The Raleigh landmark seen here has not changed much since it was built in 1959, but the communications medium for which it was built, has. This week Flashback Friday stops by the WRAL-TV studios on Western Boulevard.

WRAL-Television
Channel 5   NBC
2619 Western Boulevard
Raleigh, N.C.

No message this week!

Goodnight Raleigh visited the WRAL Studios in a previous post five years ago in which we explored the architecture of this familiar modernist treasure. This week, we’ll take a closer look at the origins and legacy of WRAL-TV itself.

“Eagle Against the Sun” by sculptor Chris Navarro graces the forecourt of the WRAL-TV studios on Western Boulevard.

Bringing Together Capitol Broadcasting Company and WRAL-TV

In 1937, Raleigh lawyer and businessman, A.J. Fletcher, applied for a 250-watt AM radio station and formed Capitol Broadcasting Company. Thus, WRAL-AM went on the air in 1939, the second commercial radio station to broadcast from Raleigh. The first was WPTF, which had begun operation in 1927.

In the decade following WW II television emerged as the major broadcasting medium in Raleigh. WNAO-TV was Raleigh’s first TV station, airing July 13, 1953. It was owned by The News & Observer, which also owned WNAO Radio (1949). Durham’s WTVD television station began broadcasting in September 1954, and Raleigh’s second TV station, WRAL, as an NBC affiliate, aired its first programs from a tiny cinder block building located on US 70 on December 15, 1956.

This photo shows the base of WRAL-TV’s 1,170-foot transmission tower and its modest studio building in 1956. Below is the sign erected alongside the highway announcing WRAL’s television presence in Raleigh.

A Modern Building for a Modern Era

Almost immediately after its conception, Capitol Broadcasting Co. sought to erect a suitable building to house its new television station. A.J. Fletcher selected G. Milton Small as his architect. The main building closely resembles his former office at the corner of Brooks Ave. and Hillsborough St. Designed in partnership with Joseph Boaz, the new WRAL offices were completed in 1959.

This view of the new WRAL-TV studios appears to be a black and white version of the photo used to produce this week’s postcard.

As a complement to his modernist studio building, A.J. Fletcher commissioned the creation of WRAL’s renowned Azalea Gardens. This verdant urban refuge lies behind the main buildings at the Western Blvd. site.  The gardens opened to the public in 1959, simultaneously with the television studio complex itself.

Located behind WRAL-TV studios, the Azalea Gardens are open to the public, and are available as a venue for weddings and other private functions.

WRAL-TV’s Lasting Mark on Raleigh

WRAL was a pioneer in local television broadcasting. Among its other initiatives, and owing to the its largely rural audience in the 1950s and 1960s, the station was one of the first in North Carolina to cover agricultural markets and farm news in its regular newscasts. “The Farm Report” was hosted for two decades by agriculture correspondent Ray Wilkinson on the noon newscast.

Among WRAL’s beloved early news personalities were Bob Debardelaben, the station’s inimitable ‘weather man’, Ray Reeve at the sports desk, and Charlie Gaddy, senior news anchor for many years.

WRAL also aired its own studio productions in the early years. These included an afternoon children’s show, Cap’n Five, starring Herb Marks. It ran 1958-1961, and was based in the fantasyland known as Happy Harbor.

And who could forget Time for Uncle Paul?  The show replaced Cap’n Five in 1961 and ran until 1981. It starred the locally renowned jazz pianist Paul Montgomery. Before Uncle Paul scored his own show, he appeared as Heinrich von Stuplebaum on the Cap’n Five show, on which he played the electric organ and entertained the children in the audience with his comedic airs.

Among other studio productions of that era was “Championship Wrestling,” which first aired in 1959, and ran for many years. Who doesn’t remember the theatrical antics of  Haystack Calhoun, the Masked Bolos, and Rick Flair as they faked their way through pugilistic set-ups?

In 1958 WRAL crossed the color barrier when it introduced J.D. Lewis as the host of the popular dance program “Teenage Frolics,” the station’s answer to Dick Clark’s American Bandstand . Lewis was a local African-American  radio personality who joined the WRAL team in 1948.

And of course, if you grew up in Raleigh in the 1960s, you will certainly remember Jesse Helms as the sometimes vitriolic host of  WRAL’s nightly news editorial segment, ‘Viewpoint’, which ran 1960-1972. Jesse’s editorials blended folksy anecdotes with conservative opinions that lambasted the federal government, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and other entities he viewed as ‘too liberal’.

