New Game of Thrones Clips Tease the ‘War to Come’



New Game of Thrones Clips Tease the ‘War to Come’




Launch Slideshow





Do you feel it? That chill in the air? If you don’t, you should. War is coming to Westeros and everyone knows it.


After a fourth season that had more bloodshed and power-grabbing than the three before it—ain’t that always the way?—Game of Thrones is coming back to HBO next month and the death shows no sign of letting up. (Neither does Tyrion’s drinking, but that’s another story.)


In two new clips from the series we see Jon Snow (Kit Harington) beseech Mance Rayder (Ciarán Hinds) to think of the survival of the clans he’s united instead of his own power and Lord Varys (Conleth Hill) and Tyrion Lannister (Peter Dinklage) talk about “the war to come.” In other words, chaos reigns and everyone is jockeying for position what will become the new world order in the Seven Kingdom. Note: That first scene is an extended look at the moment in the Season 5 trailer where Varys reminds Tyrion that the next ruler might not be a “him.”


Check out both clips below, then click through the gallery above for a ton of beautiful new images from Season 5 of Game of Thrones, which hits HBO on April 12.





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6 Things You Should Know About the VR Horror Film Catatonic

A still from the VR horror experience Catatonic. A still from the VR horror experience Catatonic. Keith Coleman



There are few things scarier than insane-asylum horror. The creepy corridors, the twisted psychiatrists, the subtle sense that maybe the crazy one is you; it’s all just too much. But there’s one thing that could make it spookier: putting it all in virtual reality.


Director Guy Shelmerdine’s Catatonic does just that. The experience, currently making the rounds at South by Southwest events, straps you in a wheelchair and takes you on a five-minute tour of a 1950s mental institution, steering you through the psych ward and eventually into a chapel where you…well, where you die.


“As the story goes along the route becomes more and more disturbing,” Shelmerdine says. “There are some supernatural things that happen and then you end up basically being medicated to death and actually find peace.”


Sounds fun. And totally horrific. (If there’s one place the intense intimacy of VR should tread lightly, it’s horror, which is scary enough when you still have the ability to cover your eyes.) WIRED asked Shelmerdine, previously a commercial and music video director, how he came to make a horror film in VR and what surprises Catatonic has in store. Pro tip: Don’t blink or you’ll miss the masturbating guy.


Shelmerdine Made Catatonic on a Dare


Ask the director why he wanted to make a scary experience for VR and he’ll be the first to tell you horror isn’t his go-to genre. But shortly after he joined Chris Milk’s VRSE.works team, Milk’s business partner Patrick Milling Smith challenged him to come up with a horror film for VR. Shelmerdine hadn’t been impressed with any of the live-action VR filmmaking he’d seen, so he decided to take the dare—and do it right. “If you’re going to go to the trouble of giving somebody a VR experience, you’ve got to throw them into a world they’re not used to,” Shelmerdine says. “So I liked the idea of horror because I could give them something that they don’t get to see on a day-to-day basis.”


Shelmerdine Built a Special Wheelchair for Catatonic, Complete With ‘ButtKicker’


The wheelchair being used for Catatonic. The wheelchair being used for Catatonic. Keith Coleman

For optimal asylum impact, Shelmerdine designed a wheelchair to better immerse people in the experience of being pushed around by an orderly. The rig comes complete with a customized “ButtKicker“—aka those things that rattle your seat when you play racing videogames. “When you watch our film the wheelchair vibrates,” he says. “So you get the feeling that you’re in motion.” Those not at SXSW will be able to experience Catatonic soon with the VRSE app and Google Cardboard—but alas, no ButtKicker functionality. (If you’re trying this at home, maybe try a rolling desk chair and a vibrator?)


The Insane Asylum Looks Spooky, But It’s Just Pasadena


When considering shooting locations, Shelmerdine had originally envisioned a mental hospital he knew of in Prague. But he ended up shooting closer to his current home base of LA. “This used hospital in Pasadena had an incredible psychiatric wing,” he says. “Just the right amount of decay.”


