firehose

If you've ever had an issue with some of the women's characters on AMC's The Walking Dead — the root of the problem might be in the source material. Robert Kirkman, the creator of the comics, definitely has some... issues... with women.

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“Trongs” allow you to pick up food without using silverware. They’re small, flexible tongs. It’s like having prehensile, jointed, fleshy appendages attached to each of your hands!

Oh. Wait.

A collection of evidence suggesting that the people who take stock photographs have absolutely no idea what the process of science looks like, beyond a vague understanding that it probably involves white coats (and also beakers full of liquid).

A Limo Con, Circa 1974.

William F. Buckley, Jr.

You may want to think twice before opening that social media account for your agency. In an April 4 memo, the Office of Management and Budget put agencies on notice that employees may be in violation of the Antideficiency Act by agreeing to open-ended terms of agreement for certain websites. You’ve seen them, the lists [...]

lovewallace:

casual-isms:

Presented without comment, because I’m sure someone will be able to find the words better than I can.

oh look we have cute doodles too

Submitted by: Unknown

Tagged: dogs , bow ties , collars Share on Facebook

How are ‘goths’ and ‘emos’ and ‘metallers’ defined?

birdworlds:

Owning a Raven is a lot of work, in America African Ravens & crows are legal to own. I’ve interacted with companion ravens before and they are fantastic. Seeing this incredible bird free flying and playing in the air while knowing he is keeping his eye on us and will come back.

heart-melting. 

scones and evil: On Fan Fiction:

onlyalittlelion:

tywinning asked you:
2012-08-09 03:37

As a professor, may I ask you what you think about fanfiction?

I think fanfiction is literature and literature, for the most part, is fanfiction, and that anyone that dismisses it simply on the grounds that it’s derivative knows fuck-all about literature and needs to get the hell off my lawn.

Most of the history of Western literature (and probably much of non-Western literature, but I can’t speak to that) is adapted or appropriated from something else.  Homer wrote historyfic and Virgil wrote Homerfic and Dante wrote Virgilfic (where he makes himself a character and writes himself hanging out with Homer and Virgil and they’re like “OMG Dante you’re so cool.”  He was the original Gary Stu).  Milton wrote Bible fanfic, and everyone and their mom spent the Middle Ages writing King Arthur fanfic.  In the sixteenth century you and another dude could translate the same Petrarchan sonnet and somehow have it count as two separate poems, and no one gave a fuck.  Shakespeare doesn’t have a single original plot—although much of it would be more rightly termed RPF—and then John Fletcher and Mary Cowden Clarke and Gloria Naylor and Jane Smiley and Stephen Sondheim wrote Shakespeare fanfic.  Guys like Pope and Dryden took old narratives and rewrote them to make fun of people they didn’t like, because the eighteenth century was basically high school.  And Spenser!  Don’t even get me started on Spenser.

Here’s what fanfic authors/fans need to remember when anyone gives them shit: the idea that originality is somehow a good thing, an innately preferable thing, is a completely modern notion.  Until about three hundred years ago, a good writer, by and large, was someone who could take a tried-and-true story and make it even more awesome.  (If you want to sound fancy, the technical term is imitatio.)  People were like, why would I wanna read something about some dude I’ve never heard of?  There’s a new Sir Gawain story out, man!  (As to when and how that changed, I tend to blame Daniel Defoe, or the Modernists, or reality television, depending on my mood.)

I also find fanfic fascinating because it takes all the barriers that keep people from professional authorship—barriers that have weakened over the centuries but are nevertheless still very real—and blows right past them. Producing literature, much less circulating it, was something that was well nigh impossible for the vast majority of people for most of human history.  First you had to live in a culture where people thought it was acceptable for you to even want to be literate in the first place.  And then you had to find someone who could teach you how to read and write (the two didn’t necessarily go together).  And you needed sufficient leisure time to learn.  And be able to afford books, or at least be friends with someone rich enough to own books who would lend them to you.  Good writers are usually well-read and professional writing is a full-time job, so you needed a lot of books, and a lot of leisure time both for reading and writing.  And then you had to be in a high enough social position that someone would take you seriously and want to read your work—to have access to circulation/publication in addition to education and leisure time.  A very tiny percentage of the population fit those parameters (in England, which is the only place I can speak of with some authority, that meant from 500-1000 A.D.: monks; 1000-1500: aristocratic men and the very occasional aristocratic woman; 1500-1800: aristocratic men, some middle-class men, a few aristocratic women; 1800-on, some middle-class women as well). 

What’s amazing is how many people who didn’t fit those parameters kept writing in spite of the constant message they got from society that no one cared about what they had to say, writing letters and diaries and stories and poems that often weren’t discovered until hundreds of years later.  Humans have an urge to express themselves, to tell stories, and fanfic lets them.  If you’ve got access to a computer and an hour or two to while away of an evening, you can create something that people will see and respond to instantly, with a built-in community of people who care about what you have to say.

