#they work in the same office as clippy and the others

[superbellsubways]

silly idea i had last night

#i dont have a real name for them yet but internally ive been calling them Walter #they work in the same office as clippy and the others #virtual assistants #object head #doodle #things are subject to change

[rawafgames]

Welcome!

So, here's how this works: This blog is... exactly what it says it is. This is an offshoot of the similar blog RawAFMovies. There WAS a Twitter version of this run by someone else, but they've since retired, and there was no Tumblr equivalent until now. I figured I'd take up the mantle. But what does "raw" mean, anyway? Well, go see the pinned for RawAFMovies for that, because the same logic applies here. I typically just post the game's box art. Along with the post, there's an emoji, serving as a mod tag. If you see ☠️ on the post, that's me (I'm Gwen, BTW)! On the other hand, if you see 📎 on the post, that means it was a submission from my friend Clippy (and yes, he's literally Microsoft Office Clippy IRL; you'll see Clippy himself if you browse this blog on Windows 11!). He'll be serving as co-mod. Unlike RawAFMovies, I'll be more open to requests here. Just drop them in the ask box.

#gaming #video games #rawafgames

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Vizio makes more money spying on people who buy TVs than it does on TVs themselves

In the simplistic account of what many call “surveillance capitalism,” the original sin was swapping our attention for free content, summed up in the pithy phrase, “If you’re not paying for the product, you’re the product.”

That’s a comforting frame if you think that the problem with surveillance capitalism is surveillance, rather than capitalism. If you think that some companies want to make money the honest way, by selling you stuff, while other companies are full of evil wizards who want to spy on you in order to deprive you of free will, then the answer is simple: just pay for stuff, and you’ll be fine.

But time and again, we learn that companies spy on you — and abuse you in other ways — whenever it suits them — even companies that make a lot of noise about how they don’t need to spy on you to make money. If a company has the power to abuse you — because of lock-in, or because someone else is making you use it — and if the company can make money by abusing you, it will abuse you.

Take Microsoft. It’s making a lot of noise right now about how it will beat Facebook to creating the metaverse because people trust the company not to spy on them (this is the same claim they made about their failed search-engine Bing, but whatever).

https://venturebeat.com/2021/11/12/why-microsoft-may-beat-zuckerberg-to-the-metaverse/

Microsoft doesn’t spy on you to show you ads, it’s true. But Microsoft’s work-from-home (AKA live-at-work) suite, Office 365, offers your boss a full-spectrum, asshole-to-appetite surveillance of everything you do:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/11/25/the-peoples-amazon/#clippys-revenge

They’re not spying on you to show you ads. They’re spying on you to sell products to your asshole boss who values the ability to strip you of your privacy and turn your lockdown life into a dystopian cyberpunk hellscape. This is a profitable angle, and Microsoft just announced a suite of expanded surveillance capabilities:

https://winbuzzer.com/2021/11/08/microsoft-365-to-add-increased-employee-surveillance-through-microsoft-edge-xcxwbn/

Microsoft is not a privacy-respecting company. It’s a company that makes tactical decisions about spying on you, and when it is in its interest to do so, it has no compunctions at all about invading your privacy.

Same goes for Apple. Yes, the company has done genuinely great stuff to head off mobile surveillance to block ad-tech (and, not coincidentally, to block commercial rivals like Facebook). But they also sold out every one of their Chinese customers by removing all working VPNs from the App Store and backdooring their Chinese cloud servers.

https://www.cnet.com/tech/mobile/apple-removes-vpn-apps-from-china-app-store/

Apple has a tactical commitment to your privacy, not a moral one. When it comes down to guarding your privacy or losing access to Chinese markets and manufacturing, your privacy is jettisoned without a second thought.

No one is giving away free Iphones in exchange for ads. You can pay $1,000 for your Apple product and still be the product. The idea that there is virtue in paying because it incentivizes better corporate ethics is absurd on its face.

The capture of the regulatory state by capitalism is why companies spy on you: spying only makes money if all costs (breaches, loss of agency, etc) can be externalized onto society, and if companies can manufacture consent by cramming an “I agree” button down your throat. In other words, they spy on you because they can get away with it, because the state permits them. We don’t have a federal privacy law with a private right of action, we don’t have statutory limits on terms of service. Even where you do have some rights, we let companies take them away with “binding arbitration” waivers that confiscate your right to sue them and join class actions.

Which brings me to Vizio. Vizio is a surveillance company that incidentally manufactures TVs. A Vizio TV nonconsensually spies on you and shows you ads, and it does so despite the fact that you’re paying for it. Vizio’s latest financials show that the company makes more money from spying on you than it does from selling TVs.

https://investors.vizio.com/news/news-details/2021/VIZIO-HOLDING-CORP.-Reports-Q3-2021-Financial-Results/default.aspx

As Richard Lawler writes for The Verge, the division that handles ads and surveillance booked $57.3 million in profits, while the hardware division’s profits were $25.6 million.

https://www.theverge.com/2021/11/10/22773073/vizio-acr-advertising-inscape-data-privacy-q3-2021

Vizio is a dirty company that breaks the law with impunity. The company doesn’t even bother with the pretextual “consent” that other firms secure prior to spying on you:

https://www.theverge.com/2017/2/6/14522582/vizio-ftc-lawsuit-tv-viewing-habits-tracking-privacy

And it uses software lifted from free/open source projects, flagrantly violating their licenses and stealing from the commons:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/10/20/vizio-vs-the-world/#dumbcast

The company gets away with this because our justice system treats corporate crime as a feature, not a bug, and allows firms to use the proceeds from their misbehavior to buy their way out of accountability.

Which means that “paying for the product” can’t possibly address corporate misbehavior, because the more money companies have —wheether through sales or spying — the more power they have to fight off a reckoning for their abuses.

“Paying for the product” isn’t just hollow, it’s actively harmful. Under conditions of gross inequality and high levels of debt, “paying for the product” excludes those who lack the means to pay from access to the digital world. If Facebook charged for access, people who couldn’t afford it wouldn’t dig a hole and pull the dirt in over themselves. They’d land on a billionaire-subsidized platform — a social media version of Prageru — where moderators would delete comments that criticized corporate power. This is even worse than widely recognized issues like, “The truth is paywalled and the lies are free”:

https://www.currentaffairs.org/2020/08/the-truth-is-paywalled-but-the-lies-are-free/

There’s nothing inevitable about an ad market that requires surveillance. Contextual advertising — advertising based on the content of articles, rather than data on the readers — is far more profitable for publishers than behavioral ads.

https://pluralistic.net/2020/08/05/behavioral-v-contextual/#contextual-ads

The catch is that they’re only profitable if the true costs of behavioral ads — privacy invasions, breaches and worse — are priced into the model. In other words, data is only “the new oil” if someone else pays for the oil spills. Otherwise, it’s the new oily rag.

https://locusmag.com/2018/07/cory-doctorow-zucks-empire-of-oily-rags/

Image: Cryteria (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HAL9000.svg

CC BY: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en

#pluralistic

[slippinmickeys]

I’m obsessed with your Drabbles and Ch 3 of the Tumblr prompts (where Mulder is married when Scully joins the X-Files) has me feeling some kind of way. I’d love to read the same thing from Scully’s perspective. Also, I’d love to know more about how they get from 9 to 10 (since clearly a lot happened 🤣). Thank you for being amazing!! 🥰

1. He wore a ring, but never mentioned a wife. Nor should he, she supposed; they’d only just been assigned to each other, they’d only just met. 

She considered that perhaps he was a widower, but didn’t feel comfortable asking. She thought maybe he was just a closed off, private man, until she found herself on his hotel bed in her robe, and he was telling her all about his family, his missing sister. 

Then they had been three cases in, and there was still that ring. She finally asked him his wife’s name. 

“Lauren,” he said.

She’d heard enough men talk about their wife in that tone of voice to know the relationship was not one like her parents, was not one she’d want herself. 

She felt something close to pity.

2. He saved her life in the Twin Cities. 

Donnie Pfaster was something more than evil, and when he told her he’d prepared himself for what he was going to see, she’d wished he’d prepared her, too. She was so thrown by the case that in addition to seeking out Karen Kosseff and availing herself of the therapist services supplied by the Bureau, she had plowed right past the fact that her partner had taken on the case for the sole purpose of taking her to the Redskins/Vikings football game.

A date.

3. She’d been with married men. She’d seen what havoc could be wreaked from the pursuit of such a relationship, and she had decided long ago that she would never do it again. 

Mulder had become her best friend. Lately, her only friend. Their reassignment had been difficult, but she talked to him more days a week than she didn’t. She tried not to notice that she was number one on his emergency contact list, and Laura was number two. 

She loved him as a friend, loved him as perhaps something more, but wasn’t convinced of his feelings for her until she was sitting atop Skyland Mountain with her hands tied in front of her, bound and gagged, and amongst a confusion of lights and sound, Mulder stumbled onto the scene, appearing as if from a TARDIS, and threw a haymaker so vicious it knocked Duane Barry out cold. He kicked him in the gut for good measure, and then tenderly removed her bindings, scooped her up in his arms and carried her down the mountain despite her shaky protestations that she could walk.

4. She had met Lauren only once, near the beginning of their partnership. 

Lauren had dropped by their office to take Mulder to lunch on his birthday and had arrived 30 minutes early. As Mulder had told Scully he’d planned to meet his wife in the lobby, she concluded that Lauren had shown up early on purpose, most likely with the sole intention of meeting Scully in the flesh. 

She’d given Scully an assessing once-over and then smiled at her with barely concealed  conceit and distaste. She then turned on her clippy Manolo’s, and purred Mulder’s first name. 

