Bewarethewumpus

Author : Duncan Shields, Staff Writer

I was a time traveler. I say ‘was’ because it’s apparent to me now that this was a one-way trip.

I realized I was a god as soon as the pain stopped.

I could hear all the other gods, shouting in my head. Billions of them ordered into groups and catalogues. Every thought that ran through my mind accordioned new sub-menus out, giving me access to the proper people. Polite queries were flooding through me like water through a dam.

I wanted to respond but it was hard to do because of all the screaming I was doing.

It was a social network in my mind. Nodes of location and profession grew and pinpointed depending on my attention. Closing my eyes did nothing.

Most countries I recognized. Some I didn’t. I shied away from the nodes labeled with the names of planets. I only recognized half of the professions. Even though I could hear everyone, I was somehow not going insane. My brain must have been augmented, too.

I looked down at my arms. Light blue with a faint tracery of new lines on the skin. I wanted to get a closer look and immediately I could see the manufactured hairs on my arm in electron microscope detail.

I started screaming again. This was not my body.

I remembered stepping out of my time machine into an alley in what was supposed to be the year 2120. Immediately, I had trouble breathing and my eyes started watering regardless of the air filter and goggles.

Then fire lit up my veins like vegas and I went down.

As soon I came in contact with the future, I was registered as a pure biological and ‘updates’ began pouring into me from the picotech floating in the air. According to the tech, I hadn’t been updated in a long time.

It was like plugging a gaming console into the ancient internet after two years of not playing it. Immediately, downloads for the OS and all of the games would pour in with a need for a restart. It took a long time.

Well, I’ve never been hooked into this network and according to its data, I was in need of a full reinstall.

I was in a coma for two weeks. Upgrade after upgrade slammed into my twitching body. I lay shuddering in the hospital while concerned medpeople monitored it all. The future ran through me like a train.

I am now connected to worldmind, overnet and airmesh. My eyes are sniper scopes and my skin is an air filter. I am blue.

I cannot go back. This future lacks the technology to regress me to my former self and the body I now possess would create thousands of patents that haven’t been invented yet if I went back.

The future is sorry. It says so. Here. In my mind. Everyone one earth apologizes and is happy to meet me. The other planets are knocking on my mental firewalls with well wishes. They all feel bad, like they sprung a trap on me. But they’ve never met a time traveler before and they want to talk.

I have five options of travel if I want to see other planets, seven if I want to leave this body here.

The blue skin around the corners of my mouth hooks up into a smile.

I think I’ll go to Mars.

Author : Jae Miles, Staff Writer

“What’s the range?”

“One hundred metres, sir. Awaiting go code.”

The screen showed multiple long-range views in stunning detail: the sunset illuminating a long balcony on which an old man sat sipping a drink and having a smoke. On the ground around his home, a pack of wolves could be seen settling down for the evening.

“Will the wolves cause us any trouble?”

“The Manson Four will not even be slowed down by them. But are we sure about the UN failsafe, sir?”

The man in the black uniform grinned contemptuously: “We’ve been killing humans since drones got the ability to behave like eagles with range weapons. The United Nations sop to the bleeding-hearts is about as effective as blu-ray region coding.”

The operator nodded: “Okay, sir. Nine minutes remain on strike window. Your decision please?”

Major-General Carsen looked at the feeds of his oldest friend turned worst opponent. A genius who personally designed, or had a hand in the designing, the core systems of every robotic warfare device in the world. Without his work, the stuff wouldn’t be half as good; if it functioned at all.

“Sir?”

“What is it?”

“I thought I’d run an advanced detection pass. Two of those wolves are Black Dog Twenties.”

Carsen smiled. Those were Geraint’s hole cards.

“Pass the targeting for them to the drone on overwatch. When I give the go, I want them in pieces before our unit clears the treeline. Good work.”

“Yessir.” The operator grinned.

“This is a go.”

The operator nodded and sent the confirmation and co-ordinates.

“Sir! Both Black Dogs have bolted into the hardened shelter under the house.”

Carsen looked down at the operator: “No matter. From there they won’t be able to interdict. Overwatch from ready to standby. Sitrep?”

