The Super Nintendo/Famicom vs. the Sega Genesis/Mega Drive was video game rivalry at its best. You had two strong companies, both with good consoles and quality first party titles. Don't really see that, at least not to the same extent, anymore or probably ever again.
With live streaming apps like Periscope gaining significant popularity, Google feels a bit left out. And rightfully so: The video giant is king of uploaded videos, but has lagged behind in any kind of live streaming. Google was late to the game with games streaming, releasing YouTube Gaming to combat Twitch.
Now Google is allegedly working on a new service called YouTube Connect, which will allow people to livestream for their audiences straight from the app. Hopefully it’ll create some good competition for apps like Periscope and Facebook Live, though those services already have big user bases that may not want to switch to YouTube Connect.
To be fair, YouTube is becoming a one-stop hub for video content. People can have regular channels and a place to stream video games, and if Connect takes off, it’ll just be an extra thing to watch in the same place. Hopefully we’ll see YouTube Connect at Google I/O, or even before. What do you guys think of livestreaming services? Let us know in the comments!
People seem to like this, but I don't know...I've got a bad feeling about it. Batman in The Lego Movie was cool and all, but is it enough to hang an entire film around? Not that this question isn't totally moot...in 10 years, every movie will feature Lego superheroes.
Update: And now there's a second trailer? Already?
At this rate, we'll be able to cut the whole movie together by the time it comes out next year, just from the trailers.
So excellent. Sarah (of Sarah's Scribbles) doing Invader Zim? Can't wait for this issue to come out.
Big news today: I wrote and illustrated an issue of “Invader Zim!” I don’t think I can accurately express how influential and amazing I think Invader Zim is, so to be allowed to work on the comic was not only incredibly cool but also incredibly fun. I had a blast working on it and I hope you enjoy the story as much as I do!
The image you see is the cover I made for the issue, which is now up for preorder! Order it at your local comic shop using code APR161825. More info here.
The music album “Press Forward” is available on Spotify and Apple Music and can also be downloaded free. This album has 12 songs that focus on the LDS 2016 Mutual theme. The entire album was written and performed by youth. Download the songs at lds.org/youth/theme/2016, along with lyrics, sheet music for male and female singers, and karaoke tracks.
In January, Elder Ronald A. Rasband, Brother Owen, and Sister Oscarson discussed the theme and answered questions from youth around the world at the Face to Face event. The 2016 theme song was also performed.
Every day, the internet seems to surprise me with its power to make almost anything cute. Such is the case with these adorable toads, who are the tiny companions of Twitter user Shuka Moe, a creative student from the Tokyo University of Agriculture.
Here’s how these cute little costumes were created:
Yep, the box-y launchpad housing all your web-app and Chrome app shortcuts is being ditched — or ‘retired’ in Google speak — from desktop builds of the browser in July.
The search giant cites low use for the decision to axe it, though the effort to prune the desktop browser of superfluous features as part of ‘project eraser’ has likely played a part too.
The app launcher will now exist exclusively on Chrome OS.
“The removal process will take place over the next several months,” Google say. “…in a few weeks, Chrome will no longer enable the launcher when users first install a Chrome app”
All existing instances of the launcher will be removed in July.
Latest Feature To Get The Chop
Google killed the notification center last year
Last year to retire the Chrome Notification Center from non-Chrome OS platforms, a move many said was a sign of Google paring back its ambitions to ‘Chrome-ify’ other platforms.
The Chrome app launcher for Windows, Mac and Linux has lagged behind its Chrome OS sibling for some time.
The latter sports a new look with Google Now card integration and support for creating and arranging folders. The former… Well, the exact features depend on your OS — the Mac launcher has never been able to create folders, while the Linux version regularly vanishes.
The Chrome App Launcher has more features in Chrome OS
The move will also bring further relief to Mac OS X users, many of whom have grown tired of finding Launchpad stuffed full of app launchers.
Uniqlo is an awesome brand that mixes engineering and fashion in beautiful ways — and while most of their lines focus on fresh seasonal basics, the collaborations that have come out of the brand have delighted fandoms across the board. From One Piece to Star Wars, Uniqlo has delivered awesome lines for years, and seeks to continue that with their all-new LEGO collection rolling out just in time for Spring.
Initially launching as a line for kids, Uniqlo’s collaboration with LEGO now includes a wonderful range of choices for adults (in men’s sizes only, sadly) to help the grown-up LEGO fan show off their fandom in loud or subtle ways.
