firehose

thehotdad:

This new episode of Seinfeld is weird.

In the decade since, Pitbull has become ubiquitous and is moving into the territory of empire builder, along the lines of 50 Cent or Jay Z. Exciting for Pitbull, now, is thinking about things other than partying, studio time, and ladies.

glamtr0n:

sam-and-dean-life:

lucifer-who:

ghdos:

I wish I had known about this when we had all that fucking snow this winter.

#do you wanna stab a snowman #it doesn’t have to be a snowman

it doesn’t have to be a snowman

OMG

Got a great idea or project to teach kids about computing?

Need some help raising the finance to make it a reality?

We have some good news: the Raspberry Pi Education Fund is finally open for applications. As a reminder, thanks to all the Raspberry Pis bought by the community over the past 2 years, we have been able to put together a £1 million education fund to help fulfil our charitable mission.

Applications are invited from organisations looking to fund projects that encourage young people to learn about computing or illustrate how computing can be used enhance education in STEM or the creative arts.  You can find more details on the eligibility criteria and submit your application here.

Go on, what are you waiting for? This is your chance to make a difference.

Courtney shared this story from Super Opinionated.

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bluemoonrush:

jaaaaaeger:

humaxgh0ull:

commanderarlert-sir:

captaincrunchmakesmebleed:

?

Tokyo ghoul. Fuck

Yep were fuck

Free
I’m safe

gekkan shoujo nozaki-kun, well never going to see any emotional pay off, but otherwise fine~

Among the many abandoned trains discovered and photographed by 24-year-old Johnny Joo are a passenger train from Philadelphia and several disused subway cars. There is also a cracked and broken New York street bus.

retrogradeworks:

nesft:

#CROW NO

Crow: CROW YES!

You can feel the offense on that golden eagle’s face.

Maggie Cheung wears a different cheongsam (qipao) dress in each scene of Wong Kar-Wai’s In the Mood For Love. There were 46 in all, though not all made it to the final cut.

zubat:

What I love the most about skulls is their “in your face” attitude

humansofcolor:

onlyblackgirl:

thepeoplesrecord:

Florida city police department embedded with KKK members
July 21, 2014

Ann Hunnewell and her central Florida police officer husband knelt in the living room of a fellow officer’s home, with pillow cases as makeshift hoods over their heads. A few words were spoken and they, along with a half-dozen others, were initiated into the local chapter of the Ku Klux Klan, she says.

Last week, that initiation ceremony, which took place five years ago, stunned residents of the small town of Fruitland Park, who found out an investigative report linked two city officers with the secret hate society that once was violently active in the area. Ann Hunnewell’s ex-husband, George Hunnewell, was fired, and deputy chief David Borst resigned from the 13-member Fruitland Park Police Department. Borst has denied being a member.

James Elkins, a third officer who Ann Hunnewell says recruited her and her husband, resigned in 2010 after his Klan ties became public.

Read More

How shocking.

Sad that these kind if things don’t surprise us anymore.

The Supreme Court’s recent Hobby Lobby decision, which allowed some for-profit companies to claim a religious exemption to Obamacare’s contraception mandate, has sparked a heated debate over the definition of religious liberty and its role in modern society. At this point, even a Satantic cult has decided to weigh in.

The Satanic Temple — a faith community that describes itself as facilitating “the communication and mobilization of politically aware Satanists, secularists, and advocates for individual liberty” — has launched a new campaign seeking a religious exemption to certain anti-abortion laws that attempt to dissuade women from ending a pregnancy. The group says they have deeply held beliefs about bodily autonomy and scientific accuracy, and those beliefs are violated by state-level “informed consent” laws that rely on misleading information about abortion risks.

Now that the Supreme Court has ruled in favor of Hobby Lobby, the Satanists point out, it strengthens their own quest to opt out of laws related to women’s health care that go against their religious liberty. “Because of the respect the Court has given to religious beliefs, and the fact that our our beliefs are based on best available knowledge, we expect that our belief in the illegitimacy of state­ mandated ‘informational’ material is enough to exempt us, and those who hold our beliefs, from having to receive them,” a spokesperson for the organization said in a statement.

The Satanic Temple, sometimes referred to as “the nicest Satanic cult in the world,” falls somewhere between satire, performance art, and activism. The group says its central mission is to “encourage benevolence and empathy among all people, reject tyrannical authority, advocate practical common sense and justice, and be directed by the human conscience to undertake noble pursuits guided by the individual will.” It has a set of seven tenets that closely track with humanism. Typically, wherever issues of church and state are overlapping, the Satanic Temple isn’t far behind.

