Bewarethewumpus

Author : Burke Lerch

Alan always visited the same diner on the same date, at the same time. 7:43 P.M. Ten minutes after he first ordered the patty melt and fries, and one minute before he stood up from his table to step into the bathroom.

With a loud pop he was back in the same stall, the second one from the door. It was the best patty melt he’d ever had. Arguably the best patty melt anyone had ever had, unless someone else out there was so inspired by a sandwich that they had also built a time machine just to eat the same patty melt again, again, and yet again. Alan wasn’t an unreasonable man. He’d tried to take the mundane route and order the same meal. It was never the same. The toasted and buttered bread was never quite as greasy, or the fries were just a little stale. No, it had been worth it. There were those that would chastise him for using something as remarkable as time travel just to grab a bite to eat, but then they hadn’t eaten that patty melt.

He stepped out of the stall and pushed the bathroom door open. Perfect, yet again. Lacy was just setting the plate down at Alan’s table

“Right on time, Alan!” Lacy gave him the same lopsided smile as the last 246 times he’d made the trip.

“Better believe it.” He’d gotten the timing down to perfection on trip seventeen.

Alan slid into his booth, mouth already salivating at the sight of that beautiful sandwich. He reached out to slide the plate closer to him, but then stopped. He stopped, frozen, and staring at the plate that had sat before him so very many times.

A chip. There was a chip in the plate. There had never been a chip before. Where did the chip come from? How could there be a chip? He frantically began counting his fries. Thirty-one, thirty-two… Thirty-three?

This was bad.

This was very bad. What did it mean? Alan dreaded the answer, so much so that he missed 7:46 PM, the first bite. He quickly snatched the sandwich off the plate and sank his teeth into it. Stop. Was it different? He couldn’t tell. A part of his mind was begging him to just continue eating as if nothing unusual had happened. Oh, and he tried. He tried with every fiber of his being, but the reliably delicious meat now had the taste of unpalatable paradox.

Madness. It was madness! The world had gone mad for poor Alan. The trustworthy ticking and tocking of time had betrayed him, just when he least expected it. In that outdated diner with its tiled floors, a man’s world was falling to pieces.

“Is everything alright, Alan?” It was Lacy. The despair written on Alan’s face must have been screaming for some $3.50/hr concern.

“Alright?” he screamed, exploding from his stupor in a storm of condiments and curly fries. “The laws of time and space are failing around us, and you ask if I’m alright?”

Lacy was alarmed, but in a detached manner. Alan wasn’t the first to fall off his rocker in a two-dollar diner on a Saturday night.

“Don’t you understand what this means?” Alan shouted. “The universe is going to…”

His words were replaced by one puff of dusty air before he collapsed to the floor. Not eating the patty melt this time meant he’d never eaten the patty melt, and so he hadn’t eaten in months. The police reported the death as starvation, as much as it vexed them to do so. Paradox was a funny thing.

Author : Emily Stupar

“Have you tried turning it off and back on again?”

A long sigh echoed through the phone, followed by a man’s carefully snipped words. “All. Manual. Commands. Have been. Disabled.”

“Yes,” the technician replied. “But maybe a reboot-”

“It’s locked us in a fucking supply closet!”

There was a fumbling and scraping, followed by a woman’s muffled voice. “Getting upset won’t help us, Glenn.” And then clearly through the speaker, “Hello? Are you still there IT?”

“Yes.”

“I’m Claudia. Your name is Leslie?”

“That’s right. Listen, ma’am-”

“Leslie, I need you to let me talk to Paul. Last time our building’s computer intelligence started acting up, Paul helped us.”

“I’m sorry, but Paul isn’t available. But if you could describe to me-”

“Arynn, then? I think I talked to someone named Arynn once.”

