These “Quest Mat” sets are amazing! Each set comes with soft tiles of pixelated grass, forest, stair, etc. images that let you build your own RPG map on your floor!
JList has four different sets (A, B, C, C, D) for $6.85 each.
SUPPORT TINY CARTRIDGE Join Club Tiny!
ANIMATED: Great moment of World Cup history
 |
submitted by rroach [link] [17 comments] |
firehoselol
Today is the start of our new summertime reading series “If you liked…, Read this next…” for diverse books. The #WeNeedDiverseBooks campaign is deeply committed to increasing the visibility of the wonderful diverse books that are published. Because these books do not get the marketing and promotion that the blockbuster books get. So we want to do our part in raising the profile of diverse books and bringing them to a larger audience. Help us spread the word! We will have a new “If You LIked” every day of the summer!
The first book in our series is the YA book Akata Witch by Nnedi Okarafor. You really need to read this author who the great Ursula LeGuin said “There’s more vivid imagination in a page of Nnedi Okorafor’s work than in whole volumes of ordinary fantasy epics.” So what are you waiting for?
firehoseWHAAAAAAAAAAAAAATTTTTTTTTTTTT
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
firehosevia Albener Pessoa
The Ready for Hillary organization, a group that's laying the groundwork for a potential presidential campaign by Hillary Clinton, has backed down from its demand that a parody T-shirt and related items be removed from an online store.
The T-shirt reads: “I’m Ready for Oligarchy,” a parody of the group’s slogan: “I’m Ready for Hillary.”
The maker of the shirt, a Minnesota-based activist named Dan McCall, had previously won a bid to make and sell T-shirts parodying the National Security Agency. Paul Alan Levy, McCall’s attorney, said that he was informed of Ready for Hillary's intention to drop the demand late Thursday.
 |
Courtney
shared this story
from  Super Opinionated.
|
Republicans just killed a bill that would have allowed students to refinance their loans at lower interest rates because rich people would have to pay for part of it.
Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s (D-Mass.) Bank on Students Emergency Loan Refinancing Act didn’t even get past a procedural vote, failing 56-38. Warren said the bill was designed to ease the debts of 40 million Americans who collectively hold nearly $1.3 trillion in loans, at a stunning $30,000 per borrower.
Senate Republicans objected to the inclusion of the so-called Buffett Rule to pay for it, which would have raised income tax rates on rich people who obtain most of their income from investments. Raising taxes is a non-starter for the GOP in both the House and Senate. Just three Republicans signed on with the bill.
Read more | Follow @policymic
I WISH I only owed $30,000.
I never hated a group of people so much in my life… I fuckin HATE republicans.
Republicans need to GO. THEY NEED TO FUCKING GO.
Some background on the politics of this because I think political reporting tends to contribute to people’s misunderstandings about just what Republican obstructionism is doing.
When the article says the vote failed 56 to 38, what you need to understand is that it failed with 56 votes in favor and 38 against. This was a bipartisan bill, attracted the support of three Republicans and the entire Democratic caucus, a clear majority of the Senate. It failed because Republicans in the Senate are exploiting procedural rules to prevent votes on anything.
It is also worth understanding that the votes they are preventing aren’t even blocking any legislation. This bill would not have passed the House where Republicans hold a majority. Indeed, even if the bill COULD have passed the House with limited GOP support joining with Democrats, the House Republicans follow a standard where only bills with a majority of Republicans supporting it can go to the floor for a vote. So Senate Republicans are obstructing literally just to obstruct. I won’t get into the mess where a the last House election, Democratic candidates actually got a 50.6% majority of the popular vote but this only resulted in 46.2% of the House seats.
Also worth noting here is that Republicans objected to the inclusion of a tax increase to pay for this bill. This is because Republicans have arbitrarily demanded that all new bills be “paid for”. If you are wondering if they held to such strict fiscal responsibility when they were in control of Congress and the Presidency, please refer to the exploding deficits during the Bush administration which inherited balanced budgets. Mind you, this isn’t even necessarily fiscally responsible. At the moment, it is actually extremely inexpensive for the federal government to borrow money. Now is precisely the time to be running responsible deficits in order to stimulate the economy by things like, say, increasing the buying power of young college graduates. Every time a Republican scolds “Washington” for not being able to balance its budgets, understand that every American with a mortgage, a car loan, and (spoiler) student loans isn’t operating with a “balanced” budget by their definition. Because these kinds of investments leading to debt are routine and fiscally healthy. Which is why Republicans always forget about fiscal responsibility when they are spending the money. Because their concern is a sham and they know it.
Except, the new generation of Republicans DON’T actually know that. They’ve swallowed this rhetoric for years and now adhere to it with a religious fervor. And THAT is a scary glimpse into our future.
"Feels good, man" —Gloria
Gloria lives at Farm Sanctuary in New York and was rescued from a racetrack, where she was kept tied up with a small length of twine for years. Someone convinced her owner to allow her to go to Farm Sanctuary, and they helped her to get badly needed veterinary care.
firehoseLord of the Rings Online
We featured those before, but I don’t believe we had a full set comparing male and female versions of the same designs :)
~Ozzie
I particularly like not just the layering but how they’ve used it to create outfits of similar practicality and overall style that all still have a feeling of belonging together in the same world and culture.
