When you think of buildings that stand at a slant, the Leaning Tower of Pisa probably comes to mind first. But many other famous leaning buildings around the world attract visitors who cherish their off-kilter charm. Atlas Obscura created this list showcasing wonderful leaning landmarks that people travel to see and photograph. — Read the rest
The post These leaning buildings outdo Pisa's famous tilt appeared first on Boing Boing.
A 2011 xkcd comic popularized the idea of using memorable but nonsensical words as passwords. The comic provided the example "correct horse battery staple," which is easy to remember but difficult to crack through brute force methods.
Recently, I stumbled upon an insult passphrase generator. — Read the rest
The post This insult passphrase generator will make your passwords unforgettable (and hilarious) appeared first on Boing Boing.
Scaly, feathered, toothed, or beaked—long-necked, spike-tailed, tiny, or gargantuan—dinosaurs are a wildly diverse group. But certain dinos stand above the rest, both literally and on the plinth of our imagination. Here’s my definitive ranking of the best dinosaurs; I’ll be mightily impressed if you’ve heard of every creature on this list.
Let’s get this predator out of the way immediately. Tarbosaurs were a genus of tyrannosaurids that thrived in Asia during the Cretaceous Period. One particular species—Tarbosaurus bataar—made headlines 10 years ago when a U.S. Federal Court found that a 24-foot-long specimen was smuggled into the United States from Mongolia. On the whole, tarbosaurs were quite cool and fearsome. Sure, it’s basically T. rex Lite, but that’s enough to squeak onto my list.
This is the type of dinosaur that doesn’t often make it into children’s books—and that’s not just because the animal’s preserved “butthole” was recently found in China. To the untrained eye, Psittacosaurus looks like an average herbivorous dinosaur, which isn’t great fodder for non-expert illustrations.
But fossils of the animal (whose name means “parrot-resembling lizard”) reveal a substantial amount about dinosaur ecology and anatomy. Researchers studying the Liaoning fossil found that the animals were countershaded, a type of coloration that many animals employ today. And that’s even before you get to its preserved cloaca, the soft-tissue multipurpose opening the animal used for defecation, urination, and laying eggs.
No preserved dinosaur penis has ever been found. But the psittacosaurus deserves some recognition for getting as close as we’ve come to one.
This wouldn’t be an honest dinosaur ranking if it didn’t include at least one duck-billed dinosaur (a hadrosaur), which went extinct along with nearly all other dinosaurs 66 million years ago. Parasaurolophus is recognisable for its pronounced head crest. The head crests were hollow, and paleontological consensus is that they likely were used for making noise, as well as being visual ornaments. I like parasaurolophus because it looks like a dinosaur that had sinus issues, something I relate to deeply.
As far as small-but-scary predators go, the petite theropod Deinonychus is one to look out for. In all likelihood a feathered dinosaur like Archaeopteryx, Deinonychus had formidable 5-inch talons on its feet, which it would have used to grab prey. The animal probably weighed about 150 pounds, according to Britannica, but that didn’t stop this raptor from being absolutely terrifying. I’ve included it here as a great example of a small predator being just as scary as the big ones, which tend to get more fanfare.
It’s difficult to say whether Argentinosaurus or Patagotitan was the largest-known land animal of all time, but the titanosaurs definitely deserve a place on this list. The massive herbivorous sauropods lived until the Late Cretaceous, and the largest individuals may have weighed over 100 tons (elephants typically weigh around 6 tons).
Any list that overlooks the largest animals—with necks so long that the tallest individuals would be able to peer into windows seven stories up—is falling short. You can’t help but wonder how many Deinonychus it would take to bring down one massive sauropod.
Tyrannosaurs aren’t that great. There, I said it. Yes, animals like T. rex were huge and ferocious, but there’s a silly amount of clamour about the billions of these reptiles that roamed Earth.
Part of the issue is that tyrannosaurs (and theropods in general) tend to control public attention; it’s a predator-driven consumer market. Tyrannosaurs dominated their environments like tyrants, indeed, but their silly little arms and lack of any armoured plates puts them down the pecking order for me.
Before humankind invented the hard hat, dinosaurs invented very, very, very hard hats. That’s right—Pachycephalosaurus (pack-ee-keffa-lo-saurus) was a dinosaur with the defining characteristic of a skullcap that could double as a battering ram.
