Paul Brownlee

Doujin game publisher Nyu Media have announced their upcoming slate of games, which will begin releasing this winter through spring 2014.

Read Nyu Media’s Upcoming Slate Of Doujin Games Has Fighters, Shooters And Beat-em-ups on Siliconera!

Valve have shared a new video that demonstrates the Steam Controller the company released announced for use with—or without—their upcoming Steam Machines.

Read Valve Demonstrate The Steam Controller With Portal 2 on Siliconera!

pimp my ride armor.

Hyper Light Drifter is coming to Wii U ⊟

It’s also coming to PS Vita! So at least it will be on one handheld. Heart Machine will also release this to other platforms like PlayStation 4, Mac/Linux/Windows, and Ouya, if you prefer playing on those things. It looks like a great game — you can get a copy for just $15 if you throw a pledge at its Kickstarter, which ends in a day.

I grabbed these GIFs from PaulloDec, theveryscaryrollie, and the official Kickstarter page, and also threw in an awesome fan-made animation from Anthony Holden.

BUY Wii U, PS Vita, upcoming games

My 16-year-old daughter came home yesterday and showed me an app called Lulu that all of her friends are using. It's purpose is to anonymously rate your male Facebook friends. Each boy is displayed alongside a number from 1 - 10, which represents an average rating for the guy. Users can rate the boys on a number of attributes, such as physical attractiveness, kissing skill, and commitment level.

I predict Apple will pull this from the iPhone store very soon.

I asked Sarina to tell me more about Lulu:

Mark: What is Lulu?

Sarina: Lulu is an app where girls can see all their male Facebook friends. The boys don't have a say in it -- their profile automatically goes to the app. You just download the app and then you can click on any of the boy's profiles.

The screen is divided into different squares with boys' pictures, and it has their name and their average score. Their average score is all the scores that girls have given them, averaged together. If you just want to quickly review them you can look at that, but if you want the full report on what kind of guy they are you can look at it. I think it's a pretty entertaining app, but I have a feeling it's going to get out of hand soon once everybody in my school finds out about it and it's going to cause a lot of drama with the boys.

Mark: What happens when you click a boy's picture?

Sarina: You can see reviews that other girls gave them: hookups with them, if the girl is a friend of theirs, or if the girl has a crush on them. The girl can rate them on being a good kisser, on their personality, how many girls have a crush on them, their appearance, commitment, ambition, manners, humor, first kiss, and things like that.

Mark: Are the girls' comments and ratings anonymous?

Sarina: Completely anonymous. Any girl can review any of the guys on it. And girls can see all the reviews that other girls have done. It's not really for the guys to look at to see what other people have said about them. It's more for girls. If you have a crush on a guy, then you can go to their profile and see what other people have said about them and other people's opinions. [It really is just for girls -- I installed the app and it wouldn't let me see the ratings since I am male. -- Mark]

Mark: So I see that the guys' profiles have these little hashtags -- attributes like best and worst qualities. The "Best" hashtags for this particular guy [one of Sarina's classmates] says "Respects women." "My friends are jealous." "Epic smile." "Strong hands." "Always stays." "Does his own laundry." "One-woman man." "Six pack." And then "Worst:" "No chemistry." "Almost too perfect." "He loves me not." "Doesn't know I exist."

Mark: Do they have a companion app for guys to rate girls?

Sarina: No, they don't, and I'm happy that that day hasn't come yet. When it does, that will be a different story.

Archer takes on the video for "Danger Zone," with music by Giorgio Morodo, lyrics by Tom Whitlock, and vocals by Kenny Loggins.

A little while ago, Treasure stated there would be some “good news” concerning Ikaruga soon. Now, we know what that good news is.

Read Ikaruga Is On Steam Greenlight For PC on Siliconera!

Hugh Pickens DOT Com writes "Madison Park and Dayu Zhang report on CNN that swarms of aggressive hornets are inflicting a deadly toll in a central China killing 42 people and injuring 1,675 people in three cities in Shaanxi province since July. Government authorities say these attacks are from a particularly venomous species, the world's largest hornet, known as the Asian giant hornet or vespa mandarinia. The giant hornet extends about 3.5 to 3.9 centimeters in length, roughly the size of a human thumb and has an orange head with a black tooth used for burrowing. The Asian giant hornet is intensely predatory; it hunts medium- to large-sized insects, such as bees, other hornet species, and mantises. The pain of the Asian Giant Hornet is described as a hot nail piercing the skin and lasts about 4 hours with instant swelling. One victim told local media earlier this month that "the more you run, the more they want to chase you." Some victims described being chased about 200 meters (656 feet) by a swarm. Local authorities have deployed thousands of police officers and locals to destroy about 710 hives but ""It's very difficult to prevent the attacks because hornet nests are usually in hidden sites," says Shunichi Makino, director general of the Hokkaido Research Center for Forestry and Forest Products Research Institute. Makino, who specializes in entomology, warned that the sting from an Asian giant hornet was severe compared with those of other insects. "The venom of an Asian giant hornet is very special compared with other hornets or yellow jackets," says Makino. "The neurotoxin — especially to mammals including humans — it's a special brand of venom." Asian Giant Hornets have been spotted in the United States."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Treasurenauts trailer ⊟

See for yourself everything that I struggled to describe in my hands-on preview of Renegade Kid’s Treasurenauts. Which, like, I don’t want to tell you what to do, but maybe you should go back and read if you haven’t… I’m so glad the sleepy crab boss is still being used! I was concerned it was placeholder art.

