Bewarethewumpus

Author : Jae Miles

I’m sitting on a rock on Hezbolla XIV. It’s a damn comfortable rock, overlooking an expanse of tundra without salient feature between me and the horizon in all directions. This is why I chose it. After four months of headlong flight, I can stop and have a cup of tea.

A rock situated at the remotest point of the least-inhabited planet of the furthest and most anti-Dominion star system at the distant edge of the outer rim, which is on the far side of the frontier systems.

They said I’d never escape. They said that eluding them was impossible. She said that even if I ran, I would be my own downfall.

A phone rings.

After I land from the jump that hurls me and my tea from the rock, I look about frantically. There is nobody in sight, no vessels in the skies.

The phone rings again.

I creep forward and peer under the edge of the rock. In a little depression, there’s a Nanga Starcom. Tucked into the survival bag next to it is a Leroo Rothfruit bar. I straighten up with the bag in my hand and a sigh gusting from my lips as they curve into a smile.

The phone rings for a third time.

“Yes?”

“Hello Curtis. You certainly got there faster than I expected.”

“How did you find me, Gloria?”

“You’re OCD, darling man. You couldn’t just hide. You had to hide at the exact point that is furthest from Dominion influence.”

There wasn’t really an answer I can give to that.

“So here’s the deal. I know you’re there. No-one else does. When you get bored, give me a call.”

“Why?”

“Well, firstly to have someone to talk to. Secondly, I may have a job offer. Either covert, or things may have changed. You were right, after all.”

“If I was right, why am I hiding by a rock over a million light years from home?”

“You’re always right. You always notice things. But, darling, you have the most appalling timing and no discretion at all.”

I’ve got no answer to that one either.

“Are you still there?”

“Yes, Gloria.”

“Do you have – no, of course you have everything you need. That would have been a silly question.”

“I have a question.”

“Go on then.”

“What if they find me?”

“They could only do that if they – oh, damn. Scrambled comms but unscrambled office.”

“Gloria, my love. I brought a two-man envirodome.”

“But they know where you are.”

“Leave now. Leave fast. Head for the last place that I stopped at before I came to this planet.”

“How can I be sure where that was?”

I grin: “Because I’m OCD, attentive, indiscrete and right. Move, woman.” I close the connection. She’s lovely. Scatty at times, but lovely. It’ll be good to share my cave with her.

Cave? Yes. The rock was only a stopover. Because I knew that they knew that I’m a little bit fixated.

Author : TJMoore

At 4:53 EST Ben Freen flicked the switch.

An instant later the little sphere of quantum foam, gallium oxide and carbon began to get hot. It started to glow red and then white. It was power! Unending, unwavering, ever-increasing power! He had created a source of power unlike anything ever known! Unexpectedly, the ceramic points it was resting on began to crumble and melt. Ben quickly placed a bucket of water under the table. Realizing the possible results, he turned and fled. The little sphere was now so bright and hot that it dropped through the table in a flash and into the bucket, which immediately exploded into a room full of super-heated steam. The garage hissed for just a moment and then exploded outward from the intense pressure of the steam. Then it started to burn. As soon as the structure immediately over the sphere had vaporized, an intense light filled the sky as the sphere became a miniature sun burning an every widening hole in the back yard of a small Cleveland home.

Meanwhile, one quantum layer away,
At 4:53 EST Ben Freen flicked the switch.

