Seeds: comic-book memoir of father's cancer is moving, sweet

Ross Mackintosh's debut graphic novel Seeds is a wrenching, first-person account of Mackintosh's father's last months as he died of lung cancer. It's not exactly upbeat, but it's also not merely an existential misery -- rather, it's a moving tour of Mackintosh's emotional journey as his father slipped away, filled with regret and love, sorrow and humor, exasperation and sweetness. I ended up crying in a restaurant as I finished it, but I spent the rest of the day turning it over and feeling good for it. Mackintosh's father -- a no-nonsense engineer who was gruff but loving -- went well, as these things go, and Mackintosh's experience of his father's cancer brought him to terms with all sorts of father-son stuff that many of us think about. I recommend it without reservation, but bring a box of tissues with me when you're reading it.

Seeds

 

• Comic book autobiography of a teen girl's life with braces - Boing ...
• Sweet memoir of a golden age of toy design - Boing Boing
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10 Architecturally Wondrous Staircases

A friend forwarded me one of those emails her husband got at work. It was full of photos of amazing staircases plus some strange magic eye type puzzles. Being the visual person that I am, I became completely fixated on the staircases and even went so far as to search for more and more visually indulging photos of creative staircases. I couldn't get enough. Who thinks of these designs? 

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Visualizing the wealth of America's super-rich ruling class

A series of 11 infographics from Mother Jones vividly illustrate the widening gap between America's rich and poor, and how skewed Americans' views of this inequality are. The myth of the American dream has led plenty of ordinary Americans to believe that they are rich-people-in-waiting, leading them to support policies that benefit the rich at their expense (see the chart after the jump for more).

It's the Inequality, Stupid (Thanks, Mmechanic, via Submitterator!)

 

• Santa Fe Institute economist: one in four Americans is employed to ...
• Much of what investment bankers do is socially worthless - Boing Boing
• UK's super-rich get even richer - Boing Boing
• Florida foreclosure mill owner who chucked out 70000 families in ...
• A pictorial day in the life of a Tijuana millionaire's wife ...
• Winner-Take-All Politics: how America's super-rich got so much ...

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Sharing the power in Tahrir Square

How Tahrir Square's protestors shared their power: an exuberant spaghetti, wall-warts, and charging handiphones of all variety.

cairofeb6_036

 

• Egypt turns off internet, Lieberman wants same option for US ...
• Egypt: TGIF - Boing Boing

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How Watson Could Have Been Defeated on Jeopardy

IBM's Watson computer beat two human opponents on Jeopardy. Would this strategy have worked?

via Borepatch

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17-year-old Tim Burton's rejection from Walt Disney Productions

In 1976, a 17-year-old Tim Burton sent a hand-drawn manuscript for a children's book called "The Giant Zlig" to Walt Disney Productions, hoping for a publishing deal. They rejected the manuscript, but they still hired him a few years later, after he had graduated from CalArts and been out in the field for a few years.

February 19, 1976

Dear Tim:

Here are some brief impressions of your book, The Giant Zlig.

STORY: The story is simple enough for a young audience (age 4-6), cute, and shows a grasp of the language much better than I would expect from one of today's high school students, despite occasional lapses in grammar and spelling. It may, however, be too derivative of the Seuss works to be marketable--I just don't know. But I definitely enjoyed reading it.

ART: Considering that you suffer from a lack of the proper tools and materials, the art is very good. The characters are charming and imaginative, and have sufficient variety to sustain interest. Your layout is also good--it shows good variety in point-of-view. Consequently, I not only enjoyed reading about the Giant Zlig, but I got a chuckle watching him, too.

The manuscript and letters were on display at Kid City's Tim Burton@MOMA exhibit in NYC.

Letters of Note: The Giant Zlig (via IO9)

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Headline of day: "Nebraska deputy stops pickup truck full of naked people"

"Lancaster County authorities say a deputy investigating a suspicious vehicle near Lincoln got a surprise when he stopped a pickup truck -- all four people inside were naked. (...) The sheriff's office says the deputy noticed a strong smell of alcohol as he approached the truck. In the bed, he found clothes. In the truck were two men and two women, all naked." (thanks, Kirk! also spotted via @fark)

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Klingon iPhone stand

Looking for that special gift for your Klingon speaking friend? Billed as a steampunk accessory stand, this 'IH 'ach HeghmoH display unit from Austin area Etsy user voodoofabrication would look at home on any Bird-of-Prey or D5 Battlecruiser.

