Tuesday, August 31, 2021

Personal skyscrapers "are all the rage among India’s wealthiest"

SCMP:

Mukesh Ambani’s Antilia is a US$2 billion personal skyscraper standing 27 stories tall in one of Mumbai’s most expensive neighbourhoods. It has a room that blasts out snow flakes, an in-house temple that fits 50 worshippers, three helipads and six floors for Ambani’s luxury cars, all attended by 600 staff.

Not to be outdone, the Raymond Group’s chairman Gautam Singhania has the 30-storey JK House in south Mumbai

Ludicrous photos and video of police officers using a pedal boat to chase a robber trying to swim away through a weed-filled lake


Today's funny posts




Stylized Scarface/Pacino figure joins Damtoys's Gangsters Kingdom line

Accessories include an alternate face, tongue, eye, and much more:

Lego island of the undead



@moto.lego

No words.

♬ This Is Halloween - TryHardNinja

Real-life location from Myst, perhaps?; Augmented reality storefront concept; Idea for a 2D fighting game

@burst151

#ocean #fidg

♬ original sound - mobile gameplay




Monday, August 30, 2021

An autonomous car struck a Paralympic athlete and injured him badly enough to knock him out of his event

BBC:

Services of the e-Palette pods were halted after a vehicle hit a visually impaired athlete last week.

The athlete was not seriously injured, but he had to pull out of an event due to cuts and bruises.

The vehicles will now have more operator control and extra staff to ensure they do not hit any more people.

(Semi-autonomous because it also had an operator aboard.)

Redditors say there's a suspect college football program connected to the suspect high school football program


Storyboards made for "Captain America: The First Avenger"

Lots of storyboards for the chase sequence after Dr. Erskine is assassinated. 

Wait, Disney was suspicious of that high school team for weeks, but proceeded anyway?

Awful Announcing:

ESPN claims they sounded the alarm to Paragon weeks in advance when they couldn’t learn anything about Bishop Sycamore’s roster, depth chart, or even just any general information about the school.

Bishop Sycamore allegedly bailed on a conference call with ESPN days before the game, before providing a fact sheet of information on Sunday claiming multiple players had major D1 offers from power programs.

ESPN could not verify any of this information and felt they were “scammed.” That feeling permeated the broadcast

...

A reporter at the game shared the following with me:

“Their roster was very small though – 30-35 players would be my guesstimate. And they had a bunch of injuries over the course of the game, which makes sense if they were playing for the second time in three days.”

...

Many people have pointed out that Bishop Sycamore plays a lot of postgraduate players. Some have actually played in JUCO games and are a few years older than most high school athletes.

Ghost Gundam figure with "phantom lights" available for preorder

Gundam Robot Spirits XM-XX Ghost Gundam Exclusive available for preorder (figure is 5.12" tall and comes with three face plates): 

Dolce & Gabbana's outdoor fashion show got pounded with hail




(Another angle.)

Today's funny posts




There were "Roller Coaster Tycoon" choose your path books; Convincing portals; Using a cyanometer


(Available at Amazon.)







Advanced blue collar techniques

@veknasvaran21

♬ original sound - veknasvarn.💓💓💓💓💓💘💘




@0o0_0257

#viral #driving #skill #cool #wow #satisfaction #satisfyingvideo #carstiktok #carlover #forupage #foryou

♬ Tsunami (Original Mix) - DVBBS,Borgeous




@numberonecrazycomedy

su akar yolunu bulur ?

♬ original sound - Bmoved




@wendyamaya45

al 💯 😇

♬ La Escuela de la Vida - El Coyote Y Su Banda Tierra Santa




@mrexcitement51b

Why women live longer than men #sketchy #foryoupage #fyp #trending #MrExcitement51b #changinglightbulb

♬ original sound - Superginger

Sunday, August 29, 2021

ESPN aired a high school football game with a team that "lied its way into this game by stating they had D1 prospects"


During the broadcast, the broadcasters acknowledged they hadn't vetted the team's claims, and that they feared for the players' safety?

For the last few days, ESPN has been airing seven high school football games as part of their GEICO ESPN High School Kickoff, with the last game of the weekend slated to be high school powerhouse IMG Academy’s second game of the season.

IMG Academy’s opponent? A small school named Bishop Sycamore, an online charter school from Ohio

....

How did we get to this point, you ask? Well apparently, Bishop Sycamore lied its way into this game by stating they had D1 prospects (they don’t) and naming players who don’t even go to the school in their press release.
AA has learned that this game was scheduled by Paragon Marketing Group. Paragon president ... told AA his company did not know that Bishop Sycamore played on Friday night, and would have canceled Sunday’s game if they had known that.

"One housing project has turned into an epic San Francisco battle"

San Francisco Chronicle on one owner's attempt to add four units to his property (including two affordable):

To some of his neighbors, the garden already is a paradise, an open space that gives the surrounding homes more sunlight, air and a view. [The] proposal, in their minds, is hellish. Building too big and destroying the character of the block. 

...

“Our association will always opt for trees, grass and shrubs because that’s what makes San Francisco San Francisco,” he said. “We consider backyards to be sacrosanct. 

...

“You could sit all day at the Planning Commission, and it’s all stories like this,” she said. “It’s all rich people yelling at each other

Today's funny posts




Triad fight club; Much better than the Crocodile Dundee scene; The big cat got glitched out

















Solarpunk location in Taiwan



The streetview on Google maps.

