Everybody knows that pizza is delicious, but did you know that there's a science to getting that perfectly browned-but-not-too-brown, moist-but-not-oily, haphazard-but-also-uniform arrangement of peaks and valleys for the blistered cheese that rests on top of a pizza?
firehoseGambit 100% accuracy
Mohawk Storm beat
firehoseand apparently I'm their replacement
firehosehttps://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=wkO4NIqAMss
"Update: Chivas Regal 12 Year. You're welcome."
When the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge first started, the rules were simple: donate money toward fighting ALS or dump a bucket of ice on your head. It was meant as an incentive to be charitable — not, as it later evolved, to be both charitable and cold.
Cheers to you, Sir Patrick Stewart, although I worry that raise of his glass was a non-verbal challenge to everyone watching to do it.
Stay classy.
firehoseamercia
Almost two weeks ago in Ferguson, Missouri, police officer Darren Wilson shot and killed 18-year-old Michael Brown. The incident kicked off protests in the racially divided town, and Wilson has been in hiding since the shooting.
Four days ago, a GoFundMe campaign to raise money to support Wilson was launched, and as of Friday afternoon it had brought 5,901 donations totaling $234,990. However, money wasn’t the only thing people were giving to the crowdfunding campaign: the campaign page quickly found itself drowning in hateful, racist commentary.
"We are NOT gonna let that racist bastard Sharpton and his kind railroad you into prison," said a $50 donor under the name Mark Milazzo. "Wake up White America!"
Read 8 remaining paragraphs | Comments
firehoseall carriers suck forever + campaign finance reform + amercia = TAL
Comcast’s proposed $45.2-billion acquisition of Time Warner Cable has been criticized by angry customers, consumer advocacy groups, and even some members of Congress.
But Comcast has plenty of support, too, much of it from politicians and organizations that benefit from its political and charitable donations. With the deadline to submit initial comments on the merger to the Federal Communications Commission set to expire Monday, a number of elected officials and charities have urged the FCC to think favorably of Comcast during its merger review.
Charities supporting the acquisition include the Greater Washington Urban League, the Urban League of Broward County in Florida, the Boys and Girls Club of Rockford, Illinois, and the United Way of Tucson in Arizona. "Comcast has dedicated itself to advancing organizations like ours through financial support and partnerships," the Greater Washington Urban League wrote.
Read 19 remaining paragraphs | Comments
firehose'Fred Ward played the tough cop turned kung fu assassin for the secretive organization CURE, which took down 1980s threats by playing songs that made them really weepy about their ex-girlfriends.'
Exciting those who fondly recall the early days of VHS as well as fans of really chunky turtlenecks, Remo Williams is set to make a return to the big screen, for the first time since 1985’s Remo Williams: The Adventure Begins became the biggest lie of a movie title since The NeverEnding Story. Indeed, the adventure began and ended with that film, in which Fred Ward played the tough cop turned kung fu assassin for the secretive organization CURE, which took down 1980s threats by playing songs that made them really weepy about their ex-girlfriends.
But now Remo Williams, the adventure continues with a new movie from Shane Black, who’s been hired to direct a fresh adaptation of Warren Murphy’s pulp novel series The Destroyer, with Fight Club’s Jim Uhls handling the script. As Deadline notes, the story combines Shane Black-friendly slick action with opportunity for ...
Sneak peek, Captain Marvel (2014) Issue 8, page 16
Art by Marcio Takara
firehosemaybe not the best timing for heroic white people and mob justice in missoh nevermind it's already funded
firehose'meaningless noir riffs like some bad Saturday Night Live skit that runs on way too long'
'the color that occasionally pops up in the mostly black-and-white film is just meaningless emphasis, a child banging on a piano'
'Dame to Kill For’s dialogue and female representation is so impossibly bad that it retroactively makes the first film, and the comics from which these films were adapted, look terrible'
'The fact that Rodriguez shoots, scores, and edits his own films no longer feels like ambitious frugality so much as baseless egocentrism, especially since the cinematography, editing, and soundtracks are relentlessly mediocre'
The first Sin City film was an example of a very small subset of comic book movies that slavishly adapt directly from the source material, using the comics as storyboards. (The other two films in this subset that immediately come to mind are Zack Snyder’s 300 and Watchmen.) It was nothing special—it’s hard to picture Sin City being anyone’s favorite movie—but at least certain scenes looked exactly like the stark illustrations from Frank Miller’s excellent first book in the Sin City series, which made the film a kind of proof-of-concept for digital filmmaking as a way to totally divorce flesh-and-blood actors from reality and insert them into an artist’s world. It was self-conscious noir rip-off, but it sure didn’t look like anything else at the multiplex.
