firehose

The rise and fall of music delivery formats

Lasrick writes "This is just fascinating: Joe Henrich and his colleagues are shaking the foundations of psychology and economics, and explain why social science studies of Westerners — and Americans in particular — don't really tell us about the human condition: 'Given the data, they concluded that social scientists could not possibly have picked a worse population from which to draw broad generalizations. Researchers had been doing the equivalent of studying penguins while believing that they were learning insights applicable to all birds.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

By John Walker on February 25th, 2013 at 8:00 pm.

The annual AGS Awards are open for voting for a couple more weeks. That is, the awards for the best games of 2012 made using Chris Jones’ enormously popular engine. As the adventure genre enjoys a return to the spotlight, what better time to delve into highlights of the last year? NO BETTER TIME. That’s what.

With the Earth’s population finally abandoning their embracing of idiocy and once more welcoming adventure gaming into their hearts and hard drives, AGS ever more proves a great source of both free and commercially successful projects. The likes of Dave Gilbert’s Wadjet Eye games, and the recent Richard & Alice from Denby Raze, show the potential the engine offers. As do the very many other games you’ve likely not heard of, because you don’t spend enough time trawling AGS’s utterly abysmal forum-site splurge. So the annual awards are a great chance to pick through what’s risen to the surface.

Dominating the nominations this year, not surprisingly, is Xii Games’ Resonance, which Richard very much enjoyed. I did too – it’s really very good. It’s up for Best Game, Best Gameplay (whatever that is), Best Dialogue Writing, Best Original Story, Best Puzzles, Best Player Character, Best Non-Player Character, Best Background Art, Best Animation, Best Character Art, Best Programming, Best Sound Effects, Best Voice Work and Best Music. Good grief. Is this like the Oscars, where the noms for Best Picture and Director inexplicably get nominated for Best Hair Cuts and Best Use Of Focus Pulling too? Actually, no – the game really does excel in all these areas (within the rather specific caveat of being a pixel-based AGS game, it should be stressed).

Also appearing a lot of times is Ben Jordan Paranormal Investigator Case 8: Relics of the Past, which I haven’t played but can inform you that the opening titles go on FOREVER, and aren’t very interesting to look at. The Cat Lady, which people keep telling me I should but actually I really hated, is up for a collection too.

Ben Chandler’s very splendid ^_^ is nominated for a Best Short, and is well deserving, even if he is infuriatingly trying to make a game for every obscure bit of punctuation on the keyboard. It’s the number one game for making you want to shout “HEADBUTT OF THE AWAKENINGS!” While the lovely-looking Anna’s Quest Vol.1 gets very deserved entry in Best Animation and Best Character Art (although should also be nominated in the OH GOOD GRIEF JUST SHUT UP AND START Prize category for interminable self-indulgent intros).

Space Quest: Incinerations is a fan-made sequel to the series, and Space Quest II VGA is a remake of the dreadful original Sierra game. Richard’s written about both of them here, observing that the first is a great reinvention of the series, while the latter is a far more bearable version of the terrible original.

Go pick through it all for yourself. Where they’re not free, there will be a demo instead. And you could even give money to people for the good ones!

The Doom (by FineLeatherJackets)

The times haven't been the kindest to B&N: retail sales are down and the Kindle is outselling the Nook. Joining Best Buy and Dell, B&N might be going private. From the article: "Barnes & Noble’s largest shareholder, Leonard Riggio, made an offer Monday to buy out the struggling company and take it private ... Essentially, it would split the company in two: one half would be Riggio’s private brick-and-mortar stores and related assets, the other the publicly-traded Nook and college bookstore management division."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Jeez, the song was a joke! Can’t you take a joke? Yes, I can take a joke. I can take a bunch! A thousand, 10,000, maybe even more! But after 30 or so years, this stuff doesn’t feel like joking. It’s dehumanizing and humiliating, and as if every single one of those jokes is an ostensibly gentler way of saying, “I don’t think you belong here.” All those little instances add up, grain of sand by grain of sand until I’m stranded in a desert of every “tits or GTFO” joke I’ve ever tried to ignore.

Then came the joke about actresses getting the flu to lose weight. “It paid off,” MacFarlane said. “Looking good.” Well, thank God, because what matters to all women is that we look good for Seth MacFarlane. How many women did he introduce over the course of the night by mentioning how they looked: “Please welcome the lovely ___ ,” “the beautiful ______”? How many men?

