firehose

faifarafalafelrofflewaffleface:

vixiana:

I honestly want to know how many time this person got hit on that night.

Because them abs are FIIIIIIINE.

FUCKING BRILLIANT

This would seriously be an excellent experiment >:U

I second this!

Last Gen Con I ran a hack of the game Kagematsu called KaGaymatsu, by Manuela Soriani. Manuela is part of the Italian gaming community which made it extra fun for me to be running at a US con. Visibility for women across the world! I wanted to run and represent games that were designed by women or queer folk, or focused on gender, queerness, or sexiness in some way. Visibility for these types of games is really important to me, as a queer woman gamer who enjoys sexy games, not only for my own personal taste, but to make this type of representation possible in the gaming community at large. So running these types of games at conventions raises awareness, and is it’s own sort of activism. The biggest benefit for me though is that it gives people permission to be sexy, queer, and to play a woman in games. It creates an atmosphere of acceptance and inclusiveness, and radical permission and acceptance is a powerful tool.

I learned about KaGaymatsu through google plus communities. The original game, written by Danielle Lewon, was hacked by another woman last year, Manuela Soriani, living across the world. Our global gaming community is so cyberpunk sometimes. The premise of the game is fairly familiar to many since it’s creation in 2009, but just in case: a group of male players play women in a village who need saving, and a female player plays the Ronin/GM whose affections they need to win, both in and out of character to a certain extent. Once the female villagers win the affections of the Ronin, they can extract a promise from him to defeat the evil in the village and save everyone. But it never quite goes that smoothly. I love this game because it plays with gender roles, and because it contains some of the most fun and suspenseful etiquette and social challenges I’ve ever experienced in a table top RPG. It also plays somewhat like an Akira Kurosawa film, and I love that guy.

There really isn’t much representation for gay men in table top RPGs. That’s where Manuela’s hack, KaGaymatsu, comes in. The premise of the game is entirely the same as the original Kagematsu, except now instead of playing women who need saved, you play men who need saved, and the Ronin is still male. The interesting bit here is that you, as a male villager, might not be gay, and additionally, you’re religious, and you need to keep your affections towards men secret because it’s still a taboo! This creates a really interesting exploration not just of the gender roles in the scenario, but the possible fluidity of your character’s sexual identity and affections as well. It also deals with shame and male sexuality and coming to terms with being gay, big important themes in gay stories in general.

With two women and two men players in the game I ran (myself included), it was interesting to see how we went about representing gay men in this setting and with our various backgrounds as players. The mechanics of the game helped us quickly move beyond stereotypes. I played our Kagetmatsu as a young, gangly, attempting to be heroic but kind of pathetically failing because of his ego type of character. We also had a devout monk, a down to earth fisherman, and a friendly blacksmith. The ways they pursued the Kagematsu and tried to win his affections were really interesting and varied. I remember the monk teaching him how to pray, and spiritually intimate moments at the temple. The fisherman would be in nature, sharing with the Ronin the beauty of the village and it’s creatures. The blacksmith was powerful and emotional, and his seductions often consisted of descriptions of his physical form and strength.

I’ve rarely experienced in RPGs such an appreciation for male sexuality and the male form. It’s an interesting juxtaposition when you consider that this game was made to put men in the shoes of women, and the roles women are “supposed to play”. Now consider the roles that men are supposed to play in RPGs, warriors, magicians, thieves, monsters. Rarely lovers, sexual creatures, intimate and tender. The way that Manuela has made a story of flirtation and allowed it to be exclusively about men allows for the expansion of male gender roles in the game. It also still performs the function of the original game in that it’s putting both men and women in the roles of gay men, so still playing with ideas of power and oppression and sexuality and gender in the real world.

