firehose

jimzub:

The board game activity pages by Roger Langridge for Li’l Sonja #1 (arriving later this month) look fantastic!

Damn.

I gotta have this.

A “huge number of places you go online?”

What about in the actual media?

There’s no scarcity of women who cry or cower, I doubt there will be any time soon. I hardly think we need to start a fundraiser for the continued existence of those portrayals.

We are at a point where we have SOME women who may do those things, but are also strong and capable and self-actualized and choosing their own destinies. But for some people, ‘SOME’ characters is clearly a flood, and we need to consider not making every character like that.

Well, I say…where is this flood? Where are the female-led superhero movies? How many action dramas on television have female leads? How many adventure comics have predominantly female casts?

It’s getting better, inch by inch, but every week we hear some executive saying female action heroes can’t anchor a film, despite the notable successes.

My concern at this point is not making sure there are lots of female characters who cower or want a husband. That number is out there already and it’s been self-perpetuating for a hundred years.

My concern is changing the thinking that there is simply SUCH a massive surplus of ‘strong’ women that it’s actually a problem, somehow.

Because it clearly is not.

The new album from Stephen Malkmus and the Jicks, Wig Out at Jagbags, is currently streaming in full over at Amazon, and will be there until January 6 (that's the day before the album's official release, January 7). While some have noted some Pavement-y sparkles on the new record, I detect something older than echoes from the '90s. To me, Jagbags bears signs of the combined forces of Malkmus' love of obscure '60s/'70s European psych and prog (fittingly, the album was recorded in the pastoral countryside of Belgium), and Jicks drummer Jake Morris' affinity for classic-rock radio of the late '70s and early '80s (in particular, Steely Dan). But don't take my word for it; give Jagbags a test drive over at Amazon with your computing machine.

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Zombie Horse Mask

Archie McPhee have recently added a fantastic new series of horse-related items to their online store. They now have a glow-in-the-dark Zombie Horse Mask, a Lady Horse Mask, a stylish pair of Horse Hooves, and a Creepy Horse Man Hand Puppet. We previously wrote about their original Creepy Horse Head Mask that started all of the fun horsing around.

Horse Hooves

Lady Horse Mask

Creepy Horse Man Hand Puppet

images via Archie McPhee

submitted via Laughing Squid Tips

fakegeekguys:

Gonna have to go a little further to prove your a geek than just put on Star Wars underwear and glasses, muscleboy. #fakegeekguys

new favorite blog hellooo

Those who like to chug a little ouzo, or perhaps absinthe, will know how the liquor clouds up when water is added to it. What causes two clear liquids to form a cloud in the glass? Chemistry gets opaque with the Ouzo Effect.

Read more...

In this really sweet video, two men feed a hungry wild fox who cautiously approached them while they were fishing in the Saratov region of Russia.

video by Alexander Tourenkov

GIF via imgur

via Daily Picks and Flicks

A red hot nickel ball dropped on a brick of processed Velveeta cheese makes a smoky mess in this video by Carsandwater. Previously we’ve written about other cool nickel ball experiments.

What happens when you put a second, backwards LSU hat on LSU's not-so-beloved Toonces logo? Nothing good, honestly.

LSU had a good thing going for a while, logo-wise. Yes, their old Tiger logo looked a little bit like veteran character actor Richard Masur (or, alternately, sort of like film critic Leonard Maltin), but it was recognizably what it was, and cool in that way. When the school replaced it with the widely reviled "Toonces" logo, no one was happy. Now, with the release of the hat above, which looks like a collaboration between Toonces and MC Escher, everyone is... even more unhappy.

Leave aside the basic problem of it being a white hat. Let's focus on the fact that Toonces himself is wearing another, different LSU hat, which happens to be camouflage. Let's ponder, if we dare, the possibility that on the back of Toonces' camo hat is another Toonces, wearing a white cap with a still-smaller Toonces in a backwards camo hat on it, and so on into infinity. Or we can just leave it to the good people behind SB's LSU blog And The Valley Shook, who have already helped out with a redesign:

That's... actually, I'm not sure that's better. Let's just burn it all and start again.

