firehose

Our helium supply is running out. When it goes, it won't just take our future technology, it could take all of our historical documents with it.

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Detail of the Giant Rail Map in Moskovsky Station, St. Petersburg, Russia

A view of this monumental map in its entirety can be seen in this previous post.

(Source: jimmyrtw/Flickr)

A fortnight ago, Benedict Cumberbatch dropped out of Guillermo del Toro’s Crimson Peak for undisclosed reasons that certainly have nothing to do with a secret race around the world, to begin on velocipede at Victoria Station and end before the clock chimes on Guy Fawkes Day. So, del Toro has been forced to staff his haunted house thriller with another English actor who inspires a passionate and often unsettling Internet fan base. Fortunately, Tom Hiddleston exists, so now the Thor actor will join Charlie Hunnam, Jessica Chastain, and Mia Wasikowska in the film we still don’t know much about—other than it definitely won’t have Benedict Cumberbatch, of course, seeing as he’s just now sailing over Frankfurt by dirigible. For those concerned about Hiddleston’s capability in replacing Cumberbatch, rest assured that “Hiddles” also has a bunch of creepy Tumblrs. 

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WHEATON, IL—Following 45 minutes of intense arguing and bitter protests, a heated screaming match between members of the Carroll family came to an end Thursday evening with a consensus to eat dinner at Macaroni Grill, household sources reported. The...

There’s a scene in a new Taco Bell TV commercial that shows a couple eating the fast food chain’s Fiery Doritos Locos Tacos in a place that looks a lot like Burning Man (though we suspect it might be a set). In the ad’s credits, an actor named Danny Dolan is credited as a “burner.”

images and video via iSpot.tv

Thanks Kevin Evans!

Dogs With Abs

le Bat

A determined and feisty sheep tries to teach a young bull how to headbutt in this video taken by MrLive123456 on Terceria Island.

via Say OMG

It’s always nice to be paid your “true value.” Venture capitalist Marc Andreesen says that is what is happening now in the technology industry, where some engineers are drawing multi-million dollar paychecks.

Andreesen explains it this way: A change in Google’s algorithms can sometimes be worth as much as $100 million in new revenue, so that easily justifies paying the best engineers “tens of millions of dollars.” Other companies are following Google’s example, with the result that highly-paid “superstar programmers” are not uncommon at California’s biggest tech firms. Andreesen calls it the “Kobe Bryant effect,” after the extravagantly paid American basketball player.

The observation lends further credence to the idea that gains from the knowledge economy are accruing only to a small group of extremely talented people. As MIT labor economist David Autor told American Public Media’s Marketplace last year, “Certainly, the labor market has never been better for very highly educated workers in the United States, and when I say never, I mean never.” Quartz’s Christopher Mims explored this in his March piece, “How the internet is making us poor“:

One thing all our machines have accomplished, and especially the internet, is the ability to reproduce and distribute good work in record time. Barring market distortions like monopolies, the best software, media, business processes and, increasingly, hardware, can be copied and sold seemingly everywhere at once. This benefits “superstars”—the most skilled engineers or content creators.

Of course, the trend also benefits consumers, who get better, cheaper products. But the consumers are also workers; in that role, they, too, get squeezed by such concentration of wealth.

wintesoldieriscoming:

Fake Geek Girl Myth: Busted (x)

anotherlgbttumblr:

kp-ks:

Book Burning Memorial

'In the center of Bebelplatz, a glass window showing rows and rows of empty bookshelves. The memorial commemorates the night in 1933 when 20,000 “anti-German” books were burned here under the instigation of Goebbels. There's a plaque nearby that says something like “Where they burn books, they will also burn humans in the end.” '

Interesting but rarely mentioned: most of the content burned that night came from the Institut für Sexualwissenschaft (institute for the science of sex) headed by Magnus Hirschfeld. The institute and Hirshfeld himself were some of the first to openly campaign for the right to have sex with someone of the same gender, the right to transition if you did not identify with your birth sex and for the general acceptance of queer people. The team had already performed the first SRS operations in Germany and in addition, the institute advocated sex education, contraception, the treatment of sexually transmitted diseases, and women’s emancipation.
Photographs of the night of the book burning are plastered across history books world wide, but the queer movement that was destroyed that night often goes unmentioned.

