Etsy user kumacrafts makes laser-cut acrylic pendants based on the Sailor Moon S lockets. Am I the only one who wants to yell “Moon cosmic power, make up!”?
Source: etsy.com
Cost $25.
Source: etsy.com
Source: etsy.com
Cost $45.
Source: etsy.com
The artist of behind those alphabet film posters also has a great series of Venn diagrams.
Source: stephenwildish.co.uk
Source: stephenwildish.co.uk
Source: stephenwildish.co.uk
Source: stephenwildish.co.uk
Via: mymodernmet.com
Army Lieutenant Jessica Scott was the accidental leader of a successful Twitter campaign against Rush Limbaugh last week. She also writes romance novels.
The most effective online warrior in the recent battles over contraception has been a 35-year-old Army officer in Fort Hood, Texas, whose tweets on March 2 helped galvanize women's outrage over the notion that using birth control would make someone a "slut."
Jessica Scott, a career soldier and company commander based in Fort Hood, Texas, had been folllowing the heated debate over contraception and religious liberty for a month, but Rush Limbaugh's description of a Georgetown University Law student and birth control advocate as a "slut" and "prostitute" pushed the second lieutenant over the line.
"The entire thing is absolutely appalling because her testimony wasn't even about sex," Second Lieutenant Scott told BuzzFeed in an email this weekend. "It was about a woman who'd lost an ovary because her insurance would not cover birth control pills she needed to control the ovarian cysts."
Scott, who has served in Iraq, wrote on Twitter that she "used birth control while deployed with my husband so I *wouldn't* get pregnant & sent home."
But it was her hashtag, #iamnotaslut, that launched hundreds of tweets in an unusual, and visceral, national reaction against Limbaugh's words — hardly the reaction Scott expected:
Source: @JessicaScott09
"Who knew it was going to go viral, huh?" she said.
Scott, who has served in the army for 17 years, hadn't sought a role as an activist. Her sideline is actually in writing romance novels whose covers feature half-dressed, well-built male soldiers. But she hasn't shied away from it either.
"Birth control is a means to an end for me," Scott said. "I can control when/if I have children and therefore I get the chance to be a soldier, a writer, a teacher. I get to be any of the things I'm capable of being because I have control over when/if I have children."
She also addressed Limbaugh, who subsequently apologized for his comments, on her website:
By all means, call me a slut. Call me a whore who expects the government to pay for my birth control so that I can abdicate my responsibilities as a parent. Call me a feminazi for forsaking my duties as a mother and using birth control so that I did not get pregnant again and miss the deployment. Call me a slut for wanting something more for myself and my daughters than to be someone’s breeder. By all means, call me a whore for wanting my daughters to be able to fulfill their potential by being able to decide when they want to start a family.
Scott, who has two children, said she met her husband, who's been deployed to Iraq four times and is there now, while stationed in Germany. She now commands 130 troops.
She started blogging while serving in Iraq herself, and her romance novels focus on soldiers coming home from war. The "Coming Home" series, published by Random House Digital, launched last year with "Because of You" last year, and two other books in the trilogy are scheduled for release later this year.
An anonymous user posted nude pictures of Christina Hendricks and Olivia Munn in a thread on the Motherless forums this weekend. Here are the pictures along with information on how the leak happened.
The pictures leaked on a site called Motherless after an anonymous user asked forum posters what celebrity they wanted to see nude:
After a few posters offered some suggestions, another anonymous user posted these nude photos of Christina Hendricks.
It’s feeding time for these baby pandas in China. And time for the rest of us to say Aww!
I hope this fan was the recipient of multiple free beers at Milwaukee Brewers spring training in Phoenix, Az.
Introducing Sad Putin. Use our image editor tool in the comments to put Sad Putin into every picture.
(AP / Ivan Sekretarev)
Numbers can tell us a lot about technology, but only if we know them. Here are a few we don't.
(Speaking of which: Email us if you do!)
The Facebook stalker index: How many people are looking at your Facebook right now, today, this week and forever? Or, more specifically, how many views do your Facebook photos have? You know, the ones with the bikini vs. the ones without. The ones with the bong vs. the ones without. Just IMAGINE.
Twitter averages: Twitter loovvees data, and they release a lot of it. Like, did you know that the average tweet is 67.9 characters long?
The company employs some of the best data scientists in the world, so it's fair to read meaning into the numbers they don't publish, like the average number of Twitter followers. Third party estimates peg the number at below 30. We're also curious about the number of people still using the egg avatar (millions!), the percentage of people with more than 1,000 followers (one or two?) and the percentage of people who've only tweeted once.
Dropped calls: Everyone hates their carriers, because cellphone service is expensive and uneven. What nobody is sure of, though, is how their carriers compare to others. Dropped calls are a serious source of frustration for pretty much anyone with a phone, so these numbers could confirm some already damaging perceptions, which could, I dunno, throw the entire industry into chaos? Or at least be a PR disaster for one or two carriers.
