firehose

The living are only a species of the dead.

Ex Libris

Amardeep Kaleka produced and directed a documentary that claims September 11 was an inside job designed to distract the public from ET revelations.

Emergency crews went to a Brooklyn school to investigate a report of a hazardous smell—only to learn that someone released Axe body spray in a classroom.

trixiedelight:

_{Young Frankenstein (1974)}

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I’m a very accomplished photographer. My work has been seen by millions and will be one of the most important resources for the history of video games. The only catch is that I’m almost never credited and don’t get paid for it.

Sherlock Holmes knew that Thomas Gregson—Tommy to his family and neighbors—was separated from his wife. He observed new patterns of behavior: earlier arrivals, later departures, and the absence of homemade lunches. And yet Sherlock never told anyone about his suspicions, nor did he speak to Gregson about them, because that isn’t the kind of person he is. While Sherlock may be in a strong position to deduce secrets people are keeping, he isn’t the kind of person who would use this skill in order for him to help those around him.

“An Unnatural Arrangement” is another case where this basic fact about Sherlock, understood based on where Elementary began, is tested. It may not be Sherlock’s instinct to help Gregson in the wake of his separation, but the longer he spends with an emotional Gregson the more he finds himself offering his assistance. Gregson’s ...

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Google’s new London office, scheduled to open in 2016, will have an open-air swimming pool, an indoor football pitch, a climbing wall and a roof garden from which to watch trains glide out of Kings Cross station towards Cambridge or Hogwarts. Googlers can cycle right into the building and to the cycle store room, which is equipped with showers and lockers. Somewhere in the interstices, there will also be desks to work on.

The 1-million-sq-ft (93,000 sq m) office will sit on 2.4 acres (1 hectare) of land between Kings Cross and St Pancras stations.  When the deal was announced in January, it was one of the biggest ever commercial property acquisitions in Britain. Reuters reports Google will spend £650 million ($1.05 billion) to buy and develop the site, with an eventual worth of £1 billion.

So why is Google splashing the cash on this much space? The cynical answer is because it can: Google needs to do something with all those billions of dollars it has earned outside the US because it can’t bring them home without a whopper of a tax bill. The more philosophical answer is that the nature of work is changing—at least for those companies that can afford it.

Conventional wisdom has it that technology has made offices leaner. Manual labour has been eliminated, paper files have been replaced by digital ones, and people can work remotely. Yet that is precisely why Google needs as much space as it does—the swimming pool, the football pitch and the free lunches are meant to entice workers into the office, to keep them there, to eliminate reasons for staying away. Tech companies take as much space as old economy firms—they just use it differently.

“The idea is that the people who are in the building—not the tenant but the actual staff—need to be attracted to the building. They need to like the community of the building,” says Simon Allford of Allford Hall Monaghan Morris, the London architects building Google’s HQ.

That’s also why Google chose to put its building at Kings Cross. Central Saint Martins, an art school, is just over the canal. The Francis Crick Institute, a biomedical research center, is coming there in 2015. The British Library, home to one of the world’s largest collections of knowledge, is up the road. And Googlers with a decent pair of binoculars should be able to read tomorrow’s news being typed out at the Guardian’s offices on the other side of Kings Cross. When complete, the neighbourhood will have one of the highest concentrations of brilliant, creative people in London.

“The point is if there’s 3,500 students, they [Googlers] might form a relationship with Central Saint Martins,” says Allford. ”You come to a city to meet people who aren’t like you, who are different and have different ways of seeing the world. The street life is incredibly important for why you live in a city. Taking that idea of life into the building and social space and what Google call positive friction. You want people to get to their desk and do work, you want them to get around, but you don’t want them to miss each other.”

It is also plugged into larger networks. From Kings Cross, Googlers can get to Cambridge, home to Britain’s tech hardware sector and chipmakers such as ARM—or Microsoft Research, which is just outside Cambridge station—in 45 minutes. From St Pancras station, on the other side of Google’s HQ, they can take the Eurostar to Brussels (capital of the European Union and useful for lobbying eurocrats) or to Paris (Eurodisney!) in just two hours.

