Spawn of Spoonfreude

#4

-“You make video games? Wow! That’s awesome! What do you do?”
-“I’m a tester.”
-“Wow! A tester! Lucky guy, getting to play video games all day.”
-“Actually, I just play one game every day. I’ve played it for a year now. I know every inch of every map. I know every secret, every lie that has been stitched into a universe made of empty polygons. I know how to melt down the entire network with one wrong item in my inventory. Every night, I dream of looped sound and text overruns. My wife left me after she tried to spice up our marriage and I said her dress wouldn’t fit ESRB guidelines. I sometimes wonder if I am a character in a crueler video game. A video game about testers. And the only reason I have not killed myself is because I’m afraid that in this video game, there are continues.”
-“Wow, how do you even get a job in video games?”
-“Craigslist.”

[Dorkly: 7 Reasons You Don’t Want to Work in the Video Games Industry]

What to do with two Amy Ponds!

This IMDb user review of Doctor Who: Space and Time by user Tweekums is somehow perfect and heartbreaking:

“Being only eight minutes long including titles this is just a fun little incident rather than a proper story. While helping The Doctor carry out repairs to the Tardis Rory tells him how Amy passed her driving test despite being a useless driver… she distracted the instructor with her usual short skirt; just as he finishes telling the story Rory is distracted by the same skirt and drops a component which causes the Tardis to materialise inside itself. He can’t really be blamed for this as he is underneath the glass floor on which Amy is standing. The Doctor enters the ‘new Tardis’ and promptly re-joins the Amy and Rory as he enters through Tardis’s outer door. He explains that this loop means that they will be forever trapped in the Tardis! Shortly after Amy enters meaning that there are two of her; the new one from slightly in the future and she explains what they must do next.

“This short was quite funny as one would expect from part of Comic Relief; it was fun seeing Amy flirting with herself and Rory clearly had an idea what to do when The Doctor asked what they would do with two Amy Ponds! Karen Gillan took the lead role in this short story and continues to impress me in the role although like Rory I might be slightly distracted by her skirt… I do hope she ignores The Doctor’s final words of the episode where he told her to ‘put some trousers on’! After a few guest appearances it looks as if Rory is going to become a permanent addition to the show; it will be interesting to see how his character develops in full length stories and whether it will change the dynamic between Amy and The Doctor.”

Seriously, I’ve read and reread this thing at least four times in the last ten minutes. The peculiarities of British English on display here—from word choice to syntax to the social conventions and manners that inform the very voice and content of the sentences—offer an increasingly rare glimpse into regional speech that hasn’t been sanitized for mass-media consumption. Fascinating. Source: IMDb

Seriously. SERIOUSLY. I mean, for REAL, people.

For me, the question that looms largest about the Penn State sexual-abuse scandal is this: How could someone see a man raping a child and fail to intervene? Fail even to call 911? I can contemplate many difficult, challenging, frightening situations that cause me to ask myself what I really would do if faced with them — and cause me to have no clear answer. This isn’t one of them. How could Mike McQueary not have done more?

[Alan Jacobs for TAS]

The FBI finally recognizes Juggalos as a national threat

While the other gangs listed in the annual report have the usual rap sheets of major drug trafficking, homicides, and the occasional dance-off, the FBI understandably has difficulty pinning down exactly what Juggalos are up to: “Juggalos’ disorganization and lack of structure within their groups, coupled with their transient nature, makes it difficult to classify them and identify their members and migration patterns,” the agency notes, having been denied by the damned liberal Obama administration the resources required to Google the word “Juggalo.”

Working within those limitations, however, they have been able to surmise that Juggalos seem to be spreading beyond the four states that officially recognize them as a gang (Arizona, California, Pennsylvania, and Utah—though Utah also classifies any two kids with a skateboard as a “gang”), with recent “migration patterns” suggesting they’re expanding to New Mexico “primarily because they are attracted to the tribal and cultural traditions of the Native Americans nearby,” whose earthbound, magic-everywhere-in-this-bitch spirituality is familiar to anyone who’s ever listened to “Miracles,” or just read a joke about it on the Internet.

[AV Club]

This is not what ‘logout’ is supposed to mean

A year ago I was screwing around with multiple Facebook accounts as part of some development work. I created a number of fake Facebook accounts after logging out of my browser. After using the fake accounts for some time, I found that they were suggesting my real account to me as a friend. Somehow Facebook knew that we were all coming from the same browser, even though I had logged out.

There are serious implications if you are using Facebook from a public terminal. If you login on a public terminal and then hit ‘logout’, you are still leaving behind fingerprints of having been logged in. As far as I can tell, these fingerprints remain (in the form of cookies) until somebody explicitly deletes all the Facebook cookies for that browser. Associating an account ID with a real name is easy - as the same ID is used to identify your profile.

Facebook knows every account that has accessed Facebook from every browser and is using that information to suggest friends to you. The strength of the ‘same machine’ value in the algorithm that works out friends to suggest may be low, but it still happens. This is also easy to test and verify.

Nick Cubrilovic on Facebook’s insidious tracking cookies (via ayjay)