firehose

Rio Burning,from Der Spiegel, Picture This. Photo credit: Reuters.

Caption:

Thousands of teachers protested on Monday night in the streets of Rio de Janeiro. They’ve been on strike now for more than 50 days to demand changes in Brazil’s public education system, including higher pay. On Monday the demonstrations turned violent when a group of some 200 masked protesters set fires, broke into a bank and attempted to loot bank machines. Several people were injured.

God’s excrement?

fixed


original

oyukiria submitted to ria-rha:

Redesign of this poor girl’s metal swimsuit .

Sooo, I have to admit I didn’t know this character AT ALL (Angela what?), so I had to do a bit of research. Well, I still don’t know much about her, only that her old armour is as ridiculous as her new one, and that her butt-cape is the evolution of a mile-long loincloth she had before.
I tried to keep a Marvel style, even if I guess that a murderous vengeance seeking fighter would be more clothed/armoured than that. Leather and metal FTW!
In her previous design she had a bit of an angel-wing design on her crown, which kinda clicks with her name, so I used that again.
And I personally wouldn’t let my hair flow freely like that in battle, so I guessed her hair is just too short to be braided or something.

For those of you playing at home, Angela is a character in Todd McFarlane’s Spawn series, and was created by the magnificent Neil Gaiman, who is not happy about McFarlane’s opinions on female armor (I personally believe that McFarlane is as much of a hack as Rob Liefeld). But enough of that. You have targeted my weak spot for massive damage with this valkyrie-esque design, and I’m absolutely loving the kilt and wings. Absolutely perfect for an angel-bounty hunter. 

-Astro

coolchicksfromhistory:

Rafaela Herrera (1742-1805)

Art by Kelci D. Crawford (blog, webcomic 1, webcomic 2)

Rafaela was the illegitimate daughter of a Spanish military commander and a local woman believed to have been of mixed ancestry (criolla or mulatto).  Raised by the Spanish side of her family, Rafaela was educated in military tactics from a young age.  

In 1762, Rafaela was living with her father at the Fortress of the Immaculate Conception in Nicaragua when British forces attacked.  Her father was killed and Rafaela swore to defend the fort with her life.  The sergeant in charge of the fort attempted to surrender but Rafaela opposed him.  She took charge of the cannon and inspired the men to fight off the invaders.  Six days later the siege ended and the Spanish defenders were victorious.

Rafaela went on to marry and raise five children in strained financial circumstances.  King Charles III of Spain eventually awarded Rafaela a small piece of land and a pension of 600 pesos a year in recognition of her bravery.

Historical Map: LNER Northumberland and Durham Quad Royal Poster, 1934

Painted by prolific transport poster artist Montague B. Black, this lovely poster shows the services of the London and North Eastern Railway (LNER) in England’s north east in 1934. The view stretches from Middlesborough all the up the Northumberland coast to the Scottish Borders and beyond. Each city is painted in imprecise but evocative detail, as is Hadrian’s Wall, shown stretching from Carlisle to Newcastle across the centre of the map. The late afternoon colour palette employed is particularly beautiful.

Definitely worth clicking through to Flickr to view this large.

(Source: DanBrady/Flickr – date and artist confirmed here)

~Frantz Fanon

Sorry that this blog's been suffering a bit as of late. I've been busy.

My teaching load is ramping up (which is good, having more day job is nice) and I've been devoting most of my free time toward working on games, transcribing Level With Me vol. 2 at Rock Paper Shotgun, and writing / researching for two talks I'm delivering -- one at QGCon, and the other at Practice.

Here are the two blurbs:

"Queering Game Development" @ QGCon, Oct 27 in Berkeley, California
Queer and feminist critiques of games often rely on high level conceptual approaches to games -- that is, analyzing games as cultural products or media objects. The hegemony's response is to go technical and go low-level, to argue that their game engine could not support playable women characters, or to argue production schedules allowed no time to support queer content, etc. Ignoring temporarily how those are bullsh*t reasons, what if we chased them into the matrix? Perhaps we could disclose the politics inherent in game engine architectures, rendering APIs, and technical know-how. If we learn about (and *practice*) actual game development, then we can articulate alternative accounts of game development at a low level, and achieve more comprehensive critiques of games.

