The nearly 24,000 square foot futuristic home designed by architect John Lautner in 1973 as a private residence for Bob Hope and his family is up for sale, according to Aol Real Estate. The property is located in Palm Springs, California, has a full view of Coachella Valley, and looks like a flying saucer (reportedly Hope quipped, upon seeing the home’s model, “At least when they come down from Mars, they’ll know where to go.”). The asking price is $50 million.
image via Blouin ArtInfo
firehosehuh
Continue reading Select Sony stores selling PS Vita 3G for $200
Select Sony stores selling PS Vita 3G for $200 originally appeared on Joystiq on Mon, 11 Mar 2013 22:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
firehose"the journey of one man's descent into madness that is fueled by his addiction to absinthe"
paging Brayden
Indie developers are the starving artists of the video-game world, often brilliant and innovative, but also misunderstood, underfunded and more prone to writing free-form poetry on their LiveJournals. We believe they deserve a wider audience with the Joystiq Indie Pitch: This week, Eric Provan dissects the beauty of rain, hallucinations and mystery with Spate, coming to PC, Mac and Linux in Q3.
What's your game called and what's it about?Gallery: Spate
Continue reading The Joystiq Indie Pitch: Spate
The Joystiq Indie Pitch: Spate originally appeared on Joystiq on Mon, 11 Mar 2013 21:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
My uniform was nice and neat, I was so coordinated in my white button down and khaki pants, my Prada sneakers were “shinning bright like a diamond”. When I was finally dressed I felt like Mao Zedong or president Barack Obama, I looked organized and presentable.
The 110-foot-tall Grasshopper rocket by SpaceX launches to a height of 80 meters, hovers for about 34 seconds, and successfully lands again, all to the tune of Johnny Cash’s Ring of Fire. The leap was the Grasshopper’s highest thus far, and is being used to develop a rocket that can re-enter Earth’s atmosphere and land intact rather than burning up.
image via SpaceX
via TechCrunch
As usual, Dr. Drang speaks for a less vocal group of rational thinkers.
Who are these hothouse flowers who always get exactly the same amount of sleep except for that terrible day in March? To hear them talk, you’d think they never stay up late watching a movie or reading a book. Only prisoners have such regimented lives.
For anyone that thinks Dr. Drang some how has a superior insight, you just need to understand one thing: He's a critical thinker. It's not genius, it's rigor.
First, they’re obvious bullshit and, like all bullshit studies, undermine the public’s confidence in real science and real research.
But if you really want to fall in love with Dr. Drang, read the comments on that post.
PAUL S, First, stop shouting. Second, a comment that’s nothing more than a link to a page that’s already linked to in the original post is generally considered worthless. Normally, I’d take pity and delete it, but I’m feeling feisty this morning, so I’m going to leave it up. It’s the blogging equivalent of sticking your head on a pike outside my castle walls.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
I have posted quite a few time-lapse videos over the past couple of years; some of them straight astronomy, others of landscapes, and some made from still images taken by astronauts aboard the International Space Station. Of those last, ISS astronaut Don Pettit has taken many of the pictures used to create them. He has lived on the station twice, totaling very nearly a year on board the orbiting platform.
During that time he essentially perfected the art of the photography of the Earth, taking thousands upon thousands of separate, stunning images. I’ve met Don at a meeting, and his enthusiasm for photographing our home world from space is refreshing, heartfelt, and quite infectious.
Astrophotographer Christoph Malin was quite properly infected. Malin took thousands of individual photos by Pettit and animated them, adding clips of Pettit giving a talk about his stay aboard the ISS and his photography there. He also set it to music, creating what is simply one the best time-lapse videos I have ever seen. Seriously, set aside 16 minutes of your busy day, sit back, and soak this in: “The ISS Image Frontier”. You'll want to make this full-screen.
When I first watched this, I was transfixed. I had seen some of the clips before, but usually in shorter videos. This longer format gave me more time to drink those in, and also could surprise me here and there with clips I hadn’t seen.
