firehose

God

Thrills, Dan Elborne

ajamstream:

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By her own account, its title wasn’t what she led with in proposing new projects to Image Comics or her artist collaborator.

But, Kelly Sue DeConnick told the laughing, applauding crowd at Image Expo earlier this month, of the potential books she suggested to publisher Eric Stephenson and artist Valentine De Landro, both latched onto one — one she was eager to confront herself: “Bitch Planet.” The upcoming comic series from the writer of the intense, mythological western “Pretty Deadly” at Image Comics and “Avengers Assemble” and the once and future “Captain Marvel” at Marvel is set on an all-female penal colony in outer space. And there’s a jailbreak.

“This is born of a deep and abiding love for exploitation and women in prison movies of the ’60s and ’70s,” DeConnick told the crowd. “I like this stuff so much, and it’s so terrible, it’s so deeply awful and delicious, like those candies that are bad for you. So I wanted to see if there was a way that I could play with the things about it that I love and also the things about it that make me wildly uncomfortable.”

It’s not surprising that some elements of the genre make the acclaimed writer uneasy. A champion of equality and diversity in gender and ethnicity in comic pages and in the industry, DeConnick is an inspiring voice at packed-to-the-walls Women of Marvel convention panels. She’s taken that company’s character Carol Danvers from being Ms. Marvel to “Captain Marvel” — and a passionate group of fans called the Carol Corps has risen around that series, set to relaunch in March. Her Image series “Pretty Deadly” similarly features magnetic female characters and has attracted fan art and even recordings of a song a character sings.

So, about “Bitch Planet” … “We’re commenting on — oh, I just got boring,” she said on stage to laughter. “If anyone wants to talk about the academics of it, you can email me later.”

In a backstage interview, Hero Complex invited DeConnick, who was carrying a copy of Bev Zalcock’s “Renegade Sisters: Girl Gangs on Film,” to jump into the academics of “Bitch Planet,” and to discuss De Landro, her approach to dialogue and encouraging creativity from readers…

More in link. 

dorkward:

That there’s a misconception that to be disabled means that you can hardly excel at anything, and if you do it’s because you’re a genius savant that will serve as an inspiring story to others.

[The Australia Council for the Arts Disability Action Plan 2014-2016 Launch]

I said a thing and I’m narcassistic enough to make gifsets of myself saying said thing.  Whatever, it’s an important thing I said - go watch the whole thing.  Also I’m still forever sad that I’ll never be a superhero.

Can I beg to differ about the superhero part?

Microsoft’s results for the fourth quarter are certainly surprising. Revenue? Up $3 billion year-over-year.

Profit edged up too, from $6.38 billion a year ago to $6.56 billion in the same quarter this year.

And about that dog of a tablet, the Surface, which forced Microsoft to take a nearly $1 billion write-down: Revenue on Surface more than doubled between this quarter and the one previous, from $400 million to $893 million, on account of Microsoft’s release this quarter of the much-improved Surface 2 and the Surface Pro 2.

Even search advertising revenue on the company’s search engine Bing grew 34%, even or perhaps because Microsoft is paying Yahoo 31% of Yahoo’s revenue to use Bing as its search engine.

Still, one good quarter does not a turnaround make. But it’s worth noting that this constitutes more than a turnaround; it’s record revenue for Microsoft. Yes, the company is enormous, sprawling and supposedly impossible to manage. But despite softness in the PC market (which led to a 3% decline in Windows revenues since last quarter), Microsoft’s kitchen sink approach to providing businesses with IT suddenly looks like a strength.

Say what you will about the death of the PC, but Microsoft’s prospects are looking up in its cloud-based subscriptions to its Office software, cloud data services including SQL Server and hardware. Revenue from consumer sale of Windows and other software is down, but offsetting that decline is the huge increase in sales of consumer hardware.

Could it be that the business strategy laid out by the much-maligned CEO Steve Ballmer—the cloud-based software subscriptions, operating systems (Windows) and hardware (Surface, and eventually Windows Phone)—is finally bearing fruit? If so, it’s not inconceivable that Microsoft’s board and shareholders gave up on Ballmer too soon.

San Francisco, thanks to outrage over swarming tech workers and rising rents, has become the symbol of gentrification’s ills. But San Francisco’s unique situation is giving gentrification a bad name; it doesn’t have to be that way, especially if the local government does its job correctly.

Gentrification, the term of art for an influx of new residents into an urban neighborhood that typically drives up rents, is controversial in many wealthy cities. It’s often blamed for driving out poorer residents. But when researchers try to prove it, facts are hard to find. Any number of outlets have reported on studies by Columbia University’s Lance Freeman and researchers at the University of Colorado and Duke University who find that gentrification doesn’t drive out a rising neighborhood’s former residents. It even stands to benefit them financially.