“Unit has stopped at the treeline, sir. Telemetry indicates a dynamic firmware flash in progress.”

Carsen threw his coffee across the room: “How many times have I told them that operational units are not for remote update?”

The operator’s fingers flew: “It’s not remote, sir. Seems to be loading from a ROM module in the chassis.”

Carsen’s hand froze in mid-wave.

“A module installed during the build?”

“Yes sir. It would have to be.”

Carsen checked the screens. The figure on the balcony flicked his cigarette to arc directly toward the unit, supposedly unseen in the trees.

“Unit has departed the zone at assault speed, sir. Course two-twenty.”

“I want to see the instruction set it is obeying. Machine speak will do.”

“Sir!”

They waited until a monitor off to one side scrolled a single line.

RTB:KILLANY INTERDICT RTB:KILLALL ALLELSE:VOID

Carsen stared. Then, in a whisper: “Operator, action a full defensive alert. Pass the specs on the Manson Four’s stealth capabilities to all personnel. Emphasise that someone better be brilliant, or get lucky; I don’t care. Otherwise we’re all dead.”

“Sir?”

He pointed at the screen: “That man never bought insurance. He said that you should always prepare for the worst. I suspect that every piece of combat robotics on this planet is hardloaded to return to base and kill everything, but only if it is sent to attack Geraint Darby.”

On the screen, the figure looked up into the lens over three miles above and raised his glass in ironic salute.

Author : Gary Will Kreie

I love my new self-driving car.

My name is Leo. This is my brand new 2029 crashless car with vehicle-to-vehicle communication and GSDS, the Google Self-Driving System. I love my commute now. My car is pre-programmed to know the best way to get me downtown where I work. I turn on internet talk radio, but it’s airing another rant from an anti-tech kook, who sees networked cars as government intrusion and would blow it all up, if he had a chance. That’s not me. I love this stuff. I push the GO button on the dash. My car backs out of the garage and makes its way into the street. Here we go.

Traffic signal? No problem. My car, I call it Mr. Jeez, exchanges digital messages with the traffic light and slows a little to reach the signal just as it turns green, so we won’t have to stop. Then Mr. Jeez accelerates onto the interstate highway.

Another car with a nice looking woman enters the highway and sends Mr. Jeez a digital message asking if her car can merge into our lane. My car automatically replies with a “Yes” digital message and slows to let her merge in front of us. I have Mr. Jeez’s aggressiveness level set to “not very”.

A car behind me is closing fast. That guy must have his level set to “espresso”. His car wants to get around mine. He must be late for work. I sit back and watch what happens.

His car sends a request to Mr. Jeez to kindly move out of our lane. My car replies with a proposed price, and tells his car that we take BitPal. His car and mine negotiate quickly per my pre-programmed instructions, and now my car is moving to the next lane to let him by. And I am 96 cents richer. As he zooms by, I see that there isn’t even a driver in the car at all. Just a big metal box in back with a glowing counter. And it has a bumper sticker that reads, “That’s all, Folks.” I heard a beep, which I think means my car and this one exchanged one late message. Hmmm.

The rest of the drive on the interstate is becoming routine, so I take a nap and let Mr. Jeez finish my drive downtown. I love Mr. Jeez.

#

About an hour later.

Where are we? I wake up and my car is stopped. I should be at my building downtown where my car drops me off and then finds itself a parking space. I appear to be parked in the desert beneath a cliff.

The GSDS map shows that we are about 50 miles from the city, which is on the other side of this hill. Why would Mr. Jeez bring me here? I wonder if Mr. Jeez knows something. I wonder if Mr. Jeez monitors me. I wonder if he heard me say I love him. I wonder what other cars tell Mr. Jeez about their owners.

I turn on the radio and hear, “…and they think the robo-car could be headed directly for the center of downtown with a thermo-nucle…”

White everywhere blinds me. I open my eyes and the white starts to dim a little. I realize my car is in the shadow of the cliff, which is shielding us from the flash coming from the direction of downtown.

My car knew something. It drove me here. It protects me from crashes. It protects me from everything.

I watch the shock wave blow past us.

