The Pizza Lab: Combine The KettlePizza and the Baking Steel For The Ultimate Home Pizza Setup
Includes the phrase “… this time actually setting one edge of the crust on fire.”
Bruce Schneier:
As the details about the bombings in Boston unfold, it’d be easy to be scared. It’d be easy to feel powerless and demand that our elected leaders do something — anything — to keep us safe.
It’d be easy, but it’d be wrong. We need to be angry and empathize with the victims without being scared. Our fears would play right into the perpetrators’ hands — and magnify the power of their victory for whichever goals whatever group behind this, still to be uncovered, has. We don’t have to be scared, and we’re not powerless. We actually have all the power here, and there’s one thing we can do to render terrorism ineffective: Refuse to be terrorized.
It’s still the best thing to do.
“Did you know if you don’t claim to work 80 hours a week, potential investors will probably shun you? You don’t even get the respect from some of your peers in game development who think that not working crazy hours is ‘lazy,’” he explained. “Those are the people who put pressures onto others to work more hours. The same people who will please their leads most and go up the ladder eventually, to feed this vicious cycle of immaturity. You are correct about developers being stunted teenagers. I’ve worked with them long enough to admit that.”
[…] Working those hours, and being stuck in that environment is only attractive for a very short time, and Boucher-Vidal claimed that the average life-span of someone in the game industry is around 5 years. “The real problem however is not that they are immature when they get in, but that too often they get out once they reach maturity,” he said.
All I can say is that it’s a good thing that workers at textile factories in the early 1900s didn’t have to wait until someone showed that a company can make a profit without burning their employees alive.
I think it’s laudable what Nine Dots is doing, trying to prove that the games industry doesn’t have to destroy its own workers in order to be successful. But that doesn’t mean that the industry should get to do so in the meantime. (We already know what unionization of the games industry would look like, by the way. It would look like the film industry.)
Glenda Jackson, Labour MP for Hampstead and Kilburn, reminds the House of Commons of what Thatcherism did to Britain, and in doing so puts to shame the leader of her party, who, as it turns out, worked hand in hand with David Cameron to force the Speaker (who is non-partisan) to break with tradition in order to shower Margaret Thatcher with inappropriate praise:
It also emerged that staging a day of tributes before the funeral and requiring an expensive recall of parliament was the idea of the prime minister and involved him in a lengthy wrangle with the Speaker’s Office. John Bercow felt there was no need to recall parliament, and was taken aback by the request. His office thought the tributes could be paid next Monday in line with precedent for previous deaths of party leaders.
At one point, Cameron had to enlist the support of [Labour leader Ed] Miliband to overcome the opposition, and Labour sources said they felt faced with a fait accompli and did not want to risk being seen as failing to show Thatcher due respect.
In the end it was Glenda Jackson and not Ed Miliband who really showed Baroness Thatcher all the respect she was due.
(Source: youtube.com)
They Might Be Giants
Spiraling Shape
Factory Showroom, 1996
And now that you’ve tried it, you’re back to report
That the spiralling shape was a fraud and a fake
You didn’t enjoy it, you never believed it
There won’t be a refund, you’ll never go back
(Source: youtube.com)
Global Shinkai Day, which celebrates the work of master anime creator and director Makoto Shinkai, has become an annual springtime tradition here at Crunchyroll. And this year, a new title will be added to the list of anime that will be available for streaming: Makoto Shinkai’s latest anime, Children Who Chase Lost Voices.
In addition, three of Shinkai’s previous works from the past will also be available for viewing worldwide (except Japan). The following titles will be available for free streaming from Friday, March 15 through Sunday, March 17.
Excellent chance to see Children (I haven’t yet either), but if you can watch only one, watch 5 Centimeters Per Second. I think it’s one of the most beautiful films ever made.
(Source: dailysaurus)
Today we unveil the results of Part 1 of our year-long Best of the ’80s feature, an ambitious, year-by-year poll of Slicing Up Eyeballs’ readers to determine just what were the best albums of each year of the 1980s — and then, when that’s all said and done at the end of 2013, we’ll run a monster best-of-the-decade poll to hash out the overall champs.
