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Liz: Another day, another expansion board. Here’s a guest post from John Woodthorpe at the Open University, where SenseBoard is being used in teaching along with the Raspberry Pi, which drives it. Some of our forum members have taken the university’s My Digital Life course, which uses the SenseBoard as a teaching tool; you can read what they thought here. Over to John!

One of the Raspberry Pi Foundation’s motivations was to promote physical computing, having the computer interact with the real world. Unfortunately, most of the existing physical computing experiment sets, such as Arduino and Phidgets, can be difficult for the uninitiated to get started.

The Open University faced the same problem when we started developing a new introductory module called ‘My Digital Life’. We wanted to integrate computing hardware into our teaching, but nothing on the market was suitable for complete newcomers.

SenseBoard – click to enlarge

So we developed our own device – the SenseBoard – and the Sense programming environment that drives it. The Senseboard is about the size of a Raspberry Pi, and comes with inputs and outputs including a slider, noise sensor, and IR detector. Input sockets allow other sensors to be added. We supply light, heat, and motion sensors, and you can make others that act as variable resistors. Outputs include a bank of LEDs and plugs for stepper motors, servo motors, and an IR LED on a lead. The SenseBoard simply plugs into a USB port.

The SenseBoard gets students, most of whom are new to computing, quickly building physical devices that have real, immediately visible effects in the real world. Based on the Scratch programming environment, Sense makes this possible by including blocks to interact with the Senseboard, as well as reading and writing over internet.

When the Raspberry Pi came out, it seemed like a marriage made in heaven. A cheap, simple computer together with a simple, robust physical interaction board opened up many possibilities.

However, getting Sense working on the Raspberry Pi wasn’t straightforward. Sense, and Scratch, are built on an old version of Squeak. We had to go through some shenanigans to compile a Squeak virtual machine for the Raspberry Pi’s ARM chip, and then persuade it that serial devices could exist on USB ports. But we got there in the end!

We’ve been working with several schools who bought SenseBoards from us, helping them to use the board and Sense in their teaching. One of the first schools to contact us was Simon Langton Grammar School for Boys in Canterbury. Graeme George has been using SenseBoards in their Computer Science and Informatics department for almost a year. They’ve created projects like weather stations, data loggers, and games like Pong.

Graeme has also been one of several teachers throughout the country asking us when Sense would be available for the Raspberry Pi. His reaction to being given this development version was to comment that it ‘could make the teaching of programming more mobile and might even mean that the classroom could become more of an experimental room than a traditional ICT suite’.

You can buy your own Senseboard kit through the OU Worldwide shop, but our main target is schools rather than hobbyists. You can download Sense for the Raspberry Pi (and for other Linux, Windows and Mac platforms) from http://sense.open.ac.uk

mk1004 writes "Yahoo news has an article explaining how the text-based CAPTCHA is giving way to ad-based challenge/response. It's claimed that users are faster at responding to familiar logos, shortening the amount of time they spend proving that they are human. From the article: 'Rather than taking just a mere glance to figure out, recent studies show that a typical CAPTCHA takes, on average, 14 seconds to solve, with some taking much, much longer. Multiply that by the millions and millions of verifications per day, and Web users as a whole are wasting years and years of their lives just trying to prove they're not actually computers. This has led many companies to abandon the age-old system in favor of something not only more secure, but also easier to use for your average Webgoer: Ad-based verification, which can actually cut the time it takes to complete the task in half.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

randomrumiel:

niknak79:

I thought we were supposed to have grown up in university.

They have warned their fellow students that the ground is lava to prevent any injuries I think that is very mature of them 

An anonymous reader writes "Quenching some rumors 'Sony Worldwide Studios boss Shuhei Yoshida has told Eurogamer that PlayStation 4 will not block the use of second-hand games, contrary to various reports, speculation and even a Sony patent unearthed last month.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

By Nathan Grayson on February 22nd, 2013 at 10:00 am.

There’s just something about goodbyes. Like, growing up, I had a pet parrot. She filled my youth with eardrum-skewering screams and will probably be able to take most of the credit for my first heart attack, which will come at age 29. Also, she’s going to outlive me. But, if she doesn’t, I’ll be a complete wreck when she finally closes her infernal, saliva-less beak, er, forever. Which is my way of saying the Mass Effect trilogy is kind of like an obnoxious cockatoo. Sure, it didn’t always do me right, but we grew together, and we had some magnificent times over the years. According to BioWare, Citadel is Shepard and co’s swan song. But hey, at least everyone (and apparently, BioWare really does mean everyone) is coming back for one last reunion tour.

