A trailer for Borderlands 2, the game in question.

Source: youtube.com

In a recent presentation to a room full of journalists, the lead designer for Gearbox Studios' Borderlands 2 described a character track which would emphasize support skills — a lower difficulty setting for the game, basically — as "girlfriend mode."

During a studio tour of Gearbox's Dallas offices, the developer showed us a work in progress build of the Mechromancer, planned to launch around 60 days after the game releases in September. Currently, the Mechromancer uses assets lifted from Maya, the Siren, for her arms. But her design and one out of three skill trees is complete.

The skill tree is called Best Friends Forever, what lead designer John Hemingway dubbed the "girlfriend mode."

"The design team was looking at the concept art and thought, you know what, this is actually the cutest character we've ever had. I want to make, for the lack of a better term, the girlfriend skill tree. This is, I love Borderlands and I want to share it with someone, but they suck at first-person shooters. Can we make a skill tree that actually allows them to understand the game and to play the game? That's what our attempt with the Best Friends Forever skill tree is."

The term "girlfriend mode," which is an internal nickname, is getting most of the press because of how incendiary it is, but the planned external name for the setting is set to be "Best Friends Forever" which, while not as overtly sexist, is still gendered and slighting. In particular, it seems clear that the term "BFF" is deployed with some irony.

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Me: If I say something is a "minimalist writing application" what do you think that is?
My Mom: Like Twitter?
Me: Um, no. What else do you think it might mean?
My mom: Something without verbs?
Me: No, it's something like Word but without all the options.
My mom: Like Notepad.
Me: Yeah but with, like, a few more options than Notepad.
My mom: Why? Who would use that?
Me: I own two minimalist writing applications.
My mom: Well that makes sense. You always had a hard time focusing.

If you have a better attention span/childhood than I do, then maybe a minimalist writing application isn't something you need. But if sitting down to write gives you an overwhelming urge to clean your apartment, a distraction-free writing environment may be the key to your productivity. How minimalist is minimalist enough? Is the one that does the least worth the most? And, like, how minimalist is too minimalist? Well, Goldilocks, let's find out.

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A lot of people want to watch HBO shows like Game of Thrones, True Blood and Girls (well, maybe not Girls) without subscribing to HBO, or cable at all. And a lot of them are watching the shows anyway, just without paying for them. So, some argue that HBO is leaving money on the table by not taking advantage of this massive potential audience. And thus, Take My Money HBO was born. It lets you put in the dollar amount you'd pay for a standalone HBO service, and tweet it.

What it shows, ultimately, is exactly why HBO probably won't offer a standalone service anytime soon: Hardly anybody knows how much it's worth.

Here's a lot of people who won't pay anything:

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We've covered how to deal with all the email you're bombarded with and how to send email like a pro. Now let's think outside the (in)box.

Where Gmail Labs really starts to flex its muscle is in organizing your inbox:

Preview Pane — For people with larger monitors this makes email even more effortless. Mimicking traditional desktop email clients, half of your inbox is allocated to displaying a selected email and the other half is your inbox. This saves you a lot of clicks and attention switching over the course of the day. Plus, once enabled, it’s easy to turn off and on with a single click from the home screen. As someone who has a large monitor at work and a small monitor at home, this fast switching between Preview Pane mode and traditional inbox is very much appreciated.

Authentication Icon For Verified Senders — Years ago I got phished by a spammer pretending to be Paypal and knew immediately after it happened that I’d made a mistake. This Gmail Lab adds a little key icon to eBay and Paypal emails so you know you can trust those emails since eBay and Paypal are the senders spammers are most often trying to spoof.

Google Docs Previews In Mail — Read through full documents from inside your email. The fewer new windows I have to open, the better.

Video Chat Enhancements — If you video chat a lot you’ll appreciate the higher definition video quality this feature offers as well as early access to updates Google makes to the video chat interface.

Unread Message Icon — Adds the number of unread messages you have to the Gmail favicon (little envelope icon in your browser tab). As someone who regularly has 30+ tabs open, this handful of pixels is the only way I know whether I have new emails.