He had the look of a man headed to the gallows. 

5. Scully had tried dating. For a while she accepted every offer, let her mother set her up on blind dates, went through the produce section of her local market with a wandering eye. 

In the end, she had a few second dates, two one night stands, and a heart that was closed to all but one. 

Each night she would soak in the bath until she pruned, cry until the water turned cold and lament her role as Eponine. In the morning, she would meet her partner at the airport, hand him a coffee and a cheerful smile and board the damn plane. 

6. “You’re in love with your partner.” Missy said it as a statement rather than a question. 

They were trying an organic tapas restaurant her sister had found and Scully’s appetite disappeared before Melissa had finished the sentence.

“Missy!” she said with horror and embarrassment, which Melissa brushed aside with a flick of her wrist.

When Scully was 12 and 13, she kept a diary. No matter how well she hid it, Missy would always find it, pick the lock, and read it back to her whenever she walked in her room. 

Now that they were older, it didn’t matter if Scully’s secrets were at the center of a maze; Missy was forever Theseus, gaining its center and slaying the minotaur. Scully could keep nothing from her--she didn’t even know why she tried.

“I can hardly blame you,” Missy plowed on, popping an olive into her mouth, “he’s a dish.”

Scully slumped in her seat.

“So’s his wife,” she said.

Missy narrowed her eyes at her sister.

“Is she mean?” Missy asked. 

Scully wouldn’t answer. 

“I knew it,” Missy said, then, “how mean? Like on a scale of Heathers?”

Scully touched a napkin delicately to her lip. “Shannon Doherty” she said, with all the dignity she could muster. 

Missy leaned back in her chair. “You and I are going shopping,” she said. 

7. On an airplane over the arid West, Mulder told her, in no uncertain terms, that he was in love with her.

When their plane landed, she called Skinner and requested a week of PTO and an immediate transfer. She would not be a homewrecker again. She would not. 

After three days next to a pool in Key Largo, Skinner called with an offer: Salt Lake City, take it or leave it. 

Three days later, drained of tears and out of sunscreen, she called him back: leave it. 

She returned to work on Monday. She pretended she never heard. 

8. Two months later, Mulder stood in the doorway of their office and told her he was on his way to divorce court. 

Scully sat at her desk, dazed, thrilled, scared out of her mind. A laugh bubbled up from inside her and burst into the dusty air at the bottom of the Hoover building. 

9. Six weeks after the paperwork went through, Mulder showed up at her door at 9:00pm on a Friday and kissed her soundly on the mouth.

Five minutes later they were completely undressed, each het up to the point of frenzy. When she sunk down on him, took him all the way inside of her, she felt something pass between them, something heady and true. From that moment on she would always be a little less of a skeptic.

Later, when he was tracing lazy patterns over her skin with his fingers, their heads just touching on the pillow, he asked thoughtfully, “Is this what forever feels like?”

She took a moment to just look at him. Then, “Yes,” she said, matter-of-factly. 

“I never knew,” he said, his voice full of wonder. 

10. Two years later, in a bed in Bellefleur, Oregon, in the place where it all started, he looked up from in between her legs and licked his lips thoughtfully. 

“You taste different,” he said. 

She did some quick math in her head, then reached down and ran her fingers lightly through his hair. 

“I think we should go back to DC,” she said with a tremulous smile

#the x-files #fanfic #prompts #my fic #msr

[jayne-hecate-writer]

Old and Useless

I am fucking angry, but my rage is impotent and useless because the people I am angry at, don’t care that I am angry. Actually, they do care a little bit and they are arguing that my anger is unjustified and unfair on them. I did not realise that I was a bully and was asking so much from them…

So you may be asking who I am so angry with and why am I being so unreasonable? The answer is complicated, but my dear reader, it is really not you, well unless you are one of those people mentioned above. You see, I am angry with the big names of the tech industry and the reasons as to why, are both complex and deep. To explain this anger, I need to tell you a story, a true story in fact, that started a little over twenty years ago. So settle down, put your feet up and let us go back through the swirly mists of time to the autumn of 1995, when I started my degree at a prestigious British university.

My University was neither prestigious or an actual university. It was a former teacher training college that had in the past trained nice young ladies to be nice young teachers of nice young children. The grounds that these nice courses were taught in, were beautiful, with ancient trees, two small lakes with a folly that looked just like Camelot from Monty Python. The college was however, not happy being just a run of the mill college, because a simple college did not make much money when compared to a prestigious University and so they set about changing from a college into a... University College, a subtle change, but a change for the better they assured us, the actual students of the place. But after all of the expensive name changes and font changes on the new name, the leaky roof still leaked in the student accommodation and the library still had not bought a new book for three years, but they were going to modernise the place with a whole new building.

When I started my degree, my essays were hand written on stuff called lined paper, or if we could afford to buy one, they were typed up on an electronic typewriter. The college had  put up a new and rather ugly building that was filled with these wondrous boxes of blinking lights, boxes of lights that were the early home computers and they came with a thing called Windows 95 that allowed you to look at pixilated images of boobies. They were amazing.

Were they really amazing? The correct answer is no, no they were not. The problem was that to someone who had never used a computer before, it was a box that made a lot of noise and a filthy heat, that took up a lot of space on my desk and did very little, even when asked. I poked the keyboard and moved the funny little box on a wire and the pointer on the screen moved too, I was entranced.

I did not play with those boxes of lights again until several years later when back in another university (again a former polytechnic that wanted to be posher and thus changed its name and status!) I was told that my essays needed to be submitted typed up or word processed. Excited, I dived into the world of home computing and spent hundreds of pounds on my own box of lights and switched it on to be greeted by the green fields of the Windows XP screen background and the appalling monster that was Clippy, the word assistant in the shape of a talking paper-clip. He would pop up when I was typing and ask me if I wanted help with my essay and would then offer me useless advice that had no relevance to what I was doing. Clippy was the first piece of technology that I regularly told to fuck off.

My first home network came in 2005, when the chance to buy a second computer presented itself and although it was broken, I could fix it. Putting the two of them together and seeing them communicate for the first time was amazing. I could drag files from one computer and put them on another. I could work on two projects at the same time and swap files between them on two different machines. Windows XP was so easy to use, wasn’t it?… No, it wasn’t. Windows XP was all that I had available at the time and I had to train my brain to think in the Windows XP way. It had plenty of quirks and numerous faults and to add further insults, with two machines, I had two versions of Clippy that I was forced to to tell to fuck off. Then my hard drive died.

I was lucky, I had back ups on CD of most of my files, but not of everything and that included the operating system. Thankfully I had the original install disk, a CD that contained Windows and another that contained Office and that cunt Clippy. Only, the disk was keyed to only one of my computers and when asked to submit a code, it was most unhappy and said no. That was the very first time that a computer said no to me. I consulted an expert and was informed that I needed to pay an awful lot of money to Microsoft in order to fix my computer and that was before I paid the already mentioned man, an awful lot to put on the computer what Microsoft gave him. So, after an awful lot of money exchanged hands, I had two computers once again, but not for long.

This time, the fault was more serious, the outer box stayed the same, but the bits inside changed. This was the first time I encountered something called a Mother Board and another thing called a graphics card. Then came the sound card and the memory and the hard disk and the optical drive and the LAN card and the USB expansion and the second hard disk and before I knew it, I was looking at a pile of parts that had cost hundreds of pounds and none of it fucking worked yet because of fucking Microsoft.

This pile of parts led me down the path of not wanting to keep giving Microsoft hundreds of pounds every time I rebuilt my computer. So I started playing with something called Linux. It was anarchic they said, it broke away from conventions they said. It does everything Windows does, but even better they said… They lied. Very quickly I had to learn about a thing called ‘The Terminal’ into which I typed out lines and lines of code. After which, I would hit return and then I would have to search through hundreds of lines of code to find the place where I had mistyped a character or two. Then I would repeat that process several more times, adding more code and finally, I had a working computer. Making it talk to the Windows XP machine was a trial because it seemed that they spoke different languages, but I did it and speak to each other they did.

My new Linux machine played my DVD movies, it played my music CDs and I was able to write on it without being interrupted by that shitcunt Clippy. But Linux back then was not all that stable and glitches would start to appear and before I knew it, I spent just as much time typing in code as I did listening to music. The two computers stopped talking to each other and I had to work really hard to make them friends again. My first machine now long dead seemed like a mere pocket calculator compared to what I had found myself with. The Micro ATX board the size of a drinks coaster had been replaced by something faster, bigger and more fun, but these money pits soon began to drain my purse of funds needed for other projects and as funds grew tight, the computers complained all the more, leaving me with just one computer again and a box of lights that had gone dark.

My first laptop had windows ME on it and it would seize up and need restarting after twenty minutes of work or half an hour of theme hospital. I really miss theme hospital, it was very silly and it was lots of fun, but it, like my laptop and Windows ME and Windows XP and Windows 7 and Windows 8 and Windows 8.1 are all long gone and here lies the nub of every issue I have with technology now. The constant need for the next new thing and frankly it boils my piss. I am fizzing in the gusset right now and not in a good way, this is anger, I am royally pissed.

In 2013 I bought a new laptop computer from PC world, a mistake I would repeat only once more. Thanks mainly to the advice from the sales adviser, who told me that the Google Chromebook was the next advance in home computing, I started looking at one. “Does it work away from home?” I asked in all innocence. I was assured that it did and with it freshly purchased, I promptly pissed off to a desert island in the Indian ocean looking forwards to writing up my adventures on my new laptop. It did not work. It would not even switch on without a connection to wifi. Finally and unbelievably on a remote desert island, we found a Pizza restaurant and I managed to switch on the Crapbook (a name I now give you for every Chromebook in existence) using their slow wifi. The Crapbook proved time and time again just how much of a worthless pile of shit it was. It promised so much and provided so little in return. In the end, I used it only to watch YouTube while in the bath because frankly every ‘Ap’ on the damn thing was fucking shit. As a writer, I wanted a laptop that could use office software to type up my stories. The Crapbook could do this, but it had no spell checker, it could not save to the laptop hard drive and when transferring files to another computer, the document would be turned into indecipherable gibberish. With imported documents, it would destroy formatting and leave behind a document that had so many page errors that not even a Windows machine could repair it.

