It's hard to imagine how someone could mess up an intentional walk, but that's exactly what happened here. The pitch from Ronald Belisario wasn't even close!
Kudos to the Tampa Bay fans in attendance who gave the pitcher a sarcastic cheer after his next intentional walk pitch made it to the catcher accurately.
In an outpouring of grief usually reserved for the passing of a cultural icon, thousands turned out at the weekend to bid a final farewell to a cat credited with saving an obscure Japanese railway line from financial ruin. (Permalink)
Uber France CEO Thibaud Simphal and Uber Europe GM Pierre-Dimitri Gore-Coty were both taken into custody today in Paris. The police started investigating on Uber in November 2014 and raided Uber’s office in Paris in March 2015.
half of games advice is "never stop playtesting ever because it's never finished" and the other half is "just fucking release it already jesus fucking christ! fucking release it! release it! aaaaaaaugh fucking release it you piece of shit"
“When you’re really happy with your game, and it’s elegant, and your playtesters love it, it still might be far from finished. Keep playing and playing and playing with everyone you can, because, in the end, you might find something lurking that will increase the development time hugely, but also make the game shimmer.”
The long-awaited overtime rule from the US labor department would more than double the threshold at which employers can avoid paying overtime, from $455 a week to $970 a week by 2016. That would mean salaried employees earning less than $50,440 a year would be assured overtime if they worked more than 40 hours per week, up from the current $23,660 a year. (Permalink)
Early America was a much, much wetter place than it is now, modern frat culture notwithstanding. Instead of binge-drinking in short bursts, Americans often imbibed all day long.
The Office of Personnel Management has suspended operation of the Electronic Questionnaires for Investigations Processing (E-QIP) system, the web gateway used to submit materials for background investigations. The agency announced the move today, citing the discovery of a vulnerability in the portal during an ongoing review of the agency's security. "As a result, OPM has temporarily taken the E-QIP system offline for security enhancements," an agency spokesperson said in an official statement to press.
The flaw in E-QIP is reportedly not related to the massive breach of the OPM's systems, which may have exposed up to 18 million individuals' personal information. That information includes everything from social security number and date of birth to records of clearance adjudications, proceedings in which officials discuss reasons why an individual's security clearance may have been removed.
So they welcomed him in and he shot them anyway. But didn’t the “New Blacks” assure us that the cure to racism was a simple matter of black people extending a hand…
Somebody get Common, Pharrell, or Raven to explain how the victims failed to cure this mass murderer’s racists ways. I’ll wait…
Look, I know Common didn’t have this situation in mind when he said that stuff, but putting the onus on black people to fix racism is bullshit. It’s not on the victims of abuse to convince their abusers that they are worthy of better treatment. And as demonstrated by Dylann Roof’s actions, no matter how nice, respectable or full of love and acceptance a black person is, white supremacy will commit any atrocity to achieve it’s ends.
So can we put the respectability politics, tone policing, and victim blaming of the black community all the way to rest once and for all.
Did anyone send this to Common and others like him yet?
Notice how whenever the perp is white and the victims brown, it’s all about “forgiveness” and “peace” and “love”. Coming together.
Let it would have been a brown guy and a white church. Terrorist woulda been dead and/or being tortured in Guantanamo. And we would be overseas fighting a new war.
But no. Black victims. Everybody stay calm. Calm right into the grave.
Stay calm until the next attack on our community… And just hope it’s not you or someone you love… I’m so tired of it.
James Spears, the Great Titan of the chapter, said the group would be rallying to protest “the Confederate flag being took down for all the wrong reasons.”
I realized that now is the time for true courage the morning after the Charleston Massacre shook me to the core of my being. I couldn’t sleep. I sat awake in the dead of night. All the ghosts of the past seemed to be rising.
“There has never been a better time to get into Game Boy as a hobby,” he said. “There is no argument against that the Game Boy is old news, but there is also no argument against that it is super duper cool.”
"The Game Boy is an old, slow, clunky, goofy looking piece of hardware that is basically capable of nothing, but thats where its beauty lies."
“Your mother is a fat ugly lazy piece of shit who tried to kill you,” the message read. “She is a bully and suffers from mental problems. She is under investigation for the hate groups and illegal computer crimes she’s committing. I hope you like your new home. You can thank me when you’re older.”
