Andrew Cunningham

Early adopters of any new hardware are always the ones who get burned the worst by hardware and software glitches, as we've seen over and over again. Some owners of the new 13-inch 2013 Retina MacBook Pros were finding that their keyboards and trackpads would occasionally become unresponsive, and after acknowledging the problem last week, Apple yesterday issued the MacBook Pro Retina EFI Update v1.3 to fix it. The previous, temporary workaround involved putting your computer to sleep and waking it back up, an inconvenient and potentially disruptive bandage.

Owners of the 15-inch 2013 Retina MacBook Pro shouldn't feel neglected just because their keyboards work properly—that laptop is also getting new firmware in the form of the MacBook Pro Retina EFI Update v1.2. This update applies specifically to high-end models with Nvidia's dedicated GeForce GT 750M GPU and "addresses an issue which, in rare cases, may limit the performance of the discrete graphics processor after a system wake or boot." If you have the lower-end version with the Intel-only GPU included, your laptop will still download and install the new firmware (as ours did), but it probably won't alter the laptop's performance.

Apple also issued a patch for Mail.app in OS X 10.9 yesterday, aimed specifically at bugs being experienced by Gmail users of the operating system's built-in mail client.

"If you're backwards compatible, you're really backwards," former Xbox chief Don Mattrick – now running things at Zynga – (in)famously said following the Xbox One’s troubled reveal in May, referring to the new console's inability to play games from previous Xbox consoles, like the Xbox and Xbox 360. In a meeting in New York this week, Microsoft's Albert Penello didn't call the pursuit backwards, but he did concede that experiments with streaming solutions had proven too "problematic" to be rolled out to consumers.

In the months following Mattrick's statement, Microsoft has made great efforts to distance itself from that, and many other, errors in messaging. In September, Penello, senior director of product management and planning at Xbox, said that it may be possible for the Xbox One to support earlier Xbox titles using the company’s much-vaunted cloud server technology. "It could be more complicated things like rendering full games like a Gaikai and delivering it to the box," Penello told GameSpot, referring to Sony’s still unproven solution for prior generation compatibility on PlayStation 4. "We just have to figure out how, over time, how much does that cost to deliver, how good is the experience."

Just a few weeks later, Halo 4 — presumably the last Halo game to be made for Xbox 360 — was seen running on a Windows PC and, more notably, a Windows Phone during a Microsoft company meeting. The demo was billed as a prototype and a spokesperson for the company said, "The Microsoft Company Meeting is a great place to demonstrate many exciting possibilities, but we don't have any specific plans to share at this time."

"In the world of things I wish they had not shown at the Company Meeting because I knew I’d be asked about it later, put that at the top of my list," Penello told Polygon earlier this week at an Xbox One demo in New York. "That is a good example, in certain circumstances [the cloud streaming] worked really awesome."

"It’s really cool and really problematic"

However, the problem, Penello explained, was that cloud streaming was simply too failure prone to provide a realistic solution for most consumers.

"It’s really cool and really problematic, all at the same time, insofar as it’s really super cool if you happen to have the world’s most awesome internet connection. It works way better than you’d expect it to," Penello said. "So managing quality of service, the tolerance people will have for it being crappy. Can you imagine, in this day and age, with the bad information around, and we can’t control the quality of that experience and make sure it’s good, or have to tell people they can’t do it?"

Even without any intention of bringing the streaming compatibility option to the market, its mere existence at the Microsoft meeting four months after Mattrick's remarks show that not everyone at Xbox thinks backwards compatibility is "backwards" thinking. For Penello, the Halo 4 prototype showed a possible way forward, in some indeterminate future.

"It was a grand experiment, I know we did a lot of work behind it, and we said this is one of the things where the network just has to get better before we can do it," he said. "When that happens, you’re going to have a really interesting conversation around that, can I actually run Xbox One games that way as well."

As for Sony's plans to use its Gaikai service to stream older PlayStation titles to the PS4, Penello said, "I’ll be really interested to see how our friends in the Bay Area [at PlayStation] deal with this problem. But I can tell you, it’s totally possible. We like it, we’re fans of the cloud. We’re not shy about that."

By Nathan Grayson on November 8th, 2013 at 1:00 pm.

