José Bruno Barbaroxa

this is what hope looks like  

this should be interesting  

OH GOD IT'S ALMOST SDCC TIME. We're boothing with Overdue media at 2300 and I'll be there Fri and Sat!

San Francisco Geeks! I'll also be attending GaymerX in its first year! Legend has it that if you type in SMBC you get a discount on your badge.

Mark Eichenlaub’s answer to the question “Do grad school students remember everything they were taught in college all the time?" is a bona fide Priceonomics recommended longread.

Read The Blog Post Here »

Markdown is a lightweight, human-readable markup language used for formatting text. It’s a simple way to add things like bold, italics, links, lists, paragraphs, headers, and images in blocks of text. Previously, we used Markdown for board and card descriptions and member bios. We’re happy to announce that you can now also use Markdown support in card comments and checklist items. And, so you can can get really expressive, we’ve added emoji support! That means you can use real images for smilies and emoticons like , , and everywhere in Trello.

Emoji

Sometimes words just aren’t enough. Sometimes only a will do. Thankfully, you can now use emoji in card comments, checklist items, descriptions, and bios. The syntax is simple, just wrap an emoji name in colons, like so — :fireworks:. Trello will render it as . In comments and checklist items, it will autocomplete for you. So if you type :fir, a list of matching emoji will show up. Press enter or tab to add it to the field.

We’ve included the over 800 emoji in the Emoji Cheat Sheet, which you can use as a reference. Enjoy!

Markdown

Markdown syntax is super simple. Here’s an example…

Add two lines to start a new paragraph.

 - This is a list.
 - You can make things **bold**
 - … or *italic* 
 - … or add [a link to Trello](https://trello.com)

You can check out the complete syntax here. We’ve extended it with a few concepts taken from GitHub-flavored Markdown. In strict Markdown, you can only add new paragraph with two new lines in your text. In Trello, you can add a line break with a single new line. We also create links for anything that looks link-y. So if trello.com appears in your text, it will get turned into a link without any formatting required.

We’ve also added a couple features to make the syntax more code-friendly. You can wrap your block of text in three backticks (```) to create a fenced code block. That means you don’t have to indent every line, which makes copying and pasting code much easier. You can also do multiple underscores in words meaning Trello won’t italicize characters in do_this_thing, for example.

Markdown features are limited in some fields where they don’t really make sense. In descriptions and bios, you can do pretty much everything. In card comments, you can’t do headers. In checklist items, you can’t do multi-line things like headers, lists, code blocks, or paragraphs.

We hope you dig it! Follow us on Twitter, Facebook, and Google+ and let us know what you think!

Hazards of Riding Bears by CarbonNYC (cc by)

As these things do, this scene began a bit underground and then started to gain momentum and then really EXPLODED. Suddenly the bears weren't a movement, they were a marketing niche. And the energy of the scene began to change. Big meetups became more, for lack of a better term, corporate. Suddenly you could buy "bear" merchandise easily rather than having to seek it out. Bear clubs were springing up all over the country, and then breaking up into smaller groups as the fights between the "we want to fuck" and the "we want to socialize" groups surfaced.

hippybear talks about the changes that have happened in a different sort of bear movement.

1) I’ve been thinking about this a lot, and I think we need to have a talk.

2) I’m feeling a lot of things, and one of those things is that you smell extremely bad.

3) I don’t mean that you smell bad to me, I mean that you smell bad objectively.

4) You smell so bad that when you walk near a cat, it scratches apart the floorboards in order to obtain material to cover the smell.

5) You smell so bad that when you walk near the ocean, you can hear bagpipes because the clams think one of their policemen has died.

6) You smell so bad that when you open a Bologna Lunchable, people in the vicinity say, “oh thank god someone opened up a bologna lunchable because that is beginning to cover over the smell we were previously smelling."

6)a) (Bologna Lunchables also smell bad, we can both agree, but not as bad as you have been smelling.)

7) So at any rate, I’ve given this a tremendous amount of thought, and at this point in my life, I think that I feel that I’ve discovered that it’s important to me to not be dating someone that smells like someone placed an entire peat bog in an old gym sock and let it do its thang in about four to five gallons of greek yogurt.

