Is there a life philosophy that you feel has carried you through your career?
My approach to what I do in my job — and it might even be the approach to my life — is that everything I do is the most important thing I do. Whether it’s a play or the next film. It is the most important thing. I know it’s not going to be the most important thing, and it might not be close to being the best, but I have to make it the most important thing. That means I will be ambitious with my job and not with my career. That’s a very big difference, because if I’m ambitious with my career, everything I do now is just stepping-stones leading to something — a goal I might never reach, and so everything will be disappointing. But if I make everything important, then eventually it will become a career. Big or small, we don’t know. But at least everything was important.
“Here’s what people get wrong about Carter,” Will Pattiz, one of the film’s directors tells me. “He was not in over his head or ineffective, weak or indecisive — he was a visionary leader, decades ahead of his time trying to pull the country toward renewable energy, climate solutions, social justice for women and minorities, equitable treatment for all nations of the world. He faced nearly impossible economic problems — and at the end of the day came so very close to changing the trajectory of this nation.”
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Originally “Simpsons yellow” was clearly the safest choice. It signified the “everyman” of the emoji. But is this a cop-out? Does the yellow represent the cowardice of Homer (the cartoon, not the poet) and his people? Am I making a statement by trying not to make a statement? And what about Apu and Carl, why were they not yellow?! Where’s their statement?
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This is just for white people, right? Like, if your name is Brock and you don’t want to get into trouble with other white people, you pick this? Like, you know what you did and you’re ashamed. But how white is this one? Dying-by-gently-coughing-blood-into-a-handkerchief white or detonating-thirty-gallons-of-gasoline-at-a-baby-gender-reveal-party white? Because those are two different kinds and that doesn’t seem fair.
All the images in this video are created by video feedback only - no computers are involved. The upper and lower monitors both display the same thing - the image from the camera, which is looking at the upper monitor. This creates a video feedback loop (much like a microphone next to a speaker creates an audio feedback loop).
Open offices have driven Panasonic to make horse blinders for humans | TechCrunch
At what point do we just give up and admit we’re living in exactly the dystopian nightmare speculative fiction warned us about? It probably ought to be these horse blinders for people, which look like something straight out of a Terry Gilliam movie.
A 32-year-old central Minnesota man faces felony charges for allegedly intentionally crashing a vehicle into the house of a Cold Spring family who has complained publicly about racial harassment they’ve endured.
According to court documents filed Monday in Stearns County District Court, the unoccupied stolen vehicle crashed into the home early Saturday morning, causing extensive damage.
Homeowners Andrea and Phillipe Robinson and their children were home at the time. They were not injured, but say they were left feeling shocked and violated.
“I don’t even know how to explain what I’m feeling,” Andrea Robinson said Tuesday. “I’m in disbelief that this happened. And I assumed it just would have been a drunk driver. I could never imagine someone would drive into the front of our house.”
Court documents say a large piece of granite was sitting on the vehicle’s accelerator. Footage from the Robinsons’ doorbell surveillance camera shows the vehicle stopping across the street and a person getting out and running off, before the vehicle crashes into the house.
Benton Beyer, of Richmond, Minn., is charged with felony theft, stalking and damage to property, plus a gross misdemeanor charge of violating a restraining order.
The Robinsons had sought and received a restraining order against Beyer and complained that he was stalking and harassing their family, including watching their home. On July 15, Beyer was arrested in Waite Park for allegedly violating the restraining order.
“We were really concerned for our safety, and kind of felt something [more] was going to happen,” Phillipe Robinson said. “But we didn’t think it would be to this point.”
Andrea Robinson has spoken publicly about bullying her Black children have suffered from other students in the Rocori school district and on social media. Last spring, she posted a video on social media describing disturbing messages in a Snapchat group that she said was created about her daughter, which mentioned getting ropes and hanging Black men from trees.
She and other parents also addressed the Rocori school board, asking school officials to do more to tackle racism and unconscious bias in the district.
Robinson plans to attend the Cold Spring City Council meeting Tuesday night to speak out about the latest incident. The couple feels that law enforcement hasn’t done enough to protect their family.
They also believe Beyer should face more severe charges, such as assault or attempted murder motivated by hate.
The Cold Spring/Richmond Police Department said in a statement, “If evidence of a racially motivated crime is found to have occurred, our department will seek prosecution to the fullest extent under the law. We appreciate the community’s patience with the criminal investigation process.”
A call to the Stearns County Attorney’s Office on Tuesday was not immediately returned.
