firehose

This week, a study was released by researchers at the University of Pennsylvania that found a surprising correlation when studying two kinds of maps: those that mapped the county-level frequency of cardiac disease, and those that mapped the emotional state of an area's Twitter posts.

In all, researchers sifted through over 826 million tweets, made available by Twitter's research-friendly "garden hose" server access, then narrowed those down to roughly 146 million tweets that had been posted with geolocation data from over 1,300 counties (each county needed to have at least 50,000 tweets to sift through to qualify). The team then measured an individual county's expected "health" level based on frequency of certain phrases, using dictionaries that had been put through scrutiny over their application to emotional states. Negative statements about health, jobs, and attractiveness—along with a bump in curse words—would put a county in the "risk" camp, while words like "opportunities," "overcome," and "weekend" added more points to a county's "protective" rating.

Not only did this measure correlate strongly with age-adjusted heart disease rate data, it turned out to be a more efficient predictor of higher or lower disease likelihood than "ten classical predictors" combined, including education, obesity, and smoking. Twitter beat that data by a rate of 42 percent to 36 percent.

Ponds, ponds, ponds – they’re all I talk about nowadays. Yesterday I had a lovely swim in 2C water with crackling ice in the center, and I’m leaving now for today’s dip. I never know what’s beneath me in the murky waters, and perhaps I don’t want to. I get paranoid when a cormorant’s diving near me, wondering if I’d even notice if it plucked off a numbed toe, and last week I think I kicked a fish.

Obviously, I’m delighted to find lake ecosystem simulator Among Ripples free on Steam.

It’s a small, quiet, and simple little sandbox about poking at a waltercolour-picturesque lake’s ecoystem, fiddling with the water and adding life to see what happens. You can add six species – pike, dace, and perch fish, crayfish and clams, and a friendly otter – and tweak the oxygen level, then they’ll get on with their lives. They’ll eat, eat each other, die, rot, and swim around looking cute for you to enjoy. Goals are your own to set.

Aside from the life-and-death peril of wondering whether you’re killing an otter or seeing pike devour everything, it’s quite relaxing. The background’s like a watercolour painting, while the creatures are colourful silhouettes, and gentle music plays.

Among Ripples actually came out last year on Windows, Mac, and Linux, but I certainly didn’t see it until it arrived on Steam yesterday. DRM-free downloads are over on Itch and Game Jolt.

cabell:

matthewgraygublet:

katzmatt:

seeyainanotherlife:

cassandrugs:

tseecka:

samandriel:

dajo42:

“Can I touch your butt” in Elvish.

This is so useful

No, this is not “Can I touch your butt” in Elvish. This is “Can I touch your butt?” in English, transcribed using the letters of the Elvish alphabet. There is a difference. 

In Elvish, the letters of the alphabet correspond to sounds, not to words. The above text spells it out using one symbol to represent one letter of the original English, which is incorrect:

• c-a-n  i  t-o-u-c-h  y-o-u-r  b-u-t-t

If you really want to spell out an English phrase using the Elvish alphabet, you would do so phonetically, which would basically equate to one symbol per phoneme (sound):

• c-a-n  a-i  t-u-ch  y-o-r  b-u-t

If you actually wanted to write “Can I touch your butt?” in Elvish, one (very rough) translation would be:

• Annog nin daf pladan tele ci?

Which, in Sindarin Elvish, roughly translates to, “Would you give me permission to touch your rear?”

Written in tengwar (the Elvish alphabet), it would look like this:

Sorry for the blurry quality.

damn, the lotr fandom doesnt fuck around

wow

not to mention LOOK HOW POLITE THIS WAS 

LIKE GOOD LORD 

OLDEST FANDOMS REALLY ARE POLITEST 

That was probably Steven Colbert

When my dad was in high school he & his girlfriend taught themselves Elvish runes from the LotR appendix and passed notes in Elvish all the time.

…I came by my nerdishness honestly, is what I’m saying.

No but like really that was actually probably Colbert tho

whether-which:

shego:

crazy that Seth rogen made a comment about how american sniper reminded him of the nazi propaganda movie in inglorious basterds which while true is still odd that he gave criticism like that considering he couldn’t stand the similar words that were said about his most recent movie
crazy

babies have no sense of object permanence.

