spriteleigh

Coffee Stain Studios is developing Goat Simulator, a strong candidate for 2014 Game of the Year. It is available for pre-order. [Video Link]

(YouTube link)

The newest art remix from Pogo (Nick Bertke) uses clips and sounds from the 1971 movie Willie Wonka and the Chocolate Factory. It’s as if he took the surreality of the film and squared it, but the result is a strangely soothing song, as you've come to expect from a Pogo remix. This is actually a project he started in 2009, but recently went back and redid the entire thing.  -via Viral Viral Videos

See also:Other Pogo remixes.

Comcast plans to acquire Time Warner Cable for about $159 a share in an all-stock deal that will combine America's two largest cable companies, reports CNBC. The newly merged company will be called "why is my internet so slow." And Net Neutrality is about to become all the more important.

Comcast to buy Time Warner Cable in all stock deal worth $159 per $TWC share- sources. Deal set for tomorrow morning. Ratio is 2.875 $CMCSA.

— DAVID FABER (@davidfaber) February 13, 2014

Comcast will indicate willingness to divest 3m subs from combination with $TWC- sources.

— DAVID FABER (@davidfaber) February 13, 2014

Snip from CNBC story, the first to break the news:

The new company, created by the $44 billion purchase, would be by far the largest cable provider in the nation with over 33 million subscribers, and is certain to face a tough review from the Federal Communications Commission.

The agreement comes more than eight months after Charter Communictions and Liberty Media made their first foray to try and negotiate a deal to acquire Time Warner Cable (a story broken by CNBC) and follows months of conversations between Time Warner Cable and Comcast about the prospect of a Comcast acquisition of the company.

Charter's offer of roughly $133 a share in cash and stock has been rejected by Time Warner Cable as it held out for a price of $160, which it has said it reflective of where an asset of its size and scope should trade in a deal.

Brace yourselves, internet.

BREAKING: Comcast and Time Warner merging to create bigger, shittier monopoly.

— Wil Wheaton (@wilw) February 13, 2014

Comcast and TWC aren’t competitors. It’s not good to consolidate ownership, but it doesn’t reduce choice. They were already cartel partners.

— Glenn Fleishman (@GlennF) February 13, 2014

Everyone who is worried about the Comcast Time Warner Cable merger can relax. I'm still getting a solid 28.8K on my modem.

— Dave Pell (@davepell) February 13, 2014

Note that almost uniquely in America, Verizon Fios and Cablevision compete in many markets and, surprise, no caps, better pricing.

— Glenn Fleishman (@GlennF) February 13, 2014

Note that AT&T suddenly, magically revamped its wireless data plans after T-Mobile introduced actually compelling competitive offers.

— Glenn Fleishman (@GlennF) February 13, 2014

Note that AT&T suddenly, magically revamped its wireless data plans after T-Mobile introduced actually compelling competitive offers.

— Glenn Fleishman (@GlennF) February 13, 2014

And yet the telecoms/internet firms persist in this delightful façade that, despite huge profits, we’re as competitive as possible already.

— Glenn Fleishman (@GlennF) February 13, 2014

For Comcast, the crown jewel of @TWC is the New York City market. Soon @Comcast will have its 30 Rock studios AND the cable pipes beneath.

— Brian Stelter (@brianstelter) February 13, 2014

There will be lots of Q's about government scrutiny of this deal. For what it's worth, Comcast is very well-connected in DC...

— Brian Stelter (@brianstelter) February 13, 2014

...Timely example: David Cohen, Comcast's head of lobbying, corporate communications, etc was a guest at the WH state dinner last night.

— Brian Stelter (@brianstelter) February 13, 2014

My initial @CNNMoney story about @Comcast + @TWC: http://t.co/NgPiA9jCci The two companies want to close the deal by the end of this year.

— Brian Stelter (@brianstelter) February 13, 2014

Here's my cartoon on Comcast and Time Warner and now I'm going to have a drink pic.twitter.com/qnoJKArXpJ

— Panoptisuz (@susie_c) February 13, 2014

WHAT THE FUCK @FCC YOU HAD ONE JOB

— dont kill me obama (@onekade) February 13, 2014

Time Warner and Comcast are merging. Now all we need is for Verizon to join and one of them to bomb Pearl Harbor.

— Josh Gondelman (@joshgondelman) February 13, 2014

The ghosts of 30 Rock are raging tonight.

— NYTFridge (@NYTFridge) February 13, 2014

Interesting that @davidfaber broke the $TWC/Comcast story.

— NYTFridge (@NYTFridge) February 13, 2014

You guys, just think about how much easier everything will be when there is only one company for everything!

