firehose

Comedian Sam Hyde, of the group Million Dollar Extreme, was able to fool organizers of the TEDx event at Drexel University into thinking he was a journalist who had just returned from Mogadishu, and they let him conclude the conference with his piece "The 2070 Paradigm Shift." ... Regardless of its effectiveness, people on YouTube enjoyed it, posting comments like "he is the next Nostradamus" and "Brilliant Speech!" As for Hyde's reason for doing it? He told Philadelphia magazine, "I don't think TED talks are cool. I don't want it to sound too sanctimonious, but I think [TED talks are] really self-congratulatory."

Original Source

freeindie:

Hmm…

Hacking computers has become commonplace in video games. The subversive activity has worked its way into countless games, even those where it doesn't belong (really, TMNT?). Hacking in games is generally a vague abstraction of the real thing. You hold a button as a progress bar slowly fills, rotate panels in a thinly-disguised version of Pipe Dream, or maybe you connect circuits in a diagram.

Quadrilateral Cowboy, the latest from Thirty Flights of Loving developer Blendo Games, takes a drastically different approach to computer infiltration. You aren't just pressing buttons or solving a mini-game; you're actually typing in code. Want to turn off a security laser? Easy, just type "laserX.off(Y)" into your portable hacking deck, where X is the designated number of the laser and Y is the number of seconds it will remain off.

Sure, it's still an abstraction of the real thing, but hacking in Quadrilateral Cowboy requires a bigger investment in both time and forethought than most espionage games, and pulling off a flawless hack is thrilling.

Continue reading Quadrilateral Cowboy invites you to hack the planet (or a hallway)

Quadrilateral Cowboy invites you to hack the planet (or a hallway) originally appeared on Joystiq on Fri, 11 Oct 2013 16:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Official Map: Tri-Rail Commuter Rail, Southern Florida

I’ve had a couple of requests to review this one, so here goes…

For me, this map is an excellent example of the overwhelming averageness of a lot of transit mapping here in the US. Yes, it does the job – you can work out how to get from here to there and where to make connections – but it’s just so completely bland and unmemorable.

Everything about the map seems to be completely generic, from the stock ESRI icons for airports and connecting services to the dull and tired Arial used for the labels. The beige background and thick, heavy black route line don’t help matters either. This is Florida here: how about some bright, sunny colours?

For me, the Tri-Rail logo itself suggests that the lovely blue in the central icon could be used as the colour for the main route line – the orange and green have already been used for the connecting Metrorail services, so why not continue with that colour theme and leverage the service’s branding a little more?

Speaking of the Tri-Rail logo, its placement in a white box within the blue header bar is awful – either reverse the logo out in white (if corporate standards allow) or put it on a light background. Similarly, the Interstate and U.S. Highway markers look odd when they’re contained in a white square.

A note regarding labelling: consistency is hugely important to produce an attractive map! Labels for the Metrorail services use all sorts of different sizes – “Douglas Road” is absolutely tiny compared to the other stations for no apparent reason. The names of the three counties that give Tri-Rail its “tri” are almost completely unreadable – light grey against a green/beige background and they also have a little offset drop shadow effect behind them that further obfuscates the text. Yes, this is subsidiary information, but it still needs to be readable.

On a more positive note, it’s nice to see that the map at least attempts to integrate services from different transit agencies, something I wish more maps that serve a large region would do.

Finally, examination of the PDF seems to suggest that this map was at least output from Microsoft Publisher: not a first-choice map/diagram design tool.

Our rating: Bland, dull and forgettable. Could easily be so much better and evocative of the area it serves. One-and-a-half stars.

(Source: Official Tri-Rail website - PDF link)

Also see the similarly dull and unattractive Miami-Dade Metrorail map (Aug. 2012, 1 star). Florida doesn’t inspire great map design, apparently.

Gabriel Whaley has figured out that if you send an iOS 7 user an iMessage containing a GIF of the animated text-in-progress icon, it looks like you’re composing a message to them…forever.

via Gizmodo

image via Gizmodo

	rachel shared this story from The Atlantic Wire:
	I totally read this headline as being about humorless feminists on Wall Street.

---

For a brief moment on Thursday afternoon at New York Comic Con, a group of women there to talk about women in comics talked instead about Wall Street. They pointed out that the male-dominated financial industry was closing the gender gap better than what's going on in mainstream comics. 