An instant later the little sphere of quantum foam, gallium oxide and carbon became jet black and then covered with frost. Not understanding what was happening, Ben reached out and touched the darkening object. His finger became instantly numb and then black as the skin froze and then evaporated in a mist of little crystals that swirled to the table top as they fell. The little sphere became colder an blacker and the air began to swirl around it as energy was sucked from the surrounding environment into the sphere. The ceramic points on which the sphere rested began to crumble as their molecules began to sublime into cold, powder vapor. Sensing impending disaster, Ben turned and fled. The sphere landed with a dull thud on the table which began to crack and vibrate as the atomic bonds within the atoms that made up its surface began to break. A light breeze began to blow through the door and the interior of the garage became opaque with fog from the condensing air. A pool of water formed around the perimeter of the garage while a tornado of evaporating mist rose from the frozen pool beneath the table. When the sphere dropped through the table and onto the frozen pool it made a loud crack that tore the ice to tiny crystals that rushed toward the sphere but evaporated before they ever touched its now ebony black surface. A gale force wind was now blowing directly into the sphere and the garage imploded with a muffled crumpling sound. The rubble seemed to bend and then vanish into the place where the sphere had been. The sphere now appeared to be a point into which everything around it was receding. The sky began to darken and snow began to blow toward the point which was slowly sinking into an ever widening hole in the back yard of a small Cleveland home.

Author : S. P. Mahoney

There is an utterly absurd amount of mineral wealth sitting in Sol’s asteroid belt. Was. Whatever. A nickel-iron asteroid of middling size contains enough mineral wealth to choke a multinational, if you were to bring it back to Earth. Not to mention so expensive that none of those aforementioned multinationals, much less the national governments, could look more than five years down the line and see the advantages in building a civilization out there.

It was almost a relief when the message came in from the Great Beyond: “Hello, we’re aliens, and we need half of your asteroid belt. You can’t do anything about this, however, we are going to pay you for it. The down payment is in FTL drives, of which we will be giving at least one to every regional power on Earth.” That’s paraphrased, but basically the jist of it.

They were pretty clever, those aliens (we never learned their name for themselves). They figured we’d be out of commission, squabbling, for long enough. They’d looked us over and decided that, yup, those Humans have a real talent for tribalizing against each other, they’re going to be arguing about who gets how many drives for years. They knew it would take us a while to find a trading outpost where we could find out how badly we were being ripped off. And if that failed, they thought they’d skate by on our good feelings towards the race that gave us a path to the stars.

They were almost right, but they underestimated Humanity’s ability to think big when it comes to who’s in and out of the tribe. And they were completely off-base on that last thing. Polls still suggest a 90% approval rate on nuking their mining colony. A significant fraction of the population even think we shouldn’t have waited for them to give us the money at the end of the term, although that seems a little wasteful to me.

It was maybe eighteen months before we were pulling into a dozen systems to run the same con. We did it better, of course; we didn’t let the victims know what was up until we were actually done. And then two of them, it turned out, were our old pals’ colony worlds. So much the better. Those poor guys became further reinforcement to a message for their folks back home:

Don’t kid a kidder. Don’t trick a trickster. Don’t scam the Humans.

Author : Duncan Shields, Staff Writer

Yes. The aliens came down and harvested the human race. Yes. We asked them to.

That was the plan all along. We just didn’t know it.

Our basic nature was installed in us by them. We were set down on this planet to evolve until overpopulation and to invent the technology necessary to start screaming our position into space. The language wasn’t important. Giving off radio and television waves was the sign that we had reached fruition.

We did it brilliantly.

The aliens, all green teeth and dimensional tentacles, saw us show up on their routine scans. We were a delicious, ripe apple. This galaxy and others like it are merely orchards for these creatures. They are farmers and we are genetically modified planet boosters.

We pulled most of the resources out of the earth already. That’s why the aliens collected the cities. All that glass, steel, copper, iron, concrete and gyprock. All processed. All ready to go. They harvested the minerals and oil, too. We had even dug the holes for them already. The Earth has ice-scream scoop craters all over it now from the aliens’ machines reaching down and picking up every single town. Those holes have been sprayed with fertilizer. In five years, they will all be jungle. Future generations won’t even know they existed.

We were very efficient parasites. We overloaded the planet with our biomass and started crying to the heavens. Then we were culled and smashed down to the stone age again.

And of course, our meat is prized. The enormous flying thresher slaughterhouses that collected us were the final nightmare. That’s why there are so few of us left. Enough to start another breeding program here to be sure, but the population of earth has gone from billions to a few thousand.

In a way, we’re lucky. The dinosaurs were the first experiment but they were killed by a meteor. Probably for the best since they’d had millions of years to build a radio but never did.

