Bewarethewumpus

Author : Rick Tobin

“C’mon, judge, you can’t be serious. That’s an old Earth name for an ancient product. There can’t possibly be trademark claims. There isn’t anything living in North America…it’s under a mile of ice.” Praxton Billings sat up straight before the judge. He rubbed his mustache a few times. Nerves.

“We, the court, understand your defense, but the retention of ancient code is a tradition upholding our humanity, far beyond our origins. This is the last Earth colony. We maintain our culture or we become another lost, migrating species passing through space.” Three judges sat before the lanky space cleaner, under a fiber tree, as was the custom.

“Look, I just clean ships. I barely make out after costs for fuel and repairs. You have to admit it’s one reason they come to our little outpost; that, and the water. If they don’t get the crap off their bulkheads they risk miscalculating exits from star drive. No one wants to eat an asteroid through the hull. Penalizing me for using Mr. Clean as a business name could close me down.” He raised his pale hands, stretching his white jump suit in supplication to the tribunal.

“You had an approved name from the licensing council. Was that not sufficient?”

“Not really. They picked it. Barnacle Bill…really? Nobody out here knows what the hell a barnacle is, and my name is Praxton. Their business name dishonored my parents.”

“And your reasons for desiring to continue this line of work?”

“Not too hard there. With my puny physique I was unfit for farming or water works. Sex slave would have been ridiculous. But the first time I learned about dark matter, and all those life forms that were building up on the skins of spaceships, I knew I could make a difference just removing debris, making junkers and cargo hulks look shiny again. I could bring pride back to the lonely pilots and crews that were ashamed of the hulks they pushed through vacuum. I love what I do and my clients relate to me as Mr. Clean.”

“So why didn’t you reapply to the council? That is the normal process.”

“And be down for six months, waiting on their decision? Think of the lives lost if those ships aren’t sparkling. I couldn’t sleep if I knew that I caused their deaths. And consider the critical cargoes that show up late when stellar customs finds creatures on the outside that are forbidden in our sector. Pilots have no way of knowing what snatched a ride as they move out of hyper drive. So, not only do I protect other worlds, I protect ours, before they land. In fact, I was scheduled to work on a contaminated cruiser before it sets down over there this afternoon.” Praxton pointed at the city’s single space port.

The senior judge scowled before calling his adjutants to his side to whisper. They soon turned and faced Praxton.

“We have judged that you have a special case worthy of dismissal. Based on need and value, we have selected to overturn the council’s claim and we reinstate you as Mr. Clean. Now, for the sake of us all please go decontaminate that ship.”

Praxton rose, bowed lightly to the tribunal, and walked off the field to his waiting cleaning scow. His brain was spinning, trying to remember if there was any scheduled incoming freighter he could offer free services to cover his story.

Author : Jae Miles, Staff Writer

They call me Wrench. It’s not particularly imaginative, but it does the job. Just like Socket, who still has a case to keep all the fiddly bits together. I like the adaptability and extra weight of a wrench, though. Socket has to be sneaky, coz if he hits anyone hard he might bend the case, so he has to use the long-handled socket drive as a little club. Still, it’s better than the spannermen. You get a poxy little quarter-inch or seven-mil to start. You can’t kill anybody with that easily. You have to get really personal about it, almost like knifework.

Knives. Yeah, I remember knives. I’m old. Seen one once, but the guardsman put it away before anyone could make a grab for it. It was just after Ma and Pa got downgraded. Good thing Pa dabbled with mechanicals as a hobby. Down here among the piles, if you can’t fix anything, you’re just fodder. Nobody wants to be fodder.

How did it get this bad? You’re asking at the wrong end of this society, chum. You want to go upside to get the lowdown on that. All we know is that our uncles and aunts made a bit of a stink about being chosen to be the underclass. They kept on making a stink until the upsiders had just about banned everything we could use against ‘em. The Bandroids were the trick. Couldn’t fool one of them. We just got our sharps taken away, then they took our blunt gear too. Left us with not a whole lot to do anything with, truth be told. But the treadmills at the powerplants don’t need tools, they just need legs.

