firehose

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Courtney shared this story from Super Opinionated.

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Courtney shared this story from Super Opinionated.

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	Courtney shared this story from BusinessTown:
	If you don't see a problem with a BusinessTown character you are that character, that's how it works, yeah?

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Tom Brady learns what everyone else in the Northeast knows: The pool industry is a huge scam

I used to work at a pool supply store in northern New Jersey. Working at a pool supply store in North Jersey was miserable because there are roughly 3 months in a temperate year in which anyone would want to use a pool, and there are so many leafy trees and fertilized lawns that it takes tens of gallons of military-grade chemicals to keep the water clean during that time, then another pile of money to keep the pool from demolishing itself in the frozen winter months. My job was to spend all day explaining these things to frazzled people who deeply regret digging an Olympic-sized money grave in their backyard.

Which is to say, California native/multimillionaire Tom Brady losing his mind over the very same explanations I gave to far poorer Northeasterners all summer for 3 summers is hiiiiilarious. All thanks to Business Insider for screencapping these bits of the post-DeflateGate Brady email deluge.

Brady's manager tells him in October that a new pool plus installation will run him $8,540, which is baffling and gets a response I've heard 1,000 times too many in my life:

[puts on baby blue Anthony & Sylvan Pool Supply polo shirt, which is size XL and goes down to my knees, and also stinks of chlorine]

You use a retractable mesh cover during the warm months. It lets the sunlight warm the water and saves you energy costs on the heater, but keeps leaves out when you're not using the pool! Unfortunately, that thing would collapse under the weight of snow and ice, so it's no good for wintertime.

Well, see a winter cover is a huge, solid piece of vinyl, like a shell. It  rests on the edge of the pool instead of floating right on the water (the level of which will be dropped when it gets cold so the expanding ice doesn't crack the tiles around the upper aspect of the pool).

A winter cover won't retract like the current one, so it'd be a pain for multiple people to move on and off every time you want to use the pool. Anyway, do you want a black or white one?

We don't have the white one.

Uhhhhh let me talk to my manger.

If we're being honest, though, Tom, I know you're rich enough that none of this really matters, but I'll tell you what I wish I could have told (and sometimes did tell) so many people before you: Building a permanent swimming hole in a New England backyard is like breathing on the moon. It takes too much money and effort to conquer the forbidding environment.

The pool industry is a huge scam. Go swim in a lake.

If you’ve ever wondered how much thought goes into worldbuilding in science fiction and fantasy, you’re going to love this Big Idea, in which N.K. Jemisin goes into detail about what it took to make the world of The Fifth Season real and believable. But worldbuilding is not enough to build a novel. Jemisin goes into that, too.

N.K. JEMISIN:

A few years back, I had a dream of a woman doing a Badass Power Walk towards me, with a mountain floating along behind her. I knew she was about my age — early forties, that is — and I could see that she wore dredlocs as I do, but it was very clear in the dream that she was not me. She was angry with me, in fact, because of something I’d done or hadn’t done, and if I didn’t find a way to appease her quickly, I knew she was going to throw that mountain at me. Why was she so pissed off? No idea. How was a mountain following her around like a geological puppy? She was controlling it through some unknown means. I woke up from this dream in a cold sweat — and fascinated. That was the moment the Broken Earth trilogy, of which The Fifth Season is book 1, was born.

I made some immediate assumptions about this woman and her world. First, that she wasn’t unique; there were others who had the ability to control mountains and everything associated with them (i.e. orogenesis). Second, that her anger wasn’t something recent or new.  You don’t toss around mountains over one bad day.  This woman had a lifetime’s worth of reasons to be angry — like being treated as a second-class citizen and having her hopes for the future crushed again and again.  But what kind of society would discriminate against such an obviously powerful person, and why?  The trilogy is my answer to that question.

Right away I faced two major challenges in trying to tell this story: the worldbuilding, and the voice.

