Pentagon Looks to Breed Immortal Beings with Genetic Kill-Switches

Thanks to Anthony for passing this one on.

“The Pentagon’s mad science arm may have come up with its most radical project yet. DARPA is looking to re-write the laws of evolution to the military’s advantage, creating “synthetic organisms” that can live forever — or can be killed with the flick of a molecular switch.

As part of its budget for the next year, Darpa is investing $6 million into a project called BioDesign, with the goal of eliminating “the randomness of natural evolutionary advancement.” The plan would assemble the latest bio-tech knowledge to come up with living, breathing creatures that are genetically engineered to “produce the intended biological effect.” Darpa wants the organisms to be fortified with molecules that bolster cell resistance to death, so that the lab-monsters can “ultimately be programmed to live indefinitely.”

Of course, many of these fascinating mostly-rumored projects amount to nothing, like the much-ballyhooed “Paranormal Activities” branch that was studying alternative methods of conducting warfare via New Age stuff like thought projection and what have ye.   This project certainly reeks of what I like to call  “Dude Science”.. there’s a certain ballsiness to the description of Project BioDesign that hides the Promethean intent behind militaristic Bravado.   Think of it!  To create life!  And to have these… slave creatures, that we can basically kill (“turn off”) at a whim.  It’s straight out of a Science Fiction novel.  Would they be capable of reason?  Would they be “citizens” in a legal sense?  Would they have souls?  Are these things simply the government’s own technologically created ghoulas, our own army of zombie soldiers, made by modern day Frankensteins?  It’s a fun idea to wrangle with and plenty people already have … in books.    Project BioDesign takes the fantasy one more step closer to reality.  Or, perhaps, it will be one giant waste of money.  Too early to tell yet.

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Pentagon Looks to Breed Immortal ‘Synthetic Organisms,’ Molecular Kill-Switch Included

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Your History Moment (Sort of): Danged straight it’s too late to apologize!

As I firmly maintain on this journal and elsewhere, I am resolutely ignorant of popular music beyond the occasional delightful surprise.  So I didn’t “get” the musical reference here until I heard my daughter listening to the original song.  THEN, well.. it’s just hilarious.  Have a look, TJ and the Revos are the bomb.

Before I keeeeeeeeel you, Mister Nizz…..

Way back in the 90s, there was a small game company called CHEAPASS GAMES.  They made fun, semi-disposable games of cheap components– with the philosopy that there’s many elements in boardgames that repeat over and over again– dice, pawns, markers, etc.  Rather than drive the price up by adding all the expensive plastic bits, they focused on delivering the game play parts.  Thus, many odd ideas for games saw their way into game format via the combination of the mind of James Ernest and Cheapass Games.  Many of their games were somewhat forgettable, some were lasting hits.  My favorites were Ben Hvrt, a game of chariot racing and betting, Kill Doctor Lucky (which is sort of the reverse of CLUE, where instead of figuring out whodunnit, you compete to “dunnit”), Give me the Brain (a game about filling fast food orders in a restraunt run by zombies).  One of my favorites was one of Cheapass’ earlier games– “Before I Kill You, Mr. Bond…”   It was a silly, somewhat meaningless game about playing out the final scene of the classic Bond films of the 60s. 

Spy Cards from the older incarnation

 I played the older one a grand total of two times, at Origins, I think.  Why so few?  Because I never saw it in a store, never saw it online, and it was pulled from the Cheapass Catalogue in point-blimfark.  And why was that?  Do you really have to ask?  When someone asked James Earnest if he was going to get in trouble for using “Mr. Bond” in a game title, he would laugh and intimate that if Albert “Cubby” Broccoli was that upset, he could send Cheapass a letter.  You guessed it, he saw it in a store and he did send Cheapass Games a cease and desist letter, and so it goes. 

Flash forward, and Cheapass isn’t really making a lot of the old plain vanilla white envelope games any more.  The old standards (Kill Dr. Lucky, Bring Me the Brain) are back in slick full color editions.  And back in 2004, we saw this arrive on the scene (See below).

