firehose

The Steam Music Player is out now for all users, following a beta that launched in February. Steam Music integrates your own music library into the Steam Overlay and collects soundtracks that come with some games, and makes all of this accessible...

whatawonderfulwaytokill:

Dear anyone still defending Sam Pepper, and believing that bullshit cover up of his that his “pranks” were a social experiment…

If he was truly going out to raise awareness for the sexual harassment of both genders, he wouldn’t resort to sending threats to lacigreen. By doing so, he is proving that there is something to hide

I kept in bribryontour's comment because I really think Laci deserves that praise. She's doing an amazing job handling the situation, and not many people would be willing to do what she's done.

A common assumption is that even if research laws ought to apply to private companies, they don’t. But that assumption is false. Facebook and OkCupid are bound by research laws, and those research laws quite clearly prohibit what they did.

In the largest settlement with a single American Indian tribe, the Obama administration will pay the Navajo Nation $554 million to settle claims that the U.S. government has mismanaged funds and

Courtney shared this story from Super Opinionated.

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It’s notable that Urban Outfitters, a chain that’s worried it’s gotten too young for its 18- to 28-year-old customers in the past year, is such a big seller of an old technology.

Obama's 'latte salute' controversy spins into second day Washington Post Sixteen months ago, President Obama came under fire from critics after he asked Marines at the White House to hold umbrellas for him and then-Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan during an outdoor news conference in which it rained. and more »

papress:

Infographic Designers’ Sketchbooks
Coming in October from Princeton Architectural Press!

Images: 1) Sketch for an infographic on the shopping habits of American men © Laura Cattaneo, 2012. 2) An infographic illustrating the adulteration of olive oil © Nicholas Blachman, 2013. 3) An infographic of the Memo Process app for iPad (in development)
 © Caroline Oh + Young Sang Cho. 4) A series of illustrations and games for The Guardian about trees, recycling and saving energy © Serge Seidlitz, 2012.

South Park pretty much nailed Roger Goodell's insipid performance in the Ray Rice investigation press conference:

ROBO GOODELL! They didn't even have to write any new dialogue for him. He played himself.

At least Jerry Jones came out looking great:

(via Comedy Central)

The distinctive typeface used for all titles, credits, and on-screen "scene change" cards, for "Law & Order" and all of its spin-offs, is named "Friz Quadrata."

An Ohio special grand jury decided after days of deliberation that no officers will be charged in the death of 22-year-old John Crawford III, who was shot and killed inside a Beaverton Wal-Mart while carrying an air rifle sold at the store.

Original Source

"My little brother thought somebody was just clowning, because somebody is always clowning by the door. He opened [it] and the man just shot him. He didn't have nothing in his hand," Andre said.

Original Source

popular shared this story from Ta-Nehisi Coates : The Atlantic.

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Soccer star Hope Solo is alleged to have assaulted her sister and 17-year old nephew in June of this year. Unlike Ray Rice, Solo is still plying her trade as a goalkeeper for the national team. This led several people to claim that Solo is the beneficiary of a double standard. In The New York Times Juliet Macur makes the argument:

One can argue the differences between an N.F.L. player punching his soon-to-be wife and a soccer star brawling with her family, but it is indisputable that both qualify as domestic violence. The glaring contrast in Solo’s case is that while several football players recently accused of assaults have been removed from the field, she has been held up for praise by the national team.

On Thursday she was even given the honor of wearing the captain’s armband in celebration of her setting the team’s career record for shutouts in its previous game. The question is why.

Celebrating Solo’s achievement right now is like allowing running back Adrian Peterson, who has been accused of child abuse, to continue to play for the Minnesota Vikings — and then awarding him the game ball for his next 100-yard game.

This analysis strikes me as incorrect, as it does for Much like Slate's Amanda Hess . It also , I find this line of questioning to be incorrect. But even more, I find it to be analysis that exists outside the bounds of human history. Ray Rice did not so much "brawl with his family" as he pummeled his fiancé into unconsciousness. Contrary to the flimsy notion that Real Men don't hit women, Real Men have been pummeling women for much of human history.