You owe A.C. Crispin a huge debt, whether you know it or not. As an author, she helped carve a space for women writing science fiction. She helped prove media tie-in novels could be great books in their own right. And she fought for writers to get treated fairly, with the indispensible site Writer Beware.

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magic thunder -

Deae Tonosama Appare Ichiban (Sunsoft - SNES - 1995)

During my trip to Gen Con 2012 I was able to meet a nice guy named Brent Povis with Two Lanterns Games.  Brent was a really nice guy and so was his wife, who taught my friend Jeremy and me the game. Morels is a two player game that has you going on a hike […]

(photo by Brandon Hunt)

What I’m about to say won’t come as a complete shock to those of you who read NCS regularly, but it may still be a challenge to wrap your mind around it:  Nick Vasallo, lead vocalist and songwriter for the excellent technical death metal band Oblivion, has a Ph.D. in Music, is a professor at Cal State Polytechnic University (Pomona), and is a composer of classical music whose works have been performed internationally.

But even if you knew all that, you may not know that one of Vassalo’s compositions, and the one that earned him his Ph.D., represents a collision of heavy metal and classical music, and then ultimately a synthesis of the two. The name of the piece is Black Swan Events, and later in this post you’re going to see and hear the premiere of a video of its performance in Berkeley, California, on August 17, 2013.

The integration of metal and classical music in this concerto goes well beyond the fact that it was written for electric guitar, drum set, and orchestra. The integration occurs at a much deeper level, as I’ll do my best to explain in a moment. But first, it may help to know where the title of the work comes from.

The concept of a “black swan event” was developed by Nassim Nicholas Taleb and described in his bestselling 2007 book The Black Swan. It refers to a kind of rare and unpredictable event with a major impact, and the tendency of human beings to find explanations and rationalizations after the fact, as if the event could have been expected. As Vasallo explains in his Ph.D. dissertation:

One of my primary goals with Black Swan Events was to create an environment where two worlds collide and become one. I wanted to treat the appearance of Heavy Metal (“metal”) as a surprising event that has a major impact upon the structure of the work. By the end of Black Swan Events, the world of “metal” – represented by the electric guitar and drums – becomes so prevalent and enmeshed within the orchestra that its initial arrival, in hindsight, no longer seems surprising. The relationship between these two worlds – metal and western art music – transforms from instability to resolution and synthesis.

I mentioned a moment ago that the composition represents an integration of metal and classical music at a much deeper level than you might be able to guess. Vasallo began the composition process by recording his own extreme metal scream, and then he used experimental computer software to analyze the musical spectrum of the sound. Using that information, he then developed musical chords to mimic the scream’s spectrum, looked for patterns in the chords, and then used them to construct musical motifs that appear throughout Black Swan Events.

Many composers want their own distinct “voices” to speak through their music. Vasallo did that literally.

Vasallo also collaborated with Oblivion guitarist Victor Dods and incorporated his input into the development of the collection of musical motifs. On top of that, Vasallo developed the metal style in the piece further by including representations of nearly every element of virtuoso guitar playing that appears in metal, and he based portions of it specifically on techniques practiced by Eddie Van Halen.

Metal was not the only “black swan event” that Vasallo incorporated. The work also includes references and allusions to Neurosis, George Crumb, J.S. Bach, Kanye West, Igor Stravinksy, György Ligeti, Beethoven, and the concept of spectralism — because one of Vasallo’s principal goals was to compose a work that contained a multitude of styles and yet produce something that was highly unified.