Star Citizen this, Star Citizen that. It’s in the news significantly more often than any real space program, and it’s probably better funded at this point too. Personally, I still can’t help but question Chris Roberts’ and co’s ability to pull it off, but I’m now much less doubtful that their aspirations are sincere. I recently lobbed all the skepticism I could at each of Roberts’ claims, and he backed them up with dates, times, and plans to prove he’s not just blasting hot air into the empty blackness of our bank accounts. Look for that mammoth back-and-forth very soon. First, though, Squadron 42. The single-player story-based spin-off kind of disappeared after Star Citizen’s initial announcement, but apparently it’s benefiting from Roberts’ lightspeed jump into the Implausible Wealth Nebula just as much as its big brother. According to Roberts, it’s now just as big as anything he could’ve done working with EA to make a new Wing Commander.

It would’ve been pretty easy to sweep Squadron 42 under the rug. At least, for a little while.

Star Citizen is the talk of the town (town name: space, population: all existence), and many wannabe pilots have become damn near obsessed with preparing their virtual armadas for impending intergalactic war. A meticulously interconnected online galaxy awaits. Single-player? Who goes to space for that?

And honestly- for better or worse – Roberts would probably get a pass from many if he managed to deliver Star Citizen without too many compromises. That absurd vision in most of its sprawling splendor. But he also promised an entire single-player story-based Wing Commander successor set in Star Citizen’s universe, and apparently that’s coming together just as quickly behind the scenes.

“I haven’t talked about Squadron 42 because it’s a narrative story,” Roberts explained to RPS during GDC Next. “I kinda want to make that more of a discovery thing. But it’s going to be as big or as fancy as any Wing Commander would be.”

“The scope and scale and ambition of it now is gonna be up there with anything I could’ve done with Wing Commander [thanks to crowdfunding]. Like, if I was doing a Wing Commander at EA, Squadron 42 is gonna be that. At that level. We already have a bunch of stuff that I really like. We have our own motion capture studio. We have a whole face rig thing.”

My eyebrow leaped into the coldest, deepest reaches of my hairline at that notion. After all, single-player games aren’t cheap. Yes, Roberts and co have amassed more than $25 million between Kickstarter and their own site, but that may as well be brightly colored Monopoly money in the grand scheme of things – especially given that it’s holding up both a single-player story and a full-fledged MMO. Roberts, however, claimed that working sans publisher, console concerns, and marketing (subscribers, whose contributions aren’t listed on the total, take care of that) don’t whittle away at the cost so much as they run it through a wood chipper. I suppose, however, that only time will if crowdfunding alone is enough.

So then, what exactly is Squadron 42? How does it work? Roberts explained the story-driven starfighter’s structure:

“You’re in the military, right? So you go wherever they want you to. But you have an effect on how the campaign unfolds. That determines where your campaign ends up, which is very much the Wing Commander model – especially Wing Commander 1. It’s gonna be more interactive than Wing Commander 3 and 4, which were more linear because you have the film element.”

But what about wings and the commanding thereof? This isn’t a one-man show, after all. As in the Wing Commanders of yore, you’ll be able to pick both your battles and your co-pilots. Conversations, however, will apparently be far more advanced.

“We’re doing a bunch of stuff with the conversation system,” Roberts continued. “It’s one I’ve been thinking about for a while that I think is going to make that field better. It’s about managing relationships with your pilots. I don’t want it to feel like you’re on some conversation tree, just ticking off answers to make sure you didn’t miss anything. The way we’re setting it up is to be much more about managing your relationships with your co-pilots, and it’s kinda up to you.”

“The original Wing Commander was a little this way. It was like, who do you like? Who do you want to hang out with? You can have a person who’s an asshole, you can have a person who’s great, you can have a person who’s funny. Players will sort of form their relationships with different wingmen and that will affect what they do and how they play.”

“The on board the ship stuff is almost like a relationship manager, as opposed to a bunch of set cut-scenes.”

The colossal claims have been growing like avalanches, but Roberts said he plans to deliver on them sooner rather than later. Already, Star Citizen’s hangar module is letting sci-fi hotrod enthusiasts fulfill their dream of owning a space garage, and dogfighting is still in the pipeline for the end of the year. After that comes planet-level trading around March/April or so, then first-person shooter ship boarding toward the middle of 2014, and Squadron 42 closer to the end.

Such a rapid-fire schedule might sound like an impossibly tall order, but much of that is mitigated by the fact that different studios are working on each part. Roberts claimed that this approach allows for focus, speed, and a much more manageable workload. Squadron 42, meanwhile, is receiving an extra helping of special attention.

