I was reading some fun stuff about the mysterious urban-legend arcade game Polybius. As part of the reading, I got curious if the mind control or brainwashing claimed was actually possible.
During some simple searching, I ran across this interesting video that claims getting information from people is very possible – but not via Hollywood brain wave machines and magical drugs.
Great little mini-documentary on creation of one of the first 3D adventure games: Alone in the Dark.
You can also watch the original GDC talk by Frederick Raynal
Movie theater popcorn can often have over a 1000% markup compared to how much it actually costs the theater to buy and produce. While that might sound excessive, bottled water is often marked up over 4,000%
In an effort to help people come back to theaters, Cinemark ran a promotion in which they would fill any popcorn container you wanted to bring for $5. People responded!
Before survival horror became a thing, at the same time as Alone in the Dark, Doctor Hauzer existed on the 3DO. A fully 3D horror game published in 1994.
Daniel Perdomo started a project to re-create the classic Atari’s arcade PONG game – but in physical form. It uses mechanical paddles and a magnetic floating bit.
I recently got to play with one of the ones created via their successful kickstarter and it was awesome fun. I would love to own one, but it’s unclear if they’re still making them. They were also a cool few thousand dollars when they were selling them.
Articles:
Fascinating story of the real life kidnapping and ransom of the Heineken CEO.
I like how Hoog used old-school 90’s era graphics to tell the story. He seems to have a number of other videos that use this same style. Awesome
SkyArt has a collection of unique and interesting avionics controls, dials, and readouts that you can buy and use as a cool desktop curios. They even have furniture and large art pieces that you can buy.
Improving code quality has become as, if not the, most important aspect of software. Bugs and security holes are exposing attack surfaces for personal data theft, infiltration, and ransomware. Google has been trying a number of approaches to improve things, and now they released a report on the effect of replacing memory unsafe languages with memory-safe languages.
Their approach stems from a number of somewhat obvious, but powerful observations. Memory vulnerabilities in a block of code decay quickly as it is tested in live conditions. In fact, they disappear exponentially with time as bugs are found and fixed. Therefore, the time when code is most likely to have the most memory safety issues is in brand new code.
It makes sense. As bugs are fixed, code becomes more and more bug-free (which is one of the big fallacies of the ‘lets scrap it and re-write all this messy code’ approaches). This also means that replacing old code with memory-safe languages actually doesn’t give you the best ROI. Instead, a team should focus on making sure the NEW code they add is in a memory-safe language to reduce the maximum amount of issues in the least amount of development time.
Google proved this out in their Android stack. By leaving the old code alone (just fixing bugs), they focused on just ensuring all NEW code was in a memory-safe language. This simple approach gave them a huge improvement in the number of memory vulnerabilities encountered each year:
Definitely worth a read
Articles:
Dr. Doot does a speedrun of Elden Ring. That’s interesting in itself, but he is doing it using a Roland Aerophone as his controller.
Also musically inclined, there was a Crazy Taxi run that featured a real band covering all the songs:
Holy Saturday is a very quiet time in the church. There is no mass celebrated anywhere in the world. No sacraments are celebrated (except in danger of death). Catholic churches, for one day of the year, sit quite. Jesus lays in the tomb. To the world, he is dead. But tradition holds that Jesus is very much at work.
The Harrowing of Hell is the period of time between the death of Jesus on the cross at around 3pm on Good Friday and his resurrection sometime during the night on Sunday morning. Before Christ, everyone in the world is subject to death due to the disobedience of Adam and Evil that brought death into the world. Jesus was was able to redeem humanity by the sacrifice of himself. Jesus tells us that all who die to themselves and are buried in Christ by baptism and following his teachings will also find redemption in him as his friends at their death and rise on the last day.
On Good Friday when Jesus dies on the Cross, Christ triumphantly descends into death and tradition tells us he brought salvation to the dead held captive there since the beginning of the world.
There’s nothing explicit in the Bible about it. It’s inferred from a few passages (primarily 1 Peter 4:6 and parts of Ephesians 4) that Jesus descended into “Sheol” or “Hell” or “Hades”. Matthew tells us in Chapter 27 that right after Jesus’ death that:
⁵⁰Jesus cried out again in a loud voice, and gave up his spirit. ⁵¹ And behold, the veil of the sanctuary was torn in two from top to bottom. The earth quaked, rocks were split, ⁵² tombs were opened, and the bodies of many saints who had fallen asleep were raised. ⁵³ And coming forth from their tombs after his resurrection, they entered the holy city and appeared to many.
While some might say it is “just tradition” and can be discarded, the Bible itself is a product of tradition and should not be considered a sole or separate source of authority—though we may regard it as the most important product of tradition. After all, most of the bible after the gospels are writings and traditions of the earliest Christians – including the apostles.