firehose

Enjoy the finer things in life, but don't like searching for them? Enter Bespoke Post. They find the most interesting products for men and deliver them to your doorstep monthly. Awesome indeed.

tastefullyoffensive:

[s-r-h]

archatlas:

My Side Your Side Pillow Cases

Zimmerman was stopped and ticketed on Tuesday in the town of Lake Mary for driving 60 miles per hour in a 45 mph zone, Lake Mary police officer Zach Hudson said. The ticket carried a $256 fine and three violation points against his driver's license.

Diesel, whose sturdy commercial appeal is proven again and again with the huge success of the "Fast & Furious" franchise, is always fun to watch. But his presence alone, comfortably durable as it is, can't make up for the total lack of other interesting characters in the screenplay by David Twohy, who also directs. Alas, that includes Katee Sackhoff as the lone female, a feisty bounty hunter named Dahl. The name sounds exactly like Doll, which is basically her role; she's pretty but has no interesting backstory or dialogue, save one profane comeback sure to draw hearty cheers.

Cumberbatch is in talks to play Percy Fawcett, who in 1925 headed into the depths of the Amazon jungles in Brazil. Fawcett was there to map the jungle and, hobbled by malaria, he discovered a mythical city he called The Lost City Of Z. Scorned by peers who claimed that this ancient kingdom was a fraud, Fawcett headed back into the jungle with his son and one other, braving the dangers of disease, insects, snakes, poison darts and other hazards to reinforce his discovery. None of them were ever seen again and it remains one of the great exploration mysteries of the 20th Century.

Oh god Portland City Council. You're bawwing about opportunities, addiction services and transition. Here's a thing, MAKE HOUSING AFFORDABLE. When condos are going up for $1 per square foot, making it so (if you take financial advice) your rent is 1/3 of your income, you need to make 6,000 a month to afford a two bedroom, you have a fucking problem. Since our city is full of awful low paying jobs and people are underemployed, no one can afford them.

But hey, let the developers tear down cheaper property so these mystical people who make 72,000 per year and aren't buying houses can rent something and totally miss any opportunity to provide for the under employed who make the average 40,000 year. While you're at it, let the same developers buy property and rip the leases from under long standing businesses to provide for hip ice cream shops and overpriced sushi. OH WAIT.

But hey that might break into your kickbacks and shady coding practices.

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Making video games is what Felipe Falanghe always wanted to do. Unfortunately, that's not what his job was at Squad, an interactive marketing company in Mexico City, Mexico. Squad was responsible for creating multi-media installations to sell products from Samsung and Nissan to the Mexican market.

So one day, in early 2011, Felipe approached his bosses and told them he wanted to make a game. "And it completely blew me away when they just said, 'Okay,'" Felipe told me during a meeting at PAX Prime. "I didn't believe them at first," he added, but his bosses were serious: If he brought them a good idea and a solid business plan, he would be free to go for it.

This is when he wrote the design document for Kerbal Space Program, a sandbox space flight simulation game that has been quite successful since its launch through the Steam Early Access program in 2011. Felipe has been lead developer ever since.

Continue reading The atypical story of Kerbal Space Program's indie flight to success

The atypical story of Kerbal Space Program's indie flight to success originally appeared on Joystiq on Wed, 04 Sep 2013 17:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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djempirical

#modelapology

First and foremost: I’m sorry.   I don’t want to bury the lede here.

But let me back up for people who don’t know what I’m talking about..

A few days ago on Twitter, I posted these two things in quick succession:

1) My son got a Transformer for his 5th birthday and named him “Tranny.”

(The above was 100% true. But then in a minute, I followed up with:)

2) I’d MUCH rather have my son playing with a Tranny-the-Transvestite doll than anything associated with Michael Bay.

I got an avalanche of very angry messages immediately after that, saying that the term “tranny” is a super-offensive term to trans people.  And that I was a [many expletives].

Let me admit it upfront:  I had no idea.  I thought the term was a shorthand for more accepted terms — maybe not the most reverent, but certainly not all that offensive.  I assumed it became offensive only in context, when used with malicious and even violent intent — when clearly meant to hurt and belittle.  In those two tweets above, the first seemed like an amusing bit of reportage of what my kid actually said.  In my mind, the second one was mostly a slam on Michael Bay.  But the more I look at the second one, the more I see how it’s not that simple.

