fmtownsmarty:

http://i.imgur.com/yezSoOr.png

Historical Map: Detail of a Tokyo Streetcar Map, c. 1950

Not much more to say here except that this is gorgeous, despite the primitive artwork and terrible colour registration.

Source: Fluoride’s memories/Flickr

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Starting in September, qualifying products at Walmart will bear this new logo, implemented in collaboration with the Women's Business Enterprise National Council (WBENC) and WEConnect International.

Ireland to hold referendum in 2015 on marriage equality:

gaywrites:

Enda Kenny, Ireland’s head of state, confirmed this week that a referendum on marriage equality will take place in Ireland in the spring of 2015. 

He has already said he supports marriage equality, as have all of Ireland’s political parties. 

The confirmation comes at a time when record numbers of people showed up last weekend in support of the Dublin Gay Pride Parade.

A poll conducted in April showed growing support for same-sex marriage in Ireland with 67% of respondents planning to vote yes in the forthcoming referendum.

Woohoo! You’re on your way, Ireland! 

Just a quick note here in passing: Enda isn’t actually the head of state of Ireland (though he is the head of government, which is different). The head of state is the President, Michael D. Higgins.

This misattribution is probably due to reasons like these::

(a) News people are uneasy about referring to Enda as a Prime Minister because the tendency is to associate that title primarily with Great Britain.

(b) News people are nervous about attempting the proper Irish name for the head of the lower house of the Irish legislature (the Dáil) and head of the coalition of ruling parties, and hence government, which is “Taoiseach" (pronounced, more or less, "TEE-shock". [Extra points if you correctly pronounce the final "ch" as at the end of "loch".]

(c) News people can’t be arsed to use even as simple a research tool as Wikipedia.

(eyeroll)

Anyway, I’m guessing that when the vote happens, Ireland will come down on the side of marriage equality by a significant majority.

Should be fun.

kotpourri:

At the Temple of Horus (via courth)

design-is-fine:

Johann Michael Vogler, Universal equinoctial dial for latitudes 0°-90° North, early 18th century. Brass. Ellingen, Germany. Via National Maritime Museum, Greenwich.

thevancouversun:

Vancouverites already know this but our city is one of the most expensive real estate markets in North America. Here’s a look at what $2 million buys on Vancouver’s west side.

More photos: http://ow.ly/yLp7h

Real estate in one of the most expensive cities in North America.

AthanasiusKircher (1333179) writes The story is classic: Boy meets Girl. Boy likes Girl. Boy goes on the internet and writes about his fantasies that involve killing and eating Girl. Boy goes to jail. In this case, the man in question, NYC police officer Gilberto Valle, didn't act on his fantasies — he just shared them in a like-minded internet forum. Yesterday, Valle was released from jail after a judge overturned his conviction on appeal. U.S. District Judge Paul Gardephe wrote that Valle was "guilty of nothing more than very unconventional thoughts... We don't put people in jail for their thoughts. We are not the thought police and the court system is not the deputy of the thought police." The judge concluded that there was insufficient evidence, since "this is a conspiracy that existed solely in cyberspace" and "no reasonable juror could have found that Valle actually intended to kidnap a woman... the point of the chats was mutual fantasizing about committing acts of sexual violence on certain women." (A New York magazine article covered the details of the case and the implications of the original conviction earlier this year.)

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Scott Kveton has spent five years building Urban Airship into one of Portland's leading technology companies, emerging as perhaps the single most visible figure in Portland's ongoing tech renaissance. Nearly that entire time, he's been quietly fighting a series of sexual assault allegations stemming from a troubled relationship with a former girlfriend.

Threats and opportunities in indexing

Welcome To Twin Peaks found the fictional home of Laura Palmer for sale here on Estately and made a collection of amazing side-by-side images comparing the house's interior with shots from the series. The original home is located in Everett, WA, and was used in the Twin Peaks pilot and and in Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me.

do not pursue

UPDATE: ‘Men only’ eSports rule overturned after Blizzard & Finnish league step in:

krudman:

At the rate that they were backpedaling, I figured this would happen by now. This is great news. Kudos to Blizzard for stepping in too.