And this does make sense: Gentrification means a city and its neighborhoods becoming more attractive to potential residents, often because of growing economic opportunities. The counter-factual is either a reduction in prosperity (think Detroit) or stagnancy, the first of which isn’t attractive and the second means leaving low-income neighborhoods low-income. (Somehow making low-income neighborhoods wealthier while banning new residents doesn’t seem tenable, either).

So why are people in affected cities so upset? Freeman notes that the legacy of red-lining and other discriminatory real estate practices can make many wary of change, and it’s not like such things have disappeared: Minority borrowers were more likely to be sold sub-prime loans during the housing bubble, even if they qualified for prime loans. Rents go up in gentrifying neighborhoods; between 2000 and 2007 gentrifying neighborhoods saw an average increase in rent of 4.5 percentage points more than non-gentrifying neighborhoods, which isn’t so bad—but affordable housing gets pinched most.

San Francisco is practically the reductio ad absurdum of gentrification: It’s already land limited on three sides by water, and the massive rise of the tech industry over the last few decades has dramatically increased both the population of the area and its wealth. San Francisco is also a city of renters, as some 60% of the city’s residents don’t own a home. It’s a scenario for dramatic increases in home prices, and that’s what we’ve seen: Per the Case-Shiller home price index, they have risen some 50% since the 2008 bottom of the housing crisis, though they have yet to re-attain their heights at the top of the bubble.

But the blame shouldn’t go to the tech companies or their employees moving to San Francisco, however despicable some might be. Blame San Francisco for being pleasant, and its policymakers for being foolish: When a lot of people are moving to your city—San Francisco the city gained 50,000 new residents between 2000 and 2012, including some 25,000 between 2010-2012 and likely more since—home prices are going to increase unless you build a lot more housing. And, according to San Francisco’s latest housing inventory report, in 2011 it created just 269 new housing units, far lower than the 10-year average addition of 2,350 units a year, for a total stock of 372,831. That’s not going to support growing population.

So short of blockading the bridges, what’s a city to do? It’s simple—adopt new policies: Economist Noah Smith suggests here on Quartz  Henry George’s land tax as a way to improve everyone’s incentives and raise money for public services. Matt Yglesias argues in favor of increasing the housing stock by simply zoning for more and larger housing. Edward Glaeser believes that environmental impact regulations should be waived for affordable housing projects. Current building owners and those who favor single-family homes may oppose ideas like this because they’ll drive down rents, but they’re the path to ensure gentrification is really development—for everyone in a city.

Orlando Arocena

theatlantic:

Get Rid of ‘Viral’ Headlines With This One Weird Browser Extension

The Upworthy headlines will find you. In tweets, in emails, in wall posts from well-meaning family: Viral Headline English, with its blithe incredulity, will hunt you down, and you won’t believe the absolutely incredible thing that happens next. OMG.

Well, what you can’t beat, change.

Alison Gianotto a New York-based developer better known as snipe, has given users a way to hide from the madness. Her plug-in for Chrome, called Downworthy, translates certain common words in viral headlines to their more accurate equivalent.

“Literally” becomes “Figuratively.” 

“Incredible” becomes “Painfully Ordinary.” 

And my favorite: “Will Blow Your Mind” becomes “Might Perhaps Mildly Entertain You For a Moment.”

Read more. [Image: Grafvision/Shutterstock]

http://i.imgur.com/jggXyuJ.gif

Original Source

Samplify is an app that helps identify the source of samples used in songs. It’s available to download for Android from Google Play.

via reddit, The Awesomer

iraffiruse:

Frozach Submitted

Pictured here: Kristin Fisher, daughter of astronauts Anna Fisher and William Fisher, hanging out in mission control during her mom's 1984 flight aboard Space Shuttle Discovery. Fisher the younger was just 15 months old when her mom became the first mom in space.

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" RISKY " - Rolling Thunder 3 (Now Production/Namco - Genesis - 1993)

Keep in mind, this game was only released in North America.

The original Madden NFL Football for the Apple II, from 1988.

A federal appeals court judge has overturned an $11 million jury award made in favor of Robin Antonick, a key developer on the original, 1988 PC version of John Madden Football. The court has ordered a new trial to determine whether EA owes Antonick royalties for decades of sequels based on his original design. (Antonick's original contract said that he would earn royalties on any "derivative works" of his titles that were made after he left the company.)

