Bewarethewumpus

Author : Gray Blix

Addressing a darkened convocation of world leaders, with images projected behind him, Dr. Spitz began, “To summarize events over the last seven months, a meteor-like object exploded about 6 kilometers above China’s Wenchang Launch Center, flattening it and leaving a zone of destruction encompassing nearly 2,000 square kilometers. Tracked by telescopes and satellites as it approached our planet, it was not a military weapon originating on Earth.”

“What about the Moon . . . the lines?”

The chairperson said, “Please hold your questions until the end of the presentation.”

Dr. Spitz continued. “Wenchang was roughly equal to Tunguska in 1908, and since we expect an event of that magnitude every hundred years or so, we were not immediately suspicious. But the appearance that night of a nearly 300km gash in Mare Serenitatis, visible to anyone with good eyesight or cheap binoculars . . . well, some thought the two events might be related. And then, exactly a month later, when a second object exploded over Spaceport America, in New Mexico, and a second gash appeared in Mare Serenitatis . . . identical circumstances . . . with the exception that the second line on the Moon was across the previous one, forming a plus sign.”

“Or a cross.”

“Please,” the chairperson pleaded.

“Yes, many found religious significance in the explosions and the ‘cross.’ We all saw press reports of the thousands who occupied a so-called ‘tribulation’ tent city in New Mexico. Actually, it was one of those, a former geology student, who found a possible fragment of the object. NASA confirmed the sheer-fractured and partially melted rock as likely part of a larger, perhaps 30-40m, object, but NASA did not disclose the origin of the rock. I can tell you today that it was a Moon rock.”

After a gasp from the audience and much cross-talk, Dr. Spitz continued, “If it came from the Moon it was either ejected by a previous impact only to later fall to the Earth, or given the coincidence of two explosions destroying spaceports, we suspected it was launched from the Moon toward a target on Earth by . . . by an unknown power.”

More gasps and cross-talk, and a question, skipping ahead of the summary and in a sarcastic tone, “Did the FIVE subsequent explosions confirm your suspicions?”

Not a word from the chairperson.

“Yes. All seven explosions targeted spaceports. More fragments were found, analyzed, and identified as Moon rocks. And experts in language and mathematics have studied the seven markings in Mare Serenitatis,” tracing the projected image with a laser pointer “the cross with two diagonals and lines across the top and two sides, and their consensus is . . .”

A cell phone brayed a musical ringtone and its owner fumbled with it.

“Well?” said the exasperated chairperson.

“By destroying seven of the world’s most advanced spaceports, the ones that can launch craft beyond satellite orbits to the Moon, Mars, Jupiter, and beyond, they have set us back by several years. We think they are telling us to cancel those projects altogether, to confine our species to Earth.”

“And if we don’t?”

“We think the arrangement of the seven markings will be finished off with a line across the bottom, creating a square, with eight segments within. Eight lines and eight segments. We think it is a representation of their numeral system, an octal system, and that they have been counting off. The last line, the one that would finish the count, could finish us. If they have the technology to cross space and toss Moon rocks at us, then they probably have the technology to scale up and throw a mountain top at us. Or maybe the whole Moon.”

 

 

Infographic for the next time a cop pulls you over. (via Infographic Pics)

Some people just can't handle their drinks!

Zach Brown, the jokester from Columbus, Ohio who somehow managed to raise over $55,000 in crowdfunding via Kickstarter, announced that he will spend the money to host a day-long benefit concert to raise more money to combat poverty and homelessness in the local community.

The FCC is still working through the public comments about their current net neutrality proposal, and it will be many months still before any final rule is made. But one industry veteran, with over four decades of experience in defining the digital world, suggests that maybe we want to slow down and rethink this a bit. What if, he suggests, true net neutrality isn’t actually everything we think it’s cracked up to be?

Nicholas Negroponte spoke with Big Think about the impossibility — and undesirability — of true neutrality in an entirely digital world.

Negroponte is not a new player in the world of high tech. His career in computer technology spans more than 40 years. He’s the chairman emeritus of the MIT media lab and founder of One Laptop Per Child. He also helped launch Wired, where he wrote a monthly column about the increasing transformation of everything into digital things. Negroponte’s 1996 book Being Digital discussed the eventual doom of physical media (like the then still relatively new CD-ROM) and shift into a world of, as he frequently says, bits, not atoms.

