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Westboro Baptist “church” Does The Harlem Shake (by bob StuffingsVille)

silentbrad writes "Cliff Bleszinski, formerly of Epic Games, posted a blog entry titled 'Nickels, dimes, and quarters' yesterday, advocating that gamers dissatisfied with the current trend toward DLC and microtransactions should vote with their wallets. Quoting: 'The video game industry is just that. An industry. Which means that it exists in a capitalistic world. You know, a free market. A place where you're welcome to spend your money on whatever you please or to refrain from spending that money. ... Adjusted for inflation, your average video game is actually cheaper than it ever has been. Never mind the ratio of the hours of joy you get from a game per dollar compared to film. To produce a high quality game it takes tens of millions of dollars, and when you add in marketing that can get up to 100+ million. ... I've seen a lot of comments online about microtransactions. They're a dirty word lately, it seems. Gamers are upset that publishers/developers are "nickel and diming them." They're raging at "big and evil corporations who are clueless and trying to steal their money." I'm going to come right out and say it. I'm tired of EA being seen as "the bad guy." I think it's bulls*** that EA has the 'scumbag EA' memes on Reddit and that Good Guy Valve can Do No Wrong. ... If you don't like EA, don't buy their games. If you don't like their microtransactions, don't spend money on them. It's that simple. ... The market as I have previously stated is in such a sense of turmoil that the old business model is either evolving, growing, or dying. No one really knows. "Free to play" aka "Free to spend 4 grand on it" is here to stay, like it or not. ... People like to act like we should go back to "the good ol' days" before microtransactions but they forget that arcades were the original change munchers. Those games were designed to make you lose so that you had to keep spending money on them. Ask any of the old Midway vets about their design techniques. The second to last boss in Mortal Kombat 2 was harder than the last boss, because when you see the last boss that's sometimes enough for a gamer. ... If you don't like the games, or the sales techniques, don't spend your money on them. You vote with your dollars.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Thom Yorke, the ethereal-voiced lead singer of the music group Radiohead, isn't a fan of what Apple, Google, and other technology companies are doing to media. In an interview with UK-publication The Guardian, Yorke lamented what he said were attempts by tech companies to turn songs into commodities.

"They have to keep commodifying things to keep the share price up," Yorke said. "But in doing so they have made all content, including music and newspapers, worthless in order to make their billions. And this is what we want? I still think it will be undermined in some way."

Five years ago, Yorke and Radiohead became Internet heroes when they self released the album In Rainbows over the Web and told fans to pay what they wanted for the work. In the interview, Yorke sounded more skeptical about that kind of distribution now.

• Via The Guardian
• Related Items google apple radiohead digital music thom yorke

““Shoot, my bangs set off a national conversation. My shoes can set off a national conversation. That’s just sort of where we are. We’ve got a lot of talking going on,” the first lady said only somewhat jokingly Thursday before an appearance in Chicago, her hometown. “It’s like everybody’s kitchen-table conversation is now accessible to everybody else so there’s a national conversation about anything.””

- First lady: Not surprised by reaction to Oscars - Yahoo! News

(via Louisiana fans punished for satirical ‘Jesus Loves You’ sign in state playoff game | Prep Rally - Yahoo! Sports)

nk497 writes "Scientists from Cancer Research UK are working with Amazon, Facebook and Google to design and develop a mobile game aimed at speeding up the search for new cancer drugs. The first step is for 40 computer programmers, gamers, graphic designers and other specialists to take part in a weekend "GameJam" to turn the charity's raw genetic data into a game format, with a working title of GeneRun. 'We're making great progress in understanding the genetic reasons cancer develops. But the clues to why some drugs will work and some won't are held in data that needs to be analysed by the human eye — and this could take years,' said Carlos Caldas at Cancer Research UK's Cambridge Institute. 'By harnessing the collective power of citizen scientists we'll accelerate the discovery of new ways to diagnose and treat cancer much more precisely.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

From Boston.com

A massive spill at a Chivas plant has sent the smell of spirits flowing through a Scottish sewer and sorrow coursing through the hearts of Scotch whisky fans.

That is some good news writing. Still, "Less than 18,000 liters" is still a shitload of Whisky down the drain.

Comedian Colin Mochrie has just revealed in a tweet that the popular improv show Whose Line Is It Anyway? will be returning. Ryan Stiles also told The Wenatchee World that Warner Bros. will bring the show back in April with a new host, comdian Aisha Tyler, and the show’s original cast.

Oh, by the way, Whose Line is coming back. More details later.

— Colin Mochrie (@colinmochrie) March 1, 2013

Thanks Sara Harris!

David Bowie’s new record, The Next Day, isn’t out until March 12, but interested and not-so-interested fans can stream the whole thing now for free on iTunes.

So far, the press for the record has been pretty positive, with Rolling Stone giving the record four stars, and Q saying it’s maybe “an equal to Low or a Heroes.” Listen here and judge for yourself.

