As for playing the same role, the actor said it’s been a “peculiar experience.” But as for why he said yes? “The fact I knew how good it was,” he told EW. “I knew what an exciting story it was and a lot of the same people are involved so I knew it wasn’t going to be turned into something … less good.”
Rudy Gobert of the Jazz is a rookie, and as a rookie, he has rookie duties, including bringing doughnuts to practice. He forgot those duties Monday (via Sportando), which earned him punishment in the form of a car filled with popcorn:
I’m hearing Jazz rookie Rudy Gobert forgot to bring the donuts. This is the consequence pic.twitter.com/owF2uJ6TgG
Now, filling a car with popcorn is a decent prank. It's extremely annoying, but not devastating by any means. It is, however, mind-bogglingly unoriginal in the NBA.
"That ain't no [expletive] joke," Martin said. "I'm going to find out who did it ... put my [expletive] hands on one of y'all. I'm going to put my hands on whoever did it. You better believe that. It's [expletive] personal. You better believe it."
So there are some variations, but it's almost always rookies and almost always popcorn. It's as if some obscure NBA bylaw cites car-popcorning as the specific punishment designated for a failure to perform rookie duties. That's the only explanation, right? Or maybe it's because large quantities of popcorn are readily available at NBA arenas? Whatever it is, NBA players need to get more creative with their pranks. Miss u, Gilbert Arenas.
'This is the best guide to becoming more cultured I’ve ever encountered: "TIP - Examine bookshelves, paintings and walls, you never know what you might discover." '
As I played Thief non-stop for three days, as well as only dreaming Thief-based dreams, and perhaps losing my mind somewhere along the way, I began to notice that the loading screen tips were providing me the sort of advice I could take away from the game. Thief may not directly cause me to turn to a life of crime, but there’s wisdom in those briefly appearing words that will stay with me forever.
As a human being who operates his body without the use of a mouse and keyboard, there’s a good deal of advice in there that perhaps doesn’t pertain to us all. While I think we can all accept the concept that hiding unconscious bodies is a smart move for a mugger, “holding E” is unlikely to aid them in such circumstances. And despite my firm belief that “swooping” is a movement style we should all add to our repertoires, few of us can achieve this by pressing a spacebar. But Thief’s loading tips go beyond which key is for what, and I think the smart mind would be open to listening about now.
There’s common sense you might overlook:
Then there’s useful advice for those navigating the streets, or perhaps taking part in an activity:
Some advice is just plain strange:
And I’m fairly sure this one is telling me to take heroin:
There’s some top tips for getting work:
And for avoiding work:
This is the best guide to becoming more cultured I’ve ever encountered:
But most of all, I hope what we can all learn from Thief is this:
Stephen Elop may not be Microsoft's new CEO, but the former head of Nokia is not going unrewarded for bringing the phone manufacturer into the Microsoft fold. According to an internal memo, Elop will replace Julie Larson-Green as the head of Microsoft's Devices and Studios business, putting him in charge of Xbox, Microsoft Surface, and Microsoft's game development efforts, in addition to the new cellular handset business. The memo reportedly comes from Julie Larson-Green herself as she takes on a new role: she's becoming the Chief Experience Officer for the company's Applications and Services group, managing the look and feel of products like Bing, Office, and Skype.
Larson-Green will report to ASG head Qi Lu
It's hard not to see the swap as a demotion of sorts for Larson-Green, who rapidly became the woman in charge of Windows after Steven Sinofsky left the company, but who was quickly shifted to Devices and Studios after Terry Myerson stepped up. Now, she's being shifted back to more familiar territory: she spent years working on UI design for Internet Explorer, Microsoft Office and eventually Windows itself before her rise to management. However, that doesn't mean her new role might not be just as important to the future of Microsoft. It was user experience that determined the consumer reaction to Windows 8, and it might be user experience that determines whether Microsoft's services catch on. Under new Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, who was previously in charge of Microsoft's services push, Larson-Green may be literally shaping the look and feel of the company's future.
This indie documentary follows Iceland's Phallological Museum's quest to get the final jewel of their collection: a human penis. And from what we're hearing, everyone loves this movie.
Chris Roberts' upcoming space epic Star Citizen has surpassed yet another crowdfunding milestone, by attracting over $39 million to the game's development to date.
As with previous funding milestones, topping $39 million adds a new feature to the...
Arthur Chu is back on ‘Jeopardy!’ Monday, and let’s hope he keeps winning—because he’s making it so much more fun to watch the show.