8) It’s not you, nor is it me, it’s the smell that surrounds you like a cursed fog upon a dhampir’s tongue, which is like a thousand hamsters caught in a quiche, left in the equatorial sun.

9) I still wish nothing but the best for you, and hope we can eventually be friends.

10) PS you still have my copy of House of Leaves, but feel free to finish it, just get it back to me whenevs.

posted by Greg Nog to Ask Metafilter at 3:36 on September 2, 2012

God, seriously. Could we maybe stop labeling anything that is intentionally designed and crafted as “pretentious"? I mean, I suppose this distinction could have meant something 20 years ago when the US still had a manufacturing sector. These days, the alternative to craft seems to be shit that’s designed by accountants, fashioned by Chinese wage-slaves and sold in big box stores or online (in which case it’s stacked, sorted and shipped by first world wage-slaves). You’re hardly “sticking it to the man" when you shop lowbrow. In fact, you’re shoving your money directly into his pockets for him.

Why are we still trying to shame people who take pride in their craft with stale labels that function to advance the lowest common denominator as a self-evident good? Who the fuck does that serve?

posted by R. Schlock to Metafilter at 21:45 on June 17, 2013

You see, if everyone is special, then no one is. 

Yeah, agreed that this is a completely toxic idea. I hated it when it was the moral of The Incredibles (which has a pretty disgusting Ayn Rand streak), and I hate it in this commencement address.

Being special is like being beautiful. If you have a field of flowers and they’re ALL beautiful, it doesn’t reduce to bland monotony — instead it makes the experience of standing there all the more breathtaking. 

Everyone IS special. It’s nothing to lord over anyone else because we all have it (there used to be this metaphysical idea called the human soul or something, but now we can’t have that because science). 

Instead, this “nobody’s special" concept is an example of the petulant frustrated ego this guy’s got. It sounds more like HE entered the world thinking that specialness was an exclusive club, and was sorely disappointed. Instead of expanding his view to reconsider the meaning of individuality, he’s bringing the “bad news" to the young people — “Don’t get your hopes up, you pitiful worms."

What a small man.

posted by overeducated_alligator at 14:38 on June 8, 2012

artists, inspired by Humble Bundle, roll their own  

easily mix 2D and 3D content on a webpage [via] 

turn ordinary objects into UAVs  

Hey poli sci geeks - my brother, Greg Weiner (yes there are more Weiners), is writing some articles here. Fair warning: They involve nuance and politics, so you will probably be angry at some of them. Enjoy!

Last day for the new project! Thanks, geeks!

I’ve been composing the letter from my 60-year-old self that would have been of some real use at 16: things I wish I’d known earlier. “Dear Me …

If you see a dog, try dressing it in funny clothes. If you see a dog that’s already dressed up, take a photograph. Always shave against the grain of your stubble. More than two blades is ridiculous. In fact, you really don’t need more than one; a regular old-fashioned safety razor is cheap and has a nice weight in your hand.

Saltines go surprisingly well with all kinds of cheeses; always keep a box on hand. If you date someone who thinks Saltines are tasteless, explain that that’s sort of the point. If you date someone who calls you a “maniac" for dressing up dogs, maybe you should break up with them. Don’t rev your car engine; it makes you look like you have something to prove.

Activated coal is cheaper to buy in bulk than in those overpriced Brita filters. Most dog owners love seeing their dogs dressed in funny clothes. However, “society" tells them that they’re supposed to “hate" it, so they’ll probably yell at you. A good way to get around this “Catch-22" is to sneak into their yards at night and do the dressing-up then. If they start locking their dogs inside at night, send anonymous photos of the dogs to them, wearing the funny clothes. There’s no practical difference between a moleskine and a regular old notebook.

The kind of man who cares about the shape of his glass matching his drink will be an insufferable bore at dinner parties. When choosing a lipstick for a dog, remember that darker lips sometimes require bolder colors to really make them stand out. For a black lab, for example, consider a really vibrant purple. Don’t ever use an electric range if you can get a gas one instead.

Bumblebees are largely harmless, so don’t bother running away from them. Honey goes surprisingly well with yogurt. Dogs dressed as presidents are never quite as satisfying as you think they’re going to be, unless you have exactly the right wig. You don’t need a motorcycle when you already have both an automobile and a bicycle.