Possibly the most loved and used fighting knife in the world, the Fairbain-Sykes Fighting Knife is a stilletto daggar designed and produced during WWII for commando troops and still used to this day. The knife was designed for a precise grip and a long thin blade that could go through a Soviet Army greatcoat to the ribs and slice, rather than tear, for faster death.

The knife's history is
worth a small book alone, but the two men who invented it also helped invent modern police fighting and close combat, and probably inspired Q from James Bond.

W.E. Fairbairn served in the British army and then in 1907 joined the Shanghai Municipal Police. Shanghai was then considered one of the most violent cities in the world with a tiny and overwhelmed police force. Fairbairn's response was to invent new tactics, equipment and training for the world's first anti-riot police unit and in his words: "Get tough, get down in the gutter, win at all costs... I teach what is called 'Gutter Fighting.' There's no fair play, no rules except one: kill or be killed"

He invented a riot baton, bulletproof vest, a training room staged like an opium den, and other innovations like marking bullets at the base to track them later. That introduced him to E.A. Sykes, then the representative for Remington in Shangi, who quickly joined the Shanghai Municipal Police as a reserve officer.

Fairbairn invented his own martial arts, Defendu, a mix of judo, jiu jitso and chinese boxing that he had learned in Shanghai, as a way for police to restrain and defend themselves, distinct from the close quarter combat style he and Sykes later trained soldiers in. They also co-wrote one of the first and still relevant books on shooting for police, Shooting to Live (PDF). Fairbairn retired from the SMP in 1940 with over 600 non-training fights he survived and scars covering his entire body. According to his daughter Dorothea, he also bred goldfish and taught her bonsai, and never swore or drank.

During WWII, together with his friend Sykes, he developed the training for the Special Operations Executive and the newly formed commandos teams. Dubbed "Dangerous Dan" (no relation to Beano) and basically trained people how to kill other people with your little finger at Churchill's secret school, Beaulieu.

Both were very well-liked trainers. One trainee remembers Sykes as having "the manner and appearance of an elderly, amiable clergyman, combined with the speed and ferocity of a footpad; lulled by his soft tones and charmed by his benevolent smile, we would be startled to hear him conclude some demonstration with a snarled "Then you bring up your right knee into his testicles".

Fairbairn also wrote two widely distributed comic booklets on hand to hand fighting: Get Tough! training comic by Fairbairn (1942) and Hands Off! Fairbairn's comic book guide to self defence for women (Bonus: short feminist history review of the comic).

Sykes and Fairbairn fell out at the end of the war, although neither ever disclosed why. Sykes' much-loved wife died young of cancer, and he never remarried. He had to retire early in 1945 due to ill-health and died soon after. Post-war, Fairbairn went briefly by Cyprus and Singapore where he set up their riot police units, before dying at home in 1960 (probably too polite to kick Death to well, death).

Carrying on their training was Colonel Rex Applegate. Born and bred in Oregon to a family heritage of shooting, Applegate joined the military police where he was recruited to the OSS, forerunner to the CIA, and eventually met and became fast friends with the two men. Ironically, Applegate never went into combat because of a lung ailment. Instead, he poured his considerable energies into training other people on how to kill effectively and efficiently. Applegate's book Kill or Be Killed (scanned marked-up book PDF or hardcover) is a classic for combining military and police tactics.

Post-war, Applegate was a special advisor in Mexico, establishing their riot police and taught John Wayne how to shoot, still lecturing and teaching up to his death in 1998.

Applegate with Fairbairn's approval, also created a version of the knife, with a handle that could be differently weighted to change the balance point and a partially serrated blade, but it wasm't as popular as the original, except for the folding version. Or you could carry a Fairbairn's other knife, the Smatchet with your spork.

Finish off with some official training films from DoD have Applegate's classic training films on shooting and why war is not sport, or just check out an entire channel of Fairbairn beating people up.

(Gutterfighting previously on metafilter mentions Fairbairn)

Manfeels Park

Manfeels Park is an exercise in flogging a pun for all it's worth.

The male dialogue in this webcomic is all taken word for word or adapted only slightly from web commentary by hurt and confused men with Very Important Things To Explain, usually to women. Artistic license is exercised in editing commentary for brevity, spelling and grammar, but the spirit of the original comment is always faithfully observed. Witty rejoinders are also 'found dialogue' where possible.

