Historical Map: Old Paris Metro Map Uncovered at Les Halles Station

A fantastic photo from Jean-Luc Raymond on Instagram of an old Metro map that’s just been revealed behind multiple layers of billboard advertising at Les Halles station. Definitely looks like it used to have a street grid layer which has faded away with age.

I’m not entirely sure of the vintage, although I’d say it can’t be from before 1979, as that’s when the RER C opened. It’s the thicker yellow line across the top of the photo with stations at Quai d'Orsay and St. Michel. The map’s typographical treatment – with names for interchange stations set in all caps Futura Bold – would also seem to point to that general era. Any further ideas on dating this?

Inceptor is a board game based off Chris Nolan's Inception, which means it's gorgeous but also complicated. Very complicated. So extremely complicated, in fact, that sometimes doesn't make any sense. But that's okay, we're in.

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babesinarmor:

This might be a repost, but it’s just such a neat Armstreet project!

That is one stylish armor.

Yearly reminder: unless you're over 60, you weren't promised flying cars. You were promised an oppressive cyberpunk dystopia. Here you go.
— Kyle Marquis (@Moochava) July 10, 2013

Corporate America arrives at Card Kingdom in Seattle. Photo courtesy of Andrew Federspiel.

Corporate America started hitting the mailboxes of Kickstarter supporters and the shelves of game stores back in July of 2013. Eight months later, you might be wondering… how’s the game doing?

The short answer, I’m happy to say, is pretty well! I recently went over the many positive reviews the game has received, and today I’ll cover how the game is selling.

Data Desert

Before you get your hopes up too much, I should warn you that the information I get on sales is pretty minimal. It also comes quite delayed: figures for one month don’t come until half way through the following month. And that’s assuming they come on time, but they often don’t. For example, I still don’t know sales figures from January.

Without further ado, here are the sales for Corporate America since July of last year:

Corporate America sales breakdown, July 2013 to January 2014.

Here, “Direct Sales” and “Direct Brick & Mortar Sales” are sales that I, your humble salesman extraordinaire, made myself. The other categories are from Game Salute.

January 2014 looks pretty bleak, but that’s because Game Salute has yet to give me the figures for the month. Sales almost certainly went down from December, but I’m sure there were some.

July incorporates a handful of preorders that were made in the months leading up to the game’s release.

Brick & mortar sales were made to local game shops. I hope the shops then went on to sell the games to players, but I don’t know for sure how the games fair after arriving on shelves.

I can only speculate about most of these numbers. But I do have some theories.

Game Salute announced the game’s availability in July, which explains the high number of brick & mortar sales that month. Some game stores will pick up anything Game Salute releases, so these stores got several copies of the game to stock their shelves. In August, word of the game’s release started to reach gamers throughout the internet (probably mostly through Tom Vassal’s review), which explains the spike in online sales that month.

I’m not sure about the spike in brick & mortar sales in October. Perhaps the first round of games sold out, so shops needed to restock their shelves? Or perhaps word that the game can actually sell started spreading to new shop owners? I’m not sure.

I had a lot of success selling the game to brick & mortar stores in November because I did a lot of traveling.

Online sales in December were very good due to a combination of Christmas gifts and the many online reviews that went out around that time.

Grand Scheme

You’ll recall from previous posts that 1630 copies of Corporate America exist. Of that total number, how many have been sold?

Total Corporate America sales, January 2014.

Again, this graph does not include most of January’s sales because I still haven’t received those figures.

The first thing you’ll notice is that more than half of the games have been sold! For just over six months, I think that’s great. It’s very likely that sales will slow down, but my hope is that word of mouth keeps copies moving.

The next thing you’ll notice is that so far, nothing beats Kickstarter sales. Brick & mortar sales will probably overtake them soon, but Kickstarter is still the top driver of sales. They also happen to be the most lucrative sales for a publisher, emphasizing the need to make sure your Kickstarter is as successful as possible. As I prepare to Kickstart my next card game, this is very much on my mind.

If you read my post on the cost to produce the game, you’ll remember that I had to spend quite a bit of money out of pocket to make Corporate America a reality. $9,500 or so, in fact. So… have I recouped my losses yet?

