Bewarethewumpus

Author : Duncan Shields, Staff Writer

I was a time traveler. I say ‘was’ because it’s apparent to me now that this was a one-way trip.

I realized I was a god as soon as the pain stopped.

I could hear all the other gods, shouting in my head. Billions of them ordered into groups and catalogues. Every thought that ran through my mind accordioned new sub-menus out, giving me access to the proper people. Polite queries were flooding through me like water through a dam.

I wanted to respond but it was hard to do because of all the screaming I was doing.

It was a social network in my mind. Nodes of location and profession grew and pinpointed depending on my attention. Closing my eyes did nothing.

Most countries I recognized. Some I didn’t. I shied away from the nodes labeled with the names of planets. I only recognized half of the professions. Even though I could hear everyone, I was somehow not going insane. My brain must have been augmented, too.

I looked down at my arms. Light blue with a faint tracery of new lines on the skin. I wanted to get a closer look and immediately I could see the manufactured hairs on my arm in electron microscope detail.

I started screaming again. This was not my body.

I remembered stepping out of my time machine into an alley in what was supposed to be the year 2120. Immediately, I had trouble breathing and my eyes started watering regardless of the air filter and goggles.

Then fire lit up my veins like vegas and I went down.

As soon I came in contact with the future, I was registered as a pure biological and ‘updates’ began pouring into me from the picotech floating in the air. According to the tech, I hadn’t been updated in a long time.

It was like plugging a gaming console into the ancient internet after two years of not playing it. Immediately, downloads for the OS and all of the games would pour in with a need for a restart. It took a long time.

Well, I’ve never been hooked into this network and according to its data, I was in need of a full reinstall.

I was in a coma for two weeks. Upgrade after upgrade slammed into my twitching body. I lay shuddering in the hospital while concerned medpeople monitored it all. The future ran through me like a train.

I am now connected to worldmind, overnet and airmesh. My eyes are sniper scopes and my skin is an air filter. I am blue.

I cannot go back. This future lacks the technology to regress me to my former self and the body I now possess would create thousands of patents that haven’t been invented yet if I went back.

The future is sorry. It says so. Here. In my mind. Everyone one earth apologizes and is happy to meet me. The other planets are knocking on my mental firewalls with well wishes. They all feel bad, like they sprung a trap on me. But they’ve never met a time traveler before and they want to talk.

I have five options of travel if I want to see other planets, seven if I want to leave this body here.

The blue skin around the corners of my mouth hooks up into a smile.

I think I’ll go to Mars.

Author : Jae Miles, Staff Writer

“What’s the range?”

“One hundred metres, sir. Awaiting go code.”

The screen showed multiple long-range views in stunning detail: the sunset illuminating a long balcony on which an old man sat sipping a drink and having a smoke. On the ground around his home, a pack of wolves could be seen settling down for the evening.

“Will the wolves cause us any trouble?”

“The Manson Four will not even be slowed down by them. But are we sure about the UN failsafe, sir?”

The man in the black uniform grinned contemptuously: “We’ve been killing humans since drones got the ability to behave like eagles with range weapons. The United Nations sop to the bleeding-hearts is about as effective as blu-ray region coding.”

The operator nodded: “Okay, sir. Nine minutes remain on strike window. Your decision please?”

Major-General Carsen looked at the feeds of his oldest friend turned worst opponent. A genius who personally designed, or had a hand in the designing, the core systems of every robotic warfare device in the world. Without his work, the stuff wouldn’t be half as good; if it functioned at all.

“Sir?”

“What is it?”

“I thought I’d run an advanced detection pass. Two of those wolves are Black Dog Twenties.”

Carsen smiled. Those were Geraint’s hole cards.

“Pass the targeting for them to the drone on overwatch. When I give the go, I want them in pieces before our unit clears the treeline. Good work.”

“Yessir.” The operator grinned.

“This is a go.”

The operator nodded and sent the confirmation and co-ordinates.

“Sir! Both Black Dogs have bolted into the hardened shelter under the house.”

Carsen looked down at the operator: “No matter. From there they won’t be able to interdict. Overwatch from ready to standby. Sitrep?”

“Unit has stopped at the treeline, sir. Telemetry indicates a dynamic firmware flash in progress.”

Carsen threw his coffee across the room: “How many times have I told them that operational units are not for remote update?”

The operator’s fingers flew: “It’s not remote, sir. Seems to be loading from a ROM module in the chassis.”

Carsen’s hand froze in mid-wave.

“A module installed during the build?”

“Yes sir. It would have to be.”

