Bewarethewumpus

In this boss fight from the 1994 role-playing game Final Fantasy 6, the character Sabin shows off his epic wrestling skills by lifting an entire train up in the air to perform a “suplex” move.

Our goal in Bridge Constructor is to build a bridge, and then pass through it. But as usual, it wouldn't be all that fun if it were that simple. Vinny on YouTube thankfully knows exactly how to do it in a classy way.

Crossing the bridge is actually the last thing you wanna do:

The source of the gifs, Vinny's original video, is really fun to watch:

Vinny - Breaking Bridge Constructor [Vinesauce, YouTube]

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abby-lemon:

GOOD AT SHARING!

The prettiest Zelda game, now playable in virtual reality and in a new perspective. Awesome.

As you can see in this video by Chadtronic, unlike the Ocarina demo, this isn't a proof of concept that's missing a lot of key elements. You can battle and interact with the world normally, and all the characters are present. There are some slight hiccups, of course, since Wind Waker was never meant to be played in this perspective, but still! It's neat to watch.

One thing I really appreciate about looking this version of the game is that it gives you a better sense of how tiny Link really is when you wade through the grass or pick a pot up. D'aaw. He's just a little kid, you know?

Zelda: Wind Waker on Oculus Rift in True First Person [Chadtronic]

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To random bystanders, the protagonist of 'Twitch Plays Pokémon' must have seemed strange—having thousands of people control the movement of a single character makes Red seem erratic. Now imagine what it must've felt like to be the mother of a kid that acts that way.

Normally, stuff about Red's movement goes for laughs, but this excellent comic by famaululat goes for the heart instead. It's the story of Red's mother, her worry about her son's behavior—and eventual relief when his adventure is over. Check it out:

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Aww. I kind of love all the stories people have come up with to go along with the first playthrough of 'Twitch Plays Pokemon.' I'd like to think things got better for Red, mental-health wise, now that it's all over, but that's partially because I've also seen this other emotional comic by kiyokon:

Dang.

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The Obama administration has a new negotiator in its effort to pass the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a secretly negotiated treaty that includes broad powers to censor and surveil the Internet: Robert Holleyman, one of the chief SOPA lobbyists. Holleyman just retired from serving as head of the Business Software Alliance. His successor is Victoria Espinel, who just quit the Obama administration, where she served as "IP Czar." Obama promised to shut down the revolving door between lobbyists and government, but it's spinning quicker than ever.

Dr. Sanjay Gupta, a neurosurgeon and CNN Chief Medical Correspondent, used to be an opponent of medical marijuana. Last year. after looking into the research, he changed his mind. Now he is "doubling down" on his position that marijuana is effective medicine.

Since our documentary "Weed" aired in August, I have continued to travel the world, investigating and asking tough questions about marijuana.

I have met with hundreds of patients, dozens of scientists and the curious majority who simply want a deeper understanding of this ancient plant. I have sat in labs and personally analyzed the molecules in marijuana that have such potential but are also a source of intense controversy. I have seen those molecules turned into medicine that has quelled epilepsy in a child and pain in a grown adult. I've seen it help a woman at the peak of her life to overcome the ravages of multiple sclerosis.

I am more convinced than ever that it is irresponsible to not provide the best care we can, care that often may involve marijuana.

I am not backing down on medical marijuana; I am doubling down.

Gupta: 'I am doubling down' on medical marijuana

NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden has submitted written testimony [PDF] to an EU committee investigating mass surveillance. Glyn Moody's Techdirt post gives a great tl;dr summary of the document, but you should really read it for yourself. It's ten single-spaced pages, but Snowden turns out to be an extremely talented writer who beautifully lays out his arguments, managing the trick of being dispassionate while simultaneously conveying the import of his subject matter.

Snowden makes the point that his testimony doesn't disclose anything that the press hasn't already published, but there's been so much that it's worth reviewing some of it. He directs our attention to something I'd missed: the NSA's Foreign Affairs Division (FAD) spends an extraordinary amount of time lobbying EU nations (and other countries) to change their laws so that the NSA can legally spy on everyone in the country. What's more, they cook these deals -- for example, they'll get German permission to listen in on everything by non-Germans and get a Danish deal that covers all the non-Danes, but since the Internet backbones traverse both countries, they can spy on Germans in Denmark and Danes in Germany. As Snowden says, "The surest way for any nation to become subject to unnecessary surveillance is to allow its spies to dictate its policy."

Snowden also reveals that before he blew the whistle on the NSA, he "reported these clearly problematic programs to more than ten distinct officials, none of whom took any action to address them." He says that he'd love EU asylum, but doesn't expect any country to have the backbone to stand up to the USA. And he is admirably unequivocal on his relationship with China and Russia: "I have no relationship with either government."

He reaffirms that good crypto is proof against spies, and describes his relationship with Russia's spooks:

Of course. Even the secret service of Andorra would have approached me, if they had had the chance: that's their job.

