firehose

“Roses are red / Gender is performative / Mass-market romance / Is heteronormative”

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Twitter / sfgnyc: Roses are red / Gender is … (via realhousewives)

OH MY GOSH THEY RHYMED SOMETHING WITH HETERONORMATIVE!!!

(via ajax-daughter-of-telamon)

lowproductionvalue:

moon-cunt:

hellnoracistdrag:

This video was submitted anonymously by a Pittsburgh queer. Shout out to the Pittsburghers who have been fighting this battle for years.

This video shows Sharon Needles/Aaron Coady dressed in her attempt to mimic a geisha saying that she’s dressed up “somewhat like their people” and that she intends to make fun of a Chinese delivery driver. Luckily, the driver is white, which Sharon notes by saying, “Chinese people are late. Good thing you’re white.”

But yea, Aaron’s totally an ally and transgressive and blah blah vomit.

aaaaaahahahaha

no, Sharon Needles. absolutely not.

Drag is great and all but so many (white) queens pull racist shit like this all the time. There’s a queen at Crews and Tangos named Daytona Bitch who once came onstage wearing a burqa, and when she spun around you could see she had fake dynamite taped under it.

Unnecessary.  

Daredevls Fred Fugen and Vince Reffet broke the world record for the highest BASE jump earlier this week by flinging themselves off the top of the 2,717-feet tall Burj Khalifa skyscraper in Dubai. The jump was sponsored by the skydiving resort Skydive Dubai, which constructed a small platform at the top of the building in order to make the jump possible. The gentleman jump together and curve around the building like flying squirrels, trailing red plumes behind them for effect.

People have jumped before from the Burj Khalifa, the tallest building in the world, but this is the first time anyone's done it from the very top.

The feature, which Google is rolling out to the web version of Maps today, generally stays out of the way unless you want to go back in time. If you’re viewing a location with earlier recorded images, there’s now an hourglass and a slider in the top left of the screen that shows you the month and year. Dial it back and it sweeps to that copy stored on Google’s servers, almost as if you were clicking on a location just up the road.

The result is a kind of time warp that can show you months' and years' worth of human ingenuity, and just as quickly show it erased following a disaster or new construction project. With Street View now recording more than 6 million miles across 55 countries, there are a lot of those.

"We have built this very complicated graph of imagery through time and space," says Luc Vincent, the director of engineering for Street View. He says the option to go back and forth through time was the most requested by Google Maps users, who have been hounding the company to add it for years. This was primarily for simple things, like seeing older images of their house, school, or neighborhood. "People would say, ‘My house, can you please preserve it? Because I like it this way,’" Vincent told The Verge. "We can show you everything now."

Google is creating so much data, in fact, Vincent says the current iteration of Time Machine is intentionally dialing back what people see. The smallest interval of time you can jump to is a month, even if Google’s gone through and captured Street View recordings more frequently. That’s not a normal occurrence for most places, Vincent says, but there are places like Google’s campus, and major cities where Street View cars are recording more than once a month, sometimes even several times a week.

Vincent says the company’s using an algorithm designed to pick the best imagery from the data that’s collected each month. It goes through the images the company has captured and weeds out sets that tend to have a lot of motion blur, or that have particularly bad weather.

But expanding the recordings to what Vincent refers to as "slices" has opened up new avenues for the company to show off Street View imagery it once kept to itself. That includes roads with shoulders heaped with snow, drenched dark forests, or simply alternate views of familiar places. "We can show you Times Square at night," Vincent says, a first for the service that overwhelmingly prefers clear blue skies. "When we chose the image, the freshest imagery is typically the best … now you don’t have to make a choice."

One wrinkle in all this is that the physical location of roads changes over time, either by human interaction or mother nature. In the case of the movement from the 9.0 earthquake, for instance, roads and buildings that were in one place when Google was first there, were at new GPS coordinates when they went through again. That’s been preserved in Time Machine, Vincent says.

"It’s not a bug; after the earthquake, the ground shifted by 3 meters. Everything else is from the same geo-coordinates," Vincent says. "It was the same thing with Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans."

Vincent and company hope Time Machine will be more than just a way to gawk at before and after photos of disasters, and perhaps become a tool for planning travel. They imagine people using it when planning a vacation to somewhere they’ve never been in order to see what it looks like during that particular time of year.