We, on the other hand, must have exceeded our presets. Because of that, they’re setting us up for a round two, I think. We get to do it again.

How do we warn the future generations? How do we tell them not to breed, not to innovate, not to invent, not to think? We want to start a religion that will celebrate meekness, to idolize servitude, to live simply, and to shun technology. But I remember that a lot of religions before the harvest were already trying to do that and they failed.

Maybe if I made an image of death that looked like a farmer but then I remember that my image of Death had a scythe and that makes me think that maybe this isn’t the first time we’ve been culled.

Maybe the wave of humans before us already tried to do what I’m trying to do now.

This is why we never got any responses to our messages into space. Those messages are silenced as soon as they start talking. There are no conversations. Only yells that are cut off.

If I could go back in time, I’d tell the people of earth to shut up. To stay quiet. To quit beaming our entire lives at full volume into space.

All we were doing was ringing the dinner bell.

DARGON Quest IV. Not a good sign. Not a good sign at all.

Dargon Quest IV is pretty good, BTW, and I imagine it'll be worth checking out when it does hit iTunes in North America, which should be soon. (It launched in New Zealand today.) Hopefully Dargon Quest VII 3DS comes to the U.S. soon too.

(via Wario64)

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"You don't have time to think up there. If you think, you're dead."

The spectacular flying seen in this clip—directed by GTA Wise Guy— is done by GTA Online collective The Originals Crew. As you can probably tell, they're very dedicated to looking awesome way up in the sky. And, tricks and stunts aren't all they do, either. They cut you down from clouds, too.

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There is a school in Denmark that teaches through Live-Action Role-Play. Or, LARPing. Amazing.

This isn't actually a documentary; it's part of a larger film called Trapped Treasure, which is all about LARPing. We featured another excerpt from it last year. Can't wait to see the finished product.

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First-person shooters have come a long way since we called them "DOOM clones" back in the nineties. After Halo, Call of Duty, and Gears of War, most have class-based gameplay, role-playing game elements, regenerating health, cover systems, and/or ironsight aiming. Toxikk from Reakktor Studios (kkool naming kkonvention bro) wants to return to the genre's roots.

The trailer above does a good job demonstrating Toxikk's mission statement (including a great bait and switch regarding free-to-play). Without any of the more recent trappings of the first-person shooter genre, it looks to be fast-paced with a good amount of verticality. Removing the need to reload seems like such a strange concept today, but what really takes it back in time is the ability to hold every weapon at once. Rad.

Toxikk is planned as a PC release, and will hit Steam Early Access this winter. Since it is designed with mouse and keyboard in mind, Reakktor has no plans to release on consoles.

Russians play around with a half-assembled microwave to see what the dangerous electromagnetic radiation is capable of.

Author : George R. Shirer

Noir York. V9.7.

The rain fell, neon droplets painting the city’s stark black and white streets in a kaleidoscope of liquid color. Sitting in Smiley’s, propping up the counter, Dashwood stared through the window at the technicolor weather.

“Shit. Would you look at that? What the hell’s the world coming to?”

“Geez, Dash. Don’t drez on us or nothing.”

Dashwood glanced at the NPC standing behind the counter, rubbing a grubby rag over the grubby surface.

“But its color,” said Dashwood. “Color! In Noir York, Smiley!”

“Probably just a glitch,” said Smiley. He shrugged. “Don’t get your jockeys in a bunch. You want some more coffee?”

Dashwood scowled and pushed his cup away. “Tastes like chalk.”

“I’m gettin’ better at makin’ the crap, then,” noted Smiley.

“Aren’t you even a little bothered?”

“Nope. I been around since the first version, Dash. I seen it all.” Smiley threw the rag across his shoulder, jerked a meaty thumb in the general direction of the weather. “This? This ain’t nothin’. I survived the Big Hack of 6.3! Now, let me tell you, pal, that was somethin’!”

“It’s not a glitch.”

Smiley quit talking, mid-remembrance, and Dashwood turned to stare at the woman seated at the end of the counter. She was a looker. Tall, slender, with silver-white hair and onyx eyes. Her lips glistened.

