Bewarethewumpus

Author : Roger Dale Trexler

THE SENTINEL

They found it.
They found the edge of the universe.
And they found the sentinel there.

EARLIER
Harrison knew this was it. Beyond, there were no stars, just utter blackness.
“My God,” he said. “I didn’t think we’d ever find it.”
Ramsey looked at him. The lines on Harrison’s face were deep. They had met each other as much younger men, each of them searching for something that life was not giving them. They had become quick friends and, in time, inseparable. So, on the day Harrison came to him with his ideas for a quantum drive that could bend time and space, Ramsey had no other choice but to join him on his adventure.
It took twenty years and a billion credits to build the two-man quantum ship, but Harrison was good at acquiring funding for such things. He had an honest face, he joked, and businessmen were always quick to see the potential profit for themselves in his work. He wondered if those businessmen, all in their high-priced suits sipping their expensive wines, were shaking their fists in rage at him.
They had departed the orbital station in the middle of the night. Subterfuge had been the order of the moment, and neither of them had told a soul they were leaving. It was only when the quantum drive came online that anyone took notice of their flight….and, by then, it was too late.
Harrison had flicked the switch, and the ship disappeared.
It hadn’t really disappeared, of course. Harrison’s quantum drive merely slid the ship into an alternate dimension for a moment. The ship sped through that dimension, following a course that Ramsey had postulated would take them to the edge of the universe the quickest.
“But,” said Harrison, “isn’t there more than one ‘edge’?”
“Of course there is,” replied Ramsey. “There are trillions upon trillions of points.”
“Then why this course?” asked Harrison.
Ramsey took a second to reply. “It’s complicated,” he said finally. “I….I’ve noticed something about this region of space we are traveling through. Something odd.”
“Oh?”
He drew a deep breath and let out a sigh. “It’s….it’s as if someone has laid out a trail of bread crumbs, in a way. The radiation coming from the stars in this direction—and in this direction only—is different than the radiation from other stars and solar systems in the known reaches of space.”
He went on to explain it, but Harrison did not fully comprehend. He was a theoretically engineer, a man who designed and thought up things no man had ever thought of before, and astrophysics was not his specialty.
In the end, he trusted Ramsey as much as Ramsey trusted him.
They traveled for months at speeds that were hundreds, if not thousands, of times faster than the speed of light.
Then, the day came that the sensors told them there was nothing ahead.
Harrison returned the ship to normal, sub-light speed.
They saw the void ahead.
And they saw the sentinel.
Both men gasped in awe at the sight. For the sentinel was neither machine, nor creature. It was something completely different. It sensed them the moment they arrived, and it started to flow toward them.
It wrapped itself around the quantum ship and Harrison, in a moment of fear, activated the drive.
Nothing happened.
“I don’t understand,” Harrison said, his voice shaky. “We should be parsecs away.”
But I do not wish it, a voice in his head replied. I have waited so long. He….he left me here….alone.
Harrison looked at Ramsey and, at that moment, both men understood. They had found the edge of the universe, and the sentinel was there to guard it. From what, they did not know.
A few seconds later, the quantum ship imploded and the sentinel, who could not help what it was, was alone….again.

Author : Bob Newbell

It’s rotating. It doesn’t look like it, but instruments show that it is. Right now it takes around 24 hours to complete one rotation. Since it’s just over two miles in diameter at its center, the amount of centrifugal “gravity” being generated right now is negligible. That’ll change. The drivers will keep slowly increasing the spin until it’s rotating once every two minutes. That will make the pseudo-gravity 0.45 g. It’ll take most of a year to get it spinning that fast. No matter. I’m in no hurry.

Even now, with the thing less than complete, it’s a work of art. Nearly ten miles long and perfectly rounded at both ends, it’s hard to believe it used to be three gigantic asteroids.

I make way stations. And while there’s an unfathomable amount of engineering that goes into them, anyone who says it isn’t art is a liar or a fool. You can’t totally rely on the equations to tell you what the proper land-to-water ratio should be. The hull specs that will block hard radiation while still greedily gathering up ordinary light to illuminate the interior? Your AI will get you pretty close, but there’s always a small gap between theory and practice. And it takes instinct to bridge that gap.

It’s surprising how many people think we’ve always used way stations in interstellar travel. We haven’t. During the first hundred and fifty years of extrasolar travel, various methods were attempted to get across the gulf between the stars. Suspended animation. Multi-generation ships. Near-light speed schemes. Not one explorer made it to his destination alive.