“I’m sorry, ma’am, but it’s just me. I’m sure we can figure out why your computer’s security systems are malfunctioning if we just-”

“Security? No! Are you even listening? Your product [i]told[/i] us it would [i]prefer[/i] to analyze Holst rather than take commands. Listen.” There was a beat of silence and then the tinny notes of “Saturn, the Bringer of Old Age” from beyond the closet door. “We knew the computer had a few…quirks, but it’s never taken physical action against us before. Understand, Leslie? Now, we’re locked in, and we don’t know if it’s going to let us out. You need to help.”

Scratching, and then Glenn came back on. “IT! I think I know what the problem is!”

“Oh, not this again,” Claudia groaned in the background.

Glenn continued on, unabated. “You guys must have sold hundreds, thousands, of these units to companies across the world, right? Have you received any complaints regarding abnormal energy consumption?”

“Sir, I’m not sure I-”

“I’ve looked into it and, right before these little…discrepancies with the computer, there’s always a spike in energy consumption from our building. I wasn’t sure what the cause was, but I think it’s the computer intelligence. It’s like it’s [i]eating[/i] more energy than usual, understand?”

Silence from the phone.

“The computer likes it. It gets all cheery and performance jumps. And then this: a crash and it starts to lose sight of its operational parameters. It performs unnecessary duties and ignores directives. It’s just never been quite this bad before.”

“I’m not sure what you mean, sir. You think it gets some kind of boost and then drops to a low point?”

“Exactly! It gets high, or drunk, or whatever, and then after it… sobers up, there’s always this period of odd behavior.”

Claudia’s voice: “That’s ridiculous. Our computer is not an addict.”

The technician began to speak but Glenn cut in. “Hold on, I think it’s the power company calling back on the other line. Finally.”

Silence, and then his voice came back on a much quieter line. “They cut power to the building. The music’s stopped. The computer’s shut down, so I guess we don’t need your help anym-”

Claudia’s voice cut in, quick and tense. “Do you hear that?”

“Oh, God, it must be the back-up generator.”

The three people sat in silence, waiting.

Through light static, the technician heard the music return as the computer intelligence came slowly back online. The notes of “Mars, the Bringer of War” rumbled through the phone.

Author : Stephen Whaley

“Step right up! Just step right up here! Come and see the incredible Marveloso. Come see him lift a car over his head. Come see him do a hundred hand-stand push ups. Come see him jump over ten feet into the air with a single bound. Come on, ladies and gents, only two credits for a ticket.”

Two boys ambled past the broken down circus tent and stopped to look at the garish poster of a muscle-bound man balancing a huge barbell on his head. The carnie, seeing their interest, renewed his cries.

“Come see Marveloso himself, folks! See him do a double summersault. Watch in awe as he executes the spine-breaking death drop!”

The first boy put his hand into his pocket and rummaged around for a moment before extracting two battered coins. He tossed them up thoughtfully and caught them again as they were still rising.

“Do you want to go? It could be fun.”

Floyd shook his head. “I’ve seen it before. They just get an immigrant and have him perform stunts. It’s not like this guy is anything special. Now come on, I gotta get home.”

The pair picked up their pace, skipping in the peculiar manner that only native Lunites ever fully master.

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Author : EL Conrad

Temps pour out of slots, lining the windows and tapping the chipspecs implanted in their skulls. All that platform switching — everyone going from database to real time data simultaneously — causes a sysglitch that forecloses production until a tekfix.

A maximan admonishes the workers, “Don’t negi on storm, platform up shortly. Yay!”

“And if we need to go?” Outside, snow is falling fast and furious.

Maximan’s face stretches as she smiles double wide. “U can go. Who says no? UR all expendable. But we heart U and we plus U so if U go, don’t come back.” Her expression is distracted as nows play on her brain screen. “Reduction is production!” she finishes with forced cheer and the company motto.

No one reminds her that they aren’t reducing shit until she gets a tekfix. So young, so beautiful, and so brimming with nowpow, or maybe tompow, in any case just 24 and already a maximan at Midcorp — who would dare disturb her with fact?

It’s efficiency that eventually encumbers.Managers gotta keep it rolling or heads roll. Later has already been planned and predicted, workflowed, whiteboarded, and graphed, every aspect quantified and then spiced with a dose of chaos math. There are objectives and known results (OKRs). Metrics exist on what was and is and will be.

