firehose

(via Young Christopher Walken Looks Exactly Like Scarlett Johansson)

nedroidcomics:

Happy Valentine’s Day, baby. Please undo this horrifying curse.

People often ask why games aren’t more ambition with in terms of scope.

The reason is because things break. A lot. 

- - -

Even with games that give you a good deal of agency, like Mass Effect or The Walking Dead, your path always pivots back into an overarching throughline. And when I profiled Ivan Belanszky for Issue 6, who has been working on the open-ended RPG Newcomer for around twenty years, mostly trying to eradicate thousands of bugs, it became obvious how the complexities can quickly multiply towards infinity.

So when you create a living, breathing ecosystem with millions of potential combinations, there are sure to be couple, um, outlier. And that's what's makes these patch notes from dollhouse simulator The Sims so absurdly moving:

• A faint line is no longer visible on the heads of babies.

• Fish are no longer duplicated in the fridge when moving homes.

• Sims can no longer “Try for Baby” with the Grim Reaper.

• Sims who are on fire will no longer be forced to attend graduation before they can put themselves out.

• Children and Teens can no longer die from motive failure while on a Time Out.

• Pianists will no longer continue playing pianos that have been detonated.

• Sims will no longer receive a wish to “Skinny Dip” with Mummies.

• Pregnant Sims can no longer “Brawl.”

• Sims can no longer WooHoo in the Elevator with a Sim who is on a different floor.

• Fixed an issue that caused Sims to leave their Toddler inside a bar at closing time.

• The Grim Reaper will no longer be prevented from reaping souls due to band affiliation.

• Kleptomaniac Sims can no longer steal Subway stations from lots.

• Fixed a tuning issue so that Sims now vomit at acceptable levels.

• The magical laundry bear Abracadabra will no longer block Sims from moving after disappearing

• Tourist NPCs can now be impregnated.

Hear that, Sims players? Your Sim will no longer be persecuted for being a metal band. But his parents will still disapprove of it.

Nap time

“A woman from the audience asks: ‘Why were there so few women among the Beat writers?’ and [Gregory] Corso, suddenly utterly serious, leans forward and says: “There were women, they were there, I knew them, their families put them in institutions, they were given electric shock. In the ’50s if you were male you could be a rebel, but if you were female your families had you locked up.”

-

Stephen Scobie, on the Naropa Institute’s 1994 tribute to Allen Ginsberg  (via thisisendless)

FUCK

(via femmeboyant)

I’m just frozen. Absences of women in history don’t “just happen,” they are made.

(via queereyes-queerminds)

Fuck

(via gladtoseeyou)

Corso will probably always be my favorite beat

(via mattachinereview)

In what could quite possibly be the most high-profile, bi-partisan exploding fist bump to be documented in U.S. history, President Obama indulges in a brief "what up" moment with Illinois' junior senator Mark Kirk (R) before his State of the Union speech last night.

Submitted by: Unknown (via Krispy Crustacean)

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Follow @drewtoothpaste and @nataliedee on Twitter or join the Married To The Sea Facebook Page.

“The New Orleans rapper made a sexual reference to the beating death of Till, a 14-year-old Chicago boy tortured and shot in Mississippi in 1955 for whistling at a white woman. Till’s family objected and the Rev. Jesse Jackson reached out to his management, The Blueprint Group, on the family’s behalf. The label issued a statement Wednesday night apologizing for the release of the song. “We regret the unauthorized remix version of Future’s ‘Karate Chop,’ which was leaked online and contained hurtful lyrics,” the statement said. “Out of respect for the legacy of Emmett Till and his family and the support of the Reverend Jesse L. Jackson, Sr. … we are going through great efforts to take down the unauthorized version.””

- Epic to pull song with offending Lil Wayne lyric - Yahoo!7 Finance Australia

• You must wait for applications everyone is talking about to get ported over.
• All the good games are on the other platform.
• People at work wonder why you’re using something different than everyone else.
• You can use themes just like Kaleidoscope for Mac OS 8.5 (your elders will remember).

