firehose

smileitsmysunshine:

_{Pocket map of London, c. 1890}

fuckyeahyoungavengers:

Comic Book Cosplay We Love: Ms. America From Young Avengers Dresses Like A Real Person

Today, the US Treasury reported a $117 billion budget surplus in June, the largest since 2008. The June surplus gives credence to estimates that this year the US will post its smallest yearly deficit since 2008.

Of course, this is just a monthly total, and if you look at the chart above, you can see that since the fiscal year began in October, we’ve had mostly deficits and the US has borrowed some $500 billion. If the White House’s latest estimates are right, the US will end up borrowing some $760 billion this year, which is some $214 billion less than they thought just a few months ago.

Today’s surprising result—analysts expected a $40 billion surplus— is partly due to a $66 billion dividends payment from housing financiers Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. The bailed-out institutions have become so lucrative since the housing recovery began that suddenly everyone wants a piece of the action.

But the housing market’s resurgence only accounts for half the surplus. June is also a time when businesses pay quarterly taxes, which also boosted receipts. Government spending was reduced by budget sequestration, the across-the-board cuts implemented after last year’s contentious budget deal flopped.

The economic recovery has also helped the budget. With more people working and more economic activity underway, spending on safety net programs is going down as revenues rise. That makes the decision by US policymakers to delay post-crisis austerity measures look wise.

If the plunge in borrowing continues, the need to raise the US debt ceiling will be pushed further away, and legislators might avoid a repeat of last year’s gridlock. It would also weaken the case of fiscal hawks rallying for immediate spending reductions.

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Prepare your body and vomit bags for AaaaaAAaaaAAAaaAAAAaAAAAA!!! for the Awesome in full virtual reality on the Oculus Rift, coming to the game's Steam version from co-developer Owlchemy Labs. For the Awesome is a free-fall simulator that tasks players with enacting stunts and hitting marks while dropping through obstacles at high speeds. Yeah, that's going to be on Oculus Rift.

For the Awesome is a semi-sequel, graphical overhaul of AaaaaAAaaaAAAaaAAAAaAAAAA!!! A Reckless Disregard for Gravity, developed by Dejobaan Games and nominated for an IGF in 2010. Dejobaan and Owlchemy collaborated on For the Awesome, and now Owlchemy is throwing it off some cliffs on the Oculus Rift.

There's no official release date for what Owlchemy calls AaaaaAAaaaAAAaaAAAAaCULUS!!!, but the team has been testing it in the lab and it should be out "sooner rather than later." Check out some Owlchemy astronauts giving the game a go on Oculus Rift in the Vine below.

For the Awesome is discounted to $2.30 throughout the Steam Summer Sale, which runs until July 22. It joins other on-sale indies Monaco, Mutant Blobs Attack and Surgeon Simulator 2013, to name a few, and today's Daily Deals Antichamber and Don't Starve.

Continue reading AaaaaAAaaaAAAaaAAAAaAAAAA!!! for Oooooculus Rift

AaaaaAAaaaAAAaaAAAAaAAAAA!!! for Oooooculus Rift originally appeared on Joystiq on Thu, 11 Jul 2013 17:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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	Courtney shared this story from PORPENTINE:
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beatyourselfup:

What Cop T-Shirts Tell Us About Police Culture

Just before the 1996 DNC in Chicago, a local printer made up a batch of shirts that read, “We kicked your father’s ass in 1968 … Wait ‘til you see what we do to you." The front read: “Chicago Police," and then, “Democratic National Convention Chicago—1996." The shirt wasn’t endorsed by Chicago PD or the police union…

…

In a 2011 investigative series on police shootings, the Las Vegas Review-Journal revisited a 2003 case in which LVPD Officer Brian Hartman shot and killed a man named Orlando Barlow. Hartman shot Barlow in the back, as he was on his knees, unarmed, and attempting to surrender. According to the Review-Journal, Hartman and the other officers in his unit celebrated the shooting by printing up t-shirts “depicting Hartman’s rifle and the initials B.D.R.T. (Baby’s Daddy Removal Team), a racially charged term and reference to Barlow, who was black and who was watching his girlfriend’s children before he was shot."

