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17 Mar 23:01

When hardware fails you

by sharhalakis

Image by Rawb

17 Mar 23:00

Um. From the Star Trek film blooper reel: Jim Kirk and Mr. Spock...



Um. From the Star Trek film blooper reel: Jim Kirk and Mr. Spock suddenly acquire Irish accents. of… dubious quality.

17 Mar 23:00

This isn’t Rock ‘n Roll…

17 Mar 22:59

Gradient

17 Mar 22:57

partyintheusanus: HAVE YOU EVER SEEN A SHAVED RABBIT

partyintheusanus:

HAVE YOU EVER SEEN A SHAVED RABBIT

image

17 Mar 22:57

Photo



17 Mar 22:55

lostintrafficlights: mildlyamused: Dagger owned by Princess...



lostintrafficlights:

mildlyamused:

Dagger owned by Princess Adile Sultana (1825-1898)

The frilly pink-ness of this murder weapon appeals to my soul.

Go back to working, my demon slave horde. I must have this by midnight.

17 Mar 22:55

A winter bee?

by Rusty
It goes without saying that beekeepers are a weird lot. Still, it’s amazing to what lengths a human being will go to imitate the glorious honey bee. Right. So this morning I received these photos from Ivan in Wisconsin. Ivan has been hanging around Honey Bee Suite long enough for me to recognize both his [...]
17 Mar 22:55

Photo





17 Mar 22:53

R.I. adults took a standardized test, and they didn’t like it

by russiansledges
The Providence Student Union, a high school student advocacy group, persuaded several dozen high-powered adults to take the test as part of their protest against a new state requirement that high school seniors must reach a certain level of proficiency on the exam to graduate — even though the test wasn’t designed for this purpose. It wasn’t even designed for the assessment of individual students. The Providence Journal interviewed many of the adults after they took the test and it reported that most of them thought they flunked. Results will be made available Tuesday. Some said the test included “trick” questions.
17 Mar 22:53

RSS-Sync Mailing List

I created a new mailing list for people who want to talk about the technical side of RSS syncing.

Ideally there would be a single standard for RSS syncing, and clients could choose among systems. But I don’t insist on that — at least not yet. I think it’s ambitious enough just to get some working sync systems up and running.

17 Mar 22:52

Using Python and the NLTK to Find Haikus in the Public Twitter Stream

17 Mar 22:41

Photo



17 Mar 21:14

Netflix Already Built And Killed An Amazing Social Network

firehose

"Much like a gym membership, Netflix’s ideal customers pay every month for a service they rarely use but feel too guilty to quit. That’s why Netflix employs friendly Oregonians as their customer service representatives to talk people out of quitting after the free trial they signed up for to watch House of Cards."

The reversal of a 1988 law makes it easier to share your Netflix picks, but this isn't the company's first try.
17 Mar 21:13

The Difference Between Family And Party Size Doritos Is One Ounce

firehose

A party is just a family with a time limit

Guess what America — the difference between family and party size bags is ONE OUNCE (that is, the family size = 17 oz. and the party size = 16 oz.). That’s like, a few chips at most.
17 Mar 19:53

poetryofblood: asgardiancherrypudding: WHERE IS YOUR GOD NOW,...





poetryofblood:

asgardiancherrypudding:

WHERE IS YOUR GOD NOW, GENDER ROLES?

every bathroom everywhere should say this

17 Mar 18:49

Photo





17 Mar 18:49

Lincoln Heard, age 3, and his Raspberry Pi

by liz

Meet Lincoln, who is three years old. He’d like to show you how to set up your Raspberry Pi.

Thanks very much, Lincoln, and thanks Dad!

17 Mar 18:49

Amy’s Game of Life

by liz
firehose

“I wanted to make it do what I wanted it to do, not what the people working at Apple or Android wanted it to do”.

Amy Mather is thirteen years old. She made a presentation at last week’s Raspberry Jamboree in Manchester, where she explains how she got into programming and why she loves it: “I wanted to make it do what I wanted it to do, not what the people working at Apple or Android wanted it to do”. Amy walks us through Conway’s Game of Life, which she ends up building…well, I won’t spoil it for you. Watch this one all the way through; it’s worth it.

In the week since the Jamboree, I think I’ve had more emails about Amy’s presentation than about anything else – people have wanted to know when the video will be ready (word about this excellent presentation spread very fast on Twitter), and to congratulate Amy.

I’m very struck by the number of different organisations that have been supporting Amy; Codecademy, Young Rewired State, the Raspberry Jams and Manchester Girl Geeks have all helped her on her journey. If you want to see more kids like Amy, there’s something you can do: support these organisations by volunteering or donating. We can’t expect schools to do it all for us; the wider engineering community has, we believe, a responsibility to give kids like Amy all the opportunities to learn she can get her crocodile clips on. The Raspberry Pi is all about putting opportunities in the way of kids, so they have a chance to discover, like Amy, something new that they can quickly become skilled at, and that they love doing.

Alan O’Donohoe, who organises the Jams with the energy of a toddler with a coffee machine, has blogged more about the day on the Raspberry Jams site. Well done Amy – and thanks Alan!

17 Mar 18:26

Kickstarter overachiever Legend of Dungeon out now for PC, Mac, Linux

by Jessica Conditt

Legend of Dungeon, new game from IGF 2011 finalist, out now
Don't expect to survive in Legend of Dungeon - at least, that's what the creepy announcer in the above video warns. From developer Robot Loves Kitty, Legend of Dungeon is a roguelike action RPG beat-em-up with dynamic lighting and soundtrack systems, featuring more than 240 responsive music tracks. Legend of Dungeon is available now for PC, Mac and Linux in "nearly beta," for $10.

The game features a single-player mode and up to four-player local co-op, an online leaderboard and absolutely no DRM. It's up for a bid on Steam via Greenlight.

Robot Loves Kitty was nominated for an IGF 2011 award in Technical Excellence for Neverdaunt:8bit, alongside nominees Minecraft and Amnesia: The Dark Descent. The team also won a coveted Ouya dev kit and saw success with Legend of Dungeon on Kickstarter, raising $33,000 of a $5,000 goal in December.

Robot Loves Kitty will be sequestered in booth 191 at PAX East from March 22 - 24, with a playable demo of Legend of Dungeon.

JoystiqKickstarter overachiever Legend of Dungeon out now for PC, Mac, Linux originally appeared on Joystiq on Sun, 17 Mar 2013 13:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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17 Mar 18:24

Film: Newswire: Michelle Williams appeared in a magazine ostensibly dressed as a Native American. Oh boy.

by Austin Bernhardt

Cue the collar-loosening. The spring/summer issue of British fashion magazine AnOther is out, and its cover feature is an interview and fashion spread with America’s sweetheart Michelle Williams dressed in a series of fun vintage looks, including long, black, braided hair with a feather in it, and makeup that makes her eyes look sunken and somber. And for the pièce de résistance, as Ruth Hopkins puts it in the inevitable diatribe against said image, “what appears to be some sort of academic or legal robe.” (Wait… that’s not part of a stereotype, right?)

Native American activists like Hopkins have already expressed their anger and disappointment over the shoot. The Native American Journalists Association issued a statement, which, though vague, urged journalists to “think about the artistic value” of images depicting members of a given cultural group. And a number of non-Native American people have very ...

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17 Mar 18:23

Film: Great Job, Internet!: Read This: The letter from a school librarian that’s responsible for Francis Ford Coppola directing The Outsiders 

by Matt Kodner

The Internet is full of interesting things to read outside of The A.V. Club—no, really! In our periodic Read This posts, we point you toward interesting or noteworthy pieces that caught our eye.

Last week, Letters Of Note compiled a series of correspondences from 1980 between an elementary school librarian and a Fred Roos, a hotshot Hollywood producer. Jo Ellen Misakian, the librarian, reached out to Francis Ford Coppola suggesting he adapt her school’s favorite book, The Outsiders. Shockingly, Misakian received a response from Roos that Letters Of Note wisely qualifies as “cautiously optimistic.” The letters chronicle the pitching process, and lead up to Coppola actually directing the film, keeping the school children updated along the way with a bevy of behind-the-scenes production notes.

It’s a very neat story that demonstrates the power of the organized fan’s opinion in the brutal Hollywood industry, which couldn ...

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17 Mar 18:21

Elementary, “Déjà Vu All Over Again”

by Myles McNutt
firehose

so the long-term twist of this series is to separate Holmes and Watson? uhh

With Joan branching out as a consulting detective in her own right, Elementary has opened the door to enabling more than a single mystery within a single episode. Although not as clearly divided as a show like CSI: (which almost always involves two or three cases at a given time), “Déjà Vu All Over Again” seeks to formalize an informal storytelling strategy we saw in earlier episodes. While Joan’s stories were often framed as secondary mysteries, like her married suitor, now, her training could theoretically allow her to handle more substantial mysteries on her own.

As “Déjà Vu All Over Again” unfolds, Sherlock sends Joan to handle a missing person case while deciding to track down a subway pusher still roaming the streets of New York City, and I will admit to being somewhat apprehensive. While I have found Lucy Liu’s performance to be consistently strong ...

