firehose

Google wants to make it easier for Gmail users to encrypt their emails, according to a report in VentureBeat. PGP has been an open-source encryption standard for nearly 20 years, but usability issues have often As a result, engineers at Google are working on ways to make it easier for users, as part of their larger push for stronger user security in the wake of recent NSA revelations. It's still unclear exactly what form the measures will take, and the details of the implementation will make a huge difference in the security of the final product.

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The biggest concern is whether users will be able to hold their own keys, or whether the keys will be kept on Google networks where they could be vulnerable to NSA attacks. By its nature, PGP doesn't allow for a password reset, and only the end user has the capability to decrypt a message. That makes life difficult for many users, who expect to be able to reset their password if they lose it. It presents an even bigger problem for Google's business, since it means the company would not be able to use the encrypted text to target ads. Reached by The Verge, Google declined to comment on the company's plans, or when the service might be available to Gmail users.

According to Purple Pawn's annual survey (PDF), Pathfinder outsold D&D by a factor of over two times in 2013. Not surprising given that D&D wasn't in production, but it's a more specific number than iCv2's quarterly rankings tend to provide. "Pathfinder products outperformed Wizards of the Coasts’ Dungeons & Dragons products by 2.5 to 1 – even more than last year – while players wait for D&D 5th edition to be released later this year. Gaming accessories, such as card sleeves, and items consumed by gamers, such as soft drinks, continue to be strong dependable sellers. RPG and miniature products from smaller publishers were included in the bestselling product lines of some retailers."

The early ’90s were spoiled for choice when it came to comic book adaptations. Not only was Batman: The Animated Series on the air, but X-Men led Marvel’s push to get on the small screen, diving right into the often convoluted continuity of everyone’s favorite mutants, luring in a generation of fans, and paving the way for cartoons to follow. That’s why we’ve set out to review every single episode of the ’90s X-Men animated series. This week, Wolverine gets sad about revelations concerning his mysterious past, so it must be a Monday.

Previously, on X-Men:

In our last episode, a few of our Merry Mutants took a trip to Europe for a ski vacation, but because they’re the X-Men they were almost murdered in a mass hate crime. The specific catalyst: Nightcrawler, a teleporting circus acrobat turned monk who had inspired the sin of jealousy in one of his fellow friars. While the monastery itself didn’t survive the attack, Nightcrawler did, and also led Wolverine to accepting Jesus Christ as his personal Lord and Savior.

Really.

That, of course, led us to the only discussion that we could have while still remaining friends, as I asked for other vacation destinations for the X-Men. Here are a few of my favorite suggestions, starting with an observation about their current vacation habits:

“The X-Men can actually, literally, choose any afternoon they want and fly their private jet to go visit a tropical dinosaur park with no fees and no screaming children. Instead, we mostly see them take trips to Scotland (the only climate more depressing than New York) and the sewers (the most depressing part of New York).” — Ben Freeman

“I’m 100% sure Gambit has booked himself into the REO Speedwagon Carnival Cruise at least once.” — Harry Jenkinson

“If Cyclops is in charge, even money on them taking a class trip to that box factory from that episode of The Simpsons.” — Jay Yaws

“I imagine an X-Men vacation would be a lot like the vacations from Calvin and Hobbes: Cyclops packs everyone into an old station wagon for a 10-hour drive to the middle of the woods to go camping, where they spend a week being swarmed by insects and eating burned hot dogs while Cyclops the Boring Dad obliviously drones on about their abject misery ‘building character.’” — Brad Hodet

And now, the greatest episode title this show has ever had:

That’s right: “Weapon X, Lies, And Video Tape,” brought to you by writers Steven Melching and David McDermott and producer/director Larry Houston. And it’s not just completely unexpected reference to a 1989 Steven Soderbergh film starring James Spader, it’s also a 100% accurate sumarry of the events of this episode. If it was even slightly more in-depth, I wouldn’t have to go through the trouble of writing it up for the episode guide. Alas.

We open in a typical Canadian home, and by that I mean a log cabin that looks like a grizzled old prospector lives there, where Sabretooth is making trouble for Wolverine and his lady friend, Silver Fox. This is, I believe, the cartoon’s first reference to Sabretooth’s tradition of showing up on Wolverine’s birthday to make his life miserable, complete with cake, but it turns out to be a dream. Or a flashback, since it’s based on real events. Or, well, actually… look, it’s complicated, okay? We’ll get to it.

