firehose

Bagram Batman, a character based on Batman from The Dark Knight trilogy, educates soldiers and civilians who are deployed in Afghanistan in this series of safety PSAs created by the U.S. Army and AFN Afghanistan. To make sure that the message sinks in, Bagram Batman ends his training by assertively saying “Swear to me!”

videos via U.S. Army, AFN Afghanistan, DVIDS

via io9

Just like Maru, lions, tigers, and other big cats enjoy playing with boxes in this video uploaded by Big Cat Rescue in Tampa, Florida.

Submitted by: Unknown

Whisk Yourself Away Into the Faniverse!

Submitted by: Hipster90

As authorities continue their relentless pursuit of Boston Marathon bombing suspect Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, another type of investigation has been developing online: a hunt for any digital footprint Tsarnaev might have left in the days and months preceding Monday's tragedy. Now, after the "uncovering" and subsequent dismissal of numerous fake accounts, it appears the 19-year-old's legitimate Twitter presence has discovered.

BroBible was first to reveal the @J_tsar account, owned by a user named Jahar, and the evidence pointing to its authenticity is quickly piling up. Aside from BuzzFeed claiming to have verified the account as genuine, numerous posts authored by Jahar line up with Tsarnaev's background; more than once, he mentions his Chechnan heritage. He attended Cambridge Rindge and Latin School, the same high school as the FBI's suspect. An old profile picture closely resembles Tsarnaev.

Another tweet tells us that, much like the young man currently on the run, this individual has spent approximately a decade living in the United States. A photo of Jahar shows him wearing wrestling shorts with Rindge's logo — Tsarnaev was known to excel at the sport. And a tweet from May 2012 makes clear that the account owner's name is in fact Dzhokhar.

Glossing over the whole of J_tsar's Twitter activity, you'd be hard-pressed to tell him apart from most other 19-year-olds. There are references aplenty to TV shows, junk food, and weed. Jahar reveals himself to be a fan of Breaking Bad and rap. But beyond the pop cultural postings, there's also insight pointing to his faith. Jahar's first direct mention of Islam came in December of last year. "Brothers at the mosque either think I'm a convert or that I'm from Algeria or Syria, just the other day a guy asked me how I came to Islam," he wrote. From there, the mentions of his religious affiliation ramp up, but are still far outweighed by other, less serious posts. Nowhere in his Twitter timeline does Jahar share views that resemble radicalism. In fact, he seeks to defend Islam on occasion from those who associate the religion with terrorisim.

Jahar also got political on occasion, revealing himself to be a supporter of the 9/11 truther movement and retweeting President Barack Obama election victory message and slamming the 9/11 truther movement. But after more than a year posting about college, his friends, and other subjects, earlier this month @J_tsar's deposition took on a decidedly different tone. In two tweets that will undoubtedly see intense scrutiny, Jahar first says, "If you have the knowledge and the inspiration all that's left is to take action." That popped up on April 7th, exactly one week ahead of Monday's bombing. "Most of you are conditioned by the media," he would follow up on the 10th.

Should this prove to be Tsarnaev's account, it seems his alleged actions in the Marathon attack didn't discourage him from tweeting. "I'm a stress free kind of guy," he posted Tuesday night. Jahar's last Twitter interaction would come on Wednesday, when he quoted Muslim scholar Mufti Ismail Menk.

As for those who reportedly knew Jahar, many seem to be in disbelief with his implied role in the terrorist attack. To them, he didn't have the makings of the man who set down that bag loaded with a bomb on Boylston Street. It seems those who interacted with Tsarnaev are torn trying to distinguish between the friend they remember and the person who carried out such a sinister act.

• Via BroBible
• Source J_tsar (Twitter)
• Related Items twitter social media boston marathon boston marathon bombing dzhokhar tsarnaev tsarnaev j_tsar

running out of fucks to give

please add fucks to continue

BREAKING: We’re Doing A Bad Job
BREAKING: Do You Think We’re Doing A Good Job?
BREAKING: We Might Be Doing A Bad Job
BREAKING: How’s Everyone Doing?
BREAKING: Can Anyone Ever Truly Know Anything? What Is The Truth?
BREAKING: Has The Word ‘Breaking’ Lost All Its Meaning?
BREAKING: Still Nothing
BREAKING: No News Breaking
CNN Releases Photos Of 3 Obese Mexican Women Suspected In Boston Bombing
FBI: ‘You Know You’re Desperate When You’re Asking The American People For Help’

nothisiscarlie:

“Harry witnessed Professor McGonagall walking right past Peeves, who was determinedly loosening a crystal chandelier, and could have sworn he heard her tell the poltergeist out of the corner of her mouth, ‘It unscrews the other way.’”