Here’s how it’s all going down, straight from BioWare’s Earth-orbiting Bio-Lair:

“All good things must come to an end, and that includes the Commander Shepard trilogy. However, just because it is coming to an end, that doesn’t mean we can’t go out with a bang. Introducing the final Mass Effect 3 single-player DLC: Citadel.”

“When a sinister conspiracy targets Commander Shepard, you and your team must uncover the truth, through battles and intrigue that range from the glamour of the Citadel’s Wards to the top-secret Council Archives. Uncover the truth and fight alongside your squad – as well as the cast from the original Mass Effect and Mass Effect 2.”

Afterward, you’ll apparently be able to hang out on the Citadel and chat with your long-lost crewmates. There’s also casino minigames, a combat arena, and a fully furnish-able living quarters. The whole thing is apparently so large that the Xbox version will have to be split into two downloads. PC eats multi-gigabyte files for breakfast, though, so our machines will unhinge their snake-like jaws and consume it in one scrumptiously sentimental bite. It’ll be out on March 5th for $15.

I’m of two minds on this: on one hand, blah blah blah BioWare endings joke blah blah blah whatever. On the other, this is a company that knows fan service. More than anything, Mass Effect 3 understood just when to trot out yet another clammy skinned space BFF to warm the cockles of our hearts, to stirring effect. I imagine Citadel will have no shortage of similar moments. But, then again, do we really need to live, get loud, and spill some drinks on the Citadel [ultra-bro fist-bump] a second time? Prolonged goodbyes are one thing, but eventually, the tears dry up and it just gets awkward. I suppose we’ll see, though.

Meanwhile, if you’ve stuck with Mass Effect for its multiplayer (which, shockingly, isn’t a completely far-fetched idea), it’s also getting one final dollop of DLC in the form of Reckoning. It’s just more guns, baddies, and the like, but oh well. Going out with a whimper’s still better than wasting away in perfect silence. That’ll be out for free on February 26th.

So then, bye-bye, Mass Effect trilogy. Yours wasn’t always the best space cockatoo voodoo, but – in many ways – it defined giant swathes of our hobby. All-in-all, I enjoyed Shepard’s tale – even if it managed to sprout a few Krogan-sized warts along the way. I have no idea what form the next Mass Effect will take, but it’s got some pretty sizable moon boots to fill.

By Alec Meer on February 21st, 2013 at 9:00 pm.

Crysis 3: a first-person shooter set in a post-apocalyptic, alien-invaded New York, in which you wear a Nanosuit which enables you to temporarily become invisible, damage-resistant or able to leap moderately-sized walls in a single bound. It has a lot of graphics. It’s out now in the US, and tomorrow in the UK. Here is an opinion.

“Shit fuck pussy,” says the man. “System X Nano Alpha Ceph Mindcarrier,” says the other man. The stupidest games are so often the ones which take themselves most seriously, aren’t they? Crysis 3, a game about being a flightless Superman with lots of guns and a rapidly-depleting energy meter, takes itself very seriously indeed. Wearing its Modern Warfare influences on its nanofibre sleeve, it gangster-growls and buzzword-babbles without even an iota of self-awareness.

It says much that the Crysis series’ only memorable character, Cyborg Ross Kemp, cockney hardnut Psycho, is here transformed from merry misanthrope to lovelorn sulk, separated from his Nanosuit and relegated to moany cutscenes, radiocomms and COD-aping follow-the-leader sequences. I’m usually all for character development, but Crysis: Warhead’s half-mad star now comes across as a chubby binman who’s in a piss because Arsenal just lost at home. He’s there to be the game’s attempted heart and soul, a mouthpiece for pompous discussion of what it means to be human, but couldn’t some other character have taken on that role, instead of sacrificing the only source of levity and humour to shoegazing and soapboxing?

