Sorta Nightly Open Thread
It’s never been easier to be a spy.
On an unrelated note, I seem to be getting the “so you’re a spy?” reply from people more and more these days when I tell them I’m a network analyst. Damn you, Jack Ryan…damn you!
But seriously…it’s almost a little frightening just how cheap and widely available surveillance equipment (especially of the “hidden camera” variety) is these days. Gandalf was right: “We never know who may be watching!”
It’s a novel idea: random tweets inserted into carefully selected Peanuts panels. Here’s a couple samples:
Try and avoid the chocolate hangover, though.
The Dude forgot his blanket somewhere.
Are Android developers just less persistent than their iOS bretheren?
That’s certainly one possible explanation for the disparity in app ecosystems between the two mobile operating systems.
How 1969 thought the Internet would be.
Some frighteningly accurate predictions, actually.
Notes from E3: Risen 2 sounds neat, swashbuckly.
Launchable parrots? I am so there.
Piranha Bytes crafted something pretty awesome with the original Risen, doing justice to the legacy they established with Gothic and Gothic 2. That Ultima 9 (and the Ultima series more generally) was clear, and their games have consistently homaged it.
Notes from E3: Mass Effect on the Wii U?
Nothing confirmed yet, but EA Games leader-type Frank Gibeau certainly thinks Nintendo’s new console would be a good fit for the series, or at least a spin-off from it.
I might be able to get my wife into this series after all!
Facebook in hot water over privacy. Must be Friday.
This time around, Facebook is taking flak over its new “facial recognition” features in photos, which — true to form — they introduced and activated on all accounts without fanfare at some point this week.
The feature ostensibly exists to aid in photo-tagging, which is fine, but as per usual it’s the fact that Facebook introduced a new, potentially privacy-circumventing feature in the “default on” mode that is causing ire. Some people are even arguing that people shouldn’t be able to tag other people in photos without the express consent of the to-be-tagged persons.
Honestly, the whole thing strikes me as being a tad absurd…but this is Facebook.
A wee little company called BlueStacks has released a handy little software package that allows Android apps to run inside the Windows environemnt. It’s not, strictly speaking, an emulator either; apps can interface directly with the hardware of the device they are being run on.
Notes from E3: Back to Back to the Future
Michael J. Fox will be lending his voice acting talents to a character or two in the final installment of Telltale Games’ Back to the Future series.
Cows in China are now producing human breast milk!
I don’t generally have a problem with genetically modified foodstuffs, but this is causing my “too far” alarm bells to start ringing.
Seriously, China? See-ree-us-lee?
Tennessee criminalizes offensive online images.
A new law recently passed in Tennessee makes it a crime to “transmit or display an image” online that could “frighten, intimidate or cause emotional distress” to anyone. The maximum penaties are a year in jail or $2,500 in fines.
Which…um…what? That makes like half of all the Internet illegal in the country music state!
A comprehensive list of honorifics!
Because you all needed one of those, right?
Notes from E3: Mirrors Edge 2 will be powered by the Frostbite 2 engine?
Oh heck yes please!
Notes from E3: John Carmack admits that Rage won’t look nearly as good on consoles.
It’s been argued a few times before, by myself and others, that the current generation of consoles is really holding games — and developers — back thanks to the lower capabilities of their admittedly dated hardware.
John Carmack ‘splains it for us:
One of the significant things thatís not really obvious is that because we break everything up into these texture pages, the consoles are limited because they donít have enough memory and on the PS3 you canít go larger than a 4096 squared texture.
Thereís a lot of scenes that really need more than that on there, so a lot of scenes sort of hit an upper limit on the consoles, where on the PC where we can use an 8k by 8k texture for that we can bring in higher fidelity. So even if youíre running the PC version at 720p resolution youíll get crisper graphics on there.
If you crank it all the way up to run at 1080p or higher then you can put of twice, probably closer to three times the unique pixels the consoles can.
Which, I think, is enough said.
BioWare used DLC for experimentation.
I seem to recall arguing this point somewhere, and it’s nice to see it confirmed:
Casey Hudson: Some of the stuff we did in our DLC was very successful, and were in a way prototypes for what weíre doing here. So when you fought the Shadow Broker, thereís a different scenario for how youíre fighting this huge guy whoís smashing parts of the environment, and charging you, and youíre working together. Or youíre on the back of that big ship, and thereís wind. And we had the whole car chase thing in the Shadow Broker. So with some of these things weíre just kind of experimenting with stuff to broaden that envelope of gameplay that weíre doing in Mass Effect 3.
To say that I am stoked for ME3 would be understatement bordering on the criminal.
Tonight’s post brought to you by Europe & Middle Earth:
Mount Doom is in Transylvania.