Mark As Read Button — “Tired of spending all that effort to click on the more actions menu every time you want to mark messages as read without reading them?” Yes, yes I do, snarky Google employee Mark K. Since I leave everything in my inbox, having a way to easily mark things as read is as important to me as easy archiving is to someone who empties their inbox.

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No matter who you are or what you do, there are some phrases that you just end up saying over and over again in emails. Like, “Please review the attached and get back to me” or “Thank you for your submission, I’ll review it and respond within 3 days” or “i h8 u ur writing sux.” Well there's a better, lazier way to do it.

You can use Gmail to save and insert phrases of any length into any email you want. Better yet, you can set up a filter to have Gmail automatically send these canned responses for you. This works especially well with plus-addressing. If you set up a filter to auto-reply to anything sent to me+submission@gmail, the email gets sent from me+canned.response@gmail. That means if they reply to you, they’ll be sending their reply to me+canned.response@gmail and not me+submission@gmail, which prevents them from then getting a second automated email from you. It’s the perfect way to create your own virtual secretary.

Odds are if you’ve been using Gmail for long enough you’ve probably stumbled onto Labs, Gmail’s workshop for new features. To start setting up your virtual secretary, first enable Canned Responses in Labs.

To set up a canned response, start by composing a new email. Write whatever you want your saved message to be in the body of the email, formatting it however you like. Once you have your response set up, click the Canned Response button to add a new one.

With filters, plus-addressing, and canned responses, we’re halfway towards a sentient inbox. And that's just the beginning of what Labs allows you to do.

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If you hate email and want to spend less time dealing with it, then over the next few days I’m going to show you some Gmail hacks to make life easier on you and the people you communicate with, all without changing your daily email habits.

When Gmail launched in 2004 it had three big innovations: storage size, conversation view, and labels. For most people, those eight-year old features continue to be enough. Over the years Gmail’s storage capacity has grown from 1 GB to 10 GB, conversation view has become more conversational, and they’ve dragged us kicking and screaming into using labels.

Gmail's latest major innovation, Priority Inbox, is the 21st century cotton gin: a revolution in unitized automation saving countless hours of menial work separating the wheat from the chaff. If you don’t want to read the rest of this article, my suggestion for how to best improve your email life in one click is by enabling Priority Inbox. By doing so, you get a cleanly segmented inbox with a more relevant unread count that frees you from email ennui. The only thing that could be better and more simple than Priority Inbox would be a sentient inbox: email that reads and responds to itself.

That said, I don’t actually use Priority Inbox. I know, I know, I just talked about how great it is. And it is! If you’re looking for a turnkey solution to email desperation, that’s absolutely what you want. But for me, I want a less automated, more artisanal email experience where I handcraft my own inbox to suit my particular needs.

What if it cost you a penny every time you clicked on something in Gmail? It’d add up fast. But seriously, every pointless distraction or unnecessary action is a tax on your valuable time. So what’s the best way to manage unimportant emails? By not seeing them in the first place.

If you’re Tim Ferriss or one of his followers then that means sending obnoxious autoresponders letting people know what email rules you have set up for yourself and how they might want to change their email practices to accommodate you. But if you’re part of the 99 percent of people who aren’t narcissistic assholes looking to alienate everyone they know, then the onus is on you to come up with a system to deal with whatever comes at you.

Your best friend for dealing with unimportant emails is Gmail’s filters. If you’re new to filters here are the basics: you set up rules in Gmail so that if certain conditions are met, then different things happen to your email. In the recent redesign, Gmail has made it harder for people unfamiliar with filters to create them: either click on the little down arrow next to the blue search button or, when selecting an email, pick “Filter messages like these” from the “More” dropdown.

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Move The Chat List

Let's start with the tamest prank. This just moves the chat list from the left hand side to the right hand side. Click to enable Right-Side Chat in Labs then click save changes and you 're done. This is also one of the quickest pranks to set up if you only have 10 seconds when someone 's back is turned.