But I didn't take any documents with me from Hong Kong, and while I'm sure they were disappointed, it doesn't take long for an intelligence service to realize when they're out of luck. I was also accompanied at all times by an utterly fearless journalist [WikiLeaks' Sarah Harrison] with one of the biggest megaphones in the world, which is the equivalent of Kryptonite for spies. As a consequence, we spent the next 40 days trapped in an airport instead of sleeping on piles of money while waiting for the next parade. But we walked out with heads held high.

EU Testimony of Edward Snowden [PDF]

Dave from the Electronic Frontier Foundation sez, "Remember when Rep. Mike Rogers likened opponents of pernicious cybersecurity legislation to 14-year-olds? It turns out that middle-school-age students are also well-prepared to debate him on the NSA's programs as well. EFF congratulates students from two middle schools who took home top prizes in the C-SPAN StudentCam 2014 competition for young filmmakers with their documentaries on the debate over mass surveillance."

The video, featuring an interview with author James Bamford, will air on C-SPAN at 6:50 a.m. E.T. and throughout the day on April 23. You can also watch it online.

Ben Blum, a filmmaker at Saint Mark's School in San Rafael, California, scored second place in the same category for his documentary "Data Obsession," featuring EFF Activist Parker Higgins. It will air on Friday, April 11 and you can watch it below:

Middle Schoolers Win C-SPAN Prizes for NSA Documentaries (Thanks, Dave!)

When you watch Netflix videos in the Chrome browser, the service disables Chrome's developer console, a debugging and programming tool that gives you transparency and control over what your browser is doing. The Hacker News thread explains that this is sometimes done in order to stop an attack called "Self-XSS" that primarily arises on social media sites, where it can cause a browser to leak nominally private information to third parties. But in this case, the "Self-XSS" attack Netflix is worried about is very different: they want to prevent browser owners from consciously choosing to run scripts in the Netflix window that subvert Netflix's restrictions on video.

This is the natural outflow of the pretense that "streaming" exists as a thing that is distinct from "downloading" -- the idea that you can send a stream of bytes to someone else's computer without the computer being able to store those bytes. "Streaming" is at the heart of "rental" business models like Netflix's, and there's nothing wrong with the idea of rental per se. But the only way to attain "rental" with computers is to design computers so that their owners can't give them orders that the landlords disagree with. You have to change the computer and its software so that you can't see what it's doing and can't change what it's doing.

Your browser is a portal to your whole social life, your financial life and your work life, entrusted with the most potentially compromising secrets of your life. Anything that allows third parties to make it harder for you to figure out what the browser is doing, or to prevent it from doing something you don't want, should be a non-starter. As soon as a powerful entity like Netflix comes to depend on -- and insist on -- computers that owners can't control, that company is doing something wrong. Not because rentals are bad, but because taking away owner control from computers is bad.

This is why it's such a big deal that Netflix has convinced Microsoft, Apple, and Google to build user-controlling technology into their browsers, and why it's such a big deal that Microsoft, Apple, and Google have convinced the W3C to standardize this for all devices with HTML5 interfaces. Any time we allow the discussion to be sidetracked into "How can Netflix maximize its revenue by enforcing rental terms?" we're missing the real point, which is, "How can people be sure that their browsers aren't betraying them?"

Netflix disables use of the Chrome developer console (pastebin.com)

In Safety and Efficacy of Lysergic Acid Diethylamide-Assisted Psychotherapy for Anxiety Associated With Life-threatening Diseases, a new paper published in The Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease, a Swiss psychiatrist named Peter Gasser and his colleagues report on the first controlled trial of LSD in forty years. Gasser used LSD therapeutically to treat 12 people nearing the end of their lives, and concluded that their anxiety "went down and stayed down."

Many psychopharmacologists believe that psychedelics such as LSD have therapeutic benefits that could be realized if the strictures on them were loosened. David Nutt, the former UK government drugs czar, called the ban on psychedelics in therapeutic settings "the worst case of scientific censorship since the Catholic Church banned the works of Copernicus and Galileo". He devotes a whole chapter to psychedelics in his brilliant book on drug policy, Drugs Without the Hot Air. If you only read one book about drug policy, read that one.

Gasser's trial is positioned as a major move in the struggle to end the damage the War on Some Drugs has wrought on legitimate medicine. It used a randomized double-blind protocol to dose some dying patients (most with terminal cancer) with LSD as part of an anxiety-reduction strategy. The results were dramatic and positive. In a NYT story, some Gasser's patients relate their experiences with the therapy:

“I had what you would call a mystical experience, I guess, lasting for some time, and the major part was pure distress at all these memories I had successfully forgotten for decades,” Peter said. “These painful feelings, regrets, this fear of death. I remember feeling very cold for a long time. I was shivering, even though I was sweating. It was a mental coldness, I think, a memory of neglect.”

