Apparently I can't do maths at 3am and now I would juust like some mercy
A brief appreciation of Peter Falk in Columbo, by Joe Dator in The New Yorker
clear-page-deactivated20201125
"Sorry sunshine"
Wow fucking IMAGINE if American politicians handled bullshit anti science believers that swiftly
I love that he didn’t bother pointing to the nearest scientist. He just, correctly, wrote the guy off as a fool talking nonsense.
Sit down, shut up, the adults are talking.
“Sorry, sunshine. Wrong place.”
“That’s it!”
“The acid in a lemon can act as a battery”
“and power up the suit!”
“Okay, but we’ll need a lot more juice than one lemon.”
“I have a whole bag of ‘em!”
“Better, but we would need, like, over a hundred thousand—”
“How about this radioactive watermelon?”
“Huh.”
“Yeah, that works.”
“Ferb, lock it in!”
“Hey, could you guys use a blowtorch and some peanut butter?”
“How can we not have met before today?”
thatrussiancowboy
revengeance:
Never forget how Kojima not only designed most of the levels in MGS1 himself but he did it by building them with fucking lego blocks first. A hero
askstarliner
This is real film of a real ghost
JESUS FUCK. GET THE GHOSTBUSTERS.
mygoldengeist
you can’t photoshop that shit. you just can’t
2020 is almost over and all I gotta say is what the fuck was that
It was the culmination of 70 years of calcified post-war conservative politics (and yes I count neoliberalism in that), unchecked capitalist greed, and near complete civic disengagement by the largest generation in recent history (cough boomers cough cough).
As this year comes to a close, as a COVID vaccine looms, as Biden prepares for inauguration, it’ll be tempting to just put all of this behind us and move on. Please don’t. Because that’s exactly how we fucking got here.
2020 has been written on the pages of history for decades. All the signs and the evidence that all of this would happen—and all at once—has been there. Shouting at us. For decades.
Nobody wanted to hear it, few were even willing to consider things were as bad as people warned, and everyone was too busy with life to take the time out to do anything about it—because “work”, because “finances”, because “school”. We put off dealing with things until they exploded in our faces with such force they nearly blinded us. And now we are faced with escalating problems alongside more “work” and worse “finances” and harder “school”—all which are more stressful and trying than they’ve ever been. And the problems still need addressing—more pressing now than they were yesterday or the day before.
And It didn’t have to be that way.
We could have dealt with income inequality and corporate malfeasance and voter suppression and poverty/social welfare and all these related issues back in 2011, during Occupy Wall Street—that big reaction to the subprime mortgage crisis, when activists were screaming from rooftops about how all that shit was going to get worse if we didn’t deal with the root of the problem properly now.
Remember how instead of bailing out families so they could pay off their mortgages (which would have cost a shit ton less) we bailed out the auto industry and Wall Street? Remember how people lost their homes? How banks went after people who didn’t even have mortgages with them??
Look at how corporations have behaved during the pandemic (Amazon engaging in price fixing on essentials), look how the stock market has become emboldened by receiving absolutely no punishment for the “Great Recession” (betting on fucking water futures as resources dwindle and Flint continues to suffer), look at how corrupt police departments across the country have consolidated power over their communities after decades of hero worship and blank checks. Look at how they protect corporate property while killing innocent black people.
We could have dealt with these issues back in 1999 during the WTO protests, which were concerned with one of the very problems we’re dealing with now—economic globalization and the suppression of labor. But like Occupy those protests were suppressed and destroyed, and ultimately forgotten—and by the time 9/11 rolled around no one wanted to hear a word of sentiment which questioned American politics or could be construed as anti-American because 2,996 deaths and Never Forget.
Today, COVID-19 killed 3,054 Americans. Just today.
So when 2021 rolls around and we talk about what a shitfest 2020 was and “what even was that??”, the answer is plain on the pages of history. How and why we ended up here—it’s all there waiting for you to connect the dots. And every time you reduce 2020 to just some awful, wild, miserable year you are supporting the false and self-serving narrative of the people who dragged us here in the first place.
So I’ll repeat:
2020 was the culmination of 70 years of calcified post-war conservative politics, unchecked capitalist greed, and near complete civic disengagement by the largest generation in recent history. It didn’t come from nowhere, and there are clear cut roots to these problems and ways to fix them (and a long legacy of activist thought and discourse on these issues). But that means you can’t “go back to brunch” or “check out of politics” or “focus on X” to the exclusion of other things.
Take that with you into 2021.
God if the Shadow Border’s degree of miniaturization was enough to infuriate and confuse Qin Shi Huang, I bet MicroSD cards would bluescreen their ass.
