firehose

The former Uber driver who won a potentially landmark employment ruling against the ride-hailing company told Reuters on Wednesday she relied on her years of running a phone sex company to take on Uber, one of Silicon Valley’s biggest private companies.

Barbara Ann Berwick represented herself, without an attorney, before the California Labor Commission, which found earlier this month that she had been an Uber employee, not an independent contractor, and thus was entitled to be reimbursed for expenses.

The ruling made waves in the tech world on Wednesday as it could impact the way many sharing-economy companies operate. Uber said the decision did not apply to other workers and has appealed it to San Francisco Superior Court.

Now a financial consultant, Berwick said she learned the nuances of contractor law when she owned a phone sex business — “Linda’s Lip Service.” The company employed some workers but the “fantasy artists” who spoke to customers were all independent contractors.

“I had to make sure I did everything right,” she told Reuters in an interview shortly after the decision was published.

Under California law, workers are deemed employees if the company exerts a certain degree of control over how they do their jobs. The commission wrote in Berwick’s ruling that Uber is “involved in every aspect of the operation.”

Classifying Uber drivers as employees could open the company up to considerably higher costs, including Social Security, workers’ compensation and unemployment insurance.

Analysts say that such a change could affect Uber’s valuation, currently above $40 billion, and the valuation of other companies that rely on large networks of individuals to provide rides, clean houses and other services.

Uber had argued that its drivers are independent contractors, not employees, and that it is “nothing more than a neutral technology platform.”

At a March hearing on her claim, Berwick faced two company attorneys and cross-examined an Uber product manager. Although she took on Uber by herself, Berwick will likely have a friend who is an attorney represent her now that the case is in court.

A Texas native and over 6 feet tall, Berwick moved to San Francisco in the 1960s and in many ways exemplifies the city’s colorful political fabric. She now works out of her home in the Anza Vista neighborhood with sparkling views of San Francisco’s iconic Sutro tower.

She is transsexual, polyamorous but in a longtime domestic partnership with a woman, and unsuccessfully ran for local office in 2010. One of her campaign planks was to offer a reward for information leading to the prosecution of anyone dealing in date rape drugs.

Berwick was a driver for Uber for nearly two months last year before she quit, saying the money was not what she expected and management was uncommunicative.

London is one of the world’s most vibrant cities, but nights out in the capital often take on a strange character. At many events, a big group of people will abruptly dash off all at once, just before midnight. London’s size and its sprawl means that getting anywhere quickly relies on the Underground network, or Tube, network, which shuts shortly after midnight from most central stations.

Those that keep the party going subject themselves to the whims of the city’s overloaded and inadequate overnight transport options. These revellers are subjected to the mind-bogglingly long and surreal journeys by the infamous Night Bus. Invariably, it will involve a transfer at Trafalgar Square, thronged with tired partiers picking at takeaway food and holding forth in semi-coherent, shouted conversations. After jostling to fit in a jammed bus, nocturnal commuters are often rewarded with someone falling asleep on their shoulder, and drooling.

After September 2015, however, it will be a different story. The Tube is going to run all night—although the change will be confined to weekends and selected routes.

From the small hours of September 12, two lines—the Jubilee and Victoria—will run a full service through to the next morning. Three more—the Northern, Piccadilly and Central—will run trains on parts of their lines.

It will change the character of the city. Transport for London (TfL), the capital’s transport authority, says that demand for Tube services has soared in the last ten years, especially on Fridays and Saturdays, when half a million people make journeys after 10pm. The new service will add £360 million ($570 million) to the economy over 30 years, according to a study (pdf) commissioned by TfL, which also found that London was falling behind other metropolises.

“London has never had an overnight underground service. In providing one, London will join New York, Chicago, Stockholm, Copenhagen, Berlin and Sydney, which all offer night time metro services to differing extents,” the study said. Tokyo and Paris are both considering an equivalent service, they added.

Of course, not everyone is happy. London Underground operators will now be required to work all night. Drivers have recently voted to strike over pay conditions and the introduction of the new hours.

Super fun read on the early days of designing Super Mario from Boing Boing.

As a child, I was obsessed with video game maps. I would pore over them in old issues of Nintendo Power magazine, and even try to recreate the levels of my favorite games block by block on pieces of graph paper. I wasn’t alone. In the early days of the Super Mario franchise, that’s exactly how the folks at Nintendo were designing them.

“Back in the day, we had to create everything by hand,” says Takashi Tezuka in a video promoting the upcoming level design game Super Mario Maker. “To design courses, we would actually one at a time onto these sheets of graph paper. We’d then hand out drawings to the programmers, who would code them into a build.”

Read more.

At the end of his lecture at his alma mater, Cooper Union’s School of Architecture in New York on June 16, Japanese architect Shigeru Ban asked: “What is the difference between temporary architecture and permanent architecture?” No architect is more qualified to explore that question.