“What do you know, doll?” asked Dashwood. He reached up and automatically straightened his tie.

“Marilyn,” said the woman. “Not doll, gumshoe.”

“All right. So what do you think you know, Marilyn?”

“I know that’s not a glitch.” She turned to stare at the colorful streets. “It’s a paradigm shift.”

“What?” Smiley wasn’t smiling. “Ya mean they’re gonna put us in color?”

“You stand here all night and don’t hear the news?” asked Marilyn.

Dashwood moved over a seat. His eyes flitted to Marilyn’s endless legs. “What news?”

“They’re shutting us down.”

“What?” shouted Smiley.

“They can’t!” said Dashwood, furiously. “They wouldn’t dare!”

“They can and they will,” said Marilyn. “You ever check the stats? Less than a thousand users a night log into Noir York. We’re below the minimum threshold.”

“But they can’t shut us down!” said Dashwood. “We’re AIs! That’d be murder!”

“Yeah!” said Smiley, hotly. “We got rights!”

Marilyn nodded. “You’re right. They won’t shut us down. They’re just taking us off the grid, dumping Noir York into a self-sustaining junk server. The same one that houses San Futuro and the Magik Kingdoms and a dozen other obsolete game-worlds.”

Dashwood and Smiley stared at her, reeling from her words. Marilyn fished in her clutch for a cigarette and a lighter. She fired up the cancer stick and began to nurse it.

“We’re scrapped, boys,” said the dame. “But look on the bright side. No more users. No more stupid, pointless deaths or dumbo quests. Hell, we’re already getting some color in this dump. Maybe, soon, we’ll even get to see a real sunrise.”

The diner fell silent. The three of them sat at the counter, considering the unknown future, while outside, the neon rain continued.

Animator and director Mikey Please of Parabella Animation Studio just released his latest stop-motion animation project, Marilyn Miller. The film screened at numerous festivals like Sundance and SXSW over the last year, picking up plenty of accolades along the way, and is now available online for the first time. Marilyn Miller is a followup to Please’s BAFTA-winning animation The Eagleman Stag, and makes heavy use of tediously sculpted styrofoam models and complex long-exposure lighting to tell a story of creation and destruction. The film was photographed and animated by Mikey Please and Dan Ojari. And you can see a bit of behind-the-scenes footage here. (via Colossal Submissions)

Update: There’s a great writeup by Jason Sondhi about Marilyn Myller over Short of the Week.

I had something important to say but I forgot what it was.

It’ll come back to me.

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Rhett and Link explain how a vacation can make even the worst misfortune seem like good luck.

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Surprise! Strong Bad, it's me! Homestar Runner! From school!

homestarrunner.com

Homestar Runner co-creator Matt Chapman made a bunch of 20- and 30-somethings happy when he said earlier this week that the cartoon could be making a comeback later this year following a successful experiment on April Fools' Day. If you watched the cartoons during their heyday, the news probably sent you down a nostalgic rabbit hole where you spent two hours re-watching all of your favorite episodes.

If you happened to miss out on Homestar during its peak, here's what you need to know: creators Matt and Mike Chapman made a lot of different Flash cartoons for the site, but the most popular were Strong Bad E-mails, also called "sbemails." Every week, Strong Bad (the luchador-looking guy in the picture above) picked a different fan-submitted e-mail to answer, and hilarity ensued. The site was updated regularly throughout the early 2000s before becoming more irregular later in the decade, and updates mostly ceased in 2009 as the Chapman brothers moved on to other projects.

We've combed through the archive and assembled 10 Strong Bad e-mails that do a pretty good job of showing what this odd Internet cartoon could be at its best. It's impossible to call out all of the good ones, but if these hook you the complete collection is still available here.

Read 37 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Ubisoft is spending a lot of money on a competition which promises to let one person become the first to ever play a video game on Mt Everest, using custom hardware built to withstand the "harsh conditions". It sounds amazing! Pity it's already been done.

