firehose

Code Name: Viper (Capcom - NES - 1990)

gamewtfs:

Woah, 7 hideouts? That drug must be HUGE!

odins-one-eyed-fuck:

hippity-hoppity-brigade:

stillvisions:

maybenotboring:

and at no point has anyone thought “maybe we should not build a giant flammable goat this year”

They tried fireproofing. And armed guards. And fences, and cameras… Sadly the wikipedia page has been cut down by super srs folks to remove all the awesome Keystone cops tales of the goat’s history (emphasis added by me)

• 1966 Stig Gavlén came up with the idea of a giant goat made out of straw. But it turned out that Gavlén organisation did not have enough funding for the goat. Then Harry Ström, who at that time was the chairman of the Södra Kungsgatan Ideella Förening (a non-profit society), decided to pay the whole cost for the goat out of his own pocket. The goat stood until midnight of New Year’s Eve, when it went up in flames. The perpetrator, who was from Hofors,Gästrikland, was found and convicted of vandalism. The first goat was insured and Ström got all his money back.
  
• 1967 Nothing happened.
  
• 1968 The goat survived. A fence was built around the goat. Previously it was popular for children to play hide-and-seek inside and around the goat. There was also a rumor that one night a couple had sex inside the goat. In subsequent years the inside of the goat was protected by a chicken-wire net.
  
• 1969 The goat was burnt down on New Year’s Eve.
  
• 1970 The goat was burnt down only six hours after it was assembled. Two very drunk teenagers were connected with the crime. With help from several financial contributors the goat was reassembled out of lake reed.
  
• 1971 The Southern Merchants got tired of their goats being burned and stopped building the goat. The Natural Science Club (Naturvetenskapliga Föreningen:NF) from the School of Vasa (Vasaskolan) took over. 
  
• 1972 The goat collapsed because of sabotage.
  
• 1973 N/A
• 1974 Burnt.
  
• 1975 N/A
• 1976 Hit by a car.
  
• 1977 N/A
• 1978 Again, the goat was kicked to pieces.
  
• 1979 The goat was burnt even before it was erected. A new one was built and fireproofed. It was destroyed and broken into pieces.
  
• 1980 Burnt down on Christmas Eve.
  
• 1981 Nothing happened.
  
• 1982 Burnt down on Lucia (13 December).
  
• 1983 The legs were destroyed.
  
• 1984 Burnt down on 12 December, the night before Lucia.
  
• 1985 The 12.5 metre (41 ft) tall goat of the Natural Science Club was featured in the Guinness Book of Records for the first time. Even though the goat was enclosed by a 2 metres (6.6 ft) high metal fence, guarded by Securitas and even soldiers from the Gävle I 14 Infantry Regiment, it was burnt down in January.
  
• 1986 The merchants of Gävle decided they were willing to build the goat once again. From 1986 on two goats were built, the Southern Merchants’ and the School of Vasa’s. The big goat burnt down the night before Christmas Eve.
  
• 1987 A heavily fireproofed goat was built. It got burnt down a week before Christmas.^[21]
• 1988 Nothing happened to the goat, but gamblers were for the first time able to gamble on the fate of the goat with English bookmakers.
  
• 1989 Again, the goat burnt down before it was assembled. Financial contributions from the public were raised to rebuild a goat that was burnt down in January. In March 1990 another goat was built, this time for the shooting of a Swedish motion picture called Black Jack.
  
• 1990 Nothing happened. The goat was guarded by many volunteers.
  
• 1991 The goat was joined by an advertising sled, that turned out to be illegally built. On the morning of Christmas Eve the goat was burnt down. It was later rebuilt to be taken to Stockholm as a part of a protest campaign against the closing of the I 14 Infantry Regiment.
  
• 1992 The goat was burnt down eight days after it was built. The Natural Science Club’s goat burnt down the same night. The Southern Merchants’ goat was rebuilt, but burned down on 20 December. The perpetrator of the three attacks was caught and sent to jail. The Goat Committee was founded in 1992.
  
• 1993 Once more the goat was featured in the Guinness Book of Records, the School of Vasa’s goat measured 14.9 metres (49 ft). The goat was guarded by taxis and the Swedish Home Guard. Nothing happened.
  
• 1994 Nothing happened. The goat followed the Swedish national hockey team to Italy for the World Championship in hockey.
  
