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Cassandra is a long-serving member of the Seekers of Truth. The quiet order both protects and polices the Chantry, and is granted ultimate authority in its investigations. Feared by everyone from the lowliest mage apprentice to the Templar leadership, all are subject to the righteous wrath of the Seekers. Their judgment is final. (x)
And here’s a closer look at Cassandra’s in-game model (in one of her outfits, anyhow). I really like where this ended up, to be perfectly honest.
firehosewhaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaat
The Metroid Mod is an impressive recreation of Nintendo's NES classic within punishing roguelike, Spelunky. The mod isn't out yet, but that can't stop you from watching Samus Aran explore Zebes-inspired caverns and avoid giant Metroids, speedy Skrees...
firehoselearn 2 linebreaks, BlorgBlag(TM)
This thing is bombing; $400 is the bottom tier, plus airfare and lodging (the event isn't being held at a hotel that takes overnight guests, so add transit to that as well) to go to LA to get into an event _for small businesses_.
Soak that shit in. Who has money to spare to go to LA to talk about what they already talk about with each other on the internet? Small businesses! Of COURSE!
Oh wait, the internet, right. It costs $100 just to get access to _videos_ of the talks; only 29 backers, so there's $2,900.
$23,000 of the $29,190 raised represents just 58 tickets sold. 88% of the money is from the fewer than 100 people who want the content, with 5 days to go, and they're still over $90,000 short.
They have to sell _225 $400 tickets_ or _900 $100 streaming tickets_ in five days just to minimally fund this. And that's with already not-insignificant press coverage, TopatoCo, Cards Against Humanity, and The Onion all shilling on this thing's behalf.
Good luck with that, but hoo boy. I am not surprised.
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| This thing is bombing; $400 is the bottom tier, plus airfare and lodging (the event isn't being held at a hotel that takes overnight guests, so add transit to that as well) to go to LA to get into an event _for small businesses_. Soak that shit in. Who has money to spare to go to LA to talk about what they already talk about with each other on the internet? Small businesses! Of COURSE! Oh wait, the internet, right. It costs $100 just to get access to _videos_ of the talks; only 29 backers, so there's $2,900. $23,000 of the $29,190 raised represents just 58 tickets sold. $25.9k of the $29.2k raised--88% of the money--is from the fewer than 100 people who want the content, with 5 days to go, and they're still over $90,000 short. They have to sell _225 $400 tickets_ or _900 $100 streaming tickets_ just to minimally fund this. And that's with not-insignificant press coverage, TopatoCo, Cards Against Humanity, and The Onion all shilling on this thing's behalf. Good luck with that, but hoo boy. I am not surprised. |
firehoseblog is spoilers
617 area code, hmm, kashira, kashira
firehosevia Russian Sledges
Comparative Media Studies, MIT
Read Thesis: tinyurl.com/pjnma9x
The mouse military faces its greatest foe: the cat giant, which has broken free from its shackles and is ready to wreak havoc on the rodent cities. What kind of story will you write about the battle between these eternal enemies?
    
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Pop culture can be as forbidding as it is inviting, particularly in areas that invite geeky obsession: The more devotion a genre or series or subculture inspires, the easier it is for the uninitiated to feel like they’re on the outside looking in. But geeks aren’t born; they’re made. And sometimes it only takes the right starting point to bring newbies into various intimidatingly vast obsessions. Gateways To Geekery is our regular attempt to help those who want to be enthralled, but aren’t sure where to start. Want advice? Suggest future Gateways To Geekery topics by emailing gateways@theonion.com.
Geek obsession: Devo
Why it’s daunting: Clever, confounding, and able to collaborate with everyone from Brian Eno to Neil Young, Devo has never been easy to parse. Yet the band’s music has never been less than accessible and catchy—even if, when it burst ...
Many of his creations reduced the need to send physical mail, but late Apple founder Steve Jobs will still get a fitting tribute from the US Postal Service: his likeness will appear on a postage stamp beginning in 2015, according to a document obtained by The Washington Post. Other deceased icons receiving their own stamps that year include Elvis Presley and famed Tonight Show host Johnny Carson. Since 1957, US postage stamp subjects have been selected by an advisory committee of ordinary citizens, who look for suggestions that are "contemporary, timely, relevant, interesting and educational." Any member of the public can nominate someone to appear on a postage stamp, and the committee reviews all suggestions. Clearly, the late Apple CEO fit the bill.
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Kraft
As the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles come back into the public eye with the second season of their CG animated Nickelodeon series and this summer’s Michael Bay-produced live action movie, so too must Vanilla Ice. It is simply the way of things.
