Start yer engines, Sherlock is officially in the public domain.
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Jesus, first letter writer. Seriously?
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Awww, Tony Gwynn. RIP. Here’s a sweet/sad story about his relationship with his son that went up the day before.
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How to really get kids coding:
Put another way: Not every cook is a David Chang, not every writer is a Jane Austen, and not every computational thinker is a Guido van Rossum, the inventor of the influential Python programming language. But just as knowing how to scramble an egg or write an email makes life easier, so too will a grasp of computational thinking. Yet the “learn to code!” camp may have set people on the uphill path of mastering C++ syntax instead of encouraging all of us to think a little more computationally.
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Read this whole interview in Guernica:
When I grew up, in the 70s, everybody in my town shopped at the Kroger. Rich, poor, middle class, that was the only option, the only supermarket. Some people bought more meat or a better cut than others; some used a stack of coupons. But we all had the same options. And that contributed to a kind of shared taste. Whereas now, it’s much easier to use food to distinguish yourself. I’m not sure that’s a good thing.
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oh my gawwwd:
This is a remarkable ad. pic.twitter.com/18TQOVbwv5
— Daniel Kraus (@DanielDKraus) June 16, 2014
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Mychal Denzel Smith has a great short piece on masculinity, homophobia, and cutting the grass:
When I was fifteen or sixteen, my father asked me if I was gay. As is his way, he didn’t actually ask me. He made a statement intended to elicit a response which would answer the question he really meant to ask. We have issues with communication in my family.
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Rejected Utah license plates!
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Mallory and I have an unhealthy attachment to this music video and LP in general:
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Tags: feminism, link roundup, the internet
That letter writer at Prudie is amazingly self-involved to think that someone else not adopting a kid just like her own kid is somehow a slap in the face.
yeah, I mean…
“Their deliberate decision to not even consider a child with developmental delays was a slap in my face.”
I want to take her aside, buy her an Old Fashioned, and help her understand that “it’s not about you, boo”
I kind of love her in a special way that I reserve for people over the age of 6 that somehow manage to make everything about them all the time. Like, hang on lady, let me make some popcorn and then you just tell me EVERYTHING.
I work with a lady like this. I really wish I had popcorn for our interactions.
I have a friend who can be like this and it is FABULOUSLY fun sometimes.
Life’s been a lot less stressful since I stopped taking crazy people seriously.
Last year, I lived in a house with very thin walls, and on the fifth straight time playing that “Halo” video, the guy who lived next to me came in and was like,”You’ve been playing this song a lot,” and I said YES I KNOW BECAUSE IT IS PERFECT.
Ahhh I saw her live last summer at a music festival and she was so effing amazing!!! It was one of those particularly great concert experiences where lots of people were not familiar with her and we all just fell in love with her.
Why am I imagining a group of Mormon elders in a room, fanning themselves with horror at the idea of someone getting a license plate that says “tooter”? And why is this so funny to me?
There’s too much honking as it is, really.
Easily 60% of the answers to Dear Prudie letters could be “Guess what? Sometimes it’s not about *you.*”
PSA: Sherlock Season 3 was just added to Netflix!
everyone watch so we can talk about it soon!
oohhhmmmggg the Sign of Three is my favorite episode so far! Sherlock’s obsession with John’s wedding just gives me heart eyes every time.
The entire stag night scene–and the 20 questions game in particular–just slays me dead.
I don’t know how many times I’ve watched John beat Sherlock up in 3 different restaurants in Ep. 1, but it is Many. Many times.
My favorite scene from S3 was during their drunken investigation. “He’s cluing for looks.” I also loved all of the question marks and “sitty thing” when Sherlock was looking at the apartment.
Clearly the best part of anything ever.
I love me some Dear Prudie, but the column reached its apogee years ago with the twincest letter and now I’m disappointed every time I read it and there isn’t something equally scandalous. (This is apart from the disappointment I feel at how terrible the people in the letters are.)
I dunno Baby Police is still pretty good no matter how depraved the other writers can get.
