Human Wellbeing Search Results

News: Man Immortalizes Dead Fiancée in Virtual World

Death is tough for the living, and those who mourn do all sorts of odd things to cope with it. Some keep mementos, some build towering statues, others create memorial paintings or write sad songs, all of which are healthy in moderation. Honoring the dead has been around for so long, it's part of what makes us human. Recently, the practice of memorializing the dead has spread from the arts, religion, and ceremonial burial to video games.

Playing Tera Online: Introduction

Tera Online is a beautiful Korean MMO with real time combat. The game is coming to the states towards the end of the year. Unlike other MMOs were combat is target specific (lock on target) and dependant on skill timers and macros, Tera Online focuses on fast area of effect action. Your blade or spell will hit whatever is in front, or miss if it's not. The closest thing to the game play of Tera is Vindictus, a free to play MMO with the same concept of game play. If you've played Vindictus, the...

News: Hetero, Gay or Bi? Bed Your Soulmate in Dragon Age 2

When you grab a video game off the shelves, finding love is probably not your end goal. Most games focus on letting the player shoot guys, order other guys to shoot guys, or build houses. Mass Effect 2 comes closer than most titles to offering virtual romance, but the relationships are shallow and strictly heterosexual. I found whoring my way around the Normandy much more satisfying as a gameplay option than developing an emotional connection to another character.

How To: Measure Radiation in Japan, Plus Other Sources of Common, Everyday Intake

In the wake of the recent tragedy in Japan, Southern Californians have been hyper alert to any news regarding dangerous levels of nuclear radiation drifting over from Fukushima. At this time, official statements from the California Department of Public Health and the EPA are assuaging the population that there is nothing to fear. While there has been some detection of radiation in the air, the current levels recorded are "thousands of times below any conservative level of concern". But despit...

News: So there's this new Predators movie.....

We don't often get super excited about upcoming flicks over at thesubstream.com, especially during the long, hot & more-often-than-not disappointing stretch of cinematic cruelty that summer has become. We've been hurt before. We've been buoyed up on cresting glorious waves of hype and what-ifs and heady nostalgia only to be sent hurling like a fat guy from Ohio on vacation down onto the cruel, razor sharp Jar-Jar Binks reef.

How To: Write the Action/Adventure Screenplay

Well, we have had a pretty basic story structure in the previous couple of blogs. However, for the third act there is considerable leeway on how this story can play out. You can turn a story like this into a tragedy or comedy. Remember the line from the film Stranger Than Fiction "Tragedy, you die. Comedy you get hitched." Well in the Action/Adventure story, almost anything goes. For instance, GUY does not have to die, but CHICK could perish tragically. However, avoid cliches like someone jum...

How To: Increase Website Traffic Using White Hat SEO Techniques and Free SEO Tools

Put simply, SEO = more organic traffic. And more traffic is always good for a web page / website (unless of course, you are an underground drug-dealer selling drugs worldwide via a spooky website whose URLs are as search engine unfriendly as possible, so that no one accidentally discovers your page and informs the police, sending to heaven both an exciting career opportunity and the likely Al Capone's successor).

News: Human Cage

So check this out. Have Johnny Knoxville dressed up in his old man costume with a cage covered by a sheat. The joke is that Wee-Man will be in the cage but nobody will know it. When Johnny Knoxville walks into a store with a bunch of tourists, Wee-man has to start hitting the cage and then the sheet gets knocked off and wee-man finds a way to get out of the cage. As soon as he gets outhave him run all around the store. He should wear a thong to make it funnier. It would be good to go into a f...

News: "Don't Be A Quitter"

Take a pack of someone’s cigarettes, and carefully remove partial contents from a few of them. In one, pull out some of the tobacco with tweezers, insert a “Pop-It” (make sure it is closer to the end without the filter) and reinsert the tobacco with tweezers. I can’t guarantee this method won’t blow someone’s face off, so try it on a dummy first. In the second cigarette, grind up a little sun-dried dog turd, and sprinkle it in before replacing the tobacco. In a third, put in a little wad of a...

News: Book Review - Egg on Mao by Denise Chong

“Of a generation who remembers Tiananmen Square, 1989, I considered how some excuse – the lack of, or slow progress on, human rights in China because ‘times have changed’, or because other concerns, including making money, come first, or because rights, freedom, and democracy are somehow different issues there than in the West.” Denise Chong

How To: Design Your Own Custom Arduino Board Microcontroller

Microcontrollers are great. You can do anything from water your garden to catch wildlife trash diggers in the act—and on the cheap. I prefer to use the Arduino microcontroller because of the large and helpful community built around the website. Though it is my favorite, there are some drawbacks to using an Arduino board in every project. It gets expensive, the board can take up too much space, and the rat's nest of breadboard wires are a pain to repair.