Ice is indeed back with an invention that isn’t entirely brand new, but it may grab a hold of you tightly. It’s a Kraft Macaroni and Cheese commercial in which Ice, who has apparently swallowed his pride and taken a job as a stocker at a supermarket, sings “Ninja Rap” with an annoyed kid’s mom. Check out the video after the jump.
Ice isn’t actually working at a grocery store, of course. He’s honestly having a great month. On Saturday, he’ll be headlining a Dallas concert with Coolio funded by a Ninja Turtles superfan’s $35,000 Kickstarter. Now to watch and see if he makes the new movie’s soundtrack…
Religious Anti-Ninja Turtle Propaganda From The '80s
[Via Uproxx]
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Canonical has come up with a replacement for the global menu bar, one of the most notable features of Ubuntu's Unity desktop and also one of its most problematic.The global menu bar places application menus at the top of a user's screen rather than within the application itself.
"Despite displaying the menu contents outside of the window, the menus are still window-specific," we noted in a review of Ubuntu 12.04 in May 2012. "By design, the global menu bar displays the menu of the focused window. This proves awkward in some applications with dialogs and multiple windows."
The intent of moving application-specific menus into the global menu bar was to leave more room for content in applications. But even for people who liked the design, it has grown more problematic over time with the proliferation of bigger monitors, according to Canonical employee Marco Trevisan. The Ubuntu desktop team is bringing the application windows back into the application windows themselves for the 14.04 release in April this year, Trevisan wrote today.
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Sometimes Classic Who is good, sometimes Classic Who is bad, sometimes it transcends good and bad and becomes a thing of beauty beyond our comprehension.
No, no. These gifs don’t do the scene justice.
Here’s the actual clip: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eRUqJSCOyZ4
firehosehey check out these photos of me and saucie on vacation
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| TW: tea-infused whisky |
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| aaaaaaaaaaaaaAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA |
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Adding to a post-30 Rock movie career that has mostly found her playing variations on other women who humorously struggle to balance their personal and professional lives, Tina Fey will is set to do that again—this time while also trying to balance not being killed in an explosion. Fey is set to produce and star in The Taliban Shuffle, an adaptation of journalist Kim Barker’s darkly comic memoir about her days as an embedded reporter in Afghanistan and Pakistan, and—as Liz Lemon once had for Tracy and Jenna—the strange affection she developed for those two troublemaking, rapscallion nations.
Fey’s 30 Rock collaborators Lorne Michaels and Robert Carlock will co-produce and write the script, respectively, a team that makes even more sense when you consider that the New York Times review of Barker’s book said she “depicts herself as a sort of Tina Fey character,” making this character ...
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As a college student, co-founder Justin Mateen perfected a system of party promotion. He would strike an agreement with a club to ensure a minimum of drink sales. He would hire a performer. Then he would enlist representatives from the fraternities and sororities of USC and UCLA to recruit people, promising a free ticket for every ten tickets sold from their houses and a monetary prize if they brought one hundred partygoers. He took a cut of sales—the more money the bar made, the bigger his cut. It was a good little gig until his parents began to bother him about it: “We don't want you to be a party thrower,” they said.
But it helped, when Sean and Justin started Tinder, that Justin knew how to populate a party. They had disdain for traditional advertising; they wanted a new challenge. He wanted the app to catch on with the most difficult group of people—college students too young and socially active to “need” online dating, people who saw it as a stigmatized practice. He wanted people to join Tinder not because they saw an ad on Facebook but because they recognized its social value.
So Justin mined his contacts for models and sorority girls. Whitney Wolfe, Tinder's vice president of marketing, remembers going to the Apple store and telling the guy behind the counter about Tinder and watching his eyes pop out as he began swiping through; there may have been only 200 people, she remembers, “but they were 200 of the prettiest girls you've ever seen.”
In the beginning, Justin ran individual campaigns to encourage people to sign up. He would text each person personally. He targeted what he called “social influencers,” avoiding the “awkward crowd” of people probably most in need of a new way to make friends. Then he hit USC, enlisting the help of his younger brother and sister, who were students there. He launched Tinder on campus with a party for 300 USC students at his parents' house.
He shows me a photo of it from Instagram: a pool in the sunshine, shirtless partygoers, lanterns, an inflatable slide. To his mother's chagrin, he hung a giant Tinder banner from the roof. “That was sixty-two weeks ago,” he says, using Instagram's preferred metric of time. A year and ten weeks after the pool party, the company claims to have made a half billion matches and registers 450 million swipes a day.