Take a closer look at some of our favorites below.
Easily one of my favorite designs, this tee offers subtle LEGO symmetry.
Feeling a little LEGO-savvy? Show it off with this perfectly punk LEGO skull and crossbones tee. Your inner pirate will thank you.
Sometimes, you just want to wear your inspiration. This awesome shirt features a colorful stack of LEGO with a motivating message at the top.
The kids’ designs.
The line goes for around $19 for adults and $12 for kids. You can check out the full collection on Uniqlo’s UK site—and stay tuned for news on when the line ships stateside.
The more I see of the upcoming Jungle Book movie, the more excited I am about it.
These new character portraits that feature actors Idris Elba, Scarlett Johansson, Ben Kingsley, Christopher Walken, Lupita Nyong’o, and Giancarlo Esposito with their animal counterparts have me counting the days until April 15th.
Check out the rest of the series on Nerd Approved along with comments from the stars about their characters.
I'm pretty excited for this one. Brian Gordan writes Fowl Language Comics, one of the most popular comics on the web. We met via me fan-boying his page a few years back, and after years of asking and begging he FINALLY drew me as a duck. OK. That's not completely true. I only asked once, and he was cool enough to say yes! Below is an actual, word for word conversation I had with my daughter after watching The Empire Strikes back.
Guess what! Brian's first book of comics came out this week. You should buy it. Seriously. They are all short and easily readable comics that you and your kids will love. I haven't been able to get it back from Duchess since it showed up at our door! Click here, or on the photo of the book to buy it on Amazon. You can also find Fowl Language Comics on Facebook, Twitter and Tumblr!
Have you been looking for a way to make the grocery and to-do lists you leave on the fridge for your girlfriend / wife / roommate / mama even more annoying? This should do it: Magnetic HTML. Like a magnetic poetry kit, but in the sweet, passionate language of programming. Use the 153 Magnetic HTML tiles to design a website on your refrigerator, or just display how proud you are of your geekdom to the world.
I'd list the types of HTML tiles included in the kit here, but only their command executions would show up! Haha, hilarious!
As a user experience expert at Nielsen Norman Group, Kate Meyer has watched a lot of people use a lot of websites. But her favorite quote comes from a young adult—under 25—talking recently about navigating a flat web design: "I don’t [know what’s a link]. I just start clicking and praying that it works."
It's a funny and telling comment, and it reveals that a lot of research remains to be done about whether young people intuitively understand flat UI better than their parents—and, even if they do, whether designers should design specifically for young people based on the idea that they're better at navigating flat design. "There’s an underlying assumption that flat UIs are targeted at millennials," Meyer writes. "So it’s okay if older users don’t quite ‘get’ how to use flat UIs, these designers argue."
Over the past year, Meyer—who teaches conferences about designing for young users—has examined how different users approach flat interfaces, offering a compelling argument against using flat design as a way to appeal to young users. Or, as Nielsen Norman Group's Don Norman and Bruce Tognazzini put it in their screed against Apple's emphasis on flat design and minimalism, "So what if many people can't read the text? It’s beautiful."
Flat design generally describes minimalist interfaces that eschew skeuomorphic flourishes: drop shadows, gradients, and the like. Recently, Meyer ran a study that asked young and old users to rate the attractiveness of five fictional websites. Four were "flat," while one was skeuomorphic, rife with drop shadows and signifiers. NNG asked almost 500 users—half between 18 and 25, half over 35—to rate each site aesthetically.
A flat website design versus the skeuomorphic control design.
It turned out that younger users liked the flat websites a lot more than their older counterparts—by more than half a point on a 1 to 10 scale. Older users said the flattest website designs were "boring," while younger subjects described them as "professional." Fascinatingly, the youngs rated the skeuomorphic design as just as attractive as their "parents" did, with both age groups describing a shadow-stuffed website for a fictional steak house as "professional" and "trustworthy."
So younger people found flat designs better-looking. Old people didn't like them. That may not surprise you—especially if you’ve ever watched an older person try to navigate a super-flat website for a few minutes. But whether or not a user likes a design is only half the story. And it turns out, it doesn’t have terribly much to do with how well they navigate it.
In her past research on flat design, Meyer closely studied how well young adults could navigate flat sites. She observed something odd: While young people seemed faster at navigating the designs, they also indicated they didn’t really understand the UI intuitively. In fact, for the most part they seemed to have, uh, pretty much no idea what they were doing.
