sfcrazy writes: Native support for Netflix is coming to Linux, thanks to their move from Silverlight to HTML5, Mozilla and Google Chrome. Paul Adolph from Netflix proposed a solution to Ubuntu developers: "Netflix will play with Chrome stable in 14.02 if NSS version 3.16.2 or greater is installed. If this version is generally installed across 14.02, Netflix would be able to make a change so users would no longer have to hack their User-Agent to play." The newer version of NSS is set to go out with the next security update.
Alibaba’s initial public offering is likely to be the biggest the world has ever seen. The scale of the thing has led many to compare the huge Chinese company to familiar internet giants in the West, such as Amazon. But the company isn’t just the “Amazon of China”—it’s also the Dropbox, PayPal, Uber, Hulu, and more. Though Google has its fingers in a similarly high volume of pies, its enterprises, unlike Alibaba’s, are exclusively digital.
Alibaba’s distinct businesses resemble more than a dozen major Western companies, by our count—a phenomenon we’ve sketched out in the graphic below. In the text that follows, we unravel some of that complexity—and explain how Alibaba has expanded on its way to a historic IPO.
Following the ambitious vision of founder and chairman Jack Ma, Alibaba has been on an investment bender, snatching up stakes in everything from mobile platforms to brick-and-mortar shopping malls, wealth-management products, and cloud services. This strategy might look scattershot. But Alibaba—a bit like Amazon, the Western company to which it’s most often compared—has demonstrated a knack for dominating whatever sector it enters and for anticipating what consumers want before they know they want it.
E-commerce platforms
Alibaba’s e-commerce platforms have historically made up the core of its business. Alibaba Group got its start with Alibaba.com, a B2B (business-to-business) site launched in 1999, which links foreign companies to Chinese manufacturers. After becoming profitable in 2002, Alibaba.com listed on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange in 2007 (Alibaba Group took Alibaba.com private in 2012 due to both the group’s IPO plans and the stock’s poor performance in 2011).
Ma reinvested Alibaba.com’s profits in Taobao, a C2C (consumer-to-consumer) site that resembles eBay, which the company rolled out in 2003. The site proved wildly popular. To meet demand from businesses to sell their goods to consumers, Alibaba Group created Taobao Mall, which it spun off as its own domain, Tmall.com, in 2010. Within a year, Western brands like Gap and Ray-Ban had opened up storefronts on Tmall.
Tapping into Chinese social media is a critical part of Alibaba’s efforts to grow its e-commerce platforms. In 2013 it bought an 18% stake in the microblog Weibo—China’s largest, now with over 129 million monthly active users and penetration in almost all of the country’s urban areas—from its parent, Sina. Following Weibo’s April public listing in New York, Alibaba’s stake was set to rise to 30%.
The deal makes sense particularly in China’s e-commerce market. Chinese shoppers are more likely than their US counterparts to follow brands online and purchase items through social media. Alibaba is also making a play for China’s quickly growing demand for online streaming—some 450 million people, or about 80% of the country’s internet users, watch television, movies and videos online. Alibaba recently shelled out $1.22 billion for a stake in the website Youku Tudou, the country’s largest online video platform—often compared to Youtube, which is banned in China. Other acquisitions include a controlling stake in ChinaVision Media Group, a television and film production company, and a 20% stake in Wasu Media, a Hangzhou-based online television firm.
Alibaba’s messaging app in the middle between WhatsApp and WeChat.
Winning over the 500 million Chinese consumers who surf the web, shop, chat, invest, or play games primarily via their smartphones is arguably Alibaba’s most critical task. It faces competition from internet giant Tencent, whose widely used messaging app WeChat is already a platform for all of those functions. Alibaba’s answers to WeChat (and, to a degree, its US-based rival, WhatsApp) include messaging apps Laiwang and the California-based Tango, in which Alibaba has a minority stake.
Beyond messaging, Alibaba wants to worm its way into every aspect of Chinese smartphone users’ daily habits, which are still forming. Alibaba offers an app for booking a taxi, Kuaide Dache(literally, “quickly get a taxi”); AutoNavi, a maps app;and a music-streaming site, Xiami. Alibaba has also started to compete with Baidu, China’s leading search portal, by developing a search engine specifically for mobile, via a venture with UCWeb-browser, an already popular Chinese mobile browser.
Education
Alibaba Group joined Temasek and other prominent funds in February to invest $100 million in TutorGroup, an English-learning tutoring platform that connects students in China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan with more than 2,000 teachers in 30 countries. TutorGroup is now expanding beyond English-language tutoring and into 40 countries worldwide. It’s not clear how large Alibaba’s stake is.