According to the American Museum of Natural History, that ram probably wasn’t used in head-to-head combat, though, as the bony dome was too weak for those impacts. Rather, males may have hit opponents on their sides when fighting over females.
Long considered a strictly herbivorous dinosaur, a recent study of Pachycephalosaurus teeth indicated that the animals may have eaten meat, too. These dinosaurs had the most dragon-like skulls, in my opinion, so they’ve well earned their place on this list.
According to Britannica, when the first Triceratops was found in 1887, it was thought to be a giant, extinct species of bison. You can’t fault the misconception too much: squint, and it makes sense. The prominent horns provided defence against predators—some Triceratops have been found with bite marks that match the maws of tyrannosaurs—but they were also used to fight each other, as Gizmodo recently reported. Simply put, the hornier the dinosaur, the better. So the three-horned Triceratops is one of the best.
I love Archaeopteryx because it blew the fossil record of dinosaurs wide open. With its discovery in 1861—just two years after the publication of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species—paleontologists could begin to connect the evolutionary dots between purely landlubbing dinosaurs and their flying relatives, birds.
Archaeopteryx could fly, but exactly how remains uncertain. Regardless, its importance in our understanding of dinosaurs and their evolution gives Archaeopteryx its rightful place in the top five best dinosaurs—even if the feathers of the animal are still controversial.
The highest-ranking carnivore on this list, spinosaurs have been having a research renaissance lately. Recently published research on the animal’s tail and bone structure indicates that the meat-eater was a proficient swimmer and that at least some species hunted prey while completely submerged.
Like other dinos on this list, spinosaurus’ sail may have been used for display or for thermoregulation. What is clear is that the look is fantastic; as glad as I am that these things are no longer around, they definitely deserve their place near the final podium.
Few armoured dinosaurs loom quite as large as the ankylosaurs and nodosaurs, animals known for their intense dorsal plating. They’re absolutely badass, and among those animals Borealopelta markmitchelli is the standout. The type specimen of this species is a ridiculously well-preserved individual from what is now Alberta, Canada, an individual whose last meal was a combination of moss, ferns, and flowering plants.
Ankylosaurs in general have hardcore anatomies. A recently named species, Spicomellus afer, had spikes that sprouted directly out of its ribcage. It would’ve made a tricky meal for any predator. My hat is off to the ankylosaurs, who made defence look way cooler than offence.
Since birds are the only dinosaurs still alive, I could make the case for ranking them No. 1 on this list. But they’re second place, and what better bird to enshrine in the pantheon of great dinosaurs than Gallus domesticus, the not-so-humble chicken? Statista estimates that there were nearly 26 billion chickens worldwide in 2021. Talk about coming home to roost—when other dinosaur species faltered, chickens stayed the course. And now, for many, they’re a main course.
A dinosaur with giant kite-shaped plates protruding from its back is the best kind. And stegosaurs didn’t stop there: They also had huge spikes sticking out of their tail.
The use of stegosaur plates is still unknown. As the Natural History Museum in London states, they could have deterred predators, been a species identifier, regulated body temperature—or perhaps some combination of these. Whatever the plates’ use, this is what peak performance looks like. The stegosaur is a classic dinosaur—it’s from the Jurassic, meaning it went extinct nearly 100 million years before T. rex and Triceratops. Stegosaurus is spiky, big, and confusing in all the best ways. Number 1 all day long.
The post The Dinosaurs, Ranked appeared first on Gizmodo Australia.
The website archive.today (also accessible at archive.is) has become a backbone of the internet, providing on-demand archives of specific pages and access to paywalled sites that play the SEO game of revealing the full text of articles to non-human viewers. — Read the rest
One of the best parts of buying a new PC is deleting all the bloatware and replacing it with your favorite programs. Of course, you probably have a list of apps you install by default. But if you only stick with what you know, there are likely some hidden gems you’re missing out on. Here are 16 such apps everyone…
The post These Winning Close-Up Photos Show Life That’s Often Overlooked appeared first on Gizmodo Australia.
People movements at Energy Catalyst, Iberdrola, WA govt, Jemena, NSW DCCEEW, Aula Energy, AMSL Aero, Eku Energy, AEC, Solar Citizens, North Harbour, 5B, ERAC, Sundrive.
The post Grid Connections: Who’s going where in Australia’s energy transition appeared first on RenewEconomy.