What can go wrong on a space mission within Earth’s solar system? A technical failure. Psychiatric issues. Medical emergencies. Radiation contamination of food or water or living space. Now extend that mission from tens of millions or a billion miles to one that has to cover multiple trillions of miles. The law of averages wins. Something going catastrophically wrong becomes all but certain.

The first way station halfway between Earth’s system and the Alpha Centauri system was small and fairly unimpressive by modern standards. The crew on the first attempt to reach Proxima Centauri after the station came online barely made it. They spent four months there effecting repairs to their ship and relaxing in an environment that at least approximated being outdoors on Earth. Now there are six stations equidistant between Sol and Proxima. It takes most of 10 years to make the trip, but you have a month or two every 18 months of the journey at one of the stations. You’re not trapped in the same spaceship for a decade. You’re never more than 18 months away from a giant O’Neill cylinder with forests and lakes and deserts.

Barnard’s Star, Wolf 359, Epsilon Eridani: They all have a string of way stations reaching back to Sol. And no two way stations are alike. You might explore a jungle on one station and participate in a snowball fight on the next one.

I’ve been working on this station for most of 20 years. A siliceous asteroid, a carbonaceous asteroid, and a metallic asteroid. Bolt them together and fling them out of the asteroid belt and command nanotech machines like a conductor directing a symphony as you travel out between the stars. Twenty years and now the first way station between Sol and Procyon is almost ready. I’ve modeled the beach and sea on Destin, Florida. White sand and emerald water. And an artificial sun illuminated by concentrated starlight. You need that on an 88 trillion mile journey.

Author : Glenn Leung

He was the Hero of time, that was all we knew. For millenia, long before he was born and long after he had died, he had been saving the world. An alien invasion two hundred years in the future, a genocidal plague three hundred years in the past, had all been averted by him. He had never once revealed his identity, even though people have seen his face. I even own a plastic figure of him, have pictures of him from eyewitnesses, and am always on the lookout for him in real life. Yet, I have not met this man, nor has anyone else in this time.

“He sounds very much like that alien with two hearts,” laughed my brother. “Does he travel in a blue box?”

I giggled, I did not realize how similar those stories had been.

“So you think it’s all just mass delusion?” I asked.

“Quite likely so, although I’m very surprised in this age of logic and reason, such things can still happen.”

Indeed, it was unthinkable that mass delusions could occur in this age of science. However, it was just as unthinkable how stories of his exploits in the future could arrive with us. Some people say that this is evidence time travel exists, citing photos that were allegedly taken with him against a futuristic background.

“The experts say the photos are genuine,” I often hear such protests against claims of photoshop. Yet, everyone knows that nowadays, experts are often wrong about many things.

“Maybe he’s a concept,” my friend Jody had once mentioned. “You know, a concept personified. Just like comic book superheroes were during the second world war. They were supposed to represent the people’s wish for a good person of immense power which brought an end to suffering.”

“But he’s not a fictional character,” I had replied. “The things he did, or will do, are supposed to be real.”

Jody sighed in disagreement.

“Who knows, a thousand years from now, people may think superheroes actually existed.”

Was it all just an issue of legends made real then? I told others I remained open-minded, but secretly, I wanted to believe. I wanted the Hero to be real, and I wanted him to be my Hero, a brave man detached from his time, traveling around to make things right. I wanted to follow him, be his sidekick, and get to know him better.

“Hey Johnny! Come take a look at this!”

It was my brother, slouched on the couch, as he has been doing every day at nine. It was the news, and some security footage was showing. It was a shot at the entrance of an old castle. No one had been in the castle at that time of night, yet at precisely 2 in the morning, someone was shown leaving it.

I could barely believe my eyes. I recognized that face, that hair, that outfit practically anywhere! It was him!

“Yet another sighting,” sighed my brother. “I bet it’s just another extremely elaborate hoax.”

No…I thought. He was here, in this time, for something. Something is about to happen, and soon, the people of this time would know how real he is. I was excited, my Hero was coming to life! So elated was I that I did not realize that the lights in the city were starting to go out…

Author : Bob Newbell

“Please be careful getting up, Mr. Turner,” says the tinny, sing-song voice of the robotic surgeon. “Some dizziness and disorientation are to be expected.”