As a matter of fact, yes! But just barely. January sales from Game Salute should put me into the realm of profitability, but it still took six months of pretty good sales to make up the money I spent to make the game. The good news is that from here on out, any Corporate America sales are pretty much pure profit! And since there are still 700+ copies of the game to sell, there’s potential to make a decent chunk of change.

(Of course, it has also been something like 2 years of work to get here, which puts me squarely into poverty levels of income. But hey, who wants a cushy middle class existence anyway?)

Eyes Ahead

I’m happy to say that Corporate America has been selling about as well as I could hope. After seven months of sales, the game has sold many copies and promises to continue. Selling out of the first print run even seems like a possibility! Who knows, maybe by the 2016 presidential election, another print run will be in order? After all, I’m sure Citizens United v. FEC won’t be overturned by then or anything.

While I’m extremely pleased with how Corporate America has done, I have also learned a lot from my mistakes with the game. I was overly ambitious with it as a first board game. Costs were higher than I expected, and I should have charged more for each copy.

As my next Kickstarter rapidly approaches, I’m keeping these lessons in mind. The goal of the campaign will be lower, the cost to manufacture each copy will be less, and the price I charge will be more financially responsible. If all goes to plan, I will not be spending a ton of my own money to make and ship the game, so it shouldn’t take selling half of the inventory to start making money.

Stay tuned… there are very exciting things on the horizon!

monsters-werewolves:

Still one of my favourite behind-the-scenes images from “Jurassic Park”. #MonsterSuitMonday

enigmaticpenguinofdeath:

Interview with Mark Gatiss in The Metro 24 February 2014 [x]

Sherlock and Doctor Who writer Mark Gatiss, 47, is bracing himself for more fan mayhem with a new role as Tycho Nestoris in Game Of Thrones.

You are about to star as Tycho Nestoris in the new series of Game Of Thrones. Are you ready for the fan frenzy? I felt a bit overwhelmed by the response. When it was announced, people bombarded me with questions. I felt a bit of a fraud. Apparently, my character in the books actually comes in a lot later so it was a bit unusual that they brought it forward.

Does this mean you could return later? Apparently so! I’m expecting an almost inevitably violent death. I’m in one episode. I went over to Belfast and did the scene there.

Go on – let us in on the storyline. It was announced the day I got to Comic-Con, which was like dropping a grenade into a pond. I was genuinely sworn to secrecy so I kept schtum. I have a lovely pair of clogs I can tell you about.

After Doctor Who and Sherlock, now this – you seem drawn to TV shows with cult fan bases? It’s an elaborate Venn diagram for my retirement.

Game Of Thrones has some very racy and often gay love scenes. If you return to the show, is sex and nudity something you’d be willing to do? It’s filled with the fittest men on television, so I wouldn’t be averse to it. It’s very unlikely with my character, though. He’s a bit like John Major.

Have you ever been tempted to move to Hollywood? I really love LA – probably because I’ve never worked there. I’ve only gone there for fun. It’s a very lonely place if you are struggling to get into a pilot. I have a lot of friends who have pretty miserable times there. If someone asked me to go over and do something, I’d be delighted if it was the right thing, but I think it is a young man’s game.

Do you enjoy all the big dos like the Emmys? I first went 20 years ago. I was researching James Whale, a gay Englishman who directed the original Frankenstein. So my first experience of Hollywood was old Hollywood. I totally fell in love with it and it was exactly what I wanted it to be. It was like I was stepping into a silent movie. That never left me. Every time I go back, I remember the smell of the trees and the sunset. It was Hollywood as I always imagined it. Then you go over for things like the Emmys and they are so grandiose and extraordinary, you can’t help but be swept along by them.

You’re in a civil partnership with Ian Hallard. Is gay marriage an important issue for you? I remember demonstrating outside the Commons for an equal age of consent. It’s amazing how much has changed in 20 years but it’s about one thing: equality before the law. No matter how people try to shave it, it’s one rule for one and another for another. Everyone should have an equal right to marry and divorce.

The Winter Olympics highlights the issue of homophobia in Russia; is it a breeze coming out in Britain these days? I don’t think we can ever generalise. When I was little, the poster for The London Lesbian & Gay Switchboard was in the background of a gay couple’s flat in a TV sitcom called Agony. That was done deliberately by Anna Raeburn, who was the co-writer, as a way of putting it on the telly. I rang it as a result. It’s always difficult, because it’s an individual thing. Some people come out and have a marvellous experience and their family is supportive. Others have a terrible experience and their family kicks them out. You can’t just broadly say that everything has changed. That’s why it’s vitally important that something like Switchboard exists.

