firehose

carcat:

our biology teacher brought a skeleton to class yesterday and now everyone’s treating it as if it’s a part if our class i’m going to

Wee Frederick Douglass

Wee Gertrude Stein

Wee Edgar Allan Poe

Wee Ada Lovelace

Of course it’s true that the whole studio contributes to the final product. Of course Blizzard’s games are “Designed by Blizzard Entertainment.” It is telling of the ideological and material conditions of the games industry that the simple act of giving a full group of workers credit on their production seems like an accomplishment. The irony, of course, is that those employees, beaming with pride, aren’t themselves named or credited in the recruitment video.

@samuelfine, via Polygon

The game features male caveman nudity as a gameplay element.

Link

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZKmsx_vv68k&feature=youtu.be

Original Source

Read on Ars Technica | Comments

In the wake of Dwayne Johnson’s announcement that he would play Black Adam in a Shazam movie, speculation turned to how his character might tie into the rest of the DC movie universe, and how that universe would lash him to the pitiless void, where laughter is swallowed in the vacuum of super seriousness. But it turns out Black Adam may escape into the light, by virtue of his movie being produced under New Line—and not parent studio Warner Bros.—and therefore not directly connected to Warners’ lineup of Justice League films. Talking to Entertainment Weekly, New Line’s Toby Emmerich says Shazam will have “a tone unto itself. It’s a DC comic, but it’s not a Justice League character, and it’s not a Marvel comic. The tone and the feeling of the movie will be different from the other range of comic book movies ...

Game of Thrones: Hodor, Bran Stark Won't Be Back for Season 5 White Hall Journal Two familiar faces will be absent when Game of Thrones returns for its fifth season.... email · print. By TV Guide. The Whitehall Journal - White Hall, AR. By TV Guide. Posted Sep. 4, 2014 @ 9:06 am. By TV Guide Posted Sep. 4, 2014 @ 9:06 am. » Social News ... and more »

Dave Winer, Let Markdown be Markdown:

The Rolling Stones openly copied American blues musicians.

But they came up with their own name, which left them free to develop their own style, following whatever direction their art pulled them in.

SAN ANTONIO—Appearing upbeat and optimistic upon leaving the offices of Red Spur Media on Thursday, local job applicant Marc Tullman told reporters he totally nailed his interview with the man who will make his existence a waking nightmare for the n...

A study at USC sponsored by IBM will study "Black Twitter," trying to figure out what it means for people to form "neighborhoods" online. But has this study become a form of racial profiling, rather than just a sociological investigation?

Read more...

An anonymous reader writes Verizon has agreed to pay $7.4 million because it did not notify customers before using their personal information in marketing campaigns. The FCC discovered that Verizon failed to alert around two million customers of rights that include telling customers how to opt out from having their personal information used. "In today's increasingly connected world, it is critical that every phone company honor its duty to inform customers of their privacy choices and then to respect those choices," Travis LeBlanc, Acting Chief of the FCC's Enforcement Bureau said.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Jason Koebler writes Did you hear about those Comcast service calls from hell that have been cropping up over the last couple months? So did FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler, who said today that switching internet service providers is too damn hard, in part because ISPs have grown used to having a monopoly on broadband services. "Once consumers choose a broadband provider, they face high switching costs that include early-termination fees and equipment rental fees," Wheeler said in a speech today. Wheeler didn't specifically say what the FCC will do (if anything) to change that, but said the answer is to help facilitate more true competition: "If those disincentives to competition weren't enough, the media is full of stories of consumers' struggles to get ISPs to allow them to drop service."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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We knew that SNOW WHITE AND THE HUNSTMAN director Rupert Sanders was working on a GHOST IN THE SHELL adaptation, but we had no idea who he wanted to play the American version of cyberwarrior Motoko Kusanagi. Surprisingly, he's going with more of an up-and-comer than a bonafide movie star: Margot Robbie.

New post from my games blog: Harassment and Marginalization in Videogame Culture:

cynixy:

brinstar:

via Acid for Blood

I was giving Gaters the benefit of the doubt at first. That some of them were sincerely concerned with journalistic quality and corruption and were willing to overlook the strange bedfellows they’d made in that tag. But I have yet to see any of them draft a letter to Sony or Nintendo expressing outrage at purchased ads and articles.Where’s the outcry against the backroom deals at E3? Or the swanky pressers? No, they are focused on SJW sites and speakers. And now they have driven two of the most insightful, moving voices in games journalism out in the name of “purity.” They post about corruption and journalism in their hashtags, while using sockpuppet accounts to harass anyone who speaks out against them. With success, but not without cost.

Jenn Frank was in favor of greater media transparency. She was, as she says, “on their side,” the side of journalistic integrity. And now she’s been driven out by the very people who claim to want that. And Mattie Brice, whose unique perspectives on gaming structures were often eye-opening to me. Gone now. And many other women and POC have written to me recently about how pointless this all is. People who’ve had to fight to make their voices heard, fight just to get a seat at the table, are now being told that they’re not wanted there. If they leave too, then the industry will be a darker place, a sadder place. But it seems like that’s what the Gaters want.

