Bewarethewumpus

Author : Duncan Shields, Staff Writer

The white Silracan clicked its chest-legs together and reared back in what was the human equivalent of a bored sigh. Between it and the hologram of the Earth forces commander lay a chess board made of light. Admiral Grimwald gazed sternly at the board, concern creasing his angry brow.

“As you can see, Admiral. I’ve created a version of our battle here in what you call a chess board. A very interesting game, I have to admit. I’ve quite enjoyed forcing our armaments and troops into an approximation of it during our takeover of your race’s empire.”

The Admiral’s face might have been carved from wood for all the change it showed at this statement. He still looked at the board, contemplating the layout.

It was going bad for black. The white pieces took up most of the board. The black only had a few pieces left to protect the king.

It wouldn’t be long before they lost Earth itself.

“One thing you need to admit, Admiral, is that at this point it would seem you are quite close to checkmate, as you say. If you are the Black King and I am the White King, then I think the game draws nearly to a close. However, I can give you a chance to end the game now and abdicate peacefully. Here. I’ll appeal to your…..ah, yes, that’s the word….sentiment.”

The Silracan clacked its mandibles together in a staccato demand. An underling brought a mutilated human forward. A soldier, still able to stand through sheer force of will. She trembled but managed to bring her head up into a level gaze with the hologram of the Admiral.

“If you give up now, Admiral, I’ll spare this hostage’s life. Though she may be a lowly pawn, I believe you can see the symbolism here. I will spare both her and the rest of your people. Slavery is an ugly word but I believe your race will find it preferable to death.”

The Admiral looked at the hostage. For the first time in six months of military action that had descended into costly attrition, rebel tactics, and guerrilla warfare, he smiled. It was like he’d forgotten how.

“Well I’ll be damned. What’s your name, private?” he asked.

“Sheila Bailey, shir.” She managed to push through her ravaged mouth.

“Your family will be notified. You’ll get more posthumous awards than anyone else in history. Well. Are you ready?” asked the Admiral.

The Silracan’s head craned back and forth between the human exchange in bewilderment.

“Quebec Uniform Echo Echo November.” Said the captain.

The Sirlracan checked the translator to see that it hadn’t malfunctioned.

The soldier fell to the ground and writhed. Smoke started to pour of her mouth as the nanotech in her bloodstream went to work, turning all of the chemicals in her body into very powerful explosive device.

“All of my soldiers were given this injection. All of my ‘pawns’ as it were. The hope was that at least one would make it over to the other side of the board. I never thought you’d actually help with that.” Said the Admiral to the Silracan sadly, watching the soldier die.

The Silracan screamed and tried to twist away from the now-glowing body of the soldier. Milliseconds later, a giant explosion tore the mothership in half.

Without leadership, the Silracan forces dissipated.

“That soldier is no longer a pawn.” Said the captain as he watched the mini-nova from the mothership’s imploding drive, big enough to be see with the naked eye happen in the night sky.

“Now she is a queen.”

VFX studio Big Lazy Robot presents iDiots, a superb CG animation short about a cardboard parallel world where smartphone-addicted robots like to share viral videos, download apps just to fit in and even line up outside the store overnight for the latest next-gen device.

These animated GIFs provide a surprisingly excellent medium for commentary regarding video game console rivalries.

Here's a new installment in Anita Sarkeesian's Kickstarter-funded, misogynist-enraging, must-watch "Tropes vs Women in Video Games" series: Ms Male Character: a closely annotated, fascinating 25 minutes on the practice of producing a "female" version of video-games by feminizing the lead characters.

The Adult Swim game Giant Boulder of Death takes the trope to ridiculous extremes by gendering a pink boulder with a giant pink bow before she’s stuffed in the refrigerator to motivate the blue boulder to seek revenge.

Now the interesting thing is that these gendered signifiers are really quite arbitrary and abstract. There’s nothing about a bow in and of itself that is intrinsically or essentially feminine; it’s just a piece of colored fabric, after all. But our society currently assigns a very specific, socially constructed and strictly enforced meaning to that piece of fabric. It’s a symbol that conveys the concept of female (and invokes the idea of girlhood.)

