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30 Dec 23:12

Eight

mattfractionblog:

Eight years ago I heard something in an AA meeting.

I was there to make sure a friend of mine didn’t bail on the meeting. SHE was fucked up. SHE needed help. I was a tourist. I had been to meetings but, shit, I’d been to math classes too but I wasn’t a fucking mathematician.

AA was the last place on earth I wanted to be. I don’t believe in God. I don’t like being in churches. I didn’t believe I needed help. I didn’t really believe I was an alcoholic or an addict. Not really. Not like really-really. Not like my friend. Not like, yknow. Those other old drunks and junkies who were so fucked up they had to spend an hour in the middle of the day on dec 29th listening to each other talk about how much they missed drinking or how much drugs fucked up their lives.

And yet, paraphrasing what they say in certain rooms, more was revealed.

First off, that I was an alcoholic and a drug addict.

And that not getting fucked up and not drinking until I couldn’t feel any more wasn’t the same thing as being sober no matter how much I pretended.

That nothing in my life was under my control, and maybe the depression and panic attacks and never ending anxiety and rage I felt maybe underscored that.

And now here I am.

It was a start. Sitting in that room sipping shitty coffee for an hour was the first sane thing I’d done in years.

There is no bottom to the gratitude I feel.

There is no end to the love I have for those other old drunks and junkies who were so fucked up they had to spend an hour in the middle of the day on dec 29th listening to each other talk about how much they missed drinking or how much drugs fucked up their lives, because they sat there and listened to me too.

They saved my life.

30 Dec 21:22

NVIDIA Breached

by Soulskill
jones_supa writes: Another day, another corporate network intrusion. NVIDIA has reportedly been breached in the first week of December, with the attack compromising personal information of the employees. There is no indication that other data has been compromised. This is according to an email sent out by the company's privacy office and Nvidia's SVP and CIO Bob Worwall on December 17th. It took NVIDIA a couple of weeks to pick up all the pieces and assess the incident. It appears that the issue was pinned down by an employee or several employees getting their personal data compromised outside of the company network. After that, the information was used to gain unauthorized access to the internal corporate network. NVIDIA's IT team has taken extensive measures since then to enhance the security of the network against similar attacks in the future.

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30 Dec 21:21

Latin American Communism, RIP (born 1917, Moscow – died 2014, Havana)

by Manuel Hinds
Finally, the end of an era.

Every week new victims of the low oil prices pop up with some sign of their distress. First, it was Venezuela, which offered a sad spectacle for years as its economy disintegrated and collapsed. Then, it was Russia, which is on the verge of staging something nasty and self-destructive, like defaulting or falling into a financial crisis. Then, a most bizarre event: the collapse of a country that is a victim of plummeting prices, without having ever been a big oil producer. Cuba is a victim because the country that kept her going, Venezuela, went broke.

The first two have gone through humbling ordeals. Venezuela has been forced to stop buying political wills all over Latin America to support its populist ideology, the Socialism of the 21st Century. Russia, which plays in a much larger and important league, had to abandon its intentions to swallow its neighbors. None of them, however, has suffered as disgracing a humiliation as that which Cuba has been forced to inflict on herself: to come close to the country Fidel and Raul Castro have called “The Empire”, which they swore to fight without giving or expecting quarter until seeing it to its death, to come close to it and humbly ask to be allowed to enter…well, The Empire — which is entering the American economic sphere of influence, opening itself to American investors, asking to be allowed to sell its wares in the American markets, asking to be allowed to receive more remittances that the Cubans living in the United States send to their families in Cuba…and begging to have the embargo removed.

The Parasitic Country

A drastic fall in the oil prices is all that was needed to push Cuba to betray all its rhetoric of class warfare and bloody revolutions. This is not surprising. It is not the first time that Cuba finds itself destitute, looking for some allowance from another country because it cannot subsist on its own means. The Castro brothers and the Communist Party destroyed the Cuban economy shortly after they staged their revolution in the late 1950s. Since then, Cuba has needed sponsors.

This didn’t seem to be a problem at the time because the Soviet Union was more than pleased to provide for the survival of the indigent island in exchange for five advantages that Castro could offer: the presence of the Soviet military 240 miles from Key West; Castro’s willingness to act as a soldier of fortune on behalf of the Soviet Union, sending his army and personnel to faraway places like Angola; a physical base for sedition against the United States in Latin America; the charisma and rhetoric of Castro and his revolutions; and, for just a short while, a platform for nuclear missiles aimed at the United States.

In this way, the island survived for the next three decades just because the Soviet Union passed it an allowance in the shape of subsidized oil, a good portion of it to be sold by Cuba in the international markets, keeping the profits.

However, in the early 1990s the Soviet Union died and its heirs refused to keep on paying for Cuba’s maintenance. The magnitude of the adjustment can be appreciated by looking at the next graph. The country’s estimated Gross Domestic Product per capita came down by 36% between 1989 and 1993. The Castros forced the Cubans to adjust by tightening further their already tight belts. To force the Cubans into such an adjustment the Castros worsened repression drastically.

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Cuba limped for a few years with some help from European friends. Then, luck came Cuba’s way in the shape of Hugo Chavez, who wanted to stage a revolution in Venezuela. Cuba had a decisive competitive advantage for him. Through the years of Soviet servitude, the Cubans had learned some trades that he could use to his advantage: the considerable abilities to spy, misinform and stage conspiracies they had acquired from the KGB, their knowledge of the political and military environments in Latin America, their connections with the revolutionaries in those countries, their ability to project themselves all over the region through social workers and political advisors and their sizeable political skills. That is, the Cuban Communist Party had become a high-powered revolutionary contractor, complete with a territory strategically located and all the advantages that owning a country may provide.

Chavez struck a deal with the Cuban communists. In exchange for a huge yearly subsidy, the Cubans would provide Venezuela with a full menu of revolutionary and strategic services.

The precise amount that Venezuela transferred to Cuba through the years is not currently known. According to Carmelo Mesa, a distinguished professor at the University of Pittsburgh, during the oil booming years Venezuela provided up to US$9.4 billion per year to close the gap in Cuba’s accounts. It did so through many different channels, including the sale of oil at highly subsidized prices, the provision of funds for specific investment projects and the hiring of tens of thousands of medical personnel now working in Venezuela.

Thus, Venezuela gave employment to people who would be unemployed in Cuba. Since the workers receive only a minor fraction of the large sums that Venezuela pays for them (US$5.6 billion per year), Venezuela also transferred money directly to the Cuban government. Moreover, the usefulness of the Cuban workers is doubtful. The project these medical workers staffed, Barrio Adentro, (whose name can be loosely translated as Into the Neighborhoods) is coming apart at the seams. By December 2014 it was estimated that 80% of the Barrio Adentro establishments were abandoned.