You, meanwhile, play as returning Crysis 2 protagonist Prophet, who by this point is a memory of a man haunting a half-cyborg, half-alien and faceless body. Every line of his dialogue involves exclaiming “the Alpha Ceph!” in some form. (The Ceph are the aliens. The Alpha Ceph is their leader. You’d like to kill it. It’s a shame the game couldn’t be similarly brief about explaining it). We’re expected to feel very sorry for this tireless saviour of humanity and how much he’s sacrificed, but a pair of talking hands intermittently yelling “the Alpha Ceph!” isn’t really a good enough reason to do so.

But hey, who’s in this malarkey for the plot anyway? Crysis games are about making our PCs bleed, for chaining our graphics cards to sex-crucifixes and whipping them into a state of agonised euphoria, right? I’d entirely agree, were the game not as determined as it is to force its lore-lost scifiballs into my face. Everything takes a back seat to the self-involved, end of the world x1000 storyline, to the point that the game’s overall concept that New York is returning to nature and is trapped within a giant dome (much like The Simpsons movie, only more ridiculous) sort of disappears. What had promise for big ideas (silly or otherwise) is drowned out by talking heads. It seems implausible now that this series’ origins were as a bunch of soldiers with cool armour galloping freely across a paradise island and playing frisbee with turtles: now it’s all wormholes and telepathy and ghosts in the shell and “shit fuck pussy.”

As for freedom of movement within the dome, that’s a mixed bag. Half-Life 2 is a (superior) comparison, and a game which Crysis 3 draws clear sci-fi urban overlord inspiration from, in that some of the environments are large and offer multiple paths of approach, but with the exception of a few optional side-objectives and scouring map corners for upgrade points, we’re talking strictly A-B fare. That’s the route the Crysis series chose with the last game, and that’s because it’s apparently much more interested in being sci-fi Call of Duty than Far Cry with superpowers.

While some maps are impressively large in terms of total area (which is to say seas and forests and mountains made of crumbled buildings positively loom in the background), and loading screens are few and far between, relentless and blatant deployment of rocks and walls which are a half-metre too tall to power-jump over prevents going too far off the beaten, bombed and gauss-scourged path to the next cutscene. You’re outdoors most of the time though, with very little of the game spent in corridors or underground, and the inevitable on-rails buggy, tank and VTOL sequences are all present and correct.

Early promotional talk of the post-apocalyptic New York being split into distinct climes comes to little, as the reality is flooded bit, foresty bit, rocky bit, totalitarian fortressy bit or usually a mix of all four. The size of the maps is impressive and there is variation, but so much of the game is spent in semi-darkness that the diversity doesn’t much make itself known. The dome, meanwhile, is simply a super-detailed graphic painted on the horizon, something that’s mentioned almost in passing but plays no real role. Plus it gets trashed in the early hours of the game, so it’s pretty academic anyway.

Graphics, then. My current system, toting a not-unrespectable GeForce GTX 670, sadly isn’t up to the task of Very High settings at 1080p. It can manage about 25FPS in the quieter sections, but playing like that makes me feel like I’ve eaten too much French cheese. I’m trying to lay temporary hands on a big-boy graphics card so I can do some more benchmarks and comparison shots, but for now the reality for me is playing on High with FXAA on and a few advanced settings (e.g. textures, motion blur, anisotropy) turned down, which averages about 55 frames per second at 1920×1080. If I want it to run well at native res on my 1440p dodgy-but-lovely Korean monitor, I have to drop down to the dreaded Medium. My impression is that Very High doesn’t make a huge amount of visible difference from High while you’re busy playing, but on Medium things certainly start looking a bit Xboxy.

At High, and in my limited experience of Very High, it does look a nose better than most anything else on a purely technical level, but I can’t say that I was truly wowed. There’s an awful lot of visual fidelity in there, and it’s very good at showing huge swathes of world at once, but not to the point that it feels like a statement, as Crysis 1 did. It doesn’t look dramatically better than Black Ops 2 did with everything ramped up – and that ran a whole lot better on the same PC than this does.

It might be that a different game on this version of the engine would be better able to forcibly remove socks from feet, though. C3 shoots itself in the armourclad-foot by sticking stubbornly to twilight half the time, for being a bit too fond of textbook ruined-city greys and browns, and for the ongoing Michael Bay approach to enemies and technology – that increasingly prevalent style of indistinct spiky bits and desaturated neon piping. Also, the FOV is set to an oppressively low level, but tap cl_fov 80 into the dev console and it gets a bit better. Sadly, it won’t go higher than 80, though I’m sure someone has managed to get around that.

