Mahmoud

The year 2013 was the driest in California's recorded history, and predictions for 2014 aren't much better. Three consecutive years of below-normal rainfall have left reservoirs at a fraction of their normal depth, seriously threatening farms in the state that grows half the nation's fruits and vegetables. California Governor Jerry Brown has declared a drought emergency and signed a $687 million drought-relief package into law, and 125 additional firefighters have been hired already in anticipation of a dangerous upcoming fire season. One bright spot: gold prospecting. Amateur prospectors are flocking to the Sierra Nevada foothills, taking advantage of lower water levels to search for gold in riverbeds that have been unreachable for decades. [25 photos]

Houseboats are docked at Bridge Bay in Shasta Lake, which is 100 feet (30 meters) below its normal levels, in Shasta, California, on January 23, 2014. Now in its third straight year of drought conditions, California is experiencing its driest year on record, dating back 119 years, and reservoirs throughout the state have very low water levels. (Reuters/Robert Galbraith)

hope everyone is having a blast today! but amid all the partying and celebrating, take a little time to remember what really happening — a bunch of money leaving your account, forever

i’m back from PAX east, thanks for your patience — i wanted to devote time to getting a full three broodhollows up because it was getting the short end of my stick for a while. but i’m back and ready to get some work done, right after i finish my citizenly duty!

and i have even more good news! chainsawsuit podcast episode 50 was live at PAX this weekend, and the audio is amazing. it’s one of our very best shows we’ve ever done, please check it out!!

indefenseofplants:

Time-lapse of river changing course over 28 years.

Rivers are not static entities!

The best possible combination of all colors and shapes, imho.

I recently removed about 430 comics from the archives because they’re super ancient and stuff (some are over 10 years old), and they deserve their own place apart from the rest.

Having said that, you can now download Robbie & Bobby Volume Zero, a PDF collection of over 400 classic comics on Gumroad for  just $1. (or more, if you’re feeling generous.)

Click here to get all the Robbie & Bobby books and collections for $1 (or more!) each! WOW.

Currently the second most viewed article of the past 24 hours on popular Chinese web portal NetEase…

From NetEase:

Business Explodes for Shenyang Barbequed Skewer Seller That Looks Incredibly Like Kim Jong-un

March 19th, Liaoning province Shenyang city, for a street vendor of barbequed meat skewers in front of a university, there is endless business, endless talk, and endless requests for photos. Those purchasing the skewers cannot help but laugh out loud that he looks too much like Kim Jong-un.

Comments from NetEase (1 & 2):

三氵已 [网易云南省昆明市网友]：

If you were in North Korea, your whole family would be persecuted for guilt-by-association. If you don’t believe me, you can go to North Korea and try.

空亦空 [网易广西桂林市网友]：

Either his mother was Kim Jong-il‘s housekeeper or his father was a bodyguard for Fatty III’s mother.

zhforestcrazy [网易广东省珠海市网友]：

Might as well call this barbeque stand “Fatty III’s Barbeque”!

网易河北省唐山市手机网友 ip：111.227.*.*:

Fatty III, give me three big kidneys, extra spicy.

islandside188 [网易上海市手机网友]：

So similar, yet different fates.

ucome888 [网易山东省威海市网友]：

Didn’t [Kim] Jong-il go to Shenyang before?

ucome888 [网易山东省威海市网友]：

A pity that he’s [making a living] barbequing, Fatty III is recruiting body-doubles.

空亦空 [网易广西桂林市网友]：

We can consider using him to replace the real one, and control North Korea.

KCOOL17 [网易广东省佛山市手机网友]：

There he is an emperor, here he sells barbequed meats.

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A modern Web page is a catastrophe. It's like a scene from one of those apocalyptic medieval paintings that depicts what would happen if Galactus arrived: people are tumbling into fiery crevasses and lamenting various lamentable things and hanging from playground equipment that would not pass OSHA safety checks. This kind of stuff is exactly what you'll see if you look at the HTML, CSS, and JavaScript in a modern Web page. Of course, no human can truly "look" at this content, because a Web page is now like V'Ger from the first "Star Trek" movie, a piece of technology that we once understood but can no longer fathom, a thrashing leviathan of code and markup written by people so untrustworthy that they're not even third parties, they're fifth parties who weren't even INVITED to the party, but who showed up anyways because the hippies got it right and free love or whatever. [...]

Describing why the Web is horrible is like describing why it's horrible to drown in an ocean composed of pufferfish that are pregnant with tiny Freddy Kruegers -- each detail is horrendous in isolation, but the aggregate sum is delightfully arranged into a hate flower that blooms all year. [...]

So, yes, it would be great if fixing your browser involved actions that were not semantically equivalent to voodoo. But, on the bright side, things could always be worse. For example, it would definitely be horrible if your browser's scripting language combined the prototype-based inheritance of Self, a quasi-functional aspect borrowed from LISP, a structured syntax adapted from C, and an aggressively asynchronous I/O model that requires elaborate callback chains that span multiple generations of hard-working Americans. OH NO I'VE JUST DESCRIBED JAVASCRIPT. What an unpleasant turn of events! People were begging for a combination of Self, LISP, and C in the same way that the denizens of Middle Earth were begging Saruman to breed Orcs and men to make Uruk-hai.

Previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously.

Ok, even though it’s fundamentally the same principle, here’s the real reason that “fwd:fwd:FWD:re:fwd” is old n’ busted: no validation!