Now, I love worldbuilding. I do it for fun and profit. The worldbuilding for TFS was more daunting than usual, though. See, in the Stillness (the sole supercontinent of The Fifth Season) extinction-level volcanic winters and other seismic disasters occur on a frequent basis. This meant I needed to learn a lot more about seismology, given that I’d never even felt an earthquake, or seen a volcano or a geyser, before I started researching this novel. (I was so excited when we had a quake in New York right after I started work on this novel! Even though at first I just thought the subway was unusually rumbly that day.)

More challenging was the fact that nothing in this world could resemble anything in our own world. Why should it? No society on Earth, outside of a few “preppers” and religious extremists, is designed for apocalyptic survival. Yet the people of the Stillness are biologically and culturally adapted for periods of extreme, rapid, hostile climate change. The can detect impending quakes through the use of special areas of the brainstem that we don’t possess, and one of their races prides itself on its acid-proof, ash-filtering hair type. To them, it’s normal to speak of six senses rather than five, and to consider a woman beautiful only if she’s at least six feet tall, at least a size 16, and looks like she can wrestle a bear. (At least.)

This was where the other challenge, the one of voice, kicked in: how could I immerse readers in such a fundamentally alien milieu? Doing that might be a staple of science fiction, but it’s rare — and not always welcome — in fantasy.

I experimented with test chapters and a proof-of-concept short story to get a feel for things before I settled into writing the novel. I picked different tenses, voices, characters, sounds and feels. First person felt too intimate, somehow. Past tense lacked impact. I like the immediacy of present tense; it can feel odd when you’re not used to it, but it’s surprisingly easy to adjust. (Psst: you just did.) Makes for some really visceral action scenes.

But there was one character for whom third person present tense never worked: Essun, my protagonist. The story starts in a moment of extreme trauma for her: she comes home from work one day to find that her son has been beaten to death by his own father. This is thankfully an experience that few readers will have had in real life, and yet it’s something that any reasonably empathetic human being can understand: that moment of almost surreal shock, the disbelief, the mental reeling. I needed a voice that could convey these feelings, which would underlie all of Essun’s actions throughout the trilogy — because that kind of trauma never really goes away. You just rebuild yourself around it.

What worked best was second person. I’ve always thought of second person as distancing; after all, it’s impossible for the reader to ever truly be “you”. Yet I’ve read some incredibly intimate second-person stories, and as I actually tried writing it for the first time, I found that it’s sort of amazing and powerful — both distancing and intimate at the same time. You can’t be this person, but you can understand her. It was perfect.

…Aaaaaand here I had an artistic panic attack. I liked what was developing, but was it even remotely salable? It’s been five years and I haven’t stopped hearing complaints from readers about the first-person that I used in the Inheritance Trilogy. SFF readers are remarkably quick to declare that they “just don’t do [person/tense]”. Or they’ll declare a story pretentious without ever having read it, simply because it’s written in a style they’re not used to. I wish I could say that I don’t care what those readers might think. In a fit of anxiety I showed those first few chapters and an outline to my editor and agent and said, “OK, is this worth something or is it a hot mess?” They must’ve decided it was worth something; I got a contract for the whole trilogy a few days later.

Now I guess I’ll see if readers think it’s worth something, too.

—-

The Fifth Season: Amazon|Barnes & Noble|Indiebound|Powell’s

Read an excerpt. Visit the author’s site. Follow her on Twitter.

Future Maps: Strip Maps for Los Angeles Metro Rail in 20124, by Steve Boland

Nice work here from Steve, adapting the current Metro strip maps into their future forms – with consistent letter designations for all the lines (starting to roll out now, I believe), the new Pink “L” Line designation for the proposed northern branch of the current Green Line to Aviation/96th, the new configurations of the current Blue and Gold Lines once the Regional Connector opens in 2020, and the first phase Purple “C” Line extension to Wilshire/La Cienega (2023).

See other maps from Steve that we’ve previously featured on Transit Maps.

Source: Los Angeles Future Rail - calurbanist.com

What happens when female players slam tilt their way into the bright, loud world of pinball?

submitted by rowdy_roddy_reposter [link] [34 comments]

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From a million miles away, a NASA satellite caught this unusual view of the moon and Earth moving through space together, but from a flipped perspective from the one we usually see.

Read more...

