firehose

Back in the early 1990s, when Blizzard was known as Silicon & Synapse, the company worked on a sideways scrolling platformer called The Lost Vikings.

Now Blizzard is offering up its old game for free download. The Lost Vikings, originally published by Interplay, is available on Battle.net along with other old Silicon & Synapse titles Rock 'n' Roll Racing and Battlethorne.

The game features three lost-in-time vikings with different combat abilities battling their way through various enemies and environments. You can download it here.

Activision is set to retire its Neversoft studio, merging its staff with internal Call of Duty house Infinity Ward, according to a report on Giant Bomb.

A memo from Activision Publishing CEO Eric Hirshberg, obtained by Giant Bomb, states that the two studios are to be merged, under the name Infinity Ward. Last year, Neversoft worked on Call of Duty: Ghosts with Infinity Ward.

"As you know, Neversoft and Infinity Ward teamed up for the development of Call of Duty: Ghosts," wrote Hirshberg in the memo. "Through that process, it became clear that the two studios have very complementary skill sets. Between these two excellent studios, it seemed like a single 'super-studio' could emerge."

Neversoft was formed in 1994 and is best known for its work on the Tony Hawk and Guitar Hero franchises. Studio head Joel Jewett and studio director Scott Pease are quitting the company, according to the memo. Activision worldwide studio head Dave Stohl is taking the lead at Infinity Ward.

"We are merging these two very talented teams and obviously had to choose a name for the combined studio," added Hirshberg. "Since the Infinity Ward brand is indelibly tied to the Call of Duty franchise, it is the sensible choice. While it will be strange to not see the Neversoft logo on future games, the important things, which are the Neversoft team's talent, creativity, professionalism and commitment to creative excellence, all remain unchanged as part of this new chapter."

Earlier this week Activision announced this year's Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare, which is being developed by Sledgehammer Games.

I’m not gonna lie, folks: Street Fighter II has been a very influential force in my life. And not just in my love of media where people shoot fireballs out of their hands and kick people in the face so fast that their feet become a lightning-fast blur of pain. I mean that it has affected the way I actually see the world. Much like I thought New York City was basically The Warriors before I went there and saw it for myself (there are fewer Baseball Furies than I expected), I have this picture of foreign lands in my mind that is entirely based around the potential for, say, green rain forest monsters who can shoot electricity out of their skin.

As a result, I am the exact target market for Fernando Reza and his series of travel posters inspired by gaming’s greatest world warriors. They’re absolutely beautiful, with subtle nods to the background of the games done as classic enticements for the jet set crowd, and they are awesome. Check ‘em out below!

To see more of Reza’s art, and purchase signed and numbered copies of his SFII posters, check out his site at frodesignco.com!

Toy Review: ‘Street Fighter II’ G.I. Joe Action Figures

So DC’s Free Comic Book Day title this year is 20 pages of superheroes getting killed.

That’s not a joke. That’s actually what they’re putting out as an enticement for readers who are going into comic book stores, looking to find out more about these characters at a time when superheroes are the most popular thing in the world, is a full-color comic promoting their new crossover, where characters are just murdered and mutilated for twenty solid pages. Oh, and someone gets an arm cut off, because if they didn’t, how would you know it was a DC Comic from 2014?

In the interest of being absolutely fair, something that I try to avoid whenever I can, Future’s End #0, the grinding slog through the fourth future dystopia in two years where Superman is actually eeeeeeevil, is only one of two FCBD books that DC is putting out this year. The other is a reprint of Teen Titans Go! #1, a comic that originally came out last year. That alone is a little problematic for me since it shows you exactly which audience they’re actively pursuing and which one they’re content to just hand something that they already had laying around the office, but it does paint a pretty clear line. If what you want is fun superheroics that aren’t full of people’s limbs being torn off, then you can have this book for tiny little babies. If, however, you’re a mature adult who wants to experience the real DC Universe, well, here’s Future’s End.

Besides, why would any kids want a comic with Batman Beyond, a character who was on a cartoon that ran on Saturday mornings for three years, featured prominently on the cover? This is for grown-ups, nephew!