Box for the Slick Repackaging

BEFORE I KILL YOU, MR. SPY.. is essentially the older game with slick new color cards in a slick box and cool graphics.  I bought it when it first came out, but put it on a shelf and forgot about it.  It was just too generic, or something.  I was donating some books recently and it popped out from behind a book, six years after purchase. 

So I dropped it in my pocket and had it there when we went out for bagels during the current record-breaking snowfall conditions hitting the Mid-Atlantic. 

It turns out it’s a hoot to play… just a silly as ever.

Before I kill you, Daddy-oh

The game is played with a fairly simple mechanic– totally with cards.  Remember, you’re an evil mastermind.  Draw two cards.  If you have a Lair Improvement card, play it face down.   If you have a Spy card, you can play it on YOUR lair, or someone ELSE’s lair.  You may not know the numeric strength of that lair (if it’s face down).  In any case, if a Spy enters any lair, all the cards placed so far reverse and you know how strong the lair is.  If their total exceeds the Spy’s number, the spy is captured.  If the Spy’s value exceeds the lair’s value, the lair goes BOOOM! and the spy escapes to the discard pile.

Now, you can KILL the captured spy for the points, but that’s dull!  There are also TAUNTING cards that represent the evil mastermind’s ponderous monologue at the end of every spy movie.  These are rated with letters.  If you play a Taunt card your spy score doubles.  BUT WAIT!  If another player has a taunt card with the same letter, he FOILS the taunt, the Spy Goes free and your precious lair goes BOOOOOOM! 

It’s a fun little time-filler game, nothing very serious, and easy to get into and enjoy.  I think it rewards the inner ham, especially someone who is a fan of cheesy films like the early Bond flicks and the Flint series.    Worth the price, which is fairly cheap, actually.

Stand back, I’m in pulp hawg heaven again.

No Good from a Corpse

For many years, I was (and still am, I suppose) a Palm operating system (Palm OS) afficienado. Back when Palm was in the business of making affordable, versatile Personal Digital Assistants (PDAs), they had the market in their, uh, hand. A friendly, easy operating system that performed minor miracles, including handwriting recognition. Several cheap, useful, multimedia friendly electronic text formatters and readers were on the market in those days, but my personal fave was MobiPocket.. Mobi would take a formatted text document, break it up into chapters, maintain your bookmarks, display illustrations, and maintain a digital library on your Palm Pilot, for virtually no overhead except disk space. There were repositories of free, public domain books, short stories and articles on the web in those days. Some, like memoware.com, The Baen Free Library, and Project Gutenburg have continued to thrive and expand with the passing of the years. Others, such as Black Mask Quarterly, have fallen by the wayside, and are much lamented. The Black Mask Quarterly site specialized in pulp horror, western, fantastic and science fiction stories from early in the 20th century. If you had an interest in reading spooky stories from an earlier era, the Black Mask Collection was the place to go. Their fate is an old story on the internet– they ran afoul of the titular copyright holder and had to close their doors, disappointing hundreds of fans.  Black Mask Quarterly slid into the “remember when”? category for me, and I forgot about it.  That was, until I discovered MUNSEYS.COM today.  Munseys is a portal for electronic book formats specializing in (you guessed it), the pulp, science fiction and fantastic literature format.  I found it via the “browse catalogues” feature on STANZA, by Lexcyle probably the best portable book reader “app” I have on my Ipod Touch.   Voila!  Instant access to a giant compendium of old pulp authors.  I quickly downloaded The Seed from the Sepulchre by Clark Ashton Smith, The Sword of Solomon Kane and the Valley of Worms by Robert E. Howard, and The Zap Gun by Phillip K. Dick.  Heaven knows when I’ll have the time to read them, but they are all free.. and you just can’t beat that phrase, can you?  Free books.  As many as you like.  All you have to do is read.  So!  Check out Munseys if you can.  I suspect those folks at Black Mask had to go somewhere, and this is where they ended up.  Enjoy!

