firehose

lonelyheartsdeathmetal:

Everyday of my life.

Kenji Eno scared the crap out of me when I was 13 years old. I didn’t know who he was at the time. I didn’t know that he was barely an adult himself at 24, running his own game studio, WARP. Didn’t know he’d cut his teeth making weird Nintendo games as a teenager, didn’t know he was a high school drop out who loved writing music and got along with his dad. Had I known his name at the time, I would have been hard pressed to say it correctly out loud.

Nonetheless, Kenji Eno scared the crap out of me with D in 1995, and I didn’t even play it. The advertisement in the back of Electronic Gaming Monthly was enough. It was the logo, hiding a woman’s face stained with tears, and the tiny screenshots of Laura, who had the ...

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New submitter genericmk writes "NPR is running an interesting story about the unfortunate status of the aging programmers in the IT industry. Older IT workers are opposing the H1-B visa overhaul. Large corporations want more visa, they claim, because of a shortage of IT talent. However, these companies are actively avoiding older, more experienced workers, and are bringing in large volumes of foreign staff. The younger, foreign workers are often easier to control, and they demand lower wages; indentured servitude is replacing higher cost labor."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

blatsuura:

crosswhenwegetthere:

#HawkeyeInitiative at #ECCC. He was our hero.

HEY LOOK I’M ON THE INTERNET! X>

For real though, my spine is definitely feeling it after doing this all day. D:

serisafitz-james:

an old doodle i found in my math textbook

Dead Writers perfume

The Rock Band Blitz transfer shakeout continues as the Rock Band music store makes its way to the final update on April 2. Rock Band Blitz is $15 and all 25 tracks are compatible with Rock Band.

Continue reading Rock Band Weekly: All-American Rejects, Blink-182, Red Hot Chili Peppers

Rock Band Weekly: All-American Rejects, Blink-182, Red Hot Chili Peppers originally appeared on Joystiq on Fri, 01 Mar 2013 13:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Gemini Rue, a critically acclaimed neo-noir point-and-click adventure that won the IGF Student Showcase back in 2010, is coming to iOS in the spring. The thriller, which mixes gritty noir mystery with cosmic sci-fi, was released for PCs in 2011, and indie publisher Wadjet Eye Games tells us it's now tweaking the game for iPad and iPhone.

Gemini Rue follows the futuristic stories of an assassin-turned cop forced to turn to his former criminal employers for help, and somewhere across the galaxy a prisoner who wakes up in a hospital not knowing who he is or how he got there. As their lives entangle, the mystery unfolds.

Dark sci-fi point-and-clicker Gemini Rue slinks onto iOS this spring originally appeared on Joystiq on Fri, 01 Mar 2013 17:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Sunday is a great day to explore and conquer new lands, whether across the Mediterranean, throughout Asia, or around the fresh vegetable aisle of your local supermarket. Steam is here to help with this quest, offering Sid Meier's Civilization 3, 4 and 5 for 75 percent off.

Civilization 3 Complete is $1.25 today, Civilization 4 is $5 and 4: The Complete Edition is $7.50. The Civilization 5: Gold Edition bundle is $12.50 and includes the game, the Gods and Kings DLC pack, five scenario packs, four Cradle of Civilization packs, the Explorer map pack and the Babylon DLC pack. Each bit of content is 75 percent off on its lonesome, if you simply need to bulk out your Civilization library.

Steam Daily Deal: Sid Meier's Civilization franchise downsized 75% originally appeared on Joystiq on Sun, 03 Mar 2013 19:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Pimoroni’s first anniversary competition has ended, and the entries have been sifted through: you can read all about the winner (and the entries that got an honourable mention) on their website. Well done all: we had fun looking at your entries with Paul at our birthday party on Friday. (Special shout-out to Sophie, aged nearly-five, who had a really neat butterfly VESA mount idea.)

Paul Clark’s winning entry – congratulations, Paul!

Speaking of that birthday party:

Transatlantic flight + party == no fun noodles.

And that, dear reader, is why there wasn’t a post here yesterday.

What else? There’s a bit of birthday video we filmed in New York with LadyAda over at TechCrunch; their proprietary Flash player won’t let me embed, but if you click the picture here you can visit TechCrunch for the full horror.

And I’ve just been sent copies of the Raspberry Pi Haynes Manual. It’s by Gray Girling, a Friend of Pi who has been involved with the Raspberry Pi project behind the scenes for a long time now. It’s really worth a look; think of the book as a technical manual for people with a little bit of experience who want to learn more. (We’d suggest that kids aged 12 and up who know a a bit about Python and Linux should get a lot out of it – it’s a book that should find a place on the shelves of a lot of grown-ups too.)

The book will lead you through projects in software and hardware (scrape web pages! run an X server! get Bluetooth, LEDs and SPI devices running!) – by the end of the book you’ll be gutting a plush toy and turning it into a device that speaks your tweets, and making an MP3 web server. Hearty recommend, and not just because Eben and I wrote the introduction.

Forever

ISOMETRIC DRAWINGS BY EVAN WAKELIN via Socks Studio

“I like decayed, vernacular architecture, old Europe, public transport, green roofs, forests, the ocean and space exploration.

My current work is an attempt to capture some of these interests in a detailed, isometric style. The intention is to represent these spaces in a form that can be explored, not framed. In isometric projection, nothing disappears into the distance, you can walk through the drawing as you would in reality.”