The building will remain inherently flexible, says Allford. “We’ve talked with Google about theatre, stage set, and props: The building is the theatre. It lasts 100 years. The stage set is the auditorium. It lasts 20 years and is a building within the building. The props are—the little meeting rooms, the furniture, all this, which ideally you could reconfigure overnight.” The idea is to have a dynamic, flexible space defined by the people who occupy it, not the other way around.

It can hold 4,500 employees, more than twice the total number of Googlers in London. The building will be ready in 2016. Until then, London-based Googlers will continue to be split between two offices at Victoria and one off Charing Cross road.

The 3 Deadliest Words In The World, “It’s A Girl” : Evan Grae Davis at TEDxGateway

In entertainment, an awful lot of stuff happens behind closed doors, from canceling TV shows to organizing music festival lineups. While the public sees the end product on TVs, movie screens, or radio dials, they don’t see what it took to get there. In Expert Witness, The A.V. Club talks to industry insiders about the actual business of entertainment in hopes of shedding some light on how the pop-culture sausage gets made.

In 1990, Congress enacted the Americans With Disabilities Act, which prohibits discrimination based on disability. While this has most noticeably made for a lot more ramps and handicapped bathrooms at restaurants and public facilities, it’s also made for a fantastically more accessible concert-going experience for all those who want to rock out.

Barbie Parker and her company, LotuSign, help make festivals like Austin City Limits, SXSW, and Lollapalooza more accessible to those with hearing impairments ...

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Here’s that Pikmin hat you were missing ⊟

Coming in February for $28.90 each, from NCSX. A bit late for Halloween, I guess.

BUY Pikmin 3, upcoming games

starglider29a writes "Yesterday, a website I maintain that has a Twitter presence encountered an 'unsafe' warning when clicking on the tweets. 'This link has been flagged as potentially harmful.' After scanning the site and its database, then checking with Google and third-party site scanners, I found no evidence of harm. At noon, The Atlantic posted an article which describes the same issue with the Philadelphia City Paper. 'Perhaps most frustrating of all is that Twitter has not been particularly responsive to the paper's plight.' If the warnings are incorrect, how does Twitter justify this libel?"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A Canadian teenager is the inspiration for a new superhero in development for DC Comics. Jeff Lemire, an illustrator and cartoonist from Toronto, says that Shannen Koostachin — a young Cree activist from Attawapiskat — inspired him.

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After producing numerous Presidents, Supreme Court justices, prominent Cabinet members, and various magnates and moguls, Yale’s secretive Skull And Bones society has at last been tapped to join the elite of ABC’s “powerful woman” dramas. The network is developing a new series titled The Order (likely because The Skulls was already taken by that Joshua Jackson movie), about a female student’s initiation into the shrouded-in-mystery-and-constant-attention organization, and that same woman 10 years later, now an FBI agent tasked with investigating it. The show, based on Alexandra Robbins’ non-fiction exposé The Secrets Of The Tomb, will alternate between those two timelines—her young, sexy, Ivy League years, and her more adult, probably still sexy, FBI years—as it delves into all the sexy conspiracy theories about how Skull And Bones members have long sexily exerted their influence over the world. And hopefully by its third season, The Order ...

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I think the Merc With a Mouth himself wouldn't mind if a bizarre plot twist made him come back from the dead as this totally awesome three year old. According to her mom, she came up with the idea herself and bossed her dear parent around until it was created for her. You can find more pictures like this on the original post, or at our Tumblr.

hodad

Aaaaaaaaah!!!!!

Original Source

San Francisco Chronicle

NYC council votes to make tobacco-buying age 21 ... Pekin Daily Times Smoking may be a bad habit — but New York City lawmakers want their residents to be older and wiser before deciding to take it up. The New York City Council voted overwhelmingly Wednesday to raise the age for purchasing cigarettes from 18 to 21, ... Tobacco-Bond Woes Seen as Chicago Seeks Highest Tax: Muni CreditBloomberg New York City Council votes to raise tobacco purchasing age to 21Reuters Staten Island contingent splits as City Council votes to raise tobacco-buying age ...SILive.com TIME -Waterbury Republican American -Salt Lake Tribune all 130 news articles »

a plot involving Ender's siblings has been cut

In this week's paper, I reviewed Ender's Game, the new movie based on the 1985 novel by Orson Scott Card. It's... not bad? It isn't great, either, but it's about as decent of an adaptation as we're going to get, once you make peace with the fact that that the filmmakers decided to (A) cram Ender's Game into two hours, and (B) soften the story so that it'll appeal to the widest possible audience. Anyway, read the whole review if you're interested, but here's the final paragraph:

While Ender's Game boasts stuff worth seeing (ZERO-GRAVITY BATTLES), here's a downer: Anti-gay activist Card is credited as a producer on the film, which means he'll likely be seeing some money once Ender's Game makes back its budget. I was going to suggest buying a ticket to another film, then sneaking into Ender's Game, but here's a better idea: Swing by Powell's. Pick up a used paperback.

TURNS OUT THAT'S NOT TRUE. According to TheWrap, Card sold his movie rights before authors realized they could have a much bigger role in the filmmaking process, let alone share in their films' profits:

Multiple sources from both inside and outside the companies that produced the Ender’s Game film—distributor Summit Entertainment, visual effects company Digital Domain and book-rights holder OddLot Entertainment—tell TheWrap that Card’s fee has already been paid through a decade-old deal that includes no backend.

If you really want to hit Card where it hurts, don’t buy his book: Card still profits handsomely from the novel, perched at the top of the latest New York Times Best Seller List for paperback mass-market fiction.

Though it was whispered early on that Card’s contract had “escalators”—built-in box-office milestones with cash bonuses attached—individuals close to the film say he has no such profit participation. (Via.)

So the good news is that if you want to see the Ender's Game movie and don't want your money going to Card, you're in the clear! That said, I'd still recommend picking up a used paperback of Ender's Game instead. The book's better than the movie—and while Card is no doubt making a ton of cash from sales of new copies of Ender's Game, authors don't see a dime when bookstores sell used copies.

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pink and green ball pit found at the Kerry Hotel in Shanghai. It's the world's largest ball pit and stretches over 80 feet long and 40 feet wide. The pit is filled with the amazingness of one million plastic balls. The ball pit was created by emptying out the Kerry Hotel's pool and was made to help raise awareness for breast cancer in China. Over 300 recovering cancer patients dove in on October 30th to break the Guinness World Records of largest ball pit ever.

Severe thunderstorms delivered a scary Halloween across the nation's midsection Thursday as torrential rains flooded Central Texas and brought threats of tornadoes in several states. The heart of the Lone Star State was drenched with up to 14 inches of rain. Flash floods killed a motorist south of Austin when he was swept out his vehicle. More than 100 people were rescued or evacuated from the floodwaters that swamped more than 500 homes in the state capital.

AUSTIN, Texas—A federal appeals court on Thursday issued a ruling reinstating most of Texas’ tough new abortion restrictions, in a decision that means as many as 12 clinics won’t be able to perform the procedure starting as soon as Friday. A panel of judges at the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals issued the ruling three days after District Judge Lee Yeakel said one provision serves no medical purpose. The panel says the law requiring doctors to have admitting privileges at a nearby hospital can take effect while a lawsuit moves forward. The restrictions could take effect Friday. The panel left in place a portion of Yeakel’s order that prevents the state from enforcing the U.S. Food and Drug Administration protocol for abortion-inducing drugs in cases where the woman is between 50 and 63 days into her pregnancy. Doctors testifying before the court had said such women would be harmed if the protocol were enforced.

Starting today, the current herd is owned by several of the caretakers you’ve no doubt met or at least seen around. You might encounter a noticeably locked gate and a lamentable lack of public access to the goats of Goat Field. As part of this transition, the gate has been locked while various and sundry matters get sorted and sussed out, but we’re working on it! Please keep an eye out here or via our Facebook and Twitter feeds (likely more immediate news on those channels) for further updates.

In the Utter Determination Department: The mouse. The cracker. The legend.

Google searches for “creeper” style shoes have grown by more than 530 percent between September 2010 and September 2013. “The goth trend is no longer reserved for an underground subculture,” said Heidi Ware, head of fashion editorial and creative for eBay. A choker necklace is sold on the site every 55 seconds.

We've seen Princess Vader, now it's time to meet Princess Dalek. EXTERMI-AWWWWW. (via Fashionably Geek)