Looking into the Past on FLICKR

I stumbled across a lovely little group on FLICKR, the image sharing website, yesterday. The folks participating (from all over the world) meticulously take interesting old photographs, research them, and find their exact placement in frame and shoot a modern photograph of roughly the same thing. Then they blend the old image and new into one image with both the old and new variants in the same frame. the results are ghostly, poignant and not a little bit beautiful. Here’s a selection of various photographers that are sharing their photographs on FLICKR.

Facebook Users: Slideshows won’t display. Visit THIS LINK to see a slideshow of the entire Flickr Pool entitled “Looking into the Past”.

Has Science Fiction gotten stupider since 1970?

I stumbled upon this on Youtube and was struck at how cogent a commentary it is not just on Science Fiction (which is a genre in a woeful state these days), but also on the dumbing of America. 

“Hugo and Nebula Award-winning author Robert J. Sawyer explains how Star Wars has dulled the edge that made science fiction such a pertinent film genre.”

Part 1 of 3: Planet of the Apes, Star Trek, and Frankenstein

Part 2 of 3: H.G. Welles and Jules Verne

Part 3 of 3: Star Wars

The complete audio lecture is located HERE. Worth a listen!

Warmachine Mark II at HMGS Cold Wars Convention

Privateer Press’ Warmachine Mark II is getting a lot of good press on the best gaming podcast of all time, The D6 Generation, so I thought I’d give it a look.  The word “steampunk” has been applied to this game– and I can kind of see that from the fanciful long rifles and automaton figures.. but really, my vision of steampunk involves stern Victorian Gentlemen with handlebar mustaches, calmly reloading their top-break Webley pistols and blazing away at hordes of incoming Red Martians whilst simultaneously exhorting trembling young Penelope to “buck up, dear, Stiff upper lip and all that, eh what?”

I guess I’m hopelessly addicted to the Frank Chadwick version of Victoriana and Steampunk, not the vision these young whippersnappers are kicking around these days.

Still, Russ Wakelin and Craig Gallant sing hosannas about this game on their podcast, and they haven’t steered me wrong yet (well, much).  So it was my intention to get in a game if it’s run at the upcoming COLD WARS Historical Gaming convention, Lancaster PA, 11-14 March 2010.   Sure enough, it will be.  I just got an email from my friend Norbert Brunhuber (who is the fantatic’s fanatic about Warmachine) and here’s the skinny on Warmachine demos, from the Keystone Gamers forums:

Mk II Demos

Play a demo of the award-winning WARMACHINE or HORDES miniatures game from Privateer Press and receive raffle tickets for daily prize drawings. All models and gaming aids will be provided. For any questions, feel free to email them to events@keystonegamers.com.
No pre-reg or event tickets required.

Fri. 12 – 8 pm
Sat. 12 – 8 pm
Sun. 10 – 2 pm

Ruleset: Warmachine/Hordes Mk II

Tournaments:

Ruleset: Mk II Rules.

Hordes armies will use latest Mk II Field Test rules for composing armies. Please bring all the necessary cards, printouts, templates and dice, these will not be supplied. No event tickets required, but have your con badge present at the day of the tournament.

Updates to these events at Keystone Gamers Forum (contact: events@keystonegamers.com).

Friday @ 8pm (approx. length 4-5 hrs, with include a small break between rounds)
Format: Jacks ‘n Beasts. Two 15 pt lists allowed. Single Caster with only Jacks and Beasts.
Timed Turns: Not timed, but stalling will not be excepted.
Each game will last approx. 45-60 minutes.
Slots available: 15 (as of 1/26)

Now, I don’t know what a lot of all that means, to be honest, but I imagine it resonates with somebody out there.  I do know that I will likely be involved in a game around mid-day on Friday, if you should feel the desire to walk up and say hello.  I’m going to try to wear a MISTER NIZZ Button (see the graphic, top left) for easy identification.