Does that mean you have to play a gay man in order to show male sexuality and tenderness? I suppose that this is where some questions of the representation of gay men in the game might be a little problematic. It feels a little exploitative, in that only men showing affection for other men can be tender or romantic or sexual. Also that it’s not really queer, or exploring identity or being truly radical in it’s shifting around of gender roles. It’s really just playing gay men. Which, I’ll admit, in and of itself is somewhat radical in the RPG sphere. But to really get at gay or queer mechanics, it needs to really go beyond representation and move into themes of identity, sexuality, and normalization of these stories instead of a romantic Orientalism and otherness that Kagematsu seems to be dancing around.

An interesting addition to KaGaymatsu would be a list of historical references and stories of male Samurai love in Japanese history. From Wikipedia, for a primer:

From religious circles, same-sex love spread to the warrior (samurai) class, where it was customary for a boy in the wakashū age category to undergo training in the martial arts by apprenticing to a more experienced adult man. The man was permitted, if the boy agreed, to take the boy as his lover until he came of age; this relationship, often formalized in a “brotherhood contract”, was expected to be exclusive, with both partners swearing to take no other (male) lovers. This practice, along with clerical pederasty, developed into the codified system of age-structured homosexuality known as shudō, abbreviated from wakashūdo, the “way (do) of wakashū“. The older partner, in the role of nenja, would teach the wakashū martial skills, warrior etiquette, and the samurai code of honor, while his desire to be a good role model for his wakashū would lead him to behave more honorably himself; thus a shudō relationship was considered to have a “mutually ennobling effect”. In addition, both parties were expected to be loyal unto death, and to assist the other both in feudal duties and in honor-driven obligations such as duels and vendettas. Although sex between the couple was expected to end when the boy came of age, the relationship would, ideally, develop into a lifelong bond of friendship. At the same time, sexual activity with women was not barred (for either party), and once the boy came of age, both were free to seek other wakashū lovers.

It would be super interesting to explore historical forms of homosexuality as we understand it in Samurai culture. It would allow for an education about the history of male love in Japan. It can also begin a discussion in the narrative of the story about the difference between essentialism and constructivism when applied to an identifier like “gay”. In other words, just because men are in a loving relationship, or having sex, doesn’t mean they’re gay by contemporary definition. This historical context lends even further context to contemporary definitions of sexuality and what they mean. I think KaGaymatsu is actually right on the verge of doing this, in not forcing any of the men in the game to identify as gay, but rather have interactions in a way we would consider to be gay today. With more historical context this could be powerful.

The game is incredibly accessible though, and one thing it does succeed at is spotlighting gay men in a positive way. It allows people of all genders to step into that position for a moment and play a man seducing another man. While I agree with Joe Mcdaldno and Joli St Patrick that we need to move beyond representation in games, representation of any kind at all is a positive first step toward more inclusiveness, and most importantly, more interesting stories.

(KaGaymatsu: Representing Gay Men in RPGs originally posted on Gaming As Women.)

“

I was asked in an interview once: You’re writing another book with a female lead? Aren’t you afraid you’re going to be pigeonholed? And I thought, I write a team superhero book, an uplifting solo hero book, I write a horror-western, and I write a ghost story. What am I gonna be pigeonholed as?

Has a man in the history of men ever been asked if he was going to be pigeonholed because he wrote two consecutive books with male leads? Half of the population is women. I lose my temper here. And it’s certainly not at you. It’s just this pervasive notion that “white male” is the default. And you have to justify any variation from it.

”

- Kelly-Sue stating the fucking obvious to anyone who actually pays attention and being no less inspiring for it. Hero. (via kierongillen)

Modern Toss

What The Fuck Is My Twitter Bio?

This is a frightened city. Over these streets, over these houses hangs a pall of fear. An ugly kind of violence is rife, stalking the town. Yes, gangs of old ladies attacking fit, defenseless young men.

Freiburg Manhole Cover on Flickr.

Delightful.

We are the women and girls behind the counters of comic shops worldwide. Owners, managers, salespeople, interns, social media gurus, convention volunteers and organizers, cosplayers and more. We pull accounts, place orders, set up displays and tweet our picks of the week. Some of us are new to comics, some are lifelong devotees, but we share one thing in common – we all live for Wednesdays and the lifestyle that comes with them.

