firehose

What an amazing story.

In fact, at the time the announcement was made that the GFP researchers were awarded the prize, the erstwhile biochemist Prasher was working as a courtesy shuttle driver at a Huntsville, Alabama, Toyota dealership.

Prasher is back in a research lab and that can't be a bad thing for anyone. It does make me wonder what socio-economic bias is involved in the Nobel committee decision.

By way of Derek Lowe

Roll Above Your Figures and Maps with the Dice Shield:

If you’re still running your RPG around one table, keeping your friends close and your frienemies closer, you know how little space there can be to roll. Between rulebooks, character sheets, minis and maps, the dice are sure to eventually go off the table or knock over a drink. With the Dice Shield you can roll above it all.

The Dice Shield is a strong, clear dice tray, extremely stable on three 2 1/8” legs. You only need one per table, since it can sit in the middle where everyone can reach it, right over the maps and minis. The Dice Shield takes virtually no table space since the legs are small, but it gives over 50 square inches of rolling area. With an optional clear vinyl sound dampener you can roll quietly, or without, you can roll like it means victory or death.

The base contribution for the Dice Shield is $50. That is not cheap, but neither is the Dice Shield. At 1.2 pounds and 3/16” thickness, it may be the biggest, clearest, smoothest, and prettiest dice tray you’ve ever seen. Roll Anywhere. See Everything. Dice Shield.

lostindelight:

children’s picture book about a corgi monster that emerges from a volcano and terrorizes a city of mice and at the end the corgi was just hungry because she had puppies, who also pop out of the volcano. Oh silly Dav Pilkey

nevver:

Alright

Freshly Exhumed writes "Chris Welch at The Verge tells us: 'Speaking at the Morgan Stanley Technology Conference moments ago, Time Warner Cable's Chief Financial Officer Irene Esteves seemed dismissive of the impact Google Fiber is having on consumers. "We're in the business of delivering what consumers want, and to stay a little ahead of what we think they will want," she said when asked about the breakneck internet speeds delivered by Google's young Kansas City network. "We just don't see the need of delivering that to consumers."' The article goes on to quote her: '...residential customers have thus far shown little interest in TWC's top internet tiers. "A very small fraction of our customer base" ultimately choose those options.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Dear Reader: The Unauthorized Autobiography of Kim Jong Il is an upcoming biography of the late North Korean leader Kim Jong-il by author & professional ghostwriter Michael Malice. To write the book in Kim Jong-il’s own words, Malice is drawing on a collection of English language North Korean propaganda books which he collected during a trip to North Korea. Malice is raising funds for the project on Kickstarter. He expects to complete the book by October 2013.

This will be the best book ever written. Welcome to the bizarre world of the north Korea (since Korea is one nation divided by American Imperialism, we keep the “n” lowercase). It’s a nation where politics is religion, and religion is the worship of an odd little man by the name of Kim Jong Il. It is a notoriously reclusive and closed nation, one whose inner workings can only be guessed at by outsiders—until now.

submitted via Laughing Squid Tips

meme4u:

http://memeblock.com/

Four pugs from TheFabulousPugModels sled down a hill together wearing matching pom pom hats and sweaters.

via Cute Overload, Tastefully Offensive

A UK judge who was involved in a case in which Apple was ordered to publish a notice on its website saying that Samsung's Galaxy Tab did not copy the registered design for the iPad has been hired by Samsung as a patent expert in a separate legal battle with Ericsson, reports software patent blog FOSS Patents.


Sir Robin Jacob served on a panel of appeals court judges reviewing the case after Apple complied with the initial court order but in a rather playful manner, quoting judge Colin Birss's earlier comment that the Galaxy Tab was "not as cool" as the iPad. Sir Robin was unamused, and ordered Apple to change the notice, accusing the company of acting with a "lack of integrity".

FOSS Patents' Florian Mueller discovered that Sir Robin is now acting as a patent expert for Samsung from a mention in a letter from Samsung's legal counsel concerning the ITC investigation of a patent infringement complaint filed by Ericsson against Samsung. The blog points out that there is nothing illegal in the maneuver and expresses no doubt that the judge has acted properly at all times, but notes that the impression given is not necessarily a favorable one.

I ... have no doubt that at the time of the ruling Sir Robin Jacob was not being paid, or improperly promised to be paid, by Samsung, and he won't have had any contact with Samsung or Samsung's counsel that would have been against the rules and barred him from adjudicating the Samsung v. Apple case.

