firehose
Shared posts
Stylist Admits He Was High When He Created The Rachel Haircut
Time-lapse satellite images show how Earth has changed over 28 years
Chances are, this is how you will be spending the rest of your day. Google Earth Engine is an incredible satellite tour through the recent history of our planet, showing year-by-year images from 1984-2012. Watch as cities expand, glaciers retreat, and seas vanish in a matter of decades.
    
|
Two Candidates Shake Up Iran's Presidential Race as Last-Minute Entries - New York Times
firehosehuh
 AFP |
Two Candidates Shake Up Iran's Presidential Race as Last-Minute Entries
New York Times TEHRAN — Iran's presidential campaign took an unexpected turn on Saturday, when two game-changing politicians, both opposed to many of the government's leaders, entered the race in the final minutes of a five-day registration period. Enlarge This Image ... Top presidential aide and former president seek Iran's presidencyLos Angeles Times Iran Ex-President, Ahmadinejad Aide Join Race as Nominations EndBloomberg Profile: Akbar Hashemi RafsanjaniBBC News Telegraph.co.uk -Washington Post -Voice of America all 52 news articles » |
DRM Moves Ahead With HTML5 Specification
firehoseaugh
Surprising funeral ad makes a lovely skeleton from pressed flowers
Japanese funeral home Nishinihon Tenrei wanted to create an ad that would break from the traditional funerary colors of black and white while still presenting a respectful image of their services. Tokyo-based ad agency I&S BBDO came up with this life-sized skeleton, celebrating the life of the departed through pressed flowers.
|
|
#5229: with implied urgency
firehosevia multitasksuicide
unimodus: himapapaftw: finally, it has appeared on my...
firehosethe inquisitor wearing a pilot's helmet and goggles always cracks me up
finally, it has appeared on my dash
you say “finally” as if you were expecting this
About bloody time.
Raw Silk Explained
firehosevia multitasksuicide
It’s still a bit chilly in San Francisco, but in anticipation of summer, I went ahead and picked up a raw silk grenadine by Drake’s last week. Michael Hill and his design team seem to be getting more adventurous these days, but I still think they achieve great success. This new design, for example, has a bit more texture than their regular raw silks – adding the slubbiness of raw silk to the textured weave of grenadine. This makes it look something like a summer version of boucle, which I really like.
Alexander, that reader who kindly introduced me to the New York cloth merchant, explained to me last year that raw silk is simply silk that has not been chemically processed. You see, every silkworm extrudes two filaments when making its cocoon, and these fibers typically undergo a chemical processing to strip them of their bonding sericin. As a result of having their sericin left on, raw silk lacks the full luster and richness associated with the kinds of processed silk used for neckties. There also tends to be an unevenness in the yarns, as the two strands of filament are left bonded together, rather than being stripped and separated, which would yield an ultra-fine filament yarn that can be densely woven.
Note, this doesn’t mean that raw silk is necessarily organic, however, which is how it’s commonly advertised on some websites. Raw silk can still undergo several types of processing and finishing that are bad for the environment, and still be left “raw."
There’s a second type of material known as Tussah (seen above), which salespeople often mistakenly call raw silk. Tussah silk is cultivated by allowing silk worms to live on a wild diet rather than exclusively on mulberry leaves. It tends to have a slightly slubby quality similar to Dupioni, which is what leads it to being misidentified as raw silk. At Drake’s you can easily tell which is a Tussah silk tie by examining the weave - their Tussahs feel a bit delicate and are looser woven, whereas their raw silks are much denser.
Dupioni or duoppioni silk, on the other hand, is when two silk worms are left next to each other to create a strange double cocoon. Dupioni silk is almost always left raw in an effort to keep the multiple strands together and maintain their irregular yarn properties. I haven’t seen that many neckties made from Dupioni, but I’ve handled a couple vintage summer suits made from such material. They’re impossible to find nowadays new and off-the-rack, and are rarely available even through bespoke tailors, but A Suitable Wardrobe found a source for Dupioni through Jodek International (don’t expect prices to be cheap). You can see Dupioni’s qualities here, if you look very closely.