#this is why the books are better

(via Twitter / shawna_england: View from my house…crazy …)

full issue of BU’s The Comment magazine that had Tamerlan Tsarnaev’s boxing photo essay (p17-18)

Following the huge success of “How Animals Eat Their Food” by Mister Epic Mann, Dominic Harris has released a parody that shows how Pokémon eat their food.

via Kotaku

“The artist at work”

Winkelhimer Smith is a Louisiana-based squirrel who became disabled in 2011 after a “mean old cat” tried to eat her. But thankfully that didn’t stop her from becoming a self-taught artist. Bushy-tailed Ms. Smith learned to paint (with food coloring) by watching her adoptive mom and doll artist Shyla Mouton who sometimes sells her pet squirrel’s art on Ebay and Etsy (all monies go to charity).

photos via Winkelhimer Smith

submitted via Laughing Squid Tips

VloggerFair, a conference for video bloggers and their fans, takes place June 8 and 9, 2013 at Terminal 5 in the Port of Seattle. The event is organized by Chris Pirillo, who previously produced the Gnomedex tech conferences.

Are you a vlogger? Do you want to become a vlogger? Do you love to watch vlogs? If you answered “yes” to any of these questions, then you’re welcome to register and connect with everyone at VloggerFair! It’s an event that everybody is invited to attend!

VloggerFair, which premieres June 8-9, 2013 in Seattle, WA, will spark valuable interaction between vloggers and vlog supporters around the role of vlogging in entertainment — helping put a finer point on the way we connect with one another.

By Alexa Ray Corriea on Apr 19, 2013 at 12:30p

Founders of indie studio Proletariat, a group of developers from mobile giant Zynga's now-shuttered Boston studio, have raised $2.25 million in funding for game development, according to a recent SEC Filling.

The filing, dated for earlier this week, shows the money was raised through equity funding. The filing names Conduit Labs founder and former Zynga Boston general manager Nabeel Hyatt as a related person to the deal, along with Proletariat chief technical officer William Daniel Ogles and studio CEO Seth Sivak.

Sivak and his team founded the studio shortly after Zynga Boston shuttered in October of last year. Earlier this year Sivak told Polygon the team at the new studio included developers hailing from Insomniac Games, Harmonix and Turbine, and that it would continue to focus on mobile and tablet games.

The company's most recent game, Letter Rush, was released in February for iOS. In the game, players must form a word out of individual letters before it floats across the screen, sifting through a heap of tiles to find the right letters. The company's porfolio also includes iOS game Hug the Sloth, in which players simulate hugging a sloth.

• Source
• The Securites and Exchanges Comission

By Samit Sarkar on Apr 19, 2013 at 1:00p

Playing Team Fortress 2 with the Oculus Rift is said to be potentially nauseating, but it looks like it could also be exhausting if you add the Virtuix Omni treadmill, as seen on Road to VR.

The Virtuix Omni is an omnidirectional virtual reality treadmill that allows users to walk or run in any direction and have their movements translated to controlling a character in a game. Virtuix already has videos of the treadmill working with Crysis Warhead and The Elder Scrolls 5: Skyrim, and yesterday the company posted footage of what it calls "true VR" — Team Fortress 2 being played with the Oculus Rift VR headset and the Omni treadmill.

The Omni currently uses Kinect for motion tracking, and actual running speed isn't tied to movement yet, but Virtuix is working on native solutions for both issues, according to Road to VR.

"The action feels like real running," said Jan Goetgeluk, CEO of Virtuix, to Road to VR. "The immersion is intense. I had a former Marine try [Half-Life 2] yesterday, and he was slightly shaking."

Virtuix plans to launch a Kickstarter for the Omni soon.

