Month: June 2020

Slay the Spire's success story is a remarkable one. As one of thousands of games to land on Steam in 2017, this fusion of roguelite progression and "deckbuilding" mechanics, made by a heretofore unknown development team out of Seattle, managed to become a phenomenon due entirely to word-of-mouth. The game has since surpassed its "2.0" milestone and climbed the download charts on Xbox One, PlayStation 4, and Nintendo Switch.

Yet the game has stayed an arm's length away from smartphone platforms this whole time, in spite of being built primarily using libGDX, a flexible, open source development framework with smartphone-specific hooks. That changes this month, as the development team at MegaCrit ironically used its Steam community page on Wednesday to announce Slay the Spire's next platform: iOS.

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  iOS screenshot: Slay the Spire's hero selection expands as you complete more "runs" of the game. [credit: MegaCrit ]

The game's first smartphone port will launch at $9.99 "this month," according to the developers at MegaCrit, with an exact date likely coming during the upcoming Guerrilla Collective game reveal stream, currently scheduled for June 6-8. ("You should try to tune in" on the event's first day, June 6, according to MegaCrit's latest update.)

With impeccable timing, HBO has dropped a new trailer for its upcoming horror series, Lovecraft Country. The series is based on the 2016 dark fantasy/horror novel, of the same name by Matt Ruff, which deals explicitly with the horrors of racism in the 1950s, along with other, more supernatural issues.

As we previously reported, Ruff also found inspiration in a 2006 essay by Pam Noles describing what it was like growing up being both black and, well, a hardcore nerd. Lovecraft Country is a gripping, extremely powerful read, which is why it was one of my choices for the Ars summer reading guide. The book's protagonist is a black veteran of the Korean War and science fiction fan named Atticus, who embarks on a perilous road trip from his home on Chicago's South Side to a small town in rural Massachusetts. He's looking for his estranged father, who purportedly vanished after encountering a well-dressed man driving a silver Cadillac.

Atticus' Uncle George and childhood friend/fellow sci-fi buff, Letitia (aka Leti), comes along for the ride. Because their journey is inspired by Lovecraft, they naturally encounter all kinds of arcane rituals, magic, shape-shifters, monsters, and an alternate reality or two along the way. HBO seems to be sticking pretty closely to the novel, if the official synopsis is any indication:

Enlarge / With an updated camera and internet connection, Just Read The Instructions showed better video of the landing. (credit: SpaceX)

9:50pm ET Update: Right on schedule, a Falcon 9 rocket lifted off on Wednesday evening from Florida. Several minutes later, the first stage came roaring back to Earth, and for the first time, the same rocket landed for the fifth time. The view from the Just Read the Instructions drone ship, with a better camera and internet connection, was quite good. The rocket descending at night light the ocean a bright blue before touching down.

Meanwhile, the second stage pushed onward into orbit, deploying its payload of 60 Starlink satellites. SpaceX has now launched nine rockets this year.

Original post: A mere four days after its historic launch of NASA astronauts Doug Hurley and Bob Behnken to the International Space Station, SpaceX is preparing for another launch of its Falcon 9 rocket.

Enlarge / A Miami Police officer watches protesters from an armored vehicle on May 31, 2020. (credit: Richard Arduengo | Getty Images)

The images of this past week are both inescapable and indelible: protesters flooding the streets of cities across the United States, met by police forces equipped with full body armor and tactical vehicles that vaguely resemble tanks. The local law enforcement responding to even nonviolent protests has often looked more like the US Armed Forces—and that was before President Donald Trump deployed an actual military police battalion against peaceably assembled US citizens in the nation's capitol Monday. That’s no accident.

It’s easy enough to buy tactical gear in the US, and the Homeland Security Grant Program has funneled billions of dollars to law enforcement agencies to acquire military-grade equipment. But for decades, a primary driver for why it can be so hard to tell a National Guard troop from a local cop has been the Department of Defense itself, through a program that has parceled out everything from bayonets to grenade launchers to precincts across the country.

Created as part of 1997’s National Defense Authorization Act, the 1033 program allows the Department of Defense to get rid of excess equipment by passing it off to local authorities, who only have to pay for the cost of shipping. (A precursor, the slightly more restrictive 1208 program, began in 1990.) According to the Law Enforcement Support Office (LESO), which oversees the process, over $7.4 billion of property has been transferred since the program’s inception; more than 8,000 law enforcement agencies have enrolled. Much of that inventory is perfectly ordinary: office equipment, clothing, tools, radios, and so on. But the haul also includes some of the so-called controlled equipment—rifles, armored vehicles, and so on—that have helped create such a spectacle of disproportion.