firehose

Terrence Howard has alleged that Robert Downey Jr. bears some of the blame for his departure from Marvel's blockbuster franchise.

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Hyakuju Sentai GaoRanger (Natsume/Bandai - PSX - 2001)

Howell discussed a number of topics related to bullying with Bill Shaikin of the Los Angeles Times.

Free agent pitcher J.P. Howell saw outfielder Yasiel Puig bullied in the Los Angeles Dodgers clubhouse, reports Bill Shaikin of the Los Angeles Times.

Howell talked with Shaikin about a number of topics related to bullying after he and his wife Heather read her children's book "Dangles," which talks about bullying, to a number of preschoolers at Children's Bureau Preschool in Los Angeles on Tuesday.

The veteran stated he saw Puig bullied, but did not disclose any details regarding who was involved or what happened. Howell did discuss Puig with Shaikin, telling the reporter:

"The guy is such a champion. He has such a big heart. Sometimes he acts like a jerk, but that is his defense mechanism. It's not really him...Someday, he is not going to be 22. He's not going to be like that. I love the guy. I hope he never changes, just maybe matures."

Howell also talked about what he considers to be other types of bullying in baseball, including pitchers throwing at someone's head. He cited a situation last season when Ian Kennedy intentionally threw at Zack Greinke, stating:

"When he's throwing at someone's head, you could be going to be a funeral. To me, that's a bully. (Kennedy) might be a great guy. But, on the baseball field, that is wrong."

Bullying has recently been an inflammatory topic in sports, partially thanks to the situation between Miami Dolphins lineman Jonathan Martin and Richie Incognito.

More from SB Nation MLB:

• BBWAA award winners vs. Marvel superheroes

• AL MVP: Miguel Cabrera wins | Troutrage over vote!

• Clayton Kershaw: NL Cy Young winner | $300 million man?

• MLB Hot Stove | Drew won’t return to Sox | Mariners interested in Butler

• Death of a Ballplayer: Wrongly convicted prospect spends 27 years in prison

When 38 Studios' intellectual properties are auctioned off by the state of Rhode Island on December 11, one more game will be included in the mix, Rise of Nations: Tactics. The Mac game was completed, albeit unreleased and seemingly unheard of until now. The auction was first slated to begin this week and includes the Kingdoms of Amalur IP, 38 Studios' in-development MMO Project Copernicus and Big Huge Games' properties Catan, Rise of Nations and Rise of Legends.

"Additionally, through the examination of the data contained on the 38 Studios servers, we have discovered a completed, but unreleased game for Mac users titled 'Rise of Nations: Tactics,'" Nick Jimenez, executive vice president of the auction host Heritage Global Partners said in a press release. "We only became aware of this game this past week through our own due diligence efforts."

The intellectual property auction follows 38 Studios' closure in May 2012, and according to the court-appointed lawyer for the now-defunct studio Richard Land, potential bidders' interest in the auction has been "greater than expected."

Continue reading Complete, unreleased Rise of Nations game found among 38 Studios' goods

Complete, unreleased Rise of Nations game found among 38 Studios' goods originally appeared on Joystiq on Fri, 15 Nov 2013 12:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Disney released the first teaser trailer for Maleficent this week, featuring Angelina Jolie as the “Mistress Of All Evil,” and Elle Fanning as Princess Aurora in the Sleeping Beauty prequel. But somebody online had a bit of fun with the first teaser poster and Curtis “50 Cent” Jackson’s name, creating an alternate, difficult-to-pronounce and yet improved version of the film entitled Male50Cent. It’s not too late for Disney to plan some crossover advertising. At the very least Funny Or Die or another Internet sketch group should be trying to get the rapper to appear in a video. But for now it’s just a delightful whim of pronunciation that turns 50 Cent into a nonsensical portmanteau a la Chamillionaire.

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The town of Seneca, CA, a 12-acre former gold-mining outpost in the northern part of the state, is being offered on Craigslist for $225,000, which includes the town’s liquor license, three cabins, and a bar.

Once again, purely for your amusement, we suffer yet more pain and indignity in deep space. This time, Pip, Matt, Brendan, Quinns and Paul are all playing Space Cadets, a co-operative game of spaceship piloting where everything can and will go wrong. Repeatedly. Forever. It's okay! Quinns has played it before and knows what he's doing, though he's not actually in charge.

Brendan may have too, but that doesn't mean he knows what he's doing. Set engines to gingerly.

You've called for more Let's Plays, so this is an HOUR LONG video and we very much hope you enjoy watching it as much as we enjoyed making it. We want to give special thanks to Ben Prunty for kindly giving us permission to use some of his music for this video. You might also have heard his work in the famous video game FTL.

Space Cadets is one big game made up of many, many minigames, which means that, if it goes to hell, it's one big disaster made up of many smaller ones. But that's not going to happen, is it?

Is it?

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Ylvis is back again with “Calle Presents: Air Horn Classics,” a new video in which Norwegian comedian Calle Hellevang Larsen and his special guests use an air horn to cover classic songs. They cover hits like the “Star Wars Main Title” by John Williams and “Great Balls of Fire” by Jerry Lee Lewis.

video via TVNorge

Danielle Susalla Deery is president of the San Diego Museum Council. She said the museum's membership was not rejected because of its mission but because of other factors.

