September 23
WORST. STATE. EVER.
Jerking guys off is clumsy and weird.
I Do Not Want To Jack Guys Off Is there anything more ludicrous than a woman giving a man a hand job? [more inside]
A hare and a tortoise walk into a bar
How animals perceive time. 'FLIES live shorter lives than elephants. Of that there is no doubt. But from a fly’s point of view, does its life actually seem that much shorter? This, in essence, was the question asked by Kevin Healy of Trinity College, Dublin, in a paper just published in Animal Behaviour. His answer is, possibly not.' [more inside]
Use Only as Directed
ProPublica.org and This American Life partnered for a special report on acetaminophen (also known as paracetamol), the active ingredient in Tylenol, which is also found in many other over-the-counter medications. The narrow therapeutic index of acetaminophen means that often, the difference between safe use and overdose can be as small as one gram. From ProPublica.org: "About 150 Americans die a year by accidentally taking too much acetaminophen, the active ingredient in Tylenol, federal data from the CDC shows."
Blood in your hands - ethical electronics
The Bangka Belitung islands are a picture postcard tropical paradise, except where the tin is mined. Tin that is used in smartphone solders, and that is responsible for widespread ecological devastation. Following a Friends of the Earth campaign, all of the major manufacturers bar one have acknowledged their role in this destruction, and are seeking improved standards for tin mining. But if you truly want ethical consumer electronics, you'll have to wait for the Fairphone(Fairphone previously).
18 Books Ernest Hemingway Wished He Could Read Again for the First Time.
18 Books Ernest Hemingway Wished He Could Read Again for the First Time. "I would rather read again for the first time Anna Karenina, Far Away and Long Ago, Buddenbrooks, Wuthering Heights, Madame Bovary, War and Peace, A Sportsman's Sketches, The Brothers Karamazov, Hail and Farewell, Huckleberry Finn, Winesburg, Ohio, La Reine Margot, La Maison Tellier, Le Rouge et le Noire, La Chartreuse de Parme, Dubliners, Yeat's Autobiographies and a few others than have an assured income of a million dollars a year."
I Can Figure This Out
Naya's Quest is the new game from Terry Cavanagh.
It looks like a simple isometric-view platformer but every level (once the game proper starts) is essentially an optical illusion.
It will do your head in. In the best possible way. [more inside]
Taken to the gleaners
Blackberry will be harvested by a private equity firm for US $4.7 billion. Generally blamed for their own decline by disdaining the massive rush of popularity of competing smartphones and becoming increasingly well-known for the bizarre behavior of their leadership, Blackberry hoped to turn things around by ejecting their co-CEOs, rebranding from Research In Motion to the name of their sole product, and launching a new spate of products: OS 10, new generation of touchscreen phones, and planning a second attempt at tablets. In spite of some misguided punditry predicting a new era, they won no love from either the reviewers or the public. [more inside]
Papercraft project blog Paper Matrix
Paper Matrix is a blog that gives instructions for cool papercraft objects, "reinterpreting the Danish tradition of woven paper hearts and ornaments." Cut paper in the prescribed ways and weave it together carefully to make a mobile of colorful hot air balloons, gorgeous and complex boxes; simple but satisfying pennants and much more... including a full theater for performances by paper dolls.
A Thousand Years In 3 Minutes
They couldn't put one quote up here from my act?
Set List is a live show where "the world’s top comedians get a never-before seen “set list” of bizarre, outrageous, and ridiculous topics as the audience follows along on the screen behind the performer." Edited highlights of this combination of improv and stand-up have just started to be posted on the Nerdist's Youtube channel. Including sets by: [more inside]
Minimalist Breaking Bad Posters
Francesco Francavilla is an artist who has been producing minimalist posters for each of the last 8 episodes of Breaking Bad.
She'll drink to that!
Elaine Stritch Is Really Not Thrilled About Her Golden Years (June 2013), but she's making it work (September 2013). A documentary about her life will premiere this fall. In the meantime, perhaps you'd be interested in the Elaine Stritch Alarm Clock?