There were warning signs. A series of IQ tests in the second grade confirmed that Arthur Chu had a college-level vocabulary. His tiger mom and dad were told to raise him carefully because he could grow up to be a genius who would change the world—or be a serial killer. In his evangelical high school Spanish class, he wrote disturbing surrealist stories; in history class he reenacted the Russian Revolution as a parody of the song “American Pie.” After fleeing to Swarthmore, he wore t-shirts and shorts in the winter and was belligerent with professors who were probably not as smart as him. Today, he visits online forums and bombards them with dissertation-length comments.
Arthur Chu did not grow up to be a serial killer, but to a few racists spouting hate on Twitter, his crime might as well be just as bad. He’s charged with being a megalomaniac savant ruining Jeopardy! As one angry viewer tweeted,“This little shithead had better lose tomorrow. His board-hopping pisses me off. And he stole Kim Jong Un’s haircut. #Jeopardy.”
But, unlike what the headlines suggest, he’s not actually the unapologetic bad boy and rebel who’s using “game theory” to dominate. Instead the answer, not phrased in the form of a question, is that he’s just probably smarter than you are.
“It turned into a story with me as the protagonist defending myself against these hordes of attackers on Twitter, somehow that became a narrative,” Chu, a 30-year-old insurance analyst, says. “It feels kind of unfair to keep telling the story that it’s me vs. the Internet. A lot of the Internet has my back.”
Playing the way that’s universally accepted really just increases the probability that luck and buzzer speed will reward a random winner.
Chu, who returns to television Monday after “The Battle of the Decades” tournament interrupted his four-game winning streak (worth $102,800), uses the a form of game theory coined the “Forrest Bounce” to hunt for the Daily Doubles by floating like a butterfly across the board and stinging like, as he says, a “rumpled-looking Asian guy with a weird stare.” He wagers enough in Final Jeopardy! so that the contestant in second place may tie him. He interrupts Alex Trebek—after correct responses, Trebek sometimes likes to add his own quip; for Chu, there is no time, and he immediately calls for the next clue. He’s a rapid-fire machine that throws other contestants off their game and into an anxiety-laden death-spiral.
74-time Jeopardy! winner Ken Jennings, who defends Chu as playing the game the right way, writes that “the sudden wave of Chu-mosity is largely just a symptom of our modern news cycle. Where one spate of hostile tweets can spawn a million repetitive reaction pieces before the feedback loop dies.” Chuck Forrest, the ex-Jeopardy! champion who in 1985 pioneered the “Forrest Bounce” (which is named after him), likes the young man. “Arthur has captured the public imagination not just for his strategy, but because he has a strong personality and incredible self-confidence,” Forrest tells me. “Some people don’t like that, but I think he has made a great contribution to the game.”
Is Chu the Walter White of quiz shows? Chu likens himself to the child prodigy Ender, the title character of Ender’s Game, who is a master of virtual games but ends up waging actual war.“Ender breaks all the rules,” he says. “Because to him it’s just a game. And if you see it as a game, you start seeing logically what kind of strategies the rules imply. And you leave aside the social implications. And then you step back afterwards and you’re like ‘Ahh, so I just committed genocide.’ Hopefully what I’ve done is not equivalent to committing genocide.”
YouTube
Chu’s wife Eliza Blair, a science fiction writer, is a bit less hyperbolic. “He brings stuff to the table like ‘incredible intelligence’ and ‘infinite trivia fire hose,’” she tells me. “And I bring stuff like ‘basic common sense’ and ‘awareness of my surroundings.’” She says that he has a tendency to leave his stinky gym socks in inappropriate places and that he sometimes ends up in a ditch when he drives in the snow—even just a day before his Jeopardy! debut. “But he’s really funny and cute and brilliant and I wouldn’t change a thing,” she adds.
Chu’s trivia prowess is not derived from cramming knowledge into his head, but instead from making it easy to access the facts that are already in his mind. “It takes so much brain power to win those buzzer races and to pull those answers out of your head that I can’t spare any brain cells for stuff like making decisions,” he says. It’s all scripted, a script he admits he found through Google. When Chu begins a game, he attacks the fourth row of the first column because statistically there’s a high probability he’ll find a Daily Double there. He doesn’t agonize over the little things. Chu knows exactly how much he’s going to bet on a Daily Double, based on his score relative to the other players, which is why he once wagered only $5 on a $1,000 sports clue. He doesn’t have a contingency plan in case he runs into a contestant who also uses the Forrest Bounce. “I’d keep doing what I was doing, and whoever won the game would come down to who was better,” he says.
Chu isn’t oblivious to the consequences. He knows that the way he’s playing Jeopardy! isn’t traditionally “fun” for viewers to watch. By refusing to start at the top of a category and work his way down, he’s stripping the game of the writer’s jokes and the familiar rhythm of the show.(To stop those from complaining, he has one change to the game: display the category as a sidebar over the clue on TV while it’s being read, so it mimics what the contestants see in the studio. Even this may be too drastic for traditionalists.)