It is now becoming fashionable to ignore human history and dump all manner of insupportable violence committed by athletes into the same bucket. The label on that bucket reads "Something Bad, Which We Should Punish." It is true that what Ray Rice did was violent and wrong. It is also true that what Adrian Peterson did was violent and wrong. And it also true that what Hope Solo is alleged to have done is violent and wrong. But they are not the same specimen of violent and wrong.

In our society we recognize different kinds of violence. We understand, for instance, that lynching enjoys a particular place in American history. We generally grant that Emmett Till was not merely murdered, but that he was murdered in a fashion that places his death in a specifically heinous tradition in our history. And thus we understand that what happened to Till, or what James Byrd, or what happened to Sam Hose is not the same thing as what happened to Tupac Shakur or Sam Cooke. This does not mean that what happened to Shakur or Cooke was good. It means that it wasn't a lynching.

In the history of humanity, spouse-beating is a particularly odious tradition—one often employed by men looking to exert power over women. Just as lynching in America is not a phenomenon wholly confined to black people, spouse-beatings are not wholly confined to women. But in our actual history, women have largely been on the receiving end of spouse-beating. We have generally recognized this in our saner moments. There is a reason why we call it the have a "Violence Against Women Act" and not the a "Brawling With Families Act." That is because we recognize that violence against women is an insidious, and sometimes lethal, tradition that deserves a special place in our customs and laws.

This is the tradition with which Ray Rice will be permanently affiliated. Hope Solo is affiliated with a different tradition—misdemeanor assault. If she is guilty she should be punished. And perhaps we do need to have a conversation about punishing athletes for assaulting people. But we don't need Ray Rice to make that case. And we should not pretend that if Ray Rice were accused of assaulting his younger brother and his 17-year old nephew, we would be having this conversation.

Hope Solo only becomes Ray Rice through the annihilation of inconvenient history—through some forgery that implies that there is no tradition of men controlling women through violence. We are familiar with other such forgeries. It is how a conversation about the racism of Richie Incognito becomes a conversation about banning black people from using the word "nigger." Or how the destruction of Mike Brown's body becomes a debate about "black-on-black crime." Or how Ray Rice knocking his wife unconscious morphs into, "Yes, but women do it too." Indeed they do—but neither with the consistency, nor urgency, nor lethality of men.

This article was originally published at http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2014/09/no-hope-solo-is-not-like-ray-rice/380626/

popculturebrain:

@Chris Pratt Douchemaster McChest

slihgtlydyslexic:

vuls:

prepare for high school then prepare for college then prepare for your career then prepare for retirement then you’re dead 

then prepare for skeleton war

daRKNESS NO PARENT 

hangs around the city lookin a troulbesome and has SEVERAL LARGE DOLLAR adn fight a crime

Simmons' suspension of three weeks is longer than the initial suspensions of Ray Rice and Adrian Peterson combined, and both of those situations had the law involved.

Wow, 4chan was actually right for once. Turns out that the threats to release stolen nude photos of Emma Watson in the wake of her stirring pro-feminist speech to the U.N. were actually a calculated plan to discredit the website all along. But by who? That’s the really weird part.

When the countdown on the “Emma You Are Next” website ended, predictably it did not end with any nude photos. Instead it redirected to the website of a company called Rantic Marketing, whose website is plastered with a giant “#Shutdown4chan” logo and whose CEO, “Brad Cockingham” (I think you can see where this is going) claims in an open letter to President Barack Obama that they’ve been hired by “Celebrity publicists” to bring attention to the privacy-invading actions of 4chan.

