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Though not from Sony. Despite reportedly toying with the idea back in 2008, the platform holder has to date never followed through with the idea of a controller that can break apart into two pieces.

In 2013, third-party peripheral manufacturer Mad Genius wants to. It's launching a Kickstarter campaign for its pad, which in addition to serving as a standard pad, can also be broken apart and used as a PlayStation Move-ish controller.

You can see a demonstration video above.

Just when you thought the days of waggle and motion were over!

Mad Genius [Site, via The Verge]

As much as we love science fiction and fantasy here, we have to admit they have a limited range. Or do they? Mainstream shows don’t have aliens or gnomes, but sometimes they capture the feelings of otherworldliness and outrageousness better than scifi and fantasy. What are your favorite stealth genre shows?

It’s a good time to be a genre fan. Look at all the media that is out there to cater to us. Even if we limit ourselves to tv, we have everything from big-budget epics to family-oriented fare to funny sitcoms. If we widen our gaze a little, we have even more than that. There are a few mainstream shows that wouldn’t be out of place as science fiction or fantasy series.

The first one, and arguably the most popular, is Mad Men. It’s no surprise that it embraces the most popular of the genres, the vampire fantasy – there’s an entire season of the show that heavily references the sixties vampire show Dark Shadows. The main character, Don Draper, is quickly revealed as the vampire of the series. His backstory shows that he died and came back to life as something new. He subsequently used his hypnotic powers to acquire fortune and worldly possessions, and collected quite a harem of idealistic young wives or girlfriends that he proceeded to suck the life out of. There are plenty of vamps that stalk the halls of his ad agency, plus there’s Pete Campbell – who anyone that watches the show has know is basically a goblin.

In fact, despite the association with Dark Shadows, Mad Men has a spiritual twin in True Blood. They both trade heavily in pretty people experiencing a heady mix of sex n’ death on screen. They both stand back and watch as values from different eras clash heavily with the modern world. Most importantly, they’re not just about themselves, but about the American subcultures they inhabit. Mad Men takes us temporally away from the mainstream, letting us see the sixties as not just the birth of hippies, but as a place where everyone gets drunk at lunch, landing a contract with a ketchup manufacturer means the ultimate prestige, and pulling up a secretary’s skirt is an accepted game at holiday parties. True Blood takes us to small-town southern America, where people keep massive books full of ancestral records and the first thing you ask a vampire is if he’ll speak at a local civil war historical society called, “The Descendants of our Glorious Dead.”

And then there’s the scifi tv. Although there are a lot of shows that make the most of a post-apocalyptic anarchy stalked by zombies and crime bosses, like Breaking Bad, and superhero shows like The Mentalist and House, I prefer the show that’s a truly immersive work of alien encounters and strange worlds - Girls. Most soft science fiction is about the encounters that would happen if someone turned the normal rules of behavior just slightly to the left. Girls explores a world in which exactly this happens every week. People have to deal with others who have a totally other set of values, and end up in situations of extreme weirdness – like a person who explains why it’s normal to expect sex in exchange for a spilling red wine on a carpet, or someone who would never volunteer vital information unless specifically asked and is blown away that, to everyone else's mind, that counts as lying, or an employer that would blithely expect their employee to prostitute themselves or do drugs just for “material” to write about and who spouts unintelligible motivational phrases when questioned.

Even the familiar aspects of Girls work as science fiction. Many books and movies explore the idea of an alien race that seems perfect until humans come to know it better and have their “To Serve Man,” moment, or a race that seems like evil invaders until they are revealed to be, in a way, justified and noble. Girls presents familiar types of people and reveals the alien sides of them – both desirable and undesirable. There’s the blonde, thin bohemian Jessa, who looks like the sexy and uninhibited type, until it’s revealed that she’s just as uninhibited about bodily fluids as she is about everything else. And through the main character, Hannah, we learn that quirkiness isn’t a double-edged sword so much as a spiked mace – efficient when correctly deployed but able to cause a lot of damage. The series is about when vastly different cultures are put into close quarters and the strange situations that people get into when they explore an alien world. There are few sci-fi shows as creative.