In other words, the man is an expert who’s been in the field for a long time, and who has no fear of the digital future (and the digital now). And yet, he says, net neutrality is not actually a good idea.

“The term net neutrality has a little bit of a pejorative ring,” says Negroponte. “How would you want something not to be neutral? … Neutrality seems to be a feature of good. And so yeah, you kind of want this to be net neutral,” he says.

But, there’s, well, a “but.”

“But the truth is all bits are not created equal,” Negroponte continues, explaining just how much more data — how many more bits — some kinds of technology use than others. An entire book, digitized, is about a megabyte. One second of HD video, though, is more than a megabyte. And it’s not just about entertainment or communication. With the internet of things dawning, everything needs access to a connection.

Take medical devices, for example. “If you have a pacemaker that transmits — this is an imaginary pacemaker now that communicates and monitors your health by sending data up to the cloud,” Negroponte suggests. “Then a few bits of your heart data are, you know, a small fraction of a book. So you have bits that represent your heart, bits that represent books, and bits that represent video. And so,” he concludes, “to argue that they’re all equal is crazy.”

Using Negroponte’s example makes his conclusion ring true. Literal life and death, in that case, would hang on the ability for certain data to move unimpeded at all times. Losing a stream of Breaking Bad halfway through a season finale might be irritating, but it’s not anywhere near the same league as interfering with a lifesaving medical device.

What we need, then, is some kind of middle ground, Negroponte suggests — but he also doesn’t quite suggest where that might be. Instead, he likens available bandwidth to a limited natural physical resource. If it’s immoral to use up all of the air, or water, or oil on frivolous things, is it perhaps also immoral to use up the internet?

“Those of us who were there at the beginning of the Internet never imagined that Netflix would represent 40 percent of it on Sunday afternoons,” Negroponte explains. “It was just off the charts. We just didn’t think that. There is, to me, a certain morality in that, because why the hell are you streaming video? Maybe streaming should be illegal.”

“But,” he concludes, “the point being, that all bits aren’t created equal and whether that resolves itself into net neutrality or not net neutrality is a separate story.”

Negroponte has a point: all bits may not be equal! But the most important, vital bits of data moving around are sometimes not owned by the company with the most money to spend on moving them through.

If, as Negroponte implies, all data traffic doesn’t need to be treated equally, then the next discussion becomes the question of who gets to decide for everyone else what traffic gets priority, and what gets sideline into oblivion. And that discussion is both loaded and challenging. We can all agree that pacemakers are important, sure. But are cloud-connected cars? Refrigerators? Thermostats? Ceiling fans?

And what about all that streaming video? Netflix is huge but they’re not the only streaming game in town. As we’ve seen from around the country and around the world, live streams of major events, from everyday citizens and from media, are one of the best ways for audiences to learn about major news events. What person, group, company, or other entity then would determine whose information is most important for the world to be able to learn?

Negroponte, alas, doesn’t float a suggestion to the questions his assertion raises. But he is sure that digital technology, in whatever form, is still the future.

The (6-minute) video and full transcript are available on the Big Think.

 

Further Reading:

 

Script

Every human used to have to hunt or gather to survive. But humans are smart-ly lazy so we made tools to make our work easier. From sticks, to plows to tractors we’ve gone from everyone needing to make food to, modern agriculture with almost no one needing to make food — and yet we still have abundance.

Of course, it’s not just farming, it’s everything. We’ve spent the last several thousand years building tools to reduce physical labor of all kinds. These are mechanical muscles — stronger, more reliable, and more tireless than human muscles could ever be.

And that's a good thing. Replacing human labor with mechanical muscles frees people to specialize and that leaves everyone better off even though still doing physical labor. This is how economies grow and standards of living rise.

Some people have specialized to be programmers and engineers whose job is to build mechanical minds. Just as mechanical muscles made human labor less in demand so are mechanical minds making human brain labor less in demand.

This is an economic revolution. You may think we've been here before, but we haven't.

This time is different.

Physical Labor

When you think of automation, you probably think of this: giant, custom-built, expensive, efficient but really dumb robots blind to the world and their own work. There were a scary kind of automation but they haven't taken over the world because they're only cost effective in narrow situations.

But they are the old kind of automation, this is the new kind.

Meet Baxter.

Unlike these things which require skilled operators and technicians and millions of dollars, Baxter has vision and can learn what you want him to do by watching you do it. And he costs less than the average annual salary of a human worker. Unlike his older brothers he isn't pre-programmed for one specific job, he can do whatever work is within the reach of his arms. Baxter is what might be thought of as a general purpose robot and general purpose is a big deal.

