firehose

Cosmic Star Heroine is a blatant homage to 90s-era roleplaying games with one key difference: Instead of playing the part of a plucky young boy cast into epic adventure, players assume the role of blue-haired secret agent Alyssa L'Salle.

"Alyssa L'Salle is one of the galactic government's top agents and always manages to save the day," states the game's official plot description. "But when she accidentally uncovers a dark conspiracy, her own government outs her as a legendary spy and the people's champion!"

"Sure, now she has hordes of adoring fans but every villainous organization she's ever crossed in her career knows who she is and is out for her blood! Can she save the day once more while she faces her greatest challenge... Everyone!?"

Developer Zeboyd Games is best known as the studio behind the third and fourth installments of Penny Arcade's On The Rain-Slick Precipice Of Darkness. With 29 days remaining in Zeboyd's Kickstarter effort, the game has attracted $7,075 of its $100,000 goal. Assuming this fundraising drive is successful, Cosmic Star Heroine is slated to make its debut on the PC, Mac, PlayStation 4 and Vita platforms at some as yet undetermined point in the future.

Cosmic Star Heroine pits female lead against classic RPG gameplay originally appeared on Joystiq on Tue, 01 Oct 2013 16:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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by goworkat

Obama snuck the tech giant into the Obamacare fight on Tuesday afternoon, trying to drum up a little patience from Americans as his administration grapples with a glitchy rollout.

Viz Media is making its entire digital manga catalog available for download on Amazon Kindle devices, meaning readers will be able to access more than 1,500 volumes from 160 different series. Launch titles include Naruto, Bleach, One Piece, Bakuman, Demon Love Spell and Magi: The Labyrinth of Magic. New volumes, generally priced at $6.99 each, [...]

You know those vacations where you say you're not checking your e-mail, but everyone knows you're lying? Well, when federal employees go off the grid, they mean it.

As some US government websites have gone dark during the shutdown, others remain up, and some are up but have notices saying they’re not being updated. It seems like there’s no rhyme or reason to these decisions. So what’s the deal?

“It’s that you need people to run them,” a former White House budget official says. In a shutdown, non-essential personnel are sent home, and that includes IT employees. In other cases, websites are managed by outside contractors who can’t get paid without Congressional approval, so those sites, too, go dark.

Basically, until Congressional funding is restored, it is illegal to do anything that would give someone an excuse to ask the government for money when it re-opens—and that includes hosting fees and electricity bills. And the varied responses underscore how confusing and messy it is when the government has to stop usual operations on a dime.

Exceptions are made  to protect health and property; if the agency has a stream of funding separate from Congress; if its duties are constitutionally-mandated (like national security); or if pulling down the front-end website would jeopardize vital back-end functions. Here’s how the top White House budget official put it in her guidance (PDF) to agency heads:

The mere benefit of continued access by the public to information about the agency’s activities would not warrant the retention of personnel or the obligation of funds to maintain (or update) the agency’s website during such a lapse. However, if maintenance of the website is necessary to avoid significant damage to the execution of authorized or excepted activities (e.g., maintenance of the IRS website may be necessary to allow for tax filings and tax collection, which are activities that continue during an appropriations lapse), then the website should remain operational even if its costs are funded through appropriations that have lapsed. If it becomes necessary to incur obligations to ensure that a website remains available in support of excepted activities, it should be maintained at the lowest possible level. For example, in the IRS case above, the IRS website would remain active, but the entire Treasury Department website would not, absent a separate justification or a determination that the two sites cannot not feasibly be operated separately.

So, in some cases, government websites simply aren’t being updated, because the people who do that aren’t at work. In other cases, websites are just shut down. Systems administrators could decide that the risk of something going wrong when they can’t fix it—whether hackers or simply a bug—isn’t worth taking. Many federal IT employees will be focused on maintaining internal data-centers with a skeleton crew, not worrying about public-facing sites.

And in some cases, of course, political appointees and outgoing employees want to make sure that everyone knows a government shutdown is happening to make sure it ends sooner. That might be why some of them have thrown up unhappy splash screens or pulled down websites.

The Zombie Cribbage card game is an undead version of the classic Cribbage game created in the 17th century. This brainy game is available to purchase online from Firebox.

The game comes complete with a zombified deck of playing cards (yes it’s a word) and instead of your standard bland cribbage board and pins you’ve got an open cobbled street and a rabble of gormless staggering zombies (you know, to remind you of precisely what’s going on outside).

images via Firebox

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Our favorite collection of weird object-related puns on comic book characters is back. BANE-Ana has been defeated, but now Batman Shampoo must face Wolverlisterine, who is confused and...Australian?  Just watch it. Previously in Batman Shampoo

I didn't have any specific reason to feel anything more emotional than neutrality on Ben Affleck being cast as Batman before. But now... now. Summon the armies of the Pink Wedge.

