firehosewhat
Hot damn, this is going to be good. Rumor has it Natalie Portman has agreed to play Lady Macbeth in the big screen adaptation of William Shakespeare's Macbeth. But wait, it gets so much better, Michael Fassbender will play her hubby. Let the hot villainous sex-scheming begin!
    
|
firehose"A more radical, disruptive, Apple-like, think-different approach would be for Cook to move some of the cash from his balance sheet onto the balance sheets of people who would spend it on consumer goods—like the 42,600 people who work at relatively low wages at the company’s 402 stores; or the contractors and vendors who run its cafeterias; or the architects who are designing Apple’s futuristic new corporate headquarters; or the armies of low-paid workers at Foxconn factories in China who assemble cheap generic components into expensive Apple-branded products. Lord knows Apple could afford to. The company’s profit margin in the most recent quarter was a stunning 37 percent."
firehosewould watch despite SyFy
Syfy is apparently racing ahead at speed Standard by Six with its remake of Blake's 7, the classic British show about criminals who join a political prisoner to fight an evil space empire. This show will live and die based on the character of Avon, and there's one actor who's uniquely qualified to play him.
|
|
firehoseidgaf about spoilers
More of my vis dev work for Bioshock: Infinite! (You can see my concepts for young Liz over yonder in this post)
Sooo I also got to work on designing Robert and Rosalind, who you end up meeting pretty early on in the game. I’m only three hours in so I don’t know if their full names are spoilers yet, so I’m playing it safe. :)
The two of them were still in the really early design stages when I was brought on, so I got to have a lot of free reign with them; I’ll be honest, I’d pretty happy rock Rosalind’s final outfit given half the chance.
I just saw that there’s a class being offered on Skillshare called Play! Make Your First Video Game in 4 Weeks from Scratch with Unity (no coding!). If you sign up at that link you’ll get $10 off, bringing the total cost of this 4-week online class to a whopping $15 US. It begins Wednesday May 1. If you sign up, be sure to post us a link to any games you create.-LT
What do you do when you have a great idea for a game but no programming background? Before you give up, let me introduce you to the world of indie game development. With the technology and tools available today, you can start creating the game you’ve always wanted to make as soon as, well, today! Who is This Class for?This class is for beginners with no prior game development or programming experience. If you know how to code in Javascript, C#, Object-C, Basic, this may be too basic for you.
What You Will Need
firehoselol
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
firehoseashdowurn
All right, you heard the announcement. You’ve seen the video. You’ve read some of the development blogs we’ve posted. You want more. You want to see what Shadowrun, Fifth Edition is going to look like, you want to read some of the text, you want to see some of the art we’ve been talking about. And you want it now, and you want it free.
Well, who can blame you? Fortunately, we’ve got just what you want! A free preview of Shadowrun, Fifth Edition is available now! Check out some short fiction, some art, and the skyline of Tenochtitlan! You can get the PDF at the Battleshop or at DriveThruRPG.
One very important note: We’re still adding corrections and proofing notes, so this PDF is the pre-proof edition. Page references, typos, and other matters will be corrected before the final release.
With that said, go check out that PDF! Enjoy!
Say, did you notice that the file is called “Preview #1″? I wonder if there will be more …
By Emily Gera on Apr 30, 2013 at 7:00a
The Adam Foster-developed Half-Life 2 mod Minerva is coming to Steam later today following its initial release in 2007, Eurogamer reports.
The updated game will feature a number of bug fixes, visual tweaks, improved puzzles, in addition to a few other improvements in time for its Steam release. The mod will require Half-Life 2: Episode One to play; however, Minerva will be made available for free beyond that initial necessity.
Minerva refers to the mod's unseen narrator who guides the player as they explore a mysterious underground Combine facility. The game will become available on Steam in late morning west coast time.