"I took a look at the numbers and said 'Wow Wall Street does a better job,'" said Amy Chu, publisher and founder of Alpha Girl Comics. After Chu, who holds an MBA from Harvard, let loose with that revelation, fellow panelist Becky Cloonan chimed in with her own number-crunching, noting that around 40 percent of attendees at New York Comic Con are women. "But just 6 percent of the special guests are women. We have to work on this," Cloonan said. 

Those two observations about women in the comics industry punctuated an afternoon of discussion about how far women working in the comics industry need to go before a "Women in Comics" panel isn't necessary. Women — as Chu, Cloonan, and their fellow panelists, creator Erica Schultz and librarians Claudia McGivney, Megan Kociolek, Emily Weisenstein and Laura Pope-Robbins will tell you — have come a long way in comics, closing the gender gap in the independent comic industry.

But in the creative departments at the Big Two, Marvel and DC, they still have a way's to go. The Los Angeles Times reported in 2012 that women were still a minority at those two companies. The reality, then, is that strong female characters like Wonder Woman, Storm, and Rogue aren't being written and helmed by wonder women. 

The real-life struggles for women to make their mark in the mainstream comic industry come against the backdrop of Sheryl Sandberg's popular "lean in" mantra. And these battles show that higher-ups don't seem invested in marketing to young women despite the success of young adult novels like The Hunger Games and its iconic heroine Katniss Everdeen. Cloonan said she had written and pitched a series aimed at women in college and older. "We don't know how to sell it," came the inevitable response. 

The hope for women like Chu and Cloonan is with youth. Because of technology and digital comics, there's been a democratization of the industry. Going to the comic book store isn't necessary anymore, and the intimidation factor is gone. And that's in turn allowed girls and women to read more.

Women make up some 20 percent of the digital comic readership, Comixology, a digital comic platform, reports. What's more, that number has quadrupled since Comixology first came on the scene in 2007. What female creators are banking on is that these women will inevitably grow up, will hopefully not stop reading, and maybe, just maybe, eventually make the industry more balanced than Wall Street. 

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Frank Horvat


Frank Horvat


Frank Horvat

Life begins at the hop

charminglyantiquated:

Classic and Reverse harpies, mermaids, centaurs, and nagas

as a species we have this habit of tacking human faces onto animals and when you think about it, it looks kind of stupid, but it looks even stupider backwards

so

The Twitter parody account is an art form already past its prime. There was a time when these accounts were fresh — we see you @InvisibleObama — but the genre quickly grew tired.

And then there’s @Vice_Is_Hip. It burst on the scene last month with the bio “we’re cool because you’re shit” and a too-close-to-home parody of Rupert Murdoch’s favorite “outlaw” media company for hipsters. The conceit is simple: tweet outrageous headlines that could just maybe be actual Vice stories. Since then, it has churned out nearly 500 hilarious tweets that have garnered it 25,000 followers and coverage in New York Magazine, Ad Age and The Independent.

Digiday asked its creator, who wishes to remain anonymous, for his take on Vice, why he turned down a job there and what we should headline this article.

What was the impetus of the account?
My friend said, “Someone should do a Vice parody account on Twitter,” and within two minutes I’d started @vice_is_hip.

Are you in media?
I’m a bike courier in London.

Do you read Vice?
I would probably read Vice if I came across a copy, yes, depending on who was looking.

What’s the most Vice article you’ve done?
It doesn’t get anymore Vice than when I simply RT the actual Vice feed.

Rupert Murdoch recently invested in Vice and extolled it as “wild.” Has Vice become a bit of a parody of itself?
I think they might actually be serious, and that’s frightening.

Your tweets often have similar features: 1. drugs; 2. exotic locations; 3. celebrities. Is there a formula?
The formula is “What would Vice think?”

Have you spoken to Vice about the account?
The Dutch version of Vice picked up on it after a couple of days. They ran an article about the account and offered me a job.

Did you take the job?
Ha ha! I didn’t accept, and I wouldn’t work for Vice.

Did you write these tweets beforehand, or do you do them as you go?
I just make them up as I go.

Is it just you?
No, there is a second tweeter involved. We’ve known each other years but never meet.

