“Quadrilateral Cowboy is a game we’ve been watching with great interest ever since Thirty Flights Of Loving creator Brendon Chung first debuted it last year. It’s about hacking, but not via
irritating minigames or jargon-your-problems-away Hollywood magic. Instead, you learn basic (albeit fictional) code and take down everything from laser grids to gun emplacements with a twitch
of your fingers and a wriggle of your brain. It’s already an extremely clever game, and it’s quite empowering despite the fact that you play as someone who probably couldn’t even heft an
assault rifle - let alone fire one. Basically, it’s a wonderfully novel idea - more Neuromancer than Deus Ex - but words only do it so much justice. Thus, I’ve decided to play it for your
enrichment, in hopes that you will understand why Quadrilateral should be driving your radar haywire.”
2011 Jul 13, 5:48Like the big red button that doesn't do anything but better "because it is slightly cheaper, and because it has the words "DON'T PANIC" in large, friendly letters on the cover"humorinternetweb
2010 Jul 21, 3:08"Amanda Palmer Performs The Popular Hits Of Radiohead On Her Magical Ukulele" "Immediate download of 7-track album in your choice of 320k mp3, FLAC, or just about any other format you could possibly
desire. Buy Now $0.84 USD or more"amanda-palmeraudiodownloadmp3musicradioheadukulele
2010 Jun 22, 3:24"On July 20th Amanda will be releasing an EP of Radiohead cover songs titled Amanda Palmer Performs The Popular Hits of Radiohead on Her Magical Ukulele." Includes her cover of Idioteque.
2009 Jul 24, 11:56New movie Hot Tub Time Machine: "Craig Robinson, John Cusack, Rob Corddry, and Clark Duke are transported back to 1986 in a magical hot tub. So crazy it just might work? Elaborate joke?"humortime-travelhot-tubmovievideopreview
2009 May 29, 9:17"Anyway, the idea is to find techniques, be they arrays of bright infrared LEDs, or paints that shine well in infrared but are not obvious in visible light, and create invisible graffiti that only
shows up in tourist photos and videos."humorgraffitiirir-paintmagictouristphotography
I watched the new Star Trek movie Thursday morning, along with many others who work on Windows. Microsoft rented out a theater and played the movie on all screens. I greatly enjoyed the movie!
Spoilers follow... I'm obviously not the biggest Star Trek nerd (or at least TOS nerd) since I didn't even pick up on the fact that Kirk's dad being dead was a discrepancy from the TV series. I
only figured out the alternate time-line stuff when they killed most of the Vulcans. I was just surprised they didn't set right what once went wrong by the end of the movie with some more time
travel magic to bring back Vulcan. On that note, I'm pretty sure the Spock-Spock conversation at the end, is Nimoy Spock sending Sylar Spock off to school so that Nimoy Spock can get freaky
repopulating the Vulcan race. Although at first after his 'two places at once' comment I thought he was saying... something else. Also, was the main evil guy a random miner turned psycho? And his
crazy looking spaceship that destroys the Federation fleet was just a mining vessel from the future? Once they invent time travel anybody can get drunk, go back in time, and conquer Earth.
This past week I finished Anathem and despite the intimidating physical size of the book (difficult to take and read on the bus) I became very engrossed and was able to finish it in several orders of
magnitude less time than what I spent on the Baroque
Cycle. Whereas reading the Baroque Cycle you can imagine Neal Stephenson sifting through giant economic tomes (or at least that's where my mind went whenever the characters began to explain
macro-economics to one another), in Anathem you can see Neal Stephenson staying up late pouring over philosophy of mathematics. When not
exploring philosophy, Anathem has an appropriate amount of humor, love interests, nuclear bombs, etc. as you might hope from reading Snow Crash or Diamond Age. I thoroughly enjoyed Anathem.
On the topic of made up words: I get made up words for made up things, but there's already a name for cell-phone in English: its "cell-phone". The narrator notes that the book has been translated
into English so I guess I'll blame the fictional translator. Anyway, I wasn't bothered by the made up words nearly as much as some folk. Its a good thing I'm long
out of college because I can easily imagine confusing the names of actual concepts and people with those from the book, like Hemn space for Hamming distance. Towards the beginning, the description
of slines and the post-post-apocalyptic setting reminded me briefly of Idiocracy.
Recently, I've been reading everything of Charles Stross that I can, including about a month ago, The Jennifer Morgue from the surprisingly awesome amalgamation genre of spy thriller and Lovecraft
horror. Its the second in a series set in a universe in which magic exists as a form of mathematics and follows Bob Howard programmer/hacker, cube dweller, and begrudging spy who works for a
government agency tasked to suppress this knowledge and protect the world from its use. For a taste, try a short story from the series that's freely available on Tor's website, Down on the Farm.
Coincidentally, both Anathem and the Bob Howard series take an interest in the world of Platonic ideals. In the case of Anathem (without spoiling anything) the universe of Platonic ideals, under a
different name of course, is debated by the characters to be either just a concept or an actual separate universe and later becomes the underpinning of major events in the book. In the Bob Howard
series, magic is applied mathematics that through particular proofs or computations awakens/disturbs/provokes unnamed horrors in the universe of Platonic ideals to produce some desired effect in
Bob's universe.
2009 Mar 17, 6:02"With LUA scripting included in the latest version of NES emulator FCEUX, Rusted Logic blogger Xkeeper has woven some black magic into Super Mario that gives you full keyboard/mouse control over your
surroundings."videoyoutubevideogamesvideogamehackmario
2009 Feb 28, 11:34"It's completely nuts... It's a book about what if the Rapture actually happened, and that's all I'm gonna tell you." -Junot Diaz, 2008 Pulitzer Prize Winner for Fictioncreativecommonscomicliteraturereligionmagicdownloadpdf
2009 Jan 23, 1:47"When you experiment with Amazon's Mechanical Turk, it feels like magic. ... Last week, I started a new Turk experiment to answer two questions: what do these people look like, and how much does it
cost for someone to reveal their face?"privacyresearchamazonmechanicalturkinternetphotoexperimentsocial
2009 Jan 20, 2:20"Because the G1 has a compass inside, nru presents its data as a sonar-like spinning map when held parallel to the ground, but presents a snazzy augmented reality overlay when tipped up towards the
horizon. It's easier to grok when you can see it in motion; there's a video up above."g1phonecellphonecompassgeolocationvideoandroid
2008 Nov 20, 11:30KITH + Portal! "We're not sure how deep into the goof juice the Kids in the Hall were when troupe funnyman Scott Thompson started sulking and playing Portal in the back of the tour bus, but something
got into Kids during this sad little gaming session. Yes, the comedic stylings of Valve writer Erik Wolpaw are most amusing, as is the struggle of watching Thompson attempt to do anything more than
move a cube - uncrouch already! - but something tells me there's something magical in those cups. Thanks for the tip, Sascha23!"portalvideohumorvalvekithscott-thompson
2008 Aug 14, 9:25"When a savage creature known only as the Adversary conquered the fabled lands of legends and fairy tales, all of the infamous inhabitants of folklore were forced into exile. Disguised among the
normal citizens of modern-day New York, these magical characters have created their own peaceful and secret society within an exclusive luxury apartment building called Fabletown. But when Snow
White's party-girl sister, Rose Red, is apparently murdered, it is up to Fabletown's sheriff, a reformed and pardoned Big Bad Wolf, to determine if the killer is Bluebeard, Rose's ex-lover and
notorious wife killer, or Jack, her current live-in boyfriend and former beanstalk-climber."comicreaddownloadfreevia:boingboingfiction