Read the Full Story » | More on MAKE » | Comments » | Read more articles in iPhone | Digg this!

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Episode 524: Failed Shaving Throw

One of the all-time classic pieces of GM assistance was the Wandering Damage System, printed in Dragon magazine #96, an April Fool's issue. It's simply too useful to keep secret any longer, so here it is in all its glory:

How To Use The Wandering Damage System

First there was the wandering monster. They serve well when applied in hordes, but why not cut out the middleman and just deal out damage to the characters directly? It makes for a smoother, faster-paced game, and if you want to kill off characters quickly, it can only be beaten by divine intervention by Cthulhoid godlings.

Instructions: Whenever a player annoys you in any way, by wearing tasteless clothes or eating the last corn chip, ask him to roll a d20. He may become worried that he's rolling a saving throw. Ha, ha!!! Little does he know that he just rolled on the Wandering Damage System matrix!!! Repeat the roll as often as desired.

The Wandering Damage System Matrix

Roll		Result
1		Your character has fallen down a flight of stairs; roll his dexterity or less on percentile dice, or else consult Limb Loss Subtable.
2		The monster your character just killed gets up and attacks him, doing 8-80 points of damage.
3		Your character smells smoke; his right arm is on fire. Take 14 points of damage and save vs. gangrene.
4		Your character cuts himself while shaving; consult Limb Loss Subtable.
5		Your character's nose hairs catch fire and he dies of smoke inhalation.
6		Your character stumbles backward into a yawning chasm and disappears from view.
7		The next time your character says something, he eats his words, chokes on them, and dies.
8		Something cuts your character's nose off, doing 2-12 points damage and really messing up his charisma.
9		Your character steps on a piece of glass; consult Limb Loss Subtable.
10		Your character suddenly catches a severe case of brain death.
11		Something invisible chews on your character, doing 6-36 points damage.
12		Your character develops an incredibly severe case of arthritis and can grasp nothing with his hands; he drops anything he's holding - and if that happened to be a sword or an axe, consult the Limb Loss Subtable.
13-20		Consult the Random Damage Subtable for no reason whatsoever.

Limb Loss Subtable (roll d6)

1 - Left leg gone
2 - Right leg gone
3 - Left arm gone
4 - Right arm gone
5 - Head gone
6 - Torso cut in half

Random Damage Subtable

Dice roll		Result
01-05		Take 10 hit points damage.
06-10		Take 15 hit points damage.
11-20		Take 30 hit points damage.
21-25		Take 10 hit points damage and consult Limb Loss Subtable, modifying die roll by +5.
26-30		Take 10 hit points damage and roll again on Wandering Damage System Matrix.
31-35		Take 15 hit points damage and then take 30 more.
36-40		Roll every die you own for damage.
41-45		Take 17 hit points damage.
46-50		Take 42 hit points damage.
51-55		Multiply your character's age by 5. Take three times that much damage.
56-60		Take 24 hit points damage and then take 31 more.
61-65		Take 1,000 hit points damage and roll again.
66-70		Roll every die within 30 feet for damage.
71-73		Add up the total hit points of everyone in the party. Take that much damage.
74-75		Take 3 hit points damage and consider yourself very lucky - for the time being.
76-00		What? You didn't get hurt? That's impossible - this system is foolproof. Roll again.

(Wandering Damage System is copyright TSR April 1985 and reproduced here as a small extract from an entire magazine for purposes of review and parody.)

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Gunslinger FOUND! Javier Bardem offered the Dark Tower lead

Gunslinger FOUND! Javier Bardem offered the Dark Tower lead

SCI FI Wire Atom Feed

I guess Christian Bale's front-runner status evaporated as soon as we reported it, as Ron Howard has decided who he wants to play the Gunslinger in his movie-TV juggernaut. The question is, will Javier Bardem say yes?

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Good news about America's scariest volcano

One of the most disconcerting moments I've ever seen in a nature documentary came a few years ago, when I watched Discovery Channel's Supervolcano—all about the, er, supervolcano located under Yellowstone National Park.

I remember the scientists talking about how they'd been looking for a caldera—the collapsed cone of an ancient volcano—in the Park for years, but hadn't found one. That is, until the day that someone looked around and realized that they couldn't see the caldera because they were standing in the middle of it. The Yellowstone caldera measures 34 miles by 45 miles, encompassing most of the Park. Meanwhile, the floor of the caldera has been swelling since 2004—as much as 10 inches in some places. That's the bad news.

