Falcon Pro developer Joaquim Vergès is caught between a rock and a hard place. His widely-acclaimed Twitter app for Android last week exhausted its allotment of tokens (which give the client permission to access Twitter) far sooner than he anticipated. Even worse, piracy seems to have reared its ugly head, with unauthorized downloads claiming an alarming number of tokens that should have gone to paying customers. And now there's another problem: breaking the token barrier means new downloads are as good as useless, but Verges can't deliver future updates to Falcon Pro if it's no longer in Google Play.

As such, he's decided the best course of action is to hike Falcon Pro's price into the stratosphere: it's currently listed at $132.13 on Google Play. Ideally that figure will be high enough to dissuade most sensible human beings from hitting the "buy" button while allowing Vergès to keep serving his current users with new features and bug fixes. "I'll keep updating the app, simply because I want to use it as my main client, and I refuse to use an outdated client," he wrote on Twitter. According to the developer, pleas for Twitter to grant him extra tokens have thus far been shot down. As expected, Twitter's reasoning is that Falcon Pro largely duplicates core functionality of the company's official Android app. "They refuse to extend the token limit because Falcon doesn't provide any features that their app doesn't have already," he says.

• Via Phandroid
• Source Falcon Pro (Google Play)

Pastagate: Quebec Agency Criticized For Targeting Foreign Words On Menus

by Bill Chappell

February 26, 2013 3:10 PMEnlarge image i

In Quebec, a restaurant's use of the word "pasta" on its menu sparked a government agency into action. Officials who enforce rules that guard French as the official language now say "exotic" words can be allowed in some cases.

Timothy Hiatt/Getty Images

A government agency in Quebec, Canada, has come under intense criticism after attempting to get pasta stricken from a restaurant's menu. The move had nothing to do with the food: Officials said Italian words such as pasta, calamari, and antipasto should be replaced with French words to conform with the law.

After Quebec's office that enforces the predominance of the French language sent an official notice of infractions against Quebec's Language Charter to the Buonanotte restaurant earlier this month, co-owner Massimo Lecas posted a photo of his menu, with "pasta" and other offending words circled.

The incident led to disbelief, outrage, a barrage of jokes, and eventually, a promise from Quebec Language Minister Diane De Courcy that her agency would review how it enforces a law requiring that no language takes precedence over French.

In a separate incident, officials also asked a Montreal restaurant named Brit Chips to rename its signature dish — fish and chips — poisson frit, et frites.

For its part, the Quebec government has admitted that its agents had acted with an "excess of zeal," although it maintained that they were responding to complaints from citizens. The agency now says Italian words such as "pasta" can be allowed on menus.

"If it's only the name of the dish, if it's an exotic name in the language of origin, that wouldn't be a problem," OQLF spokesman Martin Bergeron told the CBC. That could open the possibility of exceptions for some dishes, the report concludes, provided they have exotic names such as "fish and chips."

The flap sparked a flurry of news stories. And on Twitter, the #pastagate hashtag attracted everything from serious debate to jokes about the language police "gnocching" at people's doors.

To many of his supporters, Lecas tweeted a standard response: "Grazie...oooops MERCI!"

Monday, Lecas said that he received an official letter — in French, of course — notifying him that the inquiry into his restaurant's menu was now closed.

Despite the agency's retreat from its initial position, the publicity generated by "pastagate" led other restaurateurs to come out with their own stories of the government's efforts to cleanse them of languages other than French.

At Brasserie Holder, owner Maurice Holder tells the CBC that the Quebec agency faulted a grocery list, written on a kitchen chalkboard. While words such as salade, oeuf, and sucre passed muster, "steak" would need to be replaced by bifteck, he was told.

"The restaurateur said he was also asked to cover up print on a hot water switch that read 'on/off,'" the CBC reports."When a first layer of opaque tape failed to cover up the English words, Holder said he was told to add a second layer of tape."

"I love Quebec... but it's not getting any easier," David McMillan, owner of Montreal's Joe Beef, tells National Post. McMillan speaks both English and French. "My wife is French, my business partner is French, my children go to French school, but I just get so sad and depressed and wonder, what's wrong with these people?"