The indie game Rogue Legacy has an interesting system whereby you can be randomly assigned the choice of either male or female heirs to play on each run. The characters are essentially identical both mechanically and aesthetically (except for a very minor difference in their breast plate styles). So far so good, but all the female heirs also have a strangely conspicuous and completely unnecessary lavender colored bow on top of their armour. This is a classic example of put a bow on it!

The colour-coding of characters is another frequently used visual element to signify gender. Typically the dominant color used in the design of the female variant is bright pink (although sometimes a purple or pastel palette may be used).

In the 1985 NES classic Ice Climber, player 1 controls Popo who wears a blue parka. If you have a 2nd player they can control Nana who wears a pink parka.

Ms. Male Character - Tropes vs Women in Video Games

No surprise that the NSA is facing its largest-ever increase in Freedom of Information Act requests: up 988 percent. Don't worry, though: the agency has a strategy for coping with the floodtide of queries about warrantless spying: it just denies all of them.

This post is not about the day to day operations of The Old Reader or anything of that nature.  It’s about how our team came to get involved with RSS and how we see the future of this application and technology that we value so highly.

As a long time user of RSS and Google Reader, I’ve long appreciated the benefits of the technology.  Like many people, my use of Google Reader faded a bit as social media platforms took hold.  But, I’d always go back to Google Reader when I wanted to cut through the noise of social networks and focus on things I’m really passionate about.  Google Reader wasn’t my “second screen” application where I’d go to take a break from work.  It filled a much more essential need for me by providing these three features:

1.  Unread items are kept in a queue.  I don’t miss things.  No algorithm chooses what to show me or not show me.

2.  It’s an archive of blogs that I value and posts that I’ve read.

3.  I can follow whatever I want from anywhere on the web.  It embodies the open web.

For my professional career in web research and development, I can’t really live without these features.  I can follow twitter feeds or like Facebook pages, but I’m certain to miss important content from people who I highly value.  I need those items queued, archived, and I need to be able to subscribe to anybody on the entire open web.  I can’t be limited to those authors who choose to enter into private social networks and I don’t want to have to constantly check my accounts for updates.

So this leads me to how we got involved in The Old Reader.  When Google Reader shut it’s doors, my business partner Jim did some research and tried several services and suggested I’d like The Old Reader the best.  So we both moved on over.  I read some articles trying to understand why Google Reader would shut down and one really stuck with me.  It hypothesized that Google had been following the lead of companies like Facebook and Twitter by turning their backs on the open web and trying to build their own private/closed social networks.  It’s frankly hard to argue against this theory.

However, we see this trend of migrating from the open web to private networks as cyclical.  How long will it be before your Facebook stream is so full of promoted content, bizarre algorithmic decisions, and tracking cookie based shopping cart reminders that you won’t be getting any valuable information?  For as little as $60, a business can promote a page to Facebook users.  It won’t be long before your news feed is worthless.  So we jumped at the opportunity to get involved with developing and managing The Old Reader.  We believe in it.

As we’ve been looking to grow our engineering team at Levee Labs and The Old Reader we’ve met with a number of bright young people that are surprisingly unaware of RSS.  They say “I recognize the RSS icon, but haven’t really ever used it.”  Is it possible that there is a lost generation of internet users that are completely unfamiliar with RSS?  Are they unfamiliar with the idea of the open web too?  We believe that’s the case and we’ve been working hard to come up with ideas that’ll expose that generation to RSS, The Old Reader, and the open web.  It’s what made the internet great to begin with and it’s coming back.

Thanks for using The Old Reader!

Norway is the latest US ally to erupt in outrage at the news that the NSA was intercepting millions of its phone calls in total disregard for Norwegian law. A new Snowden leak shows that between Dec 8, 2012 and Jan 8, 2013, the NSA logged 33,186,042 Norwegian phone calls, intercepting an enormous amount of sensitive data about Norwegians' private lives. Last June, the former Norwegian prime minister was assured by senior US officials that no such interception had taken place. In addition to being a NATO member, Norway is a close surveillance partner with the US, part of the "nine eyes" surveillance partnership.

"Friends should not monitor each other," Norway's prime minister Erna Solberg told Norwegian broadcaster NRK on Tuesday. "It is legitimate to engage in intelligence, but it should be targeted and suspect based."

"It is unacceptable for allies to engage in intelligence against eachother's political leadership," added justice minister Anders Anundsen.