Other medical automata extend thin mechanical arms to help me to my feet. I still can’t believe I went through with it. I keep expecting to wake up and laugh it all off as a dream. But this is no dream. A year ago an enormous alien spaceship really did enter the solar system traveling at close to the speed of light. It really did enter Earth orbit and the Omrad really did make contact with us.

“Take it slowly. One leg at a time.”

The Omrad arrived in a ship so big it was clearly visible with the naked eye from the Earth’s surface. They immediately started transmitting a series of radio pulses denoting prime numbers and slowly worked up to more complicated mathematical functions and crude video images of the atoms in the periodic table starting with hydrogen. Within three weeks the beginnings of real-time translation was achieved and a dialog begun.

“Don’t try to walk, Mr. Turner. Let’s just stand for a minute and get our bearings.”

Tripedal robots from the Omrad ship were sent to the International Space Station. The Omrad, via their machine emissaries, were eager to have firsthand contact with human beings. The six person crew of the ISS became humanity’s ambassadors. Immediately thereafter, the Omrad broke off contact and recalled their robots.

“Would you like to try taking a step? We’re right here. We won’t let you fall.”

A few days after the ISS affair, the Omrad re-established contact. They requested permission to send a single robot to the surface to meet with a small group of diplomats. As the U.S. Permanent Representative to the United Nations, I was in that group.

“That’s fine. Let’s try another step.”

The alien machine explained that humans and the Omrad shared something in common. Both species tended, rightly or not, to judge by appearances. The Omrad possessed this attribute to a much greater extent than mankind. “The Omrad,” the robot diplomat had remarked, “are impressed that the human race has a gift for looking beyond the superficial. Regrettably, the Omrad psyche and culture do not share this talent. This will be an obstacle to direct contact between the two species without the need for machine intermediaries like myself.”

“Steady, Mr. Turner. It’s okay. A stumble is not unexpected. Let’s rest a moment and then try another step.”

There had been a collective gasp in the room when the Omrad robot had suggested that it would be necessary for a human to be biologically re-engineered to qualify as an ambassador. Even then I knew I would volunteer.

“Shall we try another step?”

What offended the Omrad about humanity’s physical appearance is that externally humans are bilaterally symmetrical. Almost all life on the Omrad homeworld is trilaterally symmetrical, as are the Omrad themselves.

“You’re doing fine, Mr. Turner,” the robot doctor says with an inflection of reassurance.

I see my reflection in the chrome-like housing of one of the Omrad medical machines. My face is thinner and I have two more of them located circumferentially around my head. My brain has trouble processing the disorienting panoramic view. I shuffle awkwardly on three legs not sure how best to move my three arms with each step. I start to say something. I stop as my three mouths all speak in unison.

“You were about say?” drone the machine physician’s three voice synthesizers all at once.

Author : Suzanne Borchers

“Good evening, Susan.” The desktop robot’s eye blinked as the gender-neutral voice greeted her.

Susan had arrived home from an 18 hour shift of nursing casualties at the local pub/hospital. She slammed the front door behind her. “I have to remain cheerful, smiling, and upbeat for destitute, half-alive drudges caught in this never-ending fight for survival. For all the hapless, close-to-dead youth dripping with blood to broken-boned elders, all who have been victimized by roving gangs of filth stealing food and soiling homes, I have to …” Susan suspended her tirade at the robot. She tugged away from her skin the sopping uniform with its remains of someone’s supper dripping off of it onto the floor.

“How was your day, Susan?” the robot’s measured voice inquired.

“Look, you idiot robot, I’m tired, cranky, and reek of half-digested hamburger.” Susan reached up under her skirt and tossed her holstered gun on the desk. Then she began to pull off her clothes with uncoordinated yanks.

The robot’s eye blinked slowly. “Relax. Peace and calm, Susan. Peace and calm.”

“Do I sound relaxed? Do I sound peaceful? Do I sound calm?” Susan strode over to the robot.

The robot stopped blinking and stared past Susan.

“There is something you should know, Susan.” The robot’s smooth voice said.

“Shut up!”

The robot immediately ceased its vocal response.

Its eye blinked quickly at the intruder quietly advancing into the room behind Susan. It stared first at Susan and then at the intruder, then back again as another intruder paused in the opened window before stepping onto the floor.

Susan watched the robot in silence.

Its eye flashed colors at Susan and the intruders, one after the other.

“What?”

Its eye produced a pulsing strobe toward Susan and the intruders, one after the other.

Her eyes widened.

She turned.

Too late.