Was calling them the start of your coming-out experience? No, I was only about 12. I just rang up for a bit, got frightened and hung up. I didn’t actually come out until I was 21, so it was a long time later.

You describe yourself as ‘Strangler’ in your Twitter bio. Explain? When I was setting it up, I was looking at the amount of people who write ‘director’ or ‘author’, that sort of thing. I thought I’d surprise people.

Do you get trolled at all and what do you make of social networking? It’s great fun and I’ve met a lot of nice people on it. I had a tweet from the guy who created Hannibal and it’s exciting like that. It’s a tool for democracy. In a world where you have no response, really, to something defamatory that is said about you, you are able to say: ‘This is not true – here is the truth.’ The downside of it is the amount of nasty people who use it. I do get a bit. You just block those people but it’s no less upsetting. Sometimes it’s like someone has spat in your face.

Have you ever had a near-death experience? I used to have a recurring nightmare where our dad was driving us around those bends on those really scary roads in the south of France and I kept telling him to go slower, then he just smashed through a barrier and flew towards the sea and said, terrifyingly: ‘This is it, son.’

Mark Gatiss supports The London Lesbian & Gay Switchboard, which is celebrating its 40th year. To donate, see www.llgs.org.uk

The private sector saves the day. AP Photo

The death yesterday of Harold Ramis, the co-writer and co-star of Ghostbusters, has prompted encomiums for the iconic 1980s film.

Ghostbusters is a favorite of mine as well. But I just can’t believe how few people recognize the movie—which was released 30 years ago this June—for what it is: a Reaganite carnival of ideological triumph.

Ghostbusters isn’t about ghosts. (Well, it kind of is.) But it’s also about the power of the US private sector and the magic of market discipline to transform anyone—even effete, over-educated academics—into heroes. Just watch.

It’s hard to believe Ghostbusters was intended to be a pro-business, anti-government polemic. Dan Aykroyd co-wrote the film with Ramis, whose previous flicks—such as Animal House, Stripes, Caddyshack—are filled with liberal digs at establishment authority figures.

But the Ivan Reitman masterpiece was made in a certain time and place. And the movie is worth reconsidering now—almost three decades after its release—if only because it so perfectly captured one of the rare moments when the supertanker of American public opinion clearly changes course.

When Ghostbusters was released in June 1984, Ronald Reagan’s landslide re-election victory to a second term as president was still a few months away. But the ideological ascent of Reagan-style conservatism—cuts to taxes and social programs, boosts for military spending and heaping helpings of anti-government rhetoric—was nearly complete. And Ghostbusters is stuffed with Reaganomics. This scene has several references.

Shaky lending from banks that were increasingly lightly regulated under Reagan sent US household debt levels soaring after he took office. Economic growth in the 1980s was fueled in part by a burst of consumer debt and bad banking practices—culminating in the savings and loan collapse—that looks pretty familiar. That’s exactly how the Ghostbusters got the financing they need to open. One can’t help but wonder about the underwriting standards at Manhattan City Bank that enabled the Ghostbusters to get a loan.

​

Dr. Venkman’s elevator pitch on paranormal eliminations as a potential player in the defense industry shouldn’t be glossed over either, as defense spending boomed under Reagan, helping to drive the US deficit to heights previously seen only during wartime.

It would have been hard to imagine this kind of upbeat flick resonating with Americans if it had been released 18 months earlier. In December 1982, unemployment was hanging around 11%, the highest since the Great Depression. While down from the peaks of the 1970s, inflation was still eating deeply into American incomes. When pollsters asked Americans that month if the US was going in the right direction, or was off track, only 36% thought the US was in “drive” rather than “reverse.” Even though president Jimmy Carter had been booted from office in 1980, the country was still mired in the malaise that was associated with his administration.

And yet, by October 1984—on the eve of the presidential vote—America had radically regained its mojo, with 61% of Americans responding that things in the country were moving in the right direction.

​

What happened?

