firehose

Warner Bros Acquires Rights To Make ‘Dungeons & Dragons’ Movie - Yahoo! Movies:

Warner Bros has acquired rights to make a movie based on Dungeons & Dragons, the perennially popular role-playing game fantasy game. The studio is actually quite far along in the development of the project, as it will use a script by Wrath Of The Titans and Red Riding Hood scribe and Frank Darabont protege David Leslie Johnson. That script, Chainmail, was acquired last year as a free-standing project, based on an obscure game that was also hatched by D&D designer Gary Gygax before he and Dave Arneson launched D&D. It is being retro-fitted to fit the much bigger game creation. The film will be produced by The Lego Movie producer Roy Lee and Courtney Solomon. The latter actually directed a 2000 Dungeons & Dragons feature, a film that starred Jeremy Irons and did not do well.

Justin Bieber has had what might be politely termed an awkward spring so far, whether he was joking about whether Anne Frank would have been a fan of his—an idea brilliantly satirized in the New Yorker by Yoni Brenner, who sketched out a vision of World War II in which the Nazis are defeated by Belieberism—and ran into trouble with his pet monkey. But as The Hollywood Reporter notes, he appears to have gotten one gesture of international cooperation right:

Amid an international tour plagued with missteps, Justin Bieber is being recognized for doing good during Thursday’s concert in Turkey. The pop star paused twice during his Istanbul performance to honor Azan–the Islamic call to prayer Muslims observe five times daily. “I’m not a Justin Bieber fan but as a Muslim, I got a lot of respect for him cos of what he did,” one Twitter user posted user after E! Online first reported the news. Wrote another, “You can hate all you want, but he earned my respect.” Later adding: “Muslim performers don’t even do what you did.”

There’s a lot of talk about a culture war without the boundaries of the United States itself. But American culture—or in this case, hybrid Canadian-American cultural products—is also a powerful export internationally. If Woodie Guthrie’s guitar was a machine that killed fascists, teenybop pop can produce earworms that transcend religious practice, national origin, and gender. Bieber’s gesture of respect is a proffer of sorts, a suggestion that religious practice and pop music can coexist—and that Christians are perfectly capable of being respectful of the practices of people of other faith traditions—and those who say it can’t are putting quarrels in the mouths of Western artists. If there’s an international culture war underway, a side that offers both the possibility of devotion and opportunities for pleasure may have one up on a party that shuts many participants out of both.

Treasury Secretary Jack Lew has improved his signature (Salon)

In a major milestone, a powerful organization of mental health researchers has said it will not be using the new, fifth edition of the Diagnostical and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-V), a handbook that has virtually defined the field of psychiatry in the United States for decades. Here's what this means.

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A new Chrome extension let Spotify users permanently download any song currently available from the streaming music service, a massive slip-up that could quickly upset record labels and music publishers.

South Carolina Election Results 2013: Mark Sanford Wins First District Race:

Sanford 54.5%, Colbert Busch 45%

Former South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford (R) has won the race for the state’s 1st District congressional seat, CNN and the Associated Press reported. Sanford, who served as governor of the Palmetto State from 2003 to 2011, defeated businesswoman Elizabeth Colbert Busch (D). Sanford had said Tuesday that if he did not win, he would not run for office again, the Associated Press reported.

Philly.com

Same-sex couples welcome Del. gay marriage law Denver Post DOVER, Del.—Mikki Snyder-Hall married her partner, Claire, in California in 2008, and moved two years ago to Rehoboth, a gay-friendly Delaware beach town. Now they're looking forward to July 1, when Delaware officially becomes the 11th state in the ... Gay marriage approved as Delaware lawmaker comes outThe News Journal Delaware becomes 11th state with gay marriage - NECN.comNECN Same-sex couples welcome Del. gay marriage law - News 12 ConnecticutNews 12 Connecticut Philly.com all 216 news articles »

The variety of dress that we have become accustomed to since globalization began has greatly increased our acceptance of differences in style. Difference has not always been so accepted. I have always remembered the story of the small riot caused by the first man to venture out in London wearing a top hat, and, on a more personal level, apprehension about the reaction of my peers kept my opera pumps in the closet for several years after their purchase.