The good news: It doesn't look like this supervolcano is heading for a super eruption.

Scientists think a swelling magma reservoir four to six miles (seven to ten kilometers) below the surface is driving the uplift. Fortunately, the surge doesn't seem to herald an imminent catastrophe, Smith said.

"At the beginning we were concerned it could be leading up to an eruption," said Smith, who co-authored a paper on the surge published in the December 3, 2010, edition of Geophysical Research Letters. "But once we saw [the magma] was at a depth of ten kilometers, we weren't so concerned. If it had been at depths of two or three kilometers [one or two miles], we'd have been a lot more concerned."

Ground deformation can suggest that magma is moving toward the surface before an eruption: The flanks of Mount St. Helens, for example, swelled dramatically in the months before its 1980 explosion. But there are also many examples, including the Yellowstone supervolcano, where it appears the ground has risen and fallen for thousands of years without an eruption.

Based on geologic evidence, Yellowstone has probably seen a continuous cycle of inflation and deflation over the past 15,000 years, and the cycle will likely continue, Smith said. Surveys show, for example, that the caldera rose some 7 inches (18 centimeters) between 1976 and 1984 before dropping back about 5.5 inches (14 centimeters) over the next decade.

National Geographic News: Yellowstone has bulged as magma pocket swells

Thanks to Marilyn Terrell for Submitterating

Pictured: A peaceful day in the middle of the Yellowstone Caldera

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Sergio Leone remix of truck-eating bridge

It 11foot8.com, a website devoted to a low-clearance bridge in Durham, North Carolina that shaves the tops off of about a dozen trucks a year, created this video compilation of the nine trucks and one RV that were can opened in 2010. As Mr. Jalopy would say, "This is my favorite kind of problem - someone else's."

The Good, The Bad and Some Ugly Crashes

(Submitterated by yovo68)

Previously: Videos of 11-foot-8 trestle eating 12-foot trucks

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Woman paralyzed by hickey

A 44 year old woman in New Zealand presented with partial paralysis at Auckland's Middlemore Hospital emergency department; after examination, the doctors concluded that she'd suffered a mild stroke caused by a hickey near a major artery in her neck. She recovered after being treated with anti-coagulant.

"Because of the physical trauma it had made a bit of bruising inside the vessel. There was a clot in the artery underneath where the hickey was."

Wu said the clot dislodged and traveled to the woman's heart, where it caused a minor stroke that led to the loss of movement.

"We looked around the medical literature and that example of having a love bite causing something like that hasn't been described before," he said.

New Zealand Woman Partially Paralyzed by Hickey

(Image: File:Love bite.jpg, Janek B./Wikimedia Commons)

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Portugal: 10 years of decriminalized drugs

Here's a good Boston Globe report on the first decade of Portugal's bold experiment with drug decriminalization and increased treatment. Ten years ago, Portugal -- whose drug problem had been spiraling out of control -- decided to treat drug addiction as a public health matter, not as a criminal matter. They decriminalized possession of drugs, and increased treatment available to addicts, and experienced an immediate, dramatic and sustained drop in negative effects from drug use -- though the use of some drugs went up.

In this sense, one drug policy expert noted, the Portuguese experiment has become a sort of Rorschach test -- in the dark blobs on the page, people can see whatever they want to see. But Tom McLellan, the former deputy director of the Office of National Drug Control Policy under President Obama, said he's happy for the conversation. While not in favor of decriminalization, McLellan believes that the American debate over drug reform has become too polarized, with one side calling for incarceration and the other for legalization. "And I just don't buy it," McLellan said. The answer is likely somewhere in the middle, he believes, and perhaps that's where we can learn something from Portugal, a country that at least tried something new.

"I like that approach to drug policy," McLellan said. "Policy is really a product. And like a product, policy can be made better with experimentation and honest evaluation, rather than stupid polemic polarization of ideology."

Drug experiment (via Kottke)

 

• Ex-drug czar John Walters made a fool on CNN - Boing Boing
• Junk science and cocaine scares - Boing Boing
• A new Drug Policy Alliance PSA - Boing Boing
• Video: Brief History of Weed - Boing Boing
• UK govt demands an end to evidence-based drug policy - Boing Boing
• What would an evidence-based drug policy look like? - Boing Boing
• Netherlands runs out of criminals, has to shut prisons - Boing Boing

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Image of the Day: Sexiest use of an R2-D2 swim suit

Presented without comment.