Google won’t initially offer Time Machine for indoor imagery of buildings, or on trails, something it’s captured using its special Trekker backpack. It also won’t be available from the get-go on mobile devices. Vincent made no promises on timing short of saying that the company was working on it. With that said, Street View on the go is often meant as a way to get your bearings on what’s around you now, not years ago. But that behavior, just like images of the world Google is capturing, might ultimately change.

"We’ve been driving 3D cars for more than seven years," Vincent says. "It was totally different from what it is now."

An update headed to the PC version of Minecraft will allow players to create their own terrain down to the grittiest of details, according to a video recently shared by Team Mojang on YouTube.

The video above demonstrates the terrain creation feature, which will hit with Minecraft update 1.8. The feature includes 16 different sliders for players to tinker with when building their environment — including biome depth, height and weight as well as the field's depth of noise. Players can use these sliders to play with these variables or input values directly, giving absolute control to creators in terms of how structures will be generated.

According to the YouTube description, Mojang will provide seven pre-set terrain options in the update that they feel players will find "interesting," serving as jumping-off points for creating their own environments. These pre-sets include a world made of almost entirely water and a set of floating islands.

Minecraft update 1.8 is currently slated to launch sometime in May.

Science-fiction adventure hero Flash Gordon may be heading back to the big screen for the first time in decades. According to The Hollywood Reporter, Twentieth Century Fox has picked up the rights to Flash Gordon and is having writers behind the script for Star Trek 3, J.D. Payne and Patrick McKay, create a screenplay for the comic book series' new adaptation. The film's producer will reportedly be John Davis — who previously was a producer on Predator and, more recently, Chronicle. Bourne Ultimatum writer George Nolfi reportedly wrote the film's treatment for Payne and McKay to work off of.

There's no word on how closely the film will follow Gordon's traditional story, which has him haplessly end up on an alien planet battling its oppressive ruler. The Reporter says various studios have been trying to create a new Flash Gordon series for some time now, but this one appears to have the pieces in place that should keep it moving. In particular, it reports that Davis worked has been working to secure the rights for over a year, so the team involved clearly has the interest.

Apple's "OS X Beta Seed Program" is offering an early build of the OS X 10.9.3 update to anyone with an Apple ID who signs up.

Apple

Apple does most of its hardware and software development behind closed doors, rarely giving public previews or commenting on rumors before it's ready to make an announcement. Today, the company made one small step in the other direction with the OS X Beta Seed Program, through which anyone with an Apple ID and a Mac can download and run the latest developer build of OS X 10.9.3.

Apple usually only offers these betas to limited test audiences or to registered Apple developers. It costs $99 a year to stay registered as an OS X developer (and another $99 a year if you want to get iOS software, too). Apple wouldn't tell us whether the Beta Seed program would extend to other OS X or iOS updates, or if major software releases like new iOS or OS X versions would also be offered this way, but it seems clear that the company wants to expand its pool of OS X testers beyond its developer audience.

Signing up for the program.

Sign up for the program with your Apple ID and you'll be asked to agree to a non-disclosure agreement similar to the one that (theoretically) keeps developers from writing about or publicizing new fixes and features before they're released. You'll then download and install a small package to enable the beta updates, at which point OS X 10.9.3 and iTunes 11.1.6 builds can be downloaded through Software Update as they normally would.

xkit-extension:

I’m really sorry about the lack of updates lately. New features and bug fixes will be made available as soon as I have some free time.

Also, due to an error on my part, I’ve lost asks sent to this blog more than 5 days ago (I accidentally cleaned the whole inbox instead of a side-blog) so if you’ve sent me an ask and did not receive a reply, I would appreciate it if you can send it back if the problem still continues, and I will be replying as soon as possible. I’m terribly sorry about this, and thank you for your patience and understanding.

1) I always tell people who say they don’t “get” Tumblr, “oh, were you not using XKit? yeahhhh…you weren’t actually on Tumblr yet.” It’s a common mistake, totally understandable.

2) The customer service from the XKit Guy will spoil you and shame every company with an actual customer service department

3) As soon as he says he wants a job, I am going to do everything I can to try to get this kid a job, because jeez mccreez.