Last Year is a first-person game where five people play as scared high school kids, and one person gets to play as the villain in an old horror movie, hunting them down one-by-one.
Source: Kotaku – Last Year Is A First-Person Game Based On Bad Horror Movies
Sometimes the best bag for a job is a box. Case in point, reader Kevin Marriner’s mobile bicycle repair tool kit that he uses as a race mechanic.
Source: LifeHacker – The Mobile Bicycle Repair Box
Google’s main selling point for Chrome has always been simple: speed. With the browser’s latest update, 64-bit Chrome 53 and 32-bit Chrome 54 on Windows, the internet juggernaut is upping performance again. By using Microsoft’s Profile Guided Optimiz…
Source: Engadget – Chrome boosts page load speeds with clever bits of code
For fans of FreeDOS as an alternative to MS-DOS, the 1.2 Release Candidate is now available…
Source: Phoronix – FreeDOS 1.2 RC1 Released
For such a fun holiday, video games have a lot of trouble doing Halloween justice. Sure there are exceptions—Destiny just did a pretty good job, and Costume Quest is fun—but for the most part it’s a time of year that games struggle to really celebrate. Unless, like right now, we’re talking about Undead Nightmare, the most Halloween video game experience of them all.
Source: Kotaku – The Zombie Game That Gets Halloween Just Right
Although Penny Dreadful may be officially cancelled on TV, it’s going to live on—thanks to the series’ own official comic book surviving the show’s ending to become a new ongoing series.
Source: io9 – Penny Dreadful Will Continue As a Comic Series
Peter Thiel, the Silicon Valley billionaire and Facebook board member, appeared today at the National Press Club in Washington, where he gave a short speech defending his support of Donald Trump and answered journalists’ written questions about his decade-long campaign to destroy Gawker Media. His answers revealed a deep-seated hatred toward Gawker and its staff, and in at least one case contradicted his past statements about the defunct site. The event ended with Thiel exiting the building as his security detail manhandled reporters, including one from Gizmodo, who tried to speak to him.
Source: Gizmodo – Peter Thiel Goes to Washington
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Business Insider: The pay TV industry is losing customers, but prices continue to climb. In fact, for U.S. cable TV in particular, price increases have outpaced inflation for every single one of the past 20 years, according to a recent FCC report surfaced by CordCutting.com. Every one! In 1995, cable cost $22.35 per month, on average. In 2015, it was $69.03. Now, it does makes sense for prices to go up for goods like cable as long as there is inflation. But cable’s increases are more than double that of inflation. On average, cable prices went up 5.8% yearly for the past 20 years. Inflation clocked in at 2.2% per year, on average. Though there has been grumbling about the high prices of cable for quite some time, it has lately taken on a more serious air. That’s because there is evidence that the pay-TV industry is experiencing a hiccup — or the start of a long-term decline. The pay-TV industry lost 800,000 subscribers last quarter, according to the research firm SNL Kagan. “About 82% of households that use a TV currently subscribe to a pay-TV service,” Bruce Leichtman of Leichtman Research said in a statement last month. “This is down from where it was five years ago, and similar to the penetration level eleven years ago.”
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Source: Slashdot – Cable TV Price Increases Have Beaten Inflation Every Single Year For 20 Years
Because the human body is (scientifically) a big, wet meat sack, murder is typically an ugly, messy thing, ill-suited for coverage on a gif-heavy video blog. Luckily, the good folks at Super Deluxe managed to correct this design flaw by making their own dirt man out of colored sand—and then hacking him into a million goddamn pieces.
Source: Gizmodo – The Brutal Murder of This Neon Sand Man Is Disturbingly Satisfying
The crew at Real Hardware Reviews say that, if you are looking for a true desktop replacement laptop, you should check out the ASUS ROG G752VS laptop they just reviewed. Here’s a quote from the full review:
The arrival of Pascal has allowed NVIDIA to shove nearly full powered desktop GPUs into the hands of laptop manufacturers. Asus combining a GTX 1070 with an unlocked Core i7 mobile processor and an SSD allows you desktop levels of performance in a form factor that allows you to move around a lot more freely than most “desktop replacement” laptops of the past. You’ll be hard pressed to beat the pure numbers that this laptop will crank out.
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Source: [H]ardOCP – ASUS ROG G752VS Review
Source: Engadget – Your Facebook check-in won’t help North Dakota protestors
Frozen soup is a lifesaver when you don’t have time, energy, or groceries to cook dinner, but not all of them freeze well. Here’s why you should stay away from freezing soups with pasta in them.
