I Tell You. You Decide If You Care.

Huh. Kendama is kind of like a yo-yo pumped on steriods, then turned into a mutant ninja, and then given cyborg implants. Well, okay, not really, but if you've ever watched vids of yo-yo tricks, then you watch these guys, it kind of feels like that. My initial thought is "synchronized kendama?  That's silly!"  Then again, synchronized swimming is a sport, and can be very beautiful to watch, and takes incredible skill and dedication, so why not "synchronized kendama"?  It takes incredible skill and dedication.   And then since damn near anything  can be turned into a work of art.... And just because college guys are silly bastards....

Ever bounce a check, or otherwise overdraft your bank account? Doesn't matter why. Unless you're rich, you've probably done it at least once. Anyway, www.StateCheckFees.com provides a list of all 50 US states and what banks are legally allowed to charge you when you bounce a check.  I've done a rant about this . This page is just to tell you about this interesting and useful site.

Catgirl artist does gorgeous art.  Go on, tell me you're not tempted. Syreene Studios (image swiped from Syreene Studios website)

I have four (4) blogs. Icarus Rants The root of all expression. I have a lot of passion. Mostly, I'm passionate about trying to get people to use their damn brains. I cover anything and everything, and there are even some just plain fun things like Musical Monday and Fictional Friday.  Theological Thursday got it's own blog - (hint: see next item) Church of the Ignorant Fool I rant about human stupidity and how it blurs together with religion. I grew up Christian, and never really stopped being Christian, although I don't practice any of the dogma or rituals of the established branches. I also rant about other religions. Sometimes I also sneak in a bit of philosophy and my Bigger Picture Than You Can Imagine view of things. I Tell You - You Decide If You Care That's the one you are reading now. I need to clean it up a bit. It's supposed to be light-hearted, but a few rants slipped in when I was more angry that attentive. Eating Your Brain...

OMG, I could totally waste hours - and hundreds of dollars - at Hero Forge creating custom tabletop minis. This is 3D printing meets gamer wet dreams. You can do durable plastic (especially if you want it really 4" action figure size), or high detail plastic (for painting just right), or steel or bronze.  (Seriously, your own custom bronze statue!) And you can make your human/alien hybrid look just so. And save it for later, when you get that next paycheck.  I could totally see myself building a collection at about one per month. And then totally see what your character might look like as a buff cat girl. OMG, yeah, I could spend a bloody fortune in no time.

We've got Mickey the Mouse, and Smokey the Bear and The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, so why not Mecki the Hedgehog (who, apparently, might actually pre-date the lot of those pretenders).

Voting is a right that must be constantly paid for in blood.  Or something like that. In the United States, the Government is Of The People, By The People, For the People.  That means You, Me, and yes, even Donald Trump. The "gummit" is not the goddamn enemy, as long as you get off your ass and be part of it.  The corportist / fascist If you live in Washington, then use the legally mandated machinery of government that tells you how to vote.  I guarantee you some rich elitist asshole like Tim Eyman has read all the rules and laws, and is using them to kick your ass around.  Your best defense is to read the same rules, and fight back by knowing your rights, before these assholes strip you of your rights.

Why do they have to fucking bury the damn "disk cleanup" on the server operating systems? Enabling Disk Cleanup Utility in Windows Server 2012

It's $7, and if you've got a little one who wants to dress in costume, get your ass over there . They have shows today, tomorrow, and Friday. Please support the arts and spread the word.  (The hardest part about finding an audience is letting the audience know you exist - someone you know wants to go, so let them know it exists ;-)

Humans have an incredible capacity to be selfish tits, who cruelly ignore the cruelty of others. It's all some petty emotional game. I ran across this totally by random, but it's an excellent hammering home of the simple historical truth that the German Nazis committed mass murder of millions of people by using poison gas chambers .  Philosophically speaking, one of the few things more horrible than cruelty is pretending it never happened. The old line "those who don't learn history are doomed to repeat it," holds true time and time again.  As a species, we need to accept the horrible shit we've done, so that we stop doing it over and over. As a species, we need to accept the horrible shit we've done, so that we stop letting ourselves do it to us over and over.  But, that's a drift into It's Class Warfare, Bitches.

