Harper Lee, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of To Kill a Mockingbird has died at age 89. She is pictured here visiting her hometown, Monroeville, Alabama, in 1961. (Donald Uhrbrock/The LIFE Images Collection/Getty Images)

For crying out glayvin! All Songs Considered host Bob Boilen is going to be on @thesimpsonsfox this Sunday night! 

A (Re)Introduction To NPR Plays

OK, it is time for a little re-introduction to this Tumblr.

We started NPR plays back in 2014, during the launch of the PS4 and XBox One, to talk about gaming and the community and to gauge where the intersection of that audience and NPR’s mainstream audience met. It’s been great, and we grew at a pretty rapid pace for being a side project and labor of love.

Things got busy, other projects came up, but now we’re back and aiming to do more in this space. As we do that, I thought it would make sense, and in the spirit of transparency, to let you know a little about about your host (me).

Who Am I?

Up there, that’s me, Steve Mullis, a digital editor at NPR and one of its resident gaming junkies. It’s not my primary function here to cover games, but I am the biggest advocate for gaming coverage in the newsroom and I occasionally write about indie games and other related topics for NPR.org. Other times I’m doing a variety digital journalism-related things.

I have been playing games since I was about 5 years old (now 36). Our first system was an Atari 2600, and we had all of the usual suspects for that system: River Raid, Pitfall, Joust, Boxing (I think it was JUST called Boxing), and many others. We bought the original NES not long after it was released, minus  R.O.B. the Robot. We had the Mike Tyson’s Punch Out “action” set. From then, it was history.

Since then, I’ve owned a wide variety of systems and spent countless hours in all genres of games. I even had Seaman on the Sega Dreamcast, if that clues you in to how far down the rabbit hole I’ve gone. For those that don’t know, that was a game where you raised a weird fish-like creature and talked to it through a microphone plugged into the Dreamcast controller.

I’ve had my hardcore phases of many genres, from playing every fighting game under the sun for a period to digging my heels in on RPGs only. Never been a huge fan of FPS games, with the exception of the Battlefield series, but I can appreciate their allure and fun. And of course, there has been the on-again, off-again relationship with industry giant World of Warcraft. That will probably continue until the servers shut down (why can’t I quit you?)

Why I play games: For the same reasons I enjoy great books and movies – they’re entertaining, often contain wonderful stories and you get to be actively involved in the action most of the time. Like many of you out there I’m sure, games give me the same level of enjoyment, and often are more personally rewarding, as any other artistic medium. And I am firmly in the camp of it being an artistic medium. To me, that battle has been decided.

Favorite games: Early Final Fantasy series, Skyrim, World of Warcraft, Diablo III, XCOM series, Metal Gear series, Thomas Was Alone, Stealth Bastard, Super Meat Boy

Currently playing: XCOM 2, Fallout 4, Firewatch, The Witness

What I like about the industry right now: Robust indie game development; amazing use of technology; games/systems for all types and income levels (there’s no ONE place everyone has to be); Rise of esports and streaming community

My beefs with the industry/community right now: Too much negativity and in-fighting; Too many giants; Too many endless franchises; Cash-grab DLC content; “Season pass” games that don’t deliver; Too many gaming/gamer zealots; toxic online communities; too many online-only games

What I want more of from the industry/community: More variety and diversity of protagonists; more genre-bending games; More advanced storytelling (not just story as filler between action set pieces)

There you have it, just a brief window into exactly who is writing the majority of these posts and your resident champion for gaming content at NPR. Thanks for reading, and feel free to reach me at the usual channels.

TWITTER: @stevemullis​ 

EMAIL: smullis [at] npr [dot] org

Thanks!

- Steve Mullis, digital editor, NPR

Last week’s announcement of the direct detection of gravitational waves proved, once again, the enduring power of Albert Einstein’s scientific vision. Once again, Einstein was right in that this theory accurately predicted the behavior of the world.

But with last week’s triumph, a deep and fascinating question arises: Could Einstein be right about his science and still be wrong about the broader context into which we humans put that science?

Let me explain.

There are a lot of reasons thinking about physics is worth the effort. From GPS to 3-D printers, it’s a subject yielding a lot of cool technology. And from flushing toilets to rising clouds, physics also explains a lot about the world around us.

But there’s another reason people love physics — the world we can’t see. Physics offers radical new perspectives on what lies beneath, behind and below our everyday experience. In this way, physics seems like more than just knowledge; it seems like truth with a capital T.

