What is an Andal? Who are the nobles to whom Littlefinger pleads his case? And why is Sansa dressed like a total goth?

As with the rest of this season to this point, we've put together a list of scenes, references, and characters that deserve a special comment or mention. There's no way we got all the good stuff (and we might be wrong on some of the things we've left below)—so please help expand our appendix.

Every show about a brainiac is in want of a eureka moment. On last night's season finale of Silicon Valley, the lightbulb turned on thanks to an elaborate riff on manually pleasuring the mostly male audience at TechCrunch Disrupt—all in order to win the conference's startup competition.

Before the HBO series launched, Mike Judge promised a "sophisticated" dick joke that "just went on and on." In the process, he also managed to blaspheme the sacred equation-on-whiteboard/algorithm-on-window scene, which is already pretty masturbatory exercise. Who use permanent marker to write on a window?!

Pied Piper, the startup in the show, makes a compression algorithm to send audio and video files faster. For their TechCrunch Disrupt demo, the characters are trying to beat a fictional "Weissman score." Judge worked with Tsachy Weissman, an electrical engineering professor at Stanford, and Ph.D. student Vinith Misra to invent the realistic-seeming compression algorithm.

According to Weissman, it's actually possible to make compression twice as fast, like Pied Piper did. Just needs the right dick joke for inspiration.

To contact the author of this post, please email nitasha@gawker.com.

[Video via HBOGo]

The Supreme Court rejected an appeal filed by New York Times reporter James Risen in which he argued that he should not be forced to testify in a case against former C.I.A. operative Jeffrey Sterling, who is suspected of leaking classified information to Risen. It it not yet clear, Risen’s lawyer said, whether federal prosecutors still intend to seek Risen’s testimony.

Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl, the only prisoner of war held by the enemy in Afghanistan, was freed last week after a deal by the U.S. to exchange him for five Taliban fighters at Guantanamo. But is he a turncoat? And did the White House sell out America to secure him? Here's what we know.

Who is Bowe Bergdahl?

Bergdahl was known as a quiet, thoughtful Idahoan when he enlisted at 22 and joined a unit preparing for deployment to Afghanistan in 2008. In the early morning of June 30, 2009, Berghdal went missing from his unit's small outpost in Mest, a restive area in Paktia province. Within several hours, radio chatter from the Taliban indicated that they'd captured the soldier.

He spent the next five years in captivity, growing gaunt in the numerous propaganda videos that the Taliban trickled out to the press. On numerous occasions, they publicly threatened him with execution. Many Afghans and some Westerners in similar positions had been tortured, decapitated, or shot to death.

Negotiations between the Americans and Taliban leadership over his release had been in the works for several years, and were seen as a precursor to the winding down of America's war in Afghanistan. Indeed, just days before announcing Berghdahl's release, President Obama announced plans to reduce troop levels to about 10,000 by year's end, with a goal of having the U.S. completely our of Afghanistan by 2016.

Bergdahl's time in captivity sounds awful. Why wouldn't we want to get him back?

Of course, the United States and the armed services have a tradition of striving never to leave a man (or woman) behind in the theater of war. It's one of the highest values of service.

But in many ways, Bergdahl's case challenges that tradition. The longtime open secret of his capture is that he reportedly deserted his outpost—perhaps out of disillusionment with the war or his unit, perhaps out of a desire to help Afghans, perhaps because he wasn't completely with it mentally. Whatever his reasons, his departure gave the Taliban a PR coup, kicked off a huge search effort that diverted tons of military resources and cost lives, and left a lot of soldiers grumbling about him.

He rolled off his safe base into the wild? Has that happened before?

It's not unheard of for soldiers to sneak "outside the wire" into "Indian country." (No, really: Bergdahl's outpost was named for Geronimo; U.S. units that searched the area for him were identified by codenames like Blackfoot, Mohawk, and Seminole.)

In 2010, two sailors who worked on a training base in Kabul were killed after a shootout with Taliban fighters in Logar province, fifty miles away. The men—a cook and a technician who worked on ships' hulls—left the base alone in a truck under mysterious circumstances, and their fatal trip to Logar has never been fully explained by officials.

The most notorious example of a soldier leaving the confines of his base in Afghanistan was Staff Sgt. Robert Bales, who slipped away on a March night in 2013, slaughtered innocent Afghans in their village, came back to base to gear up, then went out and massacred more civilians. He was sentenced to life in military prison late last year for killing 16 people in all.

So what's the story behind Bergdahl's disappearance?

The complete truth is still unclear. Initial reports said Bergdahl "fell behind on a patrol," but that's largely discredited. Another report said he was kidnapped from a latrine, but that, too, isn't given much credence. The Taliban even claimed, incredibly, that Bergdahl was "a drunken American soldier [who] had come out of his garrison" and was captured, according to MSNBC.

