firehose

OneMinuteGalactica created a Star Wars remix of the classic Schoolhouse Rock! animated musical, “Interjections.”

video via OneMinuteGalactica, image via Wired GeekDad with art by Ethan Gilsdorf

via Wired GeekDad

New York Times

Groupon CEO Is Out New York Times GROUPON DISMISSES CHIEF | Andrew Mason, the irreverent chief executive of Groupon, was ousted on Thursday, after the company's dismal fourth-quarter results capped a string of disappointing quarters. True to his humorous style, Mr. Mason wrote in a ... Groupon Ousts CEO Andrew Mason; Leonsis Named as Intern Co-CEONBC4 Washington BLOOM IS OFF THE ROSE ON “DAILY DEALS” Groupon fires CEO as shares tankSky Valley Chronicle Mason Is a Better Investment Than GrouponTheStreet.com Chicago Tribune -Atlanta Business Chronicle (blog) -CTV News all 298 news articles »

An Autopsy of a Dead Social Network: Following the collapse of the social network Friendster, computer scientists have carried out a digital autopsy to find out what went wrong.:

“Friendster is a social network that was founded in 2002, a year before Myspace and two years before Facebook. Consequently, it is often thought of as the grand-daddy of social networks. At its peak, the network had well over 100 million users, many in south east Asia.

In July 2009, following some technical problems and a redesign, the site experienced a catastrophic decline in traffic as users fled to other networks such as Facebook. Friendster, as social network, simply curled up and died. […]

Facebook and other social networks ought to be paranoid about this kind of problem, if they’re not already.  It’s not hard to imagine how botched design changes could send people away, particularly if there is another emerging network ready to pick up the slack.”

Thom Yorke did such a great job dancing in Radiohead’s “Lotus Flower” video he decided to take another crack at busting a movie for Atoms For Peace’s new video. “Ingenue” is directed and choreographed by the same team that did “Lotus Flower,” and bears a striking amount of similarities to that video. This time, though, Yorke is joined by contemporary dancer and fellow natty dresser Fukiko Takase, who is either mirroring his motions or having some sort of wacky seizure. Watch the clip below, or just check out some choice gifs from Pitchfork and save about five minutes.

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In what will go down as a rare setback for the rising stars of Smash Mouth, the Spin Doctors, et al., the Mark McGrath And Friends Cruise has been canceled before it could ever set sail, consigning its mid-’90s artists to the sort of drydock drifting that does not also include make-your-own-sundae bars. The announcement was made with the usual lyricism one has come to expect from the Sugar Ray frontman, who changed the event’s official website to read, “The Mark McGrath & Friends Cruise Has Been Cancelled” without further elaboration, then set about answering the outcry from disappointed fans on Twitter with an empathetic shrug of “it’s a real bummer”—this in regards to his planned four-day Odyssey, in which the nostalgic siren song of “alternative” radio would have lured sailors to crash, again and again, upon the jagged, gray-dyed-blonde spikes of hard reality, and specifically the ...

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These one-of-a-kind, hand-carved skulls from Skullis were created using beautiful ammonite fossils. The detailed sculptures range from $60 all the way up to $1300 depending on their size and complexity.

images via Skullis

via Swen, Nerdcore

Kubb : The Outdoor Viking Party Game - Handcrafted by Kubb Kraft — Kickstarter:

3. Trash Talk: Insult Kubb skills, life skills, or any other skills as you see fit. Kindle the Viking spirit in all of your Kubb conquests. Viking accents (or attempts thereof) are also encouraged.

“

Every map, no matter how good overall, has weaknesses.

This is not new. Paper maps were never free from errors, after all, and with satnavs, even the best onboard maps would become less reliable if you didn’t purchase the updates.

But online maps are different: we’re using them much more often than we ever did paper maps or even satnavs. We haven’t just delegated our navigation skills to them: we’ve integrated them into our maps and websites, we rely on them for transit schedules and business listings. They give us a false sense of security and a false sense of reality: we forget that the map isn’t the territory.

We used to be more tentative with our paper maps or our friends’ directions. We tended to think about it more, rather than blindly follow.

We’ve decided that knowing where to go is no longer our problem, and getting lost is no longer our fault.

This might be a bit premature.

”

- All Online Maps Suck

arsvivendi:

Geometric Gifs by Matthew DiVito

Acutely awesome.