This is a very compressed explanation of what went into the composition of Black Swan Events, and I hope I haven’t screwed it up. You can get all the detail you could desire by perusing Vasallo’s Ph.D. dissertation, which can be found here.

Because it’s so rare to see someone in a metal band with Nick Vasallo’s level of study and training in music history, music theory, and classical composition, I asked him what keeps someone like him interested in a pretty extreme form of metal. He answered as follows:

“There are certain things people fall in love with and carry with them forever. Some people get really into brewing beer. Others fall in love with oil painting. I am infatuated with the sound of extreme metal. There is something dangerously beautiful about the sonic amalgamation of electric guitar distortion, blasting drums, and overdriven vocals. What keeps me interested is creation. As long as I continue to create new sounds I will always be interested in extreme music.”

I also asked him whether there is anything he finds in common between classical music and extreme metal that has led both of them to be such important parts of his life. He gave this answer:

“There are many things in common between classical and metal music. For a more in depth response to that question, you can read my paper “Dark Reflections: The Disregarded Parallels Between Classical and Metal Music” here: http://nickvasallo.com/#!papers/ccca

“I think what makes both of these forms attractive to me is their complexity. This doesn’t necessarily mean the music has to be extremely difficult or technically dazzling, but the sonic possibilities of each style can be very complex. For instance, there is a lot of information in the sound of a distorted electric guitar. Just sustaining a drone note. There is power in there. I see and hear the same textural complexity in Ligeti or Varèse.

“Something else they have in common is that they both lie on opposite ends of the musical spectrum. On one end you have high art classical music, in the middle you have popular music, and on the other end there lies extreme music (subculture folk music). I tend to gravitate towards extremities and my musical inclinations are a good example of this.”

And now, on to the music itself. As promised, what you’re about to hear is a performance of Black Swan Events that occurred on August 17 at The Crowden Music Center in Berkeley, California. Victor Dods performed on the guitar, Vasallo’s Oblivion bandmate Luis Martinez was behind the drum kit, and the orchestra included roughly a dozen classical performers from the Bay Area. The orchestra was conducted by David Waugh, and the video was directed by directed by Brandon Hunt and Taylor Rankin. The music was produced and recorded by Nick Vasallo and was mixed and mastered by Zack Ohren.

Needless to say, I think the very idea of setting out to do what Vasallo did in creating Black Swan Events is metal as hell, and the music itself is fascinating. It’s discordant and vibrant, soft and droning, very complex and at times very simple, and ultimately I think Nick Vasallo succeeded in finding a synthesis in the power of all the seemingly divergent styles that are interwoven in this piece.

And holy shit, Victor Dods can really play some guitar!

I hope you enjoy Black Swan Events as much as I have.

http://nickvasallo.com/
https://www.facebook.com/nickvasallomusic
https://www.facebook.com/OBLlVlON/
http://obtainoblivion.bandcamp.com/track/reclamation-2

Designed with our modern times in mind, the Omni Consumer Products that is the studio franchise machine gives you the new RoboCop—an update of the 1987 Paul Verhoeven model, created primarily for an audience who never liked that movie anyway. Gone is that cumbersome social satire that took precious time from scenes where RoboCop shoots at people, replaced by a more streamlined, barely-visible hint of commentary on drone warfare. The new RoboCop is an action machine with a soul—just like RoboCop himself, now that he’s been modified from a dead guy whose brain was implanted into a cyborg, to a guy (played by The Killing’s Joel Kinnaman) who was just burned really, really badly, then given a kickass metal suit. Along with the general lack of gore, this new RoboCop will fulfill all the Prime Directives of PG-13 filmmaking.

“We’re gonna put a man inside ...

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The drumbeat of leaks from the White House this summer has made clear that former US Treasury secretary Larry Summers is the Obama administration’s leading candidate to be the next chairman of the Federal Reserve. But that may all be over now that three key liberal senators—Elizabeth Warren, Jeff Merkely and Sherrod Brown—have said they won’t vote to confirm him.

