Link Archive 6/17/15 – 8/6/15

CIVIC MYTHOLOGY – The neat part is, everything under this tag is true, it just uses poetic language.
“Canonically, the United States of America once possessed a unique artifact known as the Demon Core, but it was consumed in the process of summoning a miniature star”

The new Deadpool trailer looks fun. But why in god’s name would you put a joke that’s *older than I am* in the TRAILER? It sends the message that your writers are lazy, which is not a message you want to send in the trailer! (I’m referring to the  “Wearing a red shirt to hide your blood, then making a crack about wearing brown pants, to imply someone is shitting their pants in fear” crack. I can’t say for sure the joke’s been around since the invention of red dye, but I know it was a classic before I was born. And yes, it’s a good joke, especially the first time you hear it. But why would you show off lack of originality in a trailer?)

While we’re talking about movies, I fully expect the Sad/Rabid Puppies to nominate Pixels for a Hugo next year.

An amazingly stupid motion is filed (“prosecutors filed a motion asking the court to order a defense attorney to stop calling them “the government” “), and the defense attorney hits them with an awesome rebuttal.

Yes I know I’m years behind the times, but I just found out how much fun the Crash Course in World History series is.

Huzzah for Amnesty International, coming out for legalization of sex work!

In depressing news, mass incarceration has caused more crime than it’s prevented. Some judges are harsher than others, but the judge you get is luck of the draw. So it’s possible to track people who commit the same crime but get difference sentences and see how the length of the sentence affects the likelihood of future criminal activity. Turns out, longer sentences increase the odds of re-offending.
“each year in prison increases the odds that a prisoner would reoffend by 5.6% a quarter. Even people who went to prison for lesser crimes wound up committing more serious offenses subsequently, the more time they spent in prison. His conclusion: Any benefit from taking criminals out of the general population is more than off-set by the increase in crime from turning small offenders into career criminals.”

Fascinating episode of Rationally Speaking. Ian Morris on, “Why the West rules — for now“. Similar vein to Diamond’s “Guns, Germs, and Steel”
“Geography drives development, but development changes what geography means … as geography changes its meanings, the parts of the world that are most developed keeps moving around.”

How John Green came to believe he’d written something he never had.

A hero of the people! Time Warner Cable owes $229,500 to woman it would not stop calling.

“Breathe in strength, breathe out bullshit”

Why Special Effects Peaked in the 90s

Stupid Dinosaur Movies. “Hollywood has a neat little racket going these days: making mega-budget tent-pole action movies that so saturate the public consciousness with advertisements and brand recognition that they’re treated like major cultural events, but which are also so deliberately immaterial that anyone who criticizes them looks like an uptight buzzkill.”

Not only did teenagers not invent STI-detecting color-changing condoms, it was a straight-up stupid idea even in concept. It would do a great job of getting condom use to drop drastically and further stigmatize already over-stigmatized infections. The entire popularity of that report was just sex-shaming glee.

How long can a con man with no soccer talent whatsoever play soccer at the professional level before anybody catches on? 20 years.

Ginny being amazing again

Very well London. You win. You are the coolest city. Masked vigilante in London is being called The Bromley Batman.
(altho seriously, black pants and shirt + a bandanna is NOT a batman costume!)