Sunday, April 28, 2013

EVE Online to Publish Digital Comics via Dark Horse

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Eve is celebrating its ten year anniversary as being one of the longest lived Space based MMORPG’s. Today at the annual EVE Online Fanfest, it was announced that a free 54 page digital comic will be made available and published via Dark Horse.

The content for Eve: True Stories, will stem from the players themselves, that drive the story and politics for the game. Over the course of the next eight days, players are encouraged to submit their favorite memories of the game from the last ten years. The EVE population will then vote on the best ones and the free comic will be born.

Dark Horse will also be producing a giant 184-page glossy graphic novel that will cover all of the story driven lore behind EVE Online and DUST 514. Titled EVE Source, it will include a bunch of never seen before concept art and high-resolution images. There is no word yet if Dark Horse will also publish a digital variant.

EVE has derived most of its success through players crafting their own stories. I remember one in particular from 2005 that had The Guiding Hand Social Club mercenary outfit accepting  a contract on the life of Ubiqua Seraph, CEO Mirial. Over the course of several months, Guiding Hand spies infiltrated Ubiqua Seraph and worked their way up the ladder to become Mirial’s closest companions. They proceeded to bring the corporation to its knees in one fell swoop, destroying Mirial’s most prized ship and raiding the corporate hangars for untold billions of ISK in valuable blueprints. In recent times, a massive fleet battle of 2800 ships resulted in the largest PVP session in the games history.


EVE Online to Publish Digital Comics via Dark Horse is a post from: E-Reader News

MAKE and MCM Raspberry Pi Design Competition: the winners!

MAKE held a Raspberry Pi Design competition with MCM Electronics for US-based Pi owners, and have just released the results. I’m not sure what’s more impressive: the outstanding quality of the entries, or the fact that even though we spend much of the day furiously googling for new Pi projects, many of the submissions were new to us here at the Foundation. It’s great for us to watch other organisations running contests like this: not least because it’s a real relief not to have to judge them ourselves!

The Grand Prize went to Intonarumori, a collection of magic sound boxes made by a hacker/art collective called urbanSTEW. The STEW-folk say:

Intonarumori is a series of interactive sound boxes created by an art/tech collective, urbanSTEW. The project is based on a century-old futurist movement in which noise-generating machines were created. Inspired by this, urbanSTEW built six new noise machines, each equipped with a Raspberry Pi and various sensors/controls. The boxes are self contained and only need to be plugged in. Intonarumori was presented at a creativity festival where they were played by over 2,000 children/adults.

 

The Sunlight Foundation’s Lobbyist Meter won the Artistic category: we tweeted about this a while back (and it’s been in my “things to blog” folder for a while) because we thought it was a clever, snarky, funny way to bring attention to a very serious issue. You can read more about the Lobbyist Meter on the Sunlight Foundation’s website. Here it is, doing its transparent, democratic thing.

The Education category award went to a project you’ll all have seen before, if you’re regular readers: Emma Bennett’s beautiful school State Board project (which we have been using in talks as a demonstration of some of the very cool stuff we see kids doing with the Pi) won the prize. Read more about it in the post we wrote when we first saw Emma’s work, and see some video of the board in action below.

Everybody in our offices secretly wants a wooden case for their Pi, because we are all impractical, and we have all read Idoru. The Enclosures category was won by Chris Crumpacker for this beautiful piece of hand-tooled walnut. Chris, if you’re reading, please get in touch. We absolutely, positively need one of these to hold one of the Pis at Raspberry Towers.

walnut Raspberry Pi case

Chris told MAKE:

Some times all you need is a bit of scrap wood for inspiration. I had some walnut left over from a previous project. I just love the look of walnut. I had seen other wood cases but they where always 6 pieces of wood glued or nailed together to make a box. I wanted it to be one hunk of wood and my intentions were to carve out a home for the Raspberry Pi.

The final category, Utility, was won by another project we’ve featured here: David Bryan’s cat feeder, which I enjoyed blogging about because it gave me the opportunity to use the phrase “liver-flavoured kibbles”.

Congratulations to all the winners, and thanks to MAKE and MCM for running the competition. You can see the other entries on MAKE’s website – enjoy!