He was also doing something with those sensations, something he had almost never done before. He was talking about them. “It surprised me,” Peter said. “I didn’t know I was talking away until Dr. Gasser made me notice.”

After about two months of weekly therapy, the eight participants who received full doses of LSD improved by about 20 percent on standard measures of anxiety, and the four subjects who took a much weaker dose got worse. (After the trial, those patients were allowed to “cross over” and try the full dose.) Those findings held up for a year in those who have survived.

LSD, Reconsidered for Therapy [Benedict Carey/NYT]

(via /.)

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You've (hopefully) seen the original Zelda on the Oculus Rift. Now I'd like to bring your attention to the Oculus Rift version of what some consider the best Zelda game—not only is this in first person, which makes the game look way different, but it also lets Link jump whenever you want.

Granted, as Chadtronic notes, this is just a proof of concept—not all functionality is currently present in this version of the game. You can't, for example, pick up rupees. The game is also limited to the Kokiri Forest, and not all the character models are present. Still, despite being mostly a "walk around" demo, it looks neat!

You can download this for the Oculus Rift here, if you'd like.

Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time Oculus Rift (Kokiri Forest) [Chadtronic]

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Senate majority leader Harry Reid gave a hell of a speech in Congress about the agenda of the billionaire Koch brothers, carbon barons who are the prime beneficiaries of Citizens United, the Supreme Court case that ruled that corporate persons had the free speech right to engage in unlimited campaign finance spending.

The Facts About The Koch Brothers (via Hacker News)

New Comic: Bulwark

Seemingly out of nowhere, a major promotional campaign for a "real" hoverboard known as HUVr has launched online today. It all began with a pair of bizarre video clips featuring testimonials from celebrities including Tony Hawk, Moby, and Back to the Future's own Christopher Lloyd. One clip shows Lloyd delivering the HUVr to Hawk, followed by demonstrations that are "completely real" — at least if you believe whoever is behind the mysterious PR push. They're calling themselves HUVr Corp and claim to have a staff filled with "materials science, electricity & magnetism experts who've solved an important part of one of science's mysteries: the key to antigravity."

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Another video attempts to explain how this miraculous feat of technology actually works. Along with the YouTube videos, HUVr has also popped up across social media with accounts on Facebook and Instagram. Obviously the product we're seeing here is bogus — despite some convincing video trickery. We've thus far been unable to find any record of such a company existing or any trademarks filed for HUVr. But we're still left scratching our heads when it comes to what this viral stunt is actually seeking to promote.

HOVERBOARDS ARE REAL (finally!) thanks to huvrtech http://t.co/wYjPaJGY6z #theyrehere http://t.co/7vmi2zz94P

— Tony Hawk (@tonyhawk) March 4, 2014

The HUVr website shows a "destination time" of December 2014, suggesting we may be in for a bit of a wait before all is revealed. Is it all a carefully crafted teaser for Tony Hawk's upcoming mobile game? This seems like a very elaborate production if the end goal is boosting App Store sales. Perhaps an Oculus Rift-style virtual reality title (HUVr) could be on the way. Or is this viral campaign meant to stir up early anticipation for another Back to the Future film? Maybe those self-lacing Nike shoes? A December unveiling would make sense ahead of wider availability in 2015. There are many questions and few answers at this point. Looking up the website's registration data offers no hints, and an email from the company — sent from a Gmail account — only said HUVr Corp would respond to us with more details in the future.

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Here's a rather useful visual guide to DayZ play styles by JamesBlakesCat, using portraits from a similar game, Inna Woods. No matter how you play, you're going to get killed for a can of beans (except if you are a murderous hobo.)

A visual guide to play styles for beginners [JamesBlakesCat, via r/dayz]

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.

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Vi Hart, the Internet's favorite manic vlogging mathematician, has released a new video in which she teams up with math artists Andrea Hawksley and Gwen Fisher, and Gwen's sister Ruth of Sweets by Ruth. The four of them bake satisfyingly precise and geometric gingerbread polygons, then build up a variety of astounding three dimensional forms by piecing them together with icing. The video is both hunger-inspiring and brain-inspiring, and is likely to be the best thing you watch this week.

Cookie Shapes

"Moments ago, the Washington, D.C. City Council voted to decriminalize marijuana possession! The bill, which goes into effect this summer, replaces criminal penalties of up to six months in jail and a $1,000 fine with a civil penalty (similar to a parking ticket) of $25 for possession of up to an ounce of marijuana. It also decriminalizes marijuana paraphernalia. This means that, outside of Washington and Colorado, marijuana penalties are now less punitive in our nation’s capital than anywhere else in the country!" - Dan Riffle, Director of Federal Policies for the Marijuana Policy Project

"Monday afternoon, Robert Duncan will report to Mendota Federal Prison in Fresno, Calif., to begin a two-year prison sentence. His crime? Working for a medical marijuana business that was legal under California state law. Not owning it; not profiting from illegal sales. Merely for being employed by the business." - Hit & Run Blog

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