July 25, 2013
A man of flesh and bone, who cannot be stopped!
Legie is a depressing Czech adventure game/dungeon crawler. The only record of it left is this Let's Play.
"I have no reason to expect compensation"
How DC Contracts Work. Mark Waid, author of Superman: Birthright (drawn on heavily for the recent film Man of Steel), "explains how professionals are generally compensated for working on company-owned characters".
Pyongyang Express
The Defector: Escape From North Korea, an interactive documentary. The Trailer. via. Flash required. [more inside]
Class Dublin Taxi Driver
One sunny summer day in Dublin, pub drinkers spill out onto the streets. Blocking traffic. And dancing. With taxi drivers. The taxi driver is part-time DJ Wayne Karney. His dance partner is Andrea Pappin, spokesperson for the Irish Presidency of the EU 2013.
"I hope no one's been killed because they'll be on my conscience"
Spain has declared three days of mourning following a deadly train crash that killed at least 80 people and injured many more. [more inside]
Mouseunculus
What I want, what I really really want.
Joe Engel (1893 - 1969): the Barnum of Baseball
At the age of 19, Joe Engel started pitching for the Washington Senators in 1912 (Google books preview), but he only played one game per year in 1917, '19, and '20, due to arm injuries. Unimpressed with his performance, Manager Clark Griffith shooed Engel off to swap himself for someone from the minors who could play ball. Engel sent back the catcher Edward Patrick ("Ed" or "Patsy") Gharrity. Gharrity turned out to be so good that Engel was hired to scout for Washington, and later manage the Chattanooga Lookouts, then the farm team for Washington. It was there in Chattanooga that Engel's true career in baseball took off, where he was given the title "Barnum of Baseball." [more inside]
If we can't protect the school, you can be well sure we'll avenge it
Burka Avenger is a new cartoon series (in urdu) scheduled to start running in Pakistan in early August. Created by the British-Pakistani pop singer Haroon, the series features a ninjaburqa-clad, pen-and-book-wielding superheroine / mild-mannered non-burqa-wearing schoolteacher who fights for her school against Taliban-like baddies (short interviews with Haroon and a slightly worried media analyst).
the maps, the rain, the pills, the place
Night Stroll by Tao Tajima. A visually stunning nighttime display of lights and shapes across the streets of Tokyo. [via / epilepsy warning] [more inside]
Life is like a hurricane, here in Duckburg
Scientifically accurate DuckTales. (SLYT, NSFW)
cloud rap is sort of the chillest of raps
Depending on who you ask, Cloud Rap either is "the best shit happening right now" or it doesn't exist. If you ask Killscreen, the genre owes a lot to Japanese Role Playing Games. But according to Philly cloud-rapper Lushlife, "All Rap Is Cloud Rap." [more inside]
Should summer vacation be abolished?
There are few more cherished nostrums in American life than the importance of equal opportunities. Unfortunately, one of them is the importance of summer vacation... A 2011 RAND literature review concluded that the average student “loses” about one month’s worth of schooling during a typical summer vacation, with the impact disproportionately concentrated among low-income students. “While all students lose some ground in mathematics over the summer,” RAND concluded, “low-income students lose more ground in reading while their higher-income peers may even gain.” Most distressingly, the impact is cumulative. Poor kids tend to start school behind their middle-class peers, and then they fall further behind each and every summer, giving teachers and principals essentially no chance of closing the gap during the school year. [more inside]
Rape Joke
Our illmatic stripy hero and his glucose-heavy sidekick
Best of Breed Solution
Are human beings the descendants of chimpanzee/pig hybrids? This radical theory might seem easy to disprove, but "decent arguments against the hybrid origins theory are surprisingly hard to find."
Santa's Little Helper
Sam Simon, an original developer for The Simpsons, is still listed on the opening credits despite leaving the show in 1993. He once told a magazine that he continues to make "tens of millions" of dollars a year from his contributions. In 2012 he was diagnosed with terminal cancer. He has recently announced that he will give away his entire fortune to charity. The Sam Simon Foundation.