The post The CEO of a Major Australian EV Charging Network On Why Installing New Stations Is So Damned Difficult appeared first on Gizmodo Australia.
Electric motorcycles tend to be either extremely capable and unforgivably expensive, or affordable and really closer to scooter territory. The Ox Patagonia, coming out of Madrid, aims to find an attractive middle ground: a usable electric adventure experience for less than US$7200.
Category: Motorcycles, Transport
Tags: Electric Motorcycles, Adventure Bikes, Electric Vehicles
The post Telcos Will Now Have to Be More Supportive of Vulnerable Customers appeared first on Gizmodo Australia.
So, you’ve just bought a new car, you’re loving it, but something goes wrong and you’re not sure what to do with it (like an essential part stops working or the panels are misaligned). It could be time to claim the car warranty.
Your instinct might be to just take it down to the mechanic to have it repaired, but it’s often better to contact the manufacturer or dealer in the case of newer cars. Older cars, however, should definitely stick to the local mechanic.
So what do you do if your car turns into a lemon? That is a car that has manufacturing defects that affect its safety, utility or value. Well, we have some handy steps for you to follow below.
Now, before you go off to plead your case to the customer support worker on your manufacturer’s phone line, just know what laws protect you in Australia. The ACCC provides some solid guidelines on buying a car and knowing your rights, according to the Australian Consumer Law.
As outlined by the ACCC, the warranty period for a new vehicle is three years. If your car encounters a major failure within that period of time, the consumer gets the choice between a repair, a replacement or a refund. Alternatively, the consumer can ask for compensation for the drop in value for the vehicle or part from the supplier. It’s also noted that damages can be recovered from the supplier for any loss or damage.
However, if it’s a minor issue, then it becomes the job of the supplier to choose between a repair, a replacement or a refund. If a repair is chosen, then it’ll be handled within a reasonable time and without charge. Also, when we talk about the supplier, we’re talking specifically about the dealer, just so you know who to go to.
Additionally, extra protections may apply depending on the state you live in.
For example, in New South Wales, under the Motor Dealers and Repairers Act 2013, a dealer is required to guarantee a vehicle that has driven less than 15,000 km when purchased, up to 20,000 km after manufacture, or 12 months after purchase (less one month for each 2,000 km that the vehicle was driven before purchase) whichever occurs first.
The dealer guarantee for a new motor vehicle which has driven more than 15,000 km when purchased is limited to 5,000 km after purchase, or three months after purchase, whichever occurs first.
This is covered Similar rules apply in Victoria and Queensland.
Firstly, you’ll need to establish a good description of the problem. If you go into the dealer saying “Sometimes it makes a loud bang”, the description might be too vague and you’ll likely need to elaborate on the problem further. Consider:
With a good idea of what your problem is, get in contact with your dealer. While the ACCC refers to claiming your warranty from a “supplier”, as we mention in the previous section, you’ll actually need to go through your dealer.
There might be different avenues for getting in touch with your dealer for a warranty claim and different hoops you need to jump through depending on your car manufacturer, so below we’ve outlined warranty claiming information from some big car brands in Australia.
To claim a warranty on a Toyota vehicle, you’ll need to get in touch with your authorised Toyota dealer. You’ll also need to visit the Toyota Owner’s Portal if your address or name have changed, or if you’ve just purchased a new Toyota. Toyota vehicles purchased after January 1, 2019 are entitled to a five-year manufacturer warranty (terms apply).
Like Toyota, Mazda offers a five-year unlimited-kilometre warranty, covering any defect in material or workmanship. If you need to claim a warranty, get in touch with your authorised Mazda dealer. Provide your full name, address, phone number and details of what’s wrong with the vehicle. Once this has been provided, Mazda will book you in for an inspection and repair for the next available time.
Ford also offers a five-year unlimited-kilometre warranty for vehicles collected after May 1, 2018. If you need to claim the warranty on your vehicle, contact your Ford dealer and take it in to be serviced and reviewed. Owner and vehicle details will be required.
If your warranty claim isn’t progressing as smoothly as you would have hoped, don’t fret – you’re not powerless. Always remember that you’re protected by the Australian Consumer Law provided you’re operating within its terms.
While the ACCC doesn’t offer a resolutions and complaints service, you can find resources on their website if your car dealer isn’t honouring the warranty. It also wouldn’t hurt to get legal advice if you run into any concerns in undertaking the warranty claims process.
