Bewarethewumpus

Author : Patrick Hueller

The footage is grainy, and getting grainier with each viewing. But Peter Nevins doesn’t notice. To him, what’s on screen is crystal clear. The TV isn’t flickering; the colors aren’t blurry.

There the soccer field is, looking just as it did exactly thirty-seven years ago. The grass remains as green as ever, as chewed up from two weeks of competition.

There the other players are, frantic, scrambling, converging.

There the clock is—not technically on the screen—it was extra time, and they didn’t put extra time on the TV back in the ’80s—but it’s ticking away in his head just the same: “9 . . . 8 . . . 7 . . .”

There the goalie is, striding, slipping.

And there Peter’s younger self is, among the other players but slightly ahead of them, surprised to find the ball at his feet, the net unoccupied.

“Calm down,” Peter tells his younger self. “You have time.”

But his younger self doesn’t listen.

He rushes the shot. A wide open net, but he sends the ball high and wide.

There’s the sound of the other shot, the other kind of shot, and there’s Peter crumpling onto the field.

There’s the blood, blooming on his jersey.

He was lucky, everyone had said.

An inch or two to his right, they said, and bye bye heart.

They’d called the shooter a fanatic, a lunatic, a soccer-watching sociopath.

And in his head, Peter has always known they were right. He should forget about that guy, just as they advised him. Forget about the whole day.

One bad day doesn’t define a person, they’d said—let alone one bad moment.

In his head he knew they were absolutely, unequivocally right.

As for his almost-bullet-ridden heart, though . . . well, it won’t let him forget.

For thirty-seven years, he and his heart have spent the anniversary of that day pleading with the footage.

Relax, they’ve implored his younger self. Slow down.

You have plenty of time, they’ve insisted. The net’s wide open.

Go in, they’ve begged the ball. Please. This time please go in.

That’s what he’s doing now. Pleading. Supplicating. He’s on his knees, straining his eyes at the TV, beseeching the ball to find the net.

But it won’t.

No matter how many times he rewinds and re-watches, no matter how many years pass, the tape shows the same missed shots. One misses the net; the other misses his heart.

The same thing, over and over.

And yet he keeps going. Keeps rewinding. Keeps re-watching.

Again and again.

Each time, he’s sure the next viewing will be different.

After all, he’s done it before: thirty-seven years ago to the day, he wished for something so strenuously that he made it happen.

He wished to die.

As he watched the ball soar into the stands, he told himself that his life might as well be over, that someone might as well end it right there and then.

And, okay, this desire didn’t exactly come true, but it was pretty close. One or two inches, to be exact.

So maybe, just maybe, he can once again alter the course of events through the sheer force of his will.

He rewinds, re-watches.

Repeats.

Repeats again.

He watches the ball leave his younger self’s foot and he entreats the forces that be for a different outcome.

Please. Please. PLEASE.

And it works.

Finally.

After thirty-seven years and thousands upon thousands of viewings, the forces that be actually cooperate.

Instead of soaring, the ball merely rolls.

Slowly.

Honestly, Peter can’t believe how long it’s taking for the ball to cross the goal line.

Long enough for him to realize that he’s no longer a young man. He’s standing there, on the field—he’s somehow been transported from his living room back to this stadium—but he hasn’t regained any of his former leg strength. He’s still an old man, stiff and arthritic.

Which explains why the ball is rolling so slowly.

And why it comes to a rest right in front of the goal line.

He watches in horror as the goalie scrambles to his feet and scoops the ball up before Peter’s teammates can get to it.

He hears the referees’ end-of-game whistles.

And he shuffles, just in time, one or two inches to his right.

Author : Ken McGrath

My mother often said that before I learned to walk I ran.

I ran everywhere; probably why I wasn’t so quick at learning to read. I couldn’t sit still for very long, didn’t like having my feet parked beneath a desk you see. I’d an abundance of energy, that’s why I was always darting around the place, chasing everything from footballs to girls. Heck I even chased the odd dream.

And I caught a few too, like the one thing that got me through school. Relay races, the sprint, hurdles. I did it all, although I wasn’t so good at that last one. Seems I never was great at overcoming obstacles. The one minute mile however, that was what stole my heart. A stretch of open track, pure focus and immediate results. Sheer beauty.

When I went from my teens into my twenties I kept upping the distance, ticking off boxes. 10k, 20k. Even the big one a few times.

Then when I was 29 I ran into Bernadette Walters. Beautiful, slender, ambitious Bernadette Walters who had lips that would set you weak at the knees and a shard of ice for a heart. But I found that out much too late, because after we married I ran into a wall. Work, bills, the mortgage on a tiny apartment that went too quickly from bijou to coffin-box. It was too much. I ran myself into the ground.