“If there is no consequence, it will continue,” Andrea Robinson said. “There’s been no consequence with the education system. There’s no consequence with the police and the justice system. In every aspect of our life we have been violated and let down. And we just want to be part of the community and live.”
Mayor Dave Heinen issued a statement saying the city of Cold Spring “vehemently rejects racist behavior in all its forms,” including harassment targeting a community member or family.
“The damage to the sense of security and peace of mind in their own home is even more significant than the property damage resulting from this incident and will leave them with lasting scars,” Heinen stated. “Racist behavior is harmful to our whole community as well. It is not right, and is not welcome here.”
LeVar Burton guest hosts 'Jeopardy!' while history is made | Boing Boing
Emmett till was killed early on the morning of August 28, 1955, one month and three days after his 14th birthday. His mother’s decision to show his body in an open casket, to allow Jet magazine to publish photos—“Let the world see what I’ve seen,” she said—became a call to action. Three months after his murder, Rosa Parks kept her seat on a Montgomery, Alabama, bus, and she later told Mamie Till that she’d been thinking of Emmett when she refused to move. Almost 60 years later, after Trayvon Martin was killed, Oprah Winfrey channeled the thoughts of many Americans in evoking the memory and the warning of Emmett Till.
He-Man fans hate the new series because it has too much Teela in it | Boing Boing
But the fans hate it anyway, because the opening "Search for He-Man" plot arc features too much Teela and is too "woke". The show's been review-bombed online. Smith is reduced to denouncing He Man's angry fans in Variety magazine.
The best way to fight back against crap like this is to watch it, praise it, and make sure the loudest voices in the room aren’t the childish conservative snowflakes.
A jailed capitol rioter disapproved of other prisoners throwing feces at him | Boing Boing
And fans seem to agree with her on that notion. When Thompson tweeted on the afternoon of July 8, "I see #HowardTheDuck is trending #3. That's awesome. I love my duck #WhatIf I get to direct @Marvel reboot," the post received nearly 8,000 likes and a slew of hopeful comments.
I would fully support a Howard the Duck/Spider Ham crossover.
But the pandemic is once again entering a new phase that feels more dangerous and more in flux, even for the people lucky enough to have received their lifesaving shots. A more transmissible variant—one that can discombobulate vaccine-trained antibodies—has flooded the world. It’s wreaking havoc among the uninoculated, a group that still includes almost half of Americans and most of the global population. After a prolonged lull, the pandemic’s outlook is grimmer than it’s been in months. I am, for the foreseeable future, back to wearing masks in indoor public places, and there are four big reasons why.
I personally haven’t felt like I could stop with masks in public… Despite being vaccinated, one of my two kids can’t be for a while… So when the vacicnation rate among eligible people basically stopped with less than half done, I have felt like we can’t change behaviors as if the threat was resolved…
The YouTubers who blew the whistle on an anti-vax plot - BBC News
A mysterious marketing agency secretly offered to pay social media stars to spread disinformation about Covid-19 vaccines. Their plan failed when the influencers went public about the attempt to recruit them.
W.T.A.F… This presents one of the core issues with “citizen journalism” and the fuzzy state non-traditional “news” lives in… Because we only know this happened because a few people spoke up… But we don’t have any way of knowing who didn’t, or how many other campaigns there are like this for other topics.
That’s why the idea is so pervasive—whether it’s the bitching hour, sitcoms featuring hapless husbands with fed-up (but loving) wives, or entire genres of standup comedy. The more culture normalizes the idea that women ‘hate’ their husbands for being fuckups, the more women start to believe that their husbands being fuckups is inevitable.
That’s how equal relationships become fantasies rather than a reasonable expectation.
Just as insidious? The counterpart to women ‘jokingly’ complaining about their husbands not doing child care or domestic work is men ‘jokingly’ complaining that their wives are nags. It’s a way to make men’s petty grievance that their wives want them to do housework seem equivalent to the understandable complaint that men aren’t doing housework!
I hate this trope. Hopefully articles like this shine a light on why it’s harmful.
Why I’m glad that I’m an ‘overthinker’ | Life and style | The Guardian
The first time I remember someone telling me not to overthink was when I was trying to suss out breastfeeding. “Don’t overthink it,” said my friend, “just go with it.”
“Just going with it” is not something I do. I have to really understand what I’m doing and then I think through almost every possibility and eventuality, like a mind map on steroids. And I plan. When people say things like: “Who could have imagined XYZ would happen?” about some entirely predictable outcome, my most common response is “I could”. I have realised that for most people I am an overthinker, but for me, it is others who underthink. I just think.