• 1995 A Norwegian was arrested for attempting to burn down the goat. Burnt down on the morning of Christmas Day. Rebuilt to be standing before the 550th anniversary of Gävle county.
  
• 1996 The first time the goat was guarded by webcams, nothing happened.
  
• 1997 Damaged by fireworks. The Natural Science Club’s goat was attacked too, but survived with minor damage.
  
• 1998 Burnt down on 11 December, even though there was a major blizzard. Was rebuilt.
  
• 1999 Burnt down only a couple of hours after it was erected. Rebuilt again before Lucia. The Natural Science Club’s goat was burnt down as well.
  
• 2000 Burnt down a couple of days before New Year’s Eve. The Natural Science Club’s goat got tossed in the Gävle river.
  
• 2001 Goat set on fire on 23 December by Lawrence Jones, a 51-year-old visitor from Cleveland, Ohio, who spent 18 days in jail and was subsequently convicted and ordered to pay 100,000 Swedish kronor in damages. The court confiscated Jones’s cigarette lighter with the argument that he clearly was not able to handle it. Jones stated in court that he was no “goat burner”, and believed that he was taking part in a completely legal goat-burning tradition. After Jones was released from jail he went straight back to the US without paying his fine. As of 2006 it was still unpaid. The Natural Science Club’s goat was also burnt down.
  
• 2002 A 22 year old from Stockholm tried to set the Southern Merchants’ goat on fire, but failed, the goat receiving only minor damage. On Lucia the goat was guarded by Swedish radio and TV personality Gert Fylking.
  
• 2003 Burnt down on 12 December.
  
• 2004 Burnt 21 December, only three days before Christmas Eve. The fire brigade quickly arrived on the scene, but the goat could not be saved. No new goat was built.
  
• 2005 Burnt by unknown vandals reportedly dressed as Santa and the gingerbread man, by shooting a flaming arrow at the goat at 21:00 on 3 December. Reconstructed on 5 December. The hunt for the arsonist responsible for the goat-burning in 2005 was featured on the weekly Swedish live broadcast TV3’s “Most Wanted" ("Efterlyst”) on 8 December.
• 2006 On the night of 15 December at 03:00, someone tried to set fire to the goat by dousing the right front leg in petrol (gasoline). The red ribbon on that leg was slightly burned and fell off. The lower part of the right leg was scorched, but the rest of the goat failed to light. The leg was repaired that morning. The Natural Science Club’s goat was burned at about 00:40 on 20 December; the vandals were not seen and got away. On the night of 25 December, a drunken man managed to climb up on the goat. Before the police arrived on the scene the man climbed down and disappeared. He did not try to set fire to the goat. The Southern Merchants’ goat survived New Year’s Eve and was taken down on 2 January. It is now stored in a secret location.
  
• 2007 The Natural Science Club’s goat was toppled on 13 December and was burned on the night of 24 December. The Southern Merchants’ goat survived.
• 2008 10,000 people turned out for the inauguration of one of the goats. No back-up goat was built to replace the main goat should the worst happen, nor was the goat treated with flame repellent (Anna Östman, spokesperson of the Goat-committee said the repellent made it look ugly in the previous years, like a brown terrier). On 16 December the Natural Science Club’s Goat was vandalised and later removed. On 26 December there was an attempt to burn down the Southern Merchants’ Goat but patriotic passers-by managed to extinguish the fire. The following day the goat finally succumbed to the flames ignited by an unknown assailant at 03:50 CET.
• 2009 A person attempted to set the Southern Merchants’ goat on fire the night of 7 December. An unsuccessful attempt was made to throw the Natural Science Club’s goat into the river the weekend of 11 December. The culprit then tried, again without success, to set the goat on fire. Someone stole the Natural Science Club’s goat utilizing a truck the night of 14 December.^[36] On the night of 23 December before 04:00 the South Merchant goat was set on fire and was burned to the frame, even though it had a thick layer of snow on its back.^[37] The goat had two online webcams which were put out of service by aDoS attack, instigated by computer hackers just before the burning.^[38]
• 2010 On the night of 2 December, arsonists made an unsuccessful attempt to burn the Natural Science Club’s goat.^[39] On 17 December, a Swedish news site reported that one of the guards tasked with protecting the Southern Merchants’ goat had been offered payment to leave his post so that the goat could be stolen via helicopter and transported to Stockholm. Both goats survived and were dismantled and returned to storage in early January 2011.
  