A photo from the travelogue 117go, one of Alibaba’s investments.
As domestic and international tourism has taken off in China, Alibaba launched a travel section of its marketplace, Taobao Travel, where travel operators offer flights, hotels, tours and other packages. The company has also invested in a Chinese portal, Qyer, for travel deals, and a travel journal app called 117go (like Instagram, but exclusively for travel). It has also led funding for a visa services company called ByeCity.
Retail logistics
As an e-commerce company, Alibaba needs to ship goods to far-flung corners of China with poor infrastructure. Late last year it bought a $364 million stake in Chinese appliance and logistics company Haier. The deal establishes a joint venture with the Haier subsidiary Goodaymart, which has a network of 20,000 stores and distribution channels in some 2,800 Chinese counties that Alibaba can use.
In March, Alibaba also made its first foray into brick-and-mortar stores, buying a minority stake in the Chinese department store operator Intime. The goal is to build up “online-to-offline” shopping—a sector that accounted for only 1.2% of all e-commerce transactions last year. Intime will encourage customers to use QR codes and virtual prepaid cards offered by Alibaba to make purchases in its stores, while Alibaba will sell Intime products on Tmall.
Alibaba launched its cloud service in 2009 under the moniker Aliyun or Alicloud. Shortly after acquiring Dropbox-clone Kanbox, in September 2013, Alibaba announced plans to launch Aliyun worldwide starting this year, with hints that it will focus on the US and Southeast Asia. Alibaba is squaring off against Amazon Web Services, the current leader in rented cloud computing, which recently started expanding into China.
Going global
Though Alibaba has the corner on China’s rapidly growing e-retail sector, its ambitions are bigger. In September 2013, it launched Taobao in Singapore, which will serve as its Southeast Asia hub.
But there are signs that it also has its sights set on the US. Since the beginning of last year, Alibaba has been on a global shopping spree, buying stakes in a slew of US startups and launching 11 Main, a US online retail site, in February 2014. Its investments include 1stdibs, a luxury e-commerce site; Tango, a WeChat-like mobile messaging app; ShopRunner(paywall), a storefront-based online shopping platform; Quixey, a mobile search company; Fanatics, a sports e-commerce company; and Lyft, a US ride-sharing app that’s one of the main competitors to Uber.
The NFL has had a bevy of legal problems in recent weeks, and the league is finally trying to stop the avalanche.
The NFL is mandating that all players as well as league and team personnel undergo educational seminars about domestic violence and sexual assault during the next 30 days. In the memo sent to teams and staff, the NFL also announced that it has partnered with the National Domestic Violence Hotline and National Sexual Violence Resource Center.
"We will dedicate significant resources to raise awareness on the subjects of domestic violence and sexual assault," Goodell said, per Sports Illustrated. "These are by no means final steps. We will continue to work with experts to expand and develop long-term programs that raise awareness, educate, and prevent domestic violence and sexual assault both within the NFL and in our society in general."
These moves, along with the hiring of four women to help guide the league's domestic violence policies, are part of the NFL's response to widespread criticism for its handling of abuse cases involving some of its most high-profile players, including running backs Ray Rice and Adrian Peterson, along with defensive ends Ray McDonald and Greg Hardy.
Most archeologists bristle at the mention of Indiana Jones, and for good reason. In this piece, originally featured at Last Word On Nothing, journalist Erik Vance takes a close look at the questionable professional ethics of Henry Walton Jones, Jr. and arrives at an unsettling conclusion: The man is a looter.
The final installment of producer John Aglialoro’s three-part adaptation of Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged is prime Mystery Science Theater 3000 fodder, cut-rate to the point of incoherence. Composed in large part of stock footage and stock photos overlaid with text and narration, it’s a movie where everything, from the sets to the cast and crew, is an unconvincing, low-cost substitute for something else.
Rand’s kooky, purple imagination—with its eroticized elitism and its fixation on trains, skyscrapers, and other idealized symbols of phallic power—is here reduced to strained representations. A flight is two people getting into a plane and then getting off at the same spot at the same airstrip; a plan for a top-secret weapon is a printout of a court decision tucked into a manila folder; a futuristic power source is a light emanating from behind a half-closed door; a three-hour speech is ...