Anyway, that’s raw silk, in the best way it’s ever been explained to me. Drake’s new variety of raw silk grenadines at the moment can be found through Mr. Porter, Barney’s, and Drake’s website itself. They may or may not go on sale. I was afraid this one wouldn’t, which is why I bought early. Barney’s been having remarkably good sales at their Warehouse site, however, and things at the moment are discounted up to 75% off. That puts their remaining Drake’s ties at less than $50. The chances of a raw silk grenadine making it this far in a sale is slim, but that’s the game with discounts.
Special thanks to Alexander, as always, for taking the time to write to me.
(Pictured below: Drake’s raw silk grenadine up close, two photos of a striped raw silk tie by Drake’s, and an upcoming dotted raw silk grenadine by Panta)
Using Python to see how the Times writes about men and women
firehosevia Russian Sledges: "My quick interepretation: If your knowledge of men's and women's roles in society came just from reading last week's New York Times, you would think that men play sports and run the government. Women do feminine and domestic things. To be honest, I was a little shocked at how stereotypical the words used in the women subject sentences were."
US to return dinosaurs to Mongolia
firehosevia Russian Sledges
Cheerleaders win right to display Jesus banners at public school sporting events
firehosevia Russian Sledges
Amercia: preserving the right to publicly destroy bible verses through the violent acts of men as a prelude to their engaging in ritual brain-damaging combat
yo seriously the note and comment fields look way too much alike
Last October I reported that cheerleaders in Kountze, Texas, were displaying Christian banners, with slogans from the New Testament, at high-school football games. The Freedom from Religion Foundation (FFRF) brought suit against the school district, maintaining, correctly, that such displays violated the First Amendment, which prohibits government endorsement of religion. The case was then working its way through the courts after the displays were first rejected and then reinstated by a higher court.
ABC News reports this week that a state district court has ruled, however, that the banners are legal:
State District Judge Steven Thomas determined the Kountze High School cheerleaders’ banners are constitutionally permissible. In the ruling, Thomas determined that no law “prohibits cheerleaders from using religious-themed banners at school sporting events.”
The Kountze school district had initially said the banners could not be displayed after receiving a complaint about them in September from the Freedom From Religion Foundation. The foundation argued the banners violated the so-called First Amendment Establishment Clause that bars government — or publicly funded school districts in this case — from establishing or endorsing a religion.
Thomas ruled that the establishment clause does not prohibit the use of such religious-themed banners at school sporting events.
“This is a great victory for the cheerleaders and now they’re going to be able to have their banners,” said Hiram Sasser, a lead attorney for the Liberty Institute, a Plano, Texas-based nonprofit law firm that represented the cheerleaders.
. . . The cheerleaders in Kountze, located about 95 miles northeast of Houston, were supported by various state officials, including Gov. Rick Perry and Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott, who filed court papers seeking to intervene on their behalf. A Facebook group created after the ban, Support Kountze Kids Faith, has more than 45,000 members.
Abbott praised the court’s ruling on Wednesday, calling it a “victory for religious liberties.”
Perry in a statement said the cheerleaders “showed great resolve and maturity beyond their years in standing up for their beliefs and constitutional rights.”
Constitutional rights? What reading of the Constitution allows such rights?
It is, of course, settled law that schools cannot have official prayers broadcast before sporting events. The cheerleaders are representatives of the school, wearing school uniforms. I don’t get the difference.
The Freedom From Religion Foundation’s co-president, Annie Laurie Gaylor, was disappointed with the ruling, saying the banners “carry the appearance of school endorsement and favoritism, turning Christians into insiders and non-Christians and nonbelievers into outsiders.”
The Anti-Defamation League also criticized the ruling, calling it “misguided” and saying it “flies in the face of clear U.S. Supreme Court and other rulings.”
Curiously, attorneys for the school district advised the schools that these displays violated constitutional law:
Attorneys for the Kountze school district, in initially advising the superintendent to ban the religious statements on the cheerleaders’ banners, argued there have been several precedent-setting rulings by the Supreme Court.