Centuries ago, scientists relied on paintings and illustrations of animals to learn more about their anatomy. Today, that biology-art bond is as strong as ever. This is Carly Tribull, a PhD student studying the evolution of parasitic wasps, who uses her scientific knowledge and artistic talent to create fun comics that invite children and adults into the fascinating world of insects.

Read more...

maralizelegaljuana:

illbeyourbonnieifyoubemyclyde:

Wal-Mart would like to remind all of us that Valentine’s Day is coming.

Valentine’s day isn’t the only thing that’s coming

This is why the internet exists.

(larger)

Redditor atrubetskoy has created a map that shows how much snow, on average, it takes to cancel school across the United States. Atrubetskoy also shared a few helpful facts about the map’s limitations and inaccuracies on reddit:

The lightest green says “any snow” but also includes merely the prediction of snow. Also, this is snow accumulation over 24 hours/overnight.

In much of the Midwest and Great Plains, school closing often depends more on wind chill and temperature than on snow accumulation (“cold days”). Thus, this map may be misleading in those areas.

Many jurisdictions in California and other western states have significantly varied snowfall, depending on elevation. This makes it difficult to find an “average” number, or often makes it misleading.

Urban areas like Chicago and New York have more resources to clear snow and often need more to cause closings.

To everyone saying “I grew up in so-and-so and we never closed school,” policies have changed in the last 20 years to make closing a much more common occurrence. Just because schools stayed open back then doesn’t mean they do these days.

Hawaii does get snow! Just… not where people live.

Data was taken from hundreds of various points from user responses and interpolated using NOAA’s average annual snowfall days map. Any corrections/additions are welcome, just give a decently specific location.

via reddit

by OWC

January is such a funny time for twerk-out studios. Everyone is trying to get in shape and perfect their dance moves for the New Year. Of course, this means an overload on twerk-hopefuls entering classes just to quit mid-February.

A few weeks ago, as I settled into my crowded evening class, a young, fairly thin white woman took her position right behind me. She appeared to have never set foot in a twerk-out studio before. She anxiously glanced around the room, adjusting her booty shorts, looking wide-eyed and incredibly nervous. Within just the first few minutes of French Montana’s “Pop That,” I saw the fear in her eyes as she attempted to squat and, well, pop that.  She was obviously filled with panic and then despair. Before we even started twerking on the chairs, she had hunched over with her hand on her knees, head lowered, trapped and vulnerable. She stayed there, staring, for the rest of the class.

Because I was directly in front of her, I had no choice but to twerk in her face. I found it impossible to not think about this poor woman behind me. Even though I wasn’t positioned to stare directly at her, I knew she was still staring directly at my ass. Over the course of the next hour, I felt her despair turn into resentment and then contempt. I just knew for sure, it was directed toward me and my booty.

By the time Juvenile’s “Back That Ass Up” came on, I was completely unable to focus on my twerking.  Instead, I was feeling hyper-aware of my spandex booty shorts, my sexy tight tank top, my well-versedness in dropping it like it’s hot. My heavy-set black woman body.  Surely this skinny white girl was noticing all of these things and judging me for them, stereotyping me, resenting me – or so I assumed. However, I’m pretty sure I was right. How could I be wrong?

I thought about how even though Miley Cyrus appropriated this ancient dance which actually originated in Africa, twerking is still biased towards other races, genders, ages, experience levels and socioeconomic statuses. My twerk-out studio preaches the gospel of rump-shaking egalitarianism but despite it all, it is still mostly populated by non-white people. And in large and constantly rotating roster of instructors, I could only remember two being half-white.

I thought about how that must feel: to be a skinny white woman entering for the first time a system that by all accounts seems unable to accommodate her small booty. What could I do to help her? If I were her, I thought, I would want as little attention to be drawn to my unfortunate dance moves and despair – I would not want anyone to notice me;  in fact, I would down a glass of bleach for even embarrassing myself. And so I tried to very deliberately avoid shaking my behind in her face. But I still felt her hostility towards me. Trying to ignore her only made things worse. Should I have told her to bend over to the front and touch her toes? Should I have encouraged her to drop down and get her eagle on? Would that have made me come off rude or ghetto? Condescending even? If I asked her to articulate her experience to me so I could listen, would she have felt more comfortable? Her lack of ass and skill made me feel so uncomfortable. The system should make itself accessible to a broader range of booty shapes.

