From Ars Technica: How RPG fans convinced Nintendo to release two Japanese titles in the US


When Nintendo announced last year that it would not be bringing cult classic Japanese RPG Xenoblade Chronicles to North America, it was no surprise that the decision drew heavy Internet protest from a subgroup of dedicated gamers. After all, groups of gamers are constantly banding together online to demand everything from LAN support in Starcraft II to a Full House game (don’t lose hope, Danny Tanner super-fans!)

But Operation Rainfall, as the Xenoblade protest group came to be known, differed from other grassroots gamer protests in one important way: it worked. Not only has Nintendo given Xenoblade Chronicles a North American release date of April 2, but the company announced last week that The Last Story, another Japanese RPG the group has been pushing to see release in North America, will come across the ocean this summer through publisher XSEED games.

The success of Operation Rainfall shows that a small group of niche gamers can occasionally effect change from a big-name game publisher, as long as they’re willing to keep up the pressure and do a bit of out-of-the-box promotion.

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from Ars Technica

From Gizmodo: How a Man Survived Without Food For Two Months in a Snow-Buried Car

When a Swedish man drove down a deserted forest road near Umeaa, Sweden last December 19th, he was probably looking forward to Christmas. But that day, his car somehow became buried under a mountain of snow. He was trapped there for two months, suffering insanely low temperatures, with no access to food. Last Sunday, he was discovered. Alive. But how? More »
from Gizmodo

From Discover: Q&BA: Why spend money on NASA?

I wholeheartedly agree and endorse this article…
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During last week’s Q&BA live video chat session on Google+, I got the question, “Why spend money on NASA when we need that money here on Earth?”

This is a common question, and very apropos given the terrible budget news we got about NASA earlier today. So I put my answer up on YouTube. We’ll be hearing this argument a lot in the upcoming budget battles, and hopefully this’ll help show why we need to spend money on NASA, even more than we are now.

I have a lot of blog posts dealing with this issue, since it comes up so often. You’ll find all them linked in this blog post: Debating Space. We need to be exploring space, and we need to be investing in our future. Science and exploration are our future.

from Discover