Via @valleyshook

Eloi Vanderbecken explains the motivation for hacking his own WiFi router in pictures.

Eloi Vanderbeken

A hacker has found a backdoor to wireless combination router/DSL modems that could allow an attacker to reset the router’s configuration and gain access to the administrative control panel. The attack, confirmed to work on several Linksys and Netgear DSL modems, exploits an open port accessible over the wireless local network.

The backdoor requires that the attacker be on the local network, so this isn’t something that could be used to remotely attack DSL users. However, it could be used to commandeer a wireless access point and allow an attacker to get unfettered access to local network resources. Update: Vanderbeken reports some routers have the backdoor open to the Internet side as well, leaving them vulnerable to remote attack.

Eloi Vanderbeken described the backdoor in a PowerPoint posted with the code to Github. In his illustrated report, he explained how over the Christmas holiday he was trying to get access to the administrative console of his family’s Linksys WAG200G wireless DSL gateway wirelessly—mostly so he could limit how much bandwidth the others in the house were using. But Vanderbeken had previously turned off wireless access to the administration web console (and had forgotten his administrative password).

Read 7 remaining paragraphs | Comments

He really is the people’s pope.

Almost three times as many tourists have visited Vatican City in the last 9 1/2 months than all of 2012, testament to Pope Francis’  popularity and the public’s fascination with him. Last week, the pontiff was named Time magazine’s Person of the Year.

Between March and December of 2013,  some 6.6 million tourists poured into Vatican City, a figure calculated using ticketing figures for special events and crowd estimates at popular sites like St. Peter’s Square. Meanwhile, in 2012, the Vatican had a total of 2.35 million visitors. That was the last calendar year that the controversial Pope Benedict served before stepping down in February and becoming the first pope to fail to serve a life term in almost 600 years.

Pope Francis, (called Jorge Mario Bergoglio before his election), an Argentine and the first pope from the Americas, has enjoyed wide popularity in Latin America, and the US, despite questions about his past. He also has become well known as a progressive thinker, who speaks openly about income inequality, capitalism, and homosexuality, often angering conservative Catholics.

Italian tourism officials had been predicting a bump in Vatican visits in the first years following Pope Francis’ election, since they’d seen increases in visitation and hotel reservations within the first months of his election. It is estimated that a tenth of all tourists visits to Italy are to Vatican City, and 10.3% of Italy’s GDP relies on tourism.

Things that live too long in boxes: I have a lot of them. The shirt pictured above is now for sale, along with the three remaining tote bags. Brooklyn cow shirts are down to just $9 – quite the bargain, when you consider that the Greenpoint one bedroom they were created in now rents for over $1800 a month.

And if you’re planning on thanking people for anything, moving or just plain old emoting for the month of January you can get 16 (sixteen!) cards for just $16, shipping included ($20 if you’re outside the US). Pick your winners and then order here.

Right after Christmas, the Wall Street Journal wrote that McDonald’s had taken down its website advising employees how to eat more healthfully—by not eating McDonald’s core products.

Oops.

Nothing on the Web really disappears, in part because of screenshots.  The website Russia Today, of all places, had done just that (thanks Ben Kelley, for sending).

Here’s an aggregation of what else got sent to me from other donors who prefer to remain anonymous:

• McDonald’s shutters gaffe-prone employee help site, CBS MoneyWatch
• McDonald’s removes worker site after fast food flap, CNBC.  I like the summary:

After yet another PR headache, McDonald’s has taken down its employee resources website following what it deemed “unwarranted scrutiny and inappropriate commentary.”

• McDonald’s on employee resource site: Not lovin’ it, CNN

My favorite comment comes from a tweet from Center for Science in the Public Interest, @CSPI:

Sometimes when I put up a new post on this site, it’s because I have what I think is a good idea and I want to say, “Hey world, here’s an idea I came up with and I’d like to share it with you.” Other times I put up a new post because I want to say, “Hey, quit emailing me and asking me how to do this.”

