The Old Reader

24 Jun 00:04

devilduck: We love these wonderful vintage postcards that’ve...

devilduck:

We love these wonderful vintage postcards that’ve been beautifully illustrated with portraits of characters from Twin Peaks, still one of our all-time favorite TV shows. They’re from a series called Lost in the Post: Twin Peaks created by Paul Willoughby, London-based illustrator, artist and creative director of Human After All. They were shown at a 20th-anniversary exhibition of Twin Peaks-releated art, which took place at the Menier Gallery in Southwark, London in October 2012.

[via Flavorwire]

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24 Jun 00:03

explodingdog: I love you too.

explodingdog:

I love you too.

Infinull, Russian Sledges likes this

24 Jun 00:03

lizardsenjoyinglife: this bearded dragon enjoys dressing as a...

lizardsenjoyinglife:

this bearded dragon enjoys dressing as a real dragon.

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24 Jun 00:03

theuppitynegras: southerlyscholar: holyheifer: Welcome to the...

theuppitynegras:

southerlyscholar:

holyheifer:

Welcome to the south

Finally, someone gets it.

team cruel tea

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23 Jun 23:58

Oregon basketball players suspended from campus up to 10 years following sexual assault investigation

by Ricky O'Donnell

firehose
great

Three Oregon basketball players involved in a sexual assault case earlier this year won't be back in Eugene anytime soon.

Dominic Artis, Brandon Austin and Damyean Dotson will be suspended from campus at the University of Oregon for 4-10 years because of their involvement in a sexual assault case that surfaced in May, the school has announced. All three players were kicked off the team the night the police report became public. Dotson was at the center of the case, but none of the three players were charged by the district attorney's office due to insufficient evidence.

The length of the suspension will be determined by how long the alleged victim remains in school. The girl wants to finish her education at Oregon and recently completed her freshman year. The suspension will bar the three players from having contact with the victim in addition to banning them from the school's Eugene campus.

The sexual assault occurred on March 8. It was the second case of its nature that Austin had been involved in. He was also under investigation by police in Providence, R.I., for his involvement in a sexual assault case when he was playing for the Providence Friars.

Read the entire police report here.

23 Jun 23:58

What's the hardest part of making a comic?

the fact that it takes a really long time

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23 Jun 23:57

tschaikovsky: Best tweet ever.

tschaikovsky:

Best tweet ever.

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23 Jun 23:57

Photo

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23 Jun 23:56

Guess the state where a NASCAR fan is mad about the World Cup

by James Dator

Want to play a game?

It's a relatively slow day in the World Cup so let's pass the time with a game. You don't need any specific skills or knowledge, just a little instinct and ingenuity.

WHERE IN THE USA DID THIS HAPPEN?

We'll give you the key details, you try and think of the state.

A man told his South American neighbor she was taking jobs away from Americans.
He then informed her that her World Cup celebrations were interfering with his NASCAR viewing.
The man was listening to Lynryd Skynyrd at the time.

Okay. We know you're thinking the South. We'll help you narrow this down. The name of the state begins with an "M."

Think about it.

Got it?

That's right, it's MASSACHUSETTS!

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23 Jun 23:53

Northwestern's School of Journalism misspells own name on diplomas

firehose
Medill students flunk assignment because of a single typo; it's called the "Medill F".

in any case, the type was naturally on the marketing part of the name

Northwestern University's esteemed Medill School of Journalism, Media, Integrated Marketing Communications — one of the nation's top graduate programs for aspiring journalists — issued dozens of diplomas with the program's own name misspelled.

23 Jun 23:45

Twitter / gswannmcr: You got to love Lincolnshire...

by djempirical

https://twitter.com/gswannmcr/status/480772379027976192/photo/1

Original Source

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23 Jun 23:41

J.K. Rowling Addresses Fan Questions About Voldemort’s Virginity. Because That Is A Question Someone Had. - Well, it's hard when you live on the back of someone's head.

by Carolyn Cox

firehose
"if He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named ever got his parsel tongued"

@michaeljtabb Does a dehumanised wizard killer who murders in the pursuit of his own immortality forfeit the right to ALL privacy, Michael?

— J.K. Rowling (@jk_rowling) June 17, 2014

Did Voldemort have time to lose his virginity while he was busy securing immortality? That query was posted originally on Quora, then caused quite the stir on Slate. One fan even dared to ask J.K. Rowling herself if He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named ever got his parsel tongued, and Rowling answered in typical classy fashion.

You can see more of the dubious debate over Voldemort’s sex life on Rowling’s Twitter. Or just read fan fic, in which case the answer would obviously be no.

(via Neatorama)

Previously in The Boy Who Lived

Are you following The Mary Sue on Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, Instagram, & Google +?

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23 Jun 23:33

Community round-up

by SupSuper

firehose
XCOM XCOM XCOM XCOM XCOM XCOM XCOM XCOM XCOM XCOM XCOM XCOM XCOM XCOM XCOM XCOM XCOM XCOM XCOM XCOM XCOM XCOM XCOM XCOM XCOM XCOM XCOM XCOM

For those new to OpenXcom or even X-COM in general, Ivan Logovich has started a terrific tutorial series covering everything from setting up to playing the game, so check it out if it all feels too intimidating for you:

Plus I’m always updating the wiki as questions come up. If something’s not clear, feel free to correct it or ask us.

I also wanna give a shoutout to a bunch of other cool projects:

OpenRA – A free remake of various classic Westwood strategy games such as Command & Conquer and Red Alert, fully playable and includes multiplayer support! If you were ever an RTS fan in the 90s, be sure to give this a shot.
CorsixTH – Remake of Theme Hospital, an absurd hospital management sim, still in development and requires the original files, but fairly playable.
OpenTTD – Greatly improved free remake of Transport Tycoon Deluxe, boasting lots of extra features and options, integrated mod support and multiplayer. Probably one of my biggest inspirations on how to add features to an oldie without breaking the gameplay.
Isomer – An open-world isometric survival game, currently up on Greenlight. Give them some support.
And don’t forget all the X-COM-likes on our sidebar!

Finally, regarding our expanding platform support:

Unix users – We now support over 7 distros! Good job guys, though I’m sure someone will still come along and ask “b-b-but where’s my distro?”. Well, there’s only one way to fix that. In particular, BSD support has been lacking, and Haiku is still on 0.9.

Mac users – Things aren’t looking so good for you guys. There’s some serious issues with your builds, but we have no Mac users on the team, so they’re really hard to track down and fix. We’d really appreciate it if you could help us test and debug the builds on the forums, so we can get a proper stable download out.

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23 Jun 23:25

San Francisco orders parking spot auction app to cease-and-desist

by Cyrus Farivar

Jeramey Jannene

The City Attorney of San Francisco has sent an immediate cease-and-desist letter to the makers of Monkey Parking, a smartphone app that allows drivers to auction off their parking spaces.

In the Monday letter, City Attorney Dennis Herrera cited a city code that forbids drivers who "enter into a lease, rental agreement, or contract of any kind" for public parking spots. The violation is punishable by up to $300 in fines.

The Rome-based makers of the app have until July 11, 2014 to comply, and they could then face a lawsuit brought by the city. In addition to the City by the Bay, the startup also operates in the Italian capital.

Read 4 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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23 Jun 23:24

The 76ers appear to have a new Dribbling Ben Franklin logo

by Rodger Sherman

It turns out one of our Founding Fathers had a serious handle.

The Philadelphia 76ers' name has been a unique, great reference to the city's importance in the colonial era, but the team hasn't really sold the connection much in its various symbols. Sure, there's 13 stars in the logo and the team's colors are red, white and blue, but we personally have been waiting on some sort of awesome, over-the-top connection between basketball and the 1700s?

Well, we have to wait no more:

via @conradburry new secondary and partial logos for the NBA in 2014-15: pic.twitter.com/uwbUsCQWYK
— Phil Hecken (@PhilHecken) June 23, 2014

Let's zoom in a bit on Mr. Franklin:

Yup, that's Ben Franklin, founding father, diplomat, inventor, patriot, and SHAKING AND BAKING POINT GUARD, taking the ball up the court on a fast break. He's balling in a thick button-down coat and rocking bifocals with a sly grin. We kinda wish he wore a headband like LeBron to cover his receding hairline, but we like that he's letting his locks flow behind him as he hoops.

We're curious if this could be an actual live action mascot: In 2011, after killing off their somewhat-hated mascot (a floppy-eared dunking rabbit named Hip-Hop -- get it? Get it? Like rap music) the team announced a contest for a new mascot featuring a much gaudier version of Franklin as one of the competitors, but nothing ever came of it.

We'd like to point out the resemblance to early-era Knicks logo Father Knickerbocker, the dude wearing a tricorner cap hustling the ball up the floor, and point out that SB Nation fully endorses all 1700s basketball logos.