But playing the way that’s universally accepted really just increases the probability that luck and buzzer speed will reward a random winner. In his typical way of making cold and calculated decisions, he’s choosing not to see Jeopardy! as a popularity contest. He wants to win.
“It’s ugly, it’s sweaty, it’s painful,” he says of the Forrest Bounce. “I was literally soaked in sweat because I had to be so on the ball, which is probably why I come off as a jerk on TV. I was using so much mental energy; I had no expression on my face. I was staring at the board like a crazy person. I wasn’t smiling or chitchatting.” All of which contributes to his lack of charisma in the 20-second interviews that Trebek has to conduct after the first commercial break—he can’t just break his focus to make small talk.
“But it worked.For thousands and thousands of dollars at stake, for me, that’s what I had to do,” Chu says.
Jennings writes that Jeopardy!’s“only real breath of fresh air is the endless parade of new contestants. Familiarity, on the other hand, quickly breeds contempt.” This is true for Chu, yet it’s exactly this novelty has made Chu an anomaly, and an asset to the show. He’s a Jeopardy! champion worth writing about, who comes around once in a blue moon. It explains why a trumped up story of online vitriol—we are, mind you, talking about Jeopardy!—was enough to unleash a swarm of think pieces about modern geekery, racism, and game theory, and anoint him the villain, the guy who broke Jeopardy! the bad boy, the rebel, the jerk, and the mad genius.
Is Arthur Chu any of that?
If you ask him, he’d say he’s the giant nerd from Cleveland who works a mundane desk job that lets him act and play games and get drunk and read Shakespeare with friends in his free time. His 15 minutes of infamy won’t last forever, but it’s worth it—as long as he keeps winning.
Benedict Cumberbatch has said that he felt like a "boobie" in his motion capture suit for The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug, but how did he actually look? This video shows us how Weta translated Cumberbatch's performance into the CG-animated Smaug.
Spelunky creator Derek Yu used to believe scoring 3 million points was all but impossible, but that was before master Spelunky player Banasaurus Rex put that theory to rest last week.
We spoke to the Spelunky creator after Bananasaurus Rex ended a nearly 7.5-hour streaming session with a score that topped 3.1 million, crushing the previous world record.
"He achieved the impossible!" Yu said. "As in, we were so confident that an over 3 million score was impossible that pre-patch, the game actually thought you were cheating if you submitted a score that high. I'm going to have to watch the video to see how he did it."
Yu went on to explain why metrics like that are ineffective for the notoriously difficult procedurally generated platformer.
"When the game was first released we wanted to have some simple cheat-prevention built into the game," he said. "It's ultimately a futile battle, but it's nice to have cleanish leaderboards for at least the first few days, so we put in some checks for scores and times that seemed impossible and prevented those from going up on the boards. 3 million was the cap we set initially for score, because the [world record] on Xbox was something like 2 million … getting another million seemed pretty far-fetched at the time! I guess not!"
You can see the moment Bananasaurus Rex topped 3 million in the video above. He also performed a solo "eggplant run" last November. Be sure to read Die Gute Fabrik co-owner Douglas Wilson's analysis for an in-depth breakdown of that milestone, in which Bananasaurus Rex had to lug an obscure item with him throughout the game. For more on Spelunky, you can also read Polygon's review.
Saatchi Art and Saatchi Gallery have teamed up with Google+ to create the inaugural Motion Photography Prize. Photographers from all over the world are invited to submit one motion photo (in .GIF format) in any or all of six categories, three of which have been announced so far.
'Rudder analyzed the data from a one-week period in January and used a simple methodology: finding the users who receive the most messages from potential suitors. The four people selected wouldn’t necessarily claim to be the wealthiest, most stunning or successful singles, but, out of 400,000 annual citywide users on the site, they were among the top five in their respective categories and, perhaps less scientifically, were the four who were also willing to be interviewed for a story.
Lauren received 245 messages in that one-week period. While she was surprised to find that she is the most sought-after straight woman, she doesn’t think guys are complicated. “I’m not a stuck-up girl, but I think looks are No. 1 for everyone,” she says. As a makeup artist, Lauren spends her days at photo shoots and knows what makes a good picture. “I believe in a head-to-toe shot to show what you look like,” she says. “But you don’t need to have your ass hanging out!”
She thinks it helps that her profile reflects her idiosyncratic interest in astronomy: She has a moon and a planet tattooed on her knuckles; she quotes a physicist and links out to NASA.gov. “Even if an amazingly attractive girl said something stupid in their profile, she’ll still get messages,” she says. “So I feel like I’m intelligent and people think I look good, so I guess it’s as simple as that?” '
This is Lauren. She receives around three dozen emails a day; in the last seven months, she’s received five-star ratings, the highest possible rating, from nearly 8,000 men.