Also, the Crapbook could not talk to the Windows Machine (now on Windows 10) on he home network, but then, neither could the iMac, the Sony Smart phone, my USB stick or my external hard drive. I was by now running four computer systems, the Crapbook, the iMac, the Windows 10 Laptop and the Linux desktop. None of them were capable of communicating with each other across the network, either wired or wireless. The Crapbook was a joke at the best of times, but when I discovered that this was the only machine that could read every USB stick I owned, but none of the others could, I almost threw it out of a window.

The problem was how the USB drives were coded. The Linux machine could see all of them, but could only write to the external hard drive. It could read from the blue USB stick, but not write to it. The red USB stick would register, but the Linux machine would say that the drive was faulty and I would have to restart the machine three times just to be able to remove it safely! The old MP3 player that worked as a USB memory stick could be written to by the Linux machine, but it could not delete files and would instead turn the drive from eight gigs of data, into three song and a large file called trash, that contained every file I wanted to delete, but it seemed permanently burned onto the drive, never to be removed. I gave up trying in the end.

The Windows machine can see the external hard drive, but depending on some unknown variable can or cannot write to the drive. Some days it can and all is well. These will be the days when the system volume also works and I can make my headphones louder by clicking the appropriate button. However, some days Windows decides that my pressing the volume button is a sign of my need for existential peace and it ignores my request for louder or quieter music. On these days, the external hard drive becomes a place of mystery too. The Blue USB stick does not exist and the red one is old and slow.

The iMac could see the external drive, but not the USB sticks. If it did see the USB sticks, it would delete them and I would have no idea if they were safe to remove from the computer. Writing to the External hard drive was also impossible. As was taking data from it, but it could see it.

As I write this, I am back on the Linux desktop because the Windows Laptop has been unusable for almost four days. Why is this you may ask? The answer is because when I bought it, I could not afford very much and so bought myself a budget laptop. It has a Core i3 processor and four gigs of ram. The board in the case is the size of my mobile phone and the processor and the cooling fan are on opposite sides of the case (this is relevant shortly) with just one air vent, towards the front of the computer. While trying to render a picture of a Lego model, the computer began to overheat. The fan speed increased to maximum and the keyboard developed a hot spot that made it uncomfortable to use and then the screen went dark as the machine simply shut down. A full thermal throttling shut down that required fully dismantling to blow the dust from the fan and clear the pathway between fan and CPU. Given the amount of space inside the laptop casing, I am forced to ask why there is a six inch gap between the fan and the CPU, plus a four inch gap between the fan and the vent? The heat coming through the bottom of the machine made it uncomfortable to actually have on my lap (never do this, it blocks the vents) and the computer shut down to protect itself. When I finally restarted the laptop, I discovered that it had developed yet another instability, possibly due to thermal damage of the CPU. Meanwhile in the background, Windows update (that you cannot turn off) was slowly sucking away processing time from other functions. I have set the times when Windows can do updates, which is every evening when I am not writing. However, this update has got bigger and bigger, drawing more and more CPU time (I know because I have been watching the progress with CPU ID and monitoring the core temps) and is as we speak, only 8% downloaded of whatever current update it is now on, having restarted three (edit- four!) times already this morning.

So why am I angry? I am angry because none of these fucking things work as promised. When I do finally get them to work as I want, updates come down that fuck with my settings. I cannot prevent updates, they come with inevitable gloom and yes, I am aware that I can delay them or stop the machine from downloading on a metered connection, but just like HG Wells’ Martians, still they come! For four days, my Windows 10 Laptop has been installing, downloading and installing updates. It has been hanging while installing updates that when looking on the Microsoft website, they say it is time to start coding in the terminal.

The Crapbook gave me a message recently that read in nicer language, “give us more money or we will reveal your banking details to scammers…” Thanks for that Google, you cunts.

The Linux machine wants to update to the next version of the OS, that I have tried and really don’t like because it tries to make my desktop work like a mobile phone.

The iMac keeps telling me that it is too old and is not safe to use on line any more.

The Smart phone will interrupt what I am doing with it, to show me adverts. It also on occasion refuses to allow me to answer actual phone calls, because to do so, I must first attempt to close down an advert for emojis that will randomly appear. An advert that I neither wanted or asked for.

What was once a tool and an essential learning aid has become nought but a shallow toy, filled with advertising junk, following my every key tap, not to help me, but to sell me shit I don’t want and steal my data for companies to buy and sell me more shit I really don’t want. The machines I knew and loved are gone. Media outlets such as Linus Tech tips tell us that using old machines on line is irresponsible because it endangers everyone else to attack from scammers. The message is plain. Old is bad. Repair is bad. Throw it away and buy a new one… BUY BUY BUY, never fix. Sell my soul for old shit I don’t want. Stop using these wondrous machines for actual creative processes and use them instead to buy emojis for chatting with my friends. I fucking hate it. I fucking hate that tech companies can make their expensive computers so disposable. As much as I loved the iMac, Apple can fuck themselves in their arses with burning hot iron spikes for making them almost impossible to repair and even my trusted ASUS have gone the same way by putting the fan and the CPU in different sides of the case. Apple, Microsoft and Google have taken apart the computer world and used it to extract money from us the consumer, as if they did not have enough already. Also and probably finally for this angry rant, I really liked Theme Hospital! Bloaty Head Disease made me laugh and I can’t fucking play it any more.

I fucking hate these technology companies. They claim that they are making everything better, but what they are doing is making old but good things useless just so that they can convince us to buy the newer models of the old ones each year. To hell with the environmental impact of all of the e-waste, consume, play, dispose… When did computers become digital nappies?

PS. The Laptop is now on 85% of its forth install and restart of the day…

#apple inc #microsoft #linux #Home Computers #right to repair #Clippy #windows 10 #windows update

[dorkshadows]

Ne Zha (2019) Thoughts

Guess who finally watched  哪吒之魔童降世  Ne Zha (2019)? ME!! I did not have big screen privilege, but I’d like to see it again whenever an HD version is available for me. I can’t offer any new takes that haven’t already been said, but here’s a rundown of my thoughts:

Nezha wears Guy Fieri pants!!!

The cloud master guy looks like clippy from microsoft office omg

Shen Gong Bao suffers so many microaggressions in this movie lol; he looks like the lovechild of Scar and Hundun, but I found the character super appealing, and never expected to say this but- this is my fav character from the film. Maybe it’s the stutter

Li Jing is a DILF, and we should make a “thank you for being a great dad” meme where every other Li Jing ever has an X over his face except 19!Li

Fuck that one teen who was always calling Nezha “demon”- hate him

Every time the Li famiy uses their wealth, I’m reminded of how absolutely broke Wukong and Jiang Liuer were in 2015 

More serious thoughts:

The animation was a lot better than I thought it’d be. I expected it to be good, but didn’t think it’d be every bit as good as the internet said it was. It really was fantastic, and beautiful from start to finish. Super fluid, colors popping, etc. It had that same issue as Monkey King (2015) where sometimes the “camera” cuts too close during fight scenes, but overall a huge improvement. I’d say that on average, Ne Zha was better than Hero is Back in all departments.

Story flowed well and Taiyi Zhenren was the perfect narrator. I thought the major characters were all well fleshed-out and there was never any question of what the moral should be. The pacing was a bit odd though, as in there are some parts I felt should just have been shifted around (Ex. the first flashback of Nezha being bullied by the villagers- that would have been more impactful if it came in chronological order). Act 1 felt kinda rushed imo, but the ending does make up for it and overall, a lot of parts made me emotional :’)

Also, I thought age was an arbitrary number for Ao Bing and Nezha, but they really do have the emotional maturity of toddlers, and it’s great haha. They are literally 3 years old, and it shows XD

Some of the gimmicks and dialogue were more “modern” than I expected, but they actually work pretty well. Even the potty humor landed sometimes, and actually managed to play a purpose in the climax XD

Another nice thing about Ne Zha is that unlike Hero is Back, you don’t really have to know the story to understand what’s happening. It helps, but in this case, not necessary- I do have to reiterate what everyone else has said when I say this movie changed a lot of Nezha’s tale. Like, a lot. 

I’ve always found Nezha to be one of the most hyperviolent stories in Chinese mythology, but this film was surprisingly kid-friendly. It’s actually a lot more family friendly than Hero is Back (!). There’s a lot of talk about death and threats of violence, but (spoiler!) none of that actually comes through. MK15 was actually the more violent movie lol. The next comparison I have to make between the two films is that even though Ne Zha wins overall, I actually felt that Hero is Back had the better final act. 

Nezha builds up to a really intense part/climax, and then takes a small break from that to jump to a different climax, and then ends on that one (so what I’m saying is after he spares Ao Bing, Nezha should have immediately faced the lightning strike thing instead of going back to talk to his parents; their talk should have came before the final Ao Bing fight). Don’t get me wrong- the ending is great and well-earned, but would have been even better if it had more time to digest its emotions. (Also, Shen Gong Bao runs away and nobody seems to notice lol)

All in all fantastic movie 10/10 everyone should watch it when given the chance!