What’s been your personal favorite of the tweets?
The one about Morrissey in the quicksand and the meat rope? That was the other guy. His tweets kill me everyday.

What’s a Vice-like headline we could use for this piece?
They’re worse than drug-dealers, pimps and rapists put together! Ten reasons why people that run parody accounts are ruining the Internet for everyone.

Original Source

FX has already cast Martin Freeman, Billy Bob Thornton, and Colin Hanks into the cold for its Fargo series, but the show based on the Coen brothers’ film is really filling up its cast, as there are slightly more than three people in the North Dakota/Minnesota area. Indeed, there are at least 11 more, as the network has announced the addition of Bob Odenkirk as Deputy Bill Olson of Bemidji, MN; Sordid Lives’ Allison Tolman as his “younger, smarter, more ambitious” fellow deputy; Oliver Platt as “Stavros Milos, the Supermarket King of Minnesota;” Private Practice’s Kate Walsh as a former stripper and mother to twin boys; It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia’s Glenn Howerton as the awesomely named “Don Chumph,” a personal trainer; Ramona And Beezus’ Joey King as the daughter of Colin Hanks’ Duluth deputy; A Serious Man’s Peter Breitmayer as Hanks’ superior officer; Tom ...

Read more

Meem is 9 years old and works as a sewing helper in a garment factory. For a few days this summer, she was also my boss.

Though Detroit has recently been looking like it was hit by a convoy of mile-wide firenados, there remain signs of architectural grandeur illustrating why it was once known as the Paris of the Midwest. Perhaps nowhere is this faded beauty more palpable than in the large-format photography of Philip Jarmain, a Vancouver native who's spent three years shooting Detroit's sublime edifices, sometimes just months before they were wiped out by bulldozers.

Jarmain may be from Canada, but he has century-old family ties to Detroit and extreme respect for the place. "At one point this was probably the most important city in the world in terms of innovation, craftsmanship, and manufacturing," he says, adding that one of his childhood heroes was Henry Ford. "It was just such an incredible city in the early 1900s, and obviously things went horribly sideways at some point."

When the 41-year-old advertising photographer started hearing disturbing rumblings in 2008, he decided to venture south to document the city's Art Deco and Neo-Classical past before something horrible happened (well, even more horrible than the riots and urban decay). So he hooked up with local historian Sean Doerr of Buildings of Detroit fame, and set out to locate what he calls the "iconic Detroit architectural masterpieces" hidden in a crumbling labyrinth of 80,000 to 100,000 abandoned buildings.

The Lee Plaza

The search became more urgent when he realized many of his subjects were being eliminated by demolition crews trying to reduce the city's expensive-to-maintain footprint (not to mention what he thinks were bored youngsters setting off fires). "It's just sad because it is so beautiful, it has some of the best examples of early 1900s architecture of any city in North America," he says. "Also, it probably rivals Baghdad in terms of burnt-out structures."

While many photographers have rushed to stricken Detroit, lured by the so-called "ruin porn" that attracts sightseers to the wastelands of Chernobyl, Jarmain's mission is a bit different. He wants to preserve these venues with as much accuracy and detail as possible, so that future generations can look back in wonder about how bright the city shined. For that reason he lugs around a sophisticated, Dutch Cambo technical camera and German-engineered Schneider lenses. "These images are 5 feet by 7 feet," he says. "It's the best camera system out there."

Highland Park Police Station (demolished 2012)

The fruits of his nine trips into Detroit now hang on the walls of San Francisco's Meridian Gallery for the show "American Beauty: The Opulent Pre-Depression Architecture of Detroit." The exhibit focuses on the more ghostly and rotted-out carcasses in his oeuvre, although some of what he photographed has since been rehabbed into functioning spaces. Jarmain points out that several start-up companies have also invested in Detroit, including the luxury-watch company Shinola, a designer of an electric Tesla-like vehicle called the SP01, a nouveau-vintage bicycle maker, and others.

"Despite all the hype about the bankruptcy, for the first time in 50 years Detroit could come back," he says. "So I'm an optimist."

Belle Isle Aquarium

Woodward Presbyterian

Michigan Central

Mackenzie High School (demolished 2012)

The German House

The Farwell Building

Top image: Eastown Theatre. Photos used with permission of Philip Jarmain

It’s still unclear whether Deion Sanders will be prosecuted for allegedly assaulting an employee at Prime Prep Academy. It is clear that Sanders has been fired by the charter school Sanders co-founded in 2012.

