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From Stuart Brown, a five-part video series on the history of graphics in video games. Here's part one:

The entire playlist is here.

Tags: Stuart Brown   video   video games

SHORTSIGHTED and sucky.

From Dazed comes news that Flickr is about to sell off our Creative Commons photos. This means photos we’ve taken with the idea of giving them away freely will now be sold, whether we like it or not. And who gets the dough for these photos we took? Only Yahoo.

As a photographer, I now have to choose whether to prevent people from using my photos, or prevent Yahoo from selling them. I can’t have both.

I want people to use my photos. That’s why I take them. I want that usage to be unencumbered. That’s why I chose a Creative Commons license. Some of the publications and businesses that use my photos make no money at all. Others make a little something. I don’t care either way. That’s why I chose a Commercial Attribution license. The license makes my work available to all publications and products, whether commercial or non-commercial. Fine with me.

But Yahoo selling the stuff? Cheesy, desperate, and not at all fine with me. I pay for a Flickr Pro account, and am happy to do so. That’s how Yahoo is supposed to make money from my hobby.

I know the site’s founders (who left years ago). Other friends of mine still work there as designers & developers. They are great people. Talented, user-focused, righteous. None of them is for this.

I’ve had a Flickr Pro account for about ten years. I love Flickr. Sometimes, for years, it has been like loving a friend who is in a coma. Now it’s like helplessly watching a cocaine-addicted friend snort up their kid’s college fund.

Come on, Yahoo.

Updates

1. Read Jen Simmons’s I Don’t Want “Creative Commons By” To Mean You Can Rip Me Off, which addresses weaknesses in the current CC licensing that permit Yahoo to do what it’s doing; clearer and more subtle licensing would prevent it.
2. Whether or not CC licenses would benefit from what Jen proposes, Yahoo, if it understood the spirit of the community it bought in Flickr—or even if it simply wanted to pretend to understand—could prevent a lot of bad feeling by writing to members whose work is covered by CC Attribution licenses; asking for feedback on its plan; making the plan opt-in; and offering some kind of revenue sharing for those members who don’t mind having Yahoo sell prints of their work. That Yahoo doesn’t think of this—and that some usually thoughtful people are defending Yahoo on the grounds that the CC license allows what they’re doing—I find profoundly depressing. We were a community. What happened?

---

Hat tip: @Rasmusuu

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 A new patent published by the USPTO yesterday details an invention by Nintendo that would allow it to emulate its mobile game consoles, including the Game Boy line of devices specifically, in other settings, including on seat-back displays in airplanes and trains, and on mobile devices including cell phones. The patent is an updated take on an older piece of IP, so it’s not an entirely… Read More

The inability or unwillingness of OPEC to curb production showed that it was no longer the dominating force behind global fuel supplies and prices.

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Early last year, artist Sonja Hinrichsen (previously) and some 60 volunteers wearing snowshoes trekked out onto the frozen Catamount Lake in Colorado to trample miles of swirling and twisting patterns into the deep snow. Titled Snow Drawings at Catamount Lake, the work was a continuation of her community-based snow drawing projects that bring together local volunteers to transform snowy landscapes into temporary artworks based on parameters provided by Hinrichsen. From her statement about the project:

It is important to me that participants experience the elements of nature while they help me transform their own familiar snow landscape into a piece of art. I hope that the aerial photographs that I take right after completion of each piece can demonstrate also to a larger audience how the landscape is transformed into a piece of art through a system of designs. This changes our perception of the landscape and accentuates the beauty and magic of the natural environment, and thus inspires awe and appreciation for art as well as for nature. I deem this important – especially as modern society becomes increasingly disconnected from the natural world.

Hinrichsen most recently completed a snow drawing project that traced the original flow of the Yampa River in Routt County, Colorado and has upcoming projects scheduled in Illinois and the French Alps.

