firehose

Developers in Sweden are taking a stand against harassment in the video game industry, denouncing threats, intimidation and hate as unacceptable — including recent events some link to GamerGate — according to daily Swedish newspaper Svenska Dagbladet.

The declaration, translated via Google, comes from academics and representatives in the Swedish gaming industry, including Avalanche Studios, Coffee Stain Studios, DICE, Paradox Interactive, Mojang and Ubisoft Massive. We've contacted all those listed for comment and will update accordingly. The publication does not specifically mention GamerGate, but links to a piece discussing its origins and effects.

The GamerGate movement and Twitter hashtag is a social campaign defined by most supporters as a call to effect change in video game journalism and to defend the "gamer" identity. The movement is difficult to define because what it has come to represent has no central leadership or agreed-upon manifesto. The hashtag was first used by actor Adam Baldwin in August after intimate details of a personal relationship between a video game developer and a video game journalist were made public and led some to allege cronyism between press and developers. The campaign is now also linked to ongoing and well-established harassment of women in video games, including Depression Quest creator Zoe Quinn, Feminist Frequency creator Anita Sarkeesian and Giant Spacekat head Brianna Wu, though many of GamerGate's supporters deny the campaign should be blamed for harassment.

"We will never accept threats, hate, violence or sexism in the name of games."

According to the story in the publication, developers are aware of the attacks on "women who publicly take a stand against sexism in computer games" from anonymous individuals online.

"... Their physical safety and security in their homes can not be guaranteed," the post reads. "It should not have to be said: Hatred, intimidation and harassment is never acceptable."

"We declare our support to the women affected. We want to defend everyone's right to be and act in the game [industry] without being treated worse because of background, affiliation or gender. Threats should always be taken very seriously."

Quinn, Wu and Sarkeesian have all been forced to flee their homes due to violent threats. Earlier this month, an anonymous person threatened Utah State University, where Sarkeesian was scheduled to speak, with "the deadliest school shooting in American history." Sarkeesian canceled her talk because she felt security measures were inadequate.

Most recently, actress and geek icon Felicia Day discussed her thoughts on and fear to address GamerGate; shortly after, her personal contact information was publicly outed in the post.

The story in the Swedish paper adds that Diversi, a project designed for game companies and communities to support each other's diversity efforts, started a petition "calling for diversity and equality, against hatred, threats and sexism." It currently includes more than 1,000 signatures from developers such as Blizzard Entertainment Europe, Epic Games, Media Molecule, SCEE and Rovio Sweden.

"We're not just an anti-GamerGate movement."

"Sometimes you have to state the obvious: We will never accept threats, hate, violence or sexism in the name of games," the petition reads. "We welcome more diversity. We oppose any discrimination. Games are for all!"

Speaking with Polygon via email, a Diversi spokesperson said that the organization has not received any kind of threats, but instead continues to receive signatures and support from the industry. Its goals stretch beyond GamerGate-related harassment.

"We think it's really important that it's clear we're taking a firm stance against harassment in the gaming industry, and yes, GamerGate has been the biggest source of that the last few months," the spokesperson said. "But we also want to be clear in the fact that we're not just an anti-GamerGate movement, we are a long-term collaborative endeavor to support people facing harassment in the games industry, to promote diversity in all its forms, and to connect game companies, game educations, and gaming communities with the common goal of creating an industry where everybody is welcome."

Johnnemann Nordhagen was the lead programmer on The Fullbright Company's Gone Home. Now he's working on a new project, that will once again seek to tell real world stories in a gaming setting.

Where the Water Tastes Like Wine is about life on the road, connecting with other travelers while sharing stories and adventures. In a phone interview, Nordhagen told Polygon that the game will feature a Japanese role-playing game-style over-world, dotted with experiences inspired by America's historic relationship with traveling.

After completing the widely admired indie hit Gone Home, Nordhagen spent five months backpacking and travelling around the world, including North Africa, the Himalayas and Eastern Europe.

"That was an experience I wanted to capture in a video game," he said. "Moving from place to place and seeing all these interesting things, crossing paths with other travelers and telling stories about exciting adventures on the road."

But Where the Water Tastes Like Wine will take a specific American tone, covering stories inspired by real and fictional travelers like Huck Finn, the Oregon Trail migrants and Jack Kerouac. Developer Dim Bulb's website said the game, which does not yet have a release date, is also taking inspiration from Woody Guthrie-style American folk and blues music.

