Bewarethewumpus

Author : Gray Blix

The theory of fiction is similar to the theory of gravity in that it’s the best explanation for what we observe as reality. The average person knows that gravity is not a wishy-washy “theory” but rather an immutable force that must be reckoned with. Who among us has not felt the pain of a heavy object dropped on their toes or witnessed the anguish of a senior who has fallen and cannot get up? Gravity is happening all around us every day!

You never read “The Theory of Fiction,” did you Brenda? I self-published that treatise before you were born, after it had been rejected by every scientific journal to which I submitted it. And if there were not already enough proof back then, my explanation of the relationship between fiction and fact has been confirmed many times over the years. To make a long story short, fiction and fact are one in the same, merely separated by time and space and branes. Branes. Short for membranes. If I had only thought to call them membranes. I went with “balloons.” They laughed me out of graduate school.

Etu Brenda? No, no, it’s all right. Go ahead and have a laugh. Those peer reviewers, my caregivers here at the institution, my own family. All against me. Against reality. But denying the theory of gravity does not protect one from bird poop or meteors dropping from the sky, nor does denying the theory of fiction plug the leaky branes separating parallel universes. An infinite number of universes, invisibly pressing against one another, bringing fiction in one near fact in another. You might say, fiction inevitably catches up to fact.

How can I explain this to you in words you can comprehend and in the short time allotted for your visit? Ok, ok. Think of it as another kind of gravity. If a work of fiction in our universe has sufficient “mass,” and if our journey through space and time brings it in close proximity to a corresponding fact of sufficient mass in another universe, then the two are strongly attracted. They move towards each other, faster and faster, until they simultaneously pop that balloon, blowing their branes out, you might say, in glorious collision. At that instant, fiction and fact become one across two universes.

Take, for example, Morgan Robertson’s fictional “Titan,” about an 800 foot ocean liner, supposedly unsinkable, which went down in the North Atlantic one night in April after being struck by an iceberg on the starboard side. That fiction was written 14 years before the sinking of the Titanic — which it described in minute detail, right down to the gross tonnage, the speed it was steaming, and the high death toll because of the lack of enough lifeboats — made it a fact. And don’t get me started on Jules Verne or H.G Wells. Stories about submarines diving deep below the sea and space ships taking astronauts to the Moon. Science fiction until it became fact. And… and those reports yesterday about metal cylinders landing in England and people being burned up by some sort of laser ray, and then the communication blackout. What do you think about that?

You don’t think about that? Yes, banana bread is my favorite. Yes, it smells great. Thank your mom. And Brenda. When you get home, clear out some space in the basement. I think the family may have to take shelter there from a coming storm.

As we all know, piranhas have a gluttonous appetite for meat. …And this is how they eat meat.

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"States United To Prevent Gun Violence opens a fake gun store in NYC as hidden camera social experiment to debunk safety myths."

What seemingly begins as a strong start to a round in EA’s golf simulation game Tiger Woods PGA Tour takes an unexpected turn for the deadly.

After pitting loved ones and enemies alike against each other for what feels like all of human existence, it seems we may finally have a definitive winner in the “over vs. under” toilet paper draping debate.

Though there are still likely to be those who remain loyal to the “under” side of the line, as writer Owen Williams points out on Twitter, Seth Wheeler’s original patent for his perforated toilet paper invention in 1891 shows the paper in an “over” position, indicating that that is how it’s meant to be used.

Indeed, another drawing from the Google patents database shows the paper on the outside of the roll as well:

Wheeler’s Albany Perforated Wrapping Paper Company was the first in the world to make perforated toilet paper, originally patenting that idea in 1871 (PDF) before the 1891 patent added the roll aspect.

And it seems even back then, Wheeler knew people would be prone to using too much paper in the john.

“In carrying out my invention the sheets of paper are only partially separated, having their points of attachment arranged in a novel manner, whereby each sheet will easily separate from the series as it is drawn from the roll, there being no litter occasioned, and any waste of paper is thereby prevented,” he wrote in the patent.

