Fatbob

Thanks Mike (from Spain)

The post A dog’s life appeared first on Bits and Pieces.

Matthew Inman, creator of quirky comic website The Oatmeal, just launched a Kickstarter campaign for a new card game, called Exploding Kittens.

In the vein of Russian roulette, players go around in a circle, drawing cards from a deck, until one of them picks up an exploding kitten. That player immediately "explodes" and loses. Players can strategically use other cards they've picked up to negate an exploding kitten, or make it more likely for other players to pick one up. All of the cards feature Inman's signature Oatmeal-style drawings, and many include drawings from his past comics.

While some of you might have experienced Steam's frames-per-second counter while it was in beta, the rest of us are only now taking a look at the nice little extra.

To enable the feature, go to Steam > Settings > In-Game > In-Game FPS Counter. You can select which corner of your screen the counter will appear on, and if you aren't cool with the default white text, there's an eye-piercing high-contrast green option as well.

Steam Broadcasting is live now, too. Head to Steam > Settings > Broadcasting to tinker with settings like video dimensions, maximum bitrate, and microphone recording or to disable it.

Recommended article: Chomsky: We Are All – Fill in the Blank.
This entry passed through the Full-Text RSS service - if this is your content and you're reading it on someone else's site, please read the FAQ at fivefilters.org/content-only/faq.php#publishers.

undergroundmonorail:

cactiofficial:

pyronoid-d:

text-mode:

The Morris worm or Internet worm of November 2, 1988 was one of the first computer worms distributed via the Internet. It was written by a student at Cornell University, Robert Tappan Morris, and launched on November 2, 1988 from MIT.

It’s trapped on a floppy tho this is some dark shit it has been denied its purpose forever bound to this obsolete storage

am i glad it’s in there and we’re out here

people reading fantasy novels ask “why did the ancient ones seal the evil away for ten thousand years instead of just killing it” but then we go ahead and do this shit

Thanks Big Mac

The post A classic Irish text message… appeared first on Bits and Pieces.

It’s unclear what metahumans like the Flash and Aquaman do when they need to expel solid waste from their bodies, but when Batman needs to go number two he sits down on a toilet just like everybody else.

Batsy’s bathroom time may not seem like a moment you’d want to commemorate with a trading card, but back in 1966 that Batman bathroom card became a reality thanks to some bored employees at Topps. 

According to eBay seller clubhouse this crazy card was created as an inside joke and was never released to the public, a fact which they figure warrants an opening bid of $3500:

The holy grail of all BATMAN CARDS. A 1966 TOPPS Batman black cape BATMAN ON BAT THRONE. A family member use to work at the Topps printing plant in CT during the 1960′s. That is where this card originated from. It appears some Topps employees were bored one day and made a card of Batman sitting on the toilet. This card was never released.

If this card had been sold along with the rest of the set it might have changed an entire generation's mind about the Caped Crusader, resulting in Aquaman becoming bigger than the Bat!

-Via Comics Alliance

via

The post PSA: Text Her Back appeared first on Bits and Pieces.

Fox has confirmed that it is in talks to revive its iconic supernatural horror procedural, The X-Files.

Read more...

The X-Men of Marvel Comics are famous for being so numerous, and so interconnected in plot and history, that unraveling the connections between all of them is a herculean task. For example, take this fairly comprehensive X-Men timeline video, which runs eleven minutes and has to sprint in order to fit every team member into that running time. Along with the basic character bios, you’ll get a detailed breakdown of decades of X-Men history, including many of the later revisions made to allow older stories to make sense in context with later tales.

Note that these are all proper X-Men members. Characters who were part of related teams such as the New Mutants won’t show up unless they became proper X-Men members. These skipped characters, such as Franklin Richards, might be a prominent mutant characters, or could even have strong associations with the X-Men. But the skipped characters weren’t actually members of any of the real X-Men teams.

Will this help you guess who might show up in X-Men: Apocalypse? Maybe. For that, focus on the first half of the 1980s in this timeline, though we could see characters later introduced (in real world time) show up as well. The films aren’t very strictly related to the real-world or in-story continuity of the comics.

Note: there are major spoilers here for various X-Men stories, including character fates and identities that have been retconned and reimagined at various times over the years. There’s also a good account here of the basic swings in popularity enjoyed (or suffered) by the various comics series, all of which help influence story development and the introduction of many characters.

[via IGN]

The post Watch a Video Timeline of Every Single ‘X-Men’ Comic Character appeared first on /Film.

There's gold in them thar sewers—and silver and platinum and copper, too. A study by Arizona State University (ASU) researchers estimates there is $13 million worth of precious elements in the sewage produced by a million-person city every year. Never think of sewage as stinky worthless waste again.

Read more...

Remember the company from the Terminator franchise called Cyberdyne Systems? The same company that builds lethal robots and develops Skynet, the network of computers that eventually tries to destroy all of humanity? Well, there's a real company called Cyberdyne. And they make robotic exoskeletons. Should we be worried?

