Toothpaste for dinner

ria-rha:

brainstemsofthoughtflowers replied to your post: thejohnnyringo: repair-her-armor: OH…

what’s wrong with it? So we’ve got a little cheek action, but this isn’t horrifying. Fantasy armor is mostly impractical, and this isn’t disgusting. I’d just fix the pose, maybe. Nothing wrong with looking sexy so long as she’s her own person.

The problem is that she is an sexualized child-like character. Period.

She got every childish feature there is; baby-face, childish body (even with the lil baby-fat still on), cutesy clothes… For example, you can’t look at this and think “adult woman”, when you see her compared to the other ladies in the game:

Trust me, it gets worse. She has a childish voice (in the original version) and even an childish posture. She even got childish emotes. Yet she’s always pictured like this. Now, let’s not forget that this game is pretty much built ONLY to sexualize women. And no, it’s not me saying that just cause how they look; I actually played it to really see how it was. There was constant sexual puns (often how the girls would “serve” the player who was obviously supposed to be a heterosexual male… although you play as a girl. And I suppose you know what I mean by “serve”). And not only that; if you pay some real money, you can see the girls completely naked. No need for armor when you can have bouncing boobs - Except for Sentinel. Well, at least you get to stare at her butt. This guy explains this game pretty well. Scarlet Blade in a nutshell.

Or, if you go to their Wiki, here’s what they have to say about Sentinel:

"Ugh oh my God yes I’m old enough to be on this site! I hate explaining that, so if you message me just to ask, don’t. I was engineered to look this way!. I can’t help it! It’s so old getting carded every time I try to buy a gun or a motorcycle, believe me. Also, next time some guy calls me a “damsel in distress”, he’s getting shot in the balls. Seriously.

I like girly stuff like shopping and fashion, but mostly I like killing bad guys. Narak, mutants, murderous drug addicts…chasing them down and shooting them in the head is the best thing ever. I guess I just want someone to chat with while I do it. I don’t want to be tied down, though. I’m not that old yet!”

Yes. They even have to point out that “she’s not a child” and that “she’s old enough for this game” but yet they admit that they “made her that way”. When you have to explain something like that, you know something is fucked up. Also, her age is 18. That’s just by the “acceptable” age, because hey, she’s NOT THAT OLD yet. *rolls eyes* And take note how all classes want someone to “have as company”.

It went to the point where they had to censore her so that she wouldn’t get banned. Which, ended up with them making this;

Which is not what I’d call an improvement.

jjp9999 writes "Weibo, China's replacement for Twitter and Facebook, went offline for about two hours on Jan. 20, when a DNS attack switched its IP address to overseas VPN software used to circumvent censorship. On Jan. 21, the brief IP switch was the most discussed topic on Weibo, with one user, ITHome, saying posting 'What IP is 65.49.2.178? It's sure to go down in history.' The IP address is one of those used by Freegate, which is free software released by Chinese dissidents in the U.S. intended to help Chinese people break through the Great Firewall. However, Bill Xia, president of Dynamic Internet Technology, which makes Freegate, said he and his team of volunteers thought their networks were under attack when they got a surge of traffic with about 100,000 users a second hitting their IP address. Xia said they are still trying to analyze the incident, but he assumes it was a slip-up the Chinese authorities in charge of censoring content. 'Our guess is they messed up again,' he said. 'This doesn't make sense for them, so I assume it was a mistake in their operation.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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The 45-degree-angle weave used on various leather products of luxury good seller Bottega Veneta has been granted trademark status by the US Patent and Trademark Office.

A new timelapse photomosaic shows China's Yutu rover dramatically trundling across the Moon's stark grey terrain in the first week after it rolled all six wheels onto the desolate lunar plains.

Read more...

Rumor: Ace Attorney 1-3 compilation on 3DS in Japan ⊟

Word reportedly out of a Famitsu magazine says Capcom will re-release Ace Attorney 1, 2, and 3 on 3DS in Japan on a single cart as Gyakuten Saiban: Naruhodo Selection (Ace Attorney: Wright Selection). Apparently, all of these games have been updated with stereoscopic 3D.

What makes this easy to believe is that the GBA games have been ported and re-released so, so many times (GBA, PC, DS, Wii, mobile, iOS twice). It’s a bit weird that Apollo Justice isn’t part of the deal this time since Capcom is going DS > 3DS. Usually I understand because GBA games are the starting point, and the process of porting a DS native game would be somehow different. 