Of course, this can be exhausting. And it is. I didn’t realise just how much I thought until one day someone asked me what I was thinking (as a child I was a natural daydreamer) because I was quiet. I went through what I’d been thinking about for the past minute and it was a different thought for every second. The look of horror on their face said it all. “All that in the last 60 seconds?” “Sure,” I said, “what have you been thinking about?” I asked. “Soap,” they answered.
I'm uninstalling battle.net until I hear that Blizzard can act like a grown-up
I love some of the games Blizzard has produced. Overwatch’s PVP focus isn’t for me, but the gameplay would be fun with a PVE focus… The Diablo family is the perfect representation of the genre it birthed, where no other entry really matches the chemistry of the originals… Starcraft and Warcraft are some of the most fun RTS gameplay in their genre… And WoW’s siren call is amplified by the fact that it’s one of the first big games to make an M1 native version a priority.
All that being said, no matter how much I love the games, I can’t give a cent to the company that also breeds these stories:
At one point Activision Blizzard is described as a "frat house", but that doesn't begin to capture the scale and gravity of the allegations. Women punished for becoming pregnant. Women kicked out of lactation rooms. Women punished for leaving the office. African American women denied full employment and subjected to unique requirements. A woman committed suicide on a business trip with a male colleague who brought along lube and butt plugs.
In the office, women are subjected to “cube crawls” in which male employees drink copious [amounts] of alcohol as they “crawl” their way through various cubicles in the office and often engage in inappropriate behavior toward female employees. Male employees proudly come into work hungover, play video games for long periods of time during work while delegating their responsibilities to female employees, engage in banter about their sexual encounters, talk openly about female bodies and joke about rape.
Female employees are subjected to constant sexual harassment, including having to continually fend off unwanted sexual comments and advances by their male co-workers and supervisors and being groped at the “cube crawls” and other company events. High-ranking executives and creators engaged in blatant sexual harassment without repercussions.
In a particularly tragic example, a female employee committed suicide during a business trip with a male supervisor who had brought butt plugs and lubricant with him on the trip.
Its response to this lawsuit is libertarian dogma about "irresponsible behavior from unaccountable State bureaucrats that are driving many of the State's best businesses out of California."
Activision Blizzard attorney told the SEC in January, "While the Company has implemented a Rooney Rule policy as envisioned [for director and CEO nominees], implementing a policy that would extend such an approach to all hiring decisions amounts to an unworkable encroachment on the Company's ability to run its business and compete for talent in a highly competitive, fast-moving market."
Activision Blizzard’s attorney further said the proposal was micromanaging in nature, and “leaves no room for the Company’s management or Board of Directors to exercise discretion in how new hire decisions are structured.”
With Activision focussing on larger titles, such as Overwatch 2, and laying off 800 of its workforce in 2019, Classic Games would never receive the full support required to recapture Warcraft 3. Nevertheless, they plowed on, and even started taking pre-orders for the game. That left the team committed to releasing the title. A Blizzard spokesman told Bloomberg: “In hindsight, we should have taken more time to get it right, even if it meant returning pre-orders.”
Despite getting help from other Blizzard departments during the final development push, it was too late. The game was so poorly received that demands for refunds were upheld. Even now, 18 months on, the game is missing much of the promised content that it was sold on.
One of the biggest myths about EVs is busted in new study - The Verge
Actually building an EV is still a little more carbon-intensive than building a traditional vehicle. Recycling EV batteries could eventually bring that carbon intensity down. But for now, EV drivers start to reap the climate benefits after driving their car for a year or so, according to Bieker. That’s when the car passes the threshold when the emissions that it saves by running on cleaner electricity make it a better option for the climate than a traditional car.
CWE - 2021 CWE Top 25 Most Dangerous Software Weaknesses
The 2021 Common Weakness Enumeration (CWE™) Top 25 Most Dangerous Software Weaknesses (CWE Top 25) is a demonstrative list of the most common and impactful issues experienced over the previous two calendar years. These weaknesses are dangerous because they are often easy to find, exploit, and can allow adversaries to completely take over a system, steal data, or prevent an application from working. The CWE Top 25 is a valuable community resource that can help developers, testers, and users — as well as project managers, security researchers, and educators — provide insight into the most severe and current security weaknesses.
To create the 2021 list, the CWE Team leveraged Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVE®) data found within the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) National Vulnerability Database (NVD), as well as the Common Vulnerability Scoring System (CVSS) scores associated with each CVE record. A formula was applied to the data to score each weakness based on prevalence and severity.
Dr. Brytney Cobia said Monday that all but one of her COVID
patients in Alabama did not receive the vaccine. The vaccinated
patient, she said, just needed a little oxygen and is expected to
fully recover. Some of the others are dying.
