firehose

A mysterious Tumblr began circulating through the tech press on Tuesday as an anonymous startup founder started to blog about his company's collapse — and the result is a pretty scathing critique of the bubble culture that's come to define the modern startup life cycle.

More than ever, smart watches are looking like MP3 music players before Apple unveiled the iPod and began a lineage of mobile computing that would eventually turn the world of personal computing upside down. At the time, MP3 players were dominated by companies no one remembers now, like Diamond Multimedia, and MP3 players like its Rio were a novelty that consumers clearly wanted, even if manufacturers hadn’t yet figured out how to make them well.

With every new smart watch—today’s is Sony’s SmartWatch 2—the makers of wrist-based computers seem bent on emphasizing the inadequacy of the form factor, the design tradeoffs they’ve decided to make, their designers’ imaginations, or perhaps all three.

Summing up reviews of the current crop of smart watches, Wirecutter declared in March 2013 they were all “kind of crummy.” Ever since, it’s been up to manufacturers to prove reviewers wrong, and I predicted just days ago that Sony would fail to meaningfully up the ante with its new smart watch. A rundown of the features of Sony’s SmartWatch 2, including comparisons with its closest competitors, the Pebble and the MetaWatch, bears out that prediction.

The woes of current smart watches are myriad, from inadequate battery life (imagine charging your watch daily, like your smartphone) to low-resolution screens to a lack of third-party apps (i.e., the software that makes smartphones so useful). But the primary issue with smart watches is that there has yet to be a category-defining device worth copying by all its competitors.

That is, smart watches have yet to have their iPod or iPhone moment. This leaves the field wide open for Apple, Samsung, and Microsoft, all of which are reportedly working on smart watches, to gain the substantial first-mover advantage that comes with producing the first mobile consumer device in a new category. For the iPhone, being the first stable, truly usable pocket computer meant that developers flocked to the platform, an advantage that keeps users loyal to the iOS ecosystem even as Android handset makers offer a much more diverse and, in some respects, more capable suite of devices.

There is also a possibility that a dark-horse candidate will enter the race for smart watches and succeed by re-thinking their purpose altogether. It’s about time.

Probably the less I say about Broforce the better, but I can say that when Mercury freelancer Ben Coleman alerted me to its existence this morning via email (subject line: "HOLY GOD"), my life immediately got an order of magnitude better. It's like I've been waiting all my life for Brade and MacBrover to be in the same thing, and I didn't even know it.

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Like an ever-growing block tower, or more pertinently like an ever-growing money tower, Minecraft continues to sell and sell. After reaching the 10 million milestone in April, the Mojang game took just under three months to hit the 11 million mark on PC.

So with Pocket Edition at 10 million, Minecraft XBLA at 6 million, and the recently-released retail Xbox 360 version doing tastily according to Notch, our stats people tell us that puts the franchise's overall sales approximately in the ka-squillion range.

Oh, and there's the Xbox One version to come out, too.

Minecraft PC hits 11 million sales originally appeared on Joystiq on Tue, 25 Jun 2013 13:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Today's release of Firefox 22.0 introduces official support for 3D gaming via Epic's Unreal Engine, among other significant additions.

Mozilla outlines the update at its official blog, noting that a "supercharged subset of JavaScript" (asm.js) powers high-performance applications like 3D games. Mozilla previously demonstrated asm.js's power with an HTML5 version of the Unreal Engine tech demo "Epic Citadel."

Firefox 22.0 also adds support for video and voice calls, and enables file sharing without requiring third-party plugins. BananaBread, a free multiplayer FPS that demonstrates WebGL, Emscripten, asm.js, and WebRTC, can be played in a Firefox browser window here.

Firefox update adds support for Unreal Engine originally appeared on Joystiq on Tue, 25 Jun 2013 15:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Megatokyo blasted into the manga/webcomics scene in 2000 and quickly became established as one of the first successful non-Japanese manga — so successful that it was translated and published in Japan. The story of two clueless American otaku who go to Tokyo on a whim and have a series of increasingly absurd encounters with the [...]

Good news everyone. It looks like we can finally show some result of what we have been doing for the last couple of months, namely our mobile API. We have been running it on our test server for a week, gathered some initial feedback from several awesome mobile developers, and we think it’s now ready to be tested by the general public.

What does it mean to you? It means that there is now technical possibility to use The Old Reader with your favorite RSS app.

You can already try The Old Reader in Feeddler – free version already supports it, and the Pro version should get updated any time soon. Kudos to Che-Bin Liu for being extremely helpful in testing the API and getting Feeddler integrated so fast.