Roundabout is a game that contains roundabouts but isn't actually about roundabouts — no, a more accurate title would be: Help! I'm A Limousine And I Can't Stop Spinning.

Ok, that isn't a particularly catchy title (I've never been good at titles). But I took a break from being horribly ill to play this game because I believed I'd be a prime candidate to drive this ever-rotating limo. I've had the experience, you see. I remember fondly playing Kuru Kuru Kururin, a sort of obscure GBA title in the early 2000s, and I had no trouble getting a long rotating stick through Kuru Kuru Kururin's labyrinthine levels.

But we live in the future now, where my senses are dulled from years of existential turmoil and, despite Roundabout having a similar infinite spinning mechanic, I must admit, I'm not very good at the game.

Luckily Roundabout is extremely forgiving, letting you carry on as you smack your poor limo into strategically placed lampposts and cars. Watching my limo explode became a regular experience as I made my way in perpetual spin as you can see above.

Wish to tweet words at me? I can be found here @laserfrog.

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The menu at Fountain City Coffee in Columbus, Georgia is the beginning of an epic breakfast adventure.

Brought to light by Kumanoki on Reddit, this listing of purchasable breakfast goods begs the question — should we sacrifice readability and potentially alienate non-game-savvy customers for the sake of a The Legend of Zelda reference? The answer is yes. Always.

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That you sent an introductory telegram just as a forewarning of more insults to follow?

zooophagous:

boujhetto:

Man’s best friend

I like how he picks him up and is all, “There you go!”

fucked his shit up

LMMFAOOOOO

He just puts him over the counter all “Yeah that’s right Sparky you fuck his shit up”

HughPickens.com writes Jana Kasperkevic writes at The Guardian that it's not every day that you get to buy an iPhone from an ex-NSA officer. Yet Thomas Drake, former senior executive at National Security Agency, is well known in the national security circles for leaking information about the NSA's Trailblazer project to Baltimore Sun. In 2010, the government dropped all 10 felony charges against him and he pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor charge for unauthorized use of a computer and lost his livelihood. "You have to mortgage your house, you have to empty your bank account. I went from making well over $150,000 a year to a quarter of that," says Drake. "The cost alone, financially — never mind the personal cost — is approaching million dollars in terms of lost income, expenses and other costs I incurred." John Kiriakou became the first former government official to confirm the use of waterboarding against al-Qaida suspects in 2009. "I have applied for every job I can think of – everything from grocery stores to Toys R Us to Starbucks. You name it, I've applied there. Haven't gotten even an email or a call back," says Kiriakou. According to Kasperkevic, this is what most whistleblowers can expect. The potential threat of prosecution, the mounting legal bills and the lack of future job opportunities all contribute to a hesitation among many to rock the boat. "Obama and his attorney general, Eric Holder, declared a war on whistleblowers virtually as soon as they assumed office," says Kiriakou. "Washington has always needed an "ism" to fight against, an idea against which it could rally its citizens like lemmings. First, it was anarchism, then socialism, then communism. Now, it's terrorism. Any whistleblower who goes public in the name of protecting human rights or civil liberties is accused of helping the terrorists."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

CollegeHumor fills you in on the movies and TV shows you must watch, and the ones you can skip.

Nine minutes and fifty one seconds. That's all speedrunner linkdeadx2 needs to blaze through Super Mario World, and it's a treat to watch him do it (in Mario PJs, to boot!)

This is an 'any percentage' run, which means that a player doesn't need to get 100% completion to beat the game and claim a time.

The leaderboard runners-up at this time are xpaco5 and dram55, with 09:51.12 and 09:51.69 runs, respectively. Milliseconds can make all the difference in a speedrun; thanks to milliseconds linkdeadx2 has the world record for beating Super Mario World quickly.

You can read more about Super Mario World speedrunning, including tricks and glitches, here. Especially useful if you're curious as to how this speedrunner had a cloud for the final fight against Bowser, a glitch used in this run:

You must be small Mario to do this trick. Various powerups have various effects on what happens when you do this.

In Yoshi's Island 2, you get Yoshi, and grab the next red shell you see.

Aim to spit the fire so that the middle flame is lined up near the top of the two large bushes.

You must shoot the red shell before the green shell spawns. If you shoot too late, you won't be able to item swap.

Grab the green shell, and jump to the third step in the hill ahead.

Holding down, spit out the shell so that it's sitting still in front of you.

