A Tree Trunk Throne In Kendall, England.

just ran across this perfect 2000-year-old portrait of a pet who knows what he did.

"Dog Mosaic," Ptolemaic period, 2nd century BCE, floor of a house in Alexandria, Egypt. 3.25x3.25m. (Pitcher is probably gold.)

Launch the nukes, humanity deserves it.

We’ve Always Hated Girls Online: A Wayback Machine Investigation

Searching for a teen girl who was once internet famous for her coding skills, a former fan uncovers a story of harassment.

It wasn’t the graphics, or the jokes, or the N*Sync lyrics people had a problem with. It was that view counter, at the bottom of her home page. That view counter was into the hundreds of thousands, and that made some people very, very angry.

It’s an interesting reminder of how small the internet was in the late 90s. That this middle school girl could reach so many people by simply understanding how to make a website look good is remarkable. Her website truly didn’t have anything spectacular or unique or even that interesting on offer. Her popularity was based almost solely on her design abilities, and that is damn impressive. She was at the forefront of a revolution none of us were even aware was happening, and she was internet famousbecause of it. “I started it a long time ago, when the Internet was like slowly becoming popular, and webpages were like…whoa,” she wrote on her FAQ page. “Heheh so I think my page was like ‘extraordinary’ then, and it got people kinda hooked on it…now its just like any other webpage, but people come to it anyways.”

People came, in droves, and they signed her guestbook, and in their messages they berated Sara for her popularity. She wrote in her diary about the people who were harassing her about her extraordinarily high page views. She lamented (half-heartedly) that she wished she’d never added a view counter. She defended her popularity, and then down-played it, and then defended it again. She angrily, reluctantly, offered advice to other webmasters on getting views for their own pages: sign other people’s guestbooks, update often.

And then, the next entry, the mea culpa. The apologies for getting angry, for writing “all that stuff.”

If the internet is an archive of the things we make then it’s also an archive of the abuse we endure there, and our apologies for feeling outraged.

read more

#i like to sit around thinking about what life would have been like in the naberrie-skywalker household#padme would have been amazing when the twins were just little kids but when they hit puberty she’d be like ???#padme was a queen when she was 14; she couldn’t afford temper tantrums; she doesn’t understand any of this#and anakin stands up and he’s like MY TIME HAS COME#he is the chosen one prophecied to bring balance to this household#leia is the best at everything until anakin starts seriously training them and luke is a natural at Meditation and Jedi Stuff#and leia gets SO PISSED and luke’s like WHY CAN’T I BE BETTER THAN YOU AT ONE THING#and leia’s like WHY CAN’T YOU STOP RUBBING IT IN MY FACE#and then they yell incoherently at each other and padme’s like ????????? STOP???????????#she can get the senate to shut the fuck up and listen but she can’t get her 13yo twins to do the same#and then anakin walks in and starts yelling just as incoherently and padme’s like i’m leaving#but it works. whatever strange terrifying things they were all yelling at dinner everyone’s happy again#and padme’s like oh my god if politics were like this i’d kill all my coworkers#and anakin’s like hahahahahhahahaha.#and in another universe darth vader stops and stares out a window and he’s like huh. that was weird#‘it’s as if i felt padme again and we were in complete agreement on something’#and then he continues choking out an admiral#STAR WARS COMEDY

as a member of the lgbt community, it really hurts to hear people say that my "lifestyle" isn't "family friendly". i care a lot about being family friendly. it's very important to me. that's why this month i'm partnering with your mom -

Here’s the new 24 hour comic I drew this year!  This one is called THE KING’S FOREST.  cw: blood, violence

My cat Oscar loudly announced his presence at the front door this morning, standing over a freshly dead rabbit, its organs all on vivid display. He was looking extremely pleased with himself.

Personally, I'm quite proud of the old man, but I'm not so sure how my roommate will feel.

Can we talk about Goncharov's sound for a moment please?

I know this is tumblr so we've mostly gotta do extended examination of the themes and fanfic about the gay subtext that's absolutely there between Goncharov and Andrey and the subtext we all wishing was actually there between Katya and Sophia (as I'm sure has been point out, in the original script, it was "You could have been my *son*", not *sun*, which is a whole different mess of subtext, and the other reading only came about because of the lousy closed captioning on the one VHS release). But so much of what makes the film so involving and powerful is the *sound*.