Think computers, they too started out as highly custom and highly expensive, but when cheap-ish general-purpose computers appeared they quickly became vital to everything.

A general-purpose computer can just as easily calculate change or assign seats on an airplane or play a game or do anything by just swapping its software. And this huge demand for computers of all kinds is what makes them both more powerful and cheaper every year.

Baxter today is the computer in the 1980s. He’s not the apex but the beginning. Even if Baxter is slow his hourly cost is pennies worth of electricity while his meat-based competition costs minimum wage. A tenth the speed is still cost effective when it's a hundred times cheaper. And while Baxtor isn't as smart as some of the other things we will talk about, he's smart enough to take over many low-skill jobs.

And we've already seen how dumber robots than Baxter can replace jobs. In new supermarkets what used to be 30 humans is now one human overseeing 30 cashier robots.

Or the hundreds of thousand baristas employed world-wide? There’s a barista robot coming for them. Sure maybe your guy makes your double-mocha-whatever just perfect and you’d never trust anyone else -- but millions of people don’t care and just want a decent cup of coffee. Oh and by the way this robot is actually a giant network of robots that remembers who you are and how you like your coffee no matter where you are. Pretty convenient.

We think of technological change as the fancy new expensive stuff, but the real change comes from last decade's stuff getting cheaper and faster. That's what's happening to robots now. And because their mechanical minds are capable of decision making they are out-competing humans for jobs in a way no pure mechanical muscle ever could.

Luddite Horses

Imagine a pair of horses in the early 1900s talking about technology. One worries all these new mechanical muscles will make horses unnecessary.

The other reminds him that everything so far has made their lives easier -- remember all that farm work? Remember running coast-to-coast delivering mail? Remember riding into battle? All terrible. These city jobs are pretty cushy -- and with so many humans in the cities there are more jobs for horses than ever.

Even if this car thingy takes off you might say, there will be new jobs for horses we can't imagine.

But you, dear viewer, from beyond 2000 know what happened -- there are still working horses, but nothing like before. The horse population peaked in 1915 -- from that point on it was nothing but down.

There isn’t a rule of economics that says better technology makes more, better jobs for horses. It sounds shockingly dumb to even say that out loud, but swap horses for humans and suddenly people think it sounds about right.

As mechanical muscles pushed horses out of the economy, mechanical minds will do the same to humans. Not immediately, not everywhere, but in large enough numbers and soon enough that it's going to be a huge problem if we are not prepared. And we are not prepared.

You, like the second horse, may look at the state of technology now and think it can’t possibly replace your job. But technology gets better, cheaper, and faster at a rate biology can’t match.

Just as the car was the beginning of the end for the horse so now does the car show us the shape of things to come.

Automobiles

Self-driving cars aren't the future: they're here and they work. Self-driving cars have traveled hundreds of thousands of miles up and down the California coast and through cities -- all without human intervention.

The question is not if they'll replaces cars, but how quickly. They don’t need to be perfect, they just need to be better than us. Humans drivers, by the way, kill 40,000 people a year with cars just in the United States. Given that self-driving cars don’t blink, don’t text while driving, don’t get sleepy or stupid, it easy to see them being better than humans because they already are.

Now to describe self-driving cars as cars at all is like calling the first cars mechanical horses. Cars in all their forms are so much more than horses that using the name limits your thinking about what they can even do. Lets call self-driving cars what they really are:

Autos: the solution to the transport-objects-from-point-A-to-point-B problem. Traditional cars happen to be human sized to transport humans but tiny autos can work in wear houses and gigantic autos can work in pit mines. Moving stuff around is who knows how many jobs but the transportation industry in the United States employs about three million people. Extrapolating world-wide that’s something like 70 million jobs at a minimum.

These jobs are over.

The usual argument is that unions will prevent it. But history is filled with workers who fought technology that would replace them and the workers always loose. Economics always wins and there are huge incentives across wildly diverse industries to adopt autos.

For many transportation companies, the humans are about a third of their total costs. That's just the straight salary costs. Humans sleeping in their long haul trucks costs time and money. Accidents cost money. Carelessness costs money. If you think insurance companies will be against it, guess what? Their perfect driver is one who pays their small premium but never gets into an accident.