• 2011 The inauguration of the goat took place on 27 November. The fire-fighters of Gävle sprayed the goat with water to create a coating of ice in the hope of protecting it from arson. The goat was burnt down in the early morning of 2 December.
  
• 2012 The inauguration of the goat took place on 2 December. It was burnt just ten days later in the hours before midnight of 12 December, one day before Lucia.
  
• 2013 As in 2006 and 2007, the straw used to build the goat has been soaked in anti-flammable liquid to prevent it from burning in the event of an arson attack. The inauguration ceremony took place on 1 December. But despite the anti-flammable liquids the goat was burnt down on the early morning of December 21.
  

Any history of plots involving a DDoS attack on the security cameras, a plot to steal it with a helicopter and flaming arrows shot by people dressed as Santa and the Gingerbread man is just plain hilarious in my book.

This really gets my goat. 

WHY DO THEY KEEP BUILDING IT

TV and film actor issued the jail term in Pakistan, alongside husband and owner of a media conglomerate for ‘malicious acts’ of blasphemy against Islam.

"One woman who came with her boyfriend, who was outside the door when this happened, whipped my legs for ten minutes and then stripped my clothing and proceeded to rape me."

by @JustinCarmony

The cat fight hits the merch table.

mattlife:

*sleigh bells jingle ominously in the distance*

We all know that teen-parent relations can be a tricky business. Now neuroscientists from several leading U.S. universities think they’ve found some new brain evidence that helps explain why.

History of SCRABBLE.

The story of the game’s evolution from underground craze to cultural icon is as American as, well, the SCRABBLE game. Alfred Mosher Butts, an out-of-work architect from Poughkeepsie, New York, decided to invent a board game. Analyzing games, he found they fell into three categories: number games, such as dice and bingo; move games, such as chess and checkers and word games, such as anagrams. Attempting to create a game that would use both chance and skill, Butts combined features of anagrams and the crossword puzzle. First called LEXIKO, the game was later called CRISS CROSS WORDS. To decide on letter distribution, Butts studied the front page of The New York Times and did painstaking calculations of letter frequency. His basic cryptographic analysis of our language and his original tile distribution have remained valid for almost three generations and billions of games played.

Thanksgiving is the real sports!

New Thanksgiving tradition I suggest adapting: weigh in when you arrive and leave. Tough to see but I gained 7.4 pic.twitter.com/8omkKsterw

— Eric Wood (@EWood70) November 28, 2014

Eric Wood weighed 302.2 pounds when he arrived for Thanksgiving dinner and 309.6 when he left. By law, he is to become the next President of the United States.

(h/t CBS)

diamondstodemons:

NASA astronaut Leland D Melvin with his dogs Jake and Scout.

JUGHEAD. I made a joke-y tweet about JUGHEAD: YEAR ONE a few months ago but was immediately like, “Holy fuck, why am I not working on a JUGHEAD: YEAR ONE!?” Genuinely, I’d love to draw Jughead Jones… or any of the Riverdale crew because Archie Comics were a big part of my childhood. Mr. Lodge doesn’t get a lot of love. Give me an arc to crack Mr. Lodge’s whole deal.

I swear I’ve got actual comics stuff coming out, but I’m contractually obligated to be coy. Or, rather, I’m just not supposed to talk about them and the shithead coyness is me being a shithead.

I’d be really good on a Reggie Mantle book because we’re both shitheads.

Tu Hwnt I’r Bont Tearoom in Llanrwst, North Wales


Tu Hwnt I’r Bont Tearoom in Llanrwst, North Wales


Gapstow Bridge, New York, USA


Gapstow Bridge, New York, USA


Japanese Maple


Japanese Maple

gaksdesigns:

Before and After photos of Autumn’s beautiful transformations
via Bored Panda

professoroaksparcel:

oh you don’t say! why isn’t anyone talking about Darren Wilson’s violent past? he was no angel!

TW for violence and homophobia

I wasn’t sure if I was going to talk about this, there’s so much hell going on already, but I feel like I need to get this out. I don’t know what to call what happened. 

My son goes to college at the University of Oregon, about an hour and a bit from home. If you’ve met him, you know he’s painfully shy, he has some social anxiety disorder, despite being an amazing young man—speaks several languages including fluent Japanese, plays a bunch of instruments, he’s just a smart, smart kid. He hates bullies, he hates intolerance, he stands up for things even though it’s difficult for him to do so.