LEGO Marvel’s Avengers is seeming more and more promising by the day. Not only did Marvel listen and promise to make revisions when fans pointed out the whitewashing of America Chavez, but the game just announced a whole slew of new female characters!

According to Comic Book Resources, the game has bumped its release date to January, 2016 (it was originally intended for a late 2015 release) and will include Ms. Marvel, Squirrel Girl, the Young Avengers’ Speed, and new Thor.

What do you think of these awesome ladies?

—Please make note of The Mary Sue’s general comment policy.—

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Shots were reportedly fired at a movie theater in Tennessee Wednesday afternoon.

A SWAT team is responding to the report of shots fired/person with a weapon at the Carmike Hickory 8 theater in the 900 block of Bell Road in Antioch.
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Doctor Who fans are just over a month away from an explosive new season of the show—but apparently that might be the last drip of new episodes we get for a while, with a rumor claiming that the show won’t be returning in 2016. At least for a full season.

The rumor comes from British satirical magazine Private Eye, known for its commentary on the goings-on behind the scenes at the BBC. Their latest issue reported today that with Steven Moffat busy with his other series, the monstrously popular Sherlock, the BBC staff have been informed not to expect a tenth season of Doctor Who to air next year.

The report also alleges that the decision comes from an ongoing tussle between the BBC and Steven Moffat, who is under pressure from the corporation to stand down from Doctor Who and commit his time to Sherlock, instead of attempting to manage two of the BBC’s most popular dramas at the same time.
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Hovertext: Your move, people who aren't reductionists.

New comic!
Today's News:

On Deadliest Catch tonight, pro-Seahawks crab fishermen listen to end of Super Bowl. Not fans of passing pic.twitter.com/l86yB76i2m

— Dan Wetzel (@DanWetzel) August 5, 2015

Football analysts and fans have been questioning the late-game decision making of the Seahawks in Super Bowl XLIX for the last six months. Now we can add crab fisherman to the list.

It was Super Bowl Sunday on "The Deadliest Catch" and every boat was pulling for the Seahawks. We got to witness anguish first hand from a group of people who needed to stew with the anger of the team losing for an entire day of fishing.

There were happier times, too, so if you're a Seahawks fan looking to see crab boats with "BEAST MODE" painted on them, we've got you covered.

(h/t Sporting News)

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submitted by Loveswine [link] [32 comments]

theinturnetexplorer:

iSmart’s logo really threw me for a second.

coconut-desu:

teacup-bunny:

・しろくまカフェ in Takadanobaba, Shinjuku・
Upon entering the cafe, you’ll be greeted by Penguinさん and Pandaくん sitting by the bar. Sadly, there isn’t a space for you to join them. The food is absolutely adorable and coincidentally, there is also a girl working there who looked like Sasakoちゃん！A must visit for Shirokuma Cafe fans or animal lovers ♥︎. The good news is that it is a permanent cafe unlike My Melody Cafe or Pokemon Cafe which are only there for a limited period of time.

Website: shirokumacafe.net

是非行ってください！（＾◇＾）

yeora maikokko 行ってみようか！！

Ruth Bader Ginsburg Calls 'Choice' An Empty Concept For Poor Women:

profeminist:

“Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg said the concept of “choice” is an ephemeral one for low-income women who live in states that pass laws limiting access to abortion, as they may not be able to afford to travel to a state with less onerous restrictions.

The lack of reproductive freedom is a remaining barrier to gender parity, the justice said at a Duke Law event Wednesday evening. Advocacy organizations and groups that fund abortions have pushed the idea that being “pro-choice” includes fighting to end the decades-old Hyde Amendment, which bans federal funds from going toward Medicaid coverage for abortion except in limited circumstances. One in four women on Medicaid who would have abortions if the Hyde Amendment didn’t exist instead carry an unwanted pregnancy to term because of the prohibitive cost of the procedure, the Guttmacher Institute notes.

