firehose

le Bat

Jenny McCarthy Body Count

Frozach Submitted

“Princess Peach” by Masao

Let’s all go into the weekend in this spirit: stretched out on a cushion, just playing whatever makes us happy, whether it’s Fire Emblem or Mega Man 2 – oh yeah, Mega Man 2’s out on eShop this week! – or something from the backlog.

BUY New Super Mario Bros. 2, New Super Mario Bros. U

“Small Dads” is a funny photo project by redditor afdlips where he takes people’s family photos and ‘shops the father by shrinking him down.

via Sad and Useless, Gawker

Oregon-based freelance photographer Michael S. Den Beste (aka “Nite4awk“) has created an absolutely wonderful series of photoshopped images that place the classic comic strip characters Calvin and Hobbes into real photographs. You can view more images from this collection online.

images via Nite4awk

via reddit, Nerd Approved, Geekologie

San Francisco-based artist Josh Ellingson created “Tentacle Cluster,” a piece that combines two of his (and my) favorite things, cephalopods and booze. Prints are available to purchase.

Frito-Lay ran a Facebook contest called “Lay’s Do Us A Flavor” to come up with the next flavor of Lay’s Potato Chips and while the official finalists won’t be announced until Tuesday, February 12, bags of the three new flavors have been seen on store shelves. According to the images popping up on the internet, they will be flavored like cheesy garlic bread, chicken & waffles, and Sriracha hot sauce. MSN Money reports that a “panel of chefs and flavor experts looked though about 3.8 million submissions and selected about 20 flavors to prototype. From there, the judges picked the three finalists…”

image via First We Feast

via First We Feast, Foodbeast

Orome1 writes "Adobe has pushed out an emergency Flash update that solves two critical vulnerabilities (CVE-2013-0633 and CVE-2013-0634) that are being actively exploited to target Windows and OS X users, and is urging users to implement it as soon as possible. According to a security bulletin released on Thursday, the OS X exploit targets Flash Player in Firefox or Safari via malicious Flash content hosted on websites, while Windows users are targeted with Microsoft Word documents delivered as an email attachments which contain malicious Flash content. Adobe has also announced its intention of adding new protections against malicious Flash content embedded in Microsoft Office documents to its next feature release of Flash Player."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

theodp writes "Got Milk? Got Milk Delivery Patent? Perhaps unfamiliar with the concept of the Milkman, the USPTO has granted Amazon.com a patent for the Recurring Delivery of Products , an idea five Amazon inventors came up with to let customers schedule product deliveries to their doorsteps or mailboxes on a recurring basis, without needing to submit a new order every time. 'For instance,' the filing explains, 'a customer may request delivery of one bunch of bananas every week and two gallons of milk every two weeks.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Presto Vivace sends this news from the Hill: "House Intelligence Committee Chairman Mike Rogers (R-Mich.) and ranking member Rep. Dutch Ruppersberger (D-Md.) said Friday that they plan to re-introduce the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act (CISPA) next week during a speech at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington. The bill is aimed at improving information-sharing about cyber threats between government and industry so cyberattacks can be thwarted in real time. ... It would also encourage companies to share anonymous cyber-threat information with one another, and provide liability protection for businesses so they don't get hit with legal action for sharing data about cyber threats. " You may recall CISPA from last year, when it was hailed as being even worse than SOPA, the Stop Online Piracy Act. We discussed why it was a bad bill back then; the new version is reportedly identical, so all of the same reasons will apply. The bill stalled last year against White House plans to veto it. Congressman Rogers said this about privacy fears: "We're talking about exchanging packets of information, zeroes and ones, if you will, one hundred millions times a second. So some notion that this is a horrible invasion of content reading is wrong. It is not even close to that." Don't worry folks; it's just zeroes and ones.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Google executive chairman Eric Schmidt plans to sell 42 percent of his shares in the company, as revealed in an SEC filing on Friday. The former CEO currently owns about 2.3 percent of the search giant, but plans to sell about 3.2 million of his 7.6 million shares. Based on the current value of Google's stock, that's worth a cool $2.51 billion to Schmidt. Schmidt has the option to spread the sale of the shares out over the course of a year to reduce the impact it will have on the market.

• Via MarketWatch
• Source Google (SEC)
• Related Items google sale stock eric schmidt shares

MojoKid writes "A few weeks back, we discussed whether a new GPU like the GeForce GTX 660 could breathe new life into an older quad-core gaming system built in mid 2008. The answer concluded was definitely yes — but many readers asked to reconsider the question, this time using a lower-end dual-core Core 2 Duo. The Core 2 Duo CPU chip used was a first-generation C2D part based on Intel's 65nm Conroe core. It's clocked at 3GHz with 4MB of L2 cache and has a 1333MHz FSB. The CPU was paired with 3GB of DDR2-1066 memory. The long and short of it is, you can upgrade the graphics card on a six year-old dual core machine and expect to see a noticeable improvement in game performance — significant gains in fact, up to 50 percent or more."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The drone industry's major professional association, AUVSI, is thinking hard about what a non-military U.S. market for drones looks like. Its theory: farms will buy more robots than cops will.