Spanners? No, I don’t know how that came about either. Somebody screwed up, is my guess. Bandroids don’t consider spanners and similar to have weapons potential, so they leave us with ‘em. My adjustable wrench came from me pa. Biggest one not confiscated, so he said.

Blades? Yeah, we have a few. Problem is, Bandroids come in a lot of sizes and the small ones will call big ones and so it goes. A man can’t even get a decent shave no more. Got to use that cream instead. It’s just not manly, I tell you. A man should be able to shave with a razor. But at least we can mix that cream with solvent, freeze it and get Dust crystals. Makes a man forget his troubles for a few hours, does Dust.

Rebellion? You’ve been listening to those resistance stories, haven’t you? Well, come with me. That much I can give you a clear steer on. You see that place up there? That’s Socket’s girl’s place. Yeah, it’s proper clean. She can do that because she is the resistance. Well, she writes a good resistance. Your bosses pay her a good-damn fortune for articles about a rebellion that only exists on paper.

Illegal? Not a bit. Socket’s girl is smart. She got it all cleared with the Department of Bans. Seems she can write about rebellion as much as she likes. Makes the folk upside all nervy and obedient, she got told. That’s a good thing, apparently.

Why would I want to fight a battle where most of us would die to get to a place where I don’t know how to live? We’ve about got it sorted right here. Spanners and Dust. It’s all a man needs, these days.

Author : Gray Blix

[In the control room they hear what she hears in stereo and see what she sees on left and right vision monitors.]

A well-dressed man is sitting behind a desk, talking on the phone. His tag IDs him as “Technical Recruiter.” She stands nervously until he gestures for her to be seated.

[“What a prick.”]

After several minutes, he hangs up and, dispensing with a greeting, starts the interview abruptly with, “Your name?”

[“Now he’s turning on the charm.”]

“Maddison Fox. That’s with two d’s.”

His expression is quizzical.

“Is that a British accent?”

“Australian.”

[“Synthetic voices with foreign accents are accepted more readily as human.”]

He makes a notation on a pad, “Of course.”

“Excuse me, sir, but do you have my resume?”

“No. My assistant reviewed it, but I’d rather you tell me about yourself.”

[“She doesn’t recognize that as a request.”]

“Tell me about yourself,” he repeats.

“Oh,” embarrassed, she begins, telling him she graduated with high honors in mechatronics from a respected Australian university and worked three years for a startup robotics company in Sydney.

“Why are you leaving them?”

“Well, I haven’t made a final decision to do so, but I’m combining my vacation in San Francisco with interviews. Actually, FirstAmeriBot is at the top of my list. I want to work with the best in the world.”

He asks about projects she’s worked on, and as she talks, he makes notations and shows increasing interest in her answers.

[“She fits the specs perfectly; he’s taking the bait.”]

As the interview progresses, he becomes more cordial and it’s obvious he’s not only impressed with her professionally, but personally. He cracks a smile.

[“Her hair, facial, and body features, as well as her clothing and behavioral patterns, are all designed to make her irresistible.”]

He says her education and experience would qualify her for a temporary worker visa, and she says she won’t need one because her mum is an American, so she has dual US-Australian citizenship.

[“Reel him in.”]

The interview turns into a relaxed conversation in which the two laugh often. When he hands her a brochure, she lets it drop to the desktop and brushes her fingers on his hand. He quickly withdraws it and summarizes medical-dental benefits. Finally, he says he will arrange for her to meet the team leader for robotics before week’s end.

[High fives all around.]

Answering the phone, he holds his hand over it to say “Sorry, I’ll have to take this privately, but I’ll call you this afternoon, Maddy.”

[“Maddy?”]

As she exits, a glance back shows him admiring the sway of her hips.

[“He can’t stand up or she’d see his…”]

Her POV approaching an elevator shows a man risking his fingers to stop the door from closing. He’s all smiles as she enters.

“Do you work here?”

[“After she’s hired, we’re going to have to dial back her… She’s not equipped for intimacy.”]

[“What’s the point of planting her in FAB, since they’re behind us?”]

[“To take them down technical dead ends, sabotage their R&D, make sure they don’t catch up.”]

