There’s a Dr. Who-themed bar in Portland because obviously there is. I’ve been in there a few times, I know a bartender. It’s a weird crowd split between British expats (place started off as a Brit-run fish and chips shop), geeks, and black guys from the neighborhood in to play pool with their fat white girlfriends.

The whole thing’s a little ridiculous but the only part that really bugs me is they’ve got the bathroom doors made up to look like the canonical police box-styled TARDIS door, including the “Pull to Open” sign even though they’re push to open.

Like, The Big Bang Theory is a ridiculous caricature of nerds, and a far outdated one at that, right? That’s not how anyone is.

EXCEPT, every time I go down to The Standard lately, I run across this socially awkward really-hot-in-a-mousy-way girl with a braying laugh/chubby guy with an aspirated voice pair talking and making jokes about science and math and comic books. It’s fucking *unreal*.

old-ass-mall-photos:

less “dungeons and dragons”, more “stores and corridors”, please

Advanced Mall Madness

I see it going around like “OMG, did u kno Sasha Grey was in an abusive relationship before she got into porn!?”

And like obviously. Not like “obviously, cuz she was a sex worker”, but like, obviously, “being abused by men” was her specialty and she was really good at it. Of course she had practice.

seriously though, I don’t think I know anyone who dated before leaving high school who hadn’t been in an abusive relationship by 18

(the only question is which role they were)

neilcicierega:

80s Computers: TERRIFYING CUBES EMERGING FROM THE VOID OF SPACE. ENTER THE GRIDZONE.

90s Computers: Beige home appliances for the whole family. Put one in your study.

I like to dig through images from old computer ads and magazines. One odd observation I always make is how drastically they changed in just a couple years.

PC sales grew throughout the 80s as tools for offices and hobbyists. But come the 1990s, corporations noticed that growth was slowing down. So around that point they largely ditched the spooky sci-fi inspired imagery and starting doing what Apple had been doing for years: portraying PCs as warm & approachable, with a return to simplistic, Helmut Krone inspired advertising. The idea of the PC as a home necessity was solidified when Web and e-mail exploded in the mid-90s.
And it had good run. We’re in the “one phone and laptop per family member” phase now, and it doesn’t really need to be advertised anymore because it’s part of culture itself.

So many videogames lately about protecting a child - The Last of Us, The Walking Dead, Dead Rising 2, &ct.

And critics are like “see, the computer generation is growing up, and starting families, and suddenly the parent/child relationship is critically resonant to them!”

Question being, is that the same reason the porn tube sites are suddenly full of incest-themed shit?

Jaimes Aitken, 18th century British homegrown terrorist, radicalized on a trip to America

An “official pop album” “inspired by the late ‘80s”. Eeehhhhhhhhhh, we’ll see.

On the plus side, if I turn out to hate it, I’ve got the “Y Kant Taylor Read” joke queued up already.

This is absolutely true. Back before the (mostly German) petrochemical/pharmaceutical industries developed cost-efficient ways of processing hydrocarbons, guano was a major source of chemical stocks. 

Before the widespread employment of synthetic fertilizers (indirectly converting hydrocarbons to calories), guano was a major agricultural input and the ability to boost food production (and thus feed population, and thus raise armies) gave a significant advantage to powers which controlled it (and thus naval powers vs. land powers generally).

Also as a pretext, the Guano Islands Act allowed America to claim outposts that were vital for fueling/restocking purposes to extend naval power far enough to defend the Asian/Pacific possessions inherited from victory in the Spanish-American War.

slatestarscratchpad:

From the Yale-Brown Obsessive Compulsive Scale, a test used by psychiatrists to help diagnose OCD:

I’m not sure I understand the last part of 32.

The only explanation I can think of - and I realize this is crazy - is that there are superstitious people who associate apostrophes with demons, because they denote possession.

That might be the best superstition ever.

Well, demons are just one idiom of possession, particular to a god-haunted world; not that different from alien/government mind control rays, the idiom for a technologically enchanted world.

(cf. the shift from mystical power sources in Golden Age comics and earlier pulp fiction to the scientific/extraterrestrial origin stories of the Silver Age)

The Monroe Doctrine is nominally an American guarantee of sovereignty to the independent nations of the Americas, but really from the get go it was a claim to hemispheric dominion (all “guarantees of sovereignty” basically are, true sovereignty guarantees itself) as the successor to Spain.

It was originally proclaimed in the context of the ultimately successful independence movements of Spain’s various continental possessions, as local elites took advantage of Spain’s Napoleonic-era vulnerability to carve out their own feifdoms.

This doctrine effectively claimed the Americas as part of the US economy and sphere of influence without the necessity of formal annexation (as direct integration of the Catholic, Hispanophone, feudal, indigenous and hybridized, cultures of South America into America was too big an ask for a United States that was still struggling to reconcile its own northern mercantile republicanism and southern extractive feudalism.)

The young empire of America got away with it mostly because it wasn’t worth the bother for anyone else to contest the claim - inland South and Central America were largely too malarial or, on the Pacific side, mountainous for intensive development; extractable or already extracted precious metals had largely been exported to Europe already (prompting inflation which reduced the value of further extraction); the railroad, steamship, and refrigeration infrastructure that would enable the later perishable fruit trade was yet to be developed.

archatlas:

Réflexions Faites Romain Trystram

rotatingfloor:

do you think any company mascots are just the fursona of the person who designed them

poison-liker:

a softer new world order

Random street bro just gave me a high five for using “needn’t’ve” while talking to myself.

“the Pure Moods generation”

One of these days, you turncoat fucks will be done with your mason jar snow globes and spice planters, and you’ll move on to vintage soda bottles or pewter beer steins or whatever other trendy container gets you rock hard for a while. But until you do, we’ll just go right on fisting porn stars five at a time on the 160th floor of the Burj Khalifa—put a picture of that on your little Pinterest page under “Cute Wedding Ideas.”