In 2010, the makers of the ultrasimple blogging service Posterous went on an aggressive recruiting campaign to snatch users from "dying platforms." The startup released 15 importers that made it easy for users to migrate their blogs and photos from services like Ning, Twitpic, and Blogger. "Whatever the reason, whatever the site, we want you to switch to Posterous," the company said.
Anyone who was compelled by that campaign probably regrets it now. After growing quickly for three years, Posterous started struggling and pivoted to become Posterous Spaces, a Google Groups-like discussion app. When Twitter bought Posterous in the spring of last year, it was widely understood to be an "aquihire," a way for Twitter to absorb the Posterous team. In February of this year, Posterous announced it would be shutting down all blogs after ten weeks.
The site shut down this morning and blogs are no longer accessible
That day is here. The site will shut down sometime today, after which time blogs will no longer be accessible. If you haven’t moved your blog off Posterous yet, you’ll have an additional 30 days to access your data after the shutdown. After that, all blogs will be permanently erased.
More than 60,000 people were logging into Posterous every day, judging by public data from those who use the site with Facebook, and the site was hosting more than 52 million pages. People liked Posterous because it was incredibly easy to use. It also had a killer feature: post by email.
When it launched in 2008, Posterous was the only blogging service that let users publish posts by emailing the content — including tags, formatting, and images — to a customized address. If you attached a number of images to an email, Posterous would automatically assemble them into a gallery.
Posterous had other nifty features too, including the ability to automatically cross-post to Twitter, Facebook, and other services. It also allowed for custom Javascript. These simple but powerful features attracted a set of fairly serious daily bloggers who are now looking for a replacement. We’ve made a list of our favorite substitutes.
Rarely is there a perfect alternative when a service like Posterous shuts down, but Posthaven is actually Posterous redux. Posterous cofounder Garry Tan decamped when the startup pivoted, disappointed with the direction it was headed in. He and another Posterous cofounder, Brett Gibson, decided to recreate the blogging platform when they heard Twitter planned to shut it down. The pair has built what they say is a "perfect importer" for Posterous refugees, which transfers URLs, comments, and all types of content intact.
Posthaven already offers post-by-email and is working on building auto-post and adding more of the original features. Even more compelling is that Tan is pledging to keep users’ data "forever" for $5 a month. Tan knows he can’t guarantee that anything will be on the internet forever, but he promises Posthaven will be around at least for his lifetime.
"We really believe that something like this should exist."
"Both Brett and I have pledged to do this because we really believe that something like this should exist," Tan told The Verge. "Honestly, writing Posterous was the happiest moment of my life and I’m having a blast actually writing it again. I want to work on this over the long term."
That’s a compelling promise. Tan and Gibson are still building out features, so there will be a gap before users can do everything that they used to be able to do with Posterous. But Tan said Posthaven will eventually support galleries, custom Javascript, and maybe a few new things too.
The only free option on the list, Wordpress is also a popular choice for Posterous refugees. Wordpress also offers a paid service, which includes a custom domain and greater customization for $99 a year.
Chris Nadeau, formerly one of Posterous’s featured bloggers, went the Wordpress route and reported no problems with the data transfer. "It brought all my data (and I mean all of it) with a few clicks. Even the comments," he wrote in a blog post about the transition. Current Posterous CEO Sachin Agarwal also migrated all his data intact. However, Tan said the Wordpress importer failed to transfer document files and audio files, and downsized large images to 1,000 pixels wide.
Admittedly, it’s not the prettiest
Wordpress is the most popular blogging platform in the world. Admittedly, it’s not the prettiest. But if you’re looking for a free space to park your thoughts, it’s pretty hard to beat; and, unlike Blogger, Wordpress rolls out updates pretty frequently. Its database of plugins, contributed by independent developers, is also growing all the time.
Wordpress is not as intuitive or easy to use as many of the other options. Posting by email, for example, requires the user to configure the Wordpress installation or use plug-ins. However, it’s a very sturdy platform. "It’s what you want if your posting needs don’t go beyond just having a blog and some pages and you want the best-priced solution," Nadeau wrote.