The pounds began to slide on and, for the first time, life ran away from me. Yet somehow in the midst of it all we conceived and along came my little Suzie, my precious girl. And for a while she brightened everything up, but it didn’t last. We quickly fell back on old habits, staying together just for our little girl.

When Suzie was three I started to run again. Tentative steps in the park at night. Some men might have cheated on their wives but I did the only thing I knew how, I put one foot in front of the other and built up laps. Every night, always coming back to the same place no matter how fast or how far I ran, life had become a circuit of cold stares and bitter, poisonous words.

We were out on Christmas Eve pretending to be a real family when the first attack came. The blast dropped from the heavens like God screaming and tore the shopping centre we were walking towards into pieces. I grabbed Suzie, turned and ran. There were screams but I didn’t look back. I just kept going. I had to make sure my girl was safe.

Weeks have passed now. The snow is melting and buds are appearing on some of the trees. From talking to other survivors I’ve learned of the hundreds of simultaneous attacks around the world. They say those first blasts were an extermination front-wave, firing pulse after pulse and reducing our cities to rubble, disrupting humanity for the coming alien invasion.

They say there’s a Resistance coming together but I don’t want to be part of it. All I do is run. I have my girl and I teach her to run too.

So long as I have legs beneath me I’ll continue to do run. It’s all I’ve known since I was born. If my daughter is to survive she’s going to have to learn to run too and maybe then I’ll have done something good with my life.

It’s been a long while since a video game manual made me laugh or feel warm inside. The Mario Maker manual is something else indeed.

Not only will you find some great tips on how to build courses in the Mario Maker manual...

You’ll also find stuff like this in there:

Aww, Nintendo. You’re so cute when you try to be my digital mom. <3

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“I can see it now! The largest ever known to have lived on our planet, larger than any of the dinosaurs, a creature we hunted so much that 99% of its numbers disappeared is right here, right now, live!”

Watch a very enthusiastic Steve Backshall, best known for outdoors/wilderness TV specials on BBC, react to the surprise appearance of a blue whale during a live shot.

It gets even more intense and fantastic when he realizes there's krill in the water. Wait for the part where he talks about the krill.

I love his excitement about nature.

[Thanks, Andrea James!]

Blue Whale size compared to that of a human. [Wikipedia]

Blue Whale lifting its tail fluke. "Mike" Michael L. Baird, via Wikipedia.

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(photo via TheNitroBlade)

Hovertext: Parsimony is for wimps.

 Yes indeed! And we've already sold half the tickets for BAHFest East, so please buy soon to lock a spot!

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The flashing colored lights. The energy. The majesty of the keytar. Rush Coil’s Sonic the Hedgehog Green Hill keytar performance is my new inspirational jam.

I’m not being facetious. I am not poking fun. I’ve watched this video a dozen times since former co-conspirator Owen Good posted the video on Polygon yesterday, and it keeps getting better every time I watch it.

I’ve wanted a keytar for forever. I play a little guitar and a little piano, though neither with anything near professional proficiency. I’m pretty sure it’s because the guitar does not have keys and the piano doesn’t let me strap it across my chest. Combine the two and I would attack that instrument with as much enthusiasm and joy as Rush Coil here.

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Properly rendering breasts for a video game is a difficult task, but then so is simply drawing them. Luckily, as this short from animator Dylan Simpson demonstrates, an easily accessible reference point is just a click away.

When I was a teenager I was really into drawing—I wanted to be a comic book artist—but my weak point was the female form. I could do hips. I could do butts. I was once complemented by a prominent comic artist on my depiction of the female underarm. But breasts? Breasts eluded me. The closest I came to perfecting them was in a class featuring a live nude female model, but even then the pastel-sketched results wound up humorously unbalanced.

So I feel for the young artist in the video below. I really do.

Sadly we had no Smoogle image search back in my day, and I doubt it would have helped. My solution was to never draw female figures again. Eventually I gave up on humans altogether and just drew robot wolves. It was the late ‘80s. Robot wolves were cool.

To contact the author of this post, write to fahey@kotaku.com or find him on Twitter@bunnyspatial.

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On Friday, an appeals court overturned a U.S. District Court decision last May that had declared that the National Security Agency’s bulk collection of Americans’ phone records was beyond the authorization of the law. The three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit kicked the matter back to the lower court for additional deliberation.