Exploding Kittens is a card game where four players come together to help prevent a young, curious cat from inadvertently detonating something. Hand grenade, nuclear power plant, regular-old TNT — the Kickstarter game has it all. Plus kittens.

As of the writing of this article it also has nearly $3.5 million dollars in crowdsourced funding, money it earned in just the first 3 days of its campaign.

It all started with a $10,000 ask and a funny video with some line drawings of pudgy cats. Now the card game has become a runaway success. Kicktraq projects that, at the going rate, it could reach more than $26 million, making it far and away the most heavily funded project in Kickstarter history.

Polygon reached out to one of the co-creators of the game, Elan Lee, to find out how it all started and where Exploding Kittens goes from here.

Stirring the Oatmeal

Elan Lee is famous in game design circles as the lead designer of The Beast, a promotional event for Steven Spielberg's movie A.I. Artificial Intelligence. That alternate reality game was one of the first ARGs to break into the public consciousness. Lee went on to co-found 42 Entertainment, the company responsible for Halo's I Love Bees ARG, as well as Year Zero, the ARG used to promote the Nine Inch Nails album of the same name.

So what in the nine hells is he doing making a card game?

"This game was originally designed by my partner, Shane Small," Lee told Polygon. "We were driving into work at Microsoft ... and he said, 'I have a new game idea. We're going to take a deck of cards and we're going to put a joker in the deck of cards, and then we're going to put the deck face down and take cards from the top. Whoever draws the joker loses.'"

Elan Lee built some of the biggest ARGs in history

It sounds like a pretty terrible game and, Lee says, it was. It took two months of banging on the idea before a real game fell out, one with custom cards including defensive and offensive tricks to play against your opponents. The mockup, called Bomb Squad, accompanied them both on a trip to Hawaii.

That's where they met Matthew Inman, better known as webcomic The Oatmeal.

But for the love of all that's good and fluffy, why were Lee and Inman on vacation together?

"There's another character in the mix," Lee said. "Matt Harding, better known as Where The Hell Is Matt. He does these crazy internet dance videos. He goes all around the world doing a really hokey dance in front of famous landmarks. It's crazy.

"For a while he was the second-most popular video on all of YouTube. He was among the very first YouTube viral videos. And for a long time, I was his camera man."

Around the world

That's right. The same man who created two of the most popular ARGs in history is also the same man who helped create some of YouTube's most popular and viral imagery. Then, while on a group vacation he met one of the most popular webcomics in the world.

Boom. Exploding Kittens? Not quite.

But Lee was initially too timid to even play the game with Inman. It took days of concerted arm-twisting.

"I was like, 'Look. Let's play this for five minutes,'" Lee said. "'I'm really embarassed about this game. It's so silly.'"

Two hours later they were still playing. There, in a rented beach house over Halloween last year, they played Bomb Squad for days on end. By the end of the trip, The Oatmeal wanted a piece of the action.

"Inman said, 'Listen, I've got a book deal coming up. I'm about to do a lot of work, but I will call and postpone all of that if you take me on as a partner and let me illustrate these cards. Because this is the best game ever.'"

The only condition, Lee says, was that they re-skin the game to involve kittens instead of bombs. Why?

"Because the internet."

It's around that point in the interview where Lee's phone went berserk. His campaign had just crossed over $3 million dollars.

Horrible people

Who else do you go to for help, Lee said, when you're planning a Kickstarter campaign but the guru himself, Cards Against Humanity co-creator Max Temkin.

"We talked to him quite a bit," Lee said. "He is the god of this. Basic wisdom is follow anything he says."

Lee will be using CAH's own manufacturing and fulfillment partners, a company called Ad Magic. They're responsible for most of the heavy lifting for the past two years' Holiday Bullshit, where CAH sent people personalized playing cards, tiny bags of coal and deeds to a private island in Maine. Because of Temkin and company's shenanigans, Lee says Ad Magic is used to dealing in large volumes of unconventional, card-based products.

But they were not emotionally prepared for Exploding Kittens.

"Day one I called Shari [my contact at Ad Magic]," Lee said. "I said, 'So remember when I said we were going to only order 1,000 cards? Well, we've got — right now, at the end of day one — 50,000 orders.'

"She just started screaming. For like 20 seconds straight. Just screaming. At first it was in alarm, but after a while, in listening to her I could hear the smile creeping into her voice."