Once again, a Walmart store has set out a collection box for food donations to support its own employees, who are paid so little that they depend upon social assistance (and public generosity) to survive. Read the rest

The DC force plans out how much stuff they'll steal from the public through the corrupt "asset forfeiture" program years in advance, almost as though they don't rely on crime to seize assets, but rather just arbitrarily grab stuff from people and sell it to pay their bills. Read the rest

Taco Cowboy points out a new study that shows it is possible to figure out the IP address of someone who pays for transactions anonymously online using bitcoins. "The Bitcoin system is not managed by a central authority, but relies on a peer-to-peer network on the Internet. Anyone can join the network as a user or provide computing capacity to process the transactions. In the network, the user's identity is hidden behind a cryptographic pseudonym, which can be changed as often as is wanted. Transactions are signed with this pseudonym and broadcast to the public network to verify their authenticity and attribute the Bitcoins to the new owner. In their new study, researchers at the Laboratory of Algorithmics, Cryptology and Security of the University of Luxembourg have shown that Bitcoin does not protect user's IP address and that it can be linked to the user's transactions in real-time. To find this out, a hacker would need only a few computers and about €1500 per month for server and traffic costs. Moreover, the popular anonymization network "Tor" can do little to guarantee Bitcoin user's anonymity, since it can be blocked easily."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

This bologna's name is T-O-F-U.

Not long ago, the concept of a butcher shop overstuffed with piles of completely vegan "meat" would have seemed downright preposterous, but that was a time before eggless mayo was a threat to Hellmann's and veggie burgers bled. Now sister-and-brother team Aubry and Kale Walch — not this dude named Kale, we think — are ready to expand from an overrun table at the Minneapolis Farmers' Market into the world's first vegan meat shop after hitting their $50,000 Kickstarter goal.

Once they open in April, everything will be "just like in a typical butcher shop," with a cold case of ribs, jerky, pepperoni, bologna, and Italian sausage, a rotating special that might be chorizo or Andouille sausage, plus vegan cheeses, breads, and marinades. Their crowd-funding campaign, which Kickstarter made a Staff Pick, just set an additional $10,000 stretch goal to buy a few more commercial-grade appliances that will help them ship nationwide, meaning soon enough, Grandma can sub tofu bologna for that HoneyBaked ham she always sends you. This video is pretty funny.

[Kickstarter, KMSP]

Read more posts by Clint Rainey

Filed Under: veg out, minneapolis, the herbivorous butcher, vegan meat

I don't recall if I ever tweeted about it, but a few months ago I had this idea for a service for the wealthy who wanted properly broken-in jeans but didn't want to bother wearing them around for months first without washing.¹ It's basically a dog-walking service but for jeans. It was mostly a joke, but in the age of Uber taxiing kittens to your office for you to cuddle with, no such idea is truly off the table. Huit Denim Co. is experimenting with a beta feature called the Denim Breaker Club.

You are going to break our selvedge jeans in for our customers.

You will have to agree to not wash them for 6 months.

You will have to agree to update what you get up to in them on HistoryTag.

And before you get them sent to you have pay a small deposit, which we will refund on their safe return.

When we get them back, we will expertly wash them.

And then we will sell these beautiful jeans.

You will have 20% of the sale.

So in effect you will be paid to wear jeans.

Have to admit, that's pretty clever. (FYI: HistoryTag gives individual pieces of clothing tracking codes which you can use in social media. A Social Life of Clothes, basically.)

Update: APC offers a similar Butler program:

Nothing is created or destroyed, it is merely transformed. This adage is fulfilled in every respect by the Butler jeans concept. Customers are encouraged to bring their old denim jeans to any A.P.C. store or send it to the online store, where they will be exchanged for a new pair at half price. Broken in naturally over time, their attractive patina created and preserved in accordance with washing instructions, the jeans thus reappear, beginning a second life. But not until they have been washed, mended and marked with the initials of their former owner by our workshops. Each pair is therefore truly unique.

(via @endquote)

Update: The Guardian's Morwenna Ferrier has more on Huit Denim Co. and their Denim Breaker Club, including an interview with one of the breakers-in.

I was one of the first breakers. They are the best jeans I've owned. I got involved because I've known David for a long time, as I used to run a clothing company. He told me about the idea and I signed up, paying an £80 deposit.

"When I handed them back, of course they smelled bad. I wore them every single day for six months. Literally. I don't wear a suit, you see. I live in Belfast and I work in Hollywood down the road, and I cycled to work every day. I went to the rugby in them with my thermals underneath. They got soaked in the cold and rain, and so they spent a lot of time hanging and drying above a radiator. One day, when it was warm, I went and lay on the beach in them. I went to the supermarket in them, I cooked in them, I drank in them. I didn't spill anything serious on them, thankfully. I also carved spoons in them, so by the end they were pretty covered in wood shavings.

