Newsweek

Leonard Nimoy helped bring politics to Star Trek DAWN.com LEONARD Nimoy, best known for his portrayal of Star Trek's Spock, has died at age 83. Star Trek was a highly political show, and Nimoy, through his acting and writing, was at the heart of it. Spock believed in logic, or what social scientists call rational choice. Notable deaths last weekChicago Daily Herald 'There was something universal in his appeal': B.C. Star Trek fans mourn ...The Province Thank You, Leonard Nimoy (1931-2015)Pop Insomniacs Design & Trend -Access Hollywood all 4,149 news articles »

Los Angeles Times

Gunman in South Korea kills 3 people before shooting himself, officials say Los Angeles Times South Korea was reeling Friday from its second bloody shooting in less than a week, incidents that shocked a nation where gun violence is extremely rare. Both incidents allegedly involved disputes over money and involved victims and perpetrators who knew ... Four killed in South Korea shooting rampageBusiness Standard all 219 news articles »

Quick-witted, devious, and ambitious, otterlings are a mischievous race that dwells in riverfront villages. They make natural craftsmen and nimble fighters on the battlefield. Meanwhile their grandiose ambitions often lead them to unlawfulness.

Otterlings are the second race in the Adorable Creatures series, following Garden Gnomes. As natural rogues and wizards, otterlings make powerful allies, often thinking outside the box and having a plan or at least the resources to get them out of any situation. However, their unethical practices and greed can put them at odds with more lawful party members.

For my campaigns, I wanted to create a culture of people who make their living off the black market or else are known for raising rogues and wizards. Though evil, otterling settlements see the value of good business and rarely attack good-doers on sight. This allows DMs to include otterling villages in good campaigns where party members can track down an enemy on the run, find new magical items, or find information on the shadier corners of the world.

For the race, I naturally drew inspiration from otters. They have a bonus in Swim checks and a penchant for crafting (otters are among the few animals to use tools). As otters have historically been used to help fishermen catch fish, I felt it would be an interesting addition for otterlings to have once been enslaved by humans. Thus otterlings are not prone to trusting humans, a race that is typically seen as a safe choice in character creation.

To learn more about otterlings, download the free PDF!

Otterling Racial Traits

Type: Humanoid (Otterling)	0 RP
+2 Dexterity, +2 Intelligence, -2 Wisdom: Otterlings are slippery in tongue and on the battlefield, however their ambitions often get the best of them.	0 RP
Medium: Otterlings are Medium creatures and thus receive no bonuses or penalties due to their size.	0 RP
Base Speed: Otterlings have a base speed of 30 ft.	0 RP
Swim: Otterlings swim at a base speed of 30 ft. They receive a +8 racial skill bonus on Swim checks.	2 RP
Hold Breath: Otterlings can hold their breath for a number of rounds equal to four times their Constitution score before risking drowning or suffocating.	1 RP
Fearless: Otterlings gain a +2 racial bonus on all saving throws against fear effects.	1 RP
Craft (Skill Bonus): Otterlings receive a +2 racial bonus on any one Craft or Profession skill.	2 RP
Merchant’s Eye (Skill Bonus): Otterlings receive a +2 racial bonus on Appraise skill checks.	2 RP
Weapon Familiarity: Otterlings are proficient with thrown weapons and slings and treat any weapon with the word “halfling” in its name as a martial weapon.	1 RP
Languages: Common. Otterlings with high Intelligence scores can choose from the following: Draconic, Dwarven, Giant, Goblin, Halfling, and Orc.	0 RP
Total:	9 RP

Michael Galvis lives on the Internet, as does this blog post’s artist Clay Chastain.

If you don’t believe in vaccinations, then your doctor might not accept your child as a patient.

Some practitioners want to protect patients who can’t be vaccinated for medical reasons. Others feel it’s their responsibility to mark parents’ opposition to vaccination as unacceptable.

The American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) provides guidelines and documents to help pediatricians deal with parents who refuse to immunize their children. The guidelines include a sample letter a practice refusing to accept unvaccinated kids may share with their parents, which include very direct statements:

By not vaccinating your child you are taking selfish advantage of thousands of others who do vaccinate their children, which decreases the likelihood that your child will contract one of these diseases. We feel such an attitude to be self-centered and unacceptable.