© Cyril Porchet


© Cyril Porchet


© Cyril Porchet


© Cyril Porchet


© Cyril Porchet


© Cyril Porchet

Houses of the Holy

hodad

Someone’s gotta put a positive spin on all the rape, hazing, and death threats!

@5starsinfortgreene

To the Dartmouth community,

I am pleased to share the news of the appointment of Thomas W. Bruce as the
senior vice president for public affairs. Tommy, who is currently vice
president of university communications at Cornell, will assume his new role at
Dartmouth in November.

Tommy brings significant communications and public relations experience in
higher education, government, and private companies. He is an adept strategist,
thoughtful leader, and effective consensus builder.

His energy and expertise will help advance the College's national and
international reputation through an integrated approach to communications.
Tommy will report directly to me and oversee Dartmouth's functions in media
and public relations, creative and editorial services, web and new media,
marketing, and government relations.

See the full announcement below for additional details.

Best regards,
Phil Hanlon
President

Original Source

Does your skin get really itchy when you run, bike, or lift weights? If it does, you could suffer from a physical allergy that causes you to itch when you exercise. Greatest allergy ever? Sure, maybe – unless you've got the version that makes it miserable to even climb stairs.

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I flew back to MIT recently for the GNU 30th Anniversary Celebration and Hackathon, thanks to a generous travel scholarship from the Free Software Foundation. All I had to do was never, ever run any proprietary javascript in my browser and something something something about firstborns. Seemed like a net win.

The hackathon itself was fun. I spent most of it teaching people about privacy-enhancing tools like GnuPG and realizing that privacy-enhancing tools are intimidating, even to MIT computer science PhD students. Bad user interfaces are astonishingly powerful, and nothing cripples the human spirit like a poorly-written manpage.

I also gave a short talk to about ~30 undergrads titled, “Things you should be afraid of that you probably didn’t know about.” The alternate title was, “Useful self-preservation tactics in surveillance states.” The alternate alternate title was, “On the possibility of preserving student culture at MIT.” I admit I was trying to get more people to show up on a Friday night.

The problem was that, after an unexpected adventure in NYC the day before followed by an untimely laptop battery failure, I had barely twenty minutes to prep for the talk. So I went for a short run around the Charles River and formulated some thoughts. They went something like:

1. Surveillance is bad. Do MIT undergrads care? Or are they still trying to implement metacircular evaluators in Scheme?
2. DO NOT LET PEOPLE GIVE INTO CRYPTO-NIHILISM. Show them that we can only fight what we know.
3. Privacy, if it actually exists, must belong to a community. Privacy that belongs to individuals is necessary but not sufficient.
4. Ethical choices are painful and often ambiguous. Say you’re the CEO of a company that makes a groundbreaking app that reduces vehicle emissions by 90% in the US. In order to do so, you need to collect data on where everyone’s cars are located at all times. Then one day the government puts you in a position where your choices are to either (secretly) give them years and years of private user data or let the company shut down (and lose all your money). What do you do?
5. Imagine if the MIT administration wiretapped all student communications on the Internet and forced every mailing list to contain an administrator. Imagine the student response. Now imagine the same situation at the national scale. This is a useful exercise to brainstorm realistic ways of fighting problems that seem too large and abstract for us to think about at first (ex: mass unchecked government surveillance).

To my surprise, the talk went over rather well. People asked lots of excellent questions, like what kind of tinfoil hat to buy. Phew.

Another thing that has come up a lot on this trip is the idea of having a career. As much as I feel uncomfortable about it sometimes, I can’t help but admit that the topic of What To Do In Life has been on my mind lately. The annual MIT Career Fair was a week ago, a bizarre anti-celebratory festival during the first week of classes where hundreds of companies try to recruit students by giving them free Rubix cubes. This year, one courageous sophomore wrote an opinion article in the school newspaper about how the Career Fair is useless for inspiring faith in the student population’s ability to give a fuck about problems other than making cool-but-also-profitable technology and making hella cash.

Obviously this is a thorny issue wrapped in questions of whether the author has properly normalized for her own privilege (she probably has) and if large tech companies like FB/Apple/Google are already doing the maximal amount of good for humanity that they can while remaining profitable (they probably aren’t), BUT it was still surprising that most critical comments essentially said: “Stop looking down on other people / some of us need to make a living / not all corporations are completely evil.” Multiple commenters accused the author of “entitlement”, which seems like a ridiculous term to cast as an insult (aren’t we all entitled to pursuit of happiness?).

