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A WoW gift bag for Valentine's Day
How great is this? Reader angrypanda a.k.a. Joshua links us to this update on his Livejournal, in which he shows off the awesome set of gifts his wife got him for Valentine's Day. It's a romantic gift basket, with everything, from the chocolates to the Linen Bag itself, marked out with WoW-style tooltips. Everything looks authentic, too -- there's a Bag of Candies, Dark Desire (looks like the hit rating bonus got nerfed for the RL version, though), and even a Moonberry Juice. And there's a "Jox (Horde) Shou" handmade craft in there, too -- those are their character names, Jox and Lykishou.Joshua says he and his wife have been married nearly 15 years, and they weren't planning to do much this year (or so he thought -- here's hoping they had a very nice dinner and movie later that evening). Very awesome. Because the Livejournal seems to be hidden behind a content filter of some kind, we've put all of Joshua's pics in a gallery below so you can see everything all in one place. What a terrific Valentine's Day gift.%Gallery-44901%
All the World's a Stage: Authentic class
All the World's a Stage is a source for roleplaying ideas, suggestions, and discussions. It is published every Sunday evening.Sometimes it can be difficult make your character feel really authentic. Very likely, you work in an office in real life, for instance, and perhaps you daydream of burning up all your paperwork. You certainly don't cast hellfire and summon demons to wreak havoc upon the world, so naturally you have no personal understanding of how a warlock would really behave. Of course it helps to do some research on the lore behind your class, but in fact even lore writers are only imagining. No one in the world has practical experience of what any of the Warcraft classes would be like. Even classes like priests and hunters are so heavily fantasized that there is a great difference between the class and its real-life namesake. Imaginative extrapolation is the name of the game here, and as always when imagining things, it helps to try and root your character's class-based behavior around some tried-and-true character quirks, things that will make everyone who interacts with you feel compelled to say to themselves, "Wow! That's just the sort of thing a <insert your class here> would do!" Read on for some practical quirks, with links to more resources on the characteristics each class would display.
Authentic software to digitally authenticate paintings
We all know that keepin' it real fake has become an art form in itself, but for serious art aficionados, only the real deal will truly suffice. Currently, it takes numerous "art experts" hours to inspect every inkling of a painting to ensure the buyer isn't getting duped, but a new piece of software is looking to realize an idea that's been in the works for years. Igor Berezhnoy at Maastricht University in the Netherlands has created a system which carefully analyzes "uses of color, brush strokes, and canvas type" in order to spot fakes before they fetch millions at auction. By dividing "145 digitized paintings into pixels" and comparing their attributes with nearby pixels, Authentic recognizes uniquities that aren't likely to be expressed in faux editions. In testing, the software performed "as well" as 15 (presumably trained) human volunteers in spotting forgeries, and while the current version works specifically with Van Gogh's works, we're sure a more fleshed out version is on the drawing board.[Via Slashdot]
Authentic Ltd's ASS-60AK NXT SoundVu projection screen
Remember when we saw one of NEC's laptops equipped with NXT's SoundVu, and we jokingly mentioned how we didn't think it could cut it in a home theater system? Well apparently Authentic Ltd. thinks otherwise, because they've just announced their, ahem, ASS-60AK front projection screen, that doubles as a display surface and a speaker. The screen, which vibrates at a rate undetectable to the human eye to create sound, is made of Teonex, a material specially designed to produce high frequencies other fabrics would absorb. The release suggests it can be used as a stand-alone speaker or as the center channel to your surround sound system, thus mimicking the acoustically transparent screens used in full-scale multiplexes. While it sounds great in theory (caugh), NXT technology has been hit or miss enough that you'd probably to hear what it actually sounds like before dropping more than $500 for your own.
