For years, Something Awful forum members have reveled in user bEatmstrJ's blow-by-blow account of a terrible bathroom remodel, in which he sought to transform his bathroom "with a woman in mind" with an eye to a future home-sale ("woman play an unfair role in the home-buying process"); bEatmstrJ's saga combines terrible ideas about how a bathroom should look with total home-renovation incompetence, making it the perfect foil for Something Awful's pioneering brand of jeering insults and mayhem. Read the rest

Remember Doom? Remember Magic Eye puzzles that required you to unfocus your eyes and see forever in a field of stereographic static? Now you can do both at once with OMDO, a free download at Itch.

OMDO plays just like DOOM, except every frame is a random dot autostereogram. If you don't know what that is, you should read more about it here, but the gist is that you have to either go cross-eyed or wall-eyed in order to see the game. Otherwise it just looks like a bunch of random dots.

Fraser Brown:

Not surprisingly, this is not a particularly effective or fun way to play DOOM. Depending on your favoured method, you’ll be spending the whole time with your face almost pressed against the screen, or you’ll be cross-eyed. I’ve tried both methods, along with their accompanying game modes, and I’ve yet to see more than the gun.

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If you enjoyed British supermarkets' bleach-dipped rotten turkeys, perhaps you like to try their antibiotic-resistant superbug-infested chickens.

The FSA has also noted that the proportion of campylobacter-infected chickens which showed resistance to key antibiotics, in this case ciprofloxacin, “has increased significantly” compared with a previous survey of chickens sold at retail 10 years ago. More than 4,000 samples were tested, then samples of smaller numbers exhibiting campylobacter infections retested to detect whether they carried bacteria resistant to the key antibiotics. Ciprofloxacin resistance was identified in more than half of the samples of one form of campylobacter tested, 237 out of 437 tests on Campylobacter jejuni, and in nearly half (52 out of 108) of another strain, Campylobacter coli.

The results were taken by experts to show that the use of antibiotics to treat farm animals is giving rise to the spread of resistant bacteria, which can have major effects on human health because one of the main methods of transmission to many strains of resistant bacteria is through contact with livestock in the food chain. While proper hygiene practices and thorough cooking can kill the bugs, any lapses can result in serious infection.

The paper: "A Microbiological survey of campylobacter contamination in fresh whole UK produced chilled chickens at retail sale".

Post-Trump/Brexit omni-deregulation shall be a splendid affair.

Photo: Bertie Charman Read the rest

CCleaner is a clean-your-computer app beloved of people who own inexplicably slow PCs. If you installed recent editions of it, you were installing malware. But the company behind it hasn't gone rogue, reports Reuters. Hackers compromised their systems.

A version of CCleaner downloaded in August included remote administration tools that tried to connect to several unregistered web pages, presumably to download additional unauthorized programs, security researchers at Cisco’s (CSCO.O) Talos unit said.

Talos researcher Craig Williams said it was a sophisticated attack because it penetrated an established and trusted supplier in a manner similar to June’s “NotPetya” attack on companies that downloaded infected Ukrainian accounting software.

“There is nothing a user could have noticed,” Williams said, noting that the optimization software had a proper digital certificate, which means that other computers automatically trust the program.

The infected version is 5.33, and you likely have it if you installed the Windows version of CCleaner between August 15 and September 13. That's 2.3 million installs, admits Avast.

CCleaner's owner, Avast-owned Piriform, has sought to ease concerns. Paul Yung, vice president of product at Piriform, wrote in a post Monday: "Based on further analysis, we found that the 5.33.6162 version of CCleaner and the 1.07.3191 version of CCleaner Cloud was illegally modified before it was released to the public, and we started an investigation process.

"The threat has now been resolved in the sense that the rogue server is down, other potential servers are out of the control of the attacker.

"Users of CCleaner Cloud version 1.07.3191 have received an automatic update.

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Atlas Survival Shelters sells huge corrugated pipe shelters outfitted for living with air filtration systems, Co2 scrubbers, and power generators. A 10' x 20' shelter goes for $30-$40,000 and the "Hillside Retreat," a 10' x 51', runs as high as $109,000. Options include a big screen TV, electric fireplace, oak flooring, hatch camouflaged as a boulder, and many other fine amenities. From their pitch:

The only bunkers manufactured today that has actually been tested against the effects of a nuclear bomb and has passed, is the round corrugated pipe shelters (used in the 1950s) by the U.S. Army Corps of Enginneers..

The round shape worked then and still works today! There is little difference between the bunkers made 50 years ago and the bunkers made today except the addition of modern interiors, NBC air filtration systems, Co2 scrubbers, generators, and high-tech electronics. There is no other shape other then round that will allow you to reach the depth underground that you need for maximum protection for your family and to allow the climate to be controlled underground.

"Beware the Square". No pre-manufactured square metal bunkers passed the nuclear test and should only be regarded as a fallout shelter or tornado shelter at best!

Atlas Survival Shelters (via Uncrate)

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The street finds its own uses, etc. This one's the work of Adam Bell.

