency Management, diffused the situation by relying on his past relationship with the inmate. Nowak remembered the inmate had heard voices in the past, and spoke is short, simple sentences so his message could get through.

Sentz responded to a call in December at the Marriott Residence Inn in Crystal City during which a soldier “was intoxicated, creating a disturbance and trespassing at the hotel,” according to OEM. Sentz responded not by sending the soldier to the “drunk tank,” but by getting him medical assistance. In a letter to the OEM, Director of the U.S. Army Physical Disability Agency Col. Carl M. Johnson credited Sentz with “saving the soldier’s life.”

The awards ceremony was held April 2 at Virginia Hospital Center.

Photos courtesy Arlington County

buy this print
Or share on: facebook reddit

It was an "honest mistake," the company says. [ more › ]

by Rick Paulas

In 2022, fires will destroy over 2,025 acres of Texas. In 2048, the Glacier Land Resort will open for people looking to see what life was like before the glaciers melted. In 2049, the Smithsonian—no longer open to the public—will feature a preserved hummingbird in their archives, the last proof of their species ever existing.

These are all possible futures as created by the users of FutureCoast, an interactive alternate reality game that began in February and concludes its run in May. Funded by a grant from the National Science Foundation, the overarching story of the game is simple: Mysterious objects known as “chronofacts" have begun appearing throughout the world. Once decoded—which a grassroots organization luckily takes care of for us—they're revealed to be voicemail leaks from the future, and not necessarily all from the same one. And that's, well, that's pretty much it as far as the plot goes.

But while the story is simplistic, the project—produced by Ken Eklund (who previously tried to save our doomed planet with the award-winning ARG World Without Oil) and Sara Thacher (one of the main forces behind San Francisco's Jejune Institute ARG/public art-ish thing)—is anything but. More than simply a collection of possible “what-ifs," the true goal is figuring out how to use storytelling to persuade.

Rick Paulas: There's a lot of different mediums you could have chosen for this project. Why just voicemails?

Ken Eklund: I wanted to focus on what the medium was. Because if we're like, well, we're getting videos from the future, it really opens up this big can of worms creatively. That could be a successful thing, “the YouTube of the Future has a leak in it and we're getting videos." But you could see how that could pre-select for people who are really good at doing videos. It becomes this narrow range who could participate and get above the bar that was set. I wasn't really interested in getting high quality from a narrow group of people. I thought it was very important to make it very democratic. It is a communication medium anyone can do.

Sara Thacher: Voicemails are basically these little miniature short stories, micro-stories, that give you a sense of place and story and characters. But voicemails also do this other thing. It's a story structure that you immediately understand. I say voicemail, and you understand. It's a message that's left for a person and there's a story structure all built in just by saying “voicemail."

I was kind of shocked that, instead of the voicemails being this scary apocalyptic future, they were mostly people with everyday tones, almost banal. Did you expect to get that? Or did that come out organically?

Ken: It does organically develop. You could say there's a certain amount of transference because of the medium of voicemails. But I really thought there'd be a bunch of voicemails from people who were in crisis, and a bunch of screaming and incoherent and apocalyptic visions. If you kind of look at what goes on in the movies, it's always The Day After Tomorrow, or whatever the deal may be. So for me, that's a very interesting signal.

Sara: There's a couple of voicemails that are just screaming. They're in there. But people who take the time to create a voicemail have a genuine desire to communicate about their vision. And you just can't… it's actually very difficult to scream disaster and actually give a picture of what's going on. So people gravitate towards stories where they can be descriptive.

Were there any utopian futures you had to edit out?

Ken: We publish everything we get, so there is no editorializing. We really do want to be very receptive place. But I would say that we have indeed have utopian ones. There's one we got called The Wind-Gen One. It's a very simple message of a neighbor calling another neighbor and saying, “Hey, you don't have your wind generator on, we're thinking we're maybe going to be in a brownout situation this weekend, and we need you to turn on your wind-gen." So, that is a pretty utopian future. A neighbor is being neighborly and just calling and telling them what's going on. It's kind of strange we don't recognize utopia when we hear it.

Sara: They can be really subtle. We had a voicemail that's a pizzeria calling back to confirm an order, and they're ordering pineapple pizza, and it's their top shelf pizza. They're making a commentary on what foods are going to be available, and the relative exclusivity and price of the foods of the future. But all in this very, very simple little voicemail.

