Second highest was this at 105 (+109/-4)

Meanwhile this has the most notes of any of my tumblr posts, at 51. I specifically chose the word “bloke” to make it more nerdbaity.

I’ve actually been hearing about a *lot* of property crimes, and even street robberies lately in Portland.

(that’s over and above the usual bike and, interestingly, musical instrument thefts - I’ve *always* heard of bands getting their vans broken into outside venues)

supersmashthestatebros:

the Founding Fathers would be spinning in their graves if I hadn’t been banned from all “historically significant burial grounds” for “doing kickflips with the coffins”

unliking someone in meatspace because their new tattoos look terrible

One high-growth post-type in 2015: “You’re Right, But For Even Better Reasons Than You Think.”

Like I’ve said, The Awl is kind of the mid-late 2000s Gawker aged in place. Before it was a whole media conglomerate, or the predecessor of BuzzFeed, or whatever it is now, Gawker was a New York-focused gossip tabloid for people capable of comprehending nested clauses that split its focus between actual celebrities and the local media industry. Star magazine meets the New York Observer, I guess.

But since it was the 2000s internet it was really about itself all along, and thus was always gossiping and analyzing about itself (and so on, recursively - see the Julia Allison “microcelebrity” thing, an experiment in closed-media-cycle ecology whereby you create a viable subject of gossip and media analysis by virtue of producing enough gossip and media analysis about the gossip and media analysis you’re producing about the fact that you’re creating her as a viable subject).

Well anyway what my point is taking that and letting it run for a decade or so while the parent organism continues to mutate under its own pressures (thus creating new source material to feed the maw), they’re pretty worth listening to on the subject of internet media.

The Random Darknet Shopper, an automated online shopping bot with a budget of $100 a week in Bitcoin, is programmed to do a very specific task: go to one particular marketplace on the Deep Web and make one random purchase a week with the provided allowance. The purchases have all been compiled for an art show in Zurich, Switzerland titled The Darknet: From Memes to Onionland, which runs through January 11.

The concept would be all gravy if not for one thing: the programmers came home one day to find a shipment of 10 ecstasy pills, followed by an apparently very legit falsified Hungarian passport– developments which have left some observers of the bot’s blog a little uneasy.

If this bot was shipping to the U.S., asks Forbes contributor and University of Washington law professor contributor Ryan Calo, who would be legally responsible for purchasing the goodies? The coders? Or the bot itself?

fuckyeahplattenbau:

Kodinsk, Krasnoyarsk Krai, Siberia by Platon Terentyev

me: *rips open envelope*
me: and the first meme of 2015 is... neon genesis evangelion!
me: congratulations!
all my followers: congratulations!
everyone in the audience: congratulations!
congratulations: congratulations!

pictured: craigslist

rikerist:

foxycum:

rikerist:

friday night

I’m so fucked up what is this

Episode 30 “Friday Night” July 14, 1993

Beavis and Butt-head hang out at Maxi-Mart in an attempt to pick up chicks and meet a biker chick who uses them to shoplift.

---

Featured videos:

• Gerardo Mejía – “Rico Suave”
• Bow Wow Wow – “I Want Candy”
• Gruntruck – “Crazy Love”
• Color Me Badd – “I Want to Sex You Up”
• Terence Trent D’Arby – “She Kissed Me”

sw0rdk1ng:

concepthuman:

peashooter85:

Henry VIII’s bizarre mace pistol,

A very bizarre weapon, this is a mace with three pistol barrels located in the mace head.  A matchlock firearm, it was discharged by touching a burning slow match to a touch hole.  Most interestingly one was owned by Henry VIII King of England, who would carry it while walking the streets of London at night.  He did this to check that his constables were doing their duty.  One night they were, and he was arrested and jailed for suspicious activities, as he was carrying a huge mace gun on him at the time.  When his identity was revealed, the constables feared they would be executed, the fate of most of Henry’s wives.  However they were rewarded with a stipend of 23 pounds for their vigilance.

Henry VIII’s mace is currently a part of the Royal Armouries Collection

What the fuck

ok but did it work

close enough.

mapsontheweb:

Portland portrait as a GTA V map.

via reddit

Read More

…yeah, okay.

Went to an open house off Division today, because of course I did, because I am the cancer destroying Portland. Would be a nice place if only every single wall was somewhere else.

Hahaha, real estate!

Just started using those car2go clown cars, because I’m tired of riding drizzle season on a temperamental bike. I last had a car in Los Angeles several years ago, so it’s a sudden reimmersion into pop radio.

Here’s a nifty bit of trivia about one of the songs I was treated to today, Bryan Adams “Summer of ’69”: appearing on his album Reckless in November 5, 1984, the song’s release and it’s title period (counting from the day before the autunmal equinox) are 5,523 days apart, which is nearly *half* the 11,024 between its release and today. (The perfect point will be February 3rd.)

Further trivia: The song’s debut on Pop-up Video is also closer to its album release (4,715 days) than today (6,309)

iron-imperialist:

whitesupremacymemes:

rtrixie:

gh0st1764:

somesocialjusticebullshit:

whiskey-wolf:

And this is what happens when a masterfully crafted katana collides with a masterfully crafted longsword.

Suck it, katana

“But…but gloriously folded 1000 times Nippon steel, b-but” -

SUCK IT WEEABOOS

rtrixie

;_;7

Wait, why is this being tested edge on edge? Edge on side is more common.

It’s actually not. When i was learning sword, the first thing you learn is to catch the enemy’s blade with the edge of your own. When you catch with the flat, the angle costs your wrist a lot of strength. It’s all physics. Edge-on-edge actually is the appropriate way to parry. It nicks up your blade, yes, but better the blade than your body. 

True. The intensive smithing process that produces katanas is mostly about compensating for the shitty iron sources, in battle samurai were cavalry archers or maybe heavy cavalry that charged with polearms, the image of samurai as swordfighters and duelists (and poets, and brave facers-of-death) mostly comes from the Edo period, a time of peace when the warrior types tried to justify their social position through increasingly ridiculous romantic gestures.

Like, this is a pretty common pattern when an age of war ends, the warriors turning their energy to petty bullshit, seeing who can put together the most absurdly expensive/expensively absurd outfit, who can tell the best epic tale about how awesome they are and think up the cleverest way to throw poetic shade at each other, all starting feuds and killing each other over dumb teenage-boy honor shit.

Like, think about the French nobility at Versailles. Or wealthy Italian families after Condottieri stopped mattering in battle - that’s the setting of Romeo & Juliet, where the Montagues and Capulets are all throwing costume balls and walking around with swords and figuring out cute ways to double-entendre insult each other and killing and dying in the street and the real power lies with the Prince who is like “Oh my GOD you guys, stop it, you’re bothering the merchants.” That’s a lot closer to what samurai swordsmen were like.

Hell, think about the way the actual gang wars of the crack era to capture corners (that is, productive territory) gave way to gangsta rap, diss tracks, and silly bling.