goat

wehavecomeforyourprivateschools:

A standup comedian who works part-time as a care worker on minimum wage has topped a poll of the funniest jokes at the Edinburgh festival fringe for the second time.

Masai Graham, who works with severely autistic young adults in the West Midlands and uses his annual leave to attend the Edinburgh fringe, got the backing of 52% of 2,000 people for his one-liner: “I tried to steal spaghetti from the shop, but the female guard saw me and I couldn’t get pasta.”

lynati:

lew-basnight:

quoms:

xenosagaepisodeone:

in retrospect, video rental stores *would* probably still exist today in some capacity had it not been for blockbuster. the nostalgia for the blockbuster browsing experience undermines the reality of how aggressively the chain snuffed out smaller video rental stores and would eventually become notorious for its abusive late fee collection policy once there were no significant competitors standing. the rise of streaming is often attributed to blockbusters demise, but what’s not often recognized is how netflix’ earliest (and most successful) marketing tactics were in fact advertising the absence of the aforementioned terrible late fees as opposed to the convenience of not having to go to the store. I was actually surprised to find out how much of blockbuster’s demise can be attributed to spiraling out of control as it attempted to manage viacom’s ever increasing debts than to the fact that people just naturally gravitated towards streaming (which is not to say that it wouldn’t have happened eventually, but).

see also: borders / barnes & noble with bookstores. amazon’s original pitch was probably more “look how convenient!” than it was “look, you can avoid the awful sterility of the inside of a barnes & noble!” but it’s interesting that with its aggressive tracking and tailoring of recommendations amazon is having machines do (in an impersonal and invasive way) what the staff at a local, non-chain bookstore would do, which is match their selection to your preferences

Barnes & nobles and Borders raced against each other, across the country, to oversaturate the bookstore market. This isn’t paranoia or conspiracy — it’s the same fucking model Starbucks used. Oh, your community supports three bookstores? We’re going to open five, until the little indies go under. Then we’ll close four of our own (sorry not sorry staff, enjoy competing with each other for a handful of positions!) and now you have no other choice. Movie rental chains did the same thing.

And then all these huge chain retailers have the fucking gall to weep and whine as amazon proceeds to wipe them out, and now I live in a small city where you just… can’t get stuff. If you don’t want to use amazon, if you don’t have a car to drive out to the big box on the highway, you literally can’t buy a pair of socks or an ice pack. No more pharmacies, no more bookstores, no more video or music stores… if this was plants and not retailers you’d call it monoculture, and you’d raise an alarm about how prone to catastrophic collapse monocultures are.

Ohhh that last line.

(via tooquirkytolose)

mctreeleth:

“…of course people put into a fictional circumstance are going to want to fight, because the idea of being able to express rage without consequence is such a cathartic thing for people who most often swallow rage.”

— Brennan Lee Mulligan, on having the fights in D&D that you don’t get to have in real life

(via darcera)

evilsoup:

argumate:

pmoon1:

argumate:

I was really impressed by the accuracy of some of the [Exxon] report’s predictions about fossil fuel consumption. Then I realized, oh, right, of course.

a most excellent xkcd

next, make a chart from 500k BC till today, so You will see how significant Your chart is. hint: it is not

here is the graph you requested

Man even if that weren’t the case, the only environment in which agriculture has existed is the relatively stable one we have had for the roughly eleven thousand years since the end of the last ice age. We simply don’t know whether it’s possible to maintain agriculture and therefore complex society at 1 degree Celsius above the pre-industrial average.

(via ferenofnopewood)

talesfromthecrypts:

Indiana Jones + punching Nazis

(via goodgrammaritan)

parakeet:

ahagoat:

parakeet:

parakeet:

my dad was outside feeding the slugs cucumber slices earlier

he was like ‘thats the same one from last night!’ (he was feeding the slugs cucumber slices last night too) im like man you’ve been spending too much time with the neighbourhood slugs if you can tell them apart

Friendship comes in many forms. Don’t get in the way of a man and his friendly slug friends

you’re right sorry dad for my crimes

(via goodgrammaritan)

margokesses:

He’s right and he should say it

(via devilcroc)

normal-thoughts-official:

if you feel like laughing-crying at the absurdity of the point we’ve reached with celebrity culture i highly suggest checking out the CelebJets twitter account. They use airport information to track down celeb flights and calculate their CO2 emmissions and it’s the most insane shit I’ve ever seen

My favorites include:

Floyd Mayweather taking a flight from Las Vegas to… Las Vegas. Not even the opposite side of Las Vegas. Literally just from the south to the upper south. 1 ton of CO2 emitted

ALT

[ID: Three tweets by CelebJets describing the flight. First one says “Floyd Mayweather’s Jet Landed in Las Vegas, Nevada, US. Apx. flt. time 15 mins”. It has, attached, a map that shows that the flight went from southernmost Las Vegas to central-south Las Vegas. The flight didn’t go in a straight line, but did a circle around the region that seems to be about 8 times the distance between the two points. The second says: “Floyd Mayweather’s Jet: approximately 121 gallons (458 liters), approximately 811 lbs (368 kg) of jet fuel used, approximately $816 cost of fuel, approximately 1 ton of CO2 emissions”. The third one says, “Floyd Mayweather’s Jet Took off from Las Vegas, Nevada, US”. End ID]

Floyd Mayweather taking a flight from Las Vegas to Van Nuys, then back to Las Vegas, then to Van Nuys again, then to Las Vegas again, all in the span of 24 hours, emitting 15 tons of CO2 in the process