Cobbled together a new print from an existing drawing, a digital coloring job, and the castle background from the first Nicolas Cage Adventure Set (that’s right, I said first. Adventure Set #2 is at the printer’s right now).
games are hard and backing a kickstarter is not an entitlement beat
Two years ago, beloved science-fiction writer Neal Stephenson launched a crowdfunding campaign to start making a realistic swordfighting game. The Clang Kickstarter notched more than $500,000 towards that end. But a game never materialized and, as announced today, people who backed Clang are starting to get their money back. The game, it seems, won't be happening.
'The untitled pilot was written by Masters Of Sex creator/executive producer Michelle Ashford, whose role in the project will probably be greatly reduced now that she has her own series to run. That gives Bruckheimer and Bay the chance to put their creative stamp on the Miami-set pilot'
TNT has officially given the green light to Jerry Bruckheimer and Michael Bay’s cocaine drama pilot, a project that, unlike a big pile of cocaine, has been allowed to sit undisturbed for over six years. Bruckheimer and Bay originally wanted to sell the project to HBO, presumably because they could afford more pyrotechnics that way, but now that they’ve landed on basic cable they’ll have to make do with one Aerosmith song and two exploding helicopters per episode. (The duo presumably settled on TNT due to its association with their beloved explosions.)
The untitled pilot was written by Masters Of Sex creator/executive producer Michelle Ashford, whose role in the project will probably be greatly reduced now that she has her own series to run. That gives Bruckheimer and Bay the chance to put their creative stamp on the Miami-set pilot, loosely based on the 2006 documentary ...
the blog's name has changed to " I Make These With Garry's Mod Stop Asking Please"
The name Elaine Benes is but one important vowel away from “Elaine Bones.” This is among the things one learns when visiting jerryseinfeldsskeleton.com, and it comes as close as anything to supplying a raison d’être for the stubbornly odd, defiantly meaningless Tumblr, which recreates memorable moments from the television show Seinfeld with walking, talking skeletons in place of Jerry, George, Kramer, and Elaine. Other characters in the series, like the Soup Nazi, are typically represented as flesh-and-blood human beings. Newman, naturally, has been replaced by Shrek. The Tumblr, which is currently nearing 10,000 followers in only about a month of existence, is created with the sandbox physics game Garry’s Mod, which proudly declares itself to have no objectives and no winners, making it a perfect fit for the famed “show about nothing.”
The artist behind the Tumblr is one Bryce Maciel, who also seems to be ...
"finally allowing a hoarse, weakened Ryan Reynolds to end his heroic filibuster on the Senate floor"
After many years of being the pet lost cause of comic-book movie fans, Fox has slotted Deadpool for a February 12, 2016 release, finally allowing a hoarse, weakened Ryan Reynolds to end his heroic filibuster on the Senate floor. Plans have been in the works for years on an X-Men spinoff about Deadpool—the masked mercenary whose powers include the ability to heal himself, a magic bag, and a smart-assed wit, developed as a healing defense mechanism against people making fun of his “magic bag”—beginning when Reynolds played him in 2009’s X-Men Origins: Wolverine. Most recently, test footage from that proposed spinoff leaked online, prompting a renewed outpouring of support/outrage that the film hadn’t been made yet, even as Fox was said to be prepping its own Marvel-style universe.
While no official deal is currently in place for Reynolds to return to the character, Variety says ...
An anonymous e-mailer threatened to blow up a bomb at the Game Developers Choice Awards this past March unless the hosts rescinded an award recognizing feminist critic Anita Sarkeesian, the organizers of the event have confirmed to Kotaku.
MRAs are the American Taliban, willing to terrorize any woman who dares to speak out, and anyone who gives that woman a platform from which to speak.
"I miss the time when we were still defined by our music. When our music was still our music. I miss being younger, with a head full of subversive ideas; white cables snaking down my neck, stolen songs in my pocket. There will never be an app for that."
NONE OF THIS SHIT HAS STOPPED OR GONE AWAY YOU FUCKING MORONS
Have you ever loved a car? Maybe it was an old truck you drove for hundreds of thousands of miles, or maybe it was your very first car: where you had your very first beer and your very first kiss. You can love a car and keep on loving it as long as you don’t crash it. If you’re willing to maintain it, you can keep driving it basically forever. Maybe some day it’ll be old enough that you’ll get thumbs-ups from cool kids as you putter down the street in your charmingly vintage car. This is not the case with gadgets—even though, for many of us, our old gadgets were way more important than our old cars.
Gadgets come and go from our lives. Technology marches forward so rapidly that even if you could replace a broken part—which often you can’t—doing so just wouldn’t make any sense. Other times, the networks and services those gadgets depend on to keep running go away entirely. Gadgets die, even the ones we love.
