firehose

losed:

ANGER RELEASE MACHINE (2008) by yarisal & kublitz

Insert a coin. Your selected piece of china will fall to the bottom of the vending machine. It will shatter. You will feel better.

Submitted by: Unknown

Tagged: computers , do not disturb , information technology , monday thru friday , g rated Share on Facebook

““If Sandy Hook doesn’t [make game publishers change] … then maybe we have to proceed, but that is in the future,” said Feinstein. She went on to claim that video games play “a very negative role for young people, and the industry ought to take note of that.””

- Sen. Feinstein: Congress may ‘have to proceed’ with violent video game regulation | GamesBeat

By Samit Sarkar on Apr 05, 2013 at 5:14p

Torment: Tides of Numenera, the new game in the Numenera tabletop RPG setting from InXile Entertainment, is now the highest-funded video game in Kickstarter history, with more than $4 million raised in its month-long campaign.

Tides of Numenera eclipsed the total of the previous record-holder, the $3.99 million that Obsidian Entertainment's Project Eternity pulled in last fall, this afternoon. There are less than three hours to go in Torment's funding drive — it ends at 8 p.m. ET tonight — and InXile still has additional stretch goals set for $4.25 million and $4.5 million.

In announcing the news on Twitter today, InXile founder Brian Fargo said that even more important than the $4 million milestone is the fact that "we all get to make the game of our dreams."

Torment: Tides of Numenera is set for release on Windows PC, Mac and Linux in 2015.

• Source
• Brian Fargo on Twitter
• Torment: Tides of Numenera on Kickstarter

midnytemercury:

via kureta.

OMG This is perfect. I CAN’T. 

Consulting Detective henshin FTW. :). …BTW, if anyone could attempt a translation of the Japanese-language material in this, it would be wonderful.

snitchesbecray:

motegs:

By far one of my FAVORITE signs I’ve seen this week!

aw snap. I love the smell of logic in the afternoon

Yep.

theunknownpainter:

Hahaha oh, the beautiful irony. This book is great.

Heh.

By Michael McWhertor on Apr 05, 2013 at 7:30p

The creator of Rock Band and Dance Central is warning customers who have an account its websites — rockband.com, dancecentral.com and creators.rockband.com — of an "apparent attack" on its servers.

Harmonix alerted account holders via email today, writing, "We are investigating an apparent attack on our servers that we detected this week."

"The security of your Harmonix user information is very important to us," the email reads. "We've taken the sites down while we investigate this incident and determine how our systems and the information we maintain may have been compromised. At this time, we have not found that any of our users' information has been published or misused."

The game developer has disabled users' account passwords and will require account holders to reset them. "If you have been using your old Harmonix password on other sites, we recommend that you change those passwords too," the email reads.

Harmonix writes that its websites don't store users' credit card information or social security numbers.

The websites for both Rock Band and Dance Central currently show maintenance messages, asking visitors to refer to Harmonix's Facebook and Twitter accounts for updates.

section9:

bouffantofbaul:

lafix:

witstream:

“Top Ten Thoughts Going Through Kevin Ware’s Mind At The Moment Of The Broken Leg” (Letterman)

Classic.

I’m a fan of any and all types of self-deprecating humor.

hahahaha, #1.

Talk about a good sport.

““I do things like get in a taxi and say, “The library, and step on it.””

- David Foster Wallace

darthrose:

saltyandwet:

Two stunning pieces of artwork by Chinese artist nkzhangwang (张旺).

They incorporate the aesthetics of China’s Three Kingdoms/Six Dynasties eras with Transformers.

*flails* and now there’s a Megatron to go with the Optimus? OMG. gorgeous artwork.

Peter said “Wow, he looks like Shoki the Demon Queller.” And so he does.

I’m explaining to Peter that he’d really like a S’more. He’s never had one, having been raised on the wrong side of the water from graham crackers. We could possibly fake it a bit using wholemeal digestives…

By Megan Farokhmanesh on Apr 05, 2013 at 5:30p

Project X Zone, a role-playing strategy crossover game featuring characters from Namco Bandai, Sega and Capcom, will launch for Nintendo 3DS June 25, Namco announced.

The game will feature more than 50 different characters from franchises such as Street Fighter, Devil May Cry, .hack and more. In Project X Zone, a rift in time and space opens after an artifact called the Portalstone is stolen, allowing different universes to mix. Players will choose two characters to team up and explore affected worlds.

Project X Zone launched in Japan Oct. 11, 2012.The game was announced for North American, European and Australian release in January. Project X Zone is currently available for pre-order for $39.99 through Amazon and GameStop.

• Source
• Namco Bandai Games

Our friends at Meltdown Comics in Los Angeles are now selling this excellent Batman/Bauhaus women's t-shirt by Junk Food Clothing. Meltdown tells me that a men's version is coming soon. These aren't on the Meltdown site so you'll have to contact them to grab one. (via @meltdowncomics on Instagram)

It has been a rough few weeks for the global Internet, given numerous submarine cable failures and the largest DDOS attack ever reported. While we're hard-pressed to find evidence of the purported global Internet slowdown due to the DDOS attack, the dramatic impacts of yesterday's SMW4 submarine cable cut were profound. Recent reports that the cable break was the result of sabotage make the incident even more intriguing. In this blog, we detail what happened to some of the providers in four countries along the route of the cable: Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and India.

Impacts of the loss of SeaMeWe-4

This month's submarine cable outages have profoundly degraded connectivity to the Middle East, Asia and Africa. In particular, last week's EASSy and SEACOM outages wiped out connectivity in parts of East Africa from Djibouti to South Africa. As if that weren't bad enough, the biggest submarine cable connecting Europe and Asia, SeaMeWe-4, suffered a failure at 6:20 UTC, 27 March.

Later in the day, the Egyptian Naval forces claimed that they had caught divers sabotaging a submarine cable off the coast of Alexandria, Egypt. In any event, SMW4 clearly suffered a major failure, and as we will see below, caused widespread disruption of Internet services from Egypt to Pakistan.

These plots of latency measurements below show that westbound transit to Europe for many of these providers was either degraded or unavailable due to the SMW4 cut off the coast of Alexandria, Egypt. These providers fell back on eastbound transit through the Far East, but these backup paths weren't always up to carrying the load.

Egypt

Immediately following the cut (marked with a red line), Egyptian incumbent, Telecom Egypt, experienced a brief disruption in Internet transit followed by a reshuffling of its transit providers as it lost service from Level3 and NTT.

The loss of service from Level3 and NTT and gain of eastbound providers Bharti and Singapore Telecom (SingTel) is much clearer when the same data is viewed as a stacked graph of counts of traceroutes crossing through various providers into TE's network:

Saudi Arabia

Saudi Arabian incumbent, Saudi Telecom (STC), experienced dramatic increases in latencies to Europe as traffic shifted away from the severed submarine cable.

Headed the other direction from Saudi Arabia to Hong Kong, the cut caused STC to reshuffle its transit, but without the dramatic rises in latencies.

UAE (added 2 April)

As was the case with other Middle Eastern providers, Etisalat experienced a dramatic shift in traffic from Europe and the west, but less so from the east.

Emirates Integrated Telecommunications Company also known by its retail name, "Du", appears to have weathered the cable cut without significant disruptions to either the west or the east.

Pakistan

The impact of the SMW4 cut on the Pakistani Internet has been severe, as reported by the Pakistani media.

Pakistani incumbent, PTCL, was already struggling due to the recent loss of another major submarine cable. The graph on the left shows that latencies from Frankfurt to PTCL went through the roof as traffic was re-routed around the world to get to Pakistan. From Singapore, (on the right) there was a minor disturbance, but not nearly as crippling as for westbound traffic.

For Pakistan's other international gateway, Transworld, the impacts were severe when connecting to both the west and the east.