A specific haircut, mustache, or body type: these are things that most mini fans could rarely hope to capture with an out-of-the-box miniature. We aim to change that!

One way we’re doing this is by offering user-adjustable sliders to change things like a character’s muscularity, height, and weight. Changes between races like dwarf, elf, and human will often be encompassed in presets on these sliders rather than set body switches. This means that you’ll be able to tweak these elements, allowing for things like heroically tall dwarfs, traditionally chubby halflings, abnormally muscular elves, or comically short orcs.

Even subtle adjustments to muscularity, weight, and body shape can really change the flavor of a character.

canonicalmomentum:

skinnyghost:

I think these two paragraphs might be the best part of the new Dungeons and Dragons.

I’m um… less convinced, honestly.

I’m really glad they’re trying and being encouraging. And I like this line “Think about how your character does or does not conform to the broader culture’s expectations of sex, gender and sexual behaviour”!

When they start giving examples, though…

• 'hermaphrodite' is, as far as I know, a slur against intersex people, which only intersex people should be using, and shouldn’t be held as synonymous with ‘androgynous’.
• "for example, you could play an elf ‘made in the image of’ our fake elf god. You could also play an actual trans person." seems kinda the wrong way round?
• 'a man who feels trapped in a female body' is using a pretty shitty and outdated narrative about trans people, although I'm glad they correctly refer to him as a man.
• uh three examples, no CAMAB trans people? come on. (unless elf-‘god’ is supposed to count as a CAMAB androgyne?)

Also this is probably me just being grumpy but they seem to be presenting this as if it’s some kind of weird novel idea that they’re introducing to presumed-cis players?

I realise it’s unrealistic to expect WotC to print an entire massive lecture about gender in the middle of their book and this is a huge improvement over the past. I’m probably just being nitpicky really :/

The Internet animation community is struggling to understand and address a serious issue today: a series of tweets last night by Adventure Time storyboard artist Emily Partridge in which she identified artist Skyler Page, the creator of the Cartoon Network series Clarence, as sexually assaulting her. The incident has drawn a swift reaction from Cartoon Network. A spokesperson for the network told Cartoon Brew that, “Skyler Page is no longer an employee at Cartoon Network Studios.”

watching my cat slither all over the floor going crazy for nip and thinking “this is what burning man is like”

Umai PDX ramen, Burrasca, Henry's Diner, Ash, Haan Ghin, Duende, Mama Chow's, PDX Sliders, Thick

comicsalliance:

AFTER STRING OF CRIMES, TIMES SQUARE CONSIDERS ITS OWN SUPERHERO REGISTRATION ACT

By Matt D. Wilson

Spider-Man, no!

Following a few incidents of costumed characters in Times Square committing crimes –most recently, one where a Spider-Man allegedly groped a tourist, which came after another Spider-Man was convicted of harassment — the president of Times Square Alliance, Tim Tompkins, is putting his foot down. He’s calling for all the Times Square characters — superheroes, Sesame Street characters, Disney princesses and all others –to be licensed and regulated.

Some commentators have joked that the proposal is akin to the Superhero Registration Act from Marvel’s Civil War series, but, of course, the big difference here is that the costumed characters aren’t vigilantes and do-gooders; they’re actors who are for all intents and purposes, running a business. Licenses are required of most business owners, and indeed, of many street performers. This wouldn’t be all that unusual.

SEE ANNOYINGLY UN-TUMBLABLE VIDEO AT COMICS ALLIANCE

CALL JJJ

gamingfeminism:

fucknovideogames:

Talking up Far Cry 4's lifelike sex ratio, [creative director Alex Hutchinson] says the developer “tried very hard to make sure of the four main antagonists, half of them are women, which is cool. On your side, one of the main leaders of the rebel faction is a woman, half the rebels that fight with you are women. It's packed to the gills with women. They’re everywhere, just like life.”

There’s roughly as many women in Far Cry as there are men! Some of them are even in important narrative roles! Wow! The supporting cast is positively teeming with women, all being animated at once! No, they’re still not playable! The first version of a female multiplayer PC “jumped like a dude”, and fixing it would take too much effort, so they scrapped it. Diversity!