I am shaking with rage as I type this.

So my son was visiting with a girl friend, and they were walking home late at night just off campus, bothering no one. There was another guy with them, a friend of the girl’s. 

There were a couple of muscular frat boy jock types going the other way on the other side of the road, none of my son’s group knew them or had even seen them before.

For reasons unexplained, the jocks cross over to where my son is, aggressively, like they’re pissed off. One of them says something to my son as he is going by, Dakota doesn’t hear it, and says, “What?”  

And the guy suckerpunched him in the head as hard as he could. Dakota wasn’t even looking in that direction. And he was wearing a big ring.

Now, I come from a redneck town of farmers, loggers and fishermen, I saw a LOT of fights growing up, and have been in a few, and even the lowest creep knew that you didn’t hit a guy in the face while they are wearing glasses, I mean, even the lowest of the low knew that. We all knew that was a scumbag move, you could put someone’s eyes out. 

This guy specifically targeted my son’s glasses, bragged about it for some reason. Anyway, he was screaming at my son, calling him homophobic names, you know the names, over and over. 

Apparently he thought my son was gay, so this was an attempted gay bashing. He was screaming threats and they were all homophobic slurs.

Now, because my son wasn’t looking, he got knocked backwards onto the sidewalk. He would have cracked his head open, but he was wearing his backpack full of his school books, so he landed on that without smashing his head. 

This is my terror…growing up, my husband had a good friend who was a tough little guy, worked hauling logs all Summer every year, an athlete. A similar thing happened to him, he got suckerpunched by a homophobic scumbag, and he fell and hit his head on the pavement.

Months later, he had an aneurysm and nearly died. He spent a couple years learning how to walk and talk again. 

The backpack saved my son from that, and the guy was still screaming at Cody. My son’s group is still in shock.

Cody gets up, the guy attacks him again. Cody is furious at this point, and calls him a homophobic Nazi. 

As a mom, I’d rather he walked away, but I can hardly blame him.

At this point, the guy is saying he’s going to really hurt Cody. And again, he has NO REASON to do this at all, they’ve never met, they weren’t even going the same way. It’s just that this guy thought Cody was gay and decided to bash him for it. Off a liberal university campus in a liberal city in a liberal state.

Cody’d been hit a couple times before he knew what was happening, and the guy aimed for the eyes, and as I said, he was wearing a big ring, just a shitty excuse for  a human being.

The one positive thing here is that Mr. Jock Frat Boy didn’t know, my son is a black belt in Okinawa Shuri-te. He was hurting and taken off guard, but he knows some stuff. The guy came at him again and this time, Cody was ready, and Cody kicked him as hard as he could in the guy’s mid-section, which slowed him down. Then he rushed at Cody, and Cody threw him to the ground, got on top, and was attempting to choke him out.

Now, this whole story is awful, but even I had to smile when Cody said, “I wonder if this jock was embarrassed to get his ass kicked by a skinny vegetarian with glasses.” 

Well, ‘smile’ is the wrong word, but I silently thanked Cody’s Karate teachers, that was worth every penny.

I want to say something about the girl Cody was walking with. She could have run, I would not have blamed her at all, god knows what could have happened. But she didn’t, she was just as angry as Cody, she stayed and screamed at the guy quite bravely to attract attention, which they did, and she threatened him with jail, which was brave and smart, AND she called the cops and explained the situation urgently and intelligently.

I haven’t met her, but I LIKE her. 

Her friend took off at the first sign of trouble, by the way. I don’t blame him, I guess, but ugh.

Now here’s where things kind of suck. Cody was on top of this guy and that would have been the end of it, but someone pulled him off. Cody’s not sure who did it, it may have been the guy’s friend (who had half-heartedly been trying to get his friend to stop). So Cody is pulled off the attacker, and his arms are momentarily held…

…so the attacker jumps up and starts hitting him in the head again and for a moment, Cody can’t fight back.

We don’t know if the person who pulled him off was trying to help the attacker or just calm the situation down, but the end result is that it gave this guy free reign to start punching Cody in the face again.

If you’ve met my son at a con, you know how quiet he is. He doesn’t like confrontation. He works out, he knows karate, but he would rather talk politics or literature than fight, obviously.

