Month: April 2017

You may know someone who sends messages with more emojis than words, but chances are they don't need those symbols to communicate. For some with language disorders such as aphasia, which can make it difficult to read, talk, or write, emojis can be an ideal way to communicate with others around them. Samsung Electronics Italia, the company's Italian subsidiary, just came out with a new app called Wemogee that helps those with language disorders talk to others by using emoji-based messages.

Wemogee focuses on "bringing all users together again" regardless of their language abilities. Samsung worked with Italian speech therapist Francesca Polini to translate over 140 sentence units from text into emoji strings, sequences of emojis that accurately convey the meaning of sentences. For example, "How are you?" turns into a smiley face, an "ok" hand gesture, and a question mark on a single line.

The app has two modes, visual and textual, and users can choose which mode they prefer. In visual mode, users send an emoji-based message and the receiver will get it either as an emoji sequence if they're in visual mode as well, or as a text message if they're in textual mode. On the flip side, those in textual mode can send text messages that show up as emojis for those in visual mode. The app can also be used to assist face-to-face interactions for quicker and more accurate communication. Wemogee's promotional video shows a screen in the app with a message written in words and emojis, allowing both users to understand the conversation regardless of language capacity.

Enlarge / Wikipedia cofounder Jimmy Wales. (credit: Clodagh Kilcoyne/Getty Images)

Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales wants to bring together unpaid volunteers and journalists to create a rival news publication—dubbed Wikitribune—that he hopes will battle "fake news" more effectively than long-established newspapers.

Volunteers are encouraged to contribute funds to the project via a crowdfunding campaign. They will then shape the topics that Wikitribune will cover as well as offer up fact checking duties—again, the work of a typical newsroom.

"If we have a community guiding the work and we have people who are paying to be monthly supporters we can do the numbers and say, well for this many monthly supporters we can hire another journalist," Wales told Wired. "Which means if a group wants us to hire a journalist on a particular topic, whatever that might be, then we can do that."

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Not quite an RPG, not quite an RTS, MOBAs are fierce, fast games that combine swift fingers, strategic thinking, and uproarious bursts of skill. Two teams of five players duke it out to destroy each other's base with the assistance of computer-controlled units that march forward along set paths, or lanes, as the terminology has it. It's a simple concept that allows for a huge amount of depth, and when two teams are in full flow, firing on every cylinder, it's a joy to watch and play. But there's a precipitous learning curve at every level of skill, and it can just as easily become an exercise in frustration and self-flagellation, especially if your teammates aren't up to snuff—or if you're the rube but you don't know it.

I've played Heroes of the Storm for two years, starting just after it left beta. In that time I've played 2,490 games. Each game takes an average of 20 minutes, though they can last anything from about 12 minutes during an outright stomp to upwards of half an hour, if both sides consist of woeful morons. By my calculations, that's exactly 830 hours of furious mouse-clicks and grimaces of anguish, or just over 34 and a half full days of gaming. That's a lot. [Pfft, I had over 700 days of World of Warcraft play time! -Ed.]

Since mid-2015, I've obsessively devoured patch notes, posted several despairing notes on Reddit wondering why I always seem to find myself partnered with imbeciles (surprise: the team imbecile is often me), and even found myself watching tournaments played by men and boys 10 years my junior with frightening dedication to the game, and faster fingers than I'll ever have—e-sports being something I'd never expected to find pleasure in. These things, if you let them, have a way of taking over your life.

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According to Warhammer: 40,000 lore, the Power Fist (also known as the Power Glove) is a late-41st millennium weapon wielded by honoured Space Marine Captains and Chapter Masters. While slow to use, its powerful hydraulics mean the fist can hammer straight through the side of tanks, and end conflicts with a single, powerful blow. And yet, despite the fist's theoretical technological prowess, no one has seen fit to turn it from fiction into fact.

That is until Sega, clearly with a marketing budget surplus to burn through by the end of the fiscal year, decided the best way to promote its latest real-time strategy game Warhammer 40K: Dawn of War 3 was to build a replica 3000psi Power Fist, and then have journalists and influencers smash things with it. Yes, it's a classic PR stunt the likes of which gaming hasn't seen since that time THQ asked people to literally break into parked cars with a hammer and steal copies of Red Faction: Guerrilla(!), or when Activision renamed Edinburgh Zoo's wolverine "Logan" to launch X-Men Origins.

And it's just as brilliantly pointless.