Two people enter the interview room. Their tags ID him as “Team Leader, Robotics” and her as “Chief Scientist.” She unplugs the interviewer and pulls him backwards, revealing an upper body and chair back attached to a metal box on wheels.

Removing a side panel, “I can’t wait to get her in the lab and reverse engineer her locomotion hardware and software.”

“It’s Thanksgiving in July and she’s a gift turkey,” he says, “to be plucked, gutted, and devoured.”

Stephen Colbert has a text adventure now, and it’s great. Escape From The Man-Sized Cabinet chronicles Colbert’s adventures while waiting for his new show to start. You can die alone and afraid in a cabinet! Or you can explore a place that’s basically Narnia. Your call.

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Like the delightful and oppressive mobile-game galaxy that it summoned, Tetris is both seductive and dispiriting. Alexey Pajitnov’s falling-block puzzler captures the pleasure and the vacuousness of virtual labor. Each game of Tetris contains an interactive “Ozymandias,” a fruitless quest to build something that will outlast the lone and level sands. Look on my tetrominoes, and despair.

The best-known and best-loved video game—100 million copies played on mobile devices, dozens of millions on Game Boys, another 8 million on Nintendo Entertainment Systems, still more on personal computers—is not a Skinner box of rewards for players but a bleak encounter with futility. Like Space Invaders and Missile Command, or endless runners like Canabalt and Temple Run, Tetris ends with certain death. It is a jigsaw puzzle that must be assembled on deadline, yet never can be.

Tetris does not bother to offer its players the mercies of explosions or of dead aliens or of graceful, leaping arcs. Just blocks and more blocks, an unforgiving rain as predictable as the mounting seconds of the petty pace that creeps to our last syllables.

The sharply cornered right angles of the game’s shapes, and the Russian folk music in the game’s typical score, contribute to the atmosphere of cold, mechanical inhumanity (at least to American ears). In the New York Times Magazine a few years ago, Sam Anderson wrote:

Tetris was invented exactly when and where you would expect — in a Soviet computer lab in 1984 — and its game play reflects this origin. The enemy in Tetris is not some identifiable villain (Donkey Kong, Mike Tyson, Carmen Sandiego) but a faceless, ceaseless, reasonless force that threatens constantly to overwhelm you, a churning production of blocks against which your only defense is a repetitive, meaningless sorting. It is bureaucracy in pure form, busywork with no aim or end, impossible to avoid or escape. And the game’s final insult is that it annihilates free will. Despite its obvious futility, somehow we can’t make ourselves stop rotating blocks. Tetris, like all the stupid games it spawned, forces us to choose to punish ourselves.

All of that is true about Tetris, but if it were all that is true about Tetris, we would not find the game so captivating. Tetris might be the purest distillation of what a video game is. Devoid of story, character, navigation, even metaphor, Tetris isolates an interaction among player, machine, and screen and commands our attention with it. Nothing about what is best about Tetris translates to another medium.

Children, especially, are drawn to Tetris because it provides them a measure of control over a chaotic, strange, overwhelming universe. The fact that Tetris always ends means that it is always beginning. It is a game of green shoots, of empty canvasses, of newborn infants, of hope. Janet Murray, writing in Hamlet on the Holodeck, saw Tetris as a way for the player and Pajitnov to reach out to each other and create meaning out of emptiness. “Tetris allows us to symbolically express agency over our lives,” she wrote. “It is a kind of rain dance for the postmodern psyche, meant to allow us to enact control over things outside our power.”

Tetris gives us a respite from our existences, and a reminder that there isn’t one, as we hurtle toward the heat death of the universe. That it wordlessly contains both is what makes it a perfect game, a manifestation of our desperate, impossible need to steal a moment of happiness when—in grocery lines, in waiting rooms, in the back seats of minivans—life attempts to steal it from us.

Chris Suellentrop is the critic at large for Kotaku and a host of the podcast Shall We Play a Game? Contact him by writing chris@chrissuellentrop.com or find him on Twitter at @suellentrop.

