firehose

For the first time in forever — or at least in over a century — Elsa has become a popular name in the United States.

Courtney shared this story from Super Opinionated.

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US Democratic presidential candidate and former secretary of state Hillary Rodham Clinton aired accusations against China on Saturday, July 4. Speaking at a campaign event in the US state of New Hampshire, she claimed Chinese hackers had stolen “huge amounts of government information,” and were intent on “hacking into everything that doesn’t move in America,” according to Reuters.

US officials have blamed China for several cyber-security breaches over the past few years—most recently, when Chinese hackers reportedly got their hands on the personal data of millions of current and former US military and intelligence workers by infiltrating the Office of Personnel Management (OPM). US director of national intelligence James Clapper has said China is a “leading suspect” in the hack of OPM. Beijing has denied the allegations.

Clinton herself has been accused of exposing government information to potential cyber-breaches. She reportedly received sensitive information via a personal email address and used a home server during her time as secretary of state.

“China’s military is growing very quickly, and they are establishing military installations that again threaten countries we have treaties with,” Clinton said on Saturday, referring to ongoing territorial disputes over islands in the South China Sea between China and US allies such as the Philippines.

“Make no mistake, [the Chinese] know they’re in competition,” she added. “And they’re going to do everything they can to win.”

In CSBG's latest spotlight on "bad" superhero fights, learn what happened when Luke Cage tried to get back money owed to him by Dr. Doom.

popular shared this story from Eschaton.

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Release them all.

WASHINGTON — Sometime in the next few weeks, aides expect President Obama to issue orders freeing dozens of federal prisoners locked up on nonviolent drug offenses. With the stroke of his pen, he will probably commute more sentences at one time than any president has in nearly half a century.

I suppose the drug crime issue is one I have "evolved" on. I'm not saying I ever thought that people should have their lives destroyed by the criminal justice due to nonviolent drug offenses, just that I failed to comprehend the magnitude of the problem - imprisonment, not drugs - and the clearly racist application of the laws as much as I should have. Drug addiction is a public health problem. It's one thing to lock up people caught with 20 pounds of cocaine, quite another to have such low thresholds for "intent to sell" that you can classify basically every user as a dealer.

Send everybody home, change the laws, abolish the DEA, end all civil forfeiture. The end.

itsalways-parklandia:

Our National Anthem

bigbigtruck:

bluedelliquanti:

One of my favorite things about rewatching Cowboy Bebop is seeing all these one-line characters that you instantly know everything about from how they decorate their tiny box in space.

This show influenced the hell out of how I do character and environment designs in my comics

curseofthefanartlords:

I want y’all to know this is the actual 404 error page gif of Bloomberg Business 

Courtney shared this story from Super Opinionated.

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letterstomycountry:

Mr. Rogers makes us all look terrible.

WHYY Media

Handbook of Human Anatomy, 1896

Videogames! Aren’t they the medium of the twenty-first century? The new cinema? The apotheosis of art and entertainment, the realization of Wagnerian Gesamtkunstwerk? The final victory of interaction over passivity? No, probably not. Games are part art and part appliance, part tableau and part toaster. In How to Talk about Videogames, leading critic Ian Bogost explores this paradox more thoroughly than any other author to date.

Delving into popular, familiar games like Flappy Bird, Mirror’s Edge, Mario Kart, Scribblenauts, Ms. Pac-Man, FarmVille, Candy Crush Saga, Bully, Medal of Honor, Madden NFL, and more, Bogost posits that videogames are as much like appliances as they are like art and media. We don’t watch or read games like we do films and novels and paintings, nor do we perform them like we might dance or play football or Frisbee. Rather, we do something in-between with games. Games are devices we operate, so game critique is both serious cultural currency and self-parody. It is about figuring out what it means that a game works the way it does and then treating the way it works as if it were reasonable, when we know it isn’t.

Noting that the term games criticism once struck him as preposterous, Bogost observes that the idea, taken too seriously, risks balkanizing games writing from the rest of culture, severing it from the “rivers and fields” that sustain it. As essential as it is, he calls for its pursuit to unfold in this spirit: “God save us from a future of games critics, gnawing on scraps like the zombies that fester in our objects of study.”