Heroic travelers aren't the only people featured in the game. "Most of the romantic road stories out there are white males traveling and having adventures," he said. "That is a freedom only available to those people, but a lot of travelers don't have that freedom and I want to tell stories of people who have been displaced."

Gone Home covered issues that are not generally addressed in games, and Where the Water Tastes Like Wine is seeking to follow its lead. "Gone Home is inspiring in a number of ways," said Nordhagen. "It talked about the real world in ways that video games don't often tackle.

"We don't see real stories that often and that is one thing that I want to look at, some of the historical stuff that has happened in the U.S., the stories of people who have been pushed to the fringes. A lot of cases people are on the road not out of choice but out of necessity. They are being crushed by the rolling wheel of American society and they are doing their best to get out of the way."

columns, Foxy Boxy, free, Freeware Garden, Masami - Sushi Ace, puzzle.

Epic Manager, Kickstarter, Manavoid Entertainment.

If you told me Richard D. James — better known as Aphex Twin — was an alien, I’d believe you. He makes beats from the inside of a bank vault, he owns a tank, and when madonna  begged him to remix a song, he said he'd only do it if she agreed to record a variety of sounds of her gentiles (she did not do it). Music of late is often centered around bass drops. With Aphex Twin, the bass isn't "dropped," it's swung, torn, spun, fermented, and sent into space. We will look back at his work as some of the most important music of our time. He's often referred to as a pioneer, and I agree. But while most pioneers are followed by settlers, Aphex Twin camps alone.

Here's a bite from a recent interview with Richard: "My 5-year-old's made loads of totally insane music on his computer, and I'm just like, 'What the fuck is that? What have I done to him?' He’s using Renoise. I didn't tell him how to use it, he just downloaded a crack off Pirate Bay."

HIS FIVE YEAR OLD SON TAUGHT HIMSELF HOW TO ILLEGALLY DOWNLOAD MUSIC SOFTWARE AND MAKE BEATS

My reaction.

It is widely reported that his new album Syro is his first release in 13 years, but that's not true. Although he hasn't made music as Aphex Twin, he has fairly consistently released music under pseudonyms without telling the public. That's why you'll notice some of the artists are not listed as Aphex Twin in this playlist, but I assure you it's still Richard.

This is a playlist of 23 of his songs, and let me tell you, it was really hard to pick just 23. I love this music. It's everything. Complex, blunt, loud, quiet, beautiful, ugly, nerdy as fuck, undeniably cool, massive, minimalist, pure electronic, pure acoustic, pure bliss, and sometimes completely unlistenable.

This playlist also happens to contain my favorite moment in all of music, the final 20 seconds or so of "Mt Saint Michel + Saint Michaels Mount." Please listen to this on some decent headphones at a volume that almost hurts:

And please remember, this is headphone music. Listening to this on shitty headphones is like going to see Gravity in 2-D; what’s the point? If you aren't listening to this on headphones, you're not really hearing it.

Throw all your other music away; this is Aphex Twin.

GrooveShark first, which has more tracks available than the other services:

An all-terrain camera slider, successfully funded on Kickstarter in 2012 and effectively abandoned by the creator in 2013.

Kickstarter

The public life-cycle of a Kickstarter rarely ends in tragedy. Often, if a Kickstarter manages to get covered by the media before its funding round end, or even starts, it can meet its goal within days, and superfluous funds continue to roll in over the next few weeks. By the time its crowdfunding stage closes, the creators, backers, and media alike are excited and proud to have ushered this new project so quickly to a place of prosperity, eager for it to continue to grow.

Plenty of projects manage to deliver the goods, even if the timeline slides a bit. That was the case with Tim Schafer's Kickstarter game Broken Age. If creators miss deadlines, backers typically continue to receive updates via e-mail and the Kickstarter page. But sometimes the end of funding is the beginning of a slide into radio silence, which ultimately turns into few or no backer orders fulfilled, and no satisfactory explanation for why the project didn't pan out according to the orderly delivery schedule the creators promised.

