Yours truly is on the latest episode of “Welcome to Geekdom” talking all about Spider-Man, Spider-Gwen, and all kinds of nerdy Spider-stuff.
Jason Tate returns to the podcast to talk about The Spectacular Spider-Man, Spider-Gwen, and Miles Morales. Comics covered include Spider-Gwen #1-5, Spider-Gwen #1-18, Spider-Man #1-15, Ultimate Comics Spider-Man #1-28, and Miles Morales: Ultimate Spider-Man #1-12.
Here’s the Overcast link if that’s your bag.
James Dale, writing for The New York Times:
The Mormon Church’s latest announcement suggests that this time has come. It would therefore be a good moment for the Boy Scouts of America to take the opportunity to end anti-gay discrimination within its organization, without exception. The Boy Scouts has debated this issue for so many years already, to which I bear witness from my own struggles to change scouting so that it would accept gay youth and leaders.
In 1990, the Boy Scouts expelled me for being gay. I was a 19-year-old assistant scoutmaster in the New Jersey troop where I earned my Eagle Scout badge. For the next decade, I fought my expulsion, challenging the anti-gay policy on the basis that it violated New Jersey’s law against discrimination, including sexual-orientation discrimination.
In 2000, my lawsuit ended up before the United States Supreme Court. The justices then held, by a 5-to-4 vote, that the Boy Scouts of America was exempt from the state law prohibiting discrimination based on sexual orientation because of the First Amendment. The court concluded that the Boy Scouts effectively had a legal right to exclude gay people because the organization viewed them as “immoral” and “unclean.”
The nation was recently rocked by retaliatory nuclear blasts that have turned much of America into a barren wasteland, decimating the population, triggering the rise of firestorms and supervolcanoes, and generally bringing civilization to the brink of collapse. Let’s take a look at the political fallout.
Perfect satire of the “politics as theatre” bullshit made popular by Chris Cillizza and the like.
After a trip to lego land in Denmark I noticed how even adults buy lego in vast quantities, and at prices that were considerably higher than what you might expect for what is essentially bulk ABS. Even second hand lego isn’t cheap at all, it is sold by the part on specialized websites, and by the set, the kilo or the tub on ebay.
After doing some minimal research I noticed that sets do roughly 40 euros / Kg and that bulk lego is about 10, rare parts and lego technic go for 100’s of euros per kg. So, there exists a cottage industry of people that buy lego in bulk, buy new sets and then part this all out or sort it (manually) into more desirable and thus more valuable groupings.
I figured this would be a fun thing to get in on and to build an automated sorter. Not thinking too hard I put in some bids on large lots of lego on the local ebay subsidiary and went to bed. The next morning I woke up to a rather large number of emails congratulating me on having won almost every bid (lesson 1: if you win almost all bids you are bidding too high). This was both good and bad. It was bad because it was probably too expensive and it was also bad because it was rather more than I expected. It was good because this provided enough motivation to overcome my natural inertia to actually go and build something.
Here at the Plum Line, we write a lot about the mechanics of politics — the processes of governing, the interplay of political forces, the back-and-forth between citizens and lawmakers, and so on. We do that because it’s interesting and because it winds up affecting all our lives. But there are moments when you have to set aside the mechanics and focus intently on the substance of what government does — or in this case, what government is trying to do.
I won’t mince words. The health-care bill that the House of Representatives passed this afternoon, in an incredibly narrow 217-to-213 vote, is not just wrong, or misguided, or problematic or foolish. It is an abomination. If there has been a piece of legislation in our lifetimes that boiled over with as much malice and indifference to human suffering, I can’t recall what it might have been. And every member of the House who voted for it must be held accountable.
I recently rediscovered my youth. It made me sneeze.
It lay unremembered at the top of a tall bookcase: 15 vintage Hardy Boys novels by Franklin W. Dixon. In getting them down I took a faceful of dust and beetle carapaces.
I carried the books to my favorite rocking chair, beside my favorite lamp, and reverently broke them open to revisit the literature that had inspired in me a lifelong love of language. The pages were as thick as a shirt collar and ochered with age. They smelled the way old books smell, faintly perfumed, quaintly mysterious, like the lining of Great-Grandma’s alligator handbag out in the steamer trunk. I began to read.
Pretty soon a new smell entered the room.
The Hardy Boys stank.
Zach Lowe, writing for ESPN:
Elam, a Mensa member, has devoted most of his spare time since 2004 to solving the slog of NBA crunch time. Oklahoma City’s win was remarkable to Elam because the Thunder’s deliberate fouling worked.
Elam has tracked thousands of NBA, college, and international games over the last four years and found basketball’s classic comeback tactic — intentional fouling — almost never results in successful comebacks. Elam found at least one deliberate crunch-time foul from trailing teams in 397 of 877 nationally televised NBA games from 2014 through the middle of this season, according to a PowerPoint presentation he has sent across the basketball world. The trailing team won zero of those games, according to Elam’s data.
I’m not convinced this idea doesn’t make most of the game kind of pointless, but it’s definitely outside of the box.
My mom found my first iPod. It doesn’t hold a charge anymore but it’s still got a good engraving.
Hannah got me a new robot friend for my birthday. She now lives next to the bar and we’re already bff.
A wallpaper series using shapes and lights. High resolution rendered using Cinema 4D, for your phone and desktop
A series of black wallpapers. These are right in my wheelhouse.
