firehose

babiesareyum:

"A member of the Scottish National Antarctic Expedition plays the bagpipe for an indifferent penguin, 1904."

therogueoflights:

geekyvegan:

thomaswilliamhiddle:

fille-lioncelle:

fuckheadcunt:

When aliens in galaxies 70 million light years away look through a telescope at Earth, they see dinosaurs.  

#GET IN LOSERS #WE’RE DOING SCIENCE

Is that why there has been no alien contact? Because as far as aliens are concerned, there is legitimately no intelligent life on earth?

shit son there still isn’t intelligent life on earth

Business Insider

NSA: Snowden Stole 1.7 MILLION Classified Documents And Still Has Access ... Business Insider Edward Snowden is seen in front of the Christ the Saviour Cathedral in central Moscow. The image was released in October. See Also. THE SNOWDEN SAGA: Here's Everything We Know About The NSA's Nightmare Leak · Ex-NSA Director Has A Radical ... and more »

I was talking with a friend recently about word processors, which prompted me to think about which word processors I’ve used to write books. For the record, and for the curious, here’s what each of my novels have been written in, in order of their writing (not publication).

Agent to the Stars: Microsoft Works (the “basic” version of their office suite, which it no longer makes)

Old Man’s War: Microsoft Word

The Android’s Dream: Word

The Ghost Brigades: TextEdit

The Last Colony: Word

Zoe’s Tale: Word

Fuzzy Nation: Word

Redshirts: Begun on Google Docs, finished on Word

The Human Division: Started on WordPress, Finished on Google Docs, with one chapter written in Pages

Lock In: Word

For my non-fiction books, five (my three “Rough Guide” books, my two “Book of the Dumb” books) were written in Word, three (Coffee Shop, Hate Mail and Mallet) in WordPress because they were blog posts first and then pasted into Word for the final document, and one (24 Frames) in Google Docs, and then again pasted into Word for final compiling.

Metatropolis (which I edited) and The God Engines (novella) were also written in Word.

It’s not a terrible surprise to me that I end up using Word quite a lot. One, it’s been around in one form or another for 30 years, and its formats and feature set are the industry standard; everyone in publishing uses it. Two, as a consequence of one, I am used to it and therefore when I use a word processor that doesn’t look or act like it, I get discomfited — it messes with my chi, as it were. There are writers who are still using dead word processors on equally dying computers because they’re used to the formatting and don’t want to mess with their workflow — George RR Martin and Robert J. Sawyer are famously dedicated to the antediluvian processor WordStar, for example — and while my devotion to Word is nowhere near that strong, I understand the urge. When you find something that works, you don’t mess with it.

That said, I stray from the path when I have a reason. I wrote Ghost Brigades on TextEdit because at that particular moment I just wanted a very simple word processor, and the aesthetic of TextEdit appealed to me (I wrote Ghost Brigades using the Optima typeface, which looks great on a Mac and pretty much like hell on PC — don’t ask me why). Also I had a Mac at the time and didn’t want to spring for another copy of Word. For Redshirts, I was curious whether Google Docs are robust enough for novel-writing. At the time the answer was no, which is why I switched back to Word. With Human Division I originally started writing in WordPress because I wanted to be able to let my editor have immediate access to what I was doing — I was writing “episodes” and I wanted him to be able to get at them as they were individually completed. But it turned out WP wasn’t as good for that as Google Docs was, in part because it lacked editing tools useful for the publishing industry.

These days I’m reasonably impressed by Google Docs with the caveat that as I understand it there is a practical limit on the size of an individual document, and that size is smaller than that of most of my novels. For The Human Division that wasn’t a problem because I made each episode its own document, but for Lock In it was something I needed to consider, which is ultimately why I went back to Word. Another reason: Word now saves to SkyDrive, which I can access either with my desktop or laptop, so one advantage of Google Docs — accessing text from anywhere — is now replicated (well, sort of. My desktop and Win8 laptop both have Word on them, but my Chromebook needs to access the Web version of Word, which kinda sucks at the moment).

