As a rule, the more intricate and over-worked the doodle, the worse the writing's going...

This is from the tour show. It's the image we put up at the start of the sketch about the designer of the snake, to try to get across the idea of an animal design department. Tomorrow, I'll put up the image that replaces it when the head of the department says he has one or two questions about the new design...

After Ken Anderson

All these things can be clicked for bigger-er, by the way.

Sure, you can't stop progress, and it's not as if the old way ever worked in any case, but... still, he kind of misses it.

This was an attempt to use fewer lines. With, I would say, mixed results.

In the latest episode of their scrappy but determined podcast, Ken and Robin talk underdog opponents, the Sandby Borg massacre, All Rolled Up's Fil Baldowski, and lunar metal.

In the latest episode of their crispy-in-a-good-way podcast, Ken and Robin talk agency in the sandbox, air frying, Alphonse Bertillon, and numbers stations.

In the latest episode of their unswervingly loyal podcast, Ken and Robin talk Night's Black Agents vampire concealment, Gideon & Longknife, Robin's Yellow King novel, and Time Inc vs the Iowa caucuses.

In the latest episode of their thoroughly vetted podcast, Ken and Robin talk converting standard GUMSHOE scenarios to QuickShock, a Ukraine mole, QuestWorlds with Ian Cooper, and moving Lovecraft to Chicago.

Shaenon: Claire writes, “I redraw bits of the strip almost every evening; it started as a way to get nice avatar images, but has ended up being a longer term project.” That is…amazing, and thank you very much for this[…]↓ Read the rest of this entry...

Sports Minister Kiren Rijiju said the first priority for this would be given to those who have qualified for the Olympics.

Mondo Duplantis of Sweden and Renaud Lavillenie of France tied for the gold medal Sunday during a men's pole vault competition held in their own backyards.

The IOC Session -- an annual meeting of approximately 100 members -- will be held in July via a video conference rather than the originally scheduled gathering in Tokyo prior to the Summer Olympics.

Posted by: history79

( Read more... )

comments

Posted by: laughing_tree



Expect evil ravens, hipsters performing pun-magic and John getting drunker than you’ve ever seen him before. Fun. -- Si Spurrier

( Read more... )

comments

Kvůli koronavirové pandemii pracují z domova tisíce lidí. Home office má však určitý pracovně-právní rámec, což tuší málokdo. Jaká jsou práva a povinnosti zaměstnanců a co musí zaměstnavatel udělat, aby neporušil zákoník práce? Ve spolupráci s právníky Bořivojem Líbalem a Markem Poloni přinášíme praktický servis rad pro zaměstnance a zaměstnavatele.

V době koronavirové pandemie nás bombardují ze všech stran nejrůznější informace. Informační přetížení je tak značné, že v mnohých lidech vyvolává strach a stres. Jak tomu čelit, komu věřit a jaké informace ignorovat, se v komentáři zamýšlí psycholog Jan Urban.

Možnost cestování je silně omezená a nic zatím nenasvědčuje tomu, že by lidé v letošní letní sezoně mohli vyrazit na zahraniční dovolenou. Zároveň ale nikdo dnes ještě neví, zda se nějaká možnost přece jen neobjeví. Pokud jste si koupili dovolenkový zájezd, jste asi momentálně jako na trní. Pojedete? Vrátí vám peníze?

Současná koronavirová krize otřásla finančními trhy, zlevněné akcie jsou příležitostí, jak zhodnotit investici. Jenomže kdy je správná chvíle investovat? Už se trhy odrazily ode dna, nebo přijde další propad? A jak snížit riziko špatného načasování? Nad tím se zamýšlí Michal Valentík, investiční analytik společnosti Broker Trust.

Covid-adjacent but mostly about adapting to circumstances rather than the illness directly.

If you're suddenly homeschooling your children, or if you're suddenly having to teach online when you're used to face-to-face, there are several things I might be able to help with. I have a lot of experience and knowledge of education, all age groups from about aged 7 to university-level. My current job is primarily about online learning so I know quite a lot about both the pedagogy and the technology. I can offer advice on how to teach a range of topics, what online resources are available, or conversely how to adapt the expertise you already have to a virtual context.