But the Cubans did many other things for Chavez, supporting his every initiative in all international forums and praising him in every available occasion. In fact, Chavez had bought the entire country, which worked for him.

With time, however, something extraordinary, although perhaps predictable, happened. To take advantage of their abilities, Chavez allowed the Cubans to penetrate deeply into the most intimate circles of power in Venezuela. This was a dangerous move. After Chavez’s death it became apparent that the effective power of Venezuela had been transferred to Cuba. It was there where the main decisions were taken. The Cuban political presence in Venezuela became overwhelming. Cuba became the parasitic head of Venezuela, using its ideological and political power to extract resources from its host.

And then, Venezuela went all but bankrupt, leaving Cuba helpless again. The withdrawal of Venezuela’s support will force an adjustment in the income per capita at least as severe as that of the 1990s.

Thus, realistically facing starvation, Cuba had to find another way out. Getting into the American economic sphere is the Cubans’ only option. Renewing diplomatic relations was the first step to enter this new path.

The United States, however, will not provide the support that Cuba is used to get from other countries. Having only one core ability, that of staging revolutions, it has nothing to offer the United States. To survive, Cuba will have to do something that the Communist Party, like all parasites, does not like to do: to produce something. To do that, Cuba will have to reform its system. Like Russia, like China, like Vietnam and so many other formerly communist countries, it will have to swallow its pride and reintroduce capitalism. The reconciliation with the United States is part of this process, which has already started.

The End of Charisma

The decision that Cuba has taken marks an irreversible step in its history. It will not be able to go back to its role as parasitic contractor of revolutions. Of course, now there is no country that would take it as a teacher or manager of repressive methods and anti-American effervescence. All its potential customers — like Kirchner’s Argentina, Morales’ Bolivia, Correa’s Ecuador, Ortega’s Nicaragua — are bankrupt or in the process of becoming so. All of them depend on oil and commodity exports, and are struggling to adapt their dwindling economies to the new world of low commodity prices.

But, more fundamentally, the Cuban leaders lost face as revolutionaries, irretrievably so because they have joined hands with what for them was the incarnation of evil, the enemy they had to kill to ensure the progress of the masses toward the Communist Paradise. They based their competitive advantage on planting hatred against the United States and capitalism, and on being uncompromising on this hatred. They predicted the fall of capitalism and The Empire uncountable times over five and a half decades. They advised leftist movements all over Latin America to reject as treason the formation of commercial blocks with the United States, saying that forming them strengthened The Empire.

Now, how can they tell these very same people that capitalism and the United States have not fallen and, instead, have seen the collapse of the Soviet Union and all the Communist countries except Cuba and North Korea in the 1990s, and now the collapse of Cuba as well? How to explain that all the things they said marked the path to the future — Communism, the Soviet Union, the Socialism of the 21st Century, the Venezuela of Chavez and Maduro — are dead? Worse still, how will they tell their revolutionary clientele not only that The Empire has not fallen but also that Cuba wants to join it, though they are not using the same term this time?

Thus, Cuba’s renewal of diplomatic ties with the United States and the mere fact that it is looking for the elimination of the embargo mark the end of Cuban revolutionary charisma. With its disappearing charisma, Cuba is losing the competitive advantage it had to be a parasitic manager of rogue states.

With time, Cuba’s revolutionary clients and their movements will fade. They no longer have a country to support them in their daily fights. They have no human symbols. They have no living ideology. They have no charisma, and what had they had in addition to charisma in all these fifty-five years? They have only the sour taste in their mouths that they were left holding the bag of a loser ideology.

It is fine and proper that this is happening. This is the completion of a process that started in the late 1980s with the decline and fall of the Soviet Union, and which should have been finished a long time ago if Hugo Chavez had not intervened. Communist Cuba pertained to the old twentieth century, that century of class wars and flamboyant revolutionary caudillos promising freedom and progress while delivering repression and death. That century had to be closed, and this closed it.

It’s the end of an era in Latin America, even if most of the population in the United States, those away from Florida, will not feel any change in their lives, except, maybe, experiencing the pleasure of legally smoking a Cuban cigar.

30 Dec 21:19

Harvard Law School Cited for Inadequate Response to Sexual Harassment ... - TIME


TIME

Harvard Law School Cited for Inadequate Response to Sexual Harassment ...
TIME
Harvard Law School People walk outside Harvard Law School's Langdell Hall on May 10, 2010 at Harvard University in Cambridge, Mass. Darren McCollester—Getty Images. The Department of Education found that Harvard violated Title IX by failing to ...
Harvard settles Title IX case with administration, agrees to revise sexual assault ...Washington Post (blog)
Harvard Law Found in Violation of Title IX; Agrees to Remedy its Sexual Assault ...BostInno

all 61 news articles »
30 Dec 21:19

Making a 1980s D&D Module: The History of QUAGMIRE

D&D historian Jon Peterson has taken a detailed look at the process of making the 1980s D&D module, Quagmire. It's a wonderful insight into how adventure publishing worked back then. It's especially interesting if you're a small-press publisher today, with access to layout, editing, and other design technology not available in the 1980s.

Click here for the full article.

30 Dec 21:18

A Late 1980s Promotional Video for a Computer Sound Card Featuring State-of-the-Art Bleeps and Bloops

by Rollin Bishop
firehose

Ad Lib, motherfuckers

YouTube user GreatMewtwo uploaded what appears to be a late 1980s promotional video for sound cards from Ad Lib, a Canadian manufacturer known for the widespread adoption of its sound cards by the video game industry in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Specifically, the AdLib Music Synthesizer Card did quite well for the company, though it did not stop them from filing for bankruptcy in 1992 in the face of competition from the Sound Blaster family of sound cards.

via Kevin Church

30 Dec 21:18

Before Google, New York Public Library



Before Google, New York Public Library

30 Dec 21:16

Putting a MacBook Pro In the Oven To Fix It

by Soulskill
firehose

~it just works~

An anonymous reader writes: A post at iFixit explains how one user with a failing MacBook Pro fixed it by baking it in the oven. The device had overheating issues for months, reaching temperatures over 100 C. When it finally died, some research suggested the extreme heat caused the logic board to flex and break the solder connections. The solution was to simply reflow the solder, but that's hard to do with a MBP. "Instead, I cracked open the back of my laptop, disconnected all eleven connectors and three heat sinks from the logic board, and turned the oven up to 340 F. I put my $900 part on a cookie sheet and baked it for seven nerve-wracking minutes. After it cooled, I reapplied thermal paste, put it all back together, and cheered when it booted. It ran great for the next eight months." The laptop failed again, and another brief vacation into the oven got it running once more.