Turn Off Conversation View

This is a good prank because the person will probably think it's a Google bug rather than a feature that can be disabled. Just toggle off Conversation View in the general settings. Watch their reaction when that email thread with 60 replies explodes their whole inbox.

Re-filter Their Email

This could be either an innocent relabeling (e.g. anything from:mom@mommymail.com gets a new filter called 8===D) or a cruel refiltering (e.g. anything marked important gets auto-archived so that it never hits their inbox).

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Hashtags on Twitter signify a lot of things, but above all, using them signifies a seasoned Twitter user. Still haven't figured out how to deploy the pound sign with a bunch of words behind it in a way that makes sense? Maybe this taxonomy of the ten kinds of hashtaggers will help.

#Originalists
Way back in ye olde aught seven, a humble man named Chris Messina proposed a convention for nerds to organize at events: The pound sign, making groups easily searchable. Lo and behold, the #hashtag was born. Today, events like SXSWi now tell people exactly which hashtags to use to organize the outbound flow of thousands of tweets.

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Discover Instagram is finally available for Android when someone you follow tweets about it.

OH CRAP. Instagram for Android has arrived. theverge.com/2012/4/3/29226… via @verge— Joshua Topolsky (@joshuatopolsky) April 3, 2012

Click through to the article & find a link to the Google Play store.

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I have endeavoured in this ghostly little article, to raise the ghost of an idea, which shall not put my readers out of humour with themselves, with each other, with the season, or with me. I am here today, your digital Jacob Marley, to show you how you’ve been squandering your Twitter life. Bah humbug, you say? Well, we’ll see.

The Ghost of Twitter Past

“Who, and what are you?”
“I am the Ghost of Twitter Past.”
“Long Past?”
“No. Your past.”

I’m sure some consider Twitter’s gnat-like memory a feature rather than a bug but, like Ebenezer Scrooge, there’s a lot to be gained by examining the past. So let us travel back. Back to your earliest tweets that we can find. Three thousand and two hundred tweets ago.

Why 3200 tweets? It’s an artificial limit put in place by the Twitter API. If you want to go back further than that, you’ll have to speak to someone at the Library of Congress.

If you’re just looking for a Twitter search that lets you go back further than a week I suggest SnapBird. It allows you to do quick searches of a person’s timeline without even logging in to Twitter. If you do authenticate your account, you can search across all of your friends’ tweets at once.

Maybe search isn’t enough for you, though, and you want to start taking the archiving of your tweets into your own hands. One great way to do this is to create a robust personal database of all your activity on Twitter, using ThinkUp and PHP Fog. You’ll not only start archiving all of your tweets and favs from this point forward, but your 3.2k most recent tweets as well. It is a bit technical to set up, but there are instructions and a walkthrough vid, as well as an FAQ that should have you up and running inside half an hour.

But, hey, maybe you don’t want to bother archiving all your tweets in a separate database. I know I tend to suffer from Not Another Thing syndrome, and would prefer to leverage my existing applications. The Ghost of Twitter Past suggests you at least archive the tweets that are important to you in a program you already use: Email.

We’ll use a wonderful little application called If This Then That, a service that automates tasks online, to pipe all your important tweets to your email account where they’ll be auto archived. Unlike signing up for PHP Fog and ThinkUp, ifttt is just a behind-the-scenes middle man. Once you’re signed up it works with all your existing accounts (Twitter, email) rather than being a separate repository.

What tweets would you like to archive? Here are some ifttt recipes for archiving all your own tweets, anytime you’re mentioned on Twitter, and anything you favorite on Twitter. Once you have those running, set anything matching this Gmail filter to skip the inbox. There you go. You just rolled your own Twitter archive in less than 5 minutes.

Now with the past taken care of, how do we make our current use of Twitter better?

The Ghost of Twitter Present

“Spirit, tell me if @TinyTim will live.”
“I see a vacant tweet in a poor application, a username without an owner, carefully preserved. If these shadows remain unaltered by the Future, the child will be blocked.”

