firehose

thefrogman:

Mr. Lovenstein by J.L. Westover [website | tumblr | twitter | facebook]

In true Willy Wonka fashion, Burlingame, California-based Guittard Chocolate Company served up “Liquid Chocolate Bars” to patrons of the 2013 Outside Lands festival. By melting their gourmet chocolate bars in industrial fountains, they were able to capture cups of the warm chocolate –imagine shots of chocolate– and sell them at the festival’s forested “Choco Lands” dessert area. Festival-goers could choose between dark or milk chocolate and had the option to mix in toppings like cacao nibs, almonds, and the like. Each “bar” came with a small flat spoon to scoop up all the delicious melted goodness. Naturally I gave it a try (milk chocolate with toffee bits) and felt it was just the right kind of treat for strolling around outside on a cool foggy summer night in San Francisco. I have to say though, I’m hoping some soft pretzel or churro vendor will get wise and park next to them at future events.

photos by Rusty Blazenhoff

After half-a-year of delays, the U.S Secret Service released the first 104 pages of agency documents about the late coder and activist Aaron Swartz, including a brief report on Swartz’s suicide less than three months before his scheduled trial.

From July to August, Microsoft gained 3.10 percent (ngnx gained 0.96 percent), ostensibly taking some share from Apache. While Microsoft is gaining, its total Web server market share for the month of August currently stands at 22.75 percent, so it's still less than half the market that Apache commands. Perhaps even more surprising is that Apache's decline and Microsoft's rise are due to a single hosting company. According to Netcraft, hosting vendor GoDaddy recently moved 25 million sites from Apache on Linux to Microsoft's IIS 7.5

In the sand sculpture “Infinity,” a figure holds a miniature version of himself in his hand, and that figure holds an even smaller version, and so on, in a sculptural example of the Droste effect. The sculpture was created by artist Carl Jara back in June for the Hampton Beach Master Sand Sculpting Competition in New Hampshire, where the work earned a gold medal and the people’s choice award. For more photos from the event, check out Jara’s Flickr set. Jara has also released a time-lapse showing how he made the sculpture.

photos by Carl Jara

via Colossal

Researchers at a university in eastern Zhejiang Province have used a 3D printer to create living kidneys, which are expected to be used for transplants in the future.

We Are Unlike You is a Berlin model agency that highlights individuality by recruiting non-traditional models from the worlds of burlesque, cabaret, stand-up comedy, and more.

We are unlike other model agencies. We don’t just offer tremendous looking individuals, but real characters who don’t just look the part, they feel and act it too. Because it’s simply who they are.

via Violet Blue

Most NY voters embarrassed by Weiner, Spitzer Corvallis Gazette Times New York voters, despite their tradition of rooting for comebacks and supporting eccentric candidates, have had it with Anthony Weiner and Eliot Spitzer and their sex scandals. A Siena College poll released Monday found that 68 percent of state voters and 62 ... and more »

NPR

North Carolina's sweeping voter ID law faces legal challenge Fox News North Carolina Gov. Pat McCrory on Monday signed into law changes in how residents can vote that includes requiring them to show a photo ID at polling stations, a move that triggered threats of legal action from the NAACP and other groups. The American ... Activists Rally Around Rosa Nell Eaton as NC Voter ID Becomes LawColorLines magazine McCrory On WUNC: 'Our Right To Vote Deserves Protection'WUNC North Carolina's Newly Passed Voter ID Laws Will Face Challenge from Activist ...Bustle The Progressive Pulse -MSNBC -The Keene Sentinel all 110 news articles »

Ville Radieuse by Le Corbusier via Archdaily

Ville Radieuse (The Radiant City) is an unrealized urban masterplan by Le Corbusier, first presented in 1924 and published in a book of the same name in 1933. Designed to contain effective means of transportation, as well as an abundance of green space and sunlight, Le Corbusier’s city of the future would not only provide residents with a better lifestyle, but would contribute to creating a better society. Though radical, strict and nearly totalitarian in its order, symmetry and standardization, Le Corbusier’s proposed principles had an extensive influence on modern urban planning and led to the development of new high-density housing typologies.

Read on Ars Technica | Comments

Luc Besson directed The Professional, The Fifth Element, and more, so I have no idea why it's taken this long to get his newest film, The Extraordinary Adventures of Adele Blanc-Sec, released in the U.S. but here’s the other offerings accompanying mademoiselle!

Read more...

