Jacksonville, Florida-based artist James Hance is truly the master of geektastic mashups. I’ve been featuring his work on GAS since 2010, and the man never ceases to amaze me with his art. Keep on being awesome, James!
[Relentlessly Cheerful Art By James Hance]
We tend to look at willpower as this magical force inside of us that we either have or we don't. In a recent interview, Scott Adams—Dilbert creator and frequent advice giver —explains that willpower is actually a finite resource, and there's a way to get what you need done without draining it all.
Each day, Christy Kilgore likes to bring a little sunlight in her children’s life by drawing pop culture artwork on the lunch bags they bring to school. She’s been doing this for about a year now and uses regular colored pencils, sharpies, and crayola markers to create her art.
If you want to check out more of Christy’s work, you can follow her on twitter or instagram where she posts her new chef d’oeuvres regularly.
[Christy Kilgore on Twitter | Christy Kilgore on Instagram]
It turns out that my 24 hour trip to New York, followed by a full day of intense creative work, pretty much kicked my ass. I’m so tired, I don’t even have the energy to go to Staples Center to watch my beloved Los Angeles Kings take on our crosstown rivals, the hated Ducks. I thought about maybe homebrewing some wootstout today, but I don’t think I can even do that. It looks like I’ll spend most of today — and maybe all of tomorrow — watching movies and catching up on TV shows, so I can regenerate HP and Mana, but holy mother of balls am I tired.
But it’s a good kind of tired. It’s the kind of tired that seems to start out in my bones. The kind of tired that I feel has been earned, by lots of hard work. Sure, it’s not the kind of hard work that people who actually work for a living would consider work, but since my job basically entails me creating things and then enthusiastically sharing those creations with an audience, the last week has been some of the hardest work I’ve done in a long time.
While I was in New York to promote the awesome videos I made with Newcastle, I did seventeen interviews in about eight hours. Seventeen times, I found new and interesting ways to answer the same fundamental questions, each time making sure that the person I was talking with got 100% of the energy I had to offer, so that each interview felt like it was the only interview I did.
I did that seventeen times, and by the end of the day, I was completely exhausted. In fact, I had a beer at the end of the day (which was funny, because drinking it was technically part of working), and I fell asleep in the car moments after it pulled away from the curb to take me to the airport.
So, about that … the car took me to the wrong airport. In the wrong state. And I found out when I was inside the airport, at the wrong ticket counter, 90 minutes before my flight was scheduled to depart.
I had the most panicked panic I’ve felt related to travel in a very, very long time, as I hoped against hope that the cab I got into at the wrong airport could take me all the way across Brooklyn and Manhattan and get me to the right airport. The entire way, I did math in my head every few minutes to update my anticipated arrival time, and each time it told me that I’d make it or miss it by about five minutes. I didn’t have any checked luggage, and I had my boarding pass already, but it was going to be incredibly close.
When I got to the right airport, I tipped the driver 100%, and ran as fast as I could to security. “I’m going to miss my flight,” I said, “if you delay me at all. Please help me.”
By the grace of the old gods and new, I encountered a string of very helpful and friendly TSA people who all assured me that I’d be fine, since I had nearly 20 minutes before departure (the airline says that if you get to the plane with less than fifteen minutes before the departure time, you’re screwed).
Here’s the thing about me and travel: I’m good at it. I’m efficient. I know how to get my belt off, and I kick of my slip-on Vans quickly and easily. I have the laptop pull and bin deposit down to a fluid move that is like a ballet.
Only this trip, I was wearing Fluevog boots that tied near my ankles, and when I tried to untie them, the laces knotted themselves tightly. This trip, when I tried to take my laptop out of my bag, I nearly dropped it, and then I fell over while I was removing the knot from my shoe. I nearly forgot to take my belt off. It wasn’t a ballet so much as it was the flailing of a crazy person that would have been a perfect visual for Yakkity Sax.
Somehow, I got through security, and when I slammed my feet back into my boots, I knew that I had to run as fast as I could to get to the gate on time. I didn’t even stop to tie them — which was a mistake, it turns out. If you ever have to run in boots, tie them — and I got to my gate with less than five minutes to spare. I was the second to last person to get on the plane, and thanks to the Lords of Light, I had checked in online and they hadn’t given my seat away. I fell into my seat, explained to the bewildered man next to me why I was sweating and gasping and shaking, and when the adrenaline finally wore off, slept for most of the trip.
Yesterday, I slept straight through my alarm and was fifteen minutes late for my meeting at Geek & Sundry, where I worked with a Top Secret Team of Creative People on the Tabletop RPG show.
Hey nerds, I thought you may like to know what I'm working on today. pic.twitter.com/yDJGuHZDpq
— Wil Wheaton (@wilw) November 14, 2014
I spent the entire day building the world, figuring out what was important for the players, characters, and audience to know, and eventually ended the day with an outline for the adventure we’re going to run. I’ve never broken a season in a writer’s room before, but I imagine that the experience I had yesterday was similar: exhilarating, inspiring, challenging, incredibly fun, and exhausting.
There’s that word again: exhausting.
Exhausted.
Spent.
Drained.
Did you know that intense use of your brain for things burns a ton of calories? I didn’t, either, until recently. There’s no entry for “concentrated on storytelling and worldbuilding and character development for eight hours” in MyFitnessPal, but if there was, I would have checked it off, yesterday.
So here I am, so tired I could probably just go back to bed, but feeling compelled to write and share my experiences with the world, because that’s what writers do, and I’m spending the next six months being a capital-W Writer.
But more on that another time, because now I need to rest.
This just in! Jim has finished the first book in the Cinder Spires series, The Aeronaut’s Windlass! He’ll take some time for polishing and editorial, then he’ll start work on Dresden #16, Peace Talks!
We’ll let you know as soon as there’s a release date to announce. At present, no official date has been set.
In the meantime, don’t forget to vote in Round 2 of the Goodreads Choice Awards! Skin Game is one of many exceptional novels in the running for Best Fantasy. This round ends tomorrow, Saturday the 15th, so don’t delay! Participants get one vote per category per round, so check out all the nominees in all categories and choose your favorites, then come back Monday the 17th for the Final Round, to see if your picks made the cut!
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.