As Canada's CTV reports, an agency's analysis of media coverage of "pastagate" led to "60 times more coverage in news reports outside the province than a recent trip where Premier Pauline Marois tried to drum up foreign business for Quebec."

Copyright 2013 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/. Copyright 2013 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.

Augie looks at Warren Ellis' recently-collected "Secret Avengers" run and loves the mix of stories and artists. Plus, digital "Previews," lettering in "Saga," a Rob Liefeld TMNT/Deadpool mashup and lots more!

"quentin tarantino is bad at talking to black people":

doulaness:

blackfemdomdotcom:

gowns:

dang

wow

WOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOW

Oh. My. God.

bumsquash:

versatilequeen:

this is important for people who like to appropriate MLK as the posterboy for gentle, nonviolent, “nice,” “universally accessible” activism in order to silence angry POC.

Representing a rare mission accomplished for the U.S. Congress, the Senate Intelligence Committee has dropped its investigation into Zero Dark Thirty, having successfully protected the nation from the horrors of Zero Dark Thirty winning any major Oscars. The victory comes after months of investigation that involved writing angry press releases condemning the film as “grossly inaccurate and misleading,” and an inquiry into the filmmakers’ contacts with the CIA that was more or less subsumed by inquiries into how John McCain was feeling that day. Maverick methods to be sure, but inarguably effective in ensuring that Zero Dark Thirty was almost entirely snubbed on Sunday, for the safety of the homeland.

A congressional aide tells Reuters that the committee closed its investigation the morning after the Oscars, having achieved everything it set out to do. Any information gathered during that investigation—an inquiry that took up two months of the ...

Read more

In keeping with the natural order of things, the new season of Arrested Development hasn’t even premiered, yet already the show has been canceled again. “Arrested is a unique property, we don’t anticipate being able to do season five, six and seven,” Netflix CEO Reed Hastings said yesterday in a conference call, terming the upcoming fourth season a “fantastic one-off” that he believes will be “amazing,” but not so amazing that he considers it worth attempting again, or particularly “fundamental” to the future of Netflix original programming in the way that, say, House Of Cards is.

Of course, Hastings’ position isn’t particularly surprising, given that even series creator Mitch Hurwitz has been setting the expectation that the next “season” is really just “act one of a movie” that no one has agreed to buy yet, and Netflix reminded everyone that most of the hesitance regarding attempting more ...

Read more

part of a page of sketches of a bear in a spacesuit

Love small

dansturm:

Without VFX, Iron Man 2 is the story of two men, with soft spots on their heads, getting into trouble in their pajamas.

“The stars are never far away, Stars are out tonight”

David Bowie has released the music video for his new single “The Stars (Are Out Tonight)” which is from his first album in ten years, “The Next Day” (pre-order). The video stars Bowie, of course, and his female doppelganger Tilda Swinton (who plays his wife). It was directed by Floria Sigismondi and filmed by Jeff Cronenweth.

The aging website for Canadian sewing machine store Sewing and Embroidery Warehouse conceals a dark secret: an Embroidery Trouble Shooting Guide that quickly spirals into madness. Because of an HTML coding error, each trouble shooting tip is in a successively larger font. As you scroll down, the page degenerates into typographic madness that must be seen to be fully appreciated (our screen shots do not do it justice).

But wait, it gets bigger…

via Boing Boing

An adorable Persian cat shows off her tricks in this video, giving high fives for treats and playing dead when her owner says “Bang!”

video via PETSAMI

via Tastefully Offensive

Hey, that’s my bike.

Amid all the complaints about Seth MacFarlane’s sexist gags at The Oscars, the “We Saw Your Boobs” song has come up most often. Maybe that’s because it was right up front and hard to miss. Possibly it was just so perky and bouncy, it wound up being more memorable than, say, MacFarlane’s super-classy riff on Zero Dark Thirty reflecting “every woman’s innate ability to never ever let anything go.” While the song was hardly the worst gag of the evening, the grumbling about it has focused on the inappropriateness of reducing a bunch of heavy-duty drama films to a smarmy, smug Mr. Skin list of tits. New York software developer Kevin Gisi figured turnabout was fair play, though, and he quickly released an answer video, to the same tune and in the same theme, listing off male actors who’ve bared their dangly bits in the ...

