Bewarethewumpus

Author : Andrew Hawnt

Frozen in time behind the door to Vault Six is an explosion, and it talks to me.

How can an explosion talk to me? I don’t really know, but then again I’m just a guard. I sit next to the door to Vault Six and I read, or I clean the corridor, or I check and recheck the systems which keep the explosion imprisoned in a time bubble.

My name’s John Drake, but the explosion calls me Johnny Boy, or occasionally Drakey when it wants to wake me up. The explosion (or Bang, as I call it when we’re alone) even saved my skin last Friday when it woke me up just before Colonel Trent turned up unannounced.

Me and Bang are friends, even though it’s stuck in a cell and I’m guarding the door. We have an understanding. I don’t tell people it can talk to me, and Bang tells me stories to pass the time.

I thought I was going mad when Bang started talking to me, but hey, I have a mad job. This building is full of impossible things and a fair few staff have lost it over the years, but I can deal with Bang. It explains the monsters in other cells. The ghosts and the aliens and the sentient computer viruses and everything else.

But today, Bang told me a secret I didn’t want to hear. Where it came from. Where it began. I didn’t believe it at first, but then I remembered there’s a guy with horns claiming to be the devil in the next cell, so I figure there’s not all that much which is still impossible.

Bang is the end of this facility. This whole complex. Exploding. Bang told me the explosion was so powerful that it ruptured time and space and seeped through into the present. The department were able to imprison it using an experimental technique which bends time on itself into a loop, sealing whatever is inside it completely.

But the thing is, the thing that’s been making my head hurt all shift long, is that Bang says the explosion began when Bang gets released accidentally. But that means that Bang is both the cause and the result of the incident. An explosion from the future which detonates in the present, creating a paradox which can never end.

The thing that really freaked me out though was that Bang claimed to be me, John Drake, caught in the future explosion which created it and broke time. Bang’s voice in my head is me, my consciousness having become a part of the living explosion when the facility was, or will be, wiped out.

So that means I die here, I guess. Bang says that might not be the case. That I might get out. That it gets my voice because of all the time we spent talking in the past, or the present. That’s when my head hurts, thinking about that.

Get out, Bang tells me now. Get out quickly. It’s started.

Alarms start to chime, then the strip lights along the corridor go red and I hear commotion on the floor above and the floor below. An overlooked weakness in safety protocols. The corridor doors lock themselves. I could scream for help, but it wouldn’t do any good. Bang tells me it’s okay. Bang says it will look after me. Bang tells me in my own voice that this was always meant to be.

The protective bubble around Bang ruptures, and the building is consumed in blinding fire. I am taken away by the bubble’s broken science and the force of Bang’s unleashed energies swallows me whole. I am gone, but I am still here.

As quickly as it begins, it ends.

The bubble reverts to its previous state. Time realigns. I am Bang, and outside Vault Six there sits John Drake. He is a friend. Within the bubble which holds my fire imprisoned, I feel a sense of completion.

“Hello Drakey,” I say out loud, and the guard wakes up, staring at the door to Vault Six with eyes which are so very familiar.

From the Morning Sentinel, a story about a gentleman in Norridgewick, Maine, who has the silhouette of a gun tattooed to give the impression that he has one tucked into his belt.

David Leaming

Michael Smith went outside shirtless after being awakened Tuesday morning, yelling at a tree removal company to get off his property. The workers thought they saw a gun in his waistband and called police. Smith, who’d gone back to bed, was awakened again minutes later — this time by Maine State Police at his front door, backed up by a group of troopers with assault rifles in his driveway. They were asking him via a megaphone to come out of his house

New Comic: Titania

The NSA has a research facility in Bluffdale, Utah. It's loaded with "metadata-gathering computers that currently require 1.7 million gallons of water a day" to keep them cool. Utah representative Marc Roberts (R) has introduced HB161, which would shut off their water supply. If the bill passes, how will the federal government respond?

