Beyond the obvious beauty and grace of our First Lady, one must consider the historic importance of this photo. Our history books sweep under the rug the fact that the White House was built by African American slaves. For the next 150 years the majority of the serving staff of the so called “people’s house” were African American. In 1901 Booker T. Washington was the first African American to be received there as a guest by Theodore Roosevelt, to the horror of Washington society. They are all at last vindicated in our first African American first family. Note…It is my humble opinion that no matter what family should occupy the White House after January 2017, and the following generations for that matter, they will never equal the style, debonair, and class as that of the Obamas.
Here’s a piece I wrote about Ghostbusters that’s kind of a review and kind of a discussion of the film’s place in the current media landscape and why I think it’s generating so much excitement. Check it out if you’re interested!
EDIT to add that this does have some spoilers, in that it discusses the plot of the movie in general terms, including the ending. I personally don’t think there’s anything in there that would compromise the enjoyment of your viewing experience, but just FYI.
Shipwrecked Comedy and American Black Market proudly present: Edgar Allan Poe’s Murder Mystery Dinner Party trailer!
Edgar Allan Poe invites some of history’s most famous authors to play a murder mystery game, but things don’t go quite as planned. On August 22nd, bring your appetite for murder.
Yep. It’s here! We dropped the Poe Party trailer today much like I once dropped my phone into a pitcher of lemonade. This is actually way better than that, don’t listen to me.
I’m very proud of this and I hope you’ll watch and spread the word about Edgar’s dinner party :)
Hit the Road with #mypubliclandsroadtrip 2016 – Week 1, Places That Rock!
For the geologists, rock collectors and earth science lovers, this week is for you. The #mypubliclandsroadtrip 2016 heads out to find Places That Rock! on your public lands. All week, roadtrip stops will feature landscapes shaped by cool geological processes and formations – caves, volcanoes, hoodoos and more.
Our first stop is Sukakpak Mountain, one of the most visually stunning areas on BLM managed public lands along the Dalton Highway in northern Alaska (MP 203). A massive wall of Skajit Limestone rising to 4,459 feet (1,338 m) that glows in the afternoon sun, Sukakpak Mountain is an awe-inspiring sight. Peculiar ice-cored mounds known as palsas punctuate the ground at the mountain’s base. “Sukakpak” is an Inupiat word meaning “marten deadfall.” As pictured here from the north, the mountain resembles a carefully balanced log used to trap marten.
Sukakpak Mountain was designated in 1990 as a BLM Area of Critical Environmental Concern or ACEC to protect extraordinary scenic and geologic formations.
Follow all #mypubliclandsroadtrip stops in our @esri storymap journals: http://ift.tt/1XTIEVF. Explore #yourlands.
Ok so… cool story: I found even more things that weren’t accounted for/weren’t right (and needed to be uploaded/reuploaded/fixed) when I was typing this post.
I’ll reblog this post with the missing things when they’re done too, so consider this sort of a rough draft. If you want to share all the video together, please don’t link this post externally and wait until I can link to the complete YT playlist? I’ll also make another post for linking/tagging/reblogging purposes.
List largely gleaned from the schedule website, but there were some changes to the schedule that I believe have been accurately reflected.
Some content was omitted – the vast majority of that was all the “filming other people’s films” – because that’s not cool. I’ll link to things when the filmmakers make that stuff available (or if they actually find this and want me to post it? But please note that some of it I actually didn’t record at all.)
@cetaceanawareness, your talk was also excluded because it was nestled in the Scholar Advocacy segment that the To the Sea (upcoming documentary) folks were in. If you would like your clip excised and posted (or just want the video in general) let me know?
If Rachel Clark stumbles across this and wants the reading from her book included, I can do that too. This is her book.
I’m new to dealing with a ton of video like this (which is why it took me so long to get this all sorted) – but the idea is that I’ll learn and improve from here on out.
If I understand correctly, PS World is our world with the lone exception of spaceflight (which started a few decades earlier due to the pre-WWII defection to the U.S. of Werner von Braun) and a few associated technologies and societal developments (e.g., Reagan’s third term and colonies on the moon and Mars).
So ignoring narrative-conceit-hostile butterfly effects, things like Pokémon Go should exist in-world. (Except that the script was completed prior to the PGo singularity, so any incorporation of the game into the show would depend on last-minute rewrites/improv. But setting that aside.)
What would it be like for the newly revived Second Shift crew on Overture, seeing accounts from Earth of the latest craze? They wouldn’t have the hardware to run it, and wouldn’t have Pokestops or gyms if they did. Not being able to participate in the game would likely emphasize their feelings of separation, driving home the divergence of their stuck-in-1991 technological reality from that of Earth.
