New Text Adventures Compete In 22nd ‘Interactive Fiction Competition’

An anonymous Slashdot reader writes: 58 brand-new text adventures are now available free online for the 22nd Annual Interactive Fiction Competition. The public is encouraged to play the games, and on November 16th the contest’s organizers will announce which ones received the highest average ratings. After 22 years, the contest is now under “the auspices of the Interactive Fiction Technology Foundation, a new, charitable non-profit corporation dedicated to supporting the technologies and services that enable IF creation and play…” according to the contest’s organizers. “[T]he competition now runs on servers paid for by the IF-loving public, and for this I feel sincere gratitude.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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New Text Adventures Compete In 22nd ‘Interactive Fiction Competition’

Everything Revealed in the New Rogue One Trailer

We finally got another trailer for Rogue One: A Star Wars Story last night, and it was packed full of new stuff—including, of course, Darth Vader. We’ve gone through it with a magnifying glass and all of our nerdery to see what secrets and details are hiding inside it. Read more…

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Everything Revealed in the New Rogue One Trailer

Movie Written By Algorithm Turns Out To Be Hilarious and Intense

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Ars is excited to be hosting this online debut of Sunspring, a short science fiction film that’s not entirely what it seems. It’s about three people living in a weird future, possibly on a space station, probably in a love triangle. You know it’s the future because H (played with neurotic gravity by Silicon Valley’s Thomas Middleditch) is wearing a shiny gold jacket, H2 (Elisabeth Gray) is playing with computers, and C (Humphrey Ker) announces that he has to “go to the skull” before sticking his face into a bunch of green lights. It sounds like your typical sci-fi B-movie, complete with an incoherent plot. Except Sunspring isn’t the product of Hollywood hacks — it was written entirely by an AI. To be specific, it was authored by a recurrent neural network called long short-term memory, or LSTM for short. At least, that’s what we’d call it. The AI named itself Benjamin. The report goes on to mention that the movie was made by Oscar Sharp for the annual film festival Sci-Fi London. You can watch the short film (~10 min) on The Scene here. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Movie Written By Algorithm Turns Out To Be Hilarious and Intense

The Rebellion Rises In the First Trailer For Rogue One: A Star Wars Story

This will be a day long remembered. Here it is, after months and months of staring at the same picture of Felicity Jones and her band of troops , it’s finally here: the blistering first footage from a whole new chapter in the Star Wars saga. Take a look! Read more…

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The Rebellion Rises In the First Trailer For Rogue One: A Star Wars Story

Dr Who Detective Philip Morris Hints At More Rediscovered Episodes

BigBadBus writes: In late 2013, Philip Morris announced that he had found 9 missing episodes of 1960s Dr.Who, which completed the 1968 story “Enemy of the World” and most of “The Web of Fear.” He has now gone on record to talk about the only episode of these stories that he didn’t find — namely part 3 of “Web of Fear” and teases of more episode finds to come. Episodes keep trickling out of the past, it seems; we’ve mentioned a few small finds in 2004 and 2011, too. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Dr Who Detective Philip Morris Hints At More Rediscovered Episodes

Intense Scifi Film Shot Entirely in Moonlight Looks Completely Alien

23.2 lightyears from Earth sits the Scorpius Constellation, where scientists are working on an artificial biosphere that can harbor human life. And perhaps some other forms of life, too. Read more…

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Intense Scifi Film Shot Entirely in Moonlight Looks Completely Alien

William Gibson After Trying VR for the First Time: "They Did It"

After years of speculating about possible futures in his writing, William Gibson recently tried out one the world’s contemporary science fictions come true. At SXSW, he strapped on a Gear VR headset for the first time. Read more…

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William Gibson After Trying VR for the First Time: "They Did It"

Original 11′ Star Trek Enterprise Model Being Restored Again

NormalVisual (565491) writes The original 11-foot U.S.S. Enterprise studio model from the original series has gone back into the shop again. The Smithsonian owns the model and has had it on display in a gift shop at the National Air and Space Museum for the last 13 years, but will be placed on display in the Boeing Milestones of Flight Hall in 2016, to coincide with the museum’s 40th anniversary. In the meantime, the model will be undergoing its fourth restoration to address a number of issues. The last restoration in 1991 was performed by Ed Miarecki, a professional modelmaker well known for his work in “Star Trek: The Next Generation”, as well as films such as “Event Horizon”. This previous restoration had Trek fans up in arms owing to the paint job, which many feel doesn’t represent the way the model looked originally. Hopefully this next restoration will bring her back to her former glory. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Original 11′ Star Trek Enterprise Model Being Restored Again

Largest-Yet EVE Online Battle Destroys $200,000 Worth of Starships

Space MMO EVE Online has been providing stories of corporate espionage and massive space battles for years. A battle began yesterday that’s the biggest one in the game’s 10-year history. The main battle itself involved over 2, 200 players in a single star system (screenshot, animated picture). The groups on each side of the fight tried to restrict the numbers somewhat in order to maintain server stability, so the battle ended up sprawling across multiple other systems as well. Now, EVE allows players to buy a month of subscription time as an in-game item, which players can then use or trade. This allows a direct conversion from in-game currency to real money, and provides a benchmark for estimating the real-world value of in-game losses. Over 70 of the game’s biggest and most expensive ships, the Titans, were destroyed. Individual Titans can be worth upwards of 200 billion ISK, which is worth around $5, 000. Losses for the Titans alone for this massive battle are estimated at $200, 000 – $300, 000. Hundreds upon hundreds of other ships were destroyed as well. How did the battle start? Somebody didn’t pay rent and lost control of their system. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Largest-Yet EVE Online Battle Destroys $200,000 Worth of Starships