We made a form of data storage so small it has to have an adaptor designed to look like and interface with an earlier form of data storage!
I don’t even know if they managed to get to the CPU of the computer systems of the Shadow Border, because that should be enough to enrage them completely. A mid to high-end PC might have a CPU with around 9.9 BILLION transistors in a 5x5cm space. Miniaturization FUCKS.
There are many clubs at Chaldea. One of them is the I-Desperately-Miss-My-Wife club.
Level 1: Porn with plot
Level 2: Porn with social commentary
Level 3: Porn with troubling philosophical implications
Level 4: Porn with maddening revelations of humanity’s place in the cosmos
Level 5: Porn with math
I think the original release of Fate/Stay Night counts as at leave up to Level 4 if not all.
“Wall street can’t comprehend easy moral lessons most young children can grasp”
One sec, one thing real quick
This article is the best argument i’ve ever seen for why humanities are so important in education. Apparently you can just submit what is essentially a half assed book report with no reading comprehension or sources or basis whatsoever to certain news journals and call it a day.
Like Scrooge is pretty immoral and that’s kind of the whole point of the book. So much so that ghost visit him about it. That’s the plot. This is, again, an easy story that children can grasp via Muppets.
Anyone who sees Scrooge’s employee freezing all day in an office/going home to a hungry family he can’t support and thinks “Man, that Scrooge is a good and smart businessman” needs their own round of ghostly visitors.
Scrooge: *parrots common pro-business arguments specifically so the novel can refute them*
This fuckin guy who didn’t read past the first chapter: Well that seems perfectly sound!
And there’s a difference between Ebenezer Scrooge and the wealth hoarders of today, which is that his miserly behavior stems from the trauma of childhood privation, and from the fact that he really did work very hard to survive for many years early in life, and he lives in a kind of self-imposed quazipoverty because he’s so terrified of ever being poor again. It’s vastly different from real poverty, because he never actually has to go without food or heat or shelter, and none of this remotely justifies his behavior at all, but it’s a far cry from men who were born to wealth, inherited wealth, and continue to gain wealth in huge amounts daily without having to do a thing, who live a kind of alien decadence where they can eat gold leaf black truffles and could literally end all homelessness and still afford them, but choose not to because they have no concept whatsoever of not knowing whether you’ll eat tomorrow or having a sick child and being unable to afford a doctor, and they just don’t care.
y’all Jeff Bezos owns WSJ. expect more pro-rich propaganda like this.
adzhe
TL;DR on the latest round of Wikileaks:
Literally nothing you do is safe from the CIA. There are numerous full-on spyware suites developed by them, mostly for iOS and Windows, but also targeting Android, Linux, OS X, and Solaris. Apps thought to be secure (Telegram with encryption enabled, WhatsApp, Signal) were compromised as well, as were a host of other devices (ie smart TVs).
THIS DOES NOT PERTAIN ONLY TO AMERICANS.
If you live in a Shengen area country, your country likely hosts several CIA backed cyberwar experts. They came in via the US consulate in Frankfurt. If you don’t, you likely do as well, but I can’t find anything without sifting through the files myself.
“I have nothing to hide, why does this matter?”: Because there are now multiple thousand “zero hour”- ie “developers get zero hours to fix”- vulnerabilities floating around that no one had any idea existed. The vulnerabilities themselves weren’t leaked, but it’s the fact that someone knew about these and didn’t say.
I hate to make this kinda clickbait-y thing, but this is honest to God one of the most important leaks in history. Our response to this is pretty much going to be life or death for privacy in the developed world. Be loud about this, be annoying about this, and do not shut up about this. Please reblog this and other posts relating to it.
Not just any someone, this is one of the U.S. federal government’s foremost intelligence agencies, the CIA, which even mainstream media has reported operates on a black (off the record) budget, infamous for handing over “full” reports that are almost entirely redacted.
It’s a wonder that anyone out there could believe they are not the subject of surveillance—everyone has something to hide.