I was surprised by the reaction.  Some of the stuff coming my way was nasty, but hey, it’s the Internet.  The much more important point is: I did a bad job responding.  I apologize.  Even though I stand by my general analysis about the dilemma of offensiveness in comedy in “part one,” well… man, a lot of that was disingenuous in its details. I conveniently conflated this incident with a much more minor one on Twitter a few days before (an incident which I might follow up about sometime soon, but really, the comparison was not appropriate, like apples-and-aircraft carriers).  Also, my analysis was shot through with snottiness that I wince at, reading now. That little bunny seems like a real jerk now.

I was puzzled and angry when I wrote it.  (I’m not, anymore.) I’m leaving it up there as an honest record, but I wish I’d taken a few deep breaths first.  Maybe a few days’ worth of deep breaths.

Now I have.  And I took this seriously enough to ask some trusted friends about this — friends whose values I admire, whose sense of humanity is pretty unerring, and who I knew would be dead honest with me.  They were, damn it.   My heartfelt thanks to them and everyone else who gave me a gentle lesson in what the hell was going on here.

I also did a lot of research, not only about the nomenclature but about the science (my old friend!) of it all, and about the appalling level of violence against trans people.  I understand a LOT more than I did a week ago.  Still a relative noob, but much, much more informed than a few days back.

I won’t use the word again.  

It can be challenging for people in comedy and art to find better ways to do what we do, and avoid hurting people who don’t deserve to be hurt.  But that’s my problem to solve, not anyone else’s.

I want to make people laugh, and occasionally think, and maybe — wow! — both at once.  I want to have fun doing it.  It may always mean being irreverent, skeptical, absurd, even indulging quite a bit of cynicism and sarcasm.  But I never want to depend on continually kicking people who are already down to do what I do.   I’d rather find another line of work entirely.  (Bowling alley attendant comes to mind, since that might have been my last honest job before getting all artsy-fartsy and comedyish.)   

I want to stand on the side of humanity.  I want to be humane, even when being a goddamned wise-ass.  There’s no tried and true path through this, but it’s really worth trying to find it.  I want to make people laugh, not feel shitty about life.  ”Leave the world a better place than you found it.”  A twisty task for someone in comedy, but others have shown that its not impossible.  

I’m not sure why I had no idea that term was so red-alert powerful.   The best answers I can muster: it might be generational, and that people 20 years younger than me are much more aware.  Maybe this is like watching MY parents face gay and lesbian issues, or my grandparents fumble their way through racial stuff, saying awful things all the while.  (Though I should say that some of the other feedback I got on my two tweets, from people significantly younger than me, makes me wonder about that.)

An equally likely answer is that I really don’t know any trans people — no close friends, no family members that I know of.  The one and only trans person who I knew well was someone at a regular AA meeting I used to attend.  We are both there to recover from addiction, and [no name: anonymous, y’know*] was an inspiration: she’d been physically abused by family for years, was pulling herself out of drug and alcohol addiction, and was doing it with an amazing amount of dignity and cheer, considering what she’d been through.  She was a person vital to helping ME recover.  We no longer live in the same city, and so have lost touch… But the thought of causing her further pain in life breaks my heart.  

In apology, and to honor my friend, I am donating $100.00 to the Anti-Violence Project in New York, where I grew up. 

Thank you for your time.  

Bill

[* Re AA: in case people outside the program don’t know, “anonymous” only means you don’t betray the anonymity of others.  You’re allowed to say whatever the hell you want about yourself!  Maybe the subject of a future post for me, but first a whole bunch of my normal goofy junk. Thanks.]

Original Source

	Courtney shared this story from Tiny Subversions:
	If you get enough tequila in me, I will tell you all of my "nightmarish things said to me by various board members of the IGDA" stories.

---

For nearly three years, I served on the Board of Directors of the International Game Developers Association (IGDA). I ran in the elections for the IGDA board because in 2009 I really believed in their mission, and I believed that as an organization it could improve the lives of individual game developers everywhere.

Three years later, in March 2013, with three days left in my term, I resigned: partly because of this debacle, but also because I simply couldn’t take it anymore. It has taken me months to collect my thoughts and feelings about the IGDA into something that I hope is coherent. Here it is.

“Fiduciary responsibility” and the status quo

During my board member orientation in March 2010, the absolute first thing I was told was that as a board member, my primary duty was my fiduciary responsibility to the organization. It seemed reasonable at the time: don’t spend the organization’s money irresponsibly, right? This is standard operating procedure for nonprofits in the United States, yet it’s an incredibly fucked up concept — particularly when it’s considered more important than the actual mission of the organization.

