elric est réédité, Ctulhutech, Ikea-in-a-box, etc.
soufron
SCIENCE FICTION (en force)
DESIGN
CULTURE
INTERNET
ELRIC RecoveredOld acquaintance John Picacio just sent me his cover for Michael Moorcock’s ELRIC: THE STEALER OF SOULS, first of a six volumes collecting the major Elric works. John’s decorated the interior with a swathe of new illustrations, by all accounts, and apparently the back’s stuffed with rarely-seen essays, extras, letters, and Moorcock miscellany. John adds: “Mike and I will be signing ELRIC: THE STEALER OF SOULS on Sat., Feb. 23 at Austin Books in Texas.”
History of psychological interrogation and tortureHistorian Alfred W. McCoy is the author of A Question of Torture: CIA Interrogation, from the Cold War to the War on Terror. The book is apparently tells the story of the CIA's decades-long development of psychological techniques for coercion. I haven't read the book yet, but YouTube has a video of McCoy lecturing on the subject at UC Santa Barbara and it's fascinating, scary stuff. MindHacks has a summary of McCoy's presentation, titled "A Short History of Psychological Terror." From the post: Link to video, Link to MindHacks, Link to buy A Question of Torture   Scans from 1962 book that tries to predict life in 1975
Derrick Bostrom kindly scanned pages from a book called 1975: And the Changes To Come by Arnold B. Barach. The book was published in 1962 and has photos and captions about the ways in which technology will change our lives in the coming decade. Here's some of the wonderful things we can expect when 1975 rolls around: Utrasonic dishwashers, combination electronic oven and food freezers, portable ovens (for tabletop cooking and broiling), toaster bacon, triple purpose TV unit ("for the housewife, enabling her to watch her children at play or identify visitors at the door or watch her favorite color television program"), wireless cardiac monitors, irradiated canned beans, and automatic language translation. Caption for photo above: Film Based Teaching Machine. Student pushes one of four buttons to give answers and his score appears on paper slip at upper right. Teaching machines, expected to boom in the next decade, usually operate on the principal of repetition until the pupil understands. They aim to speed up the learning process and relieve teacher of much paper work in the classroom.I can't wait for 1975 to get here. I am saving up for a Hi-Fi Sphere. Link    When Last We Left Boing Boing Gadgets...
Rejoice, Alternative History Fans [Alternative History]The Coen Brothers, director/producers of the superlative No Country for Old Men and Fargo (along with many others), have just announced that they'll be making the movie version of Michael Chabon's alternative history novel The Yiddish Policemen's Union. The book is set in an alternative U.S. where displaced Jews were relocated to Alaska instead of Israel after World War II. So there's no Israel/Palestinian conflict, and instead the main issue is how to re-integrate Alaska back into the U.S. after decades of independent statehood. We can't think of a better pairing in Chabon and the Coen Bros. [/Film] Bas Rutten Street Defense (via Alan) Oh! The...Bas Rutten Street Defense (via Alan) Oh! The lulz! “I don’t believe in the eye for and eye. I believe in TWO eyes… for an eye.” “I start beating. Elbowing. Hold the leg. Kick him in the groin. Break the leg. Kick him in the face.” “Someone telling ME that about my wife? I’m sorry sir, but I’m gonna break your leg.” DIESEL SWEETIES Valentine E-CardsBecause Horny Werewolf Day is nearly upon us:
(I just got flowers for Her Downstairs and for my daughter, so I obviously Fail at being From The Internet. Don’t make the same mistakes I did!) NuConomy Announces the Death of the Page View
Measuring EngagementWhen looking at criteria like number of visits, recency, and depth of visits, you can't really determine a user's engagement, either positive or negative, with your site. According to NuConomy CEO, Shahar Nechmad, "engagement" has become somewhat of a buzzword lately, often used synonymously with "attention," so he wants to be clear that his product truly measures engagement, in the real definition of the word. Engagement is not only how many pages someone has viewed, but how engaged they are in the site's brand and activities.
NuConomy Dashboard The engagement levels are measured by using the combination of user interactions on the site, which includes things like purchases, media, uploads, ratings, comments, share with friends, and more, all depending on the nature of the site. These interactions are measured then combined to get an "engagement" rank for each one of the web site's users or content pieces. Since every business is unique, everyone will need to measure different things. With NuConomy, the formula of what engagement means to you can be adjusted, giving more wight to some things, and less to others.
The product offers many insightful views into your web site's analytics. There are bar graphs, charts, and tag clouds on almost anything you can imagine. You can even see how some items correlate with others, like you're mapping out the butterfly effect for your own web site. For example, when you uploaded a particular type of content, did it have any effect on the ads your users clicked, did it increase purchases, etc?
And It's Free!The best part about the detailed analytics NuConomy plans to offer is that the platform will be provided for free to anyone. Previously, any company wanting to get this level of detail would have to spend ten of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of dollars on a high-end web analytics product. Now that same level of information and analysis will be provided free to everyone. There will be a paid level of service, for sites that go over a certain level of uniques, and those users paid subscriptions will sponsor the free platform. What's Next?Once site owners understand more about their users, the next step would be to provide those users more relevant ads. Beyond just parsing a site's text and extracting keywords in order to show appropriate ads, ads based on who a user really is and how they engage with a website could lead to a new model of advertising where the ads more interactive and meaningful. However, with improved analytics such as these, there is a fine line between learning more about your users and exploiting that knowledge for financial gain. Of course, advertisers want to know as much as possible about those they are marketing to, but many users are wary of anything that could jeopardize their privacy. So in the end, the question may be, how much of your privacy would you be willing to part with if the information you shared meant a better web experience? NuConomy has been a closed beta for the past 6 months in Israel, but now opened its U.S. offices and is continuing its closed beta here with a few hundred U.S. companies on board. The public beta will be available a couple of months. Super Mario Mustache Collection 30 examples of how our favorite video game character Mario would look like wearing a mustache from famous persons like Magnum, Zorro, Frank Zappa and more. See also: Neatorama’s 10 Mario Fun Facts. Whole Room In A Box : Suck It IKEA!
Cthulhu + Mechas = CthulhuTech [Cthulhutech]
According to the CthulhuTech Web site: CthulhuTech is an innovative storytelling game that started out as a combination of two popular genres. The first was that of cosmic horror, made popular by H. P. Lovecraft and culminating in the modern day with elements of Mike Mignola's Hellboy and John Carpenter's In the Mouth of Madness. The second was that of giant mecha Japanese animation, made popular by such series as Robotech, Neon Genesis Evangelion, andRahxephon.Personally, we can't think of many things scarier than a 500 foot tall monster sporting tech weapons. If it had another fearsome baddie to square off against, you could sell popcorn and front row seats for miles. In fact, Paramount if you're still listening, just give the Cloverfield monster some sort of a blaster or missile pod in the sequel. Then we promise we won't complain. Check out Wildfire's CthuhuTech game on their site, where you can order everything you need to open dimensional portals and summon demonic forces. We didn't see any Shoggoths with armaments, but when you combine these two genres, you just know it's coming. |
McCoy discusses how these techniques were researched and developed by some of the most distinguished cognitive scientists of the time and were reflected in now uncovered CIA documents, including the 1961 'Manipulation of Human Behavior' research summary, the 1963 KUBARK interrogation manual, and the 1983 'Human Resource Exploitation Training Manual'.
A new product from
You take a shambling horror from a Lovecraft story, pop a couple of shoulder cannons on it and a replace a few tentacles with laser beams, and you've got yourself a whole new kind of horror: CthulhuTech.