What’s more awesome: that a book called Crabs: The Human Sacrifice exist, or that it’s part of a series involving the plots and villainy of sentient crabs?
No, seriously. These are real.
As noted by one of the Tumblr commenters, I really, really want to know what sort of childhood beach trauma lies at the root of the author’s crab fear.
The House has passed a bill that prohibits scientists from advising the EPA.
Given how thoroughly Lucas destroyed Star Wars with the absurdly bad prequels PLUS the fact that Abrams is objectively terrible when it comes to continuity, I’m shocked at how many people are excited about the new teaser trailer. There’s basically zero chance this film isn’t garbage.
Glad you asked. Go read this and be enlightened. It includes a minimum of background about how credit cards are processed today, and why Apple Pay is different, but the real money shot is this:
Credit card security falls down because every merchant gets a copy of your credit card number, but virtually none of them really safeguard that information, so you end up with situations like the Target breach. With Apple Pay, the merchant never has your credit card number at all.
Now, some merchants are up in arms about Apple Pay because the card number isn’t the only info they don’t get — in fact, they get just about nothing, because Apple Pay doesn’t have to leak any of that demographic information at point of sale. This is a feature, not a bug, but some merchants (Rite Aid, for example) don’t see it this way because they want to use the demo data to market to you, or to sell to advertisers as an alternate revenue stream, or whatever. That’s not your problem, though.
For a consumer, Apple Pay is a slam dunk good idea. Embrace it if you can, or whenever you get a device that supports it.
(Via DaringFireball.)
At the holidays, it’s nice to see businesses stepping up for the less fortunate — say, having a canned food drive, for example.
What’s less nice is when it turns out that the business in question is organizing a food drive for their own employees because they pay them so little that it’s necessary.
Fuck Wal-Mart.
JWZ details his work on a particularly excellent screen saver module; it draws pictures of “gear spheres” like this:
The math involved is, apparently, delightful.
W. Kamau Bell in Vanity Fair: “On Being a Black Male, Six Feet Four Inches Tall, in America in 2014“
Via BoingBoing, I call your attention to the absolute TREASURE of mid-70s kitsch that is the 1976 Paul Lynde Halloween Special.
With a special appearance by KISS.
No, I am not kidding.
Now that it’s legal and all, some YouTube types recruited three grandmothers to try weed, and filmed the results, and it’s completely adorable.
Yes, I’m in the hospital. I’ll probably go home tomorrow (Monday).
I took an unfeasibly hard fall on my bike on Thursday night.
Riding in a group, the person in front of me lost control. In an effort to avoid hitting her, I went down myself. In efforts to avoid hitting me and the first person, several other people also went down.
I took the full force of the fall on my hip joint, which was apparently enough to break it. No one else, to my knowledge, required medical help, but I was a bit out of it at the time from the pain (I didn’t hit my head at all, though).
Yes, this is precisely as unpleasant as it sounds.
Yes, the bike is fine.
In this one event, I started down a path wherein I achieved many personal firsts: first bike fall, first broken bone ever, first ambulance ride, first oxygen cannula, first IV, first experience with opiods, first actual hospital stay, first CAT scan, etc.
Oh, and first surgery. You can’t just put a cast on this, so they patched me up with a plate and some pins.
No, it is not clear if I’m going to be setting off metal detectors going forward. I should probably ask about that. My bet is yes.
All things considered, I’m doing fine. Despite the pain of the initial injury, there’s nothing like being in the ER around people with actually no-shit life threatening problems to put your plight in perspective. Plus, most of you people are on Facebook and have been commenting and messaging me with all manner of support, so I’ll repeat what I said there: I’m a lucky, lucky man to have you all in my corner.
The gay-hatin’ National Organization for Marriage is drowning in debt after their donations dropped by half from 2012 to 2013.
An between 2012 and 2013, NOM saw a staggering 50 percent drop in donations. The group raised $5.1 million in 2013, and two donors accounted for more than half the money raised by the group, according to HRC.
Emphasis added. That’s some grassroots org you’ve got there, bigots.
Longtime Heathen watchers will recall that Mrs Heathen and I take an annual rejuvenating nerd cruise with Royal Caribbean every winter. Each time has been aboard one of RCI’s Freedom class ships, which are sort of amazing and shocking in their size and scope — 154,000 gross tons and 339 meters long. To put this in context, a Nimitz class supercarrier is “only” about 333 meters long, and has a lower displacement, and they land planes on it. Regularly, apparently. At one point, these boats were the biggest cruise ships afloat, but that’s no longer true.
Because, I guess, they thought bigger was always better, RCI eclipsed this class in 2009 with the Oasis class, at over 225,000 gross tons and 360 meters long. Given the sheer size and scope of the ships we’ve been on, I find that hard to wrap my head around, but there it is.
Perhaps because of issues of gravity or fear of hubris or something, though, RCI’s absolute newest ship is actually smaller. The Quantum of the Seas isn’t bigger than the Oasis boats, but it’s materially more advanced in every other way. Gizmodo writer Adam Estes took a ride on one and wrote about it. If you ignore his utter lack of fact checking re: the boat’s size, it’s a fun read. (He states it’s the third largest ship in the world, but a host of tankers and transport ships dwarf it; it is, however, the third biggest cruise ship in the world, behind the two Oasis boats that preceded it; the Freedom boats are in 5th place.)
Please join us in wishing The Glenbrook Valley Heathen Extension Office a delightful OCHO.
(File photo.)
This piece is very, very spot on, and it makes clear something I’ve been trying to articulate for years: People like Mitch McConnell are not Americans. They are Republicans, concerned first and foremost with the good of their party, not the nation, and certainly not those whom they purport to represent.
Edit: Messages like this one from the National Review just make this point even clearer: don’t do things; people will start to expect that. Keep your eyes on 2016.
I mean, seriously. WTF?
Phil Noto will hit you right where you live. Seriously, make time.