“I’m picking the studios that I think have the personnel that can do each task, and then we’re all hooked in to the same build,” said Roberts. “We all see everything. And then I’ve gone out of my way to pick the right people. The team in England is led by my brother. It’s the team that did Privateer and Starlancer and a bunch of people that worked with me on earlier things like Wing Commander. They’re taking the lead on Squadron 42. They basically did the last good Wing-Commander-style space game.”

The multi-studio, staggered release setup serves a second purpose as well: to prove to fans and backers that any of this, er, exists at all. This goes double in the event of a Double-Fine-style emergency, because – while confident – Roberts isn’t fooling himself. Game development is an imprecise science to begin with, and a project of this scale is like trying to conduct a black hole. Something can and inevitably will go wrong.

“When there’s an article about us, there’s always one person who’s like, ‘IT’S A SCAM,’” he confessed. “[Gradually releasing each part of the game and then combining them into one] is a conscious plan. I mean, I’m building a really big game. If you ask people what they want, they’ll tell you they want the best game possible. But if you take a look at Blizzard or Valve or Irrational or Rockstar, those guys all make games people love. But then, people are still asking where Half-Life 3 is. These companies are like, ‘It’s done when it’s done.’ When some of the best in the business can’t run to some preordained schedule, [it says a lot about how this stuff ends up working out].”

“My hope and goal is that, because I share the process and fans see it happening, that when we have to make choices like that, we have different information than we did at the start of the process. People are like, ‘OK, I get it. I mean, it sucks and I wish I had it now, but this is better for the final game. Plus, I’ve already got stuff and I’m seeing what you’re doing and delivering. I’m getting new content.’”

He noted, then, that the current Star Citizen/Squadron 42 release schedule is very tentative, and already some pieces are getting jostled by (so far) minor patches of turbulence. The dogfighting module, for instance, will launch at the end of 2013 no matter what, but it might not include multiplayer until early next year. Reason being, RSI has the option of either running CryEngine’s stock multiplayer code or implementing Star Citizen’s full MMO-ready backend. At the moment, Roberts is leaning toward the latter, as it’ll allow stress testing pretty much from the get-go. So long, launch day server troubles – at least, in theory.

“That’s the decision that, if you go for the proper system, it’s much better for the game long-term,” he said. “But that means people aren’t playing multiplayer dogfights by Christmas. They’ll be able to play against AI or fly their ships around, but I think that may be the choice that I make. It’s better for the final game.”

“But it’s hard. You have to manage a lot of expectations. When we pushed back the Hornet [ship] commercial, we had a lot of upset reactions. People were like, ‘How could they? They lied to us.’ But then the commercial came out, it was fine, and many of the complaints went away. So it’s about managing from the complaints to the point where they get something good. Delivering something good is the all-important thing.”

Obvious wisdom, but deceptively easy to forget when thousands of backers are banging down your doors, certain that this time you finally, truly abandoned them. And with more backer money fueling his game than any other crowdfunded project in history, Roberts is bound to be suspected of that at every turn. Maybe justifiably so, maybe not. But whether we’re talking Squadron 42 or Star Citizen, this universe is Roberts’ new home, and he doesn’t plan on going anywhere any time soon.

“Obviously, I’m worried about consistency and quality,” he admitted. “But I’m not the guy who goes, ‘Oh yeah, that’s good enough!’ I say, ‘Guys, this is gonna have to be scrapped or redone completely.’ I want to play it. I’ve put all this effort in. My point is, I’m committing a decent amount of my life to get this thing done, and I don’t want to come out on the other end and realize I dropped the ball or it wasn’t good enough.”

"Good rule of thumb is, if you're looking for the wine crowd, just look for the Indians stuff. They were here when they were the Stanford Indians, so they are the Stanford Indians," a young alumni advises.

The young alumni are the most even-handed representation of Stanford football fandom. The name Tyrone Willingham means something to them, but they define themselves largely by the before-and-after of 1-11 campaigns and Jim Harbaugh's 2007 upset of USC. They're conscious that this is a fat, fun time. By contrast to the current student body, their enthusiasm is genuine and their football knowledge is on par with any self-respecting fan base's.

They took planes from New York and Chicago to get here, cities where all of a sudden Stanford bars can be found on Saturdays. And they confide that sometimes, some of those bars have Stanford fans that they think didn't even go to Stanford. (This detail is mentioned to me with honesty and bewilderment, and it's just precious).