The autos are coming and they're the first place where most people will really see the robots changing society. But there are many other places in the economy where the same thing is happening, just less visibly.

So it goes with autos, so it goes for everything.

The Shape of Things to Come

It's easy to look at Autos and Baxters and think: technology has always gotten rid of low-skill jobs we don't want people doing anyway. They'll get more skilled and do better educated jobs -- like they've always done.

Even ignoring the problem of pushing a hundred-million additional people through higher education, white-collar work is no safe haven either. If your job is sitting in front of a screen and typing and clicking -- like maybe you're supposed to be doing right now -- the bots are coming for you too, buddy.

Software bots are both intangible and way faster and cheaper than physical robots. Given that white collar workers are, from a companies perspective, both more expensive and more numerous -- the incentive to automate their work is greater than low skilled work.

And that's just what automation engineers are for. These are skilled programmers whose entire job is to replace your job with a software bot.

You may think even the world's smartest automation engineer could never make a bot to do your job -- and you may be right -- but the cutting edge of programming isn't super-smart programmers writing bots it's super-smart programmers writing bots that teach themselves how to do things the programmer could never teach them to do.

How that works is well beyond the scope of this video, but the bottom line is there are limited ways to show a bot a bunch of stuff to do, show the bot a bunch of correctly done stuff, and it can figure out how to do the job to be done.

Even with just a goal and no example of how to do it the bots can still learn. Take the stock market which, in many ways, is no longer a human endeavor. It's mostly bots that taught themselves to trade stocks, trading stocks with other bots that taught themselves.

Again: it's not bots that are executing orders based on what their human controllers want, it's bots making the decisions of what to buy and sell on their own.

As a result the floor of the New York Stock exchange isn't filled with traders doing their day jobs anymore, it's largely a TV set.

So bots have learned the market and bots have learned to write. If you've picked up a newspaper lately you've probably already read a story written by a bot. There are companies that are teaching bots to write anything: Sports stories, TPS reports, even say, those quarterly reports that you write at work.

Paper work, decision making, writing -- a lot of human work falls into that category and the demand for human metal labor is these areas is on the way down. But surely the professions are safe from bots? Yes?

Professions

When you think 'lawyer' it's easy to think of trials. But the bulk of lawyering is actually drafting legal documents predicting the likely outcome and impact of lawsuits, and something called 'discovery' which is where boxes of paperwork gets dumped on the lawyers and they need to find the pattern or the one out-of-place transaction among it all.

This can all be bot work. Discovery, in particular, is already not a human job in many firms. Not because there isn't paperwork to go through, there's more of it than ever, but because clever research bots sift through millions of emails and memos and accounts in hours not weeks -- crushing human researchers in terms of not just cost and time but, most importantly, accuracy. Bots don't get sleeping reading through a million emails.

But that's the simple stuff: IBM has a bot named Watson: you may have seen him on TV destroy humans at Jeopardy — but that was just a fun side project for him.

Watson's day-job is to be the best doctor in the world: to understand what people say in their own words and give back accurate diagnoses. And he's already doing that at Slone-Kettering, giving guidance on lung cancer treatments.

Just as Auto don’t need to be perfect -- they just need to make fewer mistakes than humans, -- the same goes for doctor bots.

Human doctors are by no means perfect -- the frequency and severity of misdiagnosis are terrifying -- and human doctors are severely limited in dealing with a human's complicated medical history. Understanding every drug and every drug's interaction with every other drug is beyond the scope of human knowability.

Especially when there are research robots whose whole job it is to test 1,000s of new drugs at a time.

Human doctors can only improve through their own experiences. Doctor bots can learn from the experiences of every doctor bot. Can read the latest in medical research and keep track of everything that happens to all his patients world-wide and make correlations that would be impossible to find otherwise.

Not all doctors will go away, but when doctor bots are comparable to humans and they're only as far away as your phone -- the need for general doctors will be less.

So professionals, white-collar workers and low-skill workers all have something to worry about.

But perhaps you're still not worried because you're a special creative snowflakes. Well guess what? You're not that special.

Creative Labor

Creativity may feel like magic, but it isn't. The brain is a complicated machine -- perhaps the most complicated machine in the whole universe -- but that hasn't stopped us from trying to simulate it.

There is this notion that just as mechanical muscles allowed us to move into thinking jobs that mechanical minds will allow us all to move into creative work. But even if we assume the human mind is magically creative -- it's not, but just for the sake of argument -- artistic creativity isn't what the majority of jobs depend on. The number of writers and poets and directors and actors and artist who actually make a living doing their work is a tiny, tiny portion of the labor force. And given that these are professions that are dependent on popularity they will always be a small part of the population.