The chip shortage has also brought upon some serious concern – what if my vehicle has a defect within the warranty purchase and I want a replacement? It might not actually be possible for the manufacturer to provide a replacement vehicle while chip shortages persist, so you might be locked into either a refund or a repair, if that’s even available.
Alternatively, as a consumer, you are empowered to negotiate – just make sure you’re not getting ripped off. You might want to consider replacing the faulty car with a different vehicle from the manufacturer, which might cost more or less. Make sure you’re either paying the right amount of difference for a more expensive car or being paid the right amount if you’re accepting a less-expensive car.
This article isn’t intended to be legal advice, rather treat it as a guide for where to start when your new car is being a bit of a lemon.
The post How To Claim A Car Warranty In Australia If Your New Vehicle Is A Lemon appeared first on Gizmodo Australia.
The post Elegant Weapons For A More Civilised Age: Every Lightsaber In Star Wars, Ranked appeared first on Gizmodo Australia.
Watabou's Perilous Shores draws maps of fantastic lands in a handsome hand-made style that understates the growing sophistication of the generator. Each map has a selection of interesting locales—towns, dungeons, geographic features—to ignite the imagination. And various options allow you to tweak all of it, including the stylization. — Read the rest
I’m up at 4:30, and I don’t even have the excuse of going fishing. I’m just a jangly ball of stress right now, and also, we’ve got the bathroom taps open a little to prevent freezing, so all night long it’s drip-drip-trickle-gurgle, and it gets to you after a while. So I gave up trying to sleep and got up to get some work done and check my email.
Oh boy, the Noah’s Ark/DNA guy sent me more email about his “theory”.
On Rosh
Dear PZ Meyers,A few weeks ago, I sent you a copy of my theory on human genetics and Noah’s Ark. Today, I am sending you a second part to my theory that gives special attention to the Scythian Horse Riders that I believe descend from Rosh the son of Benjamin. The theory will only take a few minutes of your time and could dramatically alter your view of the world. Next week, I plan on uploading my theory to youtube and I hope that it will get a lot of views.
This is what he sent me.
Sorry, I’m not going to bother uploading the “figures”, which seem to be random images extracted from various publications. This is not a theory. This is a guy plucking something out of Bin A, the Bible, and something out of Bin B, various scientific publications he barely understands, and declaring “Ha ha! They fit!” even if they don’t.
My view of the world continues on unaltered, my idea that there are a lot of loons out there sadly unperturbed. Confirmed, even.
He might actually succeed and get a lot of views on YouTube, since the YouTube algorithm is undiscriminating, except in the sense it seems good at launching talentless hacks into bewildering heights of popularity.
Yeah, I’ve told the Noah’s Ark/DNA guy to go away and stop sending me his lunacy, but another property of the deeply delusional is that they can’t imagine you wouldn’t be interested in their ravings.
I used to drive around with my dogs loose in the back of my Vanagon. I then watched a few doggie crash test videos. Horrified, I did a bunch of research.
I settled on the Kurgo Impact safety harnesses. As a pet owner who regularly drives with his dogs in the car, the videos are very rough to watch. — Read the rest
Dandelion Chocolate in San Francisco doesn't offer chocolate "chips," they offer artisanal chocolate "facets." This chocolate redesign is a three-year-long side project of Tesla senior industrial designer, Remy Labesque, who says the "80-year-old teardrop shape" is "ill-suited to its function."
“The chip isn’t a designed shape,” Labesque said. “It’s a product of an industrial manufacturing process.”
The baking standby is optimized for mass production, not for baking in cookies, whose broad surface area is better suited to maximize taste and melt-in-your-mouth texture. Labesque’s redesign for artisanal Dandelion Chocolate is a square, faceted pyramid, kind of like a flattened diamond. Two edges are thick, and two exceedingly thin, for even more textural pleasure...
Dandelion currently sells its “facets” in three distinct, 70% single-origin, types: from Ecuador, Costa Rica, and Madagascar. Additional single-origin styles are planned for the future. The lengthy research and development and ingredient sourcing comes at a cost: a 17.6 oz. bag of the chips goes for $30.
Chips available now through the Dandelion store.
image via Dallas News/Dandelion Chocolate
My MacBook Pro has 4 USB-C ports, only 2 of my peripherals use USB-C. This hub to the rescue.
Three standard USB ports and one USB-C power delivery port pretty much covers me. The HDMI port and card readers may come in useful later.