"She just started screaming. For like 20 seconds straight."

Lee is confident that Ad Magic will be up to the manufacturing challenge, just as he's confident he personally is up to the logistical challenge. This kind of time-intensive project management, combined with game design, is right up his alley. After high-concept ARGs like The Beast and I Love Bees, he feels like he's been training for this moment his whole life.

But for crying out loud, doesn't Lee feel a little disappointed that after so many high-concept, cutting edge play experiences this — of all things, an old-fashioned physical card game — Exploding Kittens is his big moment in the sun?

He just laughs.

"It's not an old-fashioned card game," Lee said. "You have to keep in mind there’s two elements going on simultaneously. This card game is a thing that no one has experienced yet. No one actually has any idea what this game is. We know it’s lovely and really fun, but nobody else knows that yet.

"The second component is what’s actually going on right now, which is a world-wide campaign to build an audience, a community, around a story that they alter in real time. That’s what I do. That’s what I do for a living. That’s what I’m doing today."

So far, that community has helped to create the first stretch goal; the "not safe for work" or NSFW deck for Exploding Kittens. It's not an expansion. It's completely separate game, one that can be played alone or combined to create a larger, eight-player version of the game. And without Kickstarter Lee says, and the community it brought him and his team, it might never have been made.

x-cetera:

Genre TV Character Diversity Project Index Page

In my series on genre tv character diversity, I’m moving on to how fandom represents character diversity. To start, I went over to archiveofourown.org to check out what characters and relationships are popular in fan fiction. You can check out my data spreadsheet with all the info that went into the charts here.

For the first set of pie charts, I look up the top 10 relationship tags for each tv fandom on ao3 and count up how many fics among that group have relationships that are canon or slash (non-canon), and male/male, male/female, or female/female.*

Next, I show the most popular ships, as main or side pairings, among all the fandoms. Since some of these shows have been on the air for many years whereas others are just starting, I normalize by the number of episodes the characters appear in instead of taking the raw number of fics.

Then, I present a second set of pie charts showing the main pairings in the top 100 fics for the most prolific fandoms. This does not include side pairings, but you can see those too in my data spreadsheet.**

Finally, I count up the number of fics that include each main character in a show. In the bar charts I show which fandoms have a greater emphasis on white, male, straight characters than the show itself does (e.g. Dominion), and which fandoms write more fics about characters that are POC, female, queer (e.g. Once Upon a Time).***

Some comments:

• I was surprised by how much the fan fic landscape is different across fandoms. Maybe it’s the online circles I travel in, but I mostly see slash m/m shipping, and to a lesser degree canon queer ships.
• Supernatural and Teen Wolf dominate fan fic, specifically the non-canon male/male Dean/Castiel (36k) and Stiles/Derek (31k) ships, both of which have been at the center of queerbaiting controversies on their shows. 
• When a show does have a queer lead character, fans run with it. The same sex relationship(s) of the leads are the most popular to write about within the fandom (e.g. Lost Girl, In the Flesh, Orphan Black).
• When a show has a classic Will They Won’t They pairing for the lead, that ship is generally the most popular within the fandom (e.g. Oliver/Felicity on Arrow, Ichabod/Abbie on Sleepy Hollow, Damon/Elena on The Vampire Diaries).
• In all of the above cases — queerbaiting, queer lead, hetero ship teasing — fans write most about the lead characters who have romantic tension.
• Every now and then though I run across crack pairings, meaning characters that have little to no interaction in the show or basis in canon for hipping. For example, in the Agents of SHIELD fandom, the most popular ship was Phil Coulson/Clint Barton, even though the latter isn’t even in the show. (I didn’t count those.) 
• Fandom has a race problem. Sorry, but it needs saying. All but 2 of the shows (Once Upon a Time, Sleepy Hollow) put white main characters into fics at a higher rate than those characters appear on screen. In some cases, the show has not written its POC characters well enough to make them interesting fodder for fan fiction. For example, Sembene in Penny Dreadful has hardly any lines. In other cases, it seems to me like fandom has ignored compelling POC characters who have important roles in the plot and sometimes even prominent romantic relationships on the show.
• Some POC characters that aren’t getting the love they deserve: Tommy LaSalle on Defiance, Kevin Tran on Supernatural, Sarah Essen on Gotham, Arika on Dominion, Frank Irving on Sleepy Hollow, Antoine Triplett on Agents of SHIELD, Jack Crawford and Beverly Katz on Hannibal, Hale on Lost Girl, Maxine Martin on In the Flesh, Cisco Ramon on The Flash, Art Bell on Orphan Black, Lafayette Reynolds on True Blood, Michonne on The Walking Dead, Melissa McCall on Teen Wolf, Drew Wu on Grimm, and Danny Pink on Doctor Who.
• On the other hand, some POC characters are relatively popular in fan fiction: Abbie and Jenny Mills on Sleepy Hollow, Skye on Agents of SHIELD, John Diggle on Arrow, Iris West on The Flash, Tara Thornton on True Blood, Regina Mills on Once Upon a Time, and Scott McCall on Teen Wolf. 
• Despite what you may have heard, fans do write about female characters that are given good material in the show: Regina Mills, Emma Swan, and Belle on Once Upon a Time; Sansa and Arya Stark on Game of Thrones; Skye and Jemma Simmons on Agents of SHIELD; Felicity Smoak on Arrow; Abbie Mills on Sleepy Hollow; Elena Gilbert and Caroline Forbes on The Vampire Diaries.  
• A few secondary characters loom larger in fic than they do in the show itself: Castiel, John Winchester, and Charlie Bradbury on Supernatural, Felicity Smoak on Arrow, and River Song and Jack Harkness on Doctor Who appear in a greater percentage of fics than they do episodes of the show.
• We can speculate for ages on why white male slash pairings are hugely popular, but I’m not going to get into it much here because this is all about the data. Briefly, in my opinion it’s a combination of show and fandom factors, such as tv writing better parts for those characters, casting with a certain aesthetic, fan fic writers/readers being mostly women who are attracted to men, ingrained cultural emphasis on white men as desirable, etc. 

