Download Warpath now in Google Play or pre-register in the AppStore with my link: http://bit.ly/WCinemassacre Use my creator code Warpath000 to get gold x200, military x100,000, steel x100,000, crude x100,000, army experience x100,000
Angry Video Game Nerd (AVGN) episode 185: The Legend of Kage for the Nintendo Entertainment System. Kage is an action game that was released by Taito in 1985. Players take role of the young Iga ninja named 'Kage' on the mission to rescue Princess Kiri from villains.
A look back at the bizarre Packard Bell Corner Computer, one of the weirdest computer designs of the 90s. Pentium CPU at 200MHz, 64MB RAM, Windows 95, and floppy disk and CD-ROM drives jutting out of each corner. An infrared remote control mouse thing came with it, too!
Submitter: Why would anyone want a crown made of chicken wire? Maybe I’m the odd one, but I really don’t want almost-garbage on my head. We’re a small public library and this hadn’t been circ’d in over 3 years. Plus, it’s just plain weird!
Holly: This has #NailedIt potential. It would be fun to use this book in a Nailed It! knockoff program. Give people one of these instruction sheets and then compare their final result to the picture in the book. The one on the cover is a bit…much…
One of the few parts of the federal government that hasn't dissolved into a complete partisan trash heap was the newly created Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), a division of Homeland Security that was created as part of the problematic CISA bill five years ago. While we were disappointed in many aspects of the bill itself, as an organization CISA has done some pretty good work in coordinating and dealing with cybersecurity threats. Throughout the tech industry I've heard nothing but good things about CISA as a government organization, and its director Chris Krebs (as well as the staff of CISA). Indeed, I've heard from many companies preparing for this year's election how useful CISA has been in providing clear and useful information regarding potential cybersecurity threats.
Relatedly, CISA has an excellent Rumor Control page that debunks various myths about potential cybersecurity risks regarding the election. It's very good and very thorough. And, in fact, it debunks many of the myths that various Trumpists have been spreading around social media in pretty clear and concise language:
It appears that the White House has finally realized this exists and decided it's not a good look for its own organization to be debunking the very same myths that the White House itself is trying to boost and spread as real. The White House apparently asked Krebs to have the page changed, and Krebs rejected the request. He's now telling colleagues he expects to be fired for standing up for the truth and against nonsense about election hacks.
White House officials have asked for content to be edited or removed which pushed back against numerous false claims about the election, including that Democrats are behind a mass election fraud scheme. CISA officials have chosen not to delete accurate information.
In particular, one person said, the White House was angry about a CISA post rejecting a conspiracy theory that falsely claims an intelligence agency supercomputer and program, purportedly named Hammer and Scorecard, could have flipped votes nationally. No such system exists, according to Krebs, election security experts and former U.S. officials.
The article notes that an assistant director at CISA, Bryan Ware, has handed in his resignation and it is believed that this was demanded from the White House related to this particular issue.
Krebs deserves kudos for standing up for truth and a secure election, rather than to be fired for it, while Trump continues to lie, obstruct and pretend he didn't lose the election.
Oh, and thanks to the White House for driving a ton more traffic to CISA's super useful Rumor Control website.
Endian SRL has announced the release of Endian Firewall 3.3.2, the latest version of the project's Linux security distribution, based on Red Hat Enterprise Linux and designed for home use, that can transform a hardware appliance into a full-featured Unified Threat Management (UTM) solution. The new version comes....
The two undergraduates had been accused of a bold infraction of the rules: sneaking a friend from across campus into their dorm room for some late-night socializing. As recently as last spring, nobody would’ve cared. But this semester, with Rice University officials determined to prevent a coronavirus outbreak that might shut down the school, students are not only forbidden from entering a dorm they don’t live in; they’re not allowed to move between floors in their own residential building. After a tipster turned them in, the two alleged offenders were forced to appear before the student-run COVID Community Court (CCC) that the school launched this semester to adjudicate public health violations on campus. Though the alleged offenders adamantly denied the accusation against them in their…View Original Post
Announced back in March, Plague Inc.’sThe Cure update is now available on iOS and Android. The new mode reverses the title’s usual gameplay loop in which you design a virus to wipe out the human race. Instead, you’ll need to implement measures such as contract tracing while teams of scientists work on a vaccine. Developer Ndemic Creations worked with experts from organizations like the World Health Organization and the Global Outbreak Alert and Response Network to make the mode a realistic reflection of the work that goes into stopping a global pandemic — though the studio is quick to note Plague Inc. is “not a scientific simulation.”