The documentation for the API is available in a separate github repo. It’s not the best piece of docs we’ve ever seen, but it seems to cover the basic use cases. You are welcome to improve it, just send us a pull request with your adjustments. Please note that even though you can use API both via http and https, we highly encourage you to use https for security reasons.

If you find any bugs or feel that something is not working as expected, please feel free to create a github issue or contact us at api@theoldreader.com.

And last, but not least, spread the word. Let the developer of your favorite RSS app know about The Old Reader API, and ask them to get integrated. We would really like to see more and more apps working with the site bringing native mobile experience to the users of all platforms.

(poster generated by The Keep Calm-O-Matic)

Reggie’s leaving his house in your New Leaf town

If you have a U.S. copy of Animal Crossing: New Leaf, you’ll receive a visit from Nintendo of America president Reggie Fils-Aime via SpotPass soon. You’ll be able to tour his house in-person and order his furniture over at the Happy Home Showcase (located between the post office and the Nook store on Main Street).

The Happy Home Showcase — if you can manage to StreetPass other New Leaf players — is such a great new feature for the game. I’ve seen so many inspiring homes and purchased so much awesome furniture thanks to it!

BUY Animal Crossing: New Leaf, AC:NL guide, upcoming games

This is how EVERY marvel comic is made

What would our planet look like if everything but the terrestrial plant life just vanished? Subtract all the water, all the people, all the infrastructure, and what do you get? Something like this:

Read more...

you the last person on the planet somehow not exited about Guillermo del Toro's giant robots-vs.-giant monster movie Pacific Rim? Well, if this final extended trailer doesn't do it for you, you might want to consult a doctor.

Read more...

U.S. News & World Report

Court case stirs debate over Indian child welfare Santa Cruz Sentinel This October 2011 photo provided by Melanie Capobianco shows her adoptive daughter Veronica trick-or-treating, in Charleston, S.C. A divided Supreme Court said Tuesday that federal law doesn't require that a Native American child be taken away from her ... Supreme Court: Act doesn't apply in Indian girl's adoptionSalt Lake Tribune Supreme Court rule for couple over baby girl's adoptionReuters High court: Child is not required to go to fatherMuskogee Daily Phoenix Utah Public Radio -WRAL.com all 111 news articles »

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Dragon Quest X’s PC benchmark scene

This sequence is used to test your PC’s ability to run the newest version of the Japan-only MMO (oh yeah, it’s coming to PC by the way), as well as your ability to tolerate fucking adorable imagery. I’m not about that MMO life, but I am totally all about this little girl and her accidental mass summoning.

If this YouTube capture isn’t enough for you (and you want to see if you can run the game) you can pick up the benchmark program here.

BUY Dragon Quest games, upcoming games

littletrenchcoatangel:

adroit-distraction:

psdo:

dreadfully-boring:

tearstainedashes:

thefancyphillip:

mystsaphyr:

snerpahsnerr:

2olluxii2liife:

peterbec:

A woman discovers her boyfriend’s terrible laundry secret

i

wasn’t expecting that

IT’S BACK.

IT’S BACK IT’S BACK

BEST EVER

I’M SO DONE

What…

What the actual fuck did I just watch?

I’m not sure what I was expecting

Oh thank god, I thought this had been lost in the bowels of the internet forever.

WATCH.

THIS VIDEO

The Oregonian is Already Hiring New Reporters:

Three days after The Oregonian finishedlaying off nearly a quarter of its newsroom staff, the paper’s new digital company, Oregonian Media Group, isadvertising reporting jobs at the paper. 

Oregonian Media Group, the new company formed by The Oregonian, has begun posting job openings this morning—for a general assignment reporter, a music critic, a content data analyst, and an “advertorial editor."

From the unofficial Google Operating System blog:

Google prepares a new service that’s called Google Mine. It’s integrated with Google+ and it’s a way to keep track of the items you own or you’d like to have and share some of them with your circles. Right now, the service is tested internally at Google.

Just tell Google everything you own and everything you’re interested in or like. Sure.

Facebook has joined the crowd of tech companies looking to snatch up forlorn Google fans with its own "Reader" product — but it sounds far from the RSS feed replacement your looking for. The Facebook Reader will take News Feed stories and put them into a FlipBoard type app, reports the Wall Street Journal's Evelyn M. Rusli. In other words, this is not a bunch of website RSS feeds all put into one Facebook designed app, rather it's a different way to look at news stories from your News Feed. People love Readers because the news doesn't come through some "social" meritocracy. Rather, all stories from the sites (or feeds) of your choosing show up. Facebook, however, wants to socialize that experience. 