Jens Stoltenberg, Norway's prime minister at the time the surveillance reportedly took place, said that he had not been informed of the monitoring when he grilled senior US officials on data collected from Norway after the first NSA revelations in June.

"I have not been informed of the sort of monitoring which is now being described," he told NRK. "The information that is now coming out shows that it is necessary to go a second round with the Americans. It is important to get the facts and then evaluate them."

NSA logged 33m calls in Nato ally Norway [Richard Orange/The Local]

(via Reddit)

(Image: Dagbladet.no)

The English language has a new preposition, driven by Internet conventions: "Because." It's not clear where this originates, but I like the theory that's it's a contraction of "$SOMETHING is $MESSED_UP, because, hey, politics!"

However it originated, though, the usage of "because-noun" (and of "because-adjective" and "because-gerund") is one of those distinctly of-the-Internet, by-the-Internet movements of language. It conveys focus (linguist Gretchen McCulloch: "It means something like 'I'm so busy being totally absorbed by X that I don’t need to explain further, and you should know about this because it's a completely valid incredibly important thing to be doing'"). It conveys brevity (Carey: "It has a snappy, jocular feel, with a syntactic jolt that allows long explanations to be forgone").

But it also conveys a certain universality. When I say, for example, "The talks broke down because politics," I'm not just describing a circumstance. I'm also describing a category. I'm making grand and yet ironized claims, announcing a situation and commenting on that situation at the same time. I'm offering an explanation and rolling my eyes—and I'm able to do it with one little word. Because variety. Because Internet. Because language. 

English Has a New Preposition, Because Internet [Megan Garber/The Atlantic]

(via Making Light)

Matthew says: "Evan Booth builds weapons with materials purchased in an airport terminal, past the security screening. Here's a frag grenade built with a coffee mug, batteries, and a condom."

Tycho: So, I wrote that sea shanty comic thing, and then Katie Rice drew it, so my life was more or less complete.  But then we got a mail that Ubisoft was going to have a real band actually perform it, which wasn’t anything we’d talked about previously, but obviously I was fine with that.  So pirate rock outfit The Dread Crew Of Oddwood got hold of the lyrics, and then they made this.  Which is fairly (if not utterly) wow.  You can by the track here if you are so inclined, but I thought that was pretty cool. (CW)TB

When mom leaves dad in charge of the kids, the training day begins for these two adorable wall-climbing candy ninjas.

There are totally no broken or missing features like a lack of buttons to press or anything.

A decade ago, the New York Times prepared the first, breaking story about warrantless domestic surveillance in America. But, at the Bush administration's urging, it delayed publication until after the next election. NYT public editor Margaret Sullivan reviews the ongoing sense of betrayal felt by its readers, and how it made the newspaper an unappealing port of call for whistleblowing sources such as Edward Snowden.

[Washington bureau chief Philip] Taubman remembers his fateful recommendation not to publish as “an agonizing one.” He dismisses any role played by his relationships with members of the Bush administration, including Condoleezza Rice, with whom he shares longstanding and close ties to Stanford University (where they both now teach). As national security adviser in 2004 and secretary of state in 2005, she opposed the article’s publication, he said. But “that did not affect my thinking,” which was that national security would be harmed by publication.

And here's Bill Keller, then-executive editor of the NYT:

“Three years after 9/11, we, as a country, were still under the influence of that trauma, and we, as a newspaper, were not immune,” Mr. Keller said. “It was not a kind of patriotic rapture. It was an acute sense that the world was a dangerous place.”

Nonetheless, the story suddenly became fit to print when its reporter took it to another publisher.

I was going to solve this the easy way, but this is much more difficult.  Thanks.

via http://scotchandjazzatdusk.com/

Author : Clint Wilson, Staff Writer

Billy-Jim Crenshaw was snoozing in his swamp shack when the explosion shook him fast awake. “What th’…?” He scrambled to his feet and, throwing the crooked door open, stumbled out onto the back porch. There, upon a small hillock that had been recently occupied by Billy-Jim’s dilapidated outhouse, sat a smoldering metallic disc.

“Gall dang it,” he said aloud to himself. “That thar flying saucer thingy done o-blit-ar-ated my gosh darn privy!” He stepped back into the shack and procured two items. Reemerging with his squirrel gun in one hand and a big jug of moonshine in the other, he watched as a strange door opened in the still-smoking disc. There was an electric hum and a staircase extended down from the saucer.