News: 10 Peculiar Game Rules for Competitive Scrabble Tournaments

The 2011 Toronto International Scrabble Open (TOSI) took place last weekend, with former World Champion Adam Logan beating out all of the human competition for the $3,000 grand prize. But when it came time to take on the Quackle program in the Human vs. Computer Showdown, he lost his first two games and won the last two, ultimately losing with a measly 28-point differential of the combined total scores. But he still came out three grand happier.

News: Friday Indie Game Review Roundup: Grand Theft Auto's Sci-Fi Genesis Granddad

Grand Theft Auto 3 was the biggest video game of the last decade, by far, introducing open-world adventure games to consoles, a genre that now rivals shooters and sports games for market dominance. A huge map, decentralized narrative, and myriad of interlocking quests and objectives that happen in a flexible order all became hallmarks of the "new" genre, along with the ability to shape the morality and reputation of your character. And most importantly, all of the quests and stories are compl...

News: Child Molesters and Sexy Fighters: A Study of Video Game Commercials

The Kinect for Xbox 360 and PlayStation Move might be fun to play with, but people do not look very cool while they're doing it. Air guitar is not particularly flattering (even if done on stage), and neither is air-anything else, as pleasurable as it might be. This is why I find it strange that a group of admen somewhere in the world think these kinds of commercials would appeal to anyone.

News: 10 Unconventional Hangover Cures

For most Americans, the bane of the hangover is typically remedied by lots of water, painkillers, greasy food, and a day wasted on the couch. But if you're tired of potato chips and fried eggs, perhaps it's time you enter unfamiliar territory. Below, a combination of unorthodox methods for taming the beast, derived from science, sparkly Whole Foods new ageism, and the far East.

Minecraft: Her Crushed Dreams

What happens when a person who has never played a building sandbox game tries it for the first time? Reality happens. The harsh reality of human nature. You would think playing with friends in a creation game would be utopia, but in truth it's more like being stuck with people that would walk all over you if it provided a softer path.

News: Angry Clones Are Taking Over the App World

In December 2009, Angry Birds was released to the public. The iPhone and iPod touch were the first to take on the demand, then a devoted HD version for the iPad. Since then, it's transcended iOS devices to appear on Android, Nokia, Palm phones, and many others. Next, it broke away from mobile devices with versions available on PSP, PS3, Xbox 360, Wii, Nintendo DS, 3DS, Windows PC and Mac computers. Facebook and Windows Phone 7 apps are in the works.

News: The Revolution of the Hacked Kinect, Part 1: Teaching Robots & the Blind to See

In 2007, Nintendo introduced the world to motion control video games with the Wii. Microsoft and Sony built on Nintendo's phenomenal success and released their own motion control products for the XBox 360 and Playstation 3 late in 2010: the Kinect and the Move. The Move is basically an improved Wiimote that looks like a sci-fi Harry Potter wand, but the Kinect just might be the most important video game peripheral of all time.

News: Is the Metascore Algorithm for Rating Video Games B.S.?

Guiding internet users to useful content is one of the most lucrative businesses in the world. This process is called aggregation. Google and other search engines form the top of the food chain, aggregating all of the content on the web in response to queries. There are all sorts of other important aggregators though, and you probably use at least one every day: Fark and Reddit for web content, Rotten Tomatoes for movie reviews, and Metacritic for a variety of media, but most importantly, vid...

News: 10 Ways to Lose Weight Using an iPhone

Sounds like a false promise à la infomercial or typical spammy web headline—how can a 4.8 ounce gadget aid in weight loss? But, in truth, "who" better to act as a dedicated personal trainer and nutritionalist than the iPhone? The smartphone is completely and utterly tethered to the daily life of the average middle to upper class American. It's reliable and exact. All it needs is a charged battery, the right app, and of course, as with every diet and fitness regime, a user with unwavering self...

News: The Stupid Orchestra

How can an orchestra be stupid, one may ask? Well, when musically measuring a toaster next to a cello, one device certainly comes across as inherently… dumber. Think 200 vintage vacuum cleaners, blenders and washing machines assembled into a whirling, ringing, humming cacophony of daily function. It's not exactly music to the ears, but a kind of robotic harmony is formed.

News: Amazon Mechanical Turk

It's really a shame that it is so hard for people to make money on the internet these days. The dot com bubble has receded and scams are plentiful on the web. There are, however, a couple of legitimate ways to make a few extra bucks online, Amazon Mechanical Turk, or MTurk for short, is one of them. The idea of MTurk is to hook up programmers with people that do tasks that computers can not, these tasks are called HITs (Human Intelligence Task). These tasks include article creation, creative ...