Warren Andrews had just finished putting up balloons for his stepdaughter’s 18th birthday party at their suburban home in Mayflower, Arkansas, when his wife came inside and said something was wrong. After stepping out of his house, and taking one glance, he immediately dialed 911.
“I don’t know what’s going on, but I’ve got a river of oil coming down the street at me,” Andrews told the operator. Five minutes later, the slick of noxious black crude spewing from a ruptured Exxon Mobil pipeline was eight feet wide, six inches deep and growing fast.
In this photo, spilled oil from Exxon pipeline runs through a neighborhood in Mayflower, Arkansas on March 29, 2013. Reuters was recently given access to the photo from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).
Exxon is refusing to let reporters anywhere near the accident. They’re also controlling the airspace above the spill. They don’t want you to see what’s happening. TOO BAD, EXXON.
Signal boost the shit outta this, y’all.
(via verbalgraveyard)
DISNEY HAVE STOLEN MY ARTWORK
I don’t know what to do. I am so upset. Can anyone help me?
My painting was created back in 2010, (see it HERE) and since then so many people have expressed their love for it, not just on tumblr, but in many places. At least 9 people had it tattooed on their bodies. It’s one of my favourite images I created at University and I was proud of it in many ways.
Disney have used it on a cosmetics bag HERE (look at the back)
and they have produced a Tshirt HERE with a really similar design clearly modeled from my paintingI’m so mad because I have no chance at getting Disney to do anything about it. I had so much respect for the company and now I am just SO upset and disappointed.
Any help, advice or signal boosting would be amazing. And thank you so much to the kind person who messaged me about this.
This is really sad.
Look at the bag. It is the EXACT drawing. This is terrible. For the company responsible for a lot of current copyright law to do this - wow.
Please signal boost. Literally the only thing someone can do against Disney’s stealing someone’s work. Without all the lawyers.
This is so sad. :(
Signal Boost…DISNEY! One of your designers stole this and no one noticed. Please give Katie a fair (7%) royalty WITHOUT going through the unnecessary hassle of a law suit…THANK YOU! That would be the only way to prove to me that you don’t suck.
Not okay.
Axaxaxas Mlö: Veronica Mars
The Atlantic Wire (which has said some truly nice things about Nerdfighteria) just published a nasty set of words on the proposed skeezyiness of the Veronica Mars Kickstarter, and because I cannot help myself, I would like to talk about that.
The proposal (if you…
I’m not actually sure what I think about this. On one hand, I love that fans of something could finally get what they want by helping fund it, but on the other hand I do agree that it doesn’t really seem right for profits from something funded by the public not to go back to them in some way.
Like this is how stocks became a thing, if you help fund something, you should get some of the profits of it.
I’m very excited that this happened, but I still think that the first 2m of profits should be spent paying back the people who funded it.
But back on the other hand, Kickstarters most of the time, like this time, is less of “help me by giving me money for this” and more of just a fundraiser of “help me fund this thing by buying my stuff”
So really, this whole post is me talking this out to my self and seeing if anyone else wants to respond to me and help me decide what I do really think of this.
I agree that it would be really cool if the profits came back to the givers in the same way profits come back to investors in the corporate world. Unfortunately that is currently illegal. It’s a big fat load of poo that it’s illegal, but it’s illegal.
I’m not sure if it /really/ matters though. People aren’t giving $50 in the hopes that they’ll get $60 back, they’re giving $50 for a pre-release of the movie, a t-shirt, behind the scenes production notes and updates, a copy of the shooting script, and a DVD of the movie. That is actually a pretty damn good deal.
Until crowd investment is truly legal in this country (20 years from now?) this is an excellent alternative in my book. Most people don’t care about the monetary benefit anyway, they care about the cultural and personal benefit. That’s just something economists will never understand.
I had no idea that crowd investment WAS illegal. Maybe this is my Communist side peeking through, but it seems illegal to impose a law on who is and who is not allowed to invest in a project! I mean, COME ON, that is just pure elitism.
These laws were originally created after the Great Depression when people were being taken in by con men with fancy plans. They’d take everyone’s money for some lovely-sounding project and then skip town. So it was created to protect consumers from assholes.
Now to invest in a start-up you have to be an accredited investor (which means you /literally/ have to have a networth of over $2M or a yearly income of more than $200,000 to invest in a startup.)
And yes, that is one of the thousands of reasons why the rich get richer and the poor get poorer…and the reason the law exists? Assholes. Assholes are the only thing standing between us and utopia y’all.
Also companies can only take a limited number of investors, and if the stock becomes publicly traded there is a HUGE AMOUNT OF PAPERWORK and the lawyers just to get it drawn up and taken care of cost like hundreds of thousands of dollars. This is something I’ve thought about a lot because I’ve always been interested in letting Nerdfighteria own itself. For a brief moment in 2010 I actually considered whether it would be possible to sell myself to Nerdfighteria, but then I realized that I am in fact happy that it is illegal for corporations to own people, LoL.
Panetta Lifts Ban On Women In Combat Roles : The Two-Way : NPR
HOLY SHIT.
HOLY SHIT!
!!!!
[For folks new to this issue, women are already serving in de facto combat roles and have been for years. Now they are eligible for combat pay and services. THIS IS HUGE.]
Here’s a hilarious Helen Keller joke!
Do you know what no one saw or heard coming?
Helen Keller’s radical socialist activism for the rights of the poor, women, the disabled. And so people ignored and belittled her politics. They argued a deaf, blind person could not know what she was talking about. And so they reduced her to the safe story of a young girl who overcame disability, and nothing else.
Wait I mean haha she was blind! How funny.
So, fun fact. Helen Keller went deaf and blind from scarlet fever (though wiki says “or meningitis” so who knows, I guess) which is something I had. As a kid who got strep throat basically every six months, I guess it wasn’t surprising. Anyways, I always got kinda defensive about her because I thought that if it weren’t for modern medicine I could have ended up like her from something that can now be treated with simple antibiotics. Nice to know that I like her as a human being in general, too, and not just someone who ~overcame a disability~.
(via uberverbosity)
are those pants made by karl marx? because dat ass is causing an uprising in my lower class.
(via uberverbosity)
"This comment suggests a few things. First, it suggests that he really doesn’t know much about the country he inhabits. Who are these freeloaders? Is it the Iraq war veteran who goes to the V.A.? Is it the student getting a loan to go to college? Is it the retiree on Social Security or Medicare? It suggests that Romney doesn’t know much about the culture of America. Yes, the entitlement state has expanded, but America remains one of the hardest-working nations on earth. Americans work longer hours than just about anyone else. Americans believe in work more than almost any other people. Ninety-two percent say that hard work is the key to success, according to a 2009 Pew Research Survey."
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Also see: Our lack of vacation days.
![fishingboatproceeds:
Both these comments are rhetoric and not policy, so shouldn’t be taken too seriously, but the underlying ideas here are very important to me.
When the President says that higher education is an economic necessity, he is absolutely correct. If you look at the industrialized economies that are struggling around the world, they line up very closely with higher education rates. (Look at Portugal, for instance.)
So, like, “the U.S. experienced a fairly large growth in population from 2000 to 2009. During the period, the population increased 8.68% — the 12th highest among OECD countries. Meanwhile, the rate at which the share of the population with a tertiary [post high school] education is growing has slowed to an annual rate of 1.4% — the lowest among the 34 OECD countries. Just 71% of funding for educational institutions in the country comes from public funds, placing the U.S. sixth-lowest in this measure.” [source]
So we already have one of the lowest rates of public investment in education in the industrialized world, and the lowest rate of growth in post-secondary education.
This is a real long-term and structural problem for the US economy, because the only future growth available to industrialized nations is in jobs that require education. If we only offer higher education to people who can afford it, we will lose to the many nations where university education is more highly subsidized, because they’ll have better educated workforces that will earn more and in turn pay more in taxes, which will allow future generations to be better educated still.
Both parties would like to take political credit or assign political blame for the unemployment rate and the pace of growth etc. But the truth is, government doesn’t have a lot of say in that stuff (unless of course they screw things up so royally that there’s a debt default or something). A lot of the government’s role in economic growth is much longer term—it’s stuff like infrastructure and long-term political stability and creating a better-educated workforce.
A way more eloquent version of what I tried to say to my father the other night when we discussed how manufacturing jobs will soon be largely robotic.](http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m9t2nuInxH1qb6t6wo1_500.jpg)
Both these comments are rhetoric and not policy, so shouldn’t be taken too seriously, but the underlying ideas here are very important to me.
When the President says that higher education is an economic necessity, he is absolutely correct. If you look at the industrialized economies that are struggling around the world, they line up very closely with higher education rates. (Look at Portugal, for instance.)