“Women lived in germ-ridden camps, languished in appalling prisons, and died miserably, but honorably, for their country and their cause just as men did.”

Conventional narrative has framed the Civil War as a man’s fight, with historical accounts focusing almost exclusively on the men who fought as Yanks and Rebs in the 1860s. But such commonly accepted accounts present, like all history, a revisionist history that excises the stories of the women who, despite the extraordinary obstructions of the era, took to the battlefields. In They Fought Like Demons: Women Soldiers in the Civil War (public library), historians DeAnne Blanton and Lauren M. Cook chronicle and contextualize more than 250 documented cases of women who served in the ranks of both the Union and Confederate armies dressed as men, “the best-kept historical secret of the Civil War” — an act at once rebellious and patriotic, using this usurped male social identity to claim full status as citizens of their nation and access male independence in an age when neither was available to women. Blanton and Cook write in the introduction:

Popular notions of women during the Civil War center on self-sacrificing nurses, romantic spies, or brave ladies maintaining their home front in the absence of their men. This conventional picture of gender roles does not tell the entire story, however. Men were not the only ones to march off to war. Women bore arms and charged into battle, too. Women lived in germ-ridden camps, languished in appalling prisons, and died miserably, but honorably, for their country and their cause just as men did.

To pass as a man, Union soldier Frances Louisa Clayton, who enlisted with her husband in 1861 as 'Jack Williams,' took up gambling, cigar-smoking, and swearing.

Courtesy of the Trustees of the Boston Public Library

Sarah Edmonds Seelye, one of the best-documented female soldiers, served two years in the Union army as Franklin Thompson and received a military pension 25 years after the war ended.

Courtesy of the Trustees of the Boston Public Library

So why did women do this? For some, like their male counterparts, the motivation was purely patriotic. Others did if for love, taking to the battlefields in order to remain close to a husband, lover, fiancé, father, or brother. But for many, the reason was economic — an army private made $13 a month, roughly double what a seamstress, laundress, or maid would make. At the time of the Civil War, women, unable to vote or have bank accounts and still subject to Victorian ideals of homemaking and motherhood as the sole purpose of female existence, had neither personal nor political agency. In fact, these female soldiers tended to come from particularly marginalized groups — immigrants, the working class, farm girls, and women living below the poverty line. The freedom to make and spend their own money, Blanton and Cook argue, was a source of unprecedented, if private, empowerment as they gained access to social opportunities and privileges previously unavailable to them. Blanton and Cook write:

Society placed enormous restrictions on females. While upper-class and educated middle-class women might find a small measure of independence through employment as teachers, writers, or governesses, working- and lower-class women had few appealing options outside of marriage. Their employment prospects were usually limited to sewing, prostitution, or domestic servitude. Statistically, the majority of unmarried working-class women chose the latter. In New York City in 1860, maids received received between four and seven dollars a month, ‘good’ cooks earned seven or eight dollars a month, and laundresses might earn up to ten dollars per month. … On the other hand, three months’ service as a private in the Union army yielded a hefty sum of thirty-nine dollars in an age when most monthly salaries for men ranged from ten to twenty dollars.

Union soldier Albert Cashier, who was really Jennie Hodgers, fought in dozens of battles during the Civil War. In 1913, she made headlines upon being discovered as a woman in an old soldiers home.

Courtesy of the Trustees of the Boston Public Library

Though once found out, these female soldiers were discharged from the army for “congenital peculiarities,” “sexual incompatibility,” or the unambiguously termed offense of “unmistakable evidence of being a woman,” most of these women went undetected, at least for a while — a fact not all that astounding in the context of Victorian society where the single most revealing litmus test, nudity, was a rarity given bathing was a rare occurrence and people often slept in their clothes. (But today, in an age when the tip of the devastating iceberg that is sexual assault in the military is only beginning to emerge, one has to wonder what happened to the women who did get found out.)

Thanks to the poorly fitted uniforms, some women were even able to disguise their pregnancies until the very end, startling their male platoon mates with the delivery. Others chose to continue dressing as men after the end of the war, raising gender identity questions also not discussed in the book. But perhaps most interesting of all is the question of how women got the idea for this in the first place. Blanton argues that much of it had to do with cultural influence — cross-dressing female heroines permeated Victorian literature, with military and sailor women often celebrated in 17th-century ballads, novels, and poems.

