Friday, July 31, 2020

Dancers discuss dancing for LA Clippers guard when he broke quarantine; Baker Mayfield didn't delete it quite fast enough; Blade Runner 2049 masks

(Incidentally, Atlanta's mayor is "Mayor Bottoms") LA Times:
Working the day shift from 3 to 9 p.m., Aries said she danced last week for Williams, a regular at the club who has a dish named after him: the “Louwill Lemon Pepper BBQ wings.”

After placing an order with the Magic City kitchen, the high-scoring Clippers guard ambled around the club, Aries said, and she was one of a few dancers who performed for him, keeping a six-foot distance.

“He tipped very well,” she said.



Prisoners once again escape from an Oklahoma jail by climbing down a rope made out of bedsheets



It's not the first time this has happened:
The 13-story jail opened in 1991 west of downtown Oklahoma City and was billed as escape proof. It was not. Two months after opening, two inmates in the same week broke the block windows in their cells and used bedsheets to scale down the side of the jail undetected. Others followed.
This time, one of the men, a murder defendant, was arrested several hours later. The other man, a rape defendant, fell from the rope, broke his leg, and was found "laying in the grass" a short distance away.

There's plenty of fingerpointing:
The escape also brought a renewal of the animosity between [the] County Commissioner ... and the sheriff.

[The commissioner] again blamed the sheriff for problems at the jail.

...

In response, the sheriff said, "These escapees had to cut through ... grates, and no one at the jail noticed, so how is that my fault? They hoarded bedsheets for their escape, and were free for more than an hour and Jail Trust administration didn’t even know until outside law enforcement notified them, that’s not my fault.

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Animatronic minotaur head; X-Men concept art; D&D Realms of Horror





Thursday, July 30, 2020

Charming story about three friends who adopted a wolf puppy

From a longer post:
instead of chasing squirrels when she slipped the leash, she broke the leash and killed a fucking deer once. One time we locked her in the finished and air-conditioned basement when we left for the day, because it was ten degrees cooler down there...she completely Houdini'd a steel gate, chewed the basement door in half, ripped two legs off of the dining room table upstairs out of spite, and then went to sleep watching reruns of Wishbone on TV...in the fucking basement! And I mean, who could fucking blame her--it was ten degrees cooler down there! We always brought her with us to the beach after that...just like she planned.

However despite her faults, she was also genuinely very sweet, wickedly intelligent even by dog standards, loyal and protective, gentle when she needed to be (around cats or kids), quite vocal, and highly affectionate.

"Alleged Oahu Crime Boss’ Nightclub Was A Popular Place For Political Fundraisers"

Civil Beat:
in recent years, before the nightclub was closed down, records show, some of Hawaii’s most recognizable politicians — including Hawaii['s governor and a state senator] — used the club to hold lucrative political fundraisers.

...

M Nightclub’s status as a dangerous place was well known.

...

Just a few months later, in December 2016, [he] would again have dealings with [the alleged crime boss], this time over Christmas tree lights that he had strung up in a public park to honor his son, ... who had died in a car accident that occurred the year before.

[The alleged crime boss] is now accused by federal prosecutors of orchestrating the murder of [his son]’s friend...who was in the vehicle with him at the time of the crash and who [the alleged crime boss] incorrectly believed was behind the wheel at the time.

"Taylor Swift Remains Silent as Fans Doxx and Harass Music Critic Over ‘Folklore’ Review"

"the 8.0 numerical score that accompanied [Pitchfork's] review—a metric determined not by the reviewer, but from multiple staffers’ ratings—threatened to drag down the album’s aggregated Metacritic score."

The Federalist pivots to the problem is Trump; A park gets de-benched; Ned Stark was the perfect politician for the Trump era




























The Overlook Hotel seems kind of appealing now, actually; Symmetry in the NBA restart; Virtual baseball fan glitches








Swimming Godzilla sculpture

There's a 5'4" 169lb NHL player, and it's like watching Wolverine in real life



Warhammer 40K Chainswordmaidens



A post shared by @ kitbashers_ball on



The logo for the mission to Mars that launched today




Designed by van Schneider:
For the 2020 launch of the Mars Rover, NASA asked House of van Schneider to design a symbol capturing the energy and legacy of space travel, while celebrating the engineers who worked tirelessly on this mission.

