A small part of doing your taxes might not be so daunting anymore. An official from the United States Department of the Treasury announced today that Americans can now download their tax returns directly from the IRS from the new service Get Transcript. The announcement was made at the White House’s education "

---

One would think that in 2014, getting your tax information online would already be an option. Previously, the process was laborious: you had to fill out a questionnaire and then wait 5-10 business days for physical forms to come in the mail. Get Transcript sounds like a much needed technological upgrade, letting taxpayers view, print, and download years worth of tax transcripts. If it can avoid having as many glitches as Healthcare.gov had during its rolling-out, it could restore some of the faith Americans had in online government tools, and the future of open government data.

	How to Microwave Gracefully Do you feel stiff or clumsy when you microwave? Try this guided microwavation.	From: vihartvihart Views: 47593 1716 ratings
	Time: 02:23	More in Entertainment

	9:99 Let's count down with the microwave!	From: vihartvihart Views: 59380 1574 ratings
	Time: 10:58	More in Entertainment

The Necromancer may have been cast out of Dol Guldur, but a lingering darkness remains over Mirkwood, a shadow that will grow ever longer as the years draw on – unless a fellowship of heroes step forward and hold back the gloom.
The Darkening of Mirkwood*is a complete campaign for*The One Ring, set in Mirkwood over the course of three decades. It allows you to tell your own epic saga, following your heroes in their quest as the tale of years unfolds before them.
This supplement includes enough adventure material to keep you playing for months or even years, as well as new rules that give your heroes a real stake in what happens to the world around them. Rules for Holdings allow them to carve out their own corner of Middle-earth, whilst new options for the Fellowship Phase and Undertakings to achieve allow them to chart their own path.

Visit the Parliament*of Spiders, do battle with the Nazgûl, meddle in the affairs of Wizards and enter the Halls of King Thranduil. Stand firm against the Shadow and maybe the Darkening of Mirkwood can be averted. Falter for even a moment and all that you know and love will be lost.
144 pages, full colour, hardcover. Coming soon.
Links

The One Ring Roleplaying Game
TOR*System
TOR*Characters
TOR*Supplement Overview
TOR*Downloads
Tales from Wilderland
LM's Screen & Lake-town
The Heart of the Wild
Release Schedule



(Original RSS Post)

By John Walker on January 16th, 2014 at 1:00 pm.

Having so recently written about the first hour of Broken Age, it doesn’t make too much sense to overly repeat myself here. So it’s well worth reading that first half of this review first. This one continues on from there. Following on, here’s the rest of wot i think:

It feels useful to state what Broken Age isn’t. Broken Age isn’t a wacky comedy adventure. It isn’t a revisiting of those classic LucasArts games of the 90s. And it isn’t – at least this first half of the story – an all-time classic. What it is, is a deeply charming adventure game.

Presented, as I mentioned before, like an utterly beautiful children’s storybook, gorgeous pages lavishly illustrated, each deserving of study and scrutiny. The character design is just wonderful, and the breezy delivery of an imaginary, impossible world as perfectly normal, nonchalant, is very refreshing. Whether it’s Shay’s Playmobil spacecraft, or Vella’s monsters-n-giant birds fantastical setting, neither delivers itself with lazy fanfares. Instead they just are, and you just get on with that.

And they’re worth exploring, too. While they’re disappointingly sparse in terms of interactive objects, and we’ll get to the massive limitations of there being no “look at” option, there are lots of unique responses written for the incorrect application of inventory objects, meaning it’s often fun to deliberately try all the wrong things to see what the characters will say. While this isn’t a game aiming for a gag a second, they’re often wry, silly or sweet.

And that’s a point worth noting: this isn’t a “comedy adventure”. It’s funny, in places. When it delivers a gag, it delivers it extremely well, and I often chuckled. But the game just isn’t aiming to be a laugh riot, nor even a laugh peaceful gathering. It’s a drama, I suppose, with funny lines here and there. Not a failing in any sense. A rather lovely thing, in fact. Perhaps one of my favourite things about the game.