When you read a book you like, try not to speak about it for more than one minute at a time; any longer will make people less interested in reading it. Don’t worry about that “shaking a martini bruises the gin" nonsense; it’s all an old wives’ tale. Make sure that if you put boots on a dog, they’re not too heavy; sometimes dogs aren’t as strong-legged as they look.

If the police knock on your door, you don’t have to answer it; pretend you’re not home. If they come to your office and ask, “what’s with all the dog photos, pal?" you can tell them you have to go to the bathroom. Remember that the fire escape is outside the bathroom window. Keep a spare towel in your bathroom, in case of guests. Don’t leave the same set of sheets on your bed for longer than a week.

The only real secret to most restaurant food is more butter and more salt. Dogs dressed as famous hip-hop stars is a great idea, but remember that no one will realize it’s supposed to be Dre unless you also pair him with a dog to represent Snoop.

Ammonia is a wonderfully versatile degreaser around the house. Use photoshop to make the dogs look like they have “stars in their eyes". Never add sugar to cereal. Pat the dogs and compliment them after a particularly long session. Give them small pieces of steak. Scarves stay on dogs remarkably well.

posted to Metafilter by Greg Nog at 20:23 on November 20, 2009

drawingarchitecture:

‘New Echelon - Solar Tower Axonometric’

Dan Laster

I’ve been making cigar box guitars for about five years, and this is the DVD that taught me what I needed to get started. Bill Jehle is a traditional guitar maker, and he made this video as a way to introduce people to the art of making more complex stringed instruments. His delivery is calm and orderly, and free of hype.

The video helped me over the hurdle of installing frets, which I had previously assumed was a monumentally difficult thing to do. I also learned about neck profiling and how to make the headstock. When I built my first guitar, it had plenty of problems, but it would have been much worse had I built it without the knowledge I’d picked up from viewing the video.

-- Mark Frauenfelder

How to Build a Guitar: the String Stick Box Method DVD
$20

Available from Amazon

Sample Excerpts:

Do you recall your favorite tragedy in the series? Chances are it is already available as a print in the etsy emporium! 

por Emiliano Augusto

Parece que na conjuntura nacional e internacional acabamos de atingir um ponto em que se abre a possibilidade para que voltemos a cantar que nada será como antes. Como me disse um amigo, diante de nós abriu-se uma avenida para aquele futuro que queríamos, mas ao contrário do que esperávamos, não é uma avenida larga, daquelas de seis faixas, recentemente pavimentada, e sim uma avenida tortuosa, cheia de buracos e obstáculos. E o primeiro obstáculo que aparece é o conjunto de coisas instituídas aproveitando-se da nossa inexperiência com o novo.

Assim como a extrema-direita batendo em militantes organizados na rua, os diferentes governos também tentam cooptar as mobilizações, e usá-las para tocar sua agenda, e, ao contrário da extrema-direita, os governos são muito bons nisso. Eles sabem que não podem vencer a rua jogando no mesmo campo que ela — a rua –, e tentarão de tudo para levar o jogo para um lugar em que eles têm força: os gabinetes, o cálculo eleitoral, as velhas formas amarradas de democracia representativa. Por isso, devemos tomar todo o cuidado com a primeira leva de coisas que nos será oferecida: reformas, descontos, concessões. Por mais progressistas que essas propostas possam soar, por mais que algumas delas contenham reivindicações que há um mês soavam impossíveis, temos que nos lembrar sempre: o espectro possível-impossível mudou. Sejamos novamente realistas, peçamos um novo impossível.

Nesse sentido, ainda há lições a serem aprendidas com a mobilização iniciada pelo Movimento Passe Livre em São Paulo. A primeira delas era muito clara há duas semanas, e um dos pontos fortes da estratégia traçada pelo MPL, mas parece que já estamos esquecendo: concentrar todas forças numa reivindicação clara. É um erro dispersar nossas energias num mar de reivindicações genéricas (e eu estou olhando especialmente para vocês, centrais sindicais organizando o ato do dia 11. Vocês podem mais que isso). A segunda lição tem a ver com a fragilidade de pedir a revogação do aumento. Que fique claro, isso não é uma crítica ao que pedíamos então, pelo contrário. Com os elementos que tínhamos, e com a correlação de forças naquele momento, centrar forças na revogação do aumento foi o mais acertado. Mas a vitória nos mostrou o limite dessa reivindicação: foi possível aos governos municipal e estadual fazer alguns malabarismos, espalhar os 0,20 centavos pela educação, pela saúde, pela infraestrutura, e conceder a revogação sem sequer chegar perto de enfrentar os compromissos com os interesses escusos que mantêm suas campanhas.

