Month: May 2017

120,000 movies, six minutes. Ars takes the Scarecrow Video tour. (video link)

Despite fond memories running to Blockbuster as a kid, these days you probably have fewer video-store options while away at a cabin or vacation home this Memorial Day. Another one of the formative shops for our staff—Dallas-based Premiere Video—shutter its doors just this month, in fact. So as a tribute, let Ars remind you of our farewell tour at Seattle's Scarecrow Video, whose shift to non-profit status managed to infuse new life into the shop. This resurfaced report first ran in August 2014, but the video store continues to endure three years later.

SEATTLE—On a sunny August weeknight, Matt Lynch, a clerk at longtime Seattle rental store Scarecrow Video, grabbed a cup of ice from the shop’s relatively new coffee counter. Cutely named VHS-presso, the counter was one of the shop’s many efforts in recent years to spur interest, attract more renters, and get people to walk into a video store once again.

There’s also the shop’s screening room, opened just over a year ago to host cult and niche movie nights by way of a giant screen, a smattering of speakers, and some comfy chairs. Lynch, among the shop floor’s elder statesmen at 12 years of experience, pulled one of those chairs out to sit and chew on ice while marveling at the room’s walls. The shelves are full of classic VHS tapes. The store prides itself on its vast VHS collection, totaling over 15,000 tapes at this point. But neither that fact, nor the shop’s recent additions, resulted in more rentals or sales as of late.

Enlarge (credit: Owen Duffy)

Welcome to Ars Cardboard, our weekend look at tabletop games! Check out our complete board gaming coverage at cardboard.arstechnica.com—and let us know what you think.

If you want to run a ridiculously successful board gaming Kickstarter campaign, use this tried and tested trick: cram your box full of plastic miniatures. For proof, see horror hit Kingdom Death: Monster, a game with a huge collection of figures which racked up $13 million, becoming the most lucrative gaming campaign in the history of the crowdfunding platform.

Other games have been quick to embrace the appeal of sculpted minis, which brings us to Conan, a licensed adaptation of the iconic fantasy stories by Robert E. Howard. It comes with an impressive 74 miniatures representing an array of heroes, villains, henchmen, and monsters. Vetted for authenticity by an expert in Howard’s work, the game proved to be a potent draw; backers forked out more than $3.3 million to bring the game into being.

Enlarge / Amazon's first public grocery store, now open in the Seattle neighborhood of Ballard. But you can't go inside. Pickup only. (credit: Sam Machkovech)

SEATTLE—For years, Amazon's worst-kept secret has been its interest in becoming a brick-and-mortar grocery company. After building permit leaks and employee-only beta tests, the online retailer's first public stab at grab-and-go groceries (grab-and-gro?) launched in its home city of Seattle on Friday.

Amazon Fresh Pickup is now open in two Seattle locations, and its premise is simple: take the concept of Amazon Fresh (which delivers grocery orders to your door), then invite the customer to double as his or her own deliveryman. Since I was keen on seeing exactly how it works and happen to live 10 minutes from one of the locations, I decided to make up a Memorial Day-specific food order.

My first impression was nothing but smooth. For those customers whose grocery shopping matches Amazon's Fresh Pickup vision, they're in for a treat. But for everyone else, don't rev your engines just yet.

Almost 10 years ago, journalist David Kushner had a chance to interview Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson, the two creators of Dungeons & Dragons, before they died. Kushner's reporting became a story for Wired, and now he's expanded the scope of his tale into a graphic novel. Rise of the Dungeon Master, beautifully illustrated by Koren Shadmi, is both a moving portrait of two creative outsiders and a chronicle of how a new kind of storytelling changed pop culture forever.

Kushner recounts the story of Gygax and Arneson in the second person, addressing the reader as if Kushner were the dungeon master. "You" are young Gygax, the child of immigrants growing up in the midwest, seeking escape from ordinary life by exploring the wilderness, hunting, and eventually learning to break into an old, abandoned asylum. The narrative technique sounds gimmicky, but it works: you're sucked into the story and into immediate sympathy with Gygax as he traces his fascination with adventure games back to his childhood, when he climbed around in the maze of tunnels below the creepy asylum's rotting rooms.

Nation Books

Enlarge / That sharp red line is the high-energy radiation coming from our own galaxy, some of which is produced by the annihilation of antimatter. (credit: NASA/DOE/Fermi LAT Collaboration)

Antimatter is rare in this Universe, but the Universe is a pretty big place, so even small quantities can add up fast. In our galaxy alone, there's a steady bath of radiation that indicates positrons are constantly running into their electron anti-partners and annihilating them. Over something the size of a galaxy, that means there are lots of the positrons around. Estimates have it that 9.1 trillion kilograms of antimatter are being destroyed each second.

Where's it all coming from? We don't really know, but candidates have included everything from dark matter particles to supermassive black holes. A new paper suggests a relatively unexciting source: a specific class of supernova that produces lots of radioactive titanium, which decays by releasing a positron.

Mystery

While positrons are produced by radioactivity here on Earth, they run into normal electrons almost instantly, a collision that annihilates both and releases an energetic photon. The interstellar material in space is so sparse, however, that it's thought that positrons typically travel for over 100,000 years before running into anything. That's long enough to blur out any individual sources and turn a single burst of positron production into a slow background of annihilations. So even if there are objects that produce positrons, we'd have a hard time spotting them.