With more than 4,300 players, the Magic: The Gathering Grand Prix event in Richmond, Virginia, was one of the largest face-to-face gaming events to ever take place. Many players in attendance were participating in their first-ever Magic tournament, and they experienced the courteous and respectful environment full of camaraderie and excitement that the Magic community is known for.

Conor Friedersforf counts the ways, but it comes down to saying "we've failed, sure, but we might succeed if only you gave us more money."

Someone had to do it, so YouTuber NeckerBrick did: U.S. Senate’s Republican minority leader Mitch McConnell’s campaign ad gets paired up with Guile’s Theme from Hyper Street Fighter II!

Here's a great history of English mispronunciations that became the received pronunciations. The piece makes the important point that English has no canon, no unequivocal right way or wrong way of speaking -- a point that is often lost in Internet linguistic pedantry and literacy privilege.

I'm as guilty as anyone of thinking that my English is the best English, but the next time I wince at "nukular," I'll remind myself that "bird" started out as "brid" and "wasp" started out as "waps," but were mispronounced into common usage.

Adder, apron and umpire all used to start with an "n". Constructions like "A nadder" or "Mine napron" were so common the first letter was assumed to be part of the preceding word. Linguists call this kind of thing reanalysis or rebracketing.

Wasp used to be waps; bird used to be brid and horse used to be hros. Remember this when the next time you hear someone complaining about aks for ask or nucular for nuclear, or even perscription. It's called metathesis, and it's a very common, perfectly natural process.

8 pronunciation errors that made the English language what it is today [David Shariatmadari/Guardian]

(via Hacker News)

(Image: Double bitted felling axe, Wikimedia Commons/Luigizanasi CC-BY-SA)

Just like Colorado doesn’t want drunk drivers swerving all over its roads and endangering people, the state doesn’t want anyone getting stoned and trying to operate a car, now that marijuana is legal in the state. Because if what we’ve learned from the movies about reefer is true, there are plenty of distractions when you’re stoned — food (Funyuns specifically), the way Willie Nelson’s braids sway just so and oh what’s that thing I must stare at over there?

While you probably have that one friend who insists, “No, it’s fine — I’m way more focused on the road when I’m stoned!”, Colorado disagrees: The state is spending $1 million on TV ads for the Colorado Department of Transportation’s new “Drive High, Get a DUI” campaign that make fun of pot users who already space out under normal circumstances.

The point there being that driving a potentially deadly hunk of metal around other people could be a really bad time to space out. For example — one ad shoes a guy (with huuuuge hair, because obviously the more cartoonish of a character, the better comedic value!) trying to operate a grill while high and not realizing what the problem is, because he’s stoned. The idea being, you wouldn’t want him driving a car if he can’t turn a grill on.

It’s the first time since marijuana was legalized in 2012 that Colorado has pushed such a campaign to remind drivers to treat marijuana like alcohol, reports the Associated Press. The state has also recently started tallying impaired driving violations due to marijuana, while in previous years those just fell under the same category as drunk drivers.

And also? The ads are actually pretty funny:

You can follow MBQ on Twitter if you can find her oh wait, here: @marybethquirk

Colorado launches campaign to stop stoned driving [Associated Press]

Nat writes, "A Dunedin, NZ, man lost a bet five years ago and changed his name by deed poll to the longest name he could make (99 characters, 1 shy of the Dept of Internal Affairs limit). I want to know what they were drinking because the name is fantastic. "The 22-year-old man from Normanby is now legally known as 'Full Metal Havok More Sexy N Intelligent Than Spock And All The Superheroes Combined With Frostnova'." (Thanks, Nat!)

S

First came the Ouya Android microconsole. Then came Mad Catz's M.O.J.O. Android microconsole. Today Mad Catz announces the M.O.J.O. microconsole will be playing host to Ouya content. I am so confused.