Today of course most of that sensitivity towards what others might think tends to be confined to the social set in which we move. A man may be self conscious about wearing a fedora on the street, but he soon finds that he is the only one who is paying attention. That is a form of opportunity, if you will.

Clothing should be more than just practical, and house shoes are one of the better ways for a man to have fun with his clothes and pay lip service to tradition without raising too many eyebrows too high. The Albert slipper, for example, was often worn in the evening outside the bedroom and remains a perfectly acceptable choice today. A comfortable velvet slipper with a hard leather sole, Alberts are suitable for away from home activities that do not include long walks on pavement, such as long airplane flights, black tie events, evenings at a man's club or more basic occasions like dinners out.

Part of the tradition of the Albert is a design on the vamp, either initials or a representation of a hobby or lifestyle choice. Which brings us back to opportunity. Wit is perfectly acceptable, witness the embroidered skulls on G. J. Cleverley's Alberts in the photographs. Should a friend notice, let him in on the joke. No-one else will pay attention.

How did they come up with the languages Daenerys speaks? Are they real? Or did someone just create them for the show?

Nerval's Lobster writes "As we discussed yesterday, Adobe plans on focusing the bulk of its software-development efforts on its Creative Cloud offering, with no plans to further update its 'boxed' Creative Suite products. The move isn't surprising, considering the tech industry's general movement toward the cloud over the past few years. Creative Cloud will cost $19.99 per month for a 'single app' version that features the full version of 'selected apps,' 20GB of cloud storage, and limited access to services. Those who opt for the 'complete' version will pay $49.99 per month for every Creative Cloud app, 20GB of cloud storage, and full access to services; it also requires an annual commitment. At that price, it would take a little over a year for a customer spending $49.99 per month to exceed the full retail cost of box-based Adobe Creative Suite 6, which currently retails for $599.99 at Staples and $403.99 on Amazon. In a recent interview with Mashable, Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen insisted that the Creative Cloud's cost to customers is lower, especially since they won't have to pay for cloud storage and other services — never mind that 20GB doesn't carry anyone far when it comes to visual design. However much customers stand to benefit from the cloud, it's easy to see that, over a long enough timeline, and with the right financial model in place, the companies providing those services stand to benefit even more than they did with boxed software. That's liable to make just as many people angry as happy, no?"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

This recipe is nothing new. It was first published, as far as I can gather, in 1896 in The Boston Cooking-School Cook Book by Fannie Merritt Farmer and has since been fussed over and had its virtues extolled by more food writers, newspaper dining sections and food bloggers than it has not been. It’s the equivalent Proust’s Madeleine/Jim Lahey’s No-Knead Bread/Three-Ingredient Peanut Butter Cookie*/Hey, Did I Tell You About The Time I Killed My Own Dinner? of modern food writing.

But even if I’m not going to be making an unprecedented mark on the home cooking conversation today, it would be a glaring omission not to share it here as well because there’s so much that’s very important about it. The first is the book it hails from, the late, awesome Marion Cunningham’s Breakfast Book. Do you know anyone who just got engaged/about to get married/just moved into their own apartment/thinks they want to start cooking/trying to drop a hint to their significant other that certain meal shifts are up for grabs? What better place to start than at the top of the day, and this is the book everyone — yes, girls and boys — needs on their shelves. It covers all bases. It makes people happy. These are respectable cooking goals.

... Read the rest of essential raised waffles on smittenkitchen.com

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© smitten kitchen 2006-2012. | permalink to essential raised waffles | 352 comments to date | see more: Breakfast, Pancakes, Photo

Social News Daily

Twitter's Legal Director Hired By Obama Administration As Nation's First Chief ... Social News Daily Twitter legal director Nicole Wong has been battling internet litigation issues for years and now she's working for the Obama Administration. Wang on Tuesday was chosen to be the country's first Chief Privacy Officer. Nicole Wang joined Twitter five moths ago ... and more »

Zorg issues orders to the police to arrest Korben Dallas. A squad of 8 officers arrive to his apartment block. They know what apartment number he’s supposed to be in, but the residents have blacked out their unit numbers on their doors.