Here is the problem: fiduciary responsibility as a number one priority means that the most important thing for the organization is the continued existence of the organization. This means that any action we could take as an organization that carried any sort of significant risk of us losing a chunk of members (or god forbid, our corporate sponsorships) would be immediately shot down by a majority of board members with some variation of the refrain, “My fiduciary responsibility to the organization prevents me from supporting this.” What this translated to: anyone with an agenda that promoted anything but the status quo would be heavily challenged. Even something relatively innocuous like, “Instead of pointing out bad studios to work for, let’s highlight some good studios to work for!” was cause for alarm because it would surely alienate a never-specified number of people whose memberships we couldn’t stand to lose!

Enforced austerity

A helpful analogy is the enforced austerity that groups like the IMF impose upon countries that agree to massive loans. Austerity is the means that the IMF uses to impose a set of values on a country and force it to go in a direction it was not intending to head. For example:

Turning for credits to the IMF in 1975–6, [the UK's Labour government] faced the choice of either submitting to IMF-mandated budgetary restraint and austerity or declaring bankruptcy and sacrificing the integrity of sterling, thus mortally wounding financial interests in the City of London. It chose the former path, and draconian budgetary cutbacks in welfare state expenditures were implemented. The Labour government went against the material interests of its traditional supporters. (David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism)

By continuously repeating that fiduciary responsibility is the primary responsibility of a board member (rather than doing things that are on-mission for the org), the IGDA Board lives in a state of internally-enforced austerity. Even when we have extra money, that money is either saved rather than spent, or it is spent on maintaining the status quo. Financial stability is always chosen over the material interests of the individual developers the IGDA is supposed to represent.

The IGDA website is a good example. Traditionally the IGDA has offered forums or a big shitty enterprise CMS / social network that supposedly helped members but was always just a mess and a resource drain. We’d been putting off fixing the website for years because we didn’t have the money, and then one year we did have the money, thanks to careful cost cutting and corporate sponsorship and membership drives and other things. So someone brought up: we have some money now! Can we fix the website? I proposed nuking the site completely and replacing it with a simple blog. A (relatively) radical move, and one that would piss off some members, but one that would save us money and energy that could be spent on making changes in the industry rather than maintaining a website.  Instead, the board voted to have a subcommittee create a proposal to overhaul the website, maintaining most of its original, bloated functionality, and trying to find a contractor that would do good work for the amount of money that we had set aside. Because heaven forbid we upset the status quo! We would rather spend money to not scare off members (who are considered long-term income) than save money and possibly lose some members in the short term. Even when the latter might cause us to gain members in the long term by using that money to create effective programs to help workers.

Know when to let go

The moral basis for all of this is the theory that an organization that exists can do more good in the world than an organization that does not exist. But that is a flawed assumption. Because the IGDA exists, when workers start to grumble about organizing, corporations can point to the IGDA and say, “You already have an organization. Be happy.” When workers start to talk about unionizing ¹, corporations can point to the IGDA and say, “Join that organization instead.” If workers complain that the IGDA is not effective in advocating for developers, those in power can say, “But have you tried to make it better yourself? It’s community-run! Have at it!”

The worst thing is when someone joins this organization and starts to spend their energy trying to make it more effective. They don’t know when they come in that the IGDA’s number one priority is and always has been its continued existence, full-stop. It provides an energy-sink so that young people (like me when I was 19 and first joined the org) can waste their time on pointless bullshit when really they should be spending that energy on organizing labor and other forms of activism.

What I’m saying is: if the IGDA disappeared tomorrow, 1) there would be a vacuum that could and probably would be filled by other, better orgs, and  2) the amazing and wonderful volunteers whose energy keeps the IGDA running could put that energy into those organizations, or into their own solo activist projects. If the IGDA disappeared, conditions for workers would not change materially, and in the long term, these conditions might even improve since energy would no longer be spent on an org that is structurally unable to engage in collective bargaining ². Given the current state of the IGDA, by buying into the idea of “fiduciary responsibility” to the organization as their primary duty, board members are working against the interest of the individual developers who pay dues. Better to just close up shop and deliver a prorated refund to people for their remaining memberships.

