dreamitdoitloveityeah:

Quoth the RAVEN. by tariq12

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propitlikeithot:

lies haha! Gotcha. I think I was mostly caught off guard by a non techblr mentioning meatgate. It always surprises me when two seemingly unrelated people have a connection- I’ve seen it a couple times between sara Bareilles people and theatre or techblr and webseries. It’s a small world eh?

It is. But in point of fact, I have actual tech experience.

It was 36 years ago, during my senior year at Mira Costa High School. I was going out with my first real girlfriend. Her name was Nanette, and she was wonderful. She was also in drama.

I would go sit in the back of the theater and watch her rehearsing for that year’s play (she was one of the kids in God’s Favorite). After a week or so of this the teacher/director asked me if I’d help out with doing sound in the pit. I said sure; it got me a better view of rehearsals.

According to Nanette the reason the director asked me to do that was that the kid who was already doing sound was a big stoner and she (the director) didn’t trust him to get all the complicated cues right. And I had a reputation for being smart, so she thought I could help settle things down with my big brain.

The ironic thing was, the regular sound guy was really good at his job, and had it all down, while I didn’t know anything. It ended up that he only let me do one thing: press the Play button to start the set-change music between the first and second acts. I worked hard at my job, and got to where I could do it without screwing up, mostly.

The set change was really cool. We’d take the lights down and start the music (my one job! I felt so important), and then swap out a big set of the interior, with a half wall and a bunch of furniture, and replace it with the burned-out version. We didn’t have a curtain; we just did it in full view. Then we’d bring up the lights for Act II.

As we got closer to the show we worked on that set change, trying to make it faster. At one point we figured out we could save a few seconds by not taking the overstuffed chairs out through the wings, but instead just pushing them into the pit, where stoner guy and I would catch them. So I got a second job.

At the main performance, with a packed house, there was an audible gasp and an ovation when the lights came up for the second act.

It was the coolest moment of my high school career.

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fairy-wren:

Anna’s Hummingbird

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Making a pass, part 2

Everyone who sails in the Southern Ocean talks about how fast conditions change. Storm systems track through like express trains, and a boat can be surfing in 50 knots of wind one moment, then flopping in near-drifting conditions a few hours later.

The fleet saw some of that last night, as the four lead boats all parked within a few miles of each other along the northern limit of the ice exclusion zone. Then, as they were gybing off to the north in a tight pack, the fifth-place boat, Dongfeng, can surging in and passed them in better wind to the south to take the lead. Go Dongfeng!

Meanwhile, SCA is bringing up the next system from behind, and has regained half the distance they lost in the aftermath of their bad knockdown. I hope they’ll be able to keep closing.

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dappledwithshadow:

Claude Monet

Various works from 1875-76

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dendroica:

Experimental Food Supplementation Reveals Habitat-dependent Male Reproductive Investment in a Migratory Bird

We used both natural variation in habitat quality and a food supplementation experiment to separate the effects of food availability—one key aspect of habitat quality—on extrapair paternity (EPP) and reproductive success in the black-throated blue warbler, Setophaga caerulescens. High natural food availability was associated with higher within-pair paternity (WPP) and fledging two broods late in the breeding season, but lower EPP. Food-supplemented males had higher WPP leading to higher reproductive success relative to controls, and when in low-quality habitat, food-supplemented males were more likely to fledge two broods but less likely to gain EPP. Our results demonstrate that food availability affects trade-offs in reproductive activities. When food constraints are reduced, males invest in WPP at the expense of EPP. These findings imply that environmental change could alter how individuals allocate their resources and affect the selective environment that drives variation in male mating success.

(via Smithsonian Migratory Bird Center)

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faeryhearts:

The sun came up like gold through the trees, and I felt like I was in Heaven.
— Harriet Tubman.

Photography by Alexander Gogolin.

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Haha. But how can you trust it? Maybe I only liked it _ironically_. Or worse, maybe I _lied_.

But no; I take my likes seriously. If I liked your post, I liked it a lot. Thank you for brightening my day with it, whatever it was.

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thecwst:

Ocean

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bosierosie:

lies:

bosierosie:

q2qcomics:

mermaidqueen:

one of my favorite short stories I read in high school was a story that was told from an alien perspective and they described humans as walking sacks of meat and how we communicated by flapping our meat together to make sounds and were controlled by 3 pounds of meat inside our odd exterior… and now here we are, at MeatGate2k15

The stage is a reflection of the self.

THE IMAGERY IS UNREAL.  

Also, I jokingly brought this up to one of my “theatre-can-be-anything-the-earth-is-art-look-at-the-pretty-dirt-I’m-high-during-lecture” profs, and she was so entranced that she asked me, “Hmmm, can we do Hamlet like that?”

That was a really good story. Read it for yourself: “They’re Made Out of Meat”, from the collection Bears Discover Fire and Other Stories, by Terry Bisson.

You magical dude. I’m going to read that story.

So magical I broke the link. Here’s a corrected one: They’re Made Out of Meat, by Terry Bisson. For reals this time.

