Tadeu

Hovertext: Don't worry. It broke my brain too.

Augie and the Green Knight cosplayer AAAAAH 

When the fifth season of Game of Thrones concluded with a main character lying dead on the ground, countless fans took to social media to express their disgust, declaring that they would never watch the show again. The very next day, they all started counting down the days until the next season. This is the way of the Game of Thrones fan and they’ve been this way since poor Ned Stark had his head lobbed off back in season one.

The next season of HBO’s flagship series won’t begin airing until next year, so fans have to bundle up and survive the harsh winter if they want to feel the bloody warmth of Westeros again. But HBO knows your pain and from their high castle walls, they have thrown us, the peasants, a bone. Yes, it’s the first trailer for the new season. Praise the Seven!

Watch the first Game of Thrones season 6 teaser after the jump.

Anyone expecting new footage from the first Game of Thrones trailer obviously hasn’t been watching Game of Thrones for very long. HBO knows they have your full and undivided attention, so the first teaser is always just that – a tease. This one, while undeniably an effective piece of advertising that will keep the fans satiated for a day or so, consists entirely of footage from past seasons. However, the footage consists almost entirely violence and dragons and lingering shots of the deceased-but-not-really Jon Snow, so it’s still pretty cool. It does feature one new line of dialogue, courtesy of Isaac Hempstead-Wright‘s long-absent Bran Stark: “They have no idea what’s going to happen.”

That Bran line, while certainly from the show itself, is a firm poke in the fanboy ribs. After all, this season finds the show officially outpacing George R.R. Martin‘s novels, which means that everyone, show-watchers and book-readers alike, are setting out into uncharted waters. Sure, the book fans can lean on the elaborate theories they’ve constructed using evidence from the text, but they’re operating in the dark now. The days of people spoiling major events three seasons in advance are over!

Although much of the new season is cloaked in mystery, we do know that Ian McShane will be be joining the cast as a not-so-mysterious mystery character and that the legendary Max Von Sydow will be stepping in to play the Three-Eyed Raven, Bran’s mentor in the mystic arts.

Game of Thrones season 6 will premiere in April, but HBO has yet to reveal the exact date. In any case, we have our response to that announcement: not soon enough.

The post ‘Game of Thrones’ Season 6 Teaser Brings the Death and Decapitation and Destruction and Dragons and… Bran appeared first on /Film.

(photo via jjdlg)

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…and stay down! [video]

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I

I love how they respond to him, as if he is actually a captain, even more.

Nasa confirmed for huge fucking nerds

This is awesome and priceless and people that work on space stuff are the best people of all time.

Honestly this just about brings me to tears.

Roddenberry, Shatner, Nimoy, Nichols and all the rest of the original Star Trek cast and crew had no small role in making the moon landing as important as it was.  A few years before they set that lunar module down, this little TV show came along and fanned the dream into wildfire with an image of what humanity in space could actually look like—not only peaceful on our own world, endlessly curious, and prosperous enough to pursue it, but an active force for good in the greater universe.  Carrying not what’s most toxic about us, but what’s best about us out to the stars.

Everybody who has worked at NASA or any other space agency for the past 50 years is waiting for the day when that unmanned probe doing a flyby on a comet can be controlled from the bridge of a space-faring vessel.  When we’re not just looking at that comet through a color-coded sonar map, but we can look out a porthole and see it tumbling by with our own eyes.  When as a species we can finally outgrow hate and fear and violence, and turn our faces with joy toward all the beauties and wonders that lie waiting to be discovered.

And every time he does this, Shatner is reminding them of what that hope feels like.

This was too great to not repost.

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Mad Mario by Scotty Wilson

Ideally, we’d all earn what we deserve and our employers would give us raises according to our skill level, experience, and professional value—we’d never even have to ask. Of course, reality doesn’t usually work out that way. As author Chester Karrass has said: “You don’t get what you deserve. You get what you negotiate.”

Read more...

