A former Oracle sales manager has filed a lawsuit against the database giant alleging that he was fired after refusing to offer an Indian job candidate a lower salary than would ordinarily be extended to candidates from the US.…
Look at that art. That animation. That slugcat.
I saw glimpses of Rain World long enough ago that I had forgotten about it. How did I forget about this!? The liquidity of cats is a common joke as we watch internet videos of them squeezing themselves through socks and into bowls. Slugcat takes this to a whole new level. Just look at that physics-based globbing.
Rain World is a survival platformer focusing on the interplay between sneaking away from larger, more capable murderous beast and hunting others. After being developed as a passion project for the last several years, it has taken to Kickstarter, already in an obviously fully playable alpha, to hit the requisite polish for a wide release. The page is also full of more amazing gifs and a soundtrack sample that I will probably zone out to for the rest of the work day.
Right now it is slated for PC and Mac release. This is the hottest Kickstarter I've seen since Hyper Light Drifter, which rapidly expanded to include Wii U, PS4, and Vita releases when its campaign blew up. We reached out to see if any console release is planned and right now Rain World is only promised for PC and Mac, but the team is open to release on other platforms. So we'll have to see how the Kickstarter pans out.
This would be a purrfect game to play on Vita. Existential crisis as I wonder if traditional cat puns are appropriate for slugcats.
KitUp's headline for the new Smith & Wesson .460-caliber revolver is "Smith & Wesson Unveils Backpack Cannon." Judging by its size, it looks like a hand cannon to me, yes. Or like a power tool that can kill you.
If you still have some VHS cassettes lying around, we hope you're digitizing them for safe keeping. Once you're finished with them though, Instructables user M3G has an interesting use for them: secret stashes for keys, USB drives, and documents that most people wouldn't think to open up.
    
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The Roger Corman-produced version of The Fantastic Four, from 1994, is like an optical illusion. Every time I try to watch the thing, I get about five minutes in before my eyes and brain resolutely decide to look at anything else. The term “unwatchable” gets thrown around a fair bit, but Corman’s Fantastic Four is a great candidate to define the term.
With a wave of superhero movies in full swing, two studio-made Fantastic Four movies behind us and a new one slated to shoot in March, it is inevitable that people will go back to Corman’s movie. It was never officially released, but the enterprising viewer can easily find it online. Now there’s also a documentary, called Doomed! The Untold Story of Roger Corman’s ‘The Fantastic Four’. A trailer has hit, and you can have a look below.
So is Corman’s Fantastic Four some product of underhanded dealings? Is it an unfortunate byproduct of trying to make a good movie (yes: almost every bad movie is) or is it just something best left forgotten? And who are all those people being interviewed, anyway? (Some of them are the actors, but the trailer should maybe make note of that.) Don’t expect to see many current Marvel employees in there.
At least the ’94 movie had probably the best translation of the classic Doctor Doom costume we’re likely to see on the screen. And the Thing costume isn’t bad either, especially for the time and budget. If nothing else, seeing behind the scenes footage of those elements might make the doc worth a look.
Badass Digest pointed to the trailer, and the Doomed! website.
Cheesecake + doughnut. A clever moniker hasn't been invented for it yet (I'm looking right at you, Cronut), but the very notion is so mind-blowingly decadent, so over-the-top drool worthy, that it should probably be illegal. Well, Krispy Kreme has said screw that with two new limited-time offerings. Now until January 26, they're hoping you forgo your usual hot glazed habit to try the Caramel Cheesecake Doughnut and the Chocolate Cheesecake Doughnut.
The Caramel Cheesecake starts with Krispy Kreme's basic yeast donut (a fine start, I might add, but I'm a KK guy) and adds a center of creamy cheesecake filling. On top, caramel icing and graham cracker crumbles.
The Chocolate Cheesecake features chocolate cheesecake filling (duh) and is topped with chocolate icing and brownie crumbles. I'm not sure what brownie crumbles have to do with replicating the classic cheesecake experience, but they had a chocolate theme to stick to.
As any member of the select group of people who've seen me without a baggy T-shirt on can tell you, I clearly love doughnuts. But at the same time, I like to think of myself as a fairly simple dude. A purist, if you will, about many of the best things in life. I generally don't need a lot of overcomplicated bells and whistles gussying up my doughnuts, for example. Don't want a bunch of decorations and extra accoutrements piled on top, just making it harder to cram into my piehole. (Or doughnuthole, as it were.)
The way I see it, the more stuff you throw on top of a doughnut, the more pretty shrapnel I'm gonna be vacuuming off the floor later. So the crumbles on these babies are an element I could just as easily do without. The graham seemed like a cheesecake crust, I guess, but the brownie tasted dry and bland, almost like unsweetened chocolate. Blecch.
As for that "cheesecake filling," neither doughnut's interior tasted like cheesecake to me. True, it's not overly sweet, and that is very much cheesecakesque. But texturally, this filling was more like a cross between mousse and frosting. (I totally have dibs on the word moussting, coming soon to a bakery and a dictionary near you.) And if a "cheesecake doughnut" doesn't remind you much of cheescake... what's the point?
Granted, it's still a doughnut. And a Krispy Kreme doughnut at that. They'd have to screw the pooch pretty catastrophically to make it a doughnut I'd turn my nose up at. So throw one into your next dozen for novelty's sake. But order a Caramel Cheesecake Doughnut or a Chocolate Cheesecake Doughnut over a good ol', standard-issue, hot-off-the-conveyor-belt-and glistening-from-the-icing-waterfall glazed Krispy Kreme? Here's a word for you: NO.
About the Author: Todd Brock lives the glamorous life of a stay-at-home freelance writer in the suburbs of Atlanta. Besides being paid to eat cheeseburgers for AHT, pizzas for Slice, and desserts for Sweets, he's written and produced over 1,000 hours of television and penned Building Chicken Coops for Dummies. When he grows up, he wants to be either the starting quarterback for the Dallas Cowboys or the drummer for The Gaslight Anthem. Or both.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Even if the original Nintendo Entertainment System was well before your time, you're probably still aware of a well-known issue that prevented games from working until you blew into the cartridges to clean off the contacts. Taking that idea one step further, YouTuber Basami Sentaku has turned a few old NES (or Famicom, to be exact) cartridges into electronic harmonicas that instead produce chiptune-like music when you blow into them.
Fatbobnever going to give you up
79% of people don’t know the opposites to all these words:
1. Always
2. Coming
3. From
4. Take
5. Me
6. Down
Thanks Jarrod
Imagine yourself stuck in traffic. Imagine listening to some Top 40 radio station playing the same 4 songs over and over and wondering about the things you would do if you didn't have to commute. Imagine your brain numb. And then imagine seeing some psycho bike rider pull off some bike tricks off of a half-pipe on top of a moving truck. In the middle of traffic. That would be fun for everyone.
GameFace Labs detailed its in-development GameFace Mark 4 VR headset at last week's CES in Las Vegas, revealing that its Oculus Rift competitor features head-tracking wireless gameplay without requiring a connected PC.
Engadget reports that a ...
Submitted by: Unknown
You might think you know all there is to know about the 1999 movie Fight Club, but even so, you will find trivia to blow your mind in this list. I still haven't seen the movie, and it was at least ten years old before I ever knew there was a twist in it. Now I see there are easter eggs in almost every scene, stuff that you have to look for. And after reading this list you'll have an excuse to go watch it again because you have to check out and see if these things are real. Some content NSFW.
[Update: Hideki Kamiya (Resident Evil 2, Okami, Viewtiful Joe, Bayonetta, The Wonderful 101) agrees that developing for the Wii U is "about the same" as developing for the Xbox 360 and the PS3]
A bevy of Wii U developers, such as Jools Watsham of Renegade Kid and Chris Arnold of Nami Tentou, have come out in defense of the Wii U in light of recent criticisms. According to Chris, most of the points made by the anonymous developer in the recent Eurogamer article are based on "pre-retail release SDK problems" and that "the new post release SDK kits do not contain any of the listed problems". Chris even went as far as to call the Eurogamer article "Nintendoom clickbait", while Jools says that from what he knows as a Wii U, 3DS, PC, PS3 and PS Vita developer, "the Wii U is not more difficult to develop for than other platforms."
That's sounds a lot like what the developers of Darksiders 2 had to say back in 2012, stating that the Wii U has "plenty of horsepower" and that they got it running on the console "pretty quickly". Then there's 5th Cell, who felt quite confident in the Wii U's processing power.
Every developer is going to have different experiences, and none of them are to be diminished, but the last time were heard anonymous devs talking crap about about the Wii U, most of it didn't end up being true. When you've got reports from an anonymous source versus the word from developers who are willing to go on record with their names and track history, it doesn't take a genius to figure out who to believe.
She knows exactly how to push her son's buttons. Mostly because she installed them herself. Lunarbaboon reminds us that you remain a child to at least one person in your life.
[Dtoid community blogger UsurpMyProse catches China up on what they've been missing. Turns out, it's not much! Want to see your own blog appear on our front page? Go write something! --Mr Andy Dixon]
Hey there, China! Have you heard the good news? No, the streets aren't running red with the blood of imperialist pigs, silly. Your government has finally lifted the 14-year ban on videogame consoles! Finally, after all these years of being limited to shady MMOs and heavily censored PC games, you will now at long last be able to experience all the joys of growing bored with Wii Bowling after fifteen minutes. Now, that might seem like a dated reference for everyone else in the world, but that joke ought to go over like gang busters with you guys.