Posterous was built for the traditional reverse-chronological blogger. However, maybe your needs have evolved. If you’re looking for an easy-to-use WYSIWYG website builder that includes a slick blog, Squarespace is the way to go.
Squarespace manages to be super simple and yet very feature-rich. The gallery tool includes an image editor, the store feature includes a powerful inventory manager, and every site comes optimized for mobile. Squarespace also offers real-time traffic analytics and 24 / 7 customer phone support. The templates and layout options are modern and look high-end.
Squarespace’s blogging tool allows for auto-posting to other services and mapping posts with geolocation. There is also a Squarespace bookmarklet for reblogging content from elsewhere on the web.
Squarespace manages to be super simple and yet very feature-rich
The service has three price tiers, all of which include a custom domain name. For $8, you can get 20 pages, which includes a blog with as many posts as you want. For $20, you get unlimited bandwidth, storage, and contributors. For $24 a month, you get e-commerce features.
Squarespace offers an importer for Posterous users, but users reported some pains with the importer so you may have to add some data manually. In Tan’s test, text, audio, and video files were lost in the transfer. Squarespace also generates new URLs for every page, which may cause some damage to a site’s SEO. However, Squarespace does allow users to post by email.
Fortunately for Posterous users, there are several good alternatives. Unlike Posterous, two out of three of the best are paid-only services. Paying for data allows for some peace of mind, however: it means that the company hosting the blog is motivated to continue doing so.
Paying for data allows for peace of mind
The free blogging service Tumblr was considered Posterous’s biggest competitor before the latter fell behind, but Tumblr is notoriously unprofitable. Other trendy competitors Medium and Svbtle are startups that are too new to bet on. Google’s Blogger, also free, hasn’t been updated in years and gives the impression of a forgotten product that could be buried in the Google graveyard alongside Buzz and Reader at any moment.
If you’re a serious blogger and you don’t want to have to move platforms every few years, you should be prepared to pay up.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
SuperCut Videos has released “Rocky: The Punches,” a heavy-hitting 17-minute supercut video of every punch thrown by Rocky Balboa in the Rocky films.
via Doobybrain.com
firehosechrist
When Google+ Sign-In was announced earlier this year — the search giant's riff on a Facebook Connect-style login service with integrated activity sharing — it promised that the information it saw from users of the service would yield new benefits. Today the company is announcing a new addition to Google search results: it will be using Google+ Sign-In activity to determine the most popular titles for several different movie and music services, and linking directly to those titles within search results.
The launch partners included Flixster, Fandango, SoundCloud, and Slacker Radio, amongst several others. The new links appear for all Google users, whether they're logged into their Google account or using Google+ Sign-In themselves, and will appear to the right of the main search results, below a large icon for the partnered service in question. It will also display user activity in some case; SoundCloud, for example, will note how many users are listening to a given track. Clicking the link will take the user directly to the item in question. Google says it will be rolling out the service on desktop search over the next few weeks, with more partners on the horizon.
German Immigrants to North America (1853)
J.B. Metzler's map of Immigrants to North America (German). From 1922. Immigrants to North America Date: 1853 Author: J.B. Metzler Dwnld: Full Size (13mb) Print Availability: See our Prints Page for more details pff This map isn't part of any series, but we have other thematic maps that you might want to check out. Lots of Germans, it seems, were making their ways to the United States in the mid-19th...
the BIG Map Blog - Interesting maps, historical maps, BIG maps.
firehosewhat the fuck is somebody's rpg journal doing here
Hundreds of strange metallic-looking spheres of unknown origin and purpose have been discovered by archaeologists exploring the ruins of an ancient Mesoamerican temple in Mexico, Discovery News reports. The spheres were uncovered by a camera-equipped robotic exploration rover on the floor of two previously sealed underground chambers in the Temple of the Feathered Serpent in the ancient city Teotihuacan, 30 miles away from Mexico City. They are thought to be at least 1,800 years old and are about 1.5 inches to 5 inches in size. Their cores are made up of clay and other unknown organic materials, while their surfaces are covered in pyrite, also known as "fool's gold," giving them a sparkling yellow coating.