…but then, about halfway through, something amazing happened.
Many astronauts, even from back in the Apollo days, talk about an incredible feeling they get after a few days in space. As they gaze on the Earth from above, they lose their feeling of borders and nationality. The Saudi astronaut Sultan bin Salman Al-Saud, who flew on the Space Shuttle in 1985, commented on this, saying, “The first day or so we all pointed to our countries. The third or fourth day we were pointing to our continents. By the fifth day, we were aware of only one Earth.”
As I watched the video, I caught a brief glimpse of that feeling. As I watched the Earth glide by underneath, just watching it go past, I suddenly realized I had no idea what part of the planet I was seeing. Africa, America, Europe, Asia; I didn’t know, and more importantly, it didn’t matter. It was just Earth. But what struck me is I did recognize the stars, the familiar natural patterns of the northern summer constellations. For a moment, just a moment, I had the surpassingly extraordinary feeling that only the Universe mattered, not our names and labels and boundaries for it. I had never truly felt that before.
That moment was ephemeral, but the memory remains. The astronauts, who experience this for days, weeks, even months, must have that lingering sensation in their brain for a long, long time. I wonder if the lasting legacy of space travel won’t be the technology we gain, or the scientific knowledge acquired, but the feeling of community, of belonging to that planet, experienced at a visceral level.
How much woe would be averted if everyone could feel that, if even for only a moment?
firehosegreat
In a statement sent to Joystiq, developer Sony Santa Monica has confirmed it will change the name of a controversial God of War: Ascension trophy in a patch that should be available alongside the game on Tuesday. Once the patch is applied, the name of the trophy will be "Bros Before Foes."Controversial God of War: Ascension trophy altered in upcoming patch originally appeared on Joystiq on Mon, 11 Mar 2013 18:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
firehoseso, Firefox's tab groups then
OneTab is a browser extension for Chrome that allows users to condense all of their open tabs into a list and restore them individually or en masse when they’re needed again. The extension helps save memory by reducing the number of open tabs, and also allows users to share a cluster of tabs as a list of webpages. OneTab is available for download now.
via Daniel Burka
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
firehose!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
FFGG 2THEMAXXX
By Cara Ellison on March 11th, 2013 at 7:30 pm.
There’s this… game? I don’t know how to describe it now, with my heart in my mouth. I am chewing my own heart. Space Engine probably isn’t a game. It’s… It’s a universe simulator. It’s galaxies and galaxies in a tiny zip file. And the most amazing thing is we live in it. And that it is so very beautiful.
Space Engine simulates our universe in the most beautiful, silent, slothful way, until you are delirious. It is free, Russian, and 699MB on your HDD. It’s everything in space in a little folder just there on your desktop. Jim mentioned it way back, but it’s had an interface revamp and white dwarfs, neutron stars, gas giants and black holes inserted, clouds cover planets, in spacecraft mode you now have motion control, gravity forces, collisions with planets. It just deserves more of a mention. Ste Curran pointed me towards it on One Life Left, and then flicked me towards it like a speck of dust in low gravity atmosphere. I floated, happily, towards a crash landing in a nebula.
I awoke on RS 8403-114-9-67729840-780 A5, a procedurally generated temporate terra with life. Areas of the known universe are represented using actual astronomical data, and places uncharted by human astronomy are procedurally generated by an expert coder, Vladimir Romanyuk. From this generated terra RS 8403-114-9-67729840-780 A5 I looked out on millions of galaxies, more stars than can be counted. I brought up a map of the universe, clicked on a gas giant, and went on a journey at hyperspeed outside the known universe. It makes you feel so very small, and so very in awe of everything. It makes you feel like Star Trek cannot possibly be far from us (though Tribbles may indeed be a fiction, and how much I want a replicator for endless Aberdeen Rowies and they are never bloody going to invent them are they). There is no music or sound in this game, much like in the vacuum of space, but I defied, DEFIED space – and put Pink Floyd’s The Dark Side of the Moon on – as is tradition a la Freaks and Geeks’ ”The Garage Door” episode. I highly recommend putting this on whilst you play, or perhaps my fully elated Liquor, Midnight, Tokyo as accompaniment. NO DRUGS. That would be irresponsible. Unless it’s flu medication. Go on. Get off your face on Calpol and The Great Gig In The Sky. Run along now.