The consensus among members of Bergdahl's unit is that he chose to "go native," and his choice led to numerous American deaths:

Emails reported by the late Michael Hastings in Rolling Stone in 2012 reveal what Bergdahl's fellow infantrymen learned within days of his disappearance: he told people that he no longer supported the U.S. effort in Afghanistan.

"The future is too good to waste on lies," Bowe wrote to his parents. "And life is way too short to care for the damnation of others, as well as to spend it helping fools with their ideas that are wrong. I have seen their ideas and I am ashamed to even be American. The horror of the self-righteous arrogance that they thrive in. It is all revolting."

Bergdahl wrote to them, "I am sorry for everything. The horror that is America is disgusting."

CNN has not independently verified the authenticity of the emails.

A former member of Bergdahl's squad who has yet to identify his last name publicly but goes by "Cody" tweeted this weekend that before he disappeared, Bergdahl once told him, "If deployment is lame, I'm going to get lost in the Mountains and make my way to China."

Leatherman told CNN that Bergdahl "always looked at the mountains in the distance and talked of 'seeing what's on the other side.'"

The Twitter account by that squadmate, Cody, is especially biting and detailed, suggesting that Bergdahl had made several moves in predeployment training—including getting an AK-47 and learning Afghan languages—that foreshadowed his alleged desertion to the enemy. Cody also implies that Bergdahl may have given the Taliban pointers on how to better focus their attacks on Americans, though that claim is disputed elsewhere. Another account in the Daily Beast by Nathan Bradley Bethea, a member of Bergdahl's battalion and a veteran of the rescue efforts, is unequivocal: "He deserted," Bethea writes. "That's what happened."

A secret internal report on the initial military response to Bergdahl's disappearance, released as part of the "Afghan War Diaries" by Wikileaks, corroborates the basic details of these soldiers' stories.

Where was Bergdahl all this time? Why didn't we find him ourselves?

According to at least one report, U.S. military planners believed they knew where Bergdahl was being held—in Pakistan, by an independent group of insurgents known as the Haqqani Taliban network. Even if the exact location had been known, a rescue mission would have been risky tactically—it might not have succeeded or it might have resulted in more casualties; strategically—it might have angered Pakistani authorities and civilians in an unacceptable extent; and politically—as committed as America is to returning its troops, getting Bergdahl back wasn't exactly as popular a mission as the bin Laden raid.

What was Bergdahl's family doing through all of this?

Being sort of weird, honestly. According to that 2012 profile by the late Michael Hastings, Bergdahl was homeschooled in a strict Calvinist household, and his family became ardently antiwar as they campaigned for his release—to the point that they expressed many sentiments that appear to be sympathetic to the Taliban.

Three days before his son's release, Bob Bergdahl also sent this tweet, which has since been deleted:

The family's Rose Garden press conference with President Obama also had enough weird moments, as related by these reporters' tweets, that conservatives are now talking conspiracy.

Will Bergdahl be punished?

That, too, is unclear. As early as 2009, some bloodthirsty Fox analysts were calling for Bergdahl's death for treason, which is a stretch. As part of his return, Bergdahl will undergo extensive "debriefing" by military and intelligence officials to see what happened, what he told his captors, and what his captors told him. He could conceivably be brought up on charges of absence without leave or desertion under military law. More likely, he'll be quietly discharged.

Opinion on his fate varies among the soldiers in his unit. Some, like Cody on Twitter, seem to believe he should be brought up on charges; others think he needs psychological counseling more than anything. And some share the sentiment of one defense official who spoke to CNN's Jake Tapper: "Five years [in captivity] is enough."

The one thing virtually every commentator agrees on is that the deaths of the soldiers who actively searched for him—and other fatalities that may have resulted from the diversion of resources to his rescue effort—not be forgotten.

What does this have to do with Obama, though?

Well, besides the fact that many critics are questioning Bergdahl's status as a "worthy" rescuee, they say his freedom was bought at too dear a price:

1. There are disagreements over how nasty and scary the five Gitmo detainees are who will be released to secure Bergdahl's freedom. The government's cases against them sound gnarly, but then the government has a track record of sexing up charges on Guantanamo detainees to sound as bad as possible.

On the one hand, they sound like they were pretty important to the Taliban military cause at one time. On the other hand, we've been friendly with worse people in Afghanistan, and these guys will be held in custody in Qatar for a year before they're allowed home, so they're unlikely to make it back to the Afghan frontier in time to kill American soldiers, if that's their aim.

2. Republican legislators say the deal for Bergdahl was illegal, because the Defense Department didn't give Congress the required 30 days' notice for releasing Guantanamo detainees. Administration officials say there was a rush because of reports that Bergdahