firehose

Client: Here’s the concept for the new logo we need…

Me: This just says “girly.” What do you mean by girly?

Client: I don’t know, flowers or something…

Me: Any preferences on font or color?

Client: I don’t know. Look, if I tell you anymore than I’ve already told you, I’ll be doing all the work.

Please note, we’re both women and this conversation made me very sad. 

New research paves the way for the development of a vaccine for the Tasmanian devil, currently on the brink of extinction because of a contagious cancer.

Ideology means many things, but one of them is the difference between who gets the maximum benefit of the doubt, and who gets the presumption of guilt. I know what I see, when I see this clip:

I see a law professor shoving a student—shouting “Get away from my space, you prick”—making more threatening movements, attempting to provoke a fight verbally, and grabbing a student’s cell phone out of her hand. I see the student who was pushed and threatened staying calm and passive, even trying to defuse the situation. I see the student whose phone was taken from her hands defending herself verbally and no more. And then the clip ends.

It is clear to me what I see in the video. It is clear to me who, in the video, is turning a political conflict into a physical one, and who it is that is aggressively trespassing into whose space. Mine is an ideological account of what happened, of course. Which is not to say that it’s wrong—yours is ideological too—but simply that any reading of this event, this brief window in time, cannot help but be shaped and contextualized by what you or I expect to see. And it also can’t help but be shaped by the context which we assume into existence, framing the event.

After all: what happened before this video began? What happened after it ended? That context could change how we view what we’ve just seen. In fact, it has to: we’ve already filled in the gaps in our knowledge with assumptions about what we don’t know. One of two things is true: either the law professor was provoked in some way that would justify or mitigate his conduct, or he wasn’t. And before we come to a decision about what we’ve seen, we’ve decided which of those two things are probably true. And how we come to that decision will most likely have everything to do with what our opinions are about Israel/Palestine, border checkpoints, and the meanings of the words Apartheid and Imperialism.

For example, the person who posted the video framed it this way:

“During our solidarity mock check-point/border check point, University of Oregon professor, James Olmsted, physically pushes two students after making very racists remarks to all of us. This was after we had asked him to calm down because he was making us feel intimidated.”

In this video, we see the same confrontation from a different angle, and we see some of what happened after the first video cuts out:

The poster of that video says more or less the same thing as the poster of the first video:

“Seconds before this video was recorded he shoves a student and continues to stir up tension until UOPD arrive on the scene.”

A commenter on the first video asserts:

“there are two sides to everything…people dont just act like this for no reason…I guarantee you the professor was reacting to something that isnt shown in this video”

An a commenter on the second also asserts that they are the aggressors:

“hahaha that girl thinks she’s being harassed. In reality, it’s a group of weirdos surrounding a law professor recording him, and pushing their ideals on him.”

After all: if this confrontation began with the students aggressively encroaching on his space—as he seems to be claiming—thereby impeding his ability to move freely, then our sympathy will naturally gravitate towards his side of the story. If he was simply going about his business, and they provoked him, then at least he isn’t the only asshole in the situation. But if the reverse is the case—if they were simply putting on a campus demonstration, peacefully—then he is obviously the one trying to provoke a confrontation. This is especially the case if, beforehand, he was making racist remarks.

Which is it? Which do you see?

Now, watch this six minute version, which is taken from the phone that he snatches from the students hand and puts in his pocket:

cjwho:

Shards of Turquoise Ice Jut Out of the World’s Largest Lake

Little kitten Pickles sounds like a goat when he tries to meow.

via eBaum’s World, Daily Picks and Flicks

Poorly drawn lines

Mar 17th 2013 By: Lauren Davis

Kate Vee's drawings delve into video games, Greek mythology, fairy tales and modern moments, and find the lovely ladies within. Whether she's drawing a woman having a not-so-ladylike moment (like over that oh-too-familiar puddle of post-celebratory puke) or illustrating the goddesses of Greek theater, she creates expressive figures who often show a touch of mischief. Vee is a Louisiana-based graphic designer with a flair for color and for melding the old and the new. It's especially refreshing, after seeing so many Art Nouveau portraits flung across the Internet, to see that Vee can take her Art Nouveau influences and use the for her own purposes, whether she uses jewelry-style patterns for objects in the background, or sweeping black lines to outline her subjects. You can follow Vee's work on her blog.