The Saints are favored by 2.5 points on the road to open the season as they head to Atlanta to take on a Falcons team that is finally healthy.

The New Orleans Saints and Atlanta Falcons could be heading for a shootout to open the season, with the Saints 2.5-point favorites on the road, according to OddsShark.

Despite going 1-7 ATS on the road in the regular season last year, the Saints are favored against a Falcons team that was decimated by injuries in 2013. As always, the Saints will bring with them a high-powered offense led by quarterback Drew Brees. He'll be looking to exploit a Falcons defense that was ranked 27th in the NFL.

The Falcons are trying to put last season's nightmare behind them as they welcome back healthy wide receivers Julio Jones and Roddy White. Even 31-year-old running back Steven Jackson is expected to have a better season, despite a hamstring injury throughout training camp and the preseason. This is a team not far removed from Super Bowl aspirations, and taking down the Saints at home is the first step to getting back to that point.

Atlanta is currently enjoying a 5-0 ATS run when starting the season at home, and is 5-1 ATS in its last six games overall.

Be sure to head over to OddsShark to get a complete betting preview of Sunday's matchup.

White House names Google’s Megan Smith the next Chief Technology Officer of the United States – The Washington Post.

Smith, the new U.S. CTO, is an MIT-trained mechanical engineer and entrepreneur with deep roots in the California tech world. She currently serves as a vice president at Google[x], the company’s lab for ambitious next-generation projects, like its delivery-by-drone Project Wing and its balloon-borne Internet connectivity program Project Loon. For nine years, Smith led Google’s team responsible for developing new business, where she led the acquisitions that would become Google Earth and Google Maps. And she’s familiar to Washington’s burgeoning “civic tech” community through her work with the Google Crisis Response project.

Video above – Megan Smith kicked off the Madewithcode event @ Google.

Everyone hold their breath #wheelofdeath #8pagegatefoldchallenge pic.twitter.com/DhLGiZy6Wc

(via Christian Ward ‏@cjwardart on Twitter)

I don’t know about you, but I’m over the big purse trend. The last time I was at an Urban Geek event, I just felt like my purse was in the way of balancing a drink and greeting my friends. So, what’s a girl to do? Go with this slick Urban Tech Belt as seen on the Mobile Marketer.  The belt is designed by Suzi Roher, famous for mod belt designs mixing leather and metal.

“Being hands free makes life super simple,” said Suzi Roher, fashion designer, Canada. “If you are someone who works with your hands like we do in the studio or lives an active lifestyle, it can be hard to consistently pick up that phone to see where the next meeting is, who just called or texted, and so forth.”

This sassy belt comes with a computer watch that allows you to see alerts and feel them with a buzz. Bluetooth tech also allows you to play your fave tunes, and you can even adjust the volume and track number using controls on the belt. The smartphone pocket keeps your regular device close — even Batgirl needs to send a signal once in a while.

The belt is expected to be out in January 2015 with a pricetag of $725, so you better have Alfred check the vault. Of course, if you are a DIY type, you are already contemplating the possibility of a circuit that controls your phone using snaps, zippers or buckles that are conductive. Don’t forget to test your fasteners first with a multimeter, as some glazes and finishes can cut conductivity. Then you’ll need to figure out Bluetooth with your phone — check out our Bluefruit LE Learning Guide. If you really want to go Bat themed, try making your own belt buckle with our 3D Printed LED Buckle Tutorial.

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Every Wednesday is Wearable Wednesday here at Adafruit! We’re bringing you the blinkiest, most fashionable, innovative, and useful wearables from around the web and in our own original projects featuring our wearable Arduino-compatible platform, FLORA. Be sure to post up your wearables projects in the forums or send us a link and you might be featured here on Wearable Wednesday!

Cosplayer Jill Sowell saw Guardians of the Galaxy at least twice and started working on a Peter Quill/Star-Lord costume before the movie was even released. Guardians has had that effect on people. She did a great job piecing together the costume from found pieces, making items for the costume, and modifying yet other pieces. She scored with the long red coat and found it for $8 on eBay (yes, eBay is your friend, cosplayers), painted weathered boots she already had, and made the bag using an action figure and Sideshow statue as reference. For Star-Lord’s weapon, she modified the $20 toy that’s currently on store shelves:

I bought the $20 toy gun from ToysRUs and took it apart. Gave everything a base coat of flat black then hand brushed on the silver, dark metal, and gold colors. The best part was adding what looks like Star Wars “carbon scoring” around the barrel. Saw a prop and it had this basic weathering so I wanted mine to as well. I did give this a good clear coat spray to finish it up, especially on the grip so the paint doesn’t come off when I hold it for a while.

She goes into more detail about modifying the gun and helmet in this post.

