Republican Congressman Steve King was removed from committees and publicly rebuked by his own party after his history of racist remarks flowered into open white supremacy. The experience gave him insight into Jesus's crucifixion.
"For all that I've been through -- and it seems even strange for me to say it -- but I am at a certain peace, and it is because of a lot of prayers for me. And when I have to step down to the floor of the House of Representatives, and look up at those 400-and-some accusers, you know we just passed through Easter and Christ's passion, and I have better insight into what He went through for us partly because of that experience."
He knows who the true believers are; they believe in him.
Update: Christopher Matias points out that some outlets are falsely suggesting King was censured by congress; it did not go that far.
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In spring 2014, barely weeks before GamerGate, 4chan trolls began masquerading as feminist women of color online. The targets were not fooled, obviously, and Shafiqah Hudson and others launched an education campaign against it. But conservative pundits were eager to play along, out of stupidity or malice, laundering the lies into their version of reality and engaging a supply chain of far-right bullshit that would soon be exploited at scale.
Shafiqah Hudson remembers the moment she realized something was off. She saw a tweet from an account she had never seen before: “#EndFathersDay because I’m tired of all these white women stealing our good black mens.” Something about the grammar—not to mention the idea that black women wanted to abolish Father’s Day because of interracial dating—just felt too cartoonish to be real.... Hudson found herself horrified by how easily people on social media could be lured into believing a stereotype of black women. While she watched a credulous rage build online, not just against these fake Twitter accounts but against the black feminists she called friends, her own anger grew as well: “No one is going to come into my house and start breaking shit,” she said.
The mockery #EndFathersDay made of an increasingly influential online feminist movement became predictable catnip to conservatives. Tucker Carlson devoted a segment to it. Ashe Schow in the Washington Examiner called it the latest “drivel” “from the feminist outrage machine.” Dan McLaughlin tweeted that the hashtag was “a neat illustration of the cultural trajectory of progressivism.” “#EndFathersDay Because it’s really just Second Caregiver of Unspecified Gender Identity Day, you cisnormative a**holes,” mocked Ben Shapiro.
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Dillon Cassidy and Kelly Kraft redubbed the classic Don Bluth animated feature "The Land Before Time" with "Scottish" voices. The whole movie! Enjoy it while it lasts. [via]
Narrator - Trumane Alston
Bryce - Spencer Hawk
Cera - Michelle Davey
Old Rooter - Denver Collins
Mother - Chris Hanley
Ducky - Liz Anderson
Petri - Taylor Jones
Produced by Dillon Cassidy
Edited by Kelly Kraft
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Fran Blanche explains "the greatest effect ever created" in the recording studio: plate echo.
Get out your good headphones and prepare to experience the awesome sound of plate echo through this 1980 vintage Ecoplate II! Thanks for watching and enjoy!
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Andrew Paul Joyce: "I made a composite image of all the white men running for president polling at 1% or below. Please be nice to him. He is my son."
cf. Pedigree collapse. Read the rest
A significant drop, but no worse than he's been before, reports Politico's Steven Shepherd.
“President Trump’s approval rating has dipped to its lowest point of his term in the immediate aftermath of the redacted Mueller report release,” said Tyler Sinclair, Morning Consult’s vice president. “This week, 57 percent of voters disapprove, and 39 percent approve of the president’s performance — a net approval rating of –18 percentage points, compared with 55 percent who disapproved and 42 percent who approved — a net approval rating of –13 percentage points — one month ago in the aftermath of Attorney General [William] Barr’s summary of the Mueller report to Congress.”
I'm amazed it dropped under 40%, to be honest. Accepting that four in ten American voters are unequivocally, non-negotiably, unarguably with Trump is the basic political challenge for everyone else. Read the rest
Behold The Pasta PC, a computer that has a nutrition label in addition to a spec sheet, because he used sheets of pasta as the case. It works, but between the build (consider the thermals) and the antiquity of the Atom-based computer he sacrificed to make it, it's pretty hinky. [via MeFi]
My wife said something one day joking about making a PC out of Pasta... Never joke with me on such things because I may just do it... and do it I have. Behold... The LASAGNA PC V.1 Clickbait you say?! NAY! This is the real deal. The first ever crazy PC build on this Channel, and the first ever Pasta PC in the world. You're welcome.
Beautiful as it is, I'll admit that I'm slightly disappointed he didn't actually bake a PC into a lasagne. You could get away with what, about 160° without melting stuff on the board? Tasty. Read the rest
Douglas Preston's search for a boyhood friend led to a dark discovery.
He fled from any hint of conflict, usually with a wiseass comment flung over his shoulder, and he could outrun any goofus who took up the chase. I couldn't begin to fathom the trajectory that brought him from an upper-upper-middle-class home in Wellesley to a cramped boarding house in New Jersey. Details of his life came flickering back into my memory: Petey singing songs to his hamster Gertrude; Petey cradling his dying dog after she'd been hit by a car, even though she was bleeding and peeing all over him; Petey writing silly stories about a magical valley where the animals talked like people; Petey and I burying a treasure.
It's better to know, because you never know who might not. Read the rest
There are so many major annoyances that I fear we don't give the minor ones enough attention. [via] Read the rest
Banned from the Cloudy Nights telescope forums, IT consultant David Goodyear angrily posted its address on a skeevy hacking site with a request it get nailed. It was down for more than a week thanks to the resulting DDOS. The FBI knocked on his door. They made a show of being friendly and amused by the whole thing, and because middle-aged IT consultants think they're smarter than anyone else, Goodyear admitted everything while giving the officers a tour of his telescope collection. Now he's in jail for two years.
A jury found Goodyear responsible for one count of “intentional damage to a protected computer.” A judge sentenced him to a $2,500 fine, $27,352 in restitution, and 26 months in prison.