Well there’s a few answers: A surge in patriotic sentiment surrounding the 1983 US invasion of Grenada. The pageantry of  the 1984 cross-country torch relay, which carried the Olympic flame to Los Angeles, the site of 1984 summer games, might have played a part. (As did the dominance of the US in those Soviet-boycotted games.) And, who knows, perhaps Ghostbusters, the biggest grossing film of the year, just generally put people in a good mood.

But let’s be honest. Only one thing happened that really mattered. The US economic growth improved sharply and unemployment plummeted.

​

For the record, nobody knows exactly why. (And more to the point, no one ever really knows why any economy does anything.) Republican economists argue that tax cuts and other supply-side policies helped drive growth. Democratic economists—who argue that the success of Reaganomics is largely a myth—point out that the Federal Reserve, which caused the recession intentionally in order to rein-in inflation, basically restarted economic growth by taking its foot off the brake.

For our purposes it really doesn’t matter. The fact is, the US economy staged a huge turnaround on Reagan’s watch. America started really feeling good again for the first time since the early 1960s. And Reagan and his ideas got the credit. As a direct result Democrats lost the advantage they had long held over Republicans on questions of managing the economy, which was part of a much-larger realignment of the American electorate that took shape under Reagan.

But it wasn’t economic policy proposals and Reaganomics that resonated with the American public. It was the anti-government—specifically anti-federal-government—rhetoric.

Even the most obtuse Ghostbusters fanboy has to concede one thing. The real villain in Ghostbusters isn’t Gozer the Gozerian. It’s a bureaucrat from the Environmental Protection Agency. Seriously, it’s the government—specifically the federal government—personified in the odious William Peck of the EPA, that unleashes hell on New York. Dangerously ignorant of what it takes to run a small business, Peck—played by William Atherton, the Laurence Olivier of prickish ’80s movie antagonists (see Die Hard)—cuts the power supply to the containment unit where Aykroyd & Company store their busted specters. The politics of this scene couldn’t be more clear.

Yes, Peck’s over-reach is a necessary plot point setting up the film’s final confrontation. But really, that confrontation isn’t between the Ghostbusters and the Stay Puft Mashmallow Man. It’s a conflict between these two: Venkman—representing the private sector—and Walter Peck as the federal government.

​ YouTube

We all know what happens. The private sector saves the day.

So what have we learned from this—perhaps overly long—meditation on a landmark piece of American pop cinema? Well, in one way, we learned that the 1980s were a long time ago, something Ramis’s death drove home this week. But, in a broader sense, we’re still very much living in the Reagan era. The fact that Ghostbusters is almost 30 years old is a reminder that Americans really don’t make big changes in their thinking too often.

Prior to Reagan, the only comparable rethinking of American political values came during president Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal—when the idea that big government was the only way to pull the country out of its troubles carried the day. During the Reagan years, a small-government, pro-business philosophy became much more prominent in national opinion, as Gallup survey data in the chart below show. Indeed, by some measures the anti-government turn in American public opinion took during the Reagan years has only gotten sharper over the subsequent decades.

Critics might point out that Ghostbusters doesn’t accurately reflect the fact that there’s a large gap between what Americans say they believe and how they act when disasters really strike. (Americans hold an overwhelmingly positive view of federal government disaster relief efforts.)

And that’s true. But, well, lighten up.

It’s just a movie.

I'm getting pretty sick of being nagged to install your damn apps.

XKCD helpfully translates:

Yeah, there are smart app banners, which are marginally less annoying, but it's amazing how quickly we went from "Cool! Phone apps that finally don't suck!" to this sad, eye rolling, oh-great-of-course-you-have-an-app-too state of affairs.

"Would you like to install our free app?!?" is the new "It looks like you're writing a letter!"

— Jeff Atwood (@codinghorror) January 9, 2013

Four years, give or take a few months, if you were counting. So what happened?

Millions of pointless apps

Your platform now has a million apps? Amazing! Wonderful! What they don't tell you is that 99% of them are awful junk that nobody would ever want.

Let's start with the basics. How do you know which apps you need? How do you get them installed? How do you keep them updated? How many apps can you reasonably keep track of on a phone? On a tablet? Just the home screen? A few screens? A dozen screens? When you have millions of apps out there, this rapidly becomes less of a "slap a few icons on the page" problem and more of a search problem like the greater web. My son's iPad has more than 10 pages of apps now, we don't even bother with the pretense of scrolling through pages of icons, we just go straight to search every time.