Tall Ships – Age of Sail by Mantid Interactive

Mantid Interactive, aka, Barry Geipel, is a one-man band putting together some fun little military history themed games for the Ipod Touch and now, the Ipad.   My personal favorite (and the only product he has out right now) is Tall Ships – Age of Sail. This is a sort of first person Wooden Ships and Heart of Oak sailing battle game.  The point of view is somewhat distanced from your ship– about fifty feet behind or to one side, depending on the maneuver.

Tall Ships - Age of Sail on the Itouch: click to visit Mantid Interactive

I’ve only played single ship actions, and their appears to be a sort of campaign where the naval officer fights more ships and gets promoted into larger vessels for later fights.    Stylistically, it reminds me strongly of Avalon Hill’s last efforts at creating a version of their Wooden Ships and Iron Men game for the IBM platform, although not remotely that complex.  Tall Ships takes advantage of the Ipod’s feedback and touch screen technology to greatly simplify ship and combat maneuvers.  Cannons are autoloaded.  Want to change the view?  Tilt the Ipod to the left or right.  Want to fire?  Touch the screen.  It’s a lot of fun to play, although a bit frustrating on the Apple Itouch I was using (3rd Generation).  I found that it’s way too easy to overcompensate turning the view around and I kept losing the picture of the action.. so it takes some getting used to.

Still, Tall Ships is well worth all of the, what, two dollars?  I paid for it at the Apple ITunes App store.  I wish there were more ITouch games like this.

Launching the new Apple Ipad

Steve Jobs is going to run into trouble with these acronyms. I already have trouble distinguishing between IPod and Iphone, IPad is just going to add another confusing gizmo term out there.. should have stuck with Mac Tablet, Steve. There’s something about Ipad that sounds almost… menstrual.

If you’re not a Luddite, you know that the big Ipad launch is happening right now, as I type. The following pictures are copyright 2010, Gizmodo, from the live streamcast of the Ipad Product launch. The pictures were captured from Gizmodo’s streaming video and are used strictly in accordance with fair usage standards.

These events are almost like rock concerts.. here we have Steve working the crowd

What is this Ipad thing? What are you, some kind of monk? It’s the new portable/handheld/PDA substitute/Reader/media player/Smart Tablet/whatsis.   If you have heard me rhapsodize about the Ipod Touch I got for Christmas, think of the same thing, only writ large.  Why is it a good thing? Well, you might like the fact that ITouch and IPhone operating systems all run the same operating system– and the apps that work on them will work on an Ipad as well. The new Ipad, we are told, is a revolutionary new product that will take aim at Netbooks, mobile devices, smartphones and laptops. All at once. Along the way, it will cure AIDS, solve world hunger, end global warming, and finally fix that stubborn Middle Eastern thing.

Compared to an Iphone and a standard Mac.

The Ipad will be big– not as big as a desktop or conventional laptop, but about as big as a pad of paper, lettersized, more or less. That’s MUCH more readable than the Iphone, not quite as good as the stretch flatscreen I’m using right now as I type.

Check out muh PAD, ace..

What will it do?  Pretty much anything and everything an Iphone can, for starters.  With a much larger, tablet sized screen:

The high-resolution, 9.7 inch LED-backlit, IPS display on iPad is remarkably crisp and vivid. Which makes it perfect for web browsing, watching movies, or showing off photos. It’s also been designed to work in any orientation — portrait or landscape. And because it uses a display technology called IPS (in-plane switching), it has a wide, 178° viewing angle. So you can hold it almost any way you want, and still get a brilliant picture, with excellent color and contrast.  — The Apple Website

It will do the productivity stuff you sort of assume it should do.