However, the character faces in its cutscenes especially, and to a lesser extent in weapons-free play, are genuinely incredible. Psycho might be a depressed lorry driver now, but his perfectly round face of scowls and scars is a sight to behold, very nearly trading blows with CGI cinema’s best efforts. I could swear he’s even got a bit of ear hair.

Unfortunately, the tiny named cast and the decision to stick every human enemy in a generi-helmet, speaking generi-shitfuckpussy dialogue, means you don’t get to see many other faces at all. As with the wasted geodome concept, Crysis 3 weirdly holds itself back on what could have been its finest aspects. And for a game that bangs on so often about the importance of being human, there sure aren’t many humans in it. Indeed, I struggled to grasp why anyone was remotely bothered about saving New York from further destruction, given it was apparently inhabited only by some squid-faced horrors from planet x or whatever and a couple of hundred sweary members of an evil private army you were casually murdering yourself anyway.

I’ve saved the best for last: the combat. It’s a derivation of the last two Crysis’, which means a choice between up and at ‘em warfare and stealth, and in either case you’re aided by your nanovisor’s ability to mark and keep track of targets. On the power fantasy front, it’s this constant awareness of who’s where which does more to support the feeling of superhumanity than the bullet-soaking and cloaking does. You won’t be surprised by what’s around the corner, because you’ve already hidden behind a demolished bus, scanned the landscape and setup handy glowing triangles which identify exactly what’s around the next dozen corners.

Pair that with a vaguely frightening and definitely confusing number of weapons, all of which can be customised on the fly with the likes of silencers, scopes and alt-fire modes, and it’s not a bad game for planning a plan, picking a preferred strategy and either sticking methodically to it or immediately donning your blood for the blood god hat in the event you fluff it, or just get bored of creeping about.

I personally tended towards an invisibility and sniping approach, clearing areas from afar while the enemy struggled to get a bead on me, as well as indulging myself in the hacking of turrets and mines to thin my opponents’ numbers remotely. This hacking involves a simple quick-time event minigame, which is neither exciting or infuriating, and it definitely adds to the sense of Crysis 3 being Deus Ex: Human Revolution as a pure combat game. Energy use and recharge is a little more lenient than in the early Cryses, but not to the point that it’ll get you out of all trouble, and naturally it’s still taking an extended holiday from all logic. Throwing large objects and power-jumping plays less part than it used to in my experience: they’re there, but the constrained environments and surfeit of ridiculous weapons means there isn’t much call for them.

Oh, there’s the bow too, of course. It’s a good bow. It has different types of arrow. It’s basically a sniper rifle with a bunch of alt-fires and annoyingly limited ammo capacity, and it’s entertainingly devastating. I relied on it in the earlier hours of the game, but the ammo limitations meant I was spending too long painstakingly collecting my fired arrows from corpses, so I eventually settled on a standard sniper rifle, with a preposterous range and a silencer, instead. Each to their own, though. It’s a fine and entirely welcome addition to Crysis’ arsenal, and more satisfying than Far Cry 3′s equivalent, but I’m not sure it’s a vital one.

There you go, then: it’s Crysis keepin’ on keeping on, choosing to keep on going down the Crysis 2 fork in the road rather than the Far Cry one. Its love of its own laughable plot, its determination to control your gaze at almost all times and its perpetually angry men suggests it’s very deliberately trying to be the sci-fi COD, and treated in that spirit it does a decent if forgettable job. While even a hint of traintrack isn’t what we ideally want from Crytek, it’s an infinitely better singleplayer shooter than any COD since Modern Warfare 4, and I reckon it could stand up to repeat plays so long as you can stomach the blithering, unsmiling nonsense of the plot. Freedom of playstyle, even within the strict confines of making things die, counts for a lot and, y’know, it looks pretty good when it remembers to turn the lights on.

urhajos:

Please.

