firehose

Feedbin looks nice and has a basic API. $2/month.

By way of Maciej.

sodomymcscurvylegs:

littlebitofallonsy:

He’s waited so long. In the dark. And the cold. And the diamonds. Until you came. Bodies so hot. With blood. And pain.

This is, literally, one of the best episodes in new Who. Everything about it was so smartly written. I know when we think of creep factor in DW, we tend to always think of Moffat, but this was one of the few non-Moffat antagonists that seriously scared the shit out of me.This thing is ancient…it had been there for who knows how long, just waiting, biding its time. Who knows how many identities it has stolen in its life time…and it’s so powerful it could even “steal the voice” of a Time Lord.

Mind you, not only does this thing “steal someone’s voice”, it shows a clear capability to actually learn. This thing is learning as the episode progresses, creating a sync with whatever organism it encounters while it learns to mimic it, and mimic its thoughts, and possibly learn to think like said organism at a quicker speed. This creature, literally, became the Doctor for a brief moment and began to think faster than him.

There’s never even an explanation of what this thing is. You never even get to see it. It’s this entity, this thing. I can’t begin to explain how fucking brilliant this episode was. People can hate RTD all they want, but this episode was masterful. I’d say this thing, which is never even named, stands as probably the absolute fucking creepiest antagonist in the new series, followed really closely by the Silence and the ancient entity in The Impossible Planet/The Satan Pit.

There are also a lot of complaints about the way Davis writes the 10th Doctor and how arrogant he is, and I think this is one of the few episodes where his arrogance nearly gets him killed. This thing only took over his voice because he just had to tell everyone in the room how clever he was.

This isn’t even taking into account that the entire episode was told in one set. They never leave the shuttle bus  It was nerve wrecking, and a brilliant decision. This is one of the reasons why I think series four of new Who is one of the absolute best in the new series overall.

[furrysalamander] has a friend that is a really big Doctor Who fan. It happens that this friend has a birthday coming up, and [furrysalamander] wanted to get her something amazing. A Sonic Screwdriver is always a great gift, but [furrysalamander] wanted to put his personal touch on it. He ended up adding a TV-B-Gone to [10]‘s screwdriver, turning a fictional deus ex machina into a functional device.

The body of the Sonic comes from this replica of [10]‘s screwdriver from Think Geek. Inside, the screwdriver has space for a battery a circuit board to control the lights and sound normally expected of a sonic screwdriver. [furrysalamander] added a freeform circuit composed of an ATtiny85, a transistor, LED, and a few resistors to add the ability to turn just about any TV off.

Of course [furrysalamander] needed to program the ATtiny with the TV-B-Gone firmware, and lacking any AVR development tools he used a Raspberry Pi’s GPIO pins to write the firmware to the microcontroller. That’s something we’ve seen before, but [furrysalamander] is a champ for including the process in his Instructable.

The end result is a Sonic Screwdriver that doesn’t work on wood and can’t break a deadlock seal. It turns off TVs just fine, though, and looks great to boot. You can check out a demo of [furrysalamander]‘s sonic in action after the break.

Filed under: toy hacks

I'll just throw this out there. I reviewed Fever Reader over a year ago. I really liked fever but I killed it off when I moved to a static blog. Fever also lacked all of the nice integrations with services like IFTTT. I'll probably move back to Fever now. But be warned: Fever is not well supported. I don't think Shaun Inman ever intended it to be very big. It is not updated very often and emails go unanswered. This is truly a DIY project. You are on your own. Basically, it's like Google Reader except without an end date.

One thing I enjoyed with Google Reader was an IFTTT trigger that automatically added my Google Reader starred items to Pinboard.in. Until something better comes along, I'm back on Fever Reader and want the same luxury.

The first thing to do is to get the feed of the 30 most recent saved items from Fever. It's right there in the preferences. Right click and copy the link.

Next, head over to IFTTT and create a new recipe that retrieves the RSS feed you just copied and creates a Pinboard bookmark. It's pretty simple stuff. Here's how I create the Pinboard bookmarks. I'm keeping the "gstar" tag because that matches all of my previous Google articles.

