firehose

San Francisco Chronicle

Florida Man Convicted for Killing Reporter KRIS Corpus Christi News PENSACOLA, Fla. (AP) - A man has been convicted of beating a former Pensacola newspaper reporter to death with a hammer and burying his body in a concrete-covered pit in Georgia. Prosecutors said William Cormier III was so desperate for money that he ... Closing arguments finish in body-in-concrete trialWBTV Body-In-Concrete Trial Ends Closing ArgumentsHuffington Post all 161 news articles »

No stranger to sliding between bizarre parallel universes, Jerry O’Connell established his own realm next door to the alternate existence where Shia LaBeouf is actually making a grand artistic statement by turning the public spectacle of celebrity scandal into a forced intimate confrontation, instead of just sitting around with a bag on his head because he’s an asshole. As first reported by Buzzfeed—whose office is, not coincidentally, right across the street, because they are the gulls who swarm the trawler, etc. etc.—yesterday O’Connell set up “#IAMSORRYTOO” in the gallery adjacent to LaBeouf’s exhibit, creating an exact copy of LaBeouf’s installation, which is itself an exact copy of Marina Abramovic’s “The Artist Is Present,” which LaBeouf staged after being busted for making exact copies of things, and then we all took a hard look at the emptiness of art and celebrity and realized ...

Informa, the multinational media company that last summer bought Fan Expo Canada organizer Hobby Star Marketing, has purchased Dallas Comic Con and the related Sci-Fi Expo and Fan Days. Founder Ben Stevens will remain as director. A statement on the convention website states, “this partnership will help these shows realize their true potential with new […]

The post Fan Expo Canada’s new owner buys Dallas Comic Con appeared first on Robot 6 @ Comic Book Resources.

Washington Post

What Belgium's child euthanasia law means for America and the Constitution Washington Post Belgium has just passed a law allowing euthanasia for children. The Low Countries allow for suicide and doctor-assisted suicide, but Brussels is the first to open to door to dealing death to children of any age. If the prospect of youngsters being helped to off ... 'Slippery slope?' Belgium moves to extend euthanasia rights to children (+video)Christian Science Monitor Belgian lawmakers extend euthanasia to children below 18Firstpost Belgium votes to give terminally ill children the right to dieIrish Independent Bloomberg -Times of India all 340 news articles »

OnlyMrGodKnowsWhy

help I am dying

#VILLEASHELL

This is a diagram drawn by Kate Estrop of her relationship circle. Because not everyone is comfortable using their real names, the diagram only uses first initials.

Poly people also face confusion and tension from more conservative family members, according to Somerville resident and tribal fusion belly dancer Laura Blake.

Original Source

fuckyeah1990s:

some more mister sparkle shirts just came in, theyre pretty cool

Just a couple for the day:

One: Today someone who had pirated editions of my work very nicely came to find out how to compensate for my work, noting that he wanted to pay me directly rather than publishers, who he felt didn’t add much value to the process. I told him I disagreed and why, and in the process offered him a point of view he’d not considered before, which he appreciated. The exchange, and further commenting from readers and authors, is available for your perusal over at Reddit’s SciFi subreddit.

The takeaway: I actually like my publishers, and they add value to my work and don’t rip me off in the process. Please don’t consider them evil (at least in their involvement with me), or try to cut them out of the pay loop. Thank you.

Two: Lots of people asking me what I think of Hugh Howey’s look at author earnings via Amazon. My thoughts about it essentially boil down to this: It’s highly anecdotal (which Hugh to his credit is up front about) and based on suppositions that are speculative at best. This is an issue for me; at the end of the day I like my book sales data like I like my UFOs: Verifiable.

So, it’s interesting and will no doubt feed some polemics for the folks who think there’s some deep ideological battle going on for the soul of publishing, but it seems to me it should be approached with the understanding that regardless of intent it’s a murky, inexact representation of what’s going on in the publishing world.

Which, to be clear, is not entirely on Hugh as the author of the report. He’s working with what he has and is, I think, making a good faith effort to make educated guesses when he doesn’t have useful data. But there is a lot of useful data he doesn’t have, because so much of the data one would need is incomplete and/or highly decentralized and/or not always in the author’s power to share –or, alternately, if the author is not happy with their sales, something they want to share. It should also be noted (as Cory Doctorow just has at Boing Boing) that Hugh’s data is limited only to Amazon. As much as it would like to be, Amazon is not the entire of the publishing retail world. I personally sell a ton of books on Amazon. But I also sell a ton of books off of Amazon, too.

What I would say is that more data sharing is good. It’s why I shared Redshirts hardcover data last year; it’s why Jim Hines talks about his writing income. In that respect, Hugh’s doing a mitzvah for writers; good on him.

Read 20 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Walk this way

Dungeon Scroll is a word game where players spell words (cast spells) to meet specific word challenges (dungeon encounters) to score points (gain gold).

I attended a panel spotlighting the wonderful Kelly Sue DeConick, and afterward my daughter approached her and explained that she had drawn her own comic, and would she like a copy? DeConick was delighted, and when her husband, Matt Fraction appeared, she introduced him and asked if he could have a copy as well. And Fraction proceeded to pull out his wallet and insist on paying my daughter two dollars, one for each copy of the comic she'd given them. My daughter was thrilled - not really because of the money, but because, as she told me later, "That was when I became a professional!" Comic creators get a lot of crap. Sometimes people don't like what they've done to a beloved character, or are angry about a particular turn of events. But I can tell you that comic creators are some of the warmest, most generous people I've ever met. I will always be grateful to them for their kindness to my daughter and to me.

asianhistory:

Herding Horses, Han Geng. 8th c. Tang Dynasty, National Palace Museum of Taiwan. Digitally retouched photograph, ink on silk. 

One of the most important artists working during this period was Han Kan (sic), considered to have been the supreme painter of horses. These animals were tremendously admired in China, and they were the subject of countless stories and fables extolling them as free, proud, noble creatures. A symbol of wealth and luxury, the Emperor Ming Huang— admirer of poets, painters, and beautiful women, and a keen lover of horses— had over forty thousand thoroughbreds in his stable. 

When Han Kan was called to the Court, about the middle of the 8th century, the emperor advised him to study the painting of horses under Chi’en Hung, a contemporary Court painter. Han Kan ignored the suggestion, which was the equivalent to a command. When the emperor scolded him, he replied: “I have been learning how to paint horses, and every one of the horses in the Imperial Stables has been my teacher.”

His fame increased with the passage of time so that a later critic wrote: “When Han Kan painted horses, he was truly a horse.” This was the supreme compliment, as it meant that the artist had achieved such full identification that he was able to transmit the inner spirit of the horse.”

— Chinese Art, Judith and Arthur Hart Burling, 1953.  

fat horse fat horse

Yesterday we posted a chart from Hugh Howey's new report on author earnings, showing indie and self-published authors pulling ahead of people published by the "big five" in terms of total unit sales. Now here's another chart from an e-book publishing expert who's calling some of Howey's conclusions into question.

Read more...

Little Mac joins the Super Smash Bros. Roster ⊟

Yay, it’s about time — helps make up for the lack of Punch-Out!! on the 3DS. Still no release date for Super Smash Bros., though, other than “2014.”

PREORDER Super Smash Bros for Wii U/3DS, upcoming releases

We've heard lots of names bandied about to play Doctor Strange in the Marvel Cinematic Universe — but Rob O. has a great suggestion: Chiwetel Ejiofor. I already believe in him as the Sorcerer Supreme, without seeing a single frame.

Read more...

Why sleep listening to white noise or ocean sounds, when you could hear the Starship Enterprise in flight? Or the interior of the TARDIS?

Read more...

thunderingasteroids:

Jumping in our space van and rocking all the way to the East End on 2/22!

“Incidentally, the guillotine, invented by Doctor Guillotin, was introduced as a liberal measure, and was considered to be more humane than the old methods of execution, of which the most common involved strapping the victim to a water wheel until his back broke. So it’s almost certain that when the guillotine was introduced, a French election ad will have complained, ‘The introduction of the guillotine proves that the Jacobins are soft on crime. For if a burglar knows that once he is caught he will merely be beheaded instantly without hours of agony on a water wheel, there is no deterrent whatsoever. Proving once again that Mr. Robespierre is the burglar’s friend.’””

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Vive La Revolution: A Stand-Up History of the French Revolution, Mark Steel. (via ice—-queen)

family matters

“My wife and I like to lay in bed and watch Netflix,” Tom Wheeler, chairman of the US Federal Communications Commission, said the other day. But when their internet connection slows down, breaking up the video feed, Wheeler’s wife is incredulous: “You’re chairman of the FCC,” she says to him. “Why is this happening?”

Why, indeed.

The buffering in Wheeler’s bedroom is familiar to any American who has tried to stream video over the internet at night, when their neighbors are doing the same thing. Look at the dip in average download speed between 8pm in the chart below (where each datapoint spans the following two hours):

During that primetime, about a third (pdf) of all internet traffic heading into North American homes is carrying data-heavy movies and TV shows from Netflix. Transmitting all those bits will become an increasingly severe challenge as more people opt for streaming video over traditional television. Even though TV and the internet often travel over the same pipes, the infrastructure to make each work is vastly different. And the internet is way behind.