NBC4 Washington

APNewsBreak: Work stalled on MLK Memorial; likely won't be ready for march ... Washington Post WASHINGTON — The Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial probably won't be ready for the 50th anniversary of the March on Washington later this month. Workers had been removing a disputed inscription from the memorial, but an architect working on it says a ... Atlanta event marks 50th anniversary of DC marchWSB Atlanta all 23 news articles »

Though gaily may ye laugh, In grief ye shall be left, For, mocking maids; this ring Ye ask shall never be yours


The Norns


The Norns vanish


The ravens of Wotan

willigula:

Siegfried and the Twilight of the Gods illustrated by Arthur Rakham, 1911

The Xbox One controller will work with your Windows PC - just not when the Xbox One launches later this year. A Microsoft representative says the company hopes to roll out the drivers in 2014.

"As we've stated, the Xbox One controller, although it looks similar in many ways, shares no underlying technology with the current Xbox 360 controller. New wireless protocol, combined with the ability to work in 'wired' mode, and the addition of features like Impulse triggers, means that new software has to be written and optimized for the PC," the representative told CVG . The representative also said work must go into ensuring existing games supporting Xbox 360 controllers also support the Xbox One game pad.

One of the big differentiators between the Xbox One and Xbox 360 controllers is Wired mode, which allows an Xbox One game pad, when plugged in through micro-USB, to disable its radios and operate as a true wired controller.

Xbox One controllers compatible with PC in 2014 originally appeared on Joystiq on Mon, 12 Aug 2013 18:55:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink | Email this | Comments

Golden Rice is a strain of rice genetically engineered to produce extra beta-carotene, part of a humanitarian effort to get more Vitamin A into the diets of people who subsist primarily on rice. The genes that produce the beta-carotene come from corn and a soil bacterium. On the legal end, the rice was developed using free technology licenses that allow the International Rice Research Institute to hand the rice out for free to subsistence farmers, and allow those farmers to save seeds and replant in subsequent years. Last week, anti-GMO activists destroyed a test plot of Golden Rice in the Philippines.

(from Be an Interplanetary Spy 9: Ultraheroes, 1984)

infinitenap:

the anxiety monster

Infinite Nap by Claire Jarvis [website | tumblr | twitter]

In "The Smurfs 2," men are identified by their abilities, while women are known for their femininity.

fissurina:

The Forgotten 1950s Girl Gang

No idea if this photo set is already here somewhere…it likely is…but this is a bit rad…
full article here: http://www.messynessychic.com/2013/02/10/the-forgotten-1950s-girl-gang/
_———————————————

You might have heard of the Teddy Boys, a 1950s rebel youth subculture in Britain characterized by an unlikely style of dress inspired by Edwardian dandies fused with American rock’n roll. They formed gangs from East London to North Kensington and became high profile rebels in the media. But an important sub-subculture of the Teddy Boys, an unlikely female element, has remained all but invisible from historical records. Meet The Teddy Girls.

These are one of just a few known collections of documented photographs of the first British female youth culture ever to exist. In 1955, freelance photographer Ken Russell was introduced Josie Buchan, a Teddy Girl who introduced him to some of her friends. Russell photographed them and one other group in Notting Hill.

After his photographs were published in a small magazine in 1955, Russell’s photographs remained unseen for over half a century. He became a successful film director in the meantime. In 2005, his archive was rediscovered, and so were the Teddy Girls.

Russell remembers 14 year-old Teddy Girl, Jean Rayner: “She had attitude by the truckload. No one paid much attention to the teddy girls before I did them, though there was plenty on teddy boys. They were tough, these kids, they’d been born in the war years and food rationing only ended in about 1954 – a year before I took these pictures. They were proud. They knew their worth. They just wore what they wore.”

To understand the Teddy Girls style, we first have to go back to the boys culture. They emerged in England as post-war austerity was coming to an end and working class teenagers were able to afford good clothes and began to adopt the upper class Saville Row revival of dandy Edwardian fashion. By the mid 1950s, second-hand Edwardian suits were readily available on sale in markets as they had become unwearable by the upper-class once the Teddy Boys had started sporting them. The Teds, as they called themselves, wore long drape jackets, velvet collars, slim ties and began to pair the look with thick rubber-soled creeper shoes and the ‘greaser’ hairstyles of their American rock’n’roll idols.

Despite their overall gentlemanly style of dress (certainly compared to today), the Teddys were a teenage youth culture out to shock their parents’ generation, and quickly became associated with trouble by the media.