You can use the Network Solutions (A Web.com Company) Expired Domain Name Search to see if there are any expired, or soon to expire, domains that you want to try to snatch up and squat.  Because, you know, everyone loves a domain name squatter . Actually, no one loves a domain squatter except maybe his mother.  Domain name squatters are turds.  People who snatch up other people's domain names, and ransom them back, are turds.  But, hey, you know, Free Market Capitalism, and all that crap.

Ran across this great article Although Facebook offers various privacy settings that can be tweaked, there is no way to guarantee that your photos will not be seen by people you didn't intend to share with. While the risk of sexual predators stalking children after seeing their Facebook photos is small, it cannot be completely discounted. Posting photos of your children also sets a bad example to them about privacy and opens them up to other dangers, such as identity theft. We all know we love showing off our kids. We want people to see how awesome they are.  But, have you ever watched the "mermaid costume" review vids on YouTube with the 12 year-old girls? Or maybe the "backyard water slide" with all the kids? I learned about these from a friend, who was looking at them for his little girl.   Yeah, he said after watching them for about 15 minutes, he just felt like such a creepy old man.  And he's actually a really good guy.  Imagine the jo...

Denis Loubet , fantasy artist.

The Ultimate - and I mean ULTIMATE - guide to ritual spellcasting in 5e . The author even used color-coding. This is awesome. For example, it seems so obvious to me that a ritual casting would require the character to stand still, but apparently not. The character can walk and chant at the same time. The color-coding is great, and makes it really clear the only spell list worth ritualizing is the wizard spell list. Well, that is unless or until we get a 5e version of "Relics & Rituals" which expanded the ranger and paladin lists so incredibly much that we actually had someone play a ranger with Scribe Scroll, just so she could use all those cool spells (and wow, did she).

I'm told that guys find women in clown makeup to be sexy. Well, those guys that aren't afraid of clowns, anyway (I've never understood " clown phobia ," but that's phobia for you). I think this might be part of the appeal of DC Comics' Harley Quinn - she is, after all, a charismatic hot chick in clown makeup (although, seriously guys, she's a murderous psychopath, so get a healthy hobby, okay?). Divine Caroline has a page with 10 ideas for clown makeup , with links to the women who did the design, so you can get tutorials and more ideas. Creepy or cute, or somewhere in between. Whatever strikes the fancy of yourself, or that special someone in your life. model GII GARCIA

The Voyager spacecraft - which are older than me - are still phoning home! "Today, Voyager 1, at a distance of 130 astronomical units, is the farthest human-made object from Earth, and it still regularly communicates with our planet. In August 2012, the spacecraft entered interstellar space – the space between the stars -- and has been delivering data about this uncharted territory ever since. Its twin, Voyager 2, also launched in 1977, is also journeying toward interstellar space." -- Elizabeth Landau, JPL NASA JPL keeps a blog , and they update it whenever V-GER sends anything interesting. The "V-GER" reference is from Star Trek: The Motion Picture . How's that for a nerd reference? :)

If you're like me, you have really mixed feelings on Windows 8.1 (we'll ignore Windows 8.0 like we ignore Vista). When it works, it works great. When is sucks, it sucks hard. Here is a great page for how to get the piece of junk to boot into Safe Mode. http://www.7tutorials.com/5-ways-boot-safe-mode-windows-8-windows-81

I am unashamed to say that I liked playing summoner-types in 3.x, especially with some of the relaly abusive combinations possible with 3rd-party materials. In my defense, I always brought my monster cards, and own minis, so I was prepared. I always prepared my action list in advance, and was usually one of the fastest turns at the table, depsite sometimes having as many as eight critters and 16 attacks. Heh. Yeah, I love me them minions. Which is probably why Summon Monster has disappeared from the 5e PHB. After all, 5e is intended to streamline play, and be a less-complicated experience. But, whatever. I'm not alone in feeling the gap, and this looks like a pretty fun and creative way to fill the void. http://www.enworld.org/forum/showthread.php?358469-Summon-Monster-for-5E

I wonder if I can talk the people at Body Faders and the people at Snorg Tees into doing a crossover. Or maybe ArmorClass10. I think that "Chaotic Good" t-shirt would be darkly humorous if it got red spots on it at certain temperatures. Okay, that's probably tasteless, but it got your attention :) (Think blood spatter spots, you perv :) You what else I think is cool?  Body Faders was apparently started by a woman in Michigan, and she has expanded to Europe.  I think that's cool. Smart investing and small business boom, and all that.

