News that makes us laugh, cry, or both

RobbyPants · Post by **RobbyPants** » Wed May 12, 2010 2:55 pm

That was painful to read. I couldn't finish all of it.

The preamble doesn't sound so bad, but I imagine that's most of the point. It's when I get to things like:

"Insure domestic tranquility: marriage is between a man and a women", and

"To promote general wellfare: investigate collusion between government and industry in the global warming myth ... Clarify that healthcare is not a right. It's a service."

that my brain starts to hurt. It's not so much that they're trying to quell the idea of gay marriage, but more so that it's listed under "domestic tranquility", like allowing gay marriage is somehow going to jeopardize that. And I don't even know how to start a conversation with someone who believe the whole "global warming myth" denialist stance. I mean, once you've demonstrated that much of a revulsion of science and facts, I don't know if there's any room for improvement.

Maxus · Post by **Maxus** » Wed May 12, 2010 3:11 pm

Well, here's news that makes me laugh and cry.

Close to a month ago, I got a new computer. The monitor was dead out of the box. I hooked it up, hit the power button, it did not work. I unhooked it, rehooked using cables from monitors I *knew* worked.

There was a failure to come on despite me switching outlets AND computers to hook it to.

So, I got through Dell's tech support and they're supposed to call back...oh, any time now. They asked me to hook the monitor up anyway, so they can ask me to do some stuff.

I did so, using cables I knew worked.

It came on. I'm using it right now.

*headdesk*

Cynic · Post by **Cynic** » Wed May 12, 2010 3:18 pm

Frank Frazetta never truly was one of my favorite fantasy artists but he definitely did draw the young teen in me back to conan and other SFF books along these lines with his delicious covers of almost-naked ladies.

Get yourself up to Valhalla, man.

RobbyPants · Post by **RobbyPants** » Wed May 12, 2010 3:23 pm

Maxus, here's hoping you simply forgot something or did something stupid the first time. If not, then you probably has some intermittent hardware issue, and intermittent problems are the worst to troubleshoot.

Meikle641 · Post by **Meikle641** » Wed May 12, 2010 6:15 pm

Cynic wrote:Frank Frazetta never truly was one of my favorite fantasy artists but he definitely did draw the young teen in me back to conan and other SFF books along these lines with his delicious covers of almost-naked ladies.

Get yourself up to Valhalla, man. [/url]

Fuck, he died? I only just discovered him like, two years ago thanks to /tg/... The world is down a great artist.

Crissa · Post by **Crissa** » Wed May 12, 2010 7:17 pm

Meikle641 wrote:Fuck, he died? I only just discovered him like, two years ago thanks to /tg/... The world is down a great artist.

Maybe.

The world is now free to redefine fantasy art as something else; his style and range hadn't changed in over forty years.

-Crissa

Meikle641 · Post by **Meikle641** » Wed May 12, 2010 11:52 pm

What? Why should he have changed his work when it was liked, looked good and was classic? If it works well and is liked, why change?

He drew muscular mostly naked badasses with mostly naked hot curvy women in fantasy settings. I fail to see the problem here.

Count Arioch the 28th · Thu May 13, 2010 2:58 am

What about mostly naked muscular females with mostly naked men at their feet? That is an option, and from some of the guys and gals I've spoken with; a fairly popular option.

Cynic · Post by **Cynic** » Thu May 13, 2010 3:25 am

you know, Count, I would totally go for that.

I'm not even kidding. It flips the genre on its head a bit. His style suits the women more than the men. I'd get a print just as a conversation piece.

virgil · Post by **virgil** » Thu May 13, 2010 3:49 am

I only know of one gender-reversed version of that pose.

Calibron · Post by **Calibron** » Thu May 13, 2010 5:08 am

I wouldn't really call those two muscular, nor would I call the guy mostly naked, he's got a whole pair of pants and at least half a shirt; by my calculations that's at least three quarters dressed!

Cynic · Post by **Cynic** » Thu May 13, 2010 5:12 am

it looks like the hippy dude has more muscular definition than Jinx.

Calibron · Post by **Calibron** » Thu May 13, 2010 5:13 am

Yes, but by heroic fantasy/science fantasy standards he is extremely scrawny.

CatharzGodfoot · Post by **CatharzGodfoot** » Thu May 13, 2010 9:19 am

There does seem to be a definite hierarchy in Frazetta's art: women above beasts, men above women. The closest I could find to a woman in a dominant pose with a man is this:

[An aside: Is her right arm malformed, or is that really supposed to be her breast? Can't unsee!]

But there's no lack of dominant women with submissive in fantasy art as a whole (although I'm not going to bother trying to find a SFW example).

