firehose

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My first doofus email to a CEO:

Sad times are coming

When it comes to creepy webcomics, nobody makes them like Emily Carroll. In her latest unnerving comic, a girl is lured into a ghost story through a series of fairytale dreams.

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TED

In the New York offices of Ben Wizner, the American Civil Liberties Union attorney who represents Edward Snowden, sits a telepresence robot constantly representing the exiled whistleblower. As the German newspaper Tagespiegel reported Wednesday, the robot is “a screen on stilts, with electrical rollers for legs,” and Snowden has the ability to control the robot from Moscow.

The robot is likely the same $16,000 Beam robot that he used to speak at the TED conference in March 2014.

Tagespiegel’s Julia Prosinger was at the ACLU for a week spending time with the digital avatar of the former National Security Agency contractor.

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brianmichaelbendis:

Batwoman by J.H. Williams III, 2009

I JUST SPENT four full days in New Orleans, Louisiana. (Um, actually it's pronounced Nyawlins. Um, actually it's pronounced Nlwlalwnsyns. Um, actually it's pronounced Nnwnanwnsnylns. Um, actually it's pronounced Norbit.) I'll tell you this: I fucking loved New Orleans. You'd have to be made out of frozen church water to hate New Orleans. Everything has butter in it. I had a lobster bisque that was just a bowl full of melted butter that had been near a lobster for like, ten minutes. There are no forces in New Orleans that will align to keep you from fucking yourself up to heights you haven't been fucked up to since you walked around that party in college with no shirt on drinking 7&7 out of a Brita pitcher (we all did that, don't front).

Bourbon Street is just a barf causeway that runs between shithead bars that sell asshole drinks to dumbfucks, and it's great. Don't like rambly bleating trumpet music? Well if you're in New Orleans, you're wrong. You don't get to have that opinion in New Orleans. The police exist in New Orleans only to make sure you're enjoying the rambly, bleating trumpet music. They certainly aren't doing anything else.

New Orleans doesn't really remind me of Portland at all; they're way hella different cities. Portland is like an Ewok village. New Orleans is Mos Eisley cantina. New Orleans doesn't remind me of Portland at all, except in this one way (I've been blackout drunk there? DON'T DERAIL THIS, IAN. What a dumb name. "Ian."): New Orleans and Portland are both cities obsessed with themselves, and some people in Portland grouse about the city's self-obsession, but REAL TALK: It's fucking wonderful.

I understand that sometimes Portland's celebration of itself can be obnoxious. Sometimes you see that obsession manufactured, and it makes you want to roll your eyes harder than Alicia Silverstone rolled with the homies in Clueless. (CASE IN POINT: That credit union on Hawthorne with all the Portlandy buzz-words on its window: Yoga, Chai Tea, Urban Gardening, Kevin Duckworth's Untimely Death. CUT THAT SHIT OUT, CREDIT UNION ON HAWTHORNE.)

Is that the price we (I guess you, now that I have to live in Glendale, CA) pay, though? If so, fine. Let some people sell schmatta versions of the shit that makes Portland so much fun. For a peculiarity to become an idiosyncratic identity, it needs to be nurtured, obsessed over, celebrated. As frustrating as it is to see "Urban Gardening" used to rope you into a Roth IRA or whatever, it's still pretty fucking cool when your neighbor brings you eggs or zucchini or beer they made. It doesn't suck to walk by a field full of goats after you got day-drunk at the White Owl Social Club. Trust me, I live in Los Angeles now. Every square foot is utilized by Quiznos and Home Depots. Most cities are mostly Hillsboro. Most cities are mostly the Pearl District. Maybe Bourbon Street IS a river of barf, but it's better than a river of bullshit.

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Hey, that’s my bike.

We’ve all seen images of fantastic 3D printed shoes over the past couple of years, but if you were to look close and handle them, you’d find they weren’t particularly wearable. Now that’s set to change. 

Designer Mary Huang has developed a new line of shoes, “Myth”, that, according to her are wearable. She says: 

Each design is 90-100% made from components manufactured on small desktop machines, optimized for scalable 3d printing production. Hand finishing on the shoes is kept to a minimum, in keeping with the goal of making finished consumer products from 3D printers, so that designs manifest directly from digital to physical.

Even better, Huang intends on developing new pairs for the Myth line: 

New designs will be released every month or so, and will expand to flats and boots down the line.