Teddy girls were mostly working class teens as well, but considered less interesting by the media who were more concerned with sensationalizing a violent working class youth culture. While Teddy boys were known for hanging around on street corners, looking for trouble, a young working class woman’s role at the time was still focused around the home.

But even with lower wages than the boys, Teddy girls would still dress up in their own drape jackets, rolled-up jeans, flat shoes, tailored jackets with velvet collars and put their feminine spin on the Teddy style with straw boater hats, brooches, espadrilles and elegant clutch bags. They would go to the cinema in groups and attend dances and concerts with the boys, collect rock’n’roll records and magazines. Together, they essentially cultivated the first market for teenage leisure in Britain.

In the end it was the troublesome reputation of the Teddy Boys that got the better of this youth subculture. Most of the violence and vandalism was exaggerated by the media, but there were notably a few gangs that chose a darker path.

With its rodent-like appearance, the newly identified Megaconus certainly looks like a mammal. But this forest dweller lived over 165 million years ago, before the rise of the first true mammals.

Read more...

Every day, Watch This offers staff recommendations inspired by a new movie coming out that week. This week: The sequel Percy Jackson: Sea Of Monsters has us reflecting on stellar kid-lit adaptations.

The Wind In The Willows (1996)

Kenneth Grahame’s 1908 kid-lit classic The Wind In The Willows has inspired some wacky adaptations over the years. Anyone who’s been to Disneyland (or visited Disney World between 1971 and 1998) has fond memories of Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride, by far the most anarchic attraction in the otherwise placid Fantasyland. And while there have been numerous movie versions, the most notable is the 1996 film that very nearly amounts to a Monty Python reunion. Directed by Terry Jones and featuring all the surviving Pythons except Terry Gilliam, it’s immediately unusual for being live-action rather than animated, since all of Grahame’s characters are anthropomorphic animals. Rather than burden ...

Read more

It's been a year since an all-new Sailor Moon anime was announced, and since then, nothing. So we're not sure how accurate these new announcements will end up being, but just in case: The series begins this winter, and it will contain a new adventure of the Sailor Scouts.

Read more...

popular shared this story from xkcd.com.

---

Katy Perry’s new single, “Roar,” is sparking some raised eyebrows around the Internet for its insane similarity to a recent Sara Bareilles song, “Brave.” As Entertainment Weekly points out, Perry definitely knew about Bareilles’ song, as she tweeted about it three months ago, but the two tracks don’t share any co-writers, leading one to just surmise that the two songs’ eerily similar cadences and jangly piano could, ostensibly, just be a coincidence. Or, you know, totally not.

Bareilles is taking the slight surprisingly well, tweeting “All Love, everybody. All love,” and then commenting on how she’s about a week into a meditation ritual sparked by her love of Oprah and Deepak Chopra.

Some intrepid Internet user has already laid the two songs on top of each other for comparison. Listen below, and maybe check out the Emoji-happy lyric video for Perry’s new track as well.

Read more

ActRaiser 2 (Quintet/Enix - SNES - 1993)

Doctor Who Tardis Onesie

The UK-based RED5 gadget shop has released a line of adult hooded onesies that are based on pop culture television shows and films (Doctor Who, Star Wars and more). They are all available to purchase online.

Star Wars Onesies

Batman Onesie

Superman Onesie

images via RED5

via Technabob

Xbox One does not need the Kinect sensor in order to function normally, Xbox Corporate VP Marc Whitten tells IGN. This runs contrary to previous statements: In May, Microsoft Studios Corporate VP Phil Spencer said the Xbox One would require the Kinect to be plugged in.

It's unclear whether this is a shift in policy or phrasing, but Whitten says that while ditching Kinect may limit the console's capabilities, the sensor isn't a necessary piece of equipment at all times. Instead, you'll only need it for voice- and motion-based navigation features, or to play games like Fantasia: Music Evolved, which rely on the sensor.

"Games use Kinect in a variety of amazing ways, from adding voice to control your squad mates, to adding lean and other simple controls beyond the controller, to full immersive gameplay," he says. "That said, like online, the console will still function if Kinect isn't plugged in, although you won't be able to use any feature or experience that explicitly uses the sensor."

Clean out some extra space on the entertainment center or in the closet: it depends on what you play.

Xbox One won't require plugged-in Kinect, Whitten says originally appeared on Joystiq on Mon, 12 Aug 2013 17:55:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink | Email this | Comments