The much touted New Interface is great – though you will stare at the command list in the menu for a long time, trying to memorise all the things you can do. Amongst many things you can press 1 to free-mode to fly through the universe, like God overseeing His work, or perhaps you’re an agnostic and you prefer to wander via spacecraft mode by pressing 2. Wave your mouse to the bottom left and you can select to Go To a selected planet, and you zoom through space at hyperspeed. Click to land on the planet, if you like, and press to fast forward time so that clouds roll past, and the sun rises on your part of the planet.
Oh yes, did I mention you can control time in the universe? From the ‘manual’ (a tome, a digital tome): “[L] key accelerates time to 3, 10, 30, 100, 300, etc. The [K] key slows time down. The [J] key changes the direction flow of time. The [Space] key stops and resumes time. The [\] key restores time to its normal (real-time) flow rate. Combination of [Ctrl]+[\] sets the current time to the computer’s system clock time.”
You are a god, a goddess, a supreme being. I spent time dreamily contemplating my role as this goddess over creamy purple and blue planets, regarding them benevolently. By pressing tab you can think of a planet – yes, Earth, or anywhere – scroll or search for it – and travel there via autopilot, drift in the skies of somewhere you are familiar. Or you can spin the scroll, click at random, journey to strange corners of the murk.
You can orbit, if you choose. Or you can just fly. All the places you have visited, real or generated, are there in your own personal log. You can go back to any of them in your own time. Or look them up on Wikipedia and see for yourself that 130 Electra is a real place.
I can’t mention this enough: one man, Vladimir Romanyuk, has mapped out the known universe, and then procedurally generated further universe based on how ours already functions. He deserves our attention just for that.
.
 New Yorker |
New York Times Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg has long relished his reputation as a fearless urban innovator, treating New York City as his laboratory for groundbreaking experiments in public health and social engineering. Enlarge This Image ... A slippery Slurpee slopeBoston Herald On Bloomberg and Big Gulps and boiling frogsWashington Times Soda Ban Faces Long Battle AheadWall Street Journal Eagle News -UConn Daily Campus -The Augusta Chronicle all 591 news articles » |
Craft designer Rose Pope of Stitch Finder General has created an excellent crocheted Bane mask inspired by the 2012 Christopher Nolan directed superhero film The Dark Knight Rises. It is available to purchase online from Etsy.
images via Stitch Finder General
Gif your butt (!) over to Animal Gifs for MOAR cyoot and funneh on loop!
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Centuries ago, craftsmen and smiths of all sort spent hundreds of hours crafting a crossbow. From the fine craftsmanship that went into making the bow to the impeccable smithing a windlass requires, a lot of effort went into building a machine of war. Since [Chris] has a 3D printer, he figured he could do just as well as these long-dead craftsmen and fabricate a crossbow in under a day.
What’s really interesting about [Chris]‘ crossbow is that it is only a single piece of plastic. The bow is integrated into the stock, and the trigger works by some creative CAD design that takes advantage of the bendability of plastic. The only thing required to shoot a bolt from this crossbow is a piece of string. That, and a few chopsticks.
He won’t be taking part in any sieges, but [Chris]‘ weapon is more than capable of shooting a bolt across a room or launching a balsa wood airplane. You can see an example of this after the break.
By Adam Smith on March 11th, 2013 at 8:00 pm.
Congratulations! You made Magicka and have finished creating odd DLC content for the friendly fire(ball) simulation. What do you do next?
1) Go hiking in the Pyrenees.
2) Why not craft some sort of single player Magicka RPG?
3) Form a band sort of like Daft Punk but with all the sci-fi robot vibes replaced by wizard’s robes and jokes about willies.
