firehose

Animation and live action meet halfway in Golden Age of Insect Aviation: The Great Grasshoppers, a whimsically bold 10-second adventure by Wayne Unten.

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Tomorrow, January 26th, is researcher Jon Peterson's best-guess for the 40th anniversary of Dungeons & Dragons. "For all the reasons listed above, it's probably impossible to narrow in on one date and say with any certainty that this is when the game was released. But

Meet HockeyBird.

The NHL is teaming up with "Angry Birds" owners Rovio Entertainment to introduce a new hockey-themed character to the popular mobile game.

His name is HockeyBird, and he'll debut at the Coors Light Stadium Series opener on Saturday at Dodger Stadium between the Los Angeles Kings and Anaheim Ducks.

HockeyBird's bio on NHL.com says he said "farewell to the Angry Birds flock to pursue his NHL dream" after being the top pick in the NHL Mascot Draft. He'll appear on the Dodger Stadium screens for two interactive games using voice-activated fan engagement technology. We're very interested to see how that works, and whether his stadium debut is any better than the failed Guardian Project a few years back.

No word on whether HockeyBird's hits on evil pigs will be subject to Shanabans.

More from SB Nation NHL:

• Which enforcers are good hockey players?

• Do in-season coaching changes work?

• Power rankings: Blackhawks, the superior bird

• The Penguins’ Globetrotter hockey

• Olympics: Injuries might alter Canada’s roster | USA roster analysis

• Olympic rosters shouldn’t be built with NHL restraints

Just a friendly reminder that the NSA's children's website, "CryptoKids," is an actual thing that exists.

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In Appalachia, jobs have vanished, and people live for pills, soda pop, and welfare

It would have looked like this.

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cleverhelp:

When the American writer David Foster Wallace died four years ago, he left behind the following fragments: notes towards a dictionary all his own. DFW had an amazing mind, and his notes on words are at once insightful and at times, hilarious and beautiful.

Utilize

A noxious puff-word. Since it does nothing that good old use doesn’t do, its extra letters and syllables don’t make a writer seem smarter; rather, using utilize makes you seem either like a pompous twit or like someone so insecure that she’ll use pointlessly big words in an attempt to look sophisticated. The same is true for the noun utilization, for vehicle as used for car, for residence as used for house, for presently, at present,at this time, and at the present time as used for now, and so on. What’s worth remembering about puff-words is something that good writing teachers spend a lot of time drumming into undergrads: “formal writing” does not mean gratuitously fancy writing; it means clean, clear, maximally considerate writing.

Pulchritude

A paradoxical noun because it refers to a kind of beauty but is itself one of the ugliest words in the language. Same goes for the adj. formpulchritudinous. They’re part of a tiny elite cadre of words that possess the opposite of the qualities they denote. Diminutive, big, foreign, fancy(adj.), classy, colloquialism, and monosyllabic are some others; there are at least a dozen more. Inviting your school-age kids to list as many paradoxical words as they can is a neat way to deepen their relationship to English and help them see that words are both symbols for real things and real things themselves.

Mucous

An adjective, not synonymous with the noun mucus. It’s worth noting this not only because the two words are fun but because so many people don’t know the difference. Mucus means the unmentionable stuff itself.Mucous refers to (1) something that makes or secretes mucus, as in “The next morning, his mucous membranes were in rocky shape indeed,” or (2) something that consists of or resembles mucus, as in “The mucous consistency of its eggs kept the diner’s breakfast trade minimal.”

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Perfect. Precision counts.

Found at The Guardian.

Caption: Bizarre sculptures of two naked Buddhas are seen climbing houses in Jinan, China. The artwork has sparked heated debate, with some saying they were disrespectful. It is said the inspiration for the sculptures came from a Chinese soup dish called ‘Buddha Jumps Over the Wall’ - a dish which apparently smells so good that even the Buddha can’t help jumping over the wall to taste it.

Credit: HAP/Quirky China News/Rex

Sorry

Mike Giant ‘Modern Hieroglyphics’

Got Bat?

Coca-Cola has always been more focused on its economic bottom line than on global warming, but when the company lost a lucrative operating license in India because of a serious water shortage there in 2004, things began to change.