The next novel I write will be the sequel to Human Division, and I haven’t decided which processor I am going to use yet. I am inclined to write on Google Docs, as I did for its predecessor, but if I’m using my desktop, I can configure Word to display two pages side-by-side, and while might not seem like a big deal, in fact being able to see what I’ve just written without having to do a lot of scrolling turns out to be useful to my writing flow (it’s because, among other things, it helps me keep the flow of my dialogue consistent). I’ll decide the closer I get to the actual writing.

(Before anyone asks about Scrivener or [insert your other favorite processor here], rest assured I try almost all of them just to see if I will like them better than my defaults. So far, it continues to be Word in the lead, with Google Docs as the understudy. If find something else I like better, trust me, I will let you all know.)

If you think that you're a stickler for grammar, consider the position of the British regarding the 1871 Treaty of Washington. According to a literary historian, the British government refused to sign a treaty with the Americans if the treaty contained a single split infinitive.

Read more...

Coffee may seem harmless, but its historical rap sheet is a mile long.

on the way to the christmas party

december 2013

fmtownsmarty:

http://i.imgur.com/qjL2LM5.png

New neighbourhood graffiti

Edna St. Vincent Millay

Nobody

Valve's initial Steam Controller prototype for use with the Steam Machines Linux-based game console will also work "out of the box" on other Linux distributions...

The FX breakdown for Wholock…

Whether baked cheesecake should be classified as a cake, a custard, a torte, or something else is a matter of debate.

Link

Redditor sneakylawyer and his girlfriend were doing a bit of urban exploration in Ronse, Belgium, when they came across an unexpected sight: a bevy of Batman graffiti, featuring a variety of Jokers.

Read more...

Like many medium-scale Vermont food producers, Black Bear Sugarworks owner Mark Hastings learned long ago that the in-state market for his maple syrup was finite. Even the creemees and local beef hot dogs he used to sell from a Brattleboro food trailer were primarily snapped up by tourists, he says. “We kind of tapped out our audience” — no pun intended.

Yet, Hastings goes on, he knew there was “a great void” of direct-sourced maple products in New York City, where the market supports specialty stores devoted to single items such as pickles and salt. His idea: a brick-and-mortar syrup store, which he opened at 374 Fifth Avenue in Brooklyn’s Park Slope neighborhood this past Saturday.

“I went from a county of 20,000 people to a city of eight million,” says Hastings, who also sells jams, marmalade and hot sauce from some of his Vermont neighbors. The weekend’s traffic at the store “exceeded my expectations,” he adds.

Hastings, who splits his time between his Guilford farm and New York, says the store, Black Bear Sugarworks, is bare-bones for now, but he wanted to open in time for the holiday season. After a January closure for renovations, the store will reopen in the spring with a rustic, woodsy feel. “You’ll believe you’re in a Vermont outbuilding,” Hastings says.

Hastings will add to his wares a few of the prepared foods he used to sell from his food truck, such as Black Watch Farm beef hot dogs, maple creemees from Kingdom Creamery of Vermont and maple cream sodas. He also plans to gather and sell specialty foods from producers throughout southern Vermont.

“I think there’s real opportunity in New York, where people right now are looking for ‘real’ food,” he says.

The original print version of this article was headlined "Sugarbush to Brooklyn"

Original Source

EMP Museum | Frank Gehry | Andrew Prokos | Via

The full results can be found right below.

Jameis Winston made Heisman history on Saturday evening, becoming the youngest winner in the history of the award, and the second consecutive redshirt freshman to receive college football's most coveted honor.

Behind him, though, were five other candidates -- Andre Williams, A.J. McCarron, Johnny Manziel, Jordan Lynch, and Tre Mason. The full voting results and details of their finish:

AJ McCarron is the Heisman runner up.

— Chris Huston (@HeismanPundit) December 15, 2013

Results 1. Winston (2,205), 2. AJ McCarron (704), 3. Jordan Lynch (558), 4. Andre Williams (470), 5. Johnny Manziel (421), 6. Tre Mason (404

— Andy Staples (@Andy_Staples) December 15, 2013

Rounding out Heisman top 10: 7 Bryce Petty #Baylor; 8 Derek Carr #Fresno 9 Braxton Miller #OSU 10 Ka'Deem Carey #zona.

