Tag: COD
The Power Geeks #67
by DarthMolen on Sep.15, 2010, under The Latest Shows
Podcast: Play in new window | Download
We are LIVE on Ustream!!! This week we talk IPhone Funerals, Betty White getting her own comic, Call of Duty news, and Microsoft grows some balls… Jeremy can’t be here tonight but our thoughts are with him…
Items of Interest
Gold Sponsors:
UberDorkCafe
- Will be THE place for Geeks to hang out
- What is UberDorkCafe? It is the brain child and DREAM of Natali, aka @UberDorkGirlie from twitter, and it blends art + science = geek
- Place to hang, eat, have awesome kid parties (if thats your thing), or to get your gaming on
- Woookie Coookies – a piece of UDC before there is even a physical cafe
- UberDorkCafe – Auction Sept. 11th – DC,Tampa Bay,Online
- first Piece revealed and accompanying t-shirt @hefnatron
- Ellen campaign – fill out the form!!
- Gnork Pride for Ellen Explanation
NYCC (iKdr)
- During the convention, we will all be busy waiting in lines, getting autographs, attending panels, waiting for bathrooms, and squeeeing over all that is awesome that time to meet those you have been friends with online and across the globe often takes a serious back seat. This Tweet-Up will be the perfect opportunity to hang out with friends you have made online and hopefully make some new friends.
- WHEN: Friday, October 8th @ 8:30 pm
- WHERE: Stitch Bar & Lounge 247 West 37th Street
- EPIC MUSIC: Kirby Krackle
- There is more to come so RSVP to the FB Events Page!
- GGN is looking for event sponsors. For more information on sponsoring this epic event, please email info@geekgirlsnetwork.com.
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- Both are available in the Android Market for Android devices running 1.5 or later
- Lite is a free version (ad supported) with slightly limited functionality
- Full version is only $1.99 USD
- Go Buy it! or try it, then buy it!
Deals of the Week / New Releases
- LOTR Online now “Free to Play”
- Following DDO, LOTR Online is now free to play
- Players can now DL the client from the website and get started zero cost
- quest packs, etc, can be paid for and still premium memberships available
- If you have the urge to play a hobbit, now is the time
- Won Pax best of Show
- New Kick Ass DVD’s
- LOTR: Trilogy, (Timecop,Bloodsport), The Black Cauldron, The Return of the Living Dead, Invasion of the Body Snatcher, Pirates of Penzance, Prince of Persia, Starcrash
- Limited time only Deal (iKDR)
- Don’t piss me off, and I won’t punch you in the face ?
- Dream in Plastic Sales (iKDR)
- super awesome store owned by equally awesome ladies
- this week on sale: robot puzzle coasters, robot/bunny charm bracelet * garden gnomes candle set
- Hello, My Name Is….. Yup I Wanna Win These Swords! (udg)
- Geek Chic Daily along with Factory Entertainment are giving away AWESOME replicas of the Dread Pirate Roberts’ and Inigo Montoya’s swords.
- Don’t know who they are? Don’t enter!!! If ya do and know how kick ass it would be to win this $600 bundle of sweetness, follow the link in the shownotes to enter.
Geek Speak
- Intervention Con Report! (udg)
- Can games make you smarter?
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- Gamers make decisions faster, FACT
- One study says that action games improve probabilistic inference markedly
- probabilistic inference: ability to make informed decisions with missing or limited data
- Lots of scientific mumbo-jumbo but here’s the skinny:
- When you play action or FPS style games, you are presented with a lot of information VERY VERY quickly and forced to make decisions before you have all the facts, or your dead.
- This trains the 2 parts of your brain that harvests and then processes that data so that it passes stuff to each other faster
- What do you guys think? Can VG’s make you smarter and how?
- (SM)I’ve seen cognitive and problem solving skills go up in my own son by using Legos, why not games?
Tech,Gaming, and Geek News
- Microsoft holds IPhone Funeral? (SM)
- To announce Win Phone 7 RTM, M$ holds an IPhone Funeral
- They paraded down the street with pall bearers and a giant machette of an IPhone
- Probably should have held a funeral for Win Mobile 6.5
- Best part? the Win team staged “Thriller” in the street
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- Seems PopCap isn’t happy just making casual online games that people seem to really love, they want their own social gaming network and are teaming up with the folks at NCSoft to make that happen in Korean. Yup, Korea where they LOVE their games.