…

The “us vs. them" mindset has become so common in U.S. police culture that we almost take it for granted. In my new book, I argue that this is the result of a generation of incessant rhetoric from politicians who treat cops as if they were soldiers, and policies that train and equip them as if they were fighting a war. The imagery and language depicted on the shirts in these stories are little different than the way pop culture, the military, and government propaganda have depicted the citizens of the countries we’ve fought in wars over the years.

…

Within the more militarized units of police departments, the imagery can be even stronger. Former San Jose, California police chief Joseph McNamara told National Journal in 2000 that he was alarmed when he attended a SWAT team conference the previous year and saw “officers … wearing these very disturbing shirts. On the front, there were pictures of SWAT officers dressed in dark uniforms, wearing helmets, and holding submachine guns. Below was written: ‘We don’t do drive-by shootings.’ On the back, there was a picture of a demolished house. Below was written: ‘We stop.’” In his 1999 ethnography on police culture, criminologist Peter Kraska writes that one SWAT team member he spent time with “wore a T-shirt that carried a picture of a burning city with gunship helicopters flying overhead and the caption Operation Ghetto Storm."

…

As I’ve reported here at HuffPost, the shirt isn’t wrong — Chicago cops will indeed blow down your door for smoking pot. And at the same time, it can be difficult to get them interested in, say, investigating an actual assault.

This comment thread at the online police forum PoliceLink has more examples of t-shirts the law enforcement commenters found amusing. Among the comments:

— “In God we trust, all others get searched,"

— “A picture of an electric chair with the caption: JUSTICE: Regular or Crispy"

— “B.D.R.T Baby Daddy Removal Team on the back and the initials on front with handcuffs. You should see peoples faces when I wear it….HAHAHAHA"

— “Human trash collector. ( above a pair of handcuffs )"

— “Take No Guff, Cut No Slack, Hook’em, Book’em and Don’t Look Back!"

— “‘Boys on the Hood’ Pic had two gangbangers jacked up on the hood of a patrol car with two officers."

— “SWAT T-shirt: ‘Happiness is getting the green light!’"

— “I have one that sates “SWAT SNIPER" on the front and on back it has a picure of a “terrorist" with a shell ripping through his skull and the “pink mist" spraying from the back of his head. Below the picture it reads, “Guerillas in the mist".

— “Save the police time, beat yourself up"

— “An ounce of prevention is fine and dandy…….. But we prefer 168 grains of cure."

— “Be good or you might get a visit from the bullet fairy."

— “Sniper - When you only have 1 shot at an opportunity……We’ll make it count"

— “Law Enforcement……Helping perps slip down stairs since 1766"

— “Math for Cops………2 to the chest + 1 to the head = problem solved"

— “I had a couple of ‘em a loooong time ago….1 showed a cop leaning on his rather long nightstick, saying “Police Brutality….the fun part of policework."……obviously not very PC….another was a picture of a LEO with smoke coming from the muzzle of his pistol, with a badguy falling backwards (lookin’ like swiss cheese) with the caption…..The best action is OVERREACTION….also not very PC…."

— “Cops make good roommates…they’re used to taking out the trash."

— “There was also one I saw where there was a big burly looking Sarge behind his desk and the cation read ‘It doesn’t say kindness and sympathy on the badge.’"

— “happiness is a confirmed kill"

— “Park Ranger T-shirt: One of funniest I ever saw: Picture of Smokey the Bear with Riot Gear and he’s just poked a protester in the chest with a riot baton. The Caption Reads: “Smokey Don’t Play That". Funny!"