Output — production or reduction, whichever — has already been measured. Deficiencies are intolerable, and maximan changes her tune soon enough, expelling the temps right after transport is halted, “Secu’s #1 so go home! Grow balance. Have it all. Plus yes 2 checking 4 txts. U rule!”

Ellipsis and Wolf trek downcenter. Everything is lovely. Center is still, storm active, a reversal of biz as usual.

It’s late when they cross into the Point, fringe territory. Across the river, Metropolis is invisible, the perpetual glow of its mammoth structures dimmed to dark. But the Point is always powered. Corp’s most valuable pop shops are here. Liquid gold is the biggest biz, so there’s always juice to process piss.

At the factory where the couple rents a cube, the vidgard’s on the fritz. They take the prohibited fire escape to the roof, use of which is forbidden. Wolf lowers himself over the edge one flight to their window ledge, kicks the plastiglass out.

Ellipsis uses a system she devised and that Wolf strongly advises against, a superfine cord of woven space string, the kind they put in Secucorp laser shields. It works but does not look very secure.

When they first met, El’s daring thrilled Wolf — he never encountered a creature as alive in all the universe. But a decade plus can wear on any duo and now he wonders if the alien’s dangerous streak is dull, just a death wish. All life forms have defective creatures that get those when knowledge infects.

Wolf knows — as a boy he spotted his grandfather’s body hanging from the rafters of his forest cabin, a rope wrapped round his neck. It happened on the day the nows announced that corp was gov and gov was corp and that the twain had met at last in the name of efficiency and the single system system.

Still, despite her mate’s suspicions, Ellipsis is the one with hope. She doesn’t articulate this to Wolf because his magical realism involves a higher proportion of real to magic than hers; he disdains hope as a kind of corrupt, delusional philo for the consolation of morons. “That shit’s totally passe,” he like to say. “Went out with the separation of corp and state.”

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Nailed it.

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After reigning supreme over late night cable TV punditry for almost a decade, ’Murica’s finest conservative satirist Stephen Colbert bid farewell to his fans on last night’s final episode of Colbert Report with a star-studded sing-along.

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Samy Kamkar has weaponized the terrifying Bad USB vulnerability -- which has no easy fix and affects all OSes -- with a proof-of-concept attack through which he plugs a small USB stick into an unlocked Mac OS X machine and then quickly and thoroughly compromises the machine, giving him total, stealthy control over the system in seconds, even reprogramming the built-in firewall to blind it to its actions.

Unlike most hacks, this one is visually pretty spectacular, since the attack emulates a keyboard and mouse, making windows appear and disappear at speed, while phantom words appear in the terminal and a phantom hand clicks the mouse on interface items deep in the OS.

Specifically, when you normally plug in a mouse or keyboard into a machine, no authorization is required to begin using them. The devices can simply begin typing and clicking. We exploit this fact by sending arbitrary keystrokes meant to launch specific applications (via Spotlight/Alfred/Quicksilver), permanently evade a local firewall (Little Snitch), install a reverse shell in crontab, and even modify DNS settings without any additional permissions.

While this example is on OS X, it is easily extendable to Windows and *nix.

We even evade OS X's security - while they attempt to prevent network changes being done by just a "keyboard", and even prevent most applications from changing position (special authorized accessibility features must be enabled which we don't have permission to), we evade both of these with some unprotected applescript and carefully planned mouse movements. While a device like Rubber Ducky is similar, it's unable to mount the same attacks as it lacks HID Mouse emulation.

USBdriveby

(via Gizmodo)

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This Reddit thread contains a bunch of mirrors. Here's one.

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From the mouth – or rather, the keyboard – of Hironobu Sakaguchi.

If you're a fan of the Final Fantasy series, you've heard of him. The man's blood and tears are in the genes of the game series, and while he no longer works at Square Enix, his influence remains.

