firehose

Jezebel is a new web comic by Elijah Brubaker, the writer and artist behind the Wilhelm Reich bio comic Reich. It’s humorous telling of the Biblical story of Jezebel.

The comic is being serialized at Study Group Comics every Wednesday. There’s a warning that this is not safe for work, but I haven’t noticed anything particular racy — but perhaps the comic will get more explicit as it progresses, so watch out for that.

My interview with Brubaker is here.

““(Morons) don’t tend to be fans of bones — they’ve grown up with nuggets (and a fear of everything remotely frustrating, and an eternal desire to be over-coddled four-year-olds for their entire lives),” said KFC spokesman Rick Maynard, referring to (infantile jerkoffs, but certainly not all) people in their 20s and 30s.”

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KFC to offer easy-to-eat boneless chicken - Yahoo! Finance

fixed

Prosthesis designer Sophie de Oliveira Barata has launched The Alternative Limb Project, a studio that designs unusual prosthetic limbs. The studio offers three options: realistic, surrealist, and unreal. The surreal options could include bionic components, 3D reliefs, or even skin that appears to transform into that of another species. The unreal options, like the stereo and crystallized prostheses of model and singer Viktoria Modesta, can incorporate other materials like metals, crystals, and even secret compartments.

images via The Alternative Limb Project

via Mind’s Delight, Nerdcore

In a display of blatant disregard for Nancy Reagan and her pleas to the contrary, Russia's bears, no longer able to resist the sweet temptation of gasoline, have found themselves suffering from a good, ol' fashioned jet fuel addiction. More »

A study by a money saving website has revealed that Xbox 360 owners are the best in the bedroom.

We think of the persecution of scientists as something that happened in the distant past. But in the recent past, America absolutely wrecked a brilliant scientist. Charles Drew is the reason why hundreds of thousands of people are alive today. American policies hampered him professionally and scientifically, and may be part of the reason he died early.

Read more...

Designed by Quaker City Mercantile | Country: United States

“After much intensive research and development, Philadelphia-based Quaker City Mercantile is thrilled to present Quinetum, a highly exclusive quinine cordial from Steven Grasse, creator of the iconic Hendrick’s Gin.

Quinetum is a unique and complex blend comprised of Cinchona Succirubra Bark, from which Quinine is derived, and a range of botanicals (4% ABV ethanol). It is designed to be a bartender’s tinkering tool when used as a cocktail ingredient or can be lengthened with soda water and combined with Hendrick’s in place of tonic.

Grasse decided to bring the curious history of quinine to life channeling the ethos of Thomas Whiffen, a renowned maker of poisons who established The Quinine Works of Battersea, London and whose likeness graces the Quinetum bottle. He was the first person to synthesize quinine in the 1800′s, which at the time was a lifesaving drug against malaria.”

“Hendrick’s Gin master distiller Lesley Gracie created this complexly flavored cordial, bittersweet with a slightly syrupy mouthfeel and notes of floral lime and orange zest with rose petal and lavender. Quaker City Mercantile spearheaded Quinetum’s concept and design.

The small, custom-mold glass bottle was inspired by a 1940’s-era poison bottle discovered in a London antique shop. The Quinetum bottle was designed to echo the canonical Hendrick’s Gin aesthetic, with distinctively clean, painstakingly designed packaging and a Stelvin screwcap.”

“The packaging I created for Hendricks 14 years ago is incredibly iconic, much loved and, now, much imitated,” says Grasse. “Therefore, there was a lot of pressure with this project to up the ante and take things to a new level. And, judging by the initial feedback we have received on this, I think we achieved that. Our goal is to put this out there in very limited quantities and keep Quinetum very selective and very rare. As rare as platinum, titanium or any other “um”.”

By Tracey Lien on Apr 05, 2013 at 3:15p

The LA Game Space — an initiative that was successfully funded on Kickstarter to provide a nurturing environment for game makers, game players and those with any interest in games — begins its warehouse transformation this month, according to an update on its Kickstarter campaign.

The campaign had originally asked for $250,000 to transform an old warehouse into a space that could exhibit games and game art, house research labs and host lectures and workshops. Photos of the site in its current state (which can be viewed below) show a space that requires a lot of work. According to the organizers of LA Game Space, that work can finally begin, now that they've signed a lease for the warehouse.

"We have the keys to the warehouse and the transformation will begin this month," the update reads. "Up first: painting the exterior in LA/GS yellow and attaching a large logo!"

The Kickstarter campaigned raised $335,657, but the organizers are hoping that backers can assist where they can to help the space come together at an affordable price.

