ffactory:

This is Rose Valland, one of the heroes of Nazi-Occupied France. An employee of the Louvre, she kept records of the art stolen by Nazi officers—what was taken, from where, and by whom. She was instrumental in the postwar return of countless stolen pieces, and one of the most decorated women in French history.

not-blonde:

Winona Ryder in high school

“I was wearing an old Salvation Army shop boy’s suit. As I went to the bathroom I heard people saying, ‘Hey, faggot’. They slammed my head into a locker. I fell to the ground and they started to kick the shit out of me. I had to have stitches. The school kicked me out, not the bullies.

“Years later, I went to a coffee shop and I ran into one of the girls who’d kicked me, and she said, ‘Winona, Winona, can I have your autograph?’ And I said, ‘Do you remember me? Remember in seventh grade you beat up that kid?’ And she said, ‘Kind of’. And I said, ‘That was me. Go fuck yourself.’”

Film Fashion: Only Dog Forgives

Continuing our love affair with Ryan Gosling, the trailer for Only God Forgives just dropped, Baby Goose’s followup project with Drive director Nicolas Winding Refn.

Check out that killer shirt/tie/vest combo in the perfect shade of midnight blue.

3 Piece Suit: Bespoke (alternatives: Reiss , Topman)  |  White Shirt: Ralph Lauren Black Label  |  Tie: Vintage (alternatives: Turnbull & Asser , Lanvin) |  Shoes: Church’s

Red-Band trailer here

Here with your daily dose of infrastructure porn is XKCD's Randall Munroe, who's gone and rounded up all of North America's various subway systems and combined them into one big interconnected map.

Read more...

By Porpentine on April 7th, 2013 at 1:00 pm.

THIS WEEK: Four out of four tears. WALKING DOWN THE STREET I GET PUNCHED. Massively multiplayer void of eerily ringing telephones. Feral arcade games.

The River by Courtney Stanton

The River is about a young girl who goes down to the stream to catch a fish.

Courtney’s writing is powerful but restrained, trusting me to fill in the gaps (suggestion vs. description–if suggestion is using words to cause firecracker bursts of micro-hallucination, description is trying to get high by arranging pills to spell DRUGS).

It lulls me with sparkling ASCII waters, with my simple pride at weaving a net for my mother. I feel pure as a child, unencumbered by the filters of adulthood.

I’d play before reading more. It’s short.

This is part of a series about women in Kubrick films (“he’s my favorite director and he has a glaring woman problem” says Courtney) with a focus on humanizing women with two-dimensional roles and bit parts.

I was reminded of that one Jeepform game where the victim decides how the attackers feel.

The decision to give me control over some of the assault, as the victim, had three key effects, in my mind.

1) It touches on post-abuse thought patterns–if only I did something different I could have avoided what happened.

2) At the same time, this interactivity asserts the truth that rape doesn’t turn you into an object, that you’re still a human being doing the best you can, in whatever way is left to you.

The River stays tightly focused on the girl’s feelings and agency, avoiding her original fate as a cheap sacrifice in some lofty masculine quest. This is an attempt to get her out of the refrigerator.

3) Being permitted the possibility of hope is heartbreaking.

I’m trying this new review system where I rate everything in tears. The score isn’t displayed anywhere except on my eyes.

HOWLER? by Andi McClure and Liz Ryerson

I’m conducting four discs in a sea of liquid color. Each element is tied to Liz Ryerson’s music in some way. Thrashing drums, crashing cymbals, piercing drones, and with the right settings, I can isolate cute synth plinks and electronic cries.

Of all Andi’s music games, HOWLER? has the most interesting spectrum. I was able to mold it to my mood, roaming from violence to calm, from epilepsy sky to sonorous void.

There are four ways to tweak HOWLER?: Radius, intensity, dragging the discs around, and making the discs invisible. From these variables pour planes of brilliant oil, lava lamp ovoids, burning rainbows.

PUNKSNOTDEAD by Zak Ayles

WALKING DOWN THE STREET

I GET PUNCHED

WALKING DOWN THE STREET

I GET PUNCHED

YOU’RE WALKING DOWN THE STREET

YOU GET PUNCHED

WALKING DOWN THE STREET

I GET PUNCHED PUNCHED PUNCHED PUNCHED

Bwak by Tom van den Boogaart

One-button game about watching TV late at night. Nothing could possibly go wrong.

Full Moon Rising by Drunkdevs

Here’s the situation: your girlfriend wants raw passionate werewolf sex, but to turn into a werewolf you need the Moon Rock, which lies on the other side of town.

The first half of the journey you play in man form (this is the platformer). The second half you play as wolf (this is the BLOOD FRENZY). Then you realize that was just the beginning of a wild crescendo.

Composition 37 by Nuprahtor

A stark isle in the void, populated only by phone booths. Sometimes they ring. I race from phone to phone, wondering if reaching them in time is even possible.

At first I thought that was the entire experience, which would have been enough for me–a horrifying fixation on the thing itself.