Contents

Table of Contents coming Soon

Endorsements

“This is Ian Bogost at his best. Keen intelligence, acid wit, and a restless desire to look beyond the surface and tease out games’ less obvious, more important meanings.”
—Frank Lantz, director, NYU Game Center

“No one else is as wide-ranging, funny, or inspiringly immune to cant or groupthink as Ian Bogost. How to Talk about Videogames is his most accessible and entertaining book yet.”
—Tom Bissell, author of Extra Lives and Apostle

“Ian Bogost can take apart a game’s design and tell you exactly what makes it work and what it means to us personally and to our game-playing society. How to Talk about Videogames has deep insights into a range of current topics. There’s a lot here to learn.”
—John Romero, veteran game creator

Reviews

(did you write a review I don’t know about? please let me know)

• Interview with Jason Koebler at Motherboard
• Interview with Chris Suellentrop on the Shall We Play a Game Podcast
• Interview with Joshua Rivera at Vulture
• Review by Catherine Ramsdell at Pop Matters
• Named among the Best Books of the Year 2015 by The Economist
• Review on TV and Lust
• Review by Jesse Singal in The Boston Globe
• Review by Niv M. Sultan in First Person Scholar

Hans Schäufelein, Witches and warlocks engaging in various rituals, while others are being burnt, 1511

Courtney shared this story from Super Opinionated.

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Read 11 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Clive Lee has 11 years of cosplay experience, and he’s spent many of those years making robot/mecha costumes. He’s made at least eight of them and specializes in incredibly detailed replicas of armor from Gundam. They’re nothing short of grand. One of his latest builds is Star Build Strike from Gundam, and it has several LED/light-up aspects. Lee’s taken his experience from building that costume and many others and shared a complete 11-part tutorial that goes over all the steps of making a mecha costume. Even if you’re not planning to build a robot, the information is useful and applicable for other cosplay.

See the entire how-to on Facebook.

Top photo via DeviantArt, by Alvin Tak

OED Word of the Day: ornithopter, n. A machine designed to fly by means of artificial flapping wings

WOKV

Riders stuck for 3 hours after Orlando Eye stops WOKV The Orlando Eye stopped due to technical issies, trapping 66 riders for about three hours Friday afternoon. Orange County Fire Rescue crews who responded to the scene spent a little over an hour rescuing the 66 riders. Fire officials said they were in ... Riders rescued after 120 metre ferris wheel stopsTVNZ Stranded riders evacuated from Orlando Ferris wheelPress Herald 66 riders safely evacuated after 400-foot Ferris wheel stopsKSN-TV Columbia Missourian all 358 news articles »

The English language version of Spyfall is finally available! ...And stock has immediately drained out shops the world over like a vodka martini through a sieve.

Don't worry, friends! Operating in a dangerous web of international intrigue, and with a little help from Starlit Citadel, Team SU&SD has secured a review copy. At last, we're here to tell you if this party game live up to the hype.

Read More

Atlanta Journal Constitution

Jindal poses with gun at campaign stop, met with online mockery Atlanta Journal Constitution Want more news? Sign up for free newsletters to get more of the AJC delivered to your inbox. SIBLEY, Iowa — Republican presidential candidate and Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal posted a photo of himself holding and admiring a weapon while at a campaign ... Bobby Jindal: The son of immigrants and new champion of the tough-on ...Washington Post (blog) Immigrants Should Adopt American Values, Learn English, Says Bobby JindalSouth Asian Link Jindal: 'What Is the Point' of GOP that Accepts 'Baseline Dependence'?Breitbart News Houma Courier all 26 news articles »

A new website from entrepreneur Zain Shah called Deep Neural Net Dreams, or #DeepDreams for short, takes code from Google's AI and lets you upload your own photos, which the site then transforms them into eerie, computerized dreamscapes.

The US and Germany are the only teams to have won the Women’s World Cup twice. So the United States’ 2-0 win over Germany in the World Cup semifinal on Tuesday night wasn’t only the most important game of this year’s tournament. It also helps to settle a score about which country has the greatest overall run of Women’s World Cup success.

Two weeks ago, office cleaners at WeWork locations throughout New York City began protesting unjust working conditions. WeWork is an international co-working startup recently valued at ten billion dollars that is based in New York, where it is, by footprint, reportedly the fastest growing company in the city. The janitorial staff at WeWork’s New York locations are demanding higher wages, benefits, and vacation time; they are also considering joining a union. On Wednesday, they, along with sympathetic union workers from 32BJ (the local chapter of the national Service Employees International Union), and a drum and bugle corps marched from one WeWork location, at 222 Broadway, near Fulton Center, to another, at the Charging Bull, in Bowling Green Park. Speeches were made; the band played; confused tourists looked on.