I do write the occasional fic; I wish I had the time and mental energy to write more.  I’ll admit I don’t read a lot of fic these days because most of it is not—and I know how snobbish this sounds—particularly well-written.  That doesn’t mean it’s “not good”—there are a lot of reasons people read fic and not all of them have to do with wanting to read finely crafted prose.  That’s why fic is awesome—it creates a place for all kinds of storytelling.  But for me personally, now that my job entails reading about 1500 pages of undergraduate writing per year, when I have time to read for enjoyment I want it to be by someone who really knows what they’re doing.  There’s tons of high-quality fic, of course, but I no longer have the time and patience to go searching for it that I had ten years ago. 

But whether I’m reading it or not, I love that fanfiction exists.  Because without people doing what fanfiction writers do, literature wouldn’t exist.  (And then I’d be out of a job and, frankly, I don’t know how to do anything else.)

When Disney first announced their acquisition of Star Wars, fans were trepidatious. What changes would they make to the Star Wars universe? Then Disney announced the new movies, including a sequel trilogy and stand-alone films, and fans were ecstatic. But now that Disney has killed LucasArts, we’re seeing the Dark Side of Disney’s Star Wars — and this is probably only the beginning. Lando Calrissian said it best: “This deal keeps getting worse all the time.”

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Should I use a QR Code?

Don’t criticize videogames. Speak with your wallet. (by MechaGamezilla)

This is one terrifying premise: Lena Headey and Ethan Hawke star in the not-so-distant-future movie of The Purge, where all of America's problems have been solved thanks to the government's decision to legalize all crime for 12 hours once a year. Watch what happens to Hawke and his family during their night of The Purge.

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Tokyopop CEO Stu Levy has responded to "Boys of Summer" creator Chuck Austen's advice to Tokyopop creators to "move on" after their time with the publisher. ROBOT 6 has the details.

3Drag: the Open electronics way to RepRap

Few months ago, after long months of testing, assembling and disassembling, print trials,and countless sleepless nights we finally decided to give birth our interpretation of the RepRap project.

Solar energy has a reputation as being a clean energy source but hasn't earned it — at least not up until now. That's because in a darkly ironic truth, the power used to manufacture solar panels still comes mainly from electricity generated by fossil fuels. But a new study from Stanford researchers says that the balance may be tipping: all the solar panels online around the world last year produced enough energy to make up for the energy it took to make them, researchers are able to say with more than 50 percent confidence.

Continue reading…

by niraxoid

Rage against the machine:

We misunderstand this tangle of digital technologies and the roles they play in our lives when we assume that “the Internet” has a particular logic, that it must necessarily have distinctive attributes (openness, neutrality, etc.), or that it constitutes a special “place” operating by its own rules and norms, as opposed to amplifying some preexisting rules and norms and undermining others. As with any technological system, we shape these gadgets as much as—if not more than—they shape us.

None of this analysis would strike scholars of the history of technology as controversial. But to the editors and readers of Wired magazine—and to countless other techno-evangelists in the overlapping worlds of commerce and culture—it’s nothing short of dangerous apostasy.

Popular writers about technology, including Clay Shirky, Jeff Jarvis, Steven Johnson, and Kevin Kelly, have been riding the wave of what critic Evgeny Morozov calls “Internet Centrism”: the idea that “the Internet” is a distinct historical and technological phenomenon, and that its emergence has marked a revolution in thought and perhaps even human consciousness, one that will allow—no, destine—us to march forward into better lives and better times. To some of these writers, we will all be just fine as long as we maintain faith in the power of “the Internet.” On the other hand, if we surrender to nostalgia, raise concerns a priori, or sneer at grandiose predictions of “creative destruction” or “the Singularity,” we risk waking up from this lovely dream. Deviation or dissent from the Internet-centric consensus is nothing less than a retrograde, elitist, and possibly authoritarian inclination.

In his new book, To Save Everything, Click Here, Morozov—a onetime online activist who now calls himself a “digital heretic”—effectively punctures the shallow myths of Internet centrism. But then he stabs repeatedly, flailing at its shadows and echoes in the works of more responsible and sophisticated writers such as Harvard Law professors Lawrence Lessig and Jonathan Zittrain.

Morozov, a regular contributor to the New Republic, Foreign Policy, Boston Review, and other publications, is as notorious for his brutal book reviews as he is for his prodigious work ethic. No one writing about technology seems to read more or faster than Morozov. At the age of twenty-six he published his first book, The Net Delusion (2011), which effectively destroyed any lingering utopian fantasies that digital technologies would necessarily liberate people from oppressive regimes—such as the widespread conceit that Twitter helped spark Iran’s “green revolution” uprising in 2009. Now twenty-eight and just starting his graduate work at Harvard, Morozov already grasps wide swaths of several scholarly fields and weaves them together astutely. And when he finds fault with a book, Morozov can eviscerate it mercilessly.

