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Science fiction writer Alice Sola Kim has a terrific personal essay over in Buzzfeed about how she discovered Philip K. Dick when she was 15. And even though you can be totally well-adjusted and fall in love with Dick's vision, being "bummed and ugly" helped her get into his work.

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We all celebrate the holidays in our ways. Some of us with friends and family, some of us with food and drink, and, in a small town in Sweden, with constructing a 40-foot tall Yule Goat out of straw and then burning it the ground.

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An anonymous reader writes "A 28-year-old man in Sweden has been fined 4.3 million SEK (~650,000 USD) for uploading one movie. 300,000 SEK of that was added because of the upload's low technical quality (Google translation of Swedish original). The court ruled that the viewer watching the pirated version of the movie had a worse experience than people watching it legally, thereby causing damage to the movie's reputation (full judgement in Swedish)."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The rivalry between the Seahawks and 49ers continues to escalate and now billboards are involved.

The rivalry between the Seahawks and 49ers is developing into one of the best in the NFL and it extends off the playing field. Seattle fans recently raised money to fly a "Go Hawks" banner over Candlestick Park and now 49er fans have raised money to buy a billboard in Seattle mocking the Seahawks.

The fundraising campaign has raised more than $8,000 which will allow the group to purchase a billboard near CenturyLink Field for a month. The billboard will feature a picture of Dwight Clark making "The Catch" in the background with five Lombardi Trophies in the foreground and the text "How Many Do You Have?" San Francisco has won five Super Bowls while the Seahawks are still attempting to win their first.

The group needed to raise $7,000 to fund the project and any additional money raised will be donated to the Seattle Children's Hospital, according to the San Jose Mercury News. According to the fundraising page, the plan is to purchase the billboard in late December so it will stay up through January. If Seattle clinches home-field advantage, the billboard would be up during the Seahawks' playoff run, which might just include a game against the 49ers.

Now, the question is what will Seahawk fans do to respond to the response from 49er fans. Levi's already secured the naming rights to San Francisco's new stadium, so that's out of the question. Maybe Seattle fans will buy up all of the billboard space in the city before 49er fans can. I guess we'll have to wait and find out. Until then you can head over to Field Gulls and Niners Nation, which are never short on back-and-forth between the fan bases.

More from SB Nation NFL

• NFL mock draft: Can Teddy Bridgewater save the Texans?

• The Post-Mortem: It could always be worse, Washington

• NFL Power Rankings: Seahawks, 49ers back on top

• Ravens shock Lions with 61-yard field goal | Jim Schwartz on hot seat

• Remembering a 22-year-old football player who died from a helmet-to-helmet hit

miloutzy:

this is a friend

she actually does that

i am jeeeeeeaaaaaaaaalooooooouuuuuuus !!!

On Saturday, young Y&R Indonesia copywriter Mita Diran posted a complaint on Twitter: "30 hours of working and still going strooong." Soon afterward she collapsed. She died the following day.

We all knew it wasn't going to happen but Steven Moffat had plans for Christopher Eccleston to take part in Doctor Who's 50th anniversary anyway. Just in case.

CNN International

US delegation to Russian Olympics includes gay athletes CNN International Washington (CNN) -- The United States' delegation to the upcoming Winter Olympics in Russia won't include a member of President Barack Obama's family or a cabinet secretary, but it will include openly gay athletes -- a clear jab at Russia's recent anti-gay ... Sochi Olympic Critics Harassed, Treated Like TerroristsHuffington Post Napolitano heads diverse Olympic delegationSan Francisco Chronicle President Obama's Big Gay Message to Vladimir Putin's Sochi OlympicsPoliticusUSA all 746 news articles »

Portland's star point guard took the lead with less than a second remaining on the clock to push the Blazers to 22-4 on the year.

Damian Lillard hit a game-winning three pointer over Cleveland's Kyrie Irving with 0.4 seconds left to lift the Trail Blazers over the Cavaliers 119-116 Tuesday night.

Cleveland tied the game at 116-116 with seven seconds left on a tip-in by Anderson Varejao after a Irving drive to the hoop that bounced out. Portland took a timeout and let Lillard go one-on-one to seal the game.

The win puts Portland at an NBA-best 22-4 while the Cavs slip to 9-15.

via @JDonSports

Forgotten masterpiece: “Look out! It’s the Squirt!” by Dan Clowes (art) and Mort Todd (story), from Honk! #1, published by Fantagraphics, November 1986.