Inspired in part by the path of Facebook, which launched first at elite colleges, Justin turned not just to the Ivy League but to schools known for their good parties. After seeding USC, Justin and Whitney traveled to schools like SMU in Dallas. Whitney might stand on a table in a fraternity and announce that there were 200 hot sorority girls on the app waiting for the men to sign up, then run to the sorority and tell them the reverse. They left a trail of stickers behind them—in the best campus bars, in the most exclusive nightclubs.
“I was in a sorority, so I knew how to get into the brains of sorority girls,” says Whitney, who is now 24. “Justin knew how to get into the brains and the pants of sorority girls.”
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'Ben was still supporting Rebecca’s back when Sgt. Espinoza and Officer Gabriel grabbed him from behind without warning, putting him in an arm lock and jerked him backwards over the pavement. They told him sternly that he had to leave now that trained medical professionals had arrived, implying that he was interfering and justifying their violent actions. The officers dragged him across the sidewalk, propping him against the building. Rebecca was still holding Ben’s cellphone when she lost his support. “Where are they taking him?” she asked perplexedly.
It all happened within 5 minutes of the police’s arrival. The sirens and emergency vehicles, the sudden arrival of over half a dozen uniformed personnel, two of whom had grabbed my friend, transformed an intimate street scene into something chaotic. Officer Kaur shouted at me to cross the street. It was very sudden and I was, admittedly, in shock. I stammered that I intended to head home, but that my friend was over there. I pointed at Ben against the wall, and said I’d like to take him home with me.
Without warning, I was shoved from behind by Officer Gerrans and then collectively tackled by Officers Gerrans, Kaur and Andreotti. As they took me to the ground, one of the officers kneed me in the right temple. On the pavement, I begged them to watch out for my recently broken right elbow. Knees on my back and neck pinned me to the ground. I was cuffed and left face down.'
firehoseall carriers suck forever
Comcast's purchase of Time Warner Cable is far from complete, but we're already starting to see some potential fallout from the deal. Netflix has been working with Time Warner Cable to get its app installed on the cable provider's set-top boxes, but now Bloomberg is reporting that the Comcast deal has put those efforts on hold. Comcast is expected to complete its purchase before Netflix and TWC are able to complete an agreement to distribute the Netflix app — and Comcast isn't nearly as interested in adding Netflix to its boxes as TWC appeared to be.
Instead, Comcast is said to be more focused on its own on-demand video efforts, including the company's new video download store. Comcast recently took the somewhat unexpected tactic of launching a store from which its customers could purchase movies instead of just renting them, putting it squarely in competition with the likes of iTunes and Amazon. The store had a fairly successful launch by Comcast's estimation (and in one very limited metric), so it's not surprising to see Comcast move to focus on its own platform rather than giving customer access to Netflix.
Michael K. Williams talks about an emotional moment on the set of ‘12 Years a Slave’, moving Arsenio Hall to tears.
firehosegrose doom put ur clothes on grose grose
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The correct order to refer to the two is Rocksteady and Bebop, not Bebop and Rocksteady.[citation needed]
A reverse harpy. My god.
Pffffffffflol
Oh god. My sides. Send help.
What in the hell.
firehosevia THANKGODYOUREHERE
The next time you're passing through Newark airport, look up and smile. The airport's new super-efficient LED light fixtures are also embedded with cameras and sensors—and they're part of a growing market for surveillance technology that is built into other, everyday systems.
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firehosevia THANKGODYOUREHERE: "this is what life is all about"
If you've seen Ultraman, you probably know these characters. Chances are, though, you've never seen them like this.
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A day after its release from jail, Pussy Riot tried to stage its punk protest today in Sochi, only to be met by whip-wielding police officers. Six group members—including the recently freed Nadya Tolokonnikova and Masha Alyokhina—donned the collective’s signature ski masks and were about to launch into “Putin Will Teach You To Love The Motherland,” when at least 10 Cossack militiamen intervened. The Cossacks pulled the masks from the women’s heads, used pepper spray, and beat Tolokonnikova with a whip as she lay on the ground. Alyokina has since Tweeted photos of the group’s injuries, including a photo of Tolokonnikova in what looks to be a hospital bed. There’s also video of the whole thing below that is incredibly hard to watch.
Police eventually arrived to calm the scene, and no arrests were made.
firehoselol of course his last name is a letter swap away from "fedora"
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Sean P. Fodera is a science fiction writer who works in the publishing industry. He's angry.
