Nuclear Monster

  • This shelter doesn’t sound spectacular, but the space provided opportunities for the 239 families living there to have fun activities that won’t be possible elsewhere. Splinter’s Emma Roller:

    …over the past seven years, the families and organizations that operate within the shelter have created a makeshift community of their own. This is what happens when poor families living on public land are pushed out the back door, while powerful corporate interests are invited in for dinner.

    It is being bulldozed to make room for their pitch to Amazon and luxury condo developers:

    One of the city’s proposed sites for Amazon’s new headquarters is in the Capitol Hill East neighborhood—directly on top of where D.C. General stands today. “Hill East, a quiet, traditional rowhouse community, sits at the eastern edge of the District, walkable to some of the most exciting and historic neighborhoods in the area,” the Obviously DC website reads.

    […]

    In April, the families at D.C. General noticed that signs had been put up along the fence bordering the shelter complex. The signs were from three construction and development companies, promoting their work on the site’s demolition and remodeling. One of the posters showed a slick mock-up of what the new site would look like, with crisp brick buildings, wide boulevards, a bike share station, and a fountain. None of the construction companies returned requests for comment, but one of them, McCullough Construction LLC, touts itself on its website as being “synonymous with luxury condos.”

  • Valve is releasing Steam Link apps for iOS and Android sometime during the week of the 21st of May. They’ll stream games to your device or TV from a host computer just like the Steam Link box does. Valve says that these apps will support a few different types of controllers including Apple’s MFI standard, but I’m not sure how they have Steam Controller support working without attaching the full-size USB type A dongle, unless they intend for people to use a series of adapters.

    The physical Steam Link box could still end up being useful by working with even more types of controllers, as well as running general purpose software using the Steam Link SDK.

    Valve is also putting out an app to watch any videos purchased on Steam, because that’s a thing people do?

    It’s a shame that game streaming is exclusively the domain of stores like Valve’s Steam and Nvidia’s streaming built-into their Geforce graphics cards. Although the latter has some open source support via the unofficial community-developed Moonlight project, neither option is perfect. Steam streaming is often broken for many games outside of Steam, and Nvidia only officially streams to their Shield tablet and set-top-box devices. If you’re using an AMD or intel video chipset they aren’t supported by Nvidia, either.

    I’m not sure if there’s any room for a commercial third-party solution when Nvidia and Valve’s solutions work almost well enough, so it might have to be a community-developed open source project.

  • I’ll probably never use it, because I don’t jailbreak modern consoles, but it’s an impressive discovery by KiiWii on the GBA Temp forums  (via Wololo) that the Parappa The Rapper remaster for the PlayStation 4 is actually a PlayStation Portable emulator with special features. Those features let the developers replace the textures in an emulated game with upgraded assets that look better at the higher resolutions of the PS4.

    Very few PSP games actually work in this emulator, it’s just fun to look behind the curtain of one of these remastered games and find out how the remastered sausage is made.

  • Sarah Jeong has an article up about Epic suing a 14 year old cheater in their free-to-play game Fortnite.

    It’s absolutely twisted that a business can sue anyone for cheating in a video game. It’s slightly more understandable to get litigious with people making and selling cheats, but then Epic should really just strengthen their anti-cheating software and review system.

    Epic should alter Fortnite to give players tools to understand cheating and report it when it happens. Of course they’d need to hire people to review reports. Maybe they’re doing that as well, we don’t know, but suing people for cheating in an online multiplayer game is boneheaded.

    Jeong also talks about Epic using YouTube’s copyright infringement reporting tool to take down the cheater’s videos. That shouldn’t be possible. It’s absolutely a broken system that developers and publishers can make videos disappear via copyright notices just because they don’t like the content of the video. If YouTube doesn’t want videos about game cheating on their site then video game cheating should be in their stated policies.

  • Adi Robertson has a review up of the $200 Oculus Go, a VR HMD with a built-in old-ass (seriously, it’s from 2016) smartphone chipset for people without a Samsung phone:

    The Oculus Go improves on the Gear VR in one big way: you don’t need a high-end Samsung phone to use it, so the headset is convenient for people with iPhones or other Android phones. It also fixes a lot of minor annoyances that make using the Gear VR unpleasant. Its stretchy head strap has a comfortable split-backed design, and its velcro straps slide through plastic guides that make them easy to adjust. (If you have long hair, the split back also works better with buns and ponytails.) The headset doesn’t have a wheel for adjusting focus, but it comes with a spacer insert for people with glasses, and you can buy the headset with prescription lenses.

    I’m glad that VR is continuing to remove the tethers that make it cumbersome to use, but I’ll never buy anything from Oculus/Facebook. The Windows Mixed Reality (WMR) branded headsets sound much more interesting to me. Lower quality tracking with good screens at a lower cost compared to the big boy Vive and Rift.

    One more note, the website for this headset has this text:

    Screen Shot 2018 05 02 at 11 22 43 PM

    At first glance I thought to myself “Huh, this thing has surround sound? Why wasn’t it mentioned in the review?” which, of course it doesn’t. Give me a break.