firehose

bettydraperlookingpissed:

BOW DOWN

The Nintendo eShop has launched a hub for indie games, collecting and amassing a wealth of titles for both the Wii U and 3DS. Currently, the hub features Cave Story, Attack of the Friday Monsters, Moon Chronicles, Steamworld Dig, Gunman Clive and...

“This person took meticulous time destroying EVERYTHING that was important to me; everything that I have worked very hard for all my life. He destroyed the plumbing and heating system in the building. He then completely destroyed all my medical equipment, ripping apart, breaking every glass object, bending, stabbing knives into or punching hammer holes into, and then methodically cutting and sticking knife holes into the faces of my friends and family, including pictures of my baby grandson. In my opinion, this is NOT the act of someone who was ‘high’ and didn’t know what he was doing, but rather someone who knew EXACTLY what he was doing.”

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Dr. Susan Cahill’s health clinic, All Families Health Care, was destroyed last week by Zachary Klundt, son of a board member for Hope Pregnancy Ministries, an anti-abortion organization.

Please donate to help Dr. Cahill repair the damage to her clinic and return to providing essential health care to Montana residents.

(via pixyled)

Read 12 remaining paragraphs | Comments

© Robert Doisneau, Au café "Chez Fraisse", Rue de Seine – Paris 1958


© Robert Doisneau, 1950


© Ed Van Der Elsken, Tokyo, 1984


© Garry Winogrand La Guardia Airport, New York, 1968


© Alfa Castaldi, Bar Jamaica di Milano, 1953-1955


© Willy Ronis Nightclub Paris 1952


© Paul Almásy, Couple dans un bar Parisien, 1960

So, you come here often?

thorinthesassmaster:

I did not come to steal from you, O Smaug the Unassessably Wealthy. I merely wanted to gaze upon your magnificence, to see if you were as great as the old tales say. I did not believe them.

tiny-little-dot:

this cat is the opposite of derpy! this cat is slick as hell

tvoom:

Springtime soon?

The Square | Jeff Oftedahl | Via

“The largest square in North Korea, the giant Kim Il Sung Square in central Pyongyang is an expansive urban space used for massive collective exercises, including mass dances, parades, and demonstrations of loyalty to the leaders of the country whose portraits watch over the space,” says Jeff Oftedahl.

“Everything is highly structured in North Korea—one can only go where the guides allow. On this particular day we were visiting a monument overlooking the square, which was a sight to behold. Everything is built to be impressive and to position the leadership over the people, and the people walking under the illuminated photographs really emphasized this point. I zoomed in to fill the frame with the square, showing how tiny the people truly are in comparison.”

okkvlt:

Details at a russian orthodox church in Wiesbaden, Germany. (Credit)

Where…

Photo: A Washington DC Metro strip map that’s just bound to cause confusion…

Here’s an example of an overly designed strip map that’s gone horribly wrong. This photo was taken by Bryan Rodda, who notes that the sign makes it appear that Foggy Bottom-GWU is the name of the main interchange station between the Silver, Blue and Orange Lines in the center of the photo.

Anyone who knows the DC Metro system will know that the station in question is actually Rosslyn, but the map makes this horribly ambiguous. The problem stems from the fact that all the station names are offset from their markers up and along a 45-degree axis. It seems a reasonable thing to do in theory, but what it has actually done is position most of the labels almost directly above the next station marker to the right, where it can reasonably be confused as belonging to that marker.

Good design should not create confusion or make things unnecessarily ambiguous for the end user – it should always simplify and clarify: something this map absolutely fails to do.

(Source: Bryan Rodda/Twitter)

A Study in Scarlet

Top: Title Page of (an original) Beeton’s Christmas Annual featuring A Study in Scarlet.

Bottom: First page of A Study in Scarlet, as featured in Beeton’s Christmas Annual

Courtesy of U.M Library

theorlandojones:

Rare still from the original cut of the Star Trek: TOS Episode The Trouble w/ Trollando (later retitled The Trouble w/ Tribbles) 

…I’m debating whether or not to show thus to David. :)

The foreign ministry in Kiev denounced an "invasion" by Russia's forces into its mainland, when 80 Russian troops backed by four helicopter gunships and armoured vehicles seized the gas pumping station near the village of Strilkove.

There once was a film called "Life Is Beautiful" about Nelly's "Hot In Herre" being looped on a radio station for 17 straight hours. Now, that movie has come to life.

How one British hog, shot dead in the San Juan Islands after rooting up an American's tubers, nearly caused international war between the U.S. and the UK in the Pacific Northwest.

For the select few, playing with LEGO bricks has become more than a mere hobby: the best of the best have made a career out of it. But how much can you expect to earn as a LEGO maestro, and what exactly does the job entail?