Cruz is betting that his supporters are too stupid to notice that his strategy is failing and was doomed to fail. He's probably right.

it showed the Eagles with Vick winning the NFC East at 8-8

Several threads on the Apple Support Communities forum are reporting random reboots on the iPhone 5s while using Apple's iWork apps, with the issue being signaled by the brief appearance of an all-blue screen naturally being compared to the famous Windows "Blue Screen of Death" (BSOD). The issue was reported by iPhone in Canada last month but has been gaining significantly more attention today after being picked up by The Verge.

As shown in videos posted by users, the issue may appear when a user simply opens a document in Pages or another iWork app and then closes the app by pressing the home button on their device. Double-pressing the home button to enter multitasking mode can also trigger the issue. Users in the threads are also reporting random reboots during regular device use, which also may be caused by a number of reasons specific to the device.


Users have reported that the error can be temporarily fixed by turning off iCloud syncing for Apple's Pages, Keynote and Numbers apps, but that fix does not appear to address the other random reboots on the device. Apple released iOS 7.0.2 last month with a fix for a lock screen passcode bypass issue, and was said to be seeding iOS 7.0.3 internally as of last week, but it is unknown if it will contain a fix, or whether Apple will deploy updates to its iWork suite of applications to remedy the problem.

Earlier today, a study showed that apps running on the iPhone 5s are crashing twice as frequently as on the iPhone 5c and iPhone 5, with the new 64-bit A7 chip and M7 motion coprocessor presumably adding wrinkles that may be causing some apps difficulties.

Hyper Light Drifter is coming to Wii U ⊟

It’s also coming to PS Vita! So at least it will be on one handheld. Heart Machine will also release this to other platforms like PlayStation 4, Mac/Linux/Windows, and Ouya, if you prefer playing on those things. It looks like a great game — you can get a copy for just $15 if you throw a pledge at its Kickstarter, which ends in a day.

I grabbed these GIFs from PaulloDec, theveryscaryrollie, and the official Kickstarter page, and also threw in an awesome fan-made animation from Anthony Holden.

BUY Wii U, PS Vita, upcoming games

The 7th annual HONK NYC!, a celebration of global street music, takes place in New York City, October 15 to 19, 2013. The festival will feature marching bands and other street ensembles from the U.S., Brazil, and England. Festival organizer Sara Valentine is raising funds for the festival on Kickstarter. HONK NYC! is a spin-off of the HONK! Festival of Activist Street Bands, which takes place October 11 to 13 in Somerville, Massachusetts.

photo via Honk NYC!

ThinkProgress says that Republican Arizona State Representative Brenda Barton stuck her foot in it on a Facebook post complaining about parks being closed during the shutdown:

Barton minced no words, calling Obama “De Fuhrer [sic]” and urging local sheriffs to arrest park rangers who enforce rules keeping people out of National Parks that are closed due to the federal government shutdown...Asked about it by the Arizona Capitol Times later that day, Barton stood by her Adolf Hitler analogy. “He’s dictating beyond his authority,” she explained.

Yesterday, Barton denied the whole thing, releasing a statement that indicated she wasn't calling Obama Hitler, she simply "used the German phrase for emphasis, Der Fuhrer." Uh huh.

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I’ll be speaking at GDCNext on this, in the future of gaming track.

Playing with ‘Game’

Raph Koster  |  Designer, Independent

Location: Room 515 B

Date: Tuesday, November 05

Time: 11:15am-12:15pm

Track:Future of Gaming

Discipline:Programming & Architecture

Never mind the future – the present of games is quickly carrying us well beyond the classic understandings of what a game is. We’ve got gamified restaurants, psychological self-help tools, immersive narrative experiences, quasi-gambling experiences, political statements and more. Along the way, we’re seeing conflicts between subcultures in our audience, and within our development community as well. Players get mad when a title isn’t what they expected. Developers watch the encroachment of business practices they dislike. Designers try to apply the tools of one genre to another, and find they don’t always work. Is “game” even a thing? And if it is, in what ways do these varied approaches relate to one another? In this lecture, we’ll take a look at a craft-centric approach to the question: what do we make, who do we make it for, and how can we best make what we want?