These are just a few observations. We all know how Apple turned out in the 2000’s. I wonder what’s next for Android…
Note: I’ve switched to Android from iPhone for the time being to learn about “that other platform”. I know: We just released Basecamp on iOS. I love the app. You should download it now!!!

ananyo writes "When influenza hit early and hard in the United States this year, it quietly claimed an unacknowledged victim: one of the cutting-edge techniques being used to monitor the outbreak. A comparison with traditional surveillance data showed that Google Flu Trends, which estimates prevalence from flu-related Internet searches, had drastically overestimated peak flu levels. The glitch is no more than a temporary setback for a promising strategy, experts say, and Google is sure to refine its algorithms. But with flu-tracking techniques based on mining of web data and on social media taking off, Nature looks at how these potentially cheaper, faster methods measure up against traditional epidemiological surveillance networks." Crowdsourcing is often useful, but it seems to have limits.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Forums are for creeps. We spend too much time on Facebook. Twitter is inane. It seems that everyone has a different problem with the way that socializing works on the internet, but Adrian Chen questions whether are any of these complaints are valid and if any of our current solutions work. He poses, "What if a social network operated according to a logic as different from computer logic as an underground punk club is from a computer lab?" Chen met his best friend through a messy internet community, and he doubts that a serendipitous friendships like theirs could happen in the sterile halls of Facebook. The internet allows us to connect with people who have the same niche interests as ourselves, but with our newfound obsession with identity on the internet, we're now stuck with the acquaintances that we made in college and high school. You're a loser for ending up like Manti Te'o, but then again, who's really getting any on Bang With Friends?

• Source The New Inquiry
• Related Items facebook social networks catfish forums

“The New Orleans Hornets defeated Portland, 99-63, on Wednesday night, dropping the Blazers to 25-28, the same record the Lakers have after a 91-85 victory over the Phoenix Suns on Tuesday. The Lakers are still technically in 10th place. The Lakers and Blazers have split their two games, with the next tiebreaker based on conference record. Portland is 16-16 and the Lakers are 14-18 against conference opponents.”

- Lakers are even with Portland Trail Blazers in the standings - latimes.com

By Dave Tach on Feb 14, 2013 at 10:33a

Wargaming.net, the studio behind massively multiplayer military games World of Tanks, World of Warplanes and World of Warships, acquired Gas Powered Games, the financially troubled studio that earlier this week canceled its Kickstarter campaign for Wildman, according to a press release from Wargaming.

"Gas Powered Games' heritage and development pedigree shows us just how valuable an addition Chris and his company will make to the Wargaming family," said Victor Kislyi, Wargaming's CEO. "Gas Powered Games has a long track record of providing incredibly engaging AAA gaming experiences and we can't wait to start working with them."

Late last year, Microsoft announced that Gas Powered Games would no longer be developing content for Age of Empires Online. Within weeks, the developer behind Supreme Commander and Dungeon Siege announced a Kickstarter project to raise funds for a hybrid action role-playing game and real-time strategy game called Wildman. Be sure to check out our interview with CEO Chris Taylor, which coincided with the announcement.

Shortly after the announcement, Gas Powered Games laid off a substantial portion of its staff, which caused CEO Chris Taylor to reconsider the fundraising drive. Earlier this week, well short of its Kickstarter goal, Gas Powered Games ended the fundraising effort and shifted to a strategy of finding "other ways to keep Gas Powered Games running," according to a statement on the Kickstarter blog.

The acquisition is the latest in a recent series of expansions for Wargaming. Late last month, the company announced that it had acquired FEAR 3 developer Day 1 Studios to form Wargaming West. In August 2012, the company acquired BigWorld, a middleware developer that produced much of the server code that underlies its MMOs.

MojoKid writes "PunkBuster, the anti-cheating service implemented in hundreds of online games, is down. As of the time of writing, the official PunkBuster website is up and down, after having been completely down for the past couple of hours. On Twitter, there are numerous reports of gamers who've been unable to play online in the most popular PunkBuster-backed title of the moment, Battlefield 3. EA has gone as far as to post an interim fix. Applying the fix is a simple matter of extracting an archive and then overwriting a couple of files inside of your Battlefield 3 install folder. While EA has little power over PunkBuster's ability to get things 100% functional again, this issue does highlight the fact that third-party solutions are not always the way to go."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