Single-Player Co-op
Requiring one player to independently control two characters, one with each hand, the recently released Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons (Steam/360/PS3) has been receiving high praise for its intertwining of emotional storytelling and gameplay. "Brothers is a compellingly beautiful game, yet remarkably dark... it’s a single-player co-op, executed sublimely." - Rock Paper Shotgun. "The resulting journey is so singularly devoted to creating a specific tone and atmosphere that you won't likely be able to stop thinking about it until long after you've seen it through to the end." - Giant Bomb. "We see so many games striving to be interactive movies, but Brothers is something more akin to poetry. Mechanics are stanzas, and together they pack more of an emotional wallop than some scripts achieve with thousands upon thousands of hollow words." - Polygon. [more inside]
The Star Wars Minute
The Star Wars Minute is a podcast in which each episode subjects a single minute of Star Wars to Seinfeldian levels of analysis, with commentary, childhood reminiscences, underlining of in-universe questions raised, and geekery in the extreme. Hosted by Pete the Retailer from NerdGeekDork and Alex Robinson of the Ink Panthers podcast, the Star Wars Minute runs Monday to Friday, and has so far addressed such issues as stormtroopers' dubious search methods, who the actual antagonist of the movie might be, and a Simpsons cast member's little-known role in Star Wars. [more inside]
"Oh? Breakfast I think. No need to let standards drop"
This is a greeting, that needs to be resurrected. Please use it today.
Ready to learn
An estimated 8.6 percent of parents now wait until their child is six to send them to kindergarten, hoping that their maturity and increased physical size will give them advantages in the classroom and on the sports field. However, the trend, called "academic redshirting" may actually be extremely harmful, according to recent studies.
"Everyone being held was a US citizen."
But that didn't prevent On the Media producer Sarah Abdurrahman and several members of her family and friends from being detained at a Canadian-US border while on the way home from a wedding. The story is all the more frightening as it details Sarah's inability to get any answers about policy from the Border Patrol, including the name of the officers who held her.
"Stopping bad things is a significant public service."
National [US] Beard and Mustache Championship portraits.
In 2013 the U.S. Semi finals took place in Vegas. And a fine parade of facial hair it was. The World Beard and Moustache Championship is a biennial competition that celebrates meticulously coiffed facial hair. [more inside]
Clean up your toys
This is a story of boys following their mother's advice: clean up your toys when you're through playing with them. Recovering a sunk boat when its resting place is in a 6000 cubic foot per second current.
No, this is not an Admiralty Court.
Canadian self-described "Freemen" in Alberta have recently attracted a great deal of public attention to themselves. The justice system generally takes a very dim view of their shenanigans, as laid out in one of the most comprehensively researched and bizarre judgment issued in recent memory. Here's a general overview and debunking of the arguments they use. [more inside]
Pussy Riot's Nadezhda Tolokonnikova: Why I have gone on hunger strike
You know nothing, Jon Snow
"Nobody misses the reference to Game of Thrones when we say that standing there at the Genius Bar is akin to standing Night’s Watch on the White Wall. You just don’t know what’s coming at you next." -- McSweeneys goes inside the Apple Store and encounters unexpected feelings at the genius bar.
Like your Mother used to make
"It's about coming together as a local community and sharing the fruits of your labour, your creation." In what has been described as a peer-to-peer community marketplace, people are connecting online with local cooks, who provide them with a meal for less than they would be likely to pay anywhere else. In Athens, the price is usually between three and four euros (£2.50 to £3.40). [more inside]
September 22
The Other Election
Australia has just had an election and the new Prime Minister, Tony Abbott, has pledged himself to be the first Prime Minister for Indigenous Affairs. But has he properly consulted?
'The Other Election', run by the Australian Indigenous Mentoring Experience (AIME), features over 600 Indigenous kids from around Australia in years 10-12 putting themselves into the hypothetical role of delivering a speech as Australia's first Indigenous prime minister.Ten finalists were announced today. Voting for the top 3 closes 29 January, 2013. The three best are then headed to Canberra to deliver their speeches in parliament. [more inside]
This game sucks
Robot Vacuum Simulator 2013 is a groundbreaking simulator taking place in the incredible world of Robot Vacuum cleaners, with additional 2-player duel mode [more inside]
Mazzy Star: It's True, We're Still Together (and we have a new album)
Mazzy Star are best known for their hazy, shoegazer album So Tonight I Might See (Grooveshark stream), which contained the single Fade Into You (YouTube). That album was released in 1993, and went platinum in 1995, providing an odd counter-point to the popular grunge sounds of the day. As a band, they made three albums in the 1990s, though neither hit the peak of their sophomore album. They disbanded (as far as the public was concerned*) in 1997, though there were a series of reunion tours in 2000. Eleven years later, they released a new single, Common Burn b/w Lay Myself Down, and the group toured in 2012. This week, they release their fourth album, Seasons of Your Day, and they aren't any cheerier (in responding to interview questions). [more inside]
"I was highly suspicious of this book when I first started it."