I want to be perfectly clear so that people understand my present position as a former member of the IGDA Board of Directors: I believe that it is in the interest of game studios and publishers ³ for an association of workers like the IGDA to exist in an ineffective state in order to drain the energy of people who could otherwise do effective pro-developer activism and to provide a straw man that can be pointed to in order to show that organizing will get us nowhere.

It is the fiduciary responsibility of IGDA board members to ensure that the organization continues to exist, but it is the moral responsibility of IGDA board members to ensure that it does not.

An apology

Because I have nowhere better to put this apology: to the people who elected me to the IGDA Board, I’m sorry that I was unable to enact much change during my tenure. I found it exhausting to go up against the refrain of austerity again and again. By the end of the second year of my term I was basically checked out. I should have resigned right then. I actually tried to resign on a couple occasions, but on each occasion another Board member convinced me that I could do some good by staying on the Board. Then I’d put some effort in, hit the same brick wall, feel like shit, and mentally check out again. I truly wish I’d been stronger.

As a fake mailman living in the future, sometimes it’s funny to me what you people in 2013 freak out about. Ben Affleck as Batman? He actually ends up being okay. Not great, but definitely better than Kilmer or Clooney. But man, you guys are going to completely lose your shit in 20 years when Kim and Kanye’s kid North West gets the part.

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Wicked Local Brookline reports a terrified resident dialed 911 when she heard a gang of turkeys pecking at her windows:

She was concerned they would break the glass and get inside the house.

Because, you know, it's happened before.

Original Source

Playing > Winning: The Alpha Player Problem:

jtreat:

There’s some debate regarding the legitimacy of The Alpha Player Problem. Some say it’s the biggest problem with cooperative games and they won’t play any that exhibit it. Others say it’s not a problem with the game, but with the group, and that you shouldn’t be playing any games with the kind of…

OnlyMrGodKnowsWhy

Are you a reader? A student of America’s founding? Interested in book history? We have an app for that. And we would love to show it to you. But a funny thing happened on the way to the App Store: Apple has rejected it, multiple times. Our attempt to produce an app designed to let readers interact with facsimiles of rare documents — in this case, the first printed editions of Thomas Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia, his only full-length book — is a story of great frustration for us, but, we hope, can be a cautionary tale for others who are thinking about the possibilities of developing educational and scholarly material for the iOS and the iPad.

Notes on the State of Virginia was originally written as a response to a questionnaire given to representatives of all of the American colonies by the Comte de Marbois, the French legate to the Continental Congress, in 1780. Most of the other responses to the questionnaire, which asked straightforward questions about each colonies’ chief products, geographical features, legal structures, and so on, seem to have been short and to the point, almost perfunctory. But Jefferson being Jefferson–a polymath with an obsessive streak and a deep love of his native state–Virginia’s response was amazing: a booklength compilation of facts and figures that provides an extraordinary record of early America’s natural, philosophical and political history. Like many works, the Notes went through several stages: there is a manuscript, now at the Massachusetts Historical Society, that became the basis of the first edition. This was printed in a limited edition in Paris in 1785 while Jefferson was serving as the United States’s ambassador to France. The book was more formally “published” in 1787 in London by the bookseller John Stockdale, and it is this edition that is the basis of all modern versions of Jefferson’s book.

The idea behind our app was a simple one: we wanted to enable users–who we imagined as scholars, students, and general readers–to compare images of unique copies of those two early print editions of Jefferson’s Notes: a copy of the 1785 Paris edition that Jefferson presented to the Marquis de Lafayette, and Jefferson’s own copy of the 1787 Stockdale edition. These copies are among the treasures of the Special Collections Library at the University of Virginia, which was founded by Jefferson, and where we both teach in the Department of English. Jefferson’s copy of his own book is particularly interesting, because it includes hundreds of changes in his own handwriting that he made to the book over the course of the next few decades, some of which were quite substantial. While most of these emendations were incorporated in editions of the book published after Jefferson’s death, the physical object itself is locked away, a restricted library holding.

We imagined the tablet environment as a uniquely powerful surrogate for readers interested in Jefferson‘s second-, third-, and nth thoughts, who could study marginalia and at the same time access–with the swipe of a finger–a modern annotated reading text that would put the work in its context. We got a small amount of funding, the (enthusiastic) permission of the University Library to use high-resolution images of their treasures, the assistance of a splendidly capable graduate student in our department, and a local developer, Performant Software Solutions, who understands the humanities and immediately grasped what we hoped to accomplish. We edited and annotated the text, and transcribed all of Jefferson’s annotations; meanwhile Performant came up with a clever interface that allowed the user to scroll rapidly though collated page images and to swipe between the various states of the text. We knew from the outset that this would fall well short of a scholarly edition, but imagined that our app could be a good test case for using the tablet environment to put original documents in the hands of students and general readers. We planned to issue Notes for free.