There is no such thing as a poem and painting based economy.

Oh, by the way, this music in the background that your listening to? It was written by a bot. Her name is Emily Howel and she can write an infinite amount of new music all day for free. And people can't tell the difference between her and human composers when put to a blind test.

Talking about artificial creativity gets weird fast -- what does that even mean? But it's nonetheless a developing field.

People used to think that playing chess was a uniquely creative human skill that machines could never do right up until they beat the best of us. And so it goes for all human talent.

Conclusion

Right: this might have been a lot to take in, and you might want to reject it -- it's easy to be cynical of the endless, and idiotic, predictions of futures that never are. So that's why it's important to emphasize again this stuff isn't science fiction. The robots are here right now. There is a terrifying amount of working automation in labs and wear houses that is proof of concept.

We have been through economic revolutions before, but the robot revolution is different.

Horses aren't unemployed now because they got lazy as a species, they’re unemployable. There's little work a horse can do that do that pays for its housing and hay.

And many bright, perfectly capable humans will find themselves the new horse: unemployable through no fault of their own.

But if you still think new jobs will save us: here is one final point to consider. The US census in 1776 tracked only a few kinds of jobs. Now there are hundreds of kinds of jobs, but the new ones are not a significant part of the labor force.

Here's the list of jobs ranked by the number of people that perform them - it's a sobering list with the transportation industry at the top. Going down the list all this work existed in some form a hundred years ago and almost all of them are targets for automation. Only when we get to number 33 on the list is there finally something new.

Don't that every barista and officer worker lose their job before things are a problem. The unemployment rate during the great depression was 25%.

This list above is 45% of the workforce. Just what we've talked about today, the stuff that already works, can push us over that number pretty soon. And given that even our modern technological wonderland new kinds of work are not a significant portion of the economy, this is a big problem.

This video isn't about how automation is bad -- rather that automation is inevitable. It's a tool to produce abundance for little effort. We need to start thinking now about what to do when large sections of the population are unemployable -- through no fault of their own. What to do in a future where, for most jobs, humans need not apply.

Robots, Etc in the Video

Terex Port automation

Command | Cat MieStar System.

Bosch Automotive Technology

Atlas Update

Kiva Systems

PhantomX running Phoenix code

iRobot, Do You

New pharmacy robot at QEHB

Briggo Coffee Experience

John Deere Autosteer (ITEC Pro 2010). In use while cultivating

The Duel: Timo Boll vs. KUKA Robot

Baxter with the Power of Intera 3

Baxter Research Robot SDK 1.0

Baxter the Bartender

Online Cash Registers Touch-Screen EPOS System Demonstration

Self-Service Check in

Robot to play Flappy Bird

e-david from University of Konstanz, Germany

Sedasys

Empty Car Convoy

Clever robots for crops

Autonomously folding a pile of 5 previously-unseen towels

LS3 Follow Tight

Robotic Handling material

Caterpillar automation project

Universal Robots has reinvented industrial robotics

Introducing WildCat

The Human Brain Project - Video Overview

This Robot Is Changing How We Cure Diseases

Jeopardy! - Watson Game 2

What Will You Do With Watson?

Other Credits

Mandelbrot set

Moore's law graph

Apple II 1977

Beer Robot Fail m2803

All Wales Ambulance Promotional Video

Clyde Robinson

Time lapse Painting - Monster Spa

It turns out the medical drama, which ran for eight seasons, can be tidly summed up in a single GIF.

Think you got your date figured out? CollegeHumor says hold your breath until you get a glimpse of his/her Netflix playlist.

New t-shirt design!

PC Skyrim players all must have a moment where they get bored of vanilla Skyrim and then look into mods. What happens after that key moment may be completely bonkers, depending on what someone actually decides to download.

Or at least, that's the stereotype people have about PC Skyrim players according to this parody by ClumsySaunter of how to mod Skyrim:

Fluttershy, nooooo!

How to Mod Skyrim Proper [parody] [ClumsySaunter]

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According to Pokémon news website Serebii, earlier today the official Korean Pokémon website uploaded pictures of two surprising mega Pokémon: Mega Slowbro, and Mega Audino (pictured above). While the images are no longer on the Korean website, the internet was quick to save the pictures—and have taken to social media to poke fun at mega Slowbrow.