The more apps out there, the more the app stores are clogged with mediocre junk, the more the overall noise level keeps going up, which leads directly to this profligate nagging. Companies keep asking how can we get people to find and install our amazing app instead of the one question they really should have asked.

Why the hell are we building an app in the first place?

I want to know who exactly is going to all the trouble of installing the McDonalds app on their device instead of simply visiting the McDonalds website in the browser as needed. What problem does that app solve for french fry enthusiasts that it needs to be permanently installed on your device? Why are they giving away free Big Macs just to get people to install this thing?

Fragmentation into parallel and incompatible app worlds

It was so much easier when iOS was totally dominant and the iPhone was the only player. Before the iPad and tablets. Before Android got decent in 4.0 and Google standardized the Play store. Now there are, at minimum, four radically different mobile platforms that every serious app player has to support:

1. Android phone
2. iOS phone
3. iOS tablet
4. Android tablet

(For extra credit: how many of these are actually "mobile"?)

Unless you're careful to build equivalent apps in all those places, it's like having multiple parallel Internets. "No, sorry, it's not available on that Internet, only the iOS phone Internet." Or even worse, only on the United States iOS phone Internet.

If you're feeling generous, we should technically include Windows 8 and Windows Phone in here too. All with different screen dimensions, development stacks, UI guidelines, and usage patterns. Oh and by the way, that's assuming no other players emerge as serious contenders in the computing device market. Ever.

At the point where you find yourself praying for a duopoly as one of the better possible outcomes, that's … not a good sign.

Paying for apps became a race to the bottom

Buying an app is the modern Support Your Favorite Small Software Vendor Day. I was always fine with dropping ten or twenty bucks on software I loved. I'm a software engineer by profession; apps are cheaper so I can buy even more of them.

Have you ever noticed that the people complaining about apps that cost $3.99 are the same people dropping five bucks on a cup of fancy coffee without batting an eyelash? Me too, and I'm with the coffee people. $3.99 for your app? Outraaageous!

Now, contrast this with your app, Mr. Developer. I don’t know you from Adam. You’re pitching digital Instant Refresher Juice 1.0 to me in the form of a new app. The return I’m going to get is questionable at best. I already have 30 apps on my phone, some of them very good. Do I need another one? I don’t use the 30 I have. The experience I’m going to get from adding one more app is not trustable. I’m assured of nothing. Last week I bought an app for 99 cents and it was terrible. I used it once, for 15 seconds. I could be shoving $1 straight down the toilet again for all I know. Your app, good sir, is a total gamble. Sure, it’s only a $1 gamble… but it’s a gamble and that fact matters more than any price you might place on it.

For some reason I don't completely understand, mobile app review systems are frequently of questionable value, so all you really have to go on are the screenshots and a bit of text provided by the developer.

Imagine you bought your coffee, only to open the lid and find it was only half full, or that it wasn't coffee at all but lemonade. If only 1 in 5 cups of coffee you bought actually contained coffee, a $3.99 price for that coffee starts to seem unreasonably high. When you buy an app, you don't really know what you're going to get.

Turns out, the precious resource here isn't the money after all. It's your time. In a world of millions of apps, free is the correct and only price for most apps except those rare few of extreme, easily demonstrable value – probably from well known brands of websites you already use daily. So hey, everything is free! Awesome! Right? Well…

When apps are free, you're the product

I know, I know, I'm sick of this trite phrase too. But if the market is emphatically proving that free is the only sustainable model for apps, then this is the new reality we have to acknowledge.

Nothing terrifies me more than an app with no moral conscience in the desperate pursuit of revenue that has full access to everything on my phone: contacts, address book, pictures, email, auth tokens, you name it. I'm not excited by the prospect of installing an app on my phone any more. It's more like a vague sense of impending dread, with my finger shakily hovering over the uninstall button the whole time. All I can think is what shitty thing is this "free" app going to do to me so they can satisfy their investors?

For the sake of argument, let's say the app is free, and the developers are ethical, so you trust that they won't do anything sketchy with the personal information on your device to make ends meet. Great! But they still have to make a living, don't they? Which means doing anything useful in the app requires buying three "optional" add-ons that cost $2.99 each. Or there are special fees for performing certain actions. Isn't this stuff you would want to know before installing the app? You betcha. Maybe the app is properly tagged as "offering in-app purchases" but the entire burden of discovering exactly what "in-app purchases" means, and how much the app will ultimately cost you, is placed completely on your shoulders. You, the poor, bedraggled user.

