firehose

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whovianxchick:

hippofoliage:

there was a creepy looking car parked outside my house and i’m home alone. so i put the doctor in my window and the car drove off. 

This is why, you should not skip Nine. He’ll have your back, when you need help.

crazyfilipino:

The bad news is that Seattle has been destroyed and civilization is in ruins. The good news is that you've survived - and thanks to local artist Tony Dowler, you know where not to go in post-apocalyptic Seattle.

Tony has drawn the Seattle Doomsday Map (and a book called "Dee Dee's Doomsday Guide to Seattle"), in which he reimagined The Emerald City after the Apocalypse.

From Tony's Year of the Dungeon blog:

Post Seattle: South Lake Union

Wild dogs and dangerous vagrants here. even the good scrounge’s been picked over.

Some smart geeks’ve set up a pig farm on a rooftop, though. Use the shit to run their generators and grow things hydroponic style. If you send some useful scrap up to them, they might just send down some hothouse cabbages.

There's a scrounger's den on Denny street. Look for the yellow flags. Climb in the third basement window on the left and secure it behind yourself. If you take something from the stash make sure you leave something in return.

Post Seattle: Denny Hill

Lots of people in Denny, but they aren’t folk. A few rival gangs, so don’t get caught wearing the wrong color. I opt for black. Still, you can find copper wire, electronics, and supplies if you know where to look.

One of the gangs here has a secret stash of clean water and lords it over the rest of them. Another gang has a scrounge racket trading in working car batteries. Another one collects ears, so know who you’re dealing with.

Check out more at Tony's blog: Link - via Mighty Mega

Maurice Moss
The IT Crowd: 1.02 - Calamity Jen

tastefullyoffensive:

[via]

New submitter ikhider writes "Trisquel, a 'libre' version of Ubuntu GNU/Linux, is now available for download and install (or update for those who already have it). It's one of the easiest 'libre' versions of Gnu/Linux to install and run. This version includes: Linux-Libre 3.2, Xorg, Abrowser 19 (a Firefox derivative that does not recommend non-free software), GNOME 3.4, and LibreOffice 3.5. They're also simplifying their release schedule: 'This release is a Long Term Support one, meaning that bugfix and security updates will be published until 2017. Along with this we have decided to change our release schedule from this point on: we will no longer publish short term support versions every 6 months, but focus on giving the best possible support to the LTS release, providing backported improvements to core packages like the kernel, the browser and the xorg server among others.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Use this Interview Trainer to prepare for our job interviews later today. It’s incredibly difficult, but so is typing with paws. http://teachmetojob.com 

We’ve sure been seeing a lot of original NES cases used in projects lately. This time around the thing still plays the original cartridges. This was one of the mains goals which [Maenggu] set for himself when integrating the LCD screen with the gaming console. There is a quick video clip which shows off the functionality of the device. It’s embedded after the break along with a few extra images.

To our eye the NES looks completely unmodified when the case is closed. The cartridge slot still accepts games, but you don’t have to lower the frame into place once that cartridge has been inserted. The image above shows a ribbon cable connecting the top and bottom halves of the build. It routes the signals for both the LCD screen and the cartridge adapter to the hardware in the base. He mentions that he used the original power supply. We’re not sure if the original motherboard is used as well or if this is using some type of emulator.

Filed under: nintendo hacks

Nancy Singleton and Tadaaki - teachers and farmers

at the Hachisu Egg Farm and School Saitama Japan

"You know why we did [that]? So a DJ could take a lunch break. When you have all three-minute records, you don't even have time to go to the bathroom. Or you just want to stop for a minute. So that's 19-and-a-half minutes of 'I don't have to worry about a thing.' But I didn't do it to create this thing. I just did it to help the DJs out."

By Nathan Grayson on March 12th, 2013 at 5:00 pm.

I’m quite happy to exist in a gaming world where both meticulously crafted locational tapestries and randomly generated frontiers of madness have their place. If I want an experience that weeps intentionality, I turn to something like Lone Survivor or Bastion or BioShock 2: Minerva’s Den. But if I want chaos and mystery and discovery, I can let the likes of Binding of Isaac, FTL, Proteus, or any number of others wash over me, falling wherever they may. Legend of Dungeon certainly looks to fall into the latter category, but it’s taking things a step even further. The entire soundtrack, you see, is randomized. It doesn’t sound like a set of bagpipes stuffed with broken megaphones and goats that sound like people and people that sound like goats, either. Hurrah!