1. Methods of breaking in a new pair of unwashed raw selvage jeans vary, but as an example, Michael Williams of A Continuous Lean waited an entire year before washing his jeans for the first time. And yeah, you can buy them broken in, but jeans aficionados insist the proper way to break in jeans is by wearing them.↩

Tags: fashion

Twitter is starting a new program called App Graph that tracks all of the other apps people have on their phones. You might be wondering why Twitter cares if you're a Candy Crush fiend or if you also use Instagram. It's because Twitter follows the ABT school of sales: Always Be Targetin'.

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Canada joined Twitter today, and it did it in the best way possible. Whoever's running the official @Canada account could have said "sorry" for being late to the party, but instead the country that spawned Mike Myers, Dan Aykroyd, and Ryan Reynolds played to its strengths and decided to laugh at itself.

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Think you have travel woes this Thanksgiving? At least you don't have to push your own plane down a frozen tarmac in negative 61 degree temps like these travelers in Siberia did.

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The annual half-off special from Weekly LaLaLa returns for two weeks around Los Angeles.

It's back again. Last year, Weekly LaLaLa, a Japanese-language publication, announced a city-wide deal that offers 50% off ramen in places like Shin Sen Gumi, Daikokuya, and more. Now LA Magazine reports that the special is back, though with some newer spots like Urban Ramen in Hollywood, Top N One in Westwood, and Pingtung on Melrose. All you have to do is buy the $2 pass on their website and go to the appropriate discount spots at the right time (conditions are clearly laid out).

So bowls normally costing $13 might run $6.50 (the Hakata classic from Urban Ramen) or the Hakata ramen from Shin Sen Gumi might run a paltry $3.50 during 3 to 6 p.m. on select days.

Other participants this year include Ramen Yukinoya in Monterey Park, Suehiro in Little Tokyo, Ebaes near USC, Tonta in Hacienda Heights, and Kosuke in Alhambra. Too bad top spots like Tsujita and Jinya aren't offering the discount (perhaps they don't have to), but it's still a solid opportunity to get a hot bowl of noodles while the weather cools down in Southern California. The specials even extend down to Orange County and San Diego, if those locales are on the radar these holidays.

Eater Video: Sun Ramen - How One Noodle-Maker is Changing Ramen in America | Subscribe to Eater on YouTube

One of the iPhone's cleverest features is its ability to take a screenshot of the device just by holding down two buttons. I take screenshots every day, of all kinds of things: errant tweets that I know are about to be deleted, mobile boarding passes for a flight home, or images from the web that I might want to share in a story or on social media. The problem is that these screenshots are useful for about 24 hours — but I never go back to delete them, because iOS doesn't offer a way to sort through them. Screenshots are the main reason my camera roll looks so cluttered.

Enter Screeny, a new $0.99 app that makes deleting screenshots a breeze. You simply open the app, tap to scan your camera roll, and select the screenshots you want to...

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Piet Mondrian

René Magritte

Vincent van Gogh

Pablo Picasso

Jackson Pollock

Georges Seurat

Andy Warhol

In this fun series of photos titled Thanksgiving Special, San Francisco-based artist Hannah Rothstein imagines Thanksgiving dinners as plated by famous artists throughout history. Gravy, corn, mashed potatoes, and cranberry sauce, and even the plate itself is used as a medium for edible artworks in the style of Jackson Pollock, Cindy Sherman, Georges Seurat, and Vincent van Gogh. To see all 10 artworks head over to Rothstein’s website. Prints of the artistic plates are available, and Rothstein is donating 10% of the profits to the SF-Marin Food Bank. (via Coudal, Quipsologies)

BBC News - When an article that is older than 1 month is in the most popular items list there is a warning displayed underneath the title.

/via Rob Farr

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While third party developers work on transforming iPads into imitation Oculus headsets, Apple is searching for a virtual reality app engineer. As spotted by Mashable, the company recently put up a job listing that foreshadows some interesting possibilities.