Side note, as ridiculous (ly amazing) as Doom is running on the Touch Bar is… the HUD is equally great pic.twitter.com/RFwq7nJ7ae

— Adam Bell (@b3ll) November 20, 2016

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"After over 100 hours of work, I present to you Seinfeld.wad," writes Doug Keener. "A replica of Jerry Seinfeld's Apartment from his hit sitcom, Seinfeld!"

Join Jerry, George, Kramer, and Elaine in this neat Doom/Seinfeld crossover! There are many custom textures and sprites to bring you the full experience of being inside Jerry's Apartment, inside Doom 2! Each sprite has audio clips and death animations! Have fun slaughtering the gang relentlessly in this wad about nothing! ...

Special Thanks to GIMP 2.0, GZDoomBuilder, Slade3, applekwisp, Seinfeld cast and crew, and the lovely people over at ZDoom forums and wiki.

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After 20 years at the heart of the web, Yahoo is all but done, with a sale expected soon and talent fleeing as fast as it can. CEO Marissa Mayer's plan to turn things around involve buying 50 startups. What happened to them? Read the rest

1993's epic hero, Doomguy, is back! The next installment of DOOM, the video game that defined our vibrant, gib filled world of FPS play is set to launch on May 13th. Naturally, this is a Friday.

I'm dusting off my BFG 9000 and prepping for Cacodemons.

Preorder Doom 2016, via Amazon Read the rest

Lenovo is on top of a shrinking market; only Apple is shipping significantly more machines this year than last, according to trade group numbers. HP is sinking fastest among the big players, but still in #2. The rest of the market ("Other") seems to be evacuating the bowels of modern life entirely, losing 20% its size last year.

Both analysts blamed the drop in PC sales on a combination of factors: an economic slowdown in China; a strong US dollar; and the continuing growth of smartphones and other mobile devices. IDC also noted that free Windows 10 upgrades may have hurt PC vendors as consumers chose to upgrade their OS without forking out for new hardware. However, both analysts expect sales to pick up in 2016 as businesses—by far the largest market for PCs—start to upgrade to Windows 10.

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Fans of recursion rejoice: someone has put a playable version of Doom... inside Doom.

Creativity and Doom have gone hand in hand for decades—the first user-created level appeared in 1994—and now the new game will come with fresh, easy-to-use mod tools.

Ever play a video game so often that it shows up in your dreams?

That's the idea behind Doomdream, an interactive experience created by Ian MacLarty to simulate what his own dreams look like after he's been playing the classic 1993 shooter Doom all day.

Although there are no enemies, no combat or really any plot, it generates a labyrinth of pixelated gray tunnels and bloody stalagmites for you to wander in forever, recreating the nightmare of so many players who got lost in the purgatory of Doom's looping levels, searching fruitlessly for an exit sign.

Basically, it's kind of like that Windows 95 maze screensaver, except you can control your movement, and also it's Doom. Interested? Download it now. Read the rest

Liz Ryerson is one of my favorite game critics -- she has a great eye for the alien and oddly-beautiful design harmonies of game landscapes, and she specializes in the 1993 classic Doom, particularly its mods and maps. Read the rest

Charlie Warzel: "THIS is what google's self driving car can see. So basically this thing is going to destroy us all." [via Matt Buchanan] Read the rest

In case you were curious, that atmospheric research satellite crashed to Earth without hitting a single person. It landed in the Pacific—scattering bits and pieces over an 800-mile-long stretch of ocean.

But, if your great dream was to be killed by a piece of falling satellite, never fear. Phil Plait points out that you'll have another chance in a couple of months, when the German X-Ray astronomy satellite ROSAT is expected to meet its firery end.

Smaller than UARS — a little over 2 tons, as opposed to over 6 — ROSAT will probably have more pieces survive the ride down because its mirrors had to be shielded from heat to operate. That means the odds of it hitting someone will be slightly higher than from UARS, about 1 in 2000. Bear in mind that’s still really small odds! The chance of a specific individual getting hit are still something like only 1 in 14 trillion.

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The green circle in the lower right of this image marks the position of Earth's own trojan asteroid, discovered by researcher's involved with NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer project.

What's a trojan asteroid? Glad you asked. The good news: It's not going to kill us all.

Trojans are asteroids that share an orbit with a planet near stable points in front of or behind the planet. Because they constantly lead or follow in the same orbit as the planet, they never can collide with it. In our solar system, Trojans also share orbits with Neptune, Mars and Jupiter. Two of Saturn's moons share orbits with Trojans.

Scientists had predicted Earth should have Trojans, but they have been difficult to find because they are relatively small and appear near the sun from Earth's point of view.

The team's hunt resulted in two Trojan candidates. One called 2010 TK7 was confirmed as an Earth Trojan after follow-up observations with the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope on Mauna Kea in Hawaii.

The asteroid is roughly 1,000 feet (300 meters) in diameter. It has an unusual orbit that traces a complex motion near a stable point in the plane of Earth's orbit, although the asteroid also moves above and below the plane. The object is about 50 million miles (80 million kilometers) from Earth. The asteroid's orbit is well-defined and for at least the next 100 years, it will not come closer to Earth than 15 million miles (24 million kilometers).

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