Still, scientists believe The Cure will be a helpful learning tool. “Games like Plague Inc: The Cure represent an incredibly important medium for education and public awareness that can be used to show the world the steps needed to address similar global health threats and their associated complexities,” said Richard Hatchett, the CEO of the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI).
Ndemic Creations says the Plague Inc: The Cure will be free to download until COVID-19 is under control. The update is coming to PC and consoles “soon.”
What is it about Buc-ee’s that inspires such fierce loyalty? Is it the mascot, that toothy beaver bedecked with a ball cap, a guileless expression on his face as he gazes down upon passing motorists from billboards dotted across Texas? Is it the sheer size of each of the chain’s several dozen locations, some of which sprawl over Walmart-size stretches of middle-of-nowhere along our state’s highways? Is it the bathrooms, sparkling clean and legendarily comfortable for those who need a peaceful place to relieve themselves on a break from speeding down the interstate? Is it mere Texas pride, the compulsion that residents of the Lone Star State feel to evangelize for every brand that originated here, the same way that we romanticize H-E-B, Taco Cabana,…View Original Post
HOW TO BUY one of the VIC-20s? ----------------------- keep your eye on http://www.twitter.com/1UponCancer as information will be posted there in the next week or so.
Politico's Garrett Graff says Trump is already blocking president-elect Biden's access to classified information. Some worry he might destroy White House records and begin issuing pardons.
Tropical Storm Eta made landfall for the fourth time when it hit Florida's Gulf Coast. Some areas in southern Florida could see up to 25 inches of rainfall total from this storm.
We've repeatedly made it pretty clear that President Trump's effort to ban TikTok is little more than a performative, xenophobic, idiotic mess. For one, the effort appears more focused on trying to get Trump-allied Oracle a new hosting deal than any serious concern about consumer privacy and security. Two, banning a teen dancing and lip syncing app does jack shit in terms of thwarting China or protecting U.S. consumer privacy, since the U.S. telecom, app, and adtech markets are largely an unaccountable privacy mess making it trivial to obtain this kind of data elsewhere.
Further highlighting the performative nature of the proposed ban, TikTok this week effectively stated that Trumpland appears to have forgotten about the proposed ban entirely. TikTok filed a petition this week in a US Court of Appeals calling for a review of actions by the Trump administration’s Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS), pointing out that the deadline for ByteDance to sell off its US assets over national security concerns came and went this week with no action from Trumpland or word on any extension.
Apparently the whole TikTok thing fell off the radar as the administration focuses on pretending it didn't lose the election. Whoops:
"For a year, TikTok has actively engaged with CFIUS in good faith to address its national security concerns, even as we disagree with its assessment,” TikTok says in a statement to The Verge. “In the nearly two months since the President gave his preliminary approval to our proposal to satisfy those concerns, we have offered detailed solutions to finalize that agreement – but have received no substantive feedback on our extensive data privacy and security framework."
This is, of course, because the TikTok ban was largely performative bullshit and cronyism, designed to drum up some hysteria over China and provide Trump with leverage in his harmful trade war while driving some additional cash and influence to his U.S. allies.
If the Trump administration and GOP genuinely cared about U.S. consumer privacy and security, there's a laundry list of more pressing issues it could do something about, including shoring up vulnerable U.S. telecom infrastructure, passing even a baseline U.S. privacy law for the internet era, better policing the widespread abuse of user location data (by corporations and the government alike), attempt to shore up security in the internet of broken things sector, secure election integrity, and stop, you know, trying to destroy encryption.