V.V. Ganeshananthan at The Margins on writing outside of what you know and the literary establishment's willingness to suspend disbelief and praise authenticity of narrative. As Gracie Jin put it, "In a society masquerading as post-racial, it is still only the white man who can speak authoritatively for every man."
Those paid more than the value they create are thieves.
Quit. Quit early and quit often, not when something is hard, but when something isn't for you. That's the way you find your genius, (YT) says Prof. Deepak Malhotra, who gave this among other tips to graduating students at Harvard Business School in a speech on how to avoid the tragedy of living an unhappy life. [more inside]
Gives a whole new meaning to "finger painting"
Seikou Yamaoka spends a lot of time on his iphone. But he's not playing games or texting or reading, he's creating art. He's also created some amazingly hypnotic time-lapse videos of his works in creation, including this reproduction of Vermeer's Girl with a Pearl Earring (done on an ipad mini rather than an iphone). Full gallery of his digital finger painting. He also does traditional watercolours.
A different kind of LSD trip
Early this morning, pilot John Pedersen encountered mechanical difficulties and made an emergency landing on Lake Shore Drive in Chicago [photos]. [more inside]
You only get one shot, do not miss your chance
Team Remington has won the 70th Annual One Shot Antelope Hunt in Lander, Wyoming. Team Remington defeated several other teams including Team Wyoming which lost after former Vice President Dick Cheney missed both his chosen Antelope and his fellow hunters.
The annual day long hunt consists of three man teams who take turns attempting to kill a buck pronghorn antelope with a single shot. The winning team is the first to return with all three having made a successful single shot kill. The pronghorn, although not actually an antelope, is a small ruminant approximately 3 feet tall, and holds the distinction as the world's second fastest land animal, capable of running for extended distances at speeds over 50mph. [more inside]
The Night is Dark and Full of Terrors
A Tale of Benjen Stark is a short Game of Thrones fan-fiction film by VonWong, Five Knights Productions and friends. It tells "the beginning of the adventure of Benjen Stark following his return to the wall shortly after his visit to Winterfell. On a scouting mission Benjen Stark stumbles upon the bloody aftermath of an attack on a wildling camp. A pair of survivors are discovered as Ben attempts to unravel the mystery behind the carnage." [Via]
Give me a stick and I can stay alive!
Discover how to get out of bed and do things again with these spiffy new tips from 21 Comics That Capture the Frustrations of Depression! Or pull a blanket over your head and pretend you're the last person on earth curled up in a nice, warm cave. Whatever.
"Where are we? *When* are we?"
Back to the Future: The Trip. "We wanted to take this trip because we love the Back to the Future movies and thought it would be a fun, unique, and interesting trip. What you will see for each tour stop is first of all a picture from the movie from that scene, and then a picture of us at that location or a picture of what the landscape looks like currently in 2007." [more inside]
the need for late-term abortions will never go away
I think that the extreme, right-wing, misogynist religious fanatics have basically hijacked the Republican party and are moving toward being able to hijack the Democrats too. I'm appalled at the hubris of these legislators who, one after another, think they can make more sensible decisions about a woman's personal, private reproductive decisions than the woman herself. They know nothing about these situations. They don't know a thing about later abortions, or why women seek them out, and yet they presume that they should be making these decisions. Interview with Dr. Susan Robinson, One of the Last Four Doctors in America to Openly Provide Third-Trimester Abortions
Mikey's Middle Finger
"If I'm going to die, if Al Jourgensen is going to die, I don't want it to be from recalled yogurt." On the eve of Ministry's newest release, From Beer to Eternity, and in the wake of Mike Scaccia's passing, Al seems to find a tremendous amount of peace with putting Ministry to rest. [more inside]
You can win or you can lose or you can quit
You have to give them this simplified narrative of yourself, or they won’t let you try to get their money. The danger is the distraction. The danger is letting yourself care whether Meredith or the studio audience or the millions of people watching out there in America like you. The danger is that it pulls your mind away from the absolute need to be perfect at the game, to make not even a single mistake. Easy Money: My Experience on Who Wants To Be A Millionaire.
