LionsPhil

There are times when I hate my job. And then there are times like today when I get to go sampling on a warm sunny day. I like those days. And as a bonus, today there was a bluebell wood.

Mike Pelletier: Lucy Skull

The model of the skull was generated from a friend's dental tomography scan. The form of the object was created by creating an array of copies of the skull, where each successive copy of the skull is scaled, rotated, and moved. The skull starts at life size at the front and ends up rotated 180 degrees and two times larger than life at the back.

Mirrored from jwz.org.

"Europe's Sensational Wild Animal Trainer, Fearless Daughter of Russia's Mad Monk."

I learned about this existence of this wonderful artifact and wonderful kook from Bess Lovejoy's Atlas Obscura talk at DNA Lounge last week, which you should surely attend in the future.

She also later co-authored a cookbook, which includes recipes for jellied fish heads and her father's favorite, cod soup. She also worked as a cabaret dancer in Bucharest, Romania, and then found work as a circus performer for Ringling Brothers Circus. During the 1930s she toured Europe and America as a lion tamer, billing herself as "the daughter of the famous mad monk whose feats in Russia astonished the world." She was mauled by a bear in Peru, Indiana, but stayed with the circus until it reached Miami, Florida, where she quit and began work as a riveter in a defense shipyard during World War II.

Mirrored from jwz.org.

World Bodypaint Festival

Mirrored from jwz.org.

Dear Lazyweb, can anyone tell me how to disconnect my Words With Friends account from my Facebook account?

I'm sick to death of it sending me push-notifications that someone I'm friends with on Facebook but have never played Scrabble with has played a word. There seems to be no way to turn this shit off.

Things I have tried:

1. De-authorizing the Words With Friends app on Facebook. This causes the the iOS app to go into a loop demanding that you re-authorize it.

2. Deleting and re-installing the iOS app. That stops the auth-loop, but does not stop the "notifications about non-friends" issue, and also makes it nag you daily saying "Hey, you used to log in with Facebook! Log in with Facebook okay??"

So I guess I can't do this myself, since it's stuck in their DB. I'll just mail them and ask them to delete that. Ha ha ha.

3. This joke appears to be the closest thing to a non-FAQ support page.

4. So I go to their Facebook page hoping to message them. There's no option to message them. There's no option to post a question on the wall except as a reply to a previous post from them announcing an new feature in a different game. WTF.

5. So I waste my time trying to strip my complaint down to 140 characters and ask them on Twitter. To the shock of nobody, I get no reply.

6. Then on a completely different, unlinked web site, I find this page. I get a brush-off auto-reply saying "update to the latest version of the app, which will direct you to the FAQ instead of letting you actually contact us."

The fact that they are still nagging me with updates about my Facebook friends when they no longer have authorization on my Facebook account means that they have stored an offline copy of my friends tree, which I'm pretty sure is against Facebook's application terms of service. I'm sure both parties care about this a lot.

Yeah yeah, that's what I get for dealing with amoral scumbags like Zynga in the first place. I even paid them money to make the ads go away, so I'm part of the problem. But hey, I like playing scrabble on my phone.

Remember when a paying customer could actually email support? Those were the days.

Previously.

Mirrored from jwz.org.

Dear Lazyweb:

I face-tagged a zillion faces in desktop Picasa while "Store Name Tags in Photo" was unchecked. Now I have checked it and I want it to write all those tags back to the EXIF. How?

Alternately: I just want to extract a map of filename → face-names, and then I can take care of business myself. Where's the API?

Previously.

Mirrored from jwz.org.

Any of you who have been to my home know that this is exactly what my desk looks like.

Mirrored from jwz.org.

Mirrored from jwz.org.

Peaches Geldof has signed up to Aleister Crowley's sex cult Ordo Templi Orientis

Is this, by any chance, a stupid cult? No, actually it's a respected school of academic thought known for its rigorous system of peer-reviewed publishing and many seminal contributions to the philosophy of mind, ethics and epistemology.

Really? No, of course not. It's a stupid cult.

Previously, previously, previously.

Mirrored from jwz.org.

You may have heard that the highest-paid employee in each state is usually the football coach at the largest state school. This is actually a gross mischaracterization: Sometimes it is the basketball coach.

Mirrored from jwz.org.