And now, almost a decade later, co-directors Robert Rodriguez and Miller are back with a second Sin City movie, this one subtitled A Dame to Kill For, and it’s everything you hate about sequels: There’s not one original thought in the movie, the story is a weak rehash of the first film, and everything feels phoned-in. The problems spring from the source: After Sin City, the first book in the series, the quality of Miller’s Sin City series of books dropped precipitously. The art started getting lazy and loose; the writing veered into self-parody. Since the movie hews closely to the source material, it’s a less visually dynamic experience, and the dialogue is often laughably bad.
Dame follows a number of characters through very loosely related adventures, with no real energy or wit. The best actors are Joseph Gordon-Levitt as a card shark named Johnny (he almost manages to sell this terrible bit of voiced-over narration: “A city’s like a woman, or a casino. Somebody’s gonna win, and it’s gonna be me”) and Eva Green as a femme fatale named Ava. But even Green and Gordon-Levitt are adrift in a sea of black and white and splashes of color, doing meaningless noir riffs like some bad Saturday Night Live skit that runs on way too long. (And let’s talk about the use of spot colors in Dame: Specifically, it’s stupid. Some fire is in color, and other fire is in black and white. Some blood is in color, and other blood is just pure white. Sometimes Ava’s lips are bright red, and sometimes they aren’t. Without a consistent visual language, the color that occasionally pops up in the mostly black-and-white film is just meaningless emphasis, a child banging on a piano.)
With all these stories and characters sharing a setting, you’d probably expect Dame to be a well-structured film. You’d be expecting way too much. Rather than weaving the stories together, Dame cuts from one episode to another with all the subtlety of a commercial TV break, creating a stuttering rhythm of beginning and endings. And though they share a similar backdrop, the stories are maddeningly self-contained. The ending of Johnny’s story seems to set up some revelation in the final episode featuring Jessica Alba, for example, but that payoff never comes.
A lot of people had a lot of complaints about the first Sin City’s wooden dialogue and the fact that every female character was either a stripper or a prostitute. Fans of the comic justified those flaws by saying that Miller was commenting on a long tradition of noir storytelling, from Chandler to Spillane. But Dame to Kill For’s dialogue and female representation is so impossibly bad that it retroactively makes the first film, and the comics from which these films were adapted, look terrible. This is not a smart, respectful tribute to noir filmmakers and storytellers; it’s an unmoored succession of “cool” moments strung together with no overarching narrative or aesthetic sense, a couple of dumb boys fucking around with their toys.
In the last decade, Miller has lost his grip on reality; his solo directorial debut, The Spirit, is one of the worst movies I’ve ever seen, and the only comic he’s published in that time, Holy Terror, was a bigoted, jingoistic piece of shit. And Rodriguez has churned out bad film after bad film in a parody of the do-it-yourself aesthetic that made his debut film, El Mariachi, so charming. The fact that Rodriguez shoots, scores, and edits his own films no longer feels like ambitious frugality so much as baseless egocentrism, especially since the cinematography, editing, and soundtracks are relentlessly mediocre. The word that kept coming to mind while watching Dame—from the pounds of makeup slathered on Mickey Rourke and Stacey Keach to the waste of actors like Christopher Lloyd and Juno Temple to the rampant gun-worship—was “garbage.” This is an eminently disposable movie that just takes up space, with no reason to exist. It’s not even fun enough to be trash cinema; it’s just trash.
firehosefollowup on Ice-T
The Legend of Drizzt: The Collected Stories is a 2011 anthology of short stories by author R.A. Salvatore that features protagonist Drizzt Do’Urden and his various cohorts in the Forgotten Realms campaign setting of Dungeons & Dragons. The anthology is currently available as a free audiobook at Audible with readings from the likes of Felicia Day, “Weird Al” Yankovic, Ice-T, and more.
SoundCloud user Something Awful Zack has uploaded a series of clips from Ice-T’s particularly enthusiastic reading of “Comrades at Odds” from the anthology.
image via Audible
via K. Thor Jensen
firehose'Under the proposal, a religious college or other nonprofit group could inform the Department of Health and Human Services of its religious objections and the department would then contact insurance companies and arrange the birth control coverage at no cost to the employer or its employees.
Previously, the organizations were required to notify the insurance companies directly, a step that some organizations said still made them complicit in providing drugs they objected to.'