Neither Trump Inc. nor the Trump-allied GOP does any of this because it's more interested in bad faith posturing and bullshit than serious governance or public welfare. If the folks fanning their face over TikTok truly cared about consumer privacy and security, we'd do something about the broader, unaccountable mess that is adtech, app, government, and telecom data privacy. Instead we get a giant pile of bullshit and a mountain of billable legal man hours over something that was never serious adult policy to begin with.
watches too much, it’s just not healthy
Fire (?)
fire.as.a.metaphor@gmail.com
watches too much, it’s just not healthy is an A5 black and white zine featuring Fire’s ponderings on #100-#91 of their 100 favourite movies.
“The rest of the movie is great enough. A brain-melting, gleeful in ways I never knew possible, exhausting tale of how everything would be better if people found their trash side.”
I think I’d watch the movie based on that sentence alone.
watches too much, it’s just not healthy opens with a very brief introduction about the idea that started this zine before launching right into the movie features. Each movie is given its own full title page with details like the title, director, run time, and more all set against a full A5 picture from the movie itself. Following the title page, Fire then examines each movie in a mix of synopsis, critique, mental wanderings, some nostalgia…
I called these spread movie features rather than reviews because this zine certainly made me realise just how many movie analysis and review videos I watch/listen to online. Without realising it, I’ve become quite used to a certain general structure for these things – a structure Fire more or less doesn’t follow, preferring to textually wander as the spirit takes them.
Fire explores their favourite movies in different ways. Some start more traditionally with a short opener, synopsis, and then thoughts. Others mix in different facets like facts about the actors and/or directors, personal memories associated with the movie, etc. I have to admit that this did throw me a bit. I had to reread certain sections and take my time with others to really keep up. I was expecting a bit of that simply because there are so very many movies out there and there were bound to be references that I didn’t understand.
(For example: “Desperate Living: AKA Punk Story. AKA the one without Divine”)
Fire definitely writes like someone who is familiar with movies inside and out. They also express this aesthetically as well in the layout. There’s a fun element with small pictures of movie scenes running alongside the text like a film strip. It’s the little things like that that really make me smile.
As you may have guessed from the question marks in the top details, there aren’t any socials within the zine other than an email address, from which I decided on a name to use. There could always be a reason when people limit what they share, though, so it’s only ever really a mention rather than a nitpick.
While I do enjoy recommendations and will be watching some of these movies (I haven’t watched any mentioned and have only heard of one), I think I personally prefer a bit more expected structure to these kinds of recommendations. That said, I can appreciate a refreshing take on things for what it is, and some of Fire’s thoughts had me smile and pondering quite a bit. I’d also still check out the next in this zine series, if it exists.
Medical personnel wear personal protective equipment as they register residents waiting in line at a COVID-19 testing site at El Paso Community College Valle Verde Campus in El Paso on Oct. 21, 2020.
Credit: Joel Angel Juárez for The Texas Tribune
EL PASO - El Paso’s temporary shutdown of nonessential businesses will continue for at least three more weeks under a new executive order issued by County Judge Ricardo Samaniego. The move extends a previous order Samaniego issued on Oct. 29 in an effort to curb the spread of COVID-19 in this border city, where local hospital beds are scarce because of a surge of coronavirus patients.
The county has struggled to contain new infections, which have exceeded 1,000 daily cases several times during the last two weeks. The outbreak was responsible for another 14 deaths reported Wednesday, and active cases in this border area are now at more than 29,000. Nearly 1,100 patients are hospitalized, including 279 in intensive care, according to the latest government statistics.
Samaniego’s extension of the shutdown order until Dec. 1 comes despite the Texas attorney general’s office’s ongoing efforts to have the county order squashed in court. Attorney General Ken Paxton and local restaurants argued the order exceeded the restrictions permitted under Gov. Greg Abbott’s own order, which outlines what limits can be placed on private businesses.
A state district judge last week permitted the El Paso shutdown order to stand pending a final resolution of the case. The Texas Supreme Court on Wednesday also declined to halt the order and instead said a resolution from the state's 8th Court of Appeals is expected later this week.
Samaniego said during a virtual press conference on Wednesday that the extended shutdown was "a short-term effort to make sure we don’t have a long-term impact on our community."