God, that food article is amazing. I just want to quote enormous chunks of it but I will save it for this:
It obscures how damned hard it is to make a living as a farmer. And to feed yourself. When you go back and actually read histories of cooking and farming, the idea that most people today are going to go to the lengths that people went to one hundred years ago, before processed food started to take hold, is just absurd. It’s also the volatility, the unpredictability of life. I talk to farmers all the time, who say, “Yeah, I lost my whole crop in a freeze.” People have no concept of what it would be like to lose your whole tomato crop that you were planning on then canning and using for the winter. Those are the kinds of things—when you romanticize about the small farm, and DIY, and small-batch production—people don’t think about. Because it’s just in addition to what they were going to buy at Whole Foods, where they have everything.
Going to reread this for 10 hours straight please.
It’s a truly fantastic article. As someone who works adjacent to the food movement I’m constantly trying to remind people that NOT EVERYONE LIKES KALE and it’s OK.
I mean, I like to grow the odd herb and tomato or chilli plant, but am under no illusions that it’s anything more than a pleasant addition to the stuff I can get delivered to m door (I like to buy from a veg box company, cause I’m getting stuff direct from the farm)
I feel like there’s the bizarre romanticism for our pre-processing life. Which, yeah, some of it’s great. More variety of produce, etc, good things. But we processed for a reason, and living before that had whole communities who were subsistence farming, and who could starve to death in a bad year. The romanticism for this, just like the romanticism for all previous ages, comes from looking at the perfect result rather than the every day.
Yeah, and there’s so much blanket disdain for agricultural subsidies and monoculture, and I get why (and also I get that it’s a much more complex issue than I’m qualified to talk about) but at the same time– the reason we prop up corn and wheat like that is that back in the day food prices were wildly unpredictable, and farmers lived a really tough existence, and there were big questions about whether there would be enough to eat in this country. It doesn’t mean that the current system is working, but the idea that farm life was better when it was based on subsistence agriculture– you know, we have pictures of what that actually looked like: http://www.loc.gov/pictures/collection/fsa/
OMG THIS. I have had a backyard garden for five years running and the second year it was destroyed in a hailstorm. SO MUCH CHRISTMAS CAPONATA NOT GIVEN. It was a hangnail compared to the massive wound of a farmer’s crop loss, but it gave me a window into empathy.
Dude, yes. It takes ONE storm. ONE. For a lot of people it is hard to wrap their heads around the idea that it can be a farmer’s entire yearly crop, gone. Imagine if you worked really hard for several months on a big project, and then something totally out of the blue happened–like a meteorite falls on your laptop and all your work is gone–and there was no way for you to save it even though you hoped REALLY HARD that no meteorites would fall. And THEN your boss says “Welp, no work, no pay.”
THE END.
Yes, exactly. I take great pleasure in growing and canning my own things, or shopping at the Food Coop and picking up local things to can in season, but damn, I’m under NO illusions about the fragility of it and what a gift it actually is.
My father-in-law is a retired farmer, and he’s told me that he’s very thankful he got out of the business and his sons didn’t pursue it. And very thankful that he’s still alive. Farming is one of the most dangerous professions out there, and nobody realizes it.
I just started following Modern Farmer on Twitter, and there was a mention this week of an article on farming being one of the most dangerous professions. I had no idea.
I grew up knowing people who were missing body parts or otherwise disabled (luckily, not killed) in farm accidents. It is extremely common and when I moved to a city and heard people using “farm accidents” as a punchline it really bugged me. Rural-urban divide is deep.
Sometimes people are the worst.
There’s a great TAL bit about a turkey farmer who loses 3,000 turkeys in a lightning storm, and it’s the perfect illustration of this. http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/ep…
Yeah this article is insanely quotable. I love how honest the authors are; they’re mentioning a lot of the factors that foodies don’t like to talk about because none of those bloggers want to admit that “slow food” or whatever is a huge class issue.
Ugghh I know, it’s so good. I liked the point that the reason most people don’t eat highbrow foodie stuff isn’t that they’re ignorant or too poor– they’re just eating the food they like, that’s most convenient for them, and that asking people to change such a fundamental part of their lives in order to match a highly stylized, romantic view of how food should be will always come off as condescending.
Also, interesting to see how the health-food ideal runs up against the actual pressures of running a subsidized school lunch program.