As Wolverine thrashes around in a cold sweat, all of his friends are standing around watching him sleep, which is a) mega creepy, and b) an extremely stupid thing to do when you’re dealing with someone who has knives for hands. Jean, who has apparently fully recovered from being the Phoenix and is back to pulling her hair back tight in that goofy head-sock that makes her look like fanart of a human Vulpix, claims that “the nightmares and delusions are getting worse.”

Professor X tries to calm him down/steal his credit card number using his mental powers, but some kind of weird brain lightning shoots out of Wolverine’s head and he jumps out of bed, bum rushes past the rest of the X-Men, and takes off in a Jeep, almost running Beast over in the process.

Yup. It’s definitely Monday.

With Wolverine running off, Jean heads into his room to see if she can find any clues as to why he’s so upset, which, let’s be real here, basically means she’s a terrible friend who hasn’t been paying attention at all to anything Wolverine has done or said on the past three years of this show. That dude is nothing but reasons to be upset. And, since Gambit isn’t in this episode, he has also taken the role of resident creep, which we learn when Jean starts rifling through his nightstand and pulls out a framed picture of herself with Scott that he has torn in half.

I was about to say that this makes Wolverine seem like a serial killer, but when you get right down to it, Wolverine kind of is a serial killer? I mean, his killings have been serialized, right?

Anyway, it’s also worth noting that while they definitely recycle footage from previous episodes later on in this one, this isn’t the picture of Cyclops and Jean that he was tearing up back in Season 1, which means that Wolverine has at least two nice photos of Jean and Scott that he has stolen and torn up. They should maybe not let that guy live in their house. Just a thought.

He also has a picture of Silver Fox that was mailed to Wolverine two weeks ago, complete with a set of map coordinates written on the back, because this episode had to turn into a Phoenix Wright game just to get the plot set up. Jean dispatches the Beast to bring him back, presumably because she doesn’t want to be alone with a (literally) deslusional weirdo who has been stealing photos of her and burning out her fiancee’s eyes with a cigarette.

Meanwhile, in Canada…

Sharp-eyed viewers will recognize this as the Weapon X facility that Wolverine escaped from after the Adamantium was bonded to his skeleton, as seen in a flashback back in Season 2. It’s a nice little bit of visual continuity, especially since this time, Wolverine is wandering through it while actually wearing pants.

The facility starts triggering a few flashbacks — Include Wolverine shouting about someone “messin’ with my heeeaaddd!,” take a drink — and once Beast shows up to try and calm Wolveirne down, Wolverine once again manages to get around this show’s prohibition against saying the word “kill” by saying that his memories are of “training to… take people out” which is something I’d really like to see. Wolverine, fidgeting in a dinner jacket, sweating while trying to pin a corsage on a mannequin, only to accidentally pop his claws and decapitate it.

They explore further, and get more flashbacks of his romance with Silver Fox, getting downright Archie about it and carving their names (such as they are) into the wall of their cabin before Sabretooth shows up to ruin everything:

But then! His reverie is interrupted when Sabretooth shows up IRL!!!!!!

It seems that like Wolverine, Sabretooth has also received a mysterious letter leading him to the Weapon X facility, and he thinks Wolverine was the culprit. Again, this seems to run counter to what these characters ought to know about each other. I sincerely doubt Wolverine is the type of guy who really does much written correspondence, unless you consider Lone Wolf & Cub fanfic to “correspondence.”

As the two extremely hirsute mutants fight, there’s more brain lightning and they have a mutual flashback (weird) to a mission where the Weapon X team fought against Omega Red, and Sabretooth left Wolverine’s teammates to die. But as they remember it, those very same teammates show up: Silver Fox and Maverick.

YES: MAVERICK IS MAKING HIS FOURTH APPEARANCE ON THIS SHOW. Update your scorecards to reflect that it’s Kitty Pryde: zero, Maverick: FOUR.