The justice alluded to this new reality as Mississippi’s last clinic fights to remain open and providers battle restrictions that could close all but nine or 10 clinics in Texas:

“There’s a sorry situation in the United States, which is essentially that poor women don’t have choice. Women of means do. They will, always. Let’s assume Roe v. Wade were overruled and we were going back to each state for itself, well, any woman who could travel from her home state to a state that provides access to abortion, and those states never go back to old ways … So if you can afford a plane ticket, a train ticket or even a bus ticket you can control your own destiny but if you’re locked into your native state then maybe you can’t. That we have one law for women of means and another for poor women is not a satisfactory situation.”

Read the full piece here

More Ruth Bader Ginsburg posts on Profeminist

Author: Pai Osias Source: Twitter Web Client

RT @BlunderingIdiom: Birth control? BAN IT! Abortion? BAN IT! Gay marriage? BAN IT! Guns? Look, banning things never works. People will fin…

Via the Daily Mail:

Kate Pierson, co-founder of the new wave party band The B-52s, has married her longtime lover Monica Coleman in Hawaii. The 67-year-old singer/songwriter took to her Facebook page on Tuesday to share photos of her and her new wife with the caption: ‘#itsofficial!’ A series of snaps show the happy couple post-ceremony as they don chic wedding gowns with Pierson’s in pink with a elegant Victorian style. A rep for Pierson told E! News: "The wedding was attended by the entire B-52s band, Sia Furler and husband Erik Anders Lang were the witnesses. Sia performed the song she wrote for the couple Crush Me With You Love on Pierson's first solo album Guitars and Microphones and was accompanied by the famous Hawaii music group the Lim Family who serenaded the attendees during the event. Fred Schneider made the best man speech."

RELATED: B-52s member Keith Strickland married his longtime boyfriend in Key West shortly after Florida legalized same-sex marriage in January.

buy this print!

This was a sketch under the original Straw Feminist comic but I redrew it for the book. Those crazy gals! You never know where they are lurking! Moon colony here we come!

Speaking of feminists on the moon, I would be remiss not to mention this: have you been reading Bitch Planet? I read the first one, I need to get more!

Step Aside Pops is coming soon! Drawn and Quarterly has a preview here!

The first starred review is in from Publisher's Weekly.

Pick up the August 3 issue of The New Yorker because I have a cartoon in it!

And lastly, here is an interview at Comic Book Resources where we talk about kids books and more!

fishingboatproceeds:

Jeb Bush is right. We don’t need half a billion dollars for women’s health issues (which is around $3.15 per American woman per year). We need much, much more. 

In the U.S., the disparities in women’s health care between rich and poor women, and between white women and women of color, are just absolutely astounding.

We know that in the U.S., poor women diagnosed with breast cancer are more likely to die of it than rich women.

And we know that black women are almost twice as likely to die from cervical cancer than white women.

Why? According to the National Cancer Institute, “The disproportionate burden of cervical cancer in Hispanic/Latino and African American/Black women is primarily due to a lack of screening. In an effort to understand this disparity in cervical cancer screening, NCI conducted a study of regions within the United States where cervical cancer incidence rates are high. They found that cervical cancer rates reflected a larger problem of unequal access to health care.”

We need more public investment in women’s health to close these gaps. Making access to pap smears and other screening measures more expensive will worsen health disparities in the U.S. and will result in the death of more poor women.

thegetty:

umspeccoll:

thegetty:

A conservator’s hand manipulates this medieval volvelle currently on view at the Getty Center.

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What is a volvelle? It’s part timepiece, part floppy disk, and part crystal ball. Read more on the Getty Iris.

We get abnormally excited when we come across volvelle’s in our books. Sometime we worry that it scares the students.

We imagine it to be something like this*…

*Disclaimer: The events depicted in this GIF are fictitious. Any similarity to any person living or dead is merely coincidental.

A vocal Australian Shepherd quickly responded to his human‘s request that the word “Mama” be said in order to be rewarded with a yummy treat. Unfortunately, the request was actually for the toddler sitting next to him, who couldn’t get a word in edgewise. It turns out, however, that the clever canine was rewarded with a treat after all.

For the many concerned individuals claiming that the dog from “Dog Says Mama, Baby Can’t” didn’t never got a treat, here is one brief clip of just one bite he got from that night

via reddit