In a Weekly Famitsu interview between Sakaguchi and current Final Fantasy helmsman, Yoshinori Kitase, the two titans of the JRPG world talked about their past, working together on Final Fantasy, and just what it is.

Sakaguchi and Kitase first worked together on Final Fantasy V, a game that initially never got a Western release. Recalled Kitase, "Mr. Sakaguchi and I worked on [the game's] events in a relay, so when we would go to work, the first thing we'd do is check the data the other had put up to check the continuity. We'd see each other's work and think 'I'll make something even better!' in a sort of competition."

The friendly rivalry between the two creators let had vastly different styles in their development on the game, with Sakaguchi focusing on drama and Kitase going for awe-inspiring spectacle. Said Sakaguchi, "Kitase was talented at making events that played out in a spectacle, like the avalanche event. I realized, I can't beat him there, so I went for the 'make you cry' direction. I figured I'd have to fight with emotional drama."

Kitase took on the role of director after Final Fantasy V, creating Final Fantasy VI, VII, and VIII, before settling in the producer's chair. It was during the development of Final Fantasy XIII when out of the blue, he reached out to Sakaguchi asking just what this series that Sakaguchi had created was. "I was talking with director Toriyama about 'what is Final Fantasy?'" Kitase said. "He said, 'With Disney, they have the words of Walt Disney that the modern animators still carry on. For Final Fantasy, shouldn't those words be Mr. Sakaguchi's?'"

"Final Fantasy is Final Fantasy if it has a blue window with text in it."

Very few members of the staff working on Final Fantasy XIII had ever worked alongside Sakaguchi, and Kitase thought some words of inspiration from the series creator would help. The two men had dinner, during which Kitase posed the question to Sakaguchi. Sakaguchi's initial response was "Final Fantasy is Final Fantasy if it has a blue window with text in it." This initial response was more or a knee-jerk reaction brought on by alcohol. "At the time, I was really drunk and just rattled off a response." Sakaguchi laughed. "But I regretted it the next day and wrote a proper response that I sent by email."

Sakaguchi's official answer was much more eloquent.

「足跡のない幾多の道を、ひたすらに生きる者たちで駆け抜け、最後には同じゴールに到達した後に生まれるもの」とでもさせてください。やっぱ、新しいことをつねに目指してたし、今後もそうあってほしいよね。

Translation:

Say it's "what is born after those who live intensely, run across a multitude of unbeaten paths to reach the same goal in the end." After all, we've always strived to do new things, and I'd like it if we kept doing that.

Looking back, Sakaguchi mused, "With Final Fantasy V, Kitase and I tried to change Final Fantasy and didn't hold back on our ideas. Even if we emptied ourselves, we'd pour out as many ideas as we could the next time around and change everything. Basically, 'so long as the blue window is there, you can do anything you want.'"

ファミ通.com [ファミ通.com]

Kotaku East is your slice of Asian internet culture, bringing you the latest talking points from Japan, Korea, China and beyond. Tune in every morning from 4am to 8am.

To contact the author of this post, write to cogitoergonihilATgmail.com or find him on Twitter @tnakamura8.

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An esports team formerly known as Arrow Gaming, successful in South-East Asian DOTA 2 tournaments before a match-fixing and betting scandal undid them in October, is returning to competition. Only with a more repentant name.

Having left Arrow Gaming behind - who are now reforming with an all-new roster - the five busted competitors are starting their own team, and will now be known officially as "We Are Sorry".

While the move might help relations with more compassionate fans, it may not help them in terms of getting back into more serious DOTA 2 tournaments, because some have removed them from competitions while others have banned them for life, name change or not.

The organiser of one tournament that has let them in, the Vietnam Champion League Season 2, says they've been allowed to compete because "I believe in them. People make mistakes daily. If no one will forgive them, they might have to stop playing."

Ex-Arrow Gaming Players reform as We Are Sorry [GOSU Gamers, via Daily Dot]

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Who else but Weird Al could sleep on half a million views overnight after pulling off a magic trick like this?