At once an abstract representation of the iconic rover and blocks reaching up to the sky, the logomark works as beautifully on the rover as it does on a 191-foot tall rocket ship.
Nasa is selling tees:



This mission is sending a helicopter to Mars:

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Wednesday, July 29, 2020

Bootleg DVD for "Drive"

Detailed look at "the downfall of one of the nation’s deadliest poaching crews"

A grim story by Bryan Schatz for High Country News:
But even after the evening’s staggering discoveries, the officers had no idea how much darker the case would become. [The men] knew something the officers didn’t: For years, the men had been illegally killing wildlife in the wooded Oregon-Washington borderlands, and they hadn’t been doing it alone. The investigation that began that cold night would be unlike any the wardens had known before, ultimately pushing the boundaries of what they imagined people were capable of — and what they themselves could endure.

...

Video after video played, each eerily similar to the last, the men’s hands and faces coated in blood spray from point-blank shots.

...

The poachers didn’t appear to harvest much meat; they rarely kept pelts. Heads, when they took them, were apparently often chucked behind old trucks. Their trophies mostly seemed to be the pictures and videos they took and shared with each other.

...

The first round of videos had turned up acts of brutality, but this latest batch was worse. At times, young children were the ones pulling the triggers

"A former [NBA] employee compared the atmosphere when he worked in Xinjiang to 'World War II Germany'"

ESPN:
American coaches at three NBA training academies in China told league officials their Chinese partners were physically abusing young players and failing to provide schooling, even though commissioner Adam Silver had said that education would be central to the program, according to multiple sources with direct knowledge of the complaints.

The NBA ran into myriad problems by opening one of the academies in Xinjiang, a police state in western China where more than a million Uighur Muslims are now held in barbed-wire camps. American coaches were frequently harassed and surveilled in Xinjiang, the sources said. One American coach was detained three times without cause; he and others were unable to obtain housing because of their status as foreigners.

...

The ESPN investigation, which began after Morey's tweet, sheds new light on the lucrative NBA-China relationship and the costs of doing business with a government that suppresses free expression and is accused of cultural genocide.

...

The NBA employees who spoke with ESPN said many of the league's problems stemmed from the decision to embed the academies in government-run sports facilities. The facilities gave the NBA access to existing infrastructure and elite players, Tatum said. But the arrangement put NBA activities under the direction of Chinese officials who selected the players and helped define the training.

"We were basically working for the Chinese government," one former coach said.

FBI says "man used a prosthetic face mask and other disguises to pose as an elderly gambler while stealing more than $100,000 from people at casinos"

The alleged scheme was obtaining fake driver's license using information found online, and then using the information to withdraw cash advances from kiosks made available to casino VIPs:
"[He] immediately went to the restroom, where he removed his disguise," the agent wrote. "[He] then exited the casino with a noticeable bulge down the front of his pants, believed to be the prosthetic face mask."

...

Inside [his car], investigators found four prosthetic face masks and a straw hat with a black ribbon that matched one worn by [him] inside the MGM Grand, according to the affidavit.

The search also uncovered 83 driver's licenses, 14 insurance cards in multiple names, a counterfeit $100 bill and books on how to get away with committing crimes. A recovered flash drive contained forgery documents, background checks on various people, tutorials on how to counterfeit money and Excel spreadsheets with more than 1,000 names.

Investigators found documents detailing financial transactions at the MGM Grand casino in 2019.

"[He] also had photos of himself trying on prosthetic masks," the agent wrote.

The short story Sinkhole is very good

It was announced today that Universal Pictures won a bidding war, and the story by Leyna Krow will be developed by Jordan Peele and Issa Rae.

You can read it here. Packs a lot of horror into a very short story.

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The U.S. soldier of the (retro) future; Chernobyl disaster snowglobe; Gas masks for lovers







































Brutalist NES; Frozen blade; Nuclear disarmament finally achieved in Metal Gear Solid V





























Tuesday, July 28, 2020

"Penn Museum to Remove Skull Collection of Enslaved People"

Hyperallergic:
The objectionable collection belongs to Samuel George Morton, a 19th-century Philadelphia-born, UPenn-educated physician who collected hundreds of skulls, including those of enslaved Africans, Native Americans, and Cubans to try to reinforce his white supremacist, pseudoscientific theory that the brains of some races are larger than others.

...

The museum has also amended the collection’s webpage to say that it is “not a memorial lauding Morton or his scholarship”

Data recovery device looks like an occult item



This video explains how to precisely maneuver the needles into place over your failed memory card:



Trump's new favorite doctor thanks The Daily Beast for its expose; Using Covid19 as an excuse for more intrusive monitoring technologies; A disturbing story about the rush to produce the Polio vaccine











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Mace Windu (if he survived) custom action figure; Cursed Tie Fighter design; When Harrison Ford called Mark Hamill a big baby