Downlo: Archive

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Dec 31st

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100 Things We Didn't Know Last Year →

I’m pretty sure there are quite a few things on this list that were known before last year or just wrong. But it’s still an interesting read. My favorite items: 26. The word “loo” dates from medieval times, thought to have derived from the warning shout of “gardez l’eau!” given by those tipping chamber pots out the window. More details 29. Dogs...

Dec 31st

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Dec 31st

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Dec 31st

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Roger Ebert's list of 2011's best documentaries →

I’ve only seen one of the films he mentions (Bill Cunningham: New York) and wholeheartedly recommend it. The rest look fascinating.

Dec 31st

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Dec 31st

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Dec 31st

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What Makes a Vibrator Holy?

newsweek: The evangelical Christian from California’s central valley had never had an orgasm alone nor with her husband of 25 years. “I didn’t know I wasn’t having one,” the 59-year-old mother of two told The Daily Beast. Yet after chatting with some church girlfriends, she learned what she was missing. “’All that happens to you?’” she asked. “They looked at me like I was crazy.” Joyce, who...

Dec 31st

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Top Ten Myths about the Arab Spring of 2011 |... →

thenoobyorker: irredenta: A very good list to have handy should you encounter zealots on either side. #8 (Libya & Oil) and #10 (Israel & new governments) is for you tumblr!

Dec 31st

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Dec 31st

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“A PSYCHOLOGICAL TIP Whenever you’re called on to make up your mind, and...”

– “A Psychological Tip,” lovely grook by Danish scientist and poet Piet Hein (via curiositycounts)

Dec 31st

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“Another flaw in the human character is that everybody wants to build and nobody...”

– Hocus Pocus (Kurt Vonnegut)

Dec 30th

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Dec 30th

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Dec 30th

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Top Ten Ignored Religious Stories of 2011 →

A very interesting list that discusses some recent-ish trends in religion— from Judaism to Latino Catholicism to the ‘new nihilism’—that haven’t been widely covered in the press. I’m particularly irked by #6 Upside-down Ideas about Religious Liberty: The dramatic new push for religious liberty exemptions for faith-connected providers of taxpayer-supported...

Dec 30th

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drinkyourjuice: As we roll into 2012, let’s try to remember that women existed before Bridesmaids and that calling 2011 the year of the funny woman is like me calling the act of finally watching My So Called Life on Netflix Instant its series premiere.

Dec 30th

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elleeldritchunderground replied to your post: elleeldritchunderground replied to your post: The… LIES. I refuse to acknowledge firefox’s competency. So pleased I got to burn off my small collection of nerd rage gifs today.

Dec 30th

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elleeldritchunderground replied to your post: The main reason I don’t like Google Chrome To each his/her own. [tested zoom] rereading what you wrote, I see you said BETWEEN 100 and 120. I was like, it goes up to 300%, dude. I’m in love with the url bar search feature. But you can do that with Firefox too! Plus, Firefox has an awesome extension called Instant Fox. It lets you turn the url...

Dec 30th

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Tumblr is full of shit

riverwaltz replied to your post: shimmyshimmypow replied to your post: So Tumblr… I have AdBlock Plus on Firefox and still got it. Yeah, I spoke too soon. For some reason, there was some kind of lag until I got the pop-up too. Oh well, at least I got to complain about Chrome today! I honestly don’t know what kind of “support” Tumblr offered me before I chose to forgo it...

Dec 30th

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The main reason I don't like Google Chrome

…is that I have really bad eyesight. Even with glasses/contacts. I tried using Chrome because I had problems with Firefox being super-slow and crashing constantly, but I quickly discovered that it’s much less customizable than Firefox. Most problematically, you can’t adjust the zoom between 100% (too small) and 120% (stupidly big). So I went back to Firefox. And I discovered...

Dec 30th

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elleeldritchunderground replied to your post: elleeldritchunderground replied to your post:… Uhhh definitely negative. I used to love firefox and then I had an epiphany. Nuh-uh!

Dec 30th

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elleeldritchunderground replied to your post: shimmyshimmypow replied to your post: So Tumblr… I have Adblock on chrome and it came up. Another reason why Firefox is superior to Chrome.

Dec 30th

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shimmyshimmypow replied to your post: So Tumblr staff is trying to scare people into uninstalling Missing E? It’s a dash alert. Very annoying! riverwaltz replied to your post: So Tumblr staff is trying to scare people into uninstalling Missing E? It’s a dashboard pop-up. It’s heinous. Haven’t seen it. Maybe my ad-blocking extension or some other Firefox gew-gaw is preventing the pop-up...