“Temporary” architecture, in disaster zones, is Ban’s calling card. For over 20 years, the 2014 winner of the Pritzker Prize, architecture’s Nobel, has best been known for his well-publicized humanitarian work. From Rwanda to Japan to Nepal, he has turned cheap, locally-sourced objects—sometimes even debris—into disaster-relief housing that “house both the body and spirit,” as architect Billie Tsien put it, as he introduced Ban to the audience in New York.

Cardboard tubes, beer crates, containers and cloth

Perhaps more than any architect in his generation, Ban, 57, best exemplifies the maxim, “it’s not what you use that matters, but how you use it.” From churches made of paper tubes, to a nomadic museum constructed from shipping containers, Ban is a bricoleur, and a Macgyver-level improviser with building materials.

 “What is the difference between temporary architecture and permanent architecture?” 

In 1995, after the Great Hanshin-Awaji earthquake in Kobe left 310,000 people homeless, Ban devised the first “Paper Log House,” using cardboard tubes as walls and beer crates weighed down by sand bags as foundations. This would form the prototype for cheap, comfortable, and beautiful disaster-relief buildings that Ban deployed in India, Turkey, and the Philippines.

In difficult, resource-poor environments, Ban collaborates with the local universities, and engages students to rebuild structures for their own communities, giving them a hands-on lesson in the architect’s potential to better his situation.

Beauty, privacy as basic needs

Aesthetics is a primary concern for Ban—not despite, but especially in humanitarian scenarios. He believes that beauty is a basic need, an aspect of a person’s dignity. Erecting beautiful, if simple, structures can ensure that a refugee camp is now labeled a slum. So, when examining available materials in Kobe, he fussed about the color of the beer crates, choosing Asahi’s more neutral plastic bins over Kirin’s glaring red crates.

But he knows there are limits. “In the Philippines, the beer company San Miguel [which uses pleasing pine green crates] was so difficult to deal with,” Ban says. “So we went with the red Coca-Cola crates.” They didn’t go with his original plan, but that was okay. People who lost everything in Typhoon Haiyan needed shelter, fast.

Perhaps Ban’s most poetic intervention came from his outrage over refugees’ living conditions after the 2011 tsunami in Japan. “They were not thinking about privacy. It was not on their list of priorities,” Ban told Boston Review writer Stephan Phelan, referring to the government’s effort to cram evacuees in classrooms and gymnasiums. “But of course [privacy] is a basic right of human beings, and especially important if they are suffering.” Ban used paper tubes, canvas cloth, and pins, to erect instant walls, or “paper partitions,” within a couple of hours.

Some critics have accused Ban of making temporary dwellings too beautiful, inadvertently creating a disparity in evacuation camps. In Onagawa, Japan, families have been slow to move out of the cheerful, pastel-painted housing units made from stacked shipping containers—a pop-up shelter community built in a baseball field after the 2011 earthquake.

Places to gather and heal

It’s not all about housing. Ban argues that it can be equally important to rebuild places of gathering, to lift the spirit. In L’Aquila, Italy, he designed a temporary 230-seat “Paper Concert Hall” after a deadly 2009 earthquake damaged the city, known for its music scene. He used the same sturdy cardboard pillar construction, and built the walls of the performance hall with sandbags—concealing their ugliness with vivid red drapes.

In Christchurch, New Zealand, Ban designed a “Cardboard Cathedral,” a 700-seat transitional space, that functions as a place of worship, a community center, a concert hall, and a town center as the city recovers from the 2011 quake.

Permanent monuments

Many of Ban’s temporary structures remain in use years after the community has recovered from a disaster. In Kobe, his Paper Dome, aka the Takatori Catholic Church, remained in use for a decade. The structure has since been donated to a town in Taiwan, similarly ravaged by an earthquake, where it is now a permanent place of worship. An elementary school built from paper tubes in Chengdu, China built as a transitional facility after the 2008 Sichuan earthquake, is still in use, and has survived several earthquakes since without damage.

Aside from humanitarian projects, Ban also works on the usual mix of high-end condominiums, retail stores, and museums, maintaining offices in Tokyo, Paris, and New York. His harshest critics have characterized some of Ban’s work as boring, awkward, ephemeral, or even kooky. But Ban’s work, time and again has proven to be the antidote to showy “object architecture,” which is how New York Times architecture critic Michael Kimmelman described buildings that look like they were drawn up in a studio, and parachuted in without consideration for place, history, or context. “Mr. Ban’s work points toward a timely and growing respect for what’s at hand,” writes Kimmelman.