To authorize the lockdown, the squad leader opens a police box mounted on the wall in the hallway by placing the top edge of a transparent warrant into a slot on its side. The box verifies the warrant and slides open. The squad leader presses a red button within.

During lockdown a klaxon sounds, red beacon lights descend from the hallway ceiling, and a loud, clear voiceover is heard in the hallway and in the apartments themselves.

THIS IS A POLICE PATROL. THIS IS NOT AN EXERCISE…THIS IS A POLICE PATROL. THIS IS NOT AN EXERCISE. CAN YOU PLEASE SPREAD YOUR LEGS AND PLACE YOUR HANDS IN THE YELLOW CIRCLES.

The circles in question are painted at chest height on the walls inside of each apartment, a little wider than shoulder width. There is a small intercom interface mounted in the wall directly between the yellow circles. The police use different interfaces for peering inside apartments and this intercom for communicating with citizens, but these will be discussed separately in the next post.

Analysis

There are a few sets of users for this particular set of interfaces: The police, Zorg, and Korben. To evaluate the system, we need to look at each user independently.

1. For the police, this interface seems to work well. Since the lockdown is part of the infrastructure, they don’t have to bring anything but their standard gear and the warrant. They save energy and the tedium of alerting the citizens and issuing standard compliance instructions. In a fully networked world, you might think to simply have him or her authorize themselves using biometrics, but in keeping with the principles of multifactor authentication, you might require the officer to carry something anyway. Since you’d want a physical warrant for a poor or luddite citizen to be able to see and verify, it’s going to be there, might as well use it.
2. For Zorg and issuing authorities like him, he kind-of wants to minimize danger to his people and certainly his equipment, which this helps do. He also wants to cover his ass from citizen lawsuits, and having the traceability of the warrant-scan means he will have a record that due process has been followed. As we’ll see tomorrow, ultimately he doesn’t get what he needs, but as far as this lockdown interface, it seems like it would work just fine.
3. For the citizen Korben, the interface provides a clear signal and easy-to-follow instructions, so the proximal part “works.” What doesn’t work is that the whole system is horribly demeaning, authoritarian, and—fully risking Godwin’s Law, here—fascist.

Security is almost always at odds with usability, and this interface proves no different. To improve the experience for the good citizen, you might want to provide some warning, some ability to finish what they’re doing, or some less demeaning way to show that they are cooperating. But any concessions made for the good citizens will be taken advantage of by the bad ones, and so I don’t know that design can really fix that tension.

P.S. As of this writing my Minority Report review is not posted, but readers interested to compare and contrast a similar scene done with more seriousness some 5 years later should check it out.

mlingojones writes "The CSS Zen Garden — an attempt to showcase the power of CSS, from ye olden days when most sites used tables for layout, when CSS2 was bleeding edge, when IE5 was the most popular web browser — turns 10 today. In celebration, the maintainer Dave Shea is reopening the project for submissions, with a focus on CSS3 and responsive design."

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Miss Sarajevo, 1993

via http://www.feedly.com/home#subscription/feed/http://acreativeuniverse.com/feed/

Braden Kiefiuk from Enderby, British Columbia is a metal bending man!  He's shared this buffalo skull to prominently display upon our page.


Like a good artist should, Brandon crafts these by hand.  If you think this is impressive then check out this piece of work.  Brandon, you should definitely make friend's with Skull-A-Day friend Larry Pearson.  Thanks for bringing the METAL!!!

Glenn Fleishman urges freelance writers to take accompanying photos with better cameras than their iPhones:

The iPhone and similar smartphones with decent built-in cameras aren’t as good as a real camera when you’re taking photos to accompany reporting.

We’ve seen this a few times with The Magazine: writers take their own photos of places or events that are otherwise hard to find photos of — great! — but the image quality is so poor that we can’t use them.

It’s not just iPhones that are the problem: too many people are shooting with SLRs, but only using the kit lens.

I’d go further and suggest that you shouldn’t buy an SLR if you only ever plan to use its kit lens or an inexpensive zoom lens. Kit lenses and low-end zooms produce blurry, distorted, drab images — they can look decent on blogs or phones, but the flaws become apparent when you see them on big Retina screens or printed at larger sizes.