In one of the more well-known cases, the court ruled in 2000 that a practice of allowing student-led prayer ahead of high school football games in Texas’ Santa Fe Independent School District violated the Constitution. In 1992, the Supreme Court made a similar ruling in a Rhode Island case that argued a rabbi’s prayer at a middle school graduation ceremony also violated the Constitution.
But public sentiment, combined with the pro-religion stance of state officials, was too strong. And the judge is wrong. Let’s hope that the FFRF appeals.
The forces of religion are ever busy feeding in America, and don’t care about the Constitution. What would happen if the cheerleaders displayed banners with verses from the Qur’an?
Really, who can argue that this is legal?:
Flying pig
Similar phrases in English include “when hell freezes over”, the Latin expression “to the Greek calends,” and “and monkeys might fly out of my butt”, popularized in Wayne’s World skits and movies.
Reviving and open-sourcing Sissyfight 2000, the psychological schoolyard web game
By Samit Sarkar on May 11, 2013 at 10:00a
The creators of the original browser-based social game, a turn-of-the-millennium relic called Sissyfight 2000, are attempting to bring it back through Kickstarter. They believe it's important — not just as a landmark for its time, but also as a game that's perhaps more relevant now than ever.
Sissyfight 2000's designers set their game against the backdrop of a quintessential crucible of social conflict: a school playground. The game's mechanical simplicity belied the depth of its social interactions, but the setting was what really made the experience, imbuing the proceedings with a deeper psychological meaning that was unique for each player.
In Sissyfight 2000, each player begins with 10 hearts signifying self-esteem points, and the objective is to use words and actions to take down other people's hearts until only two sissies (or sometimes one) remain. The players choose their moves in secret, and those choices are revealed at the same time on each turn.
Sissyfight 2000 was ahead of its time in a number of ways. Its design, which contained many elements that we would today recognize as "indie," stood out back then and is still striking today.
"Sissyfight really anticipated what we now call independent games," said Eric Zimmerman, the game's designer, in a phone interview with Polygon this week. "The whole look of Sissyfight, these big, chunky pixels; the idea that it was kind of experimental, a simple, replayable game that was clever and cheeky — things that are now hallmarks of indie games — just didn't exist then."
The game also flipped late-'90s video game conventions on their heads. Players could customize their avatars, but only to a point: The characters were all non-sexualized young women, as opposed to the typical tropes of the damsel in distress or the adolescent male fantasy of a buxom model. The setup was a turn-based strategy game, but without weapons aside from words and a few physical attacks.
"There [was] definitely a kind of interventionist intention with Sissyfight," Zimmerman explained. "In other words, we [felt] that Sissyfight [was] sort of an intelligent rebalancing of game culture, as opposed to another mainstream shooter game."
"Sissyfight really anticipated what we now call independent games"
Sissyfight 2000 didn't only innovate on a design level; it was a technological achievement as well. Launched in 1999 on the website of Word Magazine, a now-defunct web-based zine, Sissyfight 2000 is recognized as one of the earliest massively multiplayer online titles, and one of the first browser-based games to feature real-time chat. Although individual games were limited to between three and six players, the community of "sissies" (players) surrounding the game — which, at its height, numbered in the hundreds of thousands — made the experience feel larger.
Like all online games, Sissyfight 2000 depended on a host for its servers. When Word Magazine shut down in 2000, Zimmerman and two co-developers, producer Naomi Clark and lead programmer Ranjit Bhatnagar, took over the game and maintained it under their new studio, Gamelab. The company closed in 2009, and no one was left to run the Sissyfight 2000 servers.
According to Zimmerman, the developers have been receiving "a steady stream of emails from fans and former players since the closing of the game," which is a major impetus for their Kickstarter campaign.
Team Sissyfight is looking to raise $20,000 to fund a complete rewrite of the game in HTML5 — it was originally built in Shockwave — so it can run natively in modern browsers on computers, smartphones and other mobile devices. (Luckily, finding the source code wasn't a problem, said Bhatnagar during our phone interview: "We all just happened to have various old backups and long-forgotten ZIP drives and stuff lying around.") The developers would also recode the server back-end and set it up to be hosted on Venus Patrol, the indie game site founded by Independent Games Festival chairman Brandon Boyer.
But Kickstarter backers aren't paying for a copy of Sissyfight 2000; the game will be available for free on Venus Patrol. In fact, the developers have pledged to turn the game into an open-source project, with its source code released under the MIT license and the rest of its assets released under Creative Commons. Even if the Kickstarter drive is unsuccessful — with just under three weeks to go, it's already more than halfway toward its goal — the team plans to at least release the existing code and assets for the community to do with as it pleases.
That's the team's solution to what Clark called "a very difficult, challenging preservation obstacle" in the same phone interview.
"We think that Sissyfight is so historically important that we love the idea that it becomes open-source. And our hope is that, in a funny way, open-sourcing the game keeps it alive and helps it evolve and grow as platforms evolve and grow," said Zimmerman. "It kind of feels like we're exploring a new way for games and game culture to stay alive." One of the team's stretch goals is the ability to customize the game, since players have come up with different sets of house rules over the years, such as versions without text chat or certain actions. Even if the campaign doesn't get there, open-sourcing the game will allow users to build those experiences themselves.
"I look forward to people inventing their own weird versions of Sissyfight," said Zimmerman.
Similarly to parlor games such as Mafia/Werewolf, the actions depend on the interactions between players and are keenly balanced. Attacks consist of Tease, Scratch and Grab; defensive moves are Cower (shield from attack) and Lick Lolly (restore two hearts). There's also the Tattle option: Telling the teacher gets all attackers in trouble, but if more than one person decides to Tattle, only the tattlers lose hearts.
The in-game chat functionality turns Sissyfight 2000 into what Zimmerman described as a game that's about "making alliances, tricking people, psyching them out, bluffing [and] backstabbing your friends."
Sissyfight 2000 is about "making alliances, tricking people, psyching them out, bluffing, backstabbing your friends"
Although it's a browser-based game with a simple interface, Sissyfight 2000 drew criticism upon its release for its gameplay and themes — its overt and underlying exploration of bullying and the emotional violence that young women perpetrate against each other. And that was years before our society's increased focus on the harmful effects of bullying, with movements like the It Gets Better Project and Cartoon Network's Stop Bullying: Speak Up.
"We are definitely aware that we are bringing the game back into a very different atmosphere than when it launched," said Clark. She explained that the developers built the game to address bullying "in a way that was lighthearted, was a send-up, let people step into a sort of absurdist version of social conflict in school and kind of let them take off their adult guise and be kids again."
At the same time, said Clark, the developers consciously designed Sissyfight 2000 to make people think about these issues, and because the players determine the experience themselves, the designers had no need to bake any particular message into it. "We [wanted] to give people a space in which to express themselves and see what they [did] with it," she explained.
According to Clark, the Sissyfight team believes the issues that the game explores are just as relevant and important now as they were when Sissyfight 2000 launched, if not more so. Bullying is a major topic of discussion these days, and Clark feels that the game's lessons are also applicable to the general conversation about violence in media.
"People can learn things about violence by being placed in situations of violence and then having choices of how to react," she said. "I think the same is very true of Sissyfight when it comes to emotional violence, to bullying, to horizontal violence between women and girls."
Zimmerman agreed, but believes that games don't necessarily have a responsibility to be "good for you," or that designers should have to "justify play that is transgressive and sort of dark and edgy," because games — and all works of art — should be free to tread that potentially controversial ground.
"Games are a place where we can do things that we don't normally get to do in real life," he said. "It's part of the pleasure of games, is that games let us explore identities and conflict in a safe way."
Clark added, "I still feel, even after 13 years, like Sissyfight does a good job of approaching those subjects in a really interesting way."
queensassyofthefatties: Lewis’s law is an observation she made...
firehosevia everybody
Can we just repeat that a few more times,
“The comments on any article about feminism justify feminism.”
“The comments on any article about feminism justify feminism.”
Country songs & sporting events.
firehosevia willowbl00
That Bad?
firehosevia Overbey
TPM Reader JH says my idea of citizenship is archaic and may be in conflict with the modern principles of human rights ...