Read more...

(Maulleigh)

Ever since the (current) net neutrality fight got started a year ago, the battle lines have been pretty predictable: the companies that sell you access to data don’t really want stronger regulations, and groups that sell things that need you to have access to someone else’s data plan do. But in a surprise move this week, Sprint just broke ranks with the AT&Ts and Verizons of the mobile world to tell the FCC that actually, they’re cool with Title II regulation.

Tech news site GigaOm spotted the filing, a letter from Sprint’s CTO Stephen Bye to FCC chairman Tom Wheeler and the rest of the commission. In stark contrast to the doom and gloom cries from the rest of the industry, Sprint’s letter says that light touch common carrier regulation in the past is what allowed their company to grow and innovate to begin with, and that they will be just fine going forward if the FCC continues that approach.

Specifically, Bye’s letter begins by saying that Sprint “does not believe that a light touch application of Title II, including appropriate forbearance, would harm the continued investment in, and deployment of, mobile broadband services.”

Sprint then references the origins of mobile service pointing out that the first attempt, a licensed duopoly in the early 1990s, was a flop of “slow deployment, high prices and little innovation.” Later regulation, allowing companies including Sprint to enter the mobile market, was more effective.

But, Bye continues, “some net neutrality debaters appear to have forgotten … that this light touch regulatory regime emanated from Title II common carriage regulation.” And yes, they do indeed seem to forget that whenever it’s convenient.

“So long as the FCC continues to allow wireless carriers to manage our networks and differentiate our products,” Sprint concludes, [we] will continue to invest in data networks regardless of whether they are regulated by Title II, Section 706, or some other light touch regulatory regime.”

Verizon and AT&T, the nation’s two biggest wireless companies by far, have both been extremely vocal opponents of any move by the FCC to regulate either wired or mobile broadband services as common carriers — despite admitting that Title II regulation would not actually harm their ability to invest in their network.

In surprise filing, Sprint endorses net neutrality [GigaOm]

During an expedition to Antarctica, photographer Alex Cornell was lucky enough to see an iceberg flip over and was able to capture these spectacular images. Such flips are rare and often dangerous, because of the waves they make. Some iceberg flips can even cause tsunamis. 

People use the phrase "the tip of the iceberg" to mean that the bulk of information about a situation or item is unknown/unseen. The phrase relates to the scientific fact that approximately 90% of icebergs are underwater, thus the part we see is literally just the top tip. This can be explained by the density of sea water versus that of ice. The density of ice is .92 grams per milliliter. The density of water is 1 gram per milliliter (salt water 1.03 g/mL). So ice has nine-tenths (ninety percent) of the density of water, and thus, 90 percent of the iceberg is below the surface of the water. 

Most icebergs appear white, though some look blue or green. Ice contains air bubbles that diffuse all color wavelengths the same amount, making the ice look white. When ice is compressed, its bubbles are forced out and blue light is disseminated more than any other colors, thus the ice appears blue. Icebergs that appear to have stripes of green are caused by algae growth. 

Learn more about icebergs here, and see more of Cornell's beautiful photography from Antarctica at his website.  

Via Colossal | Images: Alex Cornell

 
 

Thanks Rich

The post One-Upping the Ice Bucket Challenge appeared first on Bits and Pieces.

Cree's always impressed us with good-looking LED lightbulbs at wonderfully affordable prices. Now, the North Carolina company is raising the stakes with a new connected bulb that's not only dimmable and programmable; it also lasts for 25,000 hours, just like its less-smart sibling . The best part? It's still a bargain.

Read more...

It feels like Starbound has been in development for a long time now. Sure, it's playable, but it is not complete. Perhaps a similarly styled game that is not quite so ambitious may tide us all over. Perhaps we want to control a character who bears an odd resemblance to VVVVVV's Captain Viridian. Perhaps Moonman is just the game to sate those desires.

Moonman features a lot of the same stuff as Starbound (and its predecessor Terraria). There is digging. There is crafting. There is building. There is combat. There is procedural generation. There is "looking for moon fragments in friends." Okay, I guess that last one is new.

Moonman has recently begun its Kickstarter campaign with a goal of $35,000 AUD. It is intended to release on Linux, Mac, and Windows this May.

The Japanese Robot Restaurant is acid on steroids. Its techno-beating, glow stick-swinging, glitter-vomiting hyperactive show will send you into a dizzying nightmare.

Then the robots appear.

Before, the only way to experience this out-of-body experience, that often leaves tourists' jaws cleaning the floor, was to travel to a red light district of Japan, Shinjuku's Kabukicho, and cough up 6000 Yen. It was worth it for the highlight of seeing an LED bikini-clad waitress battle it out with an oversized robot while you munched on some overpriced popcorn. Read more...

This hilarious commercial for the Toronto Jewish Film Festival shows legendary porn star Ron Jeremy trying to understand why his movies have never been accepted to the festival. I feel the same way as you, Ron, Woodfellas and The Rod Father are brilliant.

Read more...