As Eric Ball, a doctor from Southern Orange County Pediatric Associates, told the Los Angeles Times:

“If we allow parents to be in our practice who don’t vaccinate their kids, we’re passively telling them that it’s OK. It’s not OK for those families, the community and for other patients.”

Ball is not alone. Following the measles epidemic that has hit dozens of children in the US, about one-fifth of the doctors surveyed by medical publication MedPage Today refuse taking new patients who decline childhood immunization, and 10% have recently changed their policy toward unvaccinated patients based on other patients’ concerns.

In some cases, doctors will see patients who reject immunization only if it’s on religious grounds. As Aaron Clark, a physician who practices in Ohio told to MedPage Today:

“I have tried numerous times to educate and explain the safety and merits of immunizations and debunk myths and misunderstandings but those conversations rarely result in a change in mind from the parent.”

One of the arguments in favor of doctors still accepting kids of anti-immunization parents is that the visits might inform them about the importance of vaccines. According to a Dartmouth study on effective messages in vaccine promotion (pdf), scientific evidence does little to counter the belief that vaccines are harmful.

Construction of New York City’s much-anticipated first micro apartment complex is finally underway. While the photos show how tiny the units are actually going to be, the experience of living in a space as small as 270 sq. ft. arguably depends less on its footprint and more in the accommodations that enable residents to go about their daily routines with ease and comfort, including a good place to sleep.

Multi-purpose home-furniture lines have been extant since the 19th century—think pull-down murphy beds or the sleeper sofa. IKEA will inevitably offer some space-saving ideas. And Italian manufacturer Clei, which has been tasked with customizing transformable furniture for New York’s micro apartments, offers some solutions that don’t involve tooling with an Allen wrench for hours. While its pieces don’t come cheap, starting at $6,500, the 50+ year old company wins awards and acclaim from the design community for its innovations and craftsmanship.

Clei offers several ways to conceal your bed. Here’s a queen-size bed behind a sectional sofa with reclining seats and storage bins beneath the cushions:

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Or a bed behind a dining table.

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A place to work and sleep.

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This bunk bed hides behind a minimalist painting.

All wall units are made to order with a variety of options—presumably including the style of painting.

This project is truly incredible!!

From foobarflies via the Raspberry Pi Pod:

We seamlessly transformed two classical upright pianos into Playstation 2 controllers using custom analog piezo triggers, Raspberry Pi B+ and Arduino Unos and created a specific Python3 firmware to map a classical playing style onto the Street Fighter Alpha 3 Gameplay including combos and the like.

Full article…and don’t miss this video below!

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Each Friday is PiDay here at Adafruit! Be sure to check out our posts, tutorials and new Raspberry Pi related products. Adafruit has the largest and best selection of Raspberry Pi accessories and all the code & tutorials to get you up and running in no time!

CBS Local

Texas County Mo. In Mourning CBS Local The Missouri State Highway Patrol reports that 36-year-old Joseph Jesse Aldridge, apparently killed seven individuals and injured another at multiple residences in Tyrone, Missouri before fleeing and killing himself on February 26, 2015. Aldridge, who was ... Investigators search for what triggered Missouri rampageReuters Friends remember family members killed in Texas CountyKSPR all 1,495 news articles »

markdown.bash:

markdown.bash is a Markdown interpreter using only traditional Unix tools. Specifically, it only uses Bash, Sed, Grep, and Cut…

Capsula Mundi is an eco-friendly coffin replacement designed by an Italian company of the same name that houses a body in the fetal position in a biodegradable egg-shaped burial pod beneath a tree variety of their choosing. The idea behind the product is to replace the traditional tombstone-filled cemetery with a “sacred forest.”

Capsula Mundi is planted like a seed in the soil, and on a tree is planted on top of it. The tree is chosen when the person is alive, relatives and friends look after it when death occurs.

The company is currently working to change burial legislation in its home country to allow for the pods.

images via Capsula Mundi

via A+, Bored Panda

Courtney shared this story from Super Opinionated.