Read more

San Diego photographer Tim King recently hosted a secret society-themed party for eight of his friends, complete with robes, masks, and a soundtrack provided by the “chanting monks” Pandora station. Then he ordered a pizza delivery, turned on a video camera, and waited. The pizza delivery guy’s response is about what you’d expect.

via Tastefully Offensive

Swedish makeup artist Sandra “psychosandra” Holmbom creates absolutely amazing illusions with makeup including one that makes her lips look like a super-realistic third eye (the teeth are especially disconcerting).

via My Modern Metropolis

Hugh Pickens writes "UPI reports that for the first time in the history of Nobel Prize, one of the Nobel Prize medals, along with the diploma presented by the Nobel committee, is on auction — with an opening bid of $250,000. Awarded to Francis Crick, who along with James Watson and Maurice Wilkins won the Nobel Prize for medicine in 1962 'for their discoveries concerning the molecular structure of nucleic acids and its significance for information transfer in living material,' the medal will be auctioned off in New York City, by Heritage Auctions. The medal has been kept in a safe deposit box in California since Crick's widow passed away in 2007 and a portion of the proceeds will go to the Francis Crick Institute of disease research scheduled to open in London in 2015. '"By auctioning his Nobel it will finally be made available for public display and be well looked after. Our hope is that, by having it available for display, it can be an inspiration to the next generation of scientists," says Crick's granddaughter, Kindra Crick. "My granddad was honored to have received the Nobel Prize, but he was not the type to display his awards; his office walls contained a large chalkboard, artwork and a portrait of Charles Darwin."'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Most of the time, totally precious covers of hard-ass rap songs are bogus and borderline offensive, but Nick Offerman and Megan Mullally’s cover of Riskay’s “Smell Yo Dick” might just be the exception to the rule. Given the couple's propensity for whipping their dicks out and showing each other who's boss, this version might even make perfect sense.

The cover—which also features Friday Night Lights star and Mullally’s Nancy And Beth bandmate Stephanie Hunt—is, fair warning, pretty raw. A warning to the squeamish: At one point Mullally unzips Offerman’s pants to, um, “Smell [his] Dick,” so maybe don’t watch this with your parents. [via Uproxx]

Megan Mullally & Nick Offerman Rap About Dicks from Megan Mullally Read more

An anonymous reader writes "The team at Duo Security figured out how to bypass Google's two-factor authentication, abusing Google's application-specific passwords. Curiously, this means that application-specific passwords are actually more powerful than users' regular passwords, as they can be used to disable the second factor entirely to gain control of an account. Duo [publicly released this exploit Monday] after Google fixed this last week — seven months after initially replying that this was expected behavior!"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

I’m a big hiphop fan.  I’m surprised and not surprised that hiphop hasn’t been merged into an active product yet (someone might tell me about Wyrd is Bond but that’s more about gangs and tribes than hiphop).  I’m not surprised because I think a game that really loves hiphop is something that overall gamer culture is probably not ready for. I know a lot of gamers who are at least into hiphop as I am, but I don’t know that RPGs publishers know that these people are there and potentially looking for something that embraces the music and culture in an interesting way. There are cool things about gaming culture, but it’s not a sterling example of a subculture ready to truly adopt the other (working on changing that!).

I am surprised though, because the fundamentals of making hiphop music and RPGs are , to me, pretty damn similar. A  tabletop group when it meets is a lot like a freestyle cypher. Both are groups who meet to create a story and expression through speech.  Both follow informal and formal rules to produce that speech (creativity needs constraints), and both are rooted heavily in a sense of improvisation and experimentation. We push each other and play quite literally with our words, forming sacred spaces where imagination is the prime value.

That’s when it all works, anyway.  Half of the fun of playing at freestyling and RPGs is learning the skills to get you to that space consistently. Time is a factor, but more important to developing that skill is your commitment to experimentation and improvisation. Building your “vocabulary” gets you consistently to that space and lets you bring others with you.

In my head, that’s how hip hop and RPGs are very similar.  Having done of both (I’m a much better roleplayer than rapper, sorry!), these are the commonalities I see.