"Right now, all I am asking is [to hit] the reset button, let's do the right thing ... let's do two to three weeks of really trying to do the best, and we won't be here in January or February," he said.
The number of total cases recorded in El Paso County since the pandemic began is more than 65,000, about 8,000 greater than Bexar County, which includes San Antonio and has more than twice the population. The emergency has led hospitals in El Paso to ask for patient volunteers willing to be airlifted to other cities in order to free up bed space in local facilities. The local convention center has been converted into a makeshift field hospital, and at least six refrigeration trailers have been used or are on standby to help store the remains of COVID-19 patients.
Last week Abbott announced a deployment of some 60 medical personnel from the U.S. Air Force to the area to assist city officials. Abbott on Wednesday said the state was also sending additional resources to El Paso to supplement the state's alternate care site set up at the convention center in late October.
In early September, Conrad Bejarano, the owner of I Luv Video, announced that the beloved Austin video store would be closing permanently. Home to more than 130,000 rare videotapes, DVDs, and Blu-rays, the store is a casualty of both the declining fortunes of video stores and the retail gut-punch caused by COVID-19. Founded in 1985 as home video was replacing repertory theaters as the way movie fans viewed old movies and learned cinema history, I Luv Video was once a dominant video shop in Austin, at one time sporting five locations. Now, it’s the second Austin institution of its kind to close within the previous six months: in April, Vulcan Video, a similarly esoteric and well-stocked stop for central Texas movie nerds, closed permanently. (Alamo…View Original Post
Crowns & Tiaras
The two undergraduates had been accused of a bold infraction of the rules: sneaking a friend from across campus into their dorm room for some late-night socializing. As recently as last spring, nobody would’ve cared. But this semester, with Rice University officials determined to prevent a coronavirus outbreak that might shut down the school, students are not only forbidden from entering a dorm they don’t live in; they’re not allowed to move between floors in their own residential building. After a tipster turned them in, the two alleged offenders were forced to appear before the student-run COVID Community Court (CCC) that the school launched this semester to adjudicate public health violations on campus. Though the alleged offenders adamantly denied the accusation against them in their…View Original Post
What is it about Buc-ee’s that inspires such fierce loyalty? Is it the mascot, that toothy beaver bedecked with a ball cap, a guileless expression on his face as he gazes down upon passing motorists from billboards dotted across Texas? Is it the sheer size of each of the chain’s several dozen locations, some of which sprawl over Walmart-size stretches of middle-of-nowhere along our state’s highways? Is it the bathrooms, sparkling clean and legendarily comfortable for those who need a peaceful place to relieve themselves on a break from speeding down the interstate? Is it mere Texas pride, the compulsion that residents of the Lone Star State feel to evangelize for every brand that originated here, the same way that we romanticize H-E-B, Taco Cabana,…View Original Post
/https://static.texastribune.org/media/files/bbc6e7766b8a16bb9ee01fbb428a538f/El%20Paso%20COVID-19%20Testing%20JAJ%20TT%2017.jpg)
![She referenced Billie Eilish, so this must be getting pretty close to the pandemic. But we've seen the last two years in-universe, so if it's set in the future, they must be in at least 2023 by now. [*adds thumbtacks and string to wall*]](https://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/set_in_the_present.png "She referenced Billie Eilish, so this must be getting pretty close to the pandemic. But we've seen the last two years in-universe, so if it's set in the future, they must be in at least 2023 by now. [*adds thumbtacks and string to wall*]")
In early September, Conrad Bejarano, the owner of I Luv Video, announced that the beloved Austin video store would be closing permanently. Home to more than 130,000 rare videotapes, DVDs, and Blu-rays, the store is a casualty of both the declining fortunes of video stores and the retail gut-punch caused by COVID-19. Founded in 1985 as home video was replacing repertory theaters as the way movie fans viewed old movies and learned cinema history, I Luv Video was once a dominant video shop in Austin, at one time sporting five locations. Now, it’s the second Austin institution of its kind to close within the previous six months: in April, Vulcan Video, a similarly esoteric and well-stocked stop for central Texas movie nerds, closed permanently. (Alamo…View Original Post
