.::REALITYRECALL::.

Marvel today announced that, for the second time this year, one of their major characters is going to be killed. Spoilers ahead!

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Days after a disappointing earnings release, the axe appears to have fallen at Research in Motion Ltd., as local media reports 200 jobs have been cut at the Waterloo, Ont.-based smartphone maker.

Just days ago, Google snapped up SageTV to bolster its Google TV ecosystem. Now, the team in Mountain View appears to be on its way to making good on its promise to put the Android Market on the platform as well. Those with a Revue or other Google TV system can now see them listed as “other” in their list of My Devices in the Market. Of course, you can’t actually download any apps to your Google-fied box just yet, but it’s a start, right? Besides, if you’re really that anxious for Google to give you access to Market apps, you can just get your hands dirty and do it yourself.

Google TVs pop up in Android Market device listings, still can’t download apps originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 21 Jun 2011 08:10:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Whether you’re hosting a web page or running a Minecraft server, it’s a pain to keep track of IP addresses. Using a free dynamic DNS, you can turn 174.45.19.242 into mygeekydns.dyndns.org and be free from changing IPs.

How To Easily Access Your Home Network From Anywhere With DDNS	How To Recover After Your Email Password Is Compromised	How to Clean Your Filthy Keyboard in the Dishwasher (Without Ruining it)

You knew this would probably happen, but here it is. Halo Anniversary will support Kinect, says Microsoft Game Studios head man Phil Sepencer.

Speaking to GameSpot, he let this slip:

As a first party we believe that Kinect will be important to all genres of games, be it racing games with Forza, combat games like Ryse — even games like Halo Anniversary have Kinect integration.

He also went on to say that eventually all future first-party titles would support the device in some way. This shouldn’t surprise anyone, as Sony is basically doing the same thing with the Move on their end.

Spencer didn’t say what form this Kinect support would take, but don’t count out full control. The Ghost Recon Future Soldier E3 Kinect trailer demonstrated that it might be possible if maybe a little uncomfortable, and don’t think Microsoft is gonna wanna be one-upped by a third-party Kinect shooter.

Also see the movie Gamer.

Traveling the 515 km (320 miles) from Tokyo to Osaka by Shinkansen bullet train currently requires 2 hours and 25 minutes (and costs a small fortune, too). Come 2045, travel between Japan’s two largest metro areas will take just over one hour, following the launch of the country’s longest maglev track, which just received construction approval from Tokyo. The nine trillion yen project (approximately $112 billion) was first proposed in the 1970s, but was tabled indefinitely due to its astronomical costs, most of which stem from an extensive network of tunnels that will represent 60 percent of the route. You’ll be able to get your Japanese Maglev fix beginning in 2027, when the Central Japan Railway launches its high-speed route between Tokyo and Nagoya. One notable neighbor to the west is already operating its own maglev train. China’s Shanghai Transrapid has been blasting riders to Pudong airport since 2004, and once achieved a top speed of 501km/h (311 mph). The country is also constructing a 1000km/h vacuum-based train that it plans to launch within the next few years.

Japan speeding ahead with 500km/h Maglev train originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 20 Jun 2011 21:42:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Shut down your Internet for sixty seconds and here’s a sampling of what you will miss:

• 1500+ blog posts
• 98,000 new tweets
• 12,000 new ads on Craigslist
• 20,000 new posts on Tumblr
• 600 new videos (25+ hours worth) on YouTube

More »

Dropbox accidentally dropped the need for password authentication this past Sunday so anyone could log into anyone else's Dropbox account with any password—all they'd need was an email address. This lasted four hours and, according to Dropbox, less than 1% of users were affected. Still, this is another good reason why you should add an extra layer of security to the data in your Dropbox—particularly if you're putting sensitive data in there. More »

After having first gone on sale in Taiwan, and later Australia, it’s only fair that Yanks now have a shot at Gigabyte’s monstrous Windows 7 slate. You may recall the S1080 for its 320GB drive, dual-core Atom N570, Ethernet port, and (curious) VGA output. Or perhaps you were stoked on that optical mouse and tactile mouse button combo. Well, all that stands between you and your future LAN-partying, tablet-toting self, are 650 clams and a handful of days — you know, given that scheduled ship date of July 1st. Rounding out the remaining specs are 802.11b/g/n WiFi, Bluetooth 3.0, 1.3 megapixel webcam and a USB 3.0 port. If the thought of a Windows 7 slate with a mouse and a smattering of ports has your heart aflutter, we’d like to ask: why are you still here? Oh, and before you hit the source links, don’t forget the snazzy optional dock with optical drive + speakers that’ll ship later this summer.

Gigabyte’s S1080 Windows 7 slate now up for US pre-order, ships July 1st for $650 originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 20 Jun 2011 20:58:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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The two sides in the Canada Post labour dispute returned to the negotiating table Monday, as legislation that would send locked-out Canada Post employees back is tabled in Parliament.

Well, this sure is awkward.

Last Monday I wrote my Duke Nukem Forever review. I gave it an 85. Much to my surprise, I later learned that I am one of the few critics to enjoy DNF even a little bit.

