BioWare’s space opera epic, Mass Effect 2, is Amazon’s “Deal of the Day.” The Xbox 360 version is currently $40, which is $10 cheaper than you’d pick it up at your local Quarian pawn shop. A PC copy is 40 percent off, with a $30 price tag.
At that price, one could pick up Mass Effect 1 and 2 for the regular retail price of the sequel. For those who like their sci-fi soapy and their shooters refined, this is a deal worth going through the Omega 4 Relay for — see, if you play the game, you’ll know what that means.
[Thanks, Russ P!]
Amazon’s galactic deal of the day: Mass Effect 2 originally appeared on Joystiq on Mon, 08 Mar 2010 09:40:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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DC Comics announced this morning that Babylon 5 creator J. Michael Straczynski will take over writing both the monthly Superman and Wonder Woman series later this year, aiming to return the icons to their rightful places at the top.
Straczynski, who’s been with DC Comics since finishing up a long (and occasionally controversial) run on Marvel’s Amazing Spider-Man in 2008, has never hidden his desire to write the Man of Steel, and he plans to live up to the opportunity:
When I first came over to DC, that dream was realized in part by [then executive editor, now co-publisher] Dan DiDio’s gracious invitation to write the first of potentially many Superman original graphic novels. Now the dream has come fully true with the opportunity to write for the mainstream title, in a story that returns Superman to his roots in a way that will have the whole country talking about him in ways that we haven’t seen in a long time.
He plans a similarly attention-grabbing approach for Wonder Woman:
She’s a vital, powerful character, and we hope to bring a more contemporary sensibility to her character will retaining everything that makes her unique.
Stracynski’s debut on both titles comes with contributions to June’s Superman #700 and Wonder Woman #600, with his taking over full writing duties of both series with July’s following issues.
J. Michael Straczynski To Write Superman And Wonder Woman Starting In July [DCU The Source]
As part of its latest financial results report today, Take-Two delayed Red Dead Redemption by several weeks. Previously scheduled to arrive on April 27, the game is now slated to release in North America on May 18 and internationally on May 21. The announcement doesn’t specify a reason for the move, though it’s worth pointing out that the new date moves Red Dead Redemption out of the publisher’s fiscal Q2 (February-April) and into its third quarter (beginning May 1). [Update: During an investor call corresponding with the financial report, Take-Two chairman Strauss Zelnick clarified that the delay was issued to extend the game's pre-release marketing period.]
Take-Two also notes that financial guidance for its fiscal 2010 has been adjusted to take the date change into account. While Read Dead Redemption was at the center of a controversy concerning developer Rockstar San Diego, a barrage of recent media assets and confirmation of retail pre-order bonuses seems to indicate that development is on track.
Susan Treister’s insanely detailed art piece A Timeline of Science Fiction Inventions: Weapons, Warfare and Security catalogues 150 science fiction killing devices spanning almost 300 years. Her timeline covers crysknives, lightsabers, proton packs, and everything in between.
From Richard Grayson’s catalogue essay published by Annely Juda Fine Art:
In A Timeline of Science Fiction Inventions: Weapons, Warfare and Security Treister has drawn up a history documenting innovations of imaginary and fantastic military technology. These include the ‘Raytron Apparatus’, a form of aerial surveillance, which was described in ‘Beyond the Stars’ by Ray Cummings in 1928, or the ‘Control Helmet’, from ‘Easy Money’ by Edward Hamilton in 1934. The timeline starts in 1726 with the ‘Knowledge Engine’ in Gulliver’s travels and carries on up to the present day. It allows us to see the meetings of worlds as these weapons sometimes travel from the fantastic to manifest themselves into the real, like the ‘Atomic Bomb’ described in ‘The Crack of Doom’ by Robert Cromie in 1895. The format in which she organises this information is the schema of the connected circles of the tree of life or the Sephirot, from the Jewish mystical traditions of the Kabbalah, a representation of linkages between the worlds above and the physical world below and which map stages of transformation between these realms.
Along with your average scifi armaments, Treister also includes such security and defense innovations as the Invisible Man’s invisibility and Orwellian Doublethink. A Timeline of Science Fiction Inventions: Weapons, Warfare and Security can be seen at the Documentalist exhibit at Edinburgh’s Collective Gallery until March 28.
[via Ensemble and The Journal]
<img src="http://cache.gawker.com/assets/images/io9/2010/03/s13" width="397" height="709" /
During the last two days we have had something we haven’t seen in a while. No, I am not talking about highs near 60F…although that is true. What we have had is a very large diurnal (daily) range of temperature. Look at the plot above at Sea Tac, today the high was 59 with a low of 39F, a 20F temperature range….far greater than we have had since December. Many locations got colder than that and frost graced many a car this am.
Why so large a range? Most important have been clear skies and our strengthening sun. You feel the warmth? Remember the sun right now is as strong as in mid October, with much longer days than two months ago. And the clear skies associated with high pressure aloft allow maximum heating during the day and maximum cooling at night as the earth radiates infrared energy to space.
But why no clouds and fog…which often occur in midwinter? The secret is that we have a modest east-west pressure difference (higher pressure to the east), which is producing easterly flow across and down the western Cascade slopes. Such downslope air produces drying and warming. Check out the latest profiler data from north Seattle…you can see the easterly flow.
But too much easterly flow would cause warming due to compression and keep our temperatures up at night. But fortunately for diurnal temperature range lovers the easterly flow is strong enough to keep us clear, but not strong enough to cause too much warming.
These conditions will continue through the weekend…warm enough for tee shirts during the day, but cold enough for frost in the morning at many locations.
Today’s Contest: WHO HAS THE LARGEST DIURNAL RANGE?
PSS: There is an article in the Seattle Times today (Saturday) on the early spring.
iPhone developer Jonathan “Schwa” Wight offers a great little trick for creating pixel perfect glassy buttons: using the unofficial UIGlassButton class in the simulator to build your art. In his code paste, he shows how to build a button and render it to a PNG, which you can then save to your desktop.
It’s a great little trick, and one worth adding to your development arsenal. Be aware that UIGlassButton is a private class, and one that has long since been relegated away from the official SDK development path. Although it continues to work on the Simulator, it’s not for use on the iPhone itself or in App Store projects.
Continue reading on to find the code. Don’t forget to substitute your own user folder into the code (in my case, “ericasadun”) for Jonathan’s (“schwa”).
// Code to create a "Glass" button and render it to a png on your desktop.
// Run this from the SIMULATOR and change my username to yours.
// Update: This uses a private iPhone SDK. Do not use this code in your shipping app.
// Use it merely to generate the PNG file for you to use in a fake button.
Class theClass = NSClassFromString(@"UIGlassButton");
UIButton *theButton = [[[theClass alloc] initWithFrame:
CGRectMake(10, 10, 120, 44)] autorelease];
[theButton setValue:[UIColor colorWithHue:0.267
saturation:1.000 brightness:0.667 alpha:1.000]
forKey:@"tintColor"];
[self.view addSubview:theButton];
UIGraphicsBeginImageContext(theButton.frame.size);
CGContextRef theContext = UIGraphicsGetCurrentContext();
[theButton.layer renderInContext:theContext];
UIImage *theImage = UIGraphicsGetImageFromCurrentImageContext();
NSData *theData = UIImagePNGRepresentation(theImage);
[theData writeToFile:@"/Users/schwa/Desktop/test.png" atomically:NO];
UIGraphicsEndImageContext();
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