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30 Dec 21:15

Woman shot by toddler called responsible gun owner by friends, family - KXLY Spokane

firehose

the only way to stop a bad guy with a gun


New York Daily News

Woman shot by toddler called responsible gun owner by friends, family
KXLY Spokane
Veronica Rutledge is being called a responsible gun owner by those who were closest to her a day after she was shot and killed inside the Hayden Wal-Mart, the trigger accidentally pulled by her two year old son.
Boy in shooting 'unzipped' special purse gun pocketWJAC Johnstown

all 1,414 news articles »
30 Dec 21:15

Newswire: R.I.P. Christine Cavanaugh, voice of Babe, Rugrats’ Chuckie, Dexter’s Laboratory’s Dexter

by Katie Rife

Christine Cavanaugh, whose distinctive voice helped carry her through a 13-year career as a voiceover actress, has died at the age of 51. IndieWire reports that Cavanaugh died on December 22 of unknown causes, although her obituary did not appear in the Los Angeles Times until today.

Cavanaugh was only active as an actress from 1988, when she got her first voice role in the English version of the Polish animated film David And The Magic Pearl, until 2001, when she retired from acting to spend more time with her family. But in that decade, Cavanaugh lent her talents to memorable characters on many long-running cartoon series, most famously as Chuckie Finster on Rugrats and Dexter on Dexter’s Laboratory. She also played Gosalyn Mallard on Darkwing Duck, Oblina on Aaahh!!! Real Monsters, and Jay Sherman’s son Marty on The Critic, among other voice roles.

On the big screen ...

30 Dec 21:10

2 Boston police officers attacked by teenagers - Yahoo News

by gguillotte
When the officers found Woobenson Morrisset in a rear stairwell, he attacked them, according to the police report. Police Commissioner William Evans told WBZ-AM that as the officers were about to handcuff Morrisset, residents of two apartments came to his aid and "kicked, punched, and choked" the officers. They used pepper spray to fight off the attackers until other officers arrived. Evans said they never drew their guns.
30 Dec 21:10

US Supreme Court takes case, but plaintiff missing - Yahoo News

by gguillotte
When the U.S. Supreme Court agreed to take Bobby Chen's case involving a run-down Baltimore row house razed by the city, it looked past the fact he was too poor to pay the court's filing fee and had no attorney. But now Chen can't be found, something unheard of at the nation's highest court. The Supreme Court agrees to take less than 1 percent of the roughly 10,000 petitions it receives every year, but it was even rarer for the court to take a case like Chen's. On average, the court takes just 10 petitions a year like his, in which the party making the request is too poor to pay the court's $300 filing fee. But since the court agreed to take Chen's case in November, he hasn't surfaced. Dec. 22 was Chen's deadline to mail his main legal brief in the case. The court hadn't heard from him as of Tuesday, said Supreme Court spokeswoman Kathy Arberg. The court's Clerk's Office, which corresponds with parties who have a case before the court, has tried to reach Chen by letter and email. But it's not clear he got the messages, Arberg said. And he didn't list a phone number when he asked the court to take his case. The Associated Press also tried to reach Chen by email, but the message bounced back as undeliverable. Efforts to find a telephone number were also unsuccessful.
30 Dec 21:07

Board games are back, and Boston’s a player - Magazine - The Boston Globe

by hodad

Aram Boghosian

At Brookline’s Knight Moves cafe, owner Devon Trevelyan (center) offers some tips for playing Nuns on the Run.

By Ethan Gilsdorf  

This article is featured in the Nov. 30 issue of the Magazine.

WHEN WE WERE KIDS, we played games.

I don’t mean games of make-believe or cops and robbers or video games, although we played those, too. I’m talking about games packed in boxes with cards, dice, and metal figurines — Candy Land, Parcheesi, Monopoly, Risk, Life, Clue, and hundreds more. Folded in the middle like a book, game boards were worlds we entered over and over, as if returning to a favorite story.

Continue reading below

But we grew up, right? We put away those childish games and graduated to others on our devices and game consoles — “Call of Duty,” “Candy Crush,” “Angry Birds,” “Grand Theft Auto,” “Mario Bros.,” “Madden NFL,” “Minecraft.” Or did we?

It turns out plenty of people still play board games. Not only grade-schoolers and nerds, but average folk who partake at home, in game cafes, and at massive conventions. Feeding their appetite is a new wave of board, card, dice, and so-called Eurogames (also known as designer games, they originated in Europe and emphasize strategy, not luck). Quirky, challenging, and innovative, with themes ranging from pirates to pandemics to power brokers, their chunky boxes and metal tins are emblazoned with names like Small World, Eldritch Horror, Sushi Go!, Iota, and Cards Against Humanity.

“For several years now, we have been seeing a secular trend in gaming away from games played on a screen and toward tabletop games played in person with other players,” Milton Griepp, CEO and founder of ICv2, says by e-mail. ICv2 covers the business of pop-culture retail via a website and magazine. “There are no signs that this trend is abating.”

Non-digital games and puzzles racked up $1.9 billion in sales in the United States in 2013, according to the Toy Industry Association Inc., up 3 percent over 2012. The more focused “hobby game” market — which includes card games like 7 Wonders, dice games like King of Tokyo, and tabletop miniatures games like Warhammer 40,000 — has grown 15 percent a year on average for the past five years, and that segment was worth $700 million in 2013, according to ICv2. The toy and game giant Hasbro, based in Pawtucket, Rhode Island, saw sales rise 23 percent in 2013 for its Wizards of the Coast division, which publishes Magic: The Gathering and the fantasy role-playing game Dungeons & Dragons. Mainstream board-game sales — of the Scrabble and Taboo variety — are also up. According to NPD Group Inc., a market research company, sales of family board and action games, such as Sorry and Life, grew 5 percent in 2012 and 14 percent in 2013. In short, you might say we’re in the middle of a Golden Age for board games.

Star Trek: The Next Generation alum Wil Wheaton has followed his passion for board games into a new gig, hosting his own Web series, TableTop, for three seasons now. Promoters describe the series as “Celebrity Poker for board games,” and fans are gobbling it up: Season 2 of TableTop pulled in some 8 million YouTube views, with an average of about 500,000 views per episode.

“I personally think that it’s wonderful that it’s becoming a mainstream hobby,” says Wheaton of analog games. “If you walk into Toys ‘R’ Us, on the shelves with Cootie and Monopoly and Ants in the Pants, you’ll see Settlers of Catan, and Munchkin, and Carcassonne, and Ticket to Ride. That divide isn’t really there anymore because people are just playing games.”

It may not truly be giving the multibillion-dollar digital game industry a run for its money, but the board-game subculture is thriving. And as it happens, plenty of this tabletop-game inventing, tinkering, and fervent playing is happening in Greater Boston.

“Boston has become increasingly important to the national board-games scene — from providing must-attend conventions for board gamers all along the East Coast to cultivating an active society of game creators across the spectrum of hobby gaming,” says Jonathan Bolding, senior tabletop editor for the gaming website The Escapist. Representatives from Illinois-based Mayfair Games, the English-language publishers of the blockbuster Settlers of Catan, “have said to my face they wouldn’t dare skip the Boston conventions,” Bolding continues. “I wouldn’t either.”