"Like their animal care and the protocol and care of their exhibitions and storage. They had a lot of areas that were not in line with membership guidelines. They have a staff member on the board of directors and that’s not good governance," Deery said.

Original Source

When invited back next season, he took a different tack. Kaufman was now a clean-cut born-again Christian engaged to Kathie Sullivan, a gospel singer from The Lawrence Welk Show. Sullivan (an actual Lawrence Welk cast member who inexplicably played along) spoke of his religious conversion and her love for him. She enthused, “We’ll probably end up with a bunch of little kids running around saying tenk you veddy much!”

Original Source

Toronto City Council has voted to strip Mayor Rob Ford of his powers, many of which were only recently delegated to the mayor's office. Hizzoner Laughable Bumblefuck has vowed to use tax-dollars to sue council over this move, because that is how he rolls.

iFixit has posted its teardown of Sony’s just-released PlayStation 4 video game console. iFixit found that the lack of adhesive makes taking the console apart and putting it back together easy, and though the non-proprietary hard drive is easy to get to and replace, the fan is difficult to access for cleaning or replacement. For more photos, information on repairability, and to find out what’s inside, check out the full teardown at iFixit.

video and image via iFixit

Next Media Animation studio created “What Does The Panda Say?,” an animated Taiwanese music video parody of the hit song “The Fox” by Ylvis.

video via NMA

submitted via Laughing Squid Tips

Today, Sony launched the PS4 video game console in North America, a week ahead of rival Microsoft’s Xbox One. The competition between the platforms will be a battle worth billions of dollars and comes down to a 2,600-year-old parable—what do you want your game console to be, a multipurpose “fox” or a specialist “hedgehog?”

The all-in-one approach that Microsoft has taken with the ($499) Xbox One is perfectly legitimate. Xbox One will allow you to watch NFL games, video chat using Skype, and even workout with personalized feedback using Xbox Fitness. But Sony’s ($399) PS4 is emphatically a hedgehog and its specialty is games—not watching television, sharing snippets of gameplay with friends, or recording images of your living room—though it can do all of those things. The PS4 is a game machine.

In terms of technical specifications, the PS4 features an 8-core, low power x86-64 AMD Jaguar central processor and an AMD Radeon graphics chip. It comes with a 500 gb hard drive and 8 GB of RAM memory. This is almost the same as the Xbox One. As of September, Microsoft upped the speed of its central processor from the 1.6 GHz benchmark shared with the PS4 to 1.75 GHz. Even still, the consensus is that the PS4 is slightly more powerful, though the central difference isn’t about the hardware, it’s in Sony’s approach to gamers and developers.

This summer, Microsoft announced that the Xbox One would require internet access and that games, being individually licensed, could not be resold. Only after a prolonged outcry from gamers the world over did the company backpedal and issue a retraction on its blog. It’s just one incident in the introduction of the Xbox, but it gave the distinct impression that Microsoft was tone-deaf when it came to gamers.

At Sony, the gamer experience has taken center stage from the beginning. In February, Sony Computer Entertainment president Andrew House told reporters, “The living room is no longer the center of the Playstation ecosystem; the player is.” That focus clearly manifests itself in Sony’s game development process, which was open to independent game makers, created a hardware design optimized for ease of programming, and reached out to the development community as early as 2008 to ensure that the PS4 was an attractive platform to game makers.

Logically, if you attract the most game developers, you’ll attract the most gamers, which seems to be Sony’s ultimate goal. Whether attracting the most gamers translates to dominating the marketplace is another question entirely.

Thus, Microsoft’s gambit is a bit different. There is a market for an all in-one-entertainment center, and the Microsoft strategy will be attracting users who see themselves not primarily as gamers, but rather, as all-around tech-savvy media consumers.

Altogether, after Nintendo dropped the ball with the launch of its Wii U earlier this year, there is a gaping hole in the $63 billion video game market that the Sony and Microsoft consoles are looking to fill. And it looks like Sony will reap dividends from its game-focused approach.

The Chinese Communist Party just announced that it is loosening its one-child policy, allowing most of the remaining couples in the country who were restricted to one child to have two. That’s great and all. But it comes way too late to fix the huge glitches in China’s economic growth model that its family-planning policies created—namely, its yawning gender imbalance and rapidly aging population.

A big reason it’s too late is that it’s not the one-child policy that’s holding back many couples from having more children. Rather, it’s the spiraling costs of living in cities, where the one-child policy was mainly enforced, says Leta Hong Fincher, a PhD candidate in sociology at Tsinghua University and author of a forthcoming book on gender inequality in China.

“The central government’s announcement to loosen the one-child policy will of course result in some couples choosing to have two children who otherwise wouldn’t have done so,” Hong Fincher tells Quartz. However, “[M]any young Chinese who say they don’t want to have any children at all because the cost of living in the city has become so expensive.”

That’s bad news—at only 1.4 births per woman among young women, China’s fertility rate is already dangerously low. The country needs to bump that to 2.1 to offset the gender imbalance and demographic decline.