#nezha birth of the demon child #nezha I am the destiny #personally wonder what it'd be like if they were bold enough not to give ao bing human form #and he was just a dragon the whole time #it'd be cool because all the dragons are cool in this! #my version cut off at the credits lol so I didn't get to see the post-scene #but I know they show jiang ziya at the end #and I welcome an investiture cinematic universe #I'm half expecting the monkey king team to redo their nezha design #so that when the prequel rolls out october media will be like 'shared universe! it was *that* nezha the whole time!'

[radwolf76]

FLASHBack: Week 75 - Pong: It’s Not Just a Game

FLASHBack time again, and this week we're going to look at the Flash Pong: It's Not Just a Game. While this animation was uploaded on Newgrounds on 14 June 2002 (under the title "Pong Gets Personal"), and even earlier to Albino Blacksheep on 19 February 2002, I've found evidence of it being published for widespread online consumption as early as sometime in November 2001 on a site called madblast.com. Newgrounds and Albino Blacksheep list the author as Oska, but who is Oska? Oska is actually Oska Software, an Australian Developer that started out writing educational software for the Japanese market. One edutainment game they wrote featured a koala mascot, and they got the bright idea to repurpose all the animations of the character that they'd already made. Possibly inspired by Microsoft Office's Clippy, they made their koala Oska into a piece of software that would show character on your desktop, floating over other programs, playing different interactive animations. Oska was the first of the company's DeskMates®, but he would quickly be followed by a whole host of others.   Oska had been appropriate for all ages as was another of their DeskMates®, TeeCee, who was sort of a knockoff BonziBUDDY minus the malware nastiness. There was also Fat B an obese beer swigging redneck bastard whose animations were slightly more questionable. However the bulk of the DeskMates® made by Oska Software were straight up pornographic stripper girls who would dance on your computer screen for you. They originally started with just 2D Animation, then evolved to 3D models rendered in 3D Studio Max, and finally they used the profits this venture was turning to hire models for video capture.

Oska Sotfware would advertise their DeskMates® by having their animators work on funny Flash animations when they weren't putting together a new stripper girl. They would embed ads for their web store into the Flashes themselves, and then upload them into the usual places in hopes that the animations would go viral. These Flashes were also the basis of an eCard website they operated, cards-n-toons.com. The bulk of the Flash content on that site was either USA ultra-patriotic post-9/11 propaganda cartoons, or just straight up smut humor, in a similar vein to the software they were trying to sell (and sometimes even staring some of the DeskMates® girls). Both of these categories were likely to be passed around virally among their target demographic. Pong: It's Not Just a Game, being a homage to first generation videogaming as well as a stick figure beatdown Flash, was a bit of an outlier compared to the rest of Oska's Flash content. However, once Oska had the assets drawn for it, they went ahead and made two sequels: Pong: Breakdown, in which the accelerating ball of a continued perfectly horizontal volley breaks the right paddle, and the stick figures inside the paddle decide to go beat up Pac-Man instead, and Pong: Assassin, where the right paddle is letting loose with some Williams Sisters -style Tennis Grunting until a stick figure with a knife comes from offscreen to backstab it.   Even with the implausible storylines, Pong: It's Not Just a Game and its sequels did accurately portray a few aspects of the original Pong Arcade game by Atari. The timing chips on the original motherboard for Pong were not precise enough for the game's sprite drawing routine to keep up with the offset needed to interlace scanlines across both fields of the 30 frames per second refresh rate of the CRT monitors of the time. Instead, it just drew the second field of scanlines directly on top of the first, resulting in the every-other-line appearance that the Oska Pong flashes reproduce.   Secondly, the incident that kicks off the It's Not Just a Game animation, an argument about the ball being "Out", is actually reflective of a real hardware limitation of the original game. The paddles were not allowed full vertical travel of the screen, because of a quirk in how the ball movement logic was wired onto the motherboard. If the paddles had been allowed the full range of motion (or if the adjustment pots on the motherboard were miscalibrated), it was possible in situations where the ball hit the paddle right in the corner of the play field, for the ball to get trapped in the vertical blanking interval of the screen, straddling the top and the bottom of the playfield at the same time and softlocking the game. Rather than fix the ball movement logic, the game was wired to keep the paddles slightly away from the edges, which in practice, sometimes lead to shots that felt like they should have been counted "Out" because the paddle just was not allowed to reach them.   However, the perfect horizontal volley of Pong: Breakdown, while in theory was allowed by the game's 42 velocity vectors for the ball, was in practice very tricky to achieve on the actual arcade hardware, owing to a design error in the original schematics which went undetected for 40 years. The pinout on one of the Integrated Circuits used was misnumbered on the schematic, swapping the #1 pin and the #10 pin. This meant that when the printed circuit board was laid out, there was some crosstalk between the two paddles when they were closely aligned vertically, messing with the zones on the paddle that would bounce the ball at various angles. Only if the paddles were both at the EXACT SAME vertical height would there be a sweet spot exactly in the middle of each that would bounce the ball perfectly horizontally.   That wraps it up for this week. Next week on FLASHBack, we'll finally be getting around to that character that kills puppies, and a different character who saves them, that had to be postponed because of the breaking Magical Trevor news. (Unless some other news breaks about one of the First-Class Flash Artists, then who knows when we'll get to them?)

#radwolf76FLASHBack #Adobe Flash #Flash Animation #early 2000s #Early Web #Newgrounds #albinoblacksheep #Pong #Pong: It's Not Just a Game #Pong: Breakdown #Pong: Assassin #Oska Software #DeskMates #Cards-n-Toons.com #Stick Figure Beatdown

[idktimdrake]

New Windows Update Pending

It all started with a “windows” update. You know, one of those super annoying updates that you keep clicking “wait 24 hours” until you mess up and accidentally forget and turn off your computer, only to scream in frustration and press the “esc” button about 50 times in a vain attempt to further delay the inevitable. Or better yet, one of those updates that force restarts without warning, no matter if you’re 5 pages deep into an unsaved term paper or not.

But. I digress.

Actually, looking back on everything, I’m 90% positive that it wasn’t ACTUALLY a window’s update.

The notification looked the same as usual. The orange and white box lit up my darkened room compared to the anime I was watching. I distinctly remember feeling annoyed. I had been marathoning some random gundam for hours and the notification had interrupted a particularly intense moment and didn’t give me the usual option to delay it.

Wanting to get it over with as quickly as possible, I clicked the “Update and Restart” button and walked out of the bedroom to pee and reheat a quick bowl of whatever was left in my fridge.  If I was lucky and walked slow enough, the updates might almost be done when I made it back to my laptop/

So, you can imagine my surprise when I returned to the update completed and the screen just finished with booting up.

At first, it looked like nothing had changed. Then, something caught my eye in the corner of the screen. It looked like an image of an animated….. Paperclip?

My curiosity got the better of me and I clicked it.

The paperclip’s eyes blinked and a chat bubble, not unlike those I’d see in comic books appeared over him. This scene looked familiar.

“Hello, I’m Clippy! I’m happy to be back helping everyone again. I’ve even been promoted! So long, Microsoft Word! I’m now your personal Window’s assistant!”

I then remembered where I’d seen Clippy before. This little guy had been a giant help with essays, giving tons of tips in Microsoft Word, when I was in elementary school. He had disappeared around 2007 and my 10 year-old heart was sad to see him go. But within the next 11 years of my life, I had all but forgotten about hum. I did a quick screenshot of him to make a post on social media about him later and went back to watching anime.

I guess that it was my fault for what happened next for not investigating into Clippy more, when I absolutely should have. The animation wasn’t exactly smooth, his color scheme was just off enough to register in the back of my mind, and, weirdly enough, I couldn’t find any kind of settings or something like that to disable or mute him.

However, I just couldn’t bring myself to call customer support. Phone anxiety, you know?

The biggest red flag should’ve been when my anti-virus software disappeared. I just came home from work one day to it gone. I had purchased it when I downloaded the browser, TOR. However, at the time of this discovery, I still had not finished that term paper and it was officially 2 days late by that point and I was way too stressed out over that to care.

Over the next few weeks, Clippy became more active as various updates went through and it got more functionality. I know that it's sad and maybe even cringy, but in a way, I felt like I had made a friend in Clippy. To clarify, it’s probably pretty obvious at this point, but I didn’t exactly go out very much. I went to work and I went to class. Sure, there were a few people that I kinda hung out with, but I always kinda felt like an extra. Clippy actually asked about ME and his AI updated to incorporate these answers into later interactions.

For example:

You could sync your social media with him and then use your mic to use voice command to have him update your statusesAn AI chat feature got added kinda like chatbot except much better. It could even “talk” back through the speaker. This made him feel almost like a real life friend. He even created a Microsoft account for me! I didn’t even have to go through all the confusion of navigating a new social media. Clippy was able to ask me for all the information and transfer it all over on its own. Some general stuff like birthday, address, job, interests, family to add to friends, etc. You know what I’m talking about.The coolest thing was that I could say “Clippy take a selfie and he could use my webcam to take a photo of me and automatically post it online

Clippy had grown on me. To me, Clippy was the best decision Microsoft had made in years.

Except it wasn’t.

Again, I have no one to blame for what happened except for myself.

I knew it was weird for Clippy to offer “tips” and “search options” when I browsed curiously through the other side of the internet to see if the rumors some smart-ass computer science major said were true.

I know I should’ve done more than stick a used band-aid over my webcam when I noticed the light was on, on a few different occasions, without me even opening the camera program.

And now, I’m regretting it.

One afternoon, that I will never, ever, EVER forget, while I was watching a different anime and trying to forget about the class that I had just failed because I never turned in that god-forsaken term paper, I heard the door open.

