Jelly Roll is a 28 year-old self-described "regular fat piece of white trash" who is so devoted to Waffle House that he released a 21-track mixtape about the beloved chain. Then Waffle House sued him.
Accused woman-hater Taylor Swift has been the target of multiple feminist blogs and magazines. Some claim she doesn't know what feminism even is. Most of her songs center around relationships and heartbreak, which is hardly feminist fodder. Some of her biggest hits were even co-written by a 41-year-old man.
So, naturally, someone created a Twitter account turning her anti-woman lyrics into 140 characters of lady empowerment. It's funny stuff, but knowing Swift, she'll probably blame an evil brunette.
"Mondoshawan un-disguising taught us to Use the Available Body Part in designing gestures."
In full disclosure, The Fifth Element may be one of my favorite sci-fi films of all time. So I had to be extra vigilant about the reviews so as not to come off as a fanboy. Even with all that due diligence, Besson’s movie fared really well on a close examination of its interfaces.
Sci: A- (4 of 4)
How believable are the interfaces?
I’m giving the Ultimate Weapon a giant pass, since it’s the MacGuffin and more mystical than scientific. Other than that, there’s only three bits that really made me roll my eyes.
Interfaces: A (4 of 4)
How well do the interfaces equip the characters to achieve their goals?
Again, brilliantly. There are some missteps: The roach cam might have triggered less of a disgust reaction. Rhod’s rod might have been a little more performative. The police lights kind of work against their intentions. Whoever designed those evacuation beacons needs to be jailed for gross negligence. And the 5E-opedia could have been actually encyclopedic rather than random.
But there’s so much awesomeness to balance it out. The makeup tech fits fashionistas. The military communications fits soliders. The second bomb fits Mangalores. And of course the Ultimate Weapon fits multiple races across eons with its brilliant affordances and constraints.
For the sheer number of interfaces and the thought given to the aesthetic and interaction details, I’m proud that The Fifth Element has scored top marks, and just squeaked past another favorite, The Cabin in the Woods, for the top spot on the site so far. Here’s hoping more movies and television shows bring to life such a well-designed, personal vision of speculative technology, and grand adventures taking place amongst it.
Final Grade A (12 of 12), BLOCKBUSTER
Related lessons from the book
Lots of these interfaces could use a dose of lower case (Otherwise, AVOID ALL CAPS, page 34) but help confirm that Sans-Serif is the Typeface of the Future (page 37).
Korben’s alarm clock Uses Sound for Urgent Attention (page 208).
Korben’s taxi might have avoided pissing him off, Zorg’s desk might have saved its owner from a cherry, and Ruby’s staff might have allowed him to perform his playbacks had each Handled Emotional Inputs (page 214)
The multipass should have Required multifactor authentication (page 118)
The 5E-opedia could have Added Meaning to Information Through Organization (page 239) rather than use an alphabetical list.
New lessons
The military headsets remind us to Signal Dual-Presence, and additionally to Avoid Pushing into Wearables.
Korben’s alarm clock reminds us that Pain is an (Anti-)Affordance.
Super Smash Bros. creator Masahiro Sakurai may have been forthcoming about the new Super Smash Bros' lack of cross-platform play, but when it came to the really important information, he was still pretty cagey. For example, what could be more important than finding out what happens when Kirby eats Smash newcomer Mega Man?
These are two gaming icons whose main ability is to steal the abilities of others. For all we know, Kirby swallowing Mega Man could create a rift in the fabric of reality, destroying all life as we know it. Alas, Sakurai wouldn't give us much information. "A lot of what you're asking is still classified," he told us through an interpreter at E3.
"As far as the physical appearance of Kirby," he said, "I think what you imagine is probably pretty close to what will actually happen." Sakurai put his hands next to his head, in what we're pretty sure was the international sign for "Mega Man's helmet." We followed up by asking if Kirby would be gifted with a Mega Buster. "He's got little tiny arms, so who knows."
3D Light FX has released a mighty series of battery operated 3D Marvel superhero nightlights that look like they are smashing your walls. They are “not only cool to the eye, but are also cool to the touch.” Each nightlight is available to purchase online from Target or in store.
"Melissa McCarthy as a brash, take-no-prisoners Boston detective"
Freaks And Geeks creator Paul Feig finally got the massive commercial success he deserved with the Kristen Wiig-penned and Judd Apatow-produced hit Bridesmaids. Feig’s follow-up The Heat puts Melissa McCarthy, the breakout performer from Bridesmaids, into a higher-profile role, as a brash, take-no-prisoners Boston detective who’s forced to team up with Sandra Bullock’s unpopular FBI agent. The rest of the cast includes Michael Rapaport, Tony Hale, Taran Killam, Nate Corddry, Kaitlin Olson, and Demián Bichir, as Feig tries to catch lightning in a bottle again by coaxing out the Miss Congeniality side of Bullock to pair with McCarthy’s seemingly limitless energy for physical comedy.