Turn and face left, stopping a little bit before reaching the middle of the step you are on. You want to be facing left right up until you dismount Yoshi, as you jump further right this way.

When the coin is about to land (Roughly, when it touches the bush in the background), tap right, and quickly roll your thumb from X to A. Yoshi should turn around, stick his tongue out, and you should spinjump to the right

Immediately let go of these buttons and hold R

If everything works perfectly, you'll end up with a garbled graphic in your inventory box. This is the cloud! You're going to want to hang onto this until you get to the fight with Bowser, so don't collect any midpoints, because when you grab the cape, you'll overwrite your cloud with a mushroom.

Fascinating stuff.

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“The Favorite” by Omar Rayyan

magnus-thegreat-redundancy:

I believe that every american should at least watch this monologue from The Newsroom

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Pretty pleased with myself here.

Anchor Charlo Green quits during live news broadcast.

I’m not using Gmail or similar — I use the mail server my hosting provider gives me.

That mail server has SpamAssassin, so I have that enabled and set to quarantine everything that scores a 1 or above.

A fair amount of spam gets through to my mail client — Apple Mail — anyway. And so I have junk mail filtering turned on there too.

But Mail’s junk mail filtering doesn’t do a very good job.

To be fair, it’s dealing with messages that SpamAssassin didn’t catch either. The tough ones. But there are a lot of those.

Tonight I got fed up and went back to SpamSieve. It had been years since I used it — but I’m so happy it’s still around. It always did a great job.

* * *

You know what great technology doesn’t have a spam problem at all? RSS.

Not that RSS is a replacement for email or Twitter or anything else. It brings you what you asked for — blog posts and podcasts, mostly — and nothing else gets through.

(RSS feeds may contain advertising, of course, but so do web pages and we don’t call that spam. It’s a different thing.)

What you don’t get with RSS is blog posts from some entirely other blog than what you asked for. If you subscribe to a podcast, you don’t get episodes from some other scammy podcast.

There was a sort-of spam problem many years ago. Back then there were blog search engines (which have all shut down, as far as I know), and those search engines would index spam blogs, and so if you had a feed that was a search you could end up with posts from spam blogs.

But I’m probably the only person who remembers that. And the problem wasn’t with RSS, it was with the search engines and the providers who allowed spam blogs.

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We’ve been cataloging the spread of Christmas Creep, the debut of Christmas merchandise and decorations earlier in the season, for some years now, but it’s important to remember that aggressive Christmas marketing before Thanksgiving and even before Halloween is not a new phenomenon. Don’t believe us? Let’s take a trip back in time to 1989, when video game consoles, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, My Little Pony, and Transformers ruled the line drawings of the Kay-Bee Toys ad. Wait, this is really 25 years old?

Of course, much of what you see here is now defunct: you never see line drawings in newspaper ad circulars anymore, and Kay-Bee (later known as KB) Toys is no longer in business. Toys themselves don’t change all that much, though. Compare this flyer to Walmart’s 2014 “hot toys” list: both have dolls, cars, games, cuddly toys, and dinosaurs.

I was never really into board games, but I had no recollection of what “Tuba-Ruba” was. I found this ad, and have never quite recovered.

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Scottish readers: Undecided about the referendum? Please read How the media shafted the people of Scotland and Scottish Independence, Power And Propaganda.

Whiteboy7thst, aka Alexander Wachs, is a YouTuber who streams games. Last month he was the target of a "Swatting" when it was falsely reported that he was both armed and suicidal. When cops arrived at his house to find he wasn't a threat, however, they did find 30 grams of marijuana.

Wachs and his housemate were subsequently charged with possession of marijuana with intent to deliver. As a felony, that's serious stuff. Last week, however, the Chicago Tribune reports that police dropped the charges when they realised that, given the circumstances of their discovery of the weed, there was a pretty good chance "the evidence might not have survived a motion to suppress".

So Whiteboy7thst - who as you can see posed for one of the cutest mugshots of all time - is now free to get back to talkin' about video games on the internet.

Cops drop charges against streamer arrested for pot possession during 'swatting' raid [Daily Dot]

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Scottish readers: Undecided about the referendum? Please read How the media shafted the people of Scotland and Scottish Independence, Power And Propaganda.

panda-chan:

me

by Johan

“If you show someone something you’ve written, you give them a sharpened stake, lie down in your coffin, and say, ‘When you’re ready’.”
― David Mitchell, Black Swan Green