- wincenworks
firehosevia Russian Sledges
Today is not only Friday the 13th, it’s also a full moon! Nicknamed the Strawberry moon or Rose moon since both of those plants are at their peak in June.
Illustration of the moon from Iconographic encyclopaedia of science, literature, and art (1852)
firehosevia Albener Pessoa
They told me I could be anything. #9gag
firehoseReminder that the shooter and his family are mainstream Mormons; he was ordained as a deacon at 12 years old, and his father was a church elder.
 |
submitted by jordanlund [link] [143 comments] |
The World’s Ball @ NYTimes.com. How each ball was made with super-cool exploded views—
Early soccer balls were hand-sewn and made of leather. They were never perfectly round, and inflating them required some skill. The laces had to be undone before an interior air bladder was filled and tied with a thread; then the laces were retied.
Team captains chose a ball before each match, and every team had a preferred design, according to Peter Pesti, a collector and expert on World Cup balls. In the first World Cup, in 1930, Uruguay and Argentina could not agree on which ball to use. The first half of the match was played with a model favored by Argentina. The second half was played with Uruguay’s preferred design, the T-Model. Argentina led, 2-1, after the first half, but Uruguay recovered in the second and won, 4-2.
Great feature!
firehosevia saucie
Two students at Worcester Polytechnic Institute have raised the bar high for train data visualizations.
Courtesy of the Massachusetts Bay Transit Authority and its Developer Relations program, Michael Barry and Brian Card got their hands on information like train schedules, real-time train locations in the Boston metro area (only available for the Red, Blue, and Orange lines), and per-minute entry and exit counts at each station based on turnstile measurements.
The pair pulled all the data from the month of February 2014. And then, taking cues from information visualization pioneers like Edward Tufte, they crafted the data into a stunning set of interactive visualizations. They hope their work will help people better understand how Boston’s transit system works and how their behavior fits in to overall patterns.
For example, the graphics in the screenshot above depict all subway trips on the Red, Blue, and Orange lines on February 3, 2014. In the "timetable" on the right, each vertical line represents a station, so the colored lines represent each train's position as time passes by. Steeper lines means slower trains. In the interactive version, mousing over a single train also brings up its position on the subway map (shown below in the center).
On the very left of this screenshot is a zoomed-out look at the whole day. In the concentration of colored lines, we can make out the more frenetic morning and afternoon rush hours, the mid-day and evening lulls, and complete lack of service in the wee hours.
Below, we zoom in at around 5:00 p.m. on the "timetable," where you can see that a disabled train (bolded) on the Red Line delays all the trains following it for over an hour (which is observed in the concentrated strip of extra steep lines). Major delays due to disabled trains make headlines quite regularly in Boston—just this week a disabled train at Davis Square created mayhem on the Red Line. Now, we can see the extent of the impact of such disturbances.
The project also tackles the people component. The graphic below for example, illustrates the relationship between congestion and passenger volume. You can see how overall, the biggest delays, highlighted in red, correspond to morning and evening rush hours, when turnstile entries recorded across all the stations are highest.
Another visualization also lets you explore specific trips on each line. Just highlight the start and end positions of a trip and see how long that commute would take at different points of the day. You can begin to see what time in the morning might give you the best shot at a fast trip.
For example, as shown in the screenshot below, if you get to the Harvard Station platform at 7:56 a.m., the typical total commute time to South Station—including wait and transit time—is 18 minutes. Hover over the graphic and you can see that if you get there at 8:25 a.m., that number goes up to 21 minutes.
Barry and Card also observed trends like the fact that increased delays during rush hour are generally offset by trains arriving more frequently, and that transit times on the Blue Line are less variable than on the Red Line. To explore the detailed data in all the interactives, click through to the project page.
Inspired to make something similar? Barry has promised to share the code behind these visualizations soon on GitHub.
firehoseLouisiana state flag beat
Pelican wounding her breast in order to nourish her young, Cathedral of Aveiro, Portugal
firehose‘well done!’, ‘bravo!’; ‘good luck!’
"A parson writing an amorous Opera is a phenomenon more horrid I trust in that eye [sc. of episcopacy] than the growth of popery. But macte virtute; the deed is done, and I am ready to abide by the consequences."
firehosevia saucie
shared entirely for Pug Division
If you follow Dog Milk on Facebook, you may have seen me post what I consider the best ‘Unknown Pleasures’ album art re-do of all time: this Pug Division print by Huebucket. SO. GOOD. So good in so many ways. But the squished-face breed love doesn’t stop there, my friends. The mad genius behind the Huebucket shop on Society6 has created some of my favorite Pug, Boston, and Frenchie illustrations, all of which can be purchased as art prints, pillows, iPhone cases, clocks, shower curtains — YOU NAME IT.
Check out the Huebucket shop for more goodies and have fun trying to decide exactly which format best expresses your pug love.
![[link]](http://i.imgur.com/MLbaQXi.jpg){kind=link}