Popsicle Summer

haveiplayeddndwithgregrucka:

Okay, so I still haven’t played D&D with Greg Rucka yet, and I haven’t updated in a while because I got caught up with finals and working. But…

It turns out that Mr. Rucka found out about this blog, which is rather amazing considering the above lack of updating.

And he offered me a chance to…

No joke. I suppose we could wrangle something for Heroes Con should I make it out next year, but you make it to Portland, we’ll figure something out.

Hobbit House “before” pics. (I’ve already done a bit of cleaning but forgot to take BEFORE before pics.)

The Facebook feed is a bit like a sausage. Everyone eats it, even though nobody knows how it is made.

The gap between our use of Facebook and our understanding of how it works, however, is a problem. By now most people are aware of the outrage triggered by a paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that presented evidence of “emotional contagion” derived from an experiment conducted in Facebook.

The cries of outrage, however, express a general misunderstanding of what Facebook is and how it works. Also, as other’s have pointed out, the outrage is really part of a general negative sentiment toward this social media platform.

So before bringing down Goliath, let’s pause and understand what Facebook is, how the study was conducted, and how it fits in the context of standard business practices.

Original Source

Hans Weiditz, Four fools striving to separate honesty from profit, two boxes that are chained together, Germany, 1531

Hard-wired as a coder girl at 14 years old (Wired UK).

Amy Mather’s first brush with coding came at a Manchester Girl Geeks workshop when she was 12. Now 14, she has used several coding languages including Python and PHP to design games and write software such as Conway’s Game of Life, in which “cells” in a grid live or die based on certain rules. She has also become a leading voice for the kids’ coding movement in the UK — a whirlwind of enthusiasm encouraging peers to get into coding, making and hacking. “Young people are put off by the stereotypes,” says Mather (pictured), who was named European Digital Girl of the Year as part of the 2013 Ada Awards. “But if you come to the workshops you’ll see that it’s more about actually making things, rather than being alone with a computer in your bedroom.”

[make me choose]
anonymous asked: Cooper with donuts or Cooper with coffee.

It’s not pie, but ..

note-a-bear:

red-bird-writes:

coketalk:

"An Illustrated Guide to American Personhood" by Sarah Baker

I have never wanted to post something so bad to Facebook…

Welp

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

class-struggle-anarchism:

liebehindthetruth:

themonkboughtlunch:

17 year old Communist militant overlooking Barcelona during the Spanish Civil War

I read somewhere that the lady in this photo died only about 6 months ago at age 90-something, survived the war, Franco, tough as nails.

Yes, Marina Ginesta - she died in January this year

instagram:

Summertime #SidecarDog Adventures with @3wheels2pals1tail

To see more photos and videos of #sidecardog summer adventures, follow @3wheels2pals1tail and their friends @nelsonthegoldendoodle and @arawithspirit.

A road trip to California with her German Shepherd mix Dante inspired Melissa Monno (@3wheels2pals1tail) to take the plunge on a motorcycle and sidecar.

"He loves car rides so much," Melissa explains, but she yearned for a more adventurous mode of transportation. "I do a lot of hiking and camping and he’s been with me everywhere, from weekend getaways to week-long backpacking trips in the wilderness." Dreaming of a motorcycle but not wanting to leave Dante behind, she opted for a sidecar. "Wind in my hair, dog at my side in an off-road adventure bike!"

Inspired by other #sidecardogs like @nelsonthegoldendoodle and @arawithspirit, Melissa made sure to have lots of treats on hand and take it slow. “It took him two or three weeks to get used to it,” she says, but now he’s ready for a summer full of adventures.

unamusedsloth:

Distracting enough for a kitten, a dog, and two chickens.

typeworship:

Typeframe: Render vs. Cardboard

OK, now I give up. After seeing so many extraordinary, life-like 3D type models I had assumed this beautifully complex ‘a’ was of the same mould. But no. This character has actually been constructed physically. It’s made me realise that the line between 3D rendered graphic shapes and real constructed shapes is now imperceptible.

This Bodoni ‘a’ is part of a personal project called Typeframe by Gerard Miró of Lo Siento a Design Studio based in Barcelona, Spain. The ‘internal structure’ of the character has been constructed from cardboard “undressing the letter to show its skeleton”. 

blackhistoryalbum:

Fly You To The Moon

Beloved public radio fixture This American Life will be launching its first spin-off podcast, the weekly Serial, featuring ongoing stories that take multiple weeks to unfold. The series, which will be hosted by TAL producer Sarah Koenig, launches in Fall 2014 with a 12-episode crime story.

Our hope is that it’ll play like a great HBO or Netflix series, where you get caught up with the characters and the thing unfolds week after week, but with a true story, and no pictures. Like House of Cards, but you can enjoy it while you’re driving.

Looks like today is “Who’d ‘a Thunk It?” Day at Yr. Wonkette. First we learned that guns everywhere can lead to armed misunderstandings, and that the Supremes’ Hobby Lobby decision was a teensy bit broader than it looked at first blush. And now, you could just knock us over with a feather boa after we learned that a group of religious leaders is asking that there be a faith exemption from an upcoming executive order protecting LGBT people from employment discrimination, because otherwise Religious Liberty in America is dead (and the Nazis will come back). Color us astonished!