Throughout its early years WRAL-TV ‘signed off’ every night at midnight, playing the “Star Spangled Banner,” which was immediately followed by the ubiquitous geometric ‘test pattern’ before the TV screen went blank.

Nowadays, many years hence, some would say, WRAL-TV still reigns supreme over local television broadcasting; but, some others would say, sadly, that the likes of Bob Debardelaben, Cap’n Five, Uncle Paul, J.D. Lewis, Jesse Helms and Haystack Calhoun are long gone.

 

Our photochrome postcard this week was printed by Gillick Printing, Inc., of Berkeley, CA under the trademark ‘Spectra Color.’

Photochrome (aka Chrome)

In 1936 the development of new color inks, combined with the introduction of the first high quality, multi layered film, Kodachrome introduced process printing of color photographs. For the first time color-separated halftone negatives could be made for CYM (blue, yellow, red) hues with the aid of process cameras. When printed these three plates would render an image in better natural color than ever before. Black would be added to the pallet as a fourth color (CYMK), but it was not consistently used at first.

Postcards started to be produced through process printing almost immediately, but by the late 1940s photochromes were in high competition with linen cards and have monopolized production since the mid 1950s. These modern types of tricolor postcards that evolved from their earlier versions are now what is meant when referring to a photochrome or simply chrome for short. Their quality has increased over the years with advancements in film and offset lithography.

 

“Flashback Friday” is a weekly feature of Goodnight, Raleigh! in which we showcase vintage postcards depicting our historic capital city. We hope you enjoy this week end treat!

 

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Filed under: Real-Life, News Items, Miscellaneous

So how would you rate the horse situation in the games that you've played to date? Abysmal? Deplorable? Have you longed for the day when you could finally have your dream game that allowed you to take on the role of a horse in a third-person cover-based online experience? Riding High promises to let you do just that. Except for the third-person cover-based part. You won't be shooting anything here; you'll just be owning a virtual horse.

While the official site is a little bare, the game's Facebook page has recently posted answers to a number of questions, confirming, for example, that the game will feature distinct personalities for each horse and that players will be able to engage in PvP activities. (Probably not horse fights.) If this really is all you ever wanted from online gaming, you can register for the future beta test on the official site.

[Thanks to Zenaphex for the tip!]

Riding High might be the horse-riding MMO you've been waiting for originally appeared on Massively on Thu, 19 Jun 2014 21:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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The programming language Chef, devised by David Morgan-Mar, is designed to make programs look like cooking recipes. Variables are represented by “ingredients,” input comes from the “refrigerator,” output is sent to “baking dishes,” and so on. The language’s design principles state that “program recipes should not only generate valid output, but be easy to prepare and delicious,” but many of them fall short of that goal — one program for soufflé correctly prints the words “Hello world!”, but the recipe requires 32 zucchinis, 101 eggs, and 111 cups of oil to be combined in a bowl and served to a single person. Mike Worth set out to write a working program that could also be read as an actual recipe. Here’s what he came up with:

Hello World Cake with Chocolate sauce.

This prints hello world, while being tastier than Hello World Souffle. The main
chef makes a " world!" cake, which he puts in the baking dish. When he gets the
sous chef to make the "Hello" chocolate sauce, it gets put into the baking dish
and then the whole thing is printed when he refrigerates the sauce. When
actually cooking, I'm interpreting the chocolate sauce baking dish to be
separate from the cake one and Liquify to mean either melt or blend depending on
context.

Ingredients.
33 g chocolate chips
100 g butter
54 ml double cream
2 pinches baking powder
114 g sugar
111 ml beaten eggs
119 g flour
32 g cocoa powder
0 g cake mixture

Cooking time: 25 minutes.

Pre-heat oven to 180 degrees Celsius.

Method.
Put chocolate chips into the mixing bowl.
Put butter into the mixing bowl.
Put sugar into the mixing bowl.
Put beaten eggs into the mixing bowl.
Put flour into the mixing bowl.
Put baking powder into the mixing bowl.
Put cocoa  powder into the mixing bowl.
Stir the mixing bowl for 1 minute.
Combine double cream into the mixing bowl.
Stir the mixing bowl for 4 minutes.
Liquify the contents of the mixing bowl.
Pour contents of the mixing bowl into the baking dish.
bake the cake mixture.
Wait until baked.
Serve with chocolate sauce.

chocolate sauce.