By Alec Meer on March 15th, 2013 at 12:00 pm.

Huh, I didn’t expect this. The disintegration of THQ seems to have resulted in Games Workshop renting its Warhammer 40,000 license to all and sundry rather than keeping them locked up in one place. So we’ve got Space Hulk coming from Full Control, potentially, maybe, who knows Relic keeping hold of something Dawn of War-related when Sega snapped them up, and now strategy publisher Slitherine announcing they’ve been granted a 40K license too.

No details whatsoever on what games this means, but given Slitherine are very trad. strategy and tabletop-inspired, it might be the best hope yet for those in search of an absolutely purist digital recreation of Warhammer 40,000 or one of its spin-offs.

Here’s a statement from Slitherine Chairman JD McNeil, which gives away nothing but has a background hum of people rubbing their hands together in glee.

“This deal represents yet another testament to our continuous aim to reach new audiences, without losing sight of who we are and what we do best. It’s all about creating strategy games that are targeted to a particular audience and addressing a very specific need in the market. The Warhammer 40,000 setting is a perfect fit for the style of strategy games that we make and will be very popular with fantasy and science fiction fans alike. Joining forces with Games Workshop will allow us to bring an wonderfully deep and appropriate IP to the Turn Based Strategy genre”.

Key line there is “turn-based strategy genre”. Ooh.

Meanwhile, the Warhammer Fantasy Battles license is now with the Creative Assembly, who are working on things we could take a guess at but similarly know nothing about. A very big year or two for electronic Games Workshopping, I think.

By Alec Meer on March 15th, 2013 at 2:13 pm.

Juuuust a quick one, as I shall be returning on Tuesday with vastly more fulsome news on Frozen Endzone, Mode 7′s next game after the wonderful Frozen Synapse. But they’ve just gone live with a trailer and a Greenlight page, so see what you think. It’s a future sports game. It’s a strategy game. In other words, it’s a sports game that isn’t really a sports game. And it looks well flash.

Obviously they’d love you to do the Greenlight voting thingywotist, and there’s also a Facebook page on which to do whatever people do on Facebook these days. No, I don’t mean send them a selfie.

I went to see the game and interview the devs yesterday, so return next week for words, thoughts, pictures and more. By the way, Endzone is an American football term. It doesn’t mean your bottom.

By John Walker on March 16th, 2013 at 12:32 am.

What Maxis are doing is frankly peculiar. Earlier this week we posted a story revealing that claims that SimCity required online servers to run non-regional computations were not the case. That night we were promised a statement from the studio, but heard nothing. Repeated emails to EA have resulted in no response since, and the whole situation has become more muddy with each day. It’s since been revealed that population numbers are nonsense, even down to leaked Javascript code (Javascript code? Was this meant to be a Facebook game at one point?) featuring “simcity.GetFudgedPopulation” as a function. We’ve learned that city size limits are arbitrary, pathfinding is rudimentary at best, and Eurogamer’s absolutely superb review lists many more bugs, broken features, disappearing pretend-money and never-arriving resources.

So it’s all the more odd to see Maxis head Lucy Bradshaw acting as if none of this is happening, and instead just carefully rewording her mantra of how SimCity is only supposed to be played online, but this time leaving out the bit about server-side computations for local play.

This week’s fuss all began after Bradshaw’s repeated statement that SimCity needed to be online simply to function. A claim we learned was not the case.

On the SimCity blog on 20th December 2012 Bradshaw wrote,

“GlassBox is the engine that drives the entire game — the buildings, the economics, trading, and also the overall simulation that can track data for up to 100,000 individual Sims inside each city. There is a massive amount of computing that goes into all of this, and GlassBox works by attributing portions of the computing to EA servers (the cloud) and some on the player’s local computer.”

Speaking to Polygon on the 9th March she again said,

“With the way that the game works, we offload a significant amount of the calculations to our servers so that the computations are off the local PCs and are moved into the cloud. It wouldn’t be possible to make the game offline without a significant amount of engineering work by our team.”

And talking to Kotaku in the same week, Bradshaw yet again stated,

“Online connectivity as a creative game design decision was infused into the game’s DNA since its inception and so we’re fully committed to delivering against that experience first. A significant portion of the GlassBox Engine’s calculations are performed on our servers and off of the player’s PCs. It would take a significant amount of engineering work from our team to rewrite the game so that all of those functions are calculated locally without a significant performance hit to the player.”

In today’s posting the studio boss writes,

“From the ground up, we designed this game with multiplayer in mind – using new technology to realize a vision of players connected in regions to create a SimCity that captured the dynamism of the world we live in; a global, ever-changing, social world… We also made innovative use of servers to move aspects of the simulation into the cloud to support region play and social features.”

Spot the difference.

RPS knows that the “simulation” being run on the EA servers is about 1% of the simulation being run on your own PC, so even this rebranded version of the claim still rings a little oddly. It’s not clear what exactly is so innovative about having interactions between different players be handled by online servers – that’s kind of how multiplayer works. But yes, it’s absolutely undeniable that the multiplayer aspects of the game require connection to the, er, multiplayer servers. No one was disputing this, because to dispute that would be frog-hatted mad. The reason there was any fuss in the first place were the claims that the servers were involved in much more, aspects that were they really calculating would indeed deny the simple possibility of a single-player, non-regional version of the game.

And let’s stress again here: If Maxis wanted to make an online-only, multiplayer-only version of SimCity, then that’s their call. No one has a God-given right to a single-player version, and while deliberately shooting themselves in the foot with a canon by refusing to offer one seems a little odd, it’s Maxis’s call. The issue that RPS has only ever wanted to tackle was getting to the truth about why not. And as many have since demonstrated with offline play hacks (there’s a new one here), we didn’t have it. We could indeed write a very decent, very sensible editorial on why not offering single-player for a SimCity game is hard-boiled lunacy, but that was never the point.

Bradshaw’s post, which appears to be some sort of attempt at damage limitation – without actually ever addressing the issues raised – re-emphasises the point that they wanted it to be always online because of how they designed the game. She then lists the functions those server sums supply. And they’re what we already knew – they let the social game be social. This list that is basically just “the game has co-operative multiplayer” eight times seems to be an attempt to reveal just how grand this aspect is, how intrinsic it is to… something. It doesn’t manage this. What we’re learning from the many players posting videos, and the reviewers who actually played the game properly before smothering it with rosettes, is that those regional functions don’t work very well either.

Things then take a turn for the darned strange when Bradshaw adds,

“The game we launched is only the beginning for us – it’s not final and it never will be. In many ways, we built an MMO.”

In almost no ways have they built an MMO. The first M rather puts pay to that suggestion, with minimal numbers of players interacting, and even then interacting through relatively remote systems. Let alone that it’s a management game that previously functioned perfectly well without the addition of social aspects – which is what makes it so mystifying that apparently adding something has caused so much more to be taken away. But the association with an “MMO” is an essential part of the vocabulary Maxis and EA want us to use, to reinforce the notion that this hasn’t been about piracy, preventing solo-play cheating, and controlling players’ experiences. “Oh, MMOs,” we’re supposed to say. “Yeah, good point, because you couldn’t play World Of Warcraft offline, could you? So this must be the same.” We’re asked to ignore that SimCity looks, feels and plays like a single-player game with some multiplayer functionality, and instead conflate it with an entirely different type of game. It’s a blatantly fallacious stance, but one that’s unfortunately perpetuating. (Check out many other sites’ coverage of Bradshaw’s statements this evening.) Bradshaw then says,

“So, could we have built a subset offline mode? Yes. But we rejected that idea because it didn’t fit with our vision.”