This is all due to Ouya's recent decision to allow the Ouya experience to be embedded in other Android devices. They call it Ouya Anywhere. It basically takes the software that runs the Ouya — the storefront and such — and turns it into an app for other devices.

So the M.O.J.O., a more powerful Android microconsole (it runs on Tegra 4 to the Ouya's Tegra 3 chip), now gives Android gamers access to all of the exclusive content the Ouya folks worked so hard to acquire. Plus all the existing Android games the Ouya couldn't play.

The M.O.J.O. console does cost twice as much as Ouya's physical presence, reduced today to $199, but it's far more powerful and comes with a much better controller.

Who needs an Ouya now? Nobody, really. This Ouya Anywhere initiative effectively kills any reason to buy the physical product.

But that's okay. Ouya CEO and founder Julie Uhrman, via official press release, is just pleased to take the box out of the console experience.

"Up until now, the game console experience has been locked inside a box," said Julie Uhrman, CEO and founder of OUYA. "Together with the hardware veterans at Mad Catz, we end that. Today's announcement signifies the inception of a truly open platform where independent developers can bring their creations to the platforms where gamers actually play: everywhere."

All of the enthusiasm that made the Ouya such a ridiculous success on Kickstarter has come to this. They made a console, and then ditched it to become a platform. Is this making sense to anyone else?

This entry passed through the Full-Text RSS service — if this is your content and you're reading it on someone else's site, please read the FAQ at fivefilters.org/content-only/faq.php#publishers.

In this boss fight from the 1994 role-playing game Final Fantasy 6, the character Sabin shows off his epic wrestling skills by lifting an entire train up in the air to perform a “suplex” move.

Our goal in Bridge Constructor is to build a bridge, and then pass through it. But as usual, it wouldn't be all that fun if it were that simple. Vinny on YouTube thankfully knows exactly how to do it in a classy way.

Crossing the bridge is actually the last thing you wanna do:

The source of the gifs, Vinny's original video, is really fun to watch:

Vinny - Breaking Bridge Constructor [Vinesauce, YouTube]

To contact the author of this post, write to: gergovas@kotaku.com

This entry passed through the Full-Text RSS service — if this is your content and you're reading it on someone else's site, please read the FAQ at fivefilters.org/content-only/faq.php#publishers.

abby-lemon:

GOOD AT SHARING!

The prettiest Zelda game, now playable in virtual reality and in a new perspective. Awesome.

As you can see in this video by Chadtronic, unlike the Ocarina demo, this isn't a proof of concept that's missing a lot of key elements. You can battle and interact with the world normally, and all the characters are present. There are some slight hiccups, of course, since Wind Waker was never meant to be played in this perspective, but still! It's neat to watch.

One thing I really appreciate about looking this version of the game is that it gives you a better sense of how tiny Link really is when you wade through the grass or pick a pot up. D'aaw. He's just a little kid, you know?

Zelda: Wind Waker on Oculus Rift in True First Person [Chadtronic]

This entry passed through the Full-Text RSS service — if this is your content and you're reading it on someone else's site, please read the FAQ at fivefilters.org/content-only/faq.php#publishers.

S

To random bystanders, the protagonist of 'Twitch Plays Pokémon' must have seemed strange—having thousands of people control the movement of a single character makes Red seem erratic. Now imagine what it must've felt like to be the mother of a kid that acts that way.

Normally, stuff about Red's movement goes for laughs, but this excellent comic by famaululat goes for the heart instead. It's the story of Red's mother, her worry about her son's behavior—and eventual relief when his adventure is over. Check it out:

S

S

S

S

S

S

S

S

S

S

Aww. I kind of love all the stories people have come up with to go along with the first playthrough of 'Twitch Plays Pokemon.' I'd like to think things got better for Red, mental-health wise, now that it's all over, but that's partially because I've also seen this other emotional comic by kiyokon:

Dang.

This entry passed through the Full-Text RSS service — if this is your content and you're reading it on someone else's site, please read the FAQ at fivefilters.org/content-only/faq.php#publishers.

NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden has submitted written testimony [PDF] to an EU committee investigating mass surveillance. Glyn Moody's Techdirt post gives a great tl;dr summary of the document, but you should really read it for yourself. It's ten single-spaced pages, but Snowden turns out to be an extremely talented writer who beautifully lays out his arguments, managing the trick of being dispassionate while simultaneously conveying the import of his subject matter.

Snowden makes the point that his testimony doesn't disclose anything that the press hasn't already published, but there's been so much that it's worth reviewing some of it. He directs our attention to something I'd missed: the NSA's Foreign Affairs Division (FAD) spends an extraordinary amount of time lobbying EU nations (and other countries) to change their laws so that the NSA can legally spy on everyone in the country. What's more, they cook these deals -- for example, they'll get German permission to listen in on everything by non-Germans and get a Danish deal that covers all the non-Danes, but since the Internet backbones traverse both countries, they can spy on Germans in Denmark and Danes in Germany. As Snowden says, "The surest way for any nation to become subject to unnecessary surveillance is to allow its spies to dictate its policy."

Snowden also reveals that before he blew the whistle on the NSA, he "reported these clearly problematic programs to more than ten distinct officials, none of whom took any action to address them." He says that he'd love EU asylum, but doesn't expect any country to have the backbone to stand up to the USA. And he is admirably unequivocal on his relationship with China and Russia: "I have no relationship with either government."

He reaffirms that good crypto is proof against spies, and describes his relationship with Russia's spooks:

Of course. Even the secret service of Andorra would have approached me, if they had had the chance: that's their job.

But I didn't take any documents with me from Hong Kong, and while I'm sure they were disappointed, it doesn't take long for an intelligence service to realize when they're out of luck. I was also accompanied at all times by an utterly fearless journalist [WikiLeaks' Sarah Harrison] with one of the biggest megaphones in the world, which is the equivalent of Kryptonite for spies. As a consequence, we spent the next 40 days trapped in an airport instead of sleeping on piles of money while waiting for the next parade. But we walked out with heads held high.

EU Testimony of Edward Snowden [PDF]

Dave from the Electronic Frontier Foundation sez, "Remember when Rep. Mike Rogers likened opponents of pernicious cybersecurity legislation to 14-year-olds? It turns out that middle-school-age students are also well-prepared to debate him on the NSA's programs as well. EFF congratulates students from two middle schools who took home top prizes in the C-SPAN StudentCam 2014 competition for young filmmakers with their documentaries on the debate over mass surveillance."

The video, featuring an interview with author James Bamford, will air on C-SPAN at 6:50 a.m. E.T. and throughout the day on April 23. You can also watch it online.

Ben Blum, a filmmaker at Saint Mark's School in San Rafael, California, scored second place in the same category for his documentary "Data Obsession," featuring EFF Activist Parker Higgins. It will air on Friday, April 11 and you can watch it below:

Middle Schoolers Win C-SPAN Prizes for NSA Documentaries (Thanks, Dave!)

When you watch Netflix videos in the Chrome browser, the service disables Chrome's developer console, a debugging and programming tool that gives you transparency and control over what your browser is doing. The Hacker News thread explains that this is sometimes done in order to stop an attack called "Self-XSS" that primarily arises on social media sites, where it can cause a browser to leak nominally private information to third parties. But in this case, the "Self-XSS" attack Netflix is worried about is very different: they want to prevent browser owners from consciously choosing to run scripts in the Netflix window that subvert Netflix's restrictions on video.

This is the natural outflow of the pretense that "streaming" exists as a thing that is distinct from "downloading" -- the idea that you can send a stream of bytes to someone else's computer without the computer being able to store those bytes. "Streaming" is at the heart of "rental" business models like Netflix's, and there's nothing wrong with the idea of rental per se. But the only way to attain "rental" with computers is to design computers so that their owners can't give them orders that the landlords disagree with. You have to change the computer and its software so that you can't see what it's doing and can't change what it's doing.