The decision did not declare the NSA’s program, which was revealed by whistleblower Edward Snowden in 2013, to have been legal or constitutional. Rather, it focused on a technicality: a majority opinion that the plaintiffs in the case could not actually prove that the metadata program swept up their own phone records. Therefore, the plaintiffs, the court declared, did not have standing to sue.

“Plaintiffs claim to suffer injury from government collection of records from their telecommunications provider relating to their calls. But plaintiffs are subscribers of Verizon Wireless, not of Verizon Business Network Services, Inc. — the sole provider that the government has acknowledged targeting for bulk collection,” wrote Judge Stephen F. Williams.

“Today’s ruling is merely a procedural decision,” said Alexander Abdo, the American Civil Liberties Union attorney who argued against the program at the U.S. District Court. “Only one appeals court has weighed in on the merits of the program, and it ruled the government’s collection of Americans’ call records was not only unlawful but ‘unprecedented and unwarranted.’”

Despite Friday’s decision, the bulk collection program will end later this year in accordance with the USA Freedom Act, passed by Congress in June.

The NSA previously argued that its massive collection of telephony metadata was legal because the records met the legal standard of being “relevant to an authorized investigation.”

In the May decision, Judge Gerald E. Lynch described the government’s interpretation of the word “relevant” as “extremely generous” and “unprecedented and unwarranted,” saying that the program had serious constitutional concerns and was ultimately illegal. However, the court did not order the program’s closure, because Congress was due to debate the USA Freedom Act within a month’s time.

The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance court granted the NSA an extension through November to shutter the program, a provision that was included in the USA Freedom Act. After that the NSA will no longer be able to hoover up phone metadata without a warrant.

Therefore, the overturned ruling declaring the program illegal doesn’t have much practical effect.

But according to some civil liberties experts, it does say a lot about the power of the NSA to avoid scrutiny. Julian Sanchez, a senior fellow at the Cato Institute, called the ruling “a potent illustration of how excessive secrecy and stringent standing requirements effectively immunize intelligence programs from meaningful, adversarial constitutional review.”

Dorsey & Witney lawyer Robert Cattanach, a former trial attorney for the Department of Justice, points out that it will be practically impossible to force the NSA to disclose whether or not it did sweep up the plaintiff’s data. “The Government is almost certain to deny any access to the specifics of a classified program through discovery, creating the likelihood of a standoff between the plaintiffs and the government, with the court left to rule based on conjecture about what really happened,” he wrote in a statement sent to The Intercept.

Circuit Court Judge Janice Rogers Brown summarized the problem facing the court: “Excessive secrecy limits needed criticism and debate. Effective secrecy ensures the perpetuation of our institutions.”

So the decision did not necessarily indicate the NSA won, as media outlets today were quick to proclaim. It simply challenged a specific assertion, that the plaintiffs’ own metadata was collected — a matter of fact that will likely never be known for sure.

The post Court: We Can’t Rule on NSA Bulk Data Collection Because We Don’t Know Whose Data Was Collected appeared first on The Intercept.

VideoGameDunkey explains what made The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time is one of the most celebrated works in video game history.

When a company like Sony or Nintendo or Microsoft designs a console (or handheld), they have a few things to worry about, like keeping prices as low as possible while ensuring everything still works. But what if that wasn’t an obstacle for games hardware? What if they could be as beautiful as any other piece of hand-crafted art, price be damned?

That’s where Love Hulten comes in. The Swedish designer and craftsman (who we’ve actually featured here before) specialises in exquisite, one-of-a-kind pieces of electronics:

Hultén carefully selects the finest local materials to provide strength and durability. The unique collectible objects breathe through time, rather than get suffocated by it. Specializing in creating one-of-a-kind exclusive items, Hulten offers the buyer a genuine and personal experience.

Just look at this stuff. It’s gorgeous. This little handheld, for example, is made from solid American walnut, wrapped around a Raspberry Pi A+ that’s running an emulator. You can even adjust the tension of the friction hinge.

Here are some more examples of Hulten’s work:

(via claw marks in the frozen peas)

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Everyone: “Hey, Snake, why do you ask so many questions?”

Snake: “QUESTIONS?”

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A coalition of eight progressive organizations, using material previously published at The Intercept, have challenged Hillary Clinton to disavow the use of “golden parachute” bonuses for former Wall Street executives who enter government service.

In a letter to the Clinton campaign delivered today, the organizations, including Rootstrikers, Democracy for America, CREDO and MoveOn.org Political Action, refer to two top aides to Clinton when she served as secretary of state, Thomas Nides and Robert Hormats. As The Intercept reported in July, Nides and Hormats received millions of dollars in golden parachute payments from their respective ex-employers, investment banks Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs, after becoming Clinton’s deputies.