This is Tim from Stanford, and this is his duck. pic.twitter.com/0yd3pKKGc9

— Steven Godfrey (@38Godfrey) November 7, 2013

Back at the soccer fields, an exceedingly polite group of older Oregon fans from Boise, Idaho, watch the Stanford students from a distance. A cardboard box half-full of ice goes flying, landing in the vicinity of a Stanford tailgate built for a Cialis ad's silver-haired, good-looking adults enjoying red wine on a blanket. This lot has only a genuine affection for their Cardinal, formerly Indians, and they laugh at the (possibly purposeful) crass display of the students.

At once the change in Stanford fandom is on display. Bookending those courteous and grounded young alumni are the old and the new Cardinal, all of whom suggest some California parents spared the rod to let the spirits of their children free. No one rails against old fans drinking merlot and wearing polos with Chief Wahoo-looking caricatures, and there's no admonishment of the current student body's post-ironic expressionism. There is no animosity between the groups, and no greater change in character generation to generation in any fan base in college football today.

"People here are really catching the vibe about being possibly pretty good at this football thing," one of the fraternity members explains. "You know, you don't like, ever go to Stanford expecting to be good at football, or caring about that."

Pretty good? You guys haven't missed the BCS since you've been a student here.

"Yeah. Oh yeah," he responds with a shrug.

There is a blaring, chest-thumping stereo threatening to drown out the table-clothed Oregon alumni dinner yards away, where the median age of fans in line to get their picture with Ducks mascot "Puddles" is 28. The music changes suddenly from dubstep to "Shout," the original Isley Brothers "Animal House" version, and students pop with excitement. But there's something in each of their shit-eating grins that suggests it's genuine enthusiasm and ironic excitement.

Stanford is really good at college football. This is the Stanford way of being excited. Get it?

At its outset, Vertigo built it’s brand largely on the work of creators from the United Kingdom, particularly the work of some notable 2000 AD creators. Alan Moore, Neil Gaiman, Peter Milligan and more were part of the so-called “British Invasion” of American comics in the ’80s, with a creative output that forever changed the industry. Decades later, its a relationship that’s still working well for Vertigo, as today the imprint has announced The Royals: Masters Of War, a six issue miniseries from ComicsAlliance favorites Rob Williams and Simon Coleby.

We highlighted the work of writer Williams and artist Coleby last year with their contributions to 2000 AD’s Trifecta storyline, which we declared the best event comic of 2012. Now the duo is doing their first Vertigo work on this new story. Set against the backdrop of World War II, The Royals: Masters Of War focuses on a version of the Royal Family whose power is manifest as actual superhuman abilities — and the purer the bloodline, the stronger those abilities are. The series begins at the Battle of Berlin, with each subsequent issue set at the site of a significant event during the conflict: Pearl Harbor, The Battle Of Midway, Stalingrad, D-Day and the Fall of Berlin.

“The Royals takes all the soap opera, the scurrilous gossip and the glamour that sustains a worldwide fascination with the British Royal Family, and then adds super powers to the mix,” says Coleby. “And while there’s a satirical edge here, this, ultimately, is a story about power and control, and how a small group of individuals attempt to make a difference against overwhelming odds.”

Williams said he and Coleby were “thrilled” to be working with Vertigo on this project. “It feels like absolutely the right place for a story filled with horror, a tangible sardonic edge and big, world-shaking themes.”

The Royals: Masters Of War #1, featuring a cover by Coleby and a variant cover by Brian Bolland, goes on sale February 12.

Anyone who has ever tuned in to the annual Scripps National Spelling Bee finals on ESPN in the spring have gotten a sense of just how hardcore kids can get when arranging letters into words, but imagine if Bees were bigger than football, basketball, soccer and every other pro sporting event combined? Writer Ananth Panagariya and artist Tessa Stone are taking readers to such a pace this December with their original graphic novel, Buzz!, which is due out in December from Oni Press. Readers don’t have to worry about skimming the story like a textbook as they immediately meet Webster, a meek soon-to-be high school freshman who finds himself sucked into the seedier side of his world’s magical realism-infused spelling scene and must fight to survive through bee after bee on his way to the top. ComicsAlliance reached out to Panagariya for his word on Buzz!. Click through for the full interview.

ComicsAlliance: Buzz! takes place in a world where spelling bees are THE MOST IMPORTANT thing going on, which is an approach that’s often seen in things like manga, anime, video games and western sports movies. Were there any specific stories that informed how you capture the mood of a world shaped by ‘bee culture?

Ananth Panagariya: Michael Jordan. When I was a kid I called myself a basketball fan… in reality, I was probably a Michael Jordan fan. For a while he WAS pop culture. I’ve always loved the idea that a sport, book, movie, event could reach a level of notoriety that it hits us all at a cultural level.