In the end, the difference between permanent and temporary structures, concludes Ban, is love. That is not a word that one finds often in the parlance of architecture, notoriously replete with words like “typologies” or “tectonics.” But it seems apt for the architect who has seen the face of true despair, and the emotional toll wrought by natural and man-made disasters. “Even if a building is made out of paper, if people love them, then they will become permanent,” Ban told his New York audience of students, fellow architects, and former teachers. “Concrete buildings built by developers only for profit can be demolished.” In the end, they’re all monuments, he said. The community decides what stays and what goes.

Humanitarian Design, a book about Ban’s disaster relief projects, including detailed plans for shelter kits adaptable to emergent scenarios, has been published by the Aspen Art Museum.

Green Ronin has launched the Kickstarter for the new edition of its Blue Rose RPG. The Blue Rose game uses the Adventure Game Engine, which is the rule system behind Dragon Age, Fantasy AGE, and Titansgrave. It's a game which categorizes itself as "romantic fantasy", and focuses on complex and diverse character motivations; it is also being used to highlight inclusion in the tabletop gaming hobby.

HBO late night host John Oliver weighed in yesterday (June 21) on the Confederate flag debate that’s been rekindled after a white man allegedly killed nine black people in a South Carolina church, one of whom was a state senator. Some said the flag near the state’s capitol should be lowered to half staff. Other said the flag should be taken down altogether.

Oliver was with the second group.

“The Confederate flag is one of those symbols that should really only be seen on t-shirts, belt buckles, and bumper stickers,” he said, “to help the rest of us identify the worst people in the world.”

Oliver then pointed out the absurd government inefficiency that prevents the flag from being taken down. Usually the governor decides when flags fly at half staff, as did both the American and the South Carolina flags that are on the state’s capitol building. This flag, however, does not come under the governor’s command. It is part of a war memorial in the capital, for the South Carolinians who fought in the Civil War, and only the state legislature has power to take it down by a two-thirds vote, the Washington Post notes.

“Look, South Carolina,” Oliver said. “Now might be a great time, out of respect not just for the events of the past week but for the events of the past several centuries, to take that vote and lower the flag down to half staff. And once it’s at half staff, why not keep lowering it down. And once it’s in your hands, take it off the flag pole completely, fold it—or don’t bother. Put in it a box, label it ‘bad flag’ and put it somewhere no one can see it.”

Replay was supposed to help make sure umps got the calls right. But a year later MLB still isn't getting the job done and teams are beginning to question why.

Managers across Major League Baseball loved the addition of instant replay in 2014. The point, baseball said, was to get the calls right. There were mistakes but MLB was quick to correct them. And along with the addition came a marked clarity regarding what plays were worth challenging. Detroit Tigers manager Brad Ausmus would like to know where that clarity went this season.

"I'd like someone to explain to me what sufficient and insufficient evidence is, because last year we had a pretty good idea what that was, and I can't tell you what it is this year. I really can't," he said after a 5-2 loss to the Reds on June 16.

He's not alone. There have been several instances where a call was worth a challenge, with enough evidence to overturn. And on several occasions MLB dropped the ball -- including making a determination when the MLB Replay Command Center was down. Among the teams who have had to deal with several clearly blown calls this season are the Angels, Tigers, Red Sox, Royals and the Dodgers, just to name a few.

During nationally broadcasted games there are as many as a dozen feeds to make a determination, and even local games typically have at least three angles. Yet calls that are blatantly wrong and should be overturned, aren't, which begs the question: What in the world is the replay center watching?

The MLB Replay Command Center is composed of a rotating crew of umpires. When a review is sent to the command center the umpire reviewing the call sees the entire play, including the call on the field. And managers consider that a problem, as they say it leads to biased calls -- they don't want to stand up a fellow umpire. And even when a challenged call is ruled in favor of one team or another, being the beneficiary of a blown call hasn't sat too well with managers.

Among others, managers like the Angels' Mike Scioscia and the Dodgers' Don Mattingly are of the belief that those manning the replay center should make more succinct rulings, such as a "safe" or "out" call as it relates to the play at hand, instead of "upheld" or "overturned." Furthermore, those at the replay center shouldn't know what the call on the field is to prevent biased calls. Lastly, the replay staff should be manned by a separate, dedicated contingent of umpires, whose only job is to get the calls right in the command center.

Reviews aren't just being blown, they're taking an extremely long time to get to the wrong conclusion. During cases such as the recent Tigers-Reds game, a Nationals-Braves game in mid-April or the June 15 Angels-Diamondbacks game, the time of review was 3:38, 4 minutes and 3:42, respectively. Later in that June 15 game the replay center took 4:50 to review a second call. In all cases the calls were upheld, despite clear evidence to anyone other than the replay center that the calls should have been overturned. See a trend?

