The Lost Arcade, a documentary about the encroachment of gentrficiation upon the last real video arcade in Manhattan, is now available to watch online.
Directed by Kurt P. Vincent, the story is as much about the Chinatown Fair's community as the games, celebrating the final years of a pop culture phenomenon that moved into our homes so slowly we never realized what we were losing.
"I wanted to create a film that would capture the spirit that hit me the first time I walked through those doors," writes Vincent. "There was a melting pot of a community that congregated there, where all walks of life came together and shared one common interest: video games. It was a microcosm of what New York was all about. Not the overpriced New York we've come to accept, but what this city originally stood for and still does when you look deep enough."
The Lost Arcade sheds a behind-the-scenes light into the demise of arcade culture, as it coincided with the rise of home console and online gaming, and showcases the dichotomy of how gamers connected then vs. now. But more importantly, it highlights the diversity and camaraderie among the competitive gamer community that arcades like Chinatown Fair were so uniquely able to foster.
I signed on with the foundation in early 2015. Together, we developed a business plan for the site. We quickly realized that a 100% testicle-focused site would run out of material pretty quickly, so we started brainstorming what would be under the umbrella. Testicular stories, sure, but also stories of “ballsy” behavior. Sports, as long as the ball was the focus of the piece. Ball pits. Energy balls. Balls of snakes. You get the idea.
A majority of the Rhode Island school districts with "1-1" programs where each student is issued a laptop have a blanket policy of spying on the students and everything they do on their laptops, during, before and after school hours, on or off school premises, without any evidence (or even suspicion ) of wrongdoing.
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Thirteen years ago, Pittsburgh's Jerry Lynn carefully lowered an alarm clock on a string, lowering it into a wall from the floor above, part of a cunning plan to identify where to drill a hole by waiting for the alarm to go off. Unfortunately, the string snapped, and the clock's been going off daily ever since.
“As I was laying it down, all of a sudden I heard it go ‘thunk!’ as it came loose,” he said. “I thought, well, that’s not a real problem. You know it’s still going to go off. And it did.”
He couldn’t pull it back up, but figured, “Maybe, three-four months it’ll run out of battery. That was in September of 2004. It is still going off every day. And during daylight savings time it goes off at ten minutes ’til eight. And during standard time it goes off at ten minutes to seven at night.”
Theresa May, aloof and clueless, decided not to meet victims of the Grenfell tower fire. Her political rival Jeremy Corbyn and the Queen, however, each managed to fit them in. So May, accustomed as she is to politically transparent changes of heart, decided to meet some victims. It did not go well, and later she was filmed all but running to her car as a crowd taunted her.
I've never seen anything like this. Theresa May practically running to her car as a crowd shout "coward". This is not leadership. #Grenfellpic.twitter.com/AoOuH1Yvio
Scuffles broke out in the crowd as the Prime Minister's car drove away from the scene of the disaster.
In an interview, the Prime Minister was questioned over whether there was a need for the Government to accept some responsibility for what had happened.
"Something terrible has happened," she answered. ...
Asked if she had misread the public anger, she replied: "What I have done since this incident took place is, first of all, yesterday ensure that the public services had the support they need in order to be able to do the job they were doing in the immediate aftermath."
Dave Maass writes, "In the 1890s, a tobacco company included collectors cards featuring 'American Editors' in its cigarette packs. In all, they were 49 white dudes and one woman, and the only diversity was in their beards and mustaches."
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Reason Magazine's C.J. Ciaramella filed a Freedom of Information Act request with the FBI for the Bureau's file on TSR, the company that E Gary Gygax founded when he created Dungeons and Dragons (now a division of Hasbro).
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David Robinson used the data from the 28,657 people who self-selected to take the Stack Overflow survey to investigate the relationship between programmer pay and the conventions of using either tabs or spaces to mark indents, and found a persistent, significant correlation between using spaces and bringing home higher pay.
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I bought this set of snap-nesting measuring spoons in 2015 and they are my favorite set. Each spoon is two-sided. There's a round side for liquids and a narrow side for spice jars. It's on sale right now as an Amazon Prime add-on item for $5.
Raphael Fabre modeled his face with 3D software and used it for his French national ID card.
On April 7, 2017, I applied for an ID card to the 18th Army. All the papers requested for the card were legal and authentic, the application was accepted and I have my new French identity card today.
The photo I submitted for this request is actually a 3D model created on a computer, by means of several different software and techniques used for special effects in movies and in the video game industry. It is a digital image, where the body is absent, the result of an artificial process.
The image corresponds to the official demands for an ID: it is resembling, is recent, and answers all the criteria of framing, light, bottom and contrasts to be observed.
The document validating my french identity in the most official way thus presents today an image of me which is practically virtual, a version of video game, fiction.
Tara Golshan But generally speaking, what are the big problems it is trying to solve?
John McCain You name it. Everything from the repeal caucus, which as you know, they have made their views very clear — Rand Paul, etc. And then there are the others on the other side of the spectrum that just want to make minor changes to the present system. There’s not consensus.
...
Jeff Stein So you're saying [the bill] will lower the rates?
Chuck Grassley Um, if you're talking about lowering the rates from now down, no. The rates could be way up here. [Points to sky] And if they — if we get a bill passed, it maybe wouldn't go up or would go up a heck of a lot less than they would without a bill.
Jeff Stein By "rates," are you talking about premiums?
Chuck Grassley Yeah, premiums. … I'm sorry I have to go.
Kerry Scharfglass designed his "Commute Deck" as a laptop alternative for his morning commute: it combines a mechanical keyboard (running the TMK open keyboard firmware), a 7", 720p display from Adafruit, a long-life USB battery, and a Raspberry Pi 2 with USB, wifi and Bluetooth dongles, and a little USB hub, all mounted on a laser-cut 1/4" plywood chassis.
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Here's what we've learned: an enormous swine may enjoy having his back rubbed, but that doesn't mean it will allow a large primate to jump on it in hope of a ride around the pen.
Celebrate the life and works of James Joyce, at the Hammer Museum, tonight at 7:30pm. Admission is free!
“The stirring live readings from the book—presented by a cavalcade of dramatic actors in the museum’s Billy Wilder Theater—is most certainly gratis, and most certainly glorious.” —Alysia Gray Painter, NBC LA The Hammer’s eighth annual Bloomsday celebration features a staged reading of James Joyce’s only play, The Exiles, drawn from his short story “The Dead.” Followed by live music by Rattle the Knee, Guinness on tap, and Irish snacks available in the courtyard.
Dan Grayber's Cavity Mechanism series of sculptures are a hymn to "purposeful objects that solve their own problems," in which gravity acts upon systems of pulleys and scaffolds and wires to suspend weighty rocks in motionless perfection under glass domes.
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While the portability of smartphones and tablets is undeniably convenient, the occasional need to support your device while typing or video chatting can get exhausting after awhile. To give you an extra hand with your mobile devices, this trio of foldable stands is available in the Boing Boing Store.
These device props have an adjustable metal back, so you can keep your screen in 9 different positions. When not in use, it can be folded flat to fit inside your wallet. And since you get three in a pack, you can leave one at work to use as a discreet extra monitor for Netflix.
Lynne Patton has no experience with housing policy, claims to have a law degree from a university that says she dropped out after two semesters, claims an affiliation with Yale that no one can explain, and is implicated in the Eric Trump charity scam that directed cash earmarked for children's cancer research into the Trump Organization's pockets -- and as of July 5, she'll oversee billions in spending in the New York housing authorities. On the plus side, she reportedly did a great job as Eric Trump's wedding-planner.
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Make Justice Obstruction Again.