Uh, those are compliments! Now he can’t even give women compliments? Compliment away, friends. Let’s compliment the shit out of each other. But let’s be really cognizant of what we compliment each other on, and what that says about what we expect from each other, and what we consider valuable and worth mentioning. It doesn’t matter what Salma Hayek says, because she’s so pretty!

You just don’t like Seth MacFarlane’s sense of humor. What did you expect? Actually, I do like Seth MacFarlane’s sense of humor. (Sometimes. No one likes everything all the time!) I’ve been a loyal Family Guy viewer for almost fifteen years. I’ve been to — and adored — Family Guy: Live. If MacFarlane had sung “Shipoopi” all night, I’d be writing a really different story right now. Instead, there were jokes about how Rex Reed would probably call Adele fat — because that’s what’s important about her — and how someday Quvenzhané Wallis will be old enough to date George Clooney — because that’s what’s important about her — and how sometimes, gasp, a woman might have body hair — because that’s what’s important about them. Women are nags, and Jews run Hollywood! Thank you, Seth MacFarlane, for this cutting-edge humor. Like Mark Wahlberg said, the party’s at Jack Nicholson’s house. You remember, that place where Roman Polanski drugged and raped a 13-year-old girl. Ha-ha, ha-ha, ha.

Dominic Black

After nearly four years of distracting himself with soundtrack work, side projects, unsettlingly omniscient streaming services, and some bicep curls, Trent Reznor has confirmed what he's been saying since late last year: Nine Inch Nails is back, with live dates planned for this summer and on into 2014, including a “full-on arena tour of the US this fall.” The official Nine Inch Nails website has been updated with a “Nine Inch Nails — Twenty Thirteen” teaser that leads to this Reznor-written release on Pitchfork, wherein he talks about some tentative musical collaboration with King Crimson’s Adrian Belew that “led to the decision to re-think the idea of what Nine Inch Nails could be”—a brainstorming session that eventually settled on deciding that Nine Inch Nails could be a touring band that plays Nine Inch Nails songs and makes a lot of money again. Or, possibly a travelling improv troupe ...

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Catalyst Game Labs is pleased to announce a superb addition to the phenomenal Year of Shadowrun line up: an Introductory Box Set, coming Spring 2013. “In a year when we’re already breaking so much ground, it’s great to continue that … Continue reading →

Clearly confident that safety standards will prevent NBC from forcing a pregnant lady to ride the broken rollercoaster that is Up All Night much longer, Maya Rudolph is said to be looking to create and star in an old-fashioned variety show, the kind where constant change is an integral part of the entertainment, not a desperately misguided attempt to save it. Deadline reports that the in-demand Rudolph has already passed on as many as five pilot offers this season, telling everyone that, actually, this is what she really wants to do. And while modern variety show revivals haven’t exactly fared well, there is apparently enough faith in Maya Rudolph’s not being Rosie O’Donnell that the idea has garnered interest from ABC, Fox, and even NBC—who presumably hopes that they can kill two birds with one stone by calling it Up All Night With Maya Rudolph, and ...

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No doubt driven by kid-friendly films like Amour and the younger generation’s zeal for old-fashioned musicals, this year’s Oscars saw a 20-percent upswing in viewers aged 18 to 34 from 2012’s ceremony, in addition to a 100-percent surge in angry articles. Of course, along with that wave of tween Chicagoheads and Amourites tuning in, some of the former and (nearly) all of the latter can be attributed to host Seth MacFarlane, who was brought in specifically to attract younger viewers and say jerky, Seth MacFarlane-type things, and succeeded on both counts. While the debate still rages about his suitability as host, last night’s telecast scored 40.3 million total viewers and delivered the highest ratings in the adult demo since Ellen DeGeneres hosted back in 2007, when America was still hot on the trend of “being nice to people.” It also scored the best overall numbers ...

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Submitted by: anthropocene

Tagged: Horse Meat , in the news , they still don't know Share on Facebook

Some random site running my last post without asking.

If you’re a fan of this site, you’re also probably a fan of RSS – a once-ascendant technology that has been on most everyone’s deathwatch for five or so years. According to Google’s (almost totally outdated) Feedburner service, nearly 450,000 people subscribe to this blog via RSS – although the number of you who actually read my posts is far smaller (according to Feedburner statistics, which I’ve never fully understood).

In any case, from time to time I’ve poked at you poor RSS readers, just to find out if you’re alive. Remember this piece – Is RSS Really Dead? Or this one - Once Again, RSS Is Dead. But ONLY YOU Can Save It!?