"It’s hard when you think something's a link and it's not. And you have to figure out how to get it another way," one user said. Meyer compares this behavior to lab rats in conditioning studies:
This behavior is analogous to the behavior of laboratory rats in operant-conditioning experiments: If a rat gets a food pellet at random intervals after performing a specific action, the rat will keep doing that action in the hope of getting fed again. Similarly, users have discovered that clicking elements that don’t have strong signifiers sometimes works. Like the lab rats, users will stick to random clicking as long as they get rewarded from time to time.
Meyer and her colleagues use a term called "click uncertainty" to describe this confusion over where to click. "We see it manifested in a lot of different ways, and most of the time, users won't even verbally comment on it because they're too busy trying to figure things out," she says. "Often their eyes flick across the page, [or]they might mumble some link labels or hover over things to see if they're actually links."
So young people didn’t necessarily "get" flat designs. They were just better at quickly testing where and how to get what they wanted in the face of click uncertainty. That runs counter to the way many designers think of young users—that because they’ve grown up with contemporary technology, they intuitively understand it when there are fewer affordances. "Please don’t think that because your younger users can adapt to poorly designed interfaces you’ve got a blank check to design careless, signifier-free interfaces," as Meyer wrote a few months ago.
Meyer isn't arguing that designers should give up flat design completely, but that good design fundamentals still need to be respected. Users who like a product don't necessarily "get" how to properly use it, and that's a problem. Companies that want to appeal to younger people might end up sacrificing too much by adopting super-flat designs. "How desperately do you want to be perceived as cool?" she writes. "What are you going to sacrifice to achieve it?"
"How desperately do you want to be perceived as cool? What are you going to sacrifice to achieve it?"
Paying attention to the older users—the ones who don't "like" flat design—might help to solve flat design's usability issues sooner. This insight echoes the ideas of other technology companies moving toward "inclusive design," or the notion that by designing for ignored or underserved users—including the elderly or disabled—products will become better for all. Inclusive design has quietly spurred some of the biggest technological leaps of our time: Cliff Kuang, writing about the evolution of this approach, recently pointed out that the typewriter, email, and even the telephone evolved out of designs for the blind and deaf.
Now, the same idea is being embraced at larger companies including Microsoft and Ford, leading a new wave of inclusive design in technology. Interface design, which is so deeply connected to competition between major operating systems and fashion in general, has been slower to adapt. Yet Meyer's research, along with products Learn To Quit—an app designed alongside psychologists specifically for mentally ill users—show that the same ideas are making their way into UI.
What's more, the scientific process is finally being leveraged by designers to differentiate between what users "like" and what they actually use. The difference, it turns out, is larger than you'd think.
Add just 10 ounces of FlameStower weight to your pack and you'll add unlimited recharges to your small battery-powered outdoor gear. Cameras. GPS systems. Lights. Smartphones*. The FlameStower Fire Charger gathers heat energy from cooking and campfires, and sends the excess into drained USB devices.
The FlameStower consists of a folding metal stand, collapsible water reservoir, and protruding metal prong that slides into the flames of campfires, grills, or burners. As the prong heats, it transfers energy to a power generator, one side of which is submerged in the water bath to keep it cool. This temperature difference between the opposing surfaces generates electricity. Anywhere. At any time of day.
Setup takes less than a minute, and charging begins as soon as the reservoir is filled and the FlameStower is in place next to a fire source.
*Considered "outdoor gear" in the same way legs are. You just don't venture into the woods--or anywhere beyond the front door--without them.
In the midst of the terror attack on Belgium, all four major US carriers have come out and announced free calling and texting to Belgium. Verizon users will have free calling and texting to Belgium March 22-23, AT&T users March 22-28, T-Mobile users March 22-25, and Sprint (and Virgin and Boost) users March 22-31.
If you have family and friends in Belgium, this decision will make it easy and free to get into contact with them. Our thoughts are with those affected.
It looks like there’s a new security vulnerability found in Android, and Google is warning people about it. It’s a serious one, too, as an app can get root access to your phone simply by being installed. Root access means this app has access to a bunch of functions that are normally restricted, like modifying software.
Thankfully, Google is already on it. Apps that take advantage of this vulnerability are blocked by Verify Apps, so if you try to install an app that uses this vulnerability — whether from Google Play or outside of it — the install will be blocked. You have to make sure Verify Apps is enabled, though.