At that point, I was frozen with fear. I desperately hoped that I was just hearing things. At the very least, the robber would take the tv and games in the living room and be done with it.

Well…. I didn’t need to worry about any robbers.

I could only stare as my door slammed open. I stopped breathing as men in black masks ran in with guns. I only was able to gather my breath to scream before a blindingly hot and painful feeling assaulted my side. I can only guess that I was tasered. I’m not entirely sure about that- the pain became too much and within seconds, the world spun and went black.

As I was fading out, though, I could see the blurry outline of another man walk into the room with what I can only logically assume was a phone in his hand. I heard a beep followed by “She’s been secured” before I completely lost consciousness.

My last thought was that I recognized that voice. One that I hear everyday.

It was Clippy.

A lot has happened since then and I’ve only just now been able to piece everything together. I’ve been moved from place to place for a few months now. I don’t even know what day it is. Hell, I don’t even know what country I’m in.

But that’s about to change (I hope). Instead of my normal bed in warehouses with the rest of the girls, I woke up in what looks like an office. It doesn’t even look like the same building. I wouldn’t be surprised if that was the case. I was one of the only ones who still had something of a complection and definitely the only one who was healthy enough to still get her cycle. Lord knows what they used to drug me…. Or how long it took to get me here, for that matter.

I wonder if whoever bought me is going to kill me. Or am I going to be lucky enough to be a mistress slave. Knowing my luck, I’ll end up one of those girls in that chat room I found one time. The one where the spectators choose what happens to the girls. Death would be a mercy compared to what they endure.

You know, I was watching the news at one of the nicer warehouses and they had a brief mention about a new type of virus. Apparently they make their way into your devices when you visit “at-risk” websites and disguise themselves as normal system updates to steal your personal information. The reporter tried to make it seem like they’re talking about identity theft. Neat. I wonder if they’ve connected what’s happened to me. The reporter followed up with some general tips for protecting your device that any dumbass knows.

Except me, I guess.

So here I am, writing this all down while I still can on a random notebook with a random pen that I somehow found. This office isn’t exactly big, but the door is locked, so I can’t exactly go looking.

A few things:

Any and all rumors about the dark net you hear….. The truth is so much worse.

Always double check that a software update is legit

Call customer support if you’re not sure, you pussy

Don’t befriend fake AI

NO MATTER WHAT, trust your gut ALWAYS

Oh shit…. The door just unlocked...

**This is a purely fictional short story.  This is not making any kind of statement against Microsoft nor am I making money from this**

#writblr #creepy #creepypasta #clippy #short story #kidnapping tw #aesh speaks #horror #horror tw

[noblecrumpet-dorkvision]

D&D 5e Warlock Subclass: Clippy Patron

Clippit or “Clippy” is the eldritch entity that resides in the Office Plane, a demiplane that takes the form of an infinitely tall office building filled with cubicles. Each cubicle houses a damned soul bound by chains of paper clips as they perform mundane paperwork for the lower planes as their eternal torment. The demiplane is reachable through the door of a brutalistic building in the city of Dis on Baator. Clippy does not profit from his work but simply enjoys helping others at the expense of his eternally damned employees. He will often seek out warlocks to aid in hopes that they will seek business with him in the afterlife.

Clippy Patron Warlock Features

Expanded Spell List: Clippy lets you choose from an expanded list of spells when you learn a warlock spell. These spells aid you in creating things, informing you, conferencing with others, and performing advanced searches. The following spells are added to the warlock spell list for you. When you cast Bigby's Hand, it takes the form of a giant paper clip bent into various positions depending on its use. Chains of the Office Plane is a new spell detailed below.

Assistance: At 1st level, you can use your action to focus on one humanoid creature of your choice other than yourself within 30 ft. of you. Using your concentration, you provide aid to that creature. That creature may add 1d6 to any one damage roll of their choice during each of their turns.

Desktop Divination: Also at 1st level, you can use your action to detect all creatures within 300 ft. of you that are writing something and the nature of the inscription, but not its precise contents. For instance, you can determine that someone is writing a letter but not the contents of the letter or to whom the letter is addressed. You instantly learn the direction and distance to each writer in range relative to you.

Create Template: At 6th level, you can create templates of your spells to easily replicate them. Each time you complete a short or long rest, you may instantly create a spell scroll of any one spell from your list of spells known called a template. Any creature can use the template to use the spell scroll, even if they cannot normally cast spells. You can only have one template created at a time but you can change the spell stored in the template whenever you finish a rest.

Save Your Changes: Starting at 10th level, when you cast a spell with a duration of 1 minute or longer, you may immediately take 5 points of psychic damage to double the duration of that spell (up to a maximum of 1 hour).

Don’t Show Me This Tip Again: At 14th level, you can use your action to attempt to banish a creature you can see up to 60 ft. away. You target a living creature with an Intelligence score 4 or greater using your action. That creature must make an INT saving throw. On a failed save, the creature vanishes and reappears in the Office Plane (the home of your arcane patron). The creature remains there as long as you maintain concentration up to 1 minute. While banished in this way, the creature takes 2d10 psychic damage at the start of each of their turns. The target can attempt a new saving throw at the end of each of their turns, escaping on a success. During each of your turns, you can use your action to impose disadvantage on the creature’s next saving throw. If the creature is reduced to 0 hit points while banished or if they are banished for an entire minute, the creature becomes eternally trapped on the Office Plane where they are slowly transformed into a paper clip, one of the many that form the endless paper clip chains that weigh down the souls of the damned. Once you use this ability you must finish a long rest before using it again.

Spells

Chains of the Office Plane

3rd level conjuration

Casting Time: 1 Action

Range: 120 ft.

Duration: Concentration, up to 1 minute

Components: V, S

You call upon the paper clip chains of Clippy to bind your foes. You choose up to five large or smaller creatures within range, each no more than 10 ft. apart from at least one other target. The creatures become linked to one another in one long chain. Each creature becomes linked to the nearest other target. If two targets are the same distance from one another, you choose which ones are linked and how, as long as it produces one unbroken chain. All linked creatures move at once when one target moves and cannot move more than 10 ft. away from a target they are linked to. This unique movement expends the movement speed of all creatures in the chain until their next turn. An affected creature can attempt a STR saving throw using their action during their turn to break themselves free from the chain. On a successful saving throw, all creatures linked directly to that creature are no longer linked to that creature.

Conjure Office Supplies

Conjuration cantrip

Casting Time: 1 Action

Range: 5 ft.

Duration: 1 hour

Components: V, S

You summon your choice of either Calligrapher’s Supplies, Cartographer’s Tools, or a Forgery Kit. You also conjure a writing desk in a space within range. Only one set of tools and one desk can be summoned using this spell at a time. You may dismiss the summoned objects using a bonus action.

Clippit’s Magnificent Cubicle

7th level conjuration

Casting Time: 1 minute

Range: 5 ft.

Duration: 8 hours plus half an hour for lunch

Components: V, S

You create an extradimensional doorway to a cubicle of Clippy’s Office Plane. The door will only open for creatures that speak the passphrase you determine as you cast the spell. The doorway leads to a 10 ft. by 10 ft. room. The room contains an ordinary desk with plenty of paper and writing implements. A medium sized humanoid employee wearing a collared shirt and khakis and the paper clip chains of the damned also appears in the room. The employee follows your commands to the letter, but at half the speed of a regular person. There are also various magical tools available which allow you to do one of the following:

Shred any one paper or parchment using your action.

Make a copy of any paper or parchment using your action .

Bind up to 100 pieces of paper or parchment together into a book using your action.

Cast Scrying (save DC 17) on a crystal cube located on the desk.

Copy images seen in the crystal cube onto a sheet of parchment or paper using your action.

Invocations

Clippy’s Binding Blade: (Clippy Patron, Pact of the Blade feature) You can summon a pact weapon that takes the appearance of sharpened paper clip with a hilt. Whenever you deal damage to a creature using this pact weapon, the creature must make a STR saving throw against your spell save DC or become restrained until the start of your next turn and take an additional 1d6 bludgeoning damage from the attack. Summoning this weapon takes a warlock spell slot and lasts for 10 minutes.

Paper Clip Familiar: (Clippy Patron, Pact of the Chain feature) You can summon an avatar of Clippy for your familiar when you cast Find Familiar. The avatar takes the form of a paper clip with eyeballs riding a floating sheet of paper. The familiar has the same statistics as an Imp but also grants you a +2 bonus to all INT, WIS, and CHA ability checks while it remains within 5 ft. of you as it provides you with useful assistance.

Page Navigation: (Clippy Patron, Pact of the Tome feature) You can detect paper and parchment within 300 ft. of you at will. You can use your action to teleport using your book of shadows to any piece of paper or parchment within 300 ft. of you by spending a warlock spell slot.

#D&D 5e #Dungeons and Dragons #warlock #clippy #clippet #DnD #DnD 5e #Noblecrumpet #Dorkvision #Why did I make this #bring back coppy

[aion-rsa]

Lake Mungo: the Lingering Mystery Behind One of Australia’s Scariest Horror Films

https://ift.tt/33X4CPz

Contains spoilers for the movie Lake Mungo.

“We were thinking it’d be nice if we could make a film that was kind of a curiosity, but if you saw it years from now you wouldn’t know anything about where it came from.”

This quote from a 2009 interview with Lake Mungo director Joel Anderson proved to be strangely prescient. Anderson was speaking ahead of the film’s screening at the Brisbane Film Festival – the movie had already premiered at the Sydney Film Festival, played South by Southwest in the US, and would go on to tour several more festivals before eventually finding its way onto DVD.