In those posts, I asked if my beloved RSS readers were really out there. Turns out, I got tons of comments back – a very high number given the work involved in declaring fealty to the creaky old standard. (It kind of felt like a reshoot of that wonderful final scene in Horton Hears a Who – “Everybody yell real loud, and maybe Google will hear, and not deprecate Feedburner…”  But I digress.)

I’ve always kept my RSS feed “full text” – which means the entire post, pictures, words and all, goes out over RSS, and can be picked up by any RSS reader anywhere on the planet. I always have held the belief that it’s more important that my work get distributed than monetized. But not everyone can afford such high minded principles. Many publishers cut their feed short, teasing folks with headlines and a snippet of the story in the hopes that people will click through to the site, where their visit can be properly “monetized” via advertising.

My new feed (sadface).

After much thought, I’m going to do the same. But not for the extra clicks and ads. It’s due to the fraud that’s taken over the content space in the Indpendent Web. Untold legions of bad actors use RSS to scrape “real” sites like this one, then wrap them with ads from exchanges to make a quick buck. The rise of programmatic fraud has made this even worse (see It’s Time To Call Out Fraud In The Adtech Ecosystem for more on this). And no, I’m not going to link to examples – but you can Google “Content Scraping” if you want to learn more.

So, consider this an apology. I am very sorry that you have to click a link to get to the content I make here every day. But also consider this a plea – as in, please do click that link at the top. I very much want you to be part of this conversation.

(And if enough of you complain, you know I’ll listen, and figure out some way around this).

UPDATE: I turned full feed back on. Thanks for all the input.

“The median age of an Academy Awards voter is 62. They are 94% Caucasian and 77% male.”

- “10 things the Oscars won’t say.” Via Market Watch. (via climateadaptation)

New York Magazine

Behind Seth MacFarlane's Oscars Shout-out to a Journalist and Family Guy Fan New York Magazine During his opening monologue at last night's Academy Awards, host Seth MacFarlane anticipated — somewhat accurately, it turns out — the public reaction to his highest-profile gig ever. "Worst Oscar host ever," read the initial headline, which got ... Internet totals up Oscar host Seth MacFarlane's many offenses and finds him ...NOLA.com Oscars host Seth MacFarlane panned after 'offensive' jokesTelegraph.co.uk Seth MacFarlane, Creepy ImitatorNew Yorker (blog) Toon Zone -Cinema Blend -AFP all 713 news articles »

In our James Bond FAQ contest (still time to enter!), more than one of you has entered with a Bond/Doctor mash-up. How many of you actually knew that one happened...not on TV, but in real life? In an interview given in 1994 but not fully disclosed until now, Third Doctor Jon Pertwee has revealed that during World War II, he was in fact a senior secret intelligence agent. He was even sent for a specific assignment interview by none other than Ian Fleming. 'I thought the job was going to be liaison with the Free French. I did not fancy that at all, so I deliberately messed up the interview, pretending I could not understand what they were saying at times and throwing in the most inappropriate answers. Afterwards, when Fleming got the report back, he said they did not want me and how badly I had done. I confessed I had done it on purpose because I did not want to work with de Gaulle's mob. He told me I was a blithering idiot because the interview was a chance to be our man in Tahiti.' And in the days before eBay, he was one of the original scalpers: 'I used to attend meetings where Churchill would be at the end of the table and he would be smoking his cigars. At the end of the meeting, I used to collect the butts and sell them on to the Americans for a few dollars.' Read the rest at the Daily Mail. It's quite the untold tale.

OverTheGeicoE writes "TSA recently announced that it would remove all of Rapiscan's X-ray body scanners from airports by June. As part of this effort, it is trying to move a millimeter-wave body scanner from the Helena, Montana airport to replace an X-ray unit at a busier airport. Strangely enough, they have encountered resistance from the Helena's Airport Manager, Ron Mercer. Last Thursday, workers came to remove the machine, but were prevented from doing so by airport officials. Why? Perhaps Mercer agrees with Cindi Martin, airport director at Montana's Glacier Park International Airport airport, who called the scheduled removal of her airport's scanner 'a great disservice to the flying public' in part because it 'removed the need for the enhanced pat-down.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

See Mike Draw

The Raspberry Pi is great if you’re looking for a cheap yet powerful computer running Linux, but let’s not forget all the other ARM dev boards out there. [Adam] spent some time this weekend putting together an Ubuntu distro for his Beagleboard XM to give it the convenience of a GUI and a whole bunch of drivers to get a lot of stuff done.