The app user experience is wildly inconsistent

Have you ever tried actually using the Amazon app on iOS, Android, and Windows? iOS does the best, mostly because it's been an app platform for longer than the others, but even there, the Amazon app is a frustrating morass of missing and incomplete functions from the website. Sure, maybe you don't need the full breadth of Amazon functions on your phone, though that's debatable on a tablet. But natural web conveniences like opening links in new tabs, sharing links, the back button, and zooming in and out are available inconsistently, if at all.

The minute you begin switching between platforms – say you use an iOS tablet and an Android phone and a Windows 8 touch laptop, like I do – you'll find there are massive differences between the Amazon apps (and the eBay apps, and the Netflix apps, and the..) on these different platforms. At some point, you just get fed up with all the inconsistencies and oddities and quirks and say to hell with these apps, can I please just use the website instead?

Now, if your website is an awful calcified throwback to 2003, like eBay, then the mobile apps can be a valuable opportunity to reinvent your user interface without alienating all your existing users. If there's one thing I love about tablet and phone design it's that their small screens and touch interfaces force people to think simpler. This is a good thing. But if you don't eventually take those improvements home to the mothership, you're creating two totally different and incompatible UIs for doing the same things.

It seems like a fool's errand to dump millions of dollars of development time into these radically different app platforms when Amazon could have spent it improving their website and making that experience scale a bit better to every device out there.

The World Wide App

But that's not an option, because apparently the web is dead, and mobile apps are the future. I'm doing my best to resist a sudden uncontrollable urge to use my Ledge Finder app to find the nearest ledge to jump from right now.

The tablet and phone app ecosystem is slowly, painstakingly reinventing everything I hated about the computer software industry before the web blew it all up. Even fans are concerned:

I’m waiting for something that will unify the world of apps and make manually going to an App Store to find a new app as weird as typing in a URL to find a new website. My bet is that this won’t be Facebook. Instead, I would not bet against some young upstart, perhaps one inspired upon reading about a $19 billion deal, to go heads-down and come up with something crazy.

I'll have more to say about this soon, but I expect there to be an explosion of new computing devices all over the world in the next few decades, not a contraction. Sometimes the craziest solution is the one that's been right there in front of you the whole time.

It's all crazy rumors all the time. Batman Vs. Superman may be adding another Justice League member, while Peter Capaldi's Doctor may have an expiration date already. Josh McDermitt talks what's next for Eugene, Abraham, and Rosita. Plus, the first look at Agents of SHIELD's newest agent. Spoilers now!

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This sizable pup is tired of strangers getting so scared of him…

(via Reddit)

(via morebuildingsandfood)

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With over 4 million articles, Wikipedia is an invaluable resource, whether you're throwing a term paper together at the last minute, or trying to keep all the Adventure Time princesses straight. But follow enough links, and you get sucked into some seriously strange places. We explore some of Wikipedia's oddities in our 4,459,066-week series, Wiki Wormhole.

This Week’s Entry: Lost Lands

What It’s About: Twitter follower @comedysavage tipped us off to “sunken kingdoms” as a Wikipedia topic to get sucked into. Unfortunately, there isn’t one comprehensive page, just lots of interesting individual pages on Atlantis, Lyonesse, and the like. However, investigating those led to a broader page for Lost Lands, which encompasses places sunken and otherwise, real and imaginary, that for one reason or another no longer exist.

Strangest Fact: Despite geological evidence to the contrary, belief in a “hollow Earth”—meaning either ...

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Mercury is an adorable little striped tabby who loves to play, eat, attack his toys and sleep. In other words, he’s a cat. The only thing that is different about Mercury is that he is missing his front legs and most of his toes. These injuries were caused by what his humans believe to be a weed whacker as evidenced by recent yard work in the neighborhood. Mercury was taken in, his eyes still closed from birth, by generous Oklahoma couple who had a great deal of experience fostering animals. They nursed him back to health, taught him to move, then walk and then run. Although Mercury does have his challenges (don’t we all?), his humans don’t want anyone feeling sorry for him.