Surprising absolutely nobody, I'm sure.

Here's a trailer for Pixels, that movie where aliens mistake video games as a declaration of war, and Adam Sandler breathlessly says the names of a couple of video game franchises:

Hey, at least Pac-Man and DK look pretty good in this—the voxel-like graphics are a nice touch. Everything else though? Kiiind of cringeworthy. It's too bad—the original short that the movie is based on was kind of rad!

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A game like this wouldn't be about important decisions or character development, but rather blowing up endless armies of zombies in a top-down view.

CineFix recreated the first two seasons of The Walking Dead TV show and made it similar to 16-bit run and gun games like Jurassic Park, The Chaos Engine or even Zombies Ate My Neighbours.

To contact the author of this post, write to: gergovas@kotaku.com

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An electric door at the University of Mainz in Germany breaks down, setting off an exuberant meme-off. Because "One does not simply inform...the Techniker" .

#technikeristinformiert

We’ve written before about companies making questionable copyright claims through YouTube’s automated Content-ID sytem with the goal of collecting ad revenue from the supposedly offending clips. But here’s a case of a musician who says his own music is being used by Universal Music Group to make a copyright claim against him.

TorrentFreak.com reports on the story of Norwegian musician Bjorn Lynne, who says that UMG has twice taken over the ads on YouTube clips of his music by falsely claiming copyright violations.

His most recent example involves the video for a tune called “Kingdom of the Persians,” from his soundtrack for the Seven Kingdoms video game.

According to Lynne, Universal at some point licensed the music to use in the background of an audiobook, which is all fine and good.

Unfortunately, it looks like UMG took the step of putting that audiobook recording into the YouTube Content-ID system. When the copyright bots matched up Lynne’s recording to the background music of the audiobook (because the two are identical), he received an automated copyright notice saying that ads would be placed on his video and that Universal would get the money.

Lynne says he can understand the confusion arising from the automated system. However, when he filed a written dispute with YouTube about the claim, he was ultimately told that UMG had determined they were the rightful holders of the copyright and that the ads will stay.

“The only reasonable thing to do here, for me, would be to hire a top lawyer to go after them legally,” admits Lynne. “But realistically, it’s like $350 per hour for a lawyer and a 3-hour minimum for a case, so I’m looking at over $1,000 just to get something started.”

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Author : Emily Stupar

I’m falling and I’m not sure when it started, or when it’s going to end. Although, I do have some theories.

Maybe I’m falling because I’m fulfilling a lifelong wish to go skydiving. There’s a bot instructor strapped to my back and all I can think is that I may as well have jumped out of a plane with a floppy disk in my hand for all the good it’ll do me.

Or maybe I’m a space explorer and I’m not falling but floating. Everyone is counting on me to get this sample so we’ll know if there’s any competition out there in the stars, or if it’s just us humans and whatever mindless bits of metal we scrap together.

Maybe I was driving down the Pacific Coast Highway and then I heard on the radio about that police officer who was slaughtered by a bot in his own home. Killed by his own property. And then I was so shocked by the sound of a human being siding with the tin can that I accidentally drove off into the ocean.

Maybe I jumped off the roof after finding my spouse with the android who was fixing our plumbing.

Or maybe it’s something a bit more metaphorical and I’m falling from grace. I’m falling out of favor with nature. Maybe I’m falling because the familiar ground has dropped out from beneath my feet one piece at a time, but so slowly that I just woke up one day and suddenly I didn’t recognize my own home anymore.

Maybe Mother Nature wasn’t my mother at all; she’s my landlady and she’s not happy that I’ve drifted so far from the terms of my lease. I’ve been evicted for allowing humans to push past the limit of what is good and natural, and now I’m falling headfirst onto the pavement.

Or maybe I know a secret about all these heaps of wires and electrical signals that are worming their way into every aspect of our lives. I see the true consequences of letting man think he is God, or letting a man-made machine think it could live. Maybe I know a vulnerable place and I have the materials to force the world to stop and see the truth. Maybe I’m falling because I strapped a bomb to my back and, next to all that delicate machinery, I launched myself into the air. For humanity.