Neat, right? I like how the tone started off fairly relaxing and then descended into progressively more dismal darkness on each reset. I doubt it was intentional (because, you know, randomness and all), but it provided an interesting contrast of imagery and sound.

You’re probably wondering what manner of tiny magical computer gnomes produce these surprisingly coherent beats. Take it away, developer people:

“244 tracks are randomized and assigned to monsters, dungeon blocks, doors and even the title screen and Tavern. As you move through each room, and your proximity to things changes, the music shifts and alters. Every time you play Legend of Dungeon, not only is the dungeon randomly generated, but the soundtrack is unique for your play through.”

“If you listen closely you can even come to expect particular monsters or secrets by noticing changes to the music.”

So it’s consistently inconsistent. Or inconsistently consistent. Or something. It seems to create some decently nice moments, though, and when a game’s intended to be played for hundreds upon hundreds of hours, I’ll take anything to stave off “oh god where is the volume nob my ears are building tiny nooses for themselves” syndrome.

According to Robot Loves Kitty, Legend of Dungeon will release in alpha “very soon.” I’ll definitely be keeping an eye out for it, as I enjoy legends, dungeons, robots, kitties, and music. I do, however, realize that those qualities are specific to me and me alone, so your mileage may vary. Or, you know, the other thing: Legend of Dungeon looks scrumptious, and unless it turns out to actually be a set of bagpipes stuffed with broken megaphones and goats that sound like people and people that sound like goats, I’m betting you’ll have just as much reason to be interested as me. So then, watch the skies.

By Craig Pearson on March 12th, 2013 at 6:00 pm.

There’s dedication and there’s dedication. The second, slantier version means there’s been a bit more effort being put in. Let’s use Quake as an example: it’s the difference between someone still making Quake levels all these years later, and someone who has built a Quake editor for modern sensibilities, making it all wizzy. Handily for this analogy, that second someone exists, and has just released TrenchBroom, “A Modern Level Editor for Quake.”

What a statement! How does one define ‘modern’? TrenchBroom’s (I’d have called it “Quicker Quaker Maker Boobs Girls Bieber”, because I am an SEO ninja) definition, according to maker Kristian Duske, is all about the third dimension: “I believe that the traditional approach, where you work primarily in 2D views, forces you to think in 2D rather than in 3D. That is why this editor does not have 2D views at all – you do all work in one single 3D view.”

Watch the editor take Quake and make it bloom into life. Dragging walls! Creating *consults ‘Quake Editing For Dummies’* Trisoups? You can shape Quake like it’s some newly developed youngling game, out of polygonal clay and triangular Plasticine.

It’s cross-platform, so you can totally use it in your future Valve-Linux-Steam-Boxmajig, or a pod-person’s Apple Macintosh. Does that excite you? It excited me, and I’m not even going to make anything. I just love that someone out there can give 16 year-old game a new lease of life. There’s something very PC about it all. It’s like we’re helping a punch-drunk boxer go out in style.
What? No I’m not crying? I just have a condition where I get nostalgic and teary over silly things. The doctor said it was known as “feels”, and that it was a perfectly normal reaction to being human.

By Adam Smith on March 12th, 2013 at 7:00 pm.

I have to go That There London later today and I’ll no doubt find myself being propelled through underground tunnels in a metal tube packed full of people. A terrible fate, I’m sure you’ll agree, but at least the London Underground is not yet in a post-apocalyptic state. Underrail is an isometric RPG from a school so old that it might well be Plato’s Academy. Actually, not that old, more like the mid-nineties, when Fallout was Ultima with guns instead of Skyrim with guns. The surface of the planet is covered in fire and sewage, or something, so everybody lives in underground railway stations, which is becoming an increasingly common solution to the occasional apocalypse. There’s a new video below, a demo here and the alpha is available to those who pre-order.

By John Walker on March 12th, 2013 at 9:00 pm.