Here’s what she did for the oh-so-important walkman:

After some research, i found that the #starlord walkman was this silvery blue version from the late 70s. Painted this cassette player i found at the house and made a sticker for an old tape. The hand lettering ended up looking pretty dang cool!

Read more about the build at Jill’s blog.

via Fashionably Geek

popular shared this story from Coding Horror.

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In 2009 I lamented the state of Markdown:

Right now we have the worst of both worlds. Lack of leadership from the top, and a bunch of fragmented, poorly coordinated community efforts to advance Markdown, none of which are officially canon. This isn't merely incovenient for anyone trying to find accurate information about Markdown; it's actually harming the project's future.

In late 2012, David Greenspan from Meteor approached me and proposed we move forward, and a project crystallized:

I propose that Stack Exchange, GitHub, Meteor, Reddit, and any other company with lots of traffic and a strategic investment in Markdown, all work together to come up with an official Markdown specification, and standard test suites to validate Markdown implementations. We've all been working at cross purposes for too long, accidentally fragmenting Markdown while popularizing it.

We formed a small private working group with key representatives from GitHub, from Reddit, from Stack Exchange, from the open source community. We spent months hashing out the details and agreeing on the necessary changes to turn Markdown into a language you can parse without feeling like you just walked through a sewer – while preserving the simple, clear, ASCII email inspired spirit of Markdown.

We really struggled with this at Discourse, which is also based on Markdown, but an even more complex dialect than the one we built at Stack Overflow. In Discourse, you can mix three forms of markup interchangeably:

• Markdown
• HTML (safe subset)
• BBCode (subset)

Discourse is primarily a JavaScript app, so naturally we needed a nice, compliant implementation of Markdown in JavaScript. Surely such a thing exists, yes? Nope. Even in 2012, we found zero JavaScript implementations of Markdown that could pass the only Markdown test suite I know of, MDTest. It isn't authoritative, it's a community created initiative that embodies its own decisions about rendering ambiguities in Markdown, but it's all we've got. We contributed many upstream fixes to markdown.js to make it pass MDTest – but it still only passes in our locally extended version.

As an open source project ourselves, we're perfectly happy contributing upstream code to improve it for everyone. But it's an indictment of the state of the Markdown ecosystem that any remotely popular implementation wasn't already testing itself against a formal spec and test suite. But who can blame them, because it didn't exist!

Well, now it does.

It took a while, but I'm pleased to announce that Standard Markdown is now finally ready for public review.

standardmarkdown.com

It's a spec, including embedded examples, and implementations in portable C and JavaScript. We strived mightily to stay true to the spirit of Markdown in writing it. The primary author, John MacFarlane, explains in the introduction to the spec:

Because Gruber’s syntax description leaves many aspects of the syntax undetermined, writing a precise spec requires making a large number of decisions, many of them somewhat arbitrary. In making them, I have appealed to existing conventions and considerations of simplicity, readability, expressive power, and consistency. I have tried to ensure that “normal” documents in the many incompatible existing implementations of markdown will render, as far as possible, as their authors intended. And I have tried to make the rules for different elements work together harmoniously. In places where different decisions could have been made (for example, the rules governing list indentation), I have explained the rationale for my choices. In a few cases, I have departed slightly from the canonical syntax description, in ways that I think further the goals of markdown as stated in that description.

Part of my contribution to the project is to host the discussion / mailing list for Standard Markdown in a Discourse instance.

talk.standardmarkdown.com

Fortunately, Discourse itself just reached version 1.0. If the only thing Standard Markdown does is help save a few users from the continuing horror that is mailing list web UI, we all win.

What I'm most excited about is that we got a massive contribution from the one person who, in my mind, was the most perfect person in the world to work on this project: John MacFarlane. He took our feedback and wrote the entire Standard Markdown spec and both implementations.

A lot of people know of John through his Pandoc project, which is amazing in its own right, but I found out learned about him because he built Babelmark. I learned to refer to Babelmark extensively while working on Stack Overflow and MarkdownSharp, a C# implementation of Markdown.

Here's how crazy Markdown is: to decide what the "correct" behavior is, you provide sample Markdown input to 20+ different Markdown parsers … and then pray that some consensus emerges in all their output. emerges. That's what Babelmark does.

In Markdown, we literally built a Tower of Babel.

Have I mentioned that it's a good idea for a language to have a formal specification and test suites? Maybe now you can see why that is.

Oh, and in his spare time, John is also the chair of the department of philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley. No big deal. While I don't mean to minimize the contributions of anyone to the Standard Markdown project, we all owe a special thanks to John.

Markdown is indeed everywhere. And that's a good thing. But it needs to be sane, parseable, and standard. That's the goal of Standard Markdown — but we need your help to get there. If you use Markdown on a website, ask what it would take for that site to become compatible with Standard Markdown; when you see the word "Markdown" you have the right to expect consistent rendering across all the websites you visit. If you implement Markdown, take a look at the spec, try to make your parser compatible with Standard Markdown, and discuss improvements or refinements to the spec.

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