This guy punches Cody several times in the face, Cody’s glasses are knocked off, before the person who pulled him off lets go, and Cody can defend himself again. All the while, he’s being called a…well, you know what he’s being called.

I add as an afterthought that my son isn’t gay, he’s straight. So you don’t even need to be gay to get assaulted for being gay, I guess.

Thanks to the girl’s quick thinking, the cops showed up. The attacker realized that there was now a crowd of witnesses all around, and tries to run off. 

Again, because of the girl’s call, the cops already know what’s going on, and Cody said they were very helpful and concerned. They talked to Cody and the witnesses, there was never a question of Cody being guilty of anything, everyone was very clear that the attack was completely unprovoked.

Cody doesn’t remember a lot of what happened then, I don’t know if it’s just the emotions or if he got smacked a little too hard. We didn’t find out about it until the next morning, as his phone battery was dead, and he stayed at the girl’s house so he wouldn’t have to try to make it home while feeling wobbly.

The cops asked if he wanted to press charges and he said absolutely. I am proud of him for this, his concern is that this guy will do this again, and next time, maybe it won’t be against someone who can defend himself.

I am making it sound like a schoolyard fight, maybe, but that’s not what this was. He could have really damaged Cody. He TRIED to damage Cody. My son tried to walk away twice and this guy answered that with attacks. Because he thought Cody was gay.

If Cody hadn’t been wearing a backpack, he’d be in the hospital. That’s all it takes, one piece of garbage to look over and decide you need to be punished for daring to exist at all.

Cody was shaken up and didn’t get the officer’s name, and we didn’t hear back for a couple days. We had some concern that maybe this jock was a popular sports dude or something and he just got slapped on the wrist, but after speaking with dispatch, we now have the officer’s name, the case number, and will be getting a preliminary report.

I don’t know what the next step is for sure. But this creep can’t be allowed to get away with this. Was Cody the first kid he did this to? It seems unlikely. Will he be the last if he gets away with it?

That seems even more unlikely.

And again, what if the next kid can’t defend himself? What if the next kid cracks his head open? 

I know we are hearing a LOT about how frat guys and jocks get a free pass at universities. So it may be that this happening just off campus is a good thing. We’ll see.

But we’re not going to let it go. We are going to pursue this as hard as we can. He could have caused irreparable damage, and he was TRYING to cause it, he actually said threats to that effect, in between all the homophobic shit.

We are normally the most drama free family anywhere. But this year has had a curse on it for us, for some reason…my brother hit by a car (his neck was broken, he almost died), the Batgirl stuff, our house being robbed, and now this…

I seriously can’t wait for 2015.

Anyway, I guess the moral is, I can’t recommend teaching your kids self-defense highly enough. I have no idea what would have happened if Cody had not known how to fight back. And remind them to be aware of their surroundings. And it doesn’t hurt to have a girl with you who knows what to do in emergencies, apparently.

We went and got Cody to take him home for the weekend so I could keep an eye on him. His beautiful face was bruised and there are red angry dents where this creep’s ring hit him. He was in some pain, but I tried to spoil him with lots of his favorite foods, and just let him play our new video games all weekend. He’s back to his normal spirits, but he’s angry, he wants this guy to have consequences.

So do we.

As bad as it was, I keep thinking how badly it COULD have gone. 

That’s going to keep me up nights.

PS. The cops did catch the guy as he was running off, Cody identified him and they cuffed him to take him to the station. We don’t yet know what happened then, hopefully we find out today. But they DID catch him.

A grand jury in Harris County, Texas, has indicted a former investigator for the district attorney’s office accused of stealing thousands of dollars in rare comics. The Houston Chronicle reports Dustin Deutsch was indicted Tuesday on charges of felony theft by a public servant and tampering with evidence, stemming from an embezzlement case he and […]

Rastan Saga II aka Nastar aka Nastar Warrior (Taito - arcade - 1989)

elcomfortador:

"You know what will really draw in the arcade-goers?"

"Butts? Barbarian butts?"

"Yes, exactly. Butts. Barbarian butts."

hdmyboy: Game Boy output to HDTV ⊟

Neat looking prototype device here, due to be funded through a Kickstarter drive this month. The “hdmyboy” runs Game Boy games through HDMI, to output crisp images on HDTVs. “Everything is looking quite clean, and you can see we are experimenting with colour palettes and stretch ratios,” notes the project’s website.