Stacks in the Fog by Kate Burgess

One of the entries in BarBot 2013 was ShakeBot, a bartender robot that pees in the ingredients for a Manhattan (or any 3-ingredient cocktail). It uses tiny versions of the Belgian statue “Manneken Pis” to whiz the booze into a central container which then gets shook up with LED ice cubes. It is a project of Inertia Labs that was co-created by Alexander Rose, executive director of the Long Now Foundation.

Here is a video demo of the robot that we made for the BarBot event this weekend.It makes Manhattan’s:youtube.com/watch?v=ESO9w-…

— Alexander Rose (@zander) March 1, 2013

photo by SF WineChef

via Boing Boing

The music video for “It’s Alright” by Matt & Kim features a fantastic ‘synchronized sleeping’ routine of them dancing in bed. The single “It’s Alright” is available on their album, Lightning.

Behind-the-scenes video:

submitted via Laughing Squid Tips

NS Newsflash / flickr

A copyright battle between The Associated Press and an online news-clipping service is reaching a climax, and the case could have significant implications for fair use. AP sued Meltwater Group last year, arguing the "reputation management" company had a "parasitic business model" that violated copyright. Meltwater is defending the case, arguing that it is merely a search engine.

Meltwater News is a media-monitoring service that helps corporations track what's being said about them in press outlets online. The company boasts that it can "track keywords, phrases, and topics in over 192,000 sources from over 190 countries and 100 languages" throughout the day. It doesn't send its subscribers full articles, but does copy snippets and headlines then provide links to full stories—like Google News.

Last week, the nation's largest newspapers lined up to tell the New York federal judge considering the case that they support the AP. An amicus brief [PDF] was filed by The New York Times, The McClatchy Company, Advance Publications, and the Newspaper Association of America, which represents 200 newspapers around the country. In the brief, they argue that Meltwater isn't a search engine—it's a competitor.

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Vikings debuts tonight on the History Channel at 10 p.m. Eastern.

The only thing Vikings would need to do to be a success is deliver on the title: There should be Vikings and lots of them, doing Viking things, and raiding the English from boats with dragon heads. Fortunately for all involved, Vikings does an admirable job of living up to that title, and then it tacks on a few additional things, like a handful of somewhat compelling characters and some well-handled action sequences. Nobody’s going to mistake this for one of the best shows on TV, but in the televised epic genre, this stands as a strong third to Game Of Thrones and Spartacus. That sounds like less of a compliment than it actually is, because many, many networks have tried to do this sort of swords-n-sandals/sorcery-on-a-budget thing, and many have failed. That History Channel mostly ...

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Nothing is true

NPR (blog)

Scientists Report First Cure Of HIV In A Child, Say It's A Game-Changer NPR (blog) Scientists believe a little girl born with HIV has been cured of the infection. She's the first child and only the second person in the world known to have been cured since the virus touched off a global pandemic nearly 32 years ago. Doctors aren't releasing the ... Scientists say Baby Born with HIV Apparently CuredKAALtv.com Baby HIV 'Cure' Promising For African CountriesHere And Now Early ART may achieve 'functional cure' in children with HIVHealio 89.3 KPCC (blog) -The Hindu -CBS News all 419 news articles »

Developer Brian Provinciano doesn't expect to make any money from the launch of Retro City Rampage on Nintendo's WiiWare - in fact, he stands to lose $20,000 in development costs alone, with little chance of seeing a return.

"Between the office rent, hardware, insurance, game ratings and other costs, had I not done the WiiWare version, I could've saved around $20,000 - not even including my salary in porting it," Provinciano tells Nintendo Life. "And as it stands, virtually no games hit the threshold these days, so it's only being released as fan service. A $20,000 gift to the fans."

The loss comes down to a few odd requirements Nintendo places on WiiWare launches: The developer must have a designated office space, even for a one-man operation, and he gets paid only if the game sells a certain number of copies. Unless that sales threshold is hit, "you don't get paid a cent," as Provinciano puts it. These regulations have been tweaked for future platforms, he says, and Nintendo deserves kudos for listening to its content creators.

"They listen to feedback and take action to improve things if there's a better way. In both cases, the original policies had the best intentions, but turned out to be a bit problematic."

Regardless, Provinciano launched Retro City Rampage on WiiWare on February 28 because he wanted to keep his promise that the game would come to a Nintendo console: "I'm happy to see it finally out, and the many happy players. That said, I encourage everyone to buy it! I'm crossing my fingers that it will hit the threshold at least in one region."

Retro City Rampage is holding its own on Vita, PS3, Steam and XBLA, in that order.

WiiWare version of Retro City Rampage is a '$20,000 gift' to fans originally appeared on Joystiq on Sun, 03 Mar 2013 16:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Starwatcher gallery by Moebius (Jean Giraud)

Romney: Heart Told Him He'd Win, Until He Saw Fla - Yahoo! News:

He says his campaign underestimated the appeal of Obama’s new health care law to low-income voters.

“And thus, #ProjectAmy was born. App.net messaging integrated natively into Messages for the Mac. Here’s how to set it up. If you’re running Mountain Lion, download the Amy installer and run it. Once it has finished installing, open Messages’ Preferences and add an account. A new option for App.net will appear: pick it and enter your username and password for App.net. Add the account and you’re done.”

- Project Amy - Informal Protocol

I feel fine/nothing

Lovecraft’s racism & The World Fantasy Award statuette, with comments from China Miéville. | Nnedi's Wahala Zone Blog:

one of the many reasons I’m suspicious of modern fantasy settings that have Lovecraftian aspects

If you think there is an occasional eye game in class this semester, you are right. You're my student, and I couldn't care less. Sound familiar? Tell me when class meets.