FriendFeed Is Dead
Nothing lasts forever, and so it is with FriendFeed which has been the place I’ve visited most and liked the most on the internet for a great many years now. It was the best social network with the best social networking tools and there’s been nothing even remotely close to it in terms of friendliness or usability since its arrival. And that’s the worst part of it; nothing else has come close at all. I saw relationships form and marriages follow; I had some great arguments with people who I then came to consider friends; I met people from the internet in real life; I enjoyed seeing posts roll up my home stream in real time in English, Italian, German, Turkish, and Farsi. It’s all come to an end rather abruptly, rather sadly. It could have been handled better but faceless corporations aren’t known for their humanity. There’s no room for emotion in business, even if your business is built on people. In the admittedly small hope that something will one day plug the gap that FriendFeed filled, my connection details for any other current or former FriendFeeders are: Twitter: https://twitter.com/neonbubble Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/neonbubble Flickr: https://www.flickr.com/photos/neonbubble Instagram: https://instagram.com/mrneonbubble/ I’d link to G+ but by the time I’ve added the tag Google will have closed that...
The Crackerjack Book Of Games
Found, appropriately enough, on the always excellent Found Objects are these pictures from the 1965 Crackerjack Book of Games. Pictures on that site, yes, but no text to go with them. Fortunately, though, I’ve been able to dig out some of the game instructions. 1965 was a very different time. The Microwave Game Here’s a fun activity for all you kids whose fathers are working with one of those new-fangled industrial microwave ovens in use at all the civic cremation zones. With a friend, or if/when you don’t have a friend any longer then against the clock, see how long you can withstand the intense heat inside these miracles of modern technology. Once you’re good enough why not see whose skin can form the largest blister before it explodes and the agony of tearing skin and exposed flesh to the electromagnetic radiation becomes too much for any juvenile human to bear? The Tower Of Power You’ll need building blocks to construct towers for this game so why not pop down to Woolworths and pick up a bargain bag of Woolworths Own Brand Cups ‘N’ Discs with your earnings from scarecrowing? Gather around a table with your best friends and race against one another to build a monument that stretches towards Heaven. The winner is the first person to become filled with the Power of God and finds him or herself compelled to yell Halleluia!. Extra points if the power causes your opponents’ towers to collapse. Mind Control Here’s a game that’s both relaxing and rewarding! Can you use your telekinetic powers to get a marble to roll out of a cup and up a piece of wood? You’ll need all your powers of concentration for this but if you succeed then get your mother or father to give the local government psychic warfare recruiting offices a call and get ready for a life of intrigue and riches beyond your wildest dreams! Old Billy Old Billy is the classic family game of make-believe and dress-up brought into the sixties with a way to win! Ask your parents for permission to use their copies of The National White Person when they’ve finished memorising it for the day and dress yourself up as that boozy rascal of a tramp, Old Billy. You’ll need to stay out overnight, probably down by the canal, but if you can return home without being set alight then you win a point and it’s time for your brother or sister to see if they can do the same. Who will get the highest score? Super Sense When Britain begins its conquest of Asia in the next decade...
Afghanistan Honour Killings
From the New York Times a quite disturbing read on how women in Afghanistan suffer in a culture so horribly twisted by tradition, social indoctrination, and religious interpretation that it sees the murder of a family member preferable to allowing people – daughters, nieces, or cousins – to simply live their lives the way they want. A Thin Line of Defense Against ‘Honor Killings’: Gul Meena, 16, survived a brutal attack by her brother after she fled an older husband, who had beaten her, and ran away with another man. She had been just 8 or 9 in her home in Kunar Province on the Pakistan border when a man in the next village offered money to her unemployed father for her. […] From the moment she arrived in his house, she was a servant. The only grace was that he was not allowed to have sex with her before she had her first period. Two years after they wed, the moment came and he forced himself on her. “I was like a thing and they sold me,” she said. “He was beating me with everything near to him. With his glasses, with his mobile phone, with wood, with stones, and with his hands.” Lonely and bewildered, she tried at least twice to return to her father’s house, but the family sent her back to her husband and finally she went to a neighbor’s home. The husband of the family ran away with her to Nangarhar Province in eastern Afghanistan. When her brother caught up with them, he slit the man’s throat and slashed Gul Meena 15 times with an ax, nearly blinding her and leaving her for dead. When she woke up in the hospital, she looked in the mirror. “I was very damaged,” she said. “Before, I was beautiful and young.” Although she does not see herself that way, she is still a stunning young woman. She has never gone to school but speaks with a simple eloquence. Now she fears that she is ugly and no one will marry her. “Men are always interested in the beauty of a woman,” she said. “They are never interested in the heart.” It’s a dreadfully sad outlook, though obviously understandable, and it’s one of only a few stories. Well worth a good...