Consider what will happen tomorrow, Feb. 14, when Netflix releases all 13 episodes of the second season of House of Cards, its acclaimed political drama. Owing to positive reviews of the first season and aggressive marketing by Netflix, demand for the show is likely to be strong. Throw in some terrible weather, and it’s easy to imagine a huge portion of the 33.4 million households that subscribe to Netflix’s streaming service in the United States trying to watch House of Cards at the same time on Friday night (notwithstanding that it’s Valentine’s Day).

That is going to be a problem because primetime download speeds over some of the country’s biggest internet service providers (ISPs) have been falling in recent months, according to Netflix:

The drop has led to accusations that Verizon and Comcast are throttling, or slowing down, Netflix over their networks. If true, it would dovetail with a recent court decision that overturned the US government’s “net neutrality” regulations, which required ISPs to deal with Netflix traffic the same way as Google’s YouTube or some random web page.

But the ISPs deny it. “We treat all traffic equally, and that has not changed,” Verizon said.

Netflix also says it isn’t being throttled. The company would like to see those speeds improve—its monthly publication of the data is a shaming exercise—but figures the ISPs wouldn’t dare to intentionally degrade their customers’ experience. Public opinion clearly favors Netflix over cable TV and internet providers.

So what is slowing down Netflix?

“While investors and politicians spend significant time and energy focused on net neutrality,” BTIG analyst Rich Greenfield wrote in a note this week (registration required), “we believe peering and interconnection are the issues actually impacting content creators, distributors, CDNs, and consumers today.”

We’ll explain what that means.

Even if millions of people want to watch House of Cards on Friday, Netflix doesn’t have to send each of them a unique copy of the show. The company uses content delivery networks (CDNs), including one of its own, to send the data just once. ISPs, which get the data into homes, can choose to peer with these CDNs, essentially creating a direct connection that bypasses the rest of the internet and keeps things working speedily for Netflix and its customers.

Peering is different from traditional internet transit. And while maybe it should be, peering has never been subject to net neutrality rules. It’s more like a private internet to help Netflix and other companies—Google, Facebook, Amazon, and Microsoft all rely heavily on peering arrangements—get their data to people faster.

How those peering arrangements work can vary. Sometimes the CDN pays the ISP. Sometimes no money changes hands because a roughly equal amount of traffic travels back-and-forth between the two. And sometimes it’s a mess, as when Comcast (an ISP) suddenly demanded that Level 3 (a CDN) pay for the increasingly heavy bandwidth it was sending to Comcast on Netflix’s behalf; that dispute was settled last year.

Peering into internet TV’s future

“Peering was an engineering concept in the early days of the net,” explained the FCC’s Wheeler at an event last month. “The engineers, as engineers are wont to do, built something that was straightforward and usable and would operate. And the economics of it were not even close to their thinking.”

There’s your likely answer to what has been slowing down Netflix—and will be crucial to the future of internet TV: the economics of peering.

Should Netflix and any CDN it uses have to pay for better access to American homes? Peering, as the name would imply, was conceived as an equal partnership, but the ISPs no longer see it that way. They would like to get paid. Some already do.

Netflix, for its part, would like to side-step the issue with its own version of a CDN called Open Connect. Cablevision is the most significant American firm to sign up for OpenConnect, which provides direct access to Netflix’s servers with no money exchanged. Larger rivals, including Comcast and Verizon, have refused.

So if anything is behind the recent slowdown in Netflix speeds, it’s likely a peering dispute. (Verizon hinted as much in its recent statement.) Sometimes these disputes break out into the open—as with Comcast and Level 3 in 2010 or Verizon and Cogent in 2013—but mostly, they remain behind closed doors.

If House of Cards starts to buffer for viewers tomorrow, that’s why.

	firehose shared this story from A.V. Club:
	put the movie down now

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Falling through the ice can be a dangerous prospect for the unprepared, and even then it’s not exactly recommended. The Art of Manliness and Ted Slampyak have produced an illustrated guide on what to do after falling through ice that goes over basic tips and tricks on how to survive like resisting the urge to pull straight up out of the water.

image via The Art of Manliness

via The High Definite

You got curled, bub.

Curling seems pretty great. It is certainly the only Winter Olympics event in which pitchers of beer can be considered a performance-enhancing drug, for one thing, and competitors can participate in something like their street clothes -- or, in the case of the Norwegian team, psychedelic zoot suits.