I write as a practicing academic sociologist, specializing in urban studies, globalization, urban planning and politics, and migration. I have been an avid, daily reader of TPM for years, but never before commented. Re: your post this morning about the NYC proposal to expand voting rights in local elections to non-citizens, I'd just like to make three quick points.
1. Many European cities have extended voting rights in local elections to non-citizens who meet a residency requirement (typically 5 years or 7 years). In some cases, this has been an accepted practice for more than two decades. One good place to learn more about this is Yasemin Soysal's book The Limits of Citizenship. It's not clear to me that this practice has had much of a negative effect on social solidarity in those places.2. New York's proposal is about what we might call *urban* citizenship, yet your post refers to citizenship at a national level: the problem of dual passport holders, with which country people's allegiances lie, the cultural-political-moral commitment to the American political community, etc. Rather than focusing on the split between people who might hold two separate national allegiances, it might be better to talk about the split that would occur in the citizenship rights held by New York residents versus those granted to people in Des Moines. In other words, the real story here might be the rise of differential citizenship rights accorded to people within the United States based on where they live.
3. You write of your belief in what you call "thick citizenship." But your preference for such a thick citizenship appears to conflict with core principles of human rights. A large part of what social scientists consider citizenship rights - for example, many of the things Americans consider "their" civil rights, or perhaps the right to an education - countries are duty- and treaty-bound to protect for all individuals in the national space, whether or not they are formal citizens. To the extent that one believes in the concept of human rights, most of what we have historically called citizenship rights should be afforded to people not on the basis of their membership in this or that national polity, but simply because they are human. What then happens to the political project of crafting a thick citizenship? Little is left for that citizenship to include other than the vote and the right to run for office. That, I suspect, is not really a thick citizenship at all.
|
|
Sword Hilt: 1600 - 1625, England. “This basket-hilt of...
firehosefabulous
Sword Hilt: 1600 - 1625, England.
“This basket-hilt of blackened iron encrusted with silver is of a form known in the early 17th century as an ‘Irish’ hilt. At that period ‘Irish’ also meant the Highland Scots, who were celebrated for using a basket-hilted broadsword of similar type(…)”
rnackenziek: all-four-cheekbones: daftwithoneshoe: Shut up. I...
firehosecat is looking for waffles
Shut up. I needed a kitten stealing a pancake on my blog.
Honestly, if you don’t need a kitten stealing a pancake on your blog, it had better be because you already have a kitten stealing a pancake on your blog.
That’s not even a valid reason
Knowing what you want and going for it: about 80% of success in life, right there.
Wooden statues of Christ taken from 3 liquidated churches. Do...
firehosevia Overbey
christ is anti-sanitary and absurd
Wooden statues of Christ taken from 3 liquidated churches. Do you see the dark spot on the raised hand of the central statue? Peasants have kissed the spot for centuries. The Soviet power announces this action to be anti-sanitary and absurd. Photo by James Abbe.
Flight delays peter out as air tower staffing returns to normal
A few lawmakers have reported trouble, but FAA says no more delays because of sequester.
Don’t make fun of renowned Dan Brown
“The critics said his writing was clumsy, ungrammatical, repetitive and repetitive. They said it was full of unnecessary tautology. They said his prose was swamped in a sea of mixed metaphors. For some reason they found something funny in sentences such as “His eyes went white, like a shark about to attack.” They even say my books are packed with banal and superfluous description, thought the 5ft 9in man. He particularly hated it when they said his imagery was nonsensical. It made his insect eyes flash like a rocket.”
…It’s a good thing to laugh so hard first thing in the morning.
somelaceandpaperflowers: getawildlife: Harvest Mouse on...
Fez and Minecraft assets swiped by iOS game Ace Block Jump
firehosethe high quality of the App Store approval process justifies its oh wait
By Michael McWhertor on May 10, 2013 at 10:00p
Developer Polytron found its Fez art assets appropriated — alongside art from Mojang's Minecraft — in the recently published iOS game Ace Block Jump, a $0.99 app from a developer that also appears to have borrowed its very name, Infocom Games, from someone else.
