To celebrate the release of Rogue One, Disneyworld transformed Epcot Center’s Spaceship Earth into the Death Star yesterday night, and since most of us obviously could not attend, we have a video of the event for you guys! Check it out!
Ever wonder why sneaking in Skyrim is so over powered? Is your pursuit to be a stealth archer proving to be too easy? Wonder how Dovahkiin can make little to no noise in all that armor? Here’s a video playing with that idea. Don’t get me wrong, I love The Elder Scrolls. It’s just easy to make fun of the game logic in it.
Netflix has big plans for 2017. After recently announcing that it plans to have half of its content consist of original programming over the next few years, the company also said it would come out with 20 unscripted shows in 2017. First reported by Variety, Netflix plans to double its amount of original content in 2017 to 1,000 hours, which will include new unscripted series like the global competition show Ultimate Beastmaster, produced by Sylvester Stallone and The Biggest Loser executive producer Dave Broome.
Netflix Chief content officer Ted Sarandos spoke about his company's plans at Monday's UBS Global Media & Communications Conference in New York. Sarandos said unscripted content is a "very interesting business," and Netflix will focus on shows that have the potential to reach an international audience. Ultimate Beastmaster will feature athletes and announcers from the US, Brazil, South Korea, Mexico, Germany, and Japan, with each country recording its part of the show in its own native languages and following athletes competing across an obstacle course called "The Beast." At the end of the 10-episode series, one athlete will be crowned the Ultimate Beastmaster.
Sarandos cited the company's hit show Stranger Things as a milestone in Netflix's original programming journey. It was the first series Netflix produced and developed in-house, and thanks to its popularity, the company is already working on season two. However, Netflix doesn't want to be an all-originals streaming company. While the company continues to develop unique show and movie ideas, it still only plans to have 50 percent of its content be totally original programming. Sarandos mentioned the recent reboot of Gilmore Girls as an example where licensing and collaboration made for the best result. “Warner Bros. owned the IP. There was no model I could do that myself," Sarandos said, according to Variety. "We had a unique ability to do it."
From the toilet to the tank–biofuels from sewage. Credit: PNNL
Researchers at Pacific Northwest National Labs (PNNL) have developed a new method for treating human sewage to create a biocrude oil product that can be refined into a fuel akin to gasoline, diesel, or jet fuels.
The process is called hydrothermal liquefaction (HTL), and it has been described as a sped-up version of the way the Earth naturally creates crude oil. Researchers apply a considerable amount of heat and pressure to wastewater, breaking down its chemical components into biocrude and an aqueous liquid in minutes.
PNNL says that wastewater treatment plants handle approximately 34 billion gallons of sewage every day. In a Reddit AMA held last week, Justin Billing, one of the scientists on the project, noted that sewage traditionally has three destinations—being turned into fertilizer or soil additive, going in a landfill, or being incinerated. Some wastewater treatment plants (though not all) will also use anaerobic digestion, which “reduce[s] the volume of solids and mitigates the toxic load while also producing methane that can be used for heat and power at the plant," Billings says. But anaerobic digestion alone can’t solve the whole equation. “From a capital intensity perspective it is reasonable to consider a hydrothermal process like HTL when designing, upgrading, or expanding existing facilities,” he suggested.
Enlarge / Video card data represented in this Minecraft-built emulator of the Atari 2600 console. (credit: Seth Bling)
The world's first functioning machine emulation of a game console has arrived within Minecraft. However, it's not exactly playable. The emulator renders Atari 2600 games at a refresh rate so slow, you can only see its games, including Donkey Kong and Space Invaders, animate by using a time-lapse camera.
What's cool here, in spite of its unplayability, is how project creator Seth Bling exposes the system's machinations in an easy-to-read way for programming newbies.
Atari 2600 machine emulation within Minecraft.
"The dirt is zeroes; the stones are ones," Bling says as he pans over a giant Minecraft field on the ground of his creation. That field is dedicated to the Atari 2600's RAM, and as Bling reminds us, while the 6502C processor could support up to 64KB of RAM (a size that's visually represented), the Atari only addressed 128 bytes of it. The far end of the field is where 4KB cartridge ROM is dumped (whose zeroes and ones are also represented by Minecraft dirt and stones). The demo has a few sample cartridges floating in space; tapping a button on any of them loads that game's data into the emulator's data field.
TV show host Jimmy Fallon has aggressively courted video game makers since taking over the NBC Tonight Show desk, and he continued his nerd-cred streak on Wednesday night with Nintendo's help.