Keeping It Short Was Liberating


There’s a lot of talk in VR filmmaking circles about how long is too long to ask someone to stay in the goggles. “Obviously, Hollywood is getting really excited by VR, but it’s not there to have a 90-minute experience,” Shelmerdine says. But even at five minutes, it felt like an indulgence for a guy used to making commercials for the likes of Coca-Cola and VW. “Five minutes is a luxury to me,” he says. “It was fantastic.”


Casting the ‘Masturbating Guy’ Was…Awkward


Like many asylum films before this one, Catatonic has a “masturbating guy.” So, um, how did he find his? “Are you going to write about this in WIRED? I’m going to get shot by somebody,” he jokes. “My casting director, as casting directors do, put out [a call] and we had some people come in. It wasn’t like we were sitting there watching guys masturbate, it was just like one guy came in and said, ‘I’ll do it.’ And we trusted that he was going to do it, and he did.”


Catatonic Isn’t Trying to Scare You That Much


As scary as his short film is, Shelmerdine says he was smart enough to be careful not to freak people out too much, or, for that matter, make them sick. “There’s a health and safety aspect for anything in VR,” he says of the danger of simulator sickness (not to mention catching an eyeful of “masturbating guy”). “You have to be really careful with what the camera does. We did speed tests and turn tests. We ended up having to really slow down the pace of how fast the wheelchair was being pushed.” Ultimately he thinks the film will make people’s skin crawl more than it will make them jump out of it. “If you’re in a theater it’s one thing; in a headset it’s a different experience,” he says. “I think it’s more creepy than it is scary.”



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Windows 10 Upgrades Will Be Free, Even for Pirates. No Joke


Windows 10 is coming this summer, Microsoft has confirmed, and will be free to anyone using Windows 7 or better. Even people who didn’t pay for it.


That’s right, even Windows 7 and 8 users who don’t have a valid Windows license will get a free bump up to Windows 10. The release timing and new upgrade scheme were revealed by Microsoft operating system chief Terry Myerson at the WinHEC technology conference in Shenzhen, China, Reuters reports. Microsoft did not respond to a request for comment.


It’s a surprising move given the importance that Microsoft has placed on Windows license revenue in the past, and the lengths Microsoft has gone to to prevent the spread of pirated copies of the operating system. But the company has spent the past year reinventing itself in many ways, including going so far as to announce a free version of Windows for devices with screens smaller than nine inches.


Meanwhile, operating system pricing expectations have also been changing. Apple has offered free upgrades to OS X since 2013, and mobile operating system updates have long been free. Apple can make up for some of this lost revenue through increased hardware sales, and Microsoft is trying this strategy as well with its Surface tablet/notebook hybrid and other new devices. But Google offers its Android mobile operating system for free, making money off mobile advertising and app sales in the Google Play Store. Microsoft may similarly see a free Windows 10 as the gateway to alternate revenue streams.


The company now offers a range of cloud services, including Office 365, Skype and OneDrive, that Windows users may be more likely shell out for, even if they didn’t buy an operating system license. And even if those customers don’t end up buying cloud services from the company, at least they’re staying in the Microsoft ecosystem. Last quarter Microsoft’s revenue from consumer licensing — including both Windows and Office — accounted for only 16 percent of the company revenue, down from 23 percent the previous year. With Apple and Google Chromebooks slowly eating into Microsoft’s market share, the company could be thinking that a non-paying customer is better than no customer at all.


The company could also be worried about leaving millions of machines running outdated operating systems and software. Unpatched systems can spread malware and viruses, and releasing security updates for decades old platforms is costly. Microsoft has been campaigning to get users to retire Windows XP and the Internet Explorer 6 web browser, but China has been particularly slow to upgrade both. To make matters worse, the Chinese government, which has long clashed with Microsoft over piracy, even banned the use of Windows 8 on government computers largely due to concerns over upgrade costs.


The move to simply give away updated copies to pirates could ensure that Microsoft doesn’t end up in the same situation again. But regardless of the reason, it’s certainly a change of direction for the company. And welcome news to those who acquired Windows through less than legal means.