	Courtney shared this story from The ToastThe Toast:
	"IS THIS CORRECT? they asked. HAS A MASSIVELY ROTUND MAN WITH CHILD FEET REQUESTED OUR SERVICES, TRULY? Yes, Mr. Bittner, yes, he has." DELIGHTFUL

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When I was in seventh grade I got cast as a chorus nun in our middle school production of The Sound of Music. In the cast with me was an eighth grade boy, Wayne, playing Franz, the Von Trapp’s butler. He was in a bowtie and I was in a habit, but backstage, out of costume in rehearsals, we were talking about different roles for the future: we were going to go to prom in drag.

I think in seventh grade I’d decided I was a lesbian. I bounced around a lot in terms of labels in those tween years, though the term ‘tween’ had not been scientifically created yet. At some point amidst seeing Annie Lennox in the Sweet Dreams video at age seven and seeing softcore porn for the first time around age eleven I’d realized that I thought girls were sexy and I also thought suits might be nice to wear. Wayne was already ragingly gay at age thirteen. We hit it off great and he taught the girl playing Elsa Schmidt how to walk in heels.

These days I like to define my gender and sexual orientation as CONFUSER. I wear a lot of baseball shirts and boxer briefs, and also red lipstick and pearl earrings. These days Wayne is named Sara, and is a professional drag performer and entertainer. Everyone meets their own dreams in their own ways.

A note on pronouns, since that is a very pertinent subject: I asked Sara her preference for how I tell this story, and the direct quote from her was “I have no problem being referred to as ‘he’ back when I was a he. LoL.” It’s a tricky, sticky subject, but when it comes to drag and gender performance, sometimes hes are hes, hes are shes, shes are hes, and Wayne was a boy in a dress.

I was in seventh grade, and Wayne was in eighth grade. Wayne had spent a lot of time getting bumped around in the foster system, and so it wasn’t clear where he’d be in the next year, when he’d be going in to high school. We made an oath, though, that come the last years of high school, we’d both be in drag on prom night, no matter what.

Wayne moved away from Nashville after middle school, but we stayed in touch. We wrote letters to each other. Yes! Actual, physical, pen and paper letters to each other. In the mail, with stamps! It was the nineties. Things were hard back then. We wrote each other about plans to write fantasy novels together, he sent me drawings of elven characters we’d made up, and there wasn’t much of any talk about gender at all.

At some point Wayne read the Last Herald Mage trilogy by Mercedes Lackey, that wonderful stupid book series about tragic beautiful gay wizards with magic soul ponies, and decided his new name was going to be Vanyel Sean Fairchild. And at the same time, he was starting to do drag in earnest, and took the name Butterfly for his queen persona. Me? Christ, I was confused.

I mean, think about 1996. Jeffreyhad come out in 1995, and while there was a transgender character in that movie, it was a joke that she was a woman in a man’s body who was also a lesbian. By high school I’d figured out that liking girls didn’t mean I couldn’t also like boys, but I also figured that liking boys meant I obviously couldn’t want to bea boy. My whole conception that you could even start out a girl and become a boy later was vague at best; mostly I just wanted to be Annie Lennox. Hell, I mostly still just want to be Annie Lennox.

Here’s how I learned that gender identity and sexual identity were not connected: I found a precious mid-90s Nine Inch Nails fansite of someone deeply in love with Trent Reznor. Said person was a transman (although I did not know this term at the time) and wrote in detail about his erotic fantasies along the downward spiral. I remember reading this site, red text on a black background, and having my little confused teen mind blown. You could be a girl who wanted to be a boy and also like boys? Holy shit. I include this story because I find it a hilarious way to realize the axis of gender and sexuality.

So, I started wearing the suit my brother had worn to all his friends bar mitzvahs when he was thirteen. I’d shaved my head at the end of eighth grade, so my hair was short. I put an Ace bandage around my boobs, got my suit and tie on, and was the most dapper little gent that the Sbarro in the mall had ever seen. I told my best friend I thought I might want to be called Lucas. I still wrote letters to Vanyel.

Somewhere in there, we lost touch, though. I called myself variously a girl or a boy, straight or bi. I went to my junior prom as a totally sexy goth girl with my best friend Stephen as my date, as my boyfriend had dumped me three weeks previous. Wayne or Vanyel — I can’t remember which he preferred at the time — he went as the date of another friend of mine, in a tux, but he and I danced dramatically all night to hot late 90s hits. I remember for one song we’d gathered a small crowd around us in a circle watching us go — probably watching himgo, to be honest — and when we ended in a dramatic vogue-y pose, there was a healthy smattering of applause. What could cement a need in two dramatic children more to create a huge splash next year than that?