Last July, Antonick and his lawyers convinced a jury that the 2D console versions of Madden NFL released between 1990 and 1996 were "derivative works" of the original game he made for the Commodore 64, Apple II, and PCs running MS-DOS. But this week, Judge Charles Breyer of the US District Court for the Northern District of California overturned that verdict, saying that "even construing the evidence in the light most favorable to Antonick, there is no legally sufficient basis for the jury's verdict that any of the Sega Madden games as a whole are virtually identical to Apple II Madden as a whole."

In reviewing the case, Judge Breyer determined that Antonick did not meet the legal threshold of proving that the Genesis versions of Madden were "virtually identical" to the Apple II version he helped design. While the original trial included many examples of similarities between the versions, Judge Breyer ruled that "the record contains no evidence from which a reasonable juror could conclude that Apple II Madden and any of the seven Sega Madden games are virtually identical when compared as a whole" and that EA was entitled to a new trial in the matter.

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Aurich Lawson / Thinkstock

Apple, Microsoft, Chegg, Newegg, and Target do the best job of safeguarding customer passwords, according to a comprehensive study of the top 100 e-commerce websites that also ranked Major League Baseball, Karmaloop, Dick's Sporting Goods, Toys R Us, and Aeropostale as performing the worst.

Apple.com was the only site to receive a perfect score of 100, which was based on 24 criteria, such as whether the site accepts "123456" and other extremely weak passwords and whether it sends passwords in plaintext by e-mail. Microsoft and academic supplier Chegg tied for second place with 65, while Newegg and Target came in third with 60. By contrast, MLB received a score of -75, Karmaloop a -70, Dick's Sporting Goods a -65, and Aeropostale and Toys R US each got a -60. Each site was awarded or deducted points based on each criterion, leading to a possible score from -100 and 100. The study was conducted by researchers from password manager Dashlane based on the password policies in effect on the top 100 e-commerce sites from January 17 through January 22.

An epidemic of poor passwords

Amazingly, 55 percent of the sites accepted weak passwords such as "123456" and "password," while Toys R US, J.Crew, 1-800-Flowers.com, and five other sites sent passwords as plaintext in e-mails. Sixty-one of the sites provided no advice on how to create a strong password when creating an account, while only seven sites provided any type of on-screen meter to help assess the strength of a chosen password.

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hodad

I never would have lumped these films together.

Thomas H. Schulman (born October 20, 1950 in Nashville) is an American screenwriter best known for his screenplay Dead Poets Society which won the Best Screenplay Academy Award for 1989.

Schulman earned a B.A. in philosophy from his hometown university Vanderbilt.^[1]

Other scripts include Honey, I Shrunk the Kids, Welcome to Mooseport, What About Bob?, 8 Heads in a Duffel Bag, Holy Man and Medicine Man

Original Source

School is Hell

buriedthings:

beatonna:

Iroquois Woman from Kahnawà:ke

I love Cornelius Krieghoff’s paintings.  His portraits of Habitants make my day.  So does this lady!  You WEAR that top hat, lady!  Hell yeah!

Edit: i’m still thinking about this woman! Where did she get the hat? It looks like she’s into it, it’s the only piece of western clothing she has, far as I can see.  Like she saw it and was like “yeah I’ll take one of those.”  It is probably a man’s hat because it’s around 1850 and doesn’t look like a riding hat?  If someone told her it was a man’s hat, did she say, that’s stupid, you’re stupid, it’s a great hat and it’s mine so jump in a lake?  Top hats for everyone.

Top hats were definitely part of 19th century Native fashion! Trade materials like silver and cloth had long been prized, and clothing items like top hats and military coats were considered particularly FABULOUS.

I’ve heard that delegations to DC were given top hats, but they were also probably easily bought around white settlements as well. Earlier in the 19th century, you’d usually see Chiefs wearing them with silver bands, beading, or feathers, and it was a mark of their diplomatic importance. Men in the mid-19th century Quebec, where the Krieghoff painting is, were adopting French-y dress increasingly, while women usually stuck to native-style dress (see below), though they sometimes wore a fancy western hat! This woman probably trades her baskets to settlers for a living, and doesn’t mind playing the artiste. You still see people wearing top hats at powwows today. Total dandies, us.

Here’s an engraving by M. Elias Regnault in 1849 (via the fabulous Iroquois Beadwork), showing Native men from Quebec wearing some top hats with ostrich feather and possibly a silver band, as well as habitant dress.

And a photo of an Anishinaabe man from the western Great Lakes taken in Washington DC in 1862, with his top hat enhanced with the feathers he might have worn in a traditional headdress. The sash around the coat is also very fashionable. Photo is from the Massachusetts Historical Society, via the fabulous Beyond Buckskin.

And finally, a top hat embellished with Plains-style porcupine quills and beadwork. (Via some auction site that didn’t list provenance!).

Aaah yesss beautiful!!  Thanks for all that info and also great links!

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