4) Create a fast-paced multiplayer homage to eighties action movies, of course.
If you picked four, you are probably Arrowhead and you have made The Showdown Effect.
The Showdown Effect is both a departure and a continuation of the systems and world of Magicka. What remains is comic chaos, although the carnage is tighter and more controlled than the elemental melting pot of confusion that spilled over to create Magicka’s best moments. When my bionic gentleman dives through a window and burts into pieces before he hits the ground, struck by shotgun blasts, pillows and throwing knives, I occasionally feel guilty. I’ve let my team-mates down.
I consider a session of Magicka to have gone particularly badly if I don’t set my closest friend on fire and then explode. If Magicka was a building it’d be the smouldering ruins of an alchemist’s lab. The apprentice would be a sizzling circle of fat in the doorway and a charred beaglepuss would bristle knowingly from the centre of the pool. The Showdown Effect would be plastered with neon signs and would have quips instead of windows, but the interior is defined by its carefully crafted lines. The few rooms are precisely constructed and surprisingly clean.
All of the silliness, the spoofing and the riffing, initially works to conceal a delicately poised and surprisingly competitive arena-based multiplayer murder-game. A single bout is over quickly, a blurred ballet of crunching melee attacks and erratic bursts of gunfire, and the score actually matters. When it comes to competitive killing, I’m the worst person to find by your side, usually too busy exploring mechanics to be much use to anyone.
When I say I’m ‘exploring mechanics’, I generally mean I’m seeing how far the constituent parts of my player character will bounce when various weapons deconstruct him or her. If you ever hear me say ‘ludonarrative dissonance’, assume something similar. These are terms I use to shield myself from accusations of being incredibly bad at shooting virtual characters, particularly in cases when those characters are controlled by other people.
I am terrible at The Showdown Effect, is what I’m saying, although I have improved a great deal. Thankfully, I’m not the only person who struggles to stay alive – life expectancy is less than a minute and the last thirty seconds of that esteemed existence will be spent hopping, rolling, diving and dodging, all the while clicking various points on the screen in the vague hope of connecting a blow, or firing a bullet through somebody’s face. The controls aren’t complicated but they are finicky and intentionally so. Melee combat is the simplest way to dispatch opponents because a click of the mouse will turn anything in front of your character into tripe, or at the very least make them bleed a lot and reconsider a frontal assault, but aiming a gun is slightly different.
Bullets strike wherever the cursor is placed, so pointing a gun in someone’s general direction is not good enough. The target has to be directly over them or they’ll escape unscathed. Now, I don’t know if I’ve made this clear already, but every living thing in Showdown Effect’s maps will be bouncing around like a flea that has been feasting on a whippet’s rear end all day. Stand still for more than a few seconds and somebody will kill you. Chances are they’ll kill you even if you’re speeding around the place, self-defenestrating and popping into the odd lift to confuse your pursuers, but to be stationary is to be the largest fish in the smallest barrel. You’re a tuna in a thimble and you better believe it’s tuna season.
Finding a balance between dodging, escaping and attacking is key to success, and it’s the speed and precision of the game that put me in mind of my deathmatch heyday, which occurred in the mid-nineties playing Quake on a LAN. I’d occasionally win a match and feel like a champion, which is more than I can say for anything that’s happened to me since. That’s the appeal of The Showdown Effect – it’s wearing a silly hat and a pair of nonsensical shades, but it’s also finely tuned and though hectic, it rewards a certain degree of patience. I can feel myself improving as I play and that will keep me coming back for a while.
I do wish there was more to go back to though. There are several game modes and they offer a good deal of variety – sometimes you’re in a team, sometimes you’re a solitary target that everybody else is hunting and sometimes the next death is your last – but there are only four maps. Graphically, they are complex and I find the stylised artwork throughout the game appealing, but the areas are small and easy to learn. It’s tempting to say the limited number doesn’t matter because combat is joined so quickly, meaning that only the screen’s worth of space around your character actually matters at any one time, but some of my favourite moments have involved chases back and forth across the entirety of a level’s architecture, waiting for the optimal moment to strike. There’s a great thrill when a pursuer misses a jump by a few inches, slowing them down ever so slightly, but leaving them open to a deadly blow. That’s the best of The Showdown Effect, moments of rapid reappraisal and revenge.