By the next year, it didn’t seem like the plan would come together. Do you guys even remember how hard it was to keep track of people in the nineties? Right now if I wanted to contact my prom date I could tweet, email, text, message her on Facebook, or, uh, call her; in 1999 I didn’t even have Vanyel’s phone number, let alone an aol.com email address. Somehow, somehow! though (I think involving my friend Bob, who had previously been historically entirely straight before meeting Vanyel at one of my parties, falling head over heels, and beginning a relationship with him that lasted almost ten years), we connected again with perilously short time before prom. Operation drag prom was on! System Butterfly ENGAGED.

My parents were nothing but supportive, but my parents have always been nothing but supportive, perhaps even in times when they should have gone ‘no, stop doing that, that is a bad idea.’ My mom took me to the Bittner’s tuxedo rental place in the mall and got me measured up for my tux. I picked a very long jacket that would cover my big ass, though in retrospect I should have gone with something else, since while it hid my curves, it only emphasized the fact that I’m but five foot two. With it I got a very dashing brocade vest and matching bowtie (clip-on), a pair of tuxedo pants (size 40-30), and a pair of very shiny dress shoes (men’s size 4.) The clerk dealt with the situation with aplomb, since I’m sure every prom season brought at least a few girls in tuxes to the store, but my rental slip involved a lot of question marks scrawled over it next to the particulars of the pants and shoe sizes. IS THIS CORRECT? they asked. HAS A MASSIVELY ROTUND MAN WITH CHILD FEET REQUESTED OUR SERVICES, TRULY? Yes, Mr. Bittner, yes, he has.

Read more My Wonderful Drag Prom at The Toast.

Courtney shared this story from Feminist Ideals from a Fiesty Feline.

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bajo-el-mar:

Reading about abusive men and the way they think. Very unsettling and an incredible book so far. Here are my very professional notes.

	Courtney shared this story from People of Color in European Art History:
	repeating Scott: Yep.

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“A white student may feel discomfort when it’s pointed out to him how he has benefited from structural racism, but to compare that discomfort to discrimination is a false equivalency. Hurt feelings hurt, but it is not oppression. But hurt feelings can be bad for business. And a lot of powerful people think colleges should act more like businesses. When they do, students act more like customers. And our likely customers might not be amicable to discussions about structural racism. If the customer is always right, then the majority share of customers is more right than the minority.”

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Minneapolis professor Shannon Gibney: Reprimanded for talking about racism. (via sociolab)

Capitalism, as a system of oppression, is dependent and interlinked with White Supremacy. We have to overthrow both systems if we want liberation.

(via stoicmeditations)

submitted by JanetEastman [link] [comment]

submitted by Gubmint_Twerker
[link] [73 comments]

submitted by shriver
[link] [29 comments]

MUTHA. FUCKIN. CLOYSTER.
GET
YO
BITCH
ASS 
OUT
HERE
AND SAY. IT. TO. MAH. FAYCE.

ANIMATED: Tulsa bench crazydancing

But don’t be fooled. The political momentum for 20-week bans isn’t actually about compromising, or about adhering to a specific deadline that will prevent fetuses from feeling pain. It’s really about finding an initial foothold to chip away at Roe v. Wade, and then continuing to move the goal posts. It’s the first step in a larger strategy to cut off legal abortion access altogether, cloaked under the guise of a “moderate” policy.

For evidence, look no further than what’s currently going on in Mississippi. Lawmakers there are trying to pass a 20-week ban — but this week, the Senate made a last-minute change that actually transforms the bill into a more restrictive ban.

Original Source

An anonymous reader writes "Smithsonian Magazine has an article about one of the non-obvious effects of the Chernobyl nuclear meltdown: dead organisms are not decomposing correctly. 'According to a new study (abstract) published in Oecologia, decomposers—organisms such as microbes, fungi and some types of insects that drive the process of decay—have also suffered from the contamination. These creatures are responsible for an essential component of any ecosystem: recycling organic matter back into the soil. Issues with such a basic-level process, the authors of the study think, could have compounding effects for the entire ecosystem.' The scientists took bags of fallen leaves to various areas around Chernobyl and found that locations with more radiation caused the leaves to retain more than half of their original weight after almost a year. They're now beginning to worry that almost three decades of dead brush buildup is contributing to the area's fire risk, and a large fire could distribute radioactive material beyond Chernobyl's exclusion zone."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Last week a former Royal Marine who is the boyfriend of the model Kelly Brooks crashed into a bus stop while driving a van carrying a load of dead badgers.

I mention this solely to remind you that linguists are not kidding when they say (as they often do in introductory lectures) that your command of English enables you to understand sentences that have never occurred before in the entire history of the human species.

You don't just understand the meanings of things people have already successfully and meaningfully used in the past (I'd like to speak to the manager; Do you come here often?; I'm afraid I can't help you with that; Take your hand off my leg; Could you tell me the time?; I'll have a ham and swiss on rye; and so on); you understand things you've never heard before — and can hardly believe even after you've heard them. (See this press report for confirmation of the story.)