It’s all about the retweets, bro. When you type up a thought, and send it out into outer space (or wherever the internet lives) and some dude you barely know clicks on a button that sends electric shockwaves of golden validation straight to your soul. That’s the stuff man. The STUFF. It’s like favs and retweets exist to quantify the quality of your thoughts, of your very essence. If you’re not changing WHO YOU ARE to match what strangers on the internet want, well, you’re just not doing it right! Why “be yourself” when you can be the version of yourself that’s most tolerable to e-people.

In fact, let’s just cut out the middle man. Someone buy the domain “whoshouldibe.com” and make a social networking site where strangers just tell you exactly how to act and what to do in order to best suit them. Never again will you have to worry about disappointing other people. It would be like having a troubleshooting guide or a video game walkthrough for your OWN LIFE. Just refer to the book, and make it out clean.

Boom. I just solved humanity.

T

This comic is in celebration of the True Detective season finale! NO SPOILERS.

sorry, everyone. you chewin small gum? you gonna cry to momma? i want gum as big as a folded bedsheet. plank out on a ironing-board-sized piece of adult gum.

now u chewin’™

pmset -g assertions | grep DisplaySleep

This makes no goddamned sense, of course. NoIdleSleepAssertion makes sense for audio, but NoDisplaySleepAssertion only makes sense if video is actively playing and not paused, not merely audio.

The only way to fix this is to gently apply the Stick of Correction to the binary:

sudo sh
perl -pi -e 's/N(oDisplaySleepAssertion)/_$1/g' /usr/sbin/coreaudiod

Then you have to replace the signature with your own or it won't launch:

codesign -vfs 'Your Name' /usr/sbin/coreaudiod

Then restart it:

killall coreaudiod

You'll probably have to do that again every time you upgrade the OS. "Hooray."

Previously.

too ill for the law

A suburban Chicago man was arrested for running a meth lab while wearing a Los Pollos Hermanos shirt. Daniel Kowalski, 21, was nabbed yesterday despite already being on electronic monitoring for running a lab last summer, meaning he was not only tempting fate with his choice of t-shirt and favorite show, but also that he was just kind of dumb. Police in LaGrange, Illinois charged Kowalski with two counts of possession of a controlled substance, possession of methamphetamine manufacturing materials, and possession of materials needed to produce methamphetamines, all felonies and all charges both Walter White and Gustavo Fring managed to avoid.

The first two lines of 30 Rock.

So true.

Today is my last day at Rolling Stone As of this week I’m leaving to work for First Look Media the new organization that’s already home to reporters like Glenn Greenwald Jeremy Scahill and Laura Poitras

I’ll have plenty of time to talk about the new job elsewhere But in this

The Blood Eye tries its best u_u

BTW, tomorrow’s the last day to preorder Volume 3 for 15% off. Enter PREPARTY at checkout.

For only $299, you can have this mask thing, which… trains your face. “Say goodbye to needles and knives,” says the product description, among a dozen other dubious claims.

Revelation 1: chewing on pufferfish has an intoxicating effect (and can also slowly kill you, if you eat enough). Revelation 2: Dolphins know this, and use the spiny fish as a means to get, like, really high.

News.com.au describes a scene in a BBC documentary about everyone’s favorite marine mammals:

“This was a case of young dolphins purposefully experimenting with something we know to be intoxicating,” said Rob Pilley, a zoologist who worked as a producer on the series.

“After chewing the puffer and gently passing it round, they began acting most peculiarly, hanging around with their noses at the surface as if fascinated by their own reflection.”

…

And like any experienced drug user, dolphins appear to know their product.

“The dolphins were specifically going for the puffers and deliberately handling them with care. Dolphins seem to be experts on how to prepare puffers and how to handle them.”

Dolphins: just as smart as everyone says they are!

(Photo: Adam Fagen/Flickr)

The post Dolphins Get High on Eating Pufferfish appeared first on ANIMAL.

Forest Scent, Pavel Bautin. Russia. 2010 IAPLC Grand Prize Winner

Pale Wind, Takayuki Fukada. Japan. 2013 IAPLC Gold Prize

Whisper of the pines, Serkan Çetinkol. Turkey. 2013 IAPLC Top 27

Verve!, Chow Wai Sun. Hong Kong. 2011 IAPLC Bronze Prize

Way to heaven, Dmitriy Parshin. Russia.

Wild West, Stjepan Erdeljić. Croatia.

Georgi Chaushev, Bulgaria. 2012 IAPLC Top 100.

Francisco Wu, Spain. 2012 IAPLC Top 100.

Long Tran Hoang, Vietnam. 2012 IAPLC Third Place.

Pilgrimage, Shintaro Matsui. Japan. 2013 IAPLC Fifth Place.

No, these aren’t exactly your childhood goldfish bowls. The world of competitive aquarium design, or aquascaping, is just as difficult, expensive, and cutthroat as any other sport but requires expertise in many different fields to guarantee success. Aquarium designers possess large amounts of expertise in biology, design, photography, and excel in the art of patience, as individual aquascapes can take months if not years to fully mature into a completed landscape.

The world’s largest nature aquarium and aquatic plants layout competition is the International Aquatic Plants Layout Contest (IAPLC) which annually ranks hundreds of competitors from around the world with Asian and Eastern European countries generally dominating the top slots. While it’s somewhat difficult to track down galleries of winners from every year, above are some amazing entries from the last few years. To see more, oh so much more, check out: IAPLC Grand Prize Works, IAPLC 2011 Top 27, IAPLC 2013 Top 6, IAPLC 2012 Top 200 (or here), and the first Eastern European Planted Aquarium Design Contest.

I’ll keep posting cat comics until i get on reddit! That’s less a promise than a threat. I can keep making cat jokes all year, litter-ally.