But then I don’t know how true any of this is in the first place! So yeah! Gifs via the wonderful Court-Records… via, like, the games.

BUY Ace Attorney games, upcoming releases

For a few sweet hours, Girls on a Map became Doges on a Map.

Wow. Who is this gentleman with movie-star good looks? Why, it’s Michael Ventris (1922-1956), the main decipherer of Linear B. He was basically hella good at languages and knew like 12 languages by the time he was a teenager, he served in the RAF in WWII, and then he was trained as an architect. But this was not enough for Michael Ventris. Oh no. As a hobby, he worked on deciphering Linear B, the long unknown script found on tablets from Knossos, Crete. Basing his work off of the work of other earlier linguists who made progress with the script but never cracked it, Michael Ventris discovered that the script was encoding Greek and was subsequently able to decipher most of it. Tragically, he died young in a car crash and was not able to contribute more to Mycenaean studies or to make any more ladies swoon with his magnificent cheekbones. A gentleman, a linguist, a genius, he will live on forever in our hearts.

That sexy barbarian on the horse is the infamous Vercingetorix, a chieftan of the Arverni tribe who in 52 BC united Gaul (ancient France) against the invading Julius Caesar. In addition to having some of the best facial hair in history, he was a damn good general and almost defeated his Roman nemesis until he made a fatal mistake at the Battle of Alesia. There he surrendered, was taken prisoner, and in 46 BC was paraded through the streets of Rome and executed. Although he was defeated, the ancient French hero embodies the spirit of liberation so often stirred in his homeland, and remains a celebrated figure. Plus, look at that beautiful mane of Gallic hair….so much damn.

How to Recover from 5 Types of Skids

via http://www.designsponge.com/2014/01/24-hours-in-portland-with-kinfolk-magazine.html#more-191014

I’ve been a fan of Jan Robert Leegte for years, his latest website: “Concentric Selections of Gradient“. It has a grey gradient and marching ants, what’s there not to like?

Cards Against Humanity is the hilarious party game for horrible people, and now you can mix the game's political incorrectness with your knowledge of Doctor Who thanks to a fan-made edition called Cards Against Gallifrey.

Read more...

Myke Hurley’s recent podcast interview of John Roderick is excellent.

At 39 minutes, Myke asked how music promotion works today. I’ve quoted part of John’s response, with some slight editing and paraphrasing to read more easily:

[40:30]
[Ten years ago,] you were dependent on this whole cultural architecture of magazine writers, newspaper writers, college radio, commercial radio, public radio… and if your record got into the stream, and the right person liked it and talked about it, then pretty soon you’ve created a storm of interest that started with one or two people who decided that this record was something that really mattered.

If you couldn’t get those people to take an interest in your record — because of course everybody in the world knows who those few people are, and they’re inundating them with albums — if you couldn’t get that person to take the time, or if they just didn’t like it, then you’d be struggling, grasping at every opportunity to get someone further down the food chain to take an interest in this album. …

[43:07]
Well, five years ago, all of a sudden the conventional wisdom started to change. “Oh, no, we don’t have to do any of that anymore! You just put it on the internet, everybody listens to it, and ‘the crowd’ decides! And you don’t have to do any of that bullshit anymore. You can just tweet about your record, and everybody’s going to listen to it and love it!”

And for a brief moment, when the internet was still comprised mostly of all the right people, it was just the cool kids that were on there. Clap Your Hands Say Yeah could put out a record on Myspace, and the cool kids would all get it.

But, of course, that window was short-lived. Now, we’re back to a world where everybody’s on the internet, and nobody cares. Nobody’s following your tweet link to your record anymore! Except your fans, people who already like you.

My Twitter feed is now 85% links to people’s Kickstarters and YouTube videos. And I only follow people I know! Imagine following your favorite bands — it would be never-ending. Everybody’s trying to promote themselves the same way.

The problem is now, if you hire a publicist, what are they doing? They’re just tweeting about it, too, because the magazines are gone, the record stores are gone… it’s anybody’s guess how to promote a record now. …

[45:28] I hate to sound curmudgenly, but … what is inevitable is that the mean quality of everything is declining. In the early ’70s, it was very expensive to make a record, and you had to be really good at it to even get into the studio to give it a shot. The record companies were very selective, and the music that made it all the way out to the marketplace was astonishingly good. Think about the music that came out between 1962 and 1972: what an astonishing quality of music, in every genre. Ten different genres of music were invented and perfected.