cylonlover writes "In the wake of the meteor blast over Russia and the close-quarter flyby of asteroid 2012 DA14 last week, many people's thoughts have turned to potential dangers from above. It is timely then that the Canadian Space Agency will next week launch NEOSSat (Near-Earth Object Surveillance Satellite), the world's first space telescope for detecting and tracking asteroids, satellites and space debris." The meteor incident in Russia has spurred interested in asteroid defense across the globe; donations are pouring in for asteroid-related projects, government officials are making a show of seeming interested, and researchers are stepping up their efforts. Unfortunately, as a related article at Wired notes, we're still a long, long way from having anything more than early warning systems. Quoting: "A new endeavor coming online in 2015 named the Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System Project (ATLAS) will provide an early warning system that could provide one week’s notice for city-destroying 45-meter asteroids and three week’s notice for potentially devastating 140-meter objects. ... A more targeted effort comes from the B612 Foundation, which plans to launch the Sentinel telescope in late 2016. This spacecraft would sit inside the orbit of Venus and constantly be on the lookout for killer asteroids, whichever direction they come from. Sentinel will spot nearly all asteroids 150 meters or larger and identify a significant portion of those down to 30 meters in diameter."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

By Jim Rossignol on February 22nd, 2013 at 2:00 pm.

The world’s handsomest turn-based RPG developers (probably) Spiderweb, send word that they are bringing a second Avadon game into the world. It is to be named Corruption, and will bear the mark of “2″, indicating its sequelness. They explain: “Avadon 2: The Corruption is the second chapter in the epic Avadon trilogy. In this fantasy role-playing adventure, you will serve the keep of Avadon, working as a spy and warrior to fight the enemies of your homeland.” Shadowy powers and stuff abide, so it’s time to make turn-based decisions about the future of the fantasy world! Man, games are ace.

Avadon will appear on Mac and Windows in the autumn. Read our take on the previous game here.

Born on this day, Edward Gorey

Jetpack Solves Everything

The Man Who Fell to Earth

Peanuts

An anonymous reader writes "Michael Arrington, founder of TechCrunch, lives near Seattle and bought a boat there. He ordered it from a company based near him, but across the border in Canada. Yesterday, the company tried to deliver it to him, and it had to clear customs. An agent for the Department of Homeland Security asked him to sign a form. The form contained information about the boat, including its cost. The price was correct, but it was in U.S. dollars rather than Canadian dollars. Since the form contained legal warnings about making sure everything on it is true and accurate, Arrington suggested to the agent that they correct the error. She responded by seizing the boat. 'As in, demanded that we get off the boat, demanded the keys and took physical control of it. What struck me the most about the situation is how excited she got about seizing the boat. Like she was just itching for something like this to happen. This was a very happy day for her. ... A person with a gun and a government badge asked me to swear in writing that a lie was true today. And when I didn't do what she wanted she simply took my boat and asked me to leave.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

While #Objectify – a Twitter movement held to raise awareness of stereotypes women in the game industry need to deal with, by objectifying attractive men in the industry – has basically come and gone, and the conversation about women’s experiences in the industry continues across sectors, one event in the corner of Philly made it all look like child’s play.

- - -

During a January Bootstrap Expo at UPenn, seven-year-old Zora Ball (above) became one of the youngest people ever to program a complete game all by herself.

Ball has become the youngest individual to create a full version of a mobile application video game, which she unveiled last month in the University of Pennsylvania’s Bodek Lounge during the university’s “Bootstrap Expo.”

Seven-year-old Ball has also become a master of the Bootstrap programming language, and when asked, Ball was able to reconfigure her application on the fly using Bootstrap.

The last bit is especially important.

Apparently some grumpy olds were suspicious that her older brother was really the mastermind behind the program, but Zora showed them. When asked to reconfigure the app on the spot, Ball showed naysayers what was up when she executed the request perfectly. "We expect great things from Zora, as her older brother, Trace Ball, is a past STEM Scholar of the Year," said Harambee Science Teacher Tariq Al-Nasir. No pressure, baby geniuses, but there's an entire world for you to save. Please hurry.

For most people, a similar headline, something along the lines of “7 year-old becomes youngest person to program a game on their own” would conjure up an image of a little white boy - or perhaps an Asian boy. Most people wouldn't immediatley imagine a girl, or specifically an African-American girl. This is precisely why the lack of diversity in the game industry is a bad thing.

If Zora here is able to do this at the tender age of seven, imagine the truly incredible things she can accomplish in the future. I sincerely hope that the game industry becomes a more inclusive place by the time she’s old enough to join the workforce – and that this obviously kick-ass kid still has an interest in it at that time.