When the 1990s were getting older, there was this crazy new music format called MP3. It wasn’t the greatest audio format, but it was good enough. It was compressed in such a way that it was easy to download, and yet sounded good to most normal people. Suddenly, you could download a whole album’s worth of music to your computer. And, for me at least, that music was free. (Because I stole it.)
“You can fit your whole music library in your pocket. Never before possible.” Holy. Shit.
Since its advent, recorded music had been a scarce commodity. You had to work hard to get money to pay for compact discs or cassettes or long play vinyl records. Even blank tapes cost money. That preciousness led to a kind of curation you don’t really see anymore. You had to make choices, because you couldn’t have it all. Your music collection defined you. It was your music.
But then the internet gave us FTP and then Napster and so, so many places to steal music. It fit so perfectly with the libertine zeitgeist of the turn of the millennium. Information wanted to be free! And music, organized into digital files, was just information. Now we could have it in limitless supply.
For most of us, MP3 was still a thing you played on your computer. There were a few attempts to liberate it—little flash players that would barely hold an album, or hard-drive based jukeboxes that were too big and too delicate to be useful. They were all awful.
Then one day in October 2001, Apple invited a bunch of journalists down to see some new thing it had. I was working at Macworld magazine at the time. (Which, like the iPod, died this week. Pour one out.) We all knew it was going to be a music thing, and were even expecting an MP3 player. I remember wanting to go, and being envious of the people who were selected to cover it. It was intriguing and mysterious. What would Apple do? Would they release some little flash thing, or a giant jukebox?
Apple keynotes weren’t such a big deal back then. Sure, they were great. Steve Jobs was already doing the things he would become famous for doing, but back then he was mostly talking about Macs and OS X and software nobody except a handful of nerds cared about.
But that iPod event—the Apple “music” event—changed everything else that would come after, for Apple and the rest of us, too. Because like Steve Jobs said that day, with his dad jeans on, “you can fit your whole music library in your pocket. Never before possible.”
Holy. Shit.
Looking at someone’s iPod was like looking into their soul.
The other reporters came back with those little white MP3 players, and big boxes of compact discs. See, Apple pre-loaded the music players—the iPods, but you knew I was talking about iPods—with music from Real Bands. But they couldn’t legally give out the iPods with MP3s unless they also purchased a copy of every CD. So everyone got two copies of each album: one on the iPod, the other on a piece of plastic. Nobody who went to the event kept the CDs, they just piled them up on a table at the office. I still have one, Simon and Garfunkel’s Bookends, because, while Apple design may be the coolest thing around, the company has always, always had shitty taste in music. (See also: U2.)
Nobody had seen anything like it before. It had a 5GB hard drive packed into a device the size of a pack of cigarettes. I didn’t even know anyone was making hard drives that small. To get through all your songs, it had this wheel that let you click and click and clickckckckckckckckckckck your way through thousands and thousands of songs.
It cost $400. Out of my price range, by a long shot. (I was a junior editor at Macworld trying to pay rent in San Francisco.) But I saved and saved until I could afford one.
Suddenly, they were everywhere. White earbuds on the bus. White earbuds on the plane. White earbuds on every street I walked down, in every city in America. Sometimes you’d go to a party, and the host would leave the iPod hooked up to the speakers, so everyone could take turns DJing. Click the wheel and rock the party.
Music changed. There was a very real sense that Apple was abetting music piracy, which only made it cooler. Who could possibly be buying 10,000 songs? And so Apple made its own store, and slowly we started buying music again. Our music. Our songs. We entered the era of the single and the playlist. The track mattered and the album did not. Whole genres just vanished into the maw of the playlist.
We made playlists that spoke to the lives we lived at the moment. Looking at someone’s iPod was like looking into their soul. In their music you could see who they were. You could tell if they were sophisticated or rough. You could see in their playlists the moments they fell in love and the moments they fell back out again. You could see the filthiest, nastiest hip hop in the little white boxes of the primmest people, and know their inner lives a little better than you did before.
The iPhone is about as subversive as a bag of potato chips, and music doesn’t define anyone anymore.
For ten years my iPod—in various incarnations—was my constant companion. It went with me on road trips and backpacking through the wilderness. I ran with it. I swam with it. (In a waterproof case!) I listened to sad songs that reminded me of friends and family no longer with me. I made a playlist for my wife to listen to during the birth of our first child, and took the iPod with us to the hospital. I took one to a friend’s wedding in Denmark, where they saved money on a DJ by running a four hour playlist, right from my iPod. And because the party lasted all night, they played it again.
Everyone played everything again and again.