They Fought Like Demons goes on to explore the complex motivations, realities, and untold stories of women who fought as, and fought like, men, reminding us that omission is as much a tool of political oppression in the construction of cultural mythology as propaganda.

Some images via Smithsonian Magazine

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She’s really working it on the treadmill…

liberalsarecool:

Joe Biden refreshes our memory about Republicans.

In the swelling tide preceding Batman Incorporated #8, the promised death of the current Robin and the impending finale of Grant Morrison’s six-year opus, something jumped out at me about the writer’s previous work for hire: He has a propensity to kill the characters he introduces into the universes of Marvel and DC Comics before he leaves.

Think back to his first major mainstream superhero book, JLA. In it, Morrison and Howard Porter revived the team in a back-to-basics approach featuring the seven most popular and iconic members. But during that time Morrison also created (with Mark Millar and N. Steven Harris) the Mesoamerican hero Aztek. Launched in his own series — whose first issue teased his impending death — Aztek later joined Morrison’s JLA and was killed in JLA #41, the writer’s final issue.

Next came Morrison’s acclaimed (and sometimes criticized) run on Marvel’s New X-Men. In that, he created the introduced the helmeted Xorn, a Chinese mutant with a “star for a brain” who was one of the series’ most popular characters outside its longtime cast. However, Xorn was famously revealed in the writer’s penultimate arc to be a construct of Magneto, returning from the dead. Although Morrison effectively killed Xorn, Marvel quickly brought the character back in some conflicting stories that included twin brothers, clones and, most recently, ghost.

Not to diminish the death of Damian Wayne, but putting his death alongside Xorn’s and Aztek’s in a broader context of Morrison’s storytelling decisions within work-for-hire superhero comics raises an interesting question: Is it a coincidence, or is Morrison consciously trying to limit the use of characters he created? Or maybe, perhaps, it’s Morrison giving his creations something most work-for-hire characters never have: a genuine third act.

Google voice does a valiant job of trying to interpret Hungarian.

Dystopian Rebel writes "A Stanford comp-sci student has found a serious bug in Chromium, Safari, Opera, and MSIE. Feross Aboukhadijeh has demonstrated that these browsers allow unbounded local storage. 'The HTML5 Web Storage standard was developed to allow sites to store larger amounts of data (like 5-10 MB) than was previously allowed by cookies (like 4KB). ... The current limits are: 2.5 MB per origin in Google Chrome, 5 MB per origin in Mozilla Firefox and Opera, 10 MB per origin in Internet Explorer. However, what if we get clever and make lots of subdomains like 1.filldisk.com, 2.filldisk.com, 3.filldisk.com, and so on? Should each subdomain get 5MB of space? The standard says no. ... However, Chrome, Safari, and IE currently do not implement any such "affiliated site" storage limit.' Aboukhadijeh has logged the bug with Chromium and Apple, but couldn't do so for MSIE because 'the page is broken" (see http://connect.microsoft.com/IE). Oops. Firefox's implementation of HTML5 local storage is not vulnerable to this exploit."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Amazon today announced it's signed a deal with Scripps Networks Interactive that will bring TV content from a slew of channels including the Travel Channel, Food Network, HGTV, DIY Network, and Cooking Channel to Prime Instant Video. It's the first such online-only subscription distribution agreement anyone has reached with Scripps, representing the latest salvo fired in an escalating licensing battle with Netflix.

Scripps content will be available starting today, with popular shows including Anthony Bourdain: No Reservations, Iron Chef America, Man vs. Food, Cupcake Wars, House Hunters and more. Aside from streaming episodes, Amazon says you'll also be able to purchase "many" programs for permanent storage in the cloud via Instant Video. "We are excited to be the exclusive online-only subscription home for Scripps content and know our customers are going to love getting these great shows as part of Prime," said Brad Beale, Amazon's head of video content acquisition.

• Source Amazon
• Related Items licensing hgtv travel channel food network prime prime instant video instant video scripps networks interactive Amazon

We understand where [John Clarke Mills] is coming from when he says he wants a home theater but not at the expense of dedicating a room to it. His situation is a bit more sticky than most folks in that he has a beautifully kept Victorian era home. Recently he was removing a renovation from ages past that didn’t fit with the style and it gave him the opportunity to build in this hidden projector screen.