First, some specifics about this 'mon.

"Energy was focused in the Shellder biting Slowbro's tail, and the result was that the hardness of the shell increased and it became an immensely hard suit of armor that can be damaged by no one," Serebii says. Accordingly, mega Slowbro has high defense and special defense. "When the battle begins Mega Slowbro uses its tail to stand up straight and it propels itself like a spring."

Okay, now that we have that out of the way, let's talk about this Pokemon's design. This is normal Slowbro:

Look how happy it is. I mean, sure, there's a Shellder attached to its tail, but still, it's all good!

Now compare to mega Slowbro's face.

That's the face of regret. The face of panic. The face of sadness. Slowbro doesn't know what's happening or why it's happening to him. The Shellder is straight up overtaking its body, ack! It's incredible and kind of WTF. I think the internet feels similarly about it:

Can't wait to use Mega Slowbro at the 2015 Beyblade World Championships! pic.twitter.com/q1WMZnGACm

— Aaron Zheng (@CybertronVGC) August 12, 2014

....mega slowbro.....that's......ok

— JAKESEAL (@SealKonga) August 12, 2014

Slowbro is the magic conch shell. pic.twitter.com/1PNDOPj0jG

— ShellShocker™ ‏ (@SSBlastoise) August 12, 2014

Mega Slowbro, you tried

— ; neptuno (@JorgeFzSp) August 12, 2014

Mega Slowbro is an ice-cream pic.twitter.com/9LCCcIDJ2d

— PokéStuff (@StuffOfPoke) August 12, 2014

I think it is hilarious that Mega Slowbro's tail has decided "screw this symbiotic relationship. I'm taking over."

— John Ryan Abbott (@JohnRyanAbbott) August 12, 2014

I still can't believe mega slowbro is a thing

— Kristian (@JustVisiting03) August 12, 2014

Come at me, Slowbro! @TheFilmRenegado pic.twitter.com/exvjLo7rZh

— Andrew Dickman (@AWDtwit) August 12, 2014

mega slowbro... what the fuck man

— Chris Dame (@HeyThatsMyLeg) August 12, 2014

I was waiting for the "joke" Mega and I think Mega Slowbro has filled the role. I love it.

— Jimmy Whetzel (@NintendoFanFTW) August 12, 2014

mega slowbro is a stupid dork he's not even a bro anymore he's a waffle cone

— jane mai booboochild (@janemai_) August 12, 2014

My first reaction to Mega Slowbro? Not impressed. #Pokemon #MegaSlowbro #WhoIsResponsibleForThis pic.twitter.com/pNmOk71qSz

— The Black Squirrel (@Sorokaste) August 12, 2014

making slowbro into a burrito is the kind of innovation i want from a pokemon game.

— Jake Lawrence (@TheTimeCowboy) August 12, 2014

mega slowbro looks like a regular slowbro that made a mistake while evolving and now has to live with it forever

— A Fierce Bad Rabbit (@wiglytuf) August 12, 2014

OMG MEGA SLOWBRO IS BEING EATEN I AM SO SAD I HAVE NEVER BEEN SO SAD AND ANGRY AT SHELLDERS

— дзіця (@honky_dory) August 12, 2014

Slowbro just looks confused by this whole thing

— Heather Quinnell (@AwfulHorse) August 12, 2014

mega slowbro is like "help"

— pololo-kun (@osteosis) August 12, 2014

Mega Slowbro's the stupidest thing I've ever seen I want one

— Doba DeVader (@thedobaga) August 12, 2014

MEGA SLOWBRO IS HILARIOUS I'M HOWLING

— hot dads hotline (@killuass_) August 12, 2014

LMFAO MEGA SLOWBRO 😭😂😭

— ☤Jomaeler Franco☤ (@hoot_enanny) August 12, 2014

Well I guess the thing that I find charming about Mega Slowbro is the look on it's face..it is kinda cute with that worried/scared/sad (c)

— Jen (@ArceusLover101) August 12, 2014

Wait, mega slowbro is real?! #oras #ummok #wtf #mindblown #hashtag

— Dorian Saisse (@BitWarrior_) August 12, 2014

What I imagine Mega Slowbro is thinking. #Pokemon #megaslowbro https://t.co/9Qs4ikD2xu

— Amy Skynix Samson (@LostSoulSkynix) August 12, 2014

Mega Slowbro's eyes are like "what have I done..."

