pinballforever:

tron-a-thon:

So, I got to play the WHOA NELLIE! BIG JUICY MELONS pinball table and it left me with mixed feelings.

The distressed-wood cabinet is actually lovely, both visually and tactilely. The game itself is a throwback to the old electromechanical pinball tables - no ramps or additional playfields here. The art is lively, well-executed, and bursting with vivid color, and really fucking stupid. Same with the sound design - abundant and executed with care, but all the vocal bits I heard were unfunny variations on “BOOBS LOL”.

Was it fun? It was OK. Didn’t remotely come close to any of the other super-new tables at the Midwest Gaming Classic - I got to play THE BIG LEBOWSKI, AMERICA’S MOST HAUNTED, and THE HOBBIT - or, honestly, most of the older tables (it was hard to not buy the SPANISH EYES table one guy was selling, but I don’t have a place for it right now).

My understanding is that this machine will be selling for around $6K. For $6K you can get a hell of a lot better pinball table, and it probably won’t have the wince-inducing, backward, sexist imagery of WHOA NELLIE!. Hopefully the next time Stern makes a table without a licensed theme, it’ll be something I don’t feel embarrassed playing, not just for myself but for the hobby and industry as a whole.

(So, nerkles informs me the design is from Whiz Bang Pinball, and Stern’s just manufacturing it)

Stern getting a black eye over this machine and it doesn’t matter that they didn’t design it. My guess is 90-95% of sales will go directly to the collector market. Nobody in their right mind would display this in public for commercial use unless the venue was a strip club or XXX bookstore.

As far as hubba-hubba-ha-ha it doesn’t strike me as far off from Scared Stiff, honestly. (Also, I live in Portland, so strip clubs and sex shops seem like reasonable locations for a table.)

That said you’re right about it being a collector table, between the theme and the old-school styling. But that’s just why I think it’s a clever move for Stern to pick up and distribute it - they can use otherwise idle production capacity without cannibalizing sales from their 2-a-year operator market, while building a relationship with Whiz Bang that might see them becoming a designer stable and “imprint” for neo-retro tables (like how Buell was Harley-Davidson’s imprint for streetbike styling, say).

Stern’s clearly trying to figure out how to balance collector and operator markets, I think that’s why they alternate themes between midlife crisis brands (Harley, Mustang, Metallica, AC/DC) and brands with high youth recognition (superhero movies, WWE, Walking Dead).

I think this fits the strategy, I suspect the kind of guy who wants retro style but would rather shell out 6k than learn to fix a $500 EM won’t be put off by the theme. I mean, have you seen the Pinside forums?

They’ve been trying to put a movie together for years but I’d rather see Adult Swim or one of the premium cable channels make a Sandman animated series.

drethelin:

kontextmaschine:

They’ve been trying to put a movie together for years but I’d rather see Adult Swim or one of the premium cable channels make a Sandman animated series.

Maybe you could convince SyFy, they made a pilot for The Amazing screw-on-head

Actually maybe better an anthology series of the old Vertigo titles, say 4-episode arcs for Sandman, Preacher, Transmet, and 100 Bullets, if any of them hit it’s treated as a backdoor pilot and spun off

drethelin:

kontextmaschine:

drethelin:

kontextmaschine:

They’ve been trying to put a movie together for years but I’d rather see Adult Swim or one of the premium cable channels make a Sandman animated series.

Maybe you could convince SyFy, they made a pilot for The Amazing screw-on-head

Actually maybe better an anthology series of the old Vertigo titles, say 4-episode arcs for Sandman, Preacher, Transmet, and 100 Bullets, if any of them hit it’s treated as a backdoor pilot and spun off

it worked for Cartoon Cartoons!

peashooter85:

The most creepiest thing about working in a hospital is when mere seconds after a patient codes and time of death is called, “lullaby” is softly played over the intercom announcing that a new baby was just born in the maternity ward.

theverge:

One giant map featuring every road in America:

This map, featuring every road in the United States of America, assembled by Reddit user WestCoastBestCoast94, looks like a cartographer’s dream come true. It doesn’t take an expert to glean information from the map, like the location of major cities — dark, tight webs — and mountains — long, thin stretches of white. 

countersignal:

theverge:

One giant map featuring every road in America:

This map, featuring every road in the United States of America, assembled by Reddit user WestCoastBestCoast94, looks like a cartographer’s dream come true. It doesn’t take an expert to glean information from the map, like the location of major cities — dark, tight webs — and mountains — long, thin stretches of white. 

there’s no map that the etc etc etc etc, but the bit around it going down into georgia usually doesn’t

Home.