But when we submitted the app to Apple for approval, it was turned down. Why? The reason the App Review Team gave (again and again) was that our app was “simply” or “just a book” (their words), and that it therefore had to be formatted in Apple’s iBooks Author program in order to be distributed through the iBookstore. We decided to play along and make a good-faith effort to convert our app into an iBook, only it doesn’t work. We cannot reproduce all of the features of our app–including some of the ones that we think the app needs to be useful to anyone–and for reasons no one has been able to explain, the iBooks Author file seems to expand well beyond the maximum size for an iBook (currently 2 GB). We’re stuck with an app that does just about everything we envisioned, that has impressed the many people to whom we have shown it on our own iPads, that does something that no app or printed book out there does–but that Apple won’t allow to be listed in its App Store. So, yes, it is possible to download an app called “Burp and Fart Piano” that does pretty much what you’d expect such an app to do, but a free, edited edition of Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia that lets you compare Jefferson’s and Lafayette’s own copies and to zoom in on Jefferson’s handwritten corrections? No dice.

Which is of course Apple’s prerogative. Apple has control over both its App Store and its iBookstore, and gets to decide what goes into each and why. Our hunch is that Apple has decided to define “book” narrowly in order to populate the iBookstore with as much unique content as possible as a way of competing against Amazon and Google. But this remains just a hunch because Apple does not say what its criteria are for deciding that a piece of software with a significant textual component is primarily a “book,” and how that would differ from a piece of software with a significant textual component that it would define as an “app.” And it also presumably has the right to change its mind at any time, as its perceived business interests change. Unlike scholarly peer review, Apple’s review process is a closed and binary one: you’re either in or you’re out, and feedback is minimal. It was probably a failure of imagination on our parts not to have considered this possibility, but we were inspired by apps such as TouchPress’s wonderful edition of T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, which Apple–for reasons only it knows–classes as an app. There’s no small amount of irony in the fact that none of these digital entities is a “book” in anything other than a metaphorical sense, but on the frontier of tablet computing, a book is what Apple says it is.

We’re still convinced that tablets let readers interact with texts and other documents in ways that laptops and desktop cannot match. And sales of tablet computers are now overtaking sales of desktops and laptops; they are going to be a growing part of the digital ecosystem over the next decade at least. But that world is currently dominated by Apple, which decides what content can be distributed through the iOS. (It is true that many things can be done through the Safari browser, but software architecture of the iOS makes “the app” by far the most flexible and fastest means for organizing and retrieving data.) And as long as the process for getting material into the iOS remains opaque and inscrutable, we cannot encourage others to think about expending time and effort on developing for it, however enticing the prospect of putting scholarly work in the hands of an iPad owner might be. We’re game for suggestions for ways to get this app over the hump with Apple.

In the meantime, we’re looking for a programmer who can help us port our app to Android.

Photo is a screenshot of John and Brad’s iPad app of Notes on the State of Virginia. Courtesy of Brad Pasanek.

Original Source

The big news in France is that president François Hollande was caught with a dumb-looking grin on his face. It’s not so much the photograph itself that has enthralled the country but that the news agency responsible for it, Agence France-Presse (AFP), now wants the image to disappear.

Hollande was in the northern province of Denain, leading a discussion on changes to the public school schedule. AFP’s Denis Charlet was the “pool” photographer assigned to take photos on behalf of all news organizations covering the event.

A few hours after distributing the photo in question, which can be seen under the red “X” above, AFP emailed subscribers to say it had been withdrawn. “Please remove it from all your systems,” the notice advised.

The removal raised eyebrows because AFP, like many French news organizations, receives government subsidies. An estimated 40% of its revenue comes from the French government. But in a blog post about the issue (link in French), AFP said, “We have not been subjected to any pressure.”

AFP said it removed the photo because its policy is “to never distribute an image that gratuitously ridicules people.” It also noted that a separate photograph, below, was published by AFP and hasn’t been removed. In that photo, also by Charlet,  Hollande looks almost—but not quite—as silly. You can judge for yourself below. By the way, the text on the blackboard says, “Today, it is the start of the new school year.”