Ingredients.
111 g sugar
108 ml hot water
108 ml heated double cream
101 g dark chocolate
72 g milk chocolate

Method.
Clean the mixing bowl.
Put sugar into the mixing bowl.
Put hot water into the mixing bowl.
Put heated double cream into the mixing bowl.
dissolve the sugar.
agitate the sugar until dissolved.
Liquify the dark chocolate.
Put dark chocolate into the mixing bowl.
Liquify the milk chocolate.
Put milk chocolate into the mixing bowl.
Liquify contents of the mixing bowl.
Pour contents of the mixing bowl into the baking dish.
Refrigerate for 1 hour.

Worth confirmed that this correctly prints the words “Hello world!”, and then he used the same instructions to bake a real cake. “It was surprisingly well received,” he writes. “The cake was slightly dry (although nowhere near as dry as cheap supermarket cakes), but this was complimented well by the sauce. My brother even asked me for the recipe!”

While we’re at it: Fibonacci Numbers With Caramel Sauce.

Here’s a special kind of genius: In 1997 Daniel Nussbaum rewrote Oedipus Rex using vanity license plates registered with the California Department of Motor Vehicles:

ONCEPON ATIME LONG AGO IN THEBES IMKING. OEDIPUS DAKING. LVMYMRS. LVMYKIDS. THEBENS THINK OEDDY ISCOOL. NOPROBS.

OKAY MAYBE THEREZZ 1LTL1. MOTHER WHERERU? WHEREAT MYDAD? NOCALLZ NEVER. HAVENOT ACLUE. INMYMND IWNDER WHOAMI? IMUST FINDEM.

JO MYWIFE GOES, “OED DON’T USEE? WERHAPPI NOW LETITB.” IGO, “NOWAY. IAMBOSS. DONTU TELLME MYLIFE. INEED MYMOM. II WILLL FINDHER. FIND BOTHOF THEM.”

SOI START SEEKING DATRUTH ABOUT WHO IAM. ITGOEZ ULTRAAA SLOWE. THE SPHYNXS RIDDLE WAS ACINCH BUT NOTTHIZ.

SUDNLEE WEHEAR SHOCKING NEWS. WHEN IWASA TINY1 THISGR8 4SEER SED IWOOD OFF MY ROYAL OLDMAN THEN MARREE MYMAMA. SICKO RUBBISH, NESTPAS? WHOWHO COUDBE SOGONE? STIL MOMNDAD SENT MEEEEE AWAY. MEE ABABI AWAAAY.

NOWWWWW GETTHIZ. MANY MOONS GOBY. IMEET THISGUY ONATRIP. WEDOO RUMBLE. WHOKNEW? ILEFTMY POP ONE DEDMAN.

UGET DAFOTO. MAJOR TSURIS. JOJO MYHONEE, MYSQEEZ, MYLAMBY, MIAMOR, MYCUTEE, JOJOY IZZ MYMOMMY.

YEGODS WHYMEE? YMEYYME? LIFSUX. IAMBAD, IAMBADD, IMSOBAD. STOPNOW THISS HEDAKE. FLESH DUZ STINK. ITZ 2MUCH PAYNE 4ONE2C. TAKEGOD MYEYES! AIEEEEE!

Blood Alcohol

Could you get drunk from drinking a drunk person's blood?

Fiona Byrne

You would have to drink a lot of blood.

A person contains about 5 liters of blood, or 14 glasses.

If your blood is more than about half a percent alcohol, you stand a pretty good chance of dying. There have been a handful of cases of people surviving with a blood alcohol level of above 1%, but the LD₅₀—the level at which 50% of people will die—is 0.40 (0.4%).

If someone had a BAC of 0.40, and you drank all 14 glasses of their blood in a short amount of time,[1]Hey, there's a 50% chance they were going to die anyway. you would throw up:

You wouldn't throw up because because of the alcohol; you'd just throw up because you're drinking blood. If you somehow avoided vomiting, you would have ingested a total of 20[2]Thank you to Conor Braman, among others, for correcting a missing zero in the original version of this calculation. grams of ethanol, which is the amount you'd get from a pint of beer.

Depending on your weight, drinking that much blood could raise your own blood alcohol level to about 0.05. This is low enough that you could legally drive in many jurisdictions, but high enough to double your risk of an accident if you did.