Anderson conducted a few interviews. He talked about how the film had in part come about because he wanted to make something cheap and manageable that could be shot in sections because he’d had trouble getting financing for a different, bigger, more expensive movie he’d written a script for. And then he effectively disappeared from the film world altogether, with the only credit listed on his IMDb page after Lake Mungo (his feature debut) being a short called Gravity (with Paperclip) from 2013. It’s a mildly amusing riff on Alfonso Cuarón’s Gravity, imagining Sandra Bullock talking to ‘Clippy’ the paperclip, Microsoft’s notoriously irritating animated Office Assistant. It’s a wilfully outdated reference point even in 2013 – the short refers specifically to Windows 98 and the Clippy feature was completely removed by 2008.

IMDb says Anderson co-wrote the short with eight other people. The short itself credits “Mr Worm.” Is this Anderson’s work? Impossible to know, and if it is, it’s just another weird punchline in the story of a haunting movie shrouded in mystery.

Before we continue we should point out that we can’t offer any answers as to why Anderson is off the grid. The latest we know – via another journalist friend – is that Anderson just doesn’t want to be interviewed, and while we reached out to Martin Sharpe who plays Matthew in Lake Mungo, we haven’t heard back. It somehow adds to the mythology of a film that’s had ripple effects well beyond its own sphere. 

Lake Mungo plays like a documentary – talking heads relate the story of what happened to the Palmer family after the death of 16-year-old Alice Palmer (Talia Zucker), who drowned in a dam while swimming with her brother. Her father identifies the body but strange sightings suggest that perhaps Alice’s ghost is haunting the family – or perhaps Alice isn’t dead at all? The movie contains several set ups and reveals – you think you’re watching one kind of story but soon discover you’re watching another.

First and foremost, Lake Mungo is a movie about grief. “The idea of someone in your family or someone you care for dying, and being in a tragedy, is the one thing I think everyone fears most,” said Anderson and it’s the senselessness and lack of control the family feels immediately after the tragedy that starts the story.

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What’s incredibly striking about Lake Mungo is how naturalistic it is. The movie was unscripted, relying on the cast to improvise much of the dialogue which is told through to-camera interviews, while Anderson himself played the off screen interviewer. Some cast members found it easier than others, according to Anderson, though in the finished film it doesn’t show. Performances across the board are entirely believable, and while the family members – Alice’s father Russell (David Pledger), mother June (Rosie Traynor) and brother Matthew (Martin Sharpe) do the heavy lifting, along with Ray (Steve Jodrell), the psychic whom Alice, we discover, was also seeing before she died, there are multiple other characters including friends of Alice, neighbors, police and people from the area who may have caught glimpses of Alice after her death. It’s an effective way to build up a picture of the town of Ararat, including its darker side.

It’s surely no coincidence that the family are named the Palmers – Lake Mungo has more than a few things in common with David Lynch’s Twin Peaks. Not only does the troubling image of Alice’s body once it’s been fished out of the dam, days after she went missing, recall that of the iconic shot of Laura Palmer’s corpse wrapped in plastic, but the acceptable face of Ararat has a seamy side, just like Twin Peaks.

In Lake Mungo we discover that the sightings of Alice aren’t real, and the images from the house that Matthew had recorded on the cameras he set up to watch for her were faked – by him – in order to convince his mother to exhume Alice’s corpse and prove to her once and for all that Alice is really dead – or at least so he says. But Matthew captures something else – footage of the Palmers’ neighbor Brett in Alice’s bedroom, apparently searching for something.

Alice used to babysit for Brett’s children and what he’s searching for in Alice’s room is a VHS tape of a sex act between Alice, Brett, and his wife. Alice, just like Laura, had secrets. There’s more than a shade of Peaks’ Doctor Jacoby about psychic Ray too, a man to whom Alice revealed her deepest fears and her sense of impending doom.

“I feel like something bad is going to happen to me. I feel like something bad has happened to me, it hasn’t reached me yet but it’s on its way. And it’s getting closer.” These are the ominous words that open the film, spoken by Alice to Ray and this is the path that plays out in Lake Mungo, the terrible, awful inevitable tragedy at the heart of the story. 

While it is a story about grief, Lake Mungo is also deeply terrifying. Alice is troubled by visions of drowning, of feeling cold and wet and alone, of wandering the corridors of her own home with her mother unable to see her, and eventually she’s haunted by an apparition.

Mungo’s money shot occurs on a trip Alice takes with her friends to dry lake and national heritage site Lake Mungo. Footage taken on her boyfriend’s phone one night shows Alice separating from the group and burying something under a tree. When the family take a trip to Lake Mungo to try to find whatever it was Alice buried they discover a package of her belongings – her watch, a favorite bracelet and her phone. And when they watch the final footage on that phone…

An image you can’t unsee. You’re welcome.

So much of Lake Mungo is about foreshadowing, but also wrong footing – we think we know what’s going on, but we don’t – until this moment, when we really do. By the time we get the horrifying reveal of a shambling figure approaching Alice in the dark, getting closer and closer, we know exactly what we are going to see, and it’s unbearable. Alice is haunted by herself, by her own future, the face of her own drowned body coming towards her inexorably.

Yes, Lake Mungo is about grief, the grief experienced by the family and how they eventually come to terms with it, believing Alice only wanted the family to know her true self and has now moved on, but for Alice it’s about something much darker.

The Palmer women are secretive, we learn. June’s mother could never truly connect with June, and she, in turn, was never fully able to give herself to Alice. So Alice kept her secrets and suffered with her premonitions alone, talking only to Ray who ultimately couldn’t – or didn’t – help her.

Alice’s story is incredibly sad. It’s the story of a troubled 16-year-old, with friends who didn’t really know her, in a dubious sexual relationship with an older couple that she hadn’t told anyone about. A girl having horrifying visions of her own death who couldn’t really talk to her family about any of it. And a girl who’s visions came true.

Worse still, after her family finds closure they pack up the house and move on, believing Alice has done the same. But mid credits images show us that, no, Alice’s ghost remains, it’s just that her family can’t see her. Just like the parallel visions that she and her mother had while talking to Ray – June in the house believing that Alice isn’t there, Alice in the house knowing that her mother can’t see her – both see their version of the future, a psychic vision shared between mother and daughter, but ultimately they fail to connect.

Premonitions of one’s own death are not a new thing in fiction. In A Christmas Carol Scrooge is presented with a vision of his own depressing funeral and neglected tombstone, but Scrooge has the chance to change his ways. In Alice’s case there’s a terrible inevitability. Something bad is going to happen. Something bad has happened. It’s getting closer.

The location of Lake Mungo has significance too. It’s a place of archeological importance, where the oldest human remains found in Australia were discovered. It is a place of clear connection between past, present, and future – tangible evidence of deaths that occurred thousands of years ago resonating far into the future. 

Lake Mungo might be a low budget Australian curio from over a decade ago but its legacy in the world stretches wide. The movie retains a Rotten Tomatoes score of 94%. In recent study The Book of Horror: The Anatomy of Fear in Film by Matt Glasby, published this year, Lake Mungo was picked out as one of the scariest movies ever.

The film has some high profile fans too – American horror author Paul Tremblay, who wrote A Head Full Of Ghosts, The Cabin At The End Of The World and this year’s Survivor Song says his 2016 novel Disappearance At Devil’s Rock was partly inspired by the movie.

“In addition to being truly, bone-deep terrifying, it’s a movie about the awe and vastness of grief,” he told us. “One that honestly confronts horror’s ultimate question: what happens to us when we die.”

And more horror fans all over the world discover Lake Mungo every day.

cnx.cmd.push(function() { cnx({ playerId: "106e33c0-3911-473c-b599-b1426db57530", }).render("0270c398a82f44f49c23c16122516796"); });

Anderson might have walked away from the movie world (for now at least?) but his beautiful, chilling movie has a life of its own. That he got his wish and no one really knows much about where it came from or where he went is all part of the enigma. 

The post Lake Mungo: the Lingering Mystery Behind One of Australia’s Scariest Horror Films appeared first on Den of Geek.

from Den of Geek https://ift.tt/3lI3aGW

#aion-rsa #Den of Geek

[immedtech]

‘Hypnospace Outlaw’ is GeoCities moderator, the game

If you used the internet in the mid-to-late 90s, you probably remember GeoCities. Bright, garish webpages full of animated glitter and barely readable text. It was a different time, before Facebook, Twitter and anything resembling an ephemeral 'story.'

The old web-hosting service is now the inspiration for an upcoming adventure game called Hypnospace Outlaw. It takes place in an alternate reality where the internet -- known as the Hypnospace -- has evolved around archaic but deeply personal web pages. You play as a lowly internet janitor moderator person who has volunteered to patrol the platform in exchange for a virtual currency known as Hypno Coin. It can only be spent, however, on upgrades for your clunky Hypno OS computer.

Throughout the game, you'll receive automated messages about Hypnospace "violations." You're then tasked with finding the pages and corresponding users that are breaking the company's rules. Each investigation is a unique text-based puzzle. The process and solutions, of course, are a mystery for now. In an interview, developer Jay Tholen hinted that page tags and a search engine will play a crucial role, however. "There are other weird ways to solve the puzzles," he said, "but I don't want to spoil the conceits of those."

The allure of the game, though, is undoubtedly its nostalgia-fueled aesthetic. Each page is littered with low-resolution GIFs and fonts that make Comic Sans look sophisticated. Many websites also have music that auto-play in the background, reflecting the tastes and personality of the page owner. You can customize the operating system with different themes and icon layouts. There's also a desktop helper similar to the iconic Clippy and Merlin Office Assistants. "I just felt like we needed it!" Tholen said. "This [game] wouldn't be the same without a weird desktop assistant hanging around."

"It's always fun to feel like you're on someone else's weird computer."