He started out angry over ongoing upheaval in the science fiction and fantasy literature community. That upheaval is mirrored in the gaming community and skeptic community and other communities with devoted and vocal fanbases. It's a conflict between two groups: a group that thinks the communities have a problem with racism, sexism, and harassment and should take steps to address it, and a group that thinks that the first group is engaged in free-speech-suppressing political correctness and should be resisted. A full description of the dispute would be too lengthy for this post.1
The Daily Dot published a post about this ongoing dispute, and in the course of doing so quoted and linked to some of the angrier things that Fodera said about Mary Robinette Kowal, a science fiction author and officer of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America. Kowal has spoken out against harassment in the science fiction and fantasy literature community, and SFWA is currently a locus of controversy about such allegations and the official reactions to them. In forum threads on SFF.net, Fodera complained at rather tedious length about Kowal, called her things like "incompetent," said that she agitated him in a manner he compared to how dogs agitate him, and sneered that she was a hypocrite for complaining about sexism given how she sometimes dresses:
I find it very funny and ironic that she would jump on this bandwagon. For a long time, her website featured an array of photos of her in a diaphanous white outfit, posing on a beach. No metal bikinis or such, but they were not innocuous writer headshots either. One of them, with her recumbent on the sand with legs exposed, made her somewhat attractive. I also recall she's fond of wearing tight-fitting gowns and plunging necklines when she attends cons and award ceremonies.
I'll have to add "phony" to "incompetent" and "arrogant" in the mental tags I've assigned her.
Girls give up the right to complain about sexism unless they dress conservatively. It is known.
Anyway, if Fodera was angry before, this coverage made him really angry. How dare someone quote him and link to the full quotes! He penned this threat:
I will note that since I now have the name of the writer, and I can prove that the quotes were edited to change their meaning, I have a very good case for a libel suit. I suppose no one noted that I work in the legal profession within the publishing industry, and have taught college courses on the subject.
BTW, as of now, it looks like the article was "shared" 1,200 times already. That makes each of those sharers a part to the libel, and makes each of them equally culpable in the eyes of the law. I'll speak to my attorney first thing tomorrow.
The Streisand Effect predictably ensued. Multiple people — author John Scalzi, for instance — wrote about Fodera's bumptious legal threat, and the Daily Dot article probably got several orders of magnitude more traffic than it otherwise would have.
Though Fodera works "in the legal profession" and has "taught college courses," he does not appear to have a firm grasp of the subject matter.
First, Fodera thinks that the Daily Dot article is defamatory. It isn't. The article quotes things he wrote on the internet. It links to his original text so that the readers can judge for themselves. Fodera seems to think that the Dot article wrongly paraphrases or selectively quotes him. That's a tendentious and unpersuasive reading. Take, for instance, how the Dot quoted and paraphrased him in his dog analogy:
He calls Kowal, who is a Hugo-award-winning author, "an unperson… no one you should have heard of." Then he goes on to compare her to an aggressive dog:
“Oh, I know she has no power over me. Still, I get agitated when I think about her. There was a lot of good I could have done for SFWA, and she was a primary factor in my not being able to do it… In a way, it's like my reaction to dogs… My brain kept saying 'it's a service dog; they're well-trained; he won't hurt you,' but my body wanted nothing more than to dump my bowels and flee…”
But the Dot directly links to Fodera's own words. The Dot description and partial quote is fair and accurate. And the readers can determine that for themselves by following the link.
Is it possible for misquoting someone to constitute defamation? Yes. But the bar is set very high. In Masson v. New Yorker Magazine, the United States Supreme Court examined whether fabricating quotes and attributing them to an interviewee could be defamatory. The court applied the familiar "gist" or "sting" doctrine, saying that misquotes are only "false" for defamation purposes if they materially change the meaning of the quote:
We conclude that a deliberate alteration of the words uttered by a plaintiff does not equate with knowledge of falsity for purposes of New York Times Co. v. Sullivan, 376 U. S., at 279-280, and Gertz v. Robert Welch, Inc., supra, at 342, unless the alteration results in a material change in the meaning conveyed by the statement. The use of quotations to attribute words not in fact spoken bears in a most important way on that inquiry, but it is not dispositive in every case.
Here, the Dot has not materially changed the meaning of Fodera's words. Frankly I don't think they've changed the meaning at all. Moreover, they've linked the words so the reader can review them directly. The Supreme Court's discussion of misquotes was premised in part on the notion that the misquote misleads the reader and gives them no notice that the quote might not be exactly what the speaker said; the Dot's article serves up a way for the reader to read the underlying words if the paraphrase or partial quote interests them. Courts increasingly recognize that linking to one's sources for a challenged statement makes it less likely that it will be treated as defamatory.