The Hot Hits

Prince Threatens Fans Who Attempted To Leave His Epic SXSW Gig The Hot Hits Things got a bit crazy at Prince's South by Southwest concert over the weekend after the iconic star got annoyed at fans who tried to leave early. Just 300 people were given tickets to Prince's SXSW gig at the La Zona Rosa club, where he performed for a ... Prince Rocks SXSWExaminer.com SXSW: Prince Rocks Festival With Marathon of EncoresHollywood Reporter all 49 news articles »

We now have the title and theme for American Horror Story's third season: Coven. Ryan Murphy will be taking his regular AHS players and a few new faces down to New Orleans, where they'll be up to plenty of magical hijinks.

Actress Francis Conroy teased the witchcraft plot a few days ago, but, thanks to TV Overmind's report from PaleyFest, we now know it will be the upcoming season's main theme. Conroy will rejoin Jessica Lange, Evan Peters, Sarah Paulson, Lily Rabe, and Taissa Farmiga, along with new cast member Kathy Bates as Lange's former best friend and current nemesis.

Murphy also mentioned on the PaleyFest panel that he's thinking of creating a "companion piece" to AHS, though he wouldn't elaborate on it, and that he's been considering a vampire season of AHS. We love American Horror Story and we love a good vampire tale, but would Murphy take us in a different enough direction to really give a vampire season teeth?

The new season of American Horror Story begins in October.

[TV Overmind]

Super Clyde, the CBS comedy pilot in which Rupert Grint gets rich and decides to become a superhero, is getting an actor worthy of its Batman-spoofing concept. Stephen Fry will be playing the butler who helps Grint's Clyde with his crimefighting quest.

Deadline reports that Fry will be playing Randolph, the butler and sidekick to young Clyde. Clyde is a meek fast-food worker who comes into a fortune and decides, taking his cues from Batman, to become a superhero. But given the comedic nature of the show and Fry's prior butler experience, their relationship may be less Alfred-and-Bruce than Jeeves-and-Wooster.

Stephen Fry To Co-Star In Greg Garcia’s CBS Comedy Pilot ‘Super Clyde’ [Deadline via The Mary Sue]

sassy-tamagotchi:

Australia

kazujun:

If Sherlock was anything other than a consulting detective I want it to be this

Sometimes a single TV episode can exemplify the spirit of its time and the properties that make television a unique medium. A Very Special Episode presents The A.V. Club’s survey of TV at its most distinctive.

The blank page is a portal and a prison. Writers can call into existence anything that can be put into words, and through the miracle of revision, can make heinous mistakes that never survive beyond the first draft. That’s a tremendous power to wield. But there are also deadlines to meet and an audience to please, and the yawning gap between the spark of a great idea and the impossibility of rendering it even adequately, let alone excellently. Writers tend to be cocky enough to believe that they can take any assignment and “make it their own.” But writers also live inside their own heads, which means deep doubts creep through ...

Read more

kkleiner writes "Now the field of 3D printing has advanced so far that a company called Nanoscribe is offering one of the first commercially available 3D printers for the nanoscale. Nanoscribe's machine can produce tiny 3D printed objects that are only the width of a single human hair. Amazingly this includes 3D printed objects such as spaceships, micro needles, or even the empire state building."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

High Country News has a remarkable obituary of one Robert Berlo, an army chaplain and map collector whose 13,000 travel maps were recently acquired by Stanford University’s Branner Earth Sciences Library. The collection includes “every official state road map from 1929 to the present, plus U.S. Forest Service, topographic, regional and city maps,” according to the article.