'Juries in Caddo Parish, which has a population of two hundred and fifty thousand, now sentence more people to death per capita than juries in any other county in America. Seventy-seven per cent of those sentenced to death in the past forty years have been black, and nearly half were convicted of killing white victims. A white person has never been sentenced to death for killing a black person.'
'So how is it that a game fully aware of how ethnic and religious prejudices are inventions used to control us can produce such myopic and prejudiced arguments? Why are the metaphors lost on players? Because it positions the protagonist and thus the player as a "neutral observer," a perspective that falsifies the dynamics of oppression.
From the outset, Geralt has no specific allegiance to either humans or non-humans and remains an observer until finally forced to act. So while there are many clear real-world parallels for both oppressors and the oppressed, Geralt (and thus the player) spends most of the game engaging with prejudice from a position of comfortable neutrality.
Nor is Witcher 3 the only game to engage in this sort of convenient remove. In Bioshock Infinite, a shooting game set in a deeply racist floating city called Columbia, the two main characters always remain isolated from the game's racial atrocities—Booker by his stoicism, and Elizabeth by her naiveté. They observe the horrible things that occur, and occasionally react to them, but neither they nor the player are required to engage with racism in any meaningful way.
And this neutrality is rewarded, as the game ultimately equates rebellion against an oppressive system with oppression itself, in order to make a tepid point about the corruptive nature of power. Here, as ever, neutrality is not neutral, but rather a façade that allows us to ignore the political and human consequences of systems of disenfranchisement.'
The myth of white neutrality persists in the world of gaming, where black characters in fantasy games can be deemed less "realistic" than dragons.
Uber is acquiring a portion of Microsoft's Bing mapping unit, part of the mobile car-booking application's push to broaden its in-house technology for drivers.
Uber is offering jobs to about 100 Microsoft employees who work on image acquisition and data analysis and processing as part of the mapping team for Bing, Microsoft's Internet search engine. The deal includes a data site near Boulder, Colorado, as well as cameras, software and a license to certain intellectual- property rights. Microsoft and Uber declined to disclose terms.
Microsoft has been focusing on its main businesses, such as personal computing, mobile productivity and cloud software, while Uber, flush with cash, is seeking to build a sophisticated mapping organisation. Uber now works with Google, Apple, Baidu and others to provide maps for its drivers globally. (Permalink)
An academic study from Harvard and Columbia universities — and funded by Google competitor Yelp — found that Google discriminates against competitors in its search results.
The study showed that Google favors search results that direct users to Google content over results that point to competitors such as Yelp and Orbitz, according to one of the lead researchers, Tim Wu.
"What the data shows, is in the interest of anti-competitive behavior, maybe they're hurting consumers along the way," Wu said. "It puts the grist in the mill for an antitrust enforcer." (Permalink)
Uber Technologies Inc. is telling prospective investors that it generates $470 million in operating losses on $415 million in revenue, according to a document provided to prospective investors.
yo if I see gurps xcom one more fucking time I'm quitting this fucking hobby
I'm a big fan of the X-COM computer games, and I've been kicking the idea of a RPG campaign based on them for a little while now. Of course, I don't want the experience to be 100% identical to that of the source material - you can just play the computer games for that. Instead, players will help set the stage by choosing how the menace they're fighting manifests, and then shape the X-COM project by choosing the people who lead it. The actual PCs will be X-COM field operatives, who will have to live and die with the choices their players made :). Their missions will have a little more variety than what was possible in the computer games, but their results will still influence what goes on in the wider world.
I'm expecting 4-6 players to start with and will keep a waiting list. Post here to apply! Applications aren't first-come, first-served. The system used will be GURPS, which can contain all the elements I expect to appear here. Knowledge of its rules is a definite plus, but not an absolute requirement.
I try to maintain a regular posting rate on my games, and I'm reasonably good at it. GURPS combat requires a bit of back-and-forth, so to better fit the PBP format I tend to ask for several actions in advance and handle all the rolls. If people really want to roll their own dice we can work something out.
Maps and tactical combat are a big draw of the computer games, but cartography takes a lot out of me... Unless someone can point me to a bountiful source of ready-made, hex-friendly modern maps, we'll be shooting aliens entirely within the theatre of the mind.