Disliking the percentage of commenters who were unfairly bashing on the author, I wrote an uncharacteristically optimistic comment for someone who doesn’t have a consistent job:

This post was entirely justified and necessary. (Minus the fact that Quizlet probably doesn’t deserve to be on that list, as RJ pointed out.)

A number of the criticizing comments here have argued that companies like Apple and Facebook, on their way to making massive profits, ultimately spawn technologies that do good for the world; furthermore, even MIT students need to support themselves day-to-day regardless of their greater goals. But I think a salient counter-argument is that MIT grads can and absolutely must hold themselves to a higher standard than what these companies represent.

What I am implicitly saying is that (1) there are greater problems that humanity faces than how to get people to trigger certain javascript callbacks that generate ad revenue, and (2) people with the intellect and stamina to lead technological revolutions have a near-moral responsibility to solve these greater problems. The fact is that most MIT graduates can find a job and figure out a way to support themselves in most circumstances, which means they have a rare privilege among young people: the ability to take on great risks and be okay if they fail.

In practice, a dismayingly small percentage of MIT graduates use this privilege for tackling the hardest and most valuable problems of our generation. Climate change is a fine example, given that the lower limit of the time it’ll take for atmospheric methane to collapse the global economy is on the order of decades.

Even those of us who work as software engineers and tech CEO’s usually fail to address the question of whether we are making technology for a world where knowledge is free and accessible to everyone, or a world where governments and corporations can freely intrude on the private communications of every single person. Too often, we generate technology that is groundbreaking and astonishing without conscientiously addressing their potential to destroy civil liberties and strip away basic human rights. We can and must exert more pull over the ethical consequences of our innovation.

It is absolutely our moral responsibility to try to make the world we want to live in.

I really hope I didn’t make all of that up.

“Men who want to be feminists do not need to be given a space in feminism. They need to take the space they have in society & make it feminist.”

- Kelley Temple, National Union of Students UK Women’s Officer  (via lunagemme)

It is with great personal pride and relish that I announce the release of two new Adobe font families for Indian languages. Adobe Tamil and Adobe Gujarati were both released over the weekend, bringing the number of Indian writing systems supported by the Adobe Type Library to a total of four. Each of these families consists of two styles: a regular and a bold. The designs have been completed with print work in mind, as traditional publishing is still very much a vibrant industry within India. These new type families follow the release of two other Adobe type families for Indian languages, Adobe Devanagari and Adobe Gurmukhi, which have already been available for some time. All of these families are currently available for purchase in the Adobe Type Store.

Adobe Devanagari was the first of Adobe’s Indian font families, and was designed for Adobe by the team at Tiro Typeworks beginning in 2005. The design was conceived by Tim Holloway and Fiona Ross, Tim being the principal designer of the artwork in collaboration with Fiona and supported by John Hudson. The construction of the letters is based on traditional penmanship but possesses less stroke contrast than many Devanagari types, in order to maintain strong, legible forms at smaller sizes. To achieve a dynamic, fluid style the design features a rounded treatment of distinguishing terminals and stroke reversals, open counters that also aid legibility at smaller sizes, and delicately flaring strokes. Together, these details reveal an original hand and provide a contemporary approach that is clean, clear and comfortable to read whether in short or long passages of text. This new approach to a traditional script is intended to counter the dominance of rigid, staccato-like effects of straight verticals and horizontals in earlier types and many existing fonts. The family consists of regular, bold, italic, and bold italic styles. The font supports modern Hindi and Marathi languages, and also contains some features to enable basic setting of Sanskrit. The fonts were released with Creative Suite 6 in the spring of 2012.

Also in 2012, I was tasked with initiating a program to develop an extended set of fonts for Indian languages. Adobe has been continually improving enablement for Indian languages in our creative applications since Creative Suite 6. The Creative Cloud versions of InDesign, Photoshop, Illustrator, Dreamweaver, Flash, and Acrobat all support the top 10 languages of India. We on the type development team have made it part of our mission to provide high-quality typographic families to showcase these new language capabilities. We decided we would first focus on designs optimized for print to support our desktop publishing applications. Therefore, I reasoned that it would be prudent to develop a set of design-compatible fonts that would pair well with the existing Adobe Devanagari typeface. In approaching this objective, I have attempted to guide designers with whom we have worked to try to harmonize important parameters such as apparent size and color and to try to match style and design details as much as is appropriate.

The first project to follow after Devanagari was Adobe Gurmukhi, which I designed collaboratively with Vaibhav Singh in 2012. Professor Christopher Shackle and John Hudson consulted on the design. The concept for this family was to follow the design principles of the Devanagari and to develop a type style for text setting based on Gurmukhi broad-nibbed calligraphy. This treatment is a departure from the more popular monoline type styles that are in circulation today. The rationale behind this approach was to reintroduce some of the attractiveness of modulated letterforms to Punjabi text typography while retaining letter shapes familiar and legible to today’s readers. The design features some more cursive letter constructions than are the norm, but I have attempted to draw these in a way that they do not draw attention to themselves.