Source: LifeHacker – Why You Should Never Freeze Soup with Pasta In It
Enlarge / Hurt me plenty. (credit: ModDB)
Happy Halloween! We at Ars invite you to celebrate the most morbid of Western holidays with one of the most morbid Western game series ever: Doom. Specifically, with a free version of the less-popular version on the Nintendo 64 system, now restored and updated by a dedicated group of fans and modders.
While finding working copies and digital restorations of other Doom games isn’t hard, the N64 version, created by Midway Games’ San Diego studio in the ’90s, has never seen an official retail re-release (fan attempts to port the game to PC popped up in the early ’00s though). Which is a shame, because the N64 Doom was made up of entirely new levels and content that stood toe-to-toe with some of Doom 2‘s best maps, and the game offered some effective visual upgrades to the original idTech engine.
Now, fans have stepped in with the stunning-looking, tough-as-nails Brutal Doom 64. Even though it was made by people who worked on last year’s Brutal Doom mod, this newer version is tuned to recreate the N64 version rather than to supercharge it, at least in terms of gameplay (though the authors admit to tweaking and changing certain levels to make the game more modern, including a brand-new opening sequence that pits marines against Hell’s worst monsters).
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Source: Ars Technica – Halloween is scarier (and more fun) with free, incredible-looking Doom 2 mod
With the announcement that Disney is making a live-action version of Snow White, its first ever full-length animated movie, the studio has officially lapped itself.
Source: io9 – The Biggest Surprise About Disney Making a Live-Action Snow White Is That It Took This Long
While the World Series wraps up this week, we’re waiting to check out Netflix’s next big-ticket original series: The Crown. Also arriving to all on Friday is the new Call of Duty, although it’s hard to tell if people are more excited for Infinite War…
Source: Engadget – What’s on TV: ‘The Crown,’ ‘Atlanta’ season finale and ‘Call of Duty’
One of the first big secrets regarding Apple’s upcoming smartphone has been spilled. According to a report from Nikkei Asian Review, Foxconn, the firm responsible for assembling iPhones, is testing wireless charging modules for the iPhone 8. TrustedReviews reports: Citing ‘an industry source familiar with the matter,’ the report states the wireless charging feature could appear on the next Apple handset, but it depends whether the company can produce enough satisfactory units. The source told Nikkei: “Whether the feature can eventually make it into Apple’s updated devices will depend on whether Foxconn can boost the yield rate to a satisfactory level later on.” The yield rate refers to the ‘number of satisfactory units in the production of a batch of components,’ and if it’s found to be too low, the wireless charging feature could be left out of the iPhone 8 according to the report. It’s also claimed the wireless tech could make it into some versions of the iPhone 8 and not others. Nikkei is also reporting that Apple’s next gen smartphones are expected to arrive in three different sizes — 4.7-inch, 5-inch and 5.5-inch — all of which will come with glass-backed bodies. The Next Web reports: “Nikkei further suggests out of the three new iPhones will be a premium model with a curved edge-to-edge OLED display; the other two models will likely have standard LCD displays. Here’s what Nikkei’s source said: “Apple has tentatively decided that all the 5.5-inch, 5-inch and 4.7-inch models will have glass backs, departing from metal casings adopted by current iPhones, and Biel and Lens are likely to be providing all the glass backs for the new iPhones next year.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Source: Slashdot – Foxconn Testing Wireless Charging For iPhone 8
From Sam O’Nella, here’s an amusing look at some of the weird, creative, and deeply sinister weapons used during the Medieval period, when castles and knights and dragons existed (oh wait): the six-story tall super giant Warwolf trebuchet, used to bludgeon castles to bits; Greek Fire flamethrowers that basically burned everyone and everything; and a terrible use of pigeons and sparrows and their nests to light an entire city on fire.
Source: Gizmodo – Silly Animation Shows Off Some Crazy Weapons Used During the Middle Ages
This is a video of everyday objects shot in macro, then quickly zoomed out to reveal what they actually are. Not to toot my own horn or anything, but I knew what every single one was before they zoomed out. Just kidding, I had no clue, and expected half of them to be penises. “You expect everything to be penises.” And I’m usually right.
Keep going for the video while I put everything I can think of under my microscope for closer investigation.
Source: Geekologie – Laser Vision: Everyday Objects In Macro
The Iron Throne is what happens when you take pretty much every murderous stereotype about Game of Thrones, break them down then turn them into a board game where you lie to your friends before stabbing them in the guts.
Source: Kotaku – Game of Thrones: The Iron Throne: The Kotaku Review
Twitter will soon be adding the ability to mute tweets that include words of your choice. It’s presumably an effort to curb harassment on the site—assuming you can mute messages that are directed at you—but could also just be a way to avoid spoilers and annoying conversations. That and more in today’s news.
Source: LifeHacker – Remains of the Day: Twitter to Let You Mute Specific Words