I got home from that class and immediately broke down crying. I mean I was hysterical. I called my therapist, my mother and my pastor to help me cope with the pain. Twerking, a beloved dance that has helped me through many dark moments in my life, suddenly felt deeply evil. I so deserved to be targeted by that woman’s racially charged anger. But maybe that’s my own psychological projection. Nah, she was totally hating me.

The question is, of course, so much bigger than twerking, so much bigger than my ass – it’s a question of enormous systemic failure.  How can we fix the system? How can America practice twerking in good conscience when there isn’t enough awareness? I’m sure this piece is one of the most inspiring you will ever read in your lifetime. My words will create change and twerking will never be the same. This story calls for hope.

A woman infamously had the same issue as I did. Please read her story on XOJane and appropriately barf afterwards. I didn’t want to state the obvious of how ignorant she is, so I decided to express my frustration through humor.

Original Source

76,000 Pounds Of Ribs Burn In Truck Fire, Smell 'Wonderful'

submitted by undermind84 [link] [78 comments]

submitted by hcoded1970
[link] [comment]

  

Last year saw both a clampdown on remote working at Marissa Mayer’s Yahoo! and the publication of 37 Signals’ Remote, an occasionally breathless but largely convincing treatise on why and how to work remotely.

I’ve worked on remote teams for more than three years now, and interviewed over a dozen remote workers on teams both large and small in preparing this essay. And I’ll be the first to admit that remote work is not a panacea for all that ails the modern workplace, nor is it suitable for everyone. It’s just as possible to have a dysfunctional remote team as it is to have a broken and unproductive office space.

That said, in the tech community today, remote work has some clear advantages. For the employer, it enables hiring from a more diverse set of workers. Yahoo! may be unwilling to hire an engineer who lives in Kansas City and isn’t inclined (or able) to move to Sunnyvale or New York, but another team may be more than happy to accommodate her. Remote teams also don’t incur the costs associated with expensive campuses and their roster of caterers, laundromats, buses, and gyms, making them more appealing to smaller and leaner organizations. (And, since those perks are usually designed to keep workers at the office, employees could be said to benefit from their absence.) For employees, remote work can permit a flexibility and freedom that is especially valuable to those with less-than-perfect home lives. Caring for children or elderly parents, or contending with an illness or physical or mental disability, may all be made easier with the flexibility to work when and where it best works for you.

This last point is, in some ways, the most damning criticism of Mayer’s policy at Yahoo!: a mother with a full-time nanny may find no difficulty in making it to the office every day, but most parents are not so well-supported. Of the remote workers I spoke to, a recurring theme was the ability to time-shift one’s day to meet their kids’ schedules (as were various techniques for insulating the workspace from tantrums, about which more in a moment). Remote working holds the promise of adapting work to fit our lives, rather than requiring that we twist and bend our lives to fit the space that work demands.

But only if it’s done well. Remote working is a different way of working, with different constraints and practices. It undoes decades of management policies and, given its relatively recent uptake, there’s scant information about the best way to proceed. What follows is some advice, drawn from our own experience at Editorially, with guidance from others about how to make remote teams work — and which pitfalls to look out for.

Say it once, say it again

Perhaps the most persistent bit of advice I gathered — and in some ways the most counterintuitive — is the need for remote teams to overcommunicate. That runs against the prevailing theme of efficiency that marks many discussions about workplace best practices: most teams have evolved to consider efficient communication one of their primary concerns, and a range of tools and platforms have arisen to address that very need.