Saturday, August 28, 2021

"The Texas Bullion Depository, sold as a gold mine for taxpayers, could end up costing millions"

The Houston Chronicle:

When state lawmakers decided in 2015 that Texas needed to be the only state to have its own precious metals depository, supporters said there were plenty of reasons the project would be a gold mine.

...

“When I first presented this, to be honest with you, we got hundreds and hundreds of people from all over the world, really, who wanted to be able to put their gold in something that has the Texas banner above it,” said ... the bill’s author. “This doesn’t work in Wisconsin, it doesn’t work in Idaho.”

Best of all, because the state would find a private partner to build and own the physical depository, it would cost taxpayers nothing. The enterprise would even reap a big profit for Texas. “We estimate that we could raise tens of millions of dollars in fees,” [the bill’s author] testified.

More than three years after the depository opened, none of those things has happened. Yet this year, state lawmakers quietly voted to let the state borrow millions of dollars to bail out a project created to fix a problem that didn’t exist and which they had vowed would cost nothing.

"Promare" is so much fun

I was grinning ear to ear the entire movie (dubbed version).



"COVID-19 is surging across rural California, where inoculation rates are low, more intensely than it ever has before"

LATimes:

Perhaps nowhere in California is the disaster more acute than in Del Norte County in the remote northwest corner, where the redwood forest meets the sea. Cumulative coronavirus cases have more than doubled over the last three months, from 1,380 confirmed on May 10 to 2,805 on Friday. At least 70 cases were confirmed Thursday alone.

The county of 27,800 people has one hospital, the 49-bed Sutter Coast Hospital in Crescent City. The next-closest in California is a 90-minute drive south in Humboldt County — over a stretch of Highway 101 called Last Chance Grade that is crumbling into the sea.

Today's funny posts




This week's best Warhammer 40k miniatures and other hobby creations




Friday, August 27, 2021

Update on the investigation into the Southern Los Angeles police officers accused of spraypainting a swastika on a car

LATimes:

A search of [the Torrance officers'] phones revealed several other officers had been sharing extremely offensive memes and images that were demeaning to Black, Jewish and transgender people, according to one of the officials. Images uncovered by the investigation included pictures of a lynching, jokes about the Holocaust and memes mocking the idea of shooting Black men, the official said.

...

In addition to [those two officers], 15 officers have been placed on administrative leave as a result of the investigation

...

[Also, a] Torrance police officer who has been linked to [the] exchanging of racist text messages was charged Friday with assault in connection with a [2018] on-duty shooting

"Fatal Vision Marijuana Goggles"


A WaPo article from 2015:
experts I talked to say it's unclear how tinted goggles can simulate complicated mental phenomena like short-term memory loss and concentration deficiencies. "So the goggles take away the ability to see red, and then the teens are asked to engage in activities that are highly dependent on the color red," said ... an NYU professor who researches drug use among teens. "And this is supposed to translate into impairment from using marijuana? 
... 
The materials are expensive. The basic package of a set of goggles plus accompanying activities starts at $975. Additional goggles cost $200 each. A refill package of five laser pointers costs $280. "There is no evidence at all that they are of any value for preventing marijuana use," said ... a professor of psychiatry at Stanford who studies drug dependence and addiction.
A news article about the Moline PD purchase in 2020:
Police say the kits will be brought to local schools and community events as a way to educate people about the effects of marijuana impaired driving. According to the police department, this will be done when possible due to COVID-19 restrictions.

William Gibson's novel "Zero History" is $1.99 today

at Amazon.

Mindy Lee is offering commissions right now

Only a few slots. (I have a black and white bust by her that I love.)

Today's funny posts




The correct take on Wolverine; Shark-shaped croissants; Traffic light photography




(Kris Anka's Wolverine)
















Doctor Strange getting ready in the morning

The Marvels #4 by Greg Smallwood:

Thursday, August 26, 2021

TikTokers have accused a random business by the Van Nuys airport in Los Angeles of being involved in human trafficking

From a long Mashable article about Randonautica, an app that "sends users on a local adventure by generating random GPS coordinates within a certain radius of the user's location":

An unproven conspiracy theory circulating on TikTok alleges that multiple businesses near a non-commercial airport in California are complicit in a child trafficking ring. The clips have since racked up millions of views.

It all started with a Randonautica video. 

...

[A] TikTok creator...claimed that the app led him to a "suspicious" industrial area the first time he used it. He set his intention to going "deeper in the mystery of life" in an effort to "glitch out the matrix." The app, he said, brought him to a cabinet store coincidentally named Matrix.

In the first video, posted in July 2020, [he] said he was suspicious of the porn-viewing booth manufacturer and Star Trek toy company that neighbored Matrix. 

...

TikTok users are running with it. There isn't much of a unified theory, and like how most conspiracy theories play out, [he] and his followers are making any connection they can to justify their belief in this human trafficking ring.

...

The series has nearly 5 million views collectively, which is modest for TikTok standards, but overwhelming for the businesses named. [He] posted videos "investigating" these places in person this month, and emboldened by his visits, viewers flooded the businesses with calls accusing them of human trafficking.

Today's funny posts




Alternate concept for the Clone Wars; Badass Patches for READERS and LIBRARY People; Portraits based on Zoom tiles

















Robot Battle Cat custom figure; "Himbo Treasure Hunt"; Jawa spaceship