Month: April 2017

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Here at Ars, we like to celebrate the classics—especially classic video games—and we've long been fans of the folks over at GOG (formerly known as "Good Old Games"). They sell modern games, sure, but the site is a treasure trove of DRM-free hits from days gone by. Want to grab a copy of Tie Fighter that works on modern computers? Boom, ten bucks. Want to replay Wing Commander IV with upgraded DVD-quality cutscenes? Here ya go, $5.99. Never got a chance to try your hand at managing global thermonuclear war? DEFCON, six bucks. And there are more—so many more.

As it turns out, GOG likes Ars, too! We've been in talks with the GOG crew for the past couple of weeks and as of this morning, I am happy to announce that Ars and GOG are entering into a partnership—which means there are some cool things that are about to happen.

First thing: You get a free game! And you get a free game!

The first of those cool things is that we're giving away a few hundred thousand copies of The Witcher: Enhanced Edition—all you have to do is click in the sidebar over there to claim a code. You'll need to supply a valid e-mail address, because we'll e-mail the code to you (this is just to keep some control over distributing the codes—we won't be keeping the e-mail addresses once the giveaway period is over). Once you have a code, head to GOG.com to redeem the code and download the game. It'll work on Windows or MacOS (sorry, penguin fans—there's no Linux version of this particular game, though there's a buttload of Linux-friendly titles on GOG).

Enlarge / Ron Howard speaks to Ars Technica at March's South By Southwest festival. (credit: Sam Machkovech)

AUSTIN, Texas—Writer, director, and actor Ron Howard is very careful when considering his place in the geek-media universe. Over 20 years ago, his film Apollo 13 kicked off a trajectory of major science-and-heart storytelling, which recently crystallized as an ongoing series-development deal with National Geographic's TV channel.

This Tuesday's premiere of TV mini-series Genius, which sees Geoffrey Rush playing the role of Albert Einstein, won't be the last of that deal, either—and Howard laughs at how that fact might look to people in his past.

"My tenth grade science teacher, Mr. Dowd, would be, you know, rolling over in his grave!" Howard says with a laugh during an interview at last month's South By Southwest festival. "No, no, he'd enjoy it. He had a great sense of humor. The fact that I'm telling stories about science"—and saying this makes Howard laugh uncontrollably—"well, he thought I was a nice guy. He knew I didn't get it."

Enlarge / Let it burn: the cover of Cory Doctorow's Walkaway, a novel of building a new world from the ashes of the old post climate-apocylapse.

Science fiction has long served as a platform for the hashing out of big social, political and economic issues, either metaphorically or literally. Cory Doctorow has never been shy of speaking their names directly, whether examining the implications of the surveillance state or the shifting of social and economic forces caused by technology. In his first novel for an adult audience in eight years, Doctorow revisits many of the themes he's written about in the past, and he refines them into a compelling, cerebral "hard" science fiction narrative of a not-too distant future that ranks with some of the best of the genre.

Walkaway (from Tor Books, which releases on April 25 in hardcover) is a very Doctorow-y book. Intensely smart and tech-heavy, it still manages maintains the focus on its human (or in some cases, post-human) protagonists. Walkaway is also full of big ideas about both the future and our current condition, and it has enough philosophical, social, and political commentary lurking just below the surface to fuel multiple graduate theses.

At its heart, Walkaway is an optimistic disaster novel—"in as much as it's a book about people who, in the face of disaster, don't disintegrate into CHUDs but instead jump right into the fray to figure out how they can help each other," Doctorow explained to Ars. "That, to me, is the uplifting part—it's not a question of whether bad things will happen or won't happen, but what we'll do when disaster strikes."

Enlarge / Brad Jones' DJI Inspire 2, before its final flight. (credit: Brad Jones)

It was around sunset on Easter Sunday, April 16, when Brad Jones took his DJI Inspire 2 out for a flight in front of his home. Jones hoped, as he does on most nights, to capture some of the forested and hilly scenery in the environs of his hometown, Oliver Springs, Tennessee—about 30 miles west of Knoxville.

“I flew down over my aunt’s house, and I heard a gunshot within the first three to four minutes of flight,” Jones told Ars. “So I sped up and flew back towards my house.”

After a few more minutes, he flew back westward. He had just switched the drone’s camera mode from video to taking still photos in RAW format.