We believe this to be significant. Here we have a fashion designer who is now regularly producing totally wearable 3D printed items. Aside from “hard” pieces like jewelry, we’re not sure any other 3D printed fashion has these properties. 

Via Continuum Fashion

Photo: Passeggiando in Valcamonica

Giant map of regional rail in Lombardy on the floor of Milan’s Repubblica station.  

Source: beriapaolo/Flickr

Dad pants are bad pants, according to Jim Harbaugh's wife, who has witnessed atrocities in the field of poor leg fashion.

Do you remember whenJim Harbaugh's wife, Sarah, revealed to the world that her husband wore $8 pants from Wal-Mart, and our Spencer Hall reviewed his terrible, soulless pants?

Well, it turns out Harbaugh has been upgraded, courtesy of Dockers, who capitalized on the interest in the 49ers coach's leg garments by putting him and Sarah in an PSA about the horrible Dad Pants pandemic. (Pantdemic?)

Slightly less dad pant-y, although certainly still in the category of Pants Dads Wear. We wonder whether Spencer is still wearing his.

We are a tad concerned about how much Jim is smiling here, though:

Hey don’t go into attack mode on superopinionated please. She’s my friend and I appreciate her input. 

• "Female characters in Watch Dogs are victims, to be kidnapped or murdered in the interest of plot or character motivation and are almost all overtly sexualized." (Polygon review)
• "It’s double the animations, it’s double the voices, all that stuff and double the visual assets," Ubisoft creative director Alex Amancio said about omitting playable women characters from Assassin’s Creed: Unity. “Especially because we have customizable assassins. It was really a lot of extra production work.”
• “We were inches away from having you be able to select a girl or a guy as your co-op buddy when you invite someone in. And it was purely a workload issue because we don’t have a female reading for the character, we don’t have all the animations,” Ubisoft director Alex Hutchinson explained about omitting playable women characters from Far Cry 4. “And so it was this weird issue where you could have a female model that walked and talked and jumped like a dude.”

What a spectacle. And here people were saying not to pay attention to E3 because it’s a sexist marketing morass.

anikamyerspalm:

vanityfair:

Listen to this Dixieland jazz version of the Game of Thrones theme song (no spoilers).

More from the New Orleans Swamp Donkeys here. 

Love.

Reynolds High School freshman Jared Michael Padgett carried a guitar case and duffel bag onto his school bus yesterday morning. Arriving at Reynolds' gym building, he went to the boy's locker room, where he pulled an AR-15 rifle, handgun, nine loaded magazines, and a knife from the two cases. He put on what police say was a "non-ballistic vest" and a "multi-sport" camouflage helmet. And moments later, he shot and killed fellow freshman Emilio Hoffman, 14, and injured gym teacher Todd Rispler when confronted.

When 15-year-old Padgett encountered police officers in the building's hallway a short time later, he ducked inside a bathroom and killed himself.

That's the tale that's just emerged, at the latest press conference in yesterday's chilling incident at the Troutdale High School. There's still no indication why Padgett did what he did—whether he'd targeted Hoffman specifically or it was meant to be a more wide-ranging attack. Certainly the hundreds of rounds of ammo, two guns and knife Padgett was carrying suggest the latter. Anderson said cops have not established a connection between Padgett and Hoffman.

"The shooter obtained the weapons from his family home," said Troutdale Police Chief Scott Anderson. "The weapons had been secured, but he defeated the security measures."

The attack unfolded just after 8 a.m. on Tuesday morning. Rispler, who was grazed in the hip area, made his way immediately to the school's office to initiate lockdown, and police soon swarmed the large high school's campus.

"I cannot emphasize enough the role that Mr. Rispler and the responding officers played in saving many, many lives yesterday," Anderson said. "Given the weapons and amount of ammunition that the shooter was carrying, the early notification and the initial law enforcement response were critical. Every one of the teachers and students in that school did the exact right thing in a very difficult situation."

The attack may be the Portland-area's first-ever school shooting. It's the first in Oregon since a 1998 attack in Springfield, according to the Associated Press. But on a national scale, it's just another grim reminder of the country's issues with guns and how, more and more, they're finding their way into our schools. Yesterday's murder marked the 74th school shooting incident since the horrific events at Connecticut's Sandy Hook Elementary in December 2012, according to one group.

And Padgett wasn't even the only Reynolds student with a gun yesterday. Cops patting down the students after the shooting found someone packing a completely unrelated gun.

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A truly astounding transformation…

(via Reddit)