10/25/2014 BROOKLINE, MA Patrons played card-based games and board games at Knight Moves (cq) in Brookline. (Aram Boghosian for The Boston Globe)

Aram Boghosian

Knight Moves guests can choose from hundreds of games.

‘I’LL PLACE A TILE instead of eating.”

“I’m going to move the panda.”

“Did you roll ‘rain’?”

“You can do that? All right.”

“NOW it’s your turn.”

“Can the panda just eat? Wait, he can’t

eat three!”

On a Friday evening in Brookline, Micaela Rodriguez and Joshua Brinkmeyer, both 19-year-old college students, are playing Takenoko, a Euro-style game about a panda, a farmer, and growing bamboo. They’re not sitting at home or in a dorm room; they’re at Knight Moves Board Game Cafe, one of several such venues that have opened across the country from New York City to Seattle.

Devon Trevelyan, a gamer and former game-shop employee, opened Knight Moves in Coolidge Corner last December. For a $10 cover, you can park yourself in what’s akin to a living room decorated with card tables and mismatched chairs and a (nonworking) fireplace to play any of hundreds of games. His customers are folks who want to socialize but are interested in alternatives to bars and drinking, Trevelyan says. Knight Moves serves coffee, soft drinks, and snacks, but if you want to have a beer or glass of wine, you’ll have to bring your own. You don’t have to come with a partner, though; Trevelyan delights in matching strangers with games and each other and teaching them how to play. “I act as a test-drive facility,” he says. For his customers, it means a chance to try games like Last Night On Earth: The Zombie Game before plunking down $59.95 for it at the store. The cafe is a popular spot for dates, too: Knight Moves has become an OKCupid “hot spot,” Trevelyan says.

10/25/2014 BROOKLINE, MA Jessica Frick (cq) 26 of Malden, played "Dominion" at Knight Moves (cq) in Brookline. (Aram Boghosian for The Boston Globe)

Aram Boghosian

Dominion is one of the games Knight Moves guests can play.

Board gamers looking for a night out have plenty of other options locally. Bars such as Good Life and the Highball Lounge, both in Boston, Brass Union in Somerville, and Tavern in the Square in Cambridge are among those that host game nights and/or have games on hand for customers to use.

“The pool of gamers in New England is quite concentrated,” says W. Eric Martin, the North Carolina-based news editor at BoardGameGeek, an online community with more than 780,000 registered users and content on some 70,000 board and card games. “You can find game groups almost every night of the week in the Greater Boston area that will be willing to play anything that you bring to the table.”

Boston has helped to propel the Eurogame revolution in the United States since the 1980s, when Carol Monica, owner of the longstanding Harvard Square shop Games People Play, became the first US importer of games like 1829 and Civilization. As Euro-style games developed as a genre, Monopoly’s monopoly began to weaken.

“Board games were moribund through the mid-nineties or so. Then you had this German board-game explosion with Settlers of Catan and Carcassonne,” says Tyler Stewart, who has run another local gaming destination, Pandemonium Books and Games in Cambridge, since 1989. Many now recognize Settlers of Catan, a strategy game about colonizing an island, as the tip of the iceberg when it appeared in 1995. A worldwide 18 million-unit seller, Settlers’ English-language version flies off of shelves at a clip of some 750,000 copies a year and is carried by all the big-box stores.

“Board games have been steadily growing,” says Stewart, whose shop offers packed gaming events — for fans of everything from D&D to My Little Pony — every night of the week. “We don’t have enough space for everything we want to do.” Whenever the TableTop show plugs a new game, Stewart says, it routinely sells out not only at his store but also nationwide. “Wil Wheaton is there creating chronic shortages.” The 10-year-old horror-themed game Betrayal at House on the Hill, for example, just came back in stock for the first time since last Christmas, Stewart says.

The area’s board-game roots run way deeper than the Reagan years. In 1860, a Springfield lithographer named Milton Bradley invented The Checkered Game of Life. Decades later, Bradley’s namesake company went on to publish Candy Land, Twister, Battleship, Scrabble, and many others, including a modernized version of Bradley’s prototype called The Game of Life.

In 1883, just a couple of decades after Bradley got his start, a young entrepreneur from Salem named George S. Parker invested $40 of his $50 net worth to create a wealth-building game he called Banking. “George Parker was the rebel of his day,” says Phil E. Orbanes, former head of research and development for Parker Brothers and an expert on Monopoly. “When he was 16 years old, he decided he’d had enough of games that were moralistic, which almost every game was. Parker decided that ‘games should be fun,’ ” He went on to found Parker Brothers, which would churn out more than 2,000 games, including household favorites Clue, Risk, Boggle, and its all-time bestseller, Monopoly, now available in 111 countries in 43 languages.

East Longmeadow, Massachusetts -- 11/10/2014-- Workers add game pieces to the game Risk inside the assembly plant of Hasbro in East Longmeadow, Massachusetts November 11, 2014. Jessica Rinaldi/Globe Staff Topic: 113014boardgames Reporter:

Jessica Rinaldi/Globe Staff

At Hasbro’s plant in East Longmeadow, workers assemble games like Risk.

Though classics from Milton Bradley and Parker Brothers live on, the companies are no more. Hasbro acquired Milton Bradley in 1984, and in 1991 it bought the Tonka Corp., which owned Parker Brothers. The company is now the second-

largest toy and game maker in the United States (right behind Mattel), having snapped up Wizards of the Coast along the way. With 1,700 employees locally, Hasbro has held onto Milton Bradley’s East Longmeadow location — which Orbanes calls “the premier game manufacturing facility in the country to this day” — where games such as Monopoly, Battleship, and Connect Four still roll off the assembly line.

Other area companies have exploited what Jason Schneider calls “cracks in the foundation” of Hasbro’s stronghold. Schneider is the director of product development and marketing for Newton-based Gamewright, maker of “no screens, no batteries” family games. “When I used to play games as a kid, I used to just roll some dice and move around a board and hopefully get to the end and maybe pass ‘Go’ and collect two hundred,” Schneider says. “Now I’m actually able to create a world or negotiate something interesting.” Since 1994, Gamewright has been expanding its catalog of games, most of them playable in 30 minutes or less, and winning awards. Its hits include Forbidden Island, which sold 100,000 units in 2013 and, according to Schneider, is on track to top that number this year, and Slamwich, which has sold more than a million units.

East Longmeadow, Massachusetts -- 11/10/2014-- Stacks of Monopoly money are seen inside the assembly plant of Hasbro in East Longmeadow, Massachusetts November 11, 2014. Jessica Rinaldi/Globe Staff Topic: 113014boardgames Reporter:

Jessica Rinaldi/Globe Staff

East Longmeadow workers also produce stacks of Monopoly money.