Each of the two characters’ stories is played separately, and you can switch back and forth between Vella and Shay at will. While my tendency is to want to see an arc through, to stick with the story I’m playing, I did end up switching back and forth. On the couple of occasions when I became stuck, that proved an excellent time to change over to the other character and progress farther with them. I’m glad I finished Shay’s tale before Vella’s – I think it fits better that way around – but either would have worked just fine. The commonalities between their stories are, for the most part, more esoteric than overt – they appear to share much more in quickly established metaphor than they do in theme. But that metaphor is one I’m delighted to see a game exploring: the desire to distinguish oneself from one’s parents and one’s society.

As charmed as I was, and as interested as I might have been to learn more about each character’s situation, there’s no doubt that I’m also somewhat disappointed by Broken Age. And part of that really is because it’s created by Tim Schafer. Although not because I wanted what this game wasn’t supposed to be. While I want more Day Of The Tentacle as much as the next sane human, I didn’t want it from this game. I’m so delighted that Schafer has developed this doleful tone, a desire to ask more difficult questions of the universe than how to get the fake barf from the ceiling. Questions about identity, purpose and the trappings of circumstance. My disappointment comes from the shallow level into which Broken Age’s toes dip. From this game I wanted much more.

Of course, we’re also trapped in a mid-point – yet another developer who’s made the mistake (for whatever justification) of breaking a narrative game conceived as one whole into two parts. It is, inevitably, stopping short of every ambition it has, abandoning itself midway through any progression it hoped to make. The first half of a story should be giving us a reason to care about the characters, before we’re given cause to put that care into action in the second half. Taking away that second half is incredibly problematic, especially with its ambiguous release date somewhere in 2014.

But still, Broken Age Part One’s characters don’t reach deep enough. Both Shay and Vella are immensely likeable archetypes, but not yet really people. They express attitudes that make me want to like them, but there’s no personal reflection on those attitudes. Vella, asked by her society to be a victim, chooses to be an aggressor. That’s fantastic – that makes me like Vella right away. But I still don’t know why that was Vella’s choice. I still don’t know who she is beyond this, why she was the sort to make such a decision. I’m asked to like Vella because of that choice, and little else. In the end both characters are mostly vessels for a notion. Laverne was crazy because DOTT says she was crazy. Vella is rebellious and brave because Broken Age says she’s rebellious and brave. As much as the tone has changed, the depth hasn’t.

I’m well aware that these words could be applied to pretty much most gaming character ever. But not all. Not The Longest Journey’s April, nor Beyond Good & Evil’s Jade. And not Grim Fandango’s Manny nor Psychonauts’ Raz. And for me, Broken Age cried out for more background, more exploration. Yes – I’m pretty certain that’s to come for Shay’s story in part two – his personality is far more complex, but as yet entirely mysterious – but again, I’m only able to write about the game that’s been released.

However, saying all this, it’s worth noting that Broken Age’s background narrative, the subtle, gentle details of its overarching plot, go far deeper than you’ll see at first glance. There is clearly a huge amount of thought taking place here, and come part two I suspect my feelings will be far more positive as these pieces fully come together.

A problem that certainly doesn’t find excuses in the split is the nature of the puzzles. They’re fine. They’re solveable, not based in tortuous processes of clicking everything on everything – the logic is twisted, but it’s there. But they’re nothing special. Not a single moment made me think, “Wow! That’s clever!” And I was really hoping to think that. Things can be cute (use the innocuous item in a silly way) but never ingenious (put the jersey in the washing machine 200 years in the past). They were workaday, perhaps even perfunctory – they advanced the potentially lovely plot, so I was grateful of having solved them, but weren’t anything special themselves.

And I need to repeat my strongest criticism from the first part of this review: the controls. Broken Age is a game designed for tablets. There’s no getting around that. The PC controls are compromised by this. A single-click interface strips out so, so many options for imaginative ideas. It’s a game designed to be tapped on by a finger, not clicked on with a two-buttoned mouse, and with that goes an enormous amount of potential. And most problematic is the loss of “look at”. Taking this away, and replacing it with a single cursor that might pick something up, use something, talk to it, or perhaps look at it, is very detaching. It takes away a big part of what point and click adventures are about, and it’s a loss I felt heavily as I played.