- The new venture will be called PopCap World and is being created at PopCap’s new Shanghai game studio. NCSoft will run the operation which will launch with 13 games including Bejewelled, Plants vs. Zombies, and Zuma. Korean gamers will also be getting their very own new multiplayer game called Super Zuma.
- All the games on PopCap World will be free to play, but revenue will be generated from premium elements yet to be detailed. The site will obviously be Korean-language and should go live before the end of 2010.
- Yup, Betty White is cool enough for her own comic (iKDR)
- Bluewater has announced that Betty will be spotlighted in a November comic for its “Female Force” line.
- Bluewater honcho Darren G. Davis says”
- So not only telling her biography, we really focus on what she has done with animal rights. She is a legend in the television world and now is taking the industry by storm.”
- BWP is an independent production studio of comic books and graphic novels. Based in Vancouver, Washington – publish biographical comics, adaptations from films and original titles with self-created characters in 10th Muse and The Legend of Isis.
- Cross a Tank and a skateboard… (SM)
- 2 teen canadian engineers, Ben Gulak and Jason Morrow
- previous creation, electric unicycle
- Created a tank that you ride like a skateboard
- Dual Track, control yoke, enough torque to tow an SUV, 40 degree inclines
- Plans to market it to military-type personnel
- The videos are IMPRESSIVE!
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- It seems Google’s bug bounty program is paying some nice dividends, for both sides. Less than two weeks after releasing version 6.0 of its Chrome browser, Google has pushed out another Chrome release, which includes fixes for 10 security bugs, seven of which are rated either critical or high.
- Google Chrome 6.0.472.59 comes out just 12 days after the last Chrome release, which fixed 14 security bugs. As part of its bug bounty program, Google paid out $4,000 in rewards to researchers who disclosed security flaws in the browser. Most of the security flaws fixed in the new release are in the Windows version of Chrome, but the most serious bug is only in Chrome for Mac.
- Star Wars just got a little cuddlier (iKDR)
- In case you missed the squees yesterday on Twitter, Build-A-Bear has released a line of Star Wars costumes for your squishy friends:
- Darth Vadar, Jedi, Clone Trooper
- And to continue the nerdiness, there’s also a Batman costume
- In case you missed the squees yesterday on Twitter, Build-A-Bear has released a line of Star Wars costumes for your squishy friends:
- COD: Black Ops will have dedicated servers (SM)
- The biggest complaint about MW2 (besides the balance) was lack of dedicated servers
- Treyarch plans to make up for that with the new release
- Whats so great about Servers? Better stability. You aren’t so dependent on the client link to the pseudo-server
- Only drawback, If you want a private server, you have to go through an exclusive vendor (gameservers.com)
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- SF Weekly broke the news with the story aptly titled “FarmVillians”
- In just 3 years, Zynga has gone from a “scrappy start up” to ruling FB & yup they are even on MySpace.
- The company’s true earnings are unknown to outsiders. In May, social media analyst Lou Kerner estimated their total price tag at $4 BILLION
- How have they accomplished that in such a short time?
- One former senior employee sat and talked w/ SF weekly on the formula for success. (He wished to remain anonymous hmmm… zynga mafia for reals?)
- He went in doe-eyed and eager to be a part of something and instead learned early on in a board meeting that it wasn’t all that it appeared.
- The lesson was taught directly by Zynga CEO Mark Pincus. What was it? “”I don’t fucking want innovation,” the ex-employee recalls Pincus saying. “You’re not smarter than your competitor. Just copy what they do and do it until you get their numbers.”
- Turns out interviews conducted by SF Weekly with several former Zynga workers indicate that the practice of stealing other companies’ game ideas — and then using Zynga’s market clout to crowd out the games’ originators — was business as usual.
- Former employees describe a corporate ethos based in a predatory attitude toward rival companies and gamers. Unlike innovative and socially useful business enterprises such asTwitter or Google, Zynga sought to cash in quickly by repackaging, and then furiously peddling, the ideas of others.