With art "hand-traced on photoshop from regency period drama screencaps, just like the Old Masters used to do it."

Scroll down to the comments for a preview of next week on Manfeels Park… or read it on their Tumblr for additional snarky hashtag commentary.

A follower on Twitter showed me this really-long MOTHER 3 Medley on YouTube very recently, check it out!

Man, it’s over 50 minutes? That must’ve taken a long time to put together! It’s nice and easy to listen to, though, so thanks to Mr. Orchestra for making it!

If you’d like to get an MP3 version, you can download it from here!

Check out these clips from the Vinesauce live stream of gameplay footage featuring a corrupted Mario Kart DS game.

In a shocking story on the German site Tagesschau (Google translate), Lena Kampf, Jacob Appelbaum and John Goetz report on the rules used by the NSA to decide who is a "target" for surveillance.

Since the start of the Snowden story in 2013, the NSA has stressed that while it may intercept nearly every Internet user's communications, it only "targets" a small fraction of those, whose traffic patterns reveal some basis for suspicion. Targets of NSA surveillance don't have their data flushed from the NSA's databases on a rolling 48-hour or 30-day basis, but are instead retained indefinitely.

The authors of the Tagesschau story have seen the "deep packet inspection" rules used to determine who is considered to be a legitimate target for deep surveillance, and the results are bizarre.

According to the story, the NSA targets anyone who searches for online articles about Tails -- like this one that we published in April, or this article for teens that I wrote in May -- or Tor (The Onion Router, which we've been posted about since 2004). Anyone who is determined to be using Tor is also targeted for long-term surveillance and retention.

Tor and Tails have been part of the mainstream discussion of online security, surveillance and privacy for years. It's nothing short of bizarre to place people under suspicion for searching for these terms.

More importantly, this shows that the NSA uses "targeted surveillance" in a way that beggars common sense. It's a dead certainty that people who heard the NSA's reassurances about "targeting" its surveillance on people who were doing something suspicious didn't understand that the NSA meant people who'd looked up technical details about systems that are routinely discussed on the front page of every newspaper in the world.

But it's not the first time the NSA has deployed specialized, highly counterintuitive wordsmithing to play games with the public, the law and its oversight. From James Clapper's insistence that he didn't lie to Congress about spying on Americans because he was only intercepting all their data, but not looking at it all; to the internal wordgames on evidence in the original Prism leak in which the NSA claimed to have "direct access" to servers from Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, Apple, etc, even though this "direct access" was a process by which the FBI would use secret warrants to request information from Internet giants without revealing that the data was destined for the NSA.

I have known that this story was coming for some time now, having learned about its broad contours under embargo from a trusted source. Since then, I've discussed it in confidence with some of the technical experts who have worked on the full set of Snowden docs, and they were as shocked as I was.

One expert suggested that the NSA's intention here was to separate the sheep from the goats -- to split the entire population of the Internet into "people who have the technical know-how to be private" and "people who don't" and then capture all the communications from the first group.

Another expert said that s/he believed that this leak may come from a second source, not Edward Snowden, as s/he had not seen this in the original Snowden docs; and had seen other revelations that also appeared independent of the Snowden materials. If that's true, it's big news, as Snowden was the first person to ever leak docs from the NSA. The existence of a potential second source means that Snowden may have inspired some of his former colleagues to take a long, hard look at the agency's cavalier attitude to the law and decency.

-Cory Doctorow

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If at first you don’t succeed, try again with a more drastic measure. Just two weeks after a bill to allow private student loan borrowers to refinance at lower interest rates failed to gain traction in the Senate, a new bill expected to be introduced this week takes things a step farther.

The bill, from Iowa senator Tom Harkin, would create an option in which private student loans could be discharged through bankruptcy proceedings, according to the Wall Street Journal.

While that might seem like a dramatic measure, the impact would be rather small when looking at total student loan debt in the United States. Private lenders only hold about 10% to 15% of all student loan debt; the rest is held by the U.S. Education Department.