You're born with a ton of fucks to give. So you spend them like a kid with a credit card. You give a fuck about your friends, about your grades, about your fashion sense, about strangers opinions ..... you give away too many fucks about way too many things. You have so many. then, as you get older you have maybe ten fucks per month.... so you learn to budget them. You allocate fucks to your family and career, but there aren't enough fucks left to give the newest shit. So someone at work has something they need my help with that's outside my job title? I'll do my best to allocate some fucks, but this month is pretty tight.  Then you get even older, so you're down to one or two fucks a month.... and those fucks are damn precious. You give them to your family, your hobbies, your job... and that's kind of it. It's not your fault fucks expire too quickly. I would have liked to save my fucks when I was younger, but I can't.  Then you hit fuck insolve...

If you're like me, keeping track of "Muslim terrorist groups" is massively confusing, even when you make an effort to get decent information and filter out the crap from people like Fox  talking heads. Here is an excellent thread where a lot of the information gaps get filled in, and the history of the entire mess starts to make a bit more sense

Mark Craddock runs a comic shop. He also does a cool blog, with lots of gamer goodness. While I would love to put together one huge page of crowdfunding stuff, this ain't it. Maybe someday I will. That would be cool. Meanwhile, Mark has a "crowdfunding" label on his blog , and this means you can see a ton of cool gamer projects that have been done, and maybe see where they are today.

Okay, seriously, sometimes things just don't need any additional explanatory text, but just in case you've been living under a rock, the Pastafarians are a running gag, that started as a response to something really Stupid. The joke has taken on a life of its own. I love this joke. I've put it on my wishlist to get my certificate of ordination ;-)

If you follow the link, the author has a really amazing price/fee estimator widget that makes it fun to play about and see what different art pieces - with different shared ownership rights - cost. For about $320, I can get a friend of mine a full page, full color, full rights "movie poster" idea he's had for a story he's writing. Not that I've got $320 laying around, but in the world of gorgeous commercial art, this is really affordable.

Doug Kovacs does some beautiful art, especially fantasy art.

As the awesome Lex Larson put it: As the man says, if your organization needs an intersectionality-personified blackety black blackness speaker, facilitator and writer, hit the guy up. Or, just get a "Be Less Terrible" t-shirt or mug.

Krendel is one of those games like GURPS or Hero System - or a dozen others - one of those "generic toolkit" kind of game systems, where you can build anything, in any system, and so end up with whatever you want. I got the Krendal Core and Krendal Powers books.  I really like the layout, and presentation.  I've only played a bit with the rules, but it's pretty quick and easy. And hey - if you're a member of the Peace Corps, they'll give you a free copy! William Altman (the author) has a blog for the game .  And he's got an "open game" license , so you can create your own derivative works using the Krendel system.  I'm a huge fan of such licenses, because it's a great way for fans to expand the universe and increase the popularity (and utility) of the system without getting into trouble (and possibly make a few bucks to cover their time)  ;-)

Blue Rose Kickstarter The Blue Rose Kickstarter launches on Monday! We are bringing back our roleplaying game of Romantic Fantasy using the Adventure Game Engine, the rules that power Dragon Age and Fantasy AGE. 

Everyone has random thoughts, good and bad ideas, and just plain concepts for memes. Those random sentences that get thrown out and someone says "I'm writing that down!" Now, you have an easy way to immortalize and share your idea. Run it up the public flagpole and see if it takes off and goes viral. Or just amuse yourself for hours on end. Yeah, I'm totally going to have too much fun with MemeGenerator.net

I'm tired of rich, elitist assholes trying to grab every damn public project and turn it into their personal playground, fuck everyone else. I'm tired of having to defend a level playing field on the Interwebs. The damn thing was engineeed, built, and funded with tax money. The damn thing is still heavily subsidized - paid for - with tax money. The Internet gives everyone a voice, and a chance to be the next great idea millionaire (hey, you're more likely to get hit by lightning, but that's still a greater-than-zero chance). Protect Net Neutrality by telling Congress to knock it the fuck off, and do their jobs of representing the people who voted for them.

