firehose

North Korea is a mythically strange land, an Absurdistan, where almost nothing is known about the people or, more important, their missile-launching leaders. There is, however, one man—a humble sushi chef from Japan—who infiltrated the inner sanctum, becoming the Dear Leader's cook, confidant, and court jester.

Frank R. Lautenberg, who fought the alcohol and tobacco industries and promoted Amtrak as a five-term United States senator from New Jersey, died Monday morning. He was 89.

According to U.S. Census data, women are now the sole or primary income-earners in 40 percent of American households with children below the age of 18, which is up from 11 percent in 1960.

Like dogs, children and Axl Rose at the beginning of the “November Rain” video, the New York Yankees and Boston Red Sox are afraid of thunder.

Once the patron saint of protesters and the disenfranchised, the First Amendment has become the darling of economic libertarians and corporate lawyers who have recognized its power to immunize private enterprise from legal restraint.

Genome theft is already a possibility, and that problem looks like it’s only going to grow.

New Bean Boots! They are still hand made in ‘Always Epic’ Maine, pretty rad. (always epic is my new slogan for Maine, ‘Vacationland’ doesn’t do the state justice)
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PS - if you’re near Syracuse come say hi tonight @ 7pm @ the book signing!

brain-food:

Hospital rebrands chemotherapy as DC-themed “superformula” for kids

Chemotherapy is never fun, but A.C.Camargo Cancer Center in São Paulo is trying to make it easier for children to accept the treatment. They’re rebranding the treatment as “superformula” and using comics to help kids understand chemo.

Buzzfeed’s Copyranter blog explains that the cancer center is working with ad agency JWT, which also works with Warner Bros. The idea was to help children believe in the power of chemotherapy to make them ultimately better. They’re not just covering the chemo cases with superhero logos; they’re also giving pediatric cancer patients comic books in which the heroes experience something similar to cancer and must receive a similar treatment formulated by doctors. And in the comics, the cases for the treatment bags look just like the cases the kids get over their own chemo bags.

This is fabulous.

NBC New York

"Kai the Hitchhiker" Pleads Not Guilty, Says "Oh, Cool" to Bail Set at $3M NBC New York Caleb "Kai" McGillvary was brought back to New Jersey, where he is being held in a Union County jail. The 24-year-old internet sensation is accused of killing a lawyer he met in Times Square. Pat Battle reports. "Kai the Hitchhiker" Says He's... Link; Embed ... Not guilty plea entered for `Kai the Hitchhiker'Fort Mills Times 'Kai the Hitchhiker' expected to go before NJ judge to face murder chargeThe Republic 'Kai the Hitchhiker' to face murder charge in NJNews 12 Connecticut all 16 news articles »

club hit - Super Pachinko Taisen (Banpresto - Super Famicom - 1996)

requested by xosteve

girlgoesgrrr:

 

TODAY IN TURKEY

National Protest: Istanbul: 01-02JUNE2013

ACAB Worldwide

WAKE UP — SIGNAL BOOST

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Ich hab’ mich heute morgen noch weiter in die Proteste in Istanbul und der Türkei eingelesen, hier die interessantesten Links, die mir dabei untergekommen sind. Bilder via OccupyGezi und Istanbul for 91 Days, Facebook-Seiten: Gezi Park Direnisi und Occupy Gezi. Hier die Live-Updates der Russian Times,

Es Gerüchtet, in Istanbul würde die Polizei Agent Orange oder „Orange Gas“ einsetzen. Das stimmt nicht. Meines Erachtens handelt es sich um Signal-Gas, wie es auch bei Notfällen auf hoher See eingesetzt wird. Freunde einer Dame in Istanbul, die ich grade interviewt habe (kommt dann gleich), spricht allerdings davon, dass Freunde von Ätzungen auf der Haut sprechen („it really burned their skin“), harmlos ist das also nicht.

Es gerüchtet ebenfalls, in der Türkei würden Twitter und Facebook geblockt. Meine Interviewpartnerin kann das nicht voll bestätigen, spricht aber von Problemen mit der Verbindung.