In his post-Parker Brothers life, Orbanes has himself become a game entrepreneur. His specialty? Nostalgia. With three other industry veterans, Orbanes in 1995 founded the Danvers-based Winning Moves Games, which releases “classic, retro, cool, and fun” versions of board games such as Sorry! and Risk.

From all this “fertilizer in the soil,” as Orbanes calls it, many a local game entrepreneur has blossomed. The Greater Boston/New England area is home to “easily over a hundred tabletop developers,” says Aerjen Tamminga, designer of Pleasant Dreams: A Card Game and former cochairman of the Boston Festival of Indie Games and Game Makers Guild, who now lives in the Netherlands.

There’s Cambridge Games Factory, founded in 2004, whose top seller is Glory to Rome, and Arlington-based Asmadi Games, which launched in 2006 and is known for Innovation and Red7. Brookline’s Your Move Games, founded in 2004, creates fantasy, sci-fi, and war games, including Battleground and Battle for Hill 218. Anomia Press, based in Roslindale, has sold 200,000 units of its Mensa Select award-winning free-association card game Anomia since launching in November 2009. Marlborough-based Greenbrier Games, founded in 2011, is best known for its zombie-themed hit Zpocalypse.

The biggest indie slam-dunk in the region might be Bananagrams, the tile-based word game invented in Narragansett, Rhode Island, that comes packaged in a banana-shaped fabric pouch. “I think we’ve given the big boys a run for their money — in the nicest possible sense,” says Bananagrams CEO Rena Nathanson, from her office in London. (The company also has a Providence office.) “Our goal is to get it into every classroom, every household, and be up there with Scrabble, with Boggle, with Monopoly.” With more than 6.5 million units sold since its launch in 2006, Bananagrams looks to be well on its way.

ON A TUESDAY NIGHT in October, in a basement not far from the baseball heroics of Fenway Park, about 25 game designers are trying to “break” two games.

This is an intensive play-testing session of the Game Makers Guild, a Boston-based community of more than 500 game developers, play testers, and would-be entrepreneurs. Tonight’s goal is to troubleshoot two games in development by guild members, so the testers are hunting for weaknesses or scenarios where the rules don’t work or are confusing. Maybe the player who goes first has an unintentional advantage. Maybe there are moments when the action drags or becomes rote.

East Longmeadow, Massachusetts -- 11/10/2014-- The Puzzle and Board Room entrance inside the assembly plant of Hasbro in East Longmeadow, Massachusetts November 11, 2014. Jessica Rinaldi/Globe Staff Topic: 113014boardgames Reporter:

Jessica Rinaldi/Globe Staff

Puzzles are produced in Hasbro’s East Longmeadow plant, too.

One of the games on the testing block is Zarathustra, “a cooperative science-fiction game where everyone is a traitor,” according to its designer, Daryl Fougnie, at the time a Harvard postdoc in psychology. The other is Ursa Miner, a family-friendly strategy game where players take charge of teams of honey-mining bears and try to harvest enough royal jelly to be named the Ruler of Mount Honeycomb. Gamers hunch over tables, playing the games again and again.

“They played through the first game and they broke a piece of it,” says Eli Kosminsky, co-creator of Ursa Miner and chairman of the guild. “So we changed the rules on the fly.” Designer Jeff Johnston, from Wilmington, says the guild’s play-testing sessions improved his newest game, Flashlights and Fireflies, which is being released by Gamewright next spring. “It’s a very generous group for advice, feedback, and support,” he says.

Another guild member who’s found breakout success is Gene Mackles, a 66-year-old graphic designer/artist who spent 23 years with WGBH. His card game Iota, packaged in a tiny tin resembling a Band-Aid box, was published by Gamewright in 2012 after it won a Mensa award. It went on to sell more than 100,000 units in the United States, Russia, and the Netherlands. After his success with Gamewright, Mackles founded his own company, PDG Games, and recently published a trio of card games — BOP!, D!Git, and Q!nto — all of which he play-tested at guild meetings. “I’m almost always amazed that you work something out in your head and think, ‘This is perfect,’ and then you try it out and it’s not only not perfect, it’s awful,” Mackles says. “If there’s one thing that I’ve learned, it’s that you can’t play-test a game too much.”

Designers whose games don’t get picked up by companies like Gamewright have plenty of other paths to publication. Local annual gaming festivals like JiffyCon, TotalCon, and the Boston Festival of Indie Games celebrate “indie” game development; Kosminsky is a co-director of the last, which has become the largest such gaming event in the nation. PAX East, an annual gaming convention for both video and analog games, draws more than 50,000 game enthusiasts to Boston; like the Festival of Indie Games, PAX connects designers with audiences and hosts sessions on the business of tabletop games, among a bevy of other topics. The largest US convention of this type, Gen Con in Indianapolis, is an important venue for board games to find a national audience; attendance has grown by more than 10 percent for each of the past four years. Meanwhile, websites like BoardGameGeek, ShutUpandSitDown, and Lowell-based The Cardboard Republic offer candid reviews and forums. Emerson College’s Engagement Game Lab and the MIT Game Lab are additional gaming incubators. And digital tools like 3-D printers and online retailers allow game inventors to produce and sell their own designs.

Boston, MA 102114 For a story about the resurgence of board games in Mass. Game testers "play test" a game called Zarathustra (cq) on October 21, 2014 at Lesley Univ. where local board game makers come to play each other's games in progress. (Essdras M Suarez/ Globe Staff)/ MAG

Essdras M Suarez/Globe Staff

Boston’s Game Makers Guild troubleshoots games in development by playing them and looking for flaws. Pictured, the guild playing Zarathustra.

Then there’s the boon of Kickstarter, probably the biggest seismic change in the game-making landscape. The crowdfunding site lets “people who may not have the intestinal fortitude to start a game company,” as Schneider puts it, “test the waters in a very low-risk environment.” Novice inventors can scrape together some graphics and a video and see if they can get people interested in it, Schneider says. “And, voila, it might turn into the next Cards Against Humanity” — the edgy party game that’s consistently a bestseller in Amazon’s Toys & Games category. In the crowdfunding realm, board games have seen success, even beating out video games: According to The New York Times, in 2013, Kickstarter raised $45.3 million for digital projects and $52.1 million for tabletop.

But even with outside funding, it’s tough to make a go of it in the board-game industry, says James Takenaka, chief sales officer of the Londonderry, New Hampshire-based company Game Salute. “The biggest problem after some of these companies go through Kickstarter is they don’t have the connections to sell [their game] into the hobby market.” Game Salute helps indie designers with sales, distribution, warehousing, and even Kickstarter consulting. Its business has grown from representing a dozen clients in 2008 to more than 100 active clients today, and now the company sells and distributes more than 250 products. “Every year, we’re just seeing huge growth,” says Takenaka. The company has also shepherded more than 165 successful Kickstarter campaigns, “the most of any one organization in the world,” according to Game Salute CEO and founder Dan Yarrington. Alongside California and Texas, the Northeast, he says, is an area that has “lots of activity.”