Source:

“Far Cry 4 Is ‘Packed to the Gills’ With Women, Says Director.” (Jane Douglas, Outside Xbox) 30 June 2014.

Does the phrase “packed to the gills with women” remind anyone of Romney’s “binders full of women”?

pyxis-nautica:

stonecoldstunning:

I NEVER KNEW THE REASON THE NEPHEWS WERE LEFT WITH SCROOGE WAS BECAUSE DONALD HAD TO LITERALLY GO OFF WITH THE NAVY LIKE

I THOUGHT THE SAILOR GET UP WAS FOR SHOW IT DIDN’T OCCUR TO ME THAT DONALD WAS WITH THE US ARMED FORCES 

#thank you donald for keeping our country safe

tbkultracombo:

THE MOST RUSSIAN NAME OF ALL TIME

In the last year, we focused a lot on storing data from the feeds inside Superfeedr. We started by storing a lot of Google Reader content, using our Riak backend. When introducing our new PubSubHubbub endpoint, we had the opportunity to add things like subscribe and retrieve and later, params like before and after.

We also introduced a Jquery plugin for Superfeedr which made it extremely easy to add any RSS feed to any web page.

Streaming RSS

Today, we’re moving forward by adding HTTP streaming support to the RSS stored in Superfeedr. In English, this means, you can ask Superfeedr something like this:

Please, give me the last 5 items from that feed, but keep the connection open and give me any new item that’s coming for as long as I’m listening.

Translating in curl language that would be something like that:

curl "http://stream.superfeedr.com/?hub.mode=retrieve&wait=stream&hub.topic=http://push-pub.appspot.com/feed" 
-udemo:6f74cbf1c5d30fd0c668f2ac0592204c

You’re more than welcome to try that in your shell.

You’ll see that the connection is then hanging. You can easily update the feed by filling this form and you should see the new entry appear in your shell.

You can also get all this RSS/Atom converted to JSON by adding -H'Accept: application/json'.

Fanout

Of course building and maintaining an infrastructure to handle this kind of traffic and concurrent connections is far from trivial. In the same way that we would not write from scratch our very own database to store the content we process, it made sense to find a existing infrastructure and rely on their expertise to achieve that.

We picked Fanout because they provide a completely transparent approach by allowing us to use our very own CNAME’s and proxy calls made to our API.

The first step is to setup a sub domain and point it to Fanout’s servers. Fanout will proxy any call to our backend that it can’t handle. If your request to stream.superfeedr.com includes a wait=stream param, then, Fanout will proxy the request to Superfeedr’s main backend. We will serve the data to be returned to the client, as well as a GRIP. Fanout will serve the data, but keep the connection open.

Later, when the feed updates, we will notify Fanout and they will just serve the content to any existing connection, in a completely transparent way.

Long polling

One of the benefits of using Fanout is that they provide multiple options when building a Realtime API. HTTP streaming really works extremely well when used from a HTTP client, but browsers are not always great to deal with streams. In the browser, an option is to look at our wait=poll option, combined with the after parameter.

Basically, the first request will look like this:

curl -udemo:6f74cbf1c5d30fd0c668f2ac0592204c "https://stream.superfeedr.com?hub.mode=retrieve&wait=stream&hub.topic=http%3A%2F%2Fpush-pub.appspot.com%2Ffeed"

The response will come immediately with the current content of the feed. From there, you should extract the id element of the latest entry. At the time of writing this post, it is http://push-pub.appspot.com/feed/5637036128075776. We will re-use this element as the value for the after query parameter:

curl -udemo:6f74cbf1c5d30fd0c668f2ac0592204c "https://stream.superfeedr.com?format=json&hub.mode=retrieve&wait=poll&after=hhttp%3A%2F%2Fpush-pub.appspot.com%2Ffeed%2F5637036128075776&hub.topic=http%3A%2F%2Fpush-pub.appspot.com%2Ffeed"

If one (or more) new entry has been added during the small lag between the 2 queries, it will be served right away. However, in the more likely event that nothing was served, the connection will wait for a new item to be added to the feed. This technique will guarantee that no item is ever missed, even with a single concurrent HTTP request.

Metropolis (1927)