Things would only get worse for subsequent shifts, but Second Shift might be the one where the distance between their own memories and the increasingly alien (and multiple-light-years-distant) culture of Earth reaches the point where the crew has to confront the full extent of their isolation. FOMO is hard enough for Earthlings, but how would it feel to be committed to never experiencing the kind of connection afforded by augmented reality and a globally interconnected game, for people on a ginormous-but-tiny spaceship who decided at a young age to commit themselves to living out much of their lives in the company of exactly 3 other people?
I wonder: would they try to make some kind of simplified Pokémon game to play on the ship? Would they feel even sadder if they did? Seems like the kind of thing they might want to talk about to the therapy computer.
The Second Shift has some advantages over, say, the Twentieth. Their relatives are, largely, still alive, and the world at least resembles the one they grew up in. National borders are basically in the same places. The dominant cultures have only undergone one generation of shifting and churning. The biggest difference is the end of the Cold War. And with a ~1 month time lag one-way, regular communication is practical.
But to an extent, the similarity is a cold comfort. Things are still so different, and they are still separated by such time lag, that Earth may seem like an uncanny valley version of itself. Later shifts may actually have an easier time adjusting to a completely new world than the Second Shift has to one where everyone they loved is now old enough to be their parents.
They can’t play Pokemon Go – and probably wouldn’t even understand what it was – but they could console themselves by playing some Donkey Kong.
Thanks for the correction about the communication lag only being a month or so one-way. I’d somehow misremembered Overture’s cruising speed as 10% of the speed of light, meaning they’d be roughly 2.5 light-years away after 25 years. But since they actually travel at 1% of the speed of light they’d only be a tenth that distance. They’re not actually a quarter of a light-year from Earth, though, since they didn’t activate the Orion drive until they passed the orbit of Jupiter, which didn’t happen until well into the First Shift. So: they’re a light-month away.
Googling some of this information led me to this thread on Reddit. Can’t throw a rock around here without hitting someone wanting to fly an Orion-drive ship to a nearby exoplanet.
Dennis Hlynsky, a film and animation professor at the Rhode Island School of Design, creates videos at the intersection of art and science. Hlynsky transforms ordinary footage of birds and insects into ethereal illustrations by digitally tracing the paths they travel.
Hlynsky’s work is typically featured in galleries, where the video is projected on large screens with recorded sound. To see more videos from Hlynsky, please visit his Vimeo channel.
(by Imants Ziedonis, translated from the Latvian. Image is Deux Têtes dans les fleurs (1905) by Odilon Redon)
I feel my mind’s boundaries. I feel some centre, around which I twirl. I feel like a cow on its chain. The more I run nervously around the stake, the chain winds shorter. I want to browse, to choose, but the chain prevents it. At the stake there is no choice. i gnaw everything to the ground in my reach, but I don’t get further. I don’t know what is even there – beyond. I’m in a laughable situation: a mole emerges from the ground and remarks: “it sure is nice in your paddock isn’t it? Especially that stretch over near the woods.”
How shall I reply to him? I’m ashamed to say that in my own paddock I’ve not been beyond the chain. I’m just a house with a head – take that as you like.
But at times, the distant shimmers unexpectedly into view.
I can enter an egg without breaking it. I can enter a safe without cracking it. The world becomes fine and elastic. Yesterday my hand couldn’t reach the apple branch, today it is pipsqueak easy. Yesterday I didn’t even think about the top of the apple tree, but today I can feel my hand going further and reaching towards it.
But then I get a fear, that my arm will become too fine and snap off, and so I pull my hand back. (From where have I learned to be afraid of stretching thin and extended?) Only the thin can reach the distance. So again I allow my hand to reach, as far and as thin as it can: there, at the top of the tree grows an apple! My hand turns still finer, soon it will fly like a spider web on an autumn morning. And then someone says: that surely isn’t a hand? That’s not what a hand is like. Is that a hand? Surely no one could reach for an apple with something like that? A hand isn’t even allowed to be like that.
But I well know, that a hand can be so fine – almost invisible, almost imperceptible, you can only just detect it. I know, and I don’t listen to what they say, I stretch for the apple, in a moment I’ll have it, but then I feel it – I can’t go any finer. And that is such a painful feeling. I again feel my limits. If I stretch still further, my hand will come off. I can’t reach the top of the apple tree. It is likewise for smell.
Thanks to a scheduled (but forgotten) power outage in Crossfield I managed to sneak away and chase this beautiful beast from cochrane to just south of indus. she didn’t end up throwing a tornado, but it had a lot of the makings. Lots of cloud lowering and so much aqua green bubbling in her. It was beautiful in the fullest sense of the word.
I was nearly killed by two deer darting in front of me while i raced down a gravel road–and managed one frame of it on the dash mounted time-lapse i was making. it was quite a day.