Gif by Sam Woolley

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Our union drive has expressed at every stage of the process that one of our core goals is to protect the editorial independence of Gawker Media sites from the influence of business-side concerns. Today’s unprecedented breach of the firewall, in which business executives deleted an editorial post over the objections of the entire executive editorial staff, demonstrated exactly why we seek greater protection. Our opinions on the post are not unanimous but we are united in objecting to editorial decisions being made by a majority of non-editorial managers. Disagreements about editorial judgment are matters to be resolved by editorial employees. We condemn the takedown in the strongest possible terms.

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A poisonous monocled cobra has escaped near Austin, Texas after biting and killing an 18-year-old pet store employee who was keeping it at his home. Grant Thompson was found unresponsive in a parking lot with puncture wounds on his wrist. He was pronounced dead at the hospital. Police found six tarantulas, a foot-long non-venomous Mexican hognose snake, and an African bullfrog in Thompson's car.

Austin Animal Services is not going to look for the snake. “It would be like looking for a needle in a haystack,” said Austin Animal Services spokeswoman Patricia Fraga.

Monocled cobras are native to South and Southeast Asia. They are highly venomous and very common in Thailand. According to Wikipedia: the "monocled cobra causes the highest fatality due to snake venom poisoning in Thailand."

Thailand Snakes has a good info page about monocled cobras, where they are described as "fierce."

Here's a video that is likely to make you respectful towards monocled cobras:

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Bulbasaur summoned Darwinism! It’s SUPER EFFECTIVE!

Santa Clara’s Digital Game Museum came across a near-complete version of the cancelled Atari 2600 version of arcade classic Xevious. Behold the primitive glory of what passed for a console port in the early ‘80s.

For those of you that haven’t been alive and gaming for as long as I have, Xevious was a scrolling arcade shooter released in 1982 by Namco. With sharp graphics and relatively frenetic action, it was one of my go-to games whenever I’d steal quarters from my grandmother’s purse and hit up the local arcade.

Here’s a look at the arcade version, courtesy of Old Classic Retro Gaming.

As it did with many popular arcade titles, Atari had planned ports of Xevious for both the Atari 2600 and 5200. Both were cancelled in 1984. In progress versions of the 2600 version have been floating around since, but have lacked a title screen, final sprites, enemy waves, and music.

Then this showed up at the Digital Game Museum as part of a donation of Atari memorabilia.

It’s got everything earlier prototypes were missing. Titles, sound—everything. It’s an incredibly impressive find, even if the game itself looks pretty ridiculous by today’s standards.

“This version of Xevious is one of the most faithful arcade ports I’ve ever played on the Atari 2600,” said Dave Beaudoin, Digital Game Museum board member via official press release. ”The speed and responsiveness combined with the graphics and audio are jaw dropping. It’s amazing they were able to get this kind of performance out of the 2600.”

Sure it’s silly now, but back in the day I would have killed for a chance to play this. Digital Game Museum has teamed up with video game and pinball convention California Extreme to insure visitors to the show this weekend won’t have to kill a single person. Visitors will be able to play the newly-discovered classic on an Atari 2600 system, with a full arcade version standing by for comparison’s sake.

Oh yeah, that’s the stuff right there.

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Nintendo Co’s President and Chief Executive Satoru Iwata. REUTERS/Toru Hanai, 2014

Nintendo issued a brief statement tonight on the death of Satoru Iwata, the gamer and programmer who served as the Japanese gaming company’s fourth president and CEO.

Nintendo Co., Ltd. deeply regrets to announce that President Satoru Iwata passed away on July 11, 2015 due to a bile duct growth.

Under his leadership, Nintendo launched the monumentally successful Wii video game console. Released in 2006, the Wii has sold more than 101 million units worldwide.

Kotaku writes that he was forced to skip E3 last year because of his poor health, and soon underwent surgery to remove the bile duct growth. “A few months later, in the wake of concerns over his health, he said via Twitter ‘I’m progressing well’.”

Iwata was born and raised in the northern Japanese city of Sapporo. He programming games in high school and studied computer science at the Tokyo Institute of Technology.