So, like a million years ago I put up a couple of blog posts on this site, one about making your own ginger beer, and one about bottled carbonated cocktails, both which require some pretty tricky methods for making bubbles: one that called for using ever-unpredictable yeast, and one using a device that was recalled shortly after my post for exploding. Oops.

So about once a week I get an email from someone asking me how to do one of several things:

1. Carbonate cocktails in a way that won’t result in exploding equipment.
2. Carbonate ginger beer or other mixers without resorting to yeast.
3. Carbonate cocktails for draft delivery.

So here are the two systems that can do all of those things. Here we go.

Thanks to the fine folks at my local homebrew shop, I was able to put together a kit that takes less than five minutes to assemble, cost me around a hundred and fifty bucks to build, and costs next to nothing to operate. A bit cheaper than a top-of-the-line SodaStream, but with a lot more versatility (you can carbonate more than just water with mine) and a hell of a lot cheaper to operate long-term. Here’s what you need:

A Regulator

You need a regulator in order to do this. What a regulator does is maintain an exact pressure coming from your CO2 tank. If you’re not using a regulator, you’re dumping the contents of your CO₂ tank into your container, and your container can explode. Don’t ever think of hooking a CO₂ tank up to anything without a regulator, okay? They cost about $60 bucks and you can buy one here.

A Carbonator Cap

This is about the coolest thing ever. It’s a device that screws on to any two-liter bottle and allows you to carbonate whatever’s inside that bottle. I have this system at home and use it primarily for soda water (I’m a nut for bubbles) and sometimes sparkling lemonade, but you can also use this to carbonate cocktails. It’s especially handy for making bigger batches of bottled cocktails, and sometimes in the summer I’ll make a case of Americanos for backyard parties. Anyway, it’s part of the system I’m describing, so you need to pick one up here.

Carbon Dioxide

There’s one good way to get carbon dioxide (CO₂) into a beverage, and that’s by using a tank of the stuff. It’s cheap, it’s plentiful, and it’s real easy to find. I’m not going to tell you to buy it online, though if you want an empty tank that you can have refilled cheaply at a homebrew shop any commercial gas place, pick it up here for around $50 bucks. Otherwise, hit up your gas dealer or homebrew shop.

Putting It All Together

Getting the tank connected to the Carbonator Cap is easy, you just need a few small things. First off, get yourself a Quick Disconnect to attach to the Carbonator Cap. This allows you to take the hose on and off the bottle with ease. They’re like ten bucks and you can get one here.

Next, you’ll need some hose and a couple of hose clamps to secure either end to your equipment. I use about five feet of hose for flexibility, and I found one online that actually comes with two hose clamps, which will save you a trip to the hardware store.

Now all you need to do is connect one end of that hose to the quick disconnect, and the other to the hose barb. Use those hose clamps to get it good and secure on either end, and then screw the regulator to the CO₂ tank. Open up the tank, flip that valve on the regulator so that it’s parallel to the hose, and crank your PSI up to 35.

Time for Bubbles!

Get your empty two-liter bottle and fill it with the beverage you want to carbonate. The most important thing here is that your liquid is as cold as possible, because carbon dioxide is much more soluble in cold water than in warm. So chill your drink overnight in the fridge if you need to.

Once that puppy is cold, screw on the Carbonator Cap, connect the quick disconnect to the cap, and make sure everything is on there good and tight. Now, while the tank is connected, you’ve got to shake the shit out of your bottle. Shaking will increase the surface area between the gas and the liquid, which is where the transfer of CO₂ happens. Shake it hard until you can’t feel or hear any more gas being delivered to the bottle. This usually takes between thirty seconds and a minute.

Disconnect the Quick Disconnect valve and you’re done. If you’re only carbonating water, then you can unscrew the Carbonator Cap and you’re ready to go. If you have anything with sugar in there (and yes, booze and fruit juice all have sugar in them) then you’ll want to unscrew that cap really slowly so that it doesn’t fizz up all over your counter.

And that’s it! Now you can pour it out into glasses, or fill some bottles and cap them if that’s the route you want to take. For reference, here’s your shopping list.