Members of the Satanic Temple first made national headlines when they rallied in support of Florida Gov. Rick Scott (R) for approving a bill that allows prayer in public schools, saying they’re glad the new policy will allow children to pray to Satan. Since then, they’ve also held “a formal ceremony celebrating same-sex unions” on the grave of the mother of the leader of the Westboro Baptist Church, declaring that she has posthumously become a lesbian, and commissioned a seven-foot-tall Satanic statue near a monument to the Ten Commandments at the Oklahoma State Capitol.

And now, the Satanic Temple is turning its attention to “campaigns to assert our religious protection for women with health needs that are being complicated by unreasonable laws,” focusing on the abortion-related legislation that goes against science.

State-level abortion restrictions that aren’t actually based in medicine have swept the nation. “Informed consent” laws, which typically require women to receive biased counseling before being allowed to proceed with an abortion procedure, are now in place in 35 states. Many of those laws require doctors to tell their patients misleading information about abortion’s potential link to mental health issues and breast cancer. Some of them put words directly in doctors’ mouths, forcing them to refer to the fetus as an “whole, separate, unique, living human being.”

Members of the Temple of Satan are encouraging all women who share their belief in medical accuracy to seek their own exemption from these laws, even if they don’t personally identify as Satanists. They’ve drawn up a sample letter to help women talk to their doctors about the issue, as well as created “Right to Accurate Medical Information” t-shirts for purchase.

Satanists aren’t the only activists fighting back against the junk science used to justify anti-abortion laws. The secular humanist group Center for Inquiry recently launched a “Keep Health Care Safe and Secular” campaign to encourage more Americans to fight back against laws limiting women’s access to health services. Similarly, NARAL Pro-Choice America sometimes uses the slogan “Politicians Make Crappy Doctors.”

The post Satanists Demand Religious Exemption From Abortion Restrictions, Cite Hobby Lobby Ruling appeared first on ThinkProgress.

It feels genuinely a bit like when you finally let go of crap from your last relationship and open your life and heart to the next wonderful thing. It was yes; wrong feeling, to burn all those beautifully bound and illustrated hardback books.. But it’s also a fairly pure FTW sort of sensation. I love it! Thank you everyone who shared in the experience!!!

(via Bryce Lynch - Google)

jon-snow:

god bless sdcc

An email sent late on Monday afternoon is incurring a dour situation for the organizers of GaymerX2, an LGBTQ-focused and inclusive convention held in San Francisco on July 11-13. The marketing coordinator for niche publisher and developer NIS...

A federal judge has ordered the District of Columbia to stop enforcing its restrictions on carrying handguns on the streets of the nation's capital. The decision also forced the District government to allow out-of-state concealed carry and open carry permit holders to wield their weapons within steps of the White House.

Look around your iPad for a minute. How are its third-party apps doing?

Are they all being actively updated? Are they all built for iOS 7 yet? You never see any non-Retina graphics, iOS 6 keyboards, or old-style controls anymore, right?

Have you looked for any great new iPad apps recently? Did the market seem vibrant, with multiple good choices?

New iOS apps you care about are still launching with iPad versions, and they seem well-cared-for, right?¹

Are you confident that they’ll be updated to take advantage of iOS 8 shortly after its release?

I hope you’ve said yes to everything, and I’m the anomaly. Because while I’m not the most devoted or frequent iPad user, the software landscape on mine has become alarmingly stagnant.

*   *   *

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. Top lists reward apps that get people to download them, regardless of quality or long-term use, so that’s what most developers optimize for. Profits at the top are so massive that the promise alone attracts vast floods of spam, sleaziness, clones, and ripoffs.

Quality, sustainability, and updates are almost irrelevant to App Store success and usually aren’t rewarded as much as we think they should be, and that’s mostly the fault of Apple’s lazy reliance on top lists instead of more editorial selections and better search.

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

I hope Apple realizes how important it is to everyone — developers, customers, and Apple — that they make changes to encourage more high-quality apps. If they’re trying to boost iPad sales and increase differentiation between iOS and Android devices, that’s the first place to start.

But that won’t solve the biggest problem. (Neither will upgrade pricing, trials, or any other theoretical panacea.)

*   *   *

The app market is becoming a mature, developed industry, with vastly increased commoditization compared to its early days. Competition is ubiquitous, relentless, and often shameless, even in categories that were previously under-the-radar niches. Standing out requires more effort than ever, yet profits are harder to come by than ever.²

Full-time iOS indie developers — people who make the majority of their income from sales of their apps, rather than consulting or other related work — are increasingly rare. I thought Brent Simmons would get flooded with counterexamples when he proposed that there are very few, but he didn’t.