"Well-Made: Back to Black Mesa" @ Practice, November 17 in New York City
The modern AAA single player first person shooter consists mainly of two things: shooting faces in implausibly realistic levels with a pistol, machine gun, shotgun, sniper rifle, or rocket launcher -- and obeying NPCs when they trap you inside a room so they can emit voice-over lines at you. Half-Life's legacy in the latter is well-mythologized in history, but what if we re-visit Half-Life as a masterpiece of technical design, enemy encounters, AI scripting, weapons tuning, and architecture? Spoiler: we'll find out it's a pretty well-crafted game.

(I imagine the "Well-Made" as a counterpart to the "Well-Played" or something.)

Would you buy a phone just because it has a politician’s face on it? Or does that even matter, as long as word gets out about him before an election?

When we first heard of a phone branded with the image of the top official of India’s Gujarat province, Narendra Modi, we thought it was a hoax, but the Wall Street Journal apparently obtained one of these Chinese-made, Android-running generic smartphones that honor of the tech-savvy 63-year-old.

Modi is a controversial figure for his Hindu nationalist politics, and his alleged complicity in the deaths of more than 1,000 people during anti-Muslim riots in 2002. His combination of nationalism and business-friendliness have earned him comparisons to Bo Xilai, the disgraced Chinese politician, and Modi has publicly embraced China’s state-driven capitalism model of economic development as the way forward for India. He will become prime minister if India’s opposition party, the BJP, wins parliamentary elections next year.

Gujarati businesses have been profiting from Modi’s popularity, with everything from clothing and cups to tattoos and music being sold under his image, sometimes to fundraise for his party but other times for their own private gain. In the case of the so-called Smart NaMo phone, the idea is drawn from Chinese products that carry the image of party leaders there.

But that raises questions for the Shenzhen-based company behind the phone. It hasn’t revealed its backers or distributors, and it’s not clear if Modi has approved the use of his name or will profit from the enterprise. The company’s CEO told the Indian Express that the firm is in talk with the Gujarat government to set up a manufacturing facility in the province.

That, of course, would put Modi’s government in the position of approving—and possibly providing tax breaks and other concessions to—a firm whose main product is designed to promote Modi himself. That wouldn’t be an economy inspired by the China system so much as crony capitalism.

The global success of McDonald’s shows that, like politics, fast food is local. Though that often involves little more than slapping a “Mc” on the local favorite—e.g. McSpicy Paneer in India, McMollete in Mexico, Le Croque McDo in France—that seemingly foolproof formula helped it keep growing through the global downturn (pdf, p.11).

Burger King is one-upping McD’s, though, as reported by RocketNews 24. Instead of bastardizing national foodstuffs, Burger King is going a step further. With the rollout of Kuro Ninja (“Black Ninja”) (pdf), BK Japan is burger-ifying a national icon (complete with an inexplicabe protruding tongue):

How does a fast food chain fashion a ninja out of a burger? First, naturally, by blackening the bun. This is achieved not by leaving the toaster on too long, but by coloring the dough with bamboo charcoal. BK’s approximation of a ninja tongue is a long slab of bacon flopping lewdly out of the burger (again, we’re baffled by the idea that long tongues are typical of ninjas.) The rest is a hash brown patty and the regular fixings, topped off with Chaliapin sauce (named after a Russian opera singer), as RocketNews24 explains. As of October 25, Kuro Ninja can be had for ¥680 ($6.93).

This may be part of BK’s “commitment to menu innovation,” which management emphasized in its Q2 earnings call. The company seems intent on grabbing market share from the far more popular McDonald’s. BK added 20 stores in Japan in 2012, bringing the total to 64.

That commitment probably explains why Kuro Ninja isn’t a totally new invention. If its sire was the Kuro Burger—a ebony-bunned Whopper slathered in “Black Flavored Ketchup” (ketchup plus garlic and squid ink)—the dam appears to have been Big Bacon Whopper (that’s where the “tongue” originated). BK Japan’s menu of out-there items also includes its “Garlic Meat Beast” and Double Garlic Cheese line, BK RiNGO, a beef hamburger dressed with cinnamon-dashed apple chunks, and the fried pumpkin, bacon, beef and mixed-nut sauce melange that was BK Pumpkin.

But given how frequently it’s been rolling out wacky new sandwich concepts, BK Japan might have a problem with taking innovation too far. This time? Well, you be the judge.

As Thailand’s heavy-handed government continues to brutally stifle dissent against the monarchy, a rebel reporter learns that the most dangerous form of censorship is when it starts to feel normal.

nudityandnerdery:

feigenbaumsworld:

Know your rights. Know your IX.