Indianapolis-based artist and father Ryan Hunley of Second Street Creative asked his cute little daughter August if he could help as she tried to buckle her seat belt. She quickly responded by telling him, “Worry about yourself!”

via reddit, Videogum

Israeli animator and illustrator Leigh Lahav recreated a collection of hit TV show intros celebrating the quirky lifestyle of her husband Oren Mendezitsky, as a present for his birthday.

via Tastefully Offensive

Chinese pirate site 7659 is exploiting Apple's bulk enterprise licensing tools to distribute free versions of paid App Store applications. Bulk enterprise licensing is supposed to let businesses send in-house apps to employees without dealing with Apple's App Store. It works via a developer provisioning profile, which facilitates "sideloading" of sorts without jailbreaking.

The site is only open to users in China, but that restriction can be circumvented via proxy server. According to VentureBeat, 7659 is full of apps that would otherwise cost money. Those include our best new app last week, Badland, which is usually $3.99, and Final Fantasy V, priced at $15.99 in the App Store. In a statement on its site, Kuaiyong, the company that appears to run 7659, explains its reasoning behind offering the apps:

"First of all, we would like to thank all Apple users around the world and your support for Kuaiyong.

Statistics have shown that a significant amount of Apple users are Chinese based. However, the fact is that in China, a large number of Apple users are not very familiar with the iTunes system and how to effectively manage it.

In order for Chinese Apple fans to download applications securely, Kuaiyong developed its own method of giving users access to thousands of free apps without having to jailbreak their devices. Kuaiyong offers detailed descriptions of apps, free app download trial, IOS device management and visual and audio file backup system. IOS system backup and recovery features will also be released in the very near future.

Our goal has always been about bringing Chinese Apple users with quick, convenient and pleasant IOS experience. Since the introduce of Kuaiyong, the proportion of jailbreak in China has declined dramatically from 60% to around 30%. Kuaiyong will hold on to this goal in the future and we would like to see more support for Apple as well as Kuaiyong."

Kuaiyong's justification for providing pirate apps — that navigating the App Store is difficult for Chinese users — is laughable at best. It would appear that Apple won't have a particularly tough time putting a stop to this, though, as all of the apps are provisioned with the same developer profile. Apple just needs to find a way to cut 7659's profile off. Of course, there's always the chance that the same organization could use another developing profile to achieve the same thing, and it's not clear if Apple is able to remove apps remotely from users' phones. VentureBeat says it asked Apple for comment on the matter "multiple times" without response, but we've also reached out to ask how it plans to deal with 7659.

• Source VentureBeatKuaiyong7659 (CN)
• Related Items kuaiyong 7659 piracy pirate jailbreak app applications app store developer provisioning profile enterprise

A petition asking Verizon to follow the lead of its smaller rival T-Mobile in cutting mobile contracts has gained significant momentum after it recorded over 30,000 signatures in one day. The Change.org petition — created on April 7th in an effort to force Verizon to "create an affordable way for consumers to purchase their devices" — currently sits just short of 100,000 signups and is believed to have garnered additional support following the announcement of the carrier's positive first-quarter financials.

The petition comes after Verizon CEO Lowell McAdam called T-Mobile's plans "a great thing," noting that his company "could move to that very quickly" if customers were interested. T-Mobile introduced its new Uncarrier plans at the end of March, eliminating two-year subscriptions and separating costs to streamline pricing. While Verizon offers prepaid plans, petition organizer Mike Beauchamp told Change.org "pricing phones so high, sometimes 600 dollars or more, doesn't really make it a true option for most people." Beauchamp wants the company to adopt a similar position to T-Mobile so that long-time customers aren't forced to leave the carrier in order to get better smartphone deals.

"Pricing phones so high, sometimes 600 dollars or more, doesn't really make it a true option for most people."

The petition may be small relative to Verizon's 98.9 million retail subscriptions (including prepaid and postpaid) but it may force the carrier to acknowledge the request following the comments of its CEO earlier this year. Last week, the operator said it will lengthen the minimum period before early upgrade eligibility to 24 months, matching the duration of its two-year smartphone plans. However, Verizon did note that it will now allow customers to buy some devices through its Verizon Wireless Device Payment Plan, coming later this year.