After the House refused to consider the Employment Non-Discrimination Act, Barack Obama said, fine, I’ll do the executive order thing so that at least companies fulfilling government contracts can’t discriminate. But wait, hints the letter sent by “faith leaders” Tuesday, the Supreme Court just said you have to take corporations’ deeply held religious beliefs into account, and so you can’t make no private corporations hire sodomites, or it’s not FAAAAAIIIIRRR! Or in earnest Concern-Speak:

Without a robust religious exemption, this expansion of hiring rights will come at an unreasonable cost to the common good, national unity and religious freedom.

What about the religiously motivated bigots? Won’t SOMEBODY please think about the religiously motivated bigots? After all, if Amalgamated Death Missile Supply is forced to hire a gay technician to install Death Missile parts, that would go against their sincerely held beliefs as adherents of the Prince of Peace.

While the letter didn’t specifically mention the Hobby Lobby decision, Michael Wear, who organized the effort, and had worked as director of “faith outreach” for the 2012 Obama campaign, explained to the Atlantic that it definitely means the concerns of homohaters must get equal status with the concerns of fetus-worshipers:

“This is not an antagonistic letter by any means,” Wear told me. But in the wake of Hobby Lobby, he said, “the administration does have a decision to make whether they want to recalibrate their approach to some of these issues.”

The executive order hasn’t been issued yet, but the Senate’s version of ENDA did include a get-out-of-discrimination-free amendment that bowed in the direction of god-driven discrimination. If the unpassed law included a “please discriminate if God tells you to” clause, then it’s only fair and just that the executive order include that too. Otherwise, Congress might have to try passing laws itself, and god knows that’s not going to happen.

[Atlantic via TPM]

Follow Doktor Zoom on Twitter. He’d like an exemption from paying taxes for bigots with churches, please.

Jenny Deam writing at the LA Times.

The Boulder County clerk and recorder vowed Tuesday to continue issuing marriage licenses to same-sex couples, defying the state attorney general, who had given her until noon to stop.

”We believe the licenses are legal and just,” said Clerk and Recorder Hillary Hall outside her office as the noon deadline passed. She said the Boulder County Attorney’s Office had given her the green light, adding that “history will be on our side.”

She and Atty. Gen. John Suthers have been in a showdown for six days since the U.S. 10th Circuit Court of Appeals in Denver struck down Utah’s ban on same-sex marriage last week, issuing a 2-1 opinion that it violated the U.S. Constitution’s guarantee of equal protection and due process.

gewg_ writes:

The Center for American Progress reports:

Think a higher minimum wage is a job killer? Think again: The states that raised their minimum wages on January 1 have seen higher employment growth since then than the states that kept theirs at the same rate.

The minimum wage went up in 13 states Arizona, Connecticut, Colorado, Florida, Missouri, Montana, New Jersey, New York, Ohio, Oregon, Rhode Island, Vermont, and Washington either thanks to automatic increases in line with inflation or new legislation, as Ben Wolcott reports in his analysis at the Center for Economic and Policy Research. The average change in employment for those states over the first five months of the year as compared with the last five of 2013 is 0.99 percent, while the average for all remaining states is 0.68 percent.

Digging deeper, all but one of those states are experiencing increases in employment, and nine of them have seen growth above the median rate.

Read more of this story at SoylentNews.

maevele:

lisaquestions:

lynnieovericedtea:

lisaquestions:

cishaming:

lisaquestions:

cishaming:

note-a-bear:

*screaming*

how do you even make that mistake???? they look nothing a like!

Apparently one does it like this. Video link to an interview with Samuel L. Jackson in which the interviewer immediately confuses him for Lawrence Fishburne.

This is the commercial.

Yeah, I saw that way back when it happened. I totally forgot about it.

How is that even possible??? Like, I’d be afraid of not remembering what movies I’d want to ask them questions about. I wouldn’t for a second mix them up. Like it’s just such racist horseshit.

Yeah. I mean I can see people being faceblind (and my faceblindness has had me misidentify black people, but not nearly as often as I do white people), but it doesn’t really count if you’re basically only unable to tell black people (or other people of color) apart and never have issues with white people.

(pssst: *Laurence Fishburne)

Crap, I got the spelling from the gifs.

maybe I just dn’t get it because I think samuel l jackson is so much hotter than fishburne? I could NEVER make that mistake

jeks182:

nerdsandgamersftw:

EVERYONE STOP WHAT YOUR DOING! MOTHERFUCKING CAT ARMOR!!!

Via Etsy

And now I leave you tumblr with this armoured feline warrior.

Autoreblog

recoveringhipster:

So stoked about the Hobby Lobby ruling today. Officially going to incorporate myself so I can get a religious exemption for my student loans debt they violate my deeply held religious conviction that all debts are supposed to be forgiven every seven years, as per the book of Deuteronomy.