Carsen checked the screens. The figure on the balcony flicked his cigarette to arc directly toward the unit, supposedly unseen in the trees.

“Unit has departed the zone at assault speed, sir. Course two-twenty.”

“I want to see the instruction set it is obeying. Machine speak will do.”

“Sir!”

They waited until a monitor off to one side scrolled a single line.

RTB:KILLANY INTERDICT RTB:KILLALL ALLELSE:VOID

Carsen stared. Then, in a whisper: “Operator, action a full defensive alert. Pass the specs on the Manson Four’s stealth capabilities to all personnel. Emphasise that someone better be brilliant, or get lucky; I don’t care. Otherwise we’re all dead.”

“Sir?”

He pointed at the screen: “That man never bought insurance. He said that you should always prepare for the worst. I suspect that every piece of combat robotics on this planet is hardloaded to return to base and kill everything, but only if it is sent to attack Geraint Darby.”

On the screen, the figure looked up into the lens over three miles above and raised his glass in ironic salute.

Author : Gary Will Kreie

I love my new self-driving car.

My name is Leo. This is my brand new 2029 crashless car with vehicle-to-vehicle communication and GSDS, the Google Self-Driving System. I love my commute now. My car is pre-programmed to know the best way to get me downtown where I work. I turn on internet talk radio, but it’s airing another rant from an anti-tech kook, who sees networked cars as government intrusion and would blow it all up, if he had a chance. That’s not me. I love this stuff. I push the GO button on the dash. My car backs out of the garage and makes its way into the street. Here we go.

Traffic signal? No problem. My car, I call it Mr. Jeez, exchanges digital messages with the traffic light and slows a little to reach the signal just as it turns green, so we won’t have to stop. Then Mr. Jeez accelerates onto the interstate highway.

Another car with a nice looking woman enters the highway and sends Mr. Jeez a digital message asking if her car can merge into our lane. My car automatically replies with a “Yes” digital message and slows to let her merge in front of us. I have Mr. Jeez’s aggressiveness level set to “not very”.

A car behind me is closing fast. That guy must have his level set to “espresso”. His car wants to get around mine. He must be late for work. I sit back and watch what happens.

His car sends a request to Mr. Jeez to kindly move out of our lane. My car replies with a proposed price, and tells his car that we take BitPal. His car and mine negotiate quickly per my pre-programmed instructions, and now my car is moving to the next lane to let him by. And I am 96 cents richer. As he zooms by, I see that there isn’t even a driver in the car at all. Just a big metal box in back with a glowing counter. And it has a bumper sticker that reads, “That’s all, Folks.” I heard a beep, which I think means my car and this one exchanged one late message. Hmmm.

The rest of the drive on the interstate is becoming routine, so I take a nap and let Mr. Jeez finish my drive downtown. I love Mr. Jeez.

#

About an hour later.

Where are we? I wake up and my car is stopped. I should be at my building downtown where my car drops me off and then finds itself a parking space. I appear to be parked in the desert beneath a cliff.

The GSDS map shows that we are about 50 miles from the city, which is on the other side of this hill. Why would Mr. Jeez bring me here? I wonder if Mr. Jeez knows something. I wonder if Mr. Jeez monitors me. I wonder if he heard me say I love him. I wonder what other cars tell Mr. Jeez about their owners.

I turn on the radio and hear, “…and they think the robo-car could be headed directly for the center of downtown with a thermo-nucle…”

White everywhere blinds me. I open my eyes and the white starts to dim a little. I realize my car is in the shadow of the cliff, which is shielding us from the flash coming from the direction of downtown.

My car knew something. It drove me here. It protects me from crashes. It protects me from everything.

I watch the shock wave blow past us.

Author : Sam Davis

I think I’m a robot. Hi. I’m Arthur. My parents, well I guess I should say the people that own me, they like to call me Artie. All my friends here at school call me Arthur though. They say I seem more grown up that way, and that makes sense to them since I was in my wreck. To be clear, it wasn’t really my wreck. I didn’t cause it or anything. Really it was just a wreck that happened to me.

That’s when it happened. At least that’s when I think it happened. I remember being a kid and all that other stuff. I even remember the car slamming into my bike. There are some bits and pieces of a few other things-ambulance, nurses, a lot of yelling and some sobbing in the background. After that though, it’s all blank.

My mother says that’s because I was in a coma. It is what the doctor said too. But I can tell I’m different. I think I died and they bought a robot body to put what they could harvest of my consciousness in. Marco says they do it all the time on the streets like some sort of reverse back alley abortion. Marco likes to seem like he knows things, because he is the only Latino we know. His dad owns the dealership on Park. We all take what Marco says with a grain of salt. Laura says it’s total bullshit.

