Window Tintern Abbey Tintern Monmouthshire Wales by Joe Daniel Price
Twitter flaming Papa John’s over their NFL comment is one of the funniest things I’ve seen today
wait i have at least 31 post-its and an idea for inktober hear me out
inktober day 7
new heights of friendship
inktober day 14
what is done is done, and the journey must Go On
inktober day 20+21
new friends join in, and the scale of our crusaders’ exploits continues to grow far too vast to be properly captured
inktober day 28
target acquired
also apologies to araki, i finally understand the impossibility that is Drawing Dogs
inktober day 31
as one bizarre adventure ends, another begins
always move forward, but don’t forget the journey.
THIS ALIEN SHORE (1998) by Michael Whelan, cover for the book by C.S. Friedman.
A great cover for many reasons. First, there’s the movement created by Michael’s composition. Vibrant splashes of color draw us into the background, but the eye never lingers long there as the lines created by the alien crowd redirect back to the central figure.
In the foreground, we get a realistic portrait of Jamisia that conveys a lot about her character. All eyes seem to be on her in that moment. Her body language is closed, protective, yet her gaze is direct. Her costuming is shiny but her face is unembellished.
Contradictions abound. Even the object in her hand is meant to cast eyes away, which only serves to heighten the viewer’s curiosity about her.
All of these subtle elements add up to intrigue, drawing readers to pick up the book to learn what the story is about. And that is perhaps Michael’s greatest gift as an illustrator, his ability to connect to an audience and hold their attention in the briefest glance.
this is so fucking funny
scientists, seeing dudes learn how to make actual friends: ah fuck how are they gonna use women for emotional labor now
In Thunderbird Strike, a new side-scrolling game that launches at the ImagineNATIVEfestival this week in Toronto, players can control a thunderbird—a symbol in several Indigenous cultures—that destroys as much of the oil industry’s machinery and pipelines as it possibly can. And it’s so satisfying.
The game was created by Elizabeth LaPensée, an Anishinaabe, Métis, and Irish games developer, and assistant professor of media and information at Michigan State University. She told me in an interview that she wanted to create a game where Indigenous players could reclaim some agency around oil pipelines, even if through a video game.
“Especially when we’re talking in the context of pipelines, and the oil industry, there are some wins we can have. But ultimately protectors will be pushed out and the processes are going to move forward. It’s happening with mining and it’s happening with pipelines,” LaPensée told me over the phone.
The creator of this game is getting attacked and defamed by oil lobbyists and racists
(and let’s be honest, the venn diagram circle of “oil lobbyists” is just a small circle in the larger circle of “racists”) and could really use support and advocacy:
tweets via @nativeapprops on twitter. Here’s the link to that “Framing Indigenous resistance as terrorism” piece, and here’s the game’s creator’s twitter.
And here’s the game website:
https://www.thunderbirdstrike.com/
You can download it for Windows now here (it’s free), iOS and Android versions coming due out in December.
TPoH fandom!
WOW this is gonna be a real photo-finish of a Kickstarter, eh? I think that we’ve got a real shot at this again!
Anyway, what I’m here to say is, if it is at all possible, if you’ve already backed the campaign (which is already pretty awesome!), consider upping your pledge by just a couple bucks while you’re at it? We may be able to manage this just by bringing in people from all the signal boosting we’ve been doing, but if it looks like it’s gonna be a real close one in the last couple days, if even half of us already in pitched in an extra five dollars, it’d boost the progress bar by about a thousand! A pretty good bargain, if you ask me, if it makes the difference between having books and not having books! Or, possibly, make another account/use a relative’s and buy another book? I’m genuinely considering this myself if Mod doesn’t add an “extra book” tier. Makes for a good backup and/or gift!
Anyway, if it’s not something that sounds like it’s in your ability, that’s cool too! You guys are genuinely the best fandom I have ever found on this website, and that’s more than anybody could ever ask for! Keep on making those memes, reblogging stuff, drawing and writing things, and being awesome! Things will turn out alright somehow or another, no matter how the campaign turns out.
Heya! Whoops;;;~ i didnt know if you guys wanted to see the stills of the gif (since i focused on figuring out the glitch stuff;;;;) But yeah, cool beans!!:
Ah~the mystery gang…
in their final forms:
also its not even midnight and this got higher than 500 im so scared
jonathantylan asked:
Loving your Dead Fandoms series! Pern and Barsoom are some of my favorite planets to visit, and I'm glad I'm not the only one who can look at them from a cultural perspective. However, I am now curious about three fandoms that seem to be nonexistent/dead: (1) E.E. Knight's Age of Fire series, (2) Preston & Child's Pendergast series, and (3) Jane Yolen's Pit Dragon Trilogy/Quartet.
vintagegeekculture answered:
I think the reason the Age of Fire books didn’t become Percy Jackson level super-huge (they have their fans, of course) is that they went for the wrong audience. They should have been young adult books aimed at boys instead at aimed at the crowd who liked Mists of Avalon. Age of Fire is about being a dragon. Can you imagine how well this would play among the kind of boys who made Raptor Red (a pov dinosaur novel told from the point of view of a velociraptor living in earth’s past) one of the best selling young adult books of the 1990s, and one of the few to be a huge hit among boys as opposed to girls?
Remember all the boy’s adventure stories of the turn of the century like Wild Animals I Have Known that dealt with wildlife from their point of view, which sold like gangbusters at the turn of the century to school boys? President and naturalist Theodore Roosevelt even wrote some stories in this genre, though he was harshly critical of “Wild Animals I Have Known” on scientific grounds, sarcastically calling it “Wild Animals Only I Have Known.”(Burn.) Age of Fire should have been in Scholastic Book Sales that go to elementary schools instead of reviewed in the back of Analog.