Here’s the thing, though: Rantic Marketing doesn’t exist. It’s a front for a small team of hoaxers who once called themselves SocialVEVO and  create these fake stories and websites in order to capitalize on page views before the general public figures out the truth. Previous known pranks include spreading rumors that the GTAV PC version would not be cancelled and then pretending that their own website had been hacked by 4chan; creating another fake countdown that promised to reveal a special message from Family Guy’s Brian shortly after the character’s death on the show; pretending to be NASA during the government shutdown; and running a fake Fox vertical known as “Fox Weekly,” on which the first article about the Emma Watson countdown was written. That article has since been deleted, but you can still view the cached version.

While it’s a relief that nobody was legitimately planning retaliation against the actress for her UN speech (although if Death and Taxes is to be believed, some 4Chan users also took the bait and were more than willing to revel in Watson’s public shaming), considering how terrible the past few months have been for women who use the Internet—enduring the trolls in #GamerGate, the theft and proliferation of hundreds of female celebrity nudes, that YouTube celebrity who claims he pretended to grope women on the street as a way to fight domestic violence—that someone would choose to capitalize on the widespread online harassment of women to make money is much more upsetting than the fact that it actually worked. Which is precisely why they chose it, of course.

Hey, guys? You can go back to making pranks about Family Guy characters that don’t contribute to a pervasive culture of sexism and anti-woman rhetoric on the Internet, thanks. We’d really appreciate it.

(via Business Insider)

Previously in Gross Stuff

• 4chan Responds To Emma Watson’s U.N. Speech With #RIPEmmaWatson, Threats To Leak Nude Pictures
• Gullible People Are Microwaving Their iPhones Because of a Twitter Prank, Don’t Try This at Home
• Charity Rejects Donation From Scumbag Redditors Feeling Guilty About Posting Nude Celeb Photos

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enemaroberts:

Sensing an opportunity, the National Republican Congressional Committee posted the video to its website, writing, "This might be the most absurd video of President Obama we've ever seen." They invited people to express their outrage, of course, by donating money to elect Republicans. The White House shares a great deal of responsibility for the outrage, however. The video made the rounds after it was posted to the official White House Instagram account. It's unclear whether #LatteSalute is the correct shorthand for the screw up. The president generally drinks tea, not coffee.

Honestly, you guys are lucky I even noticed this, I’ve been skipping the title sequence lately.

Crushing on Ami: The Boy Who Can See the Future

I wouldn’t normally cover this episode’s Dark Kingdom opener because it doesn’t say much that’s new, but I couldn’t let a scene go where Queen Beryl rehashes all the exposition about the Great Monsters and the Rainbow Crystals and then caps off her speech with:

“Why, then,” she asks, “Do I have only one Rainbow Crystal.” Kunzite isn’t the least bit bovvered about Tuxedo Mask making off with the last RC: they can just catch him when he comes after the next five and take it back. It’s just this kind of passive, stay-getting, lack of initiative that’s put Kunzite where he is today. Never go to anything when you can get it to come to you.

Speaking of segues, meet another new transfer student: Ryo Urawa. He’s shy, places higher on tests than Ami, and seems like he’s got some kinda secret precognition thing going on. Also: he totally has a crush on Ami. Usagi observes this after she and Makoto both commiserate over their poor grades. I like that Makoto’s character incorporates aspects of both Usagi and Rei. Their predictable rivalry is starting to wear on me, maybe her presence can balance it out a bit. They chat with Ami about her unexpected 2nd place score, Ami excitedly says hi to Urawa, he stammers and then just RUNS AWAY. Usagi’s fo-real reaction:

She finds Urawa on the school roof, gazing longingly at a newspaper clipping about Ami placing first in a nationwide academic competition during which they briefly met, a moment when she, because she is Ami, was charmingly kind to him. At first he is reluctant to admit it, saying that he simply respects her intellect and perseverance and that he studies hard in order to be like her, and anyway they could never be together anyway because MYSTERIOUS ANGST. Usagi vows to get them together because… because she’s Usagi and she believes in true love and doing nice things for her friends.

