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Ark. Written by Ehud Lavski. Art by Yael Nathan. If you like it, please share.

Contact: [email protected]

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But for F's sake, tie your laces.

When on the bike function is important, but it’s always great to have a product that not only preforms on the bike, but looks great off the bike as well. The new Mojave Boot by @Rolandsandsdesign offers just the right amount of form and function. Check the link in their bio for more info. . Photo by @grainandglassco. . . #RolandSands #RSDApparel #RSDFootwear #croig #caferacersofinstagram #caferacer #triumph #streettwin #ad #sponsor

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As the Courier Six, I circuitously navigate the Mojave Wasteland because: A) The clues leading to the man who tried to kill me follow this path B) The lands to the Southeast hold Caesar's Legions who must be overcome C) There are a buttload of Deathclaws between here and New Vegas D) Ratslayer and the Gobi Desert Campaign Rifle...'nuff said

#fallout new vegas #new vegas #courier six

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As the Dovahkiin, I chose to defeat Alduin because: A) I had to keep him from destroying the world B) I am the Dragonborn and it is my destiny C) He was the greatest challenge to pit my skills and powers against D) He and his dragon bros are a constant inconvenience when I fast travel

#skyrim dovahkiin

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I touched upon this on Sunday but got my days mixed up, The Battle of Bonnymuir took place on the 5th of April, 1820,

The oft forgotten Battle of Bonnymuir took place in Scotland during the ‘Radical War’ of the early 19th Century. It wasn’t much of a battle as battles go and in terms of an engagement, deserves no more than to be called a skirmish. Nevertheless, it should not lie forgotten in the annals of Scottish history. Despite the numbers on each side, it was a one-sided affair from the start. A professional and properly armed, symmetric government force, made up of sixteen Hussars and sixteen Yeomanry troopers, easily routed a band of twenty-five, poorly armed, striking weavers. The leaders were captured, tried and sentenced, with the outcome being a judicial murder and the martyrdom of John Baird and Andrew Hardie, two men who came to be known as the ‘Radical Martyrs’.

In the early 19th Century as a war fuelled recession deepened, revolutionary discontent increased amongst the working classes. In fact, the underlying ideals and economic circumstances, which helped to create the French and American revolutions, were not vastly different from the situation in Scotland at that time. The workers were suppressed and despised by the ruling classes and their pay and conditions deteriorated drastically. Between 1800 and 1808, the earnings of weavers were halved and this trend continued up to 1820. In 1816, weavers in Kilsyth were working for just over £1 per week and, by 1820, their weekly income was down to between eleven and twelve shillings. This widespread discontent came to a head with a two month long strike in 1812.

Also, as a legacy of the government persecution of Scottish reformers, agitators and martyrs, such as Muir, Mealmaker, and Palmer, in the 1790’s, dissidence was stimulated and the United Scotsmen movement was formed. That underground organisation campaigned for universal male suffrage, vote by secret ballot, payment of MPs and annual general elections – things we take for granted today (except we’re not so happy about MPs pay and expenses these days). There was a lot of unrest at the time and prior to the Scottish ‘stushie’, there had also been problems in England. A precedent for Bonnymuir had taken place at ‘Peterloo’, actually St Peter’s Fields, in Manchester, in the August of 1819, when a radical reform meeting was attacked and dispersed by military force. That event provoked widespread protest and rioting. In one incident, in Paisley, the cavalry was called in to reintroduce order and there were other mass meetings in Scotland, with many weavers from Kilsyth being involved in forms of agitation.

Events neared a climax, when, on Sunday, the 2nd of April, 1820, a Proclamation was issued calling for a general strike. Most of central Scotland, especially in the weaving communities, came out the following week. The proclamation began, “Friends and Countrymen! Rouse from that state in which we have sunk for so many years, we are at length compelled from the extremity of our sufferings, and the contempt heaped upon our petitions for redress, to assert our rights at the hazard of our lives.” And, it called for a rising, “To show the world that we are not that lawless, sanguinary rabble which our oppressors would persuade the higher circles we are, but a brave and generous people determined to be free.”

Taking a lesson from Manchester and Paisley, one party of strikers decided that attack was the best form of defence. With the purpose of increasing their puny arsenal of weapons, a collection of about twenty-five weavers from Glasgow, led by Andrew Hardie and John Baird, marched on the Carron Iron Works to capture the munitions there. Tragically for that group, its movements didn’t go unnoticed. The secrecy of societies like the United Scotsmen had caused the government major concern and its spies and informers were ever active. Those clandestine infiltrators, who were the real traitors in the whole sorry business, were the reason why the march on Carron was anticipated.

