Bewarethewumpus

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.

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.

Late night host John Oliver discusses both sides of the Scottish independence referendum debate before begging the country to stay part of the United Kingdom in the style of a romantic comedy film.

[bluechaircomics/via webtoons]

stand-up-comic-gifs:

Kumail Nanjiani on the Mash Up pilot

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

With this design, Smash Bros. suddenly looks like a scene from Samurai Jack in Toxodentrail's excellent fan-art.

Here's the full picture with Link and Charizard included:

Be-all and Smash-all by Toxodentrail [DeviantART]

Dayshot is an image-based feature that runs every morning, showcasing some of the prettiest, funniest game-related screenshots and art that we can find. Send us suggestions if you've got them.

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

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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.

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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.