firehose

onisushi:

Bonsai Wisteria

alextimmons:

poco-loki:

thecorruptedquietone:

prongsmydeer:

Plot twist: The next companion is a normal girl/boy who only dies once in their lifetime and has no remarkable back story but he thinks they’re wonderful because they are human and the Doctor needs reminding that you don’t need to be a mystery to be remarkable. 

#and the doctor never has to kiss them or sexualize them at all #in fact they are not even attracted to the doctor

so basically we want Donna back

I’m drifting into a world of limitless dimensions!

Not sure what the Nooks did to piss off Isabelle ⊟

But whatever it was, it must have been serious! Maybe Lloid can set up a campaign to fund a new Nookling Junction.

This scene was made possible by Bandai’s Impact Action accessories — check out all the hilarious and awesome setups people made with them here (NSFW ads). Via Muhplastic.

BUY Animal Crossing: New Leaf ($29.84 right now!), upcoming games

vgjunk:

Fushigi no Dungeon 2: Fuurai no Shiren, Super Famicom.

(Chunsoft - 1995) 

• ported to the DS in 2006 and released in the West two years later as Mystery Dungeon: Shiren the Wanderer. 

An anonymous reader writes "As if the automated take downs on Youtube weren't already bad enough, today fans of the popular open source 3D software Blender were greeted by a copyright take down notice for their third open movie, Sintel, despite it being released under a Creative Commons license: 'This video contains content from Sony Pictures Movies & Shows, who has blocked it on copyright grounds.' It is believed that the takedown was a result of Sony Electronics adding Sintel to their official 4k demo pool."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

mucholderthen:

Incredible view of Antarctica with sea ice at its maximum, in the month of September [on September 21, 2005], made from the data taken by the AMSR-E instrument, a device designed to capture temperatures and sea ice concentration onboard NASA’s Aqua satellite.

(source)

If US cities are what they drink—or at least, what they drink at Starbucks—then Portland, Oregon, is an eggnog latte.

Coffee drinkers in Seattle, the birthplace of the global coffee giant, are likelier than anyone else to order their coffee with an extra shot of espresso. Those in San Francisco have an unusual affinity for Starbucks’ soy lattes. Los Angelenos like Frappuccinos more than anyone else—aside from people in San Antonio, Texas. And no city likes white chocolate mochas quite like Memphis does.

Starbucks’ analysts looked at hundreds of millions of transactions at the chain’s coffee shops across the US, and they shared some of the trends they observed with Quartz. Unsurprisingly, the most popular drinks across the board were simple brewed coffee and lattes. Looking solely at volume, every region, state, and city would essentially have the same exact top preferences, with regular coffee by far the most common order, and lattes a distant second.

The country can be divided along the cold-hot axis; the only states that order more iced coffee than hot coffee are Florida, Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, Oklahoma, Hawaii and southern California, which has pushed to secede from the rest of California and form its own state, anyway. This all makes sense. It basically forms a line dividing the country’s south—that is, the hottest parts—from the more northern states. But it also begs the question: What do sweltering states such as Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and Georgia, have against cold coffee?

Other dividing preferences are harder to fathom; for example, the variation in tastes when it comes to the bitterness and strength of coffee. The US’s most populous cities can be split by whether they prefer Starbucks’ new Blonde (i.e. light) roast, their Pike Place (medium), or their Bold (dark) offerings. Draw what conclusions you will from the list, below.

Which Starbucks brew big US cities like best:

Dark: Seattle, Boston, Memphis, and Minneapolis

Medium: New York, San Francisco, Portland, and Phoenix.

Light: Chicago, Philadelphia, Denver, Tampa, San Antonio, and Charlotte

Chili's intends to donate 10% of its customers' checks on April 7th to the National Autism Association, in honor of National Autism Awareness month. The problem? The NAA claims on its website that vaccines can trigger or exacerbate autism in "some, if not many, children." Dammit not this again.

Read more...

Appreciating a Cascadia Cup instant classic.

Soccer games with lots of scoring and bad defending are often contentious affairs among fans. They're lots of fun to most people, but an interesting subset of people likes to use derisive language to describe extremely high-scoring matches, like Saturday's 4-4 draw between the Seattle Sounders and Portland Timbers.