And now it’s dead. Gone from the Apple Store. Disappeared, while we were all looking at some glorified watch.
In all likelihood we’re not just seeing the death of the iPod Classic, but the death of the dedicated portable music player. Now it’s all phones and apps. Everything is a camera. The single-use device is gone—and with it, the very notion of cool that it once carried. The iPhone is about as subversive as a bag of potato chips, and music doesn’t define anyone anymore.
Soon there will be no such thing as your music library. There will be no such thing as your music. We had it all wrong! Information doesn’t want to be free, it wants to be a commodity. It wants to be packaged into apps that differ only in terms of interface and pricing models. It wants to be rented. It wants to reveal nothing too personal, because we broadcast it to Facebook and we should probably turn on a private session so our boss doesn’t see that we listen to Anaconda on repeat and think we’re high at work. (Point of information: Why is he on Facebook at work?)
There’s an iPod Classic in the console of my car. It’s the third full-sized iPod that I’ve owned, and if I could, I’d keep it forever. But there’s no way to maintain it, not practically. One day it’s going to die. Its little hard drive will seize up, and cease. Everything on it will effectively vanish. I guess, really, it’s gone already—and it has been for a few years now.
I miss the time when we were still defined by our music. When our music was still our music. I miss being younger, with a head full of subversive ideas; white cables snaking down my neck, stolen songs in my pocket. There will never be an app for that.
'Pabst has been owned by Dean Metropoulos, the consumer products magnate who recently took over the Twinkie line of products from Hostess Brands with private equity firm Apollo.
Mr. Metropoulos acquired Pabst in 2010 for about $250 million, and the sale to Oasis and TSG will be a healthy return on his investment. Since taking Pabst over, Mr. Metropoulos has turned management of the company over to his sons, Evan and Daren, who have served as co-chief executives. They are expected to step down after a sale.'
Includes Rainier and Oly's.
Does anyone have any alternatives for cheap beer owned by an American company?
' An experience which combines eating with entertainment; spec. the sector of the restaurant industry comprising restaurant chains based on an entertainment theme, such as sport, music, or film.'
The Florida man who police say gunned down his daughter and six grandchildren Thursday had been to prison for fatally shooting his young son during a hunting trip 13 years ago, according to court records.
which is even funnier because she’s the reason lesbians are called lesbians. she was know as sappho of lesbos and her poems were all about her love for women
no im totally not a lesbo my super actual husband is dick allcocks from man island i’m megahet
It seemed like the inevitable choice. When Don Pardo, the longtime voice of Saturday Night Live since the very beginning, passed away last month, speculation over his successor by and large pointed towards the one man who has professionally imitated Pardo in the past, former SNL cast member Darrell Hammond. Today NBC announced (via USA Today and the New York Times) that Hammond will, in fact, take over as the show's new announcer.
Hammond was a regular on SNL from 1995 until 2009, and during his tenure reportedly did over 100 celebrity impersonations — the most famous ones arguably being Sean Connery (opposite Will Ferrell on Celebrity Jeopardy) and then-president Bill Clinton.
"I am what I am, and I look like me, not everyone else."
On Tuesday, Norwegian news site VG reported that a 16-year-old boy found his newest Facebook profile photo deleted automatically by the site, but not for containing offensive content or misrepresenting himself. Embret Henock Haldammen, a high school student in Kristiansand, Norway, had posted his latest school portrait weeks earlier, only to receive a notice stating that "the profile picture violated Facebook's policies."
Without receiving a response clarifying what those policies were, Haldammen came to the conclusion that the image was deleted because of his face's lymphatic malformations, which he's had since birth.
"We're used to people pointing, looking, and laughing at him," Haldammen's father said to Norwegian news site Fædrelandsvennen (translated by Google). "But that Facebook acts as a youth, and not a company, is appalling." The reports also include a photo of Haldammen posing with a former Norwegian Prime Minister, which he had used as a profile photo in the past with no incident.
'Between 2010 and 2013, Seattle renters took a bigger hit to their pocketbooks than renters in any other large U.S. city. The gross median rent here — that is, rent plus utilities — spiked by $113, or nearly 11 percent. That’s the sharpest rise in rent among the nation’s 50 most-populous cities.
Seattle is the only large city where rents jumped by more than $100, and by more than 10 percent, in this period.'
Portland had the third highest increase, both dollar-wise ($62) and percentage-wise (6.9%). Colorado Springs was second.
'This is one of my favorite things about Breaking Madden. Finding the responsive behaviors in scenarios that should not exist. Surely the game's AI programmers didn't sit down and explicitly program them to walk at a grocery-aisle pace and watch their match-ups streak past them en route to murdering their quarterback.