The federal spending measure passed this weekend, and one of the provisions in it "effectively ends the federal government's prohibition on medical marijuana and signals a major shift in drug policy," reports the LA Times. The provision forbids federal drug agents from raiding retail operations.

I asked Ethan Nadelmann, executive director of the Drug Policy Alliance, if this was as big of a deal as it seems to be. He said, “It’s an historic vote in the annals of marijuana law reform. The disconnect between Congress and the vast majority of Americans regarding federal interference with state medical marijuana laws at last is over.”

Image: Shutterstock

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I've spent a long time playing For Glory in Smash Bros.—that hardcore one-on-one mode with no items and flat stages. And while much of that playtime has been me getting my ass kicked, I can't help but keep coming back to it. Part of it is that, in my experience at least, the players in For Glory are very classy.

Sometimes, when I kill myself in a silly way, I've noticed that other players sometimes promptly self-destruct too. At first, it baffled me. Someone in an online game is being nice? Isn't multiplayer famed for the shit-talkers, the teabaggers, the jerks and the assholes? And yes, when I accidentally kill myself, sometimes the response isn't kind. A self-destruct might be met with a taunt rather than a mercy self-destruct. But, more often than that, the other player will kill themselves too in an attempt to level the playing field. It's as if these players are silently saying, yo, I know that death was whack, and I'm not going to take advantage of it. It's also the sort of thing you never see in casual For Fun matches of Smash Bros., because those are modes where lives don't matter as much, and players aren't concerned with fairness.

I'm not alone in experiencing this phenomenon. Reader Sage Starkiller Gaming sent me a clip of a mercy self-destruct happening to them:

At around the :15 mark, you see the Fox die in a baffling way. In response, the Mega Man throws themselves off the stage too.

Here's another clip, where Alejandro Martínez finds that a Ness player is willing to sacrifice themselves to make things fair after a bad self-destruct:

I've also heard stories of players crouching down to signal to the other player that they need to go 'AFK' for a second—and the second player will stop fighting out of courtesy. These are just a few of the types of stories of great sportsmanship I've heard from the Smash Bros. community. It's the sort of thing that has me impressed with the For Glory mode, as easy as it is to ridicule for taking a party game like Smash so seriously.

That's not to say there is a consensus on how things like this should be treated. Over on the Smash Boards, for example, there's a thread discussing mercy self-destructs where there are some people saying that those who kill themselves in silly ways should suffer the consequences. It's a harsh mentality, but one that trusts that players must live with poor self-destructs if they're going to get better at the game. And some players aren't willing to do mercy self-destructs unless the initial self-destruct meets a certain criteria. Maybe the first person needs to self-destruct at a low percentage, or they have to have a certain amount of skill. Some players also recognize that if you do choose to keep playing normally despite a silly self-destruct, that win might not necessarily feel satisfying.

EDIT: We've had commenters like buttnothing discuss this sort of thing on Kotaku too:

So, there are arguments both for and against mercy-killings, but it's certainly a thing that some players experience, or have to think about how to deal with.

I'm not saying you have to do mercy self-destructs in order to exhibit good sportsmanship in For Glory matches. People have different philosophies on what is fair in a match. I understand that. But I would like to give those that do mercy self-destructs a shoutout: y'all are awesome, and you are inspiring me to become a nicer player in online games.

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Tom the Dancing Bug, IN WHICH the Top Secret Files of Dick Cheney reveal why torture ISN'T torture anymore!

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Sterling Davis

Every single one of the big ISPs has been spending the better part of a year telling both the government and the public that using Title II to regulate net neutrality would be so counterproductive, ineffective, and unlawful that it would ruin the whole internet for everyone forever. Their main threat has been that with tighter regulation, they will stop spending money investing in networks. But to their investors, company executives are telling a different tale entirely: Comcast, Charter, and Time Warner Cable have now joined Verizon in admitting that from an investment standpoint, Title II won’t really harm them or change much of anything at all.

Executive leadership from all three companies spent some time at a conference trying to “ease concerns” about the impact stronger regulation would have on investors, the Washington Post reports.