Renegade Kid is hoping to get this on the 3DS eShop this year.

BUY Nintendo 3DS and 3DS XL consoles, upcoming releases

The writer of best-selling thrillers including "The Hunt for Red October" and "Patriot Games" has died at the age of 66.

I'm loving this short film about two sixth-grade metalheads from Flatbush, Brooklyn.

There is a particular moment right before fame strikes a young musician – between the full flowering of talent and believing in a dream so pure and strong as to feel bulletproof – which at the same time is almost imperceptible as it is happening. This metaphysical friction is in full effect in a certain Flatbush, Brooklyn family basement. Unlocking the Truth, a metal band composed of twelve year old Malcolm Brickhouse and eleven year old Jarad Dawkins, is playfully arguing about which member can play a faster and more forceful rendition of their self-composed instrumental blast “Physical Therapy.”

While Jarad is technically the drummer (he mastered the instrument by the age of two), he is convincingly demonstrating his guitar chops. Being the precoucious, and yet consummate, professionals that they are, the band wants to make sure that in a worst case scenario – say, a member fainting onstage – each could play the other’s instrument flawlessly. It is not atypical for Unlocking the Truth to practice for up to ten hours on weekends.

They are so immersed in their music that they barely notice anything going on around them, including their parents, who usually have to force them to stop practicing when it’s bedtime. While their classmates mostly listen to radio pop or rap, Malcolm and Jarad’s enthusiasm for metal was nurtured while watching generous amounts of WWE professional wrestling. But this is no passing phase for the two boys. The band has already written two albums, Madness and Paranoid, respectively, and recently auditioned for America’s Got Talent.

Amazingly, they manage to keep up good grades in school. So watch out, America – two smart, young metalheads from Flatbush are coming to a town near you in the near future.

You can check out the band's website here.

[The Avant-Garde Diaries, thanks Brenda]

This week, the FBI arrested a 19-year-old computer science student named Jared James Abrahams for tricking young women into installing malicious software on their computers, software that let him covertly operate their webcams and microphones, as well as capturing their keystrokes and plundering their hard-drives. Abrahams captured nude photos of his victims, then threatened to release them to the victims' social media accounts unless they performed live, on-camera sex-acts for him. At least one of his victims was a minor. Another of his victims was Miss Teen USA Cassidy Wolf, who turned him into the FBI.

Ars Technica's Nate Anderson has a spellbinding account of Abrahams's crimes, and the way that the FBI tracked him down, and he places Abrahams in the larger context of "RATers" (crooks who operate Remote Access Trojans -- the kind of malware used by Abrahams). This phenomenon is also the subject of one of the chapters in Anderson's excellent book The Internet Police: How Crime Went Online, and the Cops Followed, and few journalists are better qualified to write about the subject.

On May 17, 2012, he told the RAT community at hackforums.net, "Recently I infected a person at my school with darkcomet. It was total luck that I got her infected because I suck at social engineering. Anyway, this girl happens to be a model and a really good looking one at that :D. I was hoping I could use her and her facebook account to further spread my darkcomet rat. I want to mass message all her friends on facebook but I have no idea what to message them to get them to download the rat. Any ideas or suggestions would be greatly appreciated :)."

The "model" in question appears to have been Wolf, whose machine was infected in mid-2012. Abrahams used DarkComet to snap lots of nude photos of Wolf, whom he watched until March 21, 2013. That day, Wolf received a message from Facebook saying that someone was attempting to change her password. Then came a similar message from Twitter—then messages from Tumblr and Yahoo. Suspicious, she checked her profiles; her Twitter account now displayed a "half nude" photo of Wolf.

Thirty minutes later, she received an e-mail from her attacker. He demanded that Wolf either send him "good quality" nude pictures through Snapchat, that she send a video of herself, or that she "go on skype with me and do what I tell you to do for 5 minutes." If she didn't, the attacker pledged to release his many nude photos widely—and he attached a few just to prove how many he had.

Instead, Wolf went to the FBI, and the Bureau's LA cyber squad swung into action. On March 29, the FBI looked at Wolf's laptop and found evidence of both DarkComet and another RAT known as Blackshades, which confirmed how the attacker had taken his photos. But who was he? The IP addresses behind the attacker's e-mails resolved back only to a VPN provider which purposely kept no logs. But the RATs themselves had connected back to the attacker by accessing no-ip.org, a service which allows users to dynamically map their IP address to a domain name (in this case, to cutefuzzypuppy.zapto.org and schedule2013.no-ip.org), thereby allowing the "slaves" to phone home, even when the attacker was using a dynamic IP address from a home Internet account. No-ip.org did keep records, and the FBI obtained them.

How the FBI found Miss Teen USA’s webcam spy [Nate Anderson/Ars Technica]

I would be willing to play a remake of the original Mega Man that looks like this. I think it would actually be pretty cool to see in motion.

In the arcade version of Duck Hunt you could actually shoot that damn dog. Who’s laughing now?

At Matter, physical therapy professor Eric Robertson writes about a very rare condition called rhabdomyolysis — it's what happens when chronically overworked muscle cells rupture and overload your kidneys with massive amounts of protein. The results are painful, reasonably disgusting, and potentially deadly. Rhabdomyolysis used to be something you only had to worry about if you were, say, part of an elite military squad or a professional athlete. But as more average folks have gotten into elite physical training regimens through programs like CrossFit, the profile of people damaged by rhabdomyolysis is changing. Training like a bad-ass can bring along some of the physical risks of being a bad-ass.