I really can’t say for sure, but, as far as I know, I’m the only one whose falling. My entire race has lost their minds, opening their naïve hearts to the whispers of manipulative demons, and I’m not sure I have the stomach to watch. I’ve been falling ever since I realized I was the one who needed to save humans from themselves.

I’m falling and I just hope everyone is braced for my impact.

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Alternate headline: "Every PC Game Released In The Year 2015."

This video by Crazy Boris Productions imagines a survival game (think DayZ and H1Z1 and Minecraft and Stranded Deep and Reign of Kings and The Forest and The Long Dark and Don't Starve and) that combines every other survival game. It's one of those things that's funny because it's frighteningly close to just being the thing it's making fun of. Which is to say, I could see a game with this "everything and the kitchen sink and irradiated zombie dinosaur sharks" premise actually, you know, existing. I'm not sure how to feel about that.

Don't get me wrong: I think good survival games can be really tense, interesting, and rewarding! Problem is, there are just so many of them these days, in a various states of (in)completion—not to mention a metric zombiedinoshark-load of new releases with survival elements sloppily shoehorned in.

Oh well, the video still made me laugh. Now if you'll excuse me, I'm gonna go back to beating trees with a wooden club until more wood falls out in Reign of Kings. And then someone will thwack me over the head while I'm chasing a chicken, but I'll kill them by drowning them in my own blood and it'll all be great.

You're reading Steamed, Kotaku's page dedicated to all things in and around Valve's stupidly popular PC gaming service. Games, culture, community creations, criticism, guides, videos—everything. If you've found anything cool/awful on Steam, send us an email to let us know.

To contact the author of this post, write to nathan.grayson@kotaku.com or find him on Twitter @vahn16.

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Swedish sign language interpreter Tommy Krångh steals the show while signing the lyrics of pop singer Lars Carlsson’s performance during his audition for Eurovision 2015.

When you picture the Milky Way galaxy, you probably imagine a relatively flat disc. Well, you may have to get that image out of your head -- astrophysicists have determined that the galaxy has at least four "ripples," making it look more like a piece...

John Oliver spent 20 minutes viciously ripping apart the NCAA on his show this weekend, which included a sad and hilarious parody of EA's NCAA games called March Sadness 2015.

In March Sadness—rated E for exploitation, of course—players have to avoid doing things like:

Eating a sandwich you didn't pay for!

Potentially ruining everything you've worked for with a single injury!

While 20 minutes long, the whole segment is worth watching, especially if you're sports fan looking to be bummed out by something you enjoy.

You can reach the author of this post at patrick.klepek@kotaku.com or on Twitter at @patrickklepek.

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Don’t drink and skate, kids.

Author : Bob Newbell

I raise my hand and wave to get Scott’s attention as he walks into the restaurant. He comes over and joins me in the booth. He gestures at my drink.

“Is that whiskey? Never seen you drink anything stronger than red wine. Something up?”

“Yeah. Remember a couple of weeks back when you, me, Angela, and Kim had dinner? You mentioned you’d grown up in Warren, Michigan on a street called ‘Loretta Drive’ and Angela corrected you and said it was ‘Loretta Avenue’?”

“I remember,” says Scott. “I got out my phone and googled it. Angela was right. It was ‘Avenue,’ not ‘Drive’.”

“But you’d been so certain. I mean, it’s where you grew up. How could you have been wrong about something that basic?”

“I don’t know. But I was. Look, Tim, what’s this about?”

I finish my drink. The waiter takes a drink order from Scott and I order another drink for myself.

“I’ve been noticing some similar things since we got back,” I say. “Subtle things. A picture of me as a teenager wearing a shirt I have no recall of ever having. The water faucet on the back of my house being about a foot to the left of where I remember it. That sort of thing.”

The waiter brings our drinks. Scott consumes half of his with one swallow.

“So what are you suggesting?” Scott asks. “Do you think traveling through hyperspace did something to our memories? They checked us out really thoroughly after we got back and gave us both a clean bill of health. They even did full-body medical scans on both of us.”

