Matt Garber

weirdbooksifind:

Sci-fi motor bikin’ Hitler

Oklahoma congressional candidate Tim Murray (R) has announced he plans to contest this week's primary election of Rep. Frank Lucas (R-OK) saying "it is widely known" that Lucas "is no longer alive and has been displayed by a look alike," KFOR reports.

Murray says on his website that Lucas was executed in Ukraine in 2011.

Lucas responded: "Many things have been said about me, said to me during course of my campaigns. This is the first time I've ever been accused of being a body double or a robot."

Mike Tyson's legend was secured when he KOd undefeated rival Michael Spinks in 90s. But less well known is that Tyson destroyed his opponents mind before the fight even began, by entering the arena to sinister British postindustrial drone music instead of a standard entrance theme. The real battle was, literally, Coil vs Kenny Loggins, and it was over before it began.

Bob Pepper’s art for cards from the Dark Tower board game

(via The Art Of Bob Pepper)

Hide your toes, hide your feet and lock your doors, Boston: Police say a serial tickler is breaking into homes in the Brighton area and targeting men with his fluttering fingers.

There were three reported break-ins in Brighton just this week, reports WCVB.com, involving a man who’s sole mission appears to be tickling.

One man relayed the tale of his terrified roommate: “He felt something on his foot and thought it was the cat,” he recalls. “He woke up to see a man crouched by his bed.”

They didn’t pursue the man, and it appears that he’d just walked in through an unlocked door.

A Boston College student also reported encountering The Boston Tickler (as he shall henceforth be known as) a few weeks ago.

“There was a man in the room with a ski mask,” he said of his brush with TBT. “We made eye contact and he immediately left, and ran downstairs and out the front door. It’s definitely a very scary experience turning over and seeing someone in my room.”

Victims say he doesn’t hurt anyone and hasn’t taken anything else from their homes. Police are still on the lookout.

Meanwhile, I would be wearing shoes to bed every night because tickling is the worst.

Serial tickler targeting men in Brighton [WCVB.com]

ha

ha

haaaaaa -o-

artofpetermax:

Before the words SMART and PHONE were linked.

This is what PRISM produced.

Getting this update set up earlier as I will be busy travelling back home around this time. So I will assume I had a rad time at TCAF and thank you before it actually happened to the me writing this blog post! We will know friday for sure tho what happened.

Cosmonauts

Golan Levin writes, "My lab (in collaboration with Cory Arcangel, the CMU Computer Club, The Andy Warhol Museum, and the Carnegie Museum of Art) has announced a major dead-media discovery. We have recovered previously unknown, pure-digital artworks by Andy Warhol -- extracted from decaying Amiga floppy disks from 1985."

Warhol created the works with Graphicraft, and the disks needed a lot of love and coaxing to get the files off them (to my mind, the story of the technical heroics is a lot more interesting than the pictures, but I'm not much of a Warhol fan). A documentary film about the file recovery called "Trapped" will premiere on May 10 at the Carnegie Library Lecture Hall in Pittsburgh.

Warhol’s Amiga experiments were the products of a commission by Commodore International to demonstrate the graphic arts capabilities of the Amiga 1000 personal computer. Created by Warhol on prototype Amiga hardware in his unmistakable visual style, the recovered images reveal an early exploration of the visual potential of software imaging tools, and show new ways in which the preeminent American artist of the 20th century was years ahead of his time.

...

Previously Unknown Warhol Works Discovered on Floppy Disks from 1985 (Thanks, Golan!)

Card City Nights is an original collectible card game where players get to duel with characters from the Ludosity universe to earn booster packs and new cards for their deck. In every match players take turn to place cards on their own board, and a winner is declared when one duelist loses all of their defense points or run out of room to place new cards.

A board can accomodate up to nine cards. Each card has at least one symbol on them: attack, defense, revive or neutral. A card's action is only activated when you chain three or more symbols together by connecting their arrows to one another. Some cards will have multiple arrows, while others may have no arrows at all.

When you chain three or more symbols, the dominant symbol will take effect. Players are allowed to choose an effect if the chain doesn't contain any dominant symbols. That's pretty much the gist of a card duel, though many rare and uncommon cards can also have special properties that are activated just by putting them on the board.