YES. That idea that “people think we’re telling them to spend a bunch of money and time on food they don’t like” is extremely true. People like what they like. You can’t force them to eat differently, but you can encourage them to try stuff and maybe expand their horizons. I loved the parts about small changes – “it’s not sexy but it works.”
Another thing I’ve heard people mention is that until the past 10 years or so, if you tried to do the kind of gardening or “urban farming” that a lot of people I know do, it wasn’t fancy or luxurious — your neighbors (especially if they were white and you were not, or they were richer than you) and sometimes the city would get on your case and label you low-class and a nuisance. There was an article a couple years ago about a black woman in Portland who had to fight to keep her city garden, and another article in, I think, Bust by a woman who used to be ashamed of her mom’s city garden. So the thing that would have helped people in cities eat more recently grown and various food, their (richer, whiter) neighbors have tried to eradicate.
Also, if you moved from somewhere with a different climate, you may not be able to grow the stuff you like to eat, and you may not know how to grow (or like to eat) the stuff you can grow in your new home, so even things like community gardening, which to me seemed like an everybody-wins kind of move until I started reading more, can be wholly misdirected. (That ties in with the “outsiders coming in” element in the Guernica article.)
Did you ever watch Good Neighbors? Totally relevant to this discussion and awesome and not enough people have seen it. It’s hard to really build a sustainable farm in a city although it is a romantic idea, your neighbors will be annoyed, and *spoiler alert* they do basically fail in the end.
“Barbara has given up so much for you–”
“I gave things up!”
“Like what?”
“I gave up my job.”
“You hated that job.”
“I gave it up, though.”
(this is probably not an accurate quote, but I think about that show a lot.)
Similarly, there are new populations of people who are into urban farming/eat local movements who want to keep chickens or other small animals in their back yards/rooftops/etc. But, not so long ago (in 2004), people keeping chickens/goats/etc in their backyards was seen as a big problem in my city and made illegal (for any residential property under 3 acres).
That law was definitely for the sake of animal welfare, but some of that (in past battles with the city) seemed to be class/race oriented. It wasn’t white, affluent, Whole Foods-shopping people who used to be the ones keeping chickens, it was Latino/SE Asian/African American folks, and it was seen as a big nuisance/health hazard. Now people in more affluent areas of the city are campaigning to be able to raise chickens legally…
YES, this is also a big thing. It’s very offputting to see that a SE Asian family keeping chickens in their backyard of their poorer neighbourhood was seen as a major detriment and health hazard a few years ago, but now that a wealthy white family in a rich neighbourhood wants to do it, it’s all about ~*~local agriculture~*~ and ~*~urban homesteading~*~ and it becomes a status symbol. It totally does.
Exactly. When the Cambodian or Dominican residents want to keep chickens, the narrative focus is on the noise and smell and “dirtiness” (and if they butcher the chickens themselves, how “unsanitary” that is) and if the coop they built themselves out of supplies from the hardware store is appropriate living conditions for the animals…
But if it’s the residents in the more hipster-y/earth momma areas, the focus is on the superior quality of the eggs and meat, eating local, chicken poo as natural fertilizer, special heirloom breeds, supplies/coops bought at the local Co-op, “let’s beat industrial farming”, “When you butcher the animal yourself, it makes you more aware of the food chain and where your meat comes from”, etc.
I wish I could upvote this multiple times.
Well, some of the more genius jurisdictions have legalized urban chickens and then banned slaughtering within city limits, so…yeah. Chickens lay eggs and live forever, right?
Seeeeeriously.
And african americans who ride their bikes don’t count as being part of the green movement because obviously they’re just doing it because their poor and can’t afford to pollute. Or something.
Here’s the bit that got me: “if you’re a rich winemaker in Chianti in a big villa, in the summer, you will sit down and have tomatoes and mozzarella and a glass of red wine and a bowl of pasta. And if you’re a poor person, you’ll sit down and have tomatoes and mozzarella and a glass of red wine and a bowl of pasta. Because that’s what people eat in the summer.”
YES. Can we all just enjoy our preferred simple not-terrible-for-you delicious things and not be weird about it please?