The Heat opens in Chicago on June 28th, but we have 50 passes to an advanced screening on Tuesday, June 25th at the Kerasotes Showplace ICON. Just head to Gofobo and enter the code AVCLUB78TR—and you’ll be entered to ...
Kim Deal has left the Pixies. The bassist has been with the group off and on for the last 26 years, and she's given no real explanation for her departure. On the Pixies’ Facebook page, the group says only that it “will always consider her a member of the Pixies” and that “her place will always be here for her.”
Though the Pixies parted ways in 1993—mostly due to tension between Deal and frontman Frank Black—it reunited in 2003, and has been touring pretty much ever since. The group was even said to be working on a new album, though those rumors have been floated for years.
It's possible Deal left because she couldn’t handle being in more than one reunited group at a time: Her post-Pixies band The Breeders got back together last year and is currently touring behind the 20th anniversary of Last ...
The Muppets...Again, the follow-up to last year's The Muppets, is getting a new title, one markedly less easy to say in a tone of world-weary resignation. The madcap, European-set sequel—which is not a remake of The Great Muppet Caper, but is nonetheless a great caper involving Muppets—is now called The Muppets Most Wanted. Producers have also confirmed that Flight Of The Conchords' Bret Mackenzie, who won an Oscar for his song "Man or Muppet" in the previous film, will again contribute several songs.
The Kickstarter campaign for Kobe Red beef jerky was yanked just minutes before thousands of backers lost their money
Kickstarter
Kickstarter just narrowly averted what would have been the biggest definitive fraud in the crowdfunding site’s history. It shut down the Kobe Red project, which promised to deliver mouthwatering beef jerky made from Japanese cows fed on 100% organic feed and treated to beer and massages (we’re not making this up)—just an hour before scammers would have successfully made off with $120,309 from the project’s 3,252 backers.
Rather than vetting projects on its own, Kickstarter relies on its own users to report suspicious campaigns. Kobe Red was flagged by, among others, a group of filmmakers who are working on a documentary about Kickstarter.
Here’s a brief video explaining what those documentarians discovered. It included fake testimonials from fake taste-testers, and the usual litany of breathless, credulousmedia coverage that accompanies every Kickstarter launch for a project that could plausibly appeal to the core audience of the online community Reddit.
It’s a problem Kickstarter faces as it grows: The site’s laissez-faire attitude, which has allowed an incredibly diverse range of projects to debut there, also makes it potentially attractive to fraudsters. That said, Kickstarter has launched 102,527 projects to date—with 43,193 reaching the funding stage, when backers’ credit cards are charged—and the amount of fraud appears, anecdotally at least, to be quite small.
It can also be hard to tell the difference between a fraud and a well-intentioned project whose creators just never got their act together. The most notorious such example was ZionEyez, which claimed to stream video directly from a pair of eyeglasses to a person’s Facebook stream. The project netted $343,415 in 2011 and its backers occasionally pop up again, but with nothing to show for all that money. Other maybe-scams include a role-playing video game that was shut down before it finished its funding phase, aluminum dice that already existed and which someone hoped to resell through Kickstarter, and a board game whose creator simply disappeared after raising $22,559.
Kickstarter’s position has always been that it’s up to a project’s would-be backers to evaluate its claims. Kickstarter explicitly presents itself as a site for a new kind of arts patronage, rather than a store. Its board members have said that the site simply cannot vet all the projects that people post, and have argued that in general the amounts backers lose are small. The site’s FAQ includes an “accountability” section packed to the brim with caveat emptors about what can happen if a project’s creators don’t follow through on their promises. I asked Kickstarter for comment on this story, and a spokesperson responded that they never comment on the reasons why individual projects are suspended.
However, anyone can make a fraud report, which goes to a “Manager of Trust and Safety.” Kickstarter would not comment on the nature or the existence of this position; the only evidence it exists is that there is currently a job posting for it. Perhaps Kickstarter worries that discussing the position might give the impression that the site’s projects are more vetted than they are, or that doing so is to acknowledge some kind of responsibility for whatever fraud does get through.
Either way, the site may be realizing that, with the kinds of fake testimonials, fawning press coverage and slick promotional video that a project like Kobe Red had, putting all the responsibility for evaluating frauds entirely on a project’s would-be backers just doesn’t cut it any more. Luckily for Kickstarter’s reputation, Kobe Red was shut down in time—but only just.