This should be worth watching, at least! Looks like an easier method of getting Game Boy games on TV or even into capture cards…

SUPPORT TINY CARTRIDGE Join Club Tiny!

If you've yet to try it, Torchlight is a decent way to while away the holiday hours this week. A frequent flyer in our 2009 Best of the Rests, Runic's loot-heavy action-RPG is free until Sunday, November 30 on Perfect World's Arc client, and that's f...

tastefullyoffensive:

[olsettres]

marxvx:

i think the funniest joke in friends is that rachel could afford half the rent of a 2 bedroom apartment in lower manhattan by working in food service

If you haven't been listening to Serial you've surely been hearing about it, so I won't summarize the whole story other than to say that there are three critical characters here. There's Hae Min Lee, who was brutally strangled 15 years ago, Adnan, her ex-boyfriend who's currently in jail for life for her murder, and Jay, their mutual friend who claims Adnan admitted to killing Hae and showed him her body. One of three things is happening—Adnan's lying, Jay's lying, or they both are.

It's a shocking story and the podcast itself is addictive, unsurprisingly. The detective in all of us is attracted to mysteries like this—situations where no one has a motive, no one has a great alibi, and no one's story quite adds up.

Serial makes me feel like Nancy Drew, like the piece of the puzzle that is missing from the narrative is within grasp, and I may be the person to find it. Sarah Koenig, the investigator and the narrator, perpetuates this illusion well. She admits her confusion and frustration and speaks frankly about the walls she hits in her investigation, in that solemn NPR monotone that well-meaning liberals like myself have come to associate with quality reporting. And despite Koenig's repeated claim that the investigation isn't done, the series unfolds with a precise artistry that ensures that Koenig comes off as thorough and fair. Fairness is Koenig's ultimate goal, and off the air she hammers this point. "The only thing I really, really worry about is: Am I being fair at every step of the way?" she said to Rolling Stone and, in some variation, to a number of other news outlets over the past few weeks.

I get this. After all, the story only works if we trust her to tell it correctly. This is part of its hook—the unbiased, thorough journalist foraging for the truth.

It's reliable and honorable. It's also bullshit.

Don't get me wrong—I think Serial is great storytelling. I just think it's shoddy reporting.

Koenig's search for the truth has led her to sift through the minutiae to discover some unknown discrepancy. She's thorough about the day of the murder—how many steps from the path to the hidden body in the park? How many minutes from school to Best Buy? She seeks out classmates and track coaches and diaries and Asia McClain's long-lost boyfriend's friend who's not only forgotten the day in question but has completely forgotten Asia ("Asia McClain. Is that a person or a book?"). She possesses a dogged preoccupation with what happened the day Hae was killed.

But there are critical questions Koenig's not asking, and we need to talk about those. She's focused almost entirely on the details of the crime, peripherally sketched out some details on the criminal, but failed miserably to examine the failures of the process.

This is where her reliability starts to unravel. You can't be fair without context.

I have no idea who lied fifteen years ago, and I doubt we'll ever find out. Lies have a way of burrowing into the brain and reshaping and reforming into truth after awhile. Whatever Adnan and Jay believed then could have changed by now.

What does seem clear to me, though, is that there was rampant and serious misconduct by Baltimore law enforcement. It seems impossible that, as a defendant, Adnan got within the realm of a fair shake here. And even if law enforcement's shady behavior didn't rise to illegal misconduct, there's a reasonable possibility that it could have had a tangible effect on the outcome. The police ignoring Jay's inability to stick to his story, the disappearance at trial of an entire portion of his story, the prosecutor quickly hushing one of their primary witnesses before she says something that stands in direct opposition with the theory they're presenting—each of these, handled differently, could have imparted much more reasonable doubt into the minds of the jurors.

This behavior is startling but not unusual—this is how the criminal justice process works. More often than not the things that explain the various players' motivations happen after the crime. They happen once the police get involved, threaten sentences, make deals, elicit confessions. It happens when prosecutors cover up part of the story and defense lawyers throw cases and a man involved in a murder gets to walk if he talks.