The replay center hasn't just missed calls. It's how they've missed them, the time it's taking, and the supposed lack of angles or "conclusive evidence" needed to overturn a call. Here's the thing, though. If it were obvious, managers wouldn't be challenging the call. Teams make challenges because, by definition, it's a close call. That's the whole point, and with the help of technology, so many obvious calls on replay shouldn't be missed -- especially when quick screenshots are able to make that determination in less time.

Obviously, not all calls can be overturned. Some really are too close to change a call. That's not in question. What is, though, are the calls that even MLB is admitting they messed up on, and happening far too often. So much so that managers don't even know where the boundaries lie. An example of this was on June 16, during the Tigers-Reds interleague game.

There were two plays that prompted a review: one from the Tigers in the fifth inning, the other from the Reds in the ninth. The call in the ninth -- a pickoff of Reds' Billy Hamilton by Joba Chamberlain at second -- got left by the wayside as the Reds went on to win, but between the two, that call was the easier one to determine that the wrong call had been made. But had the Tigers fought back in the ninth enough to tie the game or win, it could have been a crucial moment for the Reds. And MLB got it wrong.

There were two arguments to be made on the play in the fifth. One, that the Reds catcher Brayan Pena could have been blocking the plate before MLB rules permitted; and two, that Anthony Gose slid between the catcher's legs and touched home before getting tagged. There were several angles of the play, and the Tigers felt that, even with the call being close, it was more than enough to overturn. The crowd, fans at home and the media agreed there was enough evidence.

The call was upheld and after the game Ausmus had more than a few words to say about it. And what he said was representative of manager frustrations throughout the league.

"In my mind, instant replay has regressed this year. It's gone backwards. And I know I'm not the only one across baseball who feels that way. Very quickly in 2014, you kind of had an understanding of where that line was between sufficient and insufficient evidence. That line is blurry now. There's been a number of calls this year that I think a year ago would have been overturned. I'm not sure I have a solution for it, but I think it's moving backwards.

"And I'll say this: I was a big fan of instant replay last year. I thought it was a good thing. I thought for the most part, they changed calls in order to get the play right, and they did that on a regular basis. I'm not seeing that this year.

"I thought you could make the argument that he might have blocked the plate as well. That's a much more amorphous rule, and even harder to get overturned on a challenge, so we went with the play that we thought had a better chance of being overturned, which was the actual tagging of Gose as he slid into home.

"We don't know. There's been so many that we thought were clear that there's been no change, where we thought there should've been a change. That's what I'm saying. We don't know where the line is. We do not understand when they're going to overturn a play unless it is absolutely blatant. And that's a problem. So sometimes we're just throwing a Hail Mary. We think it's conclusive and we're throwing a Hail Mary, and they come back and they say they can't confirm, or it's unconfirmed.

"I just don't know what the line is. Last year, we knew what the line was. We had a pretty good idea when we were challenging, whether we had a shot or not, and sometimes we took risks when we weren't sure if we had a shot. But generally speaking, when we challenged and we knew it was going to be overturned, it was overturned. I think the system needs to be fixed."

This isn't an isolated case anymore. There have consistently been instances where MLB has egregiously blown calls, often leading to a shift in the momentum of games. Rallies have been cut off, tying runs have been erased and teams no longer trust that MLB desires to get the calls right. And that's a big problem. Reporters reached out to MLB following the Tigers-Reds incident on Tuesday to get an answer as to why the call wasn't overturned, as Ausmus stated he didn't expect to hear anything.

"After viewing all relevant angles, the replay official felt that he could not definitively determine that the runner touched home prior to being tagged," MLB spokesperson Michael Teevan replied in an email.

That, along with apologies from MLB after the fact, have become the common answer to blown or questionable calls. But they do no good for the teams affected, and you can't exactly just rewind to that point in the game and start over. And for a problem that has become so prevalent, waiting until after the conclusion of the season isn't a viable option.

What's done is done. Past calls can't be reversed and MLB is changing the course of games in a troubling way. Imagine if these calls were made during the playoffs or the World Series. In April the calls seemed to be a fluke. In May it was a concern. Now, as July approaches, it's a glaring problem. And MLB needs to do something about it before the situation gets any worse.

Partick Thistle F.C. is a football club in Scotland. This, if the official Twitter account is to be believed, is their new mascot:

Introducing our new mascot, designed by @davidshrigley, Kingsley. pic.twitter.com/78HQuQCUI8

— PartickThistle FC (@ThistleTweet) June 22, 2015

I guess it's supposed to be a thistle? It looks like:

- If Anthony Davis were the sun

- Pikachu's weird uncle who just got out of prison

- The character who got thrown out of Yo Gabba Gabba in Season 1 because he was trying to make liquor out of paint thinner on set

- This guy:

Very good mascot. 10 out of 10.

madlori:

oh my god

Courtney shared this story from Super Opinionated.