——————–

An Zynismus kaum zu überbieten: Der syrische Informationsminister hat Erdogan zum Rücktritt aufgefordert und für die Gewalt an den Demonstranten kritisiert: Syria Calls on Turkey to Stop Violently Repressing Peaceful Protests.

It sounds like a bad joke out of the Twilight Zone but it’s all too real. Syria’s minister of information told official media that Turkish Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan “should resign” if he “is unable to pursue non-violent means” to end growing protests. Syria’s Minister of Information Omran al-Zoubi “added that Erdogan leads his country in a terrorist way and is destroying the civil character of the Turkish people, reiterating that the Turkish people’s demands do not deserve all this violence,” notes the report by SANA.

Istanbul for 91 Days: Gezi Park after the Storm: „Following the wild weekend, we ventured back up to Gezi Park on Sunday to see how things were going. The police had pulled out, leaving Taksim Square wholly in the hands of protesters. There were thousands of people gathered around the square, and a festive atmosphere. We saw hundreds of volunteers cleaning up the trash and broken glass which had accumulated over the weekend, and others, less civic-minded, posing in front of vandalized, flipped-over cars.“

Reuters: Turkish protesters clash with police into early hours: „Turkish protesters clashed with riot police into the early hours of Monday with some setting fire to offices of the ruling AK Party as the fiercest anti-government demonstrations in years entered their fourth day.“

DailyNews: Turkish PM Erdoğan retires mall project, vows mosque in Taksim

Bianet: 414 Injured, 15 in Critical Condition in Ankara

Daily Dot: CNN-Turk airs penguin documentary during Istanbul riots, hier eine Petition an CNN International: CNN International must pull its name franchise from CNN Turk.

Guardian: Social media and opposition to blame for protests, says Turkish PM: „’Social media is the worst menace to society,’ says Recep Erdogan after thousands take control of Istanbul’s main square“

Amnesty International: Turkey: Disgraceful use of excessive police force in Istanbul: „The testimonies of protestors,lawyers and medical professionals at the scene and video evidence confirm this as a widespread tactic employed by the police at demonstrations continuing across central Istanbul. According to reports, more than a thousand protesters have been injured and at least two have died.“

PressTV: Turkey’s Syria policy prompts anxiety: Barcin Yinanc: „Press TV has conducted an interview with Barcin Yinanc, the associate editor for the Hurriyet Daily News in Istanbul.“

Beautiful Data: Mapping a Revolution

Here’s some maps I did on the basis of ~ 6.000 geotagged tweets from ~ 12 hours on 1 and 2 Jun 2013 referring to the “Gezi Park Protests” in Istanbul (i.e. mentioning the hashtags “occupygezi”, “direngeziparki”, “turkishspring”* etc.). The tweets were collected via the Twitter streaming API and saved to a CouchDB installation. The maps were produced by R (unfortunately the shapes from the map package are a bit outdated).

Gut zusammengefasste Hintergründe:
TanteJay: Türkei II – Außenpolitische Gründe, Türkei III – Innenpolitische Gründe
Ediweb: Islamic Calvinists – Social revolution in Anatolia

Vorher auf Nerdcore:
Occupy Gezi

fagglet:

sunbearsbask:

omggggg (catblogging sorry not sorry)

this just redeemed this piece of shit day.

I really relate to this as an aggressive snuggler.

From OccupyGeziPics: an uncredited photo of a woman in at the Turkish anti-government/pro-democracy protests kicking away a tear-gas cannister. It's an amazing shot -- like something out of a Banksy stencil come to life. Do you know who took it?

A young woman kicks back the tear gas.

Airplane and spaceship concept art by our friend Oscar Cafaro.

















Keywords: flying concept planes airplanes spaceships ships spacecraft esa european space agency nasa national aeronautics and space administration concept art by professional concept artist oscar cafaro film vfx visual effects

Piled Higher & Deeper by Jorge Cham		www.phdcomics.com
title: "Academic Spam" - originally published 5/31/2013 For the latest news in PHD Comics, CLICK HERE!

The UN’s International Labor Organization released its annual “World of Work” (PDF) report today, and boy are the results depressing.