It seems the entire gang has been lured to this location with a combination of nightmares and mysterious letters, which gives me the idea that the Canadian government has been planning the single worst Murder Mystery Party in history. Silver Fox, whose mutant power seems to involve exposition, explains that the Weapon X program “did something to our minds… something codenamed ‘Talos.’” She then opens up a door to reveal a massive set of sound stages that Wolverine initially refers to as “Poser Hollywood” (a pretty sick, if super ’90s, burn) before he takes a closer look and realizes that all of his “memories” were filmed here on a Canadian backlot, just like episodes of Smallville.

I’d be upset too.

The whole thing is a very interesting premise about the idea of implanted memories and faked relationships between characters that undermine everything these characters think they know about each other — and it actually gets really creepy with the insinuation that they manufactured memories of an abusive childhood to make Sabretooth the aggressive murderer that he is today, filling him with resentment for a father who would beat him with a stick because he had mutton chops at the age of 8:

That said, it’s not actually done that well, especially if you compare it to the episode of G.I. Joe that did the same thing ten years before. Both shows are heavily influenced by The Prisoner (the G.I. Joe episode lists Shipwreck’s address as No. 6, Village Drive, and the soundstages from the X-Men cartoon are pretty reminiscent of the “Degree Absolute” from The Prisoner‘s “Once Upon a Time”) but there’s really no comparison. The G.I. Joe story, a two-parter called “There’s No Place Like Springfield” that was written by comics legend Steve Gerber, holds up even today for its genuinely disturbing imagery and the surprisingly sophisticated psychology involved for a show meant to sell toys to 10 year-olds. This, however, just kind of falls flat. Maybe it’s a matter of Joe having a two-parter to work with and X-Men having to cram it all into 20 minutes and ending up with something that isn’t really set up too well, maybe it was just that we’ve had a nice string of solid episodes and something had to come along and derail it, but the whole thing just trips over its own feet and falls flat on its face.

As they keep exploring Beast gets access to Professor Thornton’s records so they can explain just what exactly is going on here: Post-hypnotic conditioning designed to allow the results of the Weapon X program to be integrated back into society as sleeper agents who could be activated by triggering their memories, which apparently would also make them take off as many articles of clothing as BS&P would allow:

Listen, none of us woke up today expecting to see Maverick’s area. It’s just something we’re all going to have to deal with.

According to Prof. Thornton, the traumatic false memories were based on real events, and were designed to overwhelm their mental defenses and make them easier to control, which seems like a truly dubious plan for controlling a squadron of human killing machines. But, you know, Weapon X. They didn’t so much manufacture super soldiers as they had a string of notably terrible decisions.

The facility isn’t done giving up its mysteries just yet, though. There’s one last door guarding the only unexplored chamber, made of unbreakable Adamantium, with four genetic scanners keyed to Wolverine, Sabretooth, Silver Fox and Maverick’s DNA:

Beast makes the cogent point that if Weapon X was trying to hide the truth, they probably wouldn’t put it behind a door that only the four of them could open, but whatever DungeonMaster wrote this adventure just keeps on railroading the party to the end of things. They all go for the scanner, and find one last video tape, with Professor Thornton announcing that they’ve trigged a failsafe called Stryfe that’s going to come and kill them.

Wait, no. It’s called Talos.

But I mean, c’mon. That’s basically Stryfe.

All things considered, the fight is pretty uninteresting and free of tension. Like, there’s four highly trained killing machines against a robot that I’ve never heard of, and even though the Weapon X stuff is far from my area of X-Pertise, there’s only one way any combination of “Wolverine vs. Robot” ever ends. That said, Talos is A ROBOT WITH A BATTLEAXE, which is actually pretty awesome.

Eventually, Team X gets the upper hand, Talos eats a grenade courtesy of Maverick, and Beast hacks the door, but in a nice twist, it’s revealed that there are multiple Talos robots that are programmed to keep coming one after the next until they get the job done. One last bit of brain lightning knocks out the Weapon X crew, and Beast rescues them by hauling ass in a farmer truck as the facility self-destructs:

The former teammates split up, but there’s one final wrinkle: Wolverine reveals that the carving on the door wasn’t on the cabin on the soundstage, meaning that his relationship with Silver Fox wasn’t entirely fabricated — it was based on the truth. Silver Fox, however, has moved on, and shuts Wolverine down toute de suite, presumably because she knows about the weird thing with the pictures of Scott and Jean.