His October 2011 review of Jarvis’s Public Parts: How Sharing in the Digital Age Improves the Way We Work and Live became instantly notorious. “This is a book that should have stayed a tweet,” Morozov wrote. “Stripped of all the inspirational buzzwords, it offers a two-fold, and insipid, argument.” Jarvis was left with no response but to call Morozov out for what he took to be personal attacks in a review of a book built largely on personal anecdotes. Jarvis’s poorly researched and glibly written book was too easy a target for any sharp-eyed reviewer and did not warrant a long review essay in the New Republic in the first place. As it turned out, Morozov’s strutting tone and his subsequent trash-talking tweets generated sympathy for Jarvis rather than any useful engagement over the more substantive issues Morozov sought to raise, such as the misuse of Jürgen Habermas’s work in popular American nonfiction. Still, that review led many technology writers to hope that their publishers’ publicists would leave the New Republic off the review-copy list. (I had no such luck when Morozov reviewed my own book The Googlization of Everything last summer, but I was immensely relieved to find that the review was respectful.)

Morozov knocks Jarvis around a bit in his new book. But for the most part he focuses on other “thought leaders” of the Internet age. In general, the purpose of To Save Everything, Click Here is to reveal poor research, ahistorical claims, and sloppy thinking. To a lesser extent, the book promotes some examples of sharp and informed analysis of technology and society. On these counts Morozov succeeds spectacularly. I would challenge anyone to read this book carefully and completely and then still assert that “the Internet” is a useful concept to apply as a model for anything else in life: crime prevention, national security, aesthetic judgment, economic policy, science, or education. All of these areas of life demand serious, informed deliberation and debate so we can work our way through urgent policy conflicts. This book delivers a primer in the best ways to think deeply and responsibly about technology. And along the way, Morozov pummels books that fail to demonstrate sufficient rigor and opt instead for the more marketable big idea or quick fix, such as Shirky’s Here Comes Everybody and Johnson’s Future Perfect.

Reno calls a domestic violence hotline: The MRA Reality Distortion Field in action | man boobz:

section9:

brute-reason:

So this MRA calls a domestic violence hotline pretending to be a man who’s being abused by his wife. He claims that the hotline refused to help him because he’s a man.

Actually, the counselor explained that he’d called a counseling line, not an actual shelter, but that she could connect him to a hotline for men that would give him and his young son a free hotel room. He refused and said that he wanted to call the police on his wife; the counselor offered to connect him directly to a police officer who specializes in domestic violence. He refused this too, and insisted that he wanted to be housed IN A SHELTER FOR BATTERED WOMEN SPECIFICALLY, even though he does not identify as a woman. The counselor continued to insist that he could get a free hotel stay if he let her connect him to the appropriate hotline. He kept refusing and finally ended the call without warning.

“Men’s rights” activism, folks.

What an asshole.

The whole “Men’s Rights” crowd would be hilarious, if they weren’t so goddamn infuriating.

SEX by SNMT Full Band FC #1532 (by EliteRhythmGaming2)

RIP Rock Band

Project X Squared by Spiros Michalakis — Kickstarter:

PhD Comics beat

“Roger Ebert, the legendary film critic, died today, his long-time employer, The Chicago Sun-Times is reporting.”

- Roger Ebert, Legendary Film Critic, Dies : The Two-Way : NPR

cameron-stewart:

My contribution in full to the #bartkira project. This was tons of fun to do.

Holy shit.

Suits Aren’t for Standing in Front of Mirrors

The past few days a several images of soccer star David Beckham showing off his moves while wearing a suit came across my dashboard (likely from this Glamour article) and it reminded me of some advice I’d once read.

Most often, when guys go to purchase a new suit they immediately go in front of a mirror and turn into a robot. Their back stiffens, the chest heaves outward and knees lock. But this is only one way to determine if a suit fits you well. Instead, try walking around a bit and not focusing on a mirror. Sit down in a chair and cross your legs or put your feet up. And perhaps consider kicking around a soccer ball. 

The point is to get a feel of how the suit moves with your body. Perhaps the slimness you like in the mirror isn’t the best for when you need to squat down and pick up something off the floor. Or maybe the shoulders don’t quite have the range of movement you’d prefer, although they may look perfect when you’re standing still like a statue. 

Your suit shouldn’t only fit you when you’re standing upright, as Mr. Beckham proves. It should make you feel like you can do anything and look great, too.

-Kiyoshi

“You’ve got a 46-year-old employed father, with no criminal record, caught selling four bottles of prescription pain pills. “Under Florida law Horner now faced a minimum sentence of 25 years, if found guilty,” the BBC reports. Twenty-five years minimum! It costs Florida roughly $19,000 to incarcerate an inmate for a year. So I ask you, dear reader, is keeping non-violent first-time drug offender John Horner locked behind bars in a jumpsuit really the best use of $475,000? For the same price, you could pay a year’s tuition for 75 students at Florida State University. You could pay the salaries of seven West Palm Beach police officers for a year. Is it accurate to call a system that demands the 25-year prison term mad?”

- A Heartbreaking Drug Sentence of Staggering Idiocy

theghostacademy:

Still swooning