The customisation options are enjoyable, with unlockable hats and other clothing, as well as new weapons and characters. The characters are the most important choice because they all have a special ability, ranging from super healing (everyone has a basic bandaging ability) to grenades and the like. The rest is essentially cosmetic, as are the many weapons scattered about each level, although some do offer increased abilities, blocking bullets or swords with greater efficiency, or in the case of rocket launchers…well, they launch rockets.
I haven’t had any problems with lag, although I’ve seen reports of stuttering which is understandably irritating in such a speedy and tight game. While it hasn’t made me laugh or marvel anywhere near as much as Magicka initially did, this is a game I’ll gladly load up for a twenty minute session most evenings. How long that will last will depend, in part, on how swiftly new content arrives and in what form, but I’m pleased to have such an oddity, a throwback in more ways than one, nestled on my hard drive and I reckon I’ll actually stick with it until I win at least a few matches. That’ll be 2015 at this rate.
Garance Franke-Ruta hails Columbia, “the feminine historic personification of the United States of America, who has since the 1920s largely fallen out of view”:
[S]he was as recognizable to Americans of yesteryear as the man in the top-hat and tails remains today, and when the suffragettes donned robes and armor, they garbed themselves in her rebel warrior’s spirit. From the 18th century until the early decades of the 20th, Columbia was the gem of the ocean, a mythical and majestic personage whose corsets or breast-plates curved out of her striped or starred or swirling skirts with all the majesty of a shield. She was honored from the birth of the nation — “Hail, Columbia!”, whose score was first composed for the inauguration of President Washington, was an unofficial anthem until the “Star-Spangled Banner” displaced it as the official national one in 1931 — to the birth of the recording and film industries, which is why we have had Columbia Records and Columbia Pictures. Yes, that lady with the torch at the start of the movies isn’t just some period-costume-wearing chick — she is a relic of this earlier personification of America, immortalized forever by the most American of industries.
America was Columbia in the same way that England was Britannia and France was Marianne. America’s capital is the District of Columbia; New York City’s great early private university was Columbia College (now University).
Why did her star fade? Garance’s view: “Female national personifications in general fell out of vogue as women took on a growing role as emancipated citizens.”
(Photo: A suffrage pageant in 1913 via Wikimedia Commons)
firehoseSPACE
BEARS
SPACEBEARS
By Cara Ellison on March 11th, 2013 at 6:00 pm.
If you don’t watch the trailer for 4X Action-Strategy game StarDrive and immediately go 1) “HOLY BALLS SPACEBEARS” 2) “JINKIES! That captain-type man smoking a pipe looks jolly good wot wot” or 3) “I really want to make my own little ship to laser people with” then you are probably not me. But don’t worry! I hear that if you do like the look of this space shenanigan you can preorder it on Steam now and get immediate access to the Beta along with a 15% discount on it at the same time. I can bearly contain myself. Have a look:
Time was when one wanted a – bear with me – real time strategic modular ship-building game, you would have to go with the real-time and not the modular ship-building, but now you can have both at once thrown in with SpaceOwls and Space….Wolves? According to Stardrive you can even go to galactic battle with a… lettuce? Some sort of Cabbage Man?
Direct arcade control of ships and custom fleet formations in battle, and the ability to incite rebellions and spy on your fellow Captain Birdseye with your Squidmonster race seem like other things that influence the Goings On. You can build your own flagship…ship… to get you invested in a fleet and the whole thing looks like a laser-toting frenzy when a battle is happening. According to the Steam info you can even beam down some ground troops for extended tactical tentacles.
RPS worder Adam Smith stated, “This trailer is really quite good.”
Beary nice. Horace the RPS bear is flipping out right now.