Fodera's claim of defamation therefore appears specious.
Second, Fodera appears confident that if the Dot article is defamatory (and it isn't), then anyone who merely links to it is a participant in defamation. That confidence is misplaced; it's not clear whether Fodera is ignorant of the law or merely argumentative about it. While not firmly established in every jurisdiction, the emerging trend is for courts to rule that merely linking to defamatory content does not republish it for defamation purposes. Eric Goldman has good coverage of this issue.
New York, regrettably, has only a mediocre anti-SLAPP statute that wouldn't be of assistance if Fodera is foolish enough to follow up his threats with a lawsuit. But as the sad case of Rakofsky v. The Internet demonstrates, New York judges are still prepared to dismiss frivolous and censorious lawsuits. Moreover, any lawsuit would be an extinction-level event for Fodera's reputation and credibility in the publishing industry, as it ought to be. I would not hesitate to light the Popehat Signal to find pro bono assistance for anyone Fodera menaces.
It's banal to be a trash-talking blowhard on the internet. Fodera could have gotten away with that — there are so many blusterers, and so little time to care about them. But Fodera has transformed himself into something else, something more iconic: the big talker who can dish it out but can't take it. Nobody respects that person. Nobody should. Fodera strikes me as a sad and stunted person, lashing out at and someone for holding a mirror up to him.
I sent Mr. Fodera an email seeking comment, and asking for responses to some specific questions, but have not heard back as of the time of this writing.
Science Fiction Community Generates This Weekend's Buffoonish Bufoonish Defamation Threat © 2007-2013 by the authors of Popehat. This feed is for personal, non-commercial use only. Using this feed on any other site is a copyright violation. No scraping.
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England’s Smartest Family is Black: We won’t hear about this in the news Meet the “First Family of Education” in England.
Peter and Paula Imafidon, 9-year-old twins from Waltham Forest in northeast London , are a part of the highest-achieving clan in the history of Great Britain education. The two youngest siblings are about to make British history as the youngest students to ever enter high school. They astounded veteran experts of academia when they became the youngest to ever pass the University of Cambridge ’s advanced mathematics exam. That’s on top of the fact they have set world records when they passed the A/AS-level math papers.
Chris Imafidon, their father, said he’s not concerned about his youngest children’s ability to adapt to secondary school despite their tender age. “We’re delighted with the progress they have made,” he said. “Because they are twins they are always able to help and support each other.” To Peter and Paula’s parents, this is nothing new. Chris Imafidon said he and his wife have been through this before: they have other super-gifted, overachieving children. Peter and Paula’s sister, Anne-Marie, now 20, holds the world record as the youngest girl to pass the A-level computing, when she was just 13.
She is now studying at arguably the most renowned medical school in the United States , Johns Hopkins University , in Baltimore. Another sister, Christina, 17, is the youngest student to ever get accepted and study at an undergraduate institution at any British university at the tender age of 11. And Samantha, now age 12, had passed two rigorous high school-level mathematics and statistics exams at the age of 6, something that her twin siblings, Peter and Paula, also did.
Chris Imafidon migrated to London from Nigeria in West Africa over 30 years ago. And despite his children’s jaw-dropping, history-making academic achievements, he denies there is some “genius gene” in his family. Instead, he credits his children’s success to the Excellence in Education program for disadvantaged inner-city children. “Every child is a genius,” he told British reporters.
“Once you identify the talent of a child and put them in the environment that will nurture that talent, then the sky is the limit. Look at Tiger Woods or the Williams sisters [Venus and Serena] — they were nurtured. You can never rule anything out with them. The competition between the two of them makes them excel in anything they do.By: PJ Dacas
Young, gifted, and Black.
“Every child is a genius,” he told British reporters.
“Once you identify the talent of a child and put them in the environment that will nurture that talent, then the sky is the limit. Look at Tiger Woods or the Williams sisters [Venus and Serena] — they were nurtured. You can never rule anything out with them. The competition between the two of them makes them excel in anything they do.”YES YES YES. THIS IS YES.
Utena: Texts From Last Night.
![[Image - Juri yelling at Ruka.]
[Text - (617): shut up. I wear heels bigger than your dick]](http://25.media.tumblr.com/45aab1c3c22ec1e011d97266d03c21b9/tumblr_mgsq1hKmv31qmubgso1_500.png)
Apparently Fish Need Bicycles..