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Woman Repped by Pao Lawyers Is Suing Facebook for Sexism

A man walks past a mural in an office on the Facebook campus in Menlo Park, Calif., June 11, 2014. A man walks past a mural in an office on the Facebook campus in Menlo Park, Calif., June 11, 2014. Jeff Chiu/AP



A former Facebook employee is suing the social networking giant for gender discrimination, racial discrimination, and sexual harassment—and she’s using the same lawyers as Ellen Pao.


Chia Hong filed the suit Monday in San Mateo County Superior court. She claims that she was harassed during her three years at the company and that bias played a role in her termination.


According to her suit, Hong was “belittled at work” and asked to complete tasks that were not part of her job description, such as “organize parties and serve drinks to male colleagues.” Additionally, she was “admonished” when she took time off to visit her child at school, which she says was her right under company policy. And when she was eventually fired in October 2013 after more than three years at the company, she “was replaced by a less qualified, less experienced male.”


Hong said she received positive feedback roughly every six months during her time at Facebook, intimating the termination was a surprise.


Pao Case the First of Many?


Hong is being represented by Lawless & Lawless, one of the firms that is representing Ellen Pao in her closely-watched sex bias lawsuit against her former employer, influential venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. The trial in Pao’s case, now in its fourth week, has generated enormous interest in Silicon Valley and beyond—attention that may embolden more individuals in minority groups to air their own grievances against the diversity-challenged tech industry.


But most discrimination suits, including Pao’s, are usually complex and layered, and rarely ever slam-dunk cases. Bringing the case to light is only the first step—Hong will still have much to prove if the case goes to trial, as the complexities of Pao’s case have shown. Facebook, for its part, has adamantly denied the allegations.“We work extremely hard on issues related to diversity, gender and equality, and we believe we’ve made progress,” a spokesperson emailed in response to an inquiry from WIRED. “In this case we have substantive disagreements on the facts, and we believe the record shows the employee was treated fairly.”



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The IT Culture War: The Struggle to Adopt DevOps


At the surface, DevOps might be easier defined by looking at what DevOps is not. DevOps isn’t tools or services that you download from the cloud, the title you give a newly hired engineer, or something you can purchase or find on a balance sheet. I can go on and on about what DevOps is not, but the three statements above are common myths and misconceptions, so it’s important to point them out early when trying to help others understand DevOps.


DevOps is better defined as an ideology, a culture of collaboration and sharing aimed at bringing the software development and operations teams together to help eliminate constraints and decrease time-to-market. But, there’s a clash happening inside of organizations today that is preventing the full adoption of this culture to be realized.


There’s a shift taking place within companies — a change that impacts IT. The culture of IT is moving in lock step with the changes happening in the larger workplace, but the discussions around this change are harder to find than those discussions about the overall transformation of the modern worker. The culture within IT is shifting dramatically, positively, and that has everything to do with DevOps.


Historically, lines of business (e.g. marketing, IT, operations, etc.) were siloed, not interacting with other business units until absolutely necessary. This separation was typically created by perceived responsibilities and the lack of a desire to work outside of these drawn lines. As a result, there have been naturally formed groups of people that don’t talk to each other yet are working toward the same goal – delivering a better product, creating value in their market, solving problems for people.


This is the culture in many businesses and it becomes even more noticeable when you start looking closely at IT departments. Traditionally, IT was an isolated group. Engineers write code and build the product and “throw it over the wall” to a different set of engineers for quality and testing, then it makes it’s way to a production environment managed by a team that has little-to-no knowledge about the code residing on their infrastructure. Marketing and sales then take over and start the promotion and selling side of the equation. Rarely do the groups collaborate with full transparency and respect for each other’s roles. They certainly interact, but it’s the collaboration piece that is often much more difficult.


