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Courtney
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We had a blast at Momocon 2014! My friends and family did a Bob’s Burgers group cosplay where I played Tina, my sister played Louise, my brother played Gene, and my friends were Bob & Linda. Too fun!
this is great!
This is wonderful!
BLESS THIS MOVEMENT!
glory
I’m here for this shit ! All of it !
This is dope.
Ok they win. Everything. Life, they win.
Soooo gooood
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Courtney
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from Super Opinionated.
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White privilege is posting a manifesto on Youtube and carrying out a mass shooting that causes more deaths than the Boston Marathon bombing and the media doesn’t label you a terrorist.
Memo to anyone who logs in to a WordPress.com-hosted blog from a public Wi-Fi connection or other unsecured network: It's trivial for the script kiddie a few tables down to hijack your site even if it's protected by two-factor authentication.
Yan Zhu, a staff technologist at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, came to that determination after noticing that WordPress.com servers send a key browser cookie in plain text, rather than encrypting it, as long mandated by widely accepted security practices. The cookie, which carries the tag "wordpress_logged_in," is set once an end user has entered a valid WordPress.com user name and password. It's the website equivalent of a plastic bracelets used by nightclubs. Once a browser presents the cookie, WordPress.com servers will usher the user behind a velvet rope to highly privileged sections that reveal private messages, update some user settings, publish blog posts, and more. The move by WordPress engineers to allow the cookie to be transmitted unencrypted makes them susceptible to interception in many cases.
Zhu snagged a cookie for her own account the same way a malicious hacker might and then pasted it into a fresh browser profile. When she visited WordPress she was immediately logged in—without having to enter her credentials and even though she had enabled two-factor authentication. She was then able to publish blog posts, read private posts and blog stats, and post comments that were attributed to her account. As if that wasn't enough, she was able to use the cookie to change the e-mail address assigned to the account and, if two-factor authentication wasn't already in place, set up the feature. That means a hacker exploiting the vulnerability could lock out a vulnerable user. When the legitimate user tried to access the account, the attempt would fail, since the one-time passcode would be sent to a number controlled by the attacker. Remarkably, the pilfered cookie will remain valid for three years, even if the victim logs out of the account before then. Zhu blogged about the vulnerability late Thursday.
Read 4 remaining paragraphs | Comments
firehose'Males, for better or worse, are ferociously protective of their position in any tribe, community, or society, and any threat to that position goes to the core of their identity and self-esteem. It’s a common observation in times of recession that while loss of a job is miserable for both genders, it’s the males who are likelier to become completely undone by it. Without the role of worker and money-earner, men feel hollowed-out, and that too often calls for revenge. it’s not for nothing that the victims in workplace shootings are often managers who just the month before demoted or sacked the shooter.
As Candice Batton, director of the School of Criminology and Criminal Justice at the University of Nebraska, Omaha, told NPR in the wake of the 2013 Washington Navy Yard shootings:
“Some research supports the idea that males are more likely than females to develop negative attributions of blame that are external in nature, that is: ‘The cause … of my problems is someone else or some force outside of me’. And this translates into anger and hostility toward others.”
[Women], on the other hand, “are more likely to develop negative attributions of blame that are internal in nature, that is: ‘The cause of my problems is some failing of my own: I didn’t try hard enough, I’m not good enough.”
This is also the reason that when women do kill—and they do—it’s typically in a more intimate way, such as by drowning or suffocating. Men tend to go wild, spraying a room with gunfire and the world be damned. That, of course, also increases the male killer’s body count.'
firehoseBrandon Bird beat
firehoseBERDBRAINS
Photographer Grant Hughes recorded this video of swallows operating an automatic door in a bike parking garage at the University of Victoria in Canada. According to Hughes, the swallows were already nesting in the garage when the door was added to the entrance. The birds are able to activate the motion sensors for the door from both the inside and outside, which allows them to pass in and out of the garage with ease.
via Cheezburger
firehosewell hello there, Brand New; "If D&D ever launched a luxury car this would look so good on the grill."
Also interesting to see an Oregon design house (and that's a stretch, it's really just Lynda.com teacher Von Glitschka) on this instead of someone bigger sent down from Hasbro.
the letters are great, no worries there, but fffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffuck that chrome. the flats look so much fucking better.