Having received the intelligence of the undercover government agents, the Army was given its own marching orders. Lietutenant Ellis Hodgson, of the 11th Hussars, quartered in Perth, set off for Kilsyth, via Stirling, in order to protect Carron. By breakfast on the morning of the battle, Baird, Hardie and their followers had reached Castlecary Inn. That same morning, Lt. Hodgson left Kilsyth with his even numbered force of sixteen Hussars and sixteen Yeomanry troopers, intent on encountering the weavers. At Bonnybridge, they left the main road and made for Bonnymuir to intercept the rebels. The two forces met and the radicals began firing. After a few volleys on both sides, the cavalry flanked the rebels and the inevitable end was swift, albeit not so bloody. Lt. Hodgson and a sergeant of the 10th Hussars were wounded, with four of the radicals being also injured. A haul of five muskets, two pistols, eighteen pikes and about one hundred rounds of ball cartridges were taken. Thus ended the little remembered Battle of Bonnymuir. Nineteen of the weavers, including the leaders, were taken prisoner and brought to Stirling Castle.

Coincidentally, at some stage in the aftermath of the battle, a number of prisoners from Paisley were being taken separately under escort to jail in Greenock. That escort came under attack from a different group of strikers and the soldiers retaliated by opening fire. The result of that tragic reaction was the killing of eight people, including eight year old James McGilp, and the wounding of a further ten. Later, angry rioters stormed the jail and set those prisoners free. A series of dramatic trials then unfolded as a total of eighty-eight charges of treason were brought against men from across West Central Scotland. Hardie and Baird were condemned, hung and beheaded, and twenty men, including the fifteen year old Alexander Johnstone, were transported to the penal colonies in Australia.

On the day of his execution, Hardie spoke saying, “Yes, my countrymen, in a few minutes our blood shall be shed on this scaffold…, for no other sin but seeking the legitimate rights of our ill used and down trodden beloved countrymen.” At that, the furious Sheriff stepped forward and ordered him to stop, “…such violent and improper language”. Hardie’s last words in riposte were, “What we said to our countrymen, we intended to say no matter whether you granted us liberty or not. So we are now both done.” Hardie and Baird then embraced each other at the last, before a callous murder in the name of justice took place.

Peter Mackenzie, a Glasgow journalist, campaigned to have the weavers pardoned and eventually, in August 1835, an absolute pardon was granted. Today, you can find the monument to John Baird and Andrew Hardie in Sighthill cemetery, in Glasgow’s Springburn district.

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Passenger pigeon?

yall want replies but we’ve had messenger pigeons since the 1800’s???

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If one considers 50/50 playing vs diagnosing crashes and freezes.

Reblog if you're STILL playing Skyrim

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One does not simply “spawn” into Skyrim

That feeling when your Skyrim is about to crash and you stop spawning chickens just in the right moment.

I really wanted to recreate this meme in Skyrim, I’m sooorry 

#Skyrim

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Bachman Turner Overtrive - You Ain’t Seen Nothin’ Yet

Van Morrison - Brown Eyed Girl

a message for brown eyed girls 

yes, her eyes are blue. yes, every love song is about them. every poem compares them to the sea. but you, you have eyes of amber and onyx. your eyes are the gold people desperately try to pull from the ground. her eyes may hold the depth of the ocean but your eyes hold the magnitude of a black hole. your eyes carry a weight too heavy for even the ocean to sweep away into it’s abyss. your eyes are anything but ordinary. 

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I called to tell my son (he's in the US, I'm working in the Netherlands) to log into SWTOR tonight to let it update so he gets as much productive game time in tomorrow as possible.

I can’t believe I’m about to make a to-do list for everything I’d like to accomplish tonight in swtor. (pvp is on the list *shudders*)

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I immediately interpreted this as Republicans wanting students to go to school longer so they would go into greater debt.

Obviously, it is just a cute cartoon, and I believe we should be able to live in a world where some people could become students for as long as they want to continue learning. It is a shame that we don't currently live in that world.

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Whoa sparky, when did we start channeling Greek Philosophers? :)

President Obama’s “before and after” reaction to the Supreme Court ruling.