In all the fuss and mess of the disastrous SimCity launch, one refrain has been repeated again and again. While legions may be begging for an offline mode, EA representatives have been abundantly clear that this simply isn’t possible. Maxis’ studio head, Lucy Bradshaw, has told both Polygon and Kotaku that they “offload a significant amount of the calculations to our servers”, and that it would take “a significant amount of engineering work from our team to rewrite the game” for single player.

A SimCity developer has got in touch with RPS to tell us that at least the first of these statements is not true. He claimed that the server is not handling calculations for non-social aspects of running the game, and that engineering a single-player mode would require minimal effort.

Our source, who we have verified worked directly on the project but obviously wishes to remain anonymous, has first-hand knowledge of how the game works. He has made it absolutely clear to us that this repeated claim of server-side calculations is at odds with the reality of the project he worked on. Our source explains:

“The servers are not handling any of the computation done to simulate the city you are playing. They are still acting as servers, doing some amount of computation to route messages of various types between both players and cities. As well, they’re doing cloud storage of save games, interfacing with Origin, and all of that. But for the game itself? No, they’re not doing anything. I have no idea why they’re claiming otherwise. It’s possible that Bradshaw misunderstood or was misinformed, but otherwise I’m clueless.”

People were already perplexed by EA’s explanation of the impossibility of offline play. Kotaku ran a series of tests today, seeing how the game could run without an internet connection, finding it was happy for around 20 minutes before it realised it wasn’t syncing to the servers. Something which would surely be impossible were the servers co-running the game itself. Markus “Notch” Persson just tweeted to his million followers that he managed to play offline too, despite EA’s claims. And now with the information from our source, it would seem the claims just don’t hold water.

So what are the servers doing? Well, alongside the obvious, of being involved in allowing players to share the same maps for their cities, and processing imports and exports between them, they’re really there to check that players aren’t cheating or hacking. However, these checks aren’t in real-time – in fact, they might take a few minutes, so couldn’t be directly involved in your game.

“Because of the way Glassbox was designed, simulation data had to go through a different pathway. The game would regularly pass updates to the server, and then the server would stick those messages in a huge queue along with the messages from everyone else playing. The server pulls messages off the queue, farms them out to other servers to be processed and then those servers send you a package of updates back. The amount of time it could take for you to get a server update responding to something you’ve just done in the game could be as long as a few minutes. This is why they disabled Cheetah mode, by the way, to reduce by half the number of updates coming into the queue.”

Clearly an offline game that included a single-player simulation of the region system derived from multiplayer would be more challenging to develop, but our source assured us that it was far from impossible.

So how difficult would it be for EA to create a single-player game that simply did away with the multiplayer-derived aspects and just let us build? It seems that lies somewhere between “easy peasy” and Bradshaw’s claims of “significant engineering”. According to our source:

“It wouldn’t take very much engineering to give you a limited single-player game without all the nifty region stuff.”

EA’s claims about the necessity of online play – claims that more people are seeing for themselves not to be true, just by running the game with the internet cable yanked out – seem inexplicable.

We’d obviously be very interested to hear a proper explanation.

atane:

So my friend’s Aunt is in town from Cameroon. She’s been on an exercise regimen for the last few months, and doesn’t feel she should stop because she’s in the US for 2 weeks. So he took her to a gym and she saw they were offering African dance class and she was interested. She got into it with the gym staff and trainer. I’m paraphrasing what my friend told me was said.

Aunt - What kind of African dance do you have?

Gym staff - Oh we have different levels of African dance. Are you a beginner?

Aunt - I don’t mean different levels of dancing skills. You say it’s African dance. What kind of dance? I’m from Douala, Cameroon. Where is your dance from?

Gym staff - It’s from Africa.

Aunt - But where in Africa?

Gym staff - Let me get the trainer. She should be able to assist you.

Aunt - Ok.

Trainer - Hello. How may I help you?

Aunt - Hello, I am inquiring about your African dance. What kind of African dance are you offering?

Trainer - We have different levels of African dance. Is this your first time?

Aunt - Is this my first time dancing as an African?

Trainer - I meant is this your first time taking an African dance class.

Aunt - Why aren’t you people telling me where in Africa your dance is from? I’m sure they don’t dance like where I’m from in many other African countries. Is there a dance class for Europe and Asia?

