Somebody giffed today’s comet-landing xkcd. Everything is better now.
yay!
No, YOU teared up watching this after all the coverage yesterday. I also feel like it’s incredibly appropriate that I’m currently reading Arthur C. Clark’s Rendezvous with Rama. (He’s my favorite. Go read him all of you.)
oh my god
It’s finally here! Our third season of Tabletop officially kicks off today, with Tokaido.
I love this game so much, and I hope we captured the beauty, balance, and wonderful mix of strategy and guile that goes into each turn.
I played with my pal Chris Kluwe, J. August Richards (who some of you may remember from The Wil Wheaton Project), and Jason Wishnov, who wrote, produced, directed, and coded a wonderful game I worked on earlier this year, called There Came An Echo.
I have said this quite a bit in the last several months, and I’ll continue saying it for the next several months: thank you, so much, to all of our backers, for helping us make this show that we love. I couldn’t have done this without you, and I sincerely believe that you’ll be happy that you did, as the season unfolds.
(NB: Apparently, we made a minor rules mistake at one point in the game, which I won’t discuss specifically because spoilers, but I don’t think it would have affected the outcome.)
This is just a great picture. Look at those happy dogs!
"These are my babies!! We MADE these!!"
Ride Sharing services like Lyft and Uber are great because you can rate your driver, but they also get to rate you. Here are some tips from Uber drivers to get great ratings and turn yourself into a VIP customer.
Ett säkerhetshål i klassvarningen ”Critical” har hittats i alla Windows från Vista till 8.1. Säkerhetsproblemet påminner om Heartbleed, som orsakade rabalder för ett tag sedan. Det kan göra att hackare kan köra kod lokalt på datorn, vilket är väldigt allvarligt.
Enligt Microsoft finns det dock inga bevis på att något sådant har hänt, och igår släppte man en säkerhetsuppdatering som finns att hämta via Windows Update. Säkerhetshålet kan drabba dig som kör framför allt webbserver på din Windowsdator.
Microsoft beskriver att buggen kan ”tillåta fjärrexekvering av kod om en angripare sänder speciellt utformade paket till en Windowsserver”. Det påminner alltså lite om Heartbleed.
Säkerhetshålet gäller alla Windows-versioner från och med Vista, men du löper bara risk att drabbas om du kör en server på din dator. Buggen finns i Microsoft Secure Channel (Schannel), en rad funktioner för att tillhandahålla säker och krypterad överföring av data.
Microsoft har redan skickat ut en säkerhetsuppdatering via Windows Update. Har du det inställt på automatiskt uppdateringar, är det förmodligen redan fixat. Annars får du ta en titt i Kontrollpanelen -> Windows Update.
Läs mer hos Microsoft.
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Sleeping in on Saturday may be a common indulgence, but it's bad for your sleep schedule . If you want to get in some extra snooze time on Saturday but don't want to ruin your Monday morning, nap in the afternoon instead.
There were plenty of clues that 2009’s Dragon Age: Origins took inspiration from A Song of Ice and Fire. Some were small—knights called “ser” instead of the customary “sir.” Some were larger, like an ancient Night’s Watch-like order called the Grey Wardens, dedicated to fighting off surges of supernatural evil called “Blights.” But there was a single moment, early in the game, that made me take notice and say “These developers have been reading their George R.R. Martin.”
Much like Game of Thrones, it seems a conventional fantasy story. There are evil creatures invading, heroic kings, steadfast allies, and your character, the unconventional hero. The good guys line up on one side, the bad guys line up on the other, and then….and then much like Ned Stark’s execution, something totally unexpected happens, and it becomes clear that the rules that are supposed to govern heroic fantasy aren’t applicable here. Dragon Age is not a simple story of supernatural conflict, but one of human ambition and treachery. Much like Game of Thrones, the people in power are unable to put their personal motives behind them in order to serve a greater purpose.
These themes pervade Dragon Age: Origins, making it feel, in many ways, like an epic Game of Thrones role-playing game. Also, Dragon Age has a much more important kitten named Ser Pounce than Game of Thrones….
Another crucial way that Dragon Age and Game of Thrones intersect is that both avoid simplistic morality. A trend in video game RPGs across the previous decade, since Fallout, had been to have a straightforward good-evil dichotomy based on player actions. Helping people good! Murder bad! But Dragon Age: Origins became one of the first major games to really complicate matters, by centering morality not on conventional ideas of good and evil, but on personal relationships between characters in the game. Go out of your way to help people, and the kind archer Leliana will be happier with you, but the ruthlessly pragmatic witch Morrigan will disdain you. Each has their own philosophy.