- The USA can access personal email, chat, and web browsing history. (Source)
- The USA tracks the numbers of both parties on phone calls, their locations, as well as time and duration of the call. (Source)
- The USA can monitor text messages. (Source)
- The USA can monitor the data in smartphone applications. (Source)
- The USA can crack cellphone encryption codes. (Source)
- The USA can identify individuals’ friends, companions, and social networks. (Source)
- The USA monitors financial transactions. (Source)
- The USA monitors credit card purchases. (Source)
- The USA intercepts troves of personal webcam video from innocent people. (Source)
- The USA is working to crack all types of sophisticated computer encryption. (Source)
- The USA monitors communications between online gamers. (Source)
- The USA can set up fake Internet cafes to spy on unsuspecting users. (Source)
- The USA can remotely access computers by setting up a fake wireless connection. (Source)
- The USA can use radio waves to hack computers that aren’t connected to the internet. (Source)
- The USA can set up fake social networking profiles on LinkedIn for spying purposes. (Source)
- The USA undermines secure networks [Tor] by diverting users to non-secure channels. (Source)
- The USA can intercept phone calls by setting up fake mobile telephony base stations. (Source)
- The USA can install a fake SIM card in a cell phone to secretly control it. (Source)
- The USA can physically intercept packages, open them, and alter electronic devices. (Source)
- The USA makes a USB thumb drive that provides a wireless backdoor into the host computer. (Source)
- The USA can set up stations on rooftops to monitor local cell phone communications. (Source)
- The USA spies on text messages in China and can hack Chinese cell phones. (Source)
- The USA spies on foreign leaders’ cell phones. (Source)
- The USA intercepts meeting notes from foreign dignitaries. (Source)
- The USA has hacked into the United Nations’ video conferencing system. (Source)
- The USA can spy on ambassadors within embassies. (Source)
- The USA can track hotel reservations to monitor lodging arrangements. (Source)
- The USA can track communications within media organizations. (Source)
- The USA can tap transoceanic fiber-optic cables. (Source)
- The USA can intercept communications between aircraft and airports. (Source)
And this leak shows that the CIA has all of these technologies and proliferates them to other entities who want this information all the time. You need your privacy to protect yourself and your information. If you have nothing to hide, you have plenty to hide:
The line “if you’ve got nothing to hide, you have nothing to worry about” is used all too often in defending surveillance overreach. It’s been debunked countless times in the past, but with the line being trotted out frequently in response to the NSA revelations, it’s time for yet another debunking, and there are two good ones that were recently published. First up, we’ve got Moxie Marlinspike at Wired, who points out that, you’re wrong if you think you’ve got nothing to hide, because our criminal laws are so crazy, that anyone sifting through your data would likely be able to pin quite a few crimes on you if they just wanted to.
Julian Sanchez points out:
Some of the potentially sensitive facts those records expose becomes obvious after giving it some thought: Who has called a substance abuse counselor, a suicide hotline, a divorce lawyer or an abortion provider? What websites do you read daily? What porn turns you on? What religious and political groups are you a member of? Some are less obvious. Because your cellphone’s “routing information” typically includes information about the nearest cell tower, those records are also a kind of virtual map showing where you spend your time — and, when aggregated with others, who you like to spend it with.
We simply cannot possibly know when something is going to incriminate us and the State is not above scapegoating individuals or coercing them into submission. James Duane, a professor at Regent Law School and former defense attorney, notes:
Estimates of the current size of the body of federal criminal law vary. It has been reported that the Congressional Research Service cannot even count the current number of federal crimes. These laws are scattered in over 50 titles of the United States Code, encompassing roughly 27,000 pages. Worse yet, the statutory code sections often incorporate, by reference, the provisions and sanctions of administrative regulations promulgated by various regulatory agencies under congressional authorization. Estimates of how many such regulations exist are even less well settled, but the ABA thinks there are ”nearly 10,000.”
The complexity of modern federal criminal law, codified in several thousand sections of the United States Code and the virtually infinite variety of factual circumstances that might trigger an investigation into a possible violation of the law, make it difficult for anyone to know, in advance, just when a particular set of statements might later appear (to a prosecutor) to be relevant to some such investigation.
Not just the State, but anyone could draw suspicion against you if they had the right information with the right circumstances. We are entitled to our privacy, and these institutions must be held to account.
Reblogging because the links in the bulleted list were broken, as someone brought to my attention.
This is why we criticize boomercons for (rightfully) being outraged about Chinese spyware but turning a blind eye to the US surveillance state out of some misguided and naive sense of nationalism.
Brian David Gilbert has announced today is his last day at Polygon. Wishing him all the best for wherever life takes him next.
Tis the season we retell the story of threatening a rich man with his own death in order to get him to pay his employees livable wages and not horde money.
Never lose the holiday spirit.
sadly it only works when such people have things like ‘shame’ and ‘guilt’
thats the thing though - the whole point of the story is about MAKING scrooge gain these.
the ghosts use psychological warfare to terrify an old white man into sharing his money and i think thats what christmas should be about actually
Do you guys think they were drawing porn of a humanized black plague girl hundreds of years ago, or is corona chan a new occurance
THEY ABSOLUTELY DID HOWEVER CONTEMPORARY ART DEPICTED THE PLAGUE AS EITHER THE ANGEL OF DEATH OR APOLLO SO WHILE IT WASNT AN ANIME TITTY GIRL IT WAS A TWUNK HOLDING A SNAKE