All the standard Ipod and Iphone classic stuff you would expect is incorporated, it plays music, video, takes dictation, has access to the Apps store, blah de blah de..  I don’t for a second think these aren’t valuable features, but really, the IPod Touch I just got for Christmas does all that, as well.  That shouldn’t be that impressive.  I’d be more impressed if it were a solid, functional substitute for a real laptop.  It isn’t.  The Ipad, in this generation, fails on a few key points.   No USB, no expansion memory, touch screen keyboard (I’m sorry, I’m not doing well with a touch screen keyboard and these giant banana fingers– it’s not the same as typing at a keyboard).  I would not want to actually write with an IPad for protracted periods of time, personally– touch screens are fatiguing after a while. because you have to be certain where your fingertips are going all the time, whereas I can type on a keyboard with my eyes shut.

The Ipad will connect to the Internet via Wireless and 3G, but not direct ethernet:

Wireless

With built-in 802.11n, iPad can take advantage of the fastest Wi-Fi networks. And it’ll automatically locate available Wi-Fi networks, which you can easily join with a few simple taps. iPad also comes with Bluetooth 2.1 with EDR, which lets you connect to devices like wireless headphones or the Apple Wireless Keyboard.

3G

iPad will also be available in a 3G model, with super-fast data speeds up to 7.2 Mbps.³ So if you’re traveling, or you happen to be somewhere that doesn’t have a Wi-Fi network, you can still get a fast connection for surfing the web, downloading email, or getting directions. — From the Ipad Website

Like the ITouch (or Ipod Touch, I can’t figure out if “ITouch” is official or not), the IPad will come in various sizes and flavors, priced to move.  this was the most meaningful slide in the presentation for me:

NOW we get to the meat of it. Not a bad set of price points, really.

Surprisingly, considering some of Apple’s past launches, I was not goggling in Sticker Shock on this one.  These are very reasonable prices compared to laptops in the main stream market right NOW.  A bit pricey compared to netbooks, for the most part, but it does appear to be a leap forward in technology from where I am sitting– but technology to do what?  Office documents? Writing? Editing digital movies?  Processing digital images?  Making presentations?  Definitely not.  There are far easier to use and more affordable platforms for those tasks– including lower priced netbooks.   Where the Tablet (excuse me, IPad) will certainly shine is when it is compared to cheaper netbooks is in the rapidly accelerating market for digital book readers and the ever present market for web browsing.   This gizmo will handle both tasks swimmingly– it sports a much bigger sized web browser space than an Iphone or most Netbooks, and it is sized roughly twice as big as a Kindle.  Indeed, it is the latter application that I think Apple is gambling on– that the Ipad will be a Kindle-killer.  We’ll see.  I rather like the Kindle/Sony E-reader electronic paperwhite display for reading with, and I have yet to see the Ipad’s new screen to see if it’s better or worse.

At the end of the day, this sort of sums it up for me, courtesy of G4G Interactive:

Yeah, I'm hip.. and I know it.

Will I buy one?  I’m tempted despite all the hype and hoo-haw.  I like the e-reader application of seeing an entire page on the tablet.. yet, I find I  might be limiting myself to trying to make a glorified toy work the way I need to work when I’m using a laptop.  Of course, I can pick up some of the accessories like a keyboard and a hard shell case.. at which point, it’s a laptop!  Huh???

Barsoomian update (the big movie, from ERBzine)

Disney Movie causes economic boomlet in Moab, Utah

Beginning in April, Disney Studios will film the science-fiction fantasy movie “John Carter of Mars” (also known as “A princess of Mars”) in the Moab, Utah area. Preliminary work already is under way in London. Disney crew members scouted the world for a location resembling the reddish planet Mars. Film crews have been in Moab for more than a year, said Tara Penner, director of the Moab to Monument Valley Movie Commission.

Moab actually has a film jobs webpage here. I guess the center of the Utah desert isn’t supportive of a thriving film community.

Also. . . from Uni-versal Extras

“I am or I look Mediterranean: For the all action feature film John Carter of Mars we are starting to cast men and women of all ages who look Mediterranean for a variety or roles!”

Looks to me like they are trying to cast the Red Martians to look actually as how they are portrayed in the novels– like Native Americans or people from the Indian subcontinent. No blonde starlets or ex-porn queens here.