The cursor itself is clumsily huge, and far too often I accidentally just missed clicking on conversation options which meant abandoning the conversation entirely. It’s a good idea to map the inventory to a mouse button, so you don’t have to use the iPad-necessary clicked icon bottom left to open it, but you’re still forced to click and drag items out of it, and then “let them go” over the object with which you want to use it. Makes perfect sense on a tablet, makes no sense on a PC. It means rather than being able to use the same item on lots of elements in a scene, you have to laboriously drag it again and again if you want to explore all the hidden lines. (It’s worth adding here that, yes, sure, Amanita’s games do an amazing job with a single-click interface. But crucially they’re not narrative led adventures, and they do an awful lot more with that single cursor.)

I can’t decide if the game’s short. It took me just under four hours to finish it. And yes, that is short. But it’s only half the game. Eight hours for an adventure is probably just fine. (People ploughing through this in under three hours really need to learn about roses and how they smell.) Again, the sense of its stopping when you’ve only just gotten started is a result of the misjudgment to break the game in two. (And honestly, if they were running out of money, you do have to ask just how much they needed to fill the game with a Hollywood cast…)

Despite that, the voices are universally stunning. Elijah Wood is just exceptional as Shay, modest, and ideally under-played. And blow me if Jack Black doesn’t also manage the same. Quite why on Earth they felt the need to hire him to play a quiet, calm character I’ve no clue, but that’s who he plays, and he plays it without a glimmer of tiresome bluster. Following the theme, Wil Wheaton also plays completely out of character – a deep-voiced woodsman, stoic and folksy. And Pendleton Ward is brilliant in a tiny, throwaway (literally) character, G’s. The rest of the cast are from the big league of voice artist talent, like the splendid Jennifer Hale, David Kaufman, Masasa Moyo and Nick Jameson. And then out of nowhere, with no previous credits, one of the best voices coming from Alex Rigopulos as Alex. Whether it was worth splashing out for big names doing unrecognisable voices I’m not sure – it was their money to spend. But the results are unquestionably superb dialogue, written by someone who has clearly carefully crafted every line, and delivered by people with the talent to capture it.

I’m quite certain that were Broken Age to have come out as a complete game, many of the criticisms above wouldn’t even have been mentioned in a review. Where it falls short it seems very likely to make up for as the story continues. But the game is split, and that means things like character development feel unfinished, and thus unsatisfactory. And will remain feeling that way for months to come. That they are unfinished sadly becomes a poor argument when this is all the game I’ve got, and will be for the next long while.

But as much as I’ve griped, again I say, you have to read the first half of this review too. It’s a dreamy, gentle, melancholic game, created with tangible passion. It’s utterly beautiful, and while not nearly challenging enough, it’s entertaining to play. I wanted much more from it, and perhaps I’ll still get it. I desperately hope revisions will be made to the PC controls, but know that it’s far too late for that to comprise re-establishing the vital “look at” that underlies adventure gaming. But what we have here is the first half of a gorgeous, loving story, and honestly, that’s good enough.

The first half of Broken Age is with Kickstarter and Slacker backers, and can now be pre-ordered on Steam for £17, due on the 28th Jan. The second half is included in all purchases.

Jen Taylor, the voice actress of Halo's A.I. companion Cortana, will reportedly lend her talents to Microsoft's voice feature of the same name, according to MSFTnerd.

According to the site, Cortana, Microsoft's answer to Apple's Siri, will launch first in beta this April in the U.S. for Lumia devices. The feature will hit the iPhone Bing app this fall, also in the U.S. The report also says Cortana will come to the Xbox One and Windows users in North America in 2015, and the feature is expected to launch internationally in 2015 and 2016.

Rumors about Cortana began circulating last fall, touting it as a feature first headed to Windows Phone 8.1. Cortana will feature improved voice command capabilities over Windows Phone's current system and will allow users to interact with their phone using more natural commands.