The critical backlash for DNF has been insane and wrongheaded, and I don’t say that lightly. I know, having been an entertainment critic for a few years now, how easy it is to be hyperbolic in one way or another about something, and hyperbole usually makes for the best reading. And negative hyperbole is the best of the best.

I’m not going to make any friends by saying that, especially after Jim Redner’s almost-scandal last week. Redner, whose PR company represented DNF, tweeted this last Tuesday: “too many went too far with their reviews…we r reviewing who gets games next time and who doesn’t based on today’s venom.” Redner apologized for saying that later, but there are some things you just can’t unsay.

I would never, ever condone blacklisting an outlet because of a harsh review — hell, I’ve handed out my fair share of harsh reviews, and I will continue to do so until every game is amazing — but I will say this: Redner was right about the vitriol directed at DNF being excessive.

Take Ben Kuchera’s review of the game, for one. I have nothing against Kuchera, and Ars Technica is a fine website that I read regularly. But Kuchera levels toward the game some invalid criticisms intended to back up his negative perspective of the game. He may not intend to mislead his readers, but it’s all part of the hyperbole train he was on. Here are two samples:

Duke arrives at a point where two nude ladies promise to lose their pregnancy weight from bearing their alien children, and they plead with you to let them live. (These are the same characters who performed fellatio on you during the beginning sequences of the game.)

The only way past this section of the game is to kill both women.

This isn’t true, as the women both explode on their own as they give birth. It honestly never occurred to me to shoot them, but OK. To his credit, Kuchera has since updated the review to acknowledge that fact.

In another scene, a woman sobs and asks for her father. You see, the women in the alien craft are being forcibly impregnated by the aliens, and during your journey, you hear a mixture of screams and sexual noises. After I accidentally blew up a few of these female victims in a firefight, Duke made a joke about abortion.

The abortion joke is not directed toward Kuchera’s destruction of innocent women, which is, again, not something I did either on purpose or on accident. During the course of the game, you’ll encounter many alien babies, and the “alien abortion” quip is something he’ll say multiple times when you kill them. I heard the quip at least a half dozen times.

I’m not claiming that Kuchera made these errors on purpose, but I am saying it’s easy to make angry, wild claims about a game when you’re determined, as Kuchera is, to hate a game.

And that seems to be the problem here. I believe most of the folks who reviewed the game knew going in what they thought of it. This isn’t unusual — we in the gaming press usually know so much about a game before playing the final version that we feel we know exactly what we’re getting before we get it.

I’m not innocent of this. Going into DNF, I expected it to make me laugh and not do anything else for me. I thought the gameplay would be miserable. It turns out my evaluation was quite the opposite, as I thought it wasn’t really funny at all, but was a blast to play.

What’s important is to not allow those preconceived notions to inform your final judgment of a game. It’s not easy, and all of us fall victim to it from time to time. If you ask any critic if they’re happy with all the 90+ scores they’ve given out over the years, I bet most will tell you they are not. I know I’m not.

But because you know a game is going to be a certain way, it’s easy to let that “knowledge” dictate what you say about a game. You “know,” based on pre-release marketing, that DNF is going to be misogynistic, and so you ignore the fact that the game takes place in a heightened reality in which every character, men and women, is a negative stereotype.

I’m not writing this because I enjoy calling out my peers, and I’m not doing it because I feel superior to those who have embraced this extreme DNF backlash. As I’ve said, this kind of thing is something we all, including myself, fall prey to from time to time.

I feel like the key to avoiding this kind of situation is a greater sense of self-awareness. We write to inform, but everything we write says as much about ourselves as it does about the things we’re writing about.

That isn’t something that can be changed, and it isn’t something that should be changed. But we’ve got to be more aware of the baggage we bring into our game reviews, or else we aren’t going to be providing the service we claim to provide.

U.S. President Barack Obama will announce the next steps in America’s decade-long war in Afghanistan on Wednesday.

Random excerpts from the Boston Bruins tab:

126 Bud Lights
2 Bottles of Ace of Spade Champagne ($2,000 each)
1 bottle of Ace of Spades Midas Champagne ($100,000)
Tip: $24,869

The NHL Players’ Association has decided to trigger the growth factor in the salary cap for next season, pushing the upper limit to roughly $64 million US.

We knew the update was coming for SkyDrive eventually, but it wasn’t clear what had been added to the new “Wave 5” release, nor was when it was going to be released. According to a blog post over on The Windows Team Blog today, Microsoft has released the massive update…

Most fitness apps for iOS will teach you to stretch and exercise through specific demonstrations, but iMuscle takes it a step further by actually showing you the muscles in action. It works by providing a ton of animated diagrams that are accessible with just a touch. When you launch the app, you just grope the part of the muscular body you want to work on and it’ll stick a few pins in it. Each pin corresponds to a muscle (or muscle group) and its associated exercises and stretches. Touching any of the exercises or stretches will provide you with an animated demonstration, written instructions, and pictures of the affected muscles. More »

Police said that around 5 a.m. RCMP received a report of a male with serious injuries at a retail business at 7th Street and Smith in Yorkton.

Noah Bordner is a veteran game animator who has worked with such companies as EA, LucasArts, and Bungie. His indie app gaming venture, Mika Mobile, has already found success in the Apple App Store. Bordner recently ported the popular RPG Battleheart over to Android. There, he found the experience to be a little trickier. More »