Billy-Jim took a long swig as he watched the little green man emerge. Suddenly from the woods, his hunting dog, Brutus sprang forth, teeth bare, growling like a raccoon caught in a rattrap. The rottweiler leapt at the alien. The green man calmly extended a finger and bright lighting flashed forth, instantly turning poor Brutus into a charred, unidentifiable smoking heap.

The hick slammed back another mouthful and cast the jug aside as the alien continued to advance. But before he could raise his gun, another four-legged beast again rushed growling toward the little green man. This time from the swamp came Billy-Jim’s pet alligator, Pork Chop. The six hundred pound lizard moved blindingly fast, but the alien was faster. Again the lightning flashed from its fingertip, again its would-be assailant was turned into smoldering ash.

“Poor Brutus, poor Pork Chop,” sniffled the hick. “This is fer you two!” The alien had been continuing toward him and was now halfway across the patchy back yard as Billy-Jim pulled the trigger. It quickly held out a palm and suddenly there was a muffled explosion as the barrel of the squirrel gun split open. The green man continued to advance unharmed.

Now a strange and eerie metallic voice reached Billy-Jim’s ears. “Please do not attempt to harm me again human. I am here to make peaceful contact with your race.” The alien strolled up to the porch as the confused man stood silently, his destroyed weapon hanging uselessly from his hand.

Billy-Jim finally uttered, “I…I…I won’t sir.”

The alien stopped and stood there staring at him with giant black, pupiless eyes. “Remain calm human. Please, pick up that vessel and continue to consume your fermented substance. I do not intend to make you uncomfortable in any way.”

Billy-Jim relaxed ever so slightly and picked up the jug. “Wha… what do ya want?”

“I need to contact your scientific department as I seem to have had a mishap with my ship back there. It’s quite simple really, I only need to procure a paltry ten or fifteen thousand terawatts of power to recharge my vehicle’s capacitor.”

The swamp dweller hadn’t a clue what the green man had said, but he again tipped back the jug and had a great long swig. Then he leaned forward and let out a mighty belch. It echoed off the trees. Then the cloud of burp-smell reached the alien. For a moment its black eyes bulged out in surprise. Then, its arms flailing, and its mouth gasping wordlessly, a paleness came over its face and it collapsed suddenly to the ground stone cold dead.

Billy-Jim spat between his few remaining teeth and said, “Serves ya right ya dang space invader! That thar was fer Brutus and Pork Chop!” He rocked back on his heels satisfied, and had another long swig of moonshine.

 

 

David Nutt is a brilliant psychopharmacologist who once served as the UK's drug czar, until he was ousted for refusing to suppress the data that showed that many legal drugs were as bad or worse for you than illegal drugs, and that the war on drugs was a losing battle that wasn't reducing abuse or crime.

Now he's back in industry, and he's got an awesome idea he's trying to get funded: a tailored variation on alcohol that has exactly the same intoxicating effect but inflicts none of the physical damage of booze, and lets you get instantly, totally sober just by taking an antidote. He describes it as having the same relationship to booze that e-cigarettes have to tobacco. He's gone on the Dragon's Den for funding (unsurprisingly, the alcohol industry wasn't interested in investing!).

Nutt's book Drugs Without the Hot Air is the best book on the drug war and the reality of drugs, addiction and intoxication that I've yet read. I have no idea if he has any business acumen, but a synthetic alcohol that doesn't wreck your liver or cause physical addiction, and that can be sobered up from in moments is an astoundingly great idea.

He said: “I think this would be a serious revolution in health... just like the e-cigarette is going to revolutionise the smoking of tobacco.

“I find it weird that we haven't been speaking about this before, as it's such a target for health improvement.”

One of the biggest benefits to Prof Nutt’s alcohol substitute would be to remove addiction as a drinking problem. The scientist said 10 per cent of drinkers become addicted, and that addicts account for most of the one and a half million people killed by alcohol every year.

The Professor said that the drug would be taken in the form of a range of cocktails, and added: “I’ve done the prototype experiments myself many years ago, where I’ve been inebriated and then it’s been reversed by the antagonist.

