Rassler is a little 2D 1980s-inspired pro wrestling RPG that I’ve been developing in my spare time, using the Love2d engine. It’s free, I’ve been doing updates pretty regularly, and plan on continuing to do so. Currently only built for OS X, but Windows builds are coming soon.
Working on a new niche-specific tumblr lately, Spatial Computing, tracking how the growth of using new sensors and positional tracking will alter human lives. But in a fun way.
Super Micro Paint is a very simple, very fun, web-based version of the simple pixel-based animation and drawing toys I had as a kid. It exports animated GIFs and has one-click upload to imgur, too.
Tiny, web-based, game engine for creating games contained to 16 drawings (each an individual color).
Makes me think of WarioWare Inc.
“Transform your whole list, with just one example.”
Paste in source data. Type in the format you want. Source data is massaged to fit new format. Very simple and works great.
COBE stands for Code of Business Ethics. Cobe is a conversation simulator, originally a database backed port of MegaHAL but a bit more now.”
As you know I’m a bit of a sucker for chatter bots that learn.
As a big fan of genetic walkers, and genetic cars, this is right up my alley. Can I get a baseball version please?
Dead simple hex color scheme web app. Just type in your hex codes, and it will update in real time. You can add any number of colors at once to see how they look together, too.
Just a little Structure Sensor ephemera I whipped up the other day…
The full image is 1920×1080, good for backgrounds.
What’s that they say about castles built on sand?
Two researchers on Thursday took down the four major browsers, Microsoft Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome, and Apple Safari, as Pwn2Own, the annual hacking contest that runs in tandem at CanSecWest, wound down in Vancouver.
A new game from Massive Damage:
A rogue-like sci-fi strategy survival game with base building, tactical combat, crew management and emergent storytelling.
90% of the words in that sentence make me so happy. Feels like equal parts X-Com, Civilization, and FTL. It looks great, too. The visual aesthetic is this kind of atemporal “18-bit” style that never really existed. The whole thing is really well done. I can’t wait.
The Chicago police department operates an off-the-books interrogation compound, rendering Americans unable to be found by family or attorneys while locked inside what lawyers say is the domestic equivalent of a CIA black site.
A whole lot more at the link. Accusations include holding minors (as young as 15 years old) without council for 12 or more hours and beatings that result in head wounds. Disgusting. Sad. If there ever were anything to the American Dream, shit-heel operations like this choked it to death and stuffed it in a sewer outflow pipe.
From the author of The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs:
The advert explains: “Only one drug is so addictive, nine out of ten laboratory rats will use it. And use it. And use it. Until dead. It’s called cocaine. And it can do the same thing to you.”
But in the 1970s, a professor of Psychology in Vancouver called Bruce Alexander noticed something odd about this experiment. The rat is put in the cage all alone. It has nothing to do but take the drugs. What would happen, he wondered, if we tried this differently? So Professor Alexander built Rat Park. It is a lush cage where the rats would have colored balls and the best rat-food and tunnels to scamper down and plenty of friends: everything a rat about town could want. What, Alexander wanted to know, will happen then?
In Rat Park, all the rats obviously tried both water bottles, because they didn’t know what was in them. But what happened next was startling.
The rats with good lives didn’t like the drugged water. They mostly shunned it, consuming less than a quarter of the drugs the isolated rats used. None of them died. While all the rats who were alone and unhappy became heavy users, none of the rats who had a happy environment did.
The war on drugs is based upon our worst tendencies as human beings, and I’m not talking about our tendency for addiction.
“I’m too idealistic,” he told me in an interview at a hacker convention in Germany in December. “In early 2013 I was really about to give it all up and take a straight job.” But then the Snowden news broke, and “I realized this was not the time to cancel.”
Like many people who build security software, Koch believes that offering the underlying software code for free is the best way to demonstrate that there are no hidden backdoors in it giving access to spy agencies or others. However, this means that many important computer security tools are built and maintained by volunteers.
The people who make important stuff get jack shit for their effort, but that how new Uber For Fart Sounds app gets millions.
A strong but honest headline about Googe’s new bullshit:
Participation in the new service requires that your entire catalog be available for streaming, at high resolution.
Participation requires that you not release your music elsewhere earlier, e.g., no early releases for fans or backers.
You no longer get a choice of whether to do nothing, block a video, or run ads. Ads are mandatory.
Five year contract.
If you don’t participate in the new service, then the option to obtain Content-ID ad revenue from the free version of Youtube no longer exists.
If you had previously been getting Content-ID ad revenue and choose not to participate in the new service, your channel will be deleted and all videos using your music will be blocked.
These are all non-negotiable and mandatory, btw.
One of the reasons they mention for enacting this policy is to attract more senior-level candidates. I hope more tech companies follow their lead. Good on them.
A user-generated collection of typography from national parks and other ‘wild’ spaces. Beautiful stuff.
Twitter Sort is a sorting algorithm that takes advantage of the Twitter API. You pass the script the numbers you would like sorted and it will tweet a request asking for somebody to sort them. When someone replies with a sorted version of the numbers, it will print them to the console and return.
Phil Nelson