Bloomberg on his humble origins:

Iwata was a teenager when Nintendo entered the video-game business. He desperately wanted into the industry, against his parents’ wishes, according to the book. In 1982, after working as a freelance game programmer, he joined HAL Laboratory, a Nintendo unit created in 1980 to make games for the parent company’s consoles. He eventually became president of HAL, before moving to Nintendo as head of corporate planning in 2000. In 2002, the year Iwata took the post of president, Nintendo had annual sales of 555 billion yen ($4.5 billion).

The Wall Street Journal notes that his death places “the company’s leadership in question just months before it embarks on its first foray into mobile gaming.”

Mr. Iwata had been president since 2002 and led the introduction of successful products such as the Wii console. But in recent years, the company’s share price and market presence lagged behind with the rise of games on smartphones, a trend which Mr. Iwata was long reluctant to join.

His final major move as president came in March of this year, when he appeared at a news conference to say that the company would develop videogames for smartphones based on its classic characters such as Super Mario. Nintendo struck a partnership with DeNA Co., a Japanese game provider, under which the companies will exchange ownership stakes and set up a new mobile game platform.

“Nintendo is undergoing one of its biggest shifts ever,” Tokyo-based videogame consultant Serkan Toto told the WSJ. “Iwata-san’s passing away will make things a little problematic, but it is not unsolvable.”

Joshua Saucedo

Mashable has a roundup of fan reactions here, noting that Iwata was “well-loved by gaming fans for his constant involvement and interaction,” appearing “in countless digital press events, videos and other media, always with a smile and a winningly goofy attitude.”

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Let’s celebrate San Diego Comic-Con with a property that embodies all aspects of media—comic books, television, movies, video games, toys—and how that can be a really bad thing.

Some people love Konami’s 1989 Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles for the NES, played here via original Ultra Games cartridge in Hyperkin’s Retron 5. The didn’t mind the harsh difficulty or buggy controls that led to as many deaths as the thoughtless design. They were fine with a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle game that only let you play one turtle at a time, completely ignoring a major theme of the property.

I am not one of those people. I remember anger and frustration and disappointment. But it was anger, frustration and disappointment at a time when you couldn’t just hop on Steam or pick up your phone for something else to play, so I played it. I hated it, but I wouldn’t let it break me.

At least not until the underwater bit. Damn this game.

The First Five is the first five minutes of a game with light commentary. Once the five minutes are up, so are we, and we mean it. No exceptions at all. That means you, Fahey.

Contact the author at fahey@kotaku.com or follow him on Twitter at @bunnyspatial

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Nintendo has just issued a short statement announcing that president Satoru Iwata has passed away at the age of 55.

The statement reads:

Nintendo Co., Ltd. deeply regrets to announce that President Satoru Iwata passed away on July 11, 2015 due to a bile duct growth.

Iwata was forced to skip last year’s E3 due to his poor health, and shortly afterwards underwent surgery to remove the bile duct growth. A few months later, in the wake of concerns over his health, he said via Twitter “I’m progressing well”.

A talented programmer, Iwata first joined Nintendo’s HAL Laboratory in the 1980s, where he worked on games like Balloon Fight and EarthBound. He became a Director of the company in 2000, and in 2002 was appointed as only the fourth President of Nintendo when he succeeded Hiroshi Yamauchi.

In his time as President, Iwata oversaw some of the strongest (Wii, DS) and weakest (GameCube, Wii U) periods in Nintendo’s history as a video game company. In recent times, he developed almost cult status as the host of the Nintendo Direct programs.

An immensely popular figure both within the industry and with Nintendo fans, he will be sorely missed. Rest in Peace, Mr. Iwata.

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For over 10 years, U.S. government agencies have been attempting to establish the rule of law and a basic justice system in Afghanistan. But according to a newly released audit, the effort is an unaccountable, largely unsuccessful use of over $1 billion taxpayer dollars.

According to the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction, the push through more than 60 different programs to establish rule of law in the country has been “impaired.”

Overall, SIGAR noticed four major problems with the current programs, which it detailed in a 52-page report. The agencies lack a clear strategy; they don’t keep good track of the money they’re spending; there’s almost no way to measure success; and the Afghanistan government doesn’t seem particularly interested.