And this is something else we’ve been meaning to mention. This notion that SimCity was born in Maxis’s womb as a permanently online, perpetually social game, is somewhat at odds with, well, Maxis’s own words from just a year ago. Back then they made it clear to the press that the internet would only be needed to boot the game, and then it could run offline after that. These straight answers seem as wobbly as the new SimCity’s roads. A game that was always intended to be so intrinsically online that no offline mode was even conceivable, except for last March, a year before the end of development, when it was.

Obviously we would still desperately love to hear from Maxis to explain the discrepancies we’ve discussed. To ask why it was repeatedly claimed that the servers were so integral for running the core game, when all people needed to do to prove otherwise was pull the ethernet cable out the back of their machine. We want to know how a game that a year ago only needed the internet to launch, is now a game that was originally conceived to be permanently online. If this is a confusion, then please do clear it up for us.

By Michael McWhertor on Mar 15, 2013 at 10:00p

Sony Online Entertainment's landmark MMO EverQuest will celebrate its 14th anniversary this weekend on March 16, with the publisher hosting a series of player events timed with the game's latest milestone.

Five temporary player-created missions, new epic ornamentation quests and a chance to revisit previous' years anniversary content are now available in the massively multiplayer online game. Those festivities have already begun for stalwart EverQuest fans, with some lasting until April 26.

SOE also announced that the Shadow of Fear game update for the original EverQuest is slated to go live mid-April, adding two zones (Chelsith Reborn, Plane of Shadow), new spells and new quests and missions. Players accepted into last year's Rain of Fear beta will have the opportunity to sample the Shadow of Fear update in late March.

Last week, SOE announced it will lifting certain restrictions for free-to-play and Silver level members in EverQuest and EverQuest 2, granting access to all classes and races, lifting restrictions on quest journals and opening up shared bank slots.

Original EverQuest designer Brad McQuaid announced earlier this week he had rejoined the MMO's development team.

• Source
• EverQuest official site

Submitted by Mareshal

The dry folded skin of the Sahara desert, looking like the crust of a pie.

Spoiler alert

Political scientist Charles Murray has never backed away from controversy, but usually his opponents have been liberals. Friday, however, he managed to upset conservatives at the annual conference known as CPAC, where thousands of...

 

bowtiesandbiscuits:

15th of March 2012.

Ordered a Caesar Salad today, proceeded to stab it 23 times before consumption. Nobody else found it as hilarious. 

[video] [h/t: fat-birds]

And I have been since I was 12.

imfuckingpkc:

Dead astronaut by =dig-orgasm

 

The Beast Shampoo by George Perez

Crazed patchwork of farms in Central Asia, a monochromatic 3D hallucination in the snow.

“I think I’ve finally determined what makes San Francisco so trying, its beauty and temperateness and extraordinary profusion of “fun things to do” notwithstanding. How can a metropolis devoted above all to the fulfillment of every inclination feel so often like a hard place to live? How can the world capital of aestheticization —where everything from jeans to protests to bees to haircuts to pastries to transit is made sophisticated, mannered, performative— seem so socially awkward, so ungainly?

It’s because San Francisco is Creep City. There are more creeps here than anywhere else, per capita at least and maybe absolutely. If you go out with friends, you will encounter creeps: creeps will involve themselves in your conversation; creeps will be loitering nearby; creeps will act creepy to third-parties on the bus and you will feel ashamed of inaction or guilty about action; you will judge others for how they respond to the creeps, how they avert their attention, how they arrange themselves away from the creeps, or how they explode at meandering, mostly harmless creeps, their pent-up civilizational frustrations getting the better of them.

Creeps are everywhere, but in San Francisco the variety of creeps makes it hard to have a settled method for dealing with them; they are not demographically uniform. In some cities, the natural segregation of social groups means that one infrequently encounters behavior that defies the conventions one favors; in SF, it is not some civic love of diversity that changes this but the fact that social groups are often so recently-composed. As a city of aspirational arrivals, SF has a populace that never shakes out the jerks; there’s too much churn for standards of normalcy to be achieved. (I hope I don’t need to distinguish between a given social group’s desire for standards of behavior and the villainous sort of “conformity” movies rail against).