— Sean Bonner Ⓥ (@seanbonner) February 13, 2014

Comcast and Time Warner. Two horrible disasters merging. This is like a crappy SyFy channel movie but real.

— Joseph Scrimshaw (@JosephScrimshaw) February 13, 2014

Representatives from Comcast and Time Warner, when reached for comment. pic.twitter.com/uG90ix5IUG

— Wil Wheaton (@wilw) February 13, 2014

It's nice that Comcast and Time Warner are getting together, because people were getting tired of hating Russia and winter and fracking

— John Schwartz -- NYT (@jswatz) February 13, 2014

@xeni You get a data cap! And you get a data cap! EVERYONE gets a data cap! </oprah> @ardalis

— James Hollingshead (@bladesjester) February 13, 2014

TWC goes to Comcast. This chart helps put it in to perspective. pic.twitter.com/XmlAZvOE3Y

— James Gross (@James_Gross) February 13, 2014

Iconic Punch Scenes from movies and TV shows have been overshadowed for decades by their more likeable siblings the Kiss, the Heroic Monologue and the Speech That Conveniently Ties Up All Loose Ends.

Artist and designer Aled Lewis has created a pixel art series dedicated to these underrated scenes, and it’s about time those “pow, bang straight in the kisser!” moments were given their day in the sun.

The pieces in Aled's series "Pixel Punches" are reminiscent of character designs from classic beat ‘em up video games like Double Dragon and Final Fight, which is an appropriate era reference since many of the scenes are from classic movies like Groundhog Day, Back to the Future, and Ace Ventura, with a Joffrey slapping scene from Game of Thrones mixed in for geek color.

-Via Pleated-Jeans

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A couple meets for dinner and their relationship totally falls apart in just a few minutes. There are 154 movie titles that make up their conversation in this video by POYKPAC Comedy. The point is, you can Say Anything and it will turn out to be a movie title. -Thanks, Ryan Hunter!  

Researchers at Kaspersky Labs have uncovered a new, long-lived piece of espionage malware called Careto (Spanish for "Mask"). The software, which attacks Windows, Mac OS and GNU/Linux, has been running since at least 2007 and has successfully targeted at least 380 victims in 31 countries, gaining access via directed spear-phishing attacks, which included setting up fake sites to impersonate The Guardian. The Mask was thought to be the work of a government, and its targets were "government institutions, diplomatic offices and embassies, energy, oil and gas companies, research organizations and activists." It is possible that the Mask also targeted Android and Ios devices.

* The authors appear to be native in the Spanish language which has been observed very rarely in APT attacks.

* The campaign was active for at least five years until January 2014 (some Careto samples were compiled in 2007). During the course of Kaspersky Lab’s investigations, the command-and-control (C&C) servers were shut down.

* We counted over 380 unique victims between 1000+ IPs. Infections have been observed in: Algeria, Argentina, Belgium, Bolivia, Brazil, China, Colombia, Costa Rica, Cuba, Egypt, France, Germany, Gibraltar, Guatemala, Iran, Iraq, Libya, Malaysia, Mexico, Morocco, Norway, Pakistan, Poland, South Africa, Spain, Switzerland, Tunisia, Turkey, United Kingdom, United States and Venezuela.

* The complexity and universality of the toolset used by the attackers makes this cyber-espionage operation very special. This includes leveraging high-end exploits, an extremely sophisticated piece of malware, a rootkit, a bootkit, Mac OS X and Linux versions and possibly versions for Android and iPad/iPhone (iOS). The Mask also used a customized attack against Kaspersky Lab’s products.

* Among the attack’s vectors, at least one Adobe Flash Player exploit (CVE-2012-0773) was used. It was designed for Flash Player versions prior to 10.3 and 11.2. This exploit was originally discovered by VUPEN and was used in 2012 to escape the Google Chrome sandbox to win the CanSecWest Pwn2Own contest.

Kaspersky Lab Uncovers “The Mask”: One of the Most Advanced Global Cyber-espionage Operations to Date Due to the Complexity of the Toolset Used by the Attackers

Nicely done, Shutterstock.

After launching ApologyWatch, a blog dedicated to tracking corporate apologies, the New York Times has itself been asked to apologize—to the identical, well-established blog SorryWatch.