If you want to take a break from internet sleuthing, you can care for a Tamagotchi-style pet on your desktop. You'll have to pet, feed and dispose of its poop that clogs up your screen as dedicated icons, however. "If too much poop is hanging around, they'll get sick and die," Tholen said. "And then you'll have a gravestone that you can't remove from your desktop." It's a clear throwback to the Windows 95 and 98 era of personal computing. There's a ghostly trail, for instance, that follows your cursor around the screen, and a bunch of weird software you can download from legally dubious sources.

"It's always fun to feel like you're on someone else's weird computer," Tholen said. "The games I've played that let you do that... even if it's a little clunky, there's something strange, nice and interesting about just poking around someone else's system. Hopefully, that transfers [with Hypnospace Outlaw]."

Tholen was inspired to make the game after working as a telemarketer at a Squarespace-style website-building company. "It was very, very Geocities," he explained. The service was marketed to older people who wanted a website for their small business. "Or for their dogs," Tholen added. "There were lots of dog and cat websites." At the company, he also took on paid work that involved building a website to a customer's exact specification.

One of these projects, commissioned by a user called Psychic Elizabeth Claire, was for a website filled with references to the Bewitched cartoon. "She wanted me to use the theme song and everything," Tholen said. He tried to explain that this would be a copyright infringement, and generally a bad idea, but "Claire" was persistent. Eventually, Tholen gave in, believing that nobody of note would visit the site anyway. "And then she started annoying everyone," he recalled. Tholen later left the company, but not before giving his personal number to the client. One day, Claire left a voicemail that said she would walk into a church and "light a candle for you to break your neck" if Tholen didn't call her back.

"It was weird, and I felt a little guilty."

The company Tholen had worked for eventually blocked and canceled her account. The budding game developer then received a call from a young girl demanding an explanation for her mother's treatment. During the conversation, she explained that "Claire" could barely read. "And then a lot of stuff started to make sense," Tholen said. "Because a lot of the work had been writing down what she was saying to me." He started to look at their conversations differently. "It was weird, and I felt a little guilty," he said, "because maybe this was just some poor lady trying to do a hustle (online)."

These types of stories are explored in Hypnospace Outlaw. Over time, you'll learn more about the users you're investigating and how Hypnospace's policies are affecting them. "You'll also eventually be able to see some of their files that they don't think other people can see," Tholen hinted. In the real world, the developer believes that everyone is "infinitely interesting" with complexity that goes beyond their online persona. He has strived, therefore, to give each character a "crunchiness" with lots of hidden details to discover. "So they're not just a pastiche on a type of person."

Hypnospace Outlaw was successfully crowdfunded in September 2016. The game has changed substantially over the last 18 months, however. The original concept, for instance, had you chasing targets on a virtual Hypnospace Highway. It stemmed from an early prototype, Hypnospace Enforcer, which focused heavily on this fast, twitch-based gameplay. Tholen was coming off Dropsy, a traditional adventure game, and wanted to make something completely different. He also worried that Twitch was giving people few reasons to actually play adventure games themselves.

"Because [normally] there's no particularly unique feeling to playing it," he said, "or achievement, or any kind of creative input from the player. You're just doing the same exact thing that you saw the streamer do in an adventure game."

"I don't want to spoil too much."

As development progressed, though, he realized the operating system could serve a similar role. Backers loved the customization aspect and wanted to explore both Hypno OS and the Hypnospace for themselves. The highway mechanic is still in the game, according to Tholen, but it will have a diminished role. "This game exists as a game within the game now," Tholen hinted. "Sort of. I don't want to spoil too much about it."

Hypnospace Outlaw will be released later this year on PC, Mac and Linux. It's being published by No More Robots, the same company behind Descenders and the Brexit-themed Not Tonight. Tholen says it's possible a special edition will come out later with a Hypnospace website builder and custom music generator. "Some version of the game so that people can mod it themselves and add their own fake internets," he said.

How very GeoCities.

Source: Hypnospace Outlaw

- Repost from: engadget Post

#ITlive #engadget #‘Hypnospace Outlaw’ is GeoCities moderator #the game

[tech-battery]

Review: Microsoft Surface Pro X

Microsoft says the Surface Pro X—the latest version of its vaunted 2-in-1 tablet-puter—is the thinnest, fastest, lightest, longest-battery-lived, and fastest-charging Surface to date. Most of these superlatives are made possible by the inclusion of a brand-new CPU called the SQ1, which was designed not with Intel or AMD but rather with Qualcomm.

The catch is that, like the smartphone CPUs Qualcomm makes, it's designed to be a small, cool, power miser … and not something to give you the full-blown Windows experience. Nonetheless, Microsoft’s stated goal with this machine was “to take a mobile architecture and push the technology to make it a fully functioning powerful PC.” Whether the Surface Pro X is actually “fully functioning” is open for debate.

Chip Switch

The new SQ1 chip runs at 3 GHz, and the review system Microsoft sent to me came with 16 GB of RAM and a 256-GB SSD. The 13-inch screen runs at 2880 x 1920 pixels. Connectivity comes via two USB-C ports (and that’s it).

There’s no question that the Surface Pro X will be a decidedly divisive device, an exercise in compromises that may be OK for many but which will be a nonstarter for power users. Let’s start with the biggie: The SQ1 can run Windows 10 and the Microsoft Office suite, but there’s also a lot that it can’t run. Namely, it can’t run any 64-bit Windows programs designed for Intel chips (which, today, is almost everything), and it can only run older 32-bit programs via a behind-the-scenes emulator.

I tried downloading a number of the most popular apps from the Microsoft Store and found that several wouldn’t install—nor would the vast majority of the standard benchmarks I run. Even apps that did install didn’t always work right. An old 32-bit version of PCMark 8 (originally released in 2013) crashed midway through its run, for example. Apps that do run, like the 32-bit version of Chrome, are noticeably slow. Running browser-based tests like Speedometer and JetStream on Chrome put performance on par with your typical $300 Chromebook. In other words, I hope you like Microsoft Edge. (It’s also worth noting: The system takes three times as long to boot up as the Surface Pro 7.)

Want to run Photoshop? Fortnite? You can’t—at least, not in any meaningful way. Critically, Microsoft says that Adobe’s Creative Cloud is being ported to run on the SQ1, but no one is offering a timeline, which may as well mean never. I did manage to get one gaming benchmark to run on the Surface Pro X: Monster Hunter. For the sake of comparison, I managed a score of 3,304 on the Surface Pro 7 and a mere 1,954 on the Surface Pro X.

But hey, you might be saying, I’m on board with Microsoft’s vision and really do just want to use my tablet for web browsing and writing the occasional poem in Word. I don’t need to run AutoCAD and never will. Is the Surface Pro X right for me?

Unfortunately, I still think not. Part of the concept behind the SQ1 is that the power-sipping ARM chip will give the system unheard-of battery life. That’s curious, because just last month, Microsoft bragged about the Surface Pro 7’s epic battery life, which topped eight hours in my testing. But when I ran the same rundown test on the Surface Pro X (a standardized YouTube loop at maximum brightness), I managed just over 6.5 hours. Sure, the Surface Pro X’s screen is about 10 percent brighter than the Surface Pro 7’s, but the claim still doesn’t add up. After I knocked the brightness down to a bit below that of the Surface Pro 7, I still only managed less than 7.5 hours of running time. Only when I dropped the brightness down to its absolute minimum (which makes the screen barely visible in daylight) did I manage to top the system’s claimed 13 hours of battery life.

Add It Up

OK, so compatibility is poor, performance isn’t great, and battery life doesn’t measure up, either. Surely that means the Surface Pro X is designed with affordability in mind, right? Sorry, as with anything with “X” in the name, the Surface Pro X is a premium-priced product that starts at $999. My test unit was $1,499 as configured. Again, to compare, the Surface Pro 7 starts at just $749.

That extra $250 does get you something, at least. The screen is slightly larger—13 inches versus 12.3 inches—and the system is virtually the same thickness and weight as the Pro 7. (Technically the Pro X is 1 gram lighter than the Pro 7.) The new Surface Pro X keyboard is slimmer and comes with a nifty magnetic tray that holds the bundled stylus, but these are still sold separately from the Pro X; the combo will run you an extra $270. One hands-down plus: LTE is included with every version of the Pro X; just add a SIM card and a data plan and you’re ready to go mobile.

I’d also be remiss if I didn’t mention the bizarre behavior I experienced after my first day of using the Surface Pro X. Out of nowhere, the system began behaving as if possessed, scrolling through web pages, opening new tabs, selecting and clicking on text, and even repositioning the task bar from the bottom of the screen to the left. I eventually discovered that phantom screen taps were being registered when the system was otherwise not in use, and after some back and forth, Microsoft sent me a whole new unit to test. One potential diagnosis was that I was charging the system via one of its two USB-C ports instead of via the magnetic charger. That didn’t turn out to be the problem, but if that’s an actual issue, it’s an even bigger deal-breaker than any of the above complaints.

Additionally, my system crashed more than once, giving me an honest-to-God blue screen, even during minimal workloads. Several days into my testing Microsoft rolled out a hardware update designed to improve stability and battery life. I didn’t encounter any additional trouble after that, but it will take long-term testing for people to discover whether these kinds of problems will be ongoing.

After several days of working with the Surface Pro X, I remained confused as to why the product exists. It’s inferior to the Surface Pro 7 in nearly every imaginable dimension, and it smacks of either corporate hubris, greed, or both, with Microsoft attempting to position its own brand as a credible alternative to Intel. The way it stands now, that’s an utter fool’s errand.