Everything unfolds with a totally opaque intensity. Someone, who is generally dressed like an employee at the Verizon Store and not necessarily supremely athletic-looking, slides a rock over a sheet of ice. Others chase it, sweeping. There's some yelling. It looks like a blast.

It can be so much fun, in fact, that even seasoned competitors can forget they're standing on a sheet of very cold, very slick, very hard ice. Maybe that is what happened to Russian curler Andrey Drozdov, who has given us this indelible #FlawlessOlympics moment. Maybe he just got lost in the moment and forgot that ice is slippery.

Or maybe curling is harder than it looks. Anyway, Russia won the match 7-6, Drozdov is okay, and be careful out there.

(GIF via Deadspin)

I don’t think we have a problem with women not wanting to do videogame filming; there are plenty of women who would love to do it and who’d be stunningly good at it.

I think the problem is, as always, with gamers not policing their own bullshit. If the community were less actively, virulently hostile toward the women who do attempt let’s-plays, I don’t think there’s any question that there’d be more of ‘em who make it to the superstar level. Or, y’know. That there’d be any of ‘em who make it to the superstar level. It’s like saying, “Oh, how do we get more women interested in science?” without addressing the issue of “How the fuck do we get the men in science to stop chasing the women out?”

Let’s-playing as a career is inherently bizarre. The funniest thing is that the folks who make a career out of it generally aren’t especially good at gaming—the hardcore types who play SC2 professionally or whatever get folks watching, but for the most part people like seeing videos of people screwing up hilariously, or messing with the game, or just hanging out with friends and having a good time. I mean, friggin’ Michael at RT got hired specifically because he was so awful at games but so funny when he screwed up. It’s stand-up comedy. It’s the ultimate sort of fantasy job: you get paid for broadcasting the goofy stuff you do when you hang out with friends.

Except, if you’re a woman, you’re pretty fuckin’ hard-pressed to find a let’s-player out there to watch who doesn’t feel the need to explain in detail which female characters are most bangable, or to grouse about how the wife doesn’t let them play as often as they’d like, and if you ever want to participate in that community you kind of have to spend a lot of time blocking your ears and going ‘la-la-la’. And, I mean, when it comes right down to it, you’re not even welcome as a consumer of this media. Why the hell would you want to put the start-up time and money into becoming a producer with that kind of reward?

But there’s nothing about let’s-playing that should make it an inherently cisdude-club sort of proposition. You don’t play video games with your dick. Women make up almost half of gamers. Despite being immensely unwelcome, women still make up a substantial fraction of the demographics of folks watching let’s-players (I think NerdCubed mentioned at some point that about 40% of his audience is female, according to YouTube). But if you’re gonna get harrassed and belittled, why the fuck would you even put in the effort, y’know?

I mean, I have zero interest in let’s-playing as a career—when I do let’s-plays or livestreams, it’s purely because it lets me throw a little gaming party with friends who live nowhere near me, and it lets me maybe draw a few more people into my gaming circle that I wouldn’t have met, otherwise. And even doing that, even with my goofy little party channel with maybe 60 subscribers, I still get shit. I get people who flirt awkwardly and incessantly, I get people who go on and on about my “sexy voice”, I get people who appear to be under the misapprehension that I’m being paid for this and that I’m only being paid for this because I’m a woman, I get people being surprised that I’m good at the game or being pissed off at me for not being good enough at the game (and again, even the people who do this for a fuckin’ living don’t get that kind of scrutiny).

Basically, it shouldn’t be expected, it shouldn’t be a given, that female let’s-players are gonna get shit, and that they’ve just gotta deal. Put the blame more squarely where it belongs: with the assholes who harrass them and the assholes who see this happening and just shrug and say, “Boys will be boys.”

erictrautmann:

I rarely do this, so bear with me. 

I previewed it a couple weeks ago, but my first vector download set is now available via my website. Over 140 individual sci-fi themed HUD elements, perfect for supervillain lairs or starship command decks, all for a mere five Yanqui dollars. 

Details and links to buy are over at my website.

So, yeah, basically what I’m saying here is “PLEASE BUY MY THING PLEASE.”

erictrautmann is a man of many, many talents. He’s the guy who’s been putting together the backmatter layout with Michael on LAZARUS, who’s been assisting me in getting the World Bible in order, who’s been making the faux ads we’ve been running throughout the “Lift” arc, who designed the Dagger, Hock, Bittner, Caragher and - currently - Morray insigne, and who makes all the tech bells and whistles for the book.

He is selling his stuffs. For you. To use.

You could do far, far worse is what I’m saying.

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