I can't remember the last time I took a CF card out of a digital camera. They seem to be put one in and leave it.
Thanks to this hub my mic and all my iPhone and Apple Watch charging crap can now be connected to my laptop again.
In this helpful video, Brent of Goobertown Hobbies recreates one of his painting ah-ha moments when he first realized how to paint highlights on objects that don't have edges.
Everyone new to miniature painting knows the joys of finally figuring out how to successfully paint undercoats/shading, basecoats, and highlights. And then the next level of being able to do competent edge highlighting and other final highlighting.
But then there's the next level of things like painting dimensionality on large, smooth surfaces and surfaces that don't really have discernible edges. In the video, Brent shows his process for tackling this aspect of mini painting. He runs through it (using some shield-wielding Warhammer lizardmen) in a way that should make it easy for painters of any intermediate skill to master.
I love Brent's calm and quiet demeanor (he's been called the Bob Ross of mini painting) and his chill approach to what can seem a daunting process: "We might not end up with exactly what we had in mind, but we'll probably end up someplace cool."
Cast iron is a favorite tool for serious home cooks. But what most people find really serious is the proper way to maintain their heavy metal cookware. Some people swear that soap is the enemy of a properly seasoned pan. Others hold firm that the correct method for seasoning a pan takes five hours.
Big Blanket Co. specializes in—wait for it—big blankets. And now, they’re finally coming out with a really big weighted blanket.
Here's what happens when a tank T-bones a car at speed. SPOILER: it is what you likely expect to happen.
![[Image]](http://www.sjgames.com/img/newsq/illq/2019/galladoriaThumb.png)
As work continues on a new demo table for The Fantasy Trip (see this post for a look at the table we used at FnordCon), we set out in search of nifty dungeon terrain and accessories to use in the construction of the new table. Multiple searches soon led us to Galladoria Games and their resin offerings, from which I ordered several different bits to paint and incorporate in the new table.After a winter dump that left an area of Durango, Colorado with 80" of snow, one small dog got stuck. No matter what he did (including high jumps) he couldn't move forward. But that's what buddies are for. His bigger canine friend clears a trail for him, leading him back to his human.
Patrik Hermannson is a young Swedish man who went undercover to explore the American alt-right movement. He works with a group called Hope Not Hate, and they’re working on a movie, My Year in Kekistan.
It doesn’t sound like he had a good time. I also hope he’s now taking precautions — he was dealing with dangerous, horrible people, and they’re not going to be happy about being exposed. He’s got video of these people saying vile things and revealing their true plans. And now they’re getting written up in the New York Times.
Mr. Hermansson and Mr. Jorjani met at an Irish pub near the Empire State Building, where the baby-faced Mr. Jorjani imagined a near future in which, thanks to liberal complacency over the migration crisis, Europe re-embraces fascism: “We will have a Europe, in 2050, where the bank notes have Adolf Hitler, Napoleon Bonaparte, Alexander the Great. And Hitler will be seen like that: like Napoleon, like Alexander, not like some weird monster who is unique in his own category — no, he is just going to be seen as a great European leader.”
More shockingly, Mr. Jorjani bragged about his contacts in the American government. “We had connections in the Trump administration — we were going to do things!” he said at one point. “I had contacts with the Trump administration,” he said at another.
His connections, fortunately, seem to have been indirect and tangential, but it does reveal the grandiose delusions of importance these people have. Another guy he met with was always wearing a Hitler Youth-style outfit. They are backwards-looking dipshits, but don’t underestimate them.
This Jorjani fellow, though…I’d recently run across that name in the Chronicle of Higher Ed as the subject of criticism.
We especially write in response to news reports that have identified Iranian-American Jason Reza Jorjani, who received his Ph.D. in philosophy from Stony Brook University, as one of the co-founders of the white nationalist website altright.com and a member of its board of directors. It is clear to us that Jorjani uses his training in higher education to promote a controversial cultural and historical platform that connects Iranianness with Aryanness. Unfortunately, Jorjani’s position has a long-standing grip in our communities. This belief is animated by claims made by 19th century philologists about linguistic affiliations between Persian and European languages, as well as the narratives of the Avesta and the Gathas, which describe Aryans as a group of ethnically distinct people settling in the Iranian plateau.