San Francisco is a city in which we are besieged from both sides: the infinitesimal middle class here contends with rich creeps and poor creeps. For every meth-addicted jerk-victim spraying spittle and salacious slurs at commuting women, there is an ostentatious startup scion hijacking a social situation and crashing it into the ground with his self-aggrandizing prattle. While the schizophrenic is defecating on the children’s playground, the high-flying narcissist at the bar waylays five adults with an unsought lecture on the intricacies of his moral hobbies.

The middle class is divided at which is the bigger problem; at parties, we fight about which outrage demands action: the $17 tube of artisanal organic chapstick available at the VC-backed cosmetic shop (run, I hasted to add, by genuinely dedicated snobs who don’t feel phony!) or the indigent junkies whose petty crimes don’t seem petty to their victims, and whose lawlessness and verbal abusiveness aren’t funny, either. The latter need help, which they’ll neither get nor work towards or with; the former are just so trying to listen to, so exhausting in their hyped-up self-centeredness.

This is a city of gafflers: people who talk to you at length without seeking or allowing your participation, people who subject you to monologues. It is a city of people who already know everything, either because they’re wasted and have been wasted for ten years and have their ideas and fixations, or because they just got back from a festival or series of talks or a conference or they’ve sold a company or been at their crowdsourced 501(c) for a few years, etc. etc. etc. etc.

And I know: street-gafflers are suffering; so are rich-kid gafflers, in their way. This isn’t really about them being immoral or blameworthy; it’s just about how hard it is to go anywhere in San Francisco without having some creep slide up to you, your girlfriend, your buddy, your dog, your bag, your table, start in on whatever automated creeper script he runs on people: his political screed, his moralizing sermon about his causes, his worn-out jokes, his little dance, his innuendo, his pitch, his act.

Haven’t these people heard about the Internet? Anyway: seriously, this is Creep City. Or Monologue City, if you like that better. Who cares?”

San Francisco: Creep City | millsinabout

“Let the record show: that you can be a United States senator for 21 years, you can be 79 years old, you can be the Chair of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence and one of the most recognizable and most widely respected veteran public servants in your nation. But if you are female while you are also all of those other things, men who you defeat in arguments will still respond to you by calling you hysterical and telling you to calm down. They will patronize you and say they ‘admire your passion, sweetie,’ but of course they only deal in facts, not your silly girly strong feelings. It is inescapable, you can set your watch by it.”

- Rachel Maddow, discussing Senator Ted Cruz’s condescending lecture to Senator Dianne Feinstein during a Senate debate on gun control. March 14, 2013.

cinephilearchive:

Hilarious negative executives notes to Ridley Scott after seeing Blade Runner for the 1st time.

Thank you immensely for this, Matt Bloom @MattBloomFilms

Hilarious negative executive notes to Ridley Scott from Suite 666.

getoutoftherecat:

mutteringly:

OMG

i don’t remember if i reblogged this already or not so here ya go

novakza:

genderikari:

i didn’t know that the united states was three hundred fucking thousand years old

THANK YOU FOR THAT COMMENT

thefingerfuckingfemalefury:

comboreversal:

puffpuffpeace:

baby baby baby 

This literally just crushed me.

I need to reblog this every time I see it just because it’s SO sweet

I want to buy her lots of coffee cake and just pet her forever

I miss my Ragdoll cat :( They are such utter sweeties, and Tardar Sauce reminds me a lot of Baby Cat.

It’s hard not to marvel at the crimson glow of 1966 science. 

Before the digital revolution converted complex workspaces into flat-screen monitors and unobtrusive computers, the control rooms of big experiments were the ultimate in analog awesome. Our Alternating Gradient Synchrotron—still accelerating particles here at Brookhaven after 53 years—featured just such an array of custom-built electronics.

Just look at all those knobs, dials, and oscilloscopes.

„I’m Goin’ to Prom!“ (via Boing Boing)

motherjones:

You may know the Team Gulp by its original name: “Lake Huron.”

More ridiculous soft drink charts here.