“I don’t mean it tastes like a candle smells. I mean it tastes like a candle tastes. Don’t ask me how I know that.”
John Oliver Has Some Words For The Pumpkin Spice Drinkers
Category: The News From Around The World
Have You Tickled Your Camel Today?
Kittens and puppies always get the majority of attention for how cute and adorable they are, but have you ever tickled a camel before? The results may surprise you!
FlexSense looks super cool!
FlexSense is a thin-film, transparent sensing surface that is being developed by Microsoft. The video below shows off just a few of the many uses for this amazing material! It’s only a matter of time before this hits the market, and I can’t wait to get my hands on it!
No Kidding: Opposition Researchers Are Now Shopping Research About Each Other
WASHINGTON — The watchers are being watched.
For decades, opposition researchers have gone to great lengths to keep their names out of the public consciousness, preferring to let the fruits of their efforts — the location of a candidate’s primary residence, a gaffe caught by a tracker’s camera, a long-forgotten college prank — be the story.
But as some oppo research firms have increasingly come out of the shadows, they’ve suddenly turned their skills not on candidates of the opposite party — but each other.
Case in point: within hours of each other earlier this week Democrats and Republicans sent BuzzFeed News opposition research materials not about candidates, but literally about two opposition research firms: Democratic American Bridge and the Republican America Rising.
Opposition research can do real damage, and the two firms have produced that this cycle. A clip Rising uncovered of Iowa Democratic Senate candidate Bruce Braley dismissing a Republican senator as “a farmer from Iowa who never went to law school,” has dogged him for months.
Read more here No Kidding: Opposition Researchers Are Now Shopping Research About Each Other
R.I.P. Saturday Morning Cartoons
Saturday morning American broadcast TV was once animation’s home field. Filling a cereal bowl with artificially colored sugar pebbles and staring at the tube was every kid’s weekend plan. Not any more: For the first time in 50-plus years, you won’t find any animation on broadcast this morning. It’s the end of an era.
Yes, The CW, the final holdout in Saturday morning animation, ran its last batch of Vortexx cartoons last weekend. This week, where you once saw shows like Cubix, Sonic X, Dragon Ball Z and Kai, Digimon Fusion, and Yu-Gi-Oh!, you’ll instead find “One Magnificent Morning,” a block of live-action educational programming.
It’s the end of an era, but it’s been a long time coming: NBC ditched Saturday morning cartoons in 1992, CBS followed suit not long after, and ABC lost its animated weekend mornings in 2004. The CW, a lower-tier broadcast network, was the last holdout in a game that the Big 3 left long ago.
What killed Saturday morning cartoons? Cable, streaming, and the FCC. In the 1990s, the FCC began more strictly enforcing its rule requiring broadcast networks to provide a minimum of three hours of “educational” programming every week. Networks afraid of messing with their prime-time slots found it easiest to cram this required programming in the weekend morning slot. The actual educational content of this live-action programming is sometimes debatable, but it meets the letter of the law.
Read more here This Is the First Weekend in America With No Saturday Morning Cartoons
Us vs. Them: What’s Wrong With You People?
#ouchy #yolo
Internet, we need to talk. In a nuanced, thoughtful, intelligent way. I don’t want this to turn into some kind of knee-jerk confrontation. But it will, won’t it? You’ll end up citing the Nazis while frothing at the mouth, won’t you? That’s what you do. Every. Single. Time. What’s wrong with you, Internet? Why can’t we just agree to disagree? By which I mean, of course, agree that you’re an idiot.
There’s incensed Internet drama everywhere I look these days. Journalism drama. Publishing drama. GamerGate. Oh, GamerGate. I’ve tried to make sense of you, I really have, but every attempt drives me back to the immortal words of Cracked:
“Gentlemen,” we said amid the stunned silence, “do you realize that if what they’re saying is true, then this is still the most pointless fucking bullshit anyone has ever forced us to read?”
I love you, Internet, but sometimes it seems like you’re mostly an outrage factory. A hate-inducing tweet or blog post appears, and everyone in its target audience attacks like a school of piranha, erupting into vituperative geysers of rage and scorn — usually without ever clicking through to the primary sources, which often tell a rather more nuanced tale.
Read more here Us vs. Them: What’s Wrong With You People?