— “My Daddy can Taser your Daddy"

— “School Patrol - You fail em, we jail em"

— “Got one that says, “You have the right to remain silent. Anything you say will be misquoted and used against you."

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In Portland, we've been battered with tales about our downed economy for years.

On message boards, locals ceaselessly warn prospective Portlanders from moving to town unless they have a job lined up (good advice—trust me—but certainly not mandatory). The rapidly tiring joke the city's a place where young people go to retire, it turns out, is borne of the city's chronic underemployment. Even the state's much-improved employment numbers, we're told, are partly due to the fact some people have simply given up looking for work.

But those improved employment figures are real, nonetheless, though not something every unemployed person in the city is going to feel. It's still tough out there for a lot of qualified and smart Portlanders I know, but things are getting better. All of which is a long way of pointing you to this piece that ran on The Atlantic's website last week (yup, I linked it in Good Morning, News, too). Rather than an overly dour outlook on the city's economy, it's fairly ecstatic (and also weirdly preoccupied with calling us "weird and crunchy").

Yet Portland is also one of America's most export-oriented and globally integrated economies. Over 18 percent of its metropolitan gross product comes from exports, the third-highest export intensity in the United States among the top 100 metros and the second-fastest-growing export market among the major metros.

It goes on to laud former Mayor Sam Adams for his work to increase Portland-area exports and positioning the city as a leader in green technology, favorably comparing us to Copenhagen, Stockholm, Curitiba and Singapore.

Anyway, in case you wanted another take on our city's economic straits.

[ Subscribe to the comments on this story ]

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No, your eyes don't deceive you — that's Aaron Eckhart and every single one of his abdominal muscles as "Adam Frankenstein," star of Liongate's I, Frankenstein, based on Kevin Grevioux's graphic novel. And yes, I assure you, he is playing the monster. The sexy, sexy monster.

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Paul McAuley is the author of The Quiet War, as well as Life After Wartime and Evening's Empires. He's also got an amazing collection of 1970s SF paperbacks, whose covers he's just digitized to share with the world. Here's his gallery of covers that feature spaceships done in a cool, psychedelic-minimalist style.

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Nerval's Lobster writes "For the second time in a month, Hewlett-Packard has been forced to admit it built secret backdoors into its enterprise storage products. The admission, in a security bulletin posted July 9, confirms reports from the blogger Technion, who flagged the security issue in HP's StoreOnce systems in June, before finding more backdoors in other HP storage and SAN products. The most recent statement from HP, following another warning from Technion, admitted that 'all HP StoreVirtual Storage systems are equipped with a mechanism that allows HP support to access the underlying operating system if permission and access is provided by the customer.' While HP describes the backdoors as being usable only with permission of the customer, that restriction is part of HP's own customer-service rules—not a limitation built in to limit use of backdoors. The entry points consist of a hidden administrator account with root access to StoreVirtual systems and software, and a separate copy of the LeftHand OS, the software that runs HP's StoreVirtual and HP P4000 products. Even with root access, the secret admin account does not give support techs or hackers access to data stored on the HP machines, according to the company. But it does provide enough access and control over the hardware in a storage cluster to reboot specific nodes, which would 'cripple the cluster,' according to information provided to The Register by an unnamed source. The account also provides access to a factory-reset control that would allow intruders to destroy much of the data and configurations of a network of HP storage products. And it's not hard to find: 'Open up your favourite SSH client, key in the IP of an HP D2D unit. Enter in yourself the username HPSupport, and the password which has a SHA1 of 78a7ecf065324604540ad3c41c3bb8fe1d084c50. Say hello to an administrative account you didn't know existed,' according to Technion, who claims to have attempted to notify HP for weeks with no result before deciding to go public."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

This is not the corgi you are looking for. Stumphrey here is a Jedi master in this Star Wars costume, and I'd wager he's the cutest one in the Republic! His overwhelming cuteness may be more effective than any Jedi mind-trick I've seen. I suddenly feel compelled to bring him a dog treat... (via Fashionably Geek)

Obsidian Entertainment once had a sci-fi game in development, built using the Skyrim engine and that game's "Radiant AI" system. Dubbed Backspace, the project was in development at Obsidian in early 2011, Kotaku sources claim. Obsidian boss Feargus Urquhart confirmed the studio could possibly come back to the idea in the future.