So, like, “the U.S. experienced a fairly large growth in population from 2000 to 2009. During the period, the population increased 8.68% — the 12th highest among OECD countries. Meanwhile, the rate at which the share of the population with a tertiary [post high school] education is growing has slowed to an annual rate of 1.4% — the lowest among the 34 OECD countries. Just 71% of funding for educational institutions in the country comes from public funds, placing the U.S. sixth-lowest in this measure.” [source]
So we already have one of the lowest rates of public investment in education in the industrialized world, and the lowest rate of growth in post-secondary education.
This is a real long-term and structural problem for the US economy, because the only future growth available to industrialized nations is in jobs that require education. If we only offer higher education to people who can afford it, we will lose to the many nations where university education is more highly subsidized, because they’ll have better educated workforces that will earn more and in turn pay more in taxes, which will allow future generations to be better educated still.
Both parties would like to take political credit or assign political blame for the unemployment rate and the pace of growth etc. But the truth is, government doesn’t have a lot of say in that stuff (unless of course they screw things up so royally that there’s a debt default or something). A lot of the government’s role in economic growth is much longer term—it’s stuff like infrastructure and long-term political stability and creating a better-educated workforce.
A way more eloquent version of what I tried to say to my father the other night when we discussed how manufacturing jobs will soon be largely robotic.
I know what it’s like, Benedict Cumberbatch. When your name sounds like Snozzlebert Mugglewump, or is an abbreviation of Archibald, and everything about your bearing and hair suggests, accurately, that you went to public school, it is easy to feel, as you say you do in a Radio Times interview, that there’s a lot of “posh-bashing that goes on”. It’s “so predictable, so domestic, so dumb”: the weight of your good fortune hangs around your neck like a millstone. You feel justified in giving arch warnings that it’s enough to drive a fellow to America. You feel misunderstood.
Benedict, I am here to tell you: just shut up about it, seriously. You are wrong. As your wild popularity proves, no one is anything more ominous than benignly amused that your name sounds like Fiddly-Dee Ponky-Tonk, and the ones who feel more hotly about it are certainly not casting directors.
When you have been so very lucky, it’s as well not to point out that although you won a scholarship to Harrow, you weren’t “born into land or titles”; that’s a distinction that will only seem relevant to people who see the world from exactly the same point of view as you. In fact, when that education and the social benefits it brought with it have helped propel you into a position where you get to act for a living, it’s best to complain as little as possible.
This isn’t about denying the rights of the famous to have feelings; I don’t mean for a second that if someone shouts “FETCH THE CAVIAR, IT’S RINKYDINK CURDLESNOOT, THE GREAT PONCE” at Cumberbatch in the street, he isn’t entitled to feel aggrieved. And it’s never fair to judge anyone if their sense of their own privations fails to consider where they fall on the global trauma scale: all of us, after all, are occasionally annoyed when the tea runs out. But the idea that we are in the grip of some sort of crisis of inverse snobbery is simply ludicrous.
Look around you, Benedict. Look at the balance of power in the Government; at Team GB; look, I’m afraid to say, at the media. Count the references to Mr Cameron’s Eton days – the only “posh-bashing” you can possibly be thinking of, and, while cartoonish, not a wholly irrelevant point as the Government enacts cuts that will fall so disproportionately on people not called Blimpleswitch Wafflechops.
Then count the stories that dwell on the shortcomings of “chavs”, even when that word isn’t used, mostly for their lifestyle choices. If you still feel like moving to America, we’ll miss Sherlock, but do it if you must. As you board the plane and turn left, at least, Benedict, remember this: most of the people with something serious to feel aggrieved about won’t have the option to do the same.
I think the funniest thing about Benihana Snooptybun threatening to flounce off to America is that he completely ignores the fact that we are having the same exact economic inequality discourse but with like 10xs the vitriol, media-spin and ignorance. At least that is my impression of British vs American politics atm, ymmv.
…a large portion of the Downton cast have changed their twitter icons to Benedict’s magazine cover. Ahahaha, this is amazing to watch. Where’s that popcorn.gif when you need it.
(via bodaciouscans)
i told my mom they edited it and she was all ‘i’m sure they had good reason’
and i didn’t know why they did it until now.
what assholes.
Ummm, no. Fuck you, NBC. You don’t get to tailor an opening ceremony. It is that country’s turn to showcase themselves. If someone cut out a 9/11 tribute for a pointless interview with one of their own athletes it would probably be portrayed as a deplorable, deeply offensive insult to the American people or some bullshit like that. I’m obviously still angry about this.