Apology Watch? SorryWatch? Sounds familiar. Twitter tag “ApologyWatch? Sounds like our Twitter tag, “SorryWatch,” doesn’t it? Two writers analyzing apologies. Why, that’s hauntingly reminiscent of SorryWatch. ... We realize that it’s possible that Sorkin or Seidman thought of this idea independently. But minimal research, such as the research that must have been done to determine whether the name “ApologyWatch” was taken, will have brought them to our site. [Note: a search for "Apology Watch" before the NYT site launched would show SorryWatch on the first page.] Yet there is no mention of our existence in Sorkin’s piece. With the prestige of the New York Times behind it, “Apology Watch” is likely to harm SorryWatch. Certainly the similarity in names will confuse readers.

No apology was forthcoming, however, with the "great minds think alike" defense sent in its stead. As it has been pointed out the writers involved obviously knew about SorryWatch before announcing their new site, perhaps they simply know something about the legal implications of apologies that most people don't.

The language in the email from the Times ("we are delighted to discover others who ... want to contribute to the dialogue about apologies") is at least in the smarmy, shit-eating spirit of corporate apologies.

Gawker's J.K. Trotter has more icky circumlocutions:

[Andrew Ross] Sorkin told Gawker that DealBook was “delighted to discover others who are passionate about this topic.” (His editor, Dan Niemi, supply a nearly identical statement to McCarthy and Ingall.) Seidman invited the women to “connect and explore.”

Connect and explore! But don't apologize, because corporate apologies are, to paraphrase Sorkin and his new project, offensively insincere.

Aled Lewis sells prints of his excellently-drawn pixel art. These ones, taken from game and TV show game tie-ins from a parallel dimension, are part of a show at Gallery1988 titled "Such Pixels."

I also dig these fighting game-style portraits.

But most of all I love his Thelma and Louise edition of OutRun.

Wow. Such linguistics. Many noun. Very adjectives. So many explanation.

This week, the city of Pensacola, FL will vote on an "anti-camping" ordinance that makes it a crime to protect yourself from the weather with a blanket or a newspaper. Its intention is to criminalize homeless people, but, of course, it also makes criminals out of anyone who holds a newspaper over her head in the rain.

Photo: Jed Kim/KPCC

Paying $4 for a cup of coffee? That's dumb ... or maybe not. Maybe it's genius because that's basically the premise of Starbucks, the world's largest coffeehouse company worth over $56 billion that we know and love.

Similarly, the jury is out whether this next venture is dumb or genius: a coffeehouse called Dumb Starbucks has recently opened in the city of Los Feliz, California, as reported by Los Angeles radio station KPCC. It looks and feels just like a regular Starbucks, except everything has the word "dumb" in front of it.

Enjoy our full menu of coffees and cold drinks pic.twitter.com/wPacrEEH9k

— Dumb Starbucks (@dumbstarbucks) February 8, 2014

Photo: Christina House/LA Times

Dumb Starbucks' menu includes "Dumb Iced Coffee," "Dumb Frappucinnos," "Dumb Espresso," and so on, that you can buy and drink while listening to "Dumb Norah Jones" and "Dumb Jazz Standards" CD.

The story of the Dumb Starbucks went viral on social media just days after the store opened, and people flocked to check it out - some waiting hours to get get their drinks, which are free at the time being.

"They're definitely not serving at Starbucks pace," customer Jeffrey Eyster, 43, after waiting about an hour in line, said to Samantha Schaefer of The Los Angeles Times.

... before taking a photo of themselves in front of the store's logo

But what is Dumb Starbucks? Is it a real business or a prank? Perhaps a marketing ploy or even - gasp - a reality TV? And how could they get away with using Starbucks name and logo so blatantly?

From the store's frequently asked questions, it's an "art gallery" and that the coffee its patrons are buying are "works of art."

According to the Wall Street Journal, the store was staffed with just two barristas who were immediately overwhelmed by the demand. One barrista who identified herself as Amber said that she got the job from a Craigslist post, and shrugged the questions of whether Dumb Starbucks is an art installation. "I don't know. What is art? Maybe serving coffee is art."

Megan Adams, a spokesperson from the real Starbucks said to KPCC, "It's obviously not a Starbucks," and that the company is "looking into it."

In the meantime, customers continue to line up for hours to experience Dumb Starbucks while it's still there. Megan Gillmore of Glendale summed it best "We figured it wasn't going to be here very long ... before they get sued."

The Random Frog Generator: For all your frog photo needs.

The Intercept, the "fearless, adversarial journalism" venture launched by Pierre Omidyar's First Look Media, launched with a big boom today.

Lead story on the site right now, which is https by default (and straining under launch day load at the moment) explores "The NSA’s Secret Role in the U.S. Assassination Program."

The Intercept will initially focus on NSA stories based on documents provided by Edward Snowden, and this is one such story.