"Dungeons & Dragons (abbreviated as D&D or DnD) is a fantasy tabletop role-playing game (RPG) originally designed by Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson, and first published in 1974 by Tactical Studies Rules, Inc. (TSR). The game has been published by Wizards of the Coast since 1997. It was derived from miniature wargames with a variation of the Chainmail game serving as the initial rule system. D&D's publication is widely regarded as the beginning of modern role-playing games and the role-playing game industry." (Source: Wikipedia)
Design by: Glitschka Studios (Salem, OR)
Opinion/Notes: Talk about flare! Every letterform has some extra flare or spike or tail or other menacing accessory to make the logo look more dungeon-y and dragon-y. The new ampersand is epic — kitschy epic, but epic nonetheless. If D&D ever launched a luxury car this would look so good on the grill. I am certain that true nerdcore D&D fans will hate this, as it does away with the medieval-ness of the previous logo.
Update: Glitschka Studios designed the ampersand; the team at Wizards of the Coast designed the rest of the wordmark and added the chrome effect.
Related Links: CNN story on the 40th year of D&D
D&D Facebook album
firehoseWELLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPP
Lemon: " I cannot let him compromise the Rap Genius mission — a mission that remains almost as delicate and inchoate" etc.
Since its start in rap and hip-hop lyrics, Rap Genius has branched out to explaining rock songs, poetry, and news. Its broad focus is what led users on subsection "News Genius" to begin annotating Isla Vista shooter Elliot Rodger's 140-page manifesto and autobiography — an extremely delicate task, given that Rodger killed six and injured over a dozen more over Memorial Day weekend. Now, Rap Genius co-founder Mahbod Moghadam has resigned after posting remarks that company CEO Tom Lehman says displayed "gleeful insensitivity and misogyny."
While many annotations added detail about names and places, and others psychoanalyzed Rodger himself, some of Moghadam's now-deleted comments proved deeply tone-deaf. Archived on Gawker, they include two annotations praising Rodger's work as "beautifully written" and "artful;" in another comment, he speculates that the killer's sister is "smokin hot." After sites called attention to his posts, Moghadam issued an apology. "I got carried away with making the annotations and making any comment about his sister was in horrible taste," he said. "Thankfully the Rap Genius community edits out my poor judgement, I am very sorry for writing it."
"I cannot let him compromise the Rap Genius mission."
A post by Lehman, however, shows that things have gone further: Moghadam has resigned from his position as a company employee and a member of the board of directors. Moghadam "annotated the piece with annotations that not only didn't attempt to enhance anyone's understanding of the text, but went beyond that into gleeful insensitivity and misogyny," says Lehman. "All of which is contrary to everything we're trying to accomplish at Rap Genius."
Moghadam's comments were in reprehensibly bad taste, but Lehman's statement hints that this is also damage control for the site's reputation at large. While a portion of the overall comments on Rodger's manifesto were helpful context — Moghadam, who is personally familiar with the neighborhoods Rodger describes, left some of them — Lehman acknowledges that there's a great deal of noise. Some annotations simply link to pages about movies or TV shows referenced in the document. Others are clear misreadings, like speculation that Rodger's childhood friends "George and David" are actually George Lucas and David Prowse, who played Darth Vader in the original Star Wars trilogy.
Lehman admits that the current version is "far from great," though "the hope is that the annotations will improve over time." But in contrast to Moghadam's comments, "[a]lmost all the annotations were at least attempting a close reading — they were genuinely, though imperfectly, trying to add context to the text and make it easier to understand." Lehman's closing statement in particular suggests that he doesn't want this to cast a shadow over News Genius' reputation. "Without Mahbod Rap Genius would not exist, and I am grateful for all he has done to help Rap Genius succeed," he says. "But I cannot let him compromise the Rap Genius mission — a mission that remains almost as delicate and inchoate as it was when we three founders decided to devote our lives to it almost 5 years ago."
firehosehyhomnb, moldy apple trashin'
The 2014 NASA LaRC Art Contest prompted kids to depict how technology is bridging the gap between the future and the present. See the full gallery, which covers themes such as robots, mars, and global warming, here. Gizmodo’s Matt Novak reports:
Much like the drawings and written predictions of American kids from earlier generations, there is a healthy mix of both optimism and pessimism. Optimism, it would seem, that we will one day conquer the stars in a way that our grandparents had only dreamed. Pessimism, in a way that can only be communicated with a handful of arctic animals surrounded by melting ice and an oppressive sun rising behind them.
The kids of today see the future a bit like the world of WALL-E, I suppose — complete with the “moldy apple trashin” recycling/compost robot above. But they also see robots on Mars. The only issue might be that we already have robots on Mars, leaving us to wonder whether kids today aren’t thinking as futuristically as we might have hoped.
firehosefly me to the moon
Gizmag has the story on the latest NASA-built homes for space rats.