Imagine if your bank wouldn't let you withdraw money, ignored your complaints, and then moved offices when you showed up at their door? If you put real dollars into Mt.Gox, the erstwhile top dog in Bitcoin trading, you've probably completely screwed.
bmahersciwriter writes "Over the past two years, computer scientist Cyril Labbé of Joseph Fourier University in Grenoble, France, has cataloged computer-generated papers that made it into more than 30 published conference proceedings between 2008 and 2013. Sixteen appeared in publications by Springer, which is headquartered in Heidelberg, Germany, and more than 100 were published by the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE), based in New York. Both publishers, which were privately informed by Labbé, say that they are now removing the papers." Looks like journal trolling is really easy.
The claim — which apppears solid — is that not only did J.D. Salinger continue writing while in New Hampshire, he also directed his literary trust to publish several books after his death. The first could appear as soon as 2015.
My favorite of these is Nine Stories. The story that made the biggest impact on my life, though, is Seymour: an Introduction.
I’ll re-read these in the order listed above, which means Catcher goes first. Of the four, it interests me least, because my memory whispers — subversively, unafraid to break hearts and make enemies — that it’s actually a whiny and annoying book.
I loved it as a teenager, but then teenagers are made to fall in love with whiny and annoying things. We can’t, for one thing, explain The Smiths without introducing biology — we need an understanding of hormones and the development of the prefrontal cortex to make sense of it. But, as with The Smiths, I suspect I’ll like Catcher better than I think I will. The Smiths has Johnny Marr, and Catcher has J.D. Salinger’s sentences.
I can’t help but wonder too how Holden Caulfield would have reacted to the age of the Like button. The way we live now is overdue for some charismatic puncturing.
But, anyway, first things first: I’m in the middle of Mission to Paris by Alan Furst. I’m a big fan of spy novels (like you, I bet) and I thoroughly enjoy Furst’s novels. Good stories, written well. Recommended.
Facebook is retiring its email service, and has begun notifying users that all email sent to their @facebook.com address will soon be forwarded to their primary email address on file. Facebook users can turn off the forwarding feature, which is on by default. Users without a primary email address on Facebook won't receive forwarded messages, but it's pretty unlikely that they're missing anything. "Most people have not being using their @facebook.com email address," said a Facebook spokesperson, who confirmed that the update effectively retires the social network's email service.
Facebook launched its email service back in November 2010 in hopes of providing one inbox where users could send and receive emails and messages. "It seems wrong that an email message from your best friend gets sandwiched between a bill and a bank statement," the company wrote in its announcement blog post for the feature. The service didn't catch on, perhaps in part because Facebook never truly created a friendly or familiar interface for emailing. The Messages screen always prioritized Facebook messages, and didn't even support cc's, bcc's, or subject lines.
Facebook's email feature caused more trouble than it was worth for the social network
The email feature, rarely updated, has in fact caused more trouble than it's been worth for Facebook. In June 2012, Facebook highlighted @facebook.com email addresses on profiles while hiding other email addresses. The move was intended to return user profiles to a blank slate where email addresses were private, but the outcome was that people thought Facebook was favoring its own email services over others.
Today's update brings another odd and unfortunate side effect for Facebook: you can now reach someone's primary email inbox by emailing their @facebook.com email address. These email addresses are by default only accessible to friends, but you can easily figure out somebody's @facebook.com email address by finding their profile page's URL and pasting it before the @ symbol. Fortunately, Facebook lets you turn off forwarding altogether, effectively destroying its email service once and for all.
In an effort to brighten the start of the work week for America’s web-surfing office drones, all of whom are presumably suffering from a collective case of the Mondays, HBO has unveiled the full trailer for Mike Judge’s new series, Silicon Valley. Like the previously released teaser, this spot lays out the basic premise of the show, which will follow several long-suffering computer programmers—played by Thomas Middleditch, Martin Starr, Josh Brener, and Kumail Nanjiani—branching out to start their own company. Judge, the creator of Beavis & Butthead and King Of The Hill, is said to have modeled the concept on his own experiences as a Silicon Valley engineer. Cultural satire is definitely the writer’s beat; here’s hoping his glimpse into the California start-up bubble is as incisive as his portraits of clockwatching wage slaves, working-class Texans, and the MTV-addicted doom generation. However the series ...
Really lovely interview with two of my writing heroes, Mercedes Lackey and Marjorie Liu, who did killer, KILLER stories in Red Sonja #4, which comes out this week.
These women are so full of creative power, I can’t even explain it.
Chris Roberts' upcoming space epic Star Citizen has surpassed yet another crowdfunding milestone, by attracting over $39 million to the game's development to date.
As with previous funding milestones, topping $39 million adds a new feature to the...
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