Discussion Question: Since this episode is all about Wolverine and memories, let’s talk memories of Wolverine! How did you first encounter the character? Is there a moment that made you a fan, or made you hate him? I’ll admit that this show was pretty formative for me — I will never not laugh at “Tell Cyclops I made him a convertible!” — but I first saw him in the story where the X-Men were brought to Murderworld, which I love to this day. How about you?

Next Week: We’re done with Season 3! Season 4 kicks off with “One Man’s Worth,” and hoo boy, it’s a time travel story. That… that’s just great.

Read More of The 'X-Men' Animated Series Episode Guide

keithcalder:

This is a regression analysis of the correlation between the Meta Critic score for all Paramount wide-release films from 2010-2014 and the percentage of overall domestic box-office that’s made up by the opening weekend gross. You can see that the polynomial trend equation matches the data pretty well by eye, and this is confirmed by the R^2 of 0.3695.

Basically this proves that the quality of a film has a pretty large impact on how well a film does after its initial weekend’s performance.

However, when you run a regression analysis comparing the opening weekend box-office with the Meta Critic score. There’s clearly no meaingful correlation at all.

These two exercises prove something that I’ve suspected for a while. The quality of a film has very little impact on its opening gross, but it has a pretty large impact on how well it will do over its whole life.

Personally, I find this refreshing. You can prove that quality does matter when it comes to the overall financial success of a film. It just doesn’t seem to matter opening weekend.

So what does this mean to the overall gross of a film? If a film opens to $20,000,000 opening weekend and has a 25% score on Meta Critic, then this model predicts the total gross of the film will be $46.51 million. If a film opens to $20,000,000 opening weekend and has a 75% score on Meta Critic, then this model predicts the total gross of the film will be $58.82 million. That’s a pretty significant difference!

 

Gaming: Gameloft’s The Amazing Spider-Man 2 mobile game is now available on multiple platforms. [Gameloft]

Video: Man-Bats attack in the latest Son of Batman clip. [TNI]

Ozzy Fernandez & Tony Kordos

Upcoming: IDW’s TMNT 30th Anniversary Special is going to have some killer alternate covers. [TMNT: A Collection]

Fashion: Ah, an anti-ballistic Detective Conan tote. Just what every bullet-proof bag fan needs. [ANN]

Awesome: Bob. H’s custom-built BMO from Adventure Time is a ray of sunshine in your day. [Bob H.]

Anime: New Gundam: The Origin concept art gives fans a glimpse of a young Char Aznable and more. [Crunchyroll]

The Games for Change Festival is changing thanks to a last-minute partnership with the Tribeca Film Festival. The more than decade-long annual game festival, seen by some as the Sundance of video games, is both narrowing the focus of its presentation and broadening the context of its content and in so doing, organizers hope, highlighting the ubiquity and importance of gaming in everything from education and health to science and entertainment.

"It definitely raised the bar," said Games for Change co-president Asi Burak. "It's putting a spotlight on everything this community is doing on the largest stage we've ever had."

This year's festival has been redesigned from the bottom up, with changes in everything from how the talks were selected, to the way the presentations will take place, to a new public-facing element for the festival.

For the first time ever, Games for Change will be a part of Tribeca's Family Festival Street Fair. The fair, which takes over the Tribeca neighborhood in New York City on April 26, will include a street set aside for the Games for Change Public Arcade.

"We will have Jay Street for one day," Burak said. "We will have a combination of digital and non-digital games on the street to be discovered by people who just happen to walk by."

The street will include a FarmVille exhibit of livestock by Zynga, a display by New York's American Museum of Natural History and street games by Come Out and Play and Sesame Street.

"The idea of being in the public space is to take Games for Change to the people who will see it for the first time," Burak said.

And that's one of the major themes of the show. In the past, the festival has fallen into the trap of becoming an echo chamber of sorts, a festival designed for people who were already aware of what games have to offer and their ability to change the world.

This new take on the festival brings with it a rethinking of both the audience and the presentors.

"I always stick to the converted," he said. "We tend to stick to the people who already love games. I don't want to lose the old audience, but I think there is a shift for a bit from games as a tool to games as a medium."