Taylor, in addition to providing the voice of Halo's Cortana since the series' beginning, has also voiced Princess Peach, Toad and Toadette in various Mario games and sports spin-offs, Zoey in Left 4 Dead and Left 4 Dead 2 and various heroes from Dota 2. She also provides narration for Rooster Teeth's animated webseries RWBY.

Polygon has reached out to Microsoft as well as actress Taylor to verify the report and will share details as we have them.

Surgeon Simulator 2013 developer Bossa Studios is bringing a nightmarish dentistry version of the game to iPad.

The announcement was made in a newly released video from the team that gives you your first glimpse of a patient getting hooked in the jaw in Surgeon Simulator: Malpractice Makes Perfect.

Surgeon Simulator 2013 is available on Windows PC, Mac and Linux, although no announcement have been made for versions of the spin-off on those platforms.

Yes, honest question.

Here's the thing -- while I do enjoy me some ponies, I find it easy to role my eyes at the grandiose proclamations of Bronies being some unique, important community because A.) it's always been a habit of fandoms to proclaim their thing the most important thing ever and B.) we live in a social infrastructure that makes it really easy for a fandom to spread, regardless of their underlining qualities. But recently, I have got to thinking, around the time the Bronies documentary started circulating, that there are elements of the MLP fandom that puts me in mind of how I think of pre-internet Trekkies. The high-sounding idealism/futurism, the insistence that the driving force of the fandom is fascination with a better world, the large consumption of lifestyle items(clothing, decorations, artwork, etc), and very much the drive to organize and centralize the community offline.

All of which could be me pissing up a rope, of course, because it's not like I'm writing a thesis on this nonsense.

But could anyone with memories of the Trekkie heyday lend me a hand here and comment on how the two might compare?

Update: This is a last call for applicants; we'll be looking at applications next week.

Ready to join the sharpest team in tech? Ars is looking for three people to expand our editorial team.

Interested candidates should provide a résumé and three examples of Ars Technica-quality stories/reviews/analysis with their application.

He's as fast as the Dickens, and some scouts believe he may be even faster than the Dickens. We haven't seen him since early October, when he suited up for the Jaguars and singlehandedly routed the Broncos, 42-0.

BEEFTANK possesses the highest possible skill ratings in Madden NFL 25. No one in the game is faster, has more moves, or can truck fools more violently than him. Well, "violently" isn't the word. He is cryptic and difficult to understand in all ways but one: he loves you, all of you. American football has never seen a soul so sensitive.

i'm am so bashful about leaving crumns that i often to eat my sugar grahams in the cabinet. nobody loves a crumn-goblin D^:

— BEEFTANK (@BEEFT4NK) October 28, 2013

His hygiene is unconventional.

400 lincolnlorgs in the bath-tub, fav'rite tugboat toy in mine furrowed hand. time for to take dry-bath. BYE. :-)

— BEEFTANK (@BEEFT4NK) October 28, 2013

He loves food nearly as much as he loves you.

i love you! having potato cream drink w/salts.

— BEEFTANK (@BEEFT4NK) October 24, 2013

☂ can't to wait for noon! it's is pudding vapour tuesday. ☂

— BEEFTANK (@BEEFT4NK) November 5, 2013

☃ kitchen nap ☃

— BEEFTANK (@BEEFT4NK) November 1, 2013

time to carve some supper shapes

— BEEFTANK (@BEEFT4NK) December 9, 2013

He loves to have a good chuckle from time to time.

imagine what if you had ENORMOUS fork & spoon. haha

— BEEFTANK (@BEEFT4NK) October 25, 2013

home plate looks like a lil bitty house. c'm'e're house! i got foods for you. i'll will feed u like a tiny duck. 8-^ quaaakc. haha

— BEEFTANK (@BEEFT4NK) October 28, 2013

It took him quite some time, but he has come to accept and embrace his body type.

my fingers is so fat. SO FAT. hah i love my body & whom it looks like, whuch is me. :))

— BEEFTANK (@BEEFT4NK) October 26, 2013

And his heart is filled with wonder.

it is night in space. oh well. ♪

— BEEFTANK (@BEEFT4NK) November 19, 2013

BEEFTANK has spent the last few months away from football, wandering the land, and his sojourn has eventually led him to the top of the San Francisco 49ers' depth chart. (It could just as easily have been the Seahawks, their opponent in the NFC Championship. I flipped a coin.) I've moved Colin Kaepernick to the position of running back. Apart from that, I made no changes to San Francisco's roster.