Under current federal law, neither federal nor private student loans can be discharged in bankruptcy. Other debts such as money owed on mortgages, credit cares and auto loans can be discharged in bankruptcy.

Consumer advocates have long said the prohibition of discharging student debt in the case of bankruptcy is keeping borrowers buried under high debt burdens that they have little chance of digging themselves out of.

On the other hand, those who support the status quo have argued it reduces the risk that borrowers will walk away from debts and in turn keeps interest rates in check.

Harkin’s bill also reportedly contains measures that would ease student costs, hold schools with high default rates accountable and mandate that colleges reveal data on the outcomes of their students.

With one-in-three students loans considered delinquent and often affecting a student’s ability to make purchases in the future, the bill could offer much-needed reprieve for college students left with mountains of both federal and private student loans. However, the likelihood of the bill moving forward this session is slim, the WSJ reports.

The debt burden created by student loans seems to be at the forefront of legislators’ minds this year with a number of bills being introduced. However, little has actually been accomplished on the front.

Just two weeks ago a bill that would have allowed consumers refinance their student loans to the rate currently being issued on new federal and private student loans died in the Senate. The Bank On Students Emergency Loan Refinancing Act, introduced in May by Sen. Elizabeth Warren, fell short of the 60 votes needed to end debate and move on to a final vote.

The Act would have allowed federal and private student loan borrowers to refinance to rates set for first-time borrowers – approximately 3.86%.

In early June, student borrowers received a bit of good news as President Obama signed an executive order that expanded a federal loan forgiveness plan to 5 million additional consumers who borrowed before October 2007 or those who have not borrowed since October 2011. The Pay As You Earn program allows students who borrowed federal direct loans to cap their loan payments at 10% of their monthly incomes.

While the order could be considered a big win for consumers, as Consumerist reported in April the debt forgiven by government programs has added up more quickly than anticipated. At its current rate the Pay As You Earn plan is expected to reach $14 billion next year, exceeding government expectations by 90%.

Legislators have also looked into attacking student loan debt concerns before they become an issue for borrowers. Back in April, Sen. Sherrod Brown from Ohio gave new life to the 2013 Know Before You Owe Act, a bill that would require much fuller disclosures for private student loan terms and options.

Harkin Opens Door To Bankruptcy Option for Student Loans [The Wall Street Journal]

General Motors’ internal investigation claims that no top executives at the car company were aware of the defective ignition switch that has resulted in at least 13 deaths (and likely many more) and the recall of nearly millions of vehicles. But newly released documents from the Congressional investigation into the debacle indicate that one current GM Vice-President was made aware of the problem as early as 2005.

The House Energy and Commerce Committee’s Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations, which recently grilled GM CEO Mary Barra, has released around 80 new documents unearthed during its investigation, much of it correspondence between various GM engineers and folks at Delphi, the manufacturer who supplied the defective switch.

But one internal GM e-mail [PDF] from June 2005 details potential fixes to the problem and includes news stories from the NY Times and others about reports of Chevy Cobalts mysteriously turning off because drivers bumped the ignition switches with their keys.

Among the intended recipients of that e-mail was Doug Parks, who used to be chief engineer on the Cobalt and the Saturn Ion, another recalled vehicle. Parks was not a VP at the time, but has been the company’s VP Global Product Programs since 2012, as is indicated in these org charts provided to investigators. He’s also been described as a close associate of Barra, herself a longtime veteran at GM before rising to the CEO position at the beginning of 2014.

Another e-mail from 2005 shows that Park was indeed aware of the issue, as he asks, “can we come up with a ‘plug’ to go into the key that centers the ring through the middle of the key and not the edge/slot? This appears to be the only real, quick solution.”

The reason that it’s important for General Motors to claim that no top execs at the company knew of the ignition problem before 2009 involves a tricky condition of the company’s bankruptcy restructuring. As part of that deal, the post-bankruptcy “New GM” can not be held liable for non-accident claims related to defective vehicles produced by pre-bankruptcy “Old GM.”

However, lawyers representing plaintiffs in class-action suits against the car maker say that the fact that the ignition problem went without a recall for more than a decade is a sign that the New GM conspired to cover up the defect for several years.