Years ago someone walled in this opening and added french doors. After opening up the wall [John] sized up the situation and decided he had just enough room to build a soffit which could hide a rolled up projection surface. He purchased a motorized screen (we’ve seen a few diy projection screens but can’t remember one that rolls up) and built a slot into the design just large enough for the screen to pass through. He’s testing it out in the clip after the break before doing the plaster work.

The columns on either side are his additions as well. The floor of the house is unlevel and one of those columns ended up a full inch longer than the other. We certainly can’t tell.

Filed under: home entertainment hacks

The White Whale is a Moby-Dick inspired illustration by Dan McCarthy that shows a giant scarred up white sperm whale charging through a large group of squid and sharks. Prints are available to purchase online.

image via Dan McCarthy

via Ted Rheingold

“

“Dave’s like, let’s just do it Wednesday. Unannounced!” Rock said. But the elder of the two comedians said he’s filming a new movie this spring and would need to get his new material ready before he would commit to a tour. (He did say he could be ready by Halloween.) This is probably what’s best for us fans—Chappelle and Rock have appeared together at the Comedy Cellar before, but it would be great to see a full-on tour or concert as opposed to more occasional impromptu duets.

We’ll have to wait and see whether Chappelle and Rock can make it happen. But in the meantime, take McCarthy’s advice and contact “HBO, Showtime, or your own favorite TV station” and ask them to help make this dream into an uproarious reality.

”

- Dave Chappelle, Chris Rock do stand-up at the Comedy Cellar together, talk potential tour plans.

“

The NFL is looking into allegations certain teams have asked a draft prospect about his sexual orientation.

Reports surfaced yesterday Colorado tight end Nick Kasa was asked whether or not he liked girls during the interview process at the NFL Scouting Combine.

“We will look into the report on the questioning of Nick Kasa at the Scouting Combine,” NFL spokesman Greg Aiello said in a statement. “It is league policy to neither consider nor inquire about sexual orientation in the hiring process.

“In addition, there are specific protections in our collective bargaining agreement with the players that prohibit discrimination against any player, including on the basis of sexual orientation.”

The allegations come just days after it was revealed teams wanted to know more about controversial Notre Dame linebacker prospect Manti Te’o’s sexual preferences.

Kasa said that during the interview process, teams outwardly questioned his sexuality.

“They ask you like, ‘Do you have a girlfriend? Are you married? Do you like girls?’” Kasa said on an ESPN Radio show in Denver. “Those kinds of things. It was kind of weird. But they would ask you with a straight face, and it’s a pretty weird experience altogether.”

”

- Report: NFL investigating teams asking prospects about sexual preference at combine - NYPOST.com

“

JACKSON, Miss. (AP) — Whatever his prospects for winning the coming mayoral election in his hometown of Clarksdale, Miss., Marco McMillian was considered by many to be a man on the rise. So word spread fast when his SUV was involved in a wreck this week, and he was nowhere to be found.

The discovery of the openly gay candidate’s body near a Mississippi River levee Wednesday stunned residents of Clarksdale, a Blues mecca in the flatlands of the Mississippi Delta.

Authorities were investigating McMillian’s death as a homicide, and said a person of interest was in custody, but released few other details.

“There’s a lot of people upset about it,” said Dennis Thomas, 33, who works at Abe’s Barbeque.

“Why would somebody want to do something like that to somebody of that caliber? He was a highly respected person in town,” Thomas said.

The 34-year-old Democrat wasn’t running what many would consider a typical campaign for political office in Mississippi, which is known for its conservative politics.

Campaign spokesman Jarod Keith said McMillian’s campaign was noteworthy because he may have been the first openly gay man to be a viable candidate for public office in the state.

McMillian, who was black, had also forged ties while serving for four years as international executive director of the historically black Phi Beta Sigma Fraternity Inc. Photos on McMillian’s website and Facebook page show him with a younger Barack Obama, former President Bill Clinton and with U.S. Rep. John Lewis, a Georgia Democrat.