“You’ve seen the surgical scar Kim has where she had her gallbladder out?”

“Yeah, when she wears a bikini. Not that I was checking out your wife or anything,” Scott says with a smile.

“The scar’s gone. She says she’s never had gallbladder surgery.”

Scott finishes his drink with a gulp and stares at me.

“Scott, this morning I spent two-and-a-half hours in a meeting with the administrator of NASA and a bunch of higher-ups trying to explain some discrepancies. Among other things, they wanted to know how the software for the ship got upgraded to a version that they’re just now completing.”

“What?! Tim, how is all this possible? We thrusted out to the orbit of Mars, completed a hyperspace jump one light-year away, stayed in the Oort Cloud for 30 minutes while the jump engines charged back up, then jumped back to Mars’ orbit. And we came right back to Earth.”

“Scott, the prevailing theory at NASA is that we’re from a parallel universe. This universe and the one we came from are nearly identical, but not exactly. So the street you grew up on and the clothes I had as a teenager and the women we married…”

“Okay, do the geniuses at NASA have a plan to get us back where we belong? Do we jump again? Are our counterparts from this universe in the world we’re supposed to be in?”

“I’m afraid it’s not that simple. They think that every trip through hyperspace lands you in an alternate universe. We landed in a different world when were came out in the Oort Cloud. And in yet another world when we jumped back. They think it’s statistically impossible to ever jump to the same world twice.”

“So we’re trapped?”

“Yeah. And it also means you can’t use FTL to explore the universe. Not the same universe, anyway.”

The waiter returns. “Would you like any more Zack Daniel’s whiskey?” he asks.

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While supporters of an open internet are excited about the FCC’s recent net neutrality ruling, some folks in the telecom and ISP world are a whole lot less happy. Many of the big businesses affected by the rule had their say in February when the vote happened, but the recent release of the full rule (all 400 pages of it) this week has become an opportunity for many groups afraid of new regulation to once again put their concerns front and center in the limelight.

It’s always a good idea to take a careful look at, and a deep dive into, the wording of a new regulation to think about the possible consequences. However, some trade organizations and think tanks still have strong concerns about the open internet order that just don’t match up to the actual rule the FCC released.

Take the Telecommunications Industry Association, for example, a trade group that represents dozens of tech companies. Its members run the gamut from tiny and obscure to huge and global, from Apple to ZTE.

The TIA’s CEO, Scott Belcher, said in a statement that Title II is “a trojan horse,” primed to unleash “heavy government control of the internet and create marketplace uncertainty.”

Belcher continued, “With Title II in place, there is little to stop future commissioners from instituting government price controls or other market-distorting regulations. The FCC’s promise of a light-touch approach is just that – a promise. There is too much at stake to allow the future of the Internet to rest upon a simple promise. … The immediate uncertainty created by this plan will produce a slowdown in capital investment. Consumers and small businesses, who have benefited enormously from the existing regulatory landscape, will bear the burden of a less robust network.”

Others have echoed the sentiment. Over on the think tank side of things, TechFreedom, a tech-related organization that has previously explicitly advocated in favor of paid prioritization, focused hard on the argument that the FCC doesn’t actually have the authority to regulate communications.

TechFreedom president Berin Szoka said in a statement that the new rule “effectively destroys nearly 18 years of bipartisan consensus,” calling it “a radical break even from the FCC’s proposed rules.”

After railing against the politicization of the process, Szoka said that the FCC is “effectively, and illegally, rewriting the Communications Act,” and concluded that “the only way to restore sanity at the FCC is for Congress to finally update the Communications Act.”

Several members of the American Enterprise Institute, a major pro-business think tank, also expressed consternation at the rule. Many called back to the original Communications Act of 1934 and the FCC’s early history dealing with a monopolistic telephone environment.