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An NBC affiliate station in Cleveland took a curious strategy to shore up flagging ratings for The Peacock’s Thursday lineup last night: It preempted The Office, 1600 Penn, and Law & Order: SVU (the first and third of which were repeats) in order to rerun a 21-year-old Matlock movie. Curiouser still: The gambit sort of worked. According to ShowBuzzDaily, the number of households in the Cleveland area tuned in to Matlock: The Return just slightly edged out the national average for 1600 Penn, thus proving the long-held notion that TV viewers in major Midwestern markets prefer the folksy, homespun wisdom of the late Andy Griffith to whatever Josh Gad is yelling about this week. (And for another notch in the win column, WKYC receives all of the ad revenue sold for that two-hour bloc, rather than the lion’s share of the money going to the network.) The station plans ...

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Preventing the trilogy from reaching an uncharacteristically abrupt end, Warner Bros. has pushed back the release of The Hobbit: There And Back Again from July 18, 2014 to December 17, 2014, stretching out that troublingly breakneck seven-month interim between the second and third films. “Wait, The Hobbit’s already over?” you would otherwise have been saying next July, sweat pooling from the heavy winter clothes you kept on while summer stole in. “Just yesterday the dwarves were singing, and I was a young man.” Now The Hobbit will instead stretch itself across two full years, or the equivalent of one walk to a mountain.   

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House of the Simpson Family (The Simpsons)

Azpeitia, Spain-based professional interior designer Iñaki Aliste Lizarralde (aka “nikneuk“) has hand-drawn an incredibly detailed series of floor plans that map out numerous popular television show apartments and houses. Prints are available to purchase on RedBubble, Etsy and deviantART.

Jerry Seinfeld’s Apartment (Seinfeld)

Sheldon, Leonard and Penny’s Apartment (The Big Bang Theory)

Dexter Morgan’s Apartment v.2 (Dexter)

Chandler – Joey & Monica – Rachel Apartments (Friends)

images via Iñaki Aliste Lizarralde

Toronto-based street artist, character designer and animator Aiden Glynn of Pizza and Pixels has created a custom package that contains a collection of Super Mario Brothers themed mushrooms. Aiden installed the package full of video game fungi into the proper area of a local grocery store for customers to stumble upon.

images via Aiden Glynn

submitted via Laughing Squid Tips

Exhibit 1B from Jazan Wild’s complaint

The Ninth Circuit rejected a comic creator’s $60-million claim against NBC Universal and the producers of the television series Heroes, determining there was no evidence of copyright infringement.

Jazan Wild (aka Jason Barnes) sued the network and Tim Kring’s Tailwind Productions in May 2010, accusing them of stealing the “carnival of lost souls and outcasts” depicted in the fourth season of the drama from his 2005-2006 comic series Jazan Wild’s Carnival of Souls. In his original complaint, he laid out numerous side-by-side comparisons that he contends prove the TV show’s traveling carnival is “virtually identical” to the one in his comic series.

However, in May 2011, a federal judge found that Heroes and Carnival of Souls “differ markedly in mood and setting, and weren’t substantially similar works, and therefore Wild had failed to prove his claim for copyright infringement. In Wild’s appeal, he insisted the judge erred by using too rigorous of a test to determine infringement, arguing that the wide availability of his comic meant he had to meet a lower standard of proof.

Law360 reports that a three-judge appeals panel on Thursday upheld the dismissal, agreeing with the district court’s ruling that “other than the presence of generic carnival elements and standard scenes that logically flow from those elements, the two works differ radically in their plot and story lines, their characters, the dialogue, the setting and themes, and the mood.”

The Ninth Circuit also rejected Wild’s assertion that the carnival on Heroes was visually similar to the one depicted in his comic books, determining that those elements aren’t are “stock scenes” or “scenes a faire” — situations that naturally flow from a basic premise — and therefore not subject to copyright protection.

“Any remaining comparable aspects of these scenes constitute nothing more than ‘random similarities scattered throughout the works’ that are insufficient to support a claim of substantial similarity,” the panel wrote.

Wild recently made waves online in September when he sent cease-and-desist notices to book reviewers who posted excerpts from Melissa Marr’s unrelated Carnival of Souls, a young-adult fantasy novel at the center of his trademark-infringement lawsuit against HarperCollins.

Viz Media

Digital comics | The manga publisher Viz Media has signed on to iVerse’s digital comics app for libraries; this is big news, because manga, especially Viz’s teen-friendly line, is still very popular in libraries. [press release]

Publishing | In his address last weekend to the ComicsPRO annual meeting in Atlanta, Image Comics Publisher Eric Stephenson urged the audience to continue asking “What’s next?” [Comics Alliance]

Retailing | Journalist and retailer Matthew Price wraps up the ComicsPRO meeting, noting Diamond’s report of a healthy year for comics retailers, with comics sales up 16 percent, graphic novels up 13 percent, and merchandise up 9 percent from last year. [The Oklahoman]

Art Spiegelman

Creators | Art Spiegelman gave a 90-minute lecture on comics at Southern Methodist University yesterday, and he had plenty to say about the internet, graphic novels, and what sort of comics he prefers: “’I think Donald Duck had much more nuance than Peter Parker,’ Spiegelman said. ‘He was far more interesting than the mood swings of the Hulk.’” [The Daily Campus]