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Exactly the same as my thoughts on toilet paper. It’s extremely necessary and anyone who disagrees is probably disgusting. 

Neubauten at The Cat Club in NYC, 1986, via Seele Brennt
 
Everyone and her uncle should seize the opportunity to see Einstürzende Neubauten play. Both of the shows I’ve seen were spellbinding. When it comes to jamming on air conditioners, those “cats” can really “blow,” and theirs is a singular beauty; it’s not like you can just go see the tribute band at the county fair instead.

While there are many historic Neubauten shows I would give a tooth to have attended, their November 19, 1983 gig in Oslo, Norway is not one of them. At that particular fun hootenanny, member Andrew (“N.U.”) Unruh threw Molotov cocktails into the crowd, like as in directly aimed them at human beings in the audience (“with a tight safety margin,” Blixa is careful to add). Here are Blixa Bargeld and FM Einheit’s memories of that show from the now scarce band-sanctioned oral history, No Beauty without Danger:

FM EINHEIT In Oslo, Norway, we played a gallery and chased people with Molotov cocktails. They also defended themselves: for instance, by trying to attack us with the ship turbine, which was actually one of our instruments. It was a pretty good riot in Oslo. That was fun.

BLIXA BARGELD For this show Andrew had prepared 20 Molotov cocktails. And Andrew actually made the audience run by throwing Molotov cocktails aimed right at them. They kept trying to escape but he followed them around the hall and, with a tight safety margin, threw burning gasoline bottles at them. That was great. One of the reasons I got kicked out of school was because I had started a fire. My expulsion had already been decided upon anyway, so I didn’t have anything to lose. But I was still the student body president, and tried to enforce my pseudo-democratic rights by decorating a “Schülermitverwaltungsversammlung”, a kind of student council assembly, with a fire bombing - in which no one was hurt - because I was no longer allowed to take part in the assembly. Fire is a medium of transformation. Fire, as an element of our lyrics and as part of the Einstürzende Neubauten stage show, accompanied us for quite a while. It was mainly Andrew who lit fires on stage. And then at some point we had to stop, because we realized that our audience practically expected this incendiarism from us. That’s when it started to get dull. But it was good, as long as we didn’t control it and so long as it wasn’t expected from us. It was normally Andrew’s job to set fires, and it began on his initiative.

Icelandic TV broadcast a couple minutes of that night’s performance of “Sehnsucht.” You can’t see any Molotov cocktails, but the show sure does look like it’s heading in that direction.

Original Source

shirokuma cafe

Turns out that there are plenty of people who want to spend five months in the bitter cold, sleeping little, isolated from the world, and are “happy not to shower for up to a month, live in close proximity to three people and 2,000 smelly penguins for five months.”

In the two weeks since February 16,  1,500 people have applied for four positions—that’s 375 applicants per spot—to be an assistant at the southernmost post office in the world in Port Lockroy, Antarctica. In 2014, the total number of applicants was a whopping 82. Inquiries skyrocketed after a documentary about the outpost aired on the BBC and PBS, according to the organization that runs it, the UK Antarctic Heritage Trust.

In addition to the cold and stinky conditions, the job is not an easy one. The assistants have to run the base’s museum and shop, monitor the 2,000 gentoo penguins that hang around, assist the 18,000 visitors to the island and handle the 70,000 letters that tourists post for that Antarctica postmark.

Yes, that’s right, even in the digital age, people still love quirky postmarks. Other popular addresses include Bethlehem, Connecticut, which processes 200,000 additional pieces of mail between Thanksgiving and December 26, and Bridal Veil, Oregon, an abandoned town that handles 150,000 envelopes for wedding invitations or “save-the-dates” between March and August.

saucieshares

You've Sunk my Battleship

"Minneapolis, officially the City of Minneapolis, is the county seat of Hennepin County, and larger of the Twin Cities, the 14th-largest metropolitan area in the United States, containing approximately 3.8 million residents. As of 2013, Minneapolis is the largest city in the state of Minnesota and 46th-largest in the United States with 400,070 residents. Minneapolis and Saint Paul anchor the second-largest economic center in the American Midwest, behind Chicago." (Wikipedia)

Design by: In-house

Opinion/Notes: I liked the geometry of the previous sailboats and how they intersected and connected but it wasn't necessarily the best drawing of sailboats ever. Even less so the new drawing, which drops one of the sailboats and goes for a curvier, more resort-like rendering. It's not terrible, it's just generic. So is the typography, which gets worse in the "City of Lakes" nickname where city staff seems like they gave up choosing something interesting. The new logo is still pending city approval.