By Guest Contributor Suzanne Persard

Am I the last Jamaican to miss the happiness train?

After millions of hits on YouTube and a whirl of international attention, arguably the most popular commercial Volkswagen has ever aired, has been approved by “100 Jamaicans,” hailed as humorous by hundreds of other Jamaicans, and endorsed by the Jamaican Minister of Tourism.

The ad features a white man from Minnesota speaking exaggeratedly in patois, urging his unhappy coworkers to become happier with phrases like, “Yuh know what dis room needs? A smile!”  Clearly, this is Volkswagen’s way of telling you, Jamaicans are happy! You should be happy, too! Buy a 2013 Volkswagen Beetle and get happy!

According to Volkswagen, those 100 Jamaicans were involved in the screening of the ad so the German automobile giant could guarantee it wasn’t racist. A speech coach was also involved, according to Volkswagen, because to parody an entire people you’ve clearly got to make sure you’ve nailed that exotic accent.

With overwhelming approval from the public in the form of thousands of virtual “likes,” and Jamaicans posting on YouTube and Facebook with notes like, “I’m Jamaican, and I approve!,” it would seem that Volkswagen has won the battle waged by blatant racialized mockery disguised as ambiguous feel-good humor.

To be fair, there are Jamaicans of many races, including Indo-Jamaicans, Chinese Jamaicans, multi-racial Jamaicans, and yes, white Jamaicans. But Volkswagen’s aim wasn’t to present the multiculturalism of the island; instead, the ad was intentionally a caricature of Jamaican people, reinforcing a national identity typecast as ganja-smoking, lazying-away-in-the-sun-at-their-own-pace island folk. You know, just like those clay souvenirs of wide-toothed Rastafarians with enormous spliffs dangling from their mouths or key chains embossed with smiley faces sprouting dreadlocks and a byline exclaiming, “No Problem!”

Matt Lauer of NBC’s Today Show responded to his colleagues’ uneasiness with the ad by saying, “I thought, ‘If you buy this car, it puts you in a happy place, and what’s happier than the memories we all have of being on beautiful islands on island time?”  Matt might want to Google “neo-colonialism.” He should also check out Jamaica for Sale and Life and Debt.

The tourism that Lauer references in the commercial is not without consequences. The relationship between tourism and the Jamaican economy is complicated; it’s the Catch-22 of post-colonialism where rich Americans and Europeans come spend their money on an island whose people need these dollars.  Tourists oblivious to their role in perpetuating a system that allows them to consume and walk away unscathed, while the realities of poverty plague an entire country. For the tourists that can afford luxurious stays in Negril and Ocho Rios, at the cost of thousands of US dollars per vacation, the average Jamaican earns the equivalent of $1 US per hour constructing these hotels. You can be sure they aren’t working on island time.

What about that easygoing, laid-back island attitude?  At a rate of 13 percent unemployment, conflating an easygoing attitude with poverty is a detrimental conclusion. To put the gravity of Jamaica’s poverty in perspective, the US unemployment rate is about 8 percent; an unemployment rate of 13 percent is devastatingly high for a country you could pick up and drop in the middle of Connecticut.

In addition to the problematic generalization of Jamaicans as happy-go-lucky and carefree, our accent seems to lend itself to a special attention for parodying. (Remember Miss Cleo, who skyrocketed to psychic television fame with her unconvincing accent? And everyone who thought they could pull off a Cool Runnings accent?) The fact that patois is a dialect and not a language implicitly allows the media to mock the Jamaican accent in a way that would be unacceptable and unabashedly racist for any other culture.

As a dialect, speaking patois is immediately delegitimized because, according to post-colonial doctrine, English is the superior and the obvious standard. Our dialect is a stepchild to the more sophisticated speech of English and, consequently, we aren’t to be taken nearly as seriously as all those other folks who are speaking properly. Patois is assumed to be the language of the lower-class, uneducated masses, a highly problematic assumption given Jamaica’s post-colonial history. Essentially, speaking the Queen’s English is the aspiration; otherwise our very speech is deficient. Mocking our accent must be more acceptable then because our dialect is inherently downgraded via post-colonialism.

Those “100 Jamaicans” Volkswagen claims to have screened might say that we are, and hundreds more on social media sites might continue hitting that virtual “like.” As a Jamaican exhausted by parodies of our feel-good, catering-to-tourists-sipping-piña-coladas island culture, I’m ready to endure the blows for sticking to the unpopular opinion on this one.  We are “out of many, one people,” but a sampling of a population is not sufficient to speak for an entire people; most of all, they do not speak for me. Stamps of approval from your Jamaican friend, major media outlets that claim we’re being “too sensitive” about race, and Volkswagen’s focus group do not equate to a post-racial society where mocking a national identity is acceptable. The very idea that Volkswagen believes a focus group is capable of screening racism–and that racism can even be screened–is in itself telling.