We are now seeing the internal structure of businesses evolving. There are traditionalists happily working within boundaries of responsibilities and modernists that want to be plugged into what everyone is doing. Another way to look at this is generational — Gen Xers or Baby Boomers historically like well defined roles and responsibilities while millennials traditionally seek out roles that have more loosely defined responsibilities.


We are hearing more about DevOps because of this evolution. DevOps shifts the tradition of how IT is organized, how engineers interact. It brings a set of best practices that guides how engineers and IT works that is markedly different than a traditional set of principles. It’s a culture of automating, measuring, and sharing in the name of increased efficiencies throughout the software development life cycle.


One of the primary principles of DevOps is empathy. Empathy from developers toward the system administrators (i.e. Operations), Operations for the developers, and even empathy across non-technical teams of the company. In most organizations the mandate of a developer is merely to produce a piece of software that works — if it worked within an engineer’s development environment, then someone else must be able to make it work in production, right? Ideally, developers must care how secure their apps are, how hard they are to deploy, how hard they are to keep running, because our colleagues on the Ops side are typically paying the price for issues once the product is released to the public, not the developers who built it.


Having more empathy for each other’s role in delivering better products and solving problems is the destination DevOps is driving forward for organizations. Until that point, DevOps adoption faces real challenges. A cultural war of sorts.


DevOps represents cultural change. Whether it’s the change of resistant engineers that don’t want to be on-call or the change of Operations teams to have more empathy towards their counterparts writing code, to the willingness of executives to embrace a culture of automation, measurement and sharing. Organizations must overcome the culture war to be able to approach the agility and productivity that organizations following a DevOps model gain. The faster they can get there, the faster these organizations can take the competitive edge away from traditional enterprises.


Jason Hand is a DevOps Evangelist at VictorOps, organizer of DevOpsDays – Rockies, and author of “ChatOps for Dummies.”



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This Screen May Be Terrible for You, and Now We Know Why


For more than 3 billion years, life on Earth was governed by the cyclical light of sun, moon and stars. Then along came electric light, turning night into day at the flick of a switch. Our bodies and brains may not have been ready.


A fast-growing body of research has linked artificial light exposure to disruptions in circadian rhythms, the light-triggered releases of hormones that regulate bodily function. Circadian disruption has in turn been linked to a host of health problems, from cancer to diabetes, obesity and depression. “Everything changed with electricity. Now we can have bright light in the middle of night. And that changes our circadian physiology almost immediately,” says Richard Stevens, a cancer epidemiologist at the University of Connecticut. “What we don’t know, and what so many people are interested in, are the effects of having that light chronically.”


Stevens, one of the field’s most prominent researchers, reviews the literature on light exposure and human health the latest Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B . The new article comes nearly two decades after Stevens first sounded the alarm about light exposure possibly causing harm; writing in 1996, he said the evidence was “sparse but provocative.” Since then, nighttime light has become even more ubiquitous: an estimated 95 percent of Americans regularly use screens shortly before going to sleep, and incandescent bulbs have been mostly replaced by LED and compact fluorescent lights that emit light in potentially more problematic wavelengths. Meanwhile, the scientific evidence is still provocative, but no longer sparse.


As Stevens says in the new article, researchers now know that increased nighttime light exposure tracks with increased rates of breast cancer, obesity and depression. Correlation isn’t causation, of course, and it’s easy to imagine all the ways researchers might mistake those findings. The easy availability of electric lighting almost certainly tracks with various disease-causing factors: bad diets, sedentary lifestyles, exposure to they array of chemicals that come along with modernity. Oil refineries and aluminum smelters, to be hyperbolic, also blaze with light at night.


Yet biology at least supports some of the correlations. The circadian system synchronizes physiological function—from digestion to body temperature, cell repair and immune system activity—with a 24-hour cycle of light and dark. Even photosynthetic bacteria thought to resemble Earth’s earliest life forms have circadian rhythms. Despite its ubiquity, though, scientists discovered only in the last decade what triggers circadian activity in mammals: specialized cells in the retina, the light-sensing part of the eye, rather than conveying visual detail from eye to brain, simply signal the presence or absence of light. Activity in these cells sets off a reaction that calibrates clocks in every cell and tissue in a body. Now, these cells are especially sensitive to blue wavelengths—like those in a daytime sky.