I worked in a comic book store for a while, and I know that while it doesn’t always result in new regular customers starting up pull lists and diving straight into the weekly titles, it is a showcase for potential new readers. People who hear about Free Comic Book Day do go to stores, and I imagine the fact that people who have never read a comic in their lives actually know who the Avengers and Batroc the Leaper are — and that they seem to be pretty into seeing those characters have adventures and fight bad guys — doesn’t hurt things. That’s the entire reason Free Comic Book Day even exists, after all, and why it’s always scheduled to tie into the release of a new superhero movie on the first Saturday in May. It’s the biggest possible opportunity for reaching people who already want to like your characters. If DC actually seemed to like theirs, maybe they could convince somebody that their books were worth reading.

Instead, we have this. And the thing is, as much as I might roll my eyes at what they’re doing with this comic, it actually is a pretty accurate representation of the DC Universe that the company wants to brand itself as. Over the past decade, they’ve taken every opportunity at reaching a mass market and used it to scream at the top of their lungs about how adult their comics are, and how they don’t have those goody two-shoes underwear perverts anymore, just killers and victims who happen to wear capes. If corporations are people, DC Comics is a 14 year-old trying to buy cigarettes while his voice cracks.

And look, I know I’m generalizing. That’s what makes it so frustrating. There are genuinely great DC books that are coming out right now, books that are compelling and honest and built on staying true to the characters while still making them compelling and exciting. I promise you that I could not possibly love what Scott Snyder and Greg Capullo are doing with Batman: Zero Year more than I already do, and that’s really just the tip of it. Pak and Kuder on Action Comics, Parker and Pelletier on Aquaman, Azzarello and Chiang on Wonder Woman, even that new Secret Origins title was both a good idea and a good comic. They’re doing good stuff. They have creators who are finally trying to shake off all the faux-maturity and “if we don’t use bright colors that means it’s good, right?” nonsense that’s been a driving force of that company for 30 years. But every time they have the spotlight, every single time you put DC comics on a stage where they could reach people who haven’t already been suckered into caring about what goes on in those books like I have and go “hey, show us what you’re about,” they do this.

According to the credits page, Future’s End #0 was written and drawn by creators whose work I tend to enjoy — writers Brian Azzarello, Jeff lemire, Dan Jurgens and Keith Giffen, and artists Ethan Van Sciver, Patrick Zircher, Aaron Lopresti, Art Thibert, Jurgens, Mark Irwin, Jesus Merino and Dan Green — but it doesn’t actualy feel like it was written or drawn by individual creators. It feels like an illustrated corporate edict, the new issue of DC Comics, right down to the mandatory arm-severing.

Seriously, I cannot stress this enough and I don’t feel bad about spoiling it because it’s going to be free on Saturday: yet another arm is cut off in this book, and that is actually hilarious. It’s like DC had a corporate meeting ten years ago and realized they needed a trademark, like the “Stan Lee Presents” tag that used to run in Marvel books, and some bright-eyed young go-getter yelled out “dismemberment!” and it was 4:59 on a Friday and so that’s just what they went with. I swear to you, I laughed out loud reading it because it’s almost, almost, a parody of what DC Comics are like in the 21st Century, and I’d be tempted to believe that it was because the people who are credited with making it are certainly smart enough to realize what you’re doing when you write and draw the 47th arm-chopping since 2005. The problem is that I’m pretty sure it’s meant to be taken seriously. Like, very seriously. Like “golly, these icons of my childhood sure are grown up, I guess I don’t have to be embarrassed about them anymore” seriously.

I’ve been through all this before, to the point where I’m just gonna save this article and keep it for the next time I get all cheesed off about some cynical nonsense, but the points always remain the same. To borrow a bit from Brandon Stroud, it’s like there’s a whiteboard in the DC Offices that someone accidentally wrote on with permanent marker, and so every time they do something they look at it and “Make Superman Evil?” and “Cut off an arm!” are right there at the top of the list. It’s old, folks. It was old the last time you did it, and it was old the time before that.