The problem for Summers is that US president Barack Obama’s Democrats have only a two-seat majority on the Senate Banking committee, and without the votes of those three members, Republican senators will have to fill the gap. While there are several, including top Republican Mike Crapo, who haven’t voiced an opinion, they aren’t inclined to do the administration any favors.

Summers is hypothetically a centrist choice for the position, given his pragmatic record, but his work on the Obama administration’s economic policies has put him in direct conflict with the current crop of Republicans. Though Fed vice chair Janet Yellen, the other top candidate for the position, is perceived as more dovish, she doesn’t have Summers’s talent as a lightening rod for controversy and would likely gain the full backing of the committee’s Democrats.

Many Republicans have been critical of the measures the Federal Reserve has taken since the crisis to stimulate the economy, making them reluctant to support any of Obama’s Fed candidates. Winning over even one vote may require promises the White House (or the future nominee) doesn’t want to make, at a time when it will be asking for votes on several controversial issues. If the administration is forced to rely on Democratic votes, it may have to turn away from its likeliest pick.

The opposition from Warren, a law professor at Harvard when Summers was president of the university, is particularly notable. After the financial crisis, Warren became the most important advocate of a new consumer financial protection agency, working with Summers and other administration officials to write it into the Dodd-Frank financial reform law. But Summers would ultimately oppose her nomination to head the agency permanently, just one of the grudges progressives hold against him.

Ironically, for Warren, who is happily known as a scourge of Wall Street, she happens to be siding with the banks on this one. Judging by informal surveys and market actions, the financial sector seems more supportive of Yellen than Summers.

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Generation gap ⊟

It sometimes takes my nephews a few seconds to realize that not all games have a touch interface, too. Credit to Hiltusori and Miki800 for the pic.

PREORDER Pokemon X and Y, official strategy guide, upcoming games

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Writer and illustrator Adam Ellis creates detailed construction paper hats for his adorable three-legged kitten Maxwell. For more photos of Maxwell in colorful, fashionable hats, check out Ellis’ Instagram.

images via Adam Ellis

via The Daily Dot

New York Daily News

Ariel Castro describes abduction during FBI interrogation NBCNews.com In video obtained of Ariel Castro's FBI interrogation, the now deceased kidnapper of three Ohio women describes the chilling details of their capture and how he came close to getting caught on several occasions. NBC's Kate Snow reports. Share This:. TODAY's Takeaway: Castro tapes, miracle babyToday.com Volunteers at Ohioan's home after captor's suicideDeseret News Report: Ohio Kidnapper Called Victim's MotherMonroe Evening News Las Vegas Review-Journal -The Week Magazine all 232 news articles »

Is it wrong that I want to see the entire opening from Zero Wing redone in high-res?

This is kind of a mantra for me, something I repeat a lot when I get caught up in the technicalities and artisinal aspects of game design. Understanding players and in so doing figuring out how one can provide what they need through your design is an incredibly important part of growing as a designer. Doing that is what this article is all about! It’s a pretty complex topic and it can’t be done quickly. Nevertheless, I’ve summarized as best I can in a TLDR that, in itself, is probably TLDR. I should note that I am a pretty ecumenical designer and so this article is written in broad terms so it can be applied to videogames, tabletop games, board games, social spaces etc. This means it’s sometimes a little vague in terms of direct examples, but I hope that the shell argument is clear enough that you’ll be able to apply the profiles provided to your particular area of interest.

In Letters from Whitechapel, a team of detectives scour the streets of Victorian London, searching desperately for the depraved murderer known as Jack the Ripper. It’s a lot like the classic '80s board game Scotland Yard, but with more bloody murder.

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Zombie stories aren't going away, and our research suggests that more are coming. This chart shows the number of zombie movies that came out in the West each year since 1910. There are definite spikes during certain periods, which always seem to happen eerily close to historical events involving war or social upheaval.

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