Your browser is a portal to your whole social life, your financial life and your work life, entrusted with the most potentially compromising secrets of your life. Anything that allows third parties to make it harder for you to figure out what the browser is doing, or to prevent it from doing something you don't want, should be a non-starter. As soon as a powerful entity like Netflix comes to depend on -- and insist on -- computers that owners can't control, that company is doing something wrong. Not because rentals are bad, but because taking away owner control from computers is bad.

This is why it's such a big deal that Netflix has convinced Microsoft, Apple, and Google to build user-controlling technology into their browsers, and why it's such a big deal that Microsoft, Apple, and Google have convinced the W3C to standardize this for all devices with HTML5 interfaces. Any time we allow the discussion to be sidetracked into "How can Netflix maximize its revenue by enforcing rental terms?" we're missing the real point, which is, "How can people be sure that their browsers aren't betraying them?"

Netflix disables use of the Chrome developer console (pastebin.com)

In Safety and Efficacy of Lysergic Acid Diethylamide-Assisted Psychotherapy for Anxiety Associated With Life-threatening Diseases, a new paper published in The Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease, a Swiss psychiatrist named Peter Gasser and his colleagues report on the first controlled trial of LSD in forty years. Gasser used LSD therapeutically to treat 12 people nearing the end of their lives, and concluded that their anxiety "went down and stayed down."

Many psychopharmacologists believe that psychedelics such as LSD have therapeutic benefits that could be realized if the strictures on them were loosened. David Nutt, the former UK government drugs czar, called the ban on psychedelics in therapeutic settings "the worst case of scientific censorship since the Catholic Church banned the works of Copernicus and Galileo". He devotes a whole chapter to psychedelics in his brilliant book on drug policy, Drugs Without the Hot Air. If you only read one book about drug policy, read that one.

Gasser's trial is positioned as a major move in the struggle to end the damage the War on Some Drugs has wrought on legitimate medicine. It used a randomized double-blind protocol to dose some dying patients (most with terminal cancer) with LSD as part of an anxiety-reduction strategy. The results were dramatic and positive. In a NYT story, some Gasser's patients relate their experiences with the therapy:

“I had what you would call a mystical experience, I guess, lasting for some time, and the major part was pure distress at all these memories I had successfully forgotten for decades,” Peter said. “These painful feelings, regrets, this fear of death. I remember feeling very cold for a long time. I was shivering, even though I was sweating. It was a mental coldness, I think, a memory of neglect.”

He was also doing something with those sensations, something he had almost never done before. He was talking about them. “It surprised me,” Peter said. “I didn’t know I was talking away until Dr. Gasser made me notice.”

After about two months of weekly therapy, the eight participants who received full doses of LSD improved by about 20 percent on standard measures of anxiety, and the four subjects who took a much weaker dose got worse. (After the trial, those patients were allowed to “cross over” and try the full dose.) Those findings held up for a year in those who have survived.

LSD, Reconsidered for Therapy [Benedict Carey/NYT]

(via /.)

New Comic: Consultant

buy this print
Or share on: facebook reddit

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

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

You've (hopefully) seen the original Zelda on the Oculus Rift. Now I'd like to bring your attention to the Oculus Rift version of what some consider the best Zelda game—not only is this in first person, which makes the game look way different, but it also lets Link jump whenever you want.

Granted, as Chadtronic notes, this is just a proof of concept—not all functionality is currently present in this version of the game. You can't, for example, pick up rupees. The game is also limited to the Kokiri Forest, and not all the character models are present. Still, despite being mostly a "walk around" demo, it looks neat!

You can download this for the Oculus Rift here, if you'd like.

Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time Oculus Rift (Kokiri Forest) [Chadtronic]

This entry passed through the Full-Text RSS service — if this is your content and you're reading it on someone else's site, please read the FAQ at fivefilters.org/content-only/faq.php#publishers.