The Beagleboard XM is another high power ARM dev board that is a little more capable than the Raspberry Pi. With an integrated USB hub, LVDS LCD displays, and a camera board, the Beagleboard already has a lot of peripherals that are now only promised for the Raspberry Pi. The only problem with the Beagleboard XM is the state of drivers and software; a problem [Adam] resolved by bringing Ubuntu to the Beagleboard.

[Adam]‘s distro comes with all the goodies a relatively high-powered ARM dev board should have: Python, scipy, numpy, and a few cool extras such as GIMP and Chromium. He says it’s a bit faster than the stock Raspbian distro on the Raspberry Pi, so if you’re looking for the best ARM/Linux dev board for your next project, you may want to give [Adam]‘s distro a try.

Filed under: ARM, linux hacks

Australian photographer Bill Gekas creates elaborate portraits of his five-year old daughter that are inspired by classic paintings. Gekas talks about his photography process in this interview with Digital Photography School.

via Digital Photography School

“It’s sweet, spicy & savory and definitely food truck worthy.”

On Instructables, Imnopeas repurposed a home corn dog making machine to make Chicken ‘n Waffles on a Stick. She served hers with her own Jalapeño Vanilla Breakfast Syrup.

via Foodiggity

An anonymous reader writes "LG is set to breathe new life into the webOS platform after the company announced today that it has acquired the software and its intellectual property from HP. The news comes after HP abandoned webOS device and software development in August 2011, then open-sourced the platform so that developers might be able to salvage something from the software that was widely acclaimed, despite the lack of smartphone and tablet sales which it powered. LG now claims complete ownership of the webOS source code, its documentation and webOS websites. It has obtained HP licenses, as well as the patents that Palm transferred to its owner when it was acquired in 2010."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

While there’s obviously nothing official yet about another season for Community (other than the official notification you just received to let you know, officially, there’s nothing official yet), should the show continue, it could see some definite Chang-es—which is the sort of joke you might be seeing less of, should Ken Jeong defect to ABC's Spy. Jeong has signed on to the U.S. adaptation of the British comedy of the same name, where Rob Corddry will star as a man who accidentally bumbles his way into working for the Secret Service in an attempt to impress his precocious son. According to The Hollywood Reporter, Jeong would co-star as “The Examiner,” a CIA agent described as a “mischievous man” who’s “erratic, incorrigible, and inappropriate with his fellow agents”—a description that’s only an “and also, he is frequently nude” away from being a boilerplate ...

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ananyo writes "The drowned remnants of an ancient micro-continent may lie scattered beneath the waters between Madagascar and India, a new study suggests. Evidence for the long-lost land comes from Mauritius, a volcanic island about 900 kilometers east of Madagascar (abstract) The oldest volcanic rocks on the island date to about 8.9 million years ago. Yet grain-by-grain analyses of beach sand collected at two sites on the Mauritian coast revealed around 20 zircons — tiny crystals of zirconium silicate that are exceedingly resistant to erosion or chemical change — that were far older. One of these zircons was at least 1.97 billion years old. The researchers that made the discovery think that geologically recent volcanic eruptions brought shards of the buried continent to the Earth's surface, where the zircons eroded from their parent rocks to pepper the island's sands. Analyses of Earth's gravitational field reveal several broad areas where sea-floor crust at the bottom of the Indian ocean is much thicker than normal — at least 25 to 30 kilometers thick, rather than the normal 5 to 10 kilometers. Those crustal anomalies may be the remains of a landmass that researchers have now dubbed Mauritia, which they suggest split from Madagascar when tectonic rifting and sea-floor spreading sent the Indian subcontinent surging northeast millions of years ago."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader writes "A small U.S. university has come up with a novel solution to reduce the possibility of using a dead person's hand to get past a fingerprint scanner through the use of hemoglobin detection. The device quickly checks the fingerprint and hemoglobin 'non-intrusively' to verify the identity and whether the individual is alive. This field of research is called Biocryptology and seeks to ensure that biometric security devices can't be easily bypassed."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

BBC News

Ikea meatball batch withdrawn in UK over horsemeat find BBC News Ikea has withdrawn a batch of frozen meatballs from sale in the food section of stores in the UK, and other European countries, after tests in the Czech Republic found traces of horsemeat. The meatballs in 1kg packs were made in Sweden, and labelled as ... Horse Meat In Ikea's Swedish Meatballs, Czech Authorities SayHuffington Post all 105 news articles »

The kids are alright