But efficiency has its limits. On a remote team, opportunities for misunderstanding between teammates distributed across both time and geography magnify. The best way to avoid that terrible realization halfway or further through a project, when one person says, “Wait, I thought we agreed on X?” and the other replies, “No, it was Y, wasn’t it?” is to communicate decisions and plans redundantly.

For example: a remote team may brainstorm ideas over a video call, then share notes from that brainstorm via email, then discuss it further amongst themselves over chat and instant message, then post revised and updated notes to an internal wiki. At each point of communication there’s opportunity for questions and clarification, plus a recording of the discussion, all of which can be referred back to later. The repetition serves to ferret out confusion and make the teams’ goals abundantly clear to everyone.

Using playful, evocative words — in this case, “byte,” “morsel,” and “noodle” — can help drive a point home in a fun way. —Ed.

Further to that, there are different kinds of communication with different needs for redundancy. Sometimes sharing information is as simple as getting a byte of knowledge from one person’s head to another’s. “What time is tomorrow’s meeting?” can be swiftly and efficiently delivered by an invitation that automatically updates everyone’s calendar. But much other communication within a team is less about delivering basic morsels of information than it is about collective thinking. Making decisions about a product direction, brainstorming new features, and evaluating various marketing strategies all involve communication, but are not straightforward knowledge handoffs. That kind of communication benefits immensely from repetition — the opportunity for a team to collectively noodle on an idea or explore it from different angles, across different mediums and platforms.

While efficiency is a laudable goal for much of our work, it isn’t the only goal. Overcommunication is a key skill for remote teams.

Remote by default

A second recurring theme among my conversations with remote workers was the need for the entire team to change: many teams are partly or only occasionally remote, with a core team in an office while remote workers are scattered about; or else, some workers split their time between being in the office and working remotely. It’s easy under these circumstances for the remote team members to end up as second-class citizens, always a step behind their in-office counterparts. Many remote workers I spoke to voiced anxiety about being neglected, simply because their colleagues naturally prioritized the needs of the people they could see face-to-face each day.

It’s necessary for everyone on a team to adapt to remote work, even those who continue to commute to a traditional office each day. For example, at Editorially, on the occasions when the entire team is in the same room together, we still prioritize chat as a mechanism for communication. More than once I’ve actually forgotten that a colleague (usually thousands of miles away) happened to be sitting next to me and was startled to hear him laugh when someone shared a particularly astute gif. You could interpret this habit as an unhealthy reliance on tools that intermediate our relationships; or you could see it for the positive effects it produces: our communication is no less real for its delivery via pixels rather than sound waves, and the remote-by-default habit ensures no one is disenfranchised.

The best way to guarantee this habit is to make sure that every team member is at least sometimes remote. There are exceptions, of course — the office manager needs to be in the office to accept deliveries, for example — but preferably everyone on a team would spend enough time as a remote worker to develop effective habits as well as empathy for the role. Teams with fixed in-house staff and roving remote workers may discover an inevitable clash between cultures.

Put another way: ensure your in-house staff communicates as if they are remote, because to somebody else, they are.

Managing time zones

Technology can bring together remote team members from as far apart as Australia and New York. But while information moves at the speed of light, our bodies remain subject to the usual constraints of the circadian rhythm. You may technically be able to make a video call from one end of the world to another at any hour, but the realities of scheduling work at 5am in one timezone and 8pm in another will get old, fast.

To put it mildly, time zones are a bitch.

Different teams and workflows will have different tolerances for the amount of time their team members need to overlap. In Remote, Jason Fried and David Hienemeier Hansson advise at least four hours of synchronous time between team members, which is certainly a reasonable baseline. At Editorially, we average a bit more than that, and find that every minute counts. In practice, that means we can hire within the continental United States (and across those same time zones to the North and South), but that adding a team member in Europe — whose day would not much overlap at all with our West coast staff — would be tough.

Switching languages here (without strictly needing to for comprehension) signals that the worker in question is doing some cultural code-switching of her own outside of work. —Ed.