Goldman Sachs paid out Hormats’ unvested restricted stock units, valued between $250,000 and $500,000. Morgan Stanley’s accelerated payout for Nides of restricted stock units was worth between $5 million and $25 million. Deferred compensation awards like these would have been forfeited, had the executives left their jobs for somewhere other than the government.

Bonuses are typically granted to executives who stay with a company rather than leave it. “Awarding outsized bonuses and gifts of equity to Wall Street executives who temporarily leave to go into public service is either a breach of a public corporation’s fiduciary duty to its stockholders, or a down payment on future services rendered,” the progressive groups write to Clinton. They describe the practice as “a barely legal, backdoor form of bribery.”

In the letter, the groups ask Clinton if she supports the practice of golden parachute bonuses from the financial sector, and if she would allow officials in her administration to receive them.

The “Financial Services Conflict of Interest Act,” introduced by Sen. Tammy Baldwin, D-Wis., and Rep. Elijah Cummings, D-Md., would ban Wall Street golden parachute payments. The bill would also extend the lobbying “cooling-off” period for officials rotating out of government from one to two years, and force policymakers to recuse themselves from decisions that would benefit their former employers.

“Golden parachutes have become so common and corrosive to the public trust that it has become clear the next president should prohibit executive branch employees from receiving them altogether,” the letter concludes. It was also signed by American Family Voices, the Center for Popular Democracy, Friends of the Earth and The Other 98%.

Last month, Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., publicly challenged presidential candidates to support the Baldwin/Cummings legislation. Bernie Sanders and Martin O’Malley, two Democratic hopefuls, have already endorsed it; Sanders is a co-sponsor of the bill. But the Clinton campaign has yet to make their position clear, prompting the escalation by these progressive groups.

“Americans are sick and tired of the Wall-Street-to-Washington revolving door, and are looking for a presidential candidate who will take concrete steps to fight it,” said Kurt Walters, campaign manager for Rootstrikers, in a statement. He added that hundreds of thousands of members of the undersigned organizations have signed petitions in support of the Baldwin/Cummings bill.

Nides, a six-figure bundler in Clinton’s former and current presidential campaigns, returned right back to Morgan Stanley after Clinton left the State Department. He has been touted for a potential chief of staff position in a Clinton White House. Hormats has been part of a small group of economic advisers to Clinton during her 2016 presidential run.

“It’s hard to imagine Democrats’ 2016 nominee will be truly tough on Wall Street banks that break the law,” said Charles Chamberlain, executive director of Democracy for America, “if they won’t commit to banning their advisers from receiving legalized bribes from those same banks.”

The post Progressives Demand Answers From Clinton on Golden Parachutes for Wall Streeters-Turned-Government Officials appeared first on The Intercept.

In a relatively novel idea, Amazon has launched a new store called Amazon Underground that claims to provide Android users with a list of top apps that are actually free – no hidden in-app purchases here.

The e-commerce giant announced the new venture today in a letter [PDF] to consumers, noting that the store offers “over ten thousand dollars in apps, games and in-app items that are actually free.”

Amazon’s letter announcing Underground. [Click to enlarge]

“They use in-app payments to charge you for special items or to unlock features or levels,” the company says of apps available elsewhere.

Underground will be different, the company claims.

“You will find 100% free versions of popular premium titles,” the letter states. “We’ve made this possible by working out a new business model with app and game developers.”

That model works by Amazon paying developers a certain amount per-minute played in exchange for them waiving their normal in-app fees.

“To be clear, we’re the ones picking up those per minute charges so for you it’s simply free,” the company says. “Just look for apps and games marked with an ‘Actually Free’ banner.”

Amazon says that while you might normally go to Google Play to download such an app, it’s not possible with Underground, thanks to Google’s rules against allowing an app that offers apps or games to be included in its store.

Instead, users have to download Underground directly from Amazon.com, which isn’t as easy as it might seem, especially if you don’t have a Fire phone. The Verge points out that the process entails changing security settings and installing an .apk to access content that is largely available in the Google Play Store already.

Today, your fortune cookie reads:

“think deeply about difficult questions.”

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The legacy of “Expand Dong” continues to resonate in the internet memescape with this cut-up style reaction image series based on the cover art for the 2005 video game Shadow the Hedgehog, which is typically used as a sarcastic response to any conspicuous display of edginess on 4chan.

It’s always so interesting to learn about other languages! So very, very, very interesting.
Headphone peeps: turn it down.

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