(Which isn’t to dismiss the challenges of creating this cultural mindset, or to say that if you like complicated and/or terrible things that’s bad, but that anecdote sounds practically utopian compared to the current state/extremes of American attitudes towards food.)
I’ll help you along with quoting:
“Jane Black: That’s actually one of the big challenges for these young, idealistic farmers. They don’t want to pay illegal migrants terrible wages. But how much can you really charge people? You’re already charging everybody at a farmers’ market a big premium. And if you actually pay your laborers a living wage, it’s out of the ballpark. It’s crazy amounts of money. Because the whole system is propped up by abuse.”
My God, so true and how can I keep overlooking this, especially when past viewing documentaries and/or reading on farm worker’s sexual exploitation, wage gaps, etc.
I want the guy who tried to put “PB4WEGO” on his license plate to be featured on the cover of Dad Magazine. You know he would have been SO pleased with himself and his kids would have died of embarrassment, gawd, really, Dad.
At first I thought the second link was about an article suggesting that Jesus was the first person to ever write a letter and was mightily confused.
The Guernica interview is really great, but I just want to say that for some reason I abhor the word “healthful.” It’s like nails on a chalkboard to me. Just say healthy or nutritious. Food is not “full of health” wtf is that.
I too that that link was about Jesus: The First Person to Write a Letter. I am actually disappointed at being linked to Dear Prudie for once.
I hate it too. I have to deal with it occasionally at my job and it drives me up the wall. But not as much as “tasteful” being used as “flavourful,” OH MY GOD, THE RAGE.
I’m going to use “flavorful” as a quasi-synonym for “tasteful” now. My bedroom is decorated flavorfully.
Made it through the first few dozen or so rejected plates and I am so not up on the kids’ slang because I need some of them explained to me:
88888888 – public welfare?
AAWHIZZ – sex reference?
RLLNTRD – vulgar?
SVOLOCH – profane?
X32IARO
And some are just hilarious:
HOSTYLE – “public welfare”. lol.
BVRFVR
HOTWAD
1PIRATE – “public welfare”. pretty sure the guy in the Camry isn’t literally a pirate but okay Utah.
Or truly inspired:
TUFTACO
FRTSNFR
4NAK8U2
UFNWISH
But the BEST –
IH8LIBS — “shows contempt”. hahahahahahaha
I only made it through a handful as well, but it seems that “public welfare” lumps in any that are not deemed distinguishable enough – they usually are super short or have a character repeated many times. So I guess if you were a criminal and they were trying to chase you, it’d be too difficult to explain your license plate? Idk, this is all a shot in the dark.
Those are going to eat away at my brain until I figure out what they mean. FRTSNFR = farts and fear?
Maybe the all 8s one was trying to do this (except 8B8B8B8 or something):
I’ve seen a bunch of folks do that with the I/1s (way before that comic strip), so I doubt it. My best guess is they’re going for a white nationalist 88=heil Hitler thing maybe?
’88’ is neo-Nazi code for Heil Hitler, since it’s the eight letter of the alphabet.
Svoloch is a Russian swear word; I’ve learned from Latvian coworkers.
This one Google found for me: http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=X3…
What in the frickety frack is X32IARO? I need explanation or I’m going to dwell on this all day.
Click the link above. It’s “oral sex” mirrored.
RLLNTRD = rolling turd
I’m embarrassed by how quickly I got that one.
Excellent choice of photo. That’s all.
Since I work in tech, this statement rang so true: “At one table, two female teachers politely endured a long, wrong explanation from an older male colleague” ah, yes. The Mansplainer. He is everywhere.
And this:” the teacher, a former software developer who, researchers noted, tended to let a few white boys monopolize her attention, pulled Janet aside and suggested she drop the class, explaining that when it comes to computational skills, you either “have it or don’t have it.”
This is an outright lie. Anyone can learn; some people just need additional help to “get it” That teacher should be fired. That’s what she is there for. Not to teach the kids that already get it. She is there to teach the ones that DON’T.
Wait, Sherlock WASN’T ALREADY in the public domain? Am I going to get in trouble for all those cocaine jokes?
Most of it was, the last ten stories weren’t.
Still aren’t, at least in the U.S.