India

With the loss of SMW4, India-based Bharti lost its main route to the west. Delays for Internet traffic coming from western Europe spiked. From the east, things were fine.

Like Bharti, Vodafone India experienced dramatic increases in latencies for connections to and through Europe.

When connecting through the East, Vodafone India was largely stable. In fact, from Los Angeles, latencies improved slightly as traffic from LA was allowed to go a slightly shorter (and presumably more expensive) path across the Pacific Ocean instead of the Atlantic to get to India.

Conclusions

For me, one of the takeaways from the above analysis is that many of these providers have carefully engineered geographic diversity into their submarine cable strategy. However, the backup paths don't always deliver relief. In Pakistan, for example, the loss of westbound transit has virtually crippled the Internet despite the fact that eastbound routes stayed up. It is almost the mirror image of the impact on Bangladesh in last year's SMW4 cable cut near Singapore. In that case, Bangladesh lost eastbound transit due to the cable cut and the westbound backup just didn't have the bandwidth to handle the load, leaving the country essentially cut off.

Finally, I'll be giving a talk next month in Paris about visualizing the impacts of submarine cable breaks such as yesterday's SMW4 cut at Suboptic 2013, the world's largest conference about the submarine cable business. We obviously have a lot more to discuss now as an industry. If you are attending, please stop by and introduce yourself.

“This is the open-source core of Pinry, a tiling image board system for people who want to save, tag, and share images, videos and webpages in an easy to skim through format.”

- Docs

“-g, —google-doc convert an html-exported Google Document”

-

aaronsw/html2text · GitHub

converts html to markdown

rescuing my existing GDocs

 

 

 

 

Arashiyama, or “Storm Mountain”, is one of Japan’s designated Historic Sites and can be found on the western edge of Kyoto. The district features Shinto shrines, natural parks, and a stunning walk that winds through its bamboo forest. Take some time to explore even more of Arashiyama’s beauty through photos from others who have visited.

Photos from * tathei *, Shibazo, Marser, Kevin Tadge / Laura Lamp, yocca, Teruhide Tomori, arcreyes, Marie Eve K.A., TORO*, and Silent Star 101.

Why the long face?

If you think Time Warner Cable’s customer service is bad, wait to you see how the far the company will go to shut down an online parody campaign.

Twitter just became a distribution platform for mobile apps but what’s even more interesting are the new possibilities this creates for mobile game developers.

“Community dipped a tenth to a new series low of 1.0”

- Ratings: Hannibal Gives NBC Thursday a Little Extra Bite, Community Dips to New Low - Yahoo! TV

“

Street Seats is a Portland Bureau of Transportation program that allows restaurants and other groups to convert on-street parking spaces to seating areas on sidewalk-high platforms with tables, chairs and other amenities.

So far, about 32 organizations from all over the city have expressed interest in participating in the 2013 program, says Gabe Graff, operations and safety manager for the Bureau of Transportation’s Active Transportation division. Applications are due by May 1.

”

- Portland’s Street Seats program expands to allow more restaurants to place seating platforms in parking spaces | OregonLive.com

corgnelius:

WHY, GRUMPY CAT, WHY!!

bunnyfood:

Happy Birthday Grumpycat!

(via grumpycat)

Rule number one for designers of all kinds: use a contract. Sometimes, this is easier said than done. Should I use a service agreement? A retainer? A licensing contract? With the help of Docracy, we collected the experience of many designers to provide a wide range of starting points for less experienced creative professionals, and to start a permanent free legal resource for the community.

Below you’ll find a collection of legal documents curated by our fantastic community. We are looking for your feedback and contribution to grow this collection. Suggest more items or add the contract you use for your own work. You might also want to have a look at our already published set of 10 basic agreements for designers.

