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2046

xombiedirge:

Hadoukrayon by Hoang Tran / Store

Framed orginal and limited edition prints available HERE.

Part of the “8-Bit & Beyond 2" art show, at the Bottleneck Gallery / Facebook. All artwork available HERE.

Reference letter

the end of summer vacation

Eye-opening story from Michael O. Church of two very different job interviews.

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Super Smash Bros. on the 3DS will feature a stage inspired by Nintendo's famous handheld, the Game Boy - AKA that "old DS" where you have to actually press buttons. Game director Masahiro Sakurai posted a picture of the stage to Miiverse earlier this...

“Yeah I’d like to put his butt in the electric chair and give him half a bolt,” Charlie Brown said laughing.

vintageruminance:

Sigourney Weaver looking to camera between takes on Aliens in 1985, London

God! In the three years I have lived in Portland, I've gained like 20 pounds. I'm disgusted.

Too many Portland indulgences. Too much beer. Too much rich food. Too much sitting on my ass in front of Netflix. Smoking pot and late-night munchies. Eating a fucking pint of ice cream! Not enough quality sleep. Not enough exercise. Embarrassed to take my shirt off this summer. Not enough bike riding, yoga, etc.

Well that's gonna stop. Fuck you, blubber around my belly! Fucking ROLLS. This is not me. No more beer for awhile. No more pot (I cannot resist the munchies). No more cream and sugar in my coffee. I will beat this. I've done it before. I can do it!!! (Please goddess help me...)

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App Camp for Girls came to Seattle, and I was lucky enough to get invited to the pitch session. (And Sheila was on the panel, which was very cool.) It was a big room and so there was enough space for not just the parents and camp counselors and volunteers but a few local folks like me.

The pitch session is kind of like the recital. At the end of the week, three teams of four girls each present their app. They talk about what it does and how it works, and they talk about competition, marketing, and how they plan to make money. (They all got the same memo about for-pay apps we did — the apps are free with in-app ads.)

It was wonderful.

I was a fan before, but actually seeing it — seeing the energy of the girls and the cool things they made, and seeing how happy (and happily tired) Jean MacDonald, Liz Marley, Kristina Sontag, and all the volunteers were at the end of the week — put me over the moon. This is the coolest thing, by far, that’s happening in our community.

If you can help, help. If you can sponsor a team, do it. If you can donate, donate. And, if you get so lucky as to get invited to a pitch session, go. Don’t miss it.

An anonymous reader writes with a link to a story in the LA Times: "Few places in the country are so warm and bright as Mary Wilkerson's property on the beach near St. Petersburg, Fla., a city once noted in the Guinness Book of World Records for a 768-day stretch of sunny days. But while Florida advertises itself as the Sunshine State, power company executives and regulators have worked successfully to keep most Floridians from using that sunshine to generate their own power. Wilkerson discovered the paradox when she set out to harness sunlight into electricity for the vintage cottages she rents out at Indian Rocks Beach. She would have had an easier time installing solar panels, she found, if she had put the homes on a flatbed and transported them to chilly Massachusetts. While the precise rules vary from state to state, one explanation is the same: opposition from utilities grown nervous by the rapid encroachment of solar firms on their business."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Legal scholar, Josh Blackman, says that he and his colleagues developed an algorithm that can predict whether the US Supreme Court will uphold or reverse a court decision. via ars technica:

“Using only data available prior to the date of decision, our model correctly identifies 69.7 percent of the Court’s overall affirm and reverse decisions and correctly forecasts 70.9% of the votes of individual justices across 7,700 cases and more than 68,000 justice votes,” Josh Blackman, a South Texas College of Law scholar, wrote on his blog Tuesday.

Read more.

popular shared this story from Feministe.

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Imagine this conversation with your employer:

YOU. Hey, it looks like my paycheck is $25 short.

EMPLOYER. Oh, no, that’s for Kitten Day.

YOU. I’m sorry?

EMPLOYER. Once a month, we bring in kittens for everyone in the office to cuddle for a day. Studies show that it reduces stress. It’s adorable.

YOU. I’m sure it is, but you’re paying for it out of my paycheck.

EMPLOYER. Yes. Kitten Day is part of your overall compensation package.

A “total compensation package” is the full value of all remuneration given to an employee in exchange for their work for their company. This includes their regular paycheck, but it can also include bonuses, stock and/or stock options, retirement contributions, and, for many workers in the U.S., health insurance. A good package can, for instance, offset a lower base salary, because the employee’s work will still be compensated, even if it doesn’t show up in their paycheck.

In short: The money spent on health insurance is the employee’s own. It was earned by their hard work, and it only passes through their employer’s hands on the way to the health insurance company. It’s not a favor or a gift provided by a benevolent employer — it is compensation for work performed.