So, this case is weird, because it’s about the characters, not the actual stories. Basically the estate of the author was claiming that that because there are some stories that are still protected by copyright, the character of Sherlock is protected by copyright, because reasons. It’s an… inventive argument that the court wasn’t buying.
tl;dr — copyright law is a massive pain in the ass. Write all the fanfic you want though, you’re in the clear.
I really, really want to learn some code (maybe I will finally be employable!) but have you seen how much 90% of those code academies cost? And most don’t have scholarships either. Which kind of pisses me off because how fucking classist is that? (And then like, I shouldn’t even be angry about it, because tech is HUGELY classist, duh Megan.)
Yep, I looked into taking one of those courses and it was, no lie, $11,000 for a full-time course. Who can do that? But yes, tech is the place to be if you like rich white dudes!!
Start off on a free website like Codecademy, or go through the materials for a free online class, either through a site like Coursera or a university that offers them directly (I think MIT does this.) There are also free books and materials online, particularly for communities centered around languages like Python or Ruby which are especially welcoming to beginners.
It’s a time suck (which goes back to the class thing, because even if the materials don’t cost money, you still have to have the time to study regularly) but it’s doable!
Yeah, I know about Codeacademy, I just do better if I have someone to be accountable to other than myself.
Me too, but I’ve found Coursera and EdX classes that have actual deadlines are great. I took a bunch of introductory python classes at once. The U of Toronto one was best at starting from scratch (doesn’t have a next session listed, though), the MIT one was more serious CS, and the Rice Interactive Games one was most fun (and they have a 3-class series now; I’m taking the second one right now).
I am taking classes in Coursera’s new Data Science specialization right now, mostly because it’s extremely relevant to my job, but also because it’s really well done – you start from the super duper basics (e.g. step by step how to set up a git hub profile) which I really appreciate because so many of them start with “okay so you already have everything you need let’s start typing a program” no I do not, halp me get there plz. But then also you learn things that are immediately useful. It focuses on the R programming language in data science, which is a very quickly growing field – almost every company has these giant databases and no idea what to do with all their data, and if you know how to manipulate it people think you are a goddess basically. You will not be able to build a website at the end of it, but you will be able to tell someone how much their business grew after they changed their website! Just as important imo. Oh also it is completely free (you can get a certificate for $500 but I can’t imagine a company demanding to see that) and you can take the courses one at a time, with fairly low time commitment. Here it is! (I promise I don’t work for them or anything, I am just pretty impressed by what I’ve seen so far)
What does a person need to know to build a website/hire a good person to build a website? I’ve been looking off and on for a female web designer in the SoCal area sporadically to try and get a website going and the few I’ve found have bailed on me.
The worst part is I feel like I don’t even have the language to structure what I’m asking for. How do people even FIND a good web designer? Its like, if you were looking for a doctor and you don’t even know if they’re a necromancer, have JD or are a medical doctor and then you just have to trust what they say! AHH. If they recommend building my webpage in one program language and not another, how do I even differentiate between the two? Good help is hard to find.
Start by sketching out some ideas of what you want: this can be as easy as collecting the addresses of websites you like and want to emulate. (I sometimes do project management for website builders, and examples of existing things are the easiest shorthand.)
Once you build up a decent profile of what you want your website to do, start shopping. Good web designers will have portfolios, and you care about how it looks as well as how it works. Make a list of a few people/firms whose work you like (referrals aren’t too hard: reach out to your networks, try CL, even a Google search should yield some good results).
From there, pick the top three to five candidates and then contact them for a quote. Use your budget to help you decide which person/firm is the best fit.
Oh! And are you going to be updating it yourself? If yes, you will want to ask for a Content Management System and you should look at demos of the options your candidates recommend. If no, you probably don’t have to care too much about how they’re programming it. (Presumably, you will have seen examples of their work and if it’s pretty and loads quickly and does what it’s supposed to do, the programming part can continue to be magic to you.)
I sort of want to Google “web design necromancer” now to see what happens…
Yes, uploading potentially by me potentially by other users. mostly a basic regular shop, but I got into the depths of sites like big cartel/shopify and was overwhelmed by if that’s what I need or not.
Those options can be totally overwhelming. Feel free to email me at my handle at gmail if you want to think through them out loud.