California's new law is so outrageously anti-cool that it's hard to see the profession continuing to have the same cache it once had — and it also got us thinking about what such a stipulation might have meant for cinema's most famous and beloved bartenders. As you can see from the below photo gallery, the results weren't pretty.

tsu doh nimh writes "Michaels Stores Inc., which runs more than 1,250 crafts stores across the United States, said Saturday that it is investigating a possible data breach involving customer cardholder information. According to Brian Krebs, the journalist who broke the story [and, previously] news of the Target and Neiman Marcus breaches, the U.S. Secret Service has confirmed it is investigating. Krebs cited multiple sources in the banking industry saying they were tracking a pattern of fraud on cards that were all recently used at Michaels Stores Inc. In response to that story, Michaels issued a statement saying it 'recently learned of possible fraudulent activity on some U.S. payment cards that had been used at Michaels, suggesting that the Company may have experienced a data security attack.' In 2011, Michaels disclosed that attackers had physically tampered with point-of-sale terminals in multiple stores, but so far there are no indications what might be the cause of the latest breach. Both Target and Neiman Marcus have said the culprit was malicious software designed to steal payment card data, and at least in Target's case that's been shown to be malware made to infect retail cash registers."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

“Your work is puerile and under-dramatized. You lack any sense of structure, character and the Aristotelian unities.”

- Wednesday Addams (via cwnerd12)

jacobtheloofah:

stephen king throwing shade like a fucking master

Wow.

That is fierce.

In a statement yesterday, Pope Francis called the internet “truly good” and labeled it “a gift from God,” saying that it brought humanity closer together.

motleyjack:

I’d have called it “Bra-barian & the Bots”. She’s annoyed with those driods.

Dang.

Now I want to write this.

Science Fiction Architecture | Frank R. Paul | Socks Studio

Born in Vienna in 1884, Frank R. Paul studied architecture, but applied his knowledge and passion in this field to illustrate cityscapes of a future to come. He became a famous and world-wide appreciated science fiction illustrator, working on an impressive number of science fiction, fantasy and comic books. Discovered by editor Hugo Gernsback (of cult editions “Amazing Stories“) in 1914, they started a prolific collaboration which defined the imaginary of sci-fi pulps in the 1920′s and became a main influence on lots of subsequent works in the genre.

Many representation techniques are directly borrowed from the artist’s architectural background: spaceships and interiors are shown in perspective section, axonometries and sometimes in a combination of more projections systems within the same drawing, as the composition of a board to present an architectural project. The language of the buildings and of urban sections in his works seems to carry the legacy of Italian Futurists, for example in the combination of multiple streets in the sky and in the powerful lines of the tower-like buildings interconnected by bridges. Given the simplicity which Frank R. Paul employed to describe human figures in his drawings, the architectural background assumes, almost all the times, the role of protagonist in a board. The carefully detailed and shaded buildings are sometimes composed in a combination of eclectic styles borrowed from past ages and updated to fit the futuristic imaginary.

Sneaky Cards is a card game about “creating fun and creative social interactions, breaking up the tedium of everyday life.” The game was created by 16-year-old Harry Lee in 2009. It has since been beefed up by a subreddit group and pushed out as a free-to-play game. Sneaky Cards is available to download for free under a Creative Commons license and can be printed at home.

The main goal of the game is to get rid of all your cards by following each cards own rule set. There are a few variations of gameplay depending on the type of deck you have, the Classic Deck can be played over the course of many days, and during everyday life. Alternatively the Mini Deck can be played competitively, with each player having a deck and the winner being the player that can complete all their objectives first.

The game works best in common social environments. Places like malls, school campuses, offices, conferences, camps, youth groups, parties, and other public places. In most situations there is a player who is playing the game and a non-player who is not. With the player interacting in some way with the non-player.

images via Sneaky Cards

via Boing Boing, The Awesomer

kiggor:

Rejected by mother - cared by a golden retriever [via]

This house for sale in Sherwood, Oregon features an incredibly elaborate ridable miniature railroad that encircles the property. The railway (which can carry passengers) includes a trestle bridge, tunnel, and train storage warehouse. There’s also a barn containing a model railway museum.

photos via The Gardner Team and video via NWVideoTours

via Looney Listing, Boing Boing