My parents don’t love me anymore though. At least, not how they used too. Instead of taking care of me, it feels like they are taking care of a car. I don’t even mind that much except when my dad stares at me for a long time at dinner. I think he is worried I’ll snap and kill them like in the movies. But that’s not the plan.

Marco said his dad has the stuff at the Dealership to make an EMP. He was right. It took us about three weeks of after school “study groups” to build it the right way. Laura says we shouldn’t do it. What if it does kill me? I told her I thought she said it was total bullshit. Apparently so would me being dead. But I’m pretty sure I already am.

We are going to try it tonight. I guess this is my note, though I don’t think this counts as suicide. Maybe vandalism? Don’t punish Marco or anything though if it works. I know it will work. I wonder if I’ll feel myself fuse together. I wonder if I have a soul any more. Or if I got a new one when I got remade. If there is an afterlife, I wonder if I’ll get to meet myself.

An American student studying abroad had to be rescued by a group of more than 20 firefighters last week after getting trapped deep inside of a gigantic vagina sculpture by Fernando de la Jara in Tübingen, Germany.

Cyber attackers had a busy schedule on Wednesday: Twitter’s TweetDeck experienced an attack that left millions of consumers’ accounts vulnerable to hijacking, and Feedly appears to have been taken for ransom. While TweetDeck was back to normal after a few hours, Feedly continues to experience sporadic outages.

Silicon Beat reports criminal hackers launched an attack on Feedly, an online RSS reader used to keep up with blogs and other news outlets, and tried to extort money from the company.

Although the company reports the issue was resolved Wednesday afternoon, it appears a second attack is currently underway. A new post on the Feedly blog simply titled “Denial of service attack [Wave #2]” links to the company’s previous posting on Wednesday’s attack.

That may explain why while using the site this morning several Consumerist editors only had partial success in reading news feeds.

Early Wednesday morning, officials with the site reported on their blog that “criminals are attacking with a distributed denial of service attack” and that the company would continue to “refuse to give in” to attempts of extortion.

A few hours later, the Feedly blog reported changes were being made to the infrastructure that would allow it to bring the site back online. Shortly after that, the blog reported it had neutralized the attack, and that users should be able to access their accounts online, via mobile apps and third-party applications.

Feedly Says Criminal Hackers Demanded Money To Stop Attack [Silicon Beat]

If you’re like most people, the most expensive stamp you have in your possession is probably valued at around, oh, whatever the current price for postage is. High five! But among serious stamp collectors it’s a different story — and the world’s most valuable stamp of all stamps just raked in a pretty penny at auction.

A 1-cent postage stamp called the 1856 British Guaina One-Cent Magenta made it to the record books again as the world’s most valuable stamp when it sold yesterday for $9.5 million at a Sotheby’s auction in New York City, reports the Associated Press.

This little bit of paper has been around the block before — it’s the fourth time its sale has broken the auction record for a single stamp.

The tiny stamp hasn’t been shown to the public since 1986, which means it’s a pretty big deal.

“You’re not going to find anything rarer than this,” said Allen Kane, director of the Smithsonian National Postal Museum. “It’s a stamp the world of collectors has been dying to see for a long time.”

The Magenta broke the previous record of $2.3 million for an 1855 Swedish stamp that sold in 1996.

The stamp comes with a bit of sordid back story as well, as its last owner was John E. du Pont, an heir to the du Pont chemical fortune. He bought the stamp in 1980 for $935,000. He was later convicted of fatally shooting an Olympic champion wrestler, and the stamp was then sold by his estate.

Though there are other example of a similar 4-cent stamp that was produced at the same time, this is the only known 1-cent stamp of its kind to exist.

Raise your hand if you fee like it’s time to start rooting around in the attic again. I can’t see your hands but I know you’re all with me here.

Rare Stamp Sells for $9.5 Million [Associated Press]

Ads by Project Wonderful! Your ad could be here, right now.

Emily why

In case you were wondering, when you put Legend of Zelda characters in a Dynasty Warriors-style set-up, everything gets a bit more ferocious. Maybe even uncomfortably so.

Usually when you see Link fighting enemies in his many video game appearances, he comes across as determined and resolute. It never seems like he likes the violence. But this trailer for Hyrule Warriors makes the Hero of Time look a bit more bloodthirsty than normal. The most interesting part of this clip might be the Dodongo fight, where Link takes on the giant lizard with his trademark bombs.