Crazy how thick 1980 was with great albums. My top 10 for 1980:
- The Cure, Seventeen Seconds
- Talking Heads, Remain in Light
- Ultravox, Vienna
- The B-52s, Wild Planet
- David Bowie, Scary Monsters (and Super Creeps)
- The Psychedelic Furs, The Psychedelic Furs
- Peter Gabriel, Peter Gabriel (“Melt”)
- The Clash, Sandinista!
- Joy Division, Closer
- Siouxsie and the Banshees, Kaleidoscope
This is gonna be impossible once we hit 1983.
Civitas - Plan, develop, and manage the city of your dreams! — Kickstarter
Civitas will be a revolutionary, open ended, community driven, highly moddable city building game, where you are not only responsible for terraforming the land, zoning, and building the structures, but you will also be able to manage many other aspects of your civilization. Civitas can either be played as a single player game, or you can play online with other city builders to make entire regions, share resources, and compete for citizens to build the largest city. We will not limit you to one or the other, both will be full featured and complete. Feel free to play it whenever, wherever, and however you want. Civitas will be available for Mac and PC through various digital download services.
Not only are the developers offering to build and release a city-building sim that doesn’t suffer from infection by EA, but they also are trying to fight against the pathological nature of the game industry:
As you all may have already heard, there have been quite a few studio closings around Austin TX and elsewhere lately. Well, some of us were among the unlucky few caught up in all of that.
Each of us spent the last few years pouring our efforts into making those studios and their titles successful, and we succeeded. But there is big difference between “successful” and “successful enough”. Make an excellent game, make a profit, still get shut down. Unfortunately for everyone involved, that’s just the reality of how this industry works today. We used to think that finally hitting the release date on the game we have poured our lives into for months or even years would be a day to celebrate, but now we all just dread them. Release date = Layoff date. That’s a very sad realization. No parties, no building a community, just uprooting our families again and trying to find more work. Even on the AAA caliber games we have built and shipped that literally earn hundreds of millions of dollars, this holds true. The current game development pipeline is directly to blame for this. Most publishers just bleed the studio dry of money and creativity, then just leave it to shutdown.
So a ragtag team of us released from various studios, of various disciplines in the game development pipeline, and a few that can already see the same “release day layoff” writing on the wall in their near future, decided to try to make a go at it ourselves. I mean, we have spent years working for other people, building their games from the ground up, so why not just do it ourselves? We have worked on several recent AAA titles such as Mortal Kombat, Darksiders 2, Borderlands 2, Quake 4, Section 8, F.E.A.R., and multiple IOS and mobile titles. Not to mention several unreleased games, some older titles, and some that are still TBA. We have proven ourselves capable of developing quality titles. We have the talent, the skills, personnel, and drive to make a quality game that we hope you will enjoy, but we are missing only one key ingredient……
Release day is layoff day? Playing musical chairs trying to get on the next project so you can continue to eat for a few more months? Only to get fucked over on release day once again? While executives bleed the company dry and abandon it once it’s an empty husk? Fuck that noise.
So even if you’re not interested in another city-building sim — and why wouldn’t you be?! — why not throw them a few bucks to see how their experiment goes?
The Pizza Lab: The Best French Bread Pizza
Madonna
Into The Groove [Extended Remix]
You Can Dance, 1987
Music for working.
(Source: youtube.com)
Fine Young Cannibals
Johnny Come Home
live at the Paramount Theatre, Seattle, 1989
This actually does raise the legitimate question as to how direct of a democracy the founding fathers really intended to create. Joe Miller, a Tea Party candidate for the Senate in Alaska a few years back, was a proponent of this plan as well. He didn’t win; it seems that asking people to elect you to the Senate so you can take away their right to elect other people to the Senate in the future isn’t a winning campaign strategy (although Miller seems to be mulling a comeback, so what do we know). Anyway, this Georgia proposal will almost certainly go absolutely nowhere. source
There’s really no question as to “how direct of a democracy the founding fathers … intended to create”: the election of senators, like everything else involving the Senate, was a massive anti-democratic compromise intended to help sell the rest of the Constitution to potential hold-out (tiny) states. So that question, while “legitimate”, is neither interesting nor important — unless your daddy fetish includes the founding fathers, that is.