Speaking of delusional…I don’t think an Iranian is going to be very popular among American hate groups. He can protest all he wants about 19th century philosophers classifying his people, as well as the Indians of South Asia, as belonging to the fictitious category of the “Aryans”, but these haters aren’t sophisticated enough to make that distinction. Brown and foreign is all they’re going to see.
So how are they going to get Adolf’s picture on our currency? Simple. Undermine people’s trust in the system, and radicalize the youth. Promote people who lean their way. Shuffle the gullible off farther and farther to the right (yeah, if you’re on /pol or r/theDonald, are flaunting Pepe memes and think torch-lit marches with white nationalists are cool, you’re just a gullible fool, a sheep following a goat).
The extreme alt-right are benefiting immensely from the energy being produced by a more moderate — but still far-right — faction known as the “alt-light.”
The alt-light promotes a slightly softer set of messages. Its figures — such as Milo Yiannopoulos, Paul Joseph Watson and Mike Cernovich — generally frame their work as part of an effort to defend “the West” or “Western culture” against supposed left-liberal dominance, rather than making explicitly racist appeals. Many of them, in fact, have renounced explicit racism and anti-Semitism, though they will creep up to the line of explicitly racist speech, especially when Islam and immigration are concerned.
This apparent moderation partly explains why they tend to have much bigger online audiences than even the most important alt-right figures — and why Hope Not Hate describes them as “less extreme, more dangerous.” Alt-light sites like Breitbart, formerly home to Mr. Yiannopoulos, as well as Prison Planet, where Mr. Watson is editor at large, draw millions of readers and are key nodes in a hyperkinetic network that is endlessly broadcasting viral-friendly far-right news, rumors and incitement.
Wait. Yiannopoulos and Watson and Cernovich are light messengers of fascism? They always sound insanely regressive and rotten to me. Intellectual light-weights, maybe, but they spread a terribly vile message. Shying away from using the N-word while still advocating for oppression, deportation, and exploitation isn’t much of a softening.
If we accept this hypothesis of media being used to gradually radicalize people (which I do), it’s unfortunate that there isn’t more mention of YouTube. There’s a bit, but in my experience, YouTube has been an important potentiator of alt-right lies and arrogance.
This goal of mainstreaming is an abiding fixation of the far right, whose members are well aware of the problems their movement has had with attracting young people in recent decades. At one point in Mr. Hermansson’s footage, Colin Robertson, a far-right YouTube personality who goes by the name Millennial Woes, explained to an older extremist the importance of putting forward a friendly, accessible face: “If we don’t appear like angry misfits, then we will end up making friendships with people who don’t agree with us,” he said.
There are people with the confidence to make videos openly endorsing anti-feminism and anti-immigration sentiments, but even more chilling, there are hordes of hateful losers who turn the comment sections of virtually every video into a churning mess of misogyny and racism. There’s the easy on-ramp to alt-right radicalism. It’s a slippery slope well-greased with pictures of Pepe the Frog and kekistani flags.
That old Jesuit motto, “Give me a child until he is seven and I will give you the man” is significant, although the age is arbitrarily specific. Shape them early and you can do all kinds of rotten things to the adult. Fundamentalist Christians also know this; we’ve seen the consequences here in the US, where they’ve invested a huge amount of time, money, and effort in school boards and corrupting the educational system. Creationists don’t just spontaneously appear, they are the product of years of indoctrination.
So what do we do about College Republicans? The school year has started, my university has over a hundred clubs (anyone can start one, for any cause or reason), and there are first year students signing up this week for the College Republicans, in a sincere belief in conservative values, and they’re going to stumble right into a toxic atmosphere.
Racial resentment has been a driving force behind College Republican recruitment for years, but at this point it’s really all they have left to offer. In the age of President Donald Trump, what inspires a young person not merely to be conservative or vote Republican, but to get active in organized Republican politics? Do you think it’s a fervent belief that Paul Ryan knows the optimal tax policy to spur economic growth? Or do you think it’s more likely to be something else?
Ha ha, no.
Our two-party system has us locked into this weirdly limiting binary dynamic, where power is driven entirely by the party qua party, both for the Democrats and the Republicans — we might as well rename the factions the Blues and the Greens. Unfortunately, it means party membership is driven more by gamesmanship and identity and hatred of the opposition than by policy and civil service and sensible leadership. The next generation is not looking any better, either.