Of course, there are possible exceptions: a night owl living in Berlin may be perfectly happy to shift her day to align with her American counterparts. Or the American arm of a European-based team may be delighted to start work in the wee hours, and take the afternoons off to watch the kids play fútbol. But it’s worth some caution, in that those kinds of extreme day/night shifts can be disruptive in the long run. A remote worker needs to not only find her life in concert with her team members, but also balance time with her friends and family.

Ultimately, the decision about how geographically distributed a team can be comes down to the needs of that team: how much of the work requires — that is, really requires — synchronous time among team members? And how much can be handled asynchronously? If your team is considering the switch to remote, it’s worth evaluating any currently synchronous processes to ascertain whether or not they really need to be handled that way. Then any work that does require real-time collaboration needs to be prioritized in those few hours when everyone is available.

Tools of the trade

A variety of tools and platforms have emerged in recent years, some aimed directly at remote teams, others providing support to office-goers and remote workers alike. Which particular tool you use is a topic big enough for another essay, but understanding the taxonomy of tools that make up a remote workflow can help you and your team members adapt.

Chat

Every single person I spoke with referred to the team chat room as their primary gathering place. Developer-oriented teams tend towards the free IRC protocol, which can be accessed through any number of third-party tools, such as Colloquy. Many other teams rely on 37Signals’ Campfire or the new (and still limited release) Slack. These tools not only enable group conversation — both of the productive and animated gif varieties — but often also support direct messaging and topic-segregated channels, as well as a wealth of integrations with other services. One of the keys to encouraging a remote-by-default workflow is to grow the team chat room into a full-fledged watering hole: on the various teams in which I’ve worked, information about system status, support tickets, commit messages, and more were all piped into the main chat room. This makes the chat room not only a good place to catch up with one’s coworkers, but also a prime resource for understanding the work as a whole.

A few things are required to make the team chat room effective: First, it should be permitted for team members to turn away from it to work quietly when they need to. That means that whatever tool is being used needs to have robust transcripts available, so a team member who was out for a while can catch up on the happenings while she was away. (This is one of the ways in which a remote workflow can be preferable to an in-person one: if you have to step away for a little while, you can catch up on the chatter when you return. That’s much easier when said chatter is written than when it’s spoken into the air.)

And, importantly, the tool needs to support superficially silly things like sharing animated gifs and emoji. Lest you think I’m kidding about that, let me be very clear: I am serious. The variety of expression available to team members across a medium like chat is considerably smaller than that achievable by people in a room together; images (even and especially frivolous ones) serve to fill in that gap and ensure productive and fun conversation. When your team can discuss a complicated topic and arrive upon a decision together using only animated gifs, you will know you have succeeded.

Video

Brown’s montage of how the Editorially team uses a tool provides not only a personal narrative, but concrete visuals and a strong case for that tool’s effectiveness. —Ed.

Of course, chat is just one way of communicating, and sometimes the speed and efficacy of face-to-face conversation is warranted. If a discussion in chat gets particularly hairy and feels like it isn’t coming to a quick resolution, bouncing to a video call can be very effective. The shift across mediums (remember the point about overcommunication, above) can help, as can the improved ability to measure colleagues’ feelings when you can see them.

Among the people I spoke with, Skype and Google Hangouts are the most commonly used tools for quick video calls. The Editorially team hosts a brief standup via Hangout each day at noon Eastern time; that Hangout serves as a quick check in and preview of the day’s work, as well as a chance to feel like we’re all in the room together. Likewise, I hold weekly one-on-ones with each member of the team over Hangout, and we routinely get the whole team together to discuss product direction, taking advantage of both video and screen-sharing features in Hangouts. And we close out each week with a Hangout in which we each talk about our work that week, share things we’ve learned, or just catch each other up on our lives away from the screen. Those end of week Hangouts — appropriately titled “The Week” — are usually accompanied by a few beers.

Project management

There are almost too many project management tools to count these days, and most of them are not designed with remote workers specifically in mind. But that hardly matters. Any tool that allows team members — whether sitting right next to each other or separated by oceans — to record information or check in on a project’s status is likely to be useful. In my conversations with remote workers, all-purpose tools like Basecamp and Trello were cited most frequently. Likewise, Dropbox, which serves as a central repository for a team’s assets, has become a critical service for remote and in-house workers alike.