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Brooklyn Nine-Nine s03e09

Match me Vincent, Salavat Fidai

Hovertext: You think this hair curls itself? Huh? You think pony shoes grow on a fucking tree? Jesus Christ, Todd. I thought you were smart. But, you're just like all the others.

Calligraphy by Seb Lester

it goes in my food whether i want it to or not, at least this way i’m choosing it

jeremykaye:

..Happy Hanukkah?

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Rebloggin for y'all

I lied. SEEMS TO BE THE THING TO DO. Now I’m sick and the computer isn’t even half set up. So have one from the archives!

…secretly sometimes I still wonder.

Hovertext: This is exactly how it works. No questions.

(credit: PROJaysin Trevino/Flickr)

Only one thing is clear about why knuckles crack, pop, and crunch: there are gas bubbles involved.

Whether the noise comes from the birth or burst of those bubbles has been a source of simmering debate for decades, though. Even with modern techniques and studies, new evidence still hasn’t resolved the issue completely. But the latest data is least intriguing—it shows that there’s a mysterious blast in the knuckle after the popping noise. Take a look:

A pop then a blast. (video link)

Read 9 remaining paragraphs | Comments

While it’s it not always important to get what you want, it sure feels good sometimes. This handy cheat sheet explains 11 different ways you can influence others to give yourself a win every once in a while.

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Hovertext: DID MY ANALOGY ABOUT BEES MEAN NOTHING TO YOU?!

A fun set of Gothic literature infographics - really - comes from the Guardian this week.  Check out "How to tell you're reading a gothic novel – in pictures".

For example,

The creators did a fine job of researching classic and important Gothic novels from the 18th and 19th centuries. Kudos for including American and Irish texts.

(thanks to Chris Lott)

(photo by general80)

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video: Seagull Does Yoga

A Turkish doctor is on trial for sharing a meme with side-by-side photos of the president of Turkey and Gollum. He is accused on insulting the president. The court has assembled a team of experts to determine whether or not the president resembles Gollum, a character from Lord of the Rings that J.R.R. Tolkien described as "a small, slimy creature."

From IBI Times:

The experts, including two academics, two behavioural scientists and an expert on cinema, will reportedly decided whether Erdogan was insulted in the tweet.

[The doctor], who claims that Gollum is not a bad character and that he did not insult anyone, faces up to two years in prison if convicted.

this one is getting Turkish twitterati into trouble: govt suing over Gollum/Erdogan comparison pic.twitter.com/O640fmY5hy

— BenAris (@bneeditor) December 2, 2015

Get ready for an epic drum battle between Animal and @foofighters' #DaveGrohl on a brand new episode of #TheMuppets tomorrow at 8|7c on ABC!

A photo posted by The Muppets (@themuppets) on Nov 30, 2015 at 3:00pm PST

The ABC TV series The Muppets had a little drum battle over the credits of last night’s episode. Animal, who plays with the band Dr. Teeth and the Electric Mayhem, faced off against Dave Grohl, who sings with the Foo Fighters now but played drums with Nirvana.

(YouTube link)

Oh, it may have ended in a draw, but if you break it down, Animal gets points for being a Muppet. Of course, you could argue that Grohl should get points for being a Foo Fighter, which would sound utterly ridiculous outside the cultural context. -via Rolling Stone

I’ve always admired people who can successfully navigate what I refer to as “Kafka’s Castle,” a term of dread for the many government and corporate agencies that have an inordinate amount of power over our permanent records, and that seem as inscrutable and chillingly absurd as the labyrinth the character K navigates in Kafka’s last allegorical novel. Even if you haven’t read The Castle, if you work for such an entity—or like all of us have regular dealings with the IRS, the healthcare and banking system, etc.—you’re well aware of the devilish incompetence that masquerades as due diligence and ties us all in knots. Why do multi-million and billion dollar agencies seem unable, or unwilling, to accomplish the simplest of tasks? Why do so many of us spend our lives in the real-life bureaucratic nightmares satirized in the The Office and Office Space?