Important notice: free sample documents and commentary are never a substitute to legal advice. Because every situation can be different, only a lawyer can answer your legal questions and assist you with a contract. The contracts below are useful examples, but they are sourced from a community of people and come without any guarantee, so treat them as general information. Smashing Magazine and the respective contributors of the documents disclaim all liability in connection to the use of these documents.

What Document Should I Sign With My Client?

If you created an icon set:

Icon License Agreement Drew Wilson’s license for the Pictos Icon Set, with popular standard terms. Icon Designer Contract A very basic contract for commissioned icon project.

If you are building a responsive website:

Contract Killer 3 The famous plain-English contract by Andy Clarke, now with specific language on device testing. Contract Killer en Español A Spanish translation of Contract Killer 3, by Spanish designer Daniel Martinez.

If you are starting a graphic design project:

Sample design contract Speider’s graphic design contract, with bonus negotiation tips. Short Commissioned Illustration Offer A pro-artist shortform contract for freelance illustrations. General Letter of Agreement for Graphic Design A thorough contract with some handy plain-language highlights to help the clients understand the terms.

If you’re doing a small project with design and code:

Development Service Contract: One of the simplest contract you might find, very flexible, too. Independent Contractor Agreement (for Designers) Ross Kimbarovsky’s annotated “contract for designers who hate contracts”. Narrated in first person. Copyright Ownership and License Agreement A licensing agreement for numerous types of creative work. Fixed fee, limited non-exclusive license.

If you’re doing a BIG project with design and code:

Design and Development Contract A classic design contract, heavily indebted to the AIGA Standard Master Agreement, that is for even bigger projects. Acuerdo de Desarollo de Sofware A handy Spanish version of the contract above.

If you’re doing UX work:

Contract for User Experience Design A version of Contract Killer, customized for UX work.

If you’re creating an infographic:

Infographic Killer 3 A verison of the Contract Killer for commissioned infographics.

If a third party wants to use your work:

Copyright Ownership and License Agreement A super-simple assignment agreement for any sort of intellectual property (code, design, copy, etc.). Tip: better sign this only after money is in the bank.

If you’re redesigning a website:

Website + Identity Design Contract A comprehensive branding/redesign agreement, with useful annotation to help you in possible negotiations. Design Contract A simple contract for freelance Web projects.

If you’re hiring a developer/designer to work on a project:

Independent Developer Agreement A balanced independent contractor agreement, written from the point of view of the hiring company. Independent Contractor Agreement A catch-all independent contractor agreement.

If you’re hired as a freelance developer:

Independent Contractor Agreement (Developers) Ross Kimbarovsky’s “contract for software developers who hate contracts”. Software Licensing Agreement If you decide to licensing your code rather than assign it, this document is very helpful.

If you’re making a mobile application:

App Design Contract Contract for Mobile Application Development Services Mobile Privacy Policy An updated open source sample privacy policy for mobile apps.

If things go wrong:

Cease & Desist Letter A handy C&D letter if someone is “stealing” your intellectual property. Friendly Collection Letter A friendly but firm reminder for clients who don’t pay on time.

Other helpful documents:

Technology Consulting Contract Generic technology contract that includes an overview of the project, including estimated time, cost, and team members Statement of Work – Digital Advertising ServicesSOW A SOW for agency projects. Retainer Agreement A useful template if you’re a designer who works on a retainer fee. Music License Agreement A licensing agreement to use copyrighted music in a certain application.

I Want To Add My Own Document

add yours

Eager to share your own experiences on documents? Please leave a comment, question or suggestion. Also, we’d love to include more documents in this article! Feel free to add yours! We’ll look at all documents which we receive and add the best ones to this guide!

Extra: Free “Legal Guide” Icon Set

You like the icons in this guide? Alvaro Casanova, designer for Docracy.com, offers you to download the set for free (retina and standard).

Credits of image on front page: storebukkebruse.

(vf) (ea)

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© Veronica Picciafuoco for Smashing Magazine, 2013.

Log cabin in a Norwegian boreal forest. 

Contributed by Sergei Evdokimov.