"The National Security Agency is using complex analysis of electronic surveillance, rather than human intelligence, as the primary method to locate targets for lethal drone strikes," Jeremy Scahill and Glenn Greenwald report, "An unreliable tactic that results in the deaths of innocent or unidentified people."

As Redditor actual_hacker said in a thread, the big point of this article: "The US has built a SIM-card kill list. They're shooting missiles at cell phones without caring about who is holding the phone. That is why so many innocent people keep getting killed. That is what this story is about. The next time someone says "it's just metadata," remember this story. Innocent people die because of NSA's use of metadata: the story cites 14 women and 21 children killed in just one operation. All because of metadata."

Like the NSA, you can follow the journalists at The Intercept on Twitter, via this handy list.

Our friends at Hover are giving $1 to the EFF for each domain transfer until Feb. 11 for “The Day We Fight Back!” Thanks for sponsoring Gweek, Hover!

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It’s hard to nail down this fan film entitled Batman Evolution, because it’s equal parts comedic and serious action, it transitions between classic TV show Batman and a sort of Dark Knight type Batdude, and it stars a guy who clearly knows a thing or two about martial arts, yet the choreography is a bit wonky at times which makes some of the fighting scenes laughably bad.

The star of the short Eric Gable studied ninjitsu in Japan years ago, and he wanted to make a film featuring Batman actually doing ninja moves, so this short has been his labor of love for years. But does it do the Batman justice? As far as fan films go it’s really well made, and fun to watch despite the occasional unintentionally comedic moment, so Batman would be proud of Eric's effort.

-Via CBM

Here's On the Road for 17,527 Miles, a 45 page ebook of driving directions for recreating the journey of Sal Paradise in Jack Kerouac's 1957 classic On the Road. Its author, German college student Gregor Weichbrodt, is selling it as a print-on-demand title via Lulu, in case you want a hardcopy to take with on your trip.

Gregor Weichbrodt, a German college student, took all of the geographic stops mentioned in On the Road, plugged them into Google Maps, and ended up with a 45-page manual of driving directions, divided into chapters paralleling those of Kerouac’s original book. You can read the manual – On the Road for 17,527 Miles– as a free ebook.

Jack Kerouac’s On The Road Turned Into Google Driving Directions & Published as a Free eBook [Open Culture]

(via Sean Bonner)

After the Sandy Hook shootings, at presidential behest, $10 million was allocated to to explore links between gun violence and video games. A year later, Mike Rose reports that nothing seems to be happening.

It's been more than a year since the meeting with Biden, and more than a year since Obama called for $10 million to be set aside for research into whether new media, such as violent video games, influence root causes of gun violence. In that time, you probably haven't heard much about that research. That's because it never actually happened, nor did any funding change hands. As discovered in my various talks with individuals and researchers close to discussions, any potential research efforts from Congress broke down fairly rapidly following the meeting with Biden, and hardly anything has been said since.

An unsuprising P.S. to this round of the game scapegoating scarehouse: despite screaming tabloid suggestions that he was inspired to kill by Call of Duty, it turned out that Adam Lanza wasn't a hardcore gamer at all. He liked innocuous kid-friendly fare such as Dance Dance Revolution and Super Mario. The report into his rampage focused on the fact that he was a) mentally ill and b) had easy access to guns and ammunition.

Here's what we know in a nutshell: The best research into the field has found very little evidence of a link between violence in games and real-life violence, and past research suggests that video game violence has even less impact that other media, like television for example. There is absolutely no consensus amongst researchers -- and even when a group does claim to find that link, they are quickly rebutted by numerous others.

Fox News claims that the Lego movie is "anti-business", despite the fact that it exists to sell toys. Sean O'Neal, at A.V. Club:

the network has lashed out at the film for attempting to indoctrinate the naïve with simpleminded messages about capitalism, only for the wrong team, blasting a movie based on a global, multibillion-dollar toy manufacturer—and the reinvigoration of its branding through movie-generated merchandising—as being “anti-business.” ... As Dergarabedian goes on to suggest implicitly that calling a major studio’s marketing synergy-based movie franchise “anti-business” might be overreaching, Payne replies that it at least sounds like “hypocrisy” to him. A hypocrisy that may result in the children who see it developing antagonistic attitudes toward business, even as they demand their parents buy them more Lego bricks.

This reminds me of an odd thing about conservative media criticism: when a work of entertainment (and let me stress that I'm not yet including the Lego movie here, as I haven't seen it!) weds a superficial criticism of greed to a more insinuating portrayal of its virtues, it doesn't get praised as a particularly devilish contribution to the cause. Instead, it meets the full brunt of criticism, as if the superficial message was the only one. Moreover, that criticism often focuses on the alleged superficiality of the whole.