After all, Nuprahtor has the intellectual integrity to focus on the texture of an object without introducing unnecessary elements. If we’re going to talk about games on par with cinema and literature, this is the kind of cerebral experimentation we should be paying attention to.

But there’s more.

You can pick up the phone when it rings.

The phones ring when other people call from their game.

Composition 37 turns us into haunted phone lines, desperate spirits forever seeking.

That means the best time to play is now, while eyes are on this page (although you can call yourself by opening multiple tabs).

As months pass, the experience of finding anyone else will become increasingly lonely and delicate. Now all I can think about is how creepy it would be to play this a year later and hear a ring.

2x0ng by David O’Toole

A Snakelike creature leaves a deadly prismatic trail to the north. Surrounding me are erratic paddles escaped from Breakout, hungry for pixelated blood.

2x0ng feels like a bunch of arcade games abandoned in a petri dish, mutated and feral. They populate the procedurally generated levels in growing abundance and all of them kill you in one hit, complicating the otherwise simple task of reaching the exit.

You have a weapon.

This weapon is a boomerang crossed with a key crossed with an eyedropper tool. It changes colors when it hits blocks and it destroys barriers (like the kind guarding the exit) if it matches their color.

This weapon is interesting because the fling has a variable refractory period, ranging from quick bounces to elaborate pinball odysseys.

This period is a blend of smooth (traveling through empty space) and crunchy (striking objects). Smooth acts as a pleasure multiplier for crunch as long as you hit something and that interaction doesn’t descend into bad crunch (weapon trapped on the other side of some blocks as enemies mob you). Bad smooth and bad crunch both waste time and leave you with nothing exciting to do until your weapon returns.

Your weapon can be boring and skill is the avoidance of that boredom.

This weapon makes you feel like a badass. A good shot will destroy your enemies. A good shot will thread obstacles and steal colors from across the screen. You could walk right up to your target but there are many opportunities in 2x0ng to save your precious time.

This weapon is fun because it ricochets off enemies. Hitting one enemy is boring. Three enemies die faster than one. They explode in bursts of pink blue confetti. Hitting them make a digitized BOING. Hitting multiple enemies gives you more confetti and more boings.

This is the best emotion of 2x0ng.

An extra post today, because this is just too good to pass up:

Interior of the Public Library of Cincinnati: 1874 via Retronaut

I have a vision of how suitors decide how much to offer for a start-up they want to buy. Several executives go into a conference room. Each scribbles a number on a piece of paper and places it in a hat. Then the chief executive pulls out a number, and there it is.

We could spend an entire day getting lost in one of JF Rauzier’s libraries.

WTSP 10 News

Mudslide Derails Amtrak Passenger Train 610kvnu Spencer Platt/Getty Images(SEATTLE) -- A mudslide derailed several cars of an Amtrak passenger train on Sunday morning, but there were no injuries reports. The cause of the slide is still being investigated, but the area between Seattle and Everett, Wash., ... Amtrak train derails in Wash. state, no injuriesUniontown Herald Standard Amtrak train hit by mudslide in EverettQ13 FOX All Share ServicesSalon all 16 news articles »

Man convicted of taking hostages at NH Clinton office vanishes from NH ... Fox News MANCHESTER, N.H. – Authorities say a New Hampshire man who took hostages at a Hillary Rodham Clinton presidential campaign office in 2007 has vanished from his correctional facility. The state Department of Corrections tells WMUR-TV ... and more »

Dating Tip #199: Drive dangerously to get her to cling to you. 

“

Irons said he doesn’t “have a strong feeling” about the issue, he “worried” that gay marriage would “debase” the institution.

“I worry that it means somehow we debase or we change what marriage is,” Irons said. “I just worry about that.”

The 64-year-old actor pondered what same-sex marriage would mean for inheritance taxes. “Could a father not marry his son?” he asked, to pass down his estate without paying a tax.

”

- Jeremy Irons’ gay remarks raise eyebrows: Actor compares gay marriage to incest - UPI.com

Prison Labor as Modern Day Slavery:

American companies that once looked to places like Mexico and China for cheap labor are bringing those jobs back to the U.S. Why? Because prison labor is much, much cheaper. Paid between 93¢ and $4.73 per day, and collecting no benefits, prisoners are a cheap labor source for about 100 companies (source).

What does this have to do with you?

If you have insurance, invest, use utilities, have a bank, drive a car, send a child to school, go to a dentist, call service centers, fly on planes, take prescription drugs, or use paper, you might be benefiting from prison labor.

If you’ve bought products by or from Starbucks, Nintendo, Victoria’s Secret, JC Penney, Sears, Wal-Mart, K-Mart, Eddie Bauer, Wendy’s, Proctor & Gamble, Johnson & Johnson, Fruit of the Loom, Motorola, Caterpiller, Sara Lee, Quaker Oats, Mary Kay, or Microsoft, you are part of this system.