The real treasures of Berlo’s collection, however, were the maps of places he’d invented himself. Berlo used “the real geography of a place as the foundation for an invented city,” and imagined the evolution of the community from its first settlement to its latest metropolitan guise, creating a new map for each decade of its existence. Island Lakes, shown here, occupies a lake valley of Admiralty Island in the Alexander Archipelago of southeastern Alaska, about 50 miles south of Juneau. What I love about Island Lakes is the very lack of whimsicality in Berlo’s fidelity to the everyday grid that characterizes most modern cities. All he’s done is create another place that might have appeared on any of the 13,000 maps he collected in his lifetime. A man loyal to his passion, certainly.

I haven’t been able to find any other examples of Berlo’s imaginary maps, but I’d certainly be interested to hear of them.

By Jim Rossignol on March 17th, 2013 at 8:27 am.

Sundays are for playing Planetside 2 all day, of course. But there’s also some time for peaceful activities, such as reading and screaming. Let’s try some of that.

• Does it matter that games like Asssassin’s Creed are historically inaccurate? “Ms. Dolmage appends a final thought as the afternoon winds down: “It’s interesting to think about what games like this, that claim to be historically accurate, mean for the authority of historians,” she says. “Mark and I both work … on groups that are typically not written about. As soon as you change the perspective of what you’re writing about, and whose perspective you’re writing from, history is going to change.””
• PC Gamer interviews Chris “Starcraft II” Metzen.
• This Ouya thing is interesting, but if you were a first-time dev, why would you bet on it for your first release? “You might think these developers would want to try their hand at developing for the established PC or mobile platforms. After all, it’s a risk to develop for an unreleased console being made by an Internet startup with no track record and no proven market share. But when talking to a few first-time developers who are supporting the Ouya in a big way, the same message is heard again and again. This tiny, unproven box represents a way to fulfill their dream of getting a game on their TV set. It can turn indie gaming into something bigger than it is now.”
• Why dev studios should do internal game jams: “Deceptively simple, the game jam’s deadline is arguably more powerful than a sprint deadline or build milestone. If you don’t think you’ll have something to present at the end of the jam, the prospect of a public shaming by your peers can be a purer motivation to finish strong than a soul-draining months-long crunch cycle.”
• What’s the deal with this interactive fiction renaissance?
• “Christopher Nolan Has Ruined Videogames.”: “Video games seem to have Nolan’s films pinned down as more gritty and more human, and while they’re certainly the former, I’m not so sure about the latter part of the equation – it’s a cold cinema that Nolan peddles, and there’s never much room between the male posturing and twisting rules for much in the way of humanity. Regardless, there’s much more to him than being the master of the gritty reboot.”
• Tracy Lien on the genesis of FTL: “In many ways the Kickstarter campaign should have failed. Its developers were unknown. The game had no existing fanbase. It didn’t have fancy graphics or promise a product so enormous that players would need to hook car engines to their computers to make it work. The developers didn’t set out to make a commercial product backed by tens of thousands of people. The Kickstarter campaign did the opposite of fail.”
• Someone is still playing Curiosity. With an interesting conclusion.
• SimCity as a textbook for modernist architecture: “There’s been a clear shift in how city planning is conceptualized in SimCity since the first iteration of the game in 1989. Will Wright, creator of the first version, acknowledged his debt to urban systems theory. His game focused on feedback loops, using models that sought to reduce city activity into algorithms and formulas. But in the new SimCity, the individualization of the Sims and the introduction of multi-player can only serve to shake up the game’s algorithmic heritage. Globalization is now built in: the success of your town’s industry is linked to the world market and stock exchange, which in turn impacts the cost of raw materials. A failing coal plant in one town can raise energy prices in others, but synergistic collaborations can be mutually beneficial to players.”
• Command & Conquer, a non-preview.
• My friend Mark Wallace is compiling an atlas of imaginary maps. Please help him out by sending him imaginary maps.
• Have a listen to the Brainy Gamer podcast.