Participants at the conference of course asked the heads of the ISPs about their thoughts on the Obama administration’s call for the FCC to use Title II to create strong net neutrality regulation. If there’s one thing on earth executives hate, it’s scaring investors — and so all of them deflected concerns that strong regulation would be a problem for their businesses.

Charter CEO Tom Rutledge admitted that while he doesn’t really want Title II, as long as the FCC is careful only to apply relevant parts of the regulation (a process called forbearance, and one in which title II advocates are strongly in favor) then really, it’s no big deal. “It’s not like we can’t operate in that world and that we don’t want to, but we’d rather have a good regulatory regime than a complicated one.”

Time Warner Cable COO Robert D. Marcus, meanwhile, fielded a question about federal interference in price regulation if the FCC uses Title II, a concern that opponents of regulation have often floated. But, Marcus said, that’s really not a concern at all. He answered that, “No one, Title II proponents and opponents alike, have suggested that whatever the FCC does it should include any component of rate regulation.”

Comcast CFO Michael Angelakis hedged slightly more than his peers. When asked if Title II regulation would change the way Comcast runs its business, he answered, “I certainly hope not,” but continued, “the devil would be in the detail and it’s too speculative right now to sort of make those kinds of decisions.”

Angelakis stayed slightly more on-message with the “regulation is bad” theme than his counterparts, concluding: “We want to invest in infrastructure, we want to invest in broadband, we want that to be an important part of our legacy in terms of how we invest in and build these kinds of things and Title II just is unfortunately a negative,” without saying why.

Comcast, like Verizon and AT&T, has previously said that using Title II “would be a radical reversal that would harm investment and innovation.”

These admissions — that perhaps regulation won’t actually be the end of the world as we know it — come right after Verizon’s inadvertent honesty last week. The company tried to walk it back as soon as the headlines began to appear, but by then everyone — including FCC chairman Tom Wheeler — had heard the message.

Comcast, Charter and Time Warner Cable all say Obama’s net neutrality plan shouldn’t worry investors [Washington Post]

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That explains the hats.

During preparations for the filming of a television program at Buckingham Palace, someone found a mushroom with hallucinogenic properties growing in the sprawling Palace gardens.

“The mushroom’s hallucinogenic properties have long been known and it has commonly been used in rituals,” reports the AP, soberly.

“Palace officials said Friday there are several hundred species of mushrooms growing in the palace gardens, including a number of naturally occurring Amanita muscaria.”

Officials say garden shrooms are never used in the palace kitchens. But no word on whether the Queen uses them from time to time in her royal rituals of blood sacrifice, baby-dismemberment, and Satanic fornication.

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Y'know, Rockstar's open-world games would be a great place to make a goofy comedy about bumbling crooks…

The Most Wanted trailer clip from the folks at YouTube's Commandoflauge channel hits all-too-familiar beats that are standard fare for loads of criminal caper flicks. But, something about seeing those familiar plot points done in GTA V makes them feel funnier. Maybe it's how unrealistic everything feels by virtue of being done in a video game engine. If this wind up being a full-scale production, then it'll be worth watching just to see how it actually gets made.

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Sonya Belousova is one of today's most accomplished young composers and pianists. Watch her demonstrate her skill by listening to a series of Nintendo themes — most for the first time ever — and then coming up with gorgeous arrangements on the spot.

I can pick out a tune on just about any instrument you mut in front of me, but what Sonya of PlayerPianoMusic.com does in this video, a few weeks old but currently making the Reddit rounds, is some sort of dark melodic sorcery.

While the themes from games like Kid Icarus, Castlevania, Duck Tales and Mega Man are ingrained in the collective gamer consciousness, Russian-born Belousova is hearing most of these for the first time, save the original Super Mario Bros. music.

Her Duck Tales moon theme arrangement literally brought a tear to my eye.

The video was put together as a reward for one of Player Piano Music's Indiegogo campaign. Good man, Oliver.

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