I'm no expert on homeschooling, so I'm probably not the best person to help you plan your curriculum, decide your educational philosophy etc. I'm thinking more on the individual topic or activity level. My professional training is in life sciences, and I have a fairly solid grasp of maths, biology and chemistry. Plus quite a lot of experience of tutoring in random other subjects like literature and religion and social sciences. I'm less useful at sport and creative arts, but I can still probably help to find resources and give advice on a general level.

Another thing I can offer, and would actually be quite happy to do, is I can give some direct external input into your teaching. Sometimes children don't take learning entirely seriously, or get over-invested emotionally, if teacher is also their parent, and a new person can be useful. So I can give a virtual lesson if we can arrange a time and topic, or I can set a novel task for a pupil, or I can look at and give helpful, constructive comments on something your children have created, even grade or mark things if you're into that. Feel free to PM me if you're not comfortable discussing details in public.

Aside from that, I wanted to plug covidcoffeecorner, which is a lovely little community where people post a different topic every day and a few dozen people chat about it. So if you miss mostly topic-centred communities from LJ (or even older systems) it might be worth having a look. There's also fictional_fans which has picked up a lot of activity lately, if you are interested in fandom-related (in the broadest sense) topic-focused discussions.

I assume few people are actually short of reading material, but I wanted to recommend a couple of collections.

honigfrosch is gathering poetry in various languages.

The Decameron project has a bunch of quite well-known speculative fiction authors writing stories in response to the pandemic. (Not all of them are directly about disease; it's modelled on the original where fictional people who were sheltering from plague wrote a bunch of stories.) It's hosted on Patreon but available without payment.

angelofthenorth made a second language café post last month, and it didn't get nearly as much attention as the first, so I reckon now would be a good time to revive it, if you feel like practising foreign languages with friendly people.

comments

I was really sad to learn of the death of Mel Baggs. I have been following Mel's writing for many years and learned a great deal about disability and activist communities.

In particular, Mel disabused me of the view of autism that says, autism is all very well if you're also highly intelligent, but it's a terrible tragedy to be autistic as well as intellectually disabled, or autistic and non-speaking, or "low-functioning". And in general lots of concrete ways of being a respectful fellow citizen towards the the kinds of disabled people who don't get much activism airtime.

It seems that Mel didn't die "of" Coronavirus in the strict sense of the word, but of complications of a number of other illnesses and conditions. Mel had posted a fair bit recently about not getting access to needed personal care as an indirect result of the pandemic and the dangerously inadequate official response to it. I don't know whether inadequate care was a contributory factor in Mel's death but it did cause a lot of suffering, and I have seen way too many reports of people not getting the care they need, and I'm not even that plugged in to the disability community.

Anyway. Mel was someone I admired greatly, and a huge influence on me, and the world is poorer.

comments

OK! I did manage to finish the video I described in the last few posts. It's this:

30 Weird Chess Algorithms: Elo World

I felt pretty down on this video as I was finishing it, I think mostly in the same way that one does about their dissertation, just because of the slog. I started it just thinking, I'll make a quick fun video about all those chess topics, but then once I had set out to fill in the entire tournament table, this sort of dictated the flow of the video even if I wanted to just get it over with. So it was way longer than I was planning, at 42 minutes, and my stress about this just led to more tedium as I would micro-optimize in editing to shorten it. RIP some mediocre jokes. But it turns out there are plenty of people on the internet who enjoy long-form nerdy content like this, and it was well-received, which is encouraging. (But now I am perplexed that it seems to be more popular than NaN Gates and Flip-FLOPS, which IMO is far more intetersting/original. I guess the real lesson is just make what you feel like making, and post it!) The 50+ hours programming, drawing, recording and editing did have the desired effect of getting chess out of my system for now, at least.

Since last post I played Gato Roboto which is a straightforward and easy but still very charming "Metroidvania." Now I'm working my way through Deux Ex: Mankind Divided, which (aside from the crashing) is a a very solid sequel to Human Revolution. Although none of these games is likely to capture the magic of the original (one of my all-time faves), they do definitely have the property that you can play them in ways that the developer didn't explicitly set out for you, and as you know I get a big kick out of that.

Aside from the video games, I've picked back up a 10 year-old project that I never finished because it was a little bit outside my skillset. But having gotten significantly better at electronics and CNC, it is seeming pretty doable now. Stay tuned!