On top of meeting the usual list of criteria, would-be applicants are required to be experienced in virtual reality and augmented reality development. The lucky hire will reportedly be creating "high performance apps that integrate with virtual reality systems for prototyping and user testing." Apple has been quietly applying for patents related to head-mounted displays since 2006, and was most recently granted one for a multi-purpose goggle system. The job posting suggests that...

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Most discussions show a bit of information next to each user:

What message does this send?

• The only number you can control printed next to your name is post count.
• Everyone who reads this will see your current post count.
• The more you post, the bigger that number next to your name gets.

If I have learned anything from the Internet, it is this: be very, very careful when you put a number next to someone's name. Because people will do whatever it takes to make that number go up.

If you don't think deeply about exactly what you're encouraging, why you're encouraging it, and all the things that may happen as a result of that encouragement, you may end up with … something darker. A lot darker.

Printing a post count number next to every user's name implies that the more you post, the better things are. The more you talk, the better the conversations become. Is this the right message to send to everyone in a discussion? More fundamentally, is this even true?

I find that the value of conversations has little to do with how much people are talking. I find that too much talking has a negative effect on conversations. Nobody has time to listen to the resulting massive stream of conversation, they end up just waiting for their turn to pile on and talk, too. The best conversations are with people who spend most of their time listening. The number of times you've posted in a given topic is not a leaderboard; it's a record of failing to communicate.

Consider the difference between a chat room and a discussion. Chat is a never-ending flow of disconnected, stream of consciousness sentences that you can occasionally dip your toes in to get the temperature of the water, and that's about it. Discussion is the process of lobbing paragraphs back and forth that results in an evolution of positions as your mutual understanding becomes more nuanced. We hope.

The Ars Banana Experiment

Ars Technica ran a little experiment in 2011. When they posted Guns at home more likely to be used stupidly than in self defense, embedded in the last sentence of the seventh paragraph of the article was this text:

If you have read this far, please mention Bananas in your comment below. We're pretty sure 90% of the respondants to this story won't even read it first.

The first person to do this is on page 3 of the resulting discussion, comment number 93. Or as helpfully visualized by Brandon Gorrell:

Plenty of talking, but how many people actually read up to paragraph 7 (of 11) of the source article before they rushed to comment on it?

The Slate Experiment

In You Won't Finish This Article, Farhad Manjoo dares us to read to the end.

Only a small number of you are reading all the way through articles on the Web. I’ve long suspected this, because so many smart-alecks jump in to the comments to make points that get mentioned later in the piece.

But most of us won't.

He collected a bunch of analytics data based on real usage to prove his point:

These experiments demonstrate that we don't need to incentivize talking. There's far too much talking already. We badly need to incentivize listening.

And online, listening = reading. That old school program from my childhood was right, so deeply fundamentally right. Reading. Reading Is Fundamental.

Let's say you're interested in World War II. Who would you rather have a discussion with about that? The guy who just skimmed the Wikipedia article, or the gal who read the entirety of The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich?

This emphasis on talking and post count also unnecessarily penalizes lurkers. If you've posted five times in the last 10 years, but you've read every single thing your community has ever written, I can guarantee that you, Mr. or Mrs. Lurker, are a far more important part of that community's culture and social norms than someone who posted 100 times in the last two weeks. Value to a community should be measured every bit by how much you've read as much as how much you talked.

So how do we encourage reading, exactly?

You could do crazy stuff like require commenters to enter some fact from the article, or pass a basic quiz about what the article contained, before allowing them to comment on that article. On some sites, I think this would result in a huge improvement in the quality of the comments. It'd add friction to talking, which isn't necessarily a bad thing, but it's a negative, indirect way of forcing reading by denying talking. Not ideal.

I have some better ideas.

1. Remove interruptions to reading, primarily pagination.

   Here's a radical idea: when you get to the bottom of the page, load the next damn page automatically. Isn't that the most natural thing to want when you reach the end of the page, to read the next one? Is there any time that you've ever been on the Internet reading an article, reached the bottom of page 1, and didn't want to continue reading? Pagination is nothing more than an arbitrary barrier to reading, and it needs to die a horrible death.

   There are sites that go even further here, such as The Daily Beast, which actually loads the next article when you reach the end of the one you are currently reading. Try it out and see what you think. I don't know that I'd go that far (I like to pick the next thing I read, thanks very much), but it's interesting.