"no one can establish their function."
The spheres are thought to be offerings of some kind, as the temple was used by priests, but for now, "no one can establish their function because it is an unprecedented discovery," said archaeologist Jorge Zavala in news release translated from Spanish, originally issued by the National Anthropology and History Institute of Mexico, which runs the site. Archaeologists are now performing imaging studies of the spheres, along with other artifacts found in the temple, to better understand what roles they played in ancient Mesoamerican society. Meanwhile, the scientists are hopeful about what they may find even deeper in the temple, potentially even the remains of the city's rulers.
 The Atlantic Wire |
The Atlantic Wire The FBI is now investigating whether or not Virginia Governor Bob McDonnell violated any laws when he allowed a campaign donor to pay for catering at his daughter's wedding. That is perhaps the least weird part of the story. The crux of the issue is whether ... Sources: FBI looking into relationship between Va. Gov. McDonnell, campaign ...The Republic all 59 news articles » |
Amongst its many holdings (including taxi cab companies) Zorg industries manufactures weapons, including their flagship weapon, the ZF-1. It has a great many features. It stores as a sealed pod, and can be activated by a remote control. With a press of a button, shielding retracts and parts extend so it can be handled like a traditional small arms weapon.
Zorg makes a pitch to the Mangalores for the ZF-1, so we’ll just let his own words sell it.
It’s light. The handle is adjustable for easy carrying. Good for righties and lefties. Breaks down into four parts. Undetectable by x-ray. Ideal for quick, discreet interventions. A word on firepower: Titanium recharger. 3,000 round clip with liquid bursts of 3-to-300.”
Next he pitches something quite unique to the weapon.
“With the Replay™ button—another Zorg invention—it’s even easier. One shot…and Replay™ sends every following shot to the same location…”
As he turns and points the weapons at the Mangalores, the ammunition arcs around to home in on the first shot.
But wait, don’t answer. The ZF-1 has other features as well.
…And to finish the job, all the Zorg oldies but goldies: Rocket launcher, arrow launcher with explosive, poisonous gas heads (very practical), our famous net launcher, the always-efficient flamethrower (my favorite), and for the grand finale, the all-new Ice Cube™ System.
After the Magalores fail to uphold their end of the bargain, Zorg leaves them to play with the weapons. As they do, one discovers that the glowing red button on the side is actually an explosive self-destruct.
I know Mangaglores are not meant to be shining examples of intellect, but if I was considering a purchase, I would yes, compliment the incredibly nifty technology of Replay, but follow it up with four more important questions about the design of the thing.
First, Mr. Zorg, what good is the remote control? Doesn’t this make the weapon hackable remotely? Isn’t that device easy to misplace? What on-weapon means do we have to unlock it?
Second, how are you selecting from among the six different types of ammunition?
On the exterior, we only see that red button. There might be some other subtle switches somewhere on the exterior, but you had to support the weight of the device with your left hand, so it’s fairly immobilized and I didn’t see you moving it. Unless it can only fire in exactly the order we saw, there’s got to be some other control. With your right hand hidden up inside the weapon, there must be other activation switches there. What switches are tucked up in there that are easy to differentiate by touch and easy to activate with your palm remaining against the grip?
Third, there’s that red button. Sure, who wouldn’t want to carry around a device that could erupt as an all-consuming fireball, but I notice that it doesn’t have a safety cover on it, gives no pause or warning during which the command can be retracted, and draws attention to itself by its glow. Isn’t that going to be increadibly easy to, you know, accidentally kill all my troops?
Fourth, during the demonstration we got a good glimpse at the front of the weapon. It’s got animated, blinking red LEDs whose pattern merges together to form a bright red diamond shape near the top of the weapon before looping over again.