One answer comes via Laurence J. Peter’s 1969 satire The Peter Principle—which offers the theory that managers and executives get promoted to the level of their incompetence—then, David Brent-like, go on to ruin their respective departments. The Harvard Business Review summed up disturbing recent research confirming and supplementing Peter’s insights into the narcissism, overconfidence, or actual sociopathy of many a government and business leader. But in addition to human failings, there’s another possible reason for bureaucratic disorder; the conspiracy-minded among us may be forgiven for assuming that in many cases, institutional incompetence is the result of deliberate sabotage from both above and below. The ridiculous inner workings of most organizations certainly make a lot more sense when viewed in the light of one set of instructions for “purposeful stupidity,” namely the once top-secret Simple Sabotage Field Manual, written in 1944 by the CIA’s precursor, the Office of Strategic Services (OSS).

Now declassified and freely available on the CIA’s website, the manual the agency describes as “surprisingly relevant” was once distributed to OSS officers abroad to assist them in training “citizen-saboteurs” in occupied countries like Norway and France. Such people, writes Rebecca Onion at Slate, “might already be sabotaging materials, machinery, or operations of their own initiative,” but may have lacked the devious talent for sowing chaos that only an intelligence agency can properly master. Genuine laziness, arrogance, and mindlessness may surely be endemic. But the Field Manual asserts that “purposeful stupidity is contrary to human nature” and requires a particular set of skills. The citizen-saboteur “frequently needs pressure, stimulation or assurance, and information and suggestions regarding feasible methods of simple sabotage.”

You can read and download the full document here. To get a sense of just how “timeless”—according to the CIA itself—such instructions remain, see the abridged list below, courtesy of Business Insider. You will laugh ruefully, then maybe shudder a little as you recognize how much your own workplace, and many others, resemble the kind of dysfunctional mess the OSS meticulously planned during World War II.

Organizations and Conferences

• Insist on doing everything through “channels.” Never permit short-cuts to be taken in order to expedite decisions.
• Make “speeches.” Talk as frequently as possible and at great length. Illustrate your “points” by long anecdotes and accounts of personal experiences.
• When possible, refer all matters to committees, for “further study and consideration.” Attempt to make the committee as large as possible — never less than five.
• Bring up irrelevant issues as frequently as possible.
• Haggle over precise wordings of communications, minutes, resolutions.
• Refer back to matters decided upon at the last meeting and attempt to re-open the question of the advisability of that decision.
• Advocate “caution.” Be “reasonable” and urge your fellow-conferees to be “reasonable” and avoid haste which might result in embarrassments or difficulties later on.

Managers

• In making work assignments, always sign out the unimportant jobs first. See that important jobs are assigned to inefficient workers.
• Insist on perfect work in relatively unimportant products; send back for refinishing those which have the least flaw.
• To lower morale and with it, production, be pleasant to inefficient workers; give them undeserved promotions.
• Hold conferences when there is more critical work to be done.
• Multiply the procedures and clearances involved in issuing instructions, pay checks, and so on. See that three people have to approve everything where one would do.

Employees

• Work slowly.
• Contrive as many interruptions to your work as you can.
• Do your work poorly and blame it on bad tools, machinery, or equipment. Complain that these things are preventing you from doing your job right.
• Never pass on your skill and experience to a new or less skillful worker.

via Slate/Business Insider

Related Content:

The CIA’s Style Manual & Writer’s Guide: 185 Pages of Tips for Writing Like a Spook

The C.I.A.’s “Bestiary of Intelligence Writing” Satirizes Spook Jargon with Maurice Sendak-Style Drawings

How the CIA Secretly Funded Abstract Expressionism During the Cold War

Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

Read the CIA’s Simple Sabotage Field Manual: A Timeless, Kafkaesque Guide to Subverting Any Organization with “Purposeful Stupidity” (1944) is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs.

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