If your BAC is 0.05, it means only 1/8th of the alcohol from the other person's blood made it into yours. Supposing that after you drank all this blood, someone killed you and drank your blood,[3]It's only fair. they would then have a BAC of 0.006. If this process were repeated about 25 times, there would be fewer than 8 molecules of ethanol left in the last person's blood. After a few more cycles, there would likely be none;[4]By homeopathic standards, this is still quite concentrated. they'd just be drinking regular blood.[5]Like a loser.

Whether there's any alcohol in it or not, drinking 14 glasses of blood wouldn't be fun. There's not a huge amount of medical literature on the subject, but anecdotal evidence from online forum posts suggests that any normal person who tries to drink more than about a pint of blood will vomit:

If you drink blood regularly, over a long period of time the buildup of iron in your system can cause iron overload. This syndrome, which sometimes affects people who have repeated blood transfusions, is one of the few conditions for which the correct treatment is bloodletting.[6]Others include PCV and PCT.

Drinking one person's blood probably wouldn't cause iron overload. What it could give you is a blood-borne disease. Most such diseases are caused by viruses that can't survive in the stomach, but they could easily get into your blood through scratches in your mouth or throat as you drank.

Diseases you could get from drinking an infected person's blood include hepatitis B and C, HIV, Hantaviruses, and Ebola. I'm not a doctor, and I try not to give medical advice in these articles. However, I will confidently say that you shouldn't drink the blood of someone with Ebola.

That said, drinking or eating blood is not unheard of. It's a taboo in many cultures, but the British eat "black pudding", which is largely blood, and there are similar dishes all around the world. Maasai pastoralists in east Africa once lived mainly on milk, but also sometimes drank blood, drawing it from their cattle and mixing it with the milk to form a sort of extreme protein shake.

So the bottom line is that drinking enough of someone's blood to get drunk would be very difficult, probably quite unpleasant, and might give you some serious diseases.

In the end, the blood itself would do awful things to your body long before the booze ever could.

Reading Rainbow ran on PBS from 1983 through 2006, and reruns were shown until 2009. But for the past five years, the only Reading Rainbow we've had is an iPad/Kindle Fire app. Now, LeVar Burton wants to reboot Reading Rainbow, deliver it to more kids, and also provide it for free to classrooms in need. He's asking for a million bucks on Kickstarter to make it happen. I think we can do this, Internet. Take a look, it's in a book video:

The project is on Kickstarter, and as I write this the dollars are rolling in. Get excited, people!

Truer words: NEVER SPOKEN.

The BBC is reporting that a UK teachers union “is calling for urgent action over the impact of modern technology on children’s ability to learn” and that “some pupils were unable to concentrate or socialise properly” due to what they perceive as ‘over-use’ of digital technology.

Due to evidence reviewed by neuroscientist Kathryn Mills in a recent paper (pdf) we know that we’ve really got no reason to worry about technology having an adverse effects on kids’ brains.

It may not be that the teachers’ union is completely mistaken, however. They may be on to something but maybe just not what they think they’re onto.

To make sense of the confusion, you need to check out an elegant study completed by psychologists Robert Weis and Brittany Cerankosky who decided to test the psychological effects of giving young boys video game consoles.

They asked for families to take part who did not have a video-game system already in their home, had a parent interested in purchasing a system for their use, and where the kid had no history of developmental, behavioural, medical, or learning problems.

They ran a randomised controlled trial or RCT where 6 to 9-year-old boys were first given neuropsychological tests to measure their cognitive abilities (memory, concentration and problem-solving) and then randomly assigned to get a video games console.

The families in the control group were promised a console at the end of the study, by the way, so they didn’t think ‘oh sod it’ and go and buy one anyway.

So, we have half the kids with spanking brand new console, and, as part of the trial, the amount of time kids spent gaming and doing their school work was measured throughout, as was reporting of any behavioural problems. At the end of the study their academic progress was measured and their cognitive abilities were tested again.

The results were clear: kids who got video game consoles were worse off academically compared to their non-console-owning peers – their progress in reading and writing had suffered.

But this wasn’t due to an impact on their concentration, memory, problem-solving or behaviour – their neuropsychological and social performance was completely unaffected.

By looking at how much time the kids spent on the consoles, they found that reduced academic performance was due to the fact that kids in the console-owning families started spending less time doing their homework.

In other words, if your kids play a lot of computer games instead of doing homework they may well appear worse off, and from the teachers’ point-of-view, might seem a little slowed-down compared to their peers, but this is not due to cognitive changes.