Music this week is some Nils Frahm.

symbolset writes "Microsoft has had some trouble as of late getting adoption of their mobile products. Even Bill Gates has said it was inadequate. Despite rave reviews of Windows Phone in the press it has failed to get double digit share of the smartphone market. Now comes reports from WMPoweruser that WP8 will lose mainstream support in July 2014."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

HARBOR SPRINGS, Mich. -- With an exchange of rings and a kiss, two men became spouses Friday during a ceremony at a northern Michigan Indian reservation after the tribal chairman signed a measure approving same-sex marriage in a state where it's officially banned.

Time for a red panda break! 

Well, unless women count as people.

…and, on a related point, Epps: “By diverting attention to a hypothetical drone strike on Jane Fonda, Paul has created the 2013 version of the 2009 “death panels.” No matter how many liberal columnists he wowed, he has done a disservice to the national interest by making it harder to address the real issues we face.” Pushback against Obama’s terror policies from Congress is desperately needed. But in addition to his horrible positions on many other civil liberties issues Paul is also worse than Obama just on national security state issues, which is why he was asking the wrong questions.

The equivalent of a guilty verdict, given the overwhelming evidence, shouldn’t be a sign of progress, but in a sense it is. The rape culture was in evidence throughout the trial:

Throughout this trial, the two defendants and a parade of friends who wound up mostly testifying against the defendants expressed little understanding of rape – let alone common decency or respect for women. Despite the conviction, the defendants likely don’t view themselves as rapists, at least not the classic sense of a man hiding in the shadows.

“It wasn’t violent,” explained teammate Evan Westlake when asked why he didn’t stop the two defendants as they abused a non-moving girl that Westlake knew to be highly intoxicated. “I always pictured it as forcing yourself on someone.”

And, as Travis Waldron points out, it’s remarkable in an awful way that the coach still has his job.

CNN broke the news on Sunday of a guilty verdict in a rape case in Steubenville, Ohio by lamenting that the “promising” lives of the rapists had been ruined.

Ahhhh se toda camiseta tivesse um pedacinho desse tipo de tecido no verso o mundo de quem usa óculos seria tãooooo mais fácil …
A idéia é simples. Colocar algumas faixas de tecido microfibra na camiseta e tá dááááá … salvar a vida dos 4 olhos <3

E nem precisava de tanto … um pedacinho já seria o suficiente :))) e de quebra ainda da pra deixar o celular sempre limpinho!

Tem AQUI e entrega no Brasil 0/

Dedico esse post a Reb’s que voltou a usar óculos hoje :)

Rap artist Tone Loc collapses on stage in Iowa: reports Reuters Canada NEW YORK (Reuters) - Grammy-winning rapper Tone Loc reportedly collapsed on stage late Saturday night during a performance in Des Moines, Iowa. Amateur video posted Sunday on the Des Moines Register newspaper website showed several ... and more »

You can create your own bullet time effect with an array of GoPros.

Pyromancers.com | Online Dungeon Painter & RPG Forum Scene Viewer - solutions for comfortoble online playing:

love a decent web-app mapping tool

Catalyst Game Labs is attending the GAMA Trade Show, as well as for the first time Pax East!

For those attending Pax East we’ll be at booths C701-C706 selling our games and running a swath of demos. From BattleTech and Leviathans to Balance of Power and The Duke (come by the booth and walk away with a free cut-out-and-play version of this game!), as well as special “convention playtests” for Shadowrun, Fifth Edition and Shadowrun: Crossfire (both games are in layout, so they won’t look very pretty at the show, but you’ll get a first chance to find out the meat of what’s coming mere months away!)

What does this mean for those not attending? It means that from March 19th till March 25th pretty much all personnel will be away from their normal communications (websites, emails, phones, you name it), including customer service.

As such, if you’re trying to contact anyone at Catalyst, please be patient during that time. Additionally, the reality is that it will also take a few days after the 25th before we’re able to dig our way out from under a week’s worth of communications, so expect a few days more after that.

We look forward to seeing everyone at these shows and for those unable to attend, thanks for your patience over the next two weeks…see you on the flip side!

Catalyst Game Labs