The employment rate won’t return to pre-crisis levels in emerging markets until 2015, while advanced economies will have to wait until 2017 for their work woes to end. But even then, the number of unemployed people is still set to grow 4% to 208 million in 2015. That disparity is because the unemployed are dropping out of the work force: In more than half of the countries surveyed, labor force participation declined largely due to discouraged workers giving up the job hunt.

Perhaps worse: job quality is worsening around the globe, even where the unemployment rate is falling. The study’s researcher made the chart below to compare “job quality,” measured by average wages, benefits and hours worked, and job creation, between 2007 and 2011. Basically, the place to be is in the top right quadrant (where countries are creating more and better jobs) and not the bottom left (where economies are creating fewer, worse jobs):

Worth noting: for most advanced economies, the new jobs being created are of lower quality, with the exceptions of countries like South Korea, Norway and Poland.  The United States has fewer jobs, but is creating better ones—a finding that reflects growing inequality in the US. The emerging markets, on the other hand, are finding it easier to create more and better jobs because they’re starting from a low base. (In other words, it’s easy to improve job quality in a country where most people make less than $10 a day; it’s much harder in a country where the median income is $50,000 per year.)

An example of how advanced economies are creating more low-quality jobs? In Germany, the Hartz labor reforms created something called the “minijob,” a part-time, wage-limited gig that’s better than being unemployed, but worse than a good job:

Kemalettin Tunç, 40, an immigrant from Turkey, said he recently lost his job at a Mercedes factory in Bremen. For now, Mr. Tunç has a minijob as a taxi driver, earning €5 euros an hour. But he is confident his work experience will allow him to quickly find a new job. Still, the “job market is kaput,” he said, because “you earn little money.”

Based on the report, the trend in a boon for the wealthy. Top incomes in advanced countries have resumed their upward trend.

Meanwhile, the middle class is shrinking due to the growing disparity between higher and lower incomes, which exacerbates overall inequality:

And why does that matter?

Meet the new Facebook. You won't find many people here. But you will find a lot of trash.

Despite never having finished the game, I have this weird attraction to Hugo’s House of Horrors that I can’t really explain. Part of it probably has to do with some strange feeling of nostalgia–I had the shareware version on one of those ONE MILLION GAMES disks back in the mid to late 1990s, and the aesthetic of the whole thing has been lodged in my head for most of my life.

I’m making this post because Darius sent me an interview with the creator of the game, David P. Gray, from thirteen years ago. Here is the internet archive link. It isn’t very long, so I’m going to paste the entire thing below.

NOTE: I DID NOT CONDUCT THIS INTERVIEW. I DON’T OWN THIS INTERVIEW. I AM JUST QUOTING IT IN ITS ENTIRETY.

I think it is a really great thing that just needs to be a little more accessible than the internet archive for Hugo enthusiasts.

Thank you Kevin for doing this interview with David Gray.

——————————————————————————————-

The latest edition of Inteview with the Author is here, allowing you to pick the brain of David P. Gray, the mastermind behind the production of the series of Hugo games.

Us: How did you get started in programming and computers in general?

David P. Gray: I “fell” into scientific programming in my first job straight from school, it wasn’t my decision since I had never really programmed before but I’m very glad someone made that decision for me. I must have shown an aptitude for it. I used to secretly write games at work like Asteroids, the scientific computers were great for that. I kept getting caught, though, since colleagues used to play them and give the game away (so to speak).

Us: What other things have you made besides the Hugo series? What kinds of things are you working on now?

DPG: Before Hugo was my first shareware program “Touch Type Tutor”. At the end of writing and testing it I found I could touch type so it definitely worked It’s in desperate need of an upgrade but it’s not as much fun as writing games so it will have to wait. After Hugo came “ProCR”, an OCR program. It didn’t work so well and sold only 92 copies. I don’t like to talk about that one… Then came Nitemare-3D which was the first 3D shooter to run native under Windows and won a Ziff Davis Best Game award in 1995. Then came Jigsaws Galore which has been hugely successful for me. It’s been twice nominated for a best game award but has so far not won.

Us: As a technical question, how did the process of porting N3D to Windows go? I know DOS has a kind of do-what-thou-wilt attitude towards hardware access whereas Windows wants everything to go through the API.

