Month: October 2019

Enlarge / Arctic sea ice is declining as waters heat up. (credit: Allan Hopkins / Flickr)

The view from Kongsfjorden, Svalbard, is endless snow-covered mountains and glassy, frigid water. You need to travel roughly 400 miles west from the remote Norwegian archipelago to reach the northeast coast of Greenland.

Kongsfjorden, home to one of the few human settlements on Svalbard, has been studied intensively. It's a "natural laboratory" of Arctic climate change, one that has suggests that the ecosystems living in these icy water have so far managed a surprising amount of resilience in the face of rising temperatures, according to a paper in Nature Climate Change. But the long-term picture suggests a future that is probably not so rosy.

Layers of complexity

As the sea ice melts in the Arctic—which is warming substantially faster than the global average—the food webs living in these icy waters are in peril.

Enlarge / That's Netflix's Emmy award-winning original film, Bandersnatch, thank you very much. (credit: Netflix)

By being eligible for, and winning, this year's Emmy for Outstanding TV Movie and Outstanding Creative Achievement in Interactive Media Within a Scripted Program, Black Mirror: Bandersnatch effectively exists at a crossroads between television and interactive fiction. The Netflix-produced narrative adventure merges choice-based interaction with the high-production value of prestige TV to create something that resists easy definition, not least in established awarding bodies.

This isn't a first for the format, though its last wave was dormant for nearly two decades (and nowhere near the Emmy threshold). TV shows in the '80s tried involving viewers with toys as "interactive" add-ons. The CD-ROM era invited TV-grade drama to computers and game consoles.

In recent years, several smaller creators have resurrected the form, blurring the lines between straight live-action drama and video game. This August, two such works were released—Flavourworks' Erica and Sam Barlow's Telling Lies—to tell stories that go far beyond FMV (full motion video) games of the ‘90s and stretch the simple 'either-or' branching nature of Bandersnatch.

Enlarge (credit: Morsa Images | Getty Images)

Like much of the Internet, online reviews are often fake. No matter the platform—Amazon, TripAdvisor, Yelp, or another—no matter the subject, where user reviews are public, fakery usually follows.

The practice has surged in popularity in recent years as retailers scramble to capitalize on consumers’ love of ecommerce. Saoud Khalifah, CEO of the fraudulent-review tracking company FakeSpot, says the number of companies padding their online ratings using reviews generated by bots, ghostwriters, or other schemes has increased dramatically over the past four years.

“When I started [looking into] this in 2015, it wasn’t as big as it is today,” said Khalifah. “Today, it has reached epidemic proportions—whether you’re looking at Sephora, Walmart, Amazon—it’s like a plague right now.”

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  Vava comes in a big sturdy box with foam inserts and a carrying handle. System76 laptop and Victorinox knife for scale. [credit: Jim Salter ]

This is Vava, a 4K definition Ultra Short Throw (UST) home theater projector retailing for $2,700. For those of you not familiar with the term, UST refers to "throw distance"—the amount of space you need between a projector and screen in order to get the desired image size. This projector also features a built-in Harman-Kardon speaker, motion sensors to keep you from blinding yourself by staring into the laser, and plenty of inputs.

A few weeks ago, we reviewed Cinemood, a miniature and fairly low-cost portable projector that unfortunately did not really impress us. Vava is the projector we thought we were getting then, and we're happy to report that it impressed us a lot.

Setup

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  Vava and all the stuff that comes with it: power cord, manual, remote control, batteries, and a soft cloth lens cleaner. [credit: Jim Salter ]

Setting Vava up was a refreshingly straightforward process. Press the power button, and the system turns on and begins walking you through what little setup it needs or wants—select a source (with PiP to show you what's on each source!), connect to your Wi-Fi, and so forth. We were very happy with Vava's on-screen keyboard, which is laid out well and wraps in all four directions. You can "type" a Q and an L with only a couple of button presses on the remote rather than laboriously arrowing over each virtual "key" across the width of the board.

Enlarge / Programming aspects are all over boardgames these days, even on Fireball Island. (credit: Charlie Theel)

Welcome to Ars Cardboard, our weekend look at tabletop games! Check out our complete board gaming coverage at cardboard.arstechnica.com.

“Programming” in board games—where you lay down instructions in advance and then execute them in order—has shown up in everything from 1984’s RoboRally to 2014’s Colt Express. Several of the most interesting games I’ve played this year rely almost entirely upon this mechanic, which makes the games fun to play while also introducing the concept of programming to young players who might have little to no previous exposure to it.

Here are three of my recent favorites.