Here’s my prediction: The Surface Pro X will go down in history alongside Microsoft Bob and Clippy as one of the worst mistakes it has ever made. I expect it will be quietly discontinued in a year or so.

Also, you should not buy one.

[johnaculbreath]

What makes something AI technology? Experts don’t always agree

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What makes something AI technology? Experts…

Law Scribbler

What makes something AI technology? Experts don't always agree

By Jason Tashea

Posted April 23, 2018, 8:30 am CDT

Jason Tashea

Last year, I had my eyes opened.

As a participant at two forums on artificial intelligence and public policy—one held by the Government Accountability Office and the other by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine—I was surrounded by AI and policy experts representing topics as varied as autonomous vehicles, criminal justice, cybersecurity, education, finance and social services.

Up until that point, my post-law school career had been cloistered away in the criminal justice system, including my tech work. So, it was fascinating to see the diversity and complexity that AI represented across industries and subject-matter areas that I didn’t often think about.

While there are numerous common interests and priorities across industries and policy areas, one takeaway from these events was a lack of uniformity about what speakers meant by “AI.” To hear this honest lack of agreement on what constituted AI from experts was eye-opening and, ironically, clarifying for me.

From these experiences and writing more about AI’s role in the legal system for ABA Journal, it is evident that both law and journalism can struggle to express concepts around artificial intelligence. In such a broad field, language can be imperfect and actual technical capabilities can be obscured by hucksterism and intellectual property protections.

Acknowledging these limitations, I sought to better understand how experts talk about AI with the hope that I can provide better coverage on artificial intelligence software.

Originally, I thought this would entail building a taxonomy of commonly used words discussing AI for a legal audience. This proved to be the wrong approach and not as illuminating as I hoped. However, through the conversations I had with experts in the field, I realized that there were tenets I could instill in my reporting to improve how I write about AI.

In the most generic and basic sense, AI is a field of study that broadly asks the question: “Can machines process information in a way similar to a human?”

The field is a dynamic and technical subject-matter area that encapsulates a seemingly endless list of technologies, techniques and competing points of view. Popular press is often—and correctly—derided for coverage that relies on hyperbolic and platitudinal language that obfuscates what the technology is actually capable of.

The way I see it, writing about AI is confounded by four different factors.

First, like many reporters covering AI, I am not a scientist. I have a law degree and a B.A. in History. This means no matter how much I read up, a level of translation has to take place between the AI expert and myself, and then again between my knowledge and what I ultimately write.

This filtration process hopefully distills the issue and adds clarity, but undeniably a level of precision will be lost when trying to make the article approachable to the widest set of readers.

Second, the definitions that do exist for AI are intentionally broad and squishy, making their utility limited.

The GAO report defined AI “as computers or machines that seek to act rationally, think rationally, act like a human, or think like a human.”

Ryan Calo, a law professor at the University of Washington, wrote that “AI is best understood as a set of techniques aimed at approximating some aspect of human or animal cognition using machines.”

Brian Kuhn, co-founder and global co-leader of IBM Watson Legal, uses the euphemism “cognitive technology” to describe AI. For him this means that software takes on a reasoning or qualitative judgement role. But like human cognition, this software equivalent is on a spectrum, he says.

In all three cases, these definitions are broad and fairly vague, which makes them a good starting place. But AI is a “suitcase” term, as many have called it, which allows it to apply to a multitude of instances.

These definitions also reinforce the idea that AI has some human nature to it. This is a hotly debated topic, however. I don’t think that using humanizing terms when reporting about AI helps people understand that the article is ultimately about software.

Third, even if we could agree to a definition, what constitutes “AI” is under constant revision.

As certain applications of AI become rote or commonplace, like optical character recognition—the process of a machine reading text—or Clippy, the popularly derided Microsoft Word assistant—we yawn at their existence and recoil when someone calls a now banal mechanical task “intelligent.”

Called the AI effect, Kevin Kelly, founding executive editor of Wired, summarized this phenomenon in 2014, writing: “Every success in AI redefines it.”

So, while natural language processing and deep learning are firmly considered AI today, as problems are solved and new issues are tackled, these, too, will be thrown to the ash heap of “obviously, a machine can do that.” We’ll then find ourselves talking about a new cutting edge when referring to AI.

Last, even if an agreed-upon definition of AI didn’t shift around, it still doesn’t tell us much about a specific tool.

AI-enabled technologies have a variety of applications and approaches, and the field can’t be treated as a monolith. However, many companies trafficking an AI product don’t want to describe their tool in particular detail.

Often, companies merely want journalists to focus on the narrative of their tool or business: “AI can rewrite news free of bias,” “AI can outthink lawyers” or “AI can find and neutralize hate speech online.” But they may decline to talk about the dataset their tool is trained on or what factors the algorithm considers—ostensibly to protect the company’s intellectual property.

This forces the press to write reductively and lean on literary devices that are more narrative than nuance.

Claims that companies make about a tool’s accuracy, bias and transparency need to be questioned, says Amanda Levendowski, fellow at the NYU Technology Law and Policy Clinic. The same light needs to be shone on the data used by the tool. A company’s unwillingness to share this information is a part of the story and should not be shrugged off, she argues.

Acknowledging there are not perfect words to describe AI, I’ve concluded that a writing more about a tool’s functionality and features can improve transparency and understanding. To that end, I created eight basic tenets to improve my reporting on AI.

When writing about artificial intelligence:

I will confirm that a tool is in fact using a form of AI.

I will qualify AI when speaking about a specific tool or technology.

I will never talk about AI, its applications or research goals as a monolith.

I will stop using anthropomorphizing verbs to describe a computer function.

I will stop using pictures of robot arms, except when talking about robots.

I will ask questions about training data, including how it is sourced, cleaned and if it is audited.

I will note if a company will not answer questions about their tool and data and the reason for their secrecy.

I will continue to expand my knowledge regarding AI.

I will not settle on a fixed approach to writing about AI but will continue to adapt based on feedback from experts, my editors and our readership.

As noted in the last tenet, this list is a beginning. I welcome feedback and input in the comments section below or over email to refine and improve this approach.

That is, of course, until I’m replaced by a robot.

Thank you to Dr. Alex Hudek at Kira Systems, Brian Kuhn at IBM Watson, Amanda Levendowski at NYU and Johnathan Unikowski at LexLoci for speaking with me and offering their expertise.

What makes something AI technology? Experts don’t always agree republished via ABA Journal Daily News - Business of Law

[elevatorupcompany]

The Original Social Network

Since I began working for The Factory, the clipboard wall has been a source of conversation, interest, and intrigue. It’s a piece of our space that’s very special to me; it always has been.

I love talking about it, showing off our members while people come in for tours. It’s quite common to hear of someone knowing a member. It shows off and puts a face to all the individuals who collectively call The Factory their community.

For us, it’s less of a decoration and more of a directory. To that point, because it takes up an entire wall in our space, I wanted it to look at least a little pretty while still being extremely functional.

Recently, the clipboards have been a point of conversation that many members have brought to the forefront. I was hearing things like:

“I don’t want to hover over there to remember I was talking to over by the coffee.”

“Who can I talk to about marketing? Or to build my website?”

“I can hardly read their name.”

“THAT DOESN’T EVEN LOOK LIKE ME/HIM/HER ANYMORE!”

These remarks can be summed us as:

Hard to read or understand. Font is too small and the look and feel is a little too monotone.

Wasn’t serving a strong purpose. Clipboards should act as a connector.

All information should be in one spot. A one stop shop to connect with your network.

I eagerly took on this small, yet rather tedious project, and approached it as an extension to strengthen The Factory’s brand. With a little help from my friends, (specifically Emily, designer over at Elevator Up), we were able to come up with a rebranded clipboard that we’d be proud to decorate an entire wall with.

First thing’s first, photos. I’m lucky enough to know all of our members by name, what they do, and where their favorite spot to sit is, and who they like to talk with when they come in to work. Beyond that, I know each person personally. How many and what the names of their kids are. I know their boyfriend, girlfriend, husband, and wife’s names. I know what project they’re working on at home, what they do over the weekends, and where they like to vacation. I wanted everyone else to know some of these things, too. So I took an entire day trolling the internet to find a picture of them that reflects their personality. I mean look at these people. They’re awesome! And then I converted all their photos to black and white for uniformity.

Next, we went to town checking out alllll the colors. We printed out examples and laid them across the table. We grouped colors that worked well together and ones that fit our current branding.

After we got a few color schemes together, it was time to test. One of the things that was super important to our users was the font legibility. We were just about ready to go to print when we decided to check it out in real life. So we threw it up on the wall of a spare office and stood on the opposite side of the room. We quickly found that the bio section took up too much space and that we couldn’t read anything on the sheet. And if we couldn’t read it. We couldn’t have it. From here, we scratched the bio section and made the font size larger than life.

We were ready to print.

After we began printing out member clippies, we got to staff clipboards, and decided to make them just a little different from the member ones to accentuate that we were point people here in the space at all times and at the ready to help out when needed.

In short, we added:

A larger, more legible font so you can read names and information from across the room

What you do. This could be your title or simply the nature of your work

Your Slack handle so we can easily connect with you online in our Slack community

A color coded level of membership so you’ll know how often your fellow member will be in if you want to connect in person

An updated member photo because you don’t look the same as you did when you were 18..or even sometimes as you did last year

This exercise was fun, deliberate, and is now a wall of pride here in our space. To see what other coworking communities do for their member wall, check out this, this, and this!

This is the first step in creating our member database. Someday, maybe this will be digital, but for now, we’re trying to help you all connect with one another a little easier and a little more often through our physical social network. :)

~Amelie, community manager

#amelie #network #connecting #clipboards #memberwall #coworking #decoration #deliberate design #member wall