I’m not a militarily-minded person, but isn’t it counter to a soldier’s goals to have anything blinking, glowing, or pinpointing the soldier’s exact midline to enemies, much less something that does all three at once, and in red, the color that travels the farthest in atmosphere?
What was that about “discreet” interventions?
firehose"a dreary commentary no more witty than pub bores misremembering the existence of old adverts and then loudly laughing at themselves"
so spot on for the 80s then
Spangles, etc.
By John Walker on April 30th, 2013 at 5:00 pm.
Do you remember that there were decades previously to this one? Far Cry 3 seems to think it does, with the appearance of an expandalone spoof of the 1980s, Blood Dragon. How does this mini-adventure hold up? Here’s wot I think:
It’s hard not to wish whoever created that first, excellent Blood Dragon trailer hadn’t been in charge of writing the whole game. This most peculiar of spin-off games, a mini-campaign and new island of bases to take over, finds itself in a bizarre space between a bunch of fun, and a lot of irritation.
If you peel away its crêpe-paper-thin veneer of confused 80s pastiche, what you’ve got here is an psuedo-expansion pack for Far Cry 3 (although there’s no crossover, no sharing of characters, etc). A new island, twelve or so new garrisons to take over (each with their own hostage-rescue additional task), new animals to shoot, dozens of new collectables to run up to and press E on, and a smattering of plot missions to play through. However, it’s an oddly stripped down version of Far Cry 3, with the skill system reduced to automatically added new abilities as you trundle through, the variation of activities reduced to three, no crafting whatsoever, and the arsenal of weapons limited to five.
So, well, that’s pretty good still. A bunch more charging about the countryside, the spontaneous events, the slaughtering of armies to take their homes for yourself, and the deaths of more tigers. Except this time there are giant laser-firing dragons, and everything’s lit in purple.
The dragons are perhaps the only really significant change in how you actually play. When you kill enemies you can tear their cyborg hearts from their chests, and store them up. The Blood Dragons are attracted to these, so you can use them for making your escape, or better, directing them toward enemies. Sneaking into a base, turning off their dragon shields, and then luring one in is obviously a fun time. Fighting the dragons themselves seems at first to be too daunting a prospect, but then later you’ll start figuring some stuff out, and be equipped with a better chance against them.
The mission quests were perhaps where Far Cry 3 saw the most criticism (although unfairly I’d argue – their leaning toward an Uncharted territory offered even more variation to the game), I doubt anyone would level the same here. They are, in general, splendid runs of violence. Rather than deviating from the core mechanics too much this time, most are focused on infiltration and then mass murder, offering multi-stage missions building to daft climaxes. Bearing in mind the minimized tone to the much of the game, these are extremely well constructed and realised. The only issue here is how few there are – that part of the game will only take about three or four hours at the very most.
Here that sound, coming over the horizon, as the purple storm crackles against the purple clouds? It’s a “but”.
But, in a strange way this game also feels like a worst-of of Far Cry 3. Other than issues with the story, what were the primary complaints? That bloody mission pop-up message that can’t be switched off? That’s still present. Mission zoning, such that you fail if you cross some arbitrary boundary on your way? Here. Then forced reloading to an earlier point, losing any progress as a consequence? Yup. Keys not responding at crucial moments? Indeed. And this time they’ve added in a new bug where if you task switch out of the game, going back in will have switched it to “Borderless” mode rather than “Windowed”, and for some reason (that wasn’t the case with the original game for me) it barely runs in Borderless.
So while you’ve got the unquestionable fun of taking over a new island, and the pleasure of the (scant few) missions, you’re also being pissed off by things that should have been patched out of FC3, let alone left in for its spin-off. And then there’s the peculiarity of the tone.