Happy 40th birthday to me! I'm currently in Connecticut visiting with the whole family, which is only somewhat coincidentally on my 40th birthday weekend. The main thing is the pizza! Two quick updates from this month, strawberry-related:

One of my all-time favorite games, Celeste, just got a new free 9th chapter (which is sized more like three chapters). This was a mixed blessing since over a year ago I finished all its hardest levels (all achievements) and then managed to pry myself from it. So I felt compelled to get the two new achievements to get back to 100%, but it was a somewhat hypnotizing and RSI-inducing grind. (Especially since I had gotten pretty rusty. I even forgot that you can hold onto walls, which made the first few levels much harder...) The worst part was that the final level was rumored to be kinda ridiculous, and the "WOW" achievement even moreso, so I was feeling worried about that the whole week it took to get through the prior 99. All told it was pretty worthwhile; the level design is really admirable as usual, and it stays true to the signature difficulty curve. I recommend it.

Second is a font sighting sent by a friendly Internet stranger. This one is from a fairly popular (18M views this month) music video called Fresa, which features Columbian Reggaeton artist Lalo Ebratt. A sighting in such a video would be interesting, but the wildest thing is where it is:

Lalo Ebratt's "THUGGER" neck tattoo

Yes, that is Action Jackson used on his highly permanent neck tattoo that reads "THUGGER" (presumably short for "Tree Hugger"). It seems to be a fairly new tattoo, but you can find many more images of it to verify. I hope it ages well!

『NO TRAVEL,NO LIFE』 ボイスドラマ CD 販売決定!!原作:須田 誠 脚本・演出:吉田武寛■出演■<CUBA 編>反橋宗一郎 /中村裕香里/吉澤 翼/武藤賢人/千歳ゆう/鵜飼主水/伊藤玲奈<ASIA 編>反橋宗一郎/遠藤三貴/北乃颯希/久下恭平/星守紗凪/KIMERU/伊藤玲奈■販売■NO TRAVEL,NO LIFE ボイスドラマ CD (CUBA 編/ASIA続きをみる

『著作権保護のため、記事の一部のみ表示されております。』

Hello, and welcome to one of two Fantastic Strangelings Book Club discussions for this month! “What is the Fantastic Strangelings Book Club and how can I join?”  Just click here, sweet baby angel face. This discussion though is about a … Continue reading →

I’m not sure if it’s depression or just life catching up but I’ve been having a lot of quicksand days.  Those times when you feel like you’re moving in slow-motion and things that should take 10 minutes for a normal … Continue reading →

At the very end of 2017, I wrote about my lovely new sewing space and how much more work I’m getting done in there. One of the pictures I did not include was the view into the rest of the family room: As you can see, there is lots of lovely space in our library. I […]

My washer and dryer failing me is a nightmare I don’t want to visit. You see, my current set came with the house 17 years ago, and were already 5 years old. The one set of appliances I’ve never bought is a washer and dryer–I’ve always purchased houses where they’d been left behind by the […]

Lily-of-the-valley getting ready to bloom — quick reminder to locals that I’m planning on replacing most of mine with native ground cover, so if you want to come dig up a few for a Mother’s Day gift, please feel free.

So Martin Scorsese said that the Marvel movies are “not cinema” and the internet kind of blew up because it is inherently polarizing, and the possibility that Scorsese is both one of our most talented living directors and also wrong about this particular subject is not particularly fun discourse for a lot of people on […]

Out of an abundance of caution regarding the developing COVID-19 situation, U.S. Grand Lodge has decided to cancel its scheduled national gatherings this spring, specifically Advanced Initiator Training, Kaaba Colloquium, and the Electoral College meeting. The Electoral College meeting will be held online according to standard Electoral College procedures. For more information regarding COVID-19, please …

Continue reading

Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law. Greetings on the First Day of the Writing of the Book of the Law! Due to the ongoing economic impact of the Coronavirus pandemic, the International Supreme Council of Ordo Templi Orientis, in consultation with the Grand Lodges, is implementing the following measures to …

Continue reading

The Worst Things For Sale is Drew's blog. It updates every day. Subscribe to the Worst Things For Sale RSS!