The Backspace design document describes "simple time travel" and combat similar to Skyrim, "but slightly faster since there is no concept of blocking." It calls for a game that is a mixture between Mass Effect, Borderlands and System Shock 2. Players would navigate between various worlds, linked together by one massive space station.

"Backspace was a project concept that we neither cancelled nor greenlit," Urquhart told Kotaku. "We had some great people work on the idea for Backspace for a bit of time and then moved them off to other projects as opportunities came up. We've been around for ten years now and have had a bunch of great ideas that we still have sitting around that we may be able to return to in the future."

Obsidian Entertainment has a lot of irons in the fire at the moment, including South Park: The Stick of Truth for publisher Ubisoft and Project Eternity, a Kickstarter campaign that yielded $3.9 million for the development studio to create a PC-only isometric dungeon crawler similar to Baldur's Gate.

Report: Obsidian considered 'sci-fi Skyrim' RPG Backspace originally appeared on Joystiq on Thu, 11 Jul 2013 21:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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It would be a real shame to forget about Cate Archer.

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American Apparel x Menswear Dog

American Apparel partners up with Menswear Dog to bring you our top picks from their collection. Best of all, everything’s real-world affordable so you can dress like MWD without breaking the bank.

Look 1:  Hawaiian Shirt  |  Denim Jacket  |  Slacks  |  Shoes  | Sunglasses

Look 2:  Seersucker Shirt  |  Windbreaker  |  Slacks  |  Chukkas  |  Watch

Look 3:  Gingham Shirt  |  Varsity Jacket  |  Chinos  |  Shoes  |  Sunglasses

Have a mosquito problem???

At your next outdoor gathering try this SAFE and EFFECTIVE method of keeping mosquitoes at bay! Simply slice a lime in half and press in a good amount of cloves for an ALL NATURAL mosquito repellent.

Thanks Grace H

MCM sez, "It's been 7 years since I released The Pig and the Box, a CC-licensed anti-DRM fable for kids. It was a fun experiment back then, and the experiment continues today: the whole book (and source files that went into making it) are now public domain. Lolipop Jones for all!"

Lady Macbeth is cray-cray like a white girl.

teratocybernetics:

mindsplat:

• there is a sustainable treehouse community
• in the middle of the costa rican rainforest
• people can zipline from house to house
• they have wi-fi ARE YOU SHITTING ME WHY DON’T I LIVE THERE RIGHT NOW

O_O

A woman in Ontario, Canada, says she was fired from her job at Walmart earlier this week because she called the police on a customer who had left his dog in a hot car with the windows rolled up — and after she told her boss she’d do it again.

She tells the CBC that she was on her way into work on Tuesday when she saw a customer lock his dog inside the truck and close the windows.

“I said, ‘Is this really happening? I’m going to give him about five or 10 minutes and then I’m going to call the police,’” says the now-former Walmarter. When the man didn’t return, she contacted the police. An officer arrived, took down the license plate number and went into the store to find the vehicle’s owner.

The customer eventually came out, but before he left the Walmart parking lot, he approached the employee who had reported him.

“He pulled up to us and said, ‘Hello, ladies, how are you?’ And I said, ‘You shouldn’t leave your dog in the car,’” recalls the woman. “He told me it was none of my business and I said that that was fine, that if I saw him do it again I would just call the police next time. He said he was no longer going to be shopping at that Walmart, and I said, ‘OK.’”

Later in the day, she says her boss called her into his office, where she claims he told her to bring any dog-in-hot-car related issues to him in the future. She declined.