Home was BAMA, the Sprawl, the Boston-Atlanta Metropolitan Axis.

Program a map to display frequency of data exchange, every thousand megabytes a single pixel on a very large screen. Manhattan and Atlanta burn solid white. Then they start to pulse, the rate of traffic threatening to overload your simulation. Your map is about to go nova. Cool it down. Up your scale. Each pixel a million megabytes. At a hundred million megabytes per second, you begin to make out certain blocks in midtown Manhattan, outlines of hundred-year-old industrial parks ringing the old core of Atlanta…

William Gibson, Neuromancer

jakke:

Why not go for someone outside the Senate? Senators already hold high-profile positions that they need enormously expensive campaigns to maintain, so they’re honestly not the most realistic long-shot progressive primary opponents. Also, they are overwhelmingly elderly white millionaires with backstories of moving from one position of power and influence to another, which is not super inspiring.

There are like a dozen House members who seem great with the media and reliably on the liberal progessive end of the Democratic caucus and not really in danger of losing their seats - Raúl Grijalva, Mike Honda, and Barbara Lee are probaby the highest profile, but there are a bunch of others. If you want someone who’s held high office (and enacted left-leaning policy) out of Congress, Julian Castro and Hilda Solis seem happy to show up in the media whenever possible. A draft of Elizabeth Warren is absolutely not going to happen, but that’s okay since she’s not the only politician you probably agree with more than Hillary Clinton.

No way could Hilda Solis survive the media attention, she’s too tied into Gil Cedillo’s skeevy-ass Latino Legislative Caucus machine, which dominates the rotten boroughs east of downtown LA (either engineered as refuges for commerce and industry, like Commerce and Industry, or with few enough citizens that elections are won with liquor-filled limo GOTV ops [which is actually pretty in keeping with tradition - Election Day used to be a drinking holiday like St. Paddy’s, NYE, and Purim])

Seriously, start by asking why all the Solis siblings have suspiciously remunerative public jobs and contracts, move on to the way figures associated with her funded the machine by widespread seizures and auctions of cars from (majority) illegal immigrants and then talked a big game about amnesty/sanctuary cities to try to lay down a smokescreen.

countersignal:

kontextmaschine:

countersignal:

theverge:

One giant map featuring every road in America:

This map, featuring every road in the United States of America, assembled by Reddit user WestCoastBestCoast94, looks like a cartographer’s dream come true. It doesn’t take an expert to glean information from the map, like the location of major cities — dark, tight webs — and mountains — long, thin stretches of white. 

there’s no map that the etc etc etc etc, but the bit around it going down into georgia usually doesn’t

Home.

Home was BAMA, the Sprawl, the Boston-Atlanta Metropolitan Axis.

Program a map to display frequency of data exchange, every thousand megabytes a single pixel on a very large screen. Manhattan and Atlanta burn solid white. Then they start to pulse, the rate of traffic threatening to overload your simulation. Your map is about to go nova. Cool it down. Up your scale. Each pixel a million megabytes. At a hundred million megabytes per second, you begin to make out certain blocks in midtown Manhattan, outlines of hundred-year-old industrial parks ringing the old core of Atlanta…

William Gibson, Neuromancer

I’ve always figured that the Eastern Corridor ends in DC (maybe Richmond, but no one lives in Richmond), but it wouldn’t surprise me if everyone south of NYC thinks they’re on the southern end of it. (People who live in Boston, if that’s all true, would think it ends in NYC.)

Do people in the Research Triangle think the corridor goes all the way to NC? Do people in Atlanta think it extends down there? Do people in Philadelphia or NYC think it ends with them?

From personal experience Philly doesn’t think it’s the terminus, ‘cause AMTRAK keeps going down to DC.