Now, we live in a world where there are probably more records coming out this week than what came out in all of 1967. All of that quantity probably hasn’t produced a single record that was as good as the worst record from 1967. Everything is easier to make, so more people are making it, the standard is so much lower for what you need, and it’s a confusing din.

As a culture, we are satisfied with worse, because there’s so much more of everything.

When a Marvin Gaye record came out 40 years ago, presumably, you went and spent your record-buying allowance on it, and you brought it home and listened to it exclusively for 2 weeks. It was an investment. This was it! You’re going to listen to this, or you’ve got an AM radio and a newspaper.

Now, we’re just clicking through songs. “How does this one sound? Oh, that’s good. How does this one sound? Pretty good. This one’s good.”

We’re just flipping through index cards.

This is equally true in all media today, including software.

This is why a hundred other sites are trying to be Daring Fireball, why everybody’s starting a podcast, and why nobody’s buying your app in the App Store.

The democratization of media production and distribution over the last few decades has worked incredibly well. Overall, it’s a net win for society. But the downside is that everything’s now extremely crowded.

There’s a lot of money and attention out there to go around, but there’s also a lot more competition for everything.

ainsherd:

made a hobbit house terrarium for my sister as a gift :) will put up some process photos from it too 

I got an email from Network Solutions — where I still have two domains, originally registered in the ’90s — that informed me I have been enrolled in their WebLock Program.

To help recapture the costs of maintaining this extra level of security for your account, your credit card will be billed $1,850 for the first year of service on the date your program goes live. After that you will be billed $1,350 on every subsequent year from that date. If you wish to opt out of this program you may do so by calling us at 1-888-642-0265.

(Here’s a screenshot of the email. I’ve pasted in the text at the end of this post.)

I couldn’t believe that I’d been opted-in, without my permission, to any new product — and I was stunned when I saw how much it cost. And further surprised when I saw that I would have to make a phone call to deal with all this.

I found on Twitter that Network Solutions has an account. So I asked if this was phishing. The reply: it’s real.

My next step was, of course, to post a screen shot of the email on Twitter.

@netsolcares responded by suggesting I call the security team.

@brentsimmons Give the security team a call and they can explain 1-888-642-0265 Sorry for the inconvenience. ^rr

I’m not going to call the security team. (Which I’d bet is really a sales team.) I’ve been a customer of Network Solutions since 1997. While their website was always kind of a pain, I’ve never had problems with them.

But this goes way beyond acceptable behavior for any company I do business with. It’s extreme.

So I’ll be transferring those domains elsewhere. (Folks have recommended Hover and Dynadot.)

Text of the email

Dear Brent Simmons,

Cybercriminals continue to strengthen and evolve the techniques and tools they use to assault our customers' websites and domain names. According to the Symantec Internet Security Annual report the pace and frequency of hacking, phishing and social engineering has increased over 42% in 2013.

Compromised domain names can lead to substantial brand, reputational and financial damage. Once a domain name is compromised cybercriminals have total control of the content that appears on "your" website. In many cases objectionable content is posted or phishing sites are established whereby your customers' private information can be exploited.

At Network Solutions we take your security very seriously. We deploy some of the most advanced security monitoring and defense mechanisms in the industry to ensure only authorized users can access your company's domain name and name servers. Given the level of traffic to your website, we are taking another significant step to protect your domain name security.

Starting 9:00 AM EST on 2/4/2014 all of your domains will be protected via our WebLock Program. Here is how the program works:

• In order to make changes to your Domain Name's configuration settings you must be pre-registered as a Certified User.
• All requests for Domain Name configuration changes must be confirmed by an outbound call we make to a pre-registered authorized phone number you establish. A unique 9 digit PIN will be required when we call.
• A message alert will be sent to all Certified Users notifying the team which Certified User has made the request.
• In addition WebLock enrolled customers will have access to a 24/7 NOC and rapid response team in the event of any security issues.

To establish Certified Users and pre-register authorized phone numbers and email addresses please call 1-888-642-0265 Monday to Friday between 8:00AM and 5:00PM EST. Please make sure to establish Certified Users with authorized phone numbers and email addresses before launch date. Once established, the unique 9-digit PINs for each certified user will be mailed to you within 45-days.