And I know, too, that it's incredibly hard to find a version that sounds good -- I was so lucky to see a 16mm print at a now-closed arthouse theater years ago, and the sound was an absolute revelation over the aged VHS tapes we normally see. But if you can find a version with proper sound somehow, absolutely do, and listen with the best sound system you can. I also saw a version pop up on a local cable channel in Denver of all places once that had pretty decent sound, so I know that version is out there somewhere!

The way each clock and watch ticks different ways that relate to the mood and character. Listen especially to how Goncharov's has a barely-perceptible stutter - it's such an old watch, one he has cherished, but he doesn't have time to repair it. And the way the seconds ticking on it slow just a little each time he looks at it. (My mom's old VHS of it was so worn I couldn't even hear it on her copy when she showed it to me as a kid!)

Or the gunshots! I miss the expressionistic way 70s and 80s movies had handguns sound like cannons to get across how loud and powerful guns are in general, but this was one of the first to really push that idea, and the way you *feel* the impact has been replicated so rarely.

And it's all the more impressive because Walter Murch only had a few weeks to work on this between American Graffiti and The Conversation! It's partly why I believe the rumors that George Lucas actually did a lot of the sound mixing uncredited - not because Murch wasn't good enough to do this, but because there's just no way he had enough... well, enough time.

Anyway, hope at some point this gets a restored release so we can properly appreciate some of the craftsmanship that's been all-but-lost in what few versions are out there.

In today’s modern society, Riddler would be the EASIEST of Batman’s villains to rehabilitate 

All you have to do? Give him a job designing/running an Escape Room facility

It’s perfect for him. A non-violent outlet for feeding his need to flex how intelligent he is, he still gets to create his elaborate puzzles and riddles, and people will willingly PAY HIM to lock them up in a room where he can mess with them for an hour or so

Someone get Bruce Wayne on the phone I have an idea for a thing he should invest in

• An Oxford comma walks into a bar, where it spends the evening watching the television, getting drunk, and smoking cigars.

• A dangling participle walks into a bar. Enjoying a cocktail and chatting with the bartender, the evening passes pleasantly.

• A bar was walked into by the passive voice.

• An oxymoron walked into a bar, and the silence was deafening.

• Two quotation marks walk into a “bar.”

• A malapropism walks into a bar, looking for all intensive purposes like a wolf in cheap clothing, muttering epitaphs and casting dispersions on his magnificent other, who takes him for granite.

• Hyperbole totally rips into this insane bar and absolutely destroys everything.

• A question mark walks into a bar?

• A non sequitur walks into a bar. In a strong wind, even turkeys can fly.

• Papyrus and Comic Sans walk into a bar. The bartender says, "Get out -- we don't serve your type."

• A mixed metaphor walks into a bar, seeing the handwriting on the wall but hoping to nip it in the bud.

• A comma splice walks into a bar, it has a drink and then leaves.

• Three intransitive verbs walk into a bar. They sit. They converse. They depart.

• A synonym strolls into a tavern.

• At the end of the day, a cliché walks into a bar -- fresh as a daisy, cute as a button, and sharp as a tack.

• A run-on sentence walks into a bar it starts flirting. With a cute little sentence fragment.

• Falling slowly, softly falling, the chiasmus collapses to the bar floor.

• A figure of speech literally walks into a bar and ends up getting figuratively hammered.

• An allusion walks into a bar, despite the fact that alcohol is its Achilles heel.

• The subjunctive would have walked into a bar, had it only known.

• A misplaced modifier walks into a bar owned by a man with a glass eye named Ralph.

• The past, present, and future walked into a bar. It was tense.

• A dyslexic walks into a bra.

• A verb walks into a bar, sees a beautiful noun, and suggests they conjugate. The noun declines.

• A simile walks into a bar, as parched as a desert.

• A gerund and an infinitive walk into a bar, drinking to forget.

• A hyphenated word and a non-hyphenated word walk into a bar and the bartender nearly chokes on the irony

- Jill Thomas Doyle

Okay, not quite. I was spot-on with what Guardians would make, but I really thought Turtles would drop faster. Also, that Expendables wouldn't completely bomb. Which is too bad; I was hoping they'd stick around long enough to make a genuinely satisfying entry. You know, with a story and some nice character work and a classic action sequence and maybe even, I don't know, living up to the title and giving its stars some good death scenes.

Box Office Prediction (August 15-17)

I know it’s a long shot, but I’m calling Guardians of the Galaxy to retake the number one spot this weekend, though it won’t be until the weekend actuals are released on Monday that we’ll know.

Read More