”

- Miss. town stunned by slaying of mayoral candidate - Yahoo! News

An anonymous reader writes "While speaking at the TED Conference in California earlier today, Sergey Brin seemingly tried to set the stage for a world where using Google Glass is as normal as using a smartphone. What's more, Brin went so far as to say that using smartphones is 'emasculating.' Brin said that smartphone users often seclude themselves in their own private virtual worlds. 'Is this the way you're meant to interact with other people,' Brin asked. Are people in the future destined to communicate via just walking around, looking down, and 'rubbing a featureless piece of glass,' Brin asked rhetorically. 'It's kind of emasculating. Is this what you're meant to do with your body?' Is wearing futuristic glasses any better?" Another reader sends in an article that also muses on our psychological connection to our devices. Or, as he puts it, the "increasingly weird and perhaps overly intimate relationship we have with our gadgets; the fist we touch when awake, the last at night. Our minds have become bookended by glass."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

It’s difficult at this point for a revisionist, large-scale cinematic fairy tale to stand out. The latest, Jack The Giant Slayer, comes on the heels of a two-year flood of similar fare, from Beastly, Red Riding Hood, Snow White And The Huntsman, Mirror Mirror, and Hansel & Gretel: Witch Hunters on the big screen to Grimm and Once Upon A Time on TV. And all of them follow a wave of fantasy children’s-book adaptations (The Spiderwick Chronicles, Bridge To Terabithia, the Narnia movies, etc.) which themselves followed in the footsteps of the billion-dollar Lord Of The Rings juggernauts. At this point, CGI battle fatigue has set in, and the latest set of angry polished pixels doesn’t look much different than the last.

Director Bryan Singer (The Usual Suspects, Superman Returns) and his three credited screenwriters seem to be trying to distinguish Jack from the last few years’ worth ...

Read more

By Jenna Pitcher on Feb 28, 2013 at 2:20a

Square Enix recently submitted a trademark application for Deus Ex: Human Defiance, according to a recent document on TMview, a European trademark information website.

The application is dated Feb. 26, 2013 and the trademark status is "application under examination."

The Deus Ex: Human Defiance trademark application applied for three classes — and their subclasses — of goods and services.

These three classes are computer games software; printed matter, which includes subclasses like computer game strategy guides and comic books; and entertainment services, such as online computer game services.

Polygon has contacted Square Enix for comment and will update the story as more information comes to hand.

The new Copyright Alert System, a.k.a. the 'Six Strikes' policy, went into effect on Monday. Comcast and Verizon activated it today. Ars Technica asked them and other participating ISPs to see the copyright alerts that will be sent to customers who have been identified as infringing. Comcast was the only one to grant their request, saying that a "small number" of the alerts have already been sent out. The alerts will be served to users in the form of in-browser popups. They explain what triggered the alert and ask the user to sign in and confirm they received the alert. (Not admitting guilt, but at least closing off the legal defense of "I didn't know.") The article points out that the alerts also reference an email sent to the Comcast email address associated with the account, something many users not be aware of. The first two notices are just notices. Alert #5 indicates a "Mitigation Measure" is about to be applied, and that users will be required to call Comcast's Security Assurance group and to be lectured on copyright infringement. The article outlines some of the CAS's failings, such as being unable to detect infringement through a VPN, and disregarding fair use. Comcast said, "We will never use account termination as a mitigation measure under the CAS. We have designed the pop-up browser alerts not to interfere with any essential services obtained over the Internet." Comcast also assures subscribers that their privacy is being protected, but obvious that's only to a point. According to TorrentFreak, "Comcast can be asked to hand over IP-addresses of persistent infringers, and the ISP acknowledges that copyright holders can then obtain a subpoena to reveal the personal details of the account holder for legal action."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Transgender first-grader's bathroom use spurs school discrimination complaint KOAA.com Colorado Springs and Pueblo News A six-year-old transgender child from Fountain is making national headlines because her elementary school says she can't use the girl's bathroom anymore. On Wednesday afternoon, the Mathis family held a press conference to announce the filing of a ... and more »

MojoKid writes "Aside from the terrible nickname (it sounds like a term for the spoiled offspring of fabulous people), phablets are somewhat controversial because they seem to be the epitome of inflated phone sizes. A lot of people wanted bigger, and this is 'bigger' to the extreme. A larger screen on a smartphone is attractive for obvious reasons, but surely there's a limit. So how big is too big? If you're not into parsing out the particulars of form factors and use cases, here's a really easy way to figure out if your phone or phablet is too big: Can you hold the device in one hand and 1) unlock the phone, 2) type out a text message with your thumb, and 3) adjust the volume with the rocker without using your other hand? If not, you might need a smaller phone."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

It's not that I want to read every website as black text on a white background. I just don't want to read it when it looks like garbage. I think the User Styles project is really nice. It makes a few mainstream sites I visit better. It boils them down to their essence but keeps the original spirit. I hope this concept expands.

By way of Pinboard