DPG: It was only possible because Microsoft had just created a driver called WinG which allowed Windows 3.1 apps to manipulate pixels in memory directly, the same way you could in DOS. Mine was the first game (as far as I know) to use it. They also created another driver, DispDIB, which allowed a special full screen mode which could take over the whole screen which I also used. Both these technologies were incorporated as standard into Windows 95 and later.

Us: How well has shareware worked out for you? Do many people register your software?

DPG: It has worked very well for me (and my family). I quit my day job back in 1991 when my sales reached twice my salary and I’ve never looked back. My wife helps a bit but our two young children that takes most of her time (and mine!).

Us: What is your favorite of the games you’ve developed?

DPG: Hugo’s House of Horrors since it was the first and got me started.

Us: What is your favorite adventure game?

DPG: From that era, probably Monkey Island.

Us: What is your favorite classic shareware game for DOS (besides yours)?

DPG: Captain Comic, by Michael Denio, since it was the first “proper” arcade game I’d seen working on an IBM PC. It inspired me to write Hugo. To be honest I don’t think it was shareware (or any-ware for that matter, being circa 1988) but it was truly astonishing at the time. I just couldn’t stop playing it until I’d finished it. I guess before that, people just assumed it couldn’t be done.

Us: How did you come up with the name “Hugo”?

DPG: I had the opening house picture done and came up with the phrase “House of Horrors” for it. So I chose “Hugo” to get the three “h’s”. I made the program hhh.exe which matched nicely with the “lll.exe” of “Leisure Suit Larry in the Land of the Lounge Lizards”, another game that inspired me.

Us: How did Hugo land a babe like Penelope?

DPG: They were high school sweethearts. After rescuing her in Hugo 1, they reversed roles with Penelope becoming a strong character in Hugo 2 and solving the whodunit. In Hugo 3 we’re back to stereotypes with Hugo once again saving Penelope.

Us: What’s the significance of 333?

DPG: The combination to the safe daubed in red on the bathroom mirror? It was originally going to be twice that number but my neighbour and friend, being religious, put her foot down and said NO WAY! So instead we used our company PO Box number, 333. This number appears several times in the first two episodes and also in the sequel, Nitemare-3D.

Us: Is there any chance of another Hugo game in the future?

DPG: I do get a lot of requests and my standard reply is that I’d love to do one but the cost of the Hollywood Studio, special effects team, famous voice-overs and cast of thousands expected by today’s market is prohibitive.

Us: One more question: Is there a strong rivalry between you and pop singer David Gray?

DPG: He he! I saw him for the first time about a month ago on TV and I can say we are totally dissimilar. According to the presenter he was last year’s “best kept secret”. Maybe if he gets mega-famous he’ll want to buy my dgray.com off me. There is also a famous snooker player in England called David Gray. I’m glad I use my middle initial…

Visit David’s site at www.dgray.com.

Filed under: Video Games Tagged: david gray, hugo's house of horror, interview, video games

Experimental metal is related to progressive metal, but experimental metal often has more experimentation.

Link (Thanks, Oliver)

An anonymous reader writes "The Times publishes Assange's takedown of Eric Schmidt and Jared Cohen. From the article: 'New Digital Age is a startlingly clear and provocative blueprint for technocratic imperialism, from two of its leading witch doctors, Eric Schmidt and Jared Cohen, who construct a new idiom for United States global power in the 21st century. This idiom reflects the ever closer union between the State Department and Silicon Valley, as personified by Mr. Schmidt, the executive chairman of Google, and Mr. Cohen, a former adviser to Condoleezza Rice and Hillary Clinton who is now director of Google Ideas.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Here’s a stellar example of how to keep your enemies close: a multi-billion dollar division of Samsung that makes “logic integrated circuits”—basically, the brains of all mobile devices and PCs—is almost entirely propped up by business from Apple, reports Digitimes Research.

In 2012, 80% of Samsung’s business for its foundries, the specialized factories where microchips are made, came from Apple. In the same year, Samsung spent $7 billion to upgrade those foundries, one of which, in Austin, Texas, is the plant that manufactures Apple’s current latest-generation processor for iPads and the iPhone 5. That plant received at least $4 billion of investment from Samsung in 2012.