No, Madden just formed a decision with the crumbs of code it had sitting around. "I guess this will happen," it said. Just as we struggle to settle on who was the first human, the descendants of artificial intelligences will one look back upon a moment. "In this moment," they will say, "we became us." Maybe that moment is a moment like this. Maybe it was the time you kept the toaster lever pressed down after it started buzzing. This moment may well have come already, and I pray only that the reckoning arrives long after I am dead. Here is a punter kicking his blocker in the nards.'
Chiefs rookie De'Anthony Thomas is on track to make his NFL debut Sunday. Breaking Madden celebrates his arrival.
After recovering from a hamstring injury, God willing, Chiefs running back/return man De'Anthony Thomas will play in his first-ever regular-season game Sunday. That is the day he will officially become my favorite player in the NFL.
This, from the preseason, happened the first time he ever caught a punt in a Chiefs uniform:
I've written previously, and multiple times, on retired Chiefs return man Dante Hall, who remains my second-favorite football player of all time. I perceive this as a Highlander sort of arrangement: there are a number of super-exciting, unreasonably fast Chiefs special-teams returners scattered across history, and De'Anthony Thomas is now the one to carry the torch.
He is also my favorite athlete to follow on Twitter.
In this episode of Breaking Madden, we will be dumping irresponsibly high expectations upon the shoulders of a dude who has never played a regular-season NFL game and is barely old enough to legally drink:
Music: "Never Catch Me" by Flying Lotus feat. Kendrick Lamar
And here is how we're going to do that.
I. MAKE THE DOLPHINS SLOW AND BAD.
Kansas City's Week 3 opponent is Miami, a team that is now magically made up of frustratingly slow players. One quirk about Madden NFL 15, as well as previous editions, is that it's nearly impossible to set the special-teams lineups you want. If you drag down the stats of the special-teamers, the game will simply find higher-rated guys and place them on the special teams unit.
So just to be safe, I individually adjusted the ratings of every player on the team. Every dude is now a 0/99 at Speed, Acceleration, and Awareness. In addition, I lowered punter Brandon Field's leg power just a little bit, in the hope that more punts will stay in play.
II. SCUTTLE THE CHIEFS' OFFENSE WITH TWITTER PLAYERS.
I want De'Anthony Thomas, via kick and punt returns, to win this game all by himself, which is why everyone who touches the ball on the Kansas City offense is a useless tree-person. As usual, I found them on Twitter.
if you would like to be in the next Breaking Madden, please tell me the worst thing you have ever worn
I asked this question because it's rather central to being a Kansas City Chiefs fan. See, I think the Chiefs' colors look pretty sweet as applied to a uniform, especially their red-on-red home uniform. This color scheme does not work in any other wardrobe context. I would usually prefer not to police the fashion choices of others, but I must here: anyone who wears a giant Chiefs jersey in any context other than "playing in a football game" looks like Ronald McDonald at a baptism.
Y'all were more than happy to self-report your fashion infractions. Ten of y'all really stood out, and you now comprise the Kansas City Chiefs' offense. You are all seven feet tall, horribly slow, and terrible at everything.
Ryan wins the starting quarterback position, in part because his story is the best-worst, and in part because including in this episode involves getting his height wrong even though it's explicitly stated in his Twitter handle.
Wearing a meat tenderizer on one's hammer loop is fundamentally iconoclastic, as it claims a spot reserved for something as useful as a hammer, and yet is itself completely useless. That animal took the trouble of building itself all that flesh, and you can't trouble yourself to tenderize it via a marinade, or by braising it, or by any other way than to whack it with a stupid-ass hammer? I see you standing in the aisle with the kitchen miscellanea and furnace filters and wrapping paper, staring at this artifact of thoughtless destruction, twist-tied to its cardboard scabbard. Go forth and ruin, Unitasker of Worlds, Thor of the Walgreens.
Neither you nor your mom could be troubled to draw a few circles on it to illustrate cheese holes, which would have literally been the only thing required to represent the completist's image of cheese. The box would be pushed upward whenever you tried to sit at a desk, rendering you nothing but a child with a box over his head. God dangit.
See, this is how I know I'm not emotionally equipped to be a parent yet: I've never met this child who doesn't even exist anymore, and I'm wrought with worry about him being picked-on and sad. If I had a kid and I got wind that he or she got called a butthead, I'd blubber until sawdust came out.