It’s hard to get precisely what it is that Blood Dragon thinks it’s spoofing. It seems to set out to be something of every 80s Saturday morning action cartoon, but then in a flurry of swearing, violence and sex scenes, veers into mocking straight-to-video 80s action movies. But the disconnect between the two is weirdly jarring. Cutscenes are barely-animated cartoon sequences – which I started to suspect weren’t so crude for the sake of mocking anything but more to save money – while the dialogue is an attempt at lampooning action movies’ tendency toward ultra-cheese. And in neither does it do a good job. (It’s also worth noting that the lovely animation in the trailer has nothing in common with the lazy crap in the game.)
The writing is abysmal, and not because it’s trying to be. It ultimately feels like a dismal Peter Kay routine, with someone shrieking “DO YOU REMEMBER THE EIGHTIES?!?!!” at you as if saying that alone is the funniest thing imaginable. Yes, I remember them. And that’s rather the issue – I remember that what it contained, even at its worst, was a lot more entertaining than the drivel this game puts out as story. That classic rule of spoofing – that you must actually be better than the target of your mockery – is not followed at all. Instead they’ve opted for that so much easier route of just being bad, and saying, “Seeeeeeee?”
There’s all manner of meta-commentary in there, but again it weirdly misfires by directing this all at current gaming, rather than arch comments on a bygone decade. So the beginning drags you through this miserable pastiche of a tutorial, which succeeds only in being a really bloody frustrating tutorial, with a character in the game saying how frustrating it is. That’s not funny – that’s actively sneering at your audience. Being bad on purpose, and then pointing out how you’re being bad on purpose is… being bad. Deliberately making your game bad.
The rest is expository voices ironically sighing lines about how convenient certain aspects of the game’s lazier moments are. Uh, great.
The result is odd. A good game, wallpapered with what should have been a festivity of fun, but instead is a dreary commentary no more witty than pub bores misremembering the existence of old adverts and then loudly laughing at themselves. And then explaining the jokes to each other in case they didn’t get it. (I finally lost all patience for the bothersome narrative when it underlined, highlighted and shone giant neon arrows at an incredibly weak and entirely misplaced “jump the shark” joke.)
For its budgety price of £12, the game inside here is well worth it. It’s just such a shame that the rich vein of an 80s send-up was so wildly missed.
Although there’s always Super Time Force to come, whose trailer seemed to have, uh, inspired Blood Dragon’s.
Blood Dragon is out tomorrow.
firehoseand it's already recognized as a class divider, how convenient
firehose"Determined to win an Xbox Kinect for his kids"
 Daily Beast |
Daily Beast Sadly, this story is not from the Onion . A New Hampshire man is calling foul after he blew $2,600—reportedly his life savings—on a carnival game. Determined to win an Xbox Kinect for his kids, Henry Gribbohm, 30, got carried away playing “Tubs of Fun” at a ... and more » |
To address New York City’s “texting and walking epidemic,” Improv Everywhere agents posed as “seeing eye people” and guided distracted New Yorkers through Manhattan. In the first stage of the mission, the seeing eye people were paired with agents posing as pedestrians, much to the delight of confused onlookers. In the second stage, seeing eye people tried to offer their services to ordinary New Yorkers. The mission was a collaboration with BuzzFeed.
photo by Joseph Lin
By Griffin McElroy on Apr 30, 2013 at 2:00p
The 10th Annual Games for Change festival, a New York-based event which examines the "positive social impact of games," will be held June 17-19, organizers announced on the event's site today.
The three-day affair will feature panels on subjects like MinecraftEdu, an effort to bring Mojang's sandbox game to the classroom, and the STEM Video Game Challenge, a competition for utilizing video games to inspire science, technology, engineering and math education. Speakers for the event include Puzzle Clubhouse creator and Carnegie Mellon faculty member Jesse Schell and Loot Drop co-founder Brenda Romero, among others.