Some cities were made for an ice cream flavor. One of the District of Columbia's nicknames, for example, is Chocolate City, which already sounds like some kind of sweet treat. In 2006, while hosting the White House Correspondents Dinner, Stephen Colbert took this idea to its most delicious conclusion: "The chocolate city with a marshmallow center and a graham-cracker crust of corruption." Mmm.
So Ben and Jerry's, with their new "City Churned" campaign, had plenty of material to work with. But this is the age of corporate social media engagement, of data collection, of taking things directly to the people, so instead of just deciding what kind of flavor a city is, the company asked around.
In D.C., New York, San Francisco, Portland, and Seattle, residents have four more days to make decisions like, Cookie dough or graham crackers? Chocolate or vanilla? Coffee or cinnamon? They can also support a handful of local ingredients, like New York's Sixpoint beer, or San Francisco's Tcho Chocolate.
But here's the thing about making a good flavor of ice cream: it's not just a series of independent, binary choices. It's more like assembling a basketball team. Are brownies and pretzels great players? Sure. But it's their chemistry that counts.
Weirder still, many choices aren't entirely up to city residents. In San Francisco, every fixed-gear bike spotted in the Mission is a vote for coffee, while each free-wheel bike is a vote for cinnamon. Over in New York, on-time 4/5/6 trains at Grand Central Station weigh towards caramel, while 1/2/3 trains at Times Square count for waffle cone. What is an on-time subway train, anyway? (You can also vote online.)
The result of all this is likely to be some civic hodgepodge of ice cream. It's unclear if these flavors will ever be widely distributed. Judging by their composition so far, I'd wager they won't. Let's hope the inevitable pun-based names are least decent.
"perhaps neither Cosmo nor Reddit is the be-all-end-all for everyone's sex life"
Maybe the women of Cosmo have a point and Reddit's sex advice really is bad. Or maybe the (mostly) men of Reddit are right and the sex-position know-it-alls at Cosmo are just purveyors of useless tips.
via Toaster Strudel where Jackie Chan trolls Bruce Lee
While in Toronto to introduce screenings of his classic films (Drunken Master, The Legend of Drunken Master, and Police Story), martial arts legend Jackie Chan stopped by George Stroumboulopoulos Tonightto recount his Best Story Ever.
In 2007, the Washington Post wrote about the happy collaboration between Microsoft and the US’s National Security Agency. “When Microsoft introduces its long-awaited Windows Vista operating system this month,” the story began, “it will have an unlikely partner to thank for making its flagship product safe and secure for millions of computer users across the world: the National Security Agency.” The Post went on to explain that the agency helped Microsoft “to protect it from worms, Trojan horses and other insidious computer attackers.”
Now the assistance runs in the other direction. Bloomberg reports this morning that American firms routinely co-operate with the US government by giving them access to information that could help the government better protect itself but also exploit loopholes and infiltrate computers. In return, “leaders of companies are showered with attention and information.”
Chief among the firms mentioned is Microsoft, which alerts intelligence agencies about bugs in its software before releasing a public fix (discovering a software vulnerability before the public knows about it makes it more useful for cyber attacks). Microsoft may as well write a direct connection with the US government into the operating system. (Microsoft already denied doing that, in 1999.) “Microsoft has several programs through which we disclose information regarding vulnerabilities, some of which have Government participants,” the company told Quartz. “While timing varies slightly each month, disclosure takes place just prior to our security update for billions of customers.”
Two things come to mind in connection with this story. The first is how the creators of Stuxnet, a now famous virus used to infiltrate and sabotage Iranian nuclear centrifuges, were able to uncover multiple previously-unknown bugs in a Windows operating system. Discovering unknown bugs, known as “zero-day exploits,” is extremely rare. That the creators of Stuxnet, widely assumed to be the US and Israel, took advantage of four such bugs was a matter of great astonishment. It’s much less astonishing if we assume that Microsoft helped out. Microsoft told Quartz that “any insinuation that Microsoft participated in the creation of Stuxnet or any other malicious code is false.”
The other is the US government’s insistence that Huawei, a Chinese telecoms equipment manufacturer, is a threat to national security. British officials regret allowing Huawei to become part of the UK’s critical national security infrastructure. Australia, India, Canada and the US have either banned Huawei or are reluctant to let its wares pollute their shores. The reason is simple: Huawei was founded by an ex-officer of the People’s Liberation Army and has received generous support from the Chinese state. For that reason, Americans and others assume it is an arm of the party and that its products are full of back-doors, trapdoors and all manner of espionage-related bugs.