Ken: You can spend a lot of time parsing them out into what they really mean. There can be the voicemails that sound like we have this future under control, but in the end they're ultimately sad, because you listen to them and be like, oh, if this is true, then this is also true. The stories of greatest hope and greatest fear can be combined in the same voicemail, and it's not obvious which it is when we're listening.

A big part of the story is that these “chronofacts" are discovered and sent in to be decoded. But these chronofacts are, in fact, real physical items you place in the actual real world. It seems odd to spend money creating and placing these when it seems mostly unnecessary for the project. What was the thinking behind that?

Ken: It's a lot of trouble, but it provides this kind of moment that makes the fiction seem a little more real. There is a desire that these games have. People want to live in the fiction a little bit. It doesn't take a lot of money, it doesn't take Hollywood actors. With as simple a thing as having these and the idea of voicemails, there's this buy-in.

By making this a user-submitted project, you're essentially taking a poll of what people's feelings/worries/etc. are about the future. Did anything surprise you?

Ken: For me the biggest point of surprise was people talking about air pollution. I just don't really flag that myself. But since the game and this theme has emerged, I'd been thinking about it, and I have my own theories about why that theme is emerging, and it has to do with China and the bad air days in Beijing. The idea that we are slaves to energy production, and the idea that if energy production necessitates us ruining our air, we will do that, because we want our energy. That's what happened in China. They were just making these coal plants, and nobody did the math about how much air a coal fire pollutes.

So, is the goal of the project to get a sense of what people are feeling?

Ken: There certainly is an aspect of FutureCoast that's interested in seeing what people come up with. But the game goes back to the creation of these voicemails, and what happens with people when they actually do that. When we talk about games of change and causing change, it's really about that moment when people think about the future. They're doing it in the context where they're considering making a voicemail, and idly speculating on the voicemails they heard. It's this really interesting space of future thinking where you go, this is not some kind of abstract subject, climate change and the future that we live in. This is what's actually going on. This is a future that people I know are going to be living in. So, to see people go through this process of making voicemails, that's where the game is actually working its change. This very simple invitation to play is actually not all that simple. It actually starts all of these gears turning, which I hope continue to turn.

Sara: When you create a voicemail, you have to put yourself in the first person. Translating from what do I think the future might be like, to what's my first person account or communication set in that future. It causes you to think about that very differently. Even if that's not a future you're ever going to see, you have now used first person language and have acted as though this future is real for that brief moment. You gain this lived experience. That's very different from “Well, I think things are going to get hotter."

Ken: The question is, how do you convince people of things? We're in this place right now with climate change where you can line up almost every single scientist on the planet and still people just kind of go, um, I'm just not going to take that. And so you ask yourself, what is actually wrong? How do people get persuaded of things? Where is the emotional contact?

Sara: It turns out information isn't that useful in changing minds, or persuading them. Facts don't actually do that very well, even if it's a fact from a reputable source. There was a fantastic article that came out recently that looked at the issue. They said, here's this data set. And a person's ability to analyze the data set is directly correlated to their mathematical ability, because it's something that requires a little bit of math. If you score well on a general math aptitude test, you're going to do better analyzing data and using it to draw a conclusion. But once it becomes at all partisan issue—that is, it has at all a spectrum of viewpoint, where there's actually a left and a right—that correlation between mathematical aptitude and ability to understand the same data set is not correlated at all. It's entirely predicted by what party you associate with, rather than your mathematical aptitude. Your ability to understand factual information drops off dramatically. Actually telling stories and telling fiction with people I can relate to, and situations I can relate to on an emotional level, is much more important than the facts. And it goes both ways. This is how Fox media runs.

Ken: There's a useful dichotomy between rhetorical and poetic means of persuasion. Rhetorical persuasion is the idea that I have an argument, someone else has an argument, and we have a winner. In the science world in particular, when they talk about persuasion, that is all they are talking about. But in the real world, there is advertising, there's the reality that poetical arguments really have currency. When you look out of the world of science, the world actually works on poetic persuasion, on the idea of stories and competing stories. When you look at the science of persuasion, there's been all of these studies done about rhetorical persuasion, and you have very little done about poetic persuasion. That's one of the things we want to bring in to the science around climate change. Voicemails are this way to open up this poetic form of talking.

Rick Paulas will gladly accept the bad parts of the future, as long as it also includes self-lacing shoes.

