firehose

dogshaming:

Scrap booking Sparkles!

I ate a bottle of glitter and now my poop sparkles.

Ms Marvel recently went to its sixth printing, a rare accomplishment in comics today.

But chatting with Marvel executives at San Diego Comic Con I discovered more. That it sells more in digital than print, and that includes the first issue.

I guess I don't understand the point of San Diego Comic-Con anymore. It used to be the event where the comic book industry revealed their most exciting plans for the year ahead, but now those announcements are spread around to all the various conventions, especially New York Comic Con and Chicago Comic Con. For a brief time, it was where superhero movies debuted and sought the approval of the true nerd fanbase. But all Marvel and DC did at this SDCC is hold press conferences about how great their upcoming movies are going to be. And why should they announce anything new at SDCC? There's a whole nerd-movie internet out there just waiting to swarm like piranhas around any scrap of a press release issued by these studios every day of the year. Why release new information at SDCC when it just gets swallowed up by everything else at SDCC?

I suppose a lot of people go to SDCC to see exclusive footage from movies that are a year away from being released. A horde of lawyers are now chasing crappy phone-cam recordings of that exclusive footage all around YouTube, but they've certainly gotten the nerd media excited. Maybe that's all this is? An attempt to prime the pump for future nerdy movies? But that hardly seems necessary; as I said above, any number of blogs and media sites are clamoring for any access studios will give them to their intellectual property.

SDCC seems, to me, to be a holdover from the days before mega-corporate domination of nerd properties. Now that Disney owns Marvel, for example, Marvel doesn't need SDCC's megaphone anymore; they've got their own. All SDCC does anymore is offer up a solid four days a year in which the media focuses on nerdy IP almost exclusively, which makes it a popular dumping ground for things like the Mad Max: Fury Road trailer at the top of this post. But nerds already dominate the media. They've won the game. They don't need a convention to praise them anymore when there's a whole media structure there to provide year-round promotional duties. The media hoopla over Comic-Con is just a holdover from the past, from the days before we all became nerds.

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[magicman]

Marco, in App Rot:

Apple’s App Store design is a big part of the problem. The dominance and prominence of “top lists” stratifies the top 0.02% so far above everyone else that the entire ecosystem is encouraged to design for a theoretical top-list placement that, by definition, won’t happen to 99.98% of them…

The best thing Apple could do to increase the quality of apps is remove every top list from the App Store.

We’re not employees, so a union doesn’t make sense. But it’s still true that a group of some kind has more leverage than individual developers.

What I’d love to see is something formal where Apple listens to developer feedback about the App Store. It’s their App Store, but it’s also the only market place for iOS apps — and, because it’s the only game in town, fairness suggests that we’d have at least an advisory role (beyond kvetching on blogs and Twitter and Radar).

But how this should work is beyond me. (I grew up more on Robert Heinlein than on Ursula K. LeGuin.)

North American Drone Leader 3D Robotics Announces Strategic Acquisition of Sifteo.

Today, 3D Robotics – the leading North American drone company across both consumer and enterprise channels, announces its acquisition of Sifteo, a cutting-edge consumer electronics company.
Sifteo’s team of consumer electronics industry veterans (UX designers, engineers, manufacturing experts, retail operations, etc.) bring expertise in building high-quality, high-tech consumer products in large volumes and getting them into mass retailers. Sifteo’s engineering team has developed a set of core technologies for high-performance embedded computation, low-latency wireless communication, virtualization techniques, and sensor fusion, which can be applied to various products.

The focus of the newly combined entities post-acquisition is on expanding from 3D Robotics’ current market leadership position in the B2B and sophisticated developer and hobby drone sectors, to establishing similar market leadership in more out-of-the-box products for the everyday consumer, a vast and still emerging market segment.
Chris Anderson, CEO of 3D Robotics (and former Editor in Chief of Wired Magazine and bestselling author of The Long Tail) commented “When we first engaged with the Sifteo team, and saw their skillset, experience, and IP portfolio, we immediately recognized the impact they would have working with us to transform and grow the consumer drone market. Their consumer electronics experience and deep product skills complement our technology perfectly. We are thrilled to have the resources of both groups together to lead what we believe will be a billion dollar market over the next few years.”

Sifteo, previously supported by multiple research grants from the National Science Foundation and venture financing from True Ventures and Foundry Group, will leave their customer support open for at least a full year for existing Sifteo customers.

British artist Hector Janse van Rensburg recently sent 50 random Facebook users paintings of their profile photos in which the users had been replaced with sloths. Van Rensburg has made a name for himself, under the moniker Shitty Watercolour, for his quick paintings of Reddit threads.

images via Hector Janse van Rensburg

via reddit, Bored Panda

A hungry goat trying to reach the low hanging fruit off a tree precariously balances on the back of a very accommodating donkey in this silly video posted by Rumble Viral. While it’s more than likely that this act was staged, the donkey was nonetheless very gracious in helping out a friend.

via Tastefully Offensive

sneakyfeets:

jensenacklesruinedmylife:

andrewducote:

sararye:

AND THAT IS HOW YOU USE AN EFFECTS PEDAL

I was gaping the entire song this is insane

If I had a dollar for every time a musician made me feel like I’ve done nothing with my life, I’d be filthy, FILTHY rich.

Wow. Wooooooooooooooooooooooow. BLESS.

A girl at my old school did the same thing as this and holy shit I was in love with her all up through senior year

The mystery ship in the image to your left has been found to be at least 240 years. The remnants of the ship were discovered by construction workers back in 2010 whilst clearing out the area where the WTC once stood. Archaeologists began to excavate the ship shortly afterwards, and after sending pieces of the wood for testing, it was determined that the ship was built from trees cut down c. 1773. It was estimated, at the time of the discovery, to be between 60-70 feet long in its entirety.