Growing up I liked movies about sports, so discovering manga brought a windfall of sports stories — some of them skewed more realistically, while others go big and bombastic. I love when elements of realism get pushed into the unreal. I played a lot of NBA Jam as a kid.

Probably the one sports manga that has really stayed with me is Slam Dunk. It changes SO much visually, it’s the story of the characters but also the story of an author who comes into his own over the course of the series. It doesn’t really inform Buzz! in terms of tone, but it’s the story of an underdog and I love underdog stories.

CA: What’s the weirdest thing you did while doing research for Buzz!?

AP: Man, it was all weird! Words are such a basic part of our every day life, they’re literally our jobs, and it was weird to realize with absolute certainty that the words in our vocabulary have gone through thousands of years of creation and modification by hundreds of generations of people long dead. Every word out of our mouths has the full weight of thousands of years of human existence behind it. WEIRD.

One of my favorite things to research was tracing the path of a word from its source language into english. The etymology of ‘assassin’ is interesting – look it up!

CA: Buzz! presents spelling bees as a form of combat, in a sense, with lots of magical realism employed to fully convey the drama at hand. It’s almost like the spellers are casting incantations. How did the two of you work together to pull those off?

The incantations are actually based on IPA (International Phonetic Alphabet) standard. IPA is a system of phonetic notation based on the Latin alphabet and is a standardized representation of oral pronunciation. It’s used by lexicographers, linguists, translators, actors and so on. I realized early on that there’s no sense of suspense if a competitor just repeats a word that the judge said since it’s all right there on the page, so I chose to obscure the spellings using IPA.

As far as words-as-combat, in many cases Tessa took a vague screen direction and ran with it. In some cases, I supplied some suggestions (there’s a scene between Bonnie & Apollo later in the book that was pretty explicitly laid out). Sometimes we ironed things out over chat.

Tessa is an incredible artist and one of the big reasons I wanted to work with her was her use of type in previous projects. Looking at her work really got me thinking about how words themselves could be used as props… she planted the seed of that, and it comes very naturally to her. Tessa’s a dynamo!

CA: Lettering plays a very integral role in this book, with entire scenes relying on it as the main visual component. Do you feel like the book gives the sometimes overlooked art form a bit of a boost?

AP: Yes! But with a caveat:

In many cases, if lettering IS being overlooked on the part of the reader, it’s doing its job. It should be pleasing and legible and enhance the art on the page. Bad lettering is difficult to overlook. Not every story has the right tone to go bananas with type.

Lucky for us, Buzz! did afford us that luxury! Tessa’s sense of type is amazing – she’s completely unafraid of letting type dominate when it must, and it feels well-integrated. I love how she makes SFX live in the three-dimensional space of the comic, and I love how big chunky letters become design elements in her layouts.

Short answer: I do feel Buzz! gives type and lettering a boost, in that it draws attention and makes the reader (and characters!) deal with it in a more active way!

CA: Yellow is the only color that appears in Buzz!, which got me thinking about what it meant to the story and its protagonists. What were your storytelling intentions with yellow?

There isn’t any explicit symbolism in terms of the color yellow – Tessa happens to be a great colorist as well, and she typically uses big bold colors on the page. Buzz! was originally going to be a B&W book, but we were all thinking that one big bold pantone would work really well with her style. Yellow was the first choice since bees are yellow!

I love how that yellow came out, but the way – I was worried it wouldn’t be bright enough, but it’s brighter than the sun. You’ll be blinded.

CA: Have you found your own spelling skills have improved since you started work on the book?

AP: For sure! I think more so, it gave me a greater appreciation for language on the whole.

CA: Are there any plans for a Buzz! sequel?

AP: Tessa and I have talked about it and kicked some ideas around… time will tell! Buzz! has a strong visual hook and I’d love to have some new visual element for Tessa to play for a second go-around.

By Graham Smith on November 8th, 2013 at 3:00 pm.

The Code Liberation Foundation offers free game development workshops for people identifying as women in New York City. So far they’ve provided short courses on C++ and openFramework, as well as their own game jam, and between now and the end of the year they’ll be offering classes in GameMaker, HTML5 and Unity.

I spoke to Nina Freeman, one of the foundation’s founders, about the whys, hows and future of the project.

RPS: What is Code Liberation and how did you get involved?

Freeman: Code Liberation began this past summer when Phoenix Perry asked myself and four other NYC game dev women (Jane Friedhoff, Catt Small and Mei Chan) over for pizza. She had been to GDC (where I met her) when she was showing a game at the PlayStation booth; people kept asking her if she could “direct them to one of the game developers.”