"We have worked hard to secure professional yet affordable assistance with the initial 'heavy lifting'," the Kickstarter update reads. "That said, we would be incredibly grateful if any backers would like to step forward with connections who can provide further professional assistances and/or materials."

The organizers also said that the backer rewards are on schedule and backer surveys should be sent out over the next few days.

• Source
• LA Game Space on Kickstarter

Hubble Space Telescope control console on eBay - Boing Boing:

YES

YESSSSSSSSSSSSSS

Coffitivity - Increase Your Creativity!:

the mix of calm and commotion in an environment like a coffee house is proven to be just what you need to get those creative juices flowing

no

fuck you

Imagine the Earth is now an ice planet, and the only logical place for humans to live is inside a class dividing giant train that rides around looking for safety. This is the premise for Korean filmmaker Joon-ho Bong's (The Host) new movie Snowpiercer. A new crop of promotional train passports show off the stellar cast, including Tilda Swinton and Chris Evans. Take a look.

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Just how quick was the great tyrant lizard, exactly? Experts in biomechanics think she was pretty damn quick – but still probably not as fast as you think.

Read more...

Submitted by: Unknown

Tagged: asteroid , landscape , aurora , destination WIN! , g rated Share on Facebook

Over is an iOS app by Potluck to easily add beautiful typography to your photos which can then be shared on Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr and Instagram. It is available to download at the iTunes store.

Create inspirational, informational or even funny images to share quickly and easily. In only a few seconds you can add captions, quotes, jokes, memes, poems or anything else you can think of to a photo.

Here’s a couple of examples I made using the app:

The Blue Scout, 1964

Little smelly trees

Choosing the perfect font

photos via Rusty Blazenhoff

via Gavin Purcell

Illustrator Ralph Sevelius has redesigned Disney princesses as lightsaber-wielding Jedi and Sith from Star Wars.

images via Ralph Sevelius

via Eric Kwun, Nerd Approved

By Megan Farokhmanesh on Apr 05, 2013 at 3:00p

Resident Evil 6 owners can now add the Left 4 Dead 2 cast to the Windows PC version of the game, Capcom-Unity announced.

The crossover was announced in March and adds Coach, Nick, Ellis and Rochelle to PC-exclusive mode "The Mercenaries: No Mercy." As per the crossover, Left 4 Dead 2 players can also now battle Resident Evil 6 enemies Lepotitsa and Ogroman. Both enemies are new skins for old Left 4 Dead 2 foes and join Napad, who was released earlier.

You can watch the previously released video above to see producer Yoshiaki Hirabayashi explain the crossover. The Windows PC version of Resident Evil 6 launched March 22.

• Source
• Capcom (YouTube)
• Capcom-Unity

This adorable sleeping miniature pig was photographed while wearing a pink sweater vest and tiny gripper socks. I could see how having to be that cute would be a very tiring ordeal.

image via KittenBabySitter

via Cute Overload, Neatorama

via http://www.tumblr.com/dashboard

art-destruction:

Alfred Hitchcock

I like Cambridge Brewing but I think this is the wrong attitude:

By making Craft Beer welcoming to all by design, we’ve made it a desirable industry in which people want to play a part. This includes the inevitable number of beer marketing companies, aka contract brewers (a few of whom call themselves “gypsy brewers”), who either feel that there’s money to be made in this fad or who genuinely love craft beer but don’t want to invest the capital in their own brick and mortar breweries. This lack of skin in the game shows me that they value short term gains over long term personal investment and hard work. And I truly believe that there is no such thing as a gypsy brewer.

Luckily cooler heads from Somerville Brewing put it into perspective:

To those of us with a more mature perspective on business, we call this friendly competition. Some of the best advice I’ve received has been from people you might call “competitors”. When the entire segment of craft beer is only approaching 7% of the US beer market, it’s almost absurd to describe other folks in the industry as a threat. Sadly, other brewers internalize the presence of other brands in their local area or the arrival of new brands by people that did not chose the same career lifestyle 20 years ago as an attack on their “brewer” sovereignty.

This is one of the rare spats I've read about in the craft brewing market. Most brewers are extremely friendly and generous. Much like independent Mac development, it's friendliest when the market is tiny and everyone needs a leg up against the common enemy (InBev in the beer market and Microsoft in the software market).

Pythonmonk is a beautiful and interactive training site for Python. It's fully interactive and forces the user to solve real code problems. You type right into the code samples and run them in the browser. Right now there is only a primer so it's not too useful for me, but I think this is a great start.