ALT

[ID: Four threads, all dated from Jul 27th (except for the last one, which is dated Jul 28th) detailing his flights. All have maps showing the same itinerary, which seems to be done more or less in a straight line. The first one says: “Floyd Mayweather’s Jet Landed in Van Nuys, California, US. Apx. flt. time 37 Mins. Floyd Mayweather’s Jet 229 mile (199 NM) flight from LAS to VNY. Approximately 300 gallons (1,135 liters); approximately 2,009 lbs (911 kg) of jet fuel used; approximately $2,032 cost of fuel; approximately 3 tons of CO2 emissions.” The second one says: “Floyd Mayweather’s Jet Landed in Las Vegas, Nevada, US. Apx. flt. time 44 Mins. Floyd Mayweather’s Jet 229 mile (199 NM) flight from VNY to LAS. Approximately 353 gallons (1,336 liters); approximately 2,365 lbs (1,073 kg) of jet fuel used; approximately $2,392 cost of fuel; approximately 4 tons of CO2 emissions.” The third one says: “Floyd Mayweather’s Jet Landed in Van Nuys, California, US. Apx. flt. time 43 Mins. Floyd Mayweather’s Jet 229 mile (199 NM) flight from LAS to VNY. Approximately 346 gallons (1,309 liters); approximately 2,317 lbs (1,051 kg) of jet fuel used; approximately $2,330 cost of fuel; approximately 4 tons of CO2 emissions.” The last one says: “Floyd Mayweather’s Jet Landed in Las Vegas, Nevada, US. Apx. flt. time 41Mins. Floyd Mayweather’s Jet 226 mile (196 NM) flight from VNY to HSH: approximately 333 gallons (1,262 liters); approximately 2,235 lbs (1,014 kg) of jet fuel used; approximately $2,247 cost of fuel; approximately 4 tons of CO2 emissions. End ID]

Tom Cruise taking a private jet to fly for 10 minutes

ALT

[ID: "Tom Cruise’s Challanger 300 Landed near Killarney, County Kerry, IE. Apx. flt. time 12 Mins. Tom Cruise’s Challanger 300 44 mile (38 NM) flight from SNN to KIR. Approximately 64 gallons (241 liters); 428 lbs (194 kg) of jet fuel used; approximately $429 cost of fuel; approximately 0.6733 tons of CO2 emissions.” End ID]

Kylie Jenner taking that personally and taking a 4 minutes long flight. That’s right, not even 5 full minutes inside the jet

[ID: Tweet describing the flight mentioned above. This time it doesn’t have the stats, only the map, which shows a distance so small you can barely see its outline under the small airplane drawing that shows her current location. The flight was from Camarillo, California, to Van Nuys, California. It lasted 4 minutes. End ID]

Jay-Z taking a flight for a distance of 12 miles (19 kilometers). Gotta get that jet to go to the grocery store!

[ID: “Puma/Jay-Z’s Jet Landed in Teterboro, New Jersey, US. Apx. flt. time 18 Mins. Puma/Jay-Z’s Jet 12 mile (11 NM) flight from EWR to TEB. Approximately 139 gallons (526 liters); approximately 932 lbs (423 kg) of jet fuel used; approximately $937 cost of fuel; approximately 1 tons of CO2 emissions.” Again the line showing the distance in the map is so small the model airplane covers it entirely. End ID]

And last but not least, Kylie Jenner emitting 50 tons of CO2 in one single day

[ID: “Kylie Jenner’s Jet Landed in Milan, Lombardy, IT. Apx. flt. time 10 Hours 17 Mins. Kylie Jenner’s Jet 6,053 mile (5,260 NM) flight from VNY to LIN. Approximately 4,737 gallons (17,933 liters); approximately 31,751 lbs (14,402 kg) of jet fuel used; approximately $31,978 cost of fuel; approximately 50 tons of CO2 emissions.” End ID]

And these are just my personal faves from the last 10 days. There is so, so much more out there and it’s just slightly less absurd than these

rhyperographer:

ampersandworm:

tanadrin:

wmb-salticidae:

tanadrin:

land plants are fundamentally weird organisms, and the fact that we not only accept them as a normal part of our environment but assume in our science fiction that evolution might regularly produce something as offbeat as Earth land plants is very strange.

What’s weird about them? Photosynthesis seems straightforward, and “thing that does photosynthesis, but on land” seems reasonable on a planet with a significant amount of dry land. 

photosynthesis isn’t what’s weird IMO, lots of clades photosynthesize. land plants include an “alternation of generations” life cycle–alternating between haploid and diploid forms–except the halpoid generation has become almost entirely hidden within the reproductive system of the diploid generation, resulting in a diploid organism with a weirdly byzantine reproductive process. flowering plants add on top of this bizarrely elaborated reproductive structures they use to dragoon all kinds of other organisms into helping them propogate, including deliberately growing fleshy protuberances with seeds inside to tempt animals into eating them. vascular plants have developed a way to transport nutrients that allows them to grow into immense fractal structures made out of a material so resilient that for the first few million years it was around nothing on Earth could really effectively digest it.

the way plants of different species can be grafted on to each other and you can propagate many plants through cuttings makes me feel like they’re really only a handful of steps removed from colonial organisms. imagine if you could stick a lizard’s leg in a jar of water and grow a whole new lizard out of it, or transplant a cow’s head onto another animal just by tying it in place. or if there was a phase in our geological history where the corpses of tigers lay so thickly on the ground that there were vast geological deposits of mineralized tiger flesh. or humans reproduced by convincing birds to eat their toes and poop them out later hundreds of miles away. very strange creatures.

the more you learn about plants the less you will like them.

You are wrong, this makes them better.

(via ferenofnopewood)

vamprisms:

you know what official the boys twitter account, i think i will

(via next-time-you-invite-pam)