Furthermore, Sir Robin Jacob is truly an expert in patent law and there is no question that Samsung will benefit from his knowledge. That said, this just doesn't feel right. It gives the impression that a judge who deals Samsung's number one rival a huge PR blow, in a way that I found very extreme and unjustified, will be generously rewarded.

Mueller himself has found himself embroiled in a somewhat similar situation, having served as consultant to Oracle (as well as Microsoft) while also writing about the patent battle between Oracle and Google.

roxa:

prostheticknowledge:

Bombermine

Massive multiplayer Bomberman clone playable in your browser.

Try it out here

AWESOME

Holy mother of all possible FUCKBALLS.

veryimportantneopian:

naegajeiljalnaganigga:

I wonder if my neopet is alive

peanutsareforpussies:

osointricate:

shorm:

birdpear:

depression is like trying to peel a potato with another potato its not fun it doesnt work and you just wanna cry

…why is this such a good metaphor what the fuck

#and then people are like #God! Why don’t you just get a peeler!? #and then they HAND YOU ANOTHER FUCKING POTATO

this makes so much sense

If Only Every City Had a Masked Lucha Libre Defender of Pedestrians - Commute - The Atlantic Cities

Twitter / bigeasy: Wow. https://t.co/3012i6xps5:

https://twitter.com/mcburton/status/306965646372134912
https://twitter.com/davelester/status/306959706243624960
https://twitter.com/tjowens/status/306958977386835969

… (31 links later)

https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/306207483238703106

In my previous post, I mentioned that I was hired by Andy Kitkowski to write an alternate setting for the translated Tenra Bansho Zero and got Andy to explain some of the cultural differences important to keep in mind when discussing some of the more problematic aspects of Tenra.

Going into the project, I already had a lot of mixed feelings about Tenra. Very early on in the process, Andy had posted some of the “gooier” (as he calls them) art pieces on a forum and asked for opinions, and I was pretty strident in voicing my dislike of the style. Now, yes, It’s easy to pick out Tenra’s art as being pretty fail-worthy:

She must be using lots and LOTS of garment tape

(I find it telling that now that the artist behind Tenra is in a long term monogamous relationship with a woman, his art style has suddenly shifted away from the realm of the boob-tastic. It’s funny how sometimes new relationships can make us question our creative patterns.)

But there were other problematic aspects to the default setting than just the boobular art. I think a lot of the time it’s easy to focus on game art that gratuitously sexualizes women, because that’s the low-hanging fruit of fail that’s easiest to go after. But let’s face it, game settings can be another huge source of fail in gaming. Case in point: the recent Kickstarter for a game called “Going Native” about Native American tribes fighting each other. (I’m not going to link to it. You can Google it easily if you feel you need to see it.) Because nothing says “sorry about that one time we committed genocide against you” like cultural appropriation.

Because many gamers tend to hand-wave and think that “it’s just fantasy” will excuse the problematic bits of their favorite game settings. So I thought it was worth picking out a few things that had particularly bothered me about the Tenra setting and talking about how I “fixed” them in my new setting.

The dilemma: beautiful slave women and crypto-Natives

The first major thing that bothered me about the default Tenra setting is the description of the Kugutsu – living dolls that are brought to life by their creators. Kugutsu are bought and sold like pieces of artwork, despite the fact that the setting is explicit that Kugutsu are alive and sentient. This rang a number of alarm bells for me. Yes it’s possible that you could have a pretty interesting character arc about the conflict between ownership and personal freedom. But Tenra is designed to be a game that lets you throw a bunch of anime tropes in a blender.

There’s nothing saying that you can’t use it to tell such nuanced stories, but the system (or what I know of it) doesn’t support it enough that I felt comfortable with that as a setting element. Especially given that their status as property is mentioned mostly as an aside, something that is secondary to what’s really important about the kugutsu: they’re really, really pretty.

What made me even more uncomfortable is the fact that the setting text specifies that male Kugutsu exist, but they’re pretty rare. Most Kugutsu are female. (Because, you know, who’d want a pretty MALE slave?) And did we mention that Kugutsu are highly sought after as nighttime companions? Oh but don’t worry! It’s because they can go into your head and give you nice dreams, all Inception-style. Yeah. Not at all because they’re super-hot and don’t get to have any say in how their owners use them.

