Nuclear Monster

  • shooting is fun

    Activision and Treyarch are competing directly with Valve’s Counter-Strike: Global Offensive by releasing a multiplayer-only version of Black Ops 3 for $15 exclusively on Steam. The same price as Global Offensive. Activision is calling this version of Blops 3 the multiplayer starter pack and it’s only available until the end of February. There’s a FAQ here that details what you do and don’t get with the starter pack versus the full game, and also the hilarious branding that starter pack players are subjected to:

    17. Why is there an icon next to my name in the lobby?

    It’s been difficult to find players for anything but team deathmatch, so I hope this starter pack sticks around and brings more people to the best Windows version of a modern CoD yet. 

  • A Peel

    There’s this iPhone case called the Peel. Apple… Peel, get it?

    Here’s what the makers of this case promise for your $25:

    This Peel case lets you protect your phone while keeping the same form factor. Other cases add bulk and weight to your iPhone but Peel cases are almost invisible.

    That’s all true and it sounds awesome compared to other third party cases. The other ones all look ridiculous with huge logos, and bizarre contortions in their designs to make their cases look distinctive instead of getting out of the way of the iPhone design and just protecting the phone.

    My last case, the Speck CandyShell Grip had their logo that looks like Kurt Vonnegut’s asterisk on the back and is ribbed for grip. It was great at protecting my phone from short falls without being as bulky as your typical Otterbox case. Even though it looked like a novelty condom for a robot, it was the Wirecutter’s top iPhone case pick for a while and I appreciated their recommendation. Then the thin strip of rubbery material on the Grip above the iPhone’s lightning port broke. Oh well. For a few months I tolerated the break while keeping my eyes open for an alternative when someone mentioned the Peel on Twitter and their pitch worked.

    The Peel feels like the opposite of every other third-party case. Instead of being thick, it’s thin. Instead of having a distinctive look, it gets out of the way so that you can see the design of the $600+ phone you purchased instead of your $20 robot condom. 

    Unfortunately the Peel is so thin and papery, immediately after receiving it in the mail I wondered aloud, “this costs $25?”

    Putting the case on my 6+ was a little bit more reassuring. The first thing the space-gray case made me think of was a stocking on my space-gray 6+. The Peel feels perfectly formed to the iPhone that it is protecting. There’s an anecdote on the product page about Apple’s in-store repair techs replacing an iPhone and forgetting to take off the Peel because they didn’t know it was there. I’m not sure I believe that, one look at the back or sides of the phone and you’ll see it, but the transparent case does get out of the way except for the raised area around the protruding camera of the 6+.

    Where the Peel goes from slightly too expensive and ineffectual to WTF is in resolving the largest issue with the iPhone 6 and 6+’s survivability, grip. It’s a slippery phone and despite the FAQ page that suggests it enhances the phone’s grip if anything, the Peel sometimes feels even more slippery than a bare iPhone.

    The front with the peel

    The Peel will still protect your phone case from scratches and short falls, but not the screen. The Speck CandyShell Grip had a bit of a bumper around the edges to protect the iPhone from drops that land on the front. The cost of the Peel being perfectly form-fitting to the iPhone is that there is no protection on the screen. Of course, the people who made this case also sell a screen protector that is even more expensive at $30.

    There is an advantage to being form-fitting in not ruining the design of your $600+ phone and in not blocking access to ports. My last few cases required adapters to fit headphone and auxiliary audio cables. The Peel requires no adapter for any port and the various buttons and switches on your device are left unencumbered.

    That isn’t enough of an advantage to justify the usability and price of this almost paper-thin case.

    If it had more of a grip, if it protected the screen with even a tiny amount of a lip around the edges of the iPhone, if it were cheaper, I might be more likely to recommend the Peel. Instead, it’s too expensive, doesn’t offer enough protection, and makes your iPhone even more slippery. Don’t be fooled by the svelte form-factor (0.35mm) and the unbranded and unobtrusive visual aesthetic. Get a hideous robot condom if you want to protect your phone.

  • Sitting on the dock of the bay

    Brendan Caldwell has this unforgettable travelogue of a flotilla that is now traveling for the next three months through Elite: Dangerous’s uncharted systems:

    The whole trip is estimated to take three months — and that’s just the outward journey. Officially, the expedition ends when the flotilla (or what’s left of the flotilla) reaches Beagle Point, a distant system on the farthest spiral arm from Sol (here’s a map of the journey plan to give you some idea of the distance). After that, the explorers are free to go wherever they want. Many will stay and explore the virgin systems of the far reaches. Some will simply head back to the “bubble” — the tiny region of space inhabited by humanity and populated with stations like Zillig City.

    […]

    “Boredem is quite a weak word for what I’m expecting it to feel like,” says Kaii. “It’s more like complete tedium. It’s going to be very important to break it up. That’s why we’ve got all these waypoints along the way that are incredible locations, getting out in the buggy, bombing about. You can do like 100, 150, 200 jumps maybe and then take a nice break at the waypoints. That’s basically how you have to do it. Not all of us have the patience and fortitude of Erimus, who can do that trip in the space of a month.”

  • The aforementioned payphone

    jwz’s payphone runs Linux now:

    One of the props that I picked up to decorate DNA Lounge at the first Cyberdelia was an old payphone. It wasn’t hooked up for the first party, but just in time for the second party, it now runs Linux.

    When I was trying to decide what I wanted the phone to do, “making phone calls” was obviously the least useful thing. Nobody needs that: that’s why payphones are extinct in the wild. It’s also why we no longer have Internet kiosks.

    So instead, when you pick up this phone, it “rings” and connects you to a “voicemail” system. Press 1 to listen to our schedule of upcoming events (the same message you hear when you call us at 415-626-1409); press 2 to listen to your saved messages; press 3 to record a message.

    Here is the sordid tale of how I made a payphone run Linux. I’m not so great at hardware hacks, and it shows. My bumbling exists for your amusement.

  • Todd Van Luling has an article for the Huffington Post about the sad garbage people who got too caught up in Sega’s marketing to recognize that Sonic gameplay was awful and their sad hunt for finding the hidden connection in Sonic 3’s soundtrack to Michael Jackson.

    Spoiler, Jackson didn’t even want to be associated with the crap Genesis sound processing:

    Jackson and the team wrote the music “high-profile,” Grigsby said, meaning that although replicating the music on the Sega console would eventually require massive compression and simplification of the audio, they started out sounding like typical Jackson songs.

    Sometimes, Grigsby remembers, Sega developers would drop by to hang out or help the team compress the songs — which, according to Grigsby, were recorded aiming for a “cinematic type of sound” Jackson sought at the time — into Sega-ready versions. “It all had to be squashed down for the game and they made more room for the graphics,” Grigsby says. “They had more data happening with the graphics and they had very little allocated for audio.”

    […]

    Buxer, Grigsby and Jones say Jackson pulled his name from the game – but not his music – because he was disappointed by how different the music sounded on Sega’s console when compressed from that “high profile” sound to bleeps and bloops.

    “Michael wanted his name taken off the credits if they couldn’t get it to sound better,” Buxer claimed.

    Even the sad garbage people now recognize that the gameplay was terrible:

    “Someone would track down someone who originally worked on Sonic 2, like a level artist,” said James Hansen, a Sonic fan from the Forest of Dean, near Gloucester. “Then they’d just get bombarded with a million emails and then you’d never hear from them ever again.”

    […]

    As a teenager, Hansen was more interested in the “secrets in the Sonic games” than the games themselves, he says now.