This fascinating, because I don’t know that I hear much of anything about Title IX other than in how it applies to funding women’s athletics programs. (Which kind of demonstrates something about how our society looks at colleges, I suppose…)

The only thing that could sink Congressional Republican approval ratings even lower would be if they moved to impeach President Obama. So, naturally:

Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.) said Tuesday that President Obama has “committed impeachable offenses” and that the House could hold a hearing to impeach.

“We can have an impeachment hearing in the House, and in my mind the president has committed impeachable offenses,” Bachmann told conservative talk show host Rusty Humphries in an interview first detailed by Right Wing Watch.

Say what you want about Michele Bachmann, but I think "in my mind the president has committed impeachable offenses" is maybe the most honest thing she's ever said. In her mind, the president has done a whole bunch of things.

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Spotted on 65th & Flavel, posted on a fence.

via r/Portland. Hat tips to Blogtown consulting detective Graham!

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During DC Comics' Superman panel at New York Comic Con, writer Scott Lobdell announced the upcoming death of Superboy in the pages of "Superman," a statement supported by the issue's solicitation copy.

Holy smokes. It’s no terrible secret that on top of a love for comics and video games, I am also an RPG nerd (and sometimes RPG artist, if I may own-horn-toot). I am not alone in my penchant for high fantasy, either, but finding high fantasy themed anything that doesn’t slap some boobplate or a chainmail bikini on the ladies is sometimes few and far between. I know the official D&D comic lost me after the first issue, and while the Pathfinder comic is a better choice it still has its moments of broken spines and in general didn’t grab me. I mean, basically, D&D has long been the bastion of epic but predominately male heroes, and while women have always been players at the table, finding representation within that game is still rare enough that when you find it, you hold onto with everything you’ve got. And boy howdy am I holding onto Rat Queens so damn hard.

Google just got a tad creepier.

Thanks to tweaks made to its terms of service today, Google will be able to use its users’ names and photos in select advertising beginning next month (November 11). The updated terms of service, first noticed by The New York Times, specifically allow for the company to use what it calls “shared endorsements,” which, the Times explains, occur only when a user comments, +1s (Google’s equivalent of a Facebook ‘like’) or follows pages or brands included in Google’s services.

That means anytime a Google Plus user endorses a company—say, McDonald’s—by giving it a +1, Google can then use those endorsements alongside an ad it later runs for the company. Google will only share the endorsed ads with the people who originally saw the endorsement, making it all the more important that users specify the friend groups, or circles with which they share their feedback and reviews. Otherwise, a publicly shared endorsement will allow the company to include a user’s name and photo in online ads distributed to just about anyone. Nearly 400 million users engage with Google Plus either directly or indirectly through interaction with other Google-owned sites like YouTube.

While Google is opting all of its adult users into the scheme, it’s also providing a means of opting out. Users can decide whether or not to share their name and photo in Google’s “shared endorsements” setting. Given the likelihood that many people will never read the company’s updated terms of service, the change is bound to go unnoticed by many of Google’s users.

In the world of social media advertising, Google’s move is merely keeping up with the Joneses. Facebook, for one, already uses its user information in ads. But in the past, Google pegged itself as a standout in this regard; it has talked about not stepping over the “creepy” line, even if it nudges up against it. Given its recent involvement in US National Security Agency’s data sharing scandal, admission that its email service Gmail isn’t private, and this latest ad endeavor, the creepy line looks like it’s being crossed.

If your default position is to support free speech, these are the kinds of titles that make you wince. It's a lot easier to defend "Huckleberry Finn" than "Taking My Drunk Daughter." Nevertheless, Amazon should leave them up. Here's why.

I can FINALLY announce my latest project for Marvel Comics. BLACK WIDOW!! written by Nathan Edmondson (The Activity, Who Is Jake Ellis?) with art and covers by myself.

 

Im guessing he was shopping for travel size shampoo??? Human suitcase man

hex-girlfriend:

how do i get into dog heaven instead of people heaven

ratak-monodosico:

iv come to dismantle the patriarchy 

freedominwickedness:

perfectly-ultimate-great-shoofle:

10knotes:

akeenerheart:

I can’t stop laughing at this.

what’s this from?

It’s from Yoshihiko and the Demon King’s Castle, an indie Japanese live-action series parodying RPG tropes.

vimeo:

Full Turn by ECAL

A new project from ECAL gives 3D volume to 2D graphics and the result is like a high tech flip book.