While the game featured some bad defending, it was not a game about bad defending. It was a game about incredible momentum swings and it featured each team's best attacking players turning in their best performances of the season. When it was all over, Seattle and Portland had left the audience transfixed, wondering what the hell they'd just seen.

Act I: Build a bonfire, build a bonfire, put Kenny Cooper on the top

Kenny Cooper was one of the first signings made by the MLS edition of the Portland Timbers. While he contributed eight goals in his only season with the club and scored their first ever MLS goal, he was ultimately disappointing and, due to his high salary, was shipped out. He was booed heavily by the Portland crowd when he was introduced on Saturday. He responded by scoring the game's opening goal.

Why did it have to be Cooper? A goal from anyone but Cooper would have stung less for Portland. Okay, so maybe not Clint Dempsey, but still. Why Cooper? The Timbers Army kept signing, but don't let them tell you that they weren't equal parts angry and worried for the next six minutes. A 1-0 home loss to the Sounders with Cooper scoring the lone goal would have stung just as badly as any loss in the club's history.

Act II: Like a Gatti-Ward fight

The Timbers fought back, thought they had gained the upper hand, then found themselves matched. When the halftime whistle blew, the sides were locked up at 2-2, and the game's status as an MLS regular season classic had already been cemented even though four more goals were yet to come.

If Saturday's game had one major overarching theme, it was that good players did cool things in a way that we haven't seen them pull off recently. This applies most to Diego Chara, the first Designated Player in Timbers history. He was solid in 2013 after turning in a couple of disappointing years previously, but he has never been much of an attacker. Even his most ardent backers were stunned when he hit the back of the net with a laser beam in the 9th minute.

Five minutes later, Diego Valeri scored his first goal of the season. Last year, Valeri was an MVP candidate, recording 10 goals and 13 assists in his first season in the league. So far this season, he's looked like he spent an entire offseason forgetting what made him so great, but he looked every bit the part of the league's most complete attacking midfielder with his excellent narrow-angle strike.

United States men's national team fans with no vested interest in the outcome of the match got a chance to cheer like ECS 10 minutes after that when Clint Dempsey hit the back of the net. They probably felt a bit better about Dempsey's form heading into the World Cup after this. They'd feel even better by the end of the match.

How these teams didn't manage to score more goals between Dempsey's 24th minute effort and the halftime break is anyone's guess. They battled back and fourth, with Seattle's forwards looking capable of putting together another scoring move at any time and Portland's Darlington Nagbe turning DeAndre Yedlin inside-out on multiple occasions.

"There was times when I was a little over-aggressive with him," said Yedlin about marking Nagbe. "He’s a guy that you can’t do that with because he can slip you pretty easily." And Nagbe did slip Yedlin easily, repeatedly. Incredibly, it didn't lead to the Timbers attacker posting a goal or an assist. It's a shame, since it was probably his best performance of the season.

Eventually, Yedlin would stop looking like a turnstile and become a hero for his team, but not before they fell on their faces.

Act III: Punishing mistakes

Here's where the bad defending comes in.

While this game was more about attacking players bringing their best than defenders making mistakes, it would be disingenuous to gloss over the nightmare three-minute spell that Jalil Anibaba turned in for the Seattle Sounders. He can't be called solely responsible for Portland's third and fourth goals simply because that would be disrespectful to Chara and Maximiliano Urruti, but he was bad.

As Kyle Martino mentioned on NBC Sports Network's broadcast of the game, the mark of a quality league is not necessarily whether or not defensive mistakes are made. It's more about whether or not the players on the other end of those mistakes are good enough to capitalize and make defenders pay. Portland's players were, in the 55th and 57th minutes.

Steve Dykes / Getty Images

First, Anibaba's failure to close down. Even though he watched Chara hit a perfect shot past his goalkeeper from the edge of the box earlier in the match and even though he had a fellow defender in support, Anibaba kept backing up as Chara dribbled at him from almost the halfway line. Backing up, backing up, backing up, until Chara was in a perfect spot to beat Stefan Frei for the second time.

Second, the turnover. Anibaba got blasted off the ball by Urruti, who, according to their listed attributes, he outweighs by 20 pounds. Urruti has struggled since his arrival in MLS, but showed everyone why he was so highly touted, curling arguably the best goal of the match around Frei's outstretched hand from 20 yards.