MTorrice writes "During the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, clean up crews applied millions of liters of dispersants to break up the oil. At the time, the public and some scientists worried about the environmental effects of the chemicals, in particular how long they would last in the deep sea. According to a new Environmental Protection Agency study, the key active ingredient in the dispersants degrades very rapidly under conditions similar to those found at the Gulf surface during the spill. Meanwhile, in the much colder temperatures found in the deep sea, the breakdown is quite slow. The chemicals' persistence at deep-sea and Arctic temperatures suggests more research is needed on their toxicity, the researchers say."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader writes "Seed giant Monsanto has won more than $23 million from hundreds of small farmers accused of replanting the company's genetically engineered seeds. Now, another case is looming – and it could set a landmark precedent for the future of seed ownership. From the article: 'According to the report, Monsanto has alleged seed patent infringement in 144 lawsuits against 410 farmers and 56 small farm businesses in at least 27 U.S. states as of January of 2013. Monsanto, DuPont and Syngenta together hold 53 percent of the global commercial seed market, which the report says has led to price increases for seeds -- between 1995 and 2011, the average cost of planting one acre of soybeans rose 325 percent and corn seed prices went up 259 percent.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Seeteufel writes "Nadim Kobeissi, security researcher, describes the Do Not Track standard of the W3C as dangerous. 'In fact, Google's search engine, as well as Microsoft's (Bing), both ignore the Do Not Track header even though both companies helped implement this feature into their web browsers. Yahoo Search also ignored Do Not Track requests. Some websites will politely inform you, however, of the fact that your Do Not Track request has been ignored, and explain that this has been done in order to preserve their advertising revenue. But not all websites, by a long shot, do this.' The revelations come as Congress and European legislators consider to tighten privacy standards amid massive advertiser lobbying. 'Do not track' received strong support from the European Commission."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Jet lag has broken my brain. I spent the night in a special extended edition of one of those paralysed 3am panics about things left undone, slept through the alarm, and only woke up eight hours later, at 4.30pm. Please don’t talk to me. Sounds hurt.

I was planning a nice long post about robots today, but the screen is strobing at me and my eyes are watering. So instead, I’m going to embed a video and give you a link to this really excellent project from Rasathus, which has a special significance for anybody feeling the way I do today. Rasathus has made a Raspberry Pi version of NASA’s circadian lighting setup, used in the International Space Station. Astronauts on the ISS do not have access to the sleep-promoting tools that we here on earth do (hot baths, warm cats, fluffy pyjamas, too much email), so NASA and Boeing spent $11.2m on making the lights on the ISS cycle through red and blue. Rasathus has done much the same thing with a $35 Pi and some $40 LEDs. Suggestions for what NASA might have done with the savings in the comments, please.

In short, this project will allow you to fake up sunrises and sunsets, bright noontime light and all that good stuff. I plan to build one myself to avoid a repeat of today’s total failure of body clock for the next time I have to travel. You’ll need some bits and pieces you can get from Adafruit (there’s a hardware list on Rasathus’s website), and the code is all available on Github.

I’m going to have a nice soothing bath in my pyjamas with Mooncake. Thank you, Rasathus, for the clever.

On Thursday, our friend LadyAda, owner of Adafruit and Entrepreneur Magazine’s 2012 Entrepreneur of the Year, is spending part of Valentine’s Day doing something called a Fireside Hangout (this sounds awfully romantic) with President Obama.

The marvellous LadyAda

We wonder what sort of hardware she’ll be talking about. She says:

I was selected to join President Obama in a Fireside Hangout this Thursday 2/14 at 4:50pm EST on Google+!

We’ll discuss issues that are top of mind for citizens, and I’d love you all to help shape this conversation. Submit your questions to http://www.youtube.com/whitehouse and the President will answer questions that are voted to the top.

Don’t forget to RSVP here for a reminder to tune in on Thursday - http://goo.gl/7pxfM.

Please head over, submit questions, vote up the good ones, and RSVP!

Hello?

We warned you about this a few weeks ago: Jerry Holkins and Mike Krahulik, the duo behind the ultra-popular webcomic series Penny Arcade, are looking to cultivate the next generation of comic artists with a web TV series titled Strip Search.

It’s a reality competition series in which 12 aspiring webcartoonists are locked in a house and pitted against each other in a Thunderdome-like scenario (minus a mohawked Tina Turner) in which their talent, skills and dedication are tested with the ultimate prize of $15,000 in cash and a year working in Penny Arcade‘s offices and taking advantage of the company’s resources. Even the break room.