1. CO₂ tank: $68.40, $15 to refill.
2. Tap-Rite Regulator: $58.99
3. 5 feet of hose and two hose clamps: $5.24
4. Ball Valve Quick Disconnect: $9.99
5. Carbonator Cap: $12.65
6. Empty two liter bottle: $0.05

Total cost: $155.32

Draft Cocktails

Now, if you really need to serve cocktails on tap, then this system isn’t going to work. For that you’ll need what’s referred to as a “Cornelius Keg”, which is a five-gallon keg typically used for soda. They’re great for this because they have a nice wide opening that makes them a cinch to clean.

I had a whole thing written where I went through the individual parts for you, and then I realized you can just buy a complete system online. It’s around $200 and includes everything you would need to serve cocktails or soda on tap (I do own this system as well). Now, if you’re hoping to connect this to your draft faucets in a professional bar you’ll need some additional connections, but if you’re at that level I’m going to assume you know how to navigate the back-end of your system and get the right connections from the homebrew shop.

Once you’ve got that all assembled, then the method is the same: mix up your drink, get it very well chilled, shake the hell out of it until there’s no more gas running into the container, and you’re almost ready. The one difference with the keg system is that once you’ve reached your full 25 or so PSI of carbonation, you’ve got to turn down the pressure coming from the regulator to about 8 PSI, otherwise you’ll be firing foam all over the place (that’s what she said). You can do this by pulling the ring on the top of the keg to release pressure while turning the regulator knob counter-clockwise until you’ve landed somewhere around 8 PSI.

That’s it! I hope this helps those of you looking to add some bubble to your beverages. I’m starting my 2014 (and my eleventh year of writing this blog!) by helping myself to a nice, cold glass of sparkling water. Cheers, you guys.

Post from: Jeffrey Morgenthaler. Follow me on Twitter.

How to Build Your Own Carbonation Rig

Cuphead is an upcoming run and gun video game by Studio MDHR that is “set in the style of a one-on-one fighting game universe.” The game is heavily inspired by cartoons from the 1930s. You can view an interview with the developers online to learn more. Cuphead is set to release for the PC sometime in 2014 “and hopefully consoles” after that.

The visuals and audio were painstakingly created with the same techniques of the era, i.e. traditional cel animation (hand drawn & hand inked!), watercolor backgrounds and live jazz recordings. Play as Cuphead or Mugman (single or co-op!) as you traverse the islands to find new challengers, rank up, and eventually compete in the grand tournament. You must become acquainted with the boundless variety of weapons, supers and secrets to stand a chance against all 30+ battles.

We are targeting PC first. Once that is complete we will port to other platforms (Mac/Linux) and hopefully consoles (PS4, Xbox One).

videos and images via Studio MDHR

via Cartoon Brew

Rovio, the media company behind Angry Birds, is finally joining the world of free apps. The latest version of the game, Angry Birds Go!, which launched last month, is Rovio’s first free-to-play Angry Birds game. But unlike most companies who operate a “freemium” model, charging nothing upfront and instead focusing on getting users to fork over cash for upgrades and add-ons once they’re hooked, Rovio is embracing the model for a different reason.

It’s been four years since the Angry Birds franchise first hit the app market, and the games have been downloaded more than two billion times and grossed over half a billion dollars. But the business these days is as much about the merchandise as the game itself. In 2013, reports the Wall Street Journal today, the company made nearly half of its cash (paywall) on licensing agreements (over $200 million in all), up from 30% the year before. These cover everything from Angry Birds t-shirts, stuffed animals and cell phone covers to hats and shoes. Rovio even expanded its licensing agreement with mammoth toy-maker Hasbro this summer, and has plans to license the world’s largest Angry Birds theme park.

Rovio seems to have calculated that it can make more money from people buying bird- and pig-decorated paraphernalia than off games themselves, which is why it no longer charges to play. “We look at this from the audience-reach point of view,” executive vice president for games at Rovio Jami Laes told the Wall Street Journal.