— Bruce Feldman (@BFeldmanCBS) December 15, 2013

Some other points of interest from the voting results:

• While Winston ended up running away with the award, it is interesting to note how close the rest of the results were -- a mere 300 points separated McCarron from 6th place finisher Tre Mason, who snuck into the voting after a strong series of games down the stretch. The small margin that separated McCarron, Lynch, Williams, Manziel and Mason indicated a largely indistinctive field of candidates this season -- other than Winston, of course.
• Winston was left off of 115 ballots entirely, yet still won by the 7th largest margin ever. His 668 first-place votes are the 9th most in Heisman history.

More from SB Nation college football:

Follow @SBNationCFBFollow @SBNRecruiting

• Interactive bowl season calendar with picks and links to more coverage:

• Mack Brown is officially resigning

• How the Heisman was won: A look at Jameis’ year

• College football news | Nick Saban is staying at Alabama

• Long CFB reads | Auburn and the future of the SEC

The Debian project is pleased to announce the third update of its stable distribution Debian 7 (codename wheezy). This update mainly adds corrections for security problems to the stable release, along with a few adjustments for serious problems. Security advisories were already published separately and are referenced where available.

Woodcut

neil-gaiman:

petermorwood:

Neil Gaiman & Charles Dickens. Draw your own conclusions.

Inspired by this tumblr post mostly, I’m going to dress as Dickens for the CHRISTMAS CAROL reading tomorrow afternoon at the New York Public Library.

Wish me luck.

I swear, I can’t turn my back on P. for a minute without finding out he’s been getting other people to do goofy (if amazing) things…

theairtightgarage:

The offices of Metal Hurlant: photos from the early 80s

1. Writer/director Alejandro Jodorowskwy, journalist Philippe Manœuvre, writer and Hurlant co-founder Jean-Pierre Dionnet, and writer/editor/game designer Pierre Rosenthal

2. 3. Two great shots of Jean-Pierre Dionnet, looking like Crumb’s identical twin.

4. Hurlant co-founder and cartoonist, Philippe Druillet, best known for his Lone Sloane series.

5. Hugo Pratt, legendary cartoonist and creator of Corto Maltese

6. Paul Gillon, cartoonist and illustrator of the Lost in Time series, written by Jean-Claude Forest

7. Yves Chaland, creator of the popular Freddy Lombard series, prolific cartoonist, and colorist(notably coloring the initial chapters of Moebius & Jodorowsky’s The Incal)

8. Chaland’s work-in-progress artwork

9. Olivia Clavel, cartoonist and co-founder of the Bazooka Groupe

10. Pascal Guichard and(I think?) Isabelle Morin, editing an issue.

zathros:

From Lisa’s demonstration at IMATS Pasadena January 2013.

Airbrush and handwork.

No Photoshop all in camera.

Artist: Lisa Berczel
Model: Michael Foster 

gunsandposes-history:

Labtayt Sulci on Saturn’s Enceladus — A view of Enceladus, sixth-largest of the moons of Saturn. More from NASA: “Do some surface features on Enceladus roll like a conveyor belt? A leading interpretation of recent images taken of Saturn’s most explosive moon indicate that they do. This form of asymmetric tectonic activity, very unusual on Earth, likely holds clues to the internal structure of Enceladus, which may contain subsurface seas where life might be able to develop. Pictured above is a composite of 28 images taken by the robotic Cassini spacecraft in October just after swooping by the ice-spewing orb. Inspection of these images show clear tectonic displacements where large portions of the surface all appear to move all in one direction. Near the top of the image appears one of the most prominent tectonic divides: Labtayt Sulci, a canyon about one kilometer deep.”(NASA)

Beauty and awe, man.

submitted by cyisfor
[link] [16 comments]

hodad

#r2k

If the emotion is overwhelming, you may want to express how you feel in a journal or to another person. The exercise may shift your perspective and bring a sense of closure. If the discomfort lingers, consider taking action. You may want to tell a friend her comment was hurtful or take steps to leave the job that makes you miserable.

Original Source

vellumandcircus:

From a series of Book Autopsies.

More here.