Also, could you be more patronising?
“It’s a credit to Danny Boyle that it required so little editing.”
Are you kidding me? What? Because no other country could possibly do it correctly?
“We only had to fix it a little bit. Your effort was only a little bit not good enough for us. Thanks for your incredibly expensive and elaborate performance representing thousands of hours of work and the essence of your culture; it was almost acceptable as it was!”
^ This.
Well, there you go.
I knew shit was going to be bad when Meredith Viera actually started singing along to the opening ceremony. My whole family groaned and started screaming at the television for her to shut up; there was actually dialogue going on and they started bantering RIGHT OVER IT. “Where can I pirate a stream of the BBC feed?” is my ultimate question out of all this.
Marvel demands $17,000 from Gary Friedrich, the creator of Ghost Rider, for selling Ghost Rider prints at conventions.
Recently, Marvel triumphed in court against Gary Friedrich, the creator of Ghost Rider, as to whether any money or rights were owed to him from the use of the characters in movies, with the second movie starring Nicolas Cage on its way.
And while the court decided that Marvel owe Gary nothing, they also decided on a counter claim from Marvel, that Gary Friedrich owes $17,000 for selling prints of the Ghost Rider character at conventions and the like.
This represents Gary’s earnings from selling such prints over several years – but now Gary is penniless. And Marvel is demanding payment now. Oh, and that he is not allowed to say he is the creator of Ghost Rider for financial gain, say by doing an interview, in the future.
Marvel was recently bought by Disney for $4 billon. Nicolas Cage recently sold his copy of Action Comics #1 for over 2 million, and will have received similar for starring in Ghost Rider 2.
Gary Friedrich, the creator of Ghost Rider is, however, penniless.
This is outrageous.
>:[
(via jhonenv)
John Green's tumblr: Why Aren't You on TV?
I’m asked every day why Hank and I haven’t tried to create a TV show.
We’ve been approached many times to do TV shows, but while we’re happy to listen and discuss ideas with people, we’ve so far turned down these opportunities, even the very tempting and lucrative ones. Here’s why:
1. When you work with a cable channel or production company, you don’t own the show you make or control the manner in which it is distributed.
2. It’s easy—and only getting easier—to watch shows like CrashCourse and SciShow on your TV.
3. We really believe that what is strong and beautiful about nerdfighteria is that we create it—every day—together. All of us. And if we were on TV, I worry we’d lose that sense of connection, which Hank and I have enjoyed so much the last five and a half years. Like, the Sherlock fandom and the Doctor Who fandom are great communities, but they are about Sherlock and Doctor Who. Nerdfighteria isn’t, and never has been, primarily about Hank or me. It’s about celebrating nerdiness and decreasing worldsuck. We really value that and don’t want it to change.
4. On YouTube, we can make exactly the stuff we want for exactly the people we want. Sometimes that means getting lower ratings (for instance, Thoughts from Places videos are consistently our least viewed videos, but we still really like making them and we know that nerdfighteria really enjoys them, too). Television is driven by viewership, and all viewers are treated equally. So you can’t say to a TV network, “I know we get fewer viewers when we make this stuff, but we get BETTER viewers.” They do not understand that idea. That idea, however, is at the very core of our relationship with our community. As Hank has told me, “I don’t care how many views we get. I care how many made-of-awesome views we get.”
If all we wanted to do was make stuff that lots of people watch, all our videos would be about animal sex. And on some level, if we had a TV show, the emphasis would be on maximizing the number of viewers, not the quality of the community, which is the exact opposite of what we want.
In one conversation with an anonymous cable network, an exec said to us, “Crash Course would be PERFECT if you were a little less nuanced and stuck to topics that interest people. Like, you know, Hitler and sex.” (Direct quote.)
I’ve read tens of thousands of Crash Course comments. No one—NO ONE—has ever asked us to be less nuanced, or to stick to Hitler and sex. That’s what I love about nerdfighteria. Our community is deeply intellectually engaged, even when that means grappling with complexity and ambiguity.
The great joy of my life is that I get to talk with you on a near-daily basis about a huge variety of things that matter to me, and listen to you discuss what matters to you. Right now, that’s not possible on TV, which is (for better and worse) still a medium where people talk toyou, not with you.
There are exactly three countries on Earth that do not provide guarantees for paid maternity leave. Papua New Guinea and Swaziland are two of them. Care to guess the third?
(via ilovecharts)
(via losemydignity)