Again, here’s a spoiler warning for a comic everyone who goes to a comic book store this week is going to end up taking home unless they actively avoid it, but the story in Future’s End #0 ends with Batman Beyond going back in time once all the superheroes of his own era have been murdered and transformed into grotesquely misshapen murderbots, he realizes that he’s too late to actually fix anything, which he was going to fix by murdering someone because Batman told him to. It’s the one thing in the comic I really related to, because as someone who genuinely loves DC comics, that’s how I’ve started to feel as a reader: We’re all too late to fix this awful, jacked up future that we’ve found ourselves in.

LADY SHE-WOMAN: FEMALE SUPERHERO CODENAMES AND IDENTITY

Given they pass the background checks, pay fees, etc. Here are the places you can get weed in Vancouver sometime after July.

MARY JANE & FRIENDS 11215 NE 28TH ST STE 5

RWZ 11205 NE 28TH ST BLDG A-3

RWZ 111 SE 103RD AVE

HIGH END MARKET PLACE 15640 4TH PLAIN BLVD STE 200

MIKES EASTSIDE DRUGS 6101 NE 127TH AVE

NEW VANSTERDAM 2803 FORT VANCOUVER WAY

Full List: WA State

Stack Exchange

This Q&A is part of a weekly series of posts highlighting common questions encountered by technophiles and answered by users at Stack Exchange, a free, community-powered network of 100+ Q&A sites.

P2l asks:

My manager has recently really been pushing to use velocity as a target and measure of productivity. We are currently working at an average velocity of 50 story points. My manager wants us to increase it by 40 percent to 70 story points (with no increase in team members). If we don't achieve this increase he wants us to deliver a full break down explaining why.

Sometimes the hardest part of getting a job is just getting noticed. Art director and designer Ivan Basurto figured he might be able to solve that problem with the internet's favorite tool of expression: the GIF. Basurto's resume is a Tumblr blog full of tastefully-designed GIFs that spell out his basic info. More detailed information — including a traditional CV — is available via links in the posts. The Ecuadorian designer tells The Creators Project that he hopes his eye-catching resume lands him a job at a creative ad agency, but he's still waiting. Considering the almighty power of a good GIF, we're sure he'll get a call soon enough.

Ai Weiwei is one of most highly-regarded, controversial artists of his time. In the West, he is viewed as China's preeminent artist and cultural critic; his written and visual work has been viewed hundreds of thousands of times over, and he currently enjoys a new exhibit, Ai Weiwei: According to What?, at the Brooklyn Museum in New York City. (You should go if you get the chance.) However, his reach in China is considerably more limited — since domestic media cannot even utter his name, most people there simply don't know who he is. And because the government holds his passport, Ai can't leave the country, all while the authorities constantly keep tabs on him. However, as Aeon Magazine reports, Ai's art is perfectly suited for the situation. By taking a picture of fresh flowers everyday and posting them online, he's engaging in a form of gentle but powerful protest. "Today, protest doesn’t have to be a walk on the street or hold[ing] a banner," he says, "but a statement of existing, repeatedly re-announcing your position." Read Ai Weiwei's entire profile at Aeon.

mumblingsage:

yamino:

iamingrid:

yamino:

omgthatdress:

Half-Mourning Dress

1910-1912

The Victoria & Albert Museum

What’s a “half-mourning” dress?  Mourning in the front, party in the back?

Half-Mourning was the third stage of mourning for a widow. She would be expected to mourn her husband for at least two years, the stages being Full Mourning, Second Mourning and Half-Mourning. The different stages regulated what they would be wearing, with Full Mourning being all black and with no ornamentation, including the wodow’s veil, and the stages after that introducing some jewellery and modest ornamentation. When in Half-Mourning you would gradually include fabrics in other colors and sort of ease your way out of mourning. 

Wow, I am happy you made that joke so I could interpert it as a serious question and have an excuse to ramble on about clothing customs of the past, I am a historical fashion nerd.

That’s very informative, but I’m going to stick with my original head canon:

I love both the informed fashion history and the hilariously off-the-wall halves of this post.

Edit: Video of the buzzer-beater and crowd reaction.