Attention space rats and astromice, NASA is sending new, posher rodent habitats to the International Space Station (ISS). The high-tech cages will first will fly in August aboard an unmanned SpaceX Dragon cargo ship and are part of an extensive study on the effects of weightlessness on prolonged space voyages.
Rodents have been part of the US space program since the first mice flew in a V-2 rocket in 1950. Though the chimps and monkeys may have taken the spotlight, mice and rats have played a vital role in space medicine with no less than 27 batches of rodents flying on the Space Shuttle from 1983 to 2011. However, the new round of rodent studies on the ISS mean that there’s a need for something more sophisticated than a shoebox to carry the animals around in.
Developed at NASA’s Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, California, the new habitats are designed for transporting the animals to the space station and as part of their long-term accommodation. They consist of a transport module, which fits inside the racks in the pressurized cargo section of the Dragon spacecraft, and an access module for moving the rodents from the transporter to the station’s rodent habitat without having the mice escape and take up residence behind the control panels. The access modules also allow the crew to remove than animals from the habitat for observation.
The habitat modules hold 10 mice or 6 rats and are designed to provide them with water, food, lighting and fresh air. Since rats and mice aren’t made for flight, the habitat is also equipped with rods for them to grasp as they move about. The habitats are also bugged with data links and a visual/infrared video system, so scientists can keep a constant eye on their charges.
Based on recommendations of the National Research Council, the new modules are part of a study of the effects of prolonged weightlessness, such as would be encountered on a mission to Mars. The six-month tours of duty that astronauts spend on the ISS have revealed a number of problems with living in zero-G, including loss of muscle mass, weakening of bones, as well as affecting the cardiovascular endocrine, nervous, reproductive, and immune systems. A two-year Mars mission could have severe, or perhaps fatal effects – especially when space radiation is included. The research is aimed at understanding these effects at the genetic and molecular level in hopes of finding ways to combat them. NASA also says that some of these conditions resemble some earthbound diseases and could help in their treatment.
firehose'The conflict in Portland involves the traditional upscale “Uber Black” service, which partners with existing professional drivers. And at least for now, it appears Portland will still be the only major West Coast city without Uber after the city’s Private for-Hire Transportation Board of Review last month unanimously rejected Uber’s requests to make the legal changes that the company says would allow it to operate Uber Black effectively.
...
asked that Portland make changes to its city code, including:
Removing a requirement that forces customers to arrange a trip with an executive sedan or limousine at least 60 minutes prior to pick-up. For example, if you request a town car and it comes in 10 minutes, you must wait 50 minutes before you are legally allowed to enter the vehicle.
Removing a requirement that forces executive sedans and limousines to charge a 35% fixed premium above current taxi rates established by the city.
At the meeting, Owens explained that the 60-minute rule forces drivers to charge higher rates to make up for the hour-long wait.
...
When taxis first began operating, Butler explained, they had to follow certain rules — accepting all customers regardless of trip distance, operating a 24/7 live dispatch, having cameras in vehicles, setting regulated fares, making a certain number of vehicles accessible to disabled people, etc.
But when the luxury providers entered the market, those companies didn’t want to meet all of those requirements because they offered a different type of transportation service — one that did not base fares on distance and time. So, in an effort to avoid being placed under the strict regulations, Butler said they asked to be distinguished from the taxi market.
That’s why the 60-minute and minimum fare rules were put into place. Without these regulations for luxury providers, Butler said that it would create a “competitive disadvantage” for the taxi industry and end up actually limiting choice for citizens.
“If the taxis have all those extra rules and costs, and luxury competitors don’t [have any regulation], it destabilizes the taxi market,” she explained. “You’ll end up not having a taxi available when that elderly person needs to get to the drug store, or when someone comes out of the bar and doesn’t want to drive home. There might not be a taxi that wants to take those fares because of all this weakening in the taxi market.”
When asked if the board is trying to protect the taxi industry, which the city considers an extension of its public transportation system, Butler said no.
“We’re protecting industry segment separation, and ensuring stability and availability of service,” she said. “Protecting consumers is our first priority. If we can find a way to enable Uber, or anyone else who’s providing an option to operate without damaging that industry stability, then we’ll figure that out. We do want to foster competitive, innovative and efficient service.”