After school, she mets with him in a cafe to discuss strategy, and to give him a goofy candid photo of Ami to serve as a lover’s token. While they’re chatting Luna notices that the Moon Wand in Usagi’s purse is going kinda crazy, but before she can do anything about it Usagi dashes off to meet Ami at her cram school and bring her to Urawa so he can confess his feelings. Also she stiffs Urawa on the bill… because she’s Usagi.

AND NOW FOR SOMETHING COMPLETELY DIFFERENT: Mamoru wanders around the city at night mooning over how he doesn’t know who he is and he’ll have to keep being Tuxedo Mask if he wants to know blah blah the same problems he’s had for like half an arc now with no change. None of this would be a problem if you were better with pets, Mamoru. Nobody’s gonna trust you with an animal guide. “You’re acting strange lately, Mamoru,” Rei tells him.

Right, also Rei is there I guess they’re still dating or whatever since he stepped on her head and dumped her into a lake.

Then we get our requisite Zoisite figuring out the location of the Rainbow Crystal of the Week, in which he’s just, like, stroking the Dark Crystal like it’s a flat hamster. Then this happens.

He confronts Urawa on the streets of Tokyo, and is confused and alarmed when the kid knows his name. Urawa reveals that thanks to his precognitive powers, he knows that he’s a reincarnated youma, and he wants nothing to do with Zoisite and his evil plans. Still, Zoisite probably would have sucked out his gem right there if Usagi and Ami hadn’t shown up. Sailor Mercury escorts Urawa from the scene, while Sailor Moon attempts to distract Zoisite. But, of course, now that even the smallest wrench has been thrown in Zoisite’s plans, he disappears in a huff.

Which leaves us the requisite quiet scene between our two love birds, Urawa and Sailor Mercury. Well, right after Ami realizes that he has a picture of her (and oh my god her reaction is so cute) and Urawa wakes up from a nightmare quite common to lovesick teenage boys: dreaming that he’s become some kind of scissors monster who violently cuts all the clothes off the girl he’s attracted to.

Upon waking, Urawa confesses that he only got that perfect score by using his precognition powers (I’m not sure how precognition allows you to ace a written test, but okay Sailor Moon), and he only did that because he wanted to be like Ami, but he’s terrified that he’ll be forced to fight her. “First of all,” says Ami, “I’m not Ami Mizuno, I’m Sailor Mercury, get it right,” and I think he believes her???? Over his own eyes/precognition???? I don’t understand how disguises work in Sailor Moon and I find it eternally confusing. “Second of all, destiny is what you make it.”

And on that bit of wisdom, Zoisite catches up with them, seizes the yellow Rainbow Crystal, and transforms Urawa in to Bunboo, the silliest name for a giant armored monster with Swiss army knives for hands. But, because love conquers all in Sailor Moon, Urawa is able to assert his own nature even as Bunboo, and he attacks Zoisite, causing the King of Heaven to drop the Crystal right into Ami’s waiting hands. Now normally this kind of hitch in the works would spell immediate teleportation escape for Zoisite, but I guess his cooldown was up because instead he pours his Dark Crystal mind control into Bunboo, increasing his size and reversing his alignment.

Sailor Moon shows up but is unable to get Moon Healing Escalation to work on this strengthened youma until his energy is reduced somehow. So it’s a good thing that Mars and Jupiter are right on her heels: between all of their special abilities, they manage to shrink Bunboo back to normal size and refresh him back into Urawa. Zoisite blips out, and we didn’t even have to call up ol’ Tux—

Listen up, Tuxedo Mask, I’m only gonna say this once.

Because romance never works out for the Sailor Senshi or their friends, even though they’ve saved the day Urawa’s dad is transferred and so he too must move to a new school. Despite this they appear to put him on a train alone? Is Urawa secretly Shinji Ikari? He attempts to return Ami’s photo…

…but she gives him a better one right back and tells him that he can visit any time. What can I say: a nice guy who would subvert his own evil identity for you is a bit of an attractive proposition.

