By Globe Staff Former Red Sox pitcher Curt Schilling’s video game company, 38 Studios, has laid off all of its employees in the wake of financial difficulties, according to a company insider who spoke on the condition of anonymity. The Providence company, which had close to 400 employees, attracted top talent from the videogame industry. 38 Studios received a $75 million loan guarantee from Rhode Island in 2010 to move from Maynard to Providence. But Rhode Island officials held emergency meetings after the company was two weeks late on a $1.1 million payment it owed the state this month and asked the state for millions more in aid to stay afloat. The firm applied to Rhode Island for $8.4 million in film-tax credits, which it ... Continue reading →

1 People rarely look the way you expect them to, even when you’ve seen pictures. The first thirty seconds in a person’s presence are the most important. If you’re having trouble perceiving and projecting, focus on projecting. Necessary ingredients for a successful projection: giggles; bare legs; shyness. The goal is to be both irresistible and invisible. When you succeed, a certain sharpness will go out of his eyes. 2 Some powerful men actually call their beauties “Beauty.” Counter to reputation, there is a deep camaraderie among beauties. If your Designated Mate is widely feared, the beauties at the house party where you’ve gone undercover to meet him will be especially kind. Kindness feels good, even when it’s based on a false notion of your identity ... Continue reading →

I got a peek inside David Rees’s pencil-sharpening kit last week at his appearance in Williamsburg, sponsored by the bookstore Word, at Public Assembly. It was the last stop on his book tour (“How to Sharpen Pencils” was reviewed on Page-Turner recently by Mark O’Connell), and for the occasion he was joined onstage by John Hodgman, who wrote the foreword for Rees’s book, and who read a hilarious piece about wine from his new collection, “That Is All” (“One kind of wine is … RED WINE”), and by Jonathan Coulton, who, at Rees’s request, sang melancholy songs from his new album, “Artificial Heart.” One of the things Rees keeps in his kit, besides his sharpeners, rags, sandpaper, vinyl tubing, and replacement blades, is plastic bags, ... Continue reading →

Minimum Security ClearanceSecret Clearance - Secret LocationMillersville, Maryland 21108 (map)Workplace: Not SpecifiedTravel: Not Specified Northrop Grumman Information Systems sector is seeking a Cyber Software Engineer 2 to join our team of qualified, diverse individuals. This position will be located in Millersville, MD, Colorado Springs, CO, or Sacramento, CA. This exciting and fast paced Research and Development project will plan, execute, and assess an Offensive Cyberspace Operation (OCO) mission. This includes the integration of capabilities such as command linkages, data flows, situational awareness (SA), and command and control (C2) tools.. Roles and Responsibilities: * Supports the integration of applications for full spectrum Cyber Operations and simulations * Extends existing simulation tools to include cyberspace components * Adapts components to a common data integration framework * Designs, ... Continue reading →

BRIAN LINDSTROM:BASES LOADED “Putting lights in Wrigley Field is like putting aluminum siding on the Sistine Chapel.” – Roger Simon Baseball says different things to different people. Some people love it for the statistics, others for the lush sights and sounds. Brian Lindstrom, a graphic designer and printmaker currently studying at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, loves baseball for the tradition. The stories, legends and athletes that have come and gone throughout the decades have compiled a massive legacy that is ripe for artistic expression. Lindstrom dove into this legacy as the inspiration for a series of 18 screenprinted posters, titling the series "Bases Loaded". Lindstrom deftly combines carefully hand drawn typography and iconography with some of the greatest moments in the history of ... Continue reading →

Last Wednesday, with relatively little fanfare, Google introduced a new technology called Google Knowledge Graph. Type in “François Hollande,” and you are offered a capsule history (with links) to his children, partner, birthday, education, and so forth. In the short-term, Knowledge Graph will not make a big difference in your world—you might get much the same information by visiting Hollande’s Wikipedia page, and a lot of people might still prefer to ask their friends. But what’s under the hood represents a significant change in engineering for the world’s largest search-engine company. And more than that, in a decade or two, scientists and journalists may well look back at the introduction of Google Knowledge Graph as the dividing line between machines that dredged massive amounts of ... Continue reading →

This evening, the New Yorker Fiction Department (@NYerFiction) will start tweeting Jennifer Egan’s new story “Black Box,” which will appear in its entirety in the Science Fiction Issue, out on Monday. We asked Egan what inspired her to structure her story in paragraphs of a hundred and forty characters or fewer. Several of my long-standing fictional interests converged in the writing of “Black Box.” One involves fiction that takes the form of lists; stories that appear to be told inadvertently, using a narrator’s notes to him or herself. My working title for this story was “Lessons Learned,” and my hope was to tell a story whose shape would emerge from the lessons the narrator derived from each step in the action, rather than from descriptions ... Continue reading →