To help recapture the costs of maintaining this extra level of security for your account, your credit card will be billed $1,850 for the first year of service on the date your program goes live. After that you will be billed $1,350 on every subsequent year from that date. If you wish to opt out of this program you may do so by calling us at 1-888-642-0265.

We strongly encourage you to take advantage of this security program and register Certified Users before the program launch date. Thank you for helping us protect you better.

Regards
Geof Birchall

Geof Birchall
Chief Security Officer
Network Solutions

Connect With Us

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"This is wrinkling my brain."

beautifulmars:

Rings in Schiaparelli Crater

spaceexp:

Saturn’s Moon, Enceladus

Beautiful picture.

marielikestodraw:

jtotheizzoe:

kenobi-wan-obi:

bouncingdodecahedrons:

Carl telling us how (not) to science.

"conclusion: dinosaurs" is still my favorite rebuttal to just about anything tbh.

Second perhaps only to “Therefore: aliens”

This is perfect

design-is-fine:

Dieter Rams, Braun record player PS 500, 1958. Germany. Via das programm

thingsfortwwings:

[Image: A screencap from Iron Man of a fragment of code with a progress bar in front of it; the code is reproduced below.]

moviecode:

From: http://deeperdesign.wordpress.com/2010/02/26/is-iron-man-made-of-lego/

I was re-watching Iron Man recently and noticed something interesting.  During Iron Man’s first “boot up sequence”, in the “terrorist” caves of Nowhereistan, some butchered C code is displayed on a faked up laptop screen.

The code displayed on screen, although missing some syntactically important characters such as semi-colons, is actual valid C source code.  So valid in fact that I wondered where it came from.

After a quick Google I found it. This code is in fact as follows:

    send[0] = 0x65;
    send[1] = 1;
    send[2] = 3;
    send[3] = 5;
    send[4] = 7;
    send[5] = 11;

    if (rcx_sendrecv(fd, send, 6, recv, 1, 50, RETRIES, use_comp) != 1) {
	fprintf(stderr, "%s: delete firmware failed\n", progname);
	exit(1);
    }

    /* Start firmware download */
    send[0] = 0x75;
    send[1] = (start >> 0) & 0xff;
    send[2] = (start >> 8) & 0xff;
    send[3] = (cksum >> 0) & 0xff;
    send[4] = (cksum >> 8) & 0xff;
    send[5] = 0;

    if (rcx_sendrecv(fd, send, 6, recv, 2, 50, RETRIES, use_comp) != 2) {
	fprintf(stderr, "%s: start firmware download failed\n", progname);
	exit(1);
    }

    /* Transfer data */
    addr = 0;
    index = 1;
    for (addr = 0, index = 1; addr 

The code above comes from a firmware downloader for the RCX (a programmable, microcontroller-based Lego brick), written in 1998 at Stanford University by Kekoa Proudfoot. You can get the full source file here and it is distributed under the Mozilla Public License.  This is the same license used by Firefox and many other Open Source software products.

The sequence in the film in which this code appears suggests that the code is either being downloaded as firmware to the Iron Man suit or being used to upload firmware to an RCX Lego brick that is somehow involved in the operation of Iron Man.

So it appears that Iron Man is either powered by Open Source software or made of Lego.  I’m not sure which is cooler.

The NFL's first legally deaf offensive player inspires an adorable letter from a little girl.

Super Bowl-bound Seahawks fullback Derrick Coleman, the NFL's only deaf player and the subject of a terrific commercial, is obviously an inspiration to those who share his impairment. But if you need evidence, here's evidence in the most adorable form possible:

@Seahawks @DC2forlife you've inspired my little girls in a way I never could. THANK YOU! #Seahawks #SuperBowlXLVIII pic.twitter.com/lhpJfCPOSD

— jake kovalcik (@JakeIsMobile) January 21, 2014

"^ my insperation" is so exceptionally cute. Date's a little off, but no matter. Coleman inspired some young girls, and I reckon this letter will inspire him right back. Wonderful all around.

(via Bleacher Report)

If you'd like to buy a little Sad Keanu of your very own, 3D printing service Shapeways is offering one for $45.

Two and a half years ago, Constable Suzanne Bourque was interviewing witnesses about the activity of a too-friendly-for-his-own-good bear cub who'd been pestering visitors at the Terra Nova National park in Newfoundland and Labrador when the bear cub himself showed up. The ensuing pictures were un-bear-ably adorable, but, in the way of things on the internet, ran under the radar for a while until they finally got their chance at becoming internet gold.