Settling The Confusion Of Stereotypes

From science to day to day life, people prejudge situations and others based on past experience. This is a natural and essential part of being alive, for if you didn’t prejudge, you would die very quickly. If I didn’t prejudge that my food was poison free, I would starve, and if I didn’t prejudge that the big mean scary guy with cauliflower ear was potential dangerous, I probably would have told him to go to the back of the line. In both of these cases I used my experience to make generalizations about people or situations that I had no evidence for in that specific instance. Is this stereotyping or is it something else? Read more »

Spotlight: Nils Widlund

We wanted to share two amazingly done videos of Nils Widlund, a Swedish kickboxer who took a fight against one of the best in the world on a few weeks notice at DREAM’s 2011 NYE show.

First off, here are some quick facts about Widlund:

Kickboxing Record: 70-16
Style: Sanshou
Country: Sweden
Gym/Camp: Black House Team Nogueira

Widlund is currently a resident of San Diego where he studies full time at UCSD.  From watching these videos and reading some of his blog, Widlund comes across as a really nice guy just living life and having fun. It also appears he is going to start his transition in to MMA. With his already successful kickboxing career and skill, he should be a natural, and training at school with such a BJJ background like Team Nog seems to be the best place to start.

On to the videos after the jump. Read more »

Gendered Legos? Can I Vomit Now?

Somehow I thought things would be looking up for reducing the number of gendered toys after the video of a little girl ranting in a Target went viral around Christmas. Then just today I found out, to my horror but not shock, that Lego is making a new collection for girls called “Lego Friends.” GAH! It appears to be some kind of Bratz-Lego hybrid complete with a site that has horrible animation reminiscent of a Barbie movie.

Of course, these new female Legos have curves and busts and love to hang out at the hair salon and cafe in their horrible little town of Heart Lake City.

HEART LAKE CITY?!?!?!?!?!?! It’s like Salt Lake City except with more ponies. Read more »

Heroica: The Minecraft Saga, Part 1

Minecraft has been an on-again off-again pastime for lunarskye and myself.  As of right now however, ITS ON!

When we first started the world, it was pretty simple due to the fact that we were playing the Alpha version. Since then of course, with recurring Beta updates, things like biomes and cave structures have become much more varied and complex.

We took on our first projects with the help of our friend Xemo. We made a pretty sweet network of forts connected by a wire controlled rail system and mined like crazy into this one mountain. We built a cool fort with automated iron doors and connected everything underground so you never have to put yourself in danger trekking over the surface at night.

It took awhile for the portals to start working on multiplayer servers, so we were forced to continue our epic journey on foot, mainly in search of our first snow/tundra biome. Along the way, we began construction of a canal system by which we would travel to and from our snow castle. It was incredibly time consuming and difficult, and sadly now that the portals actually work, we have absolutely no use for the canal or any of the paths cleared.

Most recently, I took a long journey in to the Nether to build a new portal. I ended up creating a log cabin, a cliff fortress, and discovered my first “abandoned mine” and NPC (no spawned NPCs however) village. The mine was scary, and I actually like the little village, which I’m adding onto.

Check out some screenshots from our adventures after the jump. Read more »

Pat Buchanan: Inane and Insane

Pat Buchanan has often been a lighting rod of criticism, but many people hold him in high esteem as an intellect worth having in the conversation. Sadly, with his recent book “Suicide of a Superpower: Will America Survive to 2025?”,  it seems possible that he had gone off the deep end or just more clearly showed his true colors. The controversial book and the particularly controversial chapter “The End of White America” has already sparked petitions for the former Presidential adviser and candidate to be fired from his analysis job at MSNBC.

Since his book tour started Buchanan says that “The End of White America” chapter has been brought up more than any other topic covered in his book and he decided to use the conservative website Townhall to answer the meta-question

“Why should we care if white Americans become a minority? America, interviewers remind me, assimilated the immigrants of a century ago — Italians, Poles, Jews, Slavs — and we can do the same with peoples from the Third World.”

What follows is a vexing and horrible attempt to make a rational argument out of revisionist history and prejudice.
Read more »

The Power of Will – Three Inspiring Athletes

So many things prevent us from being high level competitors in whatever competitive combat sport we dedicate ourselves to… or so it seems. The truth is that there are very few definitive factors that determine our success. One of the most vital elements to that success is Power of Will.

Now, I’m not skilled enough to express deeper sentiments on the Power of Will properly — the paradox of increasing your Power of Will by an act of will — research concerning the set in stone nature of cognitive executive function — the questions of our ability to control and mold our own personality etc. That is why I’m taking the basic route of posting something that assumes we all just need some badass emotional push that make our faces numb, our stomach fill with butterflies, and our motivation inexhaustible.

DSTRYRsg had a great post featuring one of the three videos I’m posting here. Remember that the Power of Will is so important and vital that even if you have a disability that, in theory, would prevent you from competing at all, it is not strong enough to stop you as long as you have the will to reach high, if not achieve the highest level of your sport. Read more »