Meanwhile, the only people entering the Republican Party candidate pipeline in the Trump era almost have to be allied with the alt-right, because the alt-right absolutely comprises the only effective and successful youth outreach strategy the GOP currently employs. The future leaders of the GOP aren’t the hooded Klan members or Nazi-tattooed thugs who presented the most cartoonish faces of hate in Charlottesville, but they are their clean-cut fellow marchers, and the many young right-wingers around the nation who sympathize with their cause.
Alex Pareene makes a terrifying prophecy.
This is the state of the GOP leadership pipeline. In a decade, state legislatures will start filling up with Gamergaters, MRAs, /pol/ posters, Anime Nazis, and Proud Boys. These are, as of now, the only people in their age cohort becoming more active in Republican politics in the Trump era. Everyone else is fleeing. This will be the legacy of Trumpism: It won’t be long before voters who reflexively check the box labeled “Republican” because their parents did, or because they think their property taxes are too high, or because Fox made them scared of terrorism, start electing Pepe racists to Congress.
It’s sad. There are some optimistic young people entering the university, and one of the mistakes they’ll make is to join CR and breathe the mind-rotting poison, and next thing you know, they join the staff of the Morris North Star (or its equivalent; it seems to have gone belly-up, but we’ve had a succession of right-wing rags with different names and different editors, all the same) and start writing bigoted drivel to qualify themselves for the wingnut welfare program.
And I can do nothing. The people who ought to be cracking down on this malignancy are the mythical Responsible Republicans, who believe in cautious conservative values, but who, it seems, don’t actually exist. Conservative has become a code word for racism and misogyny.
This is my promised column on data security and the Internet of Things (IoT). The recent Dyn DDoS attack showed the IoT is going to be a huge problem as networked devices like webcams are turned into zombie hoards. Fortunately I think I may have a solution to the problem. Really.
I’m an idiot today, but back in the early 1990’s I ran a startup that built one of the Internet’s earliest Content Distribution Networks (CDN), only we didn’t call it that because the term had not yet been invented. Unlike the CDNs of today, ours wasn’t about video, it was about the daily electronic delivery of PDF editions of newspapers and magazines. Canon told us that if the New York Times, say, would make a PDF version of its daily paper, the Japanese company would give an ink jet printer to every electronic subscriber, making their money solely on replacement ink cartridge sales. Communication would be between the CDN and printer with no PC involved. It was effectively an Internet of Things, circa 1994. Obviously, we failed, but learned a lot along the way.
Our network was called Pronto and had a few features so far ahead of their time that they still aren’t generally available in other products. It was my idea and general architecture but the actual network was designed by Paul Tyma before he built his own products that include Dash-O and Dotfuscator at PreEmptive Systems, a total redesign of Gmail for Google, Home-Account (my mortgage startup from 2008 — great timing with that one), Mailinator, Refresh, and most recently whatever they are doing at Lendingtree, where Paul is now the CTO.
Pronto was designed as a global delivery system using massive numbers of simple networked devices that worked together to deliver the newspaper no matter what. To Pronto nuclear war would have been a minor inconvenience.
Does this sound to you like a bot-net? That’s exactly what it was only we never thought of Pronto being used for evil. In fact I can argue pretty strongly that we designed evil out of it completely.
What made Pronto unique for the time was that it made only the most primitive use of Internet infrastructure, replacing services like DNS, for example, with something similar but different and unique to Pronto The system had publishers and clients but everything in-between was a peer-to-peer network where identities didn’t matter so much as proximities and loads determined by ping times using a bastardized multicast protocol. We didn’t even use IP addresses in the sense that Vint Cerf would have recognized them. If we could use today’s vocabulary to describe what we built 22 years ago, it was a Software Defined Network (SDN).
Part of the technical inspiration for Pronto came from a conversation I had with Roger Boisvert, a Canadian who was also a pioneering ISP in Japan. Roger ran Global OnLine (GOL), an early broadband ISP in Tokyo that specialized in English Language support. GOL supplied our test network in Japan.
NTT, Japan’s largest telco and ISP, was an investor in Pronto, but they couldn’t provide infrastructure for less than $75,000 per month, they said, because of regulations. Roger hosted us for free.
One day over lunch Roger explained his novel method of containing half a dozen Yokohama customers who used vastly (often 100X) more data than the average GOL member: he put each in his own bandwidth-constrained Virtual Private Network but never told them. Each of these customers got all the data they were paying for and no more. I thought it was brilliant so I simply applied the principle globally to Pronto! which became a VPN the size of the Earth.