Mother's Day is a great day to celebrate mothers that are sane. Not all of them are. Therefore, you get articles like this one, discussing alternative ways to endure, suffer or celebrate Mother's Day for those who survived despite competing for worst mom in history .

" Gender Identity " gives me kind of a headache, as much because it goes beyond biology and even expressed identity.  There's even one where some people with penises, but no testicles, in India call themselves "i". Or something. Wikipedia has some really excellent articles that help fill in the knowledge gaps.

Bonnie Burton signed Star Wars books. So help charity, take home Star Wars books below market value, take home Star Wars books signed by Bonnie Burton And if you're hung up on "Bonnie who?" then let's start with this from Wikipedia : From 2003 to 2013, [Bonnie Burton] worked as a Senior Editor for  Star Wars .com and staff writer for  Star Wars Insider  magazine, and was the Senior Editor of the Official Star Wars Blog.  And continue with "Author brilliant and talented enough to get hired by huge publishing company to WRITE STAR WARS BOOKS - Lucas and Disney are both really picky about the multi-billion dollar cash cow, ya know? So it ain't like this is the only thing Bonnie Burton has done, so just buy the signed books to seed your kids college fund, ya?

http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/index.php This is one of those random pages that came up in a G+ discussion thread, and I thought it was interesting.  A lot of science fiction discusses the idea of "atomic rockets."  Of course, that's such a broad phrase as to be useless, but I like to think of it as rockets with "atom bombs going off on the ass end, creating reaction thrust." Anyway, ProjectRHO is kind of a fun site to just click around. It's created by Winchell Chung, who created - apparently somewhat by accident, while still a high school kid, the iconic look of the Ogre super-mega-battletank (yeah, I had to go look it up, too, but the history of the look is a fun story). I don't get the "RHO" reference. Apparently I'm not cleared for that.  If you get the joke, please fill me in, yah?

A great article on why not to try to make money blogging (with links to an excellent article on how to do it right, if you're Hellbent and determined to try anyway) http://amylynnandrews.com/how-much-do-real-bloggers-actually-make/

Did you ever notice that little kids pull things apart all the time.   It gets exhausting putting things together, only to have the "little darlings" tear it all down. Makes me want to stop helping my friends by watching their kids. Turns out " destructive play " is both normal and educational.  Kids learn an enormous amount before age 5.  It still makes me bonkers, but at least now I know the behavior serves a function.  Bugger all if I'll ever get into "pick that up for me!" game.

Okay, Jeff Brown is not only a brilliant artist, but he knows how to sell himself.  Check this out: \-- $32/month - Commercial Use You get access to the archive & full commercial use of all of the images within! You also get to request what I paint once a month in the form of a 1 line description. --\ So, let me nail this down: for less than $400/year, you get unlimited commercial use of his entire art  library, AND you can request art. Now that's an incredible deal! The guy must be a machine. He's offering to generate one detailed painting per frickin' day if he hits $4K/month. His paintings are gorgeous.

Because you never know what will blow up as some kind of crazy-ass Internet meme http://www.hampsterdance.com

Watch this. Funny, charming, awesome. No idea if the series is any good, but come on - an eternal swordwoman baking scones in Bellingham!? I love the novelty ;-) She totally deserves money even just for this fucking awesome Kickstarter video! THROW MONIES AT THE VERY PRETTY* NATALIE FEDAK!  (And the awesome team that helped her make this video!) * - Hey, she called that one out - you know I think it's bullshit how women get judged on appearance before skill and talent.  She is very pretty, but even more than that, I love her body language. She is very comfortable with herself, and I love how her eternal warrior has that sense of "fish out of water" in her body language. Her character knows she can wipe out an army, but that's not a skill many people value for making wedding cakes. It's subtle, but wonderful nuance.