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Former Iceland basketball player and strongman competitor Hafthor “Thor” Bjornsson, who is known for playing the part of Gregor Clegane (a.k.a. “The Mountain”) on Game of Thrones, recently won the Iceland’s Strongest Man contest for the fifth year in a row. According to Bjornsson, he is the only person to complete this task. The six-foot-nine giant made the contest look easy as he picked up atlas stones and put them on tall stacks of wooden pallets, carried two different heavy boulders from point A to point B, and deadlifted a very large amount of weight.

We previously wrote about Hafthor when he broke a 1,000-year-old weightlifting record and managed to deadlift over 994 pounds.

Iceland's Strongest Man 2015 – First day was yesterday. I won all three events. 5 more to go today.

A photo posted by Hafþór Júlíus Björnsson (@thorbjornsson) on Jun 17, 2015 at 1:16am PDT

Iceland's Strongest Man 5th year in a row.???? Only man to achieve that. Congratz to Ari Gunnarsson 2nd place & Fannar Smári 3rd.

A photo posted by Hafþór Júlíus Björnsson (@thorbjornsson) on Jun 17, 2015 at 11:21am PDT

Iceland's Strongest Man top 3 @qwertyostur

A photo posted by Hafþór Júlíus Björnsson (@thorbjornsson) on Jun 18, 2015 at 4:47pm PDT

via UPROXX

E3 2015 was one of the best years for playable female characters in recent memory – especially after the bleak, sad stubbly white dude landscape of 2014. This year’s conferences gave us lady protagonists that were not only the traditional elves and clerics, but also engineers, astronauts, tanks, and more. Here are twenty-three games straight from E3 with kick-ass women we can’t wait to play.

Gigantic

From the lead designer of StarCraft and Guild Wars, Gigantic is a third-person shooter MOBA. If you want female character options, Gigantic’s got em: you can play as Imani, a one-eyed WOC with a giant crossbow; Xenobia, the dark magic Shadow Witch; Vadasi, a Hindu-inspired goddess; Mozo, the magician; Tripp, the stealthy rogue; Grisemla, the portal and beast summoner; or Aisling, the sword-wielding melee gal. Heck yes.

Mass Effect: Andromeda

I’m probably the biggest Mass Effect fan in the galaxy, so it’s no surprise that I fell on the floor shrieking during this trailer. You’ll be playing as a human of either gender, exploring the Andromeda galaxy. And don’t fret: according to this BioWare blog, the man in the trailer is not the playable character – you can see the actual playable character design here (points off for the sexy lady pose, though).

Of course, that means if the man in the trailer isn’t the protagonist, and one of the other two background characters is a krogan – is the other woman in the trailer the protagonist? Did the first Andromeda trailer perhaps actually feature a female playable character? I want to believe.

Mirror’s Edge: Catalyst

Faith Connors is back in this prequel to the first Mirror’s Edge! The new game features a huge world to explore and has completely removed the use of guns, plus (of course) a playable WOC lead. Let’s hope that it doesn’t fall prey to the origin story issues of Tomb Raider and remove all of Faith’s agency/see her crying a lot.

Rise of the Tomb Raider

I absolutely loved the gameplay in the first Tomb Raider, but hated the story so thoroughly I had to turn off my brain and pretend I was playing a Katniss simulator (which, honestly, was awesome). Let’s hope everyone who told me that Lara would totally be badass in the second game, we swear, was right.

Horizon Zero Dawn

Did someone jump into my brain and make a game especially for me? Because Horizon Zero Dawn sure seems like it. Aloy is a post-apocalyptic wildling-type archer who has to take down the hordes of robot dinosaurs (!!!!!) who have taken over the planet in humanity’s decline. It has no loading screens, was designed by the same guy who wrote Fallout: New Vegas, and a PlayStation exclusive, and I’m crying a lot thinking about it.

Michonne

We won’t see another full series of Telltale Games’ The Walking Dead until 2016, but who cares because we’re getting a Michonne mini-series! Michonne’s story doesn’t tie into the main game, and takes place in the comics between issues #126 and #139 – when she goes off on her own for reasons as yet unknown. But not for long.

ReCore

A female robotics engineer and a robot dog? Sign me the heck up. ReCore stars Joule, a nomad in a desert environment, is (as far as she knows) the world’s last human survivor, and travels with her robo-pup, Mack. Joule must discover what happened to everyone else, while using her tech powers to make sure the the cores of her companions (containing their souls) always have a body in which to live on. ReCore is an Xbox One exclusive and will be out next spring.

NierR 2

The protagonist seen in this trailer is one of three in this sequel to 2010’s cult hit NieR – though apparently the game will share little in common with its predecessor. It’s made by the same folks who do Bayonetta so your mileage may vary, but they have brought on character designer Akihiko Yoshida (Bravely Default, Final Fantasy), so we’ll see!