TE: Jane Coaston, SB Nation and EDSBS contributor (@cjane87)
This is a dangerous game. I tried to do this ironically once and just didn't have the fortitude. I once received a shirt as a gag gift that read,
Jesus Is
"WHASSAAAAAP"
In My Life
and one day I resolved to wear it in public. I stepped out the door, walked half a block down the street, and then sailed back home to change upon a wave of self-conscious shame. This is not tenable in Kentucky. This ain't Brooklyn. They will ask you about the Jesus here.
David went on to note that he had this hat custom-made at a hat-embroidering store at the mall. This is crucial.
I don't know how old David is, but when people my age were 10 years old, our culture was awash in a trend of in-your-face pith. BUTTON YOUR FLY. SHUT UP AND JAM. Shirts that said, YO! BY THE TIME YOU FINISH READING THIS SHIRT I WILL HAVE SCORED ON YOU!
When you're 10, this is the raddest thing in the world to you, but you aren't really developed enough to be able to reproduce it. And that is how we arrive at me, in my fourth-grade classroom, designing a coffee mug for my mother that read:
YO! I'M FULL OF COFFEE NOTTTTTTT FOOL!
My family saw this and dropped me off in the forest, where I died.
New project: ask athletes to sign absurd things that don't make any sense. I was at my friend's house one time when his dad poked his head into the room. He had just found out that he was going to be at some kind of event that Michael Jordan would be attending. "I've got to head to the airport in two minutes," he said. "If you give me something to autograph, I'll see if he'll sign it for you." All I had on me was a pack of baseball cards I'd just bought. I gave him a Tim Wallach baseball card. It was not signed, and it is impossible to understand why not.
POSSIBILITY A: you're rolling the dice on the astronomically low possibility of meeting someone at your party who's dressed as a wall jack. POSSIBILITY B: you coordinate with your partner, who is dressed as a wall jack, and broadcast the message that your sex life is horribly unsatisfying.
"are you in" "yeah" "stay completely still for several minutes" "i am" "charge that Nikon, baby" "oh yeah" "grill that turkey bacon, baby" "yeeeeeahhh"
Also, where's the grounding plug? Safe sex, y'all.
III. MAKE EVERY PLAY THAT IS NOT A DE'ANTHONY THOMAS RETURN THOROUGHLY UNWATCHABLE.
Our quarterback, Ryan Gantz, is the only one who will really be doing much of anything. On every play, he will take the snap and just straight-up run away.
He will run directly backwards as fast as I can make him run. (He runs far slower in that GIF, which I sped up to 3x.) Why, yes, that will sometimes result in a safety! In fact, this ensures that virtually every Chiefs possession will end in a safety.
This is important, because it gives the Dolphins a chance to compete with DAT and his punt/kick returns. Remember, all the Dolphins are too slow and terrible to build much of an offensive drive. They might kick the occasional field goal, but apart from that, they'll need all these safeties to keep pace on the scoreboard.
In other words, this is a match between De'Anthony Thomas and his self-destructive disaster of an offense. The Chiefs' greatest enemies are so often themselves.
THE GAME.
We'll get to DAT, I promise. We just need to talk about this offense first. Here is Ryan Gantz running an impromptu 40-yard dash in real time.
His 40 time is just over 10 seconds, a full four seconds slower than the slowest recorded time in NFL Combine history. That he can run so far, so slowly, ought to clue you in to the sort of Dolphins team we're dealing with here. If either side were any good at literally anything, they would win 200-0. They're just stuck in this miserable, eternal gridlock.
When Kansas City has the ball, the offensive linemen are the only real-life Chiefs on the field. You might wonder whether they're equipped with code that would tell them what to do when their tree-man of a quarterback just up and runs away. The answer is that they do not give a shit about him.
This is one of my favorite things about Breaking Madden. Finding the responsive behaviors in scenarios that should not exist. Surely the game's AI programmers didn't sit down and explicitly program them to walk at a grocery-aisle pace and watch their match-ups streak past them en route to murdering their quarterback.
No, Madden just formed a decision with the crumbs of code it had sitting around. "I guess this will happen," it said. Just as we struggle to settle on who was the first human, the descendants of artificial intelligences will one look back upon a moment. "In this moment," they will say, "we became us." Maybe that moment is a moment like this. Maybe it was the time you kept the toaster lever pressed down after it started buzzing. This moment may well have come already, and I pray only that the reckoning arrives long after I am dead. Here is a punter kicking his blocker in the nards.
This is from a practice-mode session. I wanted to try to gauge how Brandon Fields' punts would land from different spots on the field. As it turns out, if I set the line of scrimmage all the way back to the goal line and told the Dolphins to punt, this happened every single time.