Dec 30th

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So Tumblr staff is trying to scare people into...

Don’t they have anything better to do? Like redesigning the site to be even less user friendly? By the way, are they e-mailing people or is there some kind of alert on the Dashboard? I haven’t noticed anything new.

Dec 30th

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Dec 30th

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“In the shower, Ed stood with his hands at the back of his head, like someone...”

– A passage from David Guterson’s Ed King, which won The Guardian’s Literary Review’s bad sex in fiction award this year. What makes the above even worse is that Ed King is a modern-day version of the Oedipus myth. More cringe-inducing excerpts here. ETA: Ed King = King Oedipus?...

Dec 30th

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Dec 30th

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Dec 30th

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Game of Thrones title sequence →

I’m impressed by the vast amount of work and care that was put into this. This interview clarifies a lot of things about the title sequence, which I’ll be watching with new appreciation come the second season. I hadn’t noticed, for instance, that it gives us the history of Westeros from the time of the Targaryen invasion until the rise of Robert Baratheon.

Dec 30th

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Watch

9-year-old Ari Garnick asked some of the GOP candidates the question, “if you could be any superhero, who would it be and why? The geek in me thinks the answers are interesting and possibly revealing. I knew Mitt Romney would pick Superman: a patriotic, unambiguously (for the most part) good guy and a totally safe and boring pick (much like Romney himself)….no wonder three other...

Dec 30th

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Dec 29th

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Mental Floss Editors: Our Top Longreads of 2011

longreads: The editors of mental_floss magazine: Mangesh Hattikudur, Ethan Trex, Stephanie Meyers, and Jessanne Collins. They’re also on Twitter and Tumblr. *** “Deep Intellect,” Sy Montgomery (Orion Magazine) Is it weird to say we enjoyed this trek “inside the mind of an octopus” because it was so sensual? Who knew the octopus can taste with all of its skin, run amok out of water like a spooked...

Dec 29th

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10 myths about introverts →

Very true, especially these: Myth #1 – Introverts don’t like to talk. This is not true. Introverts just don’t talk unless they have something to say. They hate small talk. Get an introvert talking about something they are interested in, and they won’t shut up for days. Myth #2 – Introverts are shy. Shyness has nothing to do with being an Introvert. Introverts are not necessarily afraid of...

Dec 29th

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How to make wool clothing less itchy →

I’m going to give this a try with an old sweater. I have persnickety skin that gets especially aggravated by cold, dry weather. I can usually only wear cotton, cashmere, and silk against my skin, which makes me seem annoyingly precious.

Dec 29th

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Dec 29th

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7 Ridiculous Origins of Everyday Words →

#7. “OMG” Was Invented by a 70-Year-Old British Admiral According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the first person to use “OMG” was a 75-year-old British admiral, which is about as far as a carbon-based life form can get from a teenage valley girl in a mall texting her friends about Justin Bieber’s butt. His name was John Arbuthnot “Jacky” Fisher,...

Dec 29th

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14kgoldnyc replied to your quote: “It’s very ’80s ‘Dynasty….People who are… [The blinking kind that spell out messages can easily send someone like me to the ER; I get your point, but people going all out can be a safety hazard for their neighbors. I haven’t been able to leave my apartment past sundown for a month.] I hadn’t considered that! I was just thinking of the colored vs....

Dec 29th

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Dec 29th

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“It’s very ’80s ‘Dynasty….People who are pathological about white lights...”

– Simon Doonan on the eternal Christmas wars over colored vs. white lights. I know Christmas is past, but I like this quote. I agree with him. I used to think colored lights were tacky; now I like them more than white lights. I figure, if you’re going to put electric lights all over your house,...

Dec 29th

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7 QUESTIONS TO ASK when you’re not sure who you’re... →

These are good. I especially like this one: 7 :: If my parents / my grandma / God / whoever holds my sense of personal propriety in check was GONE (poof!) and there was no one to offend, upset, or disappoint… who would I become? What unspeakably dark (or exquisitely light) truth would I tell? What would I (finally!) allow myself to write, publish, announce or create? What kind of closet would...

Dec 29th

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Dec 29th

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“What we have is not a war against fakery, it is a war against that which...”

– Shona McCombes, In Defense of Fake Beauty. Good post. It also points out that ‘natural’ beauty is infinitely more difficult to achieve, more time-consuming, expensive, and restrictive. There is a class element in calling another woman’s hair or makeup,...

Dec 29th

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