In a blog post written nine days after he testified in front of the Board, Uber’s Owens criticized Portland’s current regulations and likened them to government forcing Apple to make songs on iTunes cost a minimum of $3.50 or forcing Netflix to require customers to wait an hour before watching TV episodes.'
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I especially love the dichotomy of the regulatory board talking in terms of ensuring access to services for everyone and the Uber guy talking in terms of not buying songs or watching TV conveniently enough.
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firehosevia Tadeu
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
firehosevia Kellygo
On this Memorial Day long weekend, did you end up working? Entrepreneur Naomi Simson has a nice reminder for the workaholics about striking that work-life balance and getting your priorities in order with a simple quote:
firehosegreat coffee roasters
Roger Williams Park Zoo Welcomes Endangered Tree Kangaroo
Roger Williams Park Zoo in Rhode Island has just announced the birth of a Matschie’s Tree Kangaroo, born in October last year. The female joey, named Holly, is the first tree kangaroo birth at the zoo in over 20 years, and one of only one of three born in captivity in the U.S. last year.
The New Internet Gods Have No Mercy - The Awl (via thisistheverge)
This has already happened. Facebook *throttled* our FB page, which originally saw an average of 65% of our 80,000 fans viewing our articles, to less than 0.01%. Overall, we’ve lost more than 40% of our total website traffic since the page throttling.
(via geeksofdoom)firehose1. The Focused Totality of Psylocke’s Telepathic Powers!
2. The X-Men Playing Baseball
3. Cannonball Explaining That He Is Near Invulnerable When He is “Blastin’”
4. Wolverine and Colossus Execute the Fastball Special!
5. “No Quarter Asked, None Given”
6. “Bang. You Dead!”
7. “Body and Soul”
firehosevia Tadeu
surprise everyone, I write xkcd
firehoseAdult Swim hall of fame
1. Sealab 2021 Seasons 1-3
2. Harvey Birdman Seasons 1-3
3. Space Ghost Coast to Coast
4. The Venture Bros.
5. (tie) The Boondocks, Metalocalypse
4-49. the wait for new Venture Bros. episodes
50. Aqua Teen
then everything else
firehoseYASSSS
Cover to All new X-Men 32 By Sarah Pichelli
this is real!
have a nice weekend :-)
firehoseblah blah blah blah
"To commemorate the latest fundraising milestone, creator Chris Roberts released a piece of concept art"
Over the past three weeks, Star Citizen added another million dollars to its world-record crowdfunding total, bringing the combined backing to $44 million. The anticipated release of the space combat simulator's dogfighting module by the end of this month is likely behind the surge.
Star Citizen's funding reached $43 million on April 28 and stood at $42 million on April 15. It is by far the highest-crowdfunded video game project ever, even considering the recent history of this segment, with more than 450,000 individual backers. Of the $44 million raised, $34 million of it has come since June 2013.
The project still is capable of setting and meeting stretch goal features. Should the project hit $46 million, backers will receive in-game "scanning software" which enables them to find resources in Star Citizen's universe.
To commemorate the latest fundraising milestone, creator Chris Roberts released a piece of concept art for a "negotiation room" (pictured above) where players can cut deals inside their ships.
Arena Commander, the dogfighting module for Star Citizen, is due to launch on Thursday, bringing with it two singleplayer modes. Others will be invited to participate in a multiplayer test. Arena Commander was shown off at PAX East in April.
firehoseWELLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLP
firehoseCarmen Sandiego cosplay autoreshare
also there's a Gambit who looks appropriately skeezy
Day three of Comicpalooza is over, and as usual, I’m feeling inspired to work on my cosplay projects. Attending conventions and seeing the hard work others put into their costumes always makes me want to do the same. It’s smart to take notes or photos to keep track of props and accessories you like or costumes you want to replicate someday. Haven’t been to a convention lately? Look through photos from others – like these – and start brainstorming about your next project. Hopefully these ten cool costumes from Comicpalooza will help get the gears turning:
Loki from Marvel Comics, photo by 8bitgeek
Gender swapped Kraven the Hunter from Marvel Comics
Princess Darth Vader from Star Wars
Carmen Sandiego, photo by @its_me_adrian.
Steampunk Green Lantern from DC Comics
Man-Thing from Marvel Comics
Gambit and Jubilee from Marvel Comics, photo by @thegamefanatics
Princesses Zelda and Hilda from Legend of Zelda
Tinker Bell from Disney’s Peter Pan
Gender swapped Robin, Batman, and Wonder Woman from DC Comics, photo by @its_me_adrian