In trying to rethink the show, the organizers drastically changed the way they filled out the heart of the festival: the presentations.

Where in years past the festival relied heavily on submissions (last year they approved about a third of all submissions), this year they spent more time reaching out to find specific topics and voices in the hope of creating a more curated experience. The end result is a show that is made up almost entirely of sought-after speakers, and only 15 percent or so of submissions.

"It's more directed this year," Burak said. "In previous years we had a lot of speakers, but some felt it created an incoherent voice."

In looking back at previous festivals, the organizers saw that while they were good at getting big names to the show, those talks weren't always very meaningful.

Speakers like Al Gore and Sandra Day O'Connor were among the show's high-profile guests, but their talks often addressed the broadening of games' acceptance, a message that doesn't really need to be addressed anymore.

"They made the definition of games broader," Burak said. "But it's not just to bring someone to the festival who says games are important, it's how you can get people to show you game thinking, games applied in science or economics."

"It was exciting and scary at the same time."

So this year's show includes speakers like Mount Sinai School of Medicine neuroscientist Dr. Adam Gazzaley, Tribeca Film Festival co-founder Craig Hatkoff, Planned Parenthood's Deborah S. Levine and Google's Noah Falstein. There are also plenty of traditional game designers lined up as well, including thatgamecompany's Jenova Chen, Superbetter Labs' Jane McGonigal and Nevermind creator Erin Reynolds.

More impressive is how quickly these changes had to come about.

Burak said the decision to partner with the Tribeca Film Festival didn't come about until last November.

"It all happened pretty fast," he said. "I happened to meet Craig Hatkoff and we were speaking of the opportunities and challenges of Games for Change and he said, 'What do you think about doing it together in April?'"

Burak and the organization agreed, but it meant shifting the festival back three months and out of the summer window when many of the speakers and audience from the educational field would still be working.

"It was exciting and scary at the same time," he said. "We've always said we wanted to be the equivalent or the little brother of Tribeca and Sundance. Suddenly it's no longer a slogan, we do have a public-facing event, live games, real outside outdoor games. Suddenly it is a festival and not just a conference."

Good Game is an internationally syndicated weekly news and opinion column about the big stories of the week in the gaming industry and its bigger impact on things to come. Brian Crecente is a founding News Editor of Polygon.

The AbleGamers Foundation, a nonprofit organization that advocates for gamers with disabilities, raised $33,635.07 at PAX East 2014, the group announced today.

It was the organization's largest single instance of fundraising, more than doubling the total from PAX East 2013.

The funds include contributions from players of Pachinko for Charity, a gaming area that the AbleGamers Foundation had set up in the lobby of the Boston Convention and Exhibition Center. Industry partners like Paradox Entertainment and Harmonix CEO Alex Rigopulos gave matching funds for the first $12,500, and other donors also pitched in. Over two dozen companies such as The Behemoth, Deep Silver, Electronic Arts and Uber Entertainment provided more than $42,000 in Pachinko for Charity prizes.

"PAX East never ceases to amaze us with its generosity and community spirit," said Mark Barlet, founder and executive director of AbleGamers Foundation, in a press release. "Every year we start out thinking there's no way we could top what we achieved the year before, and every year we do better than we could've imagined. We really owe such a debt of gratitude to our corporate sponsors for their life-changing donations, and even more so to the extremely giving crowd at PAX East. We're nothing without you."

AbleGamers will use the funds to continue its pro-accessibility initiatives and its grant program.

Two men pleaded guilty to a scam that lowered the bills of 5,790 Comcast customers in Pennsylvania by a total of $2.4 million. They now face prison time and will have to pay their ill-gotten wealth back to Comcast.

30-year-old Richard Justin Spraggins of Philadelphia pleaded guilty in February and was "ordered to make $66,825 in restitution and serve an 11- to 23-month sentence," the Times-Herald of Norristown wrote at the time.

Scaggins was described as the second-in-command of the operation. The accused ringleader, 30-year-old Alston Buchanan, pleaded guilty last week. "Buchanan faces up to 57½ to 115 years in prison, although Buchanan will likely serve a lesser sentence than the maximum," the newspaper wrote.