SunHerald.com |
Administration moves toward new rule on contraceptives SunHerald.com WASHINGTON — The Obama administration on Friday moved to enact new rules that help ensure contraception coverage for employees of certain companies that have religious objections to birth control. The new rule would seek to isolate the employers ... Administration Offers New Rules for Religious Objections to Health Care LawHealthDay all 204 news articles » |
firehoseAmercia
NBCNews.com |
$225000 in Crowdfunding Raised to Support Darren Wilson NBCNews.com A crowdfunding site created this week to support Ferguson, Missouri, police officer Darren Wilson and his family continues to rake in donations, but not without backlash against comments made by some of the campaign's donors. Created on Monday on the ... Missouri grand jury mulling Darren Wilson's shooting of Michael Brown has 3 ...New York Daily News March, memorial service planned in embattled Missouri townReuters Thousands of dollars raised for officer who shot Michael BrownMSNBC seattlepi.com -The Times-Picayune - NOLA.com -Fox News all 3,801 news articles » |
firehoseCaptain Marvel before Captain Marvel was cool
firehosen.. no. no it isn't.
what in the fuck
Quester (Namco - arcade - 1987)
Japan-only Arkanoid-style block breaking game
firehoseautoreshare
firehosepractical medical advice from your physician
28p09 is a post from: The Adventures of Dr. McNinja
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firehosewho the fuck is Ben Wolf
Hey! It’s kinda, sorta the one year anniversary for The Old Reader. I know, some of you have been using The Old Reader since 2012. But the current team took over just a year ago. And now we’re going to celebrate, have some cake, and reminisce.
When we first got involved, there was a lot of mystery about who we were. This blog initially only said that a “a new corporate entity in the United States” was going to take over and improve the service.
We didn’t mean to be so mysterious. We were a new company ourselves. Levee Labs is our web application company. It’s the kind of work we’ve been doing since the late 90’s before starting our own shop a few years ago.
Like most people who used TOR, we were sad when we heard that the founders, Elena and Dmitry, planned to shut it down because the volume of users was overwhelming. However, they were willing to sell the application as long as the new owners had the same values and attitudes along with the technical ability to improve the application’s availability. I like to think we’ve delivered on both.
Our first priority was to handle traffic spikes better. We’ve been building high volume, highly scalable web apps for a long time, so we knew a lot about that particular problem. In the first few months, a lot of what we did was backend stuff to improve the architecture and performance.
Thanks to all of you who hung with us while we moved all of the data 5,000 miles to our new infrastructure.
Next came the new features. We’ve added a number of new social sharing features as well as usability features. Social sharing features like Starred items and Send To allow you you to highlight and share posts from The Old Reader for friends or social media. We also added the bookmarklet feature to send a copy of any web page to your TOR account.
A lot of these are features you’ve all been asking for, while other are just things we think are cool. More recently, we added Spritz to help you read faster. And of course, we have grown the list of apps to make your Old Reader feed available everywhere, as with the most recent, Reeder for iOS and Mac.
Of course, the biggest change was in February when we rolled out Premium accounts for The Old Reader. This was the biggest risk of all, but I am happy to say it has worked out. TOR now has well over a half million users and thousands of Premium users.
Premium isn’t just way to make sure the service is viable for the foreseeable future. It’s what lets us keep the service available without resorting to the ads, feed manipulation, data mining, sponsored content, and all of the crap that pollutes social media and other online services. We’ll also keep rolling out new Premium features to make the service even more valuable.
Reading this, I am immensely proud of what we’ve accomplished. But know that we’re not even close to done. We’ve got a lot of stuff in the works, big and small. It should be a fun year.
Now, back to cake.
firehosevia THANKGODYOUREHERE
firehosevia Rosalind
Texas gubernatorial candidate Wendy Davis is pushing women’s rights issues in the final months of her campaign, attempting to capitalize on the very issue that gave her national notoriety.
On Wednesday, Davis, a Democratic state senator, called for an end to the statute of limitations on rape and sexual battery cases in Texas.
Eliminating the statute of limitations for rape will help ensure predators are brought to justice no matter when they committed their crime.
— Wendy Davis (@WendyDavisTexas) August 20, 2014
To turn around and make survivors pay the price for our failure and neglect by denying them justice is almost criminal in itself.
— Wendy Davis (@WendyDavisTexas) August 20, 2014
Davis has been trailing her opponent in the governor’s race, Texas Republican Attorney General Greg Abbott, by double digits for most of the summer. Now Davis is focusing in on the kind of women’s sexual health and rights issues that catapulted her to fame in 2013, when she staged an 11-hour filibuster against a bill that would have radically restricted abortion access in the state.
RELATED: msnbc’s ‘30 in 30’ series profiles Wendy Davis
Earlier this month, she launched a controversial ad accusing Abbott of “siding with a corporation over a rape victim” in a 1993 case involving an alleged rape by an employee of a vacuum company.
The court sided with the plaintiff in a lawsuit against Kirby, the vacuum company, but Abbott dissented, saying the company owed the woman nothing. Abbott’s campaign derided Davis’s ad as “gutter politics.”