General Admission to the event costs $550, but discounts are available to non-profit and government employees, minors and students. Tickets will be on sale until June 7.
firehose"According to the company's informal, survey-based research, a large number of respondents (40 percent of the 8,600 participants) are willing to pay for a proper Google Reader replacement, even though Reader was available for free. Digg also found that Google Reader's old social features aren't a priority for many people ... Despite that, though Digg says its product might not have robust social features at launch, it considers them a priority and plans to offer them at some point in the future."
New RSS reading services have been launching left and right ever since Google announced its plans to kill Reader on July 1st, but one of the most interesting options is coming from a rather unlikely source, the resurrected social news platform Digg. Digg revealed its plans to offer an RSS reader shortly after Google's announcement in March, and now it says that a beta version of the service will be available in June. That's good, because if Digg is going to capture the the remaining RSS addicts that haven't switched to a new service yet, its going to want to have its product launch before Reader shuts down.
According to the company's informal, survey-based research, a large number of respondents (40 percent of the 8,600 participants) are willing to pay for a proper Google Reader replacement, even though Reader was available for free. Digg also found that Google Reader's old social features aren't a priority for many people, and that over a third of respondents didn't use a read-later service, such as Pocket or Instapaper. Despite that, though Digg says its product might not have robust social features at launch, it considers them a priority and plans to offer them at some point in the future. It also plans to support Pocket, Instapaper, Evernote, and Readability for read-later options. The app will also offer the ability to share stories via email and major social networks.
Digg's service will have plenty of competition
While Google Reader was the dominant RSS reading tool for years, it's eventual disappearance has created a boom in alternative services. Digg's RSS reader will be competing with popular up-and-coming free services such as Feedly, and paid options such as Feedbin and the just launched Feed Wrangler. We still don't know what the best option for Google Reader lovers will be, but it's safe to say there will be plenty to choose from come July 1st.
“Space Lincoln. It’s like regular Lincoln, but in space.”
Using vintage Star Trek footage, OneMinuteGalactica has imagined what it would be like if Steven Spielberg and Gene Roddenberry had collaborated on “Space Lincoln.”
“Complex Pile” is a 51-foot-tall inflatable turd sculpture by artist Paul McCarthy. The sculpture is part of the “Mobile M+: INFLATION!” public art exhibition at the West Kowloon Cultural District in Hong Kong through June 9, 2013. The turd is accompanied by works from six other artists, including an inflatable Stonehenge and inflatable roast pig.
Complex Pile mocks its picturesque surroundings and pokes fun at the prudent qualities of public sculpture. Following a long line of other large-scale inflatable sculptures by the artist — among them, Daddies Tomato Ketchup (2007) and Santa Butt Plug (2007) — Complex Pile also uses its massive size to disrupt perceptions of space, instilling a sense of uncertainty in the viewer and destabilising the pastoral setting of a public park.
via designboom
photos by Nicholas Tse
Online apartment and home rental service Airbnb is beginning to require that its users verify their identity with a government-issued photo ID or other personal information before booking stays. The service, which allows users to rent out their own property to others, has struggled with safety concerns for both hosts and guests, and it's now attempting to quell security concerns by banning pseudonyms and anonymity. By the end of 2013, the company aims to have all users verified using both personal information as well as an online account, such as Facebook.
Airbnb needs to make users feel safe
Airbnb has previously offered verification by linking to a social network, but the service was only optional. Starting today, a quarter of its US users will be required to fully verify their identity, while the rest of its US and international users will be mandated to verify before the end of the year. If users don't want to submit a photo ID, they also have the option of answering a series of questions similar to a credit check. However, Airbnb doesn't intend to use this data to assist law enforcement — the company only plans to use the information for verifying a user's real name and identity.
The company has worked to address security concerns since reports in 2011 that a guest robbed and damaged a host's property. Nearly a year later, Airbnb began insuring hosts up to $1 million in the event of damage from guests. It's now asking a lot more of its users before allowing them to book stays — but it could increase users' trust in each other, and ultimately, their trust in Airbnb as well.