The fact that a chief engineer learned of this problem at the Old GM and kept it with him (or disregarded it; which may be worse) through his rise to a high-profile vice-presidency at the company would seem to give the plaintiffs’ lawyers much-needed ammunition.

While not from a VP or other top exec, an internal 2009 e-mail about the Cobalt ignition problem gives an indication as to how the problem had become a part of GM lore by this point.

“Gentleman! This issue has been around since man first lumbered out of sea and stood on two feet,” writes one employee about the issue of changing the key hole on Cobalts to lessen the chances of the ignition being turned off. “In fact, I think Darwin wrote the first [Problem Resolution Tracking System] on this and included as an attachment as part of his ‘Theory of Evolution.’”

In what may be additional evidence of either a cover-up or pure ineptitude, an e-mail from the NHTSA Office of Defects Investigation to GM from July 2013 says that the general perception of GM’s response to questions about the Cobalt investigation is that the car maker is “slow to communicate” and “slow to act.”

“The documents that we have received to date paint a disturbing and devastating picture, a beyond-worst-case systemic breakdown that led to lives needlessly lost,” said Congressmen Tim Murphy and Fred Upton in a statement to Detroit News. “But as the recalls mount, important questions remain and our investigation continues into both GM and NHTSA.”

The newly released papers also reveal that there is indeed a federal grand jury looking into the ignition delay, as some of the documents from Delphi include stamps indicating that they were submitted to the Justice Department under a grand jury subpoena.

A rep for the company confirms with Detroit News that “Delphi has been cooperating with all government agencies to provide any requested information.”

The documents also help to clarify the process through which the GM engineer responsible for the switch made under-the-radar changes that resulted in a safer ignition but failed to change the product number, meaning that defective and non-defective switches were commingled in GM inventory for years after the fix was made.

Bloomberg reports that the engineer — one of the 15 people who have been fired in the wake of the recall — authorized the switch improvements after an internal panel said no to the proposal for a new ignition switch that wouldn’t turn off with a slight tug or a bump of the knee.

E-mail correspondence from 2002 between this engineer and Delphi shows the discussion of how the existing switch could be strengthened. Delphi said that making it more difficult for the switch to be turned off could have the unintended effect of making it harder to turn the start the car with a key. This could lead to switches breaking or wearing out too quickly. “[D]o nothing,” replied the GM engineer, “maintain present course.”

Meanwhile, GM announced today that it will finally reveal details of its plan to compensate victims of crashes in cars related to the ignition defect. As Barra told lawmakers last week, accepting compensation from the GM fund would be in lieu of a victim or a victim’s family seeking legal action against the company.

This, folks, is the very essence of "get wrecked."

Watch as Daisy is completely unable to catch a break in this video by HowBoutGaming:

I think my favorite part is at the end, when she clearly just stops trying to move forward. I don't blame you, Daisy.

Confession: I have an absolutely irrational and intense hatred for Daisy, so this video makes me feel happy despite claims that Daisy deserves better. Still, we've all been there, right? The title of this video says it all. This is Mario Kart, this is the Mario Kart experience. It's bullshit. And that's why we love it.

(Via Reddit)

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An American student studying abroad had to be rescued by a group of more than 20 firefighters last week after getting trapped deep inside of a gigantic vagina sculpture by Fernando de la Jara in Tübingen, Germany.

Cyber attackers had a busy schedule on Wednesday: Twitter’s TweetDeck experienced an attack that left millions of consumers’ accounts vulnerable to hijacking, and Feedly appears to have been taken for ransom. While TweetDeck was back to normal after a few hours, Feedly continues to experience sporadic outages.

Silicon Beat reports criminal hackers launched an attack on Feedly, an online RSS reader used to keep up with blogs and other news outlets, and tried to extort money from the company.

Although the company reports the issue was resolved Wednesday afternoon, it appears a second attack is currently underway. A new post on the Feedly blog simply titled “Denial of service attack [Wave #2]” links to the company’s previous posting on Wednesday’s attack.

That may explain why while using the site this morning several Consumerist editors only had partial success in reading news feeds.