Starblazer Comics
From 1979 through to 1991 D. C. Thomson & Company, Limited published 281 issues of a small format comics anthology called Starblazer. It was never as successful or as widely read as Commando, which I also used to collect, but the science fiction nerd inside me preferred Starblazer. For no other reason than the thought crossed my mind today I’ve decided to hunt down covers of the magazine from that there internet machine that I remember owning and reading. One of the first images I spotted and recognised was this from issue 15, Algol The Terrible. I confess I couldn’t quite remember what the plot of the story was but if you click on the image to follow the link you’ll see a great summary from Philip Sandifer. Via the comments on this io9 article (on Spanish pulp magazine covers, bizarrely) comes Nightmare Planet. Again, no recollection of the plot but if the cover is anything to go by – and with Starblazer comics that’s frequently not the case at all – then there’s a planet involved which has all manner of nastiness on its surface. The next load of photos I found via a post on Monster Brains – Starblazer – which led me to the Flickr photostream of Aeron Alfrey and the Starblazer album. To reiterate, I’m only going to include ones I remember having. I’m also going to explain the story’s plot in each case based solely on the artwork and/or title. There’s a chance this won’t be accurate. Robot Rebellion, the story of a rebellion… by robots! Or maybe just one robot. The title isn’t clear on that matter but what is apparent is that there’s no nobility in robot rebellions and shooting your fellow artificial lifeforms in the back is considered just fine. Isaac Asimov would have a fit if he saw this. The Drifters of Darga are an alien species that float across the surface of their planet making high-pitched noises (helium, you see) and helping adventurers who find themselves trapped in the local foliage. Because of their unfortunate skin patterns they’re considered terrifying by visitors. The story is a classic “don’t judge a book by its cover” tale which is precisely what I’m doing. I’ll never learn. The Machine Master is a simple story of slavery only with a master who is a machine, incapable of caring for its labour force. Despite this, the workers love the machine because the planet they’re working on has a higher-than-usual concentration of oxygen in the atmosphere. Light-headed japes and frequent fires fill the pages of this comic. The sand people from Star Wars make an...
Equation Group
A chilling but fascinatingly informative article describing Kaspersky’s gradual uncovering of the various methods used by the hacking group – most likely tied to the U.S. government – given the monicker “Equation Group”: How ‘omnipotent’ hackers tied to NSA hid for 14 years—and were found at last Equation Group boasted the type of extraordinary engineering skill people have come to expect from a spy organization sponsored by the world’s wealthiest nation. One of the Equation Group’s malware platforms, for instance, rewrote the hard-drive firmware of infected computers—a never-before-seen engineering marvel that worked on 12 drive categories from manufacturers including Western Digital, Maxtor, Samsung, IBM, Micron, Toshiba, and Seagate. The malicious firmware created a secret storage vault that survived military-grade disk wiping and reformatting, making sensitive data stolen from victims available even after reformatting the drive and reinstalling the operating system. The firmware also provided programming interfaces that other code in Equation Group’s sprawling malware library could access. Once a hard drive was compromised, the infection was impossible to detect or...
Architecture For Children
A lovely little Swiss website here that curates photos of architectural constructs built specifically for children around the world: Architektur für Kinder The side navigation bar provides great categorised links to scans of books, designers, and projects. A sample of some of the images is below:
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