At this point, it looked like the Sounders were sinking without trace. Portland had more shots after Urruti's goal, including one off the crossbar that Yedlin unknowingly cleared off the line with his face. Seattle didn't respond with a shot of any kind until the 77th minute.

Act IV: The comeback

That 77th minute shot came from Obafemi Martins. It was a header from five yards that went over the bar, off a cross by Dempsey. He should have hit the target, but that's not terribly important, at least in the context of how the game concluded. What's important is that this was when the game turned. From this point forward, the Sounders were the better team. No one could have predicted a draw after Martins' miss, but a third Seattle goal to set up an exciting conclusion felt inevitable from that point until Dempsey scored.

In addition to the change in momentum brought on by that move, a pair of substitutions turned the tide of the game as well. Seattle brought true winger Lamar Neagle on for Kenny Cooper, a center forward masquerading as a winger, right after Portland's fourth. The Timbers brought Nagbe off for defensive-minded midfielder Ben Zemanski in the 85th minute, a sensible move for a team that had a two-goal lead with five minutes remaining in regular time.

Neagle helped set up Dempsey's second by turning away from Michael Harrington before flinging a hopeful ball into the box, which Martins helped into Dempsey's path. As is customary in this situation, the viewing public exclaimed that the match just got interesting. When teams trail by two goals with very little time left, they score quite frequently, eliciting this reaction. Usually, they end up not scoring a second, then we forget about it. This was one of those games when that goal actually resulted in the match becoming interesting.

Re-enter Yedlin. When we last left him, he was getting worked by Nagbe. He was about to close out a week that started with him getting a USMNT cap by looking like one of the primary culprits in a loss to a rival, but instead, he's a Cascadia Cup hero. And he was ready to take a dive to become one.

"I thought this was our last chance, so I figured I'd spring for the ball," said Yedlin about the move where he drew a penalty on Zemanski, Porter's seemingly adept defensive substitute. "I'm glad he touched me because I was trying to draw the penalty either way. If he fouled me or didn't foul me, I was going to try to draw the penalty."

Dempsey stepped up to the spot and scored, rescuing a draw and completing a hat trick. Over the winter, American fans were left to wonder if the Dempsey they knew and loved had left them when he left the Premier League for Seattle, but he already has four goals this season. He only has two starts.

Epilogue: The fallout

A lot of great players turned in great performances on Saturday. The Timbers and Sounders have accumulated some of the league's top stars and all of them brought their best, something that's pretty rare. Usually, due to a combination factors, some of a team's attackers are very good and some are not in any given game. In this game, every attacking player was sensational at best and solid at worst.

This game was also interesting because both teams could have very easily started playing conservatively at 1-1 or 2-2, but didn't. They went for it for 90 minutes, and because they have talented players, that resulted in eight goals. We should be thankful.

Ultimately, this game will be remembered for seasons to come and brought up in any discussion of the best MLS matches ever for the foreseeable future. Some people won't like that because they don't enjoy this type of game, but it's very important to remember that these people are fun-suckers.

It's okay to like well-defended, scoreless games, and gush about things like clearances, the positioning of a defensive midfielder and a manager's brilliant tactics. Some of the people who do this are just contrarians, but lots of them are genuine.

Everyone is allowed to enjoy sports in different ways and finding enjoyment in matches that are devoid of scoring chances is a very good thing. But an issue arises when fans take their love for expert defending too far and declare that matches like Saturday's are bad. This was not a bad game, because there is nothing bad about fun, and eight-goal games with two-goal road comebacks are as fun as sports come.

Awful defending or not, this edition of Sounders-Timbers was a gift from the soccer gods.

To get a glimpse at the interior logic of libertarian leaders who work in the technology industry, take a look at Michael Arrington's triumphal tweet from last night: "My point is this. WE'VE WON! After eons gays can now mostly feel free to be themselves, love whoever, with no stigma."

Link, (thanks, stuffthings!)

hodad

Good news, everyone! Now that Gilbert was acquitted, he’s returning to Dartmouth.