• Via VentureBeat
• Source Change.org
• Related Items verizon t-mobile uncarrier contract petition change.org signatures plans smartphone

The European Commission's investigation into Apple and major book publishers over ebook price-fixing may soon come to an end after Penguin became the last agency to offer a settlement in the antitrust case. The Commission today published a new notice on its website inviting comments from "interested parties" on Penguin's proposal to terminate existing pricing agreements with Apple which would see it refrain from signing similar agreements for five years.

Penguin's offer matches the proposal put forward by Apple, HarperCollins, Hachette, Macmillan, and Simon & Schuster in September last year. The deal would allow retailers — including Amazon — to set the price of ebooks anywhere they choose for the next two years, as long the value of the discounts offered does not exceed the value of the sales commissions the retailer receives from the publisher. If the European Commission accepts the offer, it would all but end the investigation into Apple's price-fixing agreements in Europe. However, the company is still under investigation by the US Department of Justice in a similar ebook pricing case, holding out after Macmillan became the last publisher to settle with the regulator earlier this year.

• Source Europa Press
• Related Items europe antitrust apple harpercollins eu european commission price fixing simon schuster hachette macmillan

After David offers Leeloo some clothes, he also offers her a device for applying eye makeup. Leeloo only has the most rudamentary grasp of English at this point, so to demonstrate its use he holds it up to his eyes.

This is a clear enough signal for Leeloo, who puts the device up to her eyes like a large pair of sunglasses. She can feel the momentary button near her left fingertip and presses it. In response a white ring around a Chanel™ logo illuminates for a second. Leeloo feels an unfamiliar sensation and pulls her face away, and we see that the device has applied complete eye makeup for her.

Analysis

The industrial design of the device is brilliant. It’s sized to be slightly larger than the eye area and it has the right shape for someone to know where to place it. The activation button sits exactly where the user needs it, and with enough of a button-like affordance that even without looking she can find it and press it. The device is just heavy enough to encourage supporting it with palms, which provides a firm base to resist too much movement on activation (and thereby risking eyeshadow right on the eye). The shiny black plastic reads like a cosmetic object, and professional enough that you can presume it’s safe to use near delicate eye parts. The white ring is a simple cue for those nearby that it’s in progress and not to interrupt the user.

A minor improvement would be to improve that simple light on/off to a progress ring that swept around. This would gave a sense of how much time it will take and how much time is left, even if it’s only a second.

The main question of the device is of course how does Leeloo specify the details of the makeup. A quick Google image search shows that the number of parameters is…um…vast.

Of course, if the device had some kind of low-level artificial intelligence, that agentive algorithm could handle a lot of the complexity for her, deciding on the best match for her schedule, fashion trends, current outfit, and her preferred position in the fashion-aggression spectrum. (Would there be a device that went up to 11 for drag queens?) But, when the agentive algorithm got it wrong, and Leeloo wanted to override those settings, she’s back to needing to tell the device how she’d like to override its suggestions. How does she do that?

Which raises the question of those three buttons across the bridge of the device.

Those three buttons

Of course three momentary buttons aren’t enough to control all the variables in eye makeup. Even if these are dials that control three variables, three variables aren’t enough. (Even if they were dials, why would they look identical to the momentary buttons? Things that behave differently should look different.)

Even if these buttons are not controls for variables but rather presets for sets of variables (Such as: “Work,” “Formal wear,” or “Defeating ultimate evil”), they’re not signaling their state well. Looking at that screen grab, can you tell which one is currently selected? I can’t. It should be apparent at a glance, so no one accidentally applies “clubbing” makeup when they mean “funeral.” So there should be some indication of what’s currently selected. Note that a lit button is not enough. Some descriptive text is needed. Such text would ideally be on both the “inside” and the “outside” so no matter how it was lying on a dresser, its state could be read.

Anyway, since those buttons aren’t sufficient for setting up the eye makeup, let’s hope that it’s networked to some other device with a richer interface, like a voice interface or Cornelius’ WIMP computer, where she can have a rich interaction for setting up those buttons.

With all that in mind, here’s another comp to illustrate these ideas. Admittedly, Chanel’s brand police wouldn’t be comfortable with an LED font, but it would clearly communicate that the text represents a variable and not a product name.

Special shouts out to You Yeti! who corrected our tweet that the two Fingernail-o-matics were not the only cosmetic interfaces in the survey. I love writing for a sharp, eagle-eyed audience.