A young filmmaker is believed to have frozen to death as he made a documentary about sleeping rough on the streets.

Jon Stewart took a break from politics to dish out a little media criticism tonight aimed squarely at CNN.

Theories of Anxiety

Synesthesia Solids

Will Smith and Norman Chan test out an Oculus Rift virtual reality headset developer’s kit in this video by Tested. The Oculus Rift is a virtual reality headset designed for deeply immersive gaming that was originally funded on Kickstarter in September 2012. Developer’s kits — the very first version of the Oculus Rift — have just begun shipping out to developers so they can begin creating video games for virtual reality. In this video, Smith tests out Valve’s Team Fortress 2, a first person shooter that is the first game to be ported for use with the headset. Though watching someone else play using the Oculus Rift is not at all representative of actually trying the device, Smith describes what the experience is like and his thoughts on the revolutionary new product. There’s no word yet on when a more polished, consumer version of the Oculus Rift will be available, but Oculus founder Palmer Luckey told The Verge “something has gone wrong if it takes until the 2014 holiday season to ship.”

By Alec Meer on April 5th, 2013 at 7:00 pm.

The only other Tomb Raider game I’ve ever played was the first one, which I found alternately brilliant and annoying. Oh, and I reviewed The Angel of Darkness for a magazine, but that doesn’t count. This year’s reboot, Tomb Raider, was my first experience of Crystal Dynamics’ work with Lara Croft, so I was a relative blank slate in terms of expectations. Perhaps that’s why I had a better time with it than John did – there wasn’t anything I knew to miss or call for, any pre-existing associations to be endorsed or threatened. That didn’t stop me from howling in misery at all the quicktime events and the often bobbins plot, of course, but there’s an awful lot in there I really dug.

• First up, Lara. I’m not sure I’d go so far as to call her especially memorable, but she was certainly freed from the chains of faint absurdity which have dogged her for so long. She convincingly grew from scared and vulnerable to scarred and veteran across the course of the game, even if she had to suffer enough near-fatal falls to fill a hundred Die Hard movies in the process. There was a great, sensibly subtle physicality to her when climbing up rock faces or making dangerous jumps too. Sure, she was essentially capable of superheroics, but it wasn’t realised in pantomime or tawdry fashion. Aside from occasionally recoiling at an oddly inanimate face which looked like a wax model of Jennifer Lawrence, I enjoyed her company, I never felt like a dirty old man and I never questioned her leading-woman status. She certainly put paid to the lie that action game stars need to be brawny man-hulks or cynically sexualised Valkyries.

• The environments. Not the silly colour-coded wall-climbing, exploding building bits, but the large, exploration-friendly ‘levels’ which contained plot objectives, the excellent but too few, too brief Tomb side-missions and assorted collectibles. Judicious use of light, shadow and ambient occlusion meant they looked amazing on PC, dense and Earthly settings not laid low by silly sci-fi or perpetual twilight. While interactions were restricted to some degree, there was real joy in simply clambering around them, getting to high or out-of-reach places just for the hell of it. And for the pick-ups, but I’ll get to those shortly. I didn’t feel too ushered around these areas, despite the sometimes shrill protestations of the plot – I went in determined to damn well play the game at the pace I wanted, and happily it let me once I got through each new area’s introductory talky bit. I didn’t proceed to storyline missions until I thought I’d combed every inch of every environment, and it’s definitely in that hands-off free-roaming that the game most shines. I even revisited a few areas after the end of the game, using gear Lara hadn’t had the first time she was there to access new areas, in a pleasant touch of optional Metroidvania.
• The Tombs were wonderful, but you knew that. There weren’t anywhere near enough of them and they all wrapped up far too quickly, but they contained the best aspects of the game in capsule form – gigantic architecture, navigation-based puzzles with big visual pay-offs. They seemed at the heart of what the game was trying to be, and it’s sad how often it forgot this in favour of quick-time events, but at least the MouseTrap philosophy behind them did extend into the broader game, and those larger environments. I’m usually pretty DLC-resistant, but I’d definitely have gone back in for more of those tombs – it’s crazy that there won’t be any.