The show is set to premiere later this month, with the cast members cartoonists already announced. As we await the first episode, scan through the artists’ bios and choose your early favorites.

The Guardian

Oscar Pistorius weeps as South African court hears riveting testimony The Guardian For a short while, Oscar Pistorius had maintained his composure in the dock, his face a wan and weary mask. Then came his account of what happened the night Reeva Steenkamp died, read by his defence lawyer, and the mask cracked. Pistorius's whole ... Pistorius' girlfriend cremated in private ceremonyThe Associated Press Pistorius' bail hearing postponedXinhua Pistorius 'thought he shot burglar'Irish Times CBS News -USA TODAY all 3,037 news articles »

Miyazaki x Street Fighter: Spirit Fighter by Drew Wise

This, along with a Snorlax x Totoro design, is available as a shirt for on The Yeetee today. The tees aren’t actually animated, but they are super cheap at $11 each.

BUY Studio Ghibli films

Tiny Review: Hobonichi Techo 2013

It might seem odd for Tiny Cartridge to review a daily planner, but I’m always curious about anything Mother/Earthbound creator Shigesato Itoi is involved in, whether it’s his copywriting work, his appearances on Iron Chef as a judge, or even his free DSiWare app for tracking your health.

Plus, when I shared the news last month that Itoi’s company Hobonichi released its popular Japanese planner in English for the first time this year, many of you showed interest in importing a copy. Hobonichi was kind enough to send a Techo (planner) over for us to review, so now you get to hear why you should (or shouldn’t) buy the planner.

Four things that are fab:

1. The creativity it encourages - The Techo can be used as a traditional organizer to schedule your life and plot out appointments, but the design of its daily pages, each outlined with a charcoal gray grid, allow for and encourage much more. You can use it as a diary, comic journal, scrapbook, sketchbook, school notebook, budget tracker, etc. Fill it with illustrations of cats or Animal Crossing’s K.K. Slider if that’s what you’re into; this isn’t a planner you have to take seriously.

Having no artistic ability, I’m using mine as a chronicle for a mishmash of things, recording my work-out progress, new food I’ve tried with short reviews, moments/jokes I enjoyed with my wife, tweets from @therealjuicyj I want to remember, whatever I watched or listened to that day, etc. I’m trying to live that examined life.

2. The quotes - Plenty of calendars and planners are filled with inspiring daily words, but being from Itoi and his company, the Techo offers eccentric quotes taken from his interviews and articles posted on Hobo Nikkan Itoi Shinbun, much of them never published in English. Take these words from Itoi printed on the the very first days of the year for instance:

The idea of ‘just another day’ is really quite curious.
You could say it’s just like every other day,
or you could say there’s no other day like it.
Someone is born; some people break up.
Those are some of the things that take place on ‘just another day.’

And because Itoi’s worked closely with them over the years, you’ll find quotes from Nintendo’s Satoru Iwata and Shigeru Miyamoto in there, too. It’s a treat to turn the pages every other day, and read the next quote.

3. The accessories - Something about the Techo makes you want to go out and buy accessories to enhance your experience with it, and Hobonichi is more than happy to sell you a wide range of “tools and toys” through its site: stickers, stencils, pens (I bought a multi-color Muji pen to keep clipped to my planner case), tiny scissors, mini post-its, small Polaroid cameras that print photo stickers, and other items to decorate your pages with.

Hobonichi provided me with one of its classy leather cases, which are way pricy at $158 apiece but definitely feel/look expensive. People might mistake you for a professional who’s on top of things and making bank when you pull one of these out at work, even if your Techo is nothing more than a collection of drawings you’ve made of butts.

Seeing the dozens of other cases Hobonichi sells, I want to pick up another one with more pockets, as they can double as wallets or pouches that hold things you want handy. For those seeking a personal touch, there are clear jackets that you can slide your own designs into — or you can create a cover like Birdie’s Mother-embroidered case pictured above.

4. The community - There’s already a growing group of Techo fans in the West, partly due to the Mother fans who’ve picked one up, and also due to the efforts of Lindsay Nelson, who helped localize the planner. Lindsay has not only created a site that shows you how to buy and get the most out of your planner; she’s created a Tumblr where people can post Techo photos to show their love.