Trata-se agora de encontrar uma reivindicação tão clara e tão forte quanto à negação dos 3,20, tão justa quanto ela, e impossível de ser atendida de maneira que tudo continue funcionando como ainda funciona. É necessário encontrar uma reivindicação que ligue o mínimo que se possa esperar do presente com aquele máximo que sempre deixamos para o futuro, que torne o caminho entre um e outro factível.

Sinceramente, devo dizer que eu ainda não tenho certeza qual será a reivindicação. Eu sei qual é a que eu gostaria que fosse, mas vou guardá-la para ainda não contaminar a opinião dos leitores. Digo apenas que certamente ela terá que estar ligada ao sentimento generalizado de insatisfação que pegamos difuso no ar por aí. Aqui em São Paulo, os protestos começaram por causa de um aumento de 20 centavos no preço do transporte, o que aponta para a inflação atacando os itens básicos de consumo e corroendo o poder de compra dos salários. Mas eles se massificaram depois da noite de brutal repressão policial, o que aponta para um sentimento de falta de liberdade, e isso é bem mais difícil de lidar, porque é bastante abstrato. Enfim, esta é a esfinge guardando o caminho. Se a resposta pra charada está em um pólo, no outro, ou na nossa capacidade de ligar os dois, ainda não sei. Sei que a boca dela já não é tão grande, embora ainda haja gente fazendo esforço para escancará-la

I guess this is what I wish I could have said to Doug Engelbart.

Man, that’s nothing. I once ate something called the apocalypse pepper. It grows in very small amounts in the Amazon basin, and the natives who live in the region have no word for it in their language. They just use their word for death. Every so often, a member of their tribe will brush against it by accident in the forest and burst into flames.

When this happens, the unfortunate tribesman’s ashes are mixed into a paste and then ceremonially eaten. Obviously, this is the only way you can eat the apocalypse pepper. The iepper itself has never been tested, but the ashes of someone who has touched them come in at a whopping 30 million Scoville units. It’s extraordinarily rare to be invited to participate in the apocalypse pepper ceremony. To the best of my knowledge, only non-natives have ever done so. The first was Sir Robert Blythe-Green in 1909; he left a handwritten account of the ceremony the day he took his own life. There is Margaret Whitechapel, who, of course, when mad from the experience. And there is me.

I was in the Amazon in the late 80s doing some ethnopharmacological work. I had become friendly with a small and unusually prankish tribe, and they had already given me a number of plants to eat, just to see how I would react. They found my reaction to the Panther Flower particularly amusing, although I am not sure the ferry pilot I mauled appreciated the humor. And so, when a teenage boy accidentally touched an apocalypse flower and exploded, they decided to ask me to join the ceremony.

The tribespeople set aside three days for the ceremony, and hide anything sharp or anything that might be used as a weapon. The actual eating of the ashes takes only a few minutes, and is done with surprisingly little ceremony. I suppose none is really needed. When you’re about to eat the ashes of someone who has died from the apocalypse flower, any introductory ceremony is just busy work.

I watched three or four of the tribesmen eat the paste before they passed it on to me. I don’t know what I was expecting, but I knew it wasn’t going to be like anything I had ever experienced before. The man who passed me the paste was grinning, but his eyes were stained red from blood vessels inside them bursting. This doesn’t happen to everybody. I don’t know if it happened to me.

I’ve had peppers before. I ate a bhut jolokia chili years ago, when I was in India, and it was about the hottest thing I had ever had up until that point. I was really afraid I might die from it, and my tongue felt scorched for days afterward.