The bad news is that Tee Fury hasn't sold this smashing Obey Cthulhu/Coca Cola tee since July. The good news is that you can vote for them to bring it back. Vote!

Obey Cthulhu (via Seannan McGuire)

For anyone born since 1960, a new report by the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS), a think tank, makes for disturbing reading. And although it focuses on the UK, the findings could apply to a range of Western countries, where fears of permanently lower growth and dwindling savings raise concerns for the earning power of younger generations.

By now it’s a commonly held view that economic trends have conspired against twentysomethings, who face a long, hard struggle to amass similar wealth as previous generations. The IFS reckons that those born in the 1960s and 1970s are in a similar boat, they just don’t know it yet:

When compared with those born a decade earlier at the same age, these cohorts have no higher take-home income; have saved no more previous take-home income; are less likely to own a home; are likely to have lower private pension wealth; and will tend to find that their state pensions replace a smaller proportion of prior earnings.

Early in their working lives, people now in their mid-thirties to early fifties tended to have higher inflation-adjusted incomes than earlier generations. But they have also spent more of what they earned, building up less in savings than their older counterparts. A rise in inequality, persistent wage stagnation, and the decline of defined benefit (final salary) pension plans have also chipped away at incomes over the past few decades. As a result, the earnings of every new generation are falling below the previous cohort more quickly than before, as this rather depressing chart shows:

Younger generations are also buying their first house later in life, in part because rising prices make property in Britain’s densely populated southeast increasingly unaffordable. This is another advantage older generations enjoy in terms of generating wealth, thanks to the rising prices that are deterring younger people from buying homes in the first place.

This means that hard-up younger generations will increasingly rely on inheritance from their flush elders to achieve a similar spending power later in life. The parents and grandparents that today’s thirtysomethings hope to tap for financial help are much less likely to have benefited from similar largesse:

A heavier reliance on inheritance will, presumably, make for a more polite atmosphere when extended families get together for the holidays. The macroeconomic implications, in terms of worsening income inequality, are less positive, the IFS notes:

… the prevalence and value of expected future inheritances are distributed unequally, with households that are already relatively wealthy far more likely to benefit. It is important for policymakers to be aware of these signs.

Miley was a homeless dog living on top of a pile of garbage in a junkyard when she was rescued by Hope for Paws. She was malnourished, suffered from mange, parasites and bacterial infections and according to her rescuers, Miley “was really shut down”. That is until Frankie the black Chihuahua came along. Frankie had been rescued from a drainage pipe and was “so scared of everything”. Miley helped Frankie to heal himself while she was doing the same for herself. Quite successfully as you can see from her photo taken one month and one day after her rescue.

Photo by David Miller Studios

Both Miley and Frankie are both being fostered and are currently up for adoption thanks to the hard work of Hope for Paws.

video by Eldad Hagar

via Viral Viral Videos

Uncanny X-Men #145 by Chris Claremont, Dave Cockrum, and Joe Rubinstein

kingpin By David Aja

panaran:

get your head in the game Smaug

But you can’t be speed. Lightning McQueen is Speed.

Maybe you can be Height.

A few weeks ago, a couple in Texas received the following letter from JP Morgan Chase, informing them that the accounts they’ve held for more than 30 years—along with a savings account held by the husband’s 96 year-old mother—will be closed on Christmas Day. While it doesn’t explain why this is necessary, it does note that the bank doesn’t have any obligation to inform them in advance but is doing so out of “courtesy”:

The woman and her husband, who wish to remain anonymous, originally opened the account at a different bank that was acquired by JP Morgan Chase more than a decade ago. They kept their checking and savings account with a six-figure balance, and didn’t incur over-draft fees, just direct depositing their salaries and paying their bills.

Despite following up with JP Morgan over the phone and with their local branch banker, the couple could not have their account re-opened nor gained an explanation for why the account was closed. The bank declined to comment when approached by Quartz, though they did confirm that “Chase Operating Loss Prevention” is responsible for account closers. The owner, in an e-mail with Quartz, has a theory about what happened: “I realize that the bank is not making any money off of these accounts. I feel certain that is the main reason for the closures but I would think that loyalty would account for something…it obviously does not.”

She’s probably right. In a world of low interest rates, banks don’t make as much money from deposits as they used to, and recent reforms to overdraft rules mean that less responsible customers aren’t paying enough in penalty fees to subsidize people like our staid account holders. That’s one reason why truly free checking is hard to find anymore without high balance requirements—balance requirements that our account holders appear to meet. Without the potential to assess higher fees or sell the couple, who are closer to retirement than their first jobs, on a home loan or brokerage account, the bank appears to have made a calculation that keeping these customers just isn’t worth it.