Having too much stuff on Twitter to read is a good problem to have, and an easy one to solve. iOS users have especially good options in Instapaper, Readability, and Read It Later, all of which have their reading list functionality built into popular Twitter clients as well as standalone reading apps. A more independent and operating system agnostic choice is Pinboard which allows you to connect your Twitter account directly to the service rather than having to use a specific, intermediary Twitter app. Once connected, any favorited tweet will automatically have its link added to your reading list.

But, for suffers of Not Another Thing syndrome, the Ghost of Twitter Present directs us back to ifttt. If you use any of the 27 applications that work with Twitter, then it’ll be easy to roll your own read it later task thinger. Otherwise we’ll lean on ye ole reliable email to function as our reading list manager. Here are recipes to have your Twitter favorites sent to your email and any tweet with a link by someone you follow sent to your email. Use this Gmail filter for favs & this Gmail filter for link tweets to wrangle them; having those tweets hit your inbox but be marked as read is probably the way to go. The downside of using ifttt as a read it later service is that, since it doesn’t unroll Twitter’s t.co links, searching can be more difficult and brittle. The upside is that it’s easier to give a hat tip to whoever linked you to the item since their tweet is right along side the link in the email.

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But there's gotta be a chance it'll hold a global Hunger Games, right? (Update: We won the bracket.)

The Internet is really really great (for porn). I've got a fast connection so I don't have to wait (for porn). There's always some new site (for porn). I browse all day and night (for porn). It's like I'm surfing at the speed of light (for porn).

Unlike puppets in a musical, pornography isn’t something that’s usually sung about so much as squirreled away. Ten years ago it was keeping magazines hidden under a bed, five years ago it was keeping files hidden on a hard drive, and now it’s keeping URLs hidden in a browser. Modern porn hiding technology has come a long way from a craftily labeled cardboard box or a cleverly nested computer folder.

Keep It Secret. Keep It Safe.

If Google Chrome is your main web browser then you’re probably familiar with Chrome’s incognito mode. Using an incognito mode for porn is like using condoms when having sex. It’s an easy, one-off, over-the-counter way to protect yourself so that you don’t have to worry about cookies or the browser history.

What is it?

Pages you view in this window won't appear in your browser history or search history, and they won't leave other traces, like cookies, on your computer after you close all open incognito windows.

Google originally pitched incognito mode as a way to surreptitiously shop for gifts. Right. Because you don’t want your significant other to find out that you’ve been browsing for hardcore, Asian, crackle-enamel vases.

Yes, if you think Chrome’s incognito mode seems tailor-made for porn, then you wouldn’t be the only one. This Google support thread of people asking for an option to disable incognito mode is akin to people who call for abstinence-only sex education. Not having a private browsing mode won’t keep kids (or anyone else) from looking at porn--it just means they’d be doing it in a less safe way. And for LGBT kids with conservative parents, there can be more at stake than just embarrassment if their porn habits are found out.

Chrome isn’t the only browser to offer this sort of stealth feature. All modern browsers have some sort of privacy mode. Internet Explorer calls theirs InPrivate. Firefox, Opera, and Safari simply call it Private Browsing. Although, importantly, Safari’s is less private than others because it still allows cookies.

But it’s not just the browser that records the sites you go to. Your Google account also tracks what searches you do and websites you click through on and stores them in a web history. Even in incognito mode, your searches and clickthroughs will be stored in your web history if you’re logged in. Your web history can be cleaned up on a by-item basis, the same way your browser history can--you just have to remember to do it, otherwise these searches can turn up in autocompletes anywhere you’re logged in.

Like the morning after pill, this sort of history expunging takes care of the big problem--but stored histories are only the most visible trace of where you’ve been. Cookies, local shared objects (flash cookies), and scripts are even more pernicious at keeping tabs on you.

As Alexis Madrigal recently detailed in a lengthy article for The Atlantic, there are dozens if not hundreds of companies tracking you on the web and almost no way to stop them. While private browsing modes do block cookies there are still malicious scripts, ads, and redirects to worry about.