Marveling over the creative ways others are using their Techos has given me plenty of ideas for how to enjoy my planner. It’s like the physical planner equivalent to downloading updates that introduce new features to a journaling app, or seeing others post hacks/mods for their Techos.

Three things that are butt:

1. We live in a digital age - Tumblr, Facebook, Google Calendar/iCal, or apps like Evernote can do almost everything the Techo can as far as traditional planner tasks go, short of delivering you quotes from Itoi. For many, the physical planner just lacks the power features digital solutions provide: sharing with friends and contacts, commenting and reblogging, tagging and searching, easy importing and exporting, etc. And copying and pasting is so much more convenient when it’s a couple of keystrokes, not a minute spent cutting out and gluing whatever you want to save.

There are still special joys you can only get with a physical journal like the Techo, however, like searching for the perfect pen to pair with your planner, or getting to mark in the margins that a sports team you follow won, or using a butt-based scoring system to rate your day, or affixing colorful cat stickers next to your appointments, or writing out the name of your lover or crush over and over during your daydreams, or making quick sketches of your meals, or slowly building a row of books on your shelf to create a multi-volume chronicle of your life (it helps that the simple jackets  and their spines look so attractive).

2. It’s already mid-February - You might feel wasteful, buying a planner that spans December 2012 - December 2013. Or you can do what I did, and pick something you’ve been meaning to record, and fill the blank pages for those months you missed — recipes, the first chapters of that book you’ve been meaning to start writing, lyrics to Hall and Oates songs for quick reference, portraits of people in your life, unsent love letters to Tiny and/or our Lizard, etc. Or you could use those blank pages to stash footnotes from your daily entries.

3. It’s more expensive than most planners - A Techo alone, without a cover, will cost you $29 before you even pay shipping and handling from Japan. You could get a discounted 3DS game for that amount! 

Score:

I’m actually using my Techo - I couldn’t tell you how many times I’ve purchased planners or received them from others, starting from my early teen years.  Without fail, I abandoned them within weeks, if not days.

I’ve found the Techo so much fun to use, though, thanks to the community around it and how personalized mine feels. I expect to fill this planner’s pages until the end of the year, and pick up a new one for 2014.

I know some people who are interested in buying one are waiting for the 2014 edition, but I don’t see the point of having a couple extra months’ worth of pages, versus having something now that can help you organize your days/thoughts, and examine your life. Why put that off?

If you decide to buy a Techo, make sure to read Lindsay’s instructions and bookmark this useful page.

BUY Mother 3/Earthbound, Hobonichi Techo 2013
IMAGES VIA Mochigram

I love Seth. His custom notebook system is exactly what I expect from him and it's truly great. He's like a Jedi librarian.

This is such a great idea and one of the reasons I love the world of small breweries. Flying Dog is not only making their recipes available but they are selling a stove top kit to brew your own.

Independent brewers are the happiest people I've ever seen. They are also very generous with the core of their business, the "intellectual property".

A security flaw in Apple's iOS 6.1 lets anyone bypass your iPhone password lock and access your phone app, view or modify contacts, check your voicemail, and look through your photos (by attempting to add a photo to a contact). The method, as detailed by YouTube user S1riOS6, involves making (and immediately canceling) an emergency call and holding down the power button twice. We followed the steps and managed to access the phone app on two UK iPhone 5s running iOS 6.1. This isn't the first time this has happened — a very similar bug affected iOS 4.1, and was fixed in iOS 4.2. We've reached out to Apple for comment and will update you once we hear back.

• Via Gizmodo
• Source S1riOS6 (YouTube)
• Related Items ios ios 6.1 bug ios bug lock screen password security flaw Apple Cellphones

gbooch writes "With the permission of Adobe Systems, the Computer History Museum has made available the source code for Photoshop version 1.0.1, comprising about 128,000 lines code within 179 files, most of which is in Pascal, the remainder in 68000 assembly language. This the kind of code I aspire to write. The Computer History Museum has earlier made available the source code to MacPaint."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

General Motors earned $4.9 billion in 2012; workers to get $6750 in profit sharing Plain Dealer GENERAL_MOTORS_AKERSON.JPG View full size General Motors Chairman and Chief Executive Dan Akerson said the company earned $4.9 billion in 2012. Akerson last month announced new work for the company's assembly plant in Kansas City. and more »