In an absolutely terrible story out of Detroit, police officers did not cease pursuing during a car chase once it entered a populous residential neighborhood, and two black children are now dead and several others injured:
Brother and sister Michaelangelo and Makiah Jackson, ages 6 and 3 respectively, were playing in front of their home when a police car appeared, chasing what appeared to be a red Challenger. According to eyewitnesses, the police car bumped the Challenger, and the car "flew up in the air." Witnesses heard tire squeals, as if the car was attempting to stop, but by then it was going too fast and had lost control and hit the two small children, killing them instantly.
...Even after the car had dragged the children a distance down the street, the police did not stop their pursuit. They continued to chase the car across one front lawn after another, finally crashing, critically injuring three more children including three-year-old Darius Andrews, Jr., Isaiah Williams, 5, and Zyaire Gardner, 7. Twenty-two-year-old LaKendra Hill sustained injuries. The father of the youngest called seven-year-old Zyaire "the real hero," adding, "He saved my son's life. He grabbed him and tried to hold him."
My condolences to the families, friends, and neighbors of the children who were killed, and I hope the families of the injured children, as well as LaKendra Hill, have the resources they need to heal their physical wounds.
As with many other deadly interactions with police, the original police account was contradicted by witnesses: "On the night of the incident, police Chief James Craig said that the police car had already stopped the chase after they 'lost sight of the car.' After many eyewitnesses had refuted that claim, Craig said that a supervisor had ordered a stop to the pursuit."
Further, the police tried to justify the pursuit by claiming that the driver (or passenger) of the car was seen with a gun, but again had to backpedal: "The next day the chief said there was no gun, and that the case started when the police 'made eye contact' with the occupants of the car."
If that sounds familiar, it's possibly because police in Baltimore "made eye contact" with Freddie Gray before pursuing him on foot and then arresting him and putting him in the back of a police van where he later sustained fatal injuries.
The driver of the car, according to police is 29-year old-Lorenzo Harris, "who was on parole but had not been reporting in to his parole officer." Okay. Well, unless there was evidence he was imminently planning a violent crime, a high-speed chase was hardly necessary for a parole violation.
And that's not just my opinion:
On paper, the official policy of the Detroit Police Department includes this:
Members involved in a pursuit must question whether the seriousness of the violation warrants continuation of the pursuit. A pursuit shall be discontinued when, in the judgment of the primary unit, there is a clear and present danger to the public which outweighs the need for immediate apprehension of the violator. Officers must keep in mind that a vehicle pursuit has the same potential for serious injury or death as the use of fatal force. … Officers must place the protection of human life above all other considerations.
Their true attitude, priorities, "policy" is written in the blood of small children on those front lawns.
Meanwhile, despite the Chief Craig's contention that "a supervisor had ordered a stop to the pursuit," the officers who continued the pursuit allegedly in contravention of a command have not been suspended nor fired, nor are they even being investigation, in any report I can find. Craig has said merely that "his department is reviewing its pursuit policy."
Harris, the driver being pursued for a parole violation, has been arrested and charged with two counts of second-degree murder, among other charges.
Naturally, we are meant to view Harris, a convicted drug user who was skipping parole meetings, as exclusively responsible for the deaths of Michaelangelo and Makiah Jackson.
But I wonder how it is that we are supposed to ignore the context in which any black man or woman, who is pursued after "making eye contact" with police, might find themselves dead if they land in police custody?
Who the fuck is being served or protected by any of this?
'when you’ve shown to be able to read a word, you can bite it off and eat it.'
Eating a book
These three objects can hardly be called books. Yet they are, although they are not what you’d expect from such objects. These so-called “hornbooks” were used to teach children to read, roughly from the fourteenth to the eighteenth centuries. To this end they presented some “light” reading, such as the alphabet, the Lord’s Prayer and other short texts. Some of these hornbooks were particularly clever. The one in the middle, dating from the eighteenth century, features an abacus and supports simple calculations. The one at the bottom, also the eighteenth century, is a particularly delicious specimen: the wooden slab could be used to bake a gingerbread. It is the ultimate “book” to get children to do their schoolwork: when you’ve shown to be able to read a word, you can bite it off and eat it.
Pics: Washington, Folger Library, Stc 138136 (top, 17th century); Washington, Library of Congress, 102.3 (middle, 18th century); New York, Columbia University, Plimpton Hornbook 6 (bottom, 18th century). More on hornbooks in this longer blog post I wrote a while back.
Super Opinionated.