No doubt Apple wants to rely less on Samsung, given the ongoing patent dispute between the two companies and their direct competition in the smartphone and tablet markets. All the better for Apple if it guts Samsung’s microchip business in the process.

How would Apple do that? Rumors have been swirling since summer that the next generation of microchips for Apple’s mobile devices will be made not by Samsung, but by its competitor Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC). Those rumors appear to be gaining traction.

Microchip foundries are a tough business. Because they require huge capital expenditures, they have to produce chips at or near capacity to stay afloat. Samsung’s foundries would be left in the lurch if Apple abruptly moved its microchip business away from Samsung. Such a move could cost Samsung hundreds of millions of dollars. Ouch.

At first, I thought that Remember Me would be one of those games where I liked its ideas more than its execution. But, even though it's surrounded by some rough gameplay and well-worn templates, the core concept behind the game—control over what we choose to hold onto—comes to life in ambitious ways.

The first game from French dev studio Dontnod Entertainment puts players in a total re-imagining of the future, like you see in the best sci-fi. Remember Me revolves around the repercussions that scientific advancement has on individuals and society. The world-changing discovery in the game is a virtual memory digitization technology called Sensen, controlled by mega-conglomerate Memorize. Sensen implants started off of as a utopian dream, but, in 2084, memories can be sold, stolen or wiped.

An individual's most cherished moments are commodities like anything else. Sidewalk kiosks let you buy bits of others' lives. It's a world where anyone can have the eternal sunshine of the spotless mind if they can afford it. Neo-Paris' elite can erase anything unpleasant from their grey matter and reinforce the idea that they deserve their exalted lot in life. Meanwhile, people who've suffered from broken or abused memory tech fall to the fringes of society, unable to remember anything more than the basest of instincts, fiending to suck off others' richer life experiences. The have-nots in this fiction don't even have their own selves.

You play as Nilin, an amnesiac memory hunter who's told that she used to run with a revolutionary group who want to take down Memorize and give people back control of their own memories. Neo-Paris is a glorious construct that manages to combine the old-world charms of the City of Lights with the game's harsh dystopian imagination. The open-air cafés feels distinctly Euro when you walk past them and distinctly changed when you see the lime-green androgybot waiting to take your order.

But, while Remember Me boasts great world design, it's frustrating how little of that world you can interact with. Dumpsters that you should be able to scramble onto repel you and ledges that look like you should be able to grab deny your grasp. The trash-strewn streets and gleaming high-rises aren't fully interactive; they're just backdrops to set the scene of Neo-Paris.

The game's combat is almost entirely hand-to-hand, with a few ranged weapons that serve dual purposes for platforming traversal. Combat is rhythmic and combos will stall if you button-mash. That's significant because Remember Me lets you customize your combos in clever ways. For example, if you order it just so, the third button-press in a combo can fast-forward a cooldown on your special ability, making it available more quickly than if you just waited it out. If you program combos and nail them correctly, you can shave time off cooldowns, give back health and multiply its own damage all in one chain of moves.

It's a nice evolution of the minimalist combat template made popular by Rocksteady's Batman games: simple enough to keep you in a flow but layered enough to offer engaging strategy and rewards.

You'll be stealing the memories of other characters often in Remember Me. Once you do, Nilin will see moments from their pasts holographically projected at nodes called Remembranes. These sections allow you to dodge hidden traps, solve environmental puzzles or sometimes just fill you in on backstory while you move through a level.

Nilin can remix memories, too, vaulting back into the pasts of her targets and tweaking specific moments to make them more vulnerable. Making someone remember something joyous as a trauma can mean that the person hunting Nilin is too filled with regret to deliver the killing blow. Remixing requires you to scrub back and forth through a remembrance—by rolling the left analog stick backwards or forwards—poking at various elements until you find the magic recipe that lets you proceed. There's trial and error built in to these sequences. You'll find yourself trying to constantly keep track of what the correct first, second and subsequent steps are to make a remix go right. All of this combines into a nice meta-game that has the player not trying to have his own memory betray him.