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has before called his social network "the best personalized newspaper," which sounds a lot like an RSS feed, but is pretty much the opposite of what people who get their news like that want. A well-organized Reader is the "best personalized newspaper" that pulls together a bunch of different news sources for a person to pick and choose the headlines they want to click — after reading all the options. In Facebook-land the "best personalized newspaper" shows you stories based on what friends have opted to share, like Twitter. Or, it could work like Reddit, putting together links that are trending on Facebook, as TechCrunch's John Constine suggested. Those things are certainly useful — and people who like to get information that way will welcome a better way to find it all — but it's not the way Reader obsessives consume news.

In addition, there's one other tiny problem for Reader fans: Facebook Reader isn't ready yet. With Google Reader out of commission starting in one week, former GReaders need a replacement ASAP. Rumormongers hoped the announcement might come during last week's Instavid launch. But, from the sounds of it, Facebook Reader has no launch date in site: "It's unclear when Facebook will be ready to unveil the product, if it ever is," writes Rusli. 

Wired has a gorgeous gallery of photos from Conflict and Costume, a new book by Jim Naughten documenting the Herero tribe of Namibia, who fought an early 20th-century action with German colonizers, and wore captured German uniforms as trophies. The women adopted the ankle-length dresses of German missionary women, and adapted them into gorgeous, patchwork garments that are worn with headdresses made to look like cattle-horns.

The Herero women adopted the German missionaries’ Victorian-style floor length gowns, but they eventually incorporated the vivid colors and cow-horn-shaped headdress (to represent the Herero’s respect for cattle) you see today. After a woman is married, she is expected to make most of her dresses, often from the offcuts of other garments. These voluminous, patchwork outfits are considered every-day attire, while dresses made from a single material are reserved for special occasions. In the book’s introduction, Lutz Martin writes: “Rounded to resemble healthy cows, the dresses contain up to 10 metres of cloth, despite summer temperatures reaching 50 degrees celsius.”

To get his portraits, Naughten immersed himself in Herero culture. He and his guide traveled from village to village, asking permission of the elders to photograph. In turn, he would be invited to weddings, funerals and ceremonies where would he set up his equipment and snap shots of passersby against the Namibian landscape. Naughten said he lost track of how many people he photographed (it was a lot), but he does recall that most everyone was excited to show off their garb. “The man in the yellow suit has to be a favorite,” Naughten wrote. “For walking in front of the camera/lighting set up without saying a word, posing so perfectly for one shot, and then walking off smiling.”

Conflict and Costume: The Herero Tribe of Namibia [Amazon]

Photos: The Amazing Costume Culture of Africa’s Herero Tribe [Liz Stinson/Wired]

fuckyeah-animalcrossing:

myfirstname-crossing:

Katie’s a lot tougher than she looks, damn.

(via UPDATE: Red Panda Found After It Escaped from Its Enclosure | Around The Mall)

We are were looking for a missing red panda, a male named Rusty. He was last seen at 6 p.m. last night. pic.twitter.com/JHVB79x8XY

rocknrollercoaster:

to tha window

gamesandfood:

ok, just gonna take a real quick interlude to talk about what is going on here.

at the beginning of Earthbound, you are asked for your favorite food. Machpizza chose Pizza. Throughout the game this choice is recalled and reused to give a bit of continuity to the player.

Here, a waiter is shitting on your mom’s cooking in order to cultivate an air of sophistication and elitism. A hierarchical attitude towards food is actually a really common in human history! Consider the difference between, like, the Gin Craze versus Cristal. The history of sugar in England:

“Sugar was imported to England, having been obtained from sugar cane. Any imported foods were expensive and therefore out of the reach of Lower classes and used primarily by the Elizabethan Upper Classes and Nobility. Extensive use of Sugar was known to blacken the teeth and black teeth became an Elizabethan status symbol. This fashion fad was so popular amongst Upper Class Elizabethans that cosmetics were used to create an illusion of black teeth” (source)

Or the cultural attitude we give to people who go to McDonald’s instead of Whole Foods (cw: bad discussion of obesity contained within). 

What’s interesting is that, like the waiter’s opinion here, such attitudes about food is very rarely is about quality. It’s about class. In the code of the game, the food your mom cooks doesn’t make an ounce of difference. If there were enough characters you could put “foie gras” as your favorite home-prepared food, and the waiter would still call it trash and unworthy of the establishment’s menu. Not because the waiter is reacting to the Inherent Quality Index of food - plenty of places serve high-class artisanal pizzas and charge a premium for doing so - but because the waiter is reacting to the fact that your mom can cook it.  

If the working class can take part in the trend, the rich can’t use it to show that they’re special (source)