Now I’ll give the creator some credit; I don’t think that the implications of this really occured to him. I think he was just jamming on some familiar anime tropes (they’re kind of like “superhuman robot” meets “sword princess”) and didn’t really stop to examine what he wrote past “hey that sounds cool”. But still, I was giving that portion of the game text major side-eye as I was reading through it. Maybe that’s not what the creator intended, but I’ve got enough baggage that it definitely made me uncomfortable.

The other major problem as I saw it were the oni – essentially crypto-Natives who used to be the dominant population on Tenra before humans came. The game text goes on to paint them as what sounds suspiciously close to the “Noble Savage”, citing how gentle they are and how well adjusted their society is and how they live in close harmony with nature – yadda yadda yadda. And then it takes a left turn into horrifying genocide. As it turns out, the oni are being hunted to extinction by the humans because they have “heart gems” that can be used to power the giant robot armors that are used as the dominant method of warfare on Tenra. So you have a peaceful race of noble savages who are being oppressed and killed by a colonial aggressor in order to take their resources.

… yeah.

Again, I come back to the intent of the system. Were Tenra a game about nuanced social commentary, I might not have such a problem with this. But this, too, seems like a case of “the author thought this was cool” and not a whole lot of real examination of the implications.

The fix: bake that conflict into the setting

The challenge I was left with in addressing these two real difficulties is that with the oni, the central nature of their conflict was baked into the rules. There are endless rules governing mecha characters, and those require oni heart gems to make. No getting around that. (The matter of the Kugutsu was a bit easier, since that was more an issue of description rather than rules.) So I got to thinking. If I’m going to get stuck with this awful conflict, is there a way I can bake that into the setting in such a way that makes it a central issue?

And that was how I came up with the concept for my Final Fantasy-inspired take on the Tenra universe. Instead of a multitude of small nations fighting each other, as exists in the default setting, my new Tenra was dominated by two huge empires fighting for supremacy – one a nation based on technology and one a nation based on magic.

Because it was hugely important to me to fit the oni into the setting in such a way that did not re-victimize them or paint them as noble savages, I took great pains to incorporate them in such a way so as to not adhere to either stereotype. In the past era in my setting, when the techno-empire began to rise to power, the oni made an alliance with the magic-empire and eventually became part of the ruling class, thanks to their inherent magical powers. So instead of victims or cardboard cutouts, they get to be sophisticated elites with complex motivations.

Making the oni’s story one of the central elements of the setting also made it very easy to address the problem of the Kugutsu in a satisfactory manner as well by dropping a Kugutsu rebellion into the middle of my magic-using empire. My new oni were a people who rose from the status of hunted outcasts to ruling elite, so given that past how would they reconcile their laws that kept Kugutsu in bondage? It’s a small change, but it took the most problematic aspect of the Kugutsu – their status as property – and made it an intentional jumping-off point for story to happen.

Now I didn’t want this to be a story about a monolithic evil empire versus an opposing good empire, because that would be boring. So I made the magic-using empire dogmatically Imperialistic – an aggressively colonial force who conquered their neighbors to spread their brand of “enlightenment”. And there you have the bare bones of a setting that can make some pointed social commentary and provide a rich and complex sandbox for groups looking to start a campaign off with a bang.

Final Thoughts

Being socially conscious isn’t something that just happens. I don’t mean to make this all sound easy, because it can be hard sometimes. I’ll be the first to admit that I have my share of privilege. In developing this setting I had to make a real effort to examine my motives and the implications of what I was writing. Getting friends with different perspectives to look over your work is vital! Because inevitably, they point out things that you didn’t mean to get wrong but did.

But taking the extra effort is worth it, because your product will appeal to a wider audience than just Straight White Male Gamers. This is great from a social angle – not alienating people is always a great thing. But it’s great from a commercial angle too, since you’re netting yourself a much larger potential pool of buyers.

(Thoughtful Game Development Does Not Preclude Awesome originally posted on Gaming As Women.)

Related posts:

1. RPGs and cultural context: a conversation with Andy Kitkowski about Tenra Tenra Bansho Zero is a hugely popular anime-themed tabletop roleplaying...
2. I’m good enough, I’m smart enough, and doggone it – I’m awesome enough (Okay, I might be dating myself by bastardizing an SNL...
3. Evaluating Game Groups – Member Roles and Norms As part of a brief series I plan to share...