The Painting of Love: Usagi and Mamoru Get Closer

Usagi’s still conflicted about Tuxedo Mask and Zoisite is starting to learn that being the person Queen Beryl is actually paying to isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. But that’s old news—what’s new is that Naru’s brought Usagi and Umino to a gallery showing of Yumemi Yumeno, who’s basically Lisa Frank for a high school audience. She paints colorful but chaste pop art of lovers and is a social recluse. Her self portrait is beautiful, but nobody’s ever seen her in real life. One of her paintings, of a masked man in a cape and a young blond woman, seems curiously familiar to Usagi. A wandering Mamoru sees it in the gallery window and immediately recognizes images from his recurring dreams. Meanwhile, Yumemi herself secretly wanders around the gallery, fruitlessly trying to find folks to model her newest inspiration and get out of her artistic slump.

It turns out that Yumemi is actually a plain, freckled brunette, in contrast with her self-portrait. While leaving the gallery, she bumps into Mamoru and insists that he come sit for her as a model: he looks just like the man in her new idea. Usagi, seeing the interaction through the window, thinks Mamoru is skipping out on Rei and dashes out to confront him, only to be similarly accosted by Yumemi for the same reasons. Usagi and Mamoru are both swept off to model for the artist in her own home. This leaves Umino alone with Naru.

Once at Yumemi’s house, Mamoru is hilariously grumpy about the whole thing, while Usagi figures out the twist: this plain Jane artist is actually Yumemi Yumemo. Yumemi explains that people assume that beautiful paintings were painted by a beautiful person, and she believes that if her true appearance was known her career would falter, so she hides her self from the world and paints self portraits that don’t bear her any resemblence. It means that she has no friends, but she’s satisfied with a lonely life if it means she can pursue her art. Over Mamoru’s objections and Usagi’s horror at finding out that Yumemi wants them to be in a picture together, the three get down to art. And, since this episode is partially titled “Usagi and Mamoru Get Closer,” Usagi admits to herself that Mamoru is handsome, and Mamoru… appears to find Usagi’s embarrassment cute?

We interrupt this sketch session for an important cat-related interlude: Usagi dropped her Moon Wand earlier because she’s a dummy, and Luna is trying to find her so she can give it back. Now back to art.

Usagi discovers a sketch in Yumemi’s house that features a young blonde woman giving her Mamoru-look-alike lover a gift of a star locket, on a crescent moon background, and Mamoru flips his shit, recognizing his own locket.

We interrupt this sketch session for an important Dark Kingdom interlude:

After the art is over, Yumemi walks Usagi home, and Usagi tells her firmly that she’s underestimating her audience. She’s a very wonderful person and she shouldn’t be afraid to show it. After Yumemi has gone home Usagi runs into Luna, who gives her her Moon Stick and an incredibly patronizing lecture about how the upside to Usagi’s tendency to become over-preoccupied by silly things all the time is that she forgets about them almost instantly. Usagi throws a rightful temper tantrum and dashes off, leaving Luna to wonder if she said too much (YES).

Wandering around angry with her Moon Wand, Usagi notices that it’s reacting to a youma signal from Yumemi’s house (yes, Yumemi is this episode’s youma, if you couldn’t guess just from her paintings that coincidentally look like Tuxedo Mask and Sailor Moon). Zoisite has arrived, sucks the green Rainbow Crystal out of her, and calls upon the youma Veena to emerge. Usagi watches all this quietly from the window and springs into action, calling the rest of the senshi on her communicator for backup and transforming. Having actually managed to get the crystal and the youma without a single Sailor Senshi showing up, Zoisite takes Veena back to that construction site, I guess to show her how fun it is to laugh while standing on top of it.

Veena’s got this pretty sweet power where she plucks feathers from her angel wings and uses them as quills to draw objects in the air that become real and lethal, so the fact that she uses this only to drop rocks on Sailor Moon really makes it seem like she’s not applying herself. Still, the rocks are working pretty good until Tuxedo Mask shows up, but he drops Sailor Moon as soon as she’s been taken five inches out of harm’s way and goes straight for Zoisite, ’cause that boy knows where his Rainbow Crystal is. The timely arrival of the rest of the Sailor Senshi to deal with Veena allow Sailor Moon to follow as well.