But when science reaches the hairy edges of our experience, when it reaches outward to the boundaries of our abilities to describe the world, is there something else coming along for the ride? Together with the powerful, abstract mathematics and the ingenious instrumentation, is there something beyond “just the facts” requiring special attention when physicists make their grandest claims about the cosmos?

Was Einstein Wrong?

Photo: Keystone/Getty Images and STF/AFP/Getty Images Graphic: Credit: Katherine Du, Adam Frank and Katie Park/NPR

You know it’s cold when Boston Harbor is steaming. See this chilly phenomenon from the cozy confines of the New England Aquarium. And, you know, penguins, too. #boston #polarvortex #bostonharbor #cold

Off to the mountains of central Japan! We are starting here in Nagoya, where I picked up this tiny rental car and met up with fixer Akane, my friend Ben and his wife Elle. Ben is the muse for the piece we are reporting in rural Japan, since he used to teach in a tiny village in Aichi prefecture. Stay with us…

I haven’t been drinking, but I couldn’t resist this Psy-branded hangover drink. Chungcheong-nam-do style. #Korea #annainasia (at 입장 휴게소 (상행))

Light-Filled Home Clad in Corrugated Steel 

Architects- Archterra Architects  Location- Australian Bushland, Margaret River, Australia Source- contemporist Images- Douglas Mark Black

*for design inspiration, follow @designismymuse

Looking east along Edgewood Ave. in Five Points, ca. 1892. Here we can see the artesian well that provided drinking water to Atlantans and the construction of streetcar lines.

Browse and order prints from our collections. Find this image directly by searching VIS 170.296.001.   

Dr. Marie-Helen Maras examines security and privacy in a look at the ‘Internet of Things’ on the OUPblog.

Image Credit: “The Internet of Things – How the Next Evolution of the Internet Is Changing Everything” by Dave Evans. Source: Cisco IBSG, April 2011. Image used with permission.

Buenos Dias, from Quito, the capitol of Ecuador.  It’s said to be the highest capitol in the world, in fact, at roughly 9,350 feet.  So when you arrive, take it from me, if at all possible walk down, not up, streets like this one I photographed near the city’s historic center.   The good news is that despite the altitude, and the latitude for that matter (we’re right on the equator), the weather here is quite temperate.  

I’ve arrived with a group of reporters and editors from around the globe as part of an International Reporting Project (IRP) sponsored reporting trip focused on health and development.  

In the days ahead, I’ll be posting snapshots of our adventures – as well as anything odd or interesting I encounter – from Quito to the Amazon to Ecuador’s largest city, Guayaquil, on the coast.  

This is a tremendously biologically and culturally diverse country, and I’m hoping to get a sense for how the prolonged slump in global oil prices is affecting the economy and society - the Ecuadorian Amazon has long been an important – and controversial – oil producing region. Today, roughly half of the government’s revenue still comes from oil.  I’ll also be taking a look at farming – food prices for crops such as bananas have slumped lately as well.  And there are renewed concerns that the predicted El Nino could have devastating impacts on this important sector in the months ahead – as it did during the last “Nino” in 1997-1998.  

More on all of that later.  For now, back to acclimatizing; which means I’m temporarily trading my morning run for a more leisurely (and well hydrated) stroll.  

Hablamos Pronto!

Kirk Siegler

Korean School Girls Help You Pronounce Park Geun-hye

For those of you who are going to have to use her name tomorrow since President Park is meeting with President Obama, here is our helpful pronunciation guide that we made in advance of this summer’s rescheduled summit.

Oh Nepal. ⌛

Kenyan coffee chain Java House targets Africa expansion

Kevin Ashley, who founded Java’s first outlet in Nairobi in 1999, said the company would open in Kigali, Dar es Salaam, Lagos, Accra and Lusaka. For now, the firm’s only outlets beyond Kenya are in Uganda’s capital Kampala.

“We see in five years time we are going to be having a major presence in most of the major urban centers of Africa,” he told Reuters at his office over one of his Java outlets, which offer coffees, teas and a menu of international food.

His ambition reflects the confidence of many African and other firms about rising spending power on a continent that boasts several fast-growing economies, even if a commodity price slide has taken some of the shine off the “Africa Rising” theme.

It’s Member Station Friday! What’s up, Minnesota Public Radio @893thecurrent? Here’s Ian Fox (with friend and Mugs alumnae Kate Parkinson-Morgan), a fall 2014 intern and an audience & community relations/finance/development temp extraordinaire, with his “Great music lives here” mug from 89.3 The Current. 

You know you want to see a closeup of that Fox-y bow tie.

Word of the Day: algorithm

n. A process or set of rules to be followed in calculations or other problem-solving operations, especially by a computer

GIF via Giphy