Which brings us back to the giants like Hasbro. Does the company see all this upstart action as a threat? Hasbro still has more than 60 board games on the market, and its mass-market chestnuts like Scrabble and Monopoly remain huge sellers. Cleverly, Hasbro has remade them for new generations of players. My Monopoly allows players to personalize property spaces and game tokens with customized stickers; Scrabble with “Electronic Scoring” speeds up play.

Boston, MA 102114 Dominique Giniusz (Cq) ponders her next move as she plays Ursa Miner on October 21, 2014. This is for a story about the resurgence of board games in Mass. Thi session took place Lesley Univ. where local board game makers come to play each other's games in progress. (Essdras M Suarez/ Globe Staff)/ MAG

Essdras M Suarez/Globe Staff

The guild playing Ursa Miner.

“Our focus is really how we can continue to make these brands relevant and exciting for consumers,” says Hasbro’s vice president of marketing for games, Jonathan Berkowitz. Two key trends, Berkowitz says, are strategy games and party games, which sit at “polar ends” of the market. “The party-gaming consumer is looking for something that’s easy to get into, with very few rules,” Berkowitz says. “They can pull it out of the box and play right away.” For example, Cards Against Humanity or Apples to Apples.

Then there’s the popularity of strategy-based Eurogames, which attract players looking for a longer, more complex experience. “Every year we’ll get a ‘Settlers: It’s the Monopoly Killer’ article coming out,” says Ben Rathbone, Hasbro’s vice president of gaming design and development. The company hopes to capture both the mainstream and hobby market next fall when it releases a game Rathbone and his team are working on tentatively called Magic: The Gathering Strategy Board Game, based on the hugely popular collectible card game.

Analog games have, of course, gone digital, too. For example, there are versions of Monopoly for smartphones and tablets, Rathbone points out. Hasbro and video game publisher Ubisoft this month launched the Hasbro Game Channel, where gamers can download Monopoly Plus, My Monopoly, and Monopoly Deal for game consoles such as Microsoft’s Xbox One and Sony’s PlayStation 4, with games like Risk and Trivial Pursuit Live to roll out later.

“That’s the whole breadth of different gaming options you have around one brand,” Rathbone says, fiddling with an Elvish Planeswalker figurine on a conference room table at the company’s Pawtucket offices. “Rather than us worrying about gaming getting smaller, gaming is bigger than ever.”

The reason for that may go right back to those game boards, cards, tiles, and dice we learned to love as kids gathered around the kitchen table. People are craving “to engage as human beings, personally,” says Bananagrams’ Rena Nathanson, “one-to-one, face-to-face, or in a group.” That’s something worth rolling for.

Original Source

30 Dec 20:07

:3

30 Dec 18:11

wsig/two_player - boardgames

by hodad
firehose

lol

77302ab1d83ab19dcc5841ff37e3cf2e
hodad

what?

Twilight Struggle is a quick-playing, low-complexity game.

Original Source

30 Dec 18:07

Twitch wants you to watch developers build their games

by Adi Robertson
firehose

nobody do anything, just watch people do things

You can play games on Twitch. You can watch people play games on Twitch. You can watch fish play games on Twitch. You can watch people write news reports on Twitch. And now, there's a section where you can watch people make games on Twitch. A new "Game Development" category features people who are building or modding games, whether that's doing coding or drawing concept art. The options for picking what to stream on Twitch are already pretty open, but a dedicated way to find developers raises the visibility of anyone who wants to do it. Polygon reports that this went live on October 16th, after the idea was suggested at PAX Prime at the end of August.

Right now, the overall category has 17 channels with a total of about 700 viewers,...

Continue reading…

30 Dec 18:04

If Captain Toad was a Game Boy Color release ⊟ Artist Johan...

by ericisawesome


If Captain Toad was a Game Boy Color release ⊟

Artist Johan Vinet managed to make this already lovely game look even more charming, somehow! This reminds me a bit of Goodbye Galaxy Games’ Flipper for DSiWare. Someone make this and release it to eShop, please.

I meant to mention it a while back, but Johan, Austin Ivansmith, and flashygoodness released a fun action game recently called Super Secret Service. It’s available for iOS and Android now. Check out some of its pixel art and watch a gameplay video here.

BUY Captain Toad: Treasure Tracker, Tiny Cartridge's Holiday Gift Guide
30 Dec 18:04

How To Eat Your Cake: Consortium And The Fourth Wall

by Sin Vega

By Sin Vega on December 30th, 2014 at 12:00 pm.

We can’t keep saying video games are a young medium. We’ve been saying it since I was your age (or since you were mine, if that fits better), and besides, the last few years have finally shown that there’s plenty of room for games that do more than idly amuse us. Consortium is one such game.

Unlike any RPG I can name, Consortium throws you in with no map, no introductory cutscenes or tutorial. When you start, you don’t choose a character, you sign a disclaimer. It’s disorientating and strange, and immediately different, dedicated fully to its central conceit; you the player are accessing a satellite, provided by the developer, iDGi, that allows you to control a man known as Bishop 6, on board an aircraft, in the year 2042.

It nails role playing as a person in a specific situation, to an extent no other game has. Paradoxically, it achieves this by telling you nothing.

On hearing my blather, a housemate described it as “like Quantum Leap”, and with two caveats, that’s not a bad comparison. First, you only jump into one person, and second, there’s no Al or Ziggy to guide you or tell anecdotes about various wives, and no compulsion to do good, or indeed, to do anything, beyond what is normally expected of Bishop 6.

Other characters can’t be interrogated for exposition, as you’re supposed to know this stuff. This isn’t a world waiting for a generic adventurer to show up for a guided tour; it’s an important place of work, and you’re an integral part of it. Asking too many daft questions will make you look incompetent or stupid, which only makes crewmates worry and mistrust you. You can still do it though. You can be as stupid or unpleasant as you like. The game won’t judge you, although individual characters might.

Consortium casts aside some of the genre’s most common conventions, but it doesn’t tear down the medium or the hobby. Several characters are keen gamers, openly chatting about their world’s videogames, including some about your employers, the titular Consortium, like soldiers playing CoD, or HR staff playing that game where you’re a moron literally all the time. They do this conversationally, resisting the temptation to thrust a hand into the air and go “ooh, that’s like the videogame you’re playing right now!”

Neither does it fall into that awkward groove that (for example) Far Cry 3 and Spec Ops The Line fell into, clumsily critiquing their genre by forcing the player to act like a horrible fool, then calling the player out for being a horrible fool. As some big wally or other said, such games want to have their cake and eat it. “Are you not entertained?”, they cry, somehow ignoring the possibility that we’re grown people who are well aware that shooting thousands of people for fun would not be plausible or morally acceptable in the real world. It doesn’t work. Yes, we are entertained, and what’s more, I for one don’t feel the least bit bad for that. You’re not real, Maximus, and attacking us for taking part only draws more attention to that.