But BEEFTANK needs to run free, so I reduced the Seahawks' defense to absolute ruin.

INTRODUCING SEATTLE'S TWITTER-DEFENSE

Music: "What's This Life For" by Creed, because I wanted to test whether, given enough time, Creed's music can graduate to endearing kitsch a la Chicago. Results inconclusive.

I dropped every player from the Seahawks' defensive depth charts and replaced them all with the sorriest collection of football players who have ever lived. Since this game is an exclusively West-coast affair, I waited to recruit them on Twitter until past two in the morning Sunday, in the hope that most of us East-coast chuckleheads had already headed to bed.

paste whatever's on your clipboard right now. the first 20 will be in this week's BREAKING MADDEN.

— Jon Bois (@jon_bois) January 12, 2014

The beauty of this is that I received 20 responses within about five to eight seconds of sending that tweet, so I'm virtually certain that we don't have any jokers or fake-pasters in the lot. This stuff was really on their clipboards, and I'm thankful we could get through 20 of them without running into any hardcore porn.

These players are the polar opposites of BEEFTANK: seven feet tall, 160 pounds, and set to the lowest possible ratings in every single category. These are their names.

I had no idea of what "slimenia" was, so I Googled it and found an entry on a Super Mario Bros. wiki. In part: "The capital city, Boingburg, was once attacked by the Plob."

I find it drastically unfair that I spend 25 hours a week staring at a video game but still am made to feel like an old-ass man who doesn't understand video game references. Like, I've never played any of the Bioshock games, which I'm positive are awesome, and yet I'm really, really good at typing "TOM BRADY" with an Xbox controller. This is total clownshoes.

What a delightful graphic, Randall! Did you create it yourself, or did you find it online? Terrific computing skills in either case. Prior to the arrival of the polar vortex last week, I bought lots of groceries and plotted out my life such that I wouldn't have to go outside at all. But out of curiosity, I did step outside for just a minute. And then I died!

After some deliberation, I've concluded that Kyle Z's tweet wasn't a made-up paste. The keys are spaced such that typing them while randomly slapping the keyboard is rather unlikely. It looks like it might be a CD key for a computer game, or perhaps an essay on Will Muschamp's offensive strategy.

Sara Kate, I hope she is all right by now. You just can't French-press a steak and not anticipate consequences.

#WTWTCH's tweet might be my favorite. I felt like I just walked in on a quarreling couple. And they're arguing about snacks, of all the dang things. All snacks are good, except for pretzels, the most boring food on Earth. Like, if I'd never heard of pretzels, and you handed me one to eat, and then asked me to go out and buy some, I'd probably go to Home Depot.

whoa it is a true detective

THE GAME

Pitting the best possible runner against the worst possible defenders wasn't quite enough for me, so I also tooled around with the game's global settings. I set the CPU's tackling ability, pass defense, and run defense as low as it would go.

I should also note that I played as BEEFTANK, and only BEEFTANK. Everything you see the Seahawks do in the GIFs below is entirely the computer's fault.

I suppose I can partially be blamed for Colin Kaepernick: Running Back, because I was the one who put him there, but I couldn't have made him do this if I'd tried. He just did this funny business all by himself.

Robinson tries the exotic "chest and no other part of your body" tackle once again, and then he falls to his knees like he's John Marston in front of the dang barn, and then he runs out of stuff to do, so he gets to his feet and makes a quarter-assed attempt to engage him again before just fleeing the scene entirely. Put it all together and you have a demonstration of what I thought sex would be like when I was eight.

Even when BEEFTANK and I gave the Seahawks all the time in the world, it still took at least three or four hits to bring him down, and sometimes as many as eight or nine. Sara Kate W. didn't even bother.