In the meantime, I’d really love to play her game.

Parents everywhere know the quiet pain induced by watching your child tear open the wrapping paper on a new gift, toss the actual game aside, and play with the box instead. A kid's imagination need not be confined to existing rules or points system; they'll make those up themselves, thanks very much.

Swedish developer Toca Boca realized this truism and applied it to their eponymous brand of kids apps for smartphones. Instead of games with discrete goals and challenges, they developed interactive objects or bite-sized play environments, intuitive to pick up and play with as one would a physical toy.

Twenty million downloads later, the Toca Boca brand has much to teach us about designing for our niece and nephew.

- - -

Emil Overmar, one of Toca Boca's co-founders along with Bjorn Jeffrey, never had videogames growing up. The few times he'd try, he was put off by the inherent competion of playing alongside others, and how the challege blocked off the rest of the experience. In an interview with Edge, Overmar remembers that feeling of disappointment:

All of the games were about: the more you play, the better you are. So your friend plays Super Mario for 45 minutes... You play for two and you die, then you hand back the controller. So I wasn’t that into gaming. Until I realised there were games that weren’t games.

One such non-game was Little Computer People, an early life simulation from 1985 released on Commodore 64, Apple II, and ZX Spectrum. A clear predecessor to such modern favorites as The Sims and even Animal Crossing, LCP had you managing a "little person" throughout his or her daily life. Players saw a cross-section of a three-story house with separate rooms and varying activites, from cooking to reading the paper to playing piano. But there was no flagpole to jump on, no boss to wipe out. Just a bevy of fun things to do, for the sake of doing them.

Their pleasure, or disgust, is your reward.

The interactive dollhouse mirrored how children play-act, pretending to be people they are not, from playing "house" to going grocery shopping for plastic slices of pizza. Overmar and Jeffrey have infused their own Toca Boca apps with a similar style of play, perfect for a child's boundless creativity and desire to poke and prod.

To search for "Toca Boca" on the App Store is to be invited to play-time at a whimsical, enthusiastic kindgarten. From Toca Tailer to Toca Hair Salon, we see the same kind of interactive doll aspect as tested by Little Computer People nearly thirty years prior. Sip and chat at the Toca Tea Party; Make a mechanical friend in the Toca Robot Lab. Toca Kitchen might appear similar to Majesco's popular Cooking Mama franchise, but the difference highlights the design philosophy of the Swedish team.

Mama boils down to mini-games to construct the best, tastiest meal, with points awarded and challenges unlocked. Kitchen merely gives you the ingredients and allows you to experiment, tossing this and that together as directed by your mood. Your diners--cartoon friends in the original, or furry monsters in a new updated version--react accordingly. Their pleasure, or disgust, is your reward.

Removing obstacles in videogames would be anathema to many designers. But any developer is necessarily past a certain age, when the best walls were those you built up from throwaway objects at hand. As adults we forget the joy in free expression divorced from rules. Those parents, uncles and aunts among us know: All kids need is a space in which to play and a few simple toys. They'll do the rest.

It’s no secret that China has a constrictive grip on what it’s citizens are allowed to access over the internet. Google’s struggles to operate within the nation were prominent, and residents within the country can’t use social networks like Facebook or Twitter, instead relying on state-sponsored variants like Sina Weibo. 

This isolationism spreads to online games. While the rest of the world’s EVE players play in one massive universe, players in China use their own server, an alternative universe called Serenity.

- - -

While reading about EVE’s living, breathing intergalactic ecosystem always prooves fascinating, an account of the evolution of China’s EVE, posted by Angry_Mustache over at The Mittani, is doubly so. Chinese culture has naturally influenced Serenity’s online world, which operates pretty differently from the one most EVE players are used to. Angry_Mustache writes:

You can tell a lot about the culture of an EVE player-base by the way their alliances are set up. Revenge Ostus made the observation that Serenity alliances are set up like the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China, with long term decisions and diplomacy being made by a politburo comprised of the CEOs of major member corps and a Chairman who handles immediate decisions and day-to-day operations. 

While fleet commanders have some initiative, it’s ultimately the Chairman who gets the final say on major ops (remember, a unreinforced node can start conking out at not even 100 players). It would not do at all for an FC to call in supers on a unprepared node and get them all killed.