Ennio Morricone - The Man With The Harmonica (Apollo 440 Remix) (by Topiotrelo10)

Google and the City of Austin, Texas have sent out invites for a press conference for "a very important announcement" next week, according to VentureBeat, and it is expected that the two will reveal that the city will be the second city to receive Google Fiber. VentureBeat cites "multiple sources" that tell the website that the announcement will revolve around Google's gigabit internet service, but it's possible that the event will reveal some other partnership, like a new Google campus.

Full statement below.

On Tuesday, April 9, at 11 a.m., the City of Austin and Google will make a very important announcement that will have a positive impact on Austinites and the future of the city. We anticipate more than 100 community leaders and elected officials to be in attendance to celebrate this announcement. The event invitation is attached for your convenience. Although we cannot share the details of the announcement with you in advance, we know readers will want to learn more, so we encourage you to join us on Tuesday.

Developing...

Eater is reporting that Dunkin’ Donuts is currently carrying (on the menus of select eastern Massachusetts) a Glazed Donut Breakfast Sandwich which is simply slices of bacon and a fried egg stuffed inside of a split glazed doughnut. From the images, it looks like a slice of American cheese is an optional item.

via Candice Choi, Eater

xombiedirge:

Grand Theft Mario: Mushroom Party  by Amirul Hafiz

First time accepted submitter Dawn Kawamoto writes "Employers stampeding into the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Service to get their H-1B petitions filed before the cap is reached are getting the door slammed in their face today. The cap was hit in near record time of 5 days, compared to the 10 weeks it took last year to have more than enough petitions to fulfill the combined cap of 85,000 statutory and advanced degree H-1B petitions. While U.S. tech workers scream that they're losing out on jobs as H-1B workers are hired, employers are countering that the talent pool is lacking and they need to increase the cap. Of course, Congress is wrangling in on this one as to whether it's time to raise the bar."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

If Facebook Made a Real Facebook Home via Gizmodo

Watch, as Kilmer accepts his place in the Batman universe.

SALT LAKE CITY (AP) — Elder Eldred G. Smith, the oldest Mormon church general authority and oldest known Utahn, has died at the age of 106.

The ghost of Steve Jobs will not be pleased to see this. Zack Henkel

Robert Silvie returned to his parents' home for a Mardi Gras visit this year and immediately noticed something strange: common websites like those belonging to Apple, Walmart, Target, Bing, and eBay were displaying unusual ads. Silvie knew that Bing, for instance, didn't run commodity banner ads along the bottom of its pristine home page—and yet, there they were. Somewhere between Silvie's computer and the Bing servers, something was injecting ads into the data passing through the tubes. Were his parents suffering from some kind of ad-serving malware infection? And if so, what else might the malware be watching—or stealing?

Around the same time, computer science PhD student Zack Henkel also returned to his parents' home for a spring break visit. After several hours of traveling, Henkel settled in with his computer to look up the specs for a Mac mini before bedtime. And then he saw the ads. On his personal blog, Henkel described the moment:

But as Apple.com rendered in my browser, I realized I was in for a long night. What I saw was something that would make both designers and computer programmers wince with great displeasure. At the bottom of the carefully designed white and grey webpage, appeared a bright neon green banner advertisement proclaiming: “File For Free Online, H&R Block.” I quickly deduced that either Apple had entered in to the worst cross-promotional deal ever, or my computer was infected with some type of malware. Unfortunately, I would soon discover there was a third possibility, something much worse.

The ads unnerved both Silvie and Henkel, though neither set of parents had really noticed the issue. Silvie's parents "mostly use Facebook and their employers' e-mail," Silvie told me, and both those services use encrypted HTTPS connections—which are much harder to interfere with in transit. His parents probably saw no ads, therefore, and Silvie didn't bring it up because "I didn't want [them] to worry about it or ask me a lot of questions."

Read 30 remaining paragraphs | Comments

by Leonid

Imagine former LucasArts Composer Jesse Harlin standing at the lectern, dressed in black, and delivering the following eulogy while pictures of his colleagues fade in and out in a slideshow behind him:

"LucasArts died today. It was 30 years old. Ask gamers to recall George Lucas' gaming company and they'll tell you about fulfilled childhood fantasies inside the cockpit of a TIE Bomber or laugh with you about insult sword fighting. They remember the time they spent in the boots of Kyle Katarn, Ben Throttle, or Boss. They remember our successes and they remember our stumbles. But that was the public face of LucasArts."

The speech continues, noting times of triumph and the deep, personal relationships shared by employees of LucasArts over the years, told from an inside perspective. Disney shut down LucasArts on April 3, after more than 30 years of operation, halting production on all of its games.

Harlin penned the words of what he dubs "A Eulogy for LucasArts," and he put it to photos that Joel Aron snapped of employees on their final day in the office, compiled in a heartfelt series here.

When we recall LucasArts, we think of point-and-click adventures, the SCUMM engine and TIE Fighter, among many more fond memories.

A eulogy for LucasArts, from LucasArts originally appeared on Joystiq on Sun, 07 Apr 2013 13:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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