Sure, there’s economic logic to the decision—but especially given the Christmas timing, JP Morgan’s decision nonetheless would have made Ebenezer Scrooge proud.

According to an update posted on Facebook this afternoon, scorching rockabilly act Sallie Ford and the Sound Outside are calling it quits, following their two shows this weekend at the Doug Fir:

Sallie Ford & The Sound outside have decided to break up and head their separate ways. It is a mutual decision and there are no hard feelings or ill will between any of us. We still love and support each other in whatever we do.

You can expect to see more from Sallie in 2014, as she's been writing for a new record. She is keeping her name in a new project and starting an all-girl band with some really talented local ladies, us guys are excited to see them churn out the hits, so keep your ears peeled."

One more time: Sallie Ford is starting an all-girl band. Dry your tears, because that is incredibly exciting news, and from the whispers I've heard about the new lineup, it's gonna be top notch.

In the meantime, there are two more chances to see Sallie Ford and the Sound Outside, this Friday and Saturday at the Doug Fir. Get yer tickets here.

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Following some recent issues, the Saints released kicker Garrett Hartley on Tuesday.

The Saints decided to make a change at kicker and New Orleans released Garrett Hartley on Tuesday, according to NOLA.com.

The move comes two days after Hartley missed a pair of field goals in a loss to St. Louis. That included a 26-yard attempt that he missed badly to the left. His other miss was due to a block, but Sean Payton said the kick came out too low.

"We can't kick a field goal," Payton said after the game, via NOLA.com. "We have one blocked, which was a low trajectory. The other one was shanked to the left."

New Orleans brought a few kickers in for workouts in November, before opting to stick with Hartley. According to Brian McIntyre, Derek Dimke, Shayne Graham, Brandon McManus, John Potter and Neil Rackers worked out for the Saints. New Orleans could sign one of the five, or opt for another free agent addition.

Hartley made 22-of-30 field goal attempts this season, by far the worst conversion percentage of his career. He's kicked for New Orleans for parts of six seasons, making 81.2 percent of his kicks. New Orleans is 30th in the NFL in field goal percentage this season with only Houston and Oakland having worse years.

More from SB Nation NFL

• NFL mock draft: Can Teddy Bridgewater save the Texans?

• The Post-Mortem: It could always be worse, Washington

• NFL Power Rankings: Seahawks, 49ers back on top

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• Remembering a 22-year-old football player who died from a helmet-to-helmet hit

It’s Game of the Year season again, and Bioshock: Infinite looks primed to come away with a number of awards. This is, of course, a horrifying statement about race and the videogames community at large. The cultural influence of Infinite has yet to produce anything positive, and instead empowered racists in their agendas.

As one of the few people who has actually bothered to critically look at racism in Bioshock: Infinite, and continued to cover the issues and bigotry surrounding and following it, it’s horrifying to me that we now live in an age where unironic outwardly racist groups are using promo art from Bioshock: Infinite as propaganda postings online.

EDIT: I am mistaken in the above paragraph. In my fervor I forgot a good amount of pieces critically looking at race in Bioshock: Infinite, and am including some links provided to me by Elizabeth Simins. They’re all must-reads, of course.

God Only Knows: A Conversation About Bioshock: Infinite

Booker DeWitt and the Case of the Young White Lady Feels

Bioshock Infinite Through the Eyes of an Angry Black Man

Which isn’t as “ironic” as it sounds considering Bioshock: Infinite is just as racist as the National Liberty Foundation, they just, well, know how to hide it better. They know how to wrap it in fancy art and pseudo-intellectual sci-fi bullshit, the assumed authority as a “creator” declaring that revolutionaries resisting their oppressors are simply Nat Turners waiting to happen, and that “the truth is in the middle” somehow. To quote Robert Moore:

The truth is in the middle, whispers Kevin Levine as he pens this script. After watching such situations of racism and oppression, he pulls back the sheet as he’s done in other games on the big, halfway twist. I’ve played all of Levine’s games, I’ve seen it. I expected the leader of this revolution, this Fitzroy woman, to be wicked and corrupt, our SHODAN or Fountaine. But he continues and makes a more sweeping reveal - the people of columbia feared all these individuals to be savages and monsters and lo’ and behold, they are.