- The article goes on to layout the staggering blatant ethical mockery that is Zynga in fairly great detail and includes details on how Zynga gets people sucked into the “compulsion loop” then throws in the deviant ploy of online virtual extras for all of their games that come with huge price tags. Items you need to “win” or get ahead in the games they copy and spew out.
- You all have heard my soapbox on their evils…. here’s a quote from our anonymous friend “Zynga’s motto is ‘Do Evil,’” he says. “I would venture to say it is one of the most evil places I’ve run into, from a culture perspective and in its business approach. I’ve tried my best to make sure that friends don’t let friends work at Zynga.”
- Robot skin knows the difference between a junk-punk and a kiss (iKDR)
- Artificial electronic skins that can detect the gentlest of touches have been developed by two independent US research groups.
- Skins could eventually be used in prosthetics, or in touch-sensitive robotic devices.
- Both systems detect pressure changes of less than a kilopascal, the same as everyday pressures felt by our fingers when typing or picking up a pen.
- However, fully working artificial skins will need to do more than detect pressure and bend. “The ultimate prosthetic skin should behave like our own skin,” says Stephanie Lacour, a materials scientist from the University of Cambridge, UK. That would mean the skin being able to detect sideways shear forces — such as those produced by scratching a twig down your leg — as well as pressure. “This is one of the most difficult things to implement,” she says.
- Microsoft Issues Free Licenses to Russian Non Profits (SM)
- Russian politicos have been using copyright laws to shut down opposition voices
- Racket: Org voices dissent, Russian cops raid org and confiscate computers, cops then use private copyright lawyers to keep everything in limbo
- allegations are that raids or only happening when there is dissent
- Microsoft has given a blanket free license to Non profit orgs in Russia to avoid this type of strong arming in “their” name
- The unique thing, its retroactive and always present if you meet certain requirements
Intarweb Goldmine
- Worst Airline Seat EVAR (SM)
- Looks like a saddle.
- You’re half standing and the seat in front of you looks like its 3 inches away
- Looks very similar to a roller coaster chair but with less room
- What next? Cattle prods and rails with a bus bar to hold onto during turbulence?
- (The uppity lady next to me on the flight back from DC Monday that dropped her salad all over my lap and screamed at the flight attendant for not having a fork for her would have gotten jacked if those were the seats we had- udg)
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- An advert for Antonio Frederici brand ice cream showing a heavily-pregnant nun has been banned for “making a mockery” of Roman Catholic beliefs.
- The ad showed the prego nun in a church with a tub of ice cream and a spoon with the text “immaculately conceived” and “ice cream is our religion.”
- Man Blows himself up…trying to kill a spider (iKDR)
- listen, i hate the little creepers too, like alot, but come on!!\
- Zombie course in College (SM)
- its a 3rd year english course
- Students will watch 16 classic zombie films, read zombie comics, and generally dissect the context of zombiedom in general
- An alternative to final research paper, write your own zombie script or draw storyboards for the ideal zombie flick!
- Official course objective: “Get you ready for the zombie apocalypse
- Not for the faint hearted, there will be blood and guts
- Did you know I’m already a professor at Zombie University ? (iKDR)
Extra Links
Contact Info
- On Twitter: Steven is @DarthMolen and I am @JPuent Natali is @UberDorkGirlie
- email us: darthmolen@thepowergeeks.com and jpuent@thepowergeeks.com and uberdorkgirlie@thepowergeeks.com (yay!)
- And Become a Fan
Sponsors
Prof. Mordarm’s “The Wandering Geek Con Journal”
- Kickstarter Project by Lorenzo R.(aka @Prof_Mordarm), create a useful medium to inform people of Geeky Cons across the U.S., both big and small.
- Series of physical journals that will be written in and by the geeks, the panelists, the cosplayers, the vendors, & the fans. Everyone & anyone at a Con can write in this journal Allowing good, bad, and geeky experiences to liv on
- When enough content is gathered, these experiences will be published into easy to read (online, PDF, & hardcopy) editions each year. It will be the Geek’s version of the Farmer’s Almanac, but for Geeky Cons!
- To help get your own TWGCJ and/or support or if you have questions, check out the Kickstarter @ http://kck.st/cNUADw & also follow the project creator on Twitter for updates.
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- Can I say any more superlatives? You will love her products.
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