Meikle641 · Post by **Meikle641** » Thu May 13, 2010 10:18 am

http://www.dailytelegraph.com.au/news/w ... 5865566982

Huh.

Lago PARANOIA · Post by **Lago PARANOIA** » Fri May 14, 2010 1:44 am

Hey, everything else managed to hijack the Voyager spacecraft, including its own fucken holodeck, so what's the surprise?

Koumei · Post by **Koumei** » Fri May 14, 2010 1:53 am

CatharzGodfoot wrote:An aside: Is her right arm malformed, or is that really supposed to be her breast? Can't unsee!

It's her boob. An ANTI-GRAVITY BOOB!

CatharzGodfoot · Post by **CatharzGodfoot** » Fri May 14, 2010 1:54 am

Thank goodness we haven't killed all the whales yet.

[Edit] This was in reference to Lago's and Meikle's comments, not Koumei's. [/Edit]

Ganbare Gincun · Post by **Ganbare Gincun** » Fri May 14, 2010 3:26 am

Something Awful offers up a tasteful retrospection of Frank Frazetta's work.

Crissa · Post by **Crissa** » Sat May 15, 2010 12:47 am

Something Awful sometimes is useful. Usually when regarding to commercial art.

Did anyone hear about this poll? Apparently 28% of Republicans say that the massive oil spill makes them more likely to support oil drilling.

-Crissa

RobbyPants · Post by **RobbyPants** » Sat May 15, 2010 11:42 am

That is weird. I can see them saying that it doesn't affect their position, but I can't wrap my mind around them being more likely to want to drill.

___

On another note, NPR proved to me that some people just shouldn't be allowed to say thing on public air waves. They were covering a story about Greensburg, a city in Kansas destroyed by a tornado three years ago. When they decided to rebuild it, they ended up going green, which the commentator noted as unlikely for a city in red Kansas.

So they put this random woman from Greensburg on who first says that initially she didn't support the idea of rebuilding green because it wasn't a priority (totally understandable from a random republican), and then she followed it up by saying since so many of their friends died, she thought it was a good idea.

WTF? There's a complete non sequitur for you.

"Do you want to rebuild green?"

"No."

"But a bunch of people died in matters totally unrelated to conserving our environment."

"Oh, in that case, it's a good idea!"

Count Arioch the 28th · Sat May 15, 2010 2:02 pm

Crissa wrote:Something Awful sometimes is useful. Usually when regarding to commercial art.

Did anyone hear about this poll? Apparently 28% of Republicans say that the massive oil spill makes them more likely to support oil drilling.

-Crissa

It's funny. People I know who support oil drilling tend to not know what to say when I ask them why they would sell to the US when they could sell it for three times as much to Europe and China.

Crissa · Post by **Crissa** » Sat May 15, 2010 10:58 pm

Greensburg wasn't going to rebuild without the Green monies. They would've half finished the main strip, but then it would've died as the school and churches would've have rebuilt.

Did you guys hear about the Republican convention goers vandalizing a middle-school classroom?

How about further information that immigration in fact grows the economy and most workers' wages? How about that we're actually past peak oil, and hydrocarbon extraction only gets less energy efficient from here (nonconventional extraction like tar sands).

-Crissa

Count Arioch the 28th wrote:It's funny. People I know who support oil drilling tend to not know what to say when I ask them why they would sell to the US when they could sell it for three times as much to Europe and China.

Ad this is why we can't drill our way to energy independence. Unless you ban exporting of oil, our internal price of oil will always have to match the international market. Local variation is slight; there's not enough oil pumped and processed in southern California to meet demand, so their price reflect the steepest international price; but Oklahoma doesn't face that and sees much cheaper prices.

Then other states like Oregon or Tennessee that don't have oil production see lower prices because the processors can make much more than the local demand, and so inadvertently push the price down via productivity.

Even so, those are tiny differences in price compared to the international price rises.

Crissa · Post by **Crissa** » Tue May 18, 2010 2:04 am

Republican leaders call continuing the employment of K-12 teachers during a recession a 'bailout' and call for layoffs.

-Crissa

RobbyPants · Post by **RobbyPants** » Tue May 18, 2010 11:59 am

I can see what they're saying from a strictly financial standpoint, but it's stupid to try to look at it in a vacuum like that. Just because we're in a recession doesn't mean that a bunch of students magically disappear from schools. You still need teachers to teach all those kids.

Even more baffling is when you look at all the studies that show how many problems are reduced by having kids well educated. I'll have to ask my wife for the statistic again, but she said that third grade reading level is a remarkably good predictor of crime rate down the road.