Davis’s call for an end to the statute of limitations in Texas is an extension of the lawmaker’s earlier work. The Texas legislature passed a bill she authored in 2011, which pushed law enforcement agencies to work through a backlog of untested rape kits. Davis personally pressed law enforcement officials to keep up the work on the kits. Now, Davis says, the statute of limitations must be eliminated for those victims to get justice, particularly if their rape kit went untested for years.
Current Texas law mandates that sexual assault cases can’t be prosecuted after a decade.
Both Abbott and Davis have largely steered clear of another issue dominating Texas politics in recent days – the indictment of Gov. Rick Perry over allegations of abuse of power.
Both candidates were careful not to get too close to Perry’s indictment in recent appearances, according to The Dallas Morning News.
“These are serious charges,” Davis said Wednesday in a news conference. “I trust the justice system to do its job and I won’t presuppose what the outcome will be.”
Abbott questioned how the governor could be indicted for simply exercising his authority, saying in an interview on Fox News, “I don’t know what to think of it.”
Abbott’s and Davis’s campaigns did not immediately respond to msnbc’s requests for comment.
firehose"If I did it for the money I’d probably find a way to juice the data so that I could at least afford to hire an employee"
what the fuck happened to that VC money?
So many things can go wrong and often do, but I spend a good third of my time working on infrastructure, monitoring, and analytics so that they don’t.
Here’s what happened: At approximately 4:30pm PT feed fetching ceased. The feed fetchers were still working, which is why my monitors didn’t fire and alert anybody. But I have a second large Mongo database server used exclusively for collecting data about feeds being fetched. There are approximately 75 servers dedicated to feed fetching. These analytics look at average fetch times on a per task server basis. I use these analytics to ensure that my task servers are humming along, as they each use a ton of network, cpu, and memory.
This Mongo analytics servers works in a curious way. If you right-click on a feed and go to Statistics you’ll see the feed fetch history for a feed, stretching back a hundred fetches if the feed has had any issues in fetching. I keep these statistics on an analytics server separate from the regular Mongo server. I do this so that if the mongo analytics server goes down, everything will operate normally.
But the mongo server didn’t go down. It merely gave this error:
OperationError: Could not save document (Can't take a write lock while out of disk space)
Mongo continues serving read queries while not allowing write queries. I didn’t plan for that! And it gets worse. The way MongoDB stores data is that is just keeps growing, even as you delete data. NewsBlur only saves the last few fetches, but deleting old fetches doesn’t give you back any disk space. Every other database server I use has an autovacuum process that takes care of this maintenance work (PostgreSQL, Redis, Elasticsearch, but not MongoDB). It’s unfortunate that this is yet another instance of MongoDB being the cause of downtime, even though the fault lies with me.
The server that is meant to only be used to ensure things are working correctly was itself the culprit for feeds no longer being fetched. This is the ironic part.
Now comes the painful part. On Wednesday morning (yesterday) I packed my car and headed down to Big Sur to go backpack camping for the first time. I’ve car camped plenty of times, but I felt confident enough to pack my sleeping bag and tent into a big bag and head ten miles into the woods of coastal California.
I headed out, away from cellular service, at 4pm PT, half an hour before the analytics server ran out of disk space. And then returned nearly 24 hours later to a bevy of alarmed tweets, emails, direct messages, and a voicemail letting me know that things were haywire.
But the real problem is that I set a vacation reply on both my personal and work email accounts to say that I’d be out until September 3rd. Now, I hired a firm to watch the servers while I’m at Burning Man starting this Saturday. But I figured I could get away with leaving the servers for twenty four hours. And I neglected to tweet out that I’d be gone for a day, so theories cropped up that I was injured, dead, or worse, ignoring the service.
If you’re wondering, I think about NewsBlur first thing in the morning and last thing at night when I check Twitter for mentions. It’s my life and I would never just give up on it. I just got cocky after a year and a half of nearly uninterrupted service. NewsBlur requires next to no maintenance, apart from handling support requests and building new features (and occasionally fixing old ones). So I figured what harm could 24 hours of away time be? Boy was I wrong.
If you made it this far then you probably care about NewsBlur’s future. I want to not only assure you that I will be building better monitoring to ensure this never happens again, but to also offer anybody who feels that they are not getting their money’s worth a refund. Even if you are months away from payment, if you aren’t completely satisfied and think NewsBlur’s just about the best thing to happen to RSS since Brent Simmons released NetNewsWire back in 2004, then I want to give you your money back and let you keep your premium account until it expires.
I would like to also mention how much I appreciate the more light-hearted tweets that I read while on the frenetic three hour drive back to San Francisco from Big Sur. I do this for all of your happiness. If I did it for the money I’d probably find a way to juice the data so that I could at least afford to hire an employee. This is a labor of love and your payment goes directly into supporting it.
firehosevia Kellygo
Amercia