Nintendo of America President Reggie Fils-Aime joined Fallon on stage with an iPhone in hand (and a slick Mario pin on his lapel) to show off the first full-level run of Super Mario Run we've yet to see—but this moment was quickly overshadowed by a "one more thing" reveal: the Nintendo Switch console. Even better, it was shown off running The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild for the first time; all previous footage of that game ran on the Wii U console.
As promised when AMD rolled out its long-overdue Radeon Software Crimson graphics card driver in 2015, the company has followed up with a new major version for 2016. Released today and dubbed Radeon Software Crimson ReLive—conveniently sidestepping the initial plan to introduce a new colour and name each year—the new driver features a bunch of bug fixes, performance boosts of up to eight percent for cards like the RX 480, and new power-saving tech, but also screen capture software to rival Nvidia's ShadowPlay.
Moreover, these features aren't just coming to AMD's consumer graphics cards. For the first time, the company is combining its professional Radeon Pro drivers with its consumer drivers, using the same underlying tech for both. That means whether you're using a normal Radeon GPU on a laptop, or a Radeon Pro user creating 3D models on a desktop, or a server administrator using Radeon VPro virtualisation, all will be served by the same, free driver.
But about that headline feature first. Integrated into the existing Radeon Settings interface as an additional tab, the titular "ReLive" screen capture software allows users to record gameplay or desktop footage, take screenshots, enable a DVR-like instant replay mode, and stream directly to services like YouTube and Twitch. With Instant Replay enabled, up to the last 20-minutes of gameplay or desktop use is buffered to disk, ensuring that those 20-headshot kill streaks don't go uncaptured.
When the Mummy meets Mission Impossible, this is what you get…
Thought safely entombed in a tomb deep beneath the unforgiving desert, an ancient princess (Sofia Boutella of Kingsman: The Secret Service and Star Trek Beyond) whose destiny was unjustly taken from her is awakened in our current day, bringing with her malevolence grown over millennia and terrors that defy human comprehension.
Welcome to this Wisecrack Edition on The Philosophy of Darth Vader, where we explore the philosophical origins of one of the most tragic arcs in cinema history. What ultimately turns the innocent Anakin Skywalker into the Dark Lord of the Sith is something we all confront: a paralyzing fear of death. Anakin must choose between two competing ideologies when faced with the impending death of his loved ones – The Sith way, or the Jedi way. From Buddhist texts to Pulitzer Prize-winning discourses on death anxiety, we dive deep into one of the most iconic characters to ever grace the silver screen.
Way back in 2010, a full year after it was first announced as a PlayStation 3 game, The Last Guardian creator Fumito Ueda stressed to a Tokyo Game Show press conference audience that the key to the game he envisioned was developing an "emotional attachment" between the game's unnamed boy character and Trico, his three-story-tall, mythical animal-hybrid companion that combines elements of a bird, a dog, and a horse. Six years later, after finally completing Ueda's oft-delayed opus, I find that the main emotion I feel toward Trico and the game he inhabits is frustration.
A beautiful disaster
The Last Guardian plays out as one big joint escort quest, with Trico and the boy working together to escape the extremely intricate ruins of a crumbling tower complex built into the side of a cliff. Before I dig into what frustrated me so much about the game, I'd be remiss not to laud the architectural feat of that digital environment.
Every broken brick, every rusted-over bridge, and every pile of rubble overgrown with weeds makes you feel like you're inhabiting the epilogue of a once-great civilization. It's a world full of ornate symbology and bronze-age-meets-magical-realism technology that's all the stronger for never being even partially explained. You'll feel like you're trespassing on the ghosts of master builders, who placed every last stone with a sense of purpose you'll never fully understand but love examining anyway.
Much like Ueda's Ico and Shadow of the Colossus before it, The Last Guardian also benefits from a painterly use of light, which pokes through holes in the walls to reflect through cavernous halls and oversaturated outdoor scenes with a soft, otherworldly glow. Played on an HDR television on the PlayStation Pro, every scene has a vibrancy and range of visual expressiveness that's hard to equal in modern gaming (things look pretty good on a standard 1080p television, too). Seeing what new visual splendor lies around the next corner quickly becomes the main impetus to struggle your way through the game's puzzles.
Oil pollution in US waters didn't end with Deepwater Horizons. Small spills are a chronic problem, and their impact is cumulative. The post Thousands of Invisible Oil Spills Are Destroying The Gulf appeared first on WIRED.
The game's director says he will patch up 'Final Fantasy XV'"s absurdly terrible Chapter 13. He should leave it in all its awful glory. The post Please Don’t Take Final Fantasy XV‘s Worst Level Away From Us appeared first on WIRED.
The adaptation of Dave Eggers' dystopian novel comes with bike paths, kale smoothies, and idealism run amok. The post The Circle Trailer: Emma Watson Takes on Silicon Valley appeared first on WIRED.