As this epic thread bump on NeoGAF shows (the original Kotaku link is so old it doesn't even work anymore), back in 2005 we told you about an expedition to the summit of the world's tallest mountain undertaken by Neal Mueller.

Neal and his colleagues took a bunch of electronics up the mountain with them. And only one device withstood the conditions. As he explained at the time:

We totally had so much electronic equipment, and Id say the Nintendo DS held up the best of any of it. We were using a CB radio to stay in touch and that would consistently go bad then wed bring it back to life. It was because of the wind and the cold, we had a Dell computer that got fried, a Polytechnic screen that went out we had three of the four MP3 players go bad, but the Nintendo DS units keep hanging in there. And it was the Nintendo DS units that suffered the worst of it - they were constantly with us in our tents which were moist and cold the were right there in our packs so they suffered a lot of wind blasts, they were dropped. And the Sherpas would beat the (heck) out of them - theyd play with them in the kitchen where curry would get split on them, all these incredibly hot spices and they kept on performing.

Instead of going to all the trouble of building special hardware, I wonder if it'd be cheaper for Ubisoft to just port Far Cry 4 to the DS...

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Announced today at Comic-Con: All of the original Firefly stars will reprise their characters for the online game! And Alan Tudyk is playing multiple roles. Also showing up will be Michael Fairman as the crime lord Niska, who is apparently hiring.

More details from the panel as we hear them!

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It's been a big few days for people who like to watch other people play video games real fast: the world records for both Ocarina of Time and Metroid Prime have been beaten, the former in almost perfect fashion.

T3's Metroid Prime run of fifty-five minutes is below.

And here's Cosmo Wright's Ocarina run, which he describes as "the best speed run I have ever done".

Or, try the best anyone has ever done, and may ever do (at least for a while). This is damn near perfect.

Note that he finishes the game in 18 minutes and ten seconds. The amount of time he's shaved off his own world records in just a few shorts months is insane.

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As popular as it is, League of Legends has always had an issue with its community, which to be polite can often be seen as "rude". And while developers Riot are trying some novel approaches to mending this the nice way, that carrot is being joined by a new, heavy stick.

Riot is currently testing a new combination of human review and "machine learning" to identify and punish players exhibiting "extreme cases of toxicity" (listed examples include intentional feeding, racism, death threats and homphobia). It's being tested so they can sort out how many false-positives it returns, but if it works, we can hopefully expect more bans for people who are dragging regular player's experiences into a negative space.

Players could be banned from a period of two weeks up to forever if busted engaging in this kind of talk.

In another break from current policy, Riot will also be tackling the issue of players complaining about their bans. If a player is caught by this new system attacking another player and they debate their innocence, Riot will be publishing chat transcripts so as to be "fully transparent".

Some players have also asked why we've taken such an aggressive stance when we've been focused on reform; well, the key here is that for most players, reform approaches are quite effective. But, for a number of players, reform attempts have been very unsuccessful which forces us to remove some of these players from League entirely.

Go get 'em, Riot.

If you are racist in soloQ get ready for a 14 day ban. [LoL Reddit]

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According to DC Comics, it's Batman Day today. So let's talk about your favorite stories featuring the Dark Knight.

For me, like loads of other fans, it's really hard to pin it down from just one Batman story. I'm already on the record as a big fan of Venom, the 1991 story from the Legends of the Dark Knight anthology series. Also, this scene from Batman: Year One is a great example of just how much the Dark Knight's appearance upends the corrupt nature of Gotham City so that's up there in my personal favorites list.

But the Robin's Reckoning episode from the mid-1990s Batman: The Animated Series also make my best Batman list, too. It's a good illustration of how adding Robin to the mythos makes Batman better, by giving him someone to help and a way to connect back with emotional ties that were deadened after his own parents died.

Batman's celebrating his 75th anniversary this year. That's a lot of stories. Surely you have some that you think other people should know about. The Dark Knight Returns? The Laughing Fish? Return of the Joker? Damien Wayne's first appearance? A random issue from the old Brave and Bold comics? What are your favorite stories featuring the Dark Knight?

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