A decent consumer SLR body, usually $600–900, is a big investment for most people. But if you can’t also afford to buy at least one good lens with it, you’ll get better photos by going with a less expensive kit, such as a high-end point-and-shoot or an entry-level mirrorless setup.

Fortunately, you don’t need to spend a lot of money to get a great lens if you’re willing to make one tradeoff.

Good lenses have three competing factors: price, versatility, and quality. You can optimize two of them, but usually at the expense of the third.

My best suggestion for Canon SLRs is the 40mm “pancake”, which is currently just $149 — the same price as most kit lenses. It’s a prime lens, meaning it does not zoom: it’s fixed to one medium-distance focal length, and you can zoom with your feet. By using simpler optical designs that don’t need to zoom, primes sacrifice versatility but bring very good quality at very low prices.

My wife and I have a lot of fantastic (and expensive) Canon lenses, but we use the 40mm pancake most because it delivers great quality in very little size and weight.

Photo by Tiffany Arment, taken with the Canon EF 40mm “pancake” lens.

If you absolutely must have a zoom range — and please, really reconsider if you must — you’ll generally need to spend about $700 to get noticeably better optical quality than the kit lens, and it still won’t be as good as most primes.

To approach or surpass a $150–300 prime’s quality in a zoom, you generally need to go well above $1000 — pro photographers needing a general-range zoom usually use this $2100 model, or for longer range, you’ve probably seen photographers using this $2200 beast.

Starting to see why I recommend primes if you want quality?

Understandably, these requirements may drive you out of the SLR market, but that’s OK: the smaller, cheaper mirrorless market is hot right now. There are some great midrange camera bodies around $500, such as the Olympus E-PM2 or E-PL5 (don’t miss their pancake prime).

Oh, and please don’t use your camera’s built-in flash. Ever.

Signifying our society’s maturing from the sarcastic negativity that defined the ’90s, into the cheerily positive attitude toward brand exploitation that is the more modern form of cynicism, remakes are now in the works for 10 titles from American International Pictures—the B-movie studio perhaps best known as one of the top suppliers of terrible films to Mystery Science Theater 3000. Among the first MST3K-mocked AIP movies being readied for updates are The She-Creature, Teenage Caveman, Viking Women And The Sea Serpent, The Undead, and War Of The Colossal Beast, all of which were churned out on the cheap by AIP’s Samuel Z. Arkoff and James H. Nicholson in the 1950s, all based on the first focus groups ever held to determine that teenagers are morons.

Arkoff and Nicholson used the responses they gathered from those focus groups to create their movies, first devising the kind of ...

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NPR

Firearm-related homicides drop 39 percent since mid-1990s, government study ... OregonLive.com WASHINGTON — Gun homicides have dropped steeply in the United States since their 1993 peak, a pair of reports released Tuesday showed, adding fuel to Congress' battle over whether to tighten restrictions on firearms. A study released Tuesday by the ... Govt: firearm-related homicides down 39 percentColumbus Ledger-Enquirer Gun Crisis? What Gun Crisis? Part IINational Review Online (blog) all 45 news articles »

Nine and fourteen-month-olds prefer "individuals who treat similar others well and dissimilar others poorly." Basically, babies are terrible.

Numerous sources are reporting the death of Mario Machado, the Emmy-winning broadcaster who made history when he became the first Asian-American on-air news reporter in Los Angeles, and also enjoyed several decades of playing a news reporter in movies and TV shows. Machado died of complications from pneumonia at the age of 78. 

After he broke ground by joining L.A.’s KHJ-TV (currently KCAL) in 1967, Machado’s career moved quickly, until, by 1970, he’d become a regular on the city’s popular CBS news broadcast, and such a familiar face that movies and TV shows looking to add a bit of real-world grounding would hire him to play a reporter. Machado’s list of screen credits is longer than some actors’, and—with the exception of the odd “technician” role on Mission: Impossible, and the time he played the wealthy Korean businessman who hires Emilio Estevez in ...