Don’t forget to check out the rest of the series on genre tv character diversity here. Next up I’ll be looking at tumblr. As always, feel free to contact me with questions or comments via tumblr or twitter. And if you’re looking for shows with representation, go over to genretvforall.

Some notes on methods after the jump…

Read More

There is something bracing about being reminded that there are real people who see the NFL as the NFL sees itself. They are indeed out there—this is a big and wrongly righteous world, after all—talking about football in the NFL's own grandiose and super-stilted syntax. It's roughly the difference between meeting someone who is a big professional wrestling fan and meeting someone who actually acts like The Rock. The first person enjoys overstated sports-like entertainment. The latter is severely peeling off his shirt at the supermarket and flaring his nostrils wildly because he noticed Fanta isn't on sale anymore.

Even if we grant that the New England Patriots using under-inflated footballs while stomping the Indianapolis Colts out of the AFC Championship was somewhat more offensive than paying retail for a two-liter of orange soda, there has still been a great deal of overdetermined over-emoting in response to it. For the most part, all this noise is coming from the members of the Hot Take Community, who are paid to make this sort of overwrought noise. It's their job, and they're doing it.

Read More: The NFL Wants to Blame You for Its Brain Trauma Crisis

This is all the more impressive given that the NFL has spent this entire long season tumbling, piss-drunk and pantsless, down a long spiral staircase, declaiming all the while on integrity and The NFL Way. Any expression of how frequently and floridly the NFL has shown its collective ass this season would require the use of scientific notation, and yet somehow—even when presented with a story as authentically ridiculous and utterly uncomplicated as this—the conversation about it is still conducted in the same freezer-burned Sorkin-scented vocabulary of righteous purpose.

This is pretty silly, honestly. For all the things that are still unknown, about this case and every other one of the NFL's many scandals, the question of integrity is pretty much settled business where the NFL is concerned. It is a thing the league likes to talk about, and is unwilling to pay for; it's an undisputed brand truth, and thus also mostly a lie. And so when we hear, again, that the NFL is intent on getting this right, and protecting the integrity of the game, the first instinct is either a muffled laugh or an un-muffled one.

It's not that these are bad things for the NFL to want. Cheating, even cheating as mundane and mainstream as this, is uncool; rules are rules. It's just that all this righteous huff-and-puff from the NFL—an entertainment brand that thinks it is a powerful nation-state, run by a defective Epcot "Hall of Presidents" droid that believes itself to be an actual head of state—comes across as flabby, obvious satire.