…

Was there anybody non-white on staff to shake their head at this? They really couldn’t find someone on the street to say "whoa dude, this is getting kinda racist?"

Emphasis mine.

If a person of color wants to be respected and liberated, they have to go down the whitewashed history of Ghandi and Martin Luther King, Jr., not the “savages” like Malcom X who dared to take arms and defend his community. Even then, that’s not true if you actually listen to PoC activists like Suey Park recount the bullshit they have had to put up with over the years from supposed “white allies” who only seek to prove their own goodness in the world.

In modern society, racism to white people is simply dressing up in white hoods and lynching black folk in public. It’s a costume, a hilarious caricature of evil to us that we feel ever so distant to, that we would never possibly make that mistake again, right? As long as I’m not *that,* I can’t possibly be racist! Of course, thousands upon thousands of pages written by people who have actually suffered under racism and numerous personal accounts as well as statistics and endless studies have proven that America is still a very racist, and a very un-free country for a great number of people. Even with all that, many if not most white people will deny they even benefit from modern racism, which is a factually based reality people of color have to deal with on a daily basis.

So of course, having an entirely white led creative team, Bioshock: Infinite was a racist piece of trash that will most likely go on to win numerous Game of the Year awards and go down in the history books as “true art” by the games scholars of the Western world. It’s not like other spheres of the art world have a long history of white supremacy, games are no different. Simply more embarrassing with the endless mountains of actually anti-racist material written and produced nowadays, especially at an entry level format.

Upon my discovering of the National Liberty Foundation’s appropriation of the supposedly “satirical” artwork of Ken Levine’s brainchild, I proceeded to ask him if he was proud of himself for giving ammo to such horrific people.

"Village idiot," he calls me. Not caring about the victims of racism, not attacking the racists using his material to forward their views… it’s me, daring to criticize him, the supposedly "enlightened" creative genius. I’m the idiot, too many hours reading bell hooks and Malcolm X to be able to possibly think for myself. How dare I, little well-read blogger man, speak against a captain of industry like himself?

You see, the “it takes a village” comment is what tickles my funny bone. Ken Levine’s been in the industry a rather long time, dating back to System Shock 2. Of course, it’s indisputable fact the games industry is primarily staffed with straight white males, if not according to the IGDA (http://archives.igda.org/diversity/IGDA_DeveloperDemographics_Oct05.pdf) then the endless hate speech from “gamers” using slurs “ironically.” If white people with awful views surround themselves with other white folk who share those views, it’s an endless pinball machine of back and forth bullshit where one’s racism is simply reinforced and grows bolder.

Of course, with a smash hit like Bioshock in 2008 and a games criticism community too infantile and centered around the simple storylines and mechanics of AAA, Levine was hailed as an intellectual and creative genius, creating a (heavily-scripted) world of (not that intellectual at all) wonder.

Not too long ago, intellectual giant and rap artist Kanye West asks us in the 2010 masterpiece My Dark Twisted Fantasy, “you got the power to let power go?”

Levine didn’t. He let it go right to his head, and decided his magnum opus would tackle the harsh issues of racism and time travel. Actually, he decided to make it about being a strong white angry dad man-shooter, protecting a precious innocent white girl (who brutally murders a Nat Turner inspired caricature of a black resistance leader) with time travel and racism being window dressing. Time travel’s one thing, but a entirely white head creative team using anti-black racism as a backdrop for a pile of bodies a strong angry white man stands atop of?

This is the problem with Irrational Games and Ken Levine’s attempt at “anti-racist satire,” if you’re just generating and presenting “ironically” racist content that is indistinguishable from actually racist content, and you end up equating historically accurate violent oppression to completely imagined and irrelevant violent resistance so the player can brutally slaughter hundreds of black people for your finale, you’re not being satirical at all.

Levine’s insult towards me is pretty telling - it was retweeted and favorited dozens of times, and I got plenty of hate mentions sent my way. But you know what’s funny?

Nearly

All

(note: Jonathan Ore is not white, and has asked me to let you know he mostly agrees with what I’m saying. Which is totally a-okay! My bad for including him in this, and I apologize.)

Of

Them

Are

White

As

Hell

Just how could that be? How could that possibly be?! I thought Levine had made “true art,” a real intellectual masterpiece! One that would cross racial boundaries and unite us all in wonder and racial harmony! Yet, all I see are a bunch of white pasty nerds flooding my mentions with everything from accusing me of “logical fallacies” to trying to compare the Vox Populi to the Jews during the Holocaust and the atrocities of Israel’s government following it, in hilariously inept leaps of logic.