In what promises to be our last, great hope to rally that fractured and dispirited nation, Bill Murray is headed to Afghanistan—though fortunately for Murray, only in a movie. The Hollywood Reporter says that Murray is reteaming with Scrooged writer Mitch Glazer and director Barry Levinson for Rock The Kasbah, the story of a “a burned-out music manager who goes to Afghanistan on the USO tour with his last remaining client. When he finds himself abandoned, penniless and without his passport, he discovers a young girl with an extraordinary voice, who stows away with him back to Kabul to compete on the popular television show The Afghan Star, Afghanistan’s equivalent of American Idol.” The Sharif, one presumes, doesn’t like it.

What with its story of an entertainer adrift in a foreign land, finding a new lease on life through a chance meeting with a young girl, it ...

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"Spartacus" actress Cynthia Addai-Robinson has been cast in "Arrow" and is set to appear during the CW drama's second season as Amanda Waller of A.R.G.U.S.

Harry Knowles's Ain't It Cool News helped inaugurate the modern era of film fan sites. With its enthusiastic reviews, its incredible scoops, and its roster of talented film writers, Knowles helped create the template for a lot of what fans read on the internet today (including the film site I currently work for). While AICN has fallen on hard times as of late, it's still going strong with boatloads of readers.

Recently, Knowles has taken to Kickstarter to try to raise money for his web series, "Ain't It Cool with Harry Knowles." That show aired on the Nerdist network for 30 episodes but was turned down for a follow-up season, so Knowles is now hoping his fan base will kick in some cash to keep the dream alive. I have a lot of thoughts on the show itself and its viability as an ongoing concern, but that's not the focus of my post today. Instead, I wanted to highlight how Knowles' Kickstarter project reveals one of Kickstarter's major flaws.

When Knowles posted on his website about the Kickstarter, he was inundated with comments, the vast majority of which were nasty and vitriolic. That Talkback thread has now spawned over 16,000 comments, a massive number even by the site's standards. The top-voted comment reads partially as follows: "WHY SHOULD ANY ONE FUND THIS? The 'first season' was just a vanity project for you - all about you, starring you, about you and your fabulous toys which you have and no one else does and we're supposed to envy you. Any guest who came on who had accomplished more than you from humble roots you shit on."

On a fundamental level, it's fascinating that so many people who are regulars on Ain't It Cool seem to vehemently hate the person who created it all. The Kickstarter talkback is a murderer's row of users who have built up a lot of bitterness and resentment for what appears to be decades. The high asking price on the Kickstarter project is just their latest excuse for unleashing a verbal beatdown on Knowles. Reading through the comments, it's difficult not to feel bad for Knowles, despite the potential veracity of the accusations hurled at him.

I was also struck by another realization. To my knowledge, Kickstarter has no (public) answer to the following question:

How do you stop people from manipulating Kickstarter in order to actively destroy your project?

If you visit the comments section of the AICN Kickstarter, you'll find even more hatred from some of the project's "backers." In fact, at least one of the backers is clearly pledging massive amounts of money (i.e. in the thousands) with the clear intention of retracting that pledge later. 

Why is this a problem? Here's a graph of Pledge Distribution over of the life of a project, which Kickstarter itself generated:

According to Kickstarter, "As the graph illustrates, funding tends to cluster around the very beginning and very end of a campaign. There’s a logic to this. When a project launches the creator’s most fervent fans rush to show their support. And as time runs out, people who have been sitting on the sidelines are motivated to finally take action."

Users who pledge massive amounts of money may seem totally legitimate at first. But Kickstarter gives them the option to retract those pledges or lower those amounts at any time. By pledging with the intention of retracting, users can effectively sabotage the Kickstarter by significantly lowering the urgency for people to pledge.

With less than 48 hours to go (and a project length of 30 days), Knowles' Kickstarter hasn't even reached its 2/3rds funding point, meaning he likely will not come close to his goal. Thus, the prospect that some of Knowles haters could significantly influence the outcome is pretty unlikely. Nonetheless, if the project had come closer, then a pack of his detractors could have easily led this project to a different outcome.

There aren't really any easy fixes on Kickstarter for this, but one that jumps to mind is the ability to "lock in" pledges a certain amount of time before the project has expired. This way, if people are going to play the retraction game, at least the project owners still has a significant amount of time to get the money they need. But no solutions are optimal. As Kickstarter starts to experience more diverse "user scenarios," I hope they'll move quickly to solve problems like this.