Now imagine this conversation:

EMPLOYER. Yes. Kitten Day is part of your overall compensation package.

YOU. Yeah, but I could really use that money for things that actually benefit me. Like mental health care, for instance.

EMPLOYER. Studies show —

YOU. Real mental health care.

EMPLOYER. Well, the owner of the company belongs to a religion that believes that psychological and psychiatric care are of the devil, so all we’re willing to offer is Kitten Day.

YOU. But the Affordable Care Act requires —

EMPLOYER. It’s a religious belief, and that changes everything.

YOU. But you’re spending my money on –

EMPLOYER. Just take a kitten and calm your tits.

If it sounds ridiculous, that’s because it is. For your employer to compensate you for your work with a monthly kitten is as ridiculous as compensating you with a health insurance plan that doesn’t cover your health needs. (And that’s even before you get to the point that a religious exemption on the basis that kittens are God’s Xanax is as ridiculous as an exemption on the basis that hormonal contraceptives kill babies.)

So no, I don’t expect my employer to pay for my birth control. No, this isn’t about my boss subsidizing my sex life. And no, it’s not reasonable for me to hold an aspirin between my knees and call it a contraceptive. It isn’t about an employer paying for birth control any more than it would be about an employer paying for someone’s insulin. This is about an employer imposing their religious beliefs on their employees, taking those employees’ earnings and blowing them on inadequate health care in direct opposition to federal law. And if this were any health care issue other than birth control, people would be marching with bullhorns, not calling women greedy sluts for wanting the quality health care they’re owed.

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• Hobby Lobby = The Worst by Jill July 3, 2014
• Satanists Agains Medical Misinformation by Caperton July 29, 2014
• The 11th Commandment: Thou Shalt Not Give Healthcare to the Women-folk by Jill September 4, 2007
• Anti-Choicers Defeat Birth Control Bill in South Dakota by Jill February 11, 2008
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popular shared this story from Well, I'm Back.

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I know it's not the greatest marketing pitch, but it's the truth.

Google is bent on establishing platform domination unlike anything we've ever seen, even from late-1990s Microsoft. Google controls Android, which is winning; Chrome, which is winning; and key Web properties in Search, Youtube, Gmail and Docs, which are all winning. The potential for lock-in is vast and they're already exploiting it, for example by restricting certain Google Docs features (e.g. offline support) to Chrome users, and by writing contracts with Android OEMs forcing them to make Chrome the default browser. Other bad things are happening that I can't even talk about. Individual people and groups want to do the right thing but the corporation routes around them. (E.g. PNaCl and Chromecast avoided Blink's Web standards commitments by declaring themselves not part of Blink.) If Google achieves a state where the Internet is really only accessible through Chrome (or Android apps), that situation will be very difficult to escape from, and it will give Google more power than any company has ever had.

Microsoft and Apple will try to stop Google but even if they were to succeed, their goal is only to replace one victor with another.

So if you want an Internet --- which means, in many ways, a world --- that isn't controlled by Google, you must stop using Chrome now and encourage others to do the same. If you don't, and Google wins, then in years to come you'll wish you had a choice and have only yourself to blame for spurning it now.

Of course, Firefox is the best alternative :-). We have a good browser, and lots of dedicated and brilliant people improving it. Unlike Apple and Microsoft, Mozilla is totally committed to the standards-based Web platform as a long-term strategy against lock-in. And one thing I can say for certain is that of all the contenders, Mozilla is least likely to establish world domination :-).

Giovanni Battista Della Porta, Cipher disk, 1563

Hold on to your wallets! Sherlock Holmes Consulting Detective is now available. Contained within its box is the pinnacle of puzzle technology, the supreme solo game, an astonishing coup for couples' gaming! Board games will never be the same again.

Hmm? What's that? You're saying it came out in 1981?

No, that's impossible. There... must be some mistake.

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molly23:

isoldmysoultofilm:

the pinnacle of arnold’s career

California elected this dude to run the whole state.

submitted by zifu [link] [33 comments]

sparkamovement:

lunarobverse:

A brilliant metaphor

THIISSSTHISSTHIS. -k

The Expedition 22 crew on the International Space Station grabbed a stunning photo of the silhouette of the Space Shuttle Endeavour as the orbiter moved closer to the station in 2010.

photo via Space Station Expedition 22 Crew, NASA

20 Mind-Boggling Shower Thoughts [showerthoughts/distractify]

Previously: Name Improvements for Everyday Stuff

submitted by BackOff_ImAScientist [link] [7 comments]

Courtney shared this story from Super Opinionated.

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Long before Mark Zuckerberg and Christian Rudder, there was Jeff Tarr, David Crump and Vaughan Morrill, founders of “Operation Match.”