To repeat: Serenity alliances are set up like the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China. 

In the rest of the world, most alliances on the global EVE server resemble dictatorships or monarchies with degrees of democracy. The post goes on to consider differences in the asking prices of technetium, the locations where trade hubs developed, and alliance recruitment policies, but I somehow doubt there has ever been a greater testament to the open-worldness and malleability of EVE than the emergence of Communist alliances in China. 

pantslock:

onlinedating-adventures:

If he makes Bingo within 24 hours, block him.

If one message fills two squares anywhere on the board, it probably belongs in our submit box.

I got BINGO in like five different directions.  I wish this was a scratch-off lotto ticket, I’d be rich.

thehappyfolk:

forimuchdesiretospeakwithhim:

wikatiepedia:

from now on I’m going to convey sarcasm over the internet by typing like this

oh wow look how sarcastic that looks

that actually does look really sarcastic though. this is revolutionary

davidmalki:

So happy about this.

In 2004 I was working in movie marketing. My job was to edit 15- and 30-second TV spots for (mostly bad) movies. This involved watching (mostly bad) movies over and over and over to try and find the smallest, most minute overlooked interesting bits. The Pacifier was one of these movies.

Usually when editing TV spots, we’d be working from the finished (or at least a rough cut) of the full movie, but if we needed to, we could request raw footage (dailies) from the studio — for example if we wanted a particular line of dialogue on-camera, but in the movie they cut away from the speaker for that line.

As I recall, we also had dailies on this movie because we worked on early trailers, which typically would be edited by the trailer company from the same footage the movie itself was being edited from down the street at the studio. (This is why you sometimes see shots in trailers that aren’t in the finished movie.)

ANYWAY I happened across this frame in between takes. Vin made some comment to a crew member and smiled this huge, goofy, out-of-character grin. I immediately screencapped it because I don’t know when I’ll need this. I had no idea. It just seemed like an opportunity I shouldn’t pass up.

Eight years later, four computers later, VINGRIN.jpg has found its raison d’être. These are the moments that remind us that we are on the correct track in life. All roads led us to here, and every small thing had a purpose.

Flawless victory.

The great Randall Munroe takes on one of the classic Stupid Things Adults Say to Children:

 

The “If all your friends …” bit always bugged me. It’s closely related to the teacher-favorite “It doesn’t matter if everyone else was doing it.”

Teachers love to pull that one on the one kid they’ve singled out as “an example.” So the whole class is talking or disrupting or whatever and they focus on one child to bear the brunt of the punishment. The kid protests that everyone else was doing the same thing and the teacher says that doesn’t matter.

Of course it matters. It matters a great deal. It suggests that the rule isn’t really a rule at all, merely a pretext. Arbitrary and selective justice is not justice. The kid is right. He or she is a fifth-grader, and the kids who get singled out like that aren’t usually the best students in the fifth grade, so they probably aren’t able to articulate why what the teacher is saying is horribly wrong, but it still is wrong. And the kids know it.

Even worse is another favorite of teachers or other adults breaking up fights between kids: “I don’t care who started it.”

Really? You don’t care who started it? You don’t find that morally significant at all? You don’t find the distinction between aggression and self-defense worth considering in evaluating the situation?

St. Augustine cared who started it. That was, for him, a major factor in whether or not war could be considered justifiable.

But teachers don’t care about St. Augustine, and they don’t care who started it.

Again, the kids probably can’t articulate why what the adults are saying there is wrong, but it’s still wrong. Utterly wrong.

Teaching kids that aggression and defense are morally indistinct is wrong. Teaching kids that rules retain their legitimacy when selectively enforced is wrong.

Yeah, I know, all the other teachers are saying the same thing to their students. But if all the other teachers jumped off a bridge …?

It's nice when things that make sense are also things that are fun.