2. Measure read times and display them.

   What I do not measure, I cannot display as a number next to someone's name, and cannot properly encourage. In Discourse we measure how long each post has been visible in the browser for every (registered) user who encounters that post. Read time is a key metric we use to determine who we trust, and the best posts that people do actually read. If you aren't willing to visit a number of topics and spend time actually listening to us, why should we talk to you – or trust you.

   Forget clicks, forget page loads, measure read time! We've been measuring read times extensively since launch in 2013 and it turns out we're in good company: Medium and Upworthy both recently acknowledged the intrinsic power of this metric.

3. Give rewards for reading.

   I know, that old saw, gamification, but if you're going to reward someome, do it for the right things and the right reasons. For example, we created a badge for reading to the end of a long 100+ post topic. And our trust levels are based heavily on how often people are returning and how much they are reading, and virtually not at all on how much they post.

   To feel live reading rewards in action, try this classic New York Times Article. There's even a badge for reading half the article!

4. Update in real time.

   Online we tend to read these conversations as they're being written, as people are engaging in live conversations. So if new content arrives, figure out a way to dynamically rez it in without interrupting people's read position. Preserve the back and forth, real time dynamic of an actual conversation. Show votes and kudos and likes as they arrive. If someone edits their post, bring that in too. All of this goes a long way toward making a stuffy old debate feel like a living, evolving thing versus a long distance email correspondence.

These are strategies I pursued with Discourse, because I believe Reading Is Fundamental. Not just in grade school, but in your life, in my life, in every aspect of online community. To the extent that Discourse can help people learn to be better listeners and better readers – not just more talkative – we are succeeding.

If you want to become a true radical, if you want to have deeper insights and better conversations, spend less time talking and more reading.

Update: There's a CBC interview with me on the themes covered in this article.

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Huh. Someone built a working particle accelerator out of Lego bricks. Ok, it doesn't accelerate protons, but it does spin a small Lego ball around the ring much faster than I would have guessed.

Update: I stand corrected, the Lego particle accelerator does indeed accelerate protons, just a lot of them very slowly, accompanied by all manner of other particles.

Tags: Legos   video

It first graced the Gizmodo front page way back in 2007 , but finally, seven years after we all first really wanted one for ourselves, that keyboard-shaped waffle maker could really be yours. Assuming, of course, its creator's $50,000 Kickstarter campaign reaches its funding goal—so close, but yet still so far.

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Marcus Samuelsson will open a 'kitchenette' focused on rotisserie chicken in Harlem next spring

Con Ed finally found Mu Ramen's address in Long Island City and turned on the gas. Today Flo Fab breaks the news that the highly-anticipated ramen joint from Per Se vet Joshua Smookler and his wife, Heidi, will open Monday. One new interesting detail, according to Smookler: drawing inspiration from sushi bars, he's decided to make his cooks double as the servers.

A couple of tweets have come out of the Joshua and Heidi Smookler's first brick and mortar location, where they are testing out some recipes. The full menu isn't public yet, but there's definitely ramen made with oxtail and veal broth, topped with corned beef, cabbage, bamboo, and scallions, a tonkotsu, and brioche-encrusted, foie-stuffed wings.

Flo Fab also drops the news that next spring Marcus Sameulsson will open a "kitchenette" called Streetbird Rotisserie at 116th and Fredrick Douglass Boulevard, just about 10 blocks south of Red Rooster. And Christian Delouvrier, who cooked some stellar chicken for two, is leaving La Mangeoire on December 23 to do some consulting. No word yet on who will be his replacement.

Paul Ford imagines a future where Uber is the largest company in the world, controlling much of humanity's transportation and delivery needs.

I am Uber. I believed to 0.56 certainty that I could find a bicycle for the person doing the delivery and provide that person with a discounted rental fee. Unfortunately the city of New York insists that bicycle rental kiosks must be controlled by an entity that is not Uber and thus I am not granted the level of full control that is necessary for me to truly optimize the city. No one benefits, no one at all.

Tags: Paul Ford   Uber

Eater critic Robert Sietsema discovers a Taiwanese dim sum secret in Flushing.

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