And then there’s the timing problem. Sure, China’s population will continue to grow until 2030, when it hits 1.45 billion. But that growth isn’t mainly coming from babies being born. The big driver is more old people living longer.

Let’s say couples do start cranking out more than 1.4 kids. At the absolute earliest, those kids will begin to enter the workforce in 2035. That’s not soon enough. China’s working-age population peaked in 2012 according to official statistics, at 1.0 billion people. In 2025, the (now) 930 million-strong labor force will start shedding 10 million workers a year.

That means China is already facing a competitive disadvantage to many of its neighbors, as you can see from the chart below, which shows working-age populations. An extra injection of kids will make the decline of China’s workforce a little less steep after 2035, but it won’t reverse the trend.

Then there’s the gender gap. By 2020, China will have between 30 million and 35 million more Chinese young men than women. This is alarming for both Chinese society and the economy.

But, again, that’s more than two decades before the new policy starts having an impact. And unless raising children becomes cheaper, the two-child policy won’t change a cultural preference for boys that caused the gender skew in the first place. Sex-selection techniques remain widely still available.

This isn’t to say the two-child policy isn’t a big deal for president Xi Jinping. To change the policy, Xi overcame the National Population and Family Planning Commission, a bureaucracy with such a powerful hold over the Party that it earlier today confidently dismissed rumors that the one-child policy would be relaxed. The NPFPC employs millions in the enterprise of collecting fines from violators of family planning laws. It also carries out forced abortions and sterilizations. This has earned it widespread resentment among Chinese citizens. So count this as a big win in spirit for Xi and company, even if in practice it’s much less exciting.

Sydney Morning Herald

Hundreds attend Typhoon Haiyan prayer vigil CBC.ca The Roman Catholic Archdiocese of St. John's held a prayer vigil Thursday to support those affected by Typhoon Haiyan in the Philippines. The Red Cross office in St. John's has collected nearly $25,000 in donations for people affected by Typhoon Haiyan in ... Typhoon Haiyan: Aid workers balance work and mourningBBC News Aid continues pouring to coastal cities stricken by Typhoon HaiyanChristian Science Monitor Photos of the dayWashington Post CNN International -The Independent -Wall Street Journal all 1,263 news articles »

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Controversial Teen Dance Crazes That Pissed Off Parents

The Waltz (1800s)

In 1816,The Times of London alerted parents about an “indecent foreign dance” called the waltz, which featured “the voluptuous intertwining of the limbs” and “close compressure of the bodies.” This “obscene display” sparked a panic that caused the Times to “warn every parent against exposing his daughter to so fatal a contagion” that previously remained the territory of “prostitutes and adulteresses.” Yes, this was written about the waltz.

FULL LIST on Flavorwire

The Doctor's life is restored with a fresh draught of Elixir produced by Maren's self-sacrifice to the Sacred Flame. The Doctor gives Ohica a pack of firecrackers in case they have any more trouble.

Shoot for the Moon

The blog’s rather late today but definitely worth the wait we think. It’s an jaw-droppingly brilliant Raspberry Pi-driven 3D scanner by Richard Garsthagen . He used it recently to scan over 200 people at the Groningen Makerfaire with spectacular results:

Richard’s site has details on recent events (including the best party ever: a scanning party) and instructions on how to build your own. It uses 40 Raspberry Pis and cameras but Richard says that he has had impressive results with 12 Pis.

Of course once you’ve been scanned you can be 3D printed:

There are lots of 3D scanners popping up at the moment. The standout thing about Richard’s build is that the scan is instant—the Pi cameras take simultaneous photos—so there’s no standing still in a ker-ayzee pose whilst lasers or Kinects wibble about doing their thing.

But best of all is that you can build your own 3D scanner and then print yourself. For a science fiction-brewed child of the 70s like myself this is a deeply magical thing and it makes me insanely happy. And just bit overawed.

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I’m not really sure how to begin to answer this (and that’s not helped by the fact that it’s asked anonymously).

To say that the comics industry in the US is sexist isn’t news. To say that harassment of women, both professionals and fans, occurs is sadly not news, either.

My honest opinion? The only thing that I really think is getting better is that more people are talking about it, and more people are pushing the matter into the light. Awareness is the first step, but not, by far, the only one required. The fact is, the ratio of women to men working in the industry itself is still grotesquely low. There are corners where efforts are being made to improve this. It’s not, in my opinion, enough.

Sexism is part of our culture, both outside of comics and within it; it’s exacerbated exponentially in comics because women have been excluded and/or marginalized for so very long. And I suppose that is the answer to your question as to whether or not it’s “really as bad as some of the stories” you’ve read. No, it’s not that bad. It’s worse. It’s endemic. For every story you’re hearing, there are ten that you’re not. For every instance of poor behavior you’ve heard of from and editor or a creator, there’s another twenty stories about convention trips to strip clubs for “meetings” and the like.

Whether it’s better or worse today than ten years ago, I genuinely cannot say. My sneaking suspicion is not that it’s better, but that the men who are capitalizing on the situation are doing a better job of hiding their behavior.