Interestingly, teachers may not be in the best position to see this distinction very well because they tend, like the rest of us, to measure ability by performance in the tasks they set and not in comparison to neuropsychological test performance.

The solution is not to panic about technology as this same conclusion probably applies to anything that displaces homework (too many piano lessons will have the same effect) but good parental management of out-of-school time is clearly important.
 

Link to locked study on the effects of video games.

[whisper-singing]

Hush, little baby, don't boo-hoo
Mom's gonna buy you Winnie-the-Pooh

 

And if that Pooh bear just won't hug
Mama's gonna get you a smiley bug

 

If that bug should start to bite
Then Sully here will make it right:

 

But if that monster still won't do

Then oh no! Here comes Mickey the carnivorous sociopath again!

The End.

 

Today's post has been brought to you by the delightful bedtime storybook, Go the F**k to Sleep.
(Ok, not really, but it seemed appropriate.)

 

Thanks to Ashleigh S., Erika, Rebecca E., & Medusa for making sure the yolk's on Mickey. (Because I think those are eggs. Maybe. With... chocolate. I'm scared.)

*****

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It's not the reason you've probably heard.

So check it out:

once upon a time there is this this king called Cymbeline
he is the king of England
his name is stupid
and he has an EXTREMELY COMPLICATED FAMILY
let me break it down for you
his wife is dead
he has a new wife named Evil von Bitchtits
(actually Shakespeare doesn’t give her a name
but this one is pretty on point so don’t worry about it)
and Evil von Bitchtits has a shitty son named Clotten
meanwhile Cymbeline also has a real daughter named Innogen
which i think maybe is just a misspelling of Imogen
which is an actual name
then again that would be the only real name in this play so maybe not
especially considering that Cymbeline also has an ADOPTED son
whose name is POSTHUMUS LEONATUS
because his mom died in childbirth
and that is something that he will never be able to live down b/c it’s in his name
okay I think that about covers all the background
OH NO WAIT

so Evil Queen Lady wants Clotten to marry Innogen
because Innogen is heir to the throne
because Cymbeline’s two sons were stolen twenty years ago
and nobody knows what happened to them
WHICH I AM SURE WILL NOT BECOME RELEVANT LATER ON
but Innogen wants nothing to do with Clotten
because first of all Clotten is terrible
and second of all, Innogen is busy committing adopted incest with Posthumus Leonatus
and they’re gonna get married
but the king is like “AW HELL NO
I mean, Leonatus is nice and all
but he’s not really my son”
and Innogen is like “yeah dad that’s sort of the point
if he was actually your son it would be actual incest”
and the king is like “NAW YOU DON’T GET IT
LEONATUS IS POOR AS SHIT.
YOU AIN’T MARRYIN NO POOR DUDE”
and Innogen is like “Dad,
I’m your daughter which means I’ll be rich as fuck no matter what
and the dude you seem to want me to marry is Clotten
whose sole claim to fame is that he came out of your evil wife
who is only rich because she married YOU
SO I DON’T SEE HOW THAT’S ANY BETTER”
and Cymbeline is like “Well I can’t argue with that
so instead i’m gonna banish Leonatus.”

So Leonatus gets banished
but before he goes, Innogen gives him a diamond ring
and he gives her a golden bracelet
so when they get horny they can look at their jewelry and remember that they’re engaged or w/e
and then Leonatus goes to Rome and is sad

It turns out that rome is a terrible place full of terrible people
one of those people is named Iachimo
and ten minutes after meeting Leonatus, he’s like “YO MAN NICE RING
I BET YOU TEN THOUSAND DOLLARS I CAN FUCK THE GIRL WHO GAVE IT TO YOU”
and Leonatus is like “YOU’RE ON”
so Iachimo goes back to England like “Hey babe I have a letter from your fiancee
he’s in Rome being a drunk asshole
howsabout you ditch the boozer and get with the slimy dissembling bastard?
PS: SLIMY DISSEMBLING BASTARD IS WHAT I CALL MY PENIS”
and Innogen is like “Ew no. Go away.”
and Iachomo is like “HAHA JK THAT WAS A TEST AND YOU PASSED
but hey, can i store some of my junk in your room overnight?”
and Innogen is like “Sure ok.”

so Iachomo hides in a big box
and has his servants bring it into Innogen’s room
and then in the middle of the night, he jumps out and
…writes down a detailed description of everything in her room
what did you think he was going to do, you pervert
he also steals the bracelet Leonatus gave her
and spends a lot of time looking at her boobs
…so he can describe them to Leonatus.