A project can go off the rails and fail even after its funding succeeds for a number of reasons. There can be unforeseen costs, or design problems, or a team member quits or fails to deliver their part of the project. Often, when a project skids to a halt, the final updates are obscured from the public and sent only to backers, which may be part of the reason failures are often not well-publicized. Occasionally, backers who receive them pass them on or post them publicly on forums, which is as good as it gets in terms of letting the outside world know a project did not ultimately pan out.

Why burn out when you can fade away

MyIDkey, a password manager dongle, raised $473,333 on Kickstarter in March 2013, and $3.5 million overall from other investors. The team decided to change the design of the product and many of its features midstream. In his second-to-last update to backers, which was sent privately rather than posted publicly on the project page, creator Benjamin Chen wrote about how his company's funding situation very suddenly changed:

The UK Airprox Board did not discover the drone that was reported to have flown at a passenger aircraft in May, so we're stuck using a stock approxmiation.

Doodybutch

On Sunday, a British regulatory agency revealed that the country faced its first near-collision between a passenger aircraft and a drone in May. The UK Airprox Board's report, uncovered by the Daily Mail, determined that a quadcopter flew "within 80 feet" of an 74-seat ATR 72 aircraft and did so "deliberately."

The incident happened over the county of Essex as the plane prepared to land at London Southend Airport. According to the report, the quadcopter came close to hitting the larger plane's right-side wing at an altitude of roughly 1,500 feet. The report included a conversation between the ATR 72's pilot and an air control tower, in which the tower confirmed the offending red-and-black craft was probably a quadcopter, as "we've had a couple of those around here" recently.

The Airprox Board noted that the drone's flight path and altitude seemed intent to collide with passenger airplanes taking off or landing. This event follows an American report of a drone nearly colliding with a passenger plane near Tallahassee's airport in March of this year; that near-collision happened at an altitude of over 2,000 feet. In both incidents, regulators did not discover the offending drone or its pilot.

Police shootings have come under heightened scrutiny in the United States lately in the wake of several recent fatal events, including the killing of 18-year old Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, last summer. Now a startup company is hoping to track police shootings more closely for both the sake of the officers and the wider public. The company, Yardarm, has developed a sensor that fits in the base of a police officer's Glock sidearm, which records not only every time the gun is fired, but other potentially revealing information including location, the direction the weapon was pointed when fired, and when exactly it was unholstered. The encrypted data is then sent wirelessly to a mobile app in realtime, where other officers and commanders can access it, allowing them to respond if an officer is in trouble. Yardarm announced last week that it has just begun field trials of the technology with the Sheriff's Department of Santa Cruz, California, and the Carrollton, Texas Police Department. It will also be demoing the tech this week at a police conference in Orlando, Florida.

Yardam was founded in the wake of the horrific 2012 Sandy Hook elementary school shootings and initially its founders wanted to make a consumer smart gun that could be remotely disabled, but abandoned those plans because of resistance from gun owners and gun rights advocates, the Huffington Post notes. Whether Yardarm's sensors — reportedly inspired by electronic luggage trackers — catch on with police departments or not, it's worth pointing out that the data they record can't answer some key questions about police encounters, such as what transpired before a gun was unholstered, why in particular it was drawn, and whether police or suspects tried to de-escalate the situation before resorting to deadly force. It's unclear whether anyone besides police departments — defense attorneys, for example — would have access to the data and under what conditions. The knowledge that a police officer's sidearm is being tracked could also give some officers pause before pointing their weapons, for better or worse. At the same time, Yardarm's data could provide greater objective detail about a police shooting than is available now, and the company is but one of many seeking to provide police departments with more advanced officer tracking products.

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The iPhone 6 and 6 Plus devices hit shelves today in mainland China, and buyers are lining up outside of telcos and Apple stores across the country. But one local carrier outlet is aiming to make its customers’ deep pockets even deeper. A photo going viral on Weibo depicts a tailor at a China Unicom branch in Shanghai adjusting pant pockets to accommodate the oversized iPhone 6 Plus.

It’s likely the local outlet deliberately built the booth in hopes of attracting media attention – note how the woman beside the booth stands above two microphones.

As some Chinese users have pointed out, this China Unicom branch isn’t the first to come up with this idea. When the iPhone 6 Plus arrived in Amsterdam, local telco KPN hired a tailor to enlarge pant pockets outside one of its retail stores.

We’ll keep an eye out for reports by the Global Association of Trousers on how Apple’s phablet is affecting tailors worldwide.

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