But as any of your imprisoned political dissidents can tell you, 14 years is a long time, and that means you're going to need some help catching up with everything that's happened since y'all were left wondering how they were possibly going to top Crash Bandicoot: Warped. (Hint: They didn't.) Fret not! I'm here to offer you some tips, advice, and general updates to gently wean you off the knockoff Funstation 4 you picked up at a Shanghai flea market and get you ready for the real deal.
Today, after his sixth beer, my dad looked me in the eye and said "I've never forgiven you for what you did to your mother's vagina". FML
If you're an off-roading enthusiast you've probably already seen those kits that let you replace your truck's wheels with a set of four tank treads for tackling any terrain. The Track N Go is the same idea, except that you don't need a garage, a lift, or any kind of mechanical know-how to install them. You just drive your vehicle onto the treads, lock them in place, and away you go.
Eurogamer recently hosted a first-hand account from a mystery developer, which describes the Wii U development process in great detail. It's a page turner for sure, going through the entire process of making a game for the Wii U, from the "studio visit" from Nintendo when it was "Project Cafe," to early development woes, to the rush for the day one patch, to the "less than impressive" sales figures.
Interestingly, the developer also pegs the Wii U's launch woes partially on brand confusion (Wii vs. Wii U), and "bad timing," as the PS4 and Xbox One were hyped mere months later -- when many developers were already excitedly working on them. One of the biggest shockers in the report however is the allegation of a complete lack of understanding in the online realm.
When speaking on the online functions of the system and trying to make helpful comparisons between existing infrastructures like the PSN and Xbox Live, they ran into trouble. The developer states that during a conference call with senior Nintendo officials, that they were told to stop referencing the PSN and Xbox Live because "nobody in their development teams used those systems."
This is all fairly interesting information for anyone who wants more insight into the development process, as I'm sure many console manufacturers and third parties have gone through the same difficulties when creating a new platform. I hope the Wii U recovers more as 2014 goes on, but based on what this developer is saying, many studios have moved on and decided to work with the PS4 and Xbox One (which they refer to as "real" next-gen consoles) instead. As always, take this with a grain of salt.
The Secret Developers: Wii U - the inside story [Eurogamer]
Sirgiorgiro Clardy of Portland, Oregon, was convicted of assault and robbery following an incident in which a man failed to pay a prostitute under Clardy's control. He received a 100-year sentence. Now Clardy has filed a $100 million lawsuit against Nike.
Jurors early in 2013 found him guilty of second-degree assault for using his Jordans -- a dangerous weapon -- to beat the john's face to a pulp. The man required stitches and plastic surgery on his nose.
The jury also found him guilty of robbing the john and beating the 18-year-old woman he forced to work as his prostitute. She was injured so badly that she bled from her ears.
In his three-page complaint handwritten from the Eastern Oregon Correctional Institution in Pendleton, Clardy claims that Nike, Chairman Phil Knight and other executives failed to warn consumers that the shoes could be used as a weapon to cause serious injury or death.
On the surface, this seems silly. Shoes are shoes, and the manufacture will most likely not be deemed even partially responsible for the damage Clardy did when he stomped on the victim's face. But when you look closer, you can see a method to the madness.
In the past, Oregon defendants have been convicted of using a wide array of items or substances as dangerous weapons. The list includes boots, rope, a phone receiver, scalding hot water and HIV-infected blood. The "dangerous weapon" classification can spur longer prison sentences.
It appears that Clardy expects the lawsuit to be thrown out as frivolous, which would give him ammunition to appeal the "with a deadly weapon" portion of the charges. The Oregonian has more on the story. -via Uproxx
(Image credit: Multnomah County Sheriff's Office)
[Dtoid community blogger Timnoldzim shares some his favorite vintage gaming commercials. Share your favorites in the comments! --Mr Andy Dixon]
Game commercials, these days, are a dying art. Today, if you turn on the TV or begrudgingly sit through YouTube's annoying ads and see a quick spot for the latest hot release, I already know what you see: a lightning-quick montage of game clips (primarily, the protagonist punching people) set to a second-tier piece of licensed music, featuring excerpts from some glowing reviews and ending on a mediocre tagline with a picture of the game box.
Game advertising wasn't always this dull, though. It was once, and perhaps will be in the future, a trip through Epicland. "Unusual" was the name of the game. Whether they were meant to be funny or scary, mysterious or overt, subdued or bombastic, they were almost always jaw-dropping to watch. Maybe it was only because we were kids, or because the medium was younger and more naive, but I'm not so sure. I think there was genuinely something to these old dogs. Let's look back at a few, shall we?