Beyond Eyes

A gorgeous indie coming soon to Xbox and PC, Beyond Eyes follows Rae, a blind ten-year-old who must overcome her trauma and fear of the outside world to find her lost cat, Nani. Basically, you’re playing as an awesome tiny girl Daredevil. Plus, it’s made by Dutch developer Sherida Halatoe, so you’ve got a rad lady on the dev end, too.

Adr1ft

Whaaaat, another WOC playable character? You’re Alex Oshima (aka Sandra Bullock in Gravity), trying to survive in the wreckage of her destroyed space station above Earth. Completely zero gravity, you have to monitor your oxygen as you try to survive the catastrophe. The game is entirely first-person, and is apparently really, really nuts on the Oculus Rift.

Tacoma

Fullbright’s follow-up to the incredible Gone Home, Tacoma puts you in the body of astronaut Amy Ferrier aboard the titular Earth-orbiting space station. Set seventy years in the future, Ferrier and her computer Odin must discover what happened to her missing crew. With a creepy BioShock feel and a story-driven exploration style, we can’t wait for this one. It’s coming to Xbox and PC first, but will eventually be available for PlayStation.

Assassin’s Creed: Syndicate

We gave Ubisoft some serious shit last year after their whole “women are too hard to animate!” debacle – but it looks like they might actually be learning from their mistakes. In their latest offering, set in Victorian London, you can play as both Jacob Frye and his sister, Evie. At the Sony E3 presser, we got this Evie-heavy trailer for the game and were pretty excited about it. She’s proficient with hidden weapons like the cane sword and throwing knives and also with stealing out hearts.

Fable Legends

Four hundred years before the original Fable, you can either play in four-player co-op as the heroes, or in a more strategic role as the villain. While more characters are expected to be announced, right now playable lady heroes include Inga, the sword-and-shield Protector; Glory, magical Marksman; Celeste, healing Support; Winter, a frost mage Controller; or Evienne, a two-handed tank. Also, did you hear freaking Lena Heady in the trailer?

Battlecry

A free-to-play third-person action game, Battlecry lets you choose your gender in any of the playable classes: Enforcer, Tech Archer, Gadgeteer, Brawler, or Duelist. After a world-destroying war at the end of the 20th century, after which gunpowder was banned, creating a cool steampunky alternate history world. You can play as part of the Royal Marines or the Cossacks in battles of up to thirty-two people. It heads into Beta this year.

Tom Clancy’s The Division

Admittedly the Tom Clancy games aren’t my kind of thing, but in this “action RPG” you can fully customize your character – including gender (wow, Ubisoft, really doin’ well, here). And then you can shoot at stuff. Shooty shooty shooty bang bang. It’s out next March.

Dishonored 2

Yes. You guys, yesssss. In this follow-up to the steampunk stealth hit Dishonored, you can continue to play as Corvo (why?); or you can Emily Kaldwin, the girl you had to rescue in the first game. Now this is what I like to see! Screw rescuing the girl; let’s do the rescuing ourselves, thank you very much. Set fifteen years after the first game, you’re trying to restore Emily to power as the rightful heir to the kingdom and I’m just still so happy about this. Cara Ellison, a huge proponent of women in games, is working on it, so I know we’re in good hands with the storyline. It’s out next spring.

FIFA 16

Let the lil’ babies cry about it – you can play women’s teams for the first time in the new FIFA, including Germany, USA, France, Sweden, England, Brazil, Canada, Australia, Spain, China, Italy, Mexico. They feature authentic likenesses of all the actual lady footballers, and mo cappedplayers like Canada’s Christine Sinclair, USA’s Alex Morgan, and England’s Stephanie Houghton for maximum authenticity. Like IRL, women’s teams can only compete against other women’s teams.

Fallout 4

War never changes, and neither does the fact that you can play as a dude or a lady in Fallout. Also, the dog is unkillable. Phew.

Hellblade

Based on Celtic myth, this game follows protagonist Senua into Hell, as she battles manifestations from her own mind. There’s a great development diary on her character from publisher Ninja Theory, which basically starts with them saying, we heard people say that games with female leads don’t sell well but we’re an indie dev and we’ll do whatever the heck we want, thanks very much. Inspired by the recent discovery of a previously-unknown Celtic goddess, Senua, they’ve made her “a challenging female form: not sexy, not skimpy, not young, not skinny, yet stunning, compelling, and believable.” Flawless.

Overwatch

WoW developer Blizzard’s new PC game, Overwatch, is a team-based multiplayer shooter, and seems to be direct competition for Team Fortress 2. You’re restoring peace to a war-torn world, etc, but more importantly: ZARYA. When’s the last time you’ve seen a playable female character that looks like her? They’ve got something for everyone; besides tank Zarya, there’s assassin Widowmaker, reality-manipulator Symmetra (a WOC!), healer Mercy, big-gunner Pharah (another WOC!), and time-jumper Tracer. They’ve even helpfully created cosplay reference guides for each character!