So, over pizza, we shared our frustrations with the lack of women in games, and that’s how Code Liberation was born. We decided to teach a 3-month long introduction to C++ games programming class. We had 15-20 girls (aged early twenties to early fifties) attend the class taught by myself, Phoenix and Jane, over the course of the summer. Now, we regularly offer free game programming and development workshops to anyone identifying as a woman.

RPS: What kind of response have you had so far – how many people are coming to classes?

Freeman: It’s been super positive, and our first class asked for more immediately. Once fall rolled around and we had finished our first C++ course, I decided it was time to organize a game jam. We offered two openFrameworks workshops before the game jam (open to jammers and those who couldn’t make the jam) taught by myself and Jane. I think about 40 women showed up between the two classes.

Our game jam turned out 4 really great games (12 girls, each on small teams), which I will link below. That game jam was our last big event and it took place at the end of September. We’ve already been getting e-mails asking for more classes, so our next series will be at the end of this month with a GameMaker workshop and HTML5/JS games workshop.

Our jam got some great news coverage, and there’s an interview with me at the jam. The four jam games were Beacon, IntraTerrestrial, Therapy Sesh and Tangle.

RPS: How are you supporting the courses when they’re free? Do you accept donations?

Freeman: Right now, this is all one great labor of love for us. NYU-Poly and the NYU Game Center have been super supportive, and have even offered us free space to hold our events, so that’s what we’ve been doing so far. We teach this stuff for free because we know how important it is. If no one takes any action, the lack of women in games will continue to be an issue. We are accepting donations on our website via that big link on the bottom. We’re definitely growing quickly, so money is in the forefront of our minds right now and we are planning some big stuff regarding that for this upcoming year.

RPS: How much can you cover in a single course?

Freeman: The course I’m currently teaching is our first middle/high school course. I have about 12 girls attending the course, all of which have little to no experience programming, but are very excited about games. The class is an introduction to C++ games programming via openFrameworks. My goal is to teach them the basics of C++ programming and game logic so that they can leave the course with the tools to build their own prototypes and games using openFramework.

RPS: Why do you think it’s important that there are courses that cater specifically to those who identify as women

Freeman: We’re really focusing our efforts on people that identify as women because there’s no time to fool around. We need to close the gender gap in games. One of our primary goals is to provide a safe space that is comfortable for any woman who wants to learn. That said, some of our students have encountered abuse and stereotyping in the context of games in the past, and openly feel more comfortable being in a class taught by women for women. It’s important for us to provide a positive learning environment for them, because otherwise they may just not come at all.

Of course, not all women feel this way, but we wanted to provide a safe space to those who need it. These kinds of groups exist in tech that offer similar programs, such as PyLadies and Girls Who Code, and they’ve been highly successful. We know that games needs this kind of organization so that those ladies who wouldn’t otherwise take a games programming class would see us and think, “Wow, they want to help me, and they’re making an effort to offer me a space that I feel comfortable learning in.”

RPS: If people aren’t in New York or can’t attend a course in person, are there other ways they can get involved or support the foundation?

Freeman: Absolutely! We’re always looking for people outside of NYC that want to help, and we are hopefully going to see some new chapters opening up in other parts of the states (and the world!) as well.

Part of our goal is to make games programming accessible to women, and a big part of that is compiling learning materials online. We put all of our slides up on Github where they’re accessible to anyone wanting to learn or teach their own class. Code Liberation has spoken all over the place, from MIT to Indiecade, and we’re really reaching out to find both students and mentors that want to support and participate in our cause. The wheels are certainly turning!

Read more about Code Liberation on the official site. It is really cool. If you know of any similar projects, send them my way and I’ll look into covering them.

YouTube may have overhauled its much-maligned comments this week, but the service's co-founder is just not feeling it. Jawed Karim, one of YouTube's original creators, took to the comments for the first time in eight years and asked, "Why the fuck do I need a Google+ account to comment on a video?"

While it's unclear whether or not his account was hacked to make the comment, the user writing as Karim does appear to be voicing the confusion users might feel when the rollout is complete. Google's plan to fix the YouTube comment system was a tacit admission that it has the worst comments in the world. Instead of listing the usual offensive barbs that YouTube comments are known for, the new system will privilege the most "relevant" comments from the video creator, popular personalities, and your Google+ friends. Of course, you'll need a Google+ account to get started. Time will tell how users take to the new lay of the land.