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Man paddles his canoe through a flooded McDonald's

[Video Link] I can't think of a better soundtrack for this video of a gentleman paddling his canoe through a flooded Brisbane McDonald's than "Fish Heads."

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Farting gentleman stabs partygoers, kills one

At a party this weekend in Bristol, Connecticut, a 21-year-old gentleman stabbed four people, killing one. Why? Apparently they were making fun of his farting. From CBS Local:

The Hartford Courant, quoting (court) documents, reported that Higgins told police he was angry at being derided and wanted to teach people that they shouldn't trifle with him.

Higgins appeared in court Tuesday charged with murder, assault and carrying a dangerous weapon, and was ordered held in lieu of $2 million bond.

"Cops: Flatulence Behind Fatal Stabbing In Bristol"

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Doctor Who construction toy figures

New Playmobil-esque Doctor Who toys will hit stores in a few months from toy company Character Options. From the BB Press Office:

This new brick based collection includes 3D micro-figures that are brought to life with sculpted facial features making the Doctor played by Matt Smith and Amy Pond played by Karen Gillan instantly recognisable.

Matt Smith and Karen Gillan have already had first sight of their new miniature alter egos. Matt Smith said: "It was very surreal and funny coming face to face with a miniature version of myself as the Doctor but I'm glad that the Doctor's trusty Sonic Screwdriver is in his hand, ready to fend off attacks from monsters!"

"Doctor Who builds on licensee portfolio"

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Kid's petition against school's "No hugging" policy

On the Free Range Kids blog, a senior at a New England high school writes in to discuss the petition she's circulating to protest her school's "appropriate touch" policy ("the only appropriate touch is a handshake"). As she says, "As a college-bound 17-year-old, I am insulted by the presumption that I am too immature to decide which kind of touches are appropriate for school. If the administration seriously thinks we can't make that distinction ourselves, how do they expect us to survive in college?" Her petition is really good work, too:

* Interpersonal touch is not inherently sexual, and to treat it as such is to make it so. Touch can be a powerful bonding mechanism between friends, and any rule that fails to differentiate between acts of sex and acts of friendship seems arbitrary and inherently draconian.

* High school students will soon be turned loose and made responsible for their own decisions. Is it not the responsibility of educators to impart valuable life skills and ready us for autonomy? Outright bans are not the way to do so. Rather than be taught to see interpersonal touch as inherently bad, we should learn the nuances of what is and is not appropriate for public venues. Don't force us to look at the world in black and white. Show us the shades of gray.

* Imposing limits on interpersonal relationships merely divides "school" and "life" into separate and often warring factions. This further alienates many teens who already fail to find much real-world meaning in school. School should be a holistic place in which social as well as academic needs are met. If we're expected to integrate education into our lives, we should be allowed to bring our lives into our place of education.

"No Touching" at High School? A Student Protests!

(Image: sometimes, a hug is all what we need, a Creative Commons Attribution (2.0) image from eelssej_'s photostream)

 

• Lesbian panic shuts down Mississippi high-school prom - Boing Boing
• High School teacher creates neat presentation of the things he did ...
• Trash-talking your high school teacher on Facebook is ...
• High school prom "dancing guidelines" - Boing Boing
• SoCal school district bans the dictionary Boing Boing
• When getting the bombsquad called to school was a badge of honor ...

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A better way to get rid of Kindle DRM

Jacobsor sez, "This post provides a 'how to' guide for a simple way to remove DRM from Kindle, Nook and other ebook files using the open-source Calibre application in conjunction with some third-party plugins. I tried it on my Kindle library, and it works great, without needing to muck about manually with Python scripts. The Calibre program also allows you to convert files from one format to another, such as Kindle format (.mobi files) to epub files."

This is a followup from yesterday's somewhat more complicated Kindle de-DRM-ifier method.

Ebook Formats, DRM and You -- A Guide for the Perplexed (Thanks, Jacobsor, via Submitterator!)

 

• DRM-free Kindle books: are they any free-er? - Boing Boing
• David Byrne: Kindle DRM means "you are f*cked" Boing Boing
• HOWTO break Kindle book DRM - Boing Boing
• Some Kindle books have secret caps on the number of times you can ...
• Report: Amazon flipping the DRM kill-switch on customers' Kindles ...
• Tim O'Reilly: Kindle needs to embrace standards or die - Boing Boing

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