Atlanta’s iffy, and you could almost make an argument that as spurs go Miami’s an equal, but between the “capital of black America” thing and all the Turner infrastructure it’s really the furthest west city that can really project cultural power until you hit the Pacific coast. (Maybe Vegas. Chicago and Houston somehow fell off a cultural cliff in 1996.)

huh

this is good.

germanpostwarmodern:

Palazzo Giudiziario (1967-71) in Macerata, Italy, by Alfredo Lambertucci

historicaltimes:

Soldiers demonstrate their flamethrowers at the New Orleans Army War Show, 1942

via reddit

While individuals get our empathy and sympathy, institutions seldom do. The “we’re in this together” spirit of films from the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s later gave way to a reflex shared by left and right, that villainy is associated with organization. Even when they aren’t portrayed as evil, bureaucrats are stupid and public officials short-sighted. Only the clever bravado of a solitary hero (or at most a small team) will make a difference in resolving the grand crisis at hand.

This rule of contemporary storytelling is so nearly universal that it has escaped much comment — because you never notice propaganda that you already agree with. In other words, the reflex is self-reinforcing. A left-leaning director may portray villainous oligarchs or corporations while another film-maker rails against government cabals. But while screaming at each other over which direction Big Brother may be coming from, they never seem to notice their common heritage and instinct — Suspicion of Authority (SOA) — much in the way fish seldom comment on the existence of water.

Indeed, one of the great ironies is that we all suckled SOA from every film and comic book and novel that we loved… and yet, we tend to assume that we invented it. That only we and a few others share this deep-seated worry about authority. That our neighbors got their opinions from reflexive, sheeplike obedience to propaganda. But we attained ours through logical appraisal of the evidence.

No, you did not invent Suspicion of Authority. You were raised by it.

pureamericanism:

Come my tan-faced children,

Follow well in order, get your weapons ready,
Have you your pistols? have you your sharp-edged axes?
Pioneers! O pioneers!

For we cannot tarry here,
We must march my darlings, we must bear the brunt of danger,
We the youthful sinewy races, all the rest on us depend,
Pioneers! O pioneers!

O you youths, Western youths,
So impatient, full of action, full of manly pride and friendship,
Plain I see you Western youths, see you tramping with the foremost,
Pioneers! O pioneers!

Have the elder races halted?
Do they droop and end their lesson, wearied over there beyond the seas?
We take up the task eternal, and the burden and the lesson,
Pioneers! O pioneers!

All the past we leave behind,
We debouch upon a newer mightier world, varied world,
Fresh and strong the world we seize, world of labor and the march,
Pioneers! O pioneers!

We detachments steady throwing,
Down the edges, through the passes, up the mountains steep,
Conquering, holding, daring, venturing as we go the unknown ways,
Pioneers! O pioneers!

We primeval forests felling,
We the rivers stemming, vexing we and piercing deep the mines within,
We the surface broad surveying, we the virgin soil upheaving,
Pioneers! O pioneers!

Colorado men are we,
From the peaks gigantic, from the great sierras and the high plateaus,
From the mine and from the gully, from the hunting trail we come,
Pioneers! O pioneers!

From Nebraska, from Arkansas,
Central inland race are we, from Missouri, with the continental blood intervein’d,
All the hands of comrades clasping, all the Southern, all the Northern,
Pioneers! O pioneers!

O resistless restless race!
O beloved race in all! O my breast aches with tender love for all!
O I mourn and yet exult, I am rapt with love for all,
Pioneers! O pioneers!

Raise the mighty mother mistress,
Waving high the delicate mistress, over all the starry mistress, (bend your heads all,)
Raise the fang’d and warlike mistress, stern, impassive, weapon’d mistress,
Pioneers! O pioneers!

See my children, resolute children,
By those swarms upon our rear we must never yield or falter,
Ages back in ghostly millions frowning there behind us urging,
Pioneers! O pioneers!

On and on the compact ranks,
With accessions ever waiting, with the places of the dead quickly fill’d,
Through the battle, through defeat, moving yet and never stopping,
Pioneers! O pioneers!

O to die advancing on!
Are there some of us to droop and die? has the hour come?
Then upon the march we fittest die, soon and sure the gap is fill’d.
Pioneers! O pioneers!

All the pulses of the world,
Falling in they beat for us, with the Western movement beat,
Holding single or together, steady moving to the front, all for us,
Pioneers! O pioneers!