Adobe Tamil was designed by Fernando Mello. Fiona Ross and Rathna Ramanathan consulted on the design. In contrast to the broad-nib pen construction pattern evident in the Devanagari and Gurmukhi, Tamil letter shapes are based on the effects of a pointed pen. Despite this difference in ductus model, the design harmonizes well in terms of a contemporary approach to styling. A defining feature of this particular design is the upright stance of the Tamil letters. Whereas many available Tamil fonts are sloped in style, Adobe Tamil follows what is typical in penmanship. The default text shaping favors the simplified, modern orthography, however, the fonts also include stylistic sets that can be used to emulate more traditional writing.

Adobe Gujarati was designed by David Březina of Rosetta Type. Fiona Ross consulted on the design and valuable feedback was provided by Kalapi Gajjar-Bordawekar and Hitesh Malaviya. As with the Gurmukhi, the brief for the Gujarati was to follow the design language established by Adobe Devanagari. In fact, the Gujarati and Devanagari writing systems resemble each other in many ways with the notable feature of Gujarati being that it lacks the headline that is such a prominent component of Devanagari.

The current versions of all of these fonts have been produced in-house by Adobe’s type development team using the Adobe Font Development Kit for OpenType. I completed the main portion of OpenType feature development for the Gurmukhi, Tamil, and Gujarati. Miguel Sousa provided scripting assistance and aided in mastering of the final font files. Miguel also produced the latest versions of Adobe Devanagari to add better support for Marathi typographic preferences.

With these most recent type releases, the Adobe Type Library now has basic coverage for five of the top 10 languages currently used within India. Typefaces for additional writing systems and more type styles for some of the scripts listed above are also currently under development. Our end goal is to be able to offer a full range of type options for all of the Indian languages our applications support, and with today’s milestone release, we are well on our way.

Deltron 3030’s long-delayed sophomore album, Deltron Event II, picks up nearly a century after the group’s self-titled 2000 sci-fi concept album left off, and things have only grown worse in their dystopian future. A catastrophic bank crash has set off interplanetary wars that have wiped out entire civilizations, and the survivors live among the nuclear fallout in meager shanties, where they’re easily preyed upon by roving bandits and, just as often, their own government. 

The years since Deltron 3030 haven’t been nearly as bleak for the real-life team behind the project, but they haven’t exactly been boom times, either. Though he’s issued a steady stream of independent releases, rapper Del The Funky Homosapien hasn’t had a hit, commercial or critical, since the Gorillaz single “Clint Eastwood.” Producer Dan The Automator has experienced a similar dip in his own stock, as the kind of ...

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Bill Nye, who tore 80% of his quadricep last week, was told not to participate in last night's Dancing with the Stars. But he did anyway, performing a Daft Punk-inspired robot dance with Tyne Stecklein that required him to move his injured leg as little as possible. The duo won't be returning, but they left the stage to chants of "Bill! Bill! Bill!"

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We've seen Smaug's scaly grin, now hear the voice Benedict Cumberbatch crafted for Peter Jackson's The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug in this brand new trailer, plus a whole lot of new footage.

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Without Their Permission: How the 21st Century Will Be Made, Not Managed is a newly released book by reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian in which he shares his experiences with entrepreneurship and technology. The book is currently available to purchase online at Amazon, and Ohanian will be touring the country to promote Without Their Permission for the next several months.

As Alexis Ohanian learned when he helped to co-found the immensely popular reddit.com, the internet is the most powerful and democratic tool for disseminating information in human history. And when that power is harnessed to create new communities, technologies, businesses or charities, the results can be absolutely stunning.

In this book, Alexis will share his ideas, tips and even his own doodles about harnessing the power of the web for good, and along the way, he will share his philosophy with young entrepreneurs all over the globe.

At 29, Ohanian has come to personify the dorm-room tech entrepreneur, changing the world without asking permission. Within a couple of years of graduating from the University of Virginia, Ohanian did just that, selling reddit for millions of dollars. He’s gone on to start many other companies, like hipmunk and breadpig, all while representing Y Combinator and investing in over sixty other tech startups. WITHOUT THEIR PERMISSION is his personal guidebook as to how other aspiring entrepreneurs can follow in his footsteps.

image via Without Their Permission

The new movie “Gravity” is the closest most of us will ever come to going into space, and that may be for the best. Unfortunately, with all this verisimilitude, there is a hole in the plot: a gaping orbital impossibility big enough to drive the Starship Enterprise through.