A journalist looking into a murder mystery should know this. A journalist who values fairness should definitely know this. But Koenig hasn't done her homework. "They must have had enough evidence to convict or else they wouldn't have convicted him," she asserts multiple episodes in, demonstrating a breathtaking idealism that does not comport at all with reality. It's an ignorance bordering on irresponsibility. It's totally baffling that she can look at how things played out in questioning and in trial and still conclude that, "from what [she] can tell, there's not gross negligence or malfeasance or something on the part of the detectives or the State Attorney's office. Everyone seems to be doing their job responsibly."

How law enforcement and prosecutors wield their vast and often unregulated power is not a sexy story. Finding out who committed a heinous murder is way more enticing and perhaps more palatable. So Koenig focuses pretty squarely on the latter. That's okay, I guess—this is her story, after all—but she can't call it fair. How can you tell a story about a convicted criminal without talking about the system that convicted him?

You can't tell us Adnan's story without talking about what it means to be a defendant in a courtroom in 1999, as America was putting the finishing touches on its most incarceratory decade yet. Over 350 new state prisons built in one single decade, each quickly filled to capacity. This is when incarceration was accelerating disconcertingly fast but before any of us were talking about it.

And Baltimore at that time. Jesus. Grim and poor and punitive. More than half of young black men in the city were in the criminal justice system—if they weren't incarcerated they were on probation or parole.

That "more than half" thing is incomprehensible. And it matters here. It matters because Koenig doesn't seem to know it. When, in episode 7, Deirdre says, "I'm a little concerned about racial profiling here, you know?" Koenig replies with surprise, "Oh really?"

Even apart from race, this statistic matters because of sheer numbers. That's a remarkably high body count that Baltimore was moving through the assembly line. It's even crazier because of what the prosecutor's office looked like in 1999.

Koenig doesn't talk about Baltimore. But Baltimore matters.

Just a few days before the murder, Baltimore's head prosecutor had to publicly apologize after two men accused of murder were released when the city accidentally failed to try their cases. In this apology she described her office as "totally overwhelmed," asked for a budget increase of $8 million—over 50%—or else she wouldn't be able to do her job properly, and was rejected by the Mayor.

This happens again, by the way. It happens a few times—serious violent criminals getting let out because the prosecutor's office was too overwhelmed to process cases in a reasonable time. People are all over the Baltimore Sun calling the office incompetent, expressing disgust.

Fast-forward a few months to early March, a few days after the police wake Adnan up in the middle of the night and take him to the station. In trying to stem a cavernous deficit the city came for police officer's overtime hours, hours often spent in court over charges they'd issued. These charges usually didn't hold any weight—60% percent were dismissed—and it was wasted time of the cops and the court. So the city changed the whole process, instead giving the struggling State Attorney's office the role of deciding the validity of police-issued charges, burdening the prosecutors with more work but granting them more power.

Meanwhile there were still thousands of cases to be handled and defendants in jail awaiting trial.

And Baltimore's prosecutors, stretched impossibly thin, still managed to convict or plea out an astronomical number of young black men in the city. Including Jay, who pled out and got a few years probation.

Think about this. In early 1999, the prosecutor's office was a public relations nightmare. They had no time, no money, but more charging power than ever. Plus they must have had tactics—after all, they were putting a shocking amount of people away while vastly under-resourced.

And then two months after a girl disappeared, someone is pointing to the boyfriend. That's open and shut, quick and clean. I don't think it's crazy to consider the fact that the police were overlooking Jay's six remixes to his own story to get a win and get it off their desk.

It's unclear how much of the city politics affected this case, or how much it matters. But it tells us one thing. The story is a lot bigger than eight hours. It's bigger than the act. And it's careless to not focus heavily on the bigger picture.

The truth comes down to one question—who's lying? And everyone—Koenig, acquaintances, even Adnan himself—comes back to the same question. Why would Jay lie about this?

I don't know the answer. But if Koenig wants to know if Jay is lying and why—if she wants to know how Adnan got either sold out or was framed—she's not going to find the answer in a stale analysis of the day's details. She's going to find it in the police interrogation room or in a private meeting with the prosecutor. That is where Jay began telling his narrative, where his story solidified and took form, law enforcement looking away from the discrepancies because they could. That's where Jay, either justly or unjustly, shook hands with law enforcement and went home, never to spend a single day in prison. Those are the sterile rooms with all the evidence.

Josie Duffy is a racial and economic justice lawyer in Brooklyn. She can be found online at The True Fight and Twitter at @_johelen.

[Illustration by Tara Jacoby]

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