Well, the apocalypse pepper is so far beyond that your brain is not even capable of registering it as pain. Instead, you simply assume you have gone mad. There is a very distinct sense that you may actually have lost your mouth, you nose, and throat; one imagines oneself rather grotesquely, as a humanlike thing who has had these body parts torn away. Balance is generally impossible, but the experience is so enormous that you can’t stop moving. The natives call it the crawling trance, because tribesman have been found as far as seven miles away, having squirmed the entire distance while under the spell of the apocalypse pepper. Some, of course, try to kill themselves, which is why anything that might be use as a weapon is hidden. Some succeed anyway, by drowning themselves or throwing themselves off cliffs. It doesn’t happen every time, but it happens enough that you take precautions, and be ready for the possibility that someone might be dead at the end of the experience.

There is a lot of hallucinating. A lot. And the hallucinations are beyond nightmarish. The natives like to say “There is no wisdom in the pepper," and they’re right. Some hallucinogens will give the user the distinct feeling that they have journeyed, and learned something. What you see on the apocalypse pepper you wish you didn’t, and try to forget, and never speak of. I won’t describe my hallucinations. I am not sure I can. They have an extra-dimensional quality that defies language, as though the edges of the world were just so much putrid, rotting flesh, and there is something outside it chewing its way in. That’s about the best I can describe the experience, and I’d rather not think about it anymore.

I cried for a full year after I ate the apocalypse pepper. I don’t mean that my eyes watered. I mean that I regularly burst into long fits of anguished weeping. Weirdly, this behavior seemed like it was just a reflex to me. I wasn’t actually feeling some psychic torment, and I watched myself sobbing with embarrassed curiosity. It could happen anytime, and there seemed to be no reason for it. It could have been worse, though. A percentage of those who eat the pepper lose their sense of smell. Some lose their ability to see. There’s nothing physically wrong with them, mind you — their eyes work, and their optic nerve is fine. It’s as though the pepper simply burned away their ability to register what they saw.

And, of course, some, like Margaret Whitechapel, never regain their sanity. I don’t know what her madness was like. If it was the gibbering horror of my hallucinations, I don’t know how she could stand it, although I understand she was frequently restrained. They say when she died, she was unable to speak or make any noise, as she had screamed so much and so loudly that she had destroyed her vocal chords.

It’s marked me. I feel like I just walk through the world, unconcerned about anything, like a living ghost. A few years ago my doctors were worried I might have a cancerous tumor on my neck, and had me tested. It proved to be benign and they removed it. Afterward, one of the doctors, a kind man named Erhardt, confessed to me he had never seen anybody like me. He said that I barely seemed to register the new when he first told me of the possibility of cancer, and that I behaved toward the tests and the surgery with the same vague disinterest of someone waiting for a bus. And it was true. The whole thing barely registered to me. It was more like a dull chore to me than a potentially life-threatening diagnosis. My whole life is like that.

The worst part is, I want to go back to the Amazon and to eat the ash of the pepper dead again. It’s the last time I remember really feeling anything. I suppose that’s why the Amazonians keep doing it, whenever somebody in their tribe accidentally touches the plant. They’re gentle people with a good sense of humor, but I suspect, like me, their lives are mostly seen as being the lull between when they last had the pepper and when they will have it again.

I might go back to the Amazon next year, but the truth is, I am a little afraid to do so. I have started to wonder if anybody really ever does accidentally brush against the apocalypse pepper. It’s not like it is a plant that you might not notice, because it might be found buried in a mass of other local flora. No, the apocalypse pepper grows on its own in a patch of scorched earth, and nothing living can be found within a 20 foot circle of the plant. Additionally, the air around it seems to shimmer, like the air above an oven or a volcano.

I have been thinking about that pepper a lot. Because if eating the ashes of someone who has touched it is so powerful, what must the experience of touching it be like?

When the Amazon tribesmen say that there is no wisdom in the pepper, maybe they aren’t talking about the experience of eating the ash. Maybe it is a warning against touching the plant itself. Maybe they are warning that it is just death, which is, after all, their word for the plant. Maybe there is no experience at all. You’re a living person one moment, and the next, upon touching the pepper, you are ash, and there was no experience between the first state of being and the second.

I can’t help but wonder, though. And that’s why I fear going back to the Amazon. Because, in the ghostly half-world I live in, where every experience comes to me like a muffled sound, and where I respond to it all with a shrug, thinking about touching the flower is something different, and something I crave.

It’s exciting.

posted to Metafilter by Astro Zombie at 7:21 on April 11, 2009