Just as meta are the hint screens that show you where to grab pick ups. You'll have to hold that image of the alleyway with three boxes stacked on top of each other inside your head even as you fight your way through the level. Forget the picture or forget even to collect it and you lose out on upgrading your life and special attack bars.

Back to those remixes: the first time I did one, I felt like an omnipotent film editor, given the unfettered power of final cut over a person's life. It did what I needed it to, but I'll admit to feeling a little queasy in the aftermath. What if someone had the power to make me think that my dead mother loved me less than my siblings? What if they could do that without my ever knowing? Even the knowledge that such a person with such power existed would be enough to make you never trust your mind again.

The memory remixing and combo customization impressed me enough to outweigh Remember Me's flaws. For one, bad load times threaten to hobble any narrative urgency the game hopes to build. And it's yet another game where the platforming elements ape Uncharted's ledge-clambering and stretched-out jumps. Nothing feels special about moving around the world. Indeed, getting from point A to point B always felt like a chore. For the first half of the game, combat felt similar. You punch and kick through waves for enemies in a moveset that doesn't quite deliver on the smoothness that it promises. The game's latter half mixes up enough enemy types, scenarios and customization options to feel interesting and, in flashes, challenging. But you have to slog through some stuff to get to those more inspired moments, like the great boss battle in the game's fourth episode.

This fumbling feels like growing pains of a new studio, one arguably more concerned with telling a game's plot and building a world than innovating with combat or locomotion. That story is unquestionably Remember Me's saving grace. Dontnod seem to genuinely want players to think about the underlying ideas of Nilin's adventure. The story starts off as a black-and-white drama of oppressors vs. oppressed. But, Remember Me eventually digs a bit deeper to show the moral quandary of using a power like memory-tampering to advance political aims, even if they are righteous. The dialogue feels stiff at time, nestled inside a game that's a little too in love with its own words and concepts. But those pieces are still a cut above what's in some many games.

And just because it needs reinforcing: memory remixes are the coolest game mechanic I've played with in a long time. They combine elements of a choose-your-own-adventure book with grim psychological consequences. I finished the game wishing there were more of those sequences but each one felt like it was perfectly placed when I came to them.

So, yes: parts of Remember Me feel like cool ideas in search of better gameplay execution. And its writing can come across as flowery, high-minded and overly earnest. But I couldn't stop thinking about how Sensen is one of those fictional technologies that you'd both love and hate if it actually existed. Moreover, I gasped at some of the things they game had me do as Nilin. And Neo-Paris' wretched social divide made my skin crawl. People who play Remember Me won't be talking about what badasses they felt like during their time with it. But they will wonder what they'd do inside the game's fictional construct. Would you let a significant other download your memories to their brain? Would you excise all those awful adolescent moments if you could? Remember Me plays like a thought experiment set in a world where millions of people have answered those questions—and the many others that extrapolate from its imaginary science. Play it so you can prepare for a future where your personal history lives in a digital cloud, even more than it does now.

To contact the author of this post, write to evan@kotaku.com or find him on Twitter @EvNarc

Remember Me evokes a strange nostalgia for itself. It's better to recall it with fondness than with accuracy, because the highlights are so much more endearing than the truth. What makes this especially awkward is the game's central sermon: beware of discarding reality in favor of phony memories.

There's a lot to take in before you start fabricating flashbacks. Remember Me's protagonist, Nilin, first takes a disquieting, drowsy walk through the bowels of a sterile prison, which keeps its occupants under thumb by inflicting amnesia. She escapes, returning to eloquence and to a futuristic Paris in which the affluent's memories are softened, shared and monopolized by a sprawling corporation. As a former "memory hunter" - the game's sci-fi lexicon only gets clumsier from there - Nilin gets back in the brain-hacking business alongside Edge, an enigmatic leader looking to shake the status quo.

What you do and what the game is about align briefly whenever Nilin is within arm's reach of a few important characters. Instead of punching experience points out of them, as she does with almost everyone else, she remixes their memories to instill an insidious change in their outlook and personality.

Continue reading Remember Me review: You are what you do

Remember Me review: You are what you do originally appeared on Joystiq on Mon, 03 Jun 2013 07:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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