Related Links: Memo for request of approval of use of new identity (PDF)
Star Tribune news story

Select Quote: A component of the identity package is an evolution of the City logo that modernizes the look and improves usability issues with the current logo. It is 4-color and prominently features the word "Minneapolis," accompanied by the tagline "City of Lakes" and a small, refreshed sailboat image on the top right edge. The more prominent use of the word "Minneapolis" means the logo will reproduce better at a range of sizes, allowing the word to be read clearly regardless of the scale. Eliminating the thin lines in the current version of the logo will also make it more suitable for use in digital environments.

Obvious Plant (previously) offers a clever way to get people to buy multiples of an item at a store–by cajoling people with cartoony characters attached to the items. Obvious Plant is an ongoing humor project by Jeff Wysaski of Pleated-Jeans.

photos via Obvious Plant

Denis Villeneuve is in negotiations to direct the sequel to "Blade Runner," with Harrison Ford previously asked but now confirmed to be reprising his role as Rick Deckard. Ridley Scott, who directed the iconic 1982 sci-fi pic for Warner Bros, is aboard to executive produce for Alcon Entertainment.

karenhealey:

iwannabeadored:

writeswrongs:

"No one can make you feel inferior without your consent" more like "it’s your fault other people mistreat you and make you feel like trash"

thank you for saying this I am so tired of seeing this repeated everywhere as if it were the highest wisdom when it’s trash

Corrrrrrrrect.

A new study released this week by the Urban Institute paints one of the more in-depth pictures of LGBT youth in New York City who trade sex for survival. The report is the first in a series to present findings based on in-depth interviews with nearly 300 young people whose median age was 19. And so far, those findings are debunking some of the more commonly held myths surrounding who does sex work.

Among the study's initial findings is that young men were just as likely, if not more, to trade sex for survival. In total, of the study's nearly 300 participants, 54 percent were men, 42 percent were women and 4 percent identified as transgender. Those findings fly in the face of the more commonly held assumptions that young women are far more likely than young men to trade sex for food, shelter or basic necessities.

But exactly how those young people enter the sex trade differs based on their gender. Cisgender women -- those whose gender identities align with how they were assigned at birth -- were less likely to report trading sex on their own. In total, 11 percent of cisgender women reported first trading sex on their own, compared with 24 percent of men. Similarly, transgender women were least likely to indicate initially trading sex on their own, according to researchers. What that means is cisgender and transgender women were more likely to be recruited into the commercial sex trade by an exploiter.

Of the nearly 300 participants in the study who identified as LGBT, young men who sleep with men (YMSM) or young women who sleep with women (YWSW):

• The vast majority were of color: 37 percent identified as black, 22 percent identified as Latino and 30 percent identified as more than one race.
• Homelessness is one of the most common drivers of youth engagement in survival sex.
• Homophobia contributed not only to young people becoming homeless, but was also identified as a huge barrier in their access to social services in New York City.

Read the report here. 

Parents Tanya and Adam Phillips didn’t want their daughter Honey-Rae to feel self-conscious or ashamed of the large red birthmark on the right side of her body, so they each got giant bright red tattoos to match. They each paid for the other to have the tattoo done as a gift. Adam received his tattoo as a Christmas present, and Tanya was given hers for her 40th birthday.

Tanya told The Daily Mirror that “it was worth every second of the pain,” when her daughter reacted to the tattoos by touching them and saying “Match” while pointing to her birthmark.

photos via The Daily Mirror

via The Daily Mirror, Telegragh

nasty-brat:

Jean-Ralphio Champagne?

h0llo:

I wish I could live inside this 5 seconds for the rest of my life