Ace Block Jump is described as a "pixel based shooter game" in which players seemingly shoot Minecraft-like versions of Street Fighter's Blanka, the Power Rangers and Robin from DC Comics. "The first action game, in which we mixed PIXEL and MINECRAFT style ( PIXELCRAFT )," Infocom Games writes on iTunes. "The most exciting and amusing game ever, specially in this new style."
Infocom Games' previous iOS titles include Block Craft: Iron Ops and Ace Combat: Block Sniper, games done in the Minecraft visual style that borrow characters from Iron Man and Assassin's Creed.
Additional screenshots of Ace Block Jump, which show its creators also swiped Minecraft's logo, are available at iTunes.
- Source
- Polytron on Twitter
- iTunes
The Ludum Dare Haikus
By Nathan Grayson on May 10th, 2013 at 9:00 pm.
Minimalism
Ludum Dare 26 theme
Haikus: fitting, no?
Leaf Me Alone
One part Wind Waker
Stir in a whole lot of Fez
Oh, and potatoes
Dream Fishing
Advice-giving fish
In a world of nothing
YOLO, basically
Funky Lincoln Saves The Day
Abraham Lincoln
Type jump to jump, slide to slide
Bad timing is death
simpLify
Musical machines
Solve puzzles by building songs
Too adorable
The Sentient Cube
Hey, cubes do not roll!
Unless they’re katamaris
Who turned off physics?
Be The Wind
You are the wind, see?
Wind wind wind windy wind wind
Sow seeds; you are strong
Telekinetic Minimalist Cult 5: Packrat Nightmare
Minimalist cult
OH GOD GARBAGE EVERYWHERE
Good thing you’re psychic
People
People all around
Side-by-side, worlds divided
Turn up your volume
Beyond Minimalism
White walls, find nature
Antichamber, is that you?
[Suspicious glancing]
FOLD
Haikus aren’t needed
When fewer words will suffice
Proteus for birds
The Road
The circle of life
Sure does kill lots of people
George Broussard made this
(R,G,B)
Metroidvania
Light and dark and nothingness
Save us, colorball!
Nod
Ask out a real girl
Nod or die (of awkwardness)
Next level? Headbanging
Geneva Convection
Minimalism?
Fuck that, death rays (and challenge)
BLOW UP LUDUM DARE
Naked Shades
Twine: now online
Comprehend ecosystem
What’s a lamia?
i need to lie down
Looks like kiddie scribbles
Looks are often deceiving
I’m gonna be sick
This is not a minimalist game
Ack, you broke the world!
Fix it fix it fix it [breathes]
Fix it fix it fix
Super Mario Bros 2 coming to Wii U Virtual Console next week
Super Mario Bros. 2 is coming to the North American Wii U Virtual Console service on May 16. The game will launch at $4.99.
Super Mario Bros. 2 joins a fairly light list of games on the Wii U Virtual Console, including those that launched the service in April, such as Excitebike, Ice Climbers, Punch Out and Super Mario World. Earthbound will be coming to the service at some point this year as well.
Super Mario Bros 2 coming to Wii U Virtual Console next week originally appeared on Joystiq on Sat, 11 May 2013 13:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
Ghost town, under water for 25 years, surfaces (+video)
firehosevia Russian Sledges: "underwater ruins autoshare"
Ghost town under water: After 25 years under water, this Argentine town is now above the surface. Tourists flock to the ghost town, a bizarre, post-apocalyptic landscape that captures a traumatic moment in time.
Man arrested after allegedly hitting homes with bulldozer near Port Angeles - The Seattle Times (blog)
|
Man arrested after allegedly hitting homes with bulldozer near Port Angeles
The Seattle Times (blog) No one was hurt as a result of the damage near Highway 101 and North Baker Street near Port Angeles. (Photo by Mike Howe, Clallam County Public Utility District.) PA2. These photos show the power pole and homes damaged by a bulldozer Friday near ... and more » |
modernmenagerie: amporasass: sposposey: PROOF We don’t need...
firehose"i can’t believe you wrote “A++ 10/10 would bang” and sent it to a harvard professor."
PROOF
We don’t need to talk about what I actually said in the email.
Let’s just not talk about that.
i can’t believe you wrote “A++ 10/10 would bang” and sent it to a harvard professor.
best.