23 Jun 23:24

Gorgeous 'Little Nemo' Anthology From Paul Pope, Cliff Chiang, Jill Thompson & Others Turns To Kickstarter

by Matt D. Wilson

Publisher Locus Moon press has been working on the new anthology book, Little Nemo: Dream Another Dream, for about two years now, and it’s asking for fans to help make the long journey come to fruition.

The book,which tasks creators including Paul Pope, John Cassaday, Jill Thompson, Cliff Chiang, J.H. Williams III, Craig Thompson, Carla Speed McNeil, Mike Allred and Roger Langridge, with drawing new, full-page Little Nemo strips in the style of series creator Winsor McCay, will come out in the fall if Locus Moon can raise $50,000 via Kickstarter. The project launched Monday morning, and by mid-afternoon, it was at around $13,000. Not a bad start.

The Kickstarter page has a full listing of creators involved, and it’s a formidable one. That I haven’t even had room to mention Gabriel Ba and Fabio Moon, J.G. Jones, Moritat, Peter Bagge, Bill Sienkiewicz Paolo Rivera, Jim Rugg, Tom Scioli and Ron Wimberly should be proof of that.

McCay’s Little Nemo comics, which ran in various newspapers from 1905 to 1926, have been hugely influential for decades, which makes it curious that the character has rarely reappeared in any sort of comics project in a very long time. The character last appeared in the animated film Little Nemo: Adventures in Slumberland, which was made in 1989, and the video game Little Nemo: The Dream Master a few years later.

Nonetheless, the simple idea of a little boy being transported to the fantastical worlds of his dreams is sort of the perfect concept for the visual medium of comics, and seeing how this group of creators handles the premise will be exciting, to say the least. Kickstarter donors who donate $100 or more get copies of the 144-page, newspaper-sized book, and donors higher up have the opportunity to get signed copies, personalized sketches, and original art.

For those that don’t contribute to the Kickstarter, the book should be available sometime next year.

Peter & Maria Hoey

Jeremy Bastian

Roger Langridge

Peter Bagge

David Petersen

Toby Cypress

23 Jun 23:23

Photo

firehose
via Toaster Strudel

23 Jun 23:22

Dungeons & Dragons Roleplaying Game Official Home Page - Article (A Living Rule Set)

firehose
Happening now; the printed books are just sad. I was wondering why they hadn't released cover images--it's because they don't have covers. The books' front is the ToC page. Staple bound.

Weird fucking workflow they used to develop it. The Starter Set was made first, then the PHB is the Starter Set book fleshed out, and THEN the free Basic PDF was reverse engineered from the PHB. :|

Form-fillable character sheets "down the line, when we release the rules." Role-playing elements are given the same space on the sheet front as combat stats. Starter Set sheets are less featureful than the Basic and downloadable sheets; backs have backgrounds and adventure hooks.

Join the R&D team at 4 PM (Pacific) today in a livestream unboxing of the Dungeons & Dragons Starter Set. We’ll discuss how to prepare to run the Starter Set if you’re a Dungeon Master and answer questions about the adventure’s contents.

23 Jun 23:01

Windswept deserts, 80s buddy cops from ex-Team Ico devs

by Jessica Conditt

A group of five game industry veterans, including two former The Last Guardian developers, have founded Friend & Foe, an independent studio in Tokyo. Friend & Foe is working on two games in parallel, Vane and Dangerous Men. Vane is the more...

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23 Jun 22:57

Frida Kahlo Mexico fan.

by bubbaprog

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23 Jun 22:57

Photo

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23 Jun 22:57

rumour: logs in to tumblr

rumour:

*logs in to tumblr*

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23 Jun 22:56

Photo

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23 Jun 22:56

The Withings Activité hides a fitness tracker inside a gorgeous watch

by David Pierce

firehose
#shredding

The Withings Activité isn't a smartwatch. Not in the notifications-on-your-wrist, Android Wear sense, anyway. But it's not just a watch, either. The $390 device that was announced on Monday and will be available this fall exists somewhere in between: it's one part high-end, Swiss-designed watch, and one part activity tracker, able to monitor your steps and sleep in the process. As Withings CEO Cédric Hutchings tells me, “it’s the first in a new category: a premium, high-end watch that happens to have these cool features.”

It looks mostly like a watch. It's chrome and round, available in black and silver, with an analog face and a classic design. "We tried to really turn the equation upside down," Hutchings says, "and to stop trying to make a piece of technology with a screen, a piece of rubber, something you need to charge every day. We tried to start with a watch." There's more to take from a watch than just its face, too: the Activité lasts a year with a single watch battery, is waterproof up to 5 meters, and comes with a lovely leather band.