The whale that inspired Greenpeace
The whale that inspired Greenpeace The organization that would become Greenpeace started off as an advocate for peace and as an anti-nuclear group. It expanded its activities into fighting whaling and had a major influence on the virtual cessation of the commercial fishing of whales which made Greenpeace a household name. That change in direction can be traced to a single whale. Allow me to introduce to you, Skana.
If you've got to watch a clock, then watch this one
LEGO Ball Contraptions have been seen (and gawked at) once or twice on the Blue before. But if you're looking for a bit more purpose to this particular genre of LEGO build, look no further than the impecably accurate and stylish LEGO Rolling Ball Clock.
You weren’t just a paddle, you were an astronaut gripping a paddle.
Atari cartridge art and artists "The original Atari featured a wealth of games with box art that was quite a bit more imaginative than the “grizzled man holding a gun” template that’s so popular today."
0,140866,141378,143170 ,174450,222784,139386,0,0
Ray tracing is a computer graphics technique that produces realistic images of a three-dimensional scene. In 1987, Paul Heckbert (then at Pixar) announced a contest to produce a ray tracer in the minimum amount of code, as he describes in "A Minimal Ray Tracer." In 2009, Andrew Kensler (then at the University of Utah Scientific Computing and Imaging Institute) created a C++ version that can fit on a business card. Fabien Sanglard explicates this amazing piece of code in "Decyphering the Business Card Raytracer."
Happy Hobbit Day!
Not only is today, September 22, the Autumnal Equinox it also happens to be Hobbit Day, the date Tolkien fans celebrate the shared birthdays of Bilbo and Frodo Baggins as well as Hobbit culture in general. So go around barefoot, or smoke some pipe-weed, but watch out for eating seven meals each day, because you know. . . [more inside]
The Common Core
The Common Core (Wikipedia) is a state-led effort that established a single set of clear educational standards for kindergarten through 12th grade in English language arts and mathematics that states voluntarily adopt (that is, if they want to keep their funding). In the weeks and months leading up to implementation of the Common Core, some teachers are a little wary. Teachers and community organizers are now left to translate Common Core standards for confused parents, with some myths, rumors, and miscommunications getting in the way. Now, after months of preparing for the shift, some states are dropping out of the Common Core. But why?
jerry clouds
jerry clouds is a soothing little art game where you help Jerry make clouds. (via Terry Cavanagh's freeindiegam.es)
Good times for a change
"Please Please Please Let Me Get What I Want," an infomercial fanvid.
All I ask is a tall ship and a star to steer her by
September 7th marked the beginning of the battle for the 2013 America's Cup between defending Oracle Team USA and challenging Emirates Team New Zealand. As the winners of the last cup, the Golden Gate Yacht Club decided that this year's Cup match would take place in a new class of boat, the AC72 wing sail catamaran. Almost as much airplane as sailboat, these extraordinary craft are designed to lift out of the water, allowing them to sail faster than the wind and reach astonishing speeds of up to 50 knots. It was hailed as the pinnacle of the sport until a May 2013 capsize and death of Swedish crew member Andrew Simpson had some calling it the world's most dangerous sailboat. [more inside]
And the Mercy Seat is Waiting
"Sometimes called a ‘mercy seat,’ the misericord was the small ledge that protruded from the undersides of folding seats in a choir stall in a medieval church or cathedral. Medieval liturgical services were conducted eight times a day, and the clergy who attended and performed the services had to stand during the entire ritual. Developed in the 13th century, the misericord allowed the clergy to rest while appearing to stand during services." More misericords in British cathedrals. [more inside]
A Day of Grace with Boston Ballet
A Day of Grace: A time lapse video of one day at Studio 7 with the Boston Ballet.
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