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The Answer Is No is a Twitterbot that calls out shoddy journalism by answering headlines that end in a question mark with the answer: “No.” It is based on Betteridge’s law of headlines, which states that “any headline which ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no.” As the law’s originator, British technology journalist Ian Betteridge explains it:

The reason why journalists use that style of headline is that they know the story is probably bullshit, and don’t actually have the sources and facts to back it up, but still want to run it. Which, of course, is why it’s so common in the Daily Mail.

Does Laughing Squid use question marks in our headlines? No. *Unless we’re mentioning the title of an artwork, video, or other work that is in the form of a question.

No. RT @slate: Is psychiatry a fundamentally dishonest profession? slate.me/10d5Al0

— The Answer Is No (@YourTitleSucks) May 5, 2013

No. RT @salon: Is the new Superman movie Pentagon propaganda? slnm.us/ZUV9itI via @alternet

— The Answer Is No (@YourTitleSucks) May 6, 2013

No. RT @theatlantic: Study: Does yoga have a cellular effect on our bodies? theatln.tc/11FLyw2

— The Answer Is No (@YourTitleSucks) May 3, 2013

No. RT @forbes: Can Google convince teens to pay for YouTube videos? bit.ly/17IqMjc

— The Answer Is No (@YourTitleSucks) May 7, 2013

via Jason Eppink

The Internet is full of interesting things to read outside of The A.V. Club—no, really! In our periodic Read This posts, we point you toward interesting or noteworthy pieces that caught our eye.

Mad Men viewers are generally supposed to believe that while Don Draper might not be a great human being, he’s an absolutely great ad man. Business Insider has a great (albeit a month old) story about how, in comparison to what was actually running at the time, Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce’s ad concepts were actually pretty terrible. For instance, while SCDP pitched Belle Jolie lipstick a sketchy drawing of a gamine girl, real cosmetics companies were using actual photos at the time. And SCDP’s Mohawk Airlines pitch might have showed a sexy stewardess’ butt, but the real Mohawk was pitching itself using photos of four actual flight attendants, all of whom were ...

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Former Assassin's Creed and Assassin's Creed 2 Creative Director Patrice Desilets was let go by Ubisoft today. "Contrary to any statements made earlier today, this morning I was terminated by Ubisoft," Desilets said in a statement to Polygon.

This marks the second time Desilets left the company, as he announced his departure in June 2010 for a "creative break from the industry" before joining THQ Montreal in May 2011. Desliets officially re-joined Ubisoft in March of this year, following the acquisition of THQ Montreal by Ubisoft in January.

"I was notified of this termination in person, handed a termination notice and was unceremoniously escorted out of the building by two guards without being able to say goodbye to my team or collect my personal belongings," he added. "This was not my decision." The earlier statement Desilets referred to, which was sent by Ubisoft to the press, reads:

"The acquisition of THQ Montreal in January allowed Ubisoft to welcome 170 experienced developers, including Patrice Desilets, to our existing and renowned workforce. Unfortunately, since the acquisition, the good faith discussions between Patrice and Ubisoft aimed at aligning Patrice's and the studio's visions have been inconclusive. As a result, Patrice has left the studio. Our priorities remain with the teams already hard at work on projects in development. They are at the root of Ubisoft Montreal's past and future successes."

Desilets said that "Ubisoft's actions are baseless and without merit. I intend to fight Ubisoft vigorously for my rights, for my team and for my game." According to Game Informer, the publisher refused to comment on the state of both 1666 and Underdog, the two THQ Montreal games acquired by Ubisoft during the asset purchase in January.

Patrice Desilets fired by Ubisoft originally appeared on Joystiq on Tue, 07 May 2013 14:45:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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another random user writes "Facebook is reportedly introducing video advertisements to News Feeds this summer. Reports in the Financial Times (registration required) say that the clips will last for around 15 seconds, and the first one users see each day will play automatically. The first video will apparently play without audio, and restart if the account holder chooses to activate sound. Facebook is yet to officially confirm the move, but the report claims that the social network will gradually introduce video advertising to minimize user disruption. The company's most lucrative marketing partners, including American Express, Coca Cola, Ford, Diageo and Nestle, are expected to be the first brands to make use of the feature. Facebook is said to have implemented the strategy in a bid to take a slice out of TV ad revenue by undercutting the sector."

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