Battleborn

You know the people who brought us Borderlands are going to create something excellent with Battleborn. A MOBA-style shooter that will feature twenty characters on release, the game is space-fantasy, set in a time where the universe is slowly being destroyed and all of its different species must come together to figure out what the heck is going on. Three of the ten current characters are ladies – inventor Pheobe, rogue Orendi, and archer Thorn.

Ashen

We don’t know much about this third-person indie survival RPG, but it follows your wandering character in search of a home. Exclusive to Xbox One and PC, this looks like a game worth following.

Call of Duty: Black Ops 3

We are no longer relegated to multiplayer! In the new Black Ops, you can completely customize your campaign character, including choosing to be a gal. In a preview for Gamespot, Chris Watters said, “According to Jason Blundell, the campaign director for Black Ops III, they took inspiration from the character of Commander Shepard in the Mass Effect series; a strong character can be a strong character without the world around them bending to accommodate their gender.” You don’t say.

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OED Word of the Day: monstre sacré, n. A striking or eccentric public figure

submitted by cy_sperling [link] [1 comment]

This morning, Swift wrote an open letter to Apple – on Tumblr – complaining about the company’s policy of not paying music owners when people try its upcoming Apple Music service for a three-month trial period.

Tonight, Apple media boss Eddy Cue appears to have capitulated. “#AppleMusic will pay artist [sic] for streaming, even during customer’s free trial period,” Cue wrote on Twitter

girlslug:

This is it. This is the only tweet I care about.

ewebie:

perchu:

razzliox:

perchu:

what rock group has four men that don’t sing

what

mount rushmore 

get out

Courtney shared this story from Super Opinionated.

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In the end, we spent more money than we had on the production of Sunset. Because we wanted to make it really good and reach a wider audience. Compared to the ambitions we had for the game, the extra $40,000 seemed like a relatively small sum. “Surely we can make that amount back in the first month of sales!”

We were wrong.

So far a little over 4,000 copies of Sunset have changed hands. That includes the copies for our backers on Kickstarter. That includes the sale. There’s barely enough income to keep our company going while we look for ways to raise the funds to pay back our debts.

It’s hard to deal with this intense feeling of disappointment in a context of glowing reviews and compliments and encouragement from players. A small group of people clearly deeply appreciates what we do and we curse the economic system that doesn’t allow us to be pleased with that.

Being wrong will set you free

• We studied successful games and applied our findings to the design of Sunset. And while the inclusion of certain conventions seems to have helped some people enjoy the game, it didn’t affect the size of our audience much.
• We spent a lot of money on a PR company who got us plenty of press, took some work and worries off our shoulders, and found us other marketing opportunities. But it didn’t help sales one bit.
• We even took out an advertisement on Rock, Paper, Shotgun, where we figured the people most interested in Sunset would be gathered. They must all use AdBlock because that had no effect whatsoever.
• We worked hard on presenting a gentler Tale of Tales to the public. Which basically meant that Michaël was forbidden to talk in public and Auriea often just smiled at the camera, parroting words whispered in her ears by communication coaches. Didn’t make a difference.

So now we are free. We don’t have to take advice from anybody anymore. We were wrong. Everybody whom we consulted with on Sunset was wrong.

We are happy and proud that we have tried to make a “game for gamers.” We really did our best with Sunset, our very best. And we failed. So that’s one thing we never need to do again. Creativity still burns wildly in our hearts but we don’t think we will be making videogames after this. And if we do, definitely not commercial ones.

Courtney shared this story from Super Opinionated.

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Newsweek is one of many outlets to report that Wikileaks' latest dump is a trove of Sony's company emails and other documents that consists of even more individual pieces than the 200,000-plus leaked in April. Included, says the Newsweek story, are "276,394 Sony Corp. communications, including email, travel calendars, contact lists, expense reports and private files." One interesting tidbit revealed by the documents thus revealed, spotted by Apple Insider, is that "Apple requested [from Sony] 4K content for potential digital distribution and on-demand services testing nearly two years ago, suggesting the company has been exploring ultra high-definition streaming for some time."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

gifsboom:

Spaghetti Eating Competition. video

shaylashaylala:

toonskribblez:

birbb:

i saw this on imgur and well, even if something like this is going around on tumblr already it is important.

link to imgur post

lemons - fun to watch their reaction to the bitterness

We have an lemon tree in our backyard and my dog is constantly running around with lemons in his mouth

NASA has released a new image sent back by the Cassini Spacecraft of Saturn’s moon Dione, and it’s a beauty:

Read more...