The reasons for complicity may be manifold, and the double-edged, neo-colonial sword of Caribbean tourism remains a social and economic conundrum, clearly reinforced by Western projections of so-called harmless stereotypes.  But ads like this present an important opportunity for interrogating the structures bolstering racism, resisting mainstream narratives, and demanding accountability. When Ashton Kutcher played the role of Raj the Bollywood Producer in a similarly offensive Pop Chips ad, the masses overwhelmingly declared it to be racist and the ad was pulled.  So where’s the public outcry? Are we simply as happy and carefree as Volkswagen says we are?

In the meantime, I’d like to talk to those 100 other Jamaicans.  And while I’m at it, Matt Lauer.

“If, like me, you stopped eating brunch when you turned 30, you should know a frittata is like an omelette leached of its charms. Basically if you were wearing snow boots and stepped in a moist omelette and then scraped it off your soles, that’d be a frittata.”

- Top Chef Seattle Recap: David Rees on Sourdough Starters and Tom’s Mean Girl Tendencies — Grub Street New York

thisishangingrockcomics:

actual diary entry from when i was in 5th grade oh my god

thingsofthisworld:

Remnants of Abandoned Star Wars Sets in Morocco and Tunisia Reminiscent of Ancient Ruins

source

WARNING: Pretty much every other word is the f-word, so consider yourself properly informed.

Submitted by: Unknown

Tagged: vikings , tea , intense , monday thru friday Share on Facebook

Submitted by: Unknown

Tagged: horse mask , making fun , horses , poorly dressed Share on Facebook

mikiedee:

I designed a spoof poster a year ago then thanks to Google images and a lack of translation this happened…

Gail Simone was teasing a new project on Twitter yesterday but I’m sure no one guessed this one correctly. Simone and Freddie Williams II will produce, The Movement, focusing on the 99% of the DC Universe while Art Baltazar, Franco, and Ig Guara will team  to represent the more affluent 1% in The Green Team. Sound familiar? 

If the 1% vs. 99% thing rings a bell, it should. It’s part of the slogan used by the Occupy movement where people like Bruce Wayne and Lex Luther would have had a spotlight if they were real. But is that who we’ll see in the companion books? Here’s the official solicitation for The Movement #1:

We are faceless. We are limitless. We see all. And we do not forgive.
Who defends the powerless against the GREEDY and the CORRUPT? Who protects the homeless and poverty-stricken from those who would PREY upon them in the DARK OF NIGHT?
When those who are sworn to protect us abuse their power, when toxic government calls down super-human lackeys to force order upon the populace…finally, there is a force, a citizen’s army, to push order BACK. Let those who abuse the system know this as well: We have our OWN super humans now. They are not afraid of your badges or Leagues. And they will not be SILENCED.
We are your neighbors. We are your co-workers. And we are your children.

And The Green Team #1:

INVENTORS! EXPLORERS! ADVENTURERS! Do you need money to finance an important project? Then you should set up a meeting with THE GREEN TEAM!
• Nature of world-changing idea:
• Amount requested:
• Does your project have the potential to:
Fracture space-time?
Replace the combustion engine?
Attract extraterrestrial attention?
Prove/disprove existence of deities?
Piss off The Justice League?
Render the human body obsolete?
If any of the above are checked, please fill out liability release form GT2013-05. Send any 82 drawings, plans, models, or photos with request.

So, not quite the specifics you were hoping for. Bryan Young was able to speak with the creators about the project for Huffington Post and has the full interviews on Big Shiny Robot.

“The Movement is an idea I’ve had for some time. It’s a book about power–who owns it, who uses it, who suffers from its abuse,” said Simone. “As we increasingly move to an age where information is currency, you get these situations where a single viral video can cost a previously unassailable corporation billions, or can upset the power balance of entire governments. And because the sources of that information are so dispersed and nameless, it’s nearly impossible to shut it all down.”

Simone didn’t name any characters in the interview but said The Movement would be an adventure story with some dark humor, and that it feels like a “very new kind of superhero book.”

“We’re not trying to preach platitudes at people. I happen to love superhero comics, especially the crazy glamor and thrills they contain,” she said. “But on the other, I think the backdrop is a slice of reality that we’re unlikely to see in most superhero books. And I find that tremendously exciting.”

On the other side of the coin, Tiny Titans creators Baltazar and Franco said DC knew their sense of humor would be an important element of The Green Team and mentioned Superman and Wonder Woman but not in a specific context. Of course the focus of their book is money and power.

Franco said, “What comes to mind is: Can money make you happy?” And Baltazar added, “The real question is: Can money buy you anything in the DC universe? Would it make you powerful? Can it make you a hero? Can money make you…Super?”

The companion books are set to be released in May. Both have covers by Amanda Conner and varient covers by Cliff Chiang. In other DC news, Deathstroke, Hawkman, Team 7, Firestorm, Ravagers, and Sword of Sorcery have all been cancelled.

(via Huffington Post)

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