Update: Scott in the comments points out that protection like this is already in place, but it is only for the final 24 hours and only if the pledge reduction doesn't drop the project below its goal. I don't feel this is adequate given the gaming that we are seeing here, but at least it is something.

Original Source

One thing I deeply miss about the Mercury offices being across the street from KATU News? Blowing our air horn whenever they attempted to do an outdoor live shot. But the sad thing about being a TV news troll (those people who scoot up behind reporters during live shots and scream "WooooooooHOOOOOO!!" and flash devil horns) is that the camera never focuses on THEM. Perhaps they actually have something of import to say! For example, this foreign guy who interrupts this foreign newscast—but instead of the camera turning away, this news team lets the troll have his day in the sun.*

*So what's he saying? Who knows? However, he does speak the international language of "fart noise."

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Sony has opted to settle a suit brought against it by former intern Chris Jarvis for £4,600 ($7,189.34), reports The Independent.

In 2012, Jarvis was hired by Sony Computer Entertainment Cambridge (now known as Guerrilla Cambridge, developers of Killzone: Mercenary) to act as an unpaid intern. Instead of typical intern duties, he was asked to work from 9:30AM to 6:00PM for three months as a tester on the studio's in-production games, claimed Jarvis. When he approached his bosses to ask for typical tester's wages he was instead told that his intern status effectively made him a volunteer employee, and was thus not due compensation.

Jarvis reported Sony to the British customs authority and the case was scheduled to be heard in front of a tribunal. Instead of court, Sony opted to settle, awarding the former intern £4,600 - £1,000 more than Jarvis was seeking.

Unpaid intern sues Sony, gets paid originally appeared on Joystiq on Wed, 04 Sep 2013 17:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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National Post

Weiner chews out patron at Brooklyn bakery Fox News Fiery New York City mayoral candidate Anthony Weiner chewed out a patron at a Brooklyn bakery Wednesday after he called Weiner an expletive and made an incorrect cultural reference to his wife. “You're a real sh--bag, Anthony,” the man told the ... Anthony Weiner gets into slanging match in bakeryUPI.com Anthony Weiner challenges man who rebuked him for being 'married to an Arab'CNN International Another Weiner in "dream" role as TV weathermanNew York Daily News Atlanta Journal Constitution -National Post all 205 news articles »

Like a character from a graphic novel, she dresses in black, has unusually blond hair — and kills bus drivers who sexually assault women.

It's amazing what mere time can do. For example, it turns a clip from Space Precinct (actual name), a 1994 BBC sci-fi police procedural (actual, non-satirical series concept), into a clip with an inexplicable cameo with inexplicable voice dubbing. Did they think that Idris Elba's voice alone would sound like it had better production value than the rest of the series? I say odds are high. Previously in Idris Elba

Sesame Street often teaches children very adult concepts in terms they can understand, but sometimes it just gets weird. Take the video below, for instance. Delayed gratification is a great thing for kids to learn. They should know that patience yields more satisfying rewards, as made evident by Tom Hiddleston keeping cookies from Cookie Monster. But there's just something about the way the Avengers star teases the Muppet with the sweet prize, making him smell it, and so on. It really feels like a strange ad for abstinence, but maybe that's reading way too much into it. 

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Cheri Herouard, La Vie Parisienne, 1910s by Gatochy on Flickr.

PopCap's team-based third-person shooter Plants vs. Zombies: Garden Warfare will not feature a single-player component when it launches early next year, Shacknews reports.

Instead, PopCap will double-down on the game's multiplayer focus with a variety of modes that offer up to 24-person competitive play and 4-player co-op. Speaking to Shacknews, PopCap creative director Justin Wiebe outlined the company's plans to build a dedicated multiplayer community around Garden Warfare.

"We definitely want to build on the game once it's launched," Wiebe told Shacknews. "We're definitely taking a cue from Plants vs Zombies 2. Using DLC and new content updates, we want to keep players engaged in the long haul."

Garden Warfare will launch for the Xbox One and Xbox 360 in the first quarter of 2014, and a PC release will follow afterward. PopCap recently revealed that ports for other platforms are also in development.

Plants vs Zombies: Garden Warfare is multiplayer-only originally appeared on Joystiq on Wed, 04 Sep 2013 16:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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