Here's one:
All those weapons on the D&D equipment list? Y'know the one where a spear does more damage than a shortsword and both do more damage than a dagger? Those are pretty much military weapons.
That is: they're good weapons if you're hundreds of guys in formation trying to take a hill and trying not to hit each other. But you're not--if you were hundreds of guys in formation trying to take a hill then why would you be wasting time reading this blog and how are you doing that, seriously, are you all just crowding around the screen and reading it or do you have one of those big Nasa rooms with a big computer projector or....anyway....
Here are some weapons that make less sense for hill-acquisition and more sense for skirmishing in a room and how that works.
A hook on a pole.
A hook? Yeah, a metal hook on a pole--like they yank Gonzo offstage with on the Muppet Show. Like some pole-arms basically are this almost but still kinda basically military pokey weapons. But think of it this way: Your party's fighter is smacking a bugbear around. You are unengaged and have some free space to maneuver (less likely situation on a battlefield, right?). Just slip your hook behind the bugbear and...smack Foe is prone.
What do you say to the GM? "Look, if it was a tripwire I could see our fighter getting tangled up in it, if it was a hooked pole-arm I could see maybe accidentally jabbing the fighter with it when I'm poking into the melee, but this is just the perfect tool for the job is it not? I have to hook, then yank after I'm sure I got the right guy..." "Ok, roll to hit, ignoring armor..."
A grappling hook on a chain.
Not so good for tripping people already engaged in melee but great as a missile weapon, melee weapon (might as well be a morning star), distance entangler (beats a whip 75% of the time), monster-choker, dropped-object grabber and a shield (ok, I'm going to spin this grappling hook around me really fast and you try to hit me with that sword).
And in sci-fi settings? Did I ever tell you about that time in Murdermaze I had 3 hit points and killed 6 guys with nothing but a grappling hook gun and a tape recorder?
Scrap Princess gives some love to an eastern grappling hook cognate:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kusari-gama for example. Can be used up close, but also can reach, entangles, is a short hard to cut rope (if the chain version), a plausible grappling hook , and tidies up small like for easy storage.
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And Jurgen M, a certified ninja, adds:

A kusari-gama is actually a very good choice, although I would suggest a lesser-known but a bit more versatile variation on the same kind of weapon, the kyoketsu-shoge (e.g.http://nen-nen-nen.tumblr.com/image/42489109241 ). Instead of the sickle, it has a dagger with a hook, and on the other end there's a massive metal ring that's good to throw around or use as a blunt weapon in melee.

As someone who has trained with (and against) this weapon I can attest that it is extremely difficult as a sword fighter to close in on someone wielding such a chain weapon if he knows what he's doing. And if you manage get into sword range, you then have to deal with someone dual-wielding a dagger and a bone-breaking metal ring.

For very tight spaces such as a narrow dungeon corridor, I would choose a kusari-fundo which is better suited to such environments. It's basically a shorter chain with a weight on each end. The kusari-gama and kyoketsu-shoge need a little more room to use all their potential.

Fire:

Yes yes there's the smoke and you're probably underground but most GMs are pretty forgiving about that. Remember: animals are dumb. As far as a crocodile or carrion crawler is concerned if you just jabbed them with a torch you might as well have short sworded them then cast Cause Fear. And something hairy like a mastodon? That thing is now out of the fight--just give it some room to run. (This, incidentally has been cited as one reason elephant cavalry never totally eclipsed horse cavalry in the east--they're flammable and easily panic easily.)

And then there's being on fire. Ongoing damage makes people sad, even if it is just d4. Set someone's backpack on fire sometime and see how long it  takes them to drop everything and put it out. So have your thief do that.

You can see why maybe a bunch of people tightly packed together with pikes wouldn't want to be throwing oil around, but that's only because it's too good. Fire trashed more Japanese cities than all the ninjas put together in the history of ninjas.

Net:

Whose armor works against a net? Nobody's. Who wants to hang out in a net? Nobody. What happens to flying monsters when a net lands on them? Horrible things.

There's a reason gladiators used them.

Bola:

Like a net, but for longer distances. Have the ranger roll to bola against AC 10 then everybody else on your side gets a bowshot against the now-immobilized wizard.

Blankets and sacks and handsfuls of dust:

You have to be like 15th level to cast Power Word: Blind. Unless you brought a bag. Or a jar of like baking soda. 

Bonus for 3e players: this version even works on foes with more than 200 hit points. 

This is a wholly valid tactic

Now, yes, there are lots of times when the monster's made of crystal or the room's too small and your standing on something you really don't want on fire and what you want is a sword and what you want to do is poke someone with it.

This is the fun part though: it's a toolkit. Using different things for different situations is the whole point. Those orcs just rolling d20 over and over against your chainmail and getting all excited because their pole-arm does d10 get what they deserve.

 _

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