“I’m admitting young healthy people to the hospital with very
serious COVID infections,” wrote Cobia, a hospitalist at Grandview
Medical Center in Birmingham, in an emotional Facebook post
Sunday. “One of the last things they do before they’re
intubated is beg me for the vaccine. I hold their hand and tell
them that I’m sorry, but it’s too late.”
Good link to spread. Fox News should put this doctor on the air in prime time. (Via Dave Winer.)
Swimmer Becca Meyers says she's skipping the Tokyo Paralympics because she wouldn't be able to have a personal care assistant with her. The 2016 gold medalist is seen here at an event in 2017.
Nicholas Hunt/Getty Images for Women's Sports Foundation
Becca Meyers, a swimmer seen as a favorite to bring gold home from Tokyo, has canceled plans to compete in the Paralympics after being told she can't bring a personal care assistant to Japan. Meyers is deaf and blind. U.S. Olympic & Paralympic Committee (USOPC) officials say they don't have space for her to bring an aide because of coronavirus restrictions on athletic delegations.
“I’ve had to make the gut-wrenching decision to withdraw from the Tokyo 2020 Paralympics,” Meyers said Tuesday in a statement posted on her Facebook page. “I’m angry, I’m disappointed, but most of all, I’m sad to not be representing my country.”
Meyers, 26, says officials have not taken her and other athletes' needs into account. She won three gold medals at the 2016 Rio de Janeiro Paralympics — but the experience also left her deeply shaken. In strange new surroundings, she struggled to accomplish essential tasks on her own, such as finding the athletes' dining hall.
Since then, her mother, Maria, has accompanied her at competitions as a personal care assistant. But after being told her mother can’t join her in Tokyo, Meyers opted out.
“I would love to go to Tokyo,” Meyers told The Washington Post, which first reported her withdrawal. “Swimming has given me my identity as a person. I’ve always been Becca the Swimmer Girl. I haven’t taken this lightly. This has been very difficult for me. [But] I need to say something to effect change, because this can’t go on any longer.”
All signs had been pointing to Meyers turning in a special performance in Tokyo. She has set new world records in recent years. Last month, she was celebrating dominance at the Paralympic trials, where she secured a spot on Team USA. Tokyo was set to be her third Paralympics.
Meyers, who was born with Usher syndrome, has thrived at sport’s elite level. Because of the genetic disorder, she is deaf (and is aided by cochlear implants). She often relies on lip-reading, but her eyesight continues to deteriorate — and because everyone in Tokyo will be wearing masks, her ability to understand others would be hampered.
Rick Adams, the USOPC’s chief of sport performance and national governing body services, has told the Meyerses that while he empathizes with them, Tokyo organizers have limited delegations to athletes and essential staff.
The USOPC told Meyers that the 34 athletes on the Paralympic swim team would be supported by one dedicated personal care assistant (PCA), along with six coaches. Nearly a third of the swimmers are visually impaired, according to Meyers.
The Meyers family says the situation is untenable and must change. They also believe the USOPC has held firm on its position to avoid a rush of athletes attempting to add their own PCAs to the delegation.
Meyers, who lives in a suburb between Baltimore and Washington, D.C., has been training with the Nation’s Capital Swim Club, which launched the Olympic careers of stars such as Katie Ledecky and Tom Dolan. There, Meyers has trained under famed coach Bruce Gemmell.
“Your heart just breaks for her,” Gemmell told the Post. “It seems to me if our focus is athletes first, which it should be but which it isn’t always — if athletes first is what we’re doing, then we as a USOPC, we need to do better. We must do better.”
The Tokyo Paralympics will start on Aug. 24 and run through Sept. 5.
Copyright 2021 NPR. To see more, visit [www.npr.org.](https://www.npr.org.)
Tencent have bought another game developer, so let's see how big their collection is now | Rock Paper Shotgun
So there it is: if you play games, it's likely Tencent owns at least a small part of the developer or publisher that made something you like. It's such a huge number of companies to go through, it's entirely possible I've missed one or two as well.
At the end of it all, here’s your frequent reminder that games industry consolidation is something we shouldn’t ignore. It took me a long time to put this list together, and that’s pretty concerning.
Their stakes pretty much touch every game I play.
European Beach Handball Championships: Norway hit with 1,500 euros bikini fine - BBC Sport
Norway's Minister for Culture and Sports, Abid Raja, tweeted after Monday's ruling: "It's completely ridiculous - a change of attitude is needed in the macho and conservative international world of sport."
That last quote could apply to nearly every sport, in one way or another.