— Beau (@Chronai) August 12, 2014

@pokejungle #tadah pic.twitter.com/yCnqcNfPfh

— [carnictis] (@carnictis) August 12, 2014

And yes, people have definitely started to make fan-art and photoshops of mega Slowbro, too. Most riff off the idea that Slowbro is being eaten alive, or is crying out for help. It's hilarious.

(Via comicshans)

(via wonderbolt)

(via twarda)

(Via buukin)

(Via XUZA)

(Via ewedreishzu)

(Via sixthrock)

(Via kaijukat)

What about you, what do you think about mega Slowbro?

P.S., if you're interested in the other mega leaked today, here's what Serebii has to say about mega Audino: "It has boosted Defense and Special Defense. Whoever comes into contact with its hand falls into a deep slumber."

You can check out more screenshots of both megas here.

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This Nintendo Mii avatar, resembling Link from The Legend of Zelda, has inspired the creation of several other Miis based on video game characters, including “Princess Petch” and “Dankey Kang.”

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Forget lab-made materials like graphene -- natural, old-fashioned hemp may be the ticket to our energy future. Researchers have demonstrated that you can make very efficient carbon electrodes simply by heating hemp bast fibers in a two-stage process....

Tuesday, August 12 — 12:00 AM

NO GIFT, NO CHAT.

Pop quiz! How well do you guys know your Nintendo history? If you recognize the character from this strip, give yourselves a pat on the back.

Time’s up: it’s Ness, from the SNES cult classic, EarthBound!

Joking aside, I’m glad to finally make a comic referencing one of my favorite childhood games, EarthBound StarTropics! And while the odds of Mike bringing his yo-yo, bat, and psychic powers (hey, a third thing) into Smash Bros are slim, he’ll always have a special place in my heart…as the guy who made me dip my real-life instruction manual in water to find a password to progress in-game. Man, some NES games were obtuse as heck…

This is one of the more meta comics, isn’t it? I like how cheesy Ness’s joke is, I think it really drives home Mike’s frustration.

Business-owners, listen up! Do you have a retail store? Perhaps one that sells game (or comic)-related merchandise? Because we’ve still got plenty of BitF Volume One books down here, and I’m willing to part with a good number of them if you want to buy wholesale. Launch an email to me at staff (at) brawlinthefamily.com, and maybe we can make a deal. As expected, they’re cheap in bulk.

-By Matthew

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Author : Suzanne Borchers

I polish the sterling silver door handle for the 103rd time this morning. I have been a master’s valet for more years than that. My duties have been reduced but my importance to him has never waned. His father’s father said to me, “Alfred, you are my most special invention.”

I wish I could smile.

Then that pesky microbot, Fred, whirs into the room. Of course he crosses the floor in a master’s heartbeat and stops in front of me.

I peer down at him from my superior position. “I suppose you will begin the usual argument about old versus new and large versus small,” I say. I am ready for him. I have spent 102 swipes of polish posturing new angles and configurations of opinion. I have him this time.

He shakes his tiny head.

I focus on the details of his face. Does he look sad? Microbots cannot look sad, but he does. Perhaps he knows he will lose the argument for the first time. That would make him sad. He likes to win.

I wish I could laugh.

“I am ready for you, Fred.”

I wish I could puff out my chest.

Fred murmurs at my shiny feet. “Master gave me orders to decommission your service.”

My circuits rage with heat. “Never!”

“I will miss our chats, old boy,” Fred says.

“I shall too!” I stomp down a foot where Fred stands. When I raise my foot and scrape at the bottom with my finger, nothing is there. Where is he?

There is a tingle within my chest.

“I am so very sorry,” his voice fades.

I wish I could cry.

Modern Seinfeld

via

Thanks Bill J

 

The shortening leash on American children: We heard a lot about sneaking out, petty theft, amateur arson, drugs, and sexual experimentation from our older respondents. But as time passes, the picture of childhood looks a lot less wild and reckless and a lot more monitored. We asked parents how they would react if they caught their kids doing what they had done as kids. A typical response: "I'd probably freak out and turn my home into a prison."

submitted by brentose [link] [222 comments]

Hey geeks! The Augie pre-order page will be open for just a little while longer.

Guardians of the Galaxy actor Chris Pratt’s now viral rendition of Forget About Dre sounds even better when it’s synched to the original track, courtesy of Redditor Treytech.