Early Wednesday morning, officials with the site reported on their blog that “criminals are attacking with a distributed denial of service attack” and that the company would continue to “refuse to give in” to attempts of extortion.

A few hours later, the Feedly blog reported changes were being made to the infrastructure that would allow it to bring the site back online. Shortly after that, the blog reported it had neutralized the attack, and that users should be able to access their accounts online, via mobile apps and third-party applications.

Feedly Says Criminal Hackers Demanded Money To Stop Attack [Silicon Beat]

If you’re like most people, the most expensive stamp you have in your possession is probably valued at around, oh, whatever the current price for postage is. High five! But among serious stamp collectors it’s a different story — and the world’s most valuable stamp of all stamps just raked in a pretty penny at auction.

A 1-cent postage stamp called the 1856 British Guaina One-Cent Magenta made it to the record books again as the world’s most valuable stamp when it sold yesterday for $9.5 million at a Sotheby’s auction in New York City, reports the Associated Press.

This little bit of paper has been around the block before — it’s the fourth time its sale has broken the auction record for a single stamp.

The tiny stamp hasn’t been shown to the public since 1986, which means it’s a pretty big deal.

“You’re not going to find anything rarer than this,” said Allen Kane, director of the Smithsonian National Postal Museum. “It’s a stamp the world of collectors has been dying to see for a long time.”

The Magenta broke the previous record of $2.3 million for an 1855 Swedish stamp that sold in 1996.

The stamp comes with a bit of sordid back story as well, as its last owner was John E. du Pont, an heir to the du Pont chemical fortune. He bought the stamp in 1980 for $935,000. He was later convicted of fatally shooting an Olympic champion wrestler, and the stamp was then sold by his estate.

Though there are other example of a similar 4-cent stamp that was produced at the same time, this is the only known 1-cent stamp of its kind to exist.

Raise your hand if you fee like it’s time to start rooting around in the attic again. I can’t see your hands but I know you’re all with me here.

Rare Stamp Sells for $9.5 Million [Associated Press]

Ads by Project Wonderful! Your ad could be here, right now.

Emily why

In case you were wondering, when you put Legend of Zelda characters in a Dynasty Warriors-style set-up, everything gets a bit more ferocious. Maybe even uncomfortably so.

Usually when you see Link fighting enemies in his many video game appearances, he comes across as determined and resolute. It never seems like he likes the violence. But this trailer for Hyrule Warriors makes the Hero of Time look a bit more bloodthirsty than normal. The most interesting part of this clip might be the Dodongo fight, where Link takes on the giant lizard with his trademark bombs.

Has Link ever looked this vicious? He's come close a few times.

Seriously, Wind Waker Link will eff you up. But, Hyrule Warriors' Link will almost certainly rack up a bigger body count.

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There is no disappointment as widespread and meekly accepted as the true appearance of fast food versus advertising glamour shots. As MediocreFilms proves in this hidden camera video, it doesn't have to be that way.

That's right, if you are polite and courteous and the store your in isn't in the middle of a rush, you just might be able to convince someone at McDonald'a, Wendy's, Jack-in-the-Box or Burger King to gussy up your garish gut-bombs. Because if you're going to kick yourself repeatedly in the stomach, there's no reason you can use a very pretty steel-toed boot to do it.

I'd advise against trying this under less than the ideal conditions presented in this video. If I walked into my McDonald's during the lunch rush and asked them to make my burger pretty, at the very least my request would be politely declined.

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The Gregory Brothers are back with a new electro-pop summer jam and boy, it’s got a lot of herpin’ and derpin’.

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This fan made video combines two of Trey Parker and Matt Stone’s creations, South Park and The Book of Mormon, into one musical cartoon.

Some days, it feels like it can be difficult to get people excited about space exploration. It's space! It's the universe! Get excited already! Which is why NASA, being the lovable nerds that they are, have decided to use Peter Cullen, AKA the voice of Optimus Prime, to get you pumped about the Hubble's successor.

So sit back, relax, and listen as the sultry voice of Peter Cullen shows how the James Webb Space Telescope will transform and roll out...for science!

via NASA

To contact the author of this post, write to chrisperson@kotaku.com or find him on Twitter at @papapishu.

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