Real cellphone bills: Somewhere on each carrier's computers is an awful little spreadsheet: The real average bills, after fees and overage charges, for every single cell plan on every single phone. That is, what people actually pay every month, beyond what their plan advertised. It's higher than what listed on their sites and in their stores, but it's far more important. Some carriers'; would be higher than others, which would be seen--rightfully!--as evidence of dishonesty. Of course, nobody would come out looking good: If carrier one's $70 plans usually ends up costing users $80 and carrier two's costs $82, carrier one's customers are still going to be rightly pissed off.
Gadget failure rates: Product returns are private affairs, conducted discreetly by mail and telephone. But every hardware company on earth knows exactly how shitty their products are--that is, how many come back broken, and how many get replaced. Every gadget has a non-zero failure rate, and some are probably very high. Remember the Xbox red-ring-of-death debacle? Some reports pegged the Xbox failure rate at over 50 percent, but that was well after the fact.
Ad clickthroughs: Most free things on the Internet are supported by ads. But how many people actually click on, say, those 15-second Hulu video ads, or those YouTube caption ads? Not a whole lot! Maybe even fewer than you think. To know how many people click on these things is to know how bizarrely few people buoy so much of the Internet. It might also be scary to potential advertisers, who are usually pitched some--but not all--of a site's traffic and clickthrough numbers.
Real gadget profit margins: Thanks to sites like iSuppli we know how much the different parts of a gadget cost to buy. (Not much!) What we don't know is how much they cost to put together, to market, to ship and to package--the real margin, or markup. You might not feel so good about your brand new $500 iPad if you knew exactly how many times more of its price goes toward markup than to the workers who suffered to make it.
Soda or pop? Sneakers or tennis shoes? Dust bunny or house moss? Social media is giving new life to these differences in regional speech.
Sure, there's sort of a creepy undertone of cat-slapping fetish going on here (either on behalf of the cats or the man, it's unclear), but this is just a great version of a classic song. Can these three please start touring as a Joy Division cover band? Purr Division, anyone?
Source: youtube.com / via: dooce.com
Clark Kent also shows a flagrant disregard for how important satellite positioning is. BuzzFeed got an exclusive preview of the new Man of Steel's origin story, which begs the question, you can't breathe in space but your bare feet are perfectly fine?
The latest addict from TLC's “My Strange Addiction” is Ayanna, a 54-year-old who refuses to cut her fingernails and toenails, going so far as to call them her “babies”. Did you eat lunch yet today? If not, I am SO sorry.
The "Long-Nailed Goddess" thinks her toenails are "sexy and sassy". Uh-huh.
Winter's finally almost over, and it's perfect scarf weather. Just check out how cool these fashionably warm animals are rocking scarves!
Source: cute-n-tiny.com
Source: wannasmile.s3.amazonaws.com
Source: i.telegraph.co.uk
Source: http://27.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lwx9uwYpaB1qf4fnvo1_500.jpg
According to his teammate Kevin Love, Ricky Rubio is slowly but surely discovering the wonders of the English language.
What makes a great piece of technology today ? More and more, it's software.
I bought my phone almost two years ago. Today, it does things it didn't do back then, like shooting cinemagraphs, wirelessly syncing with my computer and beaming stuff up to my TV. My first Xbox 360 didn't play Netflix or Hulu when I bought it back in 2007. Now it does. My Kindle turns pages faster now than it did when I pulled it out of the box. The weird part isn't that these things have new powers that they didn't once upon time--it's that I'd actually be upset if they didn't. I expect my phone to be better today than it was yesterday, better tomorrow than it is today.
That wasn't always the case. When Sony shipped a Walkman, TPS-L2, it stayed the same. Four or ten or 15 years later, the play button worked just like it did the day it left the factory. (Unless you broke it.) A TV was a TV was a TV. The hands on a watch turned. And turned. And turned. Until they didn't. Once they were given form in plastic or metal or glass, gadgets weren't malleable objects. Form was function, forever.
What changed? It's the software, stupid.
Gadgets aren't just hardware anymore. Hardware is, more and more, just a delivery mechanism for software, toast under the jam. Consider the iPhone or iPad: They're blank slates. A screen with a battery bolted on the back fitted together by a glass or aluminum shell. Inside of them are basically the same guts, the same silicon as the shitty $99 Android tablet I wouldn't inflict on even the most loathsome human being (except maybe Chris Brown, fuck that guy) or the Windows Phone you've never heard of. More and more, it's the software that makes a gadget different or special, or even more simply, good or bad. A beautiful piece of technology running garbage software is just beautiful garbage.