Last week, we wrote that governments shouldn’t shut out foreign tech firms that want do business in their countries. (We argued that it’s better to let in foreign firms in and monitor them, partly because it boosts trade and growth.) But examples of Microsoft’s cooperation with the US government help illustrate why the US prefers to block Chinese firms like Huawei out completely: because it suspects Chinese companies are just as tied to their governments as their American counterparts.
In one of the more interesting promotional efforts we've seen from Spotify yet, the service is promising to unlock Pink Floyd's entire album catalog once fans stream the band's iconic song "Wish You Were Here" one million times. The track — and presumably the discography that will follow once the milestone is reached — is pulled from the remastered Pink Floyd albums released in 2011. There's no counter visible, so it's difficult to assess the progress being made so far, but Spotify is telling listeners to keep attuned to its Twitter feed for the latest. It's also taken to Instagram to get the word out.
Pink Floyd's albums are available from iTunes and Amazon MP3 as paid downloads, but availability among subscription services is far more limited. Until now classic albums like Dark Side of The Moon and The Wall have been absent from both Spotify and competitor Rdio, though the band's music can be found on Pandora (and presumably will stream on iTunes Radio in the fall.) Presumably the deal between Pink Floyd and Spotify has already been finalized, but the million-stream target is a clever way to build up hype around a major artist addition.
Danger Close—the studio that made EA’s two modern-day Medal of Honor games—has been dissolved. A report on Develop seems to hint that at least some members of the former studio are being absorbed elsewhere within EA.
via Qais F this should be the inaugural winner of the Nobel prize for social media
Hell is Other People, an experiment in anti-social media. It uses FourSquare to track your 'friends' and calculates optimal locations for avoiding them.
Even as the Oculus Rift has gotten tremendous attention from the gaming world (among other things, Epic announced a partnership with it for Unreal Engine 4), designing a good game for it has proved difficult. Virtual reality throws a wrench in well-established genres like the first-person shooter, turning something as simple as aiming into a conundrum. Oculus itself has suggested things like exploration games, but EVE Online studio CCP thinks it's found another answer: send everyone to space.
At E3, I got a chance to try EVR, a dogfighting game built to take advantage of the Rift's capabilities. After strapping on the headset, you'll find yourself inside a tiny spacecraft's cockpit, virtual body manning the controls. The game pits two teams of three against each other in roughly five-minute battles, using a combination of gamepad and head controls. You'll move with a stick and fire fixed lasers with the right trigger, but it's the left trigger that's really fun: hold it down and look at another ship, and a missile will lock onto it and fire when you release.
Space combat: a natural fit for the Rift
Putting you in a spacecraft neatly sidesteps some of the Oculus Rift's biggest problems. If you walk in VR, you're looking around with natural head motion, but your body is still controlled with a stick, creating a weird mix of the real and artificial. Efforts to get around this are still working on getting people to walk in a straight line. In a virtual cockpit, the issue is completely moot: you don't expect to be able to do more than look around.
EVR is still running on the early, low-res version of the Rift, but even that is mitigated by the setting. I have no idea what being in space looks like, and it's not hard to suspend disbelief and imagine that you're wearing some kind of helmet. From there, you're free to concentrate on the exhilerating experience of soaring around asteroids and dodging missiles.
It's also one of the rare times when the Rift really seems like a natural form of interaction. I've pretty well optimized how I walk and aim in a shooter, and introducing head tracking can just confuse things. By contrast, I'm generally awful at figuring out the perspective in flight games. Allowing me to actually look around while moving didn't make me good, exactly, but I no longer felt lost. And aiming with your eyes is both awesomely futuristic and a pretty good way to zero in on a ship, especially because you can look away as soon as the missile has fired. Not having to align a "body" means you can lock onto something at any angle — above your head or to your side, for example.
A virtual body that doesn't respond is almost as weird as no body at all
Of course, there are still moments when playing with a Rift is weird and awkward. When you look down, you'll see a sexless body in a gray flight suit, hands rested on either side. While the real me shifted my legs or moved my hands on the gamepad in a fight, the virtual me... stayed completely immobile. And if you think jumping around in virtual reality is disorienting, try tumbling end-over-end in the vacuum of space. Fortunately, the spare environment means you aren't constantly reminded of how fast you're going, and the controls are forgiving.
BESbswy
EVR is far from a finished product. CCP says a team developed it over the course of seven weeks, initially as a side project. The section I saw at E3 is essentially a proof of concept, though it's possible it will be developed into a full game and released for the Rift. When might we see that? The team wouldn't say, and the headset isn't anywhere near established enough to support a commercial game with its user base. But EVR's mere existence is a major point in the Rift's favor.
Super Smash Bros: What happens when Kirby eats Mega Man is 'classified' originally appeared on Joystiq on Fri, 14 Jun 2013 14:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