Here is a deep mistrust of ambiguity, and an overwhelming belief in marketing as the maker of the message. Conservatives, moreso than others, worry that to be exposed to even a skin-deep "inoculation" or gloss on a movie or book's greater purpose, however manifestly opposite that cover story is to the author's creative intent, is to risk terminal moral infection.

That said, it's also true that Fox has an off-the-shelf story format--movie says greed is bad, woe to our culture--into which any old subject can be shoehorned if a sentence-worth of description matches the pattern.

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You know how guys think they can sneak a look or two at a pretty woman without her ever knowing it? In this instance, they are sadly mistaken. This kind of thing happens all the time. You are not as subtle as you think you are. We get a look at both perspectives in this video. -via Daily Picks and Flicks

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Facebook is celebrating its 10th anniversary with an application called A Look Back. It shows the highlights of your personal Facebook archives. If you’ve shared enough photos, videos, and status updates, you’ll see a nice presentation in chronological order. If you are a truly lame Facebooker like I am, you’ll get a boring static image of the few images you were tagged in. But some folks have extensive archives. One of them is Darth Vader, who has a lot to recall from his years of archiving memories on Facebook. -via Viral Viral Videos

The actors cast in superhero movie roles these days tend to have the biggest heads in the movie biz, that's not to say they have massive egos though that certainly applies in some cases, but overall they just have really big heads.

So when the team at Smashcave saw the cranial girth these guys were lugging around town they came up with a bright idea- increase the size of each head just a bit in Photoshop and voila! (Super) Human bobbleheads!

The Downey Jr., the Jackman, the Hemsworth, the Bale, even the Ledger (may he rest in peace) are all here to take up as much room on the movie poster as possible, and make their co-stars feel even more insignificant to the plot.

Does anyone else see the potential for a Galactus or MODOK movie here?!

-Via Gamma Squad

In two days, the Internet will erupt in a protest to rival the uprising against SOPA: in Aaron Swartz's memory, websites everywhere will add code from TheDayWeFightBack.org to their templates, helping to flood Congress -- and the world's legislative bodies -- with calls for an end to mass surveillance.

In America, we're demanding that Congress pass The USA Freedom Act, restoring the Fourth Amendment protection that Americans have enjoyed for hundreds of years. If you have a website (a Tumblr, a blog) then you -- like us -- can add the code to your template today, and on the 11th, it will go live.

The Day We Fight Back - February 11th 2014

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It appears that a new mechanical sheriff is in town thanks to the Robocop reboot movie, but everybody knows that, despite the slick CGI graphics and updated storyline, the new movie won’t compare to the 1987 classic starring Peter Weller.

To celebrate the awesomeness of the Robocop that already was Nerdist got 50 or so budding Swede style filmmakers together for a full length remake, and their Robocop remake makes the original film look so much better!

You’ll laugh in all the wrong places, watch lines being read in a very unrehearsed manner, and cheer for what a bunch of geeks with too much time on their hands can accomplish. Yay creativity!

(NSFW due to language, just like the original!)

Rogue archivist Carl Malamud sez, "Ralph Nader argues that the law must be free in a piece in the Huffington Post. Great piece, I wasn't expecting it, so it was a treat to see it pop up (my mother is going to be impressed by this one!)."

What I love about this issue of making the law available for people to read is how totally nonpartisan it is. Ralph is joined in his voice of support by an equally strong statement by Darrell Issa when I testified about the issue last month.

The law suit by the standards people is taking a lot of my time these days, so it's nice to see these votes of support popping up.

The Law Must Be Free and Accessible to All -- Not Secret and Profitable [Ralph Nader/Huffington Post]

(Thanks, Carl!)

Robbo sez, "Dave Raphael of Dave's Blog has an interesting post about a conversation he recently had with Verizon support and discovered some uncomfortable - yet wholly unsurprising - truths about how Verizon is selectively limiting bandwidth to AWS services and adversely affecting the quality of Netflix. The open admission of this by Verizon support was unexpected - but the fact it is happening should be of no surprise to anyone but the ignorant and naive."

Frankly, I was surprised he admitted to this. I’ve since tested this almost every day for the last couple of weeks. During the day – the bandwidth is normal to AWS. However, after 4pm or so – things get slow.

In my personal opinion, this is Verizon waging war against Netflix. Unfortunately, a lot of infrastructure is hosted on AWS. That means a lot of services are going to be impacted by this.

Verizon Using Recent Net Neutrality Victory to Wage War Against Netflix [Dave Raphael/Dave's Blog] (Thanks, Robbo!)