Takeaway

Attendees will learn about a framework for thinking about varied types of interactive experiences and the four types of problems that make for compelling play. They will also take away practical design checklists and techniques for these different approaches: top five tips for narrative experiences, ludic experiences, coercive experiences and so on.

This isn’t the same thing as the blog post of the same name — though some of that material will be the first few minutes. Instead, it’s an attempt to synthesize understandings coming from different quarters about what games can be and what they can mean, and how they can be and mean. I am sure that there will likely be some stuff in there to annoy people from every faction!

Most importantly, though, I want to focus back in on craft. Craft seems like it is often the forgotten root of all these approaches. Whether you are trying to make games that are personal, pure experience, narratively centered, systemically driven, emergent, linear, abstract, or Dadaist, there is always the how underlying it all. And “how” is interesting, because there’s what works for you the creator, and what works for a given audience, and in a very real sense, as creators we don’t get to quarrel with what the audience likes or accepts. It is always up to them whether to listen to what we have to say.

So this talk is going to be about how as much as I can make it… about the raw tools that might help a designer in their goal of making either a polished AAA experience or a raw emotional outpouring.

Hope to see you there!

Attention automakers: You’re doing it all wrong when selling your hybrid cars. Those Toyota commercials featuring R&B singer Raphael Saadiq and hipsters grooving in a Prius V? Not your market. At least yet.

Car companies have long pitched their rides to the young, but the biggest buyers of hybrid cars in the US are the 60-plus set. A forthcoming study from researchers at Baylor University in Texas gives some clues as to why. The “baby boom” generation, the report’s authors point out, controls about half of consumer spending in the US, and their tastes are distinctly green.

The researchers surveyed 314 buyers of hybrid cars from Toyota, Ford and Honda who had an average age of nearly 70. More than two-thirds of those surveyed had an income of more than $50,000 a year and nearly 90% held university or post-graduate degrees.

The study found that these buyers most valued the pride and prestige of driving an environmentally responsible car, as well as price and quality. Driving excitement did not play a part in their satisfaction (just as well, since most hybrids aren’t exactly road rockets.) In other words, older drivers are more concerned about being seen in a car that screams green than one that screams down the highway.

“Elderly consumers are identified as more inclined than young people to engage in pro-environmental behaviors,” Jay Yoo, the study’s lead author and an assistant professor of family and consumer sciences, told Quartz in an email. “But emotional value may not be relevant in buying green products if the emphasis is more on the consumers’ responsibility.”

Yoo noted that today’s older consumers came of age during the height of the environmental movement in the 1970s, and for some the propensity to pay more for products perceived as green, whether it’s organic food or a $30,000 car, has been baked into their purchasing habits.

That suggests carmakers should tweak their marketing: less Raphael and more Rolling Stones, for one thing. And emphasize the greener-than-thou psychic benefits of buying a hybrid. And keep hyping the fuel savings.

That said, don’t completely ignore the younger generations. While the offspring of the baby boomers may be a paler shade of green than their parents, their children are coming of age in the age of climate change. “Today’s youth will become more pro-environmental as they get older, at the same time, they will earn more money to afford to pay [for] those green products,” Yoo says.

There is one automaker that can probably safely ignore the study. While hard numbers are hard to come by, anecdotal evidence and statements by Tesla Motors chief executive Elon Musk indicates that buyers of the Silicon Valley company’s sporty Model S electric car skew younger and wealthier than the average Prius hyper-miler. Speed, it seems, can still trump saving the planet.

Though his identity was shrouded in secret in the art presented to convention attendees attending its All-New X-Men panel at New York Comic Con, Marvel Comics' website has revealed the recipient of X-23's affection.

New York Daily News

Adrian Peterson's tragic week ends with loss to Panthers USA TODAY MINNEAPOLIS — Minnesota Vikings star Adrian Peterson said he never considered sitting out Sunday's game against the Carolina Panthers, even after the 2-year-old son Peterson went to visit in the hospital Thursday in Sioux Falls, S.D., passed away Friday ... Adrian Peterson explains why he played after son's death [VIDEO]Daily Caller Peterson met son for first time after beatingNew York Post Adrian Peterson Update: NFL star talks about 2-year-old son's death after ...CBS News FanSided -CBS Local -DesMoinesRegister.com all 1,397 news articles »