Tomorrow I’m going to talk about ways we can use hip hop as a creative launching point for RPG play.

No matter how good a 3D printer gets, you’re always going to have visible print layers. Even with very high-quality prints with sub-0.1mm layer height, getting a shiny and smooth finish of injection molded plastic is nearly impossible. That is, of course, until you do some post-print finishing. [Neil Underwood] and [Austin Wilson] figured out a really easy way to smooth out even the jankiest prints using parts you probably already have lying around.

The technique relies on the fact that ABS plastic and acetone don’t get along together very well. We’ve seen acetone used to smooth out 3D printed objects before – either by dunking the parts in an acetone bath or brushing the solvent on – but these processes had mixed results. [Neil] and [Austin] had the idea of using acetone vapor, created in a glass jar placed on top of a heated build plate,

The process is pretty simple. Get a large glass jar, put it on a heated build plate, add a tablespoon of acetone, and crank the heat up to 110C. Acetone vapor will form in the jar and react with any printed part smoothing out those layers. The pic above shows from right to left a 3D printed squirrel at 0.35 mm layer height, 0.1 mm layer height – the gold standard of high-end repraps – and another print with 0.35 layer height that was run through a vapor bath for a few minutes. Amazing quality there, and cheap and easy enough for any 3D printer setup.

You can check out the tutorial video after the break along with a video showing exactly how dangerous this is (it’s not, unless you do something very, very dumb).

Filed under: 3d Printer hacks

Video games deaths in the style of Edward Gorey’s The Gashlycrumb Tinies by Brentalfloss | Poster (h/t Shane Dingman)

Previously Popped Culture...
P Is For Pac-Man, T Is For Tetris
Z Is For Zissou: A Pop Culture Alphabet
A Dimension Not Only Of Sight And Sound

Youtube Direktparker

Clueless Gamer: Conan O’Brien Reviews “Tomb Raider” - CONAN on TBS (by teamcoco)

An anonymous reader writes "AllThingsD's Kara Swisher reported and tweeted that Marissa Mayer (CEO since July 2012) has just sent an all-hands email ending Yahoo's policy of allowing remote employees. Hundreds of workers have been given the choice: start showing up for work at HQ (which would require relocation in many cases), or resign. (They can forget about Yahoo advice pieces like this). Mayer has also been putting her stamp on Yahoo's new home page, which was rolled out Wednesday."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

“It’s being described as Apples to Apples meets Super Smash Bros!” – Alexis Ohanian

“Story War” is a combative card-based storytelling party game by Brad O’Farrell (creator of Keyboard Cat), Tom McLean (aka “frezned“) and illustrator Vondell Swain of Cantrip Games. The game allows you to “battle your friends by telling stories, referencing pop culture, and making stuff up.” Cantrip Games has partnered with Breadpig to help raise funds on Kickstarter and allow for more creative content, custom cards and expansions to be released.

Story War is a storytelling party game for 3 to 8 players. Players split into teams and take control of classic characters like Puss In Boots or a fire-breathing Dragon and use creativity and humor to defeat the opposing team.

In most games the difference between victory and defeat has a lot to do with numbers; the story itself is secondary. But in Story War controlling the narrative is the only way to win. There are no numbers or rules on the cards, only artwork and hilarious descriptions. It’s up to the players to decide how to interpret their powers, which means that every game tells unique stories based on the collective creativity of everyone involved.

For $100 or more we’ll make a custom card, just for you!

images and video via Kickstarter

submitted via Laughing Squid Tips

Achewood cartoonist Chris Onstad is ready to take the next step with his insanely popular webcomic — clear to Hollywood. To that end, he’s debuted a 19-second clip showing Ray, Roast Beef and the others in animated form, the first step in what he hopes is the path to television.

“I’ve been working with a team of artists, engineers, and producers to bring Achewood to life,” Onstad wrote Sunday on his blog. “To give it the voices, richness, and opportunities it never had as a comic strip. [...] I’m flying to Los Angeles today to begin a week of network pitch meetings. If things go well, we’ll find a home for our show. Please cross your fingers for us, send us your good energy. And please, share this clip with your world. I’m very proud of what we’ve done.”