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17 Mar 18:08

Film: Newswire: Today in “What’s being Kickstarted?”: Maybe Pushing Daisies, definitely not Firefly 

by Erik Adams
firehose

attn: lg

Good news for creators and showrunners of beloved TV series canceled before their time: Thanks to the Veronica Mars movie, they can now anticipate at least one question in all interviews regarding future projects. “Any thoughts on a Kickstarter for a [insert beloved TV series canceled before its time] [sequel movie/wrap-up miniseries/collectible card game that ties up all the loose ends]?” Not that Bryan Fuller needs to answer that question during the press rounds for HannibalVeronica Mars’ Rob Thomas has already done so, telling Hitfix that Fuller reached out to him to discuss crowdfunding and its ability to touch dead things and bring them back to life. “And I know he was talking about Pushing Daisies,” Thomas continued, thus fulfilling the one-in, one-out policy of longed-for TV revivals.

But as fans of Pushing Daisies know, magic revival powers can only be used once, which is probably why ...

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17 Mar 18:08

TV: Newswire: Today show pariah Matt Lauer poised to replace Alex Trebek, kill off another American institution 

by Scott Tobias
firehose

ugh

Not Ken Jennings

For nearly 30 years, Alex Trebek has been the man with all the questions, leading Jeopardy!, the brainiest game show on television, through dramatically changing times without fundamentally changing a thing. But Trebek has suffered some health problems, including a mild heart attack last summer, and he’s expected to retire from the post in 2016. Meanwhile, Matt Lauer is the $25 million captain of the sinking ship known as NBC’s Today show, which has recently hemorrhaged viewers to ABC’s Good Morning, America, now the #1 morning show in the country. On Wednesday, the New York Times’ Brian Stetler broke a juicy story about the terrible dysfunction at the Today show, with one anonymous source after another blaming Lauer for fostering a toxic relationship with both staff members and the public at large. Lauer’s fingerprints could not be wiped from the messy departure of co-host Ann Curry ...

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17 Mar 18:07

TV: Newswire: No, Tina Fey does not want to take over SNL when Lorne Michaels retires

by Austin Bernhardt
firehose

"We can also most likely assume at this point that she doesn’t want to be the new face of Chanel No. 5 and isn’t running in 2016 and has no aspirations be the first woman on the moon, so we should probably just stop making assumptions about what she’s going to do with her life and go fuck ourselves."

Last month, we found out that Tina Fey does not want to host the Oscars. Today, Fey has confirmed that she also would not want to take over Saturday Night Live from Lorne Michaels should he decide to retire. “[H]e is the center of that show,” Fey told The Huffington Post in an interview, “and I think ... when he wants to stop, it should just stop.” We can also most likely assume at this point that she doesn’t want to be the new face of Chanel No. 5 and isn’t running in 2016 and has no aspirations be the first woman on the moon, so we should probably just stop making assumptions about what she’s going to do with her life and go fuck ourselves

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17 Mar 18:06

Music: Albums That Time Forgot: The drunk history of American drinking songs 

by Kyle Ryan

For years, The A.V. Club has delved into cinematic history’s dustbin with Films That Time Forgot, but far more records are released every year than films. If cinema has a dustbin of forgotten films, music has a giant Dumpster. In Albums That Time Forgot, we examine records few people would remember.

Artist: Oscar Brand with Erik Darling

Album: American Drinking Songs, 1956

Label: Riverside Records

Wait, who? Fans of American folk music and regular listeners to WNYC will recognize Oscar Brand’s name; the musician, singer, and musical historian has been at it for more than seven decades. His Saturday-night radio show, Oscar Brand’s Folksong Festival, ran weekly for more than 60 years on WNYC— the House Un-American Activities Committee once described it as a “pipeline of communism”—and he has an extensive discography that’s more than 50 albums deep. But even a man as established ...

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17 Mar 18:04

Ain’t nothing on

17 Mar 18:04

Donte Stallworth injured in hot-air balloon crash - Los Angeles Times

firehose

is he still banned from driving after that fatal car accident years ago?
dude needs to just stay home


Los Angeles Times

Donte Stallworth injured in hot-air balloon crash
Los Angeles Times
Donte Stallworth, the free-agent wide receiver who played for the New England Patriots last season, is recovering from severe burns he sustained when a hot-air balloon that was carrying him and two other passengers crashed into power lines in Homestead, ...
Donte' Stallworth in balloon accidentESPN
NFL player among 2 injured in Florida air balloon crashCNN
Stallworth suffers burns in hot-air balloon crashChicago Tribune
Examiner.com -Florida Times-Union -NBCSports.com
all 71 news articles »
17 Mar 18:03

Declassified Tapes Reveal Nixon Tried To Sabotage Vietnam Peace Talks

Declassified tapes of President Lyndon Johnson's telephone calls provide a fresh insight into his world. Among the revelations - he planned a dramatic entry into the 1968 Democratic Convention to re-join the presidential race. And he caught Richard Nixon sabotaging the Vietnam peace talks... but said nothing.