What will tomorrow’s solar panels look like? This week, along with colleagues from Oxford and MIT, I published a feature in Scientific American making the case for cheap and colorful solar coatings derived from a new class of solar materials: perovskites. In this post, I’ll critically examine prospects for commercialization of solar perovskites, building on our article’s claim that this technology could represent a significant improvement over current silicon solar panels. We argue:

Perovskites are tantalizing for several reasons. The ingredients are abundant, and researchers can combine them easily and inexpensively, at low temperature, into thin films that have a highly crystalline structure similar to that achieved in silicon wafers after costly, high-temperature processing. Rolls of perovskite film that are thin and flexible, instead of thick and rigid like silicon wafers, could one day be rapidly spooled from a special printer to make lightweight, bendable, and even colorful solar sheets and coatings.

Still, to challenge silicon’s dominance, perovskite cells will have to overcome some significant hurdles. The prototypes today are only as large as a fingernail; researchers have to find ways to make them much bigger if the technology is to compete with silicon panels. They also have to greatly improve the safety and long-term stability of the cells—an uphill battle.

We wanted to write for a popular science magazine, with a general audience in mind, to share an exciting story of scientific discovery that has largely been confined to specialist journals. Indeed, for solar perovskites to overcome the odds stacked against an upstart clean technology breaking into the market, we believe the academic, private, and public sectors really need to pay more attention to each other.

The lack of awareness by the clean energy industry about solar perovskites, despite the commotion in the scientific community, demonstrates how scientific research can proceed in a bubble. Following the big announcement of a highly efficient solar perovskite from our research group in Oxford, hundreds of laboratories around the world jumped on the perovskite bandwagon, in many cases abandoning their research into other solar technologies. The race among labs to publish record solar efficiencies in the top journals involved international intrigue—the UK banded with Italy, trading records with the Swiss-Chinese coalition, and everyone was eventually upstaged by the South Koreans when they reported a 20 percent efficient solar cell late last year (for reference, silicon solar cells have plateaued at 25 percent efficiency, a target solar perovskites should soon surpass). The excitement and drama reflect the gravity of the perovskite discovery—time will tell, but many of us believe this is the field’s biggest breakthrough since the original invention of the solar cell sixty years ago.

However, when I talk to industry executives at major solar manufacturers and developers, very few have even heard of solar perovskites. This does not bother scientists, many of whom narrowly focus on demonstrating a higher efficiency solar perovskite, even if it is a fingernail-sized cell that degrades in hours. Some might argue that a scientist’s value is in basic inquiry and complementary to industry’s expertise, and they have a point. But aloof regard for real markets from the ivory tower leads many academics to naïvely assume that a superior technology will naturally make the leap from prototype to profitability.

In fact, broader feedback from professionals outside of research labs is integral to commercializing solar perovskites. Currently, solar perovskites can be worryingly unstable (although we’ve demonstrated longevity if they are properly sealed away from moisture). That’s a red flag for investors familiar with a mature, 50 billion dollar silicon solar panel industry in which every panel comes with a 25-year performance warranty. And because solar perovskites contain lead, a toxic element, any commercial product will need to undergo extensive safety testing, with which private industry veterans have experience. These professionals can guide research into the stability, safety, and real-world performance of solar perovskites, which are every bit as important as the efficiency under idealized lab conditions, the paramount academic metric.

Elsewhere in the physical sciences, the transition from basic research to product development is better institutionalized. This is one of the reasons why I have argued that Moore’s Law for computer chips, which predicts rapid deployment of scientific advances, does not apply to the solar panel industry, whose products have improved at a comparatively plodding pace. Whereas in computer chip development there are established conferences at every step of commercialization from basic device physics to chip integration that bring together scientists and industry, advanced solar technology development is confined almost exclusively to the realm of academia.

Fortunately, leading researchers in the United States and Europe are making a concerted effort to bridge the gap between academia and industry. For example, one of my co-authors and the leader of the Oxford research group, Henry Snaith, founded a company to tackle real-world deployment and commercialize solar perovskites. His strategy is actually to partner with the silicon solar panel companies, adding a perovskite coating on top of silicon to boost its performance. That approach seems prudent, because allying with powerful incumbents is easier than fighting them for market access. And through a partnership, his company will benefit from gaining access to experienced solar engineers, investors, and developers to guide the design and delivery of a compelling product.

My co-authors and I do hope our article will bring professionals in the solar industry up to speed on the latest research, but our target audience is even broader. We envision architects reimagining the aesthetics and functionality of windows, roof shingles, and facades; policymakers tweaking green building codes and incentives; and the military investigating the use of solar perovskite coatings to power forward deployed bases. These applications may seem far-fetched, and they are—solar perovskites are still a risky bet to succeed in a monolithic market. But if scientists continue to broadly communicate our progress, those odds can only improve.

Read our feature, “Outshining Silicon,” in Scientific American’s July 2015 issue, here