Hello, my name is Johnny Cash

The odds should've been against Assassin's Creed III: Liberation. It starred a woman—specifically the half-black, half-French heroine Aveline du Grandpre. And it was an exclusive on the PlayStation Vita, a system that many people see as a sadly under-supported platform. More »

puddingebola writes "The Guardian reports that hackers have been targeting officials from over 20 European governments with a new piece of malware called 'MiniDuke.' 'The cybersecurity firm Kaspersky Lab, which discovered MiniDuke, said the attackers had servers based in Panama and Turkey – but an examination of the code revealed no further clues about its origin (PDF). Goverments targeted include those of Ireland, Romania, Portugal, Belgium and the Czech Republic. The malware also compromised the computers of a prominent research foundation in Hungary, two thinktanks, and an unnamed healthcare provider in the US.' Eugene Kaspersky says it's an unusual piece of malware because it's reminiscent of attacks from two decades ago. 'I remember this style of malicious programming from the end of the 1990s and the beginning of the 2000s. I wonder if these types of malware writers, who have been in hibernation for more than a decade, have suddenly awoken and joined the sophisticated group of threat actors active in the cyber world.' The computers were corrupted through an Adobe PDF attachment to an email."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

“It has been 10 years since we last saw David Brent,” Ricky Gervais said in a new statement explaining the imminent return of his Office character. And while one can quibble with the fact that, actually, we just saw David Brent (twice!) in the seventh season of the U.S. Office, it’s doubtless one would quibble with Gervais’ description of the self-deluded paper manager as his “most famous comedy creation”—nor with Gervais’ assertion that it’s high time he revisit him, given that his other comedy creations have only served to make David Brent seem all the more unique. So he’s doing just that in a one-off special titled The Office Revisited that will air during Comic Relief’s Red Nose Day on March 15 (“Who says famine has to be depressing?”) both on BBC One and on Gervais’ YouTube channel, where you’ll also currently find ...

Read more

Name Mangler was updated today and it's very impressive. I bought it before the demo video was even half over. It's on sale for $10. Sure, you could write a bunch of AppleScript, Shell or Python to do the same things. Sure, you're really awesome, but my time costs money. I don't want to spend any more of it writing scripts to rename files.

via http://oh-jess.tumblr.com/

Hustle

The Mocoro Robotic Fur Ball vacuum cleaner rolls around on the floor like a Roomba but is different because it’s cuter, more of a battery-powered dust mop than a powerful vacuum, and is made of a fuzzy & colorful microfiber material. I’m guessing kitties will love this device. Available at Japan Trend Shop.

via The Green Head, bookofjoe

In honor of White Day, the folks at FabCafe will be holding a two-part Gummy Man workshop for men on March 14, 2013 in their Tokyo-based cafe to make gummy replicas of themselves using a 3D body scanner.

via Spoon & Tomago, Foodiggity

pigrabbitbear writes "Look outside of your window: if you see miles of farmland, chances are you have terrible internet service. That's because major telecommunications companies don't think it's worth the investment to bring high-speed broadband to sparsely populated areas. But like most businesses, farms increasingly depend on the internet to pay bills, monitor the market and communicate with partners. In the face of a sluggish connection, what's a group of farmers to do? Grow their own, naturally. That's what the people of Lancashire, England, are doing. Last year, a coalition of local farmers and others from the northwestern British county began asking local landowners if they could use their land to begin laying a brand-new community-owned high-speed network, sparing them the expense of tearing up roads. Then, armed with shovels and backhoes, the group, called Broadband for the Rural North, or B4RN (it's pronounced 'barn'), began digging the first of what will be approximately 180,000 meters of trenches and filling them with fiber-optic cable, all on its own."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

photo via Dust & Grooves

For the past seven years, artist Rutherford Chang has been collecting first pressings of the Beatles’ 1968 self-titled album, which is commonly known as The White Album. Chang says he is drawn to the album because of artist Richard Hamilton’s iconic white, nearly featureless cover design—the cover visibly displays age and weathering, and in some cases the artistic alterations of the album’s former owner. Chang’s collection, currently numbering 699 copies, is on display at his installation “We Buy White Albums,” at Recess gallery in New York City. The installation resembles a record store, complete with bins organized by serial number, and Chang is on site to buy (but never sell) copies of The White Album. In addition, he is recording albums in his collection and digitally layering them into scratchy compilations—here’s 100 copies played simultaneously:

For more on Chang’s curious collection, see his interview with Dust & Grooves and this New York Times article.

photo via Rutherford Chang

photo via Dust & Grooves

via yewknee & Waxy.org