AEI visiting fellow Roslyn Layton said, “The FCC has chosen to classify broadband under the regulations of the monopoly telephone era, a sharp reversal of its policy that allowed broadband to be relatively free from regulation. In so doing, the FCC opens the Internet to hundreds of rules and provisions. Anything that the FCC deems a telecommunications service, ‘transmission between or among points specified by the user, of information of the user’s choosing,’ could be regulated. The FCC has also created the ability to hear disputes and bring actions against companies using a ‘standard of conduct’ clause. Interconnection may be the first battle.”

That part — that interconnection agreements are a battle waiting to happen — is probably true. Tensions have been running high between key players (like Netflix and Comcast) in the interconnection space for many months and those fires are unlikely to douse themselves as time goes on.

However, many of the other claims by net neutrality opponents are, well, more on the side of myth than on the side of fact.

The FCC has itself created a mythbusting, fact vs. fiction rundown of the most popular objections to the open internet rule.

In response to the popular claim that Title II is “utility regulation,” for example, the FCC says: “There is no ‘utility-style’ regulation. The Order bars the kinds of tariffing, rate regulation, unbundling requirements and administrative burdens that are the hallmarks of traditional utility regulation.”

The FCC also addresses the accusations of rate regulation (there is none) and the imposition of new taxes and fees (there are none of those either) before jumping into the most frequent accusation: “government takeover of the internet.”

“The order,” the FCC reiterates, “does not regulate the internet.”

The Commission continues:

It applies to broadband providers –- the companies that connect people’s homes to the public Internet. In other words, the Order protects consumers’ and innovators’ “last-mile” access to what’s on the Internet — the applications, content or services that ride on it and the devices that attach to it. It means consumers can go where they want, when they want and it means innovators can develop products and services without asking for permission.

As for the repeated accusations that a future FCC could change the rule, to make it either more or less strict? Well, yes. They could, but not without the public knowing about it.

The FCC can undertake the rulemaking  process whenever it sees fit, to amend any of its existing rules, or to create new ones. That’s what regulatory agencies do: they create, amend, and sometimes repeal or overturn regulations.

But it would indeed have to be the rulemaking process. The current order doesn’t have expiration dates built in. There is no note saying, “We forbear from this section temporarily until we no longer feel like it and can change our minds when the political winds blow elsewhere.” The order says: We forbear from this section.

The FCC is in some ways the picture of inertia: when its mind is made up, it stays that way unless acted upon by an outside force — like, say, the Verizon lawsuit that got the 2010 open internet rule thrown out.

Mobile voice service, as members of the FCC often point out, has been regulated under Title II for 20 years, and while control of the FCC has changed hands plenty of times since the mid-’90s — as has the political party in control of the White House — no FCC Chair has spontaneously decided to change the rules to add rate regulation.

If a future FCC wants to change something about the open internet order, they can go through the process again. They always could.

But just because a future regulator might want to endure the onerous process of amending the neutrality rules that is no reason to not have strong consumer and business protections in the here and now.

Titanic: Honor & Glory is project dedicated to recreating the RMS Titanic's ill-fated maiden voyage using Unreal Engine 4, and they made a video showing the famous grand staircase of the ship disappearing.

Their goal is to recreate the entire ship, its voyage and its final hours. The final game will include a free roam mode where we can wander around the ship with minimal crowds and no objectives and watch as everything is slowly engulfed by the icy waters.

Looks and sounds frightening enough, probably no need for Oculus support or horror elements.

To contact the author of this post, write to: gergovas@kotaku.com

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Watch as one man tries to see how far he can push Skyrim before everything crumbles into complete chaos.

You've got your typical wacky Skyrim mods here—Thomas the Tank Engine as dragons, Tommy Wiseau horses, Sonic. But it doesn't take long for you to stop being able to track all the mods videogamedunkey activates—the entire game just becomes bananas. It's the best thing I've watched all day. Enjoy.

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The Megagamerz are back again to mix it up with things and thoughts! They are realer than real, wetter than fish. Don’t mess with Gamer1 and Gamer2 unless you like pork and punches.

Okay!

Ross Merriam got some sound advice from Gerry Thompson over the weekend, and now he wants to pass it onto you before you jet off to #SCGDAL!