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How To: Social Engineer Your Way Into an Amusement Park for Free

When it comes to social engineering, Null Byte is here to show you how it's done. Social engineering is the key fundamental to unlocking tons of possibilities and opportunities in your everyday life. So, what is social engineering? Social engineering can be called many things. It's taking nothing and turning it into something. It's taking the bad and making it good. Above everything else, it's the art of manipulating the world and people around you—coercing that salesman into giving you a low...

How To: Carve Fractals and Stars on Pumpkins

Fractals and stars are two of the most beautiful and complicated-looking classes of geometric objects out there. We're going to explore these objects and how to carve them on a pumpkin. Unlike the last one on carving polyhedral pumpkins, where we used the entire pumpkin to carve a 3 dimensional shape, the pumkin carving in this post will involve two-dimensional images on a small part of the pumpkin's surface.

NORTHWAY Games: Cool Indies by a Restless Company on the Road

Game design is sedentary work. Generally its practitioners do their work with their butts planted securely in front of a computer in an office (be it home or away) as their muscles and verbal skills atrophy. Even game journalists are prone to this condition. Not so with Colin and Sarah Northway (pictured below), the husband and wife team behind NORTHWAY Games. Not only do they make really cool indie games, but they do it with just a laptop while traveling the world meeting indie developers of...

News: Iconic Indie Game Publisher Interplay Struggles to Make a Comeback

For more than a decade, Interplay was arguably the best video game publisher in America. Their list of games is a who's-who of the most creative and forward thinking games of the '90s, including everything fromOut of This World to Alone in the Dark to Earthworm Jim to Descent. They've been around since 1983, but have fallen on hard times since 1997, when they became a public company. They were acquired by a French publisher who then went bankrupt. They were forced to close their internal deve...

News: Was Worms the First Indie Video Game?

In the mid '90s, there was no such thing as a widely available indie video game. Brick-and-mortar stores were the only places for consumers to buy games, and magazines were the only outlets to hear about them. For video game creators, the need for a publisher to market and distribute was logistically essential to attract players.

News: Has SimCity Been Destroyed for Good?

Yesterday, Electronic Arts had a nice sale on Steam for 40-60 percent off some of their Sims titles, which included The Sims 3 (along with its DLCs) and SimCity 4. I've never been a big Sims fan, especially with the slew of virtual people games in the last decade, so I didn't realize until now that Maxis had stopped making their SimCity games; They haven't released any city building Sim games since SimCity 4 eight years ago. There was SimCity Societies in 2007, but it was made by a different ...

News: Yup, it's Oscar Season

So the Big Surprise News of today is that The King's Speech is Kicking Major Nomination Ass with twelve count-em 12 nominations, just brutalizing stuff like The Social Network (eight - nice try), The Fighter (seven - really? seven? that's the best you can do idiot movie?) and True Grit (ten - double figures is respectable... I guess...). How come that happened? I'll tell you. It's because North Americans freaking love rich British people.

See Jane Pwn: A Primer for Internet Slang

Making your way into an online community can be really exciting. Some life-long friendships and lasting romances begin in humble chat rooms and message boards. But for the novice internet user, one of the biggest hurdles can be trying to figure out just what people are saying to one another.

News: Groundhog 102

30 January 2011 Zynga’s new Groundhog Mission in FrontierVille allows two groundhogs to show up on your homestead at once. They’re very hard to kill; it takes at least 20 clicks to clobber each one.

New Game by Hasbro: Electronic SCRABBLE Flash

Nope, this isn't a flash game version of SCRABBLE. There's already one of those (and a multitude of imitations) for the Apple iPhone, iPod, and Facebook. This is an electronic game, and it's not a "handheld" game like the SCRABBLE Pocket Pogo Touch Screen Game (pictured right). It's an entirely new way to play everybody's favorite word game, and it's called SCRABBLE Flash (BOGGLE Flash outside of the U.S. and Canada).

News: USA into the Round of 16!!

Posted with permission via HereComeTheYanks.com Have you recovered from that heart attack inducing, hell of a game?? I am still riding high and, as such, may ramble a bit on here. But stay with me...I'm a die-hard fan!! What else do you expect??

How To: It's How You Play The Game

"Life is difficult." That's how Scott Peck's best-selling book, "The Road Less Travelled", begins. That life is difficult is not news. Over two-thousand years ago the Buddha said it too: Life is suffering. The sanskrit word the Buddha used for suffering is dukkha. Dukkha doesn't refer to physical pain, necessarily. It refers to something more akin to our English word 'dissatisfaction'. Adages abound in our language which attest to the universality of dissatisfaction in our daily lives. "The g...

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...

News: Parent "Agents"

I’m seeing a flood of posts on youth football forums and even getting a few e-mails from youth football coaches complaining about “player agents” also known as parents. Most of these unhappy coaches are dealing with parents that have non-issues, have an agenda, are misinformed, don’t know much about the game of youth football or are just people that gain great pleasure from complaining. The 80/20 rule is more like 95/5 in youth football, 95 percent of the problems are caused by 5 percent of t...

The Brooklyn Grange: A Farm up on the Roof

Up On the Roof: Urban Rooftop Farming and The Brooklyn Grange So sometimes something inspires me so much that it makes me want to run to the rooftop of my eastside L.A. apartment and shout out at the top of my lungs "LOOK AT THIS, THIS IS AMAZING!". The Brooklyn Grange is one of those kinds of things.

News: My Name is Kira, and I'm an Addict...

...a FarmVille addict, that is. Poor Kira is just one of many who pours way too much time and money into their virtual Facebook homesteads. Zynga’s FarmVille is the most popular of the many Facebook web games. In fact, it attracts more than 75 million players monthly.

News: OMG. Surf then touch a Bigass Whale at Westwards

This one smells like a fish story.  It is not.  Tuesday April 13, Dave and I got up to surf westward at 7 in the morning.  First rate waves.  Headache cold water....sun blocked by the cliffs.  Fast, clean, beach break.  3-4 foot sets, mostly lefts.  About 15 dolphins swam by.  Blase blase.  We always see dolphins.  But then some bigass whale with barnacles breaches.  We are speechless.  It is about 20 feet from us. We follow it for about thirty seconds and pinch ourselves.  Have-you-ever?  No...

News: poo poo tug of war

its like tug of war, except the team who falls in the huge pile of sh*t loses Bam Margera, Christian Moore (ME), Steve-O, Chris Pontius, Wee-Man, Ryan Dunn vs. Preston Lacy, Ehren McGhehey, Dave England, Johnny Knoxville, Rake Yohn, Rabb Himself

News: The BEER Trick

BET SOMEONE THAT YOU CAN DRINK 3 MUGS OF BEER BEFORE THEY CAN TAKE 6 SHOTS OF TEQUILA AND TELL THEM THERE IS NO TOUCHING OF EACH OTHERS CUPS AT ALL THAN DRINK ONE CUP AND PUT IT OVER ONE OF THEIR FULL SHOTS AND THEY CANNOT TOUCH IT SO YOU WIN LOL. BUT BET SOMEONE IN THE JACKASS CREW PREFERABLY STEVO-O AND THAN MAKE HIM DO SOMETHING OUTRAGEOUSLY STUPID AFTERWARDS.

How To: Play The Card Game "Seven Eight"

This is a game played by 2 players. It cannot be played by more than 2 players and is played using 30 cards. Regular jokers have no role here. However there are 2 additional jokers, the seven of hearts which is the big joker and the seven of spades which is the small joker.