NMA summarizes SimCity woes, sort of originally appeared on Joystiq on Mon, 11 Mar 2013 15:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
firehoseno more "Hugh Laurie as Blackbeard"
just Malkovich Malkovich Malkovich
as Blackbeard, supplanting rumors of Hugh Laurie
You know, it kind of does, when you think about it.
State Rep. Ernest Hewett of Connecticut (D-New London) has been under fire for a while now because of a comment he made during a hearing last month. The hearing had to do with funding for the Connecticut Science Center in Hartford, and a high-school girl was testifying about her great experience as a "teen ambassador" there for the past two years. Among other things, she said this:
I'm usually a very shy person, and now I'm more outgoing... I was able to discover that I really love working with children. It was so much fun for me. I was able to teach little children about certain things, like snakes that we have.... And just the kids — they're just great.... And I never liked snakes, but I ended up loving them.
The committee's co-chairwoman then said this:
That's very good. you're a great spokeswoman for the Connecticut Science Center. It seems like a good investment for the state. Are there any questions? Yes, Representative Hewett.
And Representative Hewett then said this:
If you're bashful, I've got a snake sittin' under my desk here.
Um.
Some have suggested that this was a sexual innuendo, which he denies. He was just making an analogy, he says, along the same lines as: "if you believe that, I've got some land in the Everglades I'd like to sell you." (He doesn't actually have land in the Everglades.) In other words, according to him he meant something like this:
If you're bashful, [then] I've got a snake sittin' under my desk here.
And, taking the absence of a real snake here as a given, then it follows that all will understand the actual import of my remark to be that I believe you not to be bashful. Or, where B represents the state of you being bashful and S the presence or non-presence of any member of the suborder Serpentes beneath my desk, the relationship can be expressed thusly:
B ⇒ S ↔ ¬S ⇒ ¬B
and therefore I was not talking about my penis. Yes, I'll yield the remainder of my time, Madam Chairwoman. Thank you.
This explanation might actually make sense, but only if he put the stress on the word "you're" in the sentence above when he said it. Because so far no one has sent me the audio (I'm looking at you, Connecticut Republicans), I can't say whether he did or not. [See update below.]
But unfortunately for the possible truth of that explanation, Hewett has what Rep. Mae Flexer described as a "history of bad behavior," though "primarily verbal," involving females. "I get along with everyone" was Hewett's response to that, which is not quite a denial. And he explained that the reason he doesn't choose female interns (which he doesn't) is just because—well, here's his explanation:
"I purposely will not have female interns. My intern now is a male. I want to keep it like that. I've had female interns in the past that sit in my office all day. I thought it was totally weird and I didn't want another.
"As a matter of fact, I went four, maybe six years without having an intern at all because of stuff like that. I have a male intern, the last two I've had were male."
Asked if he chose to only have males, he said, "I don't get to choose. That's why I was so leery about staying away from interns. I don't know what they're going to give me. They may give me a female, but I don't want a female intern. That may sound sexist but I really don't. That way that keeps me good and that keeps everybody else good."
Emphasis added. See, you started out by saying female interns are lazy and male interns aren't, and that already sounded sexist. Then you followed up by appearing to suggest that you don't choose female interns because if you did you might harass them. Your dim intuition that this also might be sexist was correct.
In fact, Hewett doesn't "choose" not to have female interns at all. According to Rep. Flexer—also a Democrat, and a former chair of the Assembly's Internship Committee—due to his "history," they won't assign him any. She said his suggestion to the contrary was "ludicrous" and "ridiculous." (Also "sexist.")
The Democrats are said to be planning a "sexual harassment refresher course" in the wake of Hewett's snaky comment, a course that should probably include a definition of "sexist."
UPDATE: Having now listened to the audio (available here), I think it actually supports his explanation of what he was trying to say. Not that it was a good idea to say it, but I don't think he meant it the way it looks on the page. Judge for yourself, though. The remainder of the evidence, of course, is unaffected by this.
