For a while Today on the Net lived on it's own hosting, but sadly due to issues with funding, the newer postings were deleted and sadly I had not backed them up before then.
But now, I am back, and using Posterous for posting and announcements for the blog. Soon posts will be coming again, let's see how we can do!
This parasite attaches itself at the base of the spotted rose snapper's (Lutjanus guttatus) tongue, entering the fish's mouth through its gills. It then proceeds to extract blood through the claws on its front three pairs of legs. As the parasite grows, less and less blood reaches the tongue, and eventually the organ atrophies from lack of blood. The parasite then replaces the fish's tongue by attaching its own body to the muscles of the tongue stub. The fish is able to use the parasite just like a normal tongue. It appears that the parasite does not cause any other damage to the host fish. Once C. exigua replaces the tongue, some feed on the host's blood and many others feed on fish mucus. They do not eat scraps of the fish's food. This is the only known case of a parasite functionally replacing a host organ.
There are many species of Cymothoa, but only C. exigua is known to consume and replace its host's tongue.
Yeah, you read that right. It replaces the host's tongue with itself. Crazy huh? Oh, an I might as well include the picture that started this off that Warren Ellis posted on his website:
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RMT operators take up a lot of server power. They use macros to run missions, rat (grind PvE) and mine 23/7. This adversely affects other players’ chances of making a simulated living as all sweet-spots for this sort of activity are totally overrun with RMT-type users," he explained to Ars. Prices for mission-related items are adversely affected as well, which hurts regular players. Then there's the criminal element.
"Practically all credit card fraud we suffer stems from the RMT element which uses stolen credit cards to register expendable accounts that they know we will ban as soon as they start using them, e.g. accounts used to spam ISK sale adverts and such." Further, almost all hacking problems involve accounts being cleaned out by ISK sellers. The game suffers, credit card fraud becomes an issue, and accounts are hi-jacked. Something had to be done, and "Unholy Rage" was what they named CCP's response.
For weeks they studied the behavior and effects these real-money traders had on the game, and then they struck. During scheduled maintenance, over 6,000 accounts were banned. Hreiðarsson assures us that the methods were sound, and the bannings went off with surgical precision. "We are quite confident that false positives are practically non-existent, but we examine all requests for review," he explained. "So far less than a dozen have been found to be false positives." The project is ongoing, and so far CCP has banned approximately 9,000 accounts.
What they found was these real-money traders were not only soaking up in-game, virtual assets as well as hacking accounts, but also taking way more than their fair share of server cycles. The result was dramatic.
After the District 9 roundtable and a one-on-one with director Neill Blomkamp, we found out a lot about what went on behind the scenes while making the alien feature. And some of the District 9 fact we uncovered may shock you, all quotes are from Blomkamp:
One actor plays all of the talking aliens.
It's only one actor who plays every alien, it's Jason Cope. He plays every single alien.
Most, if not all, of the alien interaction and dialogue with Wikus during the eviction scene was improvised by Jason Cope or the actor Sharlto Copely (Wikus).
So we would film the two of them and then we would go to a different shack. And he'd pretend to evict a new alien. Then we'd go somewhere else and somewhere else. So it was just the two of them. It's the conversations between those two, the actual dialogue and what actually came out of them was totally improved. Any details in words and the language between the two happened right there on the day of shooting. That what makes it feel like they are really communicating... But stuff like when he walks up in to the shack and says, "this is a gang sign, we're in a gang area right here," we would draw the sign on the wall and he would randomly say it's a gang area. And that meant because he's walking up to a shack that has an alien in it with a whole story that we've written with those guys distilling their fluid and I'm like, "that's interesting you just said that the supporting alien character is a gangster." But if it works, we keep going.Read the rest, including information about the location used for the titular district and the home of the aliens over at i09 [5 Things You Didn't Know About District 9]