Tuxedo Mask and Zoisite fight, and Zoisite pretty much hands him his ass, necessitating rescue from Sailor Moon just before the King of Heaven teleports out. Sailor Moon tries to return Tuxedo Mask’s star locket, but he tells her that if the Senshi are looking for the princess, she should keep it. She asks him if he could also maybe return the orange Rainbow Crystal, and he’s like “Ha ha ha NO.” He’s got just as much a right to be looking for the Rainbow Crystals as them, and if he has the opportunity to steal the yellow one from them, he’ll totally do it, man. He might not be their enemy completely, but where the Legendary Silver Crystal is concerned, they are at cross-purposes. He leaves Usagi so shocked and sad that she nearly forgets that Veena is still at large and the episode isn’t over yet. Fortunately, the other Senshi have softened her up but good, and a quick Moon Healing Escalation later everything’s back to normal.

Well, almost. The next day at her gallery, Yumemi shows Mamoru and Usagi her new self-portrait: a realistic one, saying that Usagi convinced her to bravely open up to the public. Also she had this crazy supernatural near-death experience last night. Life is short, you know?

Moon Prism Power… Wrap Up!

See Sailor Moon, this is how you do romance that doesn’t make me vaugely uncomfortable: age appropriate partners. Seriously, Ami and Urawa, triple decker cute. Of course, if romance actually worked out for the main characters, what would we ever write about again? Naru and Nephrite fell apart, Sailor Moon and Tuxedo Mask can’t figure out whether they’re on the same side, Makoto’s got some kind of whole deal with an old boyfriend, and as soon as it looks like Ami and Urawa are gonna be just fine, he has to conveniently transfer to another school.

I’m glad that this past episode finally gave us an identifiably female member of the Great Monsters. It still seems notable to me that as soon as we hit an apparently elite level of youma, we’re shown our first non-female youma in the entirety of the show. Not only because that’s a little weird from a gender roles standpoint but because one of the things I really like about watching Sailor Moon is seeing this enormous cast of fabulously designed female monsters parade by. It’s of course possible that this was more motivated by avoiding the weirdness of having a female monster emerge from a male character, but… /shrug.

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Real Genius, the 1985 comedy starring my first boyfriend Val Kilmer is getting rebooted. But not for the big screen, as a TV series for NBC. I’ll be over here reading Rebecca’s article in defense of reboots…

Deadline says a television showed based on the film is in the works at NBC from Sony TV, Adam Sandler’s Sony-based company Happy Madison, and 3 Arts Entertainment.

The film starred Kilmer and Gabriel Jarret, an actor you might not have seen in anything ever again (thought apparently he was in a West Wing episode so I did) as geniuses attending a CalTech ripoff school. It was directed by Martha Coolidge and written by Neal Israel, Pat Proft, and Peter Torokvei. The main plot revolves around the CIA wanting to repurpose a computer-guided laser the kids are working on for a weapon but otherwise it’s a cheesy, raunchy, ’80s jaunt.

But what about this new TV version? Deadline writes:

Written by Workaholics co-executive producer Craig DiGregorio and David King (Parks And Recreation), Real Genius is a present-day reboot of the cult film, set as a workplace comedy. The show centers on the relationship between a rock star-like genius — the character Kilmer played in the movie — and a sheltered, naive co-worker.

I’m feeling some Big Bang Theory vibes here, what about you? Anyway, at this junction I don’t really have an opinion either way (of course initial reaction is eegads!) but I will be keeping a keen eye on this one. And Val Kilmer. As always.

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ideonexus writes: After Emma Watson gave a speech on the need for feminism (video) to the United Nations, 4chan users threatened to release nude photos of the Harry Potter star in retaliation, setting up the emmayouarenext.com website with a countdown clock. Now it has been revealed that the site was an elaborate hoax intended publicize a movement to shut down 4chan.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.