We've crossed a point in which basically every gadget is a computer of sorts. Partly because we wanted them to be smarter and connected and because the world is simply a digital place now--there's no such thing as an analog mp3 player--but the ability to remake our listening devices and televisions in a computer's image has been driven by the fact that computing power and sensors got dirt cheap, and are getting cheaper everyday. The secret behind Microsoft's $150 Kinect is sensor technology that cost $10,000 before Microsoft got its hands on it. Your phone is stuffed with an array sensors: gyros, accelerometer, ambient light sensor, multiple mics, a camera. So of course all of your gadgets are tiny computers. Why wouldn't they be? And when everything's a computer, it's the software that counts.
SIGNAL LOSS. If Earth was invaded by marauding alien life, you can guarantee social media would be where we learned about it.
Source: @alliancenewsnet
Last night's “Khloe & Lamar” featured Rob Kardashian doing a bit of soul-searching and eventually deciding on his calling: socks. It's just something he's very passionate about, okay?
Can we talk about how ridiculously cheesy and '90s the mockups for his sock company ended up being for a second? Evidence below:
Could they really have created 514,000 U.S. jobs? Probably not.
An employee directs job seekers to queue up outside the Foxconn recruitment center in Shenzhen, Guangdong province February 22, 2012.
(Reuters / JOE TAN)
How can you calculate how many American jobs a company has created? If you’re Apple, the answer is by counting everyone from Genius bar employees and UPS drivers to workers making iPad glass at Corning factories in Kentucky — which gets them to the nice-sounding number of 514,000 U.S. jobs “created or supported by Apple.”
But look a little closer, and the numbers don’t quite add up. For one thing, there’s a lot of debate about what exactly “created or supported by” means. MIT economics professor David Autor told the New York Times that the “entire business of claiming ‘direct and indirect’ job creation is disreputable” — there’s no telling whether that UPS driver would’ve been employed anyway, or if that factory worker would’ve been making glass for something else if the iPad didn’t exist.
What the numbers do show, however, is the ways in which the Apple economy highlights broader shifts that have been occurring in the American economy overall in the last 20 years — the widening gap between people in high-paying, high-skilled jobs and lower-wage, lower-skilled jobs, with fewer and fewer people in the middle. We can assume that most of the job growth connected to the so-called “App Economy” — which, according to Apple, “has added more than 210,000 iOS jobs to the U.S. economy since the introduction of iPhone in 2007” — has been for jobs that require specialized skills in programming, software development and the like. These are skills that one is expected to have going into the job. Manufacturers have, over the last 20 years, eliminated the expectation of on-the-job training — at one time, the cornerstone of American skilled manufacturing. They’d rather hire people who come with the skills they already need. (This Atlantic article about the Standard Motor Products factory in Greenville, South Carolina, is a heartbreaking example -- a man who had the good fortune of starting to work there 20 years ago is now employed in a higher-paying, higher-skilled job involving lasers, while a woman who just started there recently has no hope of moving beyond a rote assembly line job — and she doesn’t have the time or money to go back to school.)
(Reuters / Bobby Yip / Apple)
Even a job at the Genius Bar — which is, at its core, a customer service job — requires a level of technical know-how that employees are expected to have going into the job. In a section called “A candidate we’ll love,” a current job listing for a Genius includes “your friends and family see you as an absolute technical guru,” “you have some background in tech support or customer service” and “you can communicate technical problems in laymen’s terms.” A job at the Genius Bar, the job listing concludes, is a chance “to use your knowledge and experience. To contribute meaningfully to people’s lives with your technical know-how.”
It’s not just the American economy, either: Apple needed industrial 8,700 industrial engineers to supervise the 200,000 assembly-line workers recruited to put together millions of iPhones. It would’ve taken nine months to hire that many in the U.S., but took just 15 days in China. (And at a much lower cost.) Which leads to the other unspoken motivation for the Apple jobs report: The recent revelations about the oppressive working conditions at Apple supplier Foxconn’s factories in Shenzhen, China; the front-page New York Times report was a huge black eye for secretive, image-obsessed Apple. The article estimates that Foxconn’s total Apple-related employment is around 700,000, in a total Foxconn workforce of 1 million -- numbers that dwarf even Apple’s own estimates of its “created or supported” job creation. It’s a labor force that Apple has rendered all but invisible in this report.
But the irony is that in Steve Jobs’ vision of the perfect factory, humans wouldn’t even have factory jobs at all. In 1990, his neXt computers were made in the U.S. — but by robots. “I’m as proud of the factory as I am of the computer,” Jobs said at the time. After all, robots never commit suicide. They don’t even need bathroom breaks. But it might be a little weird to meet them at the Genius Bar.
Governor Kasich has refused immediate federal aid even though both governors of Indiana and Kentucky have accepted it. Here are some pictures he should probably take a look at that might convince him otherwise.
Source: news.cincinnati.com
A view from the second floor of a damaged house shows a section of Moscow, Ohio that was hit by a tornado.
(AP / David Kohl)
A view from the second floor of a tornado damaged house.
(AP / David Kohl)
Source: @mbruning81