Here’s a personal story related to the Age of Fire books: when I saw them, I was angry because I remember mistakenly thinking they were by a man I now know to be Kenneth Eng, who is currently in prison (where he belongs), who wrote several articles entitled “Why I Hate Blacks” in print newspapers, called himself “the God of the Universe,” and was a frustrated author and furry who wrote several extremely amateurish books about hero cyborg dragons told from their point of view, where he devotes long chapters to them having sex with each other. Kenneth Eng got a lot of media attention for going on cable news, both to sell his ridiculous cyborg dragon books, and to give controversial statements on the Virginia Tech massacre. Of course, it didn’t occur to me that it was just a case of mistaken identity, and multiple people might have had the idea to write novels about hero dragons told from the dragon’s point of view, and that Knight’s Age of Fire books were utterly unrelated to all this foolishness by a malicious crank around the same time. Still, that’s an interesting crossed wire, there.
Anonymous asked:
if you have the time - how do you think horses might differ if they were a carnivorous species? like in skeletal structure, overall look, maybe even behaviour etc
drferox answered:
First of all, they would not be horses, They would be some sort of eldrich demonic fae beast monstrosity and I would like exactly none of that, thank you very much.
But on topic, some of the way an equine species would need to be modified to become carnivorous include:
- Wider mouths. Horse mouths don’t open very far and are geared towards chewing high fiber diets. All their dentition needs to change.
- So does their lips and jaw muscles. The carnivore horse needs to be able to open wide and have a strong bite force. The strongest jaw muscles of horses are for chewing grass side to side, they need more chomping power.
- Forward facing eyes if this species hunts rather than scavenging. Horses have great peripheral vision but poor binocular vision.
- A sensible digestive system, for goodness sake.
- Whether you keep them quadrupedal or make them bipedal is up to you, both motions of locomotion are efficient enough.
- They may have longer tail bones for increased dexterity when turning at speed.
- Whether you keep the hooves or switch to claws is up to your design, but the claws are definitely more concerning.
- Continuing to live (and hunt) in a group keeps the horsey flavor and is extra concerning. Imagine them playing tug of war with a corpse like wolves do.
Thanks. I hate it.
(I mean I think it looks awesome and terrifying but that’s a walking nightmare!)
Round-up: A Lot of CSI-Style Forensics Have Turned Out to be Bogus
Basically a lot of it is pseudoscience that was never rigorously tested in controlled situations to see if it actually worked.
This is because it was not developed by scientists, but by police, and mainly with an interest in putting people in prison rather than uncovering the truth.
- At least two dozen people have been falsely convicted due to “Bite Mark Analysis”.
- “Burn pattern analysis” put an innocent man to death in Texas
- “Blood Spatter analysis” such as that shown on the TV show Dexter is actually completely unreliable even according to the US Department of Justice
- Forensic hair comparison is also widely believed to be junk science and the FBI is currently reviewing convictions based on hair analysis due to the unreliability of their results
- Handwriting analysis has an unreasonably high error rate, by some accounts as high as 43%
- Lie detector tests, or polygraphs, are notoriously unreliable and based on bad science. Even though everybody knows this, they are still constantly being used in criminal investigations among other places.
- Toxicology labs can be poorly supervised and badly run, producing false and even fraudulent results
- Due to sloppy procedure at many labs and lack of regulation even DNA testing is often unreliable
- Even when correct results are produced, genetic profiles may be less useful than we have been lead to believe
- Fingerprinting analysis is not foolproof and actually has not been thoroughly tested, as this Frontline special discusses
Here are a few more articles on how unreliable modern forensics are.
Unfortunately due to TV shows that stress forensic investigation, juries are demanding this kind of evidence at trial, and have little idea of how untested and unreliable it really is.
In case you are stopped by the paywall here’s a Slate article on the same thing and here’s another one.
Hair analysis alone has been used in thousands of trials. The FBI is reviewing 2500 cases out of “21000 federal and state requests to the FBI’s hair-comparison unit between 1972 and 1999″. Even if this review exonerates some of those convictions, that doesn’t even begin to cover the hundreds of state and local “experts” trained by the FBI in this bogus “hair analysis” technique to do things like this:
Santae Tribble served 28 years for a murder based on FBI testimony about a single strand of hair. He was exonerated in 2012. It was later revealed that one of the hairs presented at trial came from a dog.
So anyway remember anytime you hear about “forensic evidence” that a lot of it is bullcrap and not scientifically validated and a lot of so-called experts are just pulling conclusions out of their ass.
the forensic hair analysis thing is terrible, the FBI literally invented a branch of forensic psuedoscience with no evidence behind it in order to boost conviction rates, then taught the bogus technique to thousands of forensic investigators in the us and around the world. we have no idea how many people have been wrongfully convicted, and this is just one in a very long list of forensic techniques that lack rigorous scientific evaluation
It’s been another year or two so here’s an extremely recent article about how “Criminal Profiling” is totally bogus and TV shows like Mindhunters continue to focus on it because it looks cool and makes good stories, but it really only works in the movies.
Profiling was trendy in the 70s-90s but has been falling into disrepute ever since. This 2007 analysis showed that Criminal Profilers do not outperform regular detective work. Here’s another analysis finding Profiling unreliable in its current form and suggests ways to make it more scientifically rigorous. Here’s another.
College students can now get microsoft office for free
Just go here and sign up with your college email. You can install it on up to 5 PCs or Macs and on other mobile devices, including Windows tablets and iPads.
GOD BLESS.
I PAYED UGH. REBLOGGING TO SAVE U GUYS SOME MORE GAS MONEY
OMG YAS
Pretty sure there are some college students following me that could use this.
alefrike