The important thing to remember about project management tools is they are personal and circumstantial (which may explain why there are so many out there). The best advice I can give is to experiment with different tools and see what works for you, keeping in mind that what works for a given circumstance may not work for another (and that’s OK).

Wearing pants

The cliché image of the remote worker is a disheveled pajama-wearing bro slouched on his sofa with empty five-hour energy bottles strewn about his feet. But in chatting with many remote workers, I found nearly all of them had dedicated workspaces within their home, or else they regularly ventured out of the house to cafés or co-working spaces. Those who worked from home emphasized the need to keep a regular schedule and wear pants, so as to provide some separation between their leisure and work lives. Remote workers with kids were especially strident in their need to carve out kid-free space at home, with at least one worker actually building an office whose only door led outside (making it difficult for tantrum-happy kids to rush in).

Co-working spaces were also popular (in fact, more than half of the Editorially team work from shared spaces in their respective cities). That said, while big cities like New York and San Francisco offer a variety of co-working spaces, smaller towns seem less likely to have many options for remote workers. Several remote workers I spoke with voiced interest in co-working, but had so far failed to find any resources near their homes. That said, as remote work gains in popularity, small town remote workers may find their numbers grow sufficiently to support shared spaces. In my own experience, a good co-working space need not reproduce the frills of a typical office so much as provide a quiet, convenient location to work and foster a community.

IRL

Finally, while remote work can enable a flexible and productive team, it doesn’t preclude gathering face-to-face. If your team is spread far and wide, plan on getting everyone together in the same room at least a few times a year. The frequency and duration of those visits will vary team by team: too much travel can be exhausting, too little and you risk alienation among distant team members. Team gatherings should privilege the kind of work that’s hard to do over the tubes: brainstorming on a whiteboard, long casual conversations over meals, longer-term thinking that you may not make time for day-to-day. Be sure to set aside time for just hanging out. And just as importantly, schedule at least one solid block of time each day for quiet; the introverts on your team will thank you.

---

One of the most unexpected things that I’ve learned from working remotely is that it isn’t just about accommodating different lifestyles or taking advantage of technology’s ability to compress long distances. Remote working encourages habits of communication and collaboration that can make a team objectively better: redundant communication and a naturally occurring record of conversation enable team members to better understand each other and work productively towards common ends. At the same time, an emphasis on written communication enforces clear thinking, while geography and disparate time zones foster space for that thinking to happen.

In that way, remote teams are more than just a more humane way of working: they are simply a better way to work.

A friend who just got a graduate degree in music composition from Harvard and is a big hockey fan has just moved to Baltimore and is looking for people to meet. Anyone willing to show him a good time?

Original Source

A @chernobylheart and @WillowBl00 video they made to promote @GWOBorg's GameSave kickstarter http://ow.ly/t8cmq (w/ Annie singing)

driftingfocus:

anogoodrabblerouser:

disquietingtruths:

universalequalityisinevitable:

Robert Sapolsky about his study of the Keekorok baboon troop from National Geographic’s Stress: Portrait of a Killer.

Thiiiiiiis, people, thiiiis!

1. Kill alpha male types
2. Achieve world peace

Got it.

I’ve actually read a lot of Sapolsky’s work.  He’s one of my favorite scientists in the neuro/socio world.

A former postal worker pleaded guilty in federal court in Boston Tuesday to stealing more than 200 video games from mail he handled, US Attorney Carmen M. Ortiz’s office said. James L. White, 68, of Dorchester stole the games between July and November 2012 from parcels at the US Postal Service’s General Mail Facility in Boston. He resold the items to a software and video game retailer, Ortiz’s office said in a statement. White’s sentencing for mail theft is slated for May 8. He faces up to five years in prison and a maximum fine of $250,000, Ortiz’s office said.

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