Life’s involv’d and varied pageants,
All the forms and shows, all the workmen at their work,
All the seamen and the landsmen, all the masters with their slaves,
Pioneers! O pioneers!

All the hapless silent lovers,
All the prisoners in the prisons, all the righteous and the wicked,
All the joyous, all the sorrowing, all the living, all the dying,
Pioneers! O pioneers!

I too with my soul and body,
We, a curious trio, picking, wandering on our way,
Through these shores amid the shadows, with the apparitions pressing,
Pioneers! O pioneers!

Lo, the darting bowling orb!
Lo, the brother orbs around, all the clustering suns and planets,
All the dazzling days, all the mystic nights with dreams,
Pioneers! O pioneers!

These are of us, they are with us,
All for primal needed work, while the followers there in embryo wait behind,
We to-day’s procession heading, we the route for travel clearing,
Pioneers! O pioneers!

O you daughters of the West!
O you young and elder daughters! O you mothers and you wives!
Never must you be divided, in our ranks you move united,
Pioneers! O pioneers!

Minstrels latent on the prairies!
(Shrouded bards of other lands, you may rest, you have done your work,)
Soon I hear you coming warbling, soon you rise and tramp amid us,
Pioneers! O pioneers!

Not for delectations sweet,
Not the cushion and the slipper, not the peaceful and the studious,
Not the riches safe and palling, not for us the tame enjoyment,
Pioneers! O pioneers!

Do the feasters gluttonous feast?
Do the corpulent sleepers sleep? have they lock’d and bolted doors?
Still be ours the diet hard, and the blanket on the ground,
Pioneers! O pioneers!

Has the night descended?
Was the road of late so toilsome? did we stop discouraged nodding on our way?
Yet a passing hour I yield you in your tracks to pause oblivious,
Pioneers! O pioneers!

Till with sound of trumpet,
Far, far off the daybreak call—hark! how loud and clear I hear it wind,
Swift! to the head of the army!–swift! spring to your places,
Pioneers! O pioneers!

–Walt Whitman

brucesterling:

*Europe mapped in geotagged Twitter tweets.  Surprising how often people tweet from ships.

https://www.flickr.com/photos/twitteroffice/8798022019/in/set-72157633647745984

My earliest memory of Earth Day was from the earnest ‘80s, my mother took little me to a fair (it might have been the fairgrounds from the Dublin Fire Carnival but I was maaaybe 6 and everything was mysterious)

Anyway there were big white tents, big enough that there were multiple kiosks within each. One of the kiosks I dunno who ran (this was PA so my guess is Quakers or at least Mennonites) but it was a basketball throw, you’d donate your dollar and get X throws to get a hoop.

And the prize? OK, there were these big glass tubes filled with glass beads, representing USG spending, big full red ones for military spending and almost-empty green ones for social spending - big full “M-X Missile”, meager “rent assistance”, etc.

And the prize was you got to move one bead of spending as you wished, the idea being at the end of the day the tubes would illustrate the budget the people really wanted. This was the first place I encountered the bumper sticker about the Pentagon hosting a bake sale.

Anyway I didn’t make a single shot because I was like 5 but the nice lady faked it for me. As my reward, I moved a bead from “AIDS treatment” to “the Seawolf-class attack submarine”, because I’ve always been like this.

minutemanworld:

thegentlemanscloset:

minutemanworld:

This is very cool. It’s a quilled bag made by Shawnee depicting a Continental Army soldier fighting a redcoat. Made circa 1780. The Shawnee sided with the French during the French & Indian War, and afterwards there was a series of conflicts between the Shawnee and the colonies. In 1774 Virginians fought the Shawnee in what would become known as Lord Dunmore’s War (Dunmore was the governor of Virginia).

During the Revolution some Shawnee sided with the British while others remained neutral.

There’s an Ojibwa made coat (dating to roughly the same time period) that is done in Ojibwa materials, but is cut in the European style. 

Two items a trend does not make, but I do find this merging of culture and fashion very interesting.

Actually, taking a closer look at that bag makes me think that the 1780s dating of it is wrong. I’m certainly not very knowledgeable on Indian clothing styles, but the uniforms depicted in the artwork of the bag make this more likely to be early 19th century than late 18th century. Perhaps War of 1812?