A city map shows the locations that you can visit to find other players who are willing to duel against you. Many of them will offer you booster packs upon victory, and a nearby shopping mall also provides an option for players who are looking to purchase additional cards. The story mode takes roughly eight hours to complete, but you're going to need a little longer than that to collect all cards and finish the post-game content as well.

Card City Nights is available to purchase now on Steam ($3.99), or you can download it for your mobile device for only $2 via the App Store and Google Play.

UW student researches ways to make robots seem more human

Jeff Ridge

Multiplayer dungeon crawler? Sure, it's been done before. How about adding a competitive element? That's familiar territory as well. What about if one person controls the hero, while the other one-to-three people playing try to kill him as the game's enemies? Now we're talking! That's Crawl in a nutshell.

Powerhoof is making sure you really want to kill your friends in Crawl. As a two-to-four player game, the objective is for the non-hero players to kill the hero as monsters or traps. The one who records the kill then becomes the hero, and the process continues. Once enough experience points have been gathered the hero can face the boss, which is cooperatively controlled by the non-hero players.

Each game takes place in randomly generated dungeons and lasts about 30 minutes. Players will unlock special spells and powerful weapons during play sessions, so the action stays fresh and fierce. There will also be bots to practice against when your friends aren't available to play. The Greenlight campaign is active, and the game is set to launch someday "soon" on Windows, Mac and Linux.

(Via Bits and Pieces)

Traditionally, every level in a classic 2D platformer is made up of blocks and other elements. Some blocks are safe to stand on and others, not so much. Maybe some things can be broken if hit from below, some drop if landed on from above, and others allow players to jump past them from below and land on them. Well, what if the main character figured out that they were in a game and learned to hack it enough to change the properties of the blocks and things around them? That's a question the developers at Nitrome asked themselves, and the answer they've come up with, changeType(), makes for a great puzzle platformer.

The player can choose any types of block that they can get at eye level and swap how they act. Swapping a solid block for spikes, for example, enables the player to run across spikes but makes solid blocks deadly. Any swap can be cancelled by pushing X, which makes it possible to do things like swapping spikes with solid blocks, then jumping off of a bunch of spikes, cancelling the swap mid-jump, and landing safely on solid blocks which are back to normal. It's even possible to swap blocks with things like coins or swap the end goal with another block type to put the goal in a new place.

changeType() is available to play over at Nitrome's website.

by Jia Tolentino

I'm so late to this party, but what a party it is. "Geometry of Circles" via FACT, and this great new Tumblr, Experimental Music on Children's TV.

0 Comments

rollership:

 psst.

The odds of you or me winning the Powerball are pretty darn slim. But who knew that if you could only have the patience to dedicate yourself entirely to just one set of numbers, and play them constantly over two decades, that you could reap say, a $1 million Powerball prize? Here’s where we point to a guy who did just that.

The Iowa man has stuck with the same set of numbers for two decades, hoping that someday those digits would be lucky and help him win the Powerball jackpot, reports KCCI News 8.

And while he didn’t win the entire $330.8 million jackpot, he did take home a hefty $1 million for matching five of the winning numbers. Not too shabby.

He assigned numbers to the letters of the alphabet and used the corresponding numbers in his last name as his Powerball numbers, the 49-year-old man explained, but had only cashed in about $100 in prize money so far.

He found out he was a winner by using a self-check kiosk to look up his numbers at a convenience store.

“I put the first three (tickets) in and no win,” he said. “Then (the winning) one came up. I just kind of glanced at it. I did tell the guy next to me, ‘I don’t believe this,’”And he leaned over and I did it again and he says, ‘Sign it and get the heck out of here.’”

At odds of 1 in 5,153,632.65 to win even $1 million, it seems his determination to never swerve from those numbers has paid off. As for what he’ll do now, I say keep on plugging those digits in, buddy. They’ve treated you well.

Playing same Powerball numbers for two decades pays off [KCCI News 8]

giganticworlds:

thems fightin’ words

I suspect this is coming from Uranus. It’s trying to make Mars the butt of the joke for once.

Being a Pokémon master takes time and patience—beating a game in the franchise usually takes at least a couple dozen of hours. Now imagine trying to beat a Pokémon game while thousands of other people also control your avatar.

Read more...