For people that think that Mercury is sad, needs to be put down, or that keeping him alive is cruel, please simply leave, as this page is about celebrating a kitty overcoming adversity. Mercury absolutely loves life, and has the most inquisitive personality. If he sees something outside he runs to the window to watch, if a new toy or scratching post is brought in he is the first to run over and check it out, he has the biggest purr when he is being petted, and if he doesn’t like something or you aren’t doing what he wants he will yell at you until he gets his way.

There’s wonderful news to report. On February 15, 2014, Mercury became a permanent member of the Oklahoma household that raised him.

When we took Mercury in we had planned just to foster him, as we do with so many other kittens. We didn’t know when we picked him up that he would be one of the kittens that would win a permanent place in our hearts, and while we have discussed putting him up for adoption we simply cannot part with him. Today we made it official, and filled out his paperwork.

images via Raising Mercury

via Catster, Fark, Neatorama

As I said in the first post of this topic, exosuits and environmental suits are out of the definition of wearable computers. But there is one item commonly found on them that can count as wearable, and that’s the forearm control panels. In the survey these appear in three flavors.

Just Buttons

Fairly late in sci-fi they acknowledged the need for environmental suits, and acknowledged the need for controls on them. The first wearable control panel belongs to the original series of Star Trek, “The Naked Time” S01E04. The sparkly orange suits have a white cuff with a red and a black button. In the opening scene we see Mr. Spock press the red button to communicate with the Enterprise.

This control panel is crap. The buttons are huge momentary buttons that exist without a billet, and would be extremely easy to press accidentally. The cuff is quite loose, meaning Spock or the redshirt have to fumble around to locate it each time. Weeeeaak.

Star Trek (1966)

Some of these problems were solved when another WCP appeared 3 decades later in the the Next Generation movie First Contact.

Star Trek First Contact (1996)

This panel is at least anchored, and located in places that could be located fairly easily via proprioception. It seems to have a facing that acts as a billet, and so might be tough to accidentally activate. It’s counter to its wearer’s social goals, though, since it glows. The colored buttons help to distinguish it when you’re looking at it, but it sure makes it tough to sneak around in darkness. Also, no labels? No labels seems to be a thing with WCPs since even Pixar thought it wasn’t necessary.

The Incredibles (2004)

Admittedly, this WCP belonged to a villain who had no interest in others’ use of it. So that’s at least diegetically excusable.

Hey, Labels, that’d be greeeeeat

Zipping back to the late 1960s, Kubrick’s 2001 nailed most everything. Sartorial, easy to access and use (look, labels! color differentiation! clustering!), social enough for an environmental suit, billeted, and the inputs are nice and discrete, even though as momentary buttons they don’t announce their state. Better would have been toggle buttons.

2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)

Also, what the heck does the “IBM” button do, call a customer service representative from space? Embarrassing. What’s next, a huge Mercedez-Benz logo on the chest plate? Actually, no, it’s a Compaq logo.

A monitor on the forearm

The last category of WCP in the survey is seen in Mission to Mars, and it’s a full-color monitor on the forearm.

Mission to Mars

This is problematic for general use and fine for this particular application. These are scientists conducting a near-future trip to Mars, and so having access to rich data is quite important. They’re not facing dangerous Borg-like things, so they don’t need to worry about the light. I’d be a bit worried about the giant buttons that stick out on every edge that seem to be begging to be bumped. Also I question whether those particular buttons and that particular screen layout are wise choices, but that’s for the formal M2M review. A touchscreen might be possible. You might think that would be easy to accidentally activate, but not if it could only be activated by the fingertips in the exosuit’s gloves.

Wearableness

This isn’t an exhaustive list of every wearable control panel from the survey, but a fair enough recounting to point out some things about them as wearable objects.

• The forearm is a fitting place for controls and information. Wristwatches have taken advantage of this for…some time. :P
• Socially, it’s kind of awkward to have an array of buttons on your clothing. Unless it’s an exosuit, in which case knock yourself out.
• If you’re meant to be sneaking around, lit buttons are counterindicated. As are extruded switch surfaces that can be glancingly activated.
• The fitness of the inputs and outputs depend on the particular application, but don’t drop the understandability (read: labels) simply for the sake of fashion. (I’m looking at you, Roddenberry.)