There’s no shortage of ambitious games content to explore storytelling techniques without insulting the player, either, but all too often the ludo- complement to the -narrative feels almost as flat and restrictive as… well, Ludo. We’ve surely all played a game with a story so intrusive, incongruent, or our options so restricted, that all impact or sense of agency was lost. While it’s easy and sometimes fair to blame bad writing, I’d say a more significant culprit is simply an inadequate grasp of the medium, and how we like to experience it.

Even the generally great Deus Ex Human Revolution fell flat there when it revealed the dramatic consequences of slacking before starting its opening mission. Uh, hell yeah I dawdled in the lobby. It’s Deus Ex! I was checking every inch of the level for secrets, and/or seeing what happened if I jumped off the third floor onto a receptionist’s head. Duh. By contrast, iDGi know how we play games, and rather than judge us for it, they embraced it, and integrated it into the core concept of their game.

In this world, they’re allowing you to do what you like. Most actions you carry out affect events in some way, and any result is as valid to them as any other. See, they’re interested in exploring possible futures, and each time you act, you create a new one. You’re confronted with several mysteries as you go, but provided you stay alive, there’s no right course of action. Every play through is as useful as any other, because they’re all possibilities.

This extra layer of plot between you as the dimension-jumping controller of Bishop 6, and you as the person sat at a PC, provides protection against that jarring moment where a developer tries to get clever with the fourth wall, but rather than impressing, succeeds only in clumsily reminding you that you’re a neurotic weirdo sat at a stupid whirring box of circuits, pawing at lumps of plastic like an idiot. It keeps you from reloading the game any time a conversation option didn’t get you the reward you wanted – these are people, not devices to feed you the next stage of a quest, and however you interact, they’ll give you something back. Even when you’ve finished, your game will be saved as a numbered universe, readily annotated with details of your actions.

Take one conversation with a young crewmate. He enthuses about just meeting a real live Bishop, and offers to make you a coffee, practically humping your leg. React with bemusement or disdain (saying nothing is always an option, as is simply walking away), and a nearby officer will make a wry remark about him having played too many video games. But it’s a good-natured, accurate comment. It’s neither a jab at gamers nor a clever pat on its own back for identifying that HEY GUYS THIS IS A VIDEOGAME HO HO. It’s just a story acknowledging that games exist, as it does with tv, films, and books, and yeah, there would totally be games about the Consortium if it were real.

Later, another NPC might take you aside conspiratorially and hint that they knew what’s really going on with you. And then you might tell them you’re from another dimension and they flip out, thinking you’re mocking them. There’s your relationship with them marred, and any opportunity to find out what they were really talking about gone. Oops. With very few exceptions, it knows exactly when and how far to nudge the fourth wall to explore a plot point or tease a mystery, and when to leave it alone to maintain the illusion.

What’s most remarkable is that this is all done in service of the game. Its encouragement of, and the wealth of alternative material provided by multiple playthroughs keep you invested – you can always make that decision differently next time, and it’ll likely offer a new experience. The notion that you’re secretly controlling this person drops you square into that situation with no information but what you can figure out through context. The practical setup brings added subtext to several events – when characters start dropping hints that they know a secret about you, you’re not pulled out of the game by an NPC having an existential crisis; instead, you’re hit with multiple reasons to be paranoid. Do they know you’re not who you claim to be? Is there something about Bishop 6 that I need to know? Is that creepy story in the news relevant or just flavour text? Why am I being allowed to do this, anyway?

None of this would work in another medium. Consortium offers a solid sample of what we’ve been saying games have the potential to do for a generation. That it’s also an entertaining game in its own right certainly doesn’t hurt, and with the questions it leaves unanswered and talk of a sequel, it might just be a stepping stone to something truly special.

30 Dec 17:42

Multimetallic Catalysis Based on Heterometallic Complexes and Clusters

by Paulin Buchwalter, Jacky Rosé and Pierre Braunstein
firehose

no idea what's going on but I like it

TOC Graphic

Chemical Reviews
DOI: 10.1021/cr500208k
30 Dec 17:42

A Dangerous Nemesis Star May Visit Our Solar System Many Years From Now

by George Dvorsky
firehose

I miss Amy

A Dangerous Nemesis Star May Visit Our Solar System Many Years From Now

A stellar orange dwarf has a 90% chance of passing through the outer reaches of our solar system no earlier than a quarter of a million years from now. Sure, that's a long way off, but this unwelcome guest could perturb the Oort cloud, flinging dangerous comets towards Earth.

Read more...








30 Dec 17:40

Photo



30 Dec 17:39

Why Teaching Everyone To Code Is Delusional

Talks and articles cheerleading the strategy of teaching young people how to create this new technology are a kind of anodyne reaction: a facile solution that supposes that everybody can just build and make and code their way out of the coming joblessness and social restructuring.
30 Dec 17:28

A definitive ranking of the most overrated and underrated dog breeds - Vox

by djempirical
firehose

fuck this guy

Finally! A (somewhat) definitive guide to the most overrated and underrated dog breeds:

dog chart 3 <img alt="dog chart 3" src="https://cdn1.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/5WuzwWxpxXzR1VUhwrvbEd2x67I=/cdn0.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/2458956/dog_chart_2.0.png">

(David McCandless/Knowledge is Beautiful)

This chart, from David McCandless' fascinating new book Knowledge is Beautiful, ranks 87 dog breeds and compares those rankings to the actual popularity of the breeds in the US.

The ranking is based on a number of factors: trainability, life expectancy, lifetime cost (including the price of food and grooming), and suitability for children, among others.

The result: Border Collies, according to McCandless, are the finest dog breed in existence. Labs, Beagles, and Golden Retrievers, while not at the very top, are other popular dogs (at the top right of the chart) that he rates highly.

On the other hand, the formula seems to penalize big dogs. German Shepherds, Great Danes, and Saint Bernards, all in the top left quadrant, are in McCandless' words, "inexplicably overrated." The formula also uncovers some overlooked breeds, at the bottom right, that should be more popular, like Border Terriers and Pointers.

Finally, on the bottom left, the chart shows the breeds that are unpopular and properly so: Old English Sheepdogs, Borzois, and Afghan Hounds.