Consider how fucking white the games industry is and how fucking long Ken Levine has been in it, dating back to System Shock 2 in 1997, it makes one wonder if he’s ever even talked to a black person. Does he even have one black friend? You know, the one that proves we’re not racist, when LBJ passed the My Black Friend law after MLK was assassinated. All us white people have to have at least one black friend to prove racism is over, if you didn’t know.

You see, white people like Ken Levine and Robinson Meyer of The Atlantic, that’s satire; not your half assed attempts spouting “ironically” racist bullshit. Satire is actually tearing down a bad thing - not just showing it at face value and going “ha ha ain’t it great we’re not literally shooting blacks in the street anymore, right guys? That Kanye West so crazy thinking Bush don’t care about black people!”

Except, uh, wait.

Black men are killed by police, security guards, and vigilantes once every 36 hours in America. Instead of shutting the fuck up and listening to what Dave Chappelle was actually saying, especially about the difference between outspoken and cloaked racism, white people were sitting around shitting themselves laughing “fuck your couch n*****” around the office water cooler back in ‘04. Ashamed, Dave abandoned fame and the comedy world lost a great man. He attempted to return, and when the white members of the audience heckled him to repeat Chappelle’s Show skits, he stormed off once again, rightly so.

At the end of the day, we white folk learned that outspoken racism wasn’t acceptable anymore, but instead we can get away with subtle racism in public, as long as it’s cloaked appropriately. We can get away with “forgetting” all the horrible shit done to get people of color out of Oregon after the civil war and laugh at goofy Portlandia segments. Shows like “Friends” or “Girls” can take place in New York City, one of the most supposedly intermixed melting pots of America, yet feature entirely white people as the main characters. Infinite demands it sets the terms for black liberation, without an ounce of input from them.

At the end of Bioshock: Infinite, the player character has a bodycount in the hundreds at his feet, initially the white racists of Columbia soon followed by the black and Irish bodies of the resistance, based not on actual black resistance to white oppression during 1912, but completely unrelated Russian and French Revolutions, with a little Nat Turner thrown in. Levine imagines himself a thought leader, bravely declaring South Park level bullshit that the truth is somewhere in the middle. To quote Tumblr user starburp:

do you know why you did this? because the black people in this storyline aren’t fucking people. they’re props. literally. they are props. and that’s what i find so fucking offensive about bioshock infinite, is that it makes black people props in a storyline in which white people get to revise white history through all kinds of fanciful sci fi wizardry in order to make themselves feel better while STILL excluding and marginalizing black people, and we’re supposed to be happy about it. okay. thank you. thank you so much for being so concerned about faithfully depicting black life in 1912 in a floating white supremacist city in the clouds in which people can travel between space and time that you forgot to depict any other aspect of historical reality or even to give the black people in the game fucking brains

no, actually what you did is create a whole fantasy 1912 in which you relegated blacks to symbolically representing the demon of overt historical white racism because that is the only demon white people are willing to fight (because it’s already obsolete, so there’s no real challenge there), forget how you just fucking perpetuated racism with your stupid fucking game

white people present this reality to the exclusion and marginalization of all other realities, and then they give themselves a pat on the back for kind of thinking about racism for like a couple of days, and then they turn viciously defensive when poc confront their stupid inane inaccurate version of reality, even though the fact that poc feel excluded and marginalized by it should be the only fucking evidence white people need to understand that they fucked up

 Emphasis again mine.

Yet with all this supposed intellectualism, a white ubermensch of slaughter reigns supreme at the end of Bioshock: Infinite, and that in the end says more about Levine’s internalized racism and the state of race in videogames in 2013 than any witty Twitter comeback. You know, I bet it drives Levine nuts, the popularity Kanye West has. The fact that a man who proclaims “put that pussy in a sarcophagus” has far more to say about the world than Levine ever will.

Instead Ken stands atop his money and fame profiteering off of exploiting black history, amongst a village of white, racist idiots, he being the biggest of them all with nothing of worth to say.

It certainly takes a village, Ken. You just happened to immerse yourself in one of the absolute worst. When your village consists of almost entirely white people, you’re probably in no place to speak about the histories of people of color, and Bioshock: Infinite’s lasting testament is tantamount proof of this fact. That is your legacy, Ken - one of continuing the long legacy of white supremacy in games, and nothing more.