That link you supplied is telling me that it costs $49, am I clicking on the wrong thing?
They try to trick you into paying, but you don’t have to. If you click on the class name, there’s a link on that page to join for free.
Local community colleges are a good resource. My mom has taken C and Visual Basic classes at a nearby campus. Much more affordable. Her new knowledge of C got her a promotion.
Ugggggh yes tech is super classist and it’s hard to learn on your own. Coursera has some good courses (I’m a software developer and I started taking their databases class because I never took databases in college, and I found it really well done.)
Look into the Women’s Coding Collective. I think their courses are about $50 each and it’s a supportive ladies-only community.
Check out railsbridge.org to see if anything’s going on in your location — it’s a free 2-day lady-centric workshop that does a really good job of teaching the basics.
Set, the ursuper god. Judas of Kerioth, the betrayer. Chinggis Khaan, the million-slayer. What did they all have in common? RED HAIR.
Here at Eastern Airlines, we don’t believe in coincidences. That’s why we screen all of our potential stewardesses for the crimson sign of evil. We rejected the greater part of the vipers you see here on sight, but we had to apply a number of more subtle tests to catch out the rest of them:
-A protocol of caustic rinses gave the lie to artificial dyes and tints.
-Hydraulic tow pulleys (the same ones we use to haul our Boeing 707s) tore off the most tightly applied wigs and weaves, revealing the demon red beneath.
-We administered genetic surveys to every applicant, every applicant’s parents, and every applicant’s relations, out to 10 degrees of kinship. You may rest assured: all Eastern stewardesses are free from the taint of Varangian descent.
Our tests reject 18 out of 20 applicants. You’ll find a representative sample* of the accursed below. Behold, and fear!
*(The 19th girl has no red hair on her head or in her family, but she went to Mount Holyoke. At Eastern, we take every precaution.)
“What’s your slant on the new copy, Chet?”
“Hum.” (Three thoughtful pipe puffs.) “Can you make it…worse?”
“Boy, can I!”
I wish I could give this more thumbs-up. The MHC sentence is just the cherry on top of the Awesome Sundae.
I managed to get a sexual innuendo past the censors on the vanity tag for my ’68 Chevelle. NGL it will always be one of the highlights of my life.
I think my face just became the heart eyes emoji
We’re doing an off-the-frame restoration to it right now, but next year when it’s up and running, if you find yourself in Lawrence, KS, gimme a heads-up. We’ll go for a drive.
Everything about this picture is rad as heck
Thanks!
AMAZING.
Oooookay, so something didn’t like my emoticon, so have a gif:
Thanks for testing my capacity to keep from crying in public with the Tony Gwynn news / article…
LP: that VOICE! That blazer! Those curls! Gawwwwd.
I have been listening to LP over and over at work today.
Front and center in that Easter ad? A certain Ali MacGraw. Really.
Regarding the Guernica article, from Jezebel:
“Fortune spotlights Colorado Corrections Industries, where six inmates milk a thousand goats twice a day, then turn the results over to the cheese-makers at Haystack Mountain. The growing program employs 2,000 prisoners at 17 facilities overall; inmates also breed and pack tilapia for Arrowhead Fisheries, among other tasks. Both companies sell their products at Whole Foods.”
re: license plates–I have absolutely NO idea how it got through but relatively recently I saw a California plate that said “R<3BDSM” (CA allows a heart). I was stunned.
Look into the Women's Coding Collective. I think their courses are about $50 each and it's a supportive ladies-only community.
Wow, that advert. “Guess what, we don’t just employ people based on looks! I mean, that’s obviously the first consideration, but we also think about how well they can do the job. Crazy, right? But it just might work.”
I would like to hear more discussion about this, because my computer programmer spouse does not agree, even though his driving directions are flawless. "Sometime in the next .8 miles you need to move into the first or second lane from the right" flawless.
I’m a sucker for my family certain Costly Prudie, however column got to a apogee a long time ago when using the twincest cover letter and then I will be disillusioned all the time That i look over it all together with there isn’t an item evenly scandalous. (This is certainly independent of the letdown I feel for the way in which horrific those who during the numbers happen to be. ).