4.withings_activit__silver_move-330

You might never know there's anything else inside the Activité were it not for the second, smaller dial in its bottom-right corner. That's the Activity dial, tracking your progress towards your fitness goals for the day. The Activité's accelerometer can track both steps and sleep, and connects via Bluetooth to your phone (iPhone-only for now) to sync with Withings' apps and other devices. It can also work as a smart alarm clock, gently vibrating to wake you up when you're at the lightest point in your sleep cycle.

An activity tracker for people who won't wear an activity tracker

The Activité enters into a Withings ecosystem that is ever more powerful at tracking your every move. The scale tracks your weight; the Pulse wristband tracks steps and sleep, plus blood glucose levels and your heart rate; the Aura is an astoundingly accurate sleep-tracking device. The Activité is made to be a sort of entry point, the activity tracker for people who wouldn't normally want to wear an activity tracker.

If the Activité's features aren't groundbreaking, Withings' approach to building a smarter watch certainly is. Hutchings tells me the company's goal was always to be different from the Moto 360 or LG G Watch, to make something other than the standard screen-on-your-wrist design. For one thing, he says, almost as if he's surprised he needs to, a wrist-worn device should always tell the time. "If you take any activity trackers, they are really far from providing what we expect when we have something on our wrists, which is to be able to display time without pushing a button, without going in the shade because it's sunny, and without having to recharge it."

"We think smartwatches are currently giving a bad name to the watch," he says. "We did not want to build an extension of my smartphone on my wrist. We don't want to go to a Swiss army knife approach, having something that is ugly to wear." He wanted to build a device people wouldn't need to upgrade every year or two, but would keep for years and decades.

Hutchings seems to exist equally in the past and the future. He's enthralled by the intricacies of watch design, full of stories about the double-curved glass on the Activité's screen and how it fits better in the watch industry this way. ("It has a very tiny reflection," he says. "It’s not something you’d get at first.") He also clearly thinks a great deal about Bluetooth LE, the information it can send quickly and efficiently between phone and wrist. The Activité uses Bluetooth to sync data and automatically keep accurate time, but Hutchings says there's potential for much more integration.

Blending past and future, design and technology

Mostly, though, he's interested in how to seamlessly blend past and future together. "I'm very much convinced that these so-called wearables will disappear into natural devices," he says. "I'm a firm believer that we can enrich a lot about everyday design, and without adding too much we can track and sense a lot of things. So we have to be smart in the way we embed the devices."

The Activité was announced in New York City at an event that was conspicuously more like a fashion show than a gadget unveiling. But Hutchings reminds me that the really exciting stuff happens when the two work in perfect concert. That's the category he believes the Activité can be the first to define. "It's a very integrated design. It is not two products in one box." It's a watch, a beautiful watch, that just happens to do smart things.

23 Jun 22:56

Perl Is Undead

by samzenpus

Ptolemarch writes At the Yet Another Perl Conference beginning today in Orlando, the first keynote squarely blamed Slashdot for starting the "Perl is Dead" meme in 2005. Let's be clear: if Perl was ever dead, it must now be undead. If you can't be at YAPC, you can still watch it live.

Chromebook buyers were promised two years of free Verizon data, only got one

by Jon Brodkin

firehose
all carriers suck forever

Andrew Cunningham

Google's LTE-equipped Chromebook Pixel cost $1,449 at launch in April 2013, but it was advertised as coming with various perks, such as two years of free data from Verizon Wireless.

It was just 100MB a month, a little taste to tempt people into buying pricy data packages. But Verizon apparently only delivered the promised data for about a year before pulling the plug. Computerworld's JR Raphael has the story today, confirming it himself because he bought an LTE-equipped Pixel in April 2013.

One year after purchase, "Pixel LTE owners are discovering their data plans have been disconnected," Raphael wrote today. "The option to pay for data remains, but the free 100MB per month mysteriously vanished just one year into the promised two-year period."

Read 5 remaining paragraphs | Comments

23 Jun 22:54

Happy Birthday Alan Turing

by adafruit

Alan Turing Photo-1
Alan Turing.

Alan Mathison Turing, OBE, FRS (23 June 1912 – 7 June 1954) was a British mathematician, logician, cryptanalyst, philosopher, computer scientist, mathematical biologist, and marathon and ultra distance runner. He was highly influential in the development of computer science, providing a formalisation of the concepts of “algorithm” and “computation” with the Turing machine, which can be considered a model of a general purpose computer. Turing is widely considered as the “Father of Theoretical Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence.

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23 Jun 22:53