Has Link ever looked this vicious? He's come close a few times.

Seriously, Wind Waker Link will eff you up. But, Hyrule Warriors' Link will almost certainly rack up a bigger body count.

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There is no disappointment as widespread and meekly accepted as the true appearance of fast food versus advertising glamour shots. As MediocreFilms proves in this hidden camera video, it doesn't have to be that way.

That's right, if you are polite and courteous and the store your in isn't in the middle of a rush, you just might be able to convince someone at McDonald'a, Wendy's, Jack-in-the-Box or Burger King to gussy up your garish gut-bombs. Because if you're going to kick yourself repeatedly in the stomach, there's no reason you can use a very pretty steel-toed boot to do it.

I'd advise against trying this under less than the ideal conditions presented in this video. If I walked into my McDonald's during the lunch rush and asked them to make my burger pretty, at the very least my request would be politely declined.

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The Gregory Brothers are back with a new electro-pop summer jam and boy, it’s got a lot of herpin’ and derpin’.

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This fan made video combines two of Trey Parker and Matt Stone’s creations, South Park and The Book of Mormon, into one musical cartoon.

Some days, it feels like it can be difficult to get people excited about space exploration. It's space! It's the universe! Get excited already! Which is why NASA, being the lovable nerds that they are, have decided to use Peter Cullen, AKA the voice of Optimus Prime, to get you pumped about the Hubble's successor.

So sit back, relax, and listen as the sultry voice of Peter Cullen shows how the James Webb Space Telescope will transform and roll out...for science!

via NASA

To contact the author of this post, write to chrisperson@kotaku.com or find him on Twitter at @papapishu.

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BIG ANNOUNCEMENT!!

submitted by yoyoyoyoyoyoyoyoyow
[link] [6 comments]

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Pyro from X-Men isn't one of the best known characters in the Marvel universe, but that doesn't mean his backpack mounted flamethrower isn't cool as all heck. And for our amusement, one tinkerer decided to bring it to life.

Watch inventor Colin Furze (the same guy who made retractable wolverine claws) takes on a nerdy tinkering challenge and sets stuff on fire in the process . Throw some space marine armor and that could also pass as a sweet Terran Firebat costume.

It should be noted that strapping a tank of propane to your back and having wrist-activated flamethrowers is probably incredibly dangerous and stupid, so whatever you do don't try this at home. Unless that is you're really, really cool and want to impress all your friends, in which case I'm not gonna narc on you, man. Here's how Colin did it:

You got my attention, Colin!

Colinfurze via Devour

To contact the author of this post, write to chrisperson@kotaku.com or find him on Twitter at @papapishu.

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The conclusion of three years of work, this is FamilyJules7x taking us on one hell of a musical journey, as he thrashes out metal versions of the theme songs to most of gaming's greatest games.

It's quite the feat musically, sure, but I'm actually more impressed by the amount of research that went into this. It's easy to cover the Halo theme. It's a lot harder to rock out to Phozon's soundtrack.

There are 38 songs in all.

Replay: A Metal Tribute to the History of Video Games [YouTube]

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"Let’s face it, anybody who does not believe that gay marriage is going to be the law of the land just hasn’t been observing what’s going on. There is a question whether [the courts] should be able to tell the states what they can or cannot do with something as important as marriage, but the trend right now in the courts is to permit gay marriage and anybody who doesn’t admit that just isn’t living in the real world. We have an excellent federal bench [in Utah]. Other federal judges down there might not have arrived at the same conclusion that these two have. But I think it’s a portent of the future that sooner or later gay marriage is probably going to be approved by the Supreme Court of the United States, certainly as the people in this country move towards it, especially young people. I don’t think that’s the right way to go; on the other hand, I do accept whatever the courts say." - Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-UT), speaking on Utah radio.

RELATED: The Salt Lake Tribune points out that Hatch "played a key role" in the appointment of the judge who overturned Utah's ban on same-sex marriage. They also note that his website continues to back a federal ban.

lawfulgoodness:

chad-hunter:

LUPITA NYONG’O IS LITERALLY GOD INCARNATE ON THIS EARTH AND THIS GIFSET IS PROOF

She is one of us!

thebigblackwolfe:

If you’ve cut a negative person from your life, whether they were abusive or just someone who wasn’t a positive influence on you, at NO POINT in your healing are you required to let that person BACK into your life.

Your healing should never be contingent on you bringing people who have harmed you back into your space. Your healing does not require you to give these people a second chance to harm you.