But artificial lights, particularly LCDs, some LEDs, and fluorescent bulbs, also favor the blue side of the spectrum. So even a brief exposure to dim artificial light can trick a night-subdued circadian system into behaving as though day has arrived. Circadian disruption in turn produces a wealth of downstream effects, including dysregulation of key hormones. “Circadian rhythm is being tied to so many important functions,” says Joseph Takahashi, a neurobiologist at the University of Texas Southwestern. “We’re just beginning to discover all the molecular pathways that this gene network regulates. It’s not just the sleep-wake cycle. There are system-wide, drastic changes.” His lab has found that tweaking a key circadian clock gene in mice gives them diabetes. And a tour-de-force 2009 study put human volunteers on a 28-hour day-night cycle, then measured what happened to their endocrine, metabolic and cardiovascular systems.


Changes over 24 hours in metabolic and endocrine function in people with aligned (green lines) and misaligned (red lines) circadian clocks. Changes over 24 hours in metabolic and endocrine function in people with aligned (green lines) and misaligned (red lines) circadian clocks. Scheer et al./PNAS

Crucially, that experiment investigated circadian disruption induced by sleep alteration rather than light exposure, which is also the case with the many studies linking clock-scrambling shift work to health problems. Whether artificial light is as problematic as disturbed sleep patterns remains unknown, but Stevens thinks that some and perhaps much of what’s now assumed to result from sleep issues is actually a function of light. “You can wake up in the middle of the night and your melatonin levels don’t change,” he says. “But if you turn on a light, melatonin starts falling immediately. We need darkness.” According to Stevens, most people live in a sort of “circadian fog.”


Just how much health risk can be attributed to artificial light rather than sleep disruption? If breast cancer rates jump 30 percent in women who work at night, and prostate cancer rates nearly triple in men, what proportion of that circadian disruption comes from artificial light rather than sleep cycle problems? And just how much blue light must be absorbed before things get risky: a few minutes a night or a few hours, a few years or a few decades? These are now pressing research questions, yet it may be difficult to know for sure, says Stevens. Conclusively settling the matter would likely require studies both rigorously controlled and terribly unethical. In the meantime, it might make sense to let a little nighttime back into your life.



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These Tiny Model Motorcycles Look Just Like the Real Thing



In the small Spanish town of Molins de Rei lives Pere Tarragó, a motorcycle builder of quite extraordinary skill. His bikes are completely unrideable—but that’s only because they’re 1:5 and 1:6 scale models.


These are nothing like the Revell or Tamiya kits you played with back in the ’70s. In photographs, Tarragó’s creations are virtually impossible to separate from the real thing. In many ways, Tarragó’s process is similar to that of a regular custom builder: It involves lathes, milling and welding. But normal tools are often useless for this kind of detail work, so Tarragó has made his own.


Pere Tarragó is a motorcycle builder of remarkable skill—you just can't ride anything he builds. Pere Tarragó.He starts a build by taking photographs, making drawings and copying decals from a full-scale bike. The subjects are usually classic Spanish machines like Bultaco, Montesa or OSSA—although there’s the occasional venture further afield, with Italian marques such as MV Agusta and Moto Guzzi. And the odd Henderson and Indian from across the Atlantic.


Once he’s satisfied with the blueprint, Tarragó returns to his workshop and begins construction, using authentic materials such as steel, aluminum, brass and soft-tempered Nappa leather. Weeks later, he’s ready to make a test assembly of the model, and check the operation of the brakes, clutch, wheels and transmission. Yes, the controls are usually functional.


On some builds, operating the brake lever will move the brake pads in the drum, and the front suspension will operate via friction plates and leaf springs. Tarragó then takes the model apart and applies the finishing touches—polishing, plating with nickel and chrome, and painting. The final assembly takes between 250 and 400 hours.


This post originally appeared on Bike EXIF.



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