Likewise, the choices themselves tend to be more complicated than “Save the kitten!” versus “Burn the village!” Coming across a possessed boy gives you the option to save him at all costs, but that cost may end up being the life of his mother. The characters in Game of Thrones are likewise rarely presented with simple good and evil—and when they do, “good” usually backfires spectacularly. Just ask Daenerys about her attempt to save the Lamb People.
Dragon Age: Origins is a fairly traditional-style role-playing game made by BioWare, developers of the much-loved Baldur’s Gate and Knights of the Old Republic games. It uses combination of real-time and turn-based combat. Its interface can be a little bit clunky at times, but it’s worth powerful through that for the expansive world and great companions. It was released on PC, Xbox 360, and Playstation 3, and should be cheap and easy to find on any of those systems.
There’s one respect where Dragon Age: Origins can’t quite match up with Game of Thrones: the use of multiple perspectives. In Dragon Age, you play as a single hero, and travel to all the important parts of the world yourself, resolving each major issue. This doesn’t reconcile very well with Game of Thrones’ multiple perspectives, where stories are resolved based on the local characters–which lends itself better to negative results like a Red Wedding, which wouldn’t happen if there were a single hero who had to be able to fix everything.
The second Dragon Age game, released in 2011, resolved some of the issues of tragedy by offering more difficult choices and, quite cleverly, offering situations where the player completing a quest doesn’t always resolve happily. But Dragon Age 2 was also set in a single city, and had a story based on the very specific workings of magic in the game world–in other words, it had the human drama of A Song of Ice and Fire but lacked the specificity that connected the original game to Martin’s works.
A third game, Dragon Age: Inquisition is scheduled for release next week, making it the first game in the series since the Game of Thrones show started. If it connects to Game of Thrones like the first game in the series did, we’ll be giving it more coverage here.
Brilliant Tumblr shows women get catcalled no matter what they’re wearing
Besides the fact that a women’s appearance is never a justification for street harassment, it’s almost a moot point since women can get catcalled no matter what they’re wearing.
To prove it, Kati Heng started a tumblr to document what girls are wearing when they’re catcalled, and some of the outfits might surprise you. Titled “But What Was She Wearing: Stop the Cat Call,” the tumblr compiles and publishes photos and descriptions of what women were wearing along with their story of street harassment.
STAHP.
Edit: you may have to click through to see the gif of this pittie puppy who does not want to be woken up from its nap.
When this young girl was adopted by the Lewis family at the age of seven, she chose the name "Alice" as both a tribute to the Lewis Caroll character and as a way to control her own identity. Now, she gets to use costumes, styling, props, and the photography skills of her mom, Kelly.
Check out the cool slot box label outside my office door. “Executive Producer” would have been fine, but they went ahead and included “Showrunner” – which is nice, but I would’ve preferred “The Commodore”. In fact, that’s how I’d like to be referred to moving forward.
It wasn’t my first choice, but Natalie Cooper already snagged that.
Hey, check it out! Revised versions of episodes #1 and #2, just in time for the Art Department meeting…which also included props, costumes, and construction.
2:00 p.m. I arrived promptly, eager to get started.
2:10 p.m. Who called this meeting? Beginning to suspect I’m the victim of some elaborate practical joke.
2:27 p.m. I’m overcome with concern for the other attendees. Have they been kidnapped? Accidentally locked themselves in the linen closet? Worry gives way to panic and, ultimately, sleepiness.
2:43 p.m. I doze off but eventually wake up feeling refreshed. Only to discover it’s the next day. And someone took my wallet.
Random point of discussion. We’re going projectiles over lasers and blasters. For the most part.
Our awesome Supervising Art Director, the amazing Kimberly Zaharko, generating these handy preliminary set lists for episodes 1-3. Color-coded to boot! Dark blue for VFX, light brown for Construction and Paint, dark green for Playback, light green for Graphics, grey for Props, white for Special Effects, and invisible ink for the Subliminal Message Department.
I came in this morning to discover that Alison and Trevor had redecorated, turning their desks around to face out toward the windows and daylight (and freedom) instead of facing the walls and dreary grey bulletin board. Not sure how I feel about this. I thought the scattering of lone thumbtacks was a nice touch, holding the promise of something more – an Art Department schematic, a colorful print, a Tiger Beat centrefold of Robby Benson – while simultaneously crushing their spirits. Also, this makes it much harder for me to sneak up on them whenever the mood strikes. :(