Google has also released a patch for this problem, and Nexus devices will receive it during the next monthly security update. Other devices may have to wait longer, and devices no longer supported by manufacturers are out of luck. Security updates are a big problem in the Android world, but at least Google has our backs with Verify Apps and other such features.
Lighting 6000 closely grouped wooden matchsticks takes less than a minute, but waiting for the resulting fire to extinguish takes quite a bit longer and is surprisingly relaxing to watch. (Two is a trend, right...it is also surprisingly relaxing and satisfying to watch a tomato being unsliced. Is there an entire genre of videos like this out there?) (via digg)
On Jane the Virgin, Jane’s new adviser instructs her to make sure the romance novel she's writing passes the Bechdel test, prompting the show’s narrator to assess whether the show itself passes the test. (Diagnosis: not great.) And on Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, Rebecca is visited by a dream ghost/Jiminy Cricket figure who admonishes her to stop paying so much attention to the guys in her story: "Do you know how hard it is to pass the Bechdel test as a dream ghost?"
The Bechdel test is integral to the way we talk about pop culture
The Bechdel test is named for cartoonist Alison Bechdel, who introduced the idea in 1985 in her comic strip "Dykes to Watch Out For" (although she says it should be called the Bechdel-Wallace test after her friend Liz Wallace, who gave her the idea). The rules are simple: To pass the test, a work of fiction must contain at least two women, with names, who have a conversation about something besides a man.
"The Rule," Dykes to Watch Out For, Alison Bechdel, 1985.
The original Bechdel test.
The test has become an integral part of the way we talk about pop culture. Websites maintain extensive databases detailing which movies pass and which don’t. In Sweden, some movie theaters are rating movies by whether they pass the Bechdel test. When Star Wars: The Force Awakens passed, it was a cause for celebration. And a major part of the feminist critique of dude-centric prestige films like The Social Networkis that they don’t pass it.
The Bechdel test has also been the subject of some criticism: If a movie like Sex and the City 2 can pass it while The Hurt Locker —the first movie to net a Best Director Oscar for a woman — fails, how much does the test really tell us about how feminist a movie is? Bechdel herself says she’s "little bit sheepish" about its popularity as a tool for analysis; she intended to use it as nothing more than the setup for a joke.
The CW showcased both sides of the Bechdel test
Crazy Ex-Girlfriend demonstrates exactly what the test is good for: It helps us redirect our focus away from romantic plot lines, like Rebecca’s Josh-or-Greg angst, and toward the rest of the story. In "Josh Has No Idea Where I Am!" as Rebecca’s dream ghost walks her through her past, Rebecca keeps trying to talk about the men in her life: her absent father, the sweet college nerd she overlooked in favor of a douchey play director, and, of course, Josh Chan, the guy of whom she is the titular crazy ex-girlfriend.
"Forget about the guys!" Rebecca’s dream ghost tells her. "That’s the worst part about being a ghost and working with women. So much talk about the guys. It’s not the guys. FORGET THE GUYS!" Instead, the show informs us, the important parts of Rebecca’s life are her mother, who loves her; music, which Rebecca loves; and her friends, who care about her.
This shift in focus is the kind of thing the Bechdel test does at its best. A good Bechdel-passing work of fiction creates a space in which women can have complex interior lives that are not solely focused on men, in which they have interests and passions and mixed feelings that are important in their own right, not for how they affect the men around them.
But "Josh Has No Idea Where I Am!" also demonstrates some of the test's limitations. It is, after all, a rare episode of Crazy Ex-Girlfriend that passes the Bechdel test. Most of Rebecca’s conversations with her best friend Paula revolve around her plans to win back Josh; her conversations with Josh’s girlfriend Valencia are about whether or not she’s trying to steal Josh away; her conversations with her neighbor Heather are about her plans for a one-night stand. If we use the Bechdel test as a definitive arbiter of feminism, Crazy Ex-Girlfriend fails miserably.
What the Bechdel test can’t measure is how important men are in the context of the conversations women have about them. And for Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, the answer is "not very." When Rebecca decides to turn her life upside down to follow Josh across the country, her decision has nothing to do with Josh as a person — it has to do with Rebecca and her desire for happiness and how she projects that desire onto Josh.
Likewise, when Rebecca talks about boys with her friends, the focus is rarely on the boy himself. Instead, it's on the unapologetic middle school pleasure these women get from talking about their crushes and planning their romantic strategies together, as a team. It’s not a coincidence that Crazy Ex-Girlfriend's premiere episode ends with Rebecca and Paula singing a duet together. The lyrics might be about Rebecca winning Josh over, but the song isn’t really about the guy. The joy of the moment comes from the fact that Rebecca has clearly found her true soul mate: her best friend.
On Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, guys are excuses, tools the show can use to explore the psyches and relationships of its female characters. None of Rebecca’s Bechdel-violating conversations about Josh are really about Josh. They’re about Rebecca herself, and her interests and passions and mixed feelings that are important in their own right, not for how they affect the men around her. Forget the guys. The situation is a lot more nuanced than that.
The Bechdel test provides a solid baseline, but there are limits to its usefulness
Jane the Virgin, meanwhile, is downright skeptical about the usefulness of the Bechdel test. In "Chapter Thirty-Seven," Jane rolls her eyes as she checks her manuscript to make sure it passes the test, at the request of her stern adviser. "Yeah, she sounds like a hard-ass," Jane's mother, Xiomara, sympathizes, right before she changes the subject to talk about boys. But even after Jane revises the manuscript to be Bechdel-compliant, her adviser doesn’t like it: So what if a book passes the test on a technicality? That doesn’t mean it’s feminist; the test is just "a baseline."
The episode itself only passes the Bechdel test on a technicality too: Jane tells a book club full of women that she enjoyed Where’d You Go, Bernadette, and a green checkmark appears in a corner of the screen where the narrator has been tracking the episode's Bechdel rating. But does that make Jane the Virgin anti-feminist?
This is, after all, a show that's full of complex, three-dimensional women with full, rich lives. Jane has romantic drama, sure, and a major part of her character arc is focused on motherhood and her relationship with her son. (Fact: Any conversation Jane has about Mateo fails the Bechdel test.) But her arc is also about her career aspirations, her dreams of becoming a writer, and her slowly developing confidence in her own voice. It’s about her relationship with her spirituality and how much religion is a part of her life.
Boys are not the be-all, end-all of Jane’s life — or of Xiomara’s life or Alba’s. Xiomara has career goals, too, and the deft, nuanced way Jane the Virgin has explored her decision to refocus on those goals now that her daughter is an adult — along with her fear that she’s waited too long to do it — has been a joy to watch. And Alba, Jane's grandmother, has her politically charged immigration status storyline and her slowly changing religious convictions. The idea that the question of whether Jane the Virgin is a feminist show might be decided over a throwaway line at a book club highlights the limitations of the Bechdel test.
And it is limited. It is a blunt instrument, fantastic for looking at trends and almost useless for looking at individual works of fiction. To say that Ratatouille fails the Bechdel test means very little; to say that 10 out of 14 Pixar movies fail the Bechdel test means a lot.
What makes The CW’s current Monday-night lineup feminist is not its ability to pass or fail the Bechdel test. It’s the fact that the network has created a space in which women can have complex interior lives that are not solely focused on men, in which they have interests and passions and mixed feelings that are important in their own right, not for how they affect the men around them.
Google Cast, the technology behind the Chromecast we all know and love, has grown into much more than just part of a single streaming device. It’s now a technology used across many devices made by many manufacturers. It’s a great way of streaming content from mobile devices to the big screen, and some TVs even come with it.
To make the Chromecast app more in line with its uses, it has been renamed to Google Cast. Google and Vizio have also announced the new P-Series TVs, which not only include built in 4K Google Cast functionality, but also come with a 6-inch Android tablet for a remote.
The tablet remote is an interesting idea, since it can be used to stream content to the TV via different apps. The longevity of this tablet is a potential issue, but we’ll have to see how it works out. The Google Cast app will get its updated name on Android and iOS this week.
The Super Nintendo/Famicom vs. the Sega Genesis/Mega Drive was video game rivalry at its best. You had two strong companies, both with good consoles and quality first party titles. Don't really see that, at least not to the same extent, anymore or probably ever again.
The music album “Press Forward” is available on Spotify and Apple Music and can also be downloaded free. This album has 12 songs that focus on the LDS 2016 Mutual theme. The entire album was written and performed by youth. Download the songs at lds.org/youth/theme/2016, along with lyrics, sheet music for male and female singers, and karaoke tracks.
In January, Elder Ronald A. Rasband, Brother Owen, and Sister Oscarson discussed the theme and answered questions from youth around the world at the Face to Face event. The 2016 theme song was also performed.
The more I see of the upcoming Jungle Book movie, the more excited I am about it. 
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"The Rule," Dykes to Watch Out For, Alison Bechdel, 1985.