“I [told him] if I did see something unsafe, that I would just go to the police if I thought it was necessary,” she tells the CBC. “He told me then that I was terminated, he wanted my vest, my badge, and to clean out my locker and that I needed to leave.”

She says that Walmart’s official reason for the firing is that she was rude to a customer, “but I felt because I was not even on the clock, it shouldn’t have been an issue anyways. And I don’t think it should be an issue even if I was on the clock… because it’s on the news and we’re being told not to leave animals and children in cars.”

Walmart Canada declined to comment on the incident to the CBC but did say that it has guidelines in place for handling these sorts of situations, and that it’s reviewing these guidelines with employees.

400 1_ |a X, D M

There is much more to a good whiskey than simply its bottled alcohol percentage.

Buffalo Trace Distillery is going beyond the usual debate over whether it is preferable to have a higher entry proof, especially for wheated-recipe bourbons, or use a lower entry proof to produce a mellower finish.

Its latest Experimental Collection, released Tuesday, release is the result of four of the experiments coming off the still at a consistent 130 proof, but put into the barrel for aging using four different entry proofs. All of the barrels then were aged together for 11 years, 7 months and bottled at 90 proof (45% abv). Here are the details, as supplied by Buffalo Trace:  

Wheat 125 – At 125 proof, this was the highest entry proof used, which also resulted in a high evaporation rate of 71% in the 11-plus years it was in the barrel. The high entry proof of this wheat recipe bourbon resulted in a well-rounded flavor with the taste being a balance of cooked berries mingled with sweet honey and slight hints of spicy cloves and pepper.  

Wheat 115 – This wheated recipe bourbon was put into the barrel at 115 proof and lost the highest percentage due to evaporation, at 73%. Tasting notes for this bourbon say it is a well-balanced spirit, which was rated the best tasting by the quality analysis team at Buffalo Trace. The upfront taste is sweet and fruity, with buttery toffee notes that follow. A dry oaky finish completes the taste.  

Wheat 105 – At an entry proof of 105, the angels were particularity generous with their share, taking the lowest amount of all four experiments with a rate of 62%. The 105 entry proof produced a bourbon that is a nice balance of sweet caramel, vanilla, and dry oakiness.  

Wheat 90 – At an entry point of 90, this bourbon had a 64% evaporation rate as it aged alongside the other four experimental wheat barrels in Warehouse K. The result was a bourbon with more wood characters and slight sweet notes. It is mellow with hints of cedar and other wood flavors.

“This was an interesting experiment for us to conduct, and by keeping all of the variables consistent such as the proof off the still, aging time and placement next to each other in the warehouse, we were able to focus just on the entry proof into the barrel and see how it affected taste and evaporation rate,” said Harlen Wheatley, master distiller.

“We were pleased that what we consider the ideal entry proof for a wheated bourbon, at 114 proof, was pretty close in proof to what we evaluated to also taste the best in this experiment – which was the 115 proof experiment. It was gratifying to see that we have been on the right track this whole time with our entry proof for our wheated recipe bourbons. Another point of interest is the higher entry proofs, the higher the evaporation rates, which is something we’ve always suspected but now know for a fact.”

The wheated-recipe barrels are part of the more than 1,500 experimental barrels of whiskey aging in the warehouses of Buffalo Trace Distillery, located in Frankfort, Franklin County, KY.

Some examples of these experiments include unique mash bills, type of wood and barrel toasting levels. To further increase the scope, flexibility and range of the experimental program, an entire microdistillery, named The Colonel E.H. Taylor, Jr. “OFC” Micro Distillery, complete with cookers, fermenting tanks, and a state-of-the-art micro still has been constructed within the main distillery.

The latest Experimental Collection will be packaged in 375ml bottles, 12 to a case, with three bottles of each entry proof in a case. Each label will include all the pertinent information unique to that barrel of whiskey. These whiskeys will retail for approximately $46.35 each and should be available in the next few weeks.