Meanwhile the Evil Queen buys a bunch of rat poison from her doctor
promising to only use it on animals and definitely not people
but the doctor happens to know that she’s a fucking psychopath
so instead of giving her rat poison
he gives her that poison from Romeo and Juliet that makes you sleepy for a while
which she immediately turns around and gives to this dude Pisanio
who was Leonatus’s servant before Leonatus left
and is now Innogen’s servant.
she tells Pisanio that the poison is like Midol or something
and honestly I have no idea what her endgame is
but spoiler alert: It doesn’t work.

So Iachimo gets back to rome like “HAHA I BANGED INNOGEN
HERE’S WHAT HER ROOM LOOKS LIKE
HERE’S WHAT HER BOOBS LOOK LIKE
HERE’S HER BRACELET
HIGH FIVE”
and Leonatus is like “No
no high five
the lowest of fives, in fact
this five i am giving you
it is downright subterranean
because THAT’S WHERE I WANT INNOGEN TO BE”

So he sends a letter back to Pisanio like
Dear Pisanio
Innogen is a slutty slut and I need you to stab her
take her to wales and then stab her
here is a letter from me to her that will lure her to wales
love,
Crazyballs

And Pisanio gets this letter and he’s like “fuuuuuuuuuuuck
Hey Innogen, wanna go to Wales to see Leonatus?”
and Innogen is like “OMG YES I LOVE LEONATUS”
so they go to Wales
and then halfway there Pisanio is like “ok look
I’m actually supposed to be stabbing you right now
dunno why Leonatus wanted me to take you all the way out here but w/e
anyway I’m not gonna do it
I’ll just pull some snow white woodsman shit and let you go
meanwhile I think the best course of action
is for you to dress up as a man
and go to rome to spy on Leonatus
PS: I have this vial of untested mystery Midol
given to me by the totally scrupulous evil queen
why don’t you hold onto this in case of cramps or something”
and Innogen is like “Okay that sounds about as reasonable as the rest of this.”

MEANWHILE, BACK AT THE CASTLE
Clotten is like “where the fuck is Innogen
where the fuck is Pisanio
Oh hey Pisanio
where Innogen at?”
and Pisanio is like “Uhh … I got a letter from Leonatus
it says she’s in wales?”
and Clotten is like “SWEET
here’s what I’m gonna do:
I’m gonna dress up like Leonatus
go to Wales
kill Leonatus
and then rely on Innogen’s complete lack of facial recognition
to get her to bang me”
and Pisanio is like “That sounds fucking amazing.”

MEANWHILE, IN WALES
Innogen runs into a group of outlaws
who just happen to be the king’s two long lost sons
PLUS THE DUDE WHO STOLE THEM WHEN HE WAS BANISHED
they think he’s their dad
it’s all super convenient
They’re like “Hey bro, what’s your name?”
and she’s like “Uhh … Fidele
it’s latin for ‘I’m totally a dude, trust me.’”
and they’re like “Yeah okay.”
and they all get along really well
until Innogen gets a visit from her aunt flo and decides to take the Midol
which knocks her out, obviously
and that’s exactly when Clotten decides to show up
and insult the fuck out of the outlaws
so one of them chops his head off with an axe because Clotten is a chump
and then they find Innogen’s apparently-dead body
and they’re like “AW JEEZE
NOW WE GOTTA BURY TWO BODIES”

Luckily they don’t bury them very deep
so when Innogen wakes up she looks over next to her
and there’s a headless body dressed in Leonatus’s clothes
and since there is conveniently no face to recognize
she’s like “OH NO LEONATUS DIED SOMEHOW”
and then the Roman Consul shows up like “Hey kid
you look pretty sad
why don’t you join my army so we can go fight England.”

Because oh yeah I forgot to tell you
England and Rome are at war now
because Evil Queenypants convinced Cymbeline to stop paying tribute
so now it’s stabbing time
and basically everybody in the whole play shows up:
Cymbeline, his two (secret) sons, their (not real) dad, and Leonatus (disguised as a peasant)
versus Iachomo (that lying seducer guy), Innogen (disguised as a dude) and the Roman Consul
so basically it’s a battle composed entirely of the most talented liars in two empires
but it turns out they are much better liars than soldiers
because nobody dies
Cymbeline almost gets captured, but his sons and their dad save him
and England ends up winning and capturing all the romans
who they intend to execute the next day

So Leonatus is in jail, feeling pretty shitty
when Zeus shows up like “Don’t worry dude
things may look bad right now
but soon you will be knee-deep in vagina
trust me, I know about this stuff.”
Then he flies off on an eagle
so that’s weird.