The truth is that direct election of senators was driven by the states themselves — Arizona ratified it within months of its admission to the union! — so they clearly were not concerned over whether it reduced their power relative to the federal government. Modern efforts to repeal the seventeenth amendment seem to me to be less about federalism and more about preventing the wrong people from electing senators. I mean, Republicans have already gerrymandered the House into knots, why should the dirty plebs get to pick the senators?
You have to see this incredible fan-built Lego Ghostbusters’ firehouse — made by studying the two films, the animated series, and the 2009 video game — to believe it. (Lots more pics there!)
Peter: What do you think, Egon?
Egon: I think this building should be condemned. There’s serious metal fatigue in all the load-bearing members, the wiring is substandard, it’s completely inadequate for our power needs, and the neighborhood is like a demilitarized zone.
Ray: Hey, does this pole still work? [slides down firepole]
(Source: twitter.com)
![upwithchris:
President Obama proposed an increase in the minimum wage in his State of the Union address this week, and according to polls, that policy is broadly popular, even among Republicans. But researchers at Princeton University and Harvard Business School have detected a startling trend in support for the minimum wage: it dips among the people who make just above the minimum wage.
The current federal minimum wage is $7.25 an hour, and about 85% of people who make that amount of money or less support an increase in the minimum wage. according to the study. Support jumps to almost 95% among people who make between $8.26 and $9.25 and would benefit from an increase as well. But among hourly wage workers, the lowest level of support for an increase comes, surprisingly, from people who make just above the minimum wage, between $7.26 and $8.25.
This surprising trend helps explain another startling political trend over the last few decades: Support for policies that redistribute wealth and reduce income differences has plummeted, according to the General Social Survey, which asks Americans every year whether government should do more to reduce income inequality. In 2010, the number of people who told the General Social Survey that they oppose redistributive policies was at its highest level in decades. So the researchers asked: Why do people who would benefit from policies that redistribute income gains oppose those policies?
The researchers propose a theory: people don’t want to end up in “last place.” An increase in the minimum wage would benefit people at the low end of the income scale. But, as the researchers found, people who make just above the minimum wage don’t want to become minimum wage workers themselves. They don’t want to end up in “last place” on the income scale. They’d rather make just above the minimum wage, even if it [means] making less money overall. It’s a fascinating finding, and one that helps explain a lot about the politics of wealth redistribution and inequality in the United States. [emphasis mine]](http://24.media.tumblr.com/420233cc7db8e067c68e0ef47906dbc8/tumblr_mibh44GFjI1r72z2uo1_500.jpg)
President Obama proposed an increase in the minimum wage in his State of the Union address this week, and according to polls, that policy is broadly popular, even among Republicans. But researchers at Princeton University and Harvard Business School have detected a startling trend in support for the minimum wage: it dips among the people who make just above the minimum wage.
The current federal minimum wage is $7.25 an hour, and about 85% of people who make that amount of money or less support an increase in the minimum wage. according to the study. Support jumps to almost 95% among people who make between $8.26 and $9.25 and would benefit from an increase as well. But among hourly wage workers, the lowest level of support for an increase comes, surprisingly, from people who make just above the minimum wage, between $7.26 and $8.25.
This surprising trend helps explain another startling political trend over the last few decades: Support for policies that redistribute wealth and reduce income differences has plummeted, according to the General Social Survey, which asks Americans every year whether government should do more to reduce income inequality. In 2010, the number of people who told the General Social Survey that they oppose redistributive policies was at its highest level in decades. So the researchers asked: Why do people who would benefit from policies that redistribute income gains oppose those policies?
The researchers propose a theory: people don’t want to end up in “last place.” An increase in the minimum wage would benefit people at the low end of the income scale. But, as the researchers found, people who make just above the minimum wage don’t want to become minimum wage workers themselves. They don’t want to end up in “last place” on the income scale. They’d rather make just above the minimum wage, even if it [means] making less money overall. It’s a fascinating finding, and one that helps explain a lot about the politics of wealth redistribution and inequality in the United States. [emphasis mine]
(Source: upwithsteve)