Consulting isn’t immune to decline, either. Clients were spending top dollar on app development in 2008 because they had to, as almost nobody could make apps. Now, mobile-app developers are everywhere. App development is no longer a specialty — it’s a commodity.

I’m not the only one seeing this. Here’s Matt Gemmell:

There’s a chill wind blowing, isn’t there? I know we don’t talk about it much, and that you’re crossing your fingers and knocking on wood right now, but you do know what I mean.

We’ve had our (latest) software Renaissance in the form of the mobile platforms and their App Stores, and I think the software biz is now starting to slide back towards consolidation and mega-corps again. It’s not a particularly great time to be an indie app developer anymore.

Small shops are closing. Three-person companies are dropping back to sole proprietorships all over the place. Products are being acquired every week, usually just for their development teams, and then discarded.

Luc Vandal:

Let’s face it, the app gold rush is well over. It is now much harder to make it into the market and it requires more planning, financial investment and time. … I have spoken with other successful developers and many told me the same: sales are generally down. They are still doing great but there are more and more competitors are also taking a slice of the same pie.

Gus Mueller:

I’m in my tenth year as a full time indie dev (so I can claim to have a bit of perspective). And I think that yes, it is much harder these days to go indie.

Why though?

I think it comes down to a handful of reasons, but the major one is that we have more potential customers than ever, but we also have more developers than ever.

Jared Sinclair’s sales figures for Unread, which launched to rave reviews from major writers in our community:

Considering the enormous amount of effort I have put into these apps over the past year, that’s a depressing figure. I try not to think about the salary I could earn if I worked for another company, with my skills and qualifications. It’s also a solid piece of evidence that shows that paid-up-front app sales are not a sustainable way to make money on the App Store.

These pressures are taking an immense toll on the quality and sustainability of iOS apps. I picked on the iPad earlier because its problem is deeper and more visible than on the iPhone today: while the iPad has most of the pricing and competitive pressure of the iPhone, the iPhone’s immense installed base can hide the problems for longer. The iPad has a much smaller installed base, so iPad development is even harder to justify.

But the iPhone app market has the same fate. It’s most of the way there already.

*   *   *

As the economics get tighter, it becomes much harder to support the lavish treatment that developers have given apps in the past, such as full-time staffs, offices, pixel-perfect custom designs of every screen, frequent free updates, and completely different iPhone and iPad interfaces.

Many will give up and leave for stable, better-paying jobs. (Many already have.) But there’s a way forward for those of us who want to stay.

When other industries mature and deal with these pressures, the survivors are those who can adapt and — to borrow a horrible phrase for corporations to justify downsizing and convince the remaining workers to accept more work without a raise — do more with less.

That’s where we are today.

Benjamin Mayo in response to the Unread numbers, emphasis mine:

You have to be efficient with your time to make good ROI’s on the App Store. … If you want to maximise your profitability, make small apps that do a few things well. The amount of effort you put into an app has very little to do with how much of the market will buy it.

Brent Simmons on standard vs. custom controls a few weeks ago:

A big problem is the cost of all this development. … It’s probably necessary for indies to make more than just one iPhone app. Do the same app on Macintosh. Maybe make a second or third app.

Not long ago this would have been very, very expensive — because we believed (rightly) that we had to do custom versions of all the things.

But now, I most emphatically suggest getting out of that mindset. Use standard components in the expected ways as much as possible. Create custom things only when absolutely needed.

Efficiency is key. And efficiency means doing more (or all) of the work yourself, writing a lot less custom code and UI, dropping support for older OSes, and providing less customer support.³

Apple is greatly helping our efficiency. Every version of iOS brings new capabilities that make previously difficult features much easier. iOS 7’s redesign gave indie developers a huge advantage by making the stock UI cool again.

iOS 8 helps even more. Extensions open up vast new markets and give our apps a lot more functionality for very little effort. CloudKit removes the need for many apps to run web services. Adaptive Layout will remove the need for most apps to code radically different UIs for their iPad and iPhone versions, instead providing a responsive-web-like method of automatically rearranging one UI to fit any size screen.

It’s not going to be an easy road, but it’s possible to adapt and keep going.

daria grownup -  Daria and Jane step out from Jane’s senior art show at Boston Fine Arts College to get a slice of pizza from a food truck

I aspire to Bunk’s fuck-this-shit expressions

geekgirlsmash:

blueandbluer:

blueandbluer:

geekgirlsmash:

blueandbluer, there’s new Wonder Woman chucks (x)

FUCK

Yeah, I bought them.

I figured that was going to happen.

got to got to put yellow or gold lassos laces on that

you got to