We could do the same thing today with the Internet of Things. There is no reason at all why the IoT has to share address space with IPV4 or V6. The point is networking these things together, not networking them to mess with CNN or Facebook. As an SDN the IoT could use a radically different addressing scheme along with packets unrecognizable to most NICs and all built to overlay the regular Internet using the same fiber and routers. The bits would still flow through the same network, but it wouldn’t be evident what they were for until they reached their final destination, which would be a relatively rare gateway between the two networks.
Key here is the idea that the IoT has to be dirt cheap so that means microcoding the network in a way that’s super-cheap to build in volume but inevitably super-expensive to change (or co-opt). I’m not saying it would be impossible to turn a Pronto-ized IoT into a malicious bot-net, but I am saying it would be a lot easier to find your bots somewhere else.
Normally we’d say “the bad news in this is that everything currently in use for IoT has to be thrown away” but given the dire possibilities for data security of current IoT hardware the scenario shifts into an OPPORTUNITY to replace all six billion IoT nodes operating today, because doing so saves the future. And what hardware industry doesn’t want an opportunity to be paid again to replace 100 percent of its already large installed base?
Thank you, sir. May I build you another?
The flat-math design of D&D 5th Edition simplifies monster customization to change their behavior or increase their power. Like reskinning, attribute modification is simple enough to be done at the table. You don't need to write anything down, all you need to do is know how an increased stat will affect a creature.
For this article, we'll be looking at monsters from the D&D 5e DM Basic Rules. If you don't have a copy, go download it now so you can follow along.
Let's look at some examples.
Let's start with the basic gnoll on page 30 of the basic rules. As listed the gnoll has a strength of 14 (+2). What if we want to make a champion gnoll among his tribe? Maybe he's personally touched by Yeenoghu. Instead of a strength of 14, this champion of Yeenoghu has a strength of 19 (ogre strength). How does that affect his performance in combat? If his strength started at 14 (+2) and we modified it to 19 (+4) we add +2 to his attacks and +2 to his damage.
You can tweak monster attributes like this for any monster you choose. In general, if you want to see an attribute have an affect at the table, modify the primary attribute of the monster. For example, let's say you want a tougher named mage. With a base intelligence of 17, you might boost her intelligence to 20 instead of 17, giving her +2 to DCs and spell attacks. As her primary stat, intelligence will have a big effect when tweaked.
Returning to our Yeenoghu-touched gnoll, he's likely to be tougher than a normal gnoll so we'll increase his constitution on top of his strength. A baseline gnoll has a con of 11. What if we give him a constitution of 16 and give him +3 hit points for every hit die (15 extra hit points). Now the gnoll has HP of 37 instead of 22. If you want something a bit simpler, just double the hit points. The difference won't matter too much during the game.
Now, with strength like that, this particular Yeenoghu-touched Gnoll might want a better weapon so let's take away his shield (-2 AC) and give him a greataxe (1d12 instead of 1d6). Now his attack is +6 for 1d12+4 damage on a hit. Powerful!
Note that instead of just tweaking the math directly, we actually have a story-based reason for the changes in mechanics. Our powerful gnoll dumped his crappy shield and picked up a great axe that most normal gnolls couldn't lift. This gives us flavor reinforced by mechanics instead of mechanics strictly for the sake of gameplay.
With all of these tweaks our new gnoll is likely to need a boost in its challenge rating as well. For the changes above, it's probably a CR 1 creature instead of the CR 1/2 creature we've seen before. It's roughly double what a normal gnoll is.
If you're only increasing or changing one stat, you can probably get away with it and not change the CR. If the creature poses a much greater threat by increasing more than one stat, you might want to increase its CR. If it's roughly twice as powerful, like our gnoll, double the CR.
In the beginning of this article we said that you could likely alter a monster and not have to write anything down. Even with the changes above we can likely keep it in our head but with enough of these changes we might as well jot it down on a 3x5 card. For our Yeenoghu-touched Gnoll we only have to write down the following:
Yeenoghu-touched Gnoll: AC 13, 37 hp, +6 to hit, 1d12+4 dam
That's it!
This is just one way we can tweak monsters to fit the theme of our adventure and keep our players on their toes. Tweaking attributes and changing out equipment is just the beginning. Next time you want a monster to stand out from the rest, play with its attributes and describe the story of the results!