To the Editor:

Lessons taught to Dartmouth students by the March 28 verdict in the Parker Gilbert trial:

Male students observe: 1) Sex with a sleeping woman is not rape; she automatically gives consent. 2) When a woman says “no,” she really means “yes,” unless she shouts loudly enough to be heard by a third party “witness.” 3) What happened to Gilbert’s accuser is nothing more than clumsy, messy, “college sex.” Go for it. 4) If a woman expresses fear of pain resulting from any sexual act, she is still consenting to it. 5) If a woman has ever lied, you need not believe her when she says “no” before or during sex. 6) New Hampshire courts convict only 3 percent of men brought to court for rape. That result clearly confirms what all men “know” — that women never tell the truth when “crying rape.”

Female students observe: 1) Expect that Dartmouth men will operate under the above assumptions. Not all men do, but expect and prepare for them to do so. 2) An unlocked dorm room is an open invitation for anyone to enter for any reason. Men can leave their doors unlocked without fear of assault. Women cannot. 3) If you accuse a man of rape, the New Hampshire legal system will fail you 97 percent of the time. 4) Don’t bother saying “no” to sex unless a) you’ve never lied in your life, and b) you have a third-party witness to confirm you said no and to confirm you don’t “like it rough.” 5) If you pursue a court trial, your assailant will watch as you alone testify. If you break down during testimony, the stone-faced jury might “feel sorry” for you, but they’ll feel sorrier for your assailant.

Gretchen Spalding Wetzel

Dartmouth Class of 1977

Cumberland Foreside, Maine

Original Source

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welcome to portland

Skyrim in Real Life: Snowcleaner (by Mr.TVCow)

rightsided:

This is exactly what happened.

bad at the arts: you're not less intelligent, you just have a technical mind

bad at math/science: you must be stupid

Late night television has been dominated by the same old white dudes for decades, but with a top slot opening up, that could all change. Here's who we'd like to see take the chair.

Vice’s latest documentary short, ‘The Giants of Iceland,’ is an examination of the strongman population of Europe’s most sparsely populated country. Iceland, which has a population of 326,000 people, has won eight World’s Strongest Man titles since the competition began in 1977, putting the country second to only the USA, which has won a total of nine. ‘The Giants of Iceland,’ an entry in Vice’s Fringes series, explores the lifestyle and health risks surrounding strongman culture.

The first in-house candidate would be Craig Ferguson of "The Late Late Show," which currently airs at 12:35 a.m. on CBS and is produced by Letterman. But Ferguson's star has dimmed, his show quickly passed by in the ratings by Seth Meyers on NBC, and he is considered an unlikely choice.

You can also bypass the Package feature and just make your own folder next to any InDesign file and call it “Document fonts”. Most people think that this is just a handy way to keep all the document fonts in one place so you can transport them along with the document. But the Document Fonts folder is far more interesting and helpful than that. InDesign automatically loads any font that is in that folder when you open the document! That means in order to use the font, you don’t have to use a font manager or find the fonts folder or anything. You simply open the document and the font is there, ready to use. This is very, very cool.

Mightybell is a social network service for small groups that allows users to create what the company refers to as “smarter” social networks with people users should know rather than ones they already do. Its purpose is to provide an all-in-one social network service for users and organizations that are tired of the currently fragmented social landscape. The service, which has been in private beta since 2012, recently launched to the public and is free for organizations with 100 members or fewer.

via TechCrunch

In the US jobs report this morning, attention was on the slightly disappointing 192,000 increase and the unmoving 6.7% unemployment rate. But the market did notch a milestone of sorts. The Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that the total number of private sector jobs climbed to 116.1 million. That’s higher than the previous peak in January 2008, when there were just shy of 116 million private sector jobs.

Does this mean everything is hunky-dory? No, because millions of extra people have reached working age since that peak. (That’s one reason labor-force participation among working age people is quite low.) Still, it’s ”an important—and overdue—milestone on the path of normalization for both the labor market and, by implication, the economy,” wrote Ward McCarthy, chief financial economist at Wall Street firm Jefferies.

But when it comes to all jobs—not just the private sector—the US is still below the high-water mark set in early 2008, by about 440,000 jobs. With any luck, that’s about two months of job growth.

And the main reason we’re short of the the January 2008 high of 138.4 million jobs is because government employment remains about 550,000 jobs short of what it was back then.