Anyway. Here's what our other Twitter players were up to: a whole lot of nothing. I just sent them on verts every time, because it didn't really matter. Every time, they were comfortable calling for the ball. Take, for instance, tight end Jane Coaston. It's a first-and-goal situation, and she's calling for it. That's perfectly reasonable! Let's see how the quarterback's doi--
yeah
So. On to De'Anthony Thomas himself, who was taking shit from absolutely no one.
I find it really tough to return punts and kicks in this year's Madden. As recently as a couple years ago, two or three times out of ten, I could pull this specific zig-zag route that would take my man right through a hole in the coverage and into the end zone. Under normal settings, I've never scored a return touchdown in this game.
Even with all the game's settings pushed in my favor, it was kind of difficult. Only 11 of Thomas' 24 punt returns went for touchdowns. That's ridiculous, of course, but the enterprise was far from automatic, and I don't think I scored any of those without reversing field at least once or twice.
This maneuver won us some success. The guy in the blue circle is De'Anthony.
I'd kind of bait the Dolphins into gravitating toward the right side of the field. Once they sold out for it, I'd make this broad sweep to the other side of the field and haul ass.
You know what, this was often a lot like playing Snake.
It's like DAT was the head of the snake. He and the Dolphins were a singular organism. We just had to be careful not to run him into his tail. This required us to buy a lot of time in far-flung regions of the field, just waiting in holding patterns until a hole opened up.
This one, though. This was our best run.
We didn't draw this constellation to be cute. It was a measure of necessity. In some way, it felt like smacking the side of a bottle until ketchup comes out. Just survive and keep moving the pieces around. And, man, we killed it. Even if none of DAT's teammates were worth two quarters of a shit.
He's like a backpack! Like a lil' bitty backpack!
THE RESULTS.
The ebb and flow of this game was probably the strangest I've seen in the history of Breaking Madden. I played almost the entire game with either no idea or the wrong idea of which team was going to come out on top.
The safeties piled up early, and I was down at the end of the first quarter, 18-16. Then I started to get better at returning, and before I knew it, I was up 78-52 in the second half. This was a rout.
In my pride and foolishness, I had failed to consider that while Miami safeties were a near-immovable constant, opportunities for punt returns were not. Down several scores in the fourth quarter, the Dolphins often went for it rather than punting. They started to aim their punts out of bounds. Unbelievably, they started placing their kickoffs out of bounds, which of course results in a penalty. The game was getting wise.
With that 78-52 lead, and on such a roll, I would have found it inconceivable that the Dolphins would 28 unanswered points (two field goals and 11 safeties) to take the lead, but that is exactly what they did.
One minute left. With an 86-84 lead, the Dolphins elected to punt. It was, mercifully, inbounds. I was nervous. Please know that the rules I'd insisted on for this game made the game very time-consuming. Just playing the game itself took about seven hours. I had spent all day on this quest, and my success depended on one single punt return.
I ran out of room. I had to gun it. I iust ... I ran out of room.
The first time I ever really invested myself in an entire football game, I was eight years old. Chiefs-Dolphins, wild-card playoffs, 1991. The Chiefs trailed, 17-16, when Nick Lowery made his paces and readied for a 52-yard field goal try. It was so close, I thought he'd made it, and I started to celebrate before I realized I was the only one in the house who was celebrating.
I had these NFL bed sheets with all the NFL teams' logos printed on them. That night, I found all the Dolphins logos and crossed them out with my little magic markers. It was now a school night in January. I cried and went to sleep.
First down, around midfield, with seconds left. A Chief and a Dolphin begin to dance. Ryan Gantz dutifully offers himself up for safety one final time.
And it is done. Dolphins 88, Chiefs 84.
The game said we lost, and also that we won. Madden has trouble adding the final score, just as it has for the better part of the last decade. This is fine. I do not need a picture of loss. I know the stench.
But on this day, De'Anthony Thomas has shattered every return record in the books. To the stats:
Music: "Steppin' Out" by Joe Jackson
For many more episodes of Breaking Madden, click here.
Super Opinionated.
WIRED.
![Looks like our 'Have you tried Seattle?' campaign worked! However, we still came in third and are still being priced out... :/ [/r/seattle]](http://b.thumbs.redditmedia.com/nQLPu5n_r6nSi1MrLTsThq_w25ziKmpADbXIAlh_FQk.jpg "Looks like our 'Have you tried Seattle?' campaign worked! However, we still came in third and are still being priced out... :/ [/r/seattle]")