Angry Birds Go! is also a step into a new genre for Rovio. Unlike its predecessors, which entail firing birds out of slingshots, it involves racing them in cars down an obstacle course. That likely means that Rovio plans to expand to other genre games, especially if this latest version is a hit. “It is kind of an implication of our future direction, where we are thinking more of games as free-to-play. We think that when done right, free-to-play is the best model for our fans, consumers, developers and publisher,” Laes told the WSJ. He probably should have mentioned licensees, too.

	Courtney shared this story from The ToastThe Toast:
	"He goes to nightclubs and drinks orange drinks with little umbrellas with them; dresses like a slightly louche Bertie Wooster and catcalls nightclub singers. Partial self-awareness." Perfection.

Previously: The Rise and Fall of Fox Civilization in Disney Films. 

Generally it is possible to establish a sort of makeshift sliding scale of animal morality and sentience in most Disney films by sorting them into a carniverous/anthropomorphic matrix: animals that eat other animals are likeliest (though not always) to be villains, animals with the most human-like characteristics are likeliest to be heroes. And yet there is a maddening inconsistency to this sorting mechanism: lizards are sometimes villainous henchmen, sometimes two-timing traitors, sometimes helpful weirdos. Rats sometimes act exactly as they do in the wild (and try to kill human children), sometimes walk on two legs and wear hats and blend in seamlessly with human society, and sometimes become executive chefs. This week we examine the problem of the wolf.

What to do with the wolf? Is he the noble, wilder brother of the dog or a savage scavenger? The villainous counterpart to the more sociable fox? Does he go on all fours? Does he speak? Can he feel?

Movie: Robin Hood
Wolf(ves) Present: The Sheriff of Nottingham, wolf archers (they look like giant rats to me, but the Disney Wiki calls them wolf archers and I defer to their authority on this subject)
Level of Sentience: Fully humanoid. The Sheriff walks like a person and wears shoes and a doublet and one of those little medieval hats, although oddly enough he speaks like an old-timey prospector, in the manner of many a corrupt fictional officer of the law.
Moral Alignment: A real dick. He steals coins out of that injured dog’s cast! General attitude: cheerful but sleepily evil. He’s got tiny eyes. Nobody with tiny eyes is good, in a Disney movie.

Movie: The Jungle Book
Wolf(ves) Present: So many! Mowgli’s brothers, Rama, Mowgli’s foster-father, the entire Wolf Council
Level of Sentience: Advanced. They don’t wear clothes or walk on their hind legs, but they do have a fairly complex social and judicial structure, inasmuch as their Wolf Council bears a striking similarity to Iceland’s Althing. Due process is a big thing with them. Also, the animation from the scene where the grown wolf cubs lick Mowgli’s face is recycled from a similar scene in The Sword in the Stone, which explains why Mowgli has the same haircut as a young King Arthur.
Moral Alignment: Good as hell. They adopt Mowgli as an infant and raise him as one of their own, instead of eating his entire body. Friends with panthers and bears (good), enemies of tigers (evil, which is its own messed-up alignment; why is a panther nice and a tiger evil when they’re practically the same animal? Ridiculous).

Movie: The Big Bad Wolf
Wolf(ves) Present: The big bad wolf.
Level of Sentience: The wolf equivalent of Danny DeVito’s character from Matilda. A shady huckster. I don’t remember offhand if the old top hat he wears has the brim coming off, but it wouldn’t surprise me a bit if he did. Walks on hind legs and wears human clothes, but still tries to eat pigs while they’re raw and alive, which seems to me the worst of both worlds.
Moral Alignment: Not great. In some of the early animated shorts, he has a young son named Li’l Bad Wolf, who tries and fails to be evil, which is fairly humanizing; in some of the others he has three evil sons (with no sign of Li’l Bad Wolf at all; it’s possible that he has two separate families with two separate female wolves, possibly one good and one evil, which would explain the varying moral alignments of his offspring). Here are his evil sons putting Tabasco sauce on the Three Little Pigs.