Beer Labels in Motion
she would often either fall asleep or cry after making an image
A talkative porcupine eats a banana
The price of security
PreCheck, a new program instituted by the TSA, will allow passengers to keep their shoes, jackets and belts during screening, as well as allow laptop computers and approved liquids to remain in bags for a fee of $85.
Crime is driven by proximity and opportunity
Call Me Jazzy
Questions. Morbidity. Incept dates.
Detroit, New Orleans, Oakland... some of the safer places in America to live! Sure, big cities might have more murders per capita... but residents in large cities are *MUCH* safer when it comes to injury deaths than those living in more rural parts of America, according to a new study in The Annals of Emergency Medicine.
"Cars, guns and drugs are the unholy trinity causing the majority of injury deaths . . . Although the risk of homicide is higher in big cities, the risk of unintentional injury death is 40 percent higher in the most rural areas than in the most urban. And overall, the rate of unintentional injury dwarfs the risk of homicide, with the rate of unintentional injury more than 15 times that of homicide among the entire population."
"Cars, guns and drugs are the unholy trinity causing the majority of injury deaths . . . Although the risk of homicide is higher in big cities, the risk of unintentional injury death is 40 percent higher in the most rural areas than in the most urban. And overall, the rate of unintentional injury dwarfs the risk of homicide, with the rate of unintentional injury more than 15 times that of homicide among the entire population."
Gnomeland
Gnomeland "New Hampshire's Premiere Gnome Destination!" Also known as, what happens when friends play a prank on you and install 500 handpainted gnomes in and around your house. Full Flickr set [via mefi projects]
Sicker, sadder world
"High school was a lot like the Civil War: it lasted four years, you were defined by what you wore, and I lost 1 in 10 of my friends to gangrene."
Daria: The Live-Action Movie, starring Aubrey Plaza. [more inside]
Daria: The Live-Action Movie, starring Aubrey Plaza. [more inside]
Android hack found
"All Android applications contain cryptographic signatures, which Android uses to determine if the app is legitimate and to verify that the app hasn’t been tampered with or modified. This vulnerability makes it possible to change an application’s code without affecting the cryptographic signature of the application – essentially allowing a malicious author to trick Android into believing the app is unchanged even if it has been." [more inside]
The Doom that came to Doom
The Doom that Came to Atlantic City was billed as something of a Monopoly meets Cthulhu. It was a Kickstarter that got great reviews and raised over $120K. Then, suddenly, it was over. [more inside]
Top Myths of Renaissance Martial Arts
The diverse range of misconceptions and erroneous beliefs within historical fencing studies today is considerable. But there are perhaps some myths that are more common, and more pervasive, than others. This webpage presents an ongoing project that will continually try in an informal and condensed manner to help address some of these mistaken beliefs.
4. A robot must not scalp restaurant reservations
If you find it impossible to make restaurant reservations online it might be because you're competing against bots. A developer explains how it works and just how common it might be in San Francisco. [more inside]
A is for ... aah you guessed
So back in the early thirties the Soviets had a problem: how to combat adult illiteracy in a country where millions of peasants had never had been to so much as primary school? How do you get these people to learn the alphabet? Well, by making an adult illiteracy campaign into an adult illiteracy campaign using an erotic alphabet book designed by Sergei Merkurov.
Burp.
A new article in Nature warns that "the costs of a melting Arctic will be huge", thanks in part to the likely release of "a 50-gigatonne (Gt) reservoir of methane, stored in the form of hydrates" beneath the East Siberian Arctic Shelf, "either steadily over 50 years or suddenly". An abrupt release is "highly possible at any time", says Natalia Shakhova of the University of Alaska at Fairbanks, who has observed plumes of methane up to a kilometre wide bubbling to the surface in the area. [more inside]
It's not a conspiracy, it's a business opportunity
Had enough government rhetoric? Tired of following the sheeple? Fed up with believing what THEY want you to believe? Maybe it's time to branch out and discover THE TRUTH.
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