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Doing another swtor decoration giveaway! This time - it’s a Dread Altar! For all your skull storage needs! It glows! Guaranteed to keep gizka from breeding!

Must be on Ebon Hawk server. Like or reblog or send a message or something to enter. I’ll draw next Friday the 4th. Because I live in Canada and that’s just another day I guess?

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Bananas like those are far more common around the world as standard food bananas.  They also tend to have a thinner skin and are just as flavorful.  

I don’t get the point of these…

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What happened to Joss Whedon yesterday, and why it’s a super bad thing for everyone.

Spoilers for Age of Ultron and such.

On the one hand:

I thoroughly enjoyed The Avengers: Age of Ultron, having seen it only once so far. In particular, I liked the character developments they gave to Hawkeye, The Hulk, and Black Widow, and though the film was tonally very different from the first film, that was not nearly as bad a thing as I thought it would be. Sure, there was an absence of Whedon-ish dialogue with rare exceptions (”Well… I was born yesterday”), but Whedon-ish dialogue doesn’t belong everywhere, and this film was probably a good example of where not to put it. And the female characters were not only well-written, they were varied. It would have been cheap and easy to make all the major female characters some variation on Black Widow, but they weren’t. For example, Laura’s character was so normal under the circumstances (welcome 5 extra superheroes into her house like it’s no big deal, put them up for the night, smuggle Nick Fury into her shed for a pep talk, send everyone off with well-wishes the next morning) that it almost seems miraculous.

And I found nothing wrong with the aspects of Black Widow’s character which leaned towards what you might call traditional femininity, i.e. motherhood.

I don’t believe Joss Whedon deserved any of the hate that he got because I genuinely don’t believe there was anything to complain about in this instance, whether you generally like Joss Whedon or not.

On the other hand:

I don’t want this to sound like victim-blaming, but it probably will anyway, so here goes.

This was always going to happen. Today, next month, next year, some time in the future, the rabid feminists of Twitter were going to turn on Joss Whedon. And I’m not saying that he should necessarily have foreseen it, but he most definitely backed the wrong horse. That is, he backed the horse which only cared about his support because he was, knowingly or otherwise, regurgitating rhetoric that the mob had already heard and evaluated to be absolute truth. The moment that Joss Whedon did something to challenge that rhetoric (however unknowingly and unintentionally), that is, giving Black Widow a motherhood angle and a love interest in the form of Banner, the people turned on him.

And the really scary thing is, they turned on him as though they had always meant to do it. Reading through the wild mud-slinging being spouted by all these random Twitter people, it becomes clear that they never actually liked him. There is no conflict. There is no “Ooh, I want to like Whedon, but this is beyond the pale”. There’s no “Gosh, Whedon’s usually so good at this sort of thing, what happened?” There’s just “Aha! Whedon’s a misogynist, racist, transphobe! I knew it! I always knew it!”

There is no substitute for a network of friends, or a group of fans, that you know you can trust. And I doubt Whedon can trust either of his to do right by him.

What does this mean?

If this controversy blows up hard enough, it may actually have a marked negative effect on female characters in cinema.

Black Widow was a well-rounded, well-written, entertaining female character.

For the crime of writing her as such, Joss Whedon was harassed to the extent that he deleted his Twitter account.

This is what I call the Wonder Woman paradox in action: The reason that she may never get a movie is because nobody wants to write the script.

The people who demand the existence of a Wonder Woman movie have also, inadvertently, set the bar way too high. I was telling judging-arguments-by-their-merit many months ago, any slight deviations in Wonder Woman’s character or writing that the louder sections of her audience don’t like are going to be lambasted, and held up as proof that Hollywood can’t write a good woman, or they just don’t care, or whatever fits their preordained narrative. Ironically, for all that they want a Wonder Woman movie, they will end up hating her character. And nobody wants to write that script, because if they screw up (and they will screw up) they will never hear the end of it.

How right I turned out to be. But it wasn’t Wonder Woman, it was Black Widow. Which is almost as bad.

See, if this does blow up hard enough, then scriptwriters in Hollywood might actually start shying away from writing decent female characters, or any female characters at all. “Oh no” they might say, “That’s far too big a risk. Remember what happened to Joss Whedon? We thought he was good at writing female characters, but even Black Widow wasn’t good enough for the audience.”

Yes, I am saying that the people who are pushing for better representation for female characters in cinema, are in fact making it harder to have better representation for female characters in cinema.

Another glorious victory for social justice.