“That’s what really gave us the idea. There’s no question that you can produce a whole range of effects like alcohol by manipulating the brain.”

Getting drunk without the hangover or health risks – scientist seeks investment for ‘alcohol substitute’ drug [Adam Withnall/The Independent]

(via /.)

Great book.

In an Atlantic editorial, Bruce Schneier discusses the post-Snowden business-climate. The NSA relied on Internet giants to do surveillance for them (surveillance being a major part of the Big Data business model), and pre-Snowden, there was no real downside to cooperating with illegal NSA spying requests -- in some cases, spooks would shower your company with money if it went along with the gag. Post-Snowden, all surveillance cooperation should be presumed to be destined to be made public, and that's changed the corporate calculus.

Pre-Snowden, there was no downside to cooperating with the NSA. If the NSA asked you for copies of all your Internet traffic, or to put backdoors into your security software, you could assume that your cooperation would forever remain secret. To be fair, not every corporation cooperated willingly. Some fought in court. But it seems that a lot of them, telcos and backbone providers especially, were happy to give the NSA unfettered access to everything. Post-Snowden, this is changing. Now that many companies' cooperation has become public, they're facing a PR backlash from customers and users who are upset that their data is flowing to the NSA. And this is costing those companies business.

How much is unclear. In July, right after the PRISM revelations, the Cloud Security Alliance reported that US cloud companies could lose $35 billion over the next three years, mostly due to losses of foreign sales. Surely that number has increased as outrage over NSA spying continues to build in Europe and elsewhere. There is no similar report for software sales, although I have attended private meetings where several large US software companies complained about the loss of foreign sales. On the hardware side, IBM is losing business in China. The US telecom companies are also suffering: AT&T is losing business worldwide.

This is the new reality. The rules of secrecy are different, and companies have to assume that their responses to NSA data demands will become public. This means there is now a significant cost to cooperating, and a corresponding benefit to fighting.

A Fraying of the Public/Private Surveillance Partnership [Bruce Schneier/Atlantic]

Ah, the quaint days when it was believed that only a paltry 2.9 million users’ accounts were affected by the hack that went unnoticed for several weeks. Then things got uglier and that estimate blew up to around 38 million. Now The Verge Reports that one group claims that there were upwards of 150 million accounts involved in the hack. [The Verge]

Electrode, Diglett, Nidoran, Mankey, Venusaur, Rattata, Fearow, Pidgey, Seaking, Jolteon, Dragonite, Gastly, Ponyta, Vaporeon, Poliwrath, Butterfreeeeee! ...wait, there's more than just these Pokémon at the start of the Pokerap? No way.

Oh, but there are. Many, many more—while many of us have only memorized the first part of the famous Pokerap (a song featured in the Pokémon anime), as new generations go by, the Pokerap has slowly been gaining an absurd number of Pokémon. The games themselves, after all, now have a tremendous number of Pokémon.

All together, it amounts to about ten minutes worth of Pokerap, in fact—or at least, that's how long College Humor's version of the newest Pokerap is. This version includes all Pokémon—yes, even those new 'mon from Pokemon X & Y. Have a listen:

Okay now memorize it!

Ha, yeah right.

This entry passed through the Full-Text RSS service — if this is your content and you're reading it on someone else's site, please read the FAQ at fivefilters.org/content-only/faq.php#publishers. Five Filters recommends:

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(via Door-to-Door Prosletyzing - Born Again Pagan Cartoons) click through for more.

YouTube video game critic Cr1TiKaL slams the video-sharing site’s aggressive promotion of Google Plus at the expense of user experience.

Friday, November 8 — 12:00 PM

Hey everyone! About today’s strip, Marth’s been confirmed so I’ve decided to revisit the “Smash Voters” concept to see how that’d play out. I don’t believe he’s ever spoken before in the comic, so I took care to make his dialogue a little more proper-sounding than the average brawler. Man, the Fire Emblem boys take me forever to draw.

Thanks so much for the support so far on the Tadpole Treble Kickstarter! We’re over 1/3 of the way to making the game a reality now, but there’s still a ways to go before it’ll be finished (and on the Wii U), so keep letting people know who might be interested!

I started a Reddit AMA yesterday and will be answering more questions today at 2 PM Central, so come on by if you want to ask me anything…today will be the last day I answer these!

-By Matthew