The live-action short-film version by Stephen O’Regan is also highly recommended:

Enjoy!

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Yay!

It has been a very good night in terms of my shipping of human/spider friendships.

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thegetty:

This Webpage Only Renders IRL

We made a new thing! It’s called “The Secret Tour” because it’s…secret.

It only makes sense and is awesome if you’re at the Getty Center, so we can’t give you the URL.

Just kidding: http://ift.tt/1CNQAw0/

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marykatewiles:

#gramaday – @higgaroni capturing Shipwrecked on a shipwreck.

Oh wow; my hero(ine)s stood on the Dominator!

I used to stare at it whenever we sailed past there, like in the 4th of July race, back when I was a kid. There was more of it then. :-)

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bosierosie:

q2qcomics:

mermaidqueen:

one of my favorite short stories I read in high school was a story that was told from an alien perspective and they described humans as walking sacks of meat and how we communicated by flapping our meat together to make sounds and were controlled by 3 pounds of meat inside our odd exterior… and now here we are, at MeatGate2k15

The stage is a reflection of the self.

THE IMAGERY IS UNREAL.  

Also, I jokingly brought this up to one of my “theatre-can-be-anything-the-earth-is-art-look-at-the-pretty-dirt-I’m-high-during-lecture” profs, and she was so entranced that she asked me, “Hmmm, can we do Hamlet like that?”

That was a really good story. Read it for yourself: “They’re Made Out of Meat”, from the collection Bears Discover Fire and Other Stories, by Terry Bisson.

Reposted from http://ift.tt/1HBjjn6.

High winds caught up with the Volvo fleet over the past day. There were some scary moments and torn sails, but no one was seriously hurt and all the boats are back racing. Details after a cut.

Four boats (at least) experienced uncontrolled crash gybes as they surfed at high speed on big waves. First it happened to ADOR, and then to MAPFRE, whose OBR Stefan Coppers posted this intense crash-cam video:

Rob Greenhalgh (Libby’s brother; the guy I pointed out in that leave-taking post the other day) was on the wheel at the time. You can see them surf down a big wave and stuff the bow at the bottom, causing the boat to pitchpole a little and spin out to port. The main gybes over, hanging up on the starboard running backstay, and they stop dead, pinned in position with the keel canted the wrong way.

You can see the crewmember who’d been on the mainsheet pedestal unclip his harness and start clambering around the cockpit, and Rob shouting for the engine to be started. (They need the engine so they can power up the hydraulics to cant the keel back to vertical.) Other things you can see during obsessive rewatching:

• easing the sheet to let the headsail (the fractional Code Zero, or “FRO”) go forward
• a cut after which the four-person watch on deck has been supplemented by the rest of the crew
• easing of the starboard running backstay, allowing the main to go to leeward and the boat to start moving again
• post-mortem commentary by Rob
• sail repairs and re-hoisting the main

Dongfeng also did a crash gybe, though it was at night so their crash-cam footage wasn’t as compelling:

All three of those boats recovered relatively quickly from their crashes. The fourth boat, SCA, had a harder time when they suffered a series of mishaps around sunset yesterday.

Here’s their crash-cam footage:

It sounds like Sophie was thrown pretty violently across the boat during the gybe, but I think she’s saying that she was “afraid for her back”, and taking things slow, rather than saying she’d actually re-injured herself. Annie Lush got knocked down by a big wave a few days ago, and has been only gradually cycling back into standing watches, so the crew has definitely been banged up.

Sam gave more details during a satellite interview with Genny during today’s Inside Track episode:

Fifty-knot squalls with hail sounds intense.

SCA’s FRO was seriously damaged in the crash. Hopefully they’ll be able to repair it; it’s a crucial sail for running in medium to heavy air. They also broke one or more battens in the main, and apparently had the stack (the unused sails that they move around the boat for ballast) come partially free, such that it was dragging over the side for a while.

They ended up spending most of last night putting things back together and resting, only getting back up to full speed after sunrise. That sounds like a wise decision, given what they were dealing with, but the reality is that they dropped more than 100 miles behind the rest of the fleet by doing so. Here’s a tracker animation showing the time from their gybe to their recovery:

The boats should have lighter winds for a day or so as they pass the northernmost part of the iceberg exclusion zone. Then the wind should increase again as they push south toward Cape Horn. Here’s hoping they all stay safe.

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gandalf1202:

Nicolae Grigorescu – Apple Blossom [c.1868-90] on Flickr.

Nicolae Grigorescu (Pitaru, May 15, 1838 – Câmpina, July 21, 1907) was one of the founders of modern Romanian painting.

[Sotheby’s, London – Oil on canvas, 34 x 24.5 cm]

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_{An Infinite List of Favorite Collections – Paolo Sebastian S/S 2014-15 Haute Couture}

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theartofanimation:

Yaphleen

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jacindaelena:

by dustandchimes

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tezukaspanels:

comicblah:

Nausicaa by Hayao Miyazaki

I want this on the wall in my room

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