WeWork cleaners are not employed by the company, but by the Commercial Building Maintenance Corp., which is a non-union shop. They make eleven dollars an hour or less, without benefits; the prevailing wage in New York for union workers is twenty-three dollars an hour, with full benefits. According to 32BJ, ninety percent of commercial office cleaners in New York City—and ninety-eight percent in Manhattan—are unionized. Union members from 32BJ—which claims to be the country’s largest property service workers union, with a hundred and forty-five thousand members, including seventy thousand in New York City—leafleted outside WeWork locations in Boston, Washington, D.C., and Miami, where WeWork just opened. If CBM’s cleaners vote to unionize, they will likely join 32BJ. “Everybody wants to join the union,” Bolivar, a WeWork cleaner, told me.

When a country's financial sector gets too big, it drags down productivity. This is probably because it's draining all the smart, educated people from other industries.

In an interview with Essence magazine, Ava DuVernay confirmed that she will not be directing Marvel’s Black Panther. She had been rumored to direct since May. Those rumors ramped up when Marvel’s Kevin Feige confirmed that he had been meeting with DuVernay to direct, with the fever pitch striking when DuVernay alluded to superheroes in her tweet supporting activist Bree Newsome.

But those rumors were put to rest on Friday. She said:

I’m not signing on to direct Black Panther. I think I’ll just say we had different ideas about what the story would be. Marvel has a certain way of doing things and I think they’re fantastic and a lot of people love what they do. I loved that they reached out to me.

I loved meeting Chadwick and writers and all the Marvel execs. In the end, it comes down to story and perspective. And we just didn’t see eye to eye. Better for me to realize that now than cite creative differences later.

I love the character of Black Panther, the nation of Wakanda and all that that could be visually. I wish them well and will be first in line to see it.

Totally understandable. It’s hard to imagine DuVernay without a specific vision of how she wants to do things. If there are bumps and rockiness along the road even during the courting phase, then it’s probably a good idea this didn’t happen. You can bet we’ll be watching to see what she thinks of the movie after it comes out, though.

No pressure!

(via Comics Alliance)

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Your turn as grill master this 4th of July? You can literally put your signature on the barbecue this holiday with laser etched hotdogs! A classic from x-Laser.

We hosted a 4th of July barbeque for all the staff here at X-Laser and thought we’d have a little fun. After all, we make lasers, why not have a laser events on Independence Day! We lit fireworks with lasers, laser engraved burgers, steaks and hot dogs and of course enjoyed a few great laser shows in the warehouse.

We used an Epilog Helix 35W, I found that the sweet spot for hot dogs was 1200DPI, 14% speed and 100% power. We had less success rastering ground beef though, it seems to be better suited for vector engraving.

The ending of Zack Snyder’s Man of Steel has been heavily criticized for the sheer amount of destruction, something that fans have noted is out of character for Superman. Now, in an interview with Entertainment Weekly, Snyder has defended the destruction of Metropolis, and confirmed a theory that we’ve long entertained.

Read more...

Freedom

This video of Sam the Eagle reading the preamble to the Declaration of Independence is actually funnier than this description might make it out to be. Poor guy just can’t catch a break sometimes.

• Apparently Malia Obama is now interning with Lena Dunham. The Root has photos of her on the set of Girls running coffee and working crowd control. This isn’t her first entertainment gig; she was a production assistant on Extant, a CBS show from Halle Berry. (via Vulture)
• Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, the project that seemingly just refused to stay dead, has just released a new batch of movie stills. Entertainment Weekly has the photos, and, well… yes. This movie might just be well worth the wait. (via /Film)

It’s the 4th of July. That means burgers, barbecue, and HUGE FUTZIN’ EXPLOSIONS. Thanks to our friends at BBC across the pond, there’s a neat interactive video you can use to try your own hand at making things explode in the safety of your own home. Maybe keep the first aid kit handy just in case. (via The Daily Dot)

• Speaking of annoyingly loud noises, there’s apparently a campaign “against special treatment for women, like reduced fees to get into night clubs, dudes holding the door open.” It’s called “Don’t Mancriminate,” and they’ve been using celebrity likenesses (without their permission) to make their weird ads. Seriously I can’t even finish typing this entry without tears streaming down my face from laughing. (via Jezebel)
• Zack Snyder recently had an interview with Entertainment Weekly, touching on some Batman v Superman details and, interestingly enough, defending Man of Steel‘s uh… polarizing ending. (via Collider)

To everyone celebrating, let’s go over this again: be safe! Hydrate! Hangovers suck! Wear sunscreen! Give all glory to THE HYPNOTOA–America! Yeah.

What’d you see today besides food and fireworks?

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Wow. This looks like a born winner. Telltale and Mojang team up to create an episodic Minecraft adventure game. I thought it was illegal to print money.

The trailer is embedded below. Great choices for voice acting too.