[Cloudy Nights' Michael] Bieler had assumed the case was closed until the FBI arrested Goodyear a year later and summoned Bieler to court. He was shocked when he learned about the length of the sentence. He never wanted Goodyear to be imprisoned at all, let alone for two years. “Honestly, I think it’s extreme, what happened,” he says. “We actually asked in our letter [to the court] that he not get prison time. We just wanted him to stop attacking our website.”
The 34-year-old Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA), which tech policy expert Tim Wu has called “the worst law in technology,” is controversial for many reasons. One of the most common is its harsh sentencing rules.
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Police were forced to restrain the Easter Bunny this weekend after he landed a series of blows on a man during a street brawl in Orlando, Fla.
[The Easter Bunny] said he was out bar hopping with friends when he saw a man and woman fighting. He said he jumped in and tried to pull the man off the woman.
Lindsey Edwards, who provided WESH 2 News with cellphone video of the fight, said that just before the bunny jumped in he saw the man spit on the woman he was fighting with.
Police arrived seconds later and dispersed the crowd. No arrests were made.
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It's Monday again, and I am here to provide the content you crave.
WHO WILL WIN? Best of Trucks vs Stumps. Toughest Dodge, Ford, Chevy Trucks and more pulling out tree stumps. Cool and funny ways to remove tree stumps with trucks. Some win and some fail when trucks take on stumps.
If you've only got time for one, 0:55 is pretty good, but this one at 7:34 is best.
Previously:
Men arrested for stealing shed by trying to drag it down the road behind a truck Read the rest
Jason Bailey is curating a show of generative art, among the first major retrospectives of computer-mediated work. It comes at an important time, too, as the art business's Morf Vandewalts fuss over machine learning as if it were born yesterday.
In the last twelve months we have seen a tremendous spike in the interest of “AI art,” ushered in by Christie’s and Sotheby’s both offering works at auction developed with machine learning. Capturing the imaginations of collectors and the general public alike, the new work has some conservative members of the art world scratching their heads and suggesting this will merely be another passing fad. What they are missing is that this rich genre, more broadly referred to as “generative art,” has a history as long and fascinating as computing itself. A history that has largely been overlooked in the recent mania for “AI art” and one that co-curators Georg Bak and Jason Bailey hope to shine a bright light on in their upcoming show Automat und Mensch (or Machine and Man) at Kate Vass Galerie in Zurich, Switzerland.
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How does the amazingly concise 1-kilobyte chess program that came with 1981's Sinclair ZX81 fare against a modern PC armed with the powerful StockFish chess engine? Ha ha, it gets its ass kicked!
The game of chess is an ancient one, dating back to sometime around the 6th century. While the Sinclair ZX81 isn't quite that old, it is now 37 years old. Standard ZX81 models came with only 1KB of RAM, but somehow David Horne managed to squeeze a playable chess game into that space. The question is, can 1K ZX81 chess compete with a more modern chess engine, in this computer vs computer chess game.
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Rossi Lorathio Adams II, a social media "influencer", built a brand around "State Snaps." Telling people to "Do it for State" became a catchphrase in the comments. The owner of doitforstate.com was not interested in selling the domain, however, so Adams sent his cousin to force the owner to transfer the domain at gunpoint. The owner disarmed the intruder, shot him several times with the weapon, then called the police. Now Adams and his cousin are going to jail.
"Between 2015 and 2017, Adams repeatedly tried to obtain 'doitforstate.com,' but the owner of the domain would not sell it. Adams also threatened one of the domain owner's friends with gun emojis after the friend used the domain to promote concerts," court records show. Then he had an idea: Why not take it by force?
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GB Studio is a "free and easy to use retro adventure game creator for your favourite handheld video game system." Use a modern visual scripting interface to create Zelda-style 2D role-playing games that run on the Nintendo Game Boy or standalone on the web.
· Visual game builder with no programming knowledge required.
· Design your graphics in any editor that can output PNG files e.g. Photoshop, Tiled, Aseprite.
· Example project included to get started right away.
· Make top down 2D JRPG style adventure games.
· Build real GB Rom files which can be played in an emulator or on device using USB Carts.
· Build a HTML5 playable game that also works on mobile and can deployed to any webserver or uploaded to Itch.io.
· Built for macOS, Windows and Linux.
· Supports both macOS light and dark mode.
· Includes the full tools that were used to build Untitled GB Game, free to play on Itch.io.
It's by Chris Maltby (on Itch, Twitter) and downloads are available for MacOS, Linux and Windows. [h/t Agies] Read the rest
Samsung's folding phone, which will ding buyers about two grand after tax, is already in deep trouble: the review units sent to journalists are dying after hours of use.
CNBC's Todd Haselton writes that it was "a tantalizing glimpse of the future — before it broke."
During my second day of testing, the screen began flickering and would turn off and on at a rapid pace. It became completely unusable and at times wouldn’t turn on at all.
Samsung had said not to remove a thin layer that sits on top of the screen. Other reviewers accidentally removed this layer and ran into similar issues that I saw. But I never removed the protective film or used the device outside any way a normal user might.
The Verge titled its video review "after the break" and awarded it the not-so coveted "Yikes" rating.
Whatever happened, it certainly wasn’t because I have treated this phone badly. I’ve done normal phone stuff, like opening and closing the hinge and putting it in my pocket. We did stick a tiny piece of molding clay on the back of the phone yesterday to prop it up for a video shoot, which is something we do in every phone video shoot. So perhaps a tiny piece of that snuck into a gap on the back of the hinge and then around or through its cogs until it lodged in between the screen and the hinge. It’d be sort of like Charlie Chaplin getting caught in the gears in Modern Times.
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