Trainer - It’s most likely a hybrid of African dances. It’s really a terrific workout!

Aunt - You’re most likely offering hybrid African dances?

Trainer - It’s a wonderful way to get in shape. Should I sign you up?

Aunt - You don’t know where this dance you are teaching is from do you? How do you know it’s even African? I’m not going to pay you to instruct me on African dance if you don’t know where in Africa it’s from. I want to know before I spend my money.

My friend said his Aunt walked out after that. I asked him why he didn’t say anything the entire time, and he said it looked like his Aunt had a handle on things and he was too busy trying to hold his laughter in. Aunties don’t play.

bwahahahahahahahahahaha

I can see and hear the entire thing playing out in my mind: her accent, her eternal side-eye.

We are just trying to figure each other out.

What fan of Batman, whether as a child or as an adult, hasn’t wished to own Batarangs that could scare the bejeezus out of a bad guy or, I don’t know, maybe sever a carotid artery? Well, now you can make your own … as long as you have a fully equipped blacksmith shop at your disposal.

Tony Swatton, a veteran armorer and master blacksmith who has created props for the likes of Batman Forever, The Dark Knight, Thor and Buffy the Vampire Slayer, hosts a web series called Man at Arms in which he recreates famous weaponry from movies and television series (he’s tacked everything from Raphael’s sais from Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles to Jaime Lannister’s sword from Game of Thrones). In the latest installment, he turns his attention to the Batarangs from the Batman movies.

Normally I would razor-sharpen a knife or a sword,” Swatton says. “I’m not quite putting that degree of sharpness on it, but a comparative sharpness to these Batarangs would be as sharp as I sharpen an ax. These are not stunt Batarangs. These ones will tear stuff up.”

Don”t believe him? Watch the video below.

(via Batman-News)

The TableFu library looks like a very handy little bit of Python. I especially like that CSV or Python list data can be turned into HTML tables. Sure, the Ruby folks already had TableFu. This is still cool.

Vector based displays were used for arcade games in the ’70s and ’80s. A typical CRT uses raster graphics, which are displayed by deflecting a beam in a grid pattern onto a phosphor. A vector display deflects the beam in lines rather than a full grid, drawing only the needed vectors. Perhaps the best known vector game is the original Asteroids.

[Jeremy] built up a RGB laser projector, and wanted to run some classic arcade titles on it. He started off by using the XMAME emulator, but had to modify it to communicate with the laser and reduce flicker on the display.

To control the laser, a modified version of OpenLase was used. This had to be enhanced to support RGB color. The modified sources for both the MAME emulator and OpenLase are available on Github.

[Jeremy]‘s friend, [Steve], even got a vector based game that he wrote working on the system. “World War vi” is a shoot-em-up battle about the vi and emacs text editors.

The results of the build are shown in a series of videos after the break.

Filed under: classic hacks

NBCNews.com (blog)

Colorado: Gays and lesbians can enter civil unions NBCNews.com (blog) By Miranda Leitsinger, Staff Writer, NBC News. Ed Andrieski / AP. Rep. Pete Lee, D-Colorado Springs, left, and Rep. Tony Exum, D-Colorado Springs, confer as the civil unions bill is debated in the House Chamber at the Capitol on Monday, March 11, 2013. Senate Dems deny pay threat over gun stance, as Springs sheriff claimsDenver Post Civil Unions Bill Needs Final House Vote Before Hitting the Governor's DeskKUNC BREAKING: Civil Unions To Become Law In Colorado After Final House VoteThinkProgress all 136 news articles »

You name it

Wall Street Journal

George P. Bush, fourth generation of family, to run for public office Reuters By Jim Forsyth. SAN ANTONIO | Tue Mar 12, 2013 6:13pm EDT. SAN ANTONIO (Reuters) - George P. Bush, son of former Florida Governor Jeb Bush and the grandson of former President George H.W. Bush, said on Tuesday he would run for the Republican ... It's official: George P. Bush files paperwork to run for Texas land commissioner in ...Washington Post George P. Bush files to run for office in TexasUSA TODAY George P. Bush makes Texas bid officialCNN (blog) Houston Chronicle (blog) -San Antonio Business Journal all 45 news articles »