Television has always been about creating little worlds that are separate from our own. Sometimes they appear to be about reality, but clearly aren’t. Are there shows out there that you see as more fantastic than realistic? Are there shows that spin science fact so far that they become science fiction? Let us know about the shows that you think have turned everyday reality into genre fiction.

Reynard submitted the following through the Visual Studios plug-in. He writes that he was charged with making the Customer Values page go faster. Depending on the client, there could be hundreds or thousands of Values that can be attached to a user (Client). The user manages them through a standard checkbox-laden page.

He quickly came to learn that you'd only be able to pry CSV from the lead developer's cold, dead code.

He tries to walk us through it.

"The user's values are cached in the session in a single CSV value. The text description of the values is saved. Not the IDs. The CSV are split into a list for data manipulation."

// Comma seperated list of values current user has selected, plus their Free Text value. Split into a list.

$curItemArr = split($_SESSION["CustomerValues"], ",");

// The text description (but not ID) of possible values, from the database
$oRecSet = DB.Execute("SELECT ValueName FROM Values WHERE ValueType='Customer' ORDER BY ValueName ");

$curItemSQLNoExt = "";

"After pulling up the entire data table from the DB, the system loops through each record, then inner loops through all the user's selected values to find matches. It puts them into, of course, a CSV."

// For each value in the session
while (! $oRecSet.eof)
{

// For each database item (backwards)

for ($i = $curItemArr.length; $i >= 0; $i++)
{

// If the current split item equals the current database item
if ($curItemArr($i) = $oRecSet["ValueName"])
{

// put it into a comma seperated array for SQL
// Be sure to escape, because we wouldn't want this code to suck or anything
$curItemSQLNoExt += "'" + replace($curItemArr[x], "'", "''") & "'," } // end if } // next i

$oRecSet.movenext();

// next database item } //endwhile

"As mentioned, only text values are in session, not IDs. So the system goes back and selects all the IDs for values the user has. It stores those IDs in a CSV"

// at least they didn't just re-execute the sql.
$oRecSet.movefrist();

idStr = "";

// this one was-- umm-- if the session contained a language that was the same language as the databse
if ($curItemSQLNoExt <> "")
{ // Get the ID of the languages that the user has in their session.
sSQL = "select ValueID from Values where ValueType='Customer' AND ValueName in (" + mid($curItemSQLNoExt, 1, len($curItemSQLNoExt)-1) + ") "

$oRecSet2 = DB.Execute(sSQL);

while (! $oRecSet2.eof)
{ // Back into a csv list!
idStr = idStr & $oRecSet2("ValueID") + " "
$oRecSet2.movenext(); }

// TOO MANY SPACES!
if (idStr <> "")
{

idStr = mid(idStr, 1,len(idStr) - 1);

}
}

"The CSV is split back into an array for obvious reasons below."

// Split it back into an array.
if (idStr <> "")
{ idArr = idStr.split(" "); }

"Finally,checkboxes are made using the CSV."

// Finally, UI!
while (! $oRecSet.EOF)
{ if (instr(1, idStr, trim($oRecSet["ValueID"].value)))
{ Response.Write( "<input type='checkbox' name='UserValue' value='" + $oRecSet["ValueName"] + "' checked />" + $$oRecSet["ValueName"]); }

else

{

Response.Write("<input type='checkbox' name='UserValue' value='" + $oRecSet["ValueID"] + "' />" + $$oRecSet["ValueName"]); }

$oRecSet.movenext();

}

// And textbox
if (FreeTextValue = "")
{ Response.Write("<textarea name='FreeText'>" + FreeTextValue + "</textarea>"); }

Reynard thought about educating the lead programmer on normalized data. He was able to replace all the CSV with a bit of XML, and all was right in the world.

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