Kerbal Space Program, the space flight sim about sending millions of Kerbal astronauts to an early grave/advancing the space-faring dreams of the Kerbal nation, is now offering a wave of merchandise based on the game - a site which lets you upload your wildest Kerbal creations and turn them into 3D-printed models.
For her Master's project, graphic designer Barbara Bernát created a fictional currency she calls the Hungarian Euro. Instead of people or monuments, the obverse and reverse of Bernat's notes feature beautiful illustrations of European animals and plants; beneath UV light, the skeletal anatomies of the former become visible.
This newest collection of bloopers and flubs from the most recent season of Game of Thrones, but it has everything you're looking for: flubbing lines, badass characters falling down, and, most of all, the one true king of Westeros, Ser Pounce. By all the old gods and the new, watch it now!
What if instead of being haunted by the fictional superhero Birdman, an actor was being stalked by his alter ego, Big Bird? That's the premise of this absolutely perfect spoof from Sesame Street, "Big Birdman," featuring Caroll Spinney.
Last month, I wrote about choices in games, and how they should be meaningful, informed, and limited. (It’s short. Go on and read it if you haven’t. I’ll wait.)
Today, I’d like to briefly revisit that territory with a look at Magic: the Gathering and beauty of limited choices.
One of the most elegant parts of the grand-daddy of all TCGs is how its choices start out super-limited, but expand over time. Consider, if you will, the play pattern of a typical* game:
At the start of the game, you have no cards in play and no mana. You have one decision to make: what type of land card to play from your hand. (And if you only have one type of land in your hand, it’s not even a decision, really, since the only meaningful choice is to play that card.)
Once you have that land in play, you have a wider array of choices, but they’re still limited to what you have in your hand — and in a “typical” hand, only about half of those cards are viable choices (since the others require more mana than you have, or mana of a color you don’t have yet).
It’s often not until the second or third turn that you have to expand your decision-making to include not only the cards in your hand, but your card in play. Even then, some number of cards from your hand can still be ignored for now for lack of mana.
Of course, it doesn’t take too long for the game to explode into a crazy interconnected web of decisions that may be anything but limited. But that’s fine. You’ve ramped into that complexity rather than diving into it on the first turn, and that makes all the difference.
Yay for limited choices!
* Yes yes, some decks and more experienced players don’t necessarily follow this play pattern. I’m speaking in broad generalities here.
Yesterday we looked at the great "fattening" of New York and all the parts that are built on what basically amounts to trash. But it turns out that parts of the city have also disappeared—and for a few decades, New York even had 13 grand north-south avenues, not 12.
Well, this is just brilliant. Racist adverts promoting hatred against Muslims are currently being run on buses in San Francisco - but someone has started covering them up with anti-hatred messages from Marvel's première Muslim superhero, Ms. Marvel.
You probably know Ben Elton as the writer behind such amazing shows as Blackadder and The Young Ones. But he's also the author of a ton of novels , many of which explore totally ludicrous science fiction premises with the kind of zany humor you'd expect. (The best are Gridlock and Stark.) And now, he's just published a time-travel book!
Sorry, Secret Wars. In the inarguably best comic news of the week, original co-publisher Derek Dingle, along with writer/producer Reggie Hudlin and artist Denys Cowyn, is resurrecting the late Dwayne McDuffie's Milestone Media, best known as the home of beloved character Static Shock.
We've seen it happen time and again in commercials: a six-foot-tall pitcher of walking, talking Kool-Aid bursts through a brick wall, bellowing his trademark, "Oh yeah!" But could he really do it without completely cracking up?
Snow days can be nightmares for working parents. Some areas tend to need very little snow to cause a school closing, while in other areas schools don't blink if there's two feet of snow.
Jon.9836Very cool.
Not every land has dragons and unicorns — there's a great variety of creatures out there to be inspired/terrified by. This inofgraphic gathers fifty of them, gives a brief description, and tells you where they can be "found." The Jersey Devil, I knew.
Jon.9836If only I could have the solution implanted in my head!
Frankly, we're a little weary of Bigfoot and Nessie. What about those mysterious critters that don't have dedicated reality shows ... but are still integral, beloved, and/or feared parts of the communities in which they're said to dwell? Here are 9 wonderfully weird, staunchly local cryptozoological creatures.
Where are you going on your next vacation? The beach? The Grand Canyon? Hiking in the mountains? NASA has a much better idea: How about an exoplanet? And, after seeing these gorgeously retro travel posters they've produced, we're ready to spacesuit up.
When we think of Spider-Man, we usually think of that classic red and blue costume with the webbing motif. But Spidey's outfit has gone through some changes over the years — some more drastic than others.
Scientists have never seen anything quite like this before. It's a newly discovered species of fanged frog that gives direct birth to live tadpoles instead of laying eggs. It isn't that rare for scientists to find new species of animals, but finding an entirely new mode of reproduction is a different story altogether.
You'd think with all the war, assassinations, turmoil, political backstabbing, invasions from beyond the Wall, and everything else, that the Seven Kingdoms of Westeros wouldn't have had the time or the resources to craft quality public transportation for its people. But as this shockingly cool map proves, not so!
This bi-colored northern cardinal has female plumage on its right, and male plumage on its left. Called a "gynandromorphs," these animals are rare in nature. Rarer still is the chance to study one for extended periods of time — but researchers recently had such a chance with the bird you see here.
Astronaut Barry Wilmore needed a socket wrench, but there was just one problem. Wilmore is currently on the ISS, over 200 miles above the nearest hardware store. So, what did NASA do? Easy, they emailed him one.
Jon.9836Excellent.
If you haven't dived into the pages of The Silmarillion, there's a whole cosmology of J.R.R. Tolkien's Middle-earth that you may not know. This short video outlines the basics, explaining as much about the universe's divine and angelic beings as you can learn in four minutes.
Jon.9836Cool. My father-in-law has one of these.
We already published our gift guide for people who love science , but these wooden maps from Below the Boat – which depict in three dimensions the underwater features of coastal regions and interior lakes around United States – are so cool, I had to include them as a late entry.
Jon.9836I've never heard her music, but that cover art is fantastic.
Marian Call, my favorite geek songstress, has released a new holiday EP titled Yippee Ki Yay. Like most of Marian’s catalog, this release is an eclectic mix of tracks, eight in all, that emphasize her voice and witty writing style. The album opens with Marian’s acapella rendition of Ave Maria which I’ve had the privilege of hearing live. What follows is a delightful path through the beauty and comedy of Marian’s work. If you’ve seen her live in the last year you may have heard a couple of these. My favorites on this album are Princess Cupcake, which we got to sing-along in Dallas this summer, and the Die Hard–inspired Christmas in L.A. (Yippee Ki Yay). As with most of Marian’s work this album is family friendly with the exception of the title track, which does contain some strong language.
Pay what you want for this awesome album at Marian’s Bandcamp page: Yippee Ki Yay
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YouTuber Tomas N and his friend were hiking the High Tatra Mountain range along the border of Slovakia and Poland when they happened upon a frozen lake with astonishingly clear ice. The resulting visual effect – that of walking on air – is really something else. But how did this clear ice come to be?