Next day, everybody gets together in the same room
to either be knighted or executed
and Cymbeline is like “Hey great job, mystery knights
can I do you any solids?”
and they’re like “Yeah could you not execute that dude Fidele
he’s sort of our bro”
and the king is like “Yeah sure.
Hey Fidele, can I do you any solids?”
and Fidele is like “Yeah
make Iachimo tell everybody how he got that bracelet and that ring”
so Iachimo spills the beans
which sets off a chain reaction
of TWENTY-SEVEN CONFESSIONS
through which the whole plot of the play basically gets told to us again.
Oh also the evil queen is dead
because she got sick for no reason
and it turns out she was planning to poison the king
which is weird because she gave all her poison to Pisanio
THE NUMBER ONE MOST TRUSTWORTHY DUDE IN THE PLAY

So everybody finally sees through everybody’s lies
the king gets his sons back
and he’s not worried about Innogen inheriting the kingdom anymore
so she can marry whoever the fuck she wants
and she decides to marry Leonatus
even though he tried to have her killed
and Cymbeline agrees to start paying tribute to Rome again
because he’s pardoned basically everybody else already so why the fuck not
then they all have a dance party

so the moral of the story
is that long distance relationships are hard.

The end.

November 16, 1985 — see The Complete Peanuts 1983-1986

Filed under: Fantasy, Business Models, Game Mechanics, MMO Industry, PvE, Opinion, Free-to-Play, Hands-On, Casual, Sandbox, Crafting, Housing, Working As Intended

Villagers and Heroes is not the sort of sandbox that gets a lot of coverage in the gaming press. You can't gank in the game. No one will murder you for your ore or your logs. There are no petty internet crime lords generating scandals or developers being ousted for cheating. Clichéd zombies are not waiting to slaughter you come nightfall. You cannot fall off a cliff or treetop pathway to your death. You never have to walk 10 miles uphill in the snow both ways to get to your house. You don't have to wait in line for an instance. You don't really have to fight at all.

In fact, the worst thing that might happen to you is that you'll run out of energy.

Continue reading Working As Intended: Dabbling in indie sandbox Villagers and Heroes

Working As Intended: Dabbling in indie sandbox Villagers and Heroes originally appeared on Massively on Fri, 23 May 2014 12:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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To save an endangered species, scientists have to play the part.

Paleface pay price for appropriating culture! Paleface feel pang of guilt mixed with stubborn belief in dominant historical narrative!

Or paleface eat sandwich with mayo, in trunk, many moon 

Google's self-driving cars have never been ticketed. But what happens when one does?

archiemcphee:

Artist brandonbird found an X-Men coloring book in a dollar store about ten years ago and became obsessed with its terrible wonderfulness. So obsessed, he asked his friends and colleagues to interpret the pages in their own style. The amazing results were gathered together in a show called X-Mans. Some of them are quite literal, the artists didn’t do much more than color the original, but others attempt to unpack the meaning behind the drawing. We’re not sure if the art in the show is canon or just part of some strange issue of “What If?" Judge for yourself, the rest of the pieces are posted here. 

Buy prints here

The World of Warcraft will be getting cosmetic accessories to spice up their characters. These items will allow people to customize the looks of their characters to greater reflect the classes and play-styles that they choose.

In the example that Blizzard gives, rogues could equip cosmetic daggers or vials of poisons -- they'd have no in-game effect other than to change the look of the character. And as we see from the picture above, librams and quivers (they're back from the dead) are also another example of cosmetic options. As with all new features, there's a lot of fine tuning, so don't read too much into everything yet.

This new feature was announced in an Artcraft blog post that briefly appeared on Blizzard's French site, but has since vanished. We suspect that we'll see another version of it appear soon.

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Filed under: News items, Transmogrification

WoW is getting class accessories originally appeared on WoW Insider on Tue, 20 May 2014 11:45:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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According to the International Labour Organization, only three countries don't offer paid maternity leave: Oman, Papua New Guinea, and the U.S.

