walkin

What does it take to teach a bee to use tools? A little time, a good teacher and an enticing incentive. Read more here: http://to.pbs.org/2mpRUAz

Credit: O.J. Loukola et al., Science (2017)

Far-right cartoonist Ben Garrison frequently posts bigoted illustrations of conservatives' favorite enemies on his website, but the absurdity of his work is even more apparent in his portrayals of former President Donald Trump.

Garrison often paints Trump as an athletic, god-like figure leading the crusade against supposed enemies of freedom.

But a recent Garrison masterpiece is going viral for all the wrong reasons.

Trump recently announced a lawsuit against Big Tech companies like Facebook, Twitter, and Google's YouTube for what he says are free speech violations against conservatives. Trump and his ilk immediately started fundraising off the effort.

Garrison attempted to embody Trump as a fighter against Big Tech suppression, portraying Big Tech as a windmill and Trump as the literary icon Don Quixote.

Don Quixote is the main character of the 15th century story The Ingenious Gentleman Don Quixote of La Mancha by Miguel de Cervantes.

Quixote is an aging and angry man who becomes delusional and rebrands himself as a knight, donning a dilapidated suit of armor and mounting an exhausted horse. He sees inns as castles, innkeepers as lords, and windmills as ferocious giants.

Quixote's feud with windmills has been an enduring theme for centuries, and gave birth to the British phrase "tilting at windmills," meaning to fight enemies that don't actually exist.

Garrison's portrayal of Trump as Don Quixote pursuing the windmill of Big Tech censorship paints the former President as delusional, mounting a war on an imaginary foe—a primary criticism of Trump's

Garrison tried to clarify that Trump's enemies aren't imagined—the diametric opposite of the meaning conveyed by his picture—but the internet had to laugh at the accidentally true comparison.

Are you sad that June is over and you don't have a pride month anymore? Fear not, friends! There's a different pride month just beginning!

lgballt

me and @yarrayora having a fun time

YOU hates terfs

GUYS READ ALL OF THIS PLEASE PLEASE PL–

ok but legitimately i think the reason why kids aren’t taking internet safety seriously is because the people who are telling us not to put our personal information out seem so out of touch. no one acknowledges the possibility of meeting very real teenaged friends online, they always say that everyone you meet is a 40 year old white man in disguise. because they aren’t acknowledging things we know are true, it becomes a lot easier to dismiss the rest of what they’re saying as well. internet safety lessons absolutely must keep up with the times and acknowledge the internet’s capacity for good if you want kids to take to heart warnings about its capacity for bad.

“Chimera” by Thierry Mugler, fall 1997-98

If you’re wondering what the whole drama regarding tieflings is in the Dungeons & Dragons fandom: basically, capitalism ruined tieflings, and for once that’s not even slightly a joke.

Tieflings were first introduced as a playable species in Dungeons & Dragons 2nd Edition, via the Planescape campaign in 1994. At the time, there were no particular rules regarding what a tiefling was supposed to look like. The text explicitly stated that their basic physiology could vary wildly depending on what their fiendish ancestor was, and one of the first major Planescape supplements even included a table for randomly generating your tiefling’s appearance, if you were into that sort of thing.

This continued to be the case up through the game’s Third Edition. However, when the Fourth Edition rolled around in 2008, the game’s text suddenly became very particular about insisting that all tieflings looked pretty much the same. Some campaign settings even provided iin-character explanations for why all tieflings now had a standardised appearance. Understandably, this made a lot of people very annoyed.

There was naturally a great deal of speculation concerning what had motivated this change. It was widely cited as “proof” that Dungeons & Dragons was trying to appeal to the World of Warcraft fanbase – which was nonsense, of course; nearly all of the Fourth Edition’s allegedly MMO-like features were things that popular MMOs had borrowed from Dungeons & Dragons in the first place, and to the extent that tieflings’ new look resembled a particular WoW race, it was in that they were both extraordinarily generic.

In reality, it was a change that had been lurking for some time. Though Dungeons & Dragons is directly published by Wizards of the Coast, Wizards of the Coast is in turn owned by Hasbro, and Hasbro has long regarded the D&D core rulebooks as a vehicle for promoting D&D-branded merch – in particular, licensed miniature figures.

This was a bugbear that had reared its head before. When the Third Edition received major revisions in 2003, Hasbro corporate had ordered the game’s editors to completely remove any discussion of how to improvise minifigs for large battles, and replace it with an advertisement for the then-current Dungeons & Dragons Heroes product line. Implying that purchasing licensed minis wasn’t 100% mandatory simply would not do.

If you’ve gotten this far, you’ve probably already guessed where this is going: tieflings having no standard appearance made it difficult to sell tiefling minifigs, as any given minifig design would only be suitable for a small subset of tiefling characters. In the brutally reductive logic of the corporate mind, Hasbro reasoned: well, if we tell tiefling players that all of their characters now look the same, we can sell them all the same minifigs. So that’s what the game did, going so far as to write justifications into several published settings for magically transforming all existing tiefling characters to fit the new mould!

This worked about as well as anyone who isn’t a corporate drone would naturally anticipate – and that’s the story of how capitalism ruined tieflings.

this is peak Craigslist

Don't return ebooks or audiobooks you've consumed on Amazon and Audible

Amazon and Audible made it into their policy that you can return ebooks and audiobooks and get a full refund.

They actively promote this, making their book shop into a book lending service, de facto a library you subscribe to. That's their business plan to encourage subscribtions.

The dirty thing, however, is that Amazon and Audible are making the authors pay for each refunded item. They will detract money, income, royalties, from the authors' account. They're not hurting from the refund, the author is.

Look, no-one is saying you're not allowed to return an item if you've read the first 50 pages or listened to the first 45 minutes. Maybe the style is not your thing. Maybe you don't like the narrator's voice. Maybe the quality of the writing drops severely after chapter three. Go ahead, if the product is bad, return it.

What I'm talking about is that no one should be able to listen to a ten-hour audiobook or read through nearly an entire novel and still get a refund.

Most of the readers don't know who's paying for this business plan. It's not Amazon and Audible, they're still keeping your subscription money. It's the authors.

Spread the word.