The Disney Wiki entry on the etymology of his full name, by the way, is too fantastic for words:

One of Big Bad Wolf’s names, Zeke Midas Wolf, has two origins: The first name, Zeke, is a shortened form of Ezekiel, Hebrew for “God is my Strength.” It was also the codename for a World War II Japanese fighter plane. The middle name, Midas, is a name of Greek origin relating to the legend of Midas, who was believed to turn things into solid gold as a gift from the Gods, which led to his downfall when he accidentally killed his daughter by turning her into a golden statue with his power.

You can’t ask for more thoroughness than that.

Movie: Peter and the Wolf
Wolf(ves) Present: The wolf.
Level of Sentience: This wolf is beyond sentience. This wolf is the essence of poisoned nightmare fuckery. Remember the wolf from The Neverending Story? Gmork? Remember what he says to Atreyu at the end?

“Because people have begun to lose their hopes and forget their dreams. So the Nothing grows stronger. It’s the emptiness that’s left. It’s like a despair, destroying this world. And I have been trying to help it. Because people who have no hopes are easy to control; and whoever has the control…has the power! I am the servant of the power behind the Nothing. I was sent to kill the only one who could have stopped the Nothing. I lost him in the Swamps of Sadness.”

This wolf’s heart and that wolf’s heart are the same.
Moral Alignment: Horror.

Movie: Beauty and the Beast
Wolf(ves) Present: The wolf pack just outside of the Beast’s castle.
Level of Sentience: Enough to growl and to advance menacingly; not enough to attack as a coordinated unit
Moral Alignment: Mindlessly evil. It’s odd, perhaps, that in a land of talking clocks and cabinets we should encounter such dim wolves, but there one is. Even Phillipe, the horse, seems dimly aware of the world around him and is capable of obeying basic directions, but these wolves are goddamn simpletons. There are at least eight of them, and after they (finally) manage to run Belle down, they waste their best chance by snapping showily at a massive Clydesdale instead of going for the exhausted woman lying motionless in the snow. They could have had her divvied up and skinned before the Beast even shows up, but they waste their time prancing uselessly around Phillipe, giving Belle a chance to grab a club and end their home-court advantage.

Movie: The Sword in the Stone
Wolf(ves) Present: The sad little scraggly wolf who never gets to eat Wart
Level of Sentience: None. He is driven by nothing more than his animal instincts. He tries to eat Wart, it’s true, but this is not an act of malice or even intent. He is hunger wrapped in skin. He fails and he suffers.
Moral Alignment: Desperate. He’s the saddest little wolf that I ever did see. Kay says that the woods Wart runs into are “swarming with wolves,” but this sad, gasping specimen seems to be entirely alone. He is old, we know that. His fur is ragged and thatched; his ribs protrude under his mangy hide; his eyebrows are a grandfather’s eyebrows. He is whippet-thin, thinner even than Wart — his tongue is his most prominent feature. He drools actively. He tires easily. He is pelted by boulders and half-drowned in freezing rivers and stuffed into hollow trees and runs himself ragged chasing a meal he will never catch. When last we see him, he is exhausted, thwarted, defeated; death is close at hand. Without food, he cannot possibly make it through another winter, and there is no food.

Movie: Red Hot Riding Hood
Wolf(ves) Present: Just goes by “Wolf” (“Wolfie” for that hot-to-trot grandma).
Level of Sentience: He goes to nightclubs and drinks orange drinks with little umbrellas with them; dresses like a slightly louche Bertie Wooster and catcalls nightclub singers. Partial self-awareness.
Moral Alignment: Oh, man. I’m not sure where to land on this one. He is definitely a creep of the highest order, but he’s so horrifically traumatized by the persistent seduction attempts of Granny that he commits suicide at the end of the cartoon. Then his ghost, unable to find peace, returns to compulsively holler at strange women — and this is the altered ending, after the original was deemed “too controversial.” I feel enormous sorrow for this emotionally stunted wolf, as trapped in death as he was in life. He is more to be pitied than censured, although you are welcome to do both, if you like.

[Images via Disney Wiki]

Read more The Sliding Scale of Wolf Sentience and Morality in Disney Films at The Toast.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.