Everybody behind this podium is a robot. Photo by Tim Heitman-USA TODAY Sports

And yet here they still are: the designated khaki-fied heralds assuring us of the league's sense of urgency on this matter. The peevish chorus of columnists treating this latest bit of Belichick-ian gamesmanship like a matter of national import, as opposed to more amusingly amoral a-holery from one of the sport's all-time amusingly amoral a-holes. It's not different, but it feels different. Maybe this is what transition looks like: everyone knows the NFL's grandiosity and integrity fetish are laughable and false, but no one has quite figured out a new way to talk about the league.

The game balls that the New England Patriots supplied for their own use (due to some peculiar and outdated NFL rules and in defiance of all reason, this is how it is done) were manipulated after the usual inspection such that they were less-inflated and therefore easier to hold than NFL rules allow. The Colts noticed, referees tested the balls and found them in violation, and removed them from play; during the second half, when the Patriots shredded the Colts, they were reportedly using regulation, ref-approved footballs to do it. Belichick said Thursday that he has no idea how the balls got deflated, and maybe he doesn't. We don't know what happened.

We can be much more certain that the NFL's response to this will be characteristically purposeful and characteristically buffoonish, and be centered around disciplinary action. The blue-ribbon panel that Goodell will bring together to investigate the ball-deflating—separate and distinct from the blue-ribbon panel investigating whether it's smart for teams to be allowed to groom their own game balls, but probably also headed by a former Senator or something—will get to the bottom of it sometime. Goodell will hold a press conference and appear purposeful and chastened, promise that this will be taken very seriously. The debate will turn to whether he did a good job or not, and I will probably write another column about how he's like Teddy Ruxpin or whatever.

But there's an alternative. The NFL could just change this weirdo rule so that all the game balls are handled by the officials and only the officials, as with the footballs used for kicking; it could regulate the substances that quarterbacks are allowed to use to alter the balls or—and hear me out on this—it could also not. A simple rule that replaces the century-old congeries of micro-rules would go a long way towards clarifying this and many other NFL ambiguities, and is probably the least likely outcome of all this. The NFL can't do a lot of the things it tries to do, but it can change a rule and then enforce it, and that's probably enough in this case. Instead, we will have commissions and official reports and rafts of updated talking points.

Tom Brady flings a deflated and totally un-ball-like piece of leather as millions look on eagerly. Photo by Stew Milne-USA TODAY Sports

It's worth wondering who ever wanted the NFL to be this way. The impractical grandiosity of it—the idea that the NFL needs to Stand For Something, instead of actually doing the basic things it's supposed to do—suggests that this call is coming from inside the house; only the NFL would think that prioritizing excellence over competence is a good way for the NFL to be. Think of the NFL as an organization actually dedicated to integrity and excellence—in terms of accountability, honesty, fairness, and so on—and it is really not doing a very good job at all. Think of it as an organization staffed by people who have been in the same smug-stupid culture for so long that they believe integrity and excellence to be words for "whatever we just did," and it's a lot easier to understand.

Lose the NFL's pomp and rum-dummy-dum rhetoric, and we see the NFL as what it is: a moderately skanky business concern selling us something that is both bad for us and extremely addictive. The NFL is welcome to use its delusion however it wants, just as people are welcome to talk about it in the NFL's own language if they wish. But, as serious as Bill Belichick is about football—and the great gray recession of his personality suggests that this is an acid seriousness that opens onto a big, mean void—he clearly does not see or think about the NFL this way.

He, and maybe we, can see a rulebook that's too big and too dimly understood and too lazily mis-enforced to constrain his intellect and ambition. He sees a game that is bigger and weirder than any authority that would attempt to govern it. He sees how soft, stupid, and self-regarding the NFL truly is, and then he does whatever he wants, secure in the knowledge that no one can really stop him from doing it. He innovates in thrilling ways and cheats in trivial ones for the same reason, and it's the reason that people climb Everest.

There is nothing that says we have to like this about Belichick, or respect the amoral arrogance of it. But we might as well acknowledge that he understands the NFL more clearly than the NFL understands itself, and borrow some of that instrumentalism for our own purposes. We might as well see the NFL as Belichick does—something to play around with for as long as it's amusing, and something we do not need to take nearly as seriously as it takes itself.