Even people into exhibitionism would probably be uncomfortable at the long gaze Big Brother has into your bedroom. So what’s the solution? Sandbox it. Set it free. Send it to a farm upstate where it can run around all day in a beautiful meadow with all the other porn.

AKA, make a dedicated porn browser.

There Can Be Only One

If Chrome is your main browser and you want to keep using it for porn, you should download Chrome Canary. Canary was designed to be a side-by-side installation with regular Chrome so web developers could test things in a functionally separate browser. Since Canary is independent that means it keeps its own bookmarks, history, and cookies, making it effectively incognito from anyone who only uses regular Chrome on the same computer.

One of the downsides of Canary-as-porn-browser is that since it was designed to be an experimental browser for developers to bang away on, it can break unexpectedly.

If you don’t like the idea of your porn browser suddenly deciding not to work one day then you should choose a browser that is stable, highly customizable, and, most importantly, one that no one who borrows your computer would ever use voluntarily. I’m of course referring to Opera.

Opera: When You Think Porn, Think Opera
Opera: Choosy Porn Watchers Choose Opera
Opera: The Browser That Really Makes Porn Sing

Those new to Opera will be pleased to see that several of Chrome’s best UI touches were borrowed from Opera. But whichever browser you pick there are a few commonalities.

The first rule of having a dedicated porn browser is you do not tell anyone you have a dedicated porn browser. That means don’t pin it to the OSX dock or the Windows start menu. Your porn habits won’t be incognito for long if people borrowing your computer get curious about what that prominent red O is.

The second rule of having a dedicated porn browser is you do not tell anyone you have a dedicated porn browser. Don’t cross the streams. Save quick Gmail checks for browsers where you don’t mind Google peeking in on your search history.

The third rule of having a dedicated porn browser is keep the browser simple, stupid. Unlike your main web browser, where cookies and such can have their uses, porn sites are much more likely to be malicious so a porn browser should be stripped bare. No cookies, no pop-ups, no ads, no scripts. Opera allows for a lot of control over plug-ins and scripts out of the box but you should still consider installing an extension like NoAds Advanced that offers more fine grained control, especially for Windows users where viruses are a concern.

The upside, of course, is the ability to personalize the browser--from local bookmark storage to remembering passwords to customizing extensions.

While convenient and relatively secure, there are reasons you might not want to use a separate, dedicated porn browser: you’re not the primary user of the computer, you want to keep things as hidden as possible, you don’t have many bookmarks or personalizations, you don’t feel the need to extensively block ads/scripts. Or maybe you just want to keep things simple and not muck about with two browsers.

Coming To The Cloud

We’re going to go back to our friend, the private browsing mode, but also add in some cloud-level personalization. Trying to subsist on a diet consisting solely of Chrome’s incognito mode is bulimic, since you’re constantly binging and purging. Having a web account or two to help discover or store links will give you a more balanced porn diet.

In a recent Gizmodo article, Mat Honan pointed out an as-yet-unlaunched Pinterest for Porn called Sinterest. Though that’s a bit misleading, as all Sinterest purports to be is a bookmarking site rather than a sharing community. If bookmarking a few favorite porn sites is what you’re looking for, both Pinboard and Delicious allow private link storing. While it’s not free like Delicious, Pinboard is probably the better choice because of its great archiving capabilities (for an additional fee) and especially strong terms of service in support of privacy and anonymity.

If you don’t want to porn alone and are looking for the sharing or discovery that would come with a Pinterest for Porn then your best bets are StumbleUpon and Tumblr. Yes, both of these mainstream sites have active porn communities--a fact, unsurprisingly, that neither company advertises. But porn had been discoverable from both sites’ directories until they were reprogrammed not to display it. Like those wanting to disable Chrome incognito, though, obscuring porn on these sites has not deterred people. Tumblr has dozens if not hundreds of erotica sites and StumbleUpon has 143,000 people who stumble pornography, one of several x-rated interests.

Protect yourself: practice safe porn. Out of sight, out of mind, out of browser history.

I'm glad we have this new technology which gives us untold opportunity. From your own desktop you can research, browse and shop until you've had enough and you're ready to stop. For porn.

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