Read more...

Running for as little as five minutes a day could add years to your life. And it doesn't matter how fast you run. After studying 55,137 adults between the ages of 18 and 100, it was discovered that runners had a 30% lower risk of death from all causes and a 45% lower risk of death from heart disease or stroke.

Read more...

The comedic duo Keegan-Michael Key and Jordan Peele released a preview from their upcoming fourth season of Key & Peele at San Diego Comic-Con 2014 titled “Stan Lee’s New Heroes.” The comedy sketch features Stan Lee, played by Peele, walking into the Marvel offices and pitching a new series of comic book superheroes. Unfortunately, Lee’s superhero ideas all fail due to the characters being inspired by strange people and events from his real life: “Hey, Where am I Man,” “The Gray Chaser,” and more. Season four of Key & Peele is scheduled to premiere September 24th, 2014 on Comedy Central.

via Tastefully Offensive

http://instagram.com/p/rB8fzSO61G/

Original Source

Do it yourself doodler

Rafael Varona

djempirical

https://twitter.com/BhasChat/status/494147355374260224/photo/1

Obvious trigger warning is obvious.

The blessed gift that is the Shit My Clueless Granddad Says Richard Dawkins Twitter account just keeps on giving. In the past several years, Dawkins has smoothly transitioned from being a fairly well-respected science communicator and public intellectual into being a raving sideshow act, on par with the Tweets of luminaries like Jaden Smith and Jose Canseco.

Previously, Dawkins coined the phrase “mild paedophilia” to describe his experience at a boarding school with a molesting master. It’s a strange phrase, and problematic in how it seems to minimize an already too-accepted crime, but obviously he can contextualize his own sexual assault in whatever way he wishes. The primary problem was that he extended that not just to what the master did to him but what the master did throughout his career to his schoolmates, as well: “I don’t think he did any of us lasting harm.”

He then suddenly seemed to reject his previous decades of rhetoric in order to became a cultural relativist, saying that “you can’t condemn people of an earlier era by the standards of ours.” That is, of course, utter bullshit. Billions of people made it through recorded history and well through the 1950s knowing that adults shouldn’t be sexually assaulting children.

Dawkins’ insistence on ranking sexual assault means that he continually brings it up, again and again, with no change to his own self awareness or to his understanding of the context of his remarks. Here are today’s examples:

He seems to genuinely believe that people only have a problem with his remarks because they think you can’t compare any two bad things without condemning both of them. Dawkins tries a number of different forms of “X is worse than Y” but misses any that are actually educational. How about this one:

Subprime lending is bad. Getting robbed at gunpoint is worse. If you think that’s an endorsement of subprime lending, go away and learn how to think.

Here are a few reasons why this form of “logic” is ridiculous:

1. What is the purpose of comparing and ranking different forms of sexual assault? Is there someone who had their butt grabbed once who is loudly insisting that they were equally harmed as a person who was violently raped and left for dead? Is he defending the victim of the violent rape from the insult of having their own assault minimized? I honestly cannot find any evidence that this, or anything similar, is happening. On the contrary, sexual assault that doesn’t match our preconceived notions of what a rape “should” look like (generally the stereotype is that of a violent stranger rape where the victim fights back valiantly and which exclusively involves penis-in-vagina penetration) is minimized, ignored, laughed about, and rarely prosecuted.

To bring that back to my analogy, yes, getting robbed at gunpoint may be more psychologically damaging. But we already live in a society where subprime lenders get away with horrific tactics and leave people severely hurt. What’s the point of comparing the two in this way?

2. What expertise do you have to rank various crimes? The best the average person can do is to contextualize their own experiences. When it comes to the experiences of others, we can look at what research exists and try to judge the quality of that research and put the results into context. For child sexual assault, there have been some studies of the long-term effects but absolutely not enough to come up with some specific ranking of each form. For instance, we can say that most likely use of force has a greater long-term negative effect, but the threat of force may be similar. Women may be more traumatized than men. or maybe we just don’t have enough reporting for men. Children subjected to very similar kinds of abuse can have very different outcomes, meaning that Dawkins’ classmates may not all agree with his statement that there was no lasting harm. Unfortunately, they don’t get interviewed by the Guardian.

3. What the hell is “mild paedophila” and “mild date rape”? These are not scientific terms – they are phrases that Dawkins made up, with no real information on what they encompass. As the research makes clear, there are many different kinds of sexual assault that differ wildly from the stereotypical “legitimate rape.” There are different body parts involved, different kinds of penetration, different durations, different relationships between rapist and victim, different age of abuse, and different underlying physical and psychological conditions in the victim, all of which can affect the lasting harm. There is no way to conveniently classify a particular type of sexual assault as “mild.”

It’s worth noting that the language Dawkins has chosen to label this nebulous grouping of sexual assault has resulted in a tautology. In other words, he wants to say “this kind of sexual assault is not as bad as this other kind of sexual assault,” and then to make sure that he’s right, he names those two groups with labels that directly state that one is not as bad as the other kind. He may as well have Tweeted this:

Bad rape is bad. Worse rape is worse. If you think that’s an endorsement of bad rape, go away and learn how to think.

Original Source

https://twitter.com/LukeWhiston/status/494040489780592640/photo/1

Original Source

djempirical

“mild pedophilia” is a thing Dawkins believes exists. and he wants us to learn how to think.

https://twitter.com/RichardDawkins/status/494012589828218881

Original Source