The rule of law is generally considered to require accountability, lack of corruption, transparency, fundamental rights, civil and criminal justice, and a functioning government.

Though SIGAR recognizes the difficulty in “achieving ideal or perfect program performance measurement in Afghanistan” considering problems with “security, mobility, illiteracy, and other challenges,” it concludes that the level of unaccountability inherent in these programs is unacceptable to taxpayers and Afghanistan’s citizens, who continue to suffer without access to the most basic legal rights.

“In Afghanistan, a country plagued by decades of conflict, access to fair, efficient, and transparent justice is limited,” reads the report.

Just last week, when SIGAR tried to generate a map of USAID’s health clinics in Afghanistan, the majority of them were in the wrong place. One of the clinics, according to the data USAID reportedly gave to SIGAR, was in the Mediterranean Sea.

SIGAR also routinely publishes reports on facilities and programs that have been a waste of money, including a command and control facility at Camp Leatherneck in Afghanistan. According to SIGAR, the center is a $36 million waste that is unnecessary, unwanted, and unused.

(This post is from our blog: Unofficial Sources.)

Photo:  Afghan moneychangers (Shah Marai/AFP/Getty)

The post 10 Years and $1B Later, Little Progress in Establishing Rule of Law in Afghanistan appeared first on The Intercept.

Philip Montgomery for The New York Times

Just a thought: if synthetic, lab-brewed subsitutes for marijuana turning victims into vegetables and sending emergency responders into a panic, as this horrifying New York Times feature on ‘Spike’ indicates, guys, maybe we could think about just legalizing actual marijuana, which does not kill people or turn them into zombies.

You pretty much *cannot overdose* (not to the point where it kills you or causes you to go bonkers forever) with Cannabis sativa.

You can definitely OD on fake cannabis sativa.

People sometimes die after taking synthetic pot. But not on real pot.

Steve Featherstone in the NYT:

Syracuse, where I’ve lived almost my entire life, has struggled with synthetic drugs before. William Harper, a local businessman and two-time Republican candidate for City Council, moonlighted as the kingpin of bath salts in New York for two years before the Drug Enforcement Administration took him down in 2011. Was there a spike kingpin out there now, flooding the street with a bad batch? Perhaps, but similar outbreaks occurred in several states along the Gulf of Mexico in April, and the American Association of Poison Control Centers reports that between January and June, the nationwide number of synthetic marijuana ‘‘exposures’’ — that is, reported contact with the substance, which usually means an adverse reaction — had already surpassed totals for 2013 and 2014, and that 15 people died from such exposure. Maybe there was a larger cause.

Every state has banned synthetic cannabinoids, the chemicals in spike that impart the high. Although the active ingredients primarily come from China, where commercial labs manufacture them to order like any other chemical, spike itself is produced domestically. Traffickers spray the chemicals on dried plant material and seal the results in foil pouches; these are then sold on the Internet or distributed to stores across the country, which sell them sometimes under the counter, as in Syracuse, or sometimes right by the cash register, depending on local laws. Unlike marijuana, cocaine and other naturally occurring drugs, synthetic cannabinoids can be tweaked on a molecular level to create novel, and arguably legal, drugs.

Since 2008, when authorities first noted the presence of synthetic cannabinoids in ‘‘legal marijuana’’ products, periodic surges in overdoses have often coincided with new releases, and emergency doctors have had to learn on the fly how to treat them. This latest surge is notable for the severity of symptoms: seizures, extreme swings in heart rate and blood pressure, kidney and respiratory failure, hallucinations. Many patients require such enormous doses of sedatives that they stop breathing and require intubation, and yet they still continue to struggle violently. Eric Kehoe, a shift commander at the Rural Metro ambulance company that employs Darbee and Drake, said bath-salts overdoses are easier to deal with. ‘‘You might find them running naked down the middle of the street,’’ he said, but ‘‘you could talk them down. These people here — there’s no point. You can’t even reason with them. They’re just mute. They have this look about them that’s just like a zombie.’’

Spike Nation [Steve Featherstone/NYT]

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