• Hell, I even enjoyed the shooting. Sure, regenerating health is a perennial let-down, but at least it wasn’t a recharging magic-shield. The limited choice of weapons, and the very clear roles they took (especially by contrast to the homogeneous death-tubes of that other big action game of recent weeks, BioShock Infinite), served the game well, and while the idea of Lara being distressed by her first kill only to then mow down hundreds without blinking was classic videogame absurdity (see Niko Bellic in GTA 4) I thought the combat itself was well-balanced, most enemies a sweet spot between bullet sponges and mere mortals. Upgrading the weapons, with the effects being visual as well as statistical, was pleasant roleplaying-lite, and seemed far more tactile and rewarding than the similar, vending machine-based system in Binfinite.

• I especially loved the bow, and how it gradually turned into a sort of massive string-based Transformer. It was my primary weapon most of the time, even when it was incredibly unwise for it to be so, simply because it felt good. Best of all, the bow served the purposes of exploration, with all its zipline-creation, wall-pulling and fire-starting – it felt cannily enmeshed with the game and its environments, rather than simply the faddish sniper rifle analogue it’s been in other recent games.

• Something which surprised me, given it’s a game element I so often sneer at (see the Arkham and Assassin’s Creed games), was how hard the collectormania element grabbed me. At one point, I even decided I was going to 100% the game. I made it a good way towards that until trying to find the last few GPS caches became too gruesome. Most of the while though, it felt rewarding. The combination of environmental/navigational puzzles necessary to reach all the relics, caches, documents and whatnot, and the fact they had in-game rewards rather than simply progress towards achievements, made all my clambering and falling off things and rope-shooting and swearing seem eminently worthwhile. When this stuff isn’t merely ephemeral, and when it fits in-game logic (i.e. Lara hunting relics makes sense; an Assassin collecting hovering feathers does not), it feels like it’s – pun not intended – achieving something rather than grinding. Though the GPS caches were a collectible too far – no museum’s going to by those, Croft.
• But: I couldn’t stand the supporting cast. It was one of those cases where we were expected to care about them right out of the gate, without their having done anything to earn it. Twists were signposted from three furlongs away. The baddie made no sense and just appeared to pop out of nowhere unless you’d found and listened to the audio diaries. The father figure character seemed to be constructed only of stereotypes. I didn’t care when people died. Why did the black character need to be angry and unreasonable from start to almost-end? The idea that the tall, handsome guy in fashionable glasses was supposed to be some sort of feckless ultra-nerd who Lara couldn’t possibly be attracted to was laughable. The best friend/damsel in distress character had no definable personality traits. This was so clearly, and often so winningly, Lara’s game – it would have been better without these people in it, were she shipwrecked alone and trying to find a way home by herself. At least she wasn’t ultimately dependent on these people – in fact, she wound up leading them – but their very presence did diminish her.

The QTE overload, the super-prescribed wall-climbing and the unannounced, disorientating switching between cutscene and suddenly needing to act certainly grated at the time, but it’s now been a couple of weeks since I played Tomb Raider I find that my feeling about it is predominantly a fond one. I enjoyed being in that place, solving the grand puzzle of the environment with the grand Swiss army knife of my bow, and I think this reboot is a fine sign-post to where this series could and should go. Hopefully Crystal Dynamics, if they’re allowed to make another in the wake of the game apparently not meeting sales expectations, are receptive to complaints about quick-time events and Unchartedisms. I want more puzzle-fun in large, epic environments, because I reckon they did a stand-up job when they made that element of the game their focus.

And no, I couldn’t get the hair to run well either.

Mixed news everyone!

1. First and the most important: thank you everybody for your donations. We now have enough to secure our servers for the next two months or so. You can donate using Flattr or using bitcoins: 1JMYDeTaJHvfL6stbvwNdbY8zVqWfEnucU.

2. We’ve got an incredible amount of emails during last three weeks. There’ve been several days when all three of us were busy mostly dealing with user requests. If you believe that The Old Reader is missing something (and it surely is), please go to our Uservoice page, browse the issues (most likely, someone has already created your suggestion), and vote for the ones you like. Also you can see what’s already planned there. And please, check our Status page or subscribe to our Twitter account — we are updating these two on current issues.

We only have that much time during the day to spare on this project, and we would prefer to spend it making The Old Reader more reliable or implementing new features, not removing duplicate feature requests or explaining how to create a folder.

We are focused on making everything work for the vast number of users and feeds, for now this is our top priority.

(image by ProlificPen)

3. We could really use some help on the Ruby on Rails front. If you have experience engineering medium-size websites, and you’d like to become a part of our small team, please, drop us a line to hello@theoldreader.com. If you have any other suggestions about how you can help us, feel free to email us as well. Or just spread the word, that’d be much appreciated.

We can’t pay you a huge pile of money, but we still have something interesting to offer.

4. Cool graphs, no?