Poor, poor Afghan Hounds:

afghan hound <img alt="afghan hound" src="https://cdn2.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/9mGky0naLZdfsTgk_1NfkrS4LC4=/cdn0.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/2458412/2982813320_ce509006f0_o.0.jpg">

(Vicky Hugheston)

Original Source

30 Dec 17:23

Tetris disappearing from eShop ⊟ Nintendo UK tweeted that both...

by 20xx
firehose

'In related news: uuuuuugughghghhghghghghhgghghgghhhhhhhhhhhh'



Tetris disappearing from eShop ⊟

Nintendo UK tweeted that both Tetris (Game Boy, aka The Good One) and Tetris Axis (3DS, aka One of Hudson’s Last Games) will be removed from the eShop in that region on 12/31 (via Nintendaan).

I don’t know if North America also has the same deal (I haven’t really been at work enough to email NOA, and ain’t nobody working there right now anyway!) but, like, maybe get that Game Boy Tetris just to be safe.

In related news: uuuuuugughghghhghghghghhgghghgghhhhhhhhhhhh

CHECK OUT Tiny Cartridge's Holiday Gift Guide
30 Dec 17:14

NYPD Arrests Plummet 66%, Cops In 'Virtual Work Stoppage'

firehose

how to engender public trust as a police officer: stop protecting the public

NYPD traffic tickets and summonses for minor offenses have dropped off by a staggering 94 percent following the execution of two cops — as officers feel betrayed by the mayor and fear for their safety.
30 Dec 17:13

Daredevil Will Feel More Like The Wire Than a Superhero Show, Says Showrunner - Less Red Batman, more Red Ribbon Killer.

by Victoria McNally
firehose

no thanks

"But how much time will you spend exploring the blue-collar world of the city’s stevedores"

?????????????????????

But if this show’s going to downplay the fantasy elements of the Marvel universe, then how exactly are we going to get Idris Elba’s Thor character a cameo? Somebody didn’t think this comparison to The Wire through that well, you guys!

Yup, the team behind Netflix’s upcoming Daredevil series is really doubling down on the gritty localized crime drama angle they’ve been using to promote the show—so much so, in fact, that they’ve invoked the holiest of all bullet-holey shows to make their point: HBO’s The Wire. Yikes, but that’s a high bar to climb there. I mean, just think of all the TV-obsessed bros who will talk about that program for hours on end if you let them.

Showrunner Steven DeKnight didn’t stop there, however. In the full interview that he, Marvel Head Jeph Loeb, and star Charlie Cox gave Entertainment Weekly recently, he also brought up pretty much literally every ’70s New York crime story this side of The Warriors. Hey, you think if they name enough Al Pacino movies, he might come on as a guest star next season?

“We really wanted to take our cue from [films like] The French Connection, Dog Day AfternoonTaxi Driver, and make it very, very grounded, very gritty, very real,” DeKnight said. “We always say we would rather lean toward The Wire than what’s considered a classic superhero television show.”

Instead of “magic hammers,” expect to probably see: subway cars covered in graffiti, wrinkled old extras smoking cigarettes that they brought themselves to the shoot, and more then a few establishing scenes of cops messing with pedestrians. So! Gritty!

But! Don’t worry, gritty-reboot-weary nerds; DeKnight wants you to know that he’s not going overboard.

“When I came onto this there was no way I wanted to make this hard-R or NC-17[...] I don’t think the material warrants that. It is a little grittier and edgier than Marvel has gone before, but we’re not looking to push it to extreme graphic violence, gratuitous nudity or anything like that. The story does not require that and I think would suffer if you pushed it that far.”

You know what else you won’t see? Bullseye, the character played by Colin Farrell in the original—err, film-adaption-who-must-not-be-named—and one of Daredevil’s most iconic foes. “I wouldn’t say there’s no plans to include the character in the series,” DeKnight said. “It’s not not to say he wouldn’t be in the series at some point. But I think if you try to jam in too many characters, it just becomes a mess.” Cough GOTHAM cough cough wheeze. “[Bullseye’s] story was told in the last iteration of Daredevil that anybody saw. My feeling was, ‘Why repeat it?’”

“And honestly, if you’re looking for a juicy, multi-faceted crime drama, Wilson Fisk [Kingpin] was the obvious choice to play the antagonist,” he added. “Bullseye is a little more cut and dry. Not to say you couldn’t make him fantastic over 13 hours, but Fisk really felt like the right yin to the yang for Matt, and for what we wanted to do this season.”

But how much time will you spend exploring the blue-collar world of the city’s stevedores? Inquiring minds want to know.

(via EW)

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30 Dec 17:11

Clever Shiba Inu Learns How to Sit and Wait For His Human’s Signal Before He Eats His Dinner

by Lori Dorn
firehose

exactly what bou does

A very clever Shiba Inu named Kibo learns how sit and wait for his human Jon Sun to give a signal before approaching his food bowl at dinnertime. According to Jon, Kibo “has a minor freakout every time I feed him.”

Jon also taught Kibo how to face the wall with his paws up whenever he says “spread ‘em.”

via reddit

30 Dec 17:00

New Oregon laws taking effect in 2015

firehose

'Marijuana aficionados: The consumption and cultivation of marijuana is set to become legal in Oregon July 1.

The new law will allow a household to have up to 8 ounces of marijuana and to cultivate up to four plants. A person could legally carry up to 1 ounce with them.

However, the sale of marijuana will remain illegal until the early 2016 when Oregon Liquor Control Commission begins issuing licenses to retailers.'
-
'Home buyers: The principle of buyer beware will no longer apply to foreclosed homes that may have been used to manufacture methamphetamine.

Starting Jan. 1, sellers of foreclosed homes will have to inform buyers that the property could contain toxic residue from a meth lab prior to sale.' (re: that old share from a family who got sick from buying a meth den)
-
'Teenagers: People who consume alcohol under the age of 21 will no longer be prosecuted for possession if they seek medical attention for themselves or others.

HB 4094 offers immunity starting Jan. 1 from a minor-in-possession charge only. It does not shield minors from other offenses like driving under the influence or possessing illegal drugs.'
-
'For Oregonians, the minimum wage is set to go up 15 cents to $9.25 an hour, which will put $312 additional dollars into the pockets of full-time workers.'
-
'Gun owners: Oregon residents who were convicted of minor marijuana offenses in other states will be able to obtain concealed carry permits starting Jan. 1.'
-
'Nonprofit organizations engaged in charitable activities have to file annual disclosure reports with the Oregon Department of Justice, but the agency previously lacked a clear way to punish those caught submitting false information.'
-
'Children of volunteers: If emergency reserve or volunteer personnel are killed or disabled in the line of duty, their children will be eligible for college scholarships starting Jan. 1.'

30 Dec 16:57

State Farm Insurance - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

by gguillotte
firehose

fyi

The State Farm jingle ("Like a good neighbor, State Farm is there") was written by American songwriter Barry Manilow in 1971. A cover was released by Weezer in 2011.
30 Dec 16:55

Embroidery Trouble Shooting Page

by gguillotte
firehose

via Russian Sledges
I ain't fuckin around when I said "autoreshare"

Embroidery Trouble Shooting Guide