1 Comments

The post Voicemails From The Terrifying Future appeared first on The Awl.

by Awl Sponsors

Millennials are embracing their fear of commitment in a major way, and they don't seem to mind one bit. Check out the mini-documentary above for a glimpse into the mindset of what we might call the anti-commitment generation.

This interview series is the latest in The Mobile Movement campaign, in which AT&T travels the country documenting the life and times of millennials. In each case, they aim to capture a different angle on the "networked existence."

Follow the movement at www.youtube.com/themobilemovement.

0 Comments

The post The Anti-Commitment Generation appeared first on The Awl.

by Alex Balk

Are you ready for THE BIG COOLDOWN? THE BIG COOLDOWN is coming and none of us will survive! BIG BIG BIG COOLDOWN.

0 Comments

The post Cooldown Big appeared first on The Awl.

If you have any animal/pet photos you’d like to share please send an email to princeofpetworth(at)gmail(dot)com with ‘Animal Fix’ in the title and say the name of your pet and your neighborhood. Your photos will go into the queue (usually 3-4 weeks wait) and will be posted in the order I receive them. If you’ve already entered your pet and would like to do so again – that’s no problem – just space the entries out a bit. Please try to send horizontal photos 640×480 (medium size on your iphone) if possible.

“Stamos, photobombing a perfectly good sunrise shot from the Lincoln Memorial.”

“This is Yuko from Westend. He’s a stray who is now living it up.”

“Lola, the Puerto Rican Corgi-mix from Columbia Heights, poses after killing her stuffed bear.”

Photo by PoPville flickr user ekelly80

You can talk about whatever is on your mind – quality of life issues, a beautiful tree you spotted, scuttlebutt, or any random questions/thoughts you may have. But please no personal attacks and no need to correct people’s grammar. This is a place to vent and/or celebrate things about daily life in DC.

2007 18th Street, NW

From a press release:

“Jack Rose Dining Saloon is excited to announce the appointment of its new Executive Chef Russell Jones. A kitchen veteran of Restaurant Eve, Vinoteca and Le Paradou, Chef Jones will create and execute a menu of smaller creative share plates, playful Southern-style bar snacks, and overall complementary fare that pairs well with the restaurant’s award-winning beverage program. Chef Jones will take full helm of the kitchen on April 14th.

A South Carolina native, Jones’ love for food was inspired by early childhood travels – the taste of his first real baguette in Paris, buying chestnuts from a street vendor in London, watching butchers at work in the open-air markets. These experiences coupled with his mom’s Southern home cooking helped inspire his current “somewhat Southern, executed with French technique” culinary style.

“My mom worked full-time but always had dinner on the table for our family. It was very traditionally Southern – we never had just one dish, but one main protein and lots of vegetables and other sides,” says Jones. His love for fresh, seasonal produce will be apparent in the new menu at Jack Rose, with many more composed vegetable dishes and sides, directed by the seasons.

His first taste of the restaurant industry was working at an all-natural market and co-op while attending the University of South Carolina, with the intention of becoming a high school English teacher. The Rosewood Market & Deli in Columbia, SC catered to the vegetarian and vegan community, and sold prepared foods which Jones helped make fresh every morning, working under Chef Benoit St. Jacques. “I eventually realized that I preferred being in the kitchen than to what I was studying,” says Jones. “Also, Benoit was always an inspiration of what I thought I wanted to be professionally.” The market was very ahead of its time, before the locally-sourced and organic/all-natural craze really took foot, but it inspired Jones to cook and source locally during the three years he worked there.

He eventually moved to DC and worked in kitchens throughout the area learning the craft, and decided to attend culinary school. After graduating from L’Academie de Cuisine in Gathersburg, MD, Jones honed his French culinary technique at Le Paradou, working with acclaimed chef Yannick Cam. He opened Vinoteca as Executive Chef, then moving on to award-winning fine dining Restaurant Eve to learn from one of his biggest influences, Cathal Armstrong. During his three-year stint at Eve, he learned to cook “in the season” and worked his way up to Sous Chef.

At Jack Rose, Chef Jones plans to serve what people want to eat right now, and what pairs well with drinking. The menu will offer smaller share plates, entrees with hearty proteins, and snacks that complement the restaurant’s acclaimed beverage program. His new menu will launch in late April.”

Will you buy tickets to see Paris Hilton DJ? Will anyone? [ more › ]

Solving two problems at once (or more!) is the most satisfying way to go about improving the world.