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May 20th, 2014: Last night I dreamed that it was my job to describe how it feels to be a dog, but then I woke up into a world where it's my job to make dinosaurs talk in comics! I feel like I traded up!! – Ryan

It's already summer in this video.

mermaidmagicart:

Finally it’s finished. A really quick informational comic about women in games for my Sociology final. So yeah there’s a lotta stuff here. UuU

Special thanks to those who gave their stories for me to use: clouddesu /starryeyed-freak / and the anon

He was hardly a typical frenchman.

Sometimes I flail around to try and come up with a way to start talking about a subject. So this time, I'm just going to go straight to the link - this article by Slate about why people play the characters they do in World of Warcraft, especially the genders they choose, interested me. One of the reasons is because it confirms with actual research an argument I've heard a lot as I've played the game. To quote the article:

Because players see their avatars from a third-person perspective from behind, men are confronted with whether they want to stare at a guy's butt or a girl's butt for 20 hours a week. Or as the study authors put it in more academic prose, gender-switching men "prefer the esthetics of watching a female avatar form." This means that gender-switching men somehow end up adopting a few female speech patterns even though they had no intention of pretending to be a woman.

There's more to it, though - what I really find interesting is that when men choose to play women in game, (which they do far more often than women do - 23% of men play female characters, while only 7% of women play male characters) they tend to start talking like women, or at least, like what they believe women talk like. But the paper discussed that while the men use language that fits their stereotype of what women behave like, they can't emulate how women actually move their characters in game. Men, according to the study from Information, Communication and Society that prompted the article, tend to stand further away from groups, back up more often, and jump more often, and this behavior doesn't change when they're playing woman characters.

I find the study a little limited. There's a lot more to gender and identity than it covered. But I do find it interesting that so many male WoW players play as women, for the reason that's been accepted all along, but in a way no one expected. The idea that these men, deliberately or not, emulate how they believe women communicate while playing a character that is one, whether or not they actually do communicate that way, but are betrayed by a kind of body language unique to the game world is fascinating. I'd love to see more work done on this. Why do so few women play as men? Why do those women that do play as men make that choice? What about gender identities that aren't so binary, how do the differences between cisgendered and transgendered players factor into it? In a way, World of Warcraft can serve as a distillation of the real world (remember the corrupted blood plague was used by researchers to model how virus outbreaks work in the real world) and I'd like to see more work done on it.

With thanks to my nemesis Chase for the tip

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Filed under: Analysis / Opinion, News items

Gender in World of Warcraft originally appeared on WoW Insider on Wed, 14 May 2014 16:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Magical fruit.

Eating the fruit that falls from trees - all fruit grows from the same kind of tree - gives you temporary powers. What the power does depends on the fruit.

I’m still trying to figure out what’s going on, but I know the fruit thing for sure.

Blueberry Garden (2009)

I love my husband far too much to risk getting dry, lifeless “middle-age” skin!

A reader (and former colleague) sends along this picture from the Connecticut Science Center. When my family and lived in the area, we used to take the kids there, in the old facility. As of 2009, they have a new building in downtown Hartford, which I haven't seen personally, but if this is the sort of science they've filled it with, I haven't missed much. Update: turns out that this new building is a new organization, different from the older site in West Hartford. Readers also tell me that this is from from the only nonsensical chemical decoration to be found inside the place.

What gets me about this sort of thing is (1) how idiotic it is and (2) how avoidable it is. That structure is probably the worst fake chemical drawing I've ever seen - it makes no sense, in several different directions at once, and anyone who knows chemistry will feel like spitting on the floor after seeing it. And it would have taken the decorator about five minutes to come up something real instead.

But that, I guess, is what really gets me about this sort of thing. It's the attitude: close enough, right? Who's going to notice, a bunch of geeks? 'Sall the same, anyway, buncha lines and chemically-stuff. If someone had a display up about (say) Thailand, but the people in the video display were just gabbling funny noises instead of speaking Thai, there would be complaints. If a wall featured a background illustration of a map of the world, with the countries mislabeled and some of the letters backwards, there would be complaints. And there should be complaints about this, and by golly, this is one right here. The Connecticut Science Center should demonstrate that it actually gives a flying *&!# about science, and fix this. And perhaps they should check the other exhibits while they're at it, to make sure that the same decorative flair hasn't been applied to them as well.

Update: Good news! The Science Center has now said that they apologize for the bad chemistry, and that the graphics are being removed.

Flavor-y Ideas with Butter

via