Creators | Steven Heller interviews Michael Schumacher and Denis Kitchen about their new biography of Al Capp, Al Capp: A Life to the Contrary. [The Atlantic]

Awards | The nominees for the 17th Osamu Tezuka Cultural Awards were announced this week; none of the works is licensed in the United States, but several of the creators are familiar to American readers, including Hiromu Arakawa (Fullmetal Alchemist) and Chica Umino (Honey and Clover) [Anime News Network]

Gene Yuen Lang

Comics | Gene Luen Yang became acquainted with Chinese opera while researching his book Boxers and Saints, and he points out that it is similar to comics in its use of color, its well choreographed battles, and its love of primates. [Gene Luen Yang]

Comics | Gret Beato looks at five risible examples of comics as government propaganda, all drawn from the pages of Richard Graham’s 2011 book Government Issue: Comics for the People. [Reason]

Manga | Jason Thompson takes a look at the cute cat manga Chi’s Sweet Home and pet manga in general. [Anime News Network]

The only image placeholder service on the web bringing you nothing but Vanilla Ice jpgs.

Buddhists try really hard to masturbate themselves to nirvana. 

I had this high-minded goal that I wasn’t going to ever discuss Dan Harmon in these reviews after the review of the first episode. It’s not fair to the people making Community now, and it’s not fair to Harmon, either. Acting as if his era of the show was infallible is just inaccurate, and acting as if this era of the show is unsalvageable because he’s not around also is. The fact of the matter is that there are still a ton of talented writers working on this show, the cast is amazing, and the production is… well, the budget’s been cut, and you can tell, but it’s the sort of thing that would be easier to overlook if the scripts were top-notch. (I’m hoping to do an FOC column on the noticeable shift in production values between the first two seasons and ...

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National Post

How the Harlem Shake is being used to push for change in Egypt NBCNews.com Youth activists gathered in front of the Muslim Brotherhood's headquarters in Cairo to dance the Harlem Shake in protest of Egypt's ruling party. NBCNews.com's Dara Brown reports. By Charlene Gubash, Producer, NBC News. CAIRO -- It is the latest Internet ... Harlem Shake & Ballet: The English National Dance Company Shows Everyone ...Huffington Post LeBron James leads Miami Heat in “Harlem Shake” (Video)Washington Post (blog) Clark Chronicle: Harlem Shake videos bombard Internetmy.hsj.org Business Insider -New York Times -NPR all 213 news articles »

BEHOLD! The Dinosaurs!

Virus Venn Diagram

Feb 28th 2013 By: Ziah Grace

Time travel is an tricky adventurescape to navigate. Despite a hero or heroine's best intentions, they tend to leave a trail of bodies/fractured timelines/nearly-kissed mothers in their wake across fiction. Cartoonist Jess Fink, on the other hand, seems poised to avoid the pitfalls of her chronally displaced contemporaries in Top Shelf's upcoming graphic novel, We Can Fix IT!: A Time Travel Memoir, wherein she enacts revenge on childhood bullies and makes out with... herself?

From Top Shelf:

What would you do if you had a time machine? Bet on sporting events? Assassinate all the evildoers of history? Or maybe try to fix all the mistakes and regrets that have haunted you all these years?

Join Jess as she travels back in time to share her wisdom with her naive younger self, stand up to bullies who terrorized her child self, and teach her horny teenage self a thing or two. What begins as a raunchy adventure in teen wish fulfillment grows into a thoughtful story about memory, regret, and growing up.

One time machine, one frustrated girl, one sexy futuristic jumpsuit...infinite possibilities.

We Can Fix It is Fink's second Top Shelf release, following the printed version her pornographic Chester 5000 webcomic. Her new book is decidedly safer for work, but judging from preview pages, no less amorous.

Originally posted on her website, the comic's been polished up for the print release, with another 250 pages added that aren't available online.The original graphic novel will be available in May, and you can check out a few of Top Shelf's preview pages below.

Thank God it’s Frida

— Philip K. Dick

An anonymous reader writes "Yes, those OS/2 Warp bastards just don't want to quit. Today the eComStation 2.2 beta live CD was released for public download. There is also this positive review from TechRepublic, and OS/2 Zelots partying/ranting at their community sites."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Here’s a camera rig that makes it a snap to produce photorealistic 3D models of an object. It was put together rather inexpensively by an indie game company called Skull Theatre. They published a couple of posts which show off how the rig was built and how it’s used to capture the models.

They’re using 123D, a software suite which is quite popular for digitizing items. The rig has a center table where an object is placed, and a movable jig which holds three different cameras (or one camera for three rotations). You can see the masking tape on the floor which marks the location for each shot. These positions are mapped out in the software so that it has an easy time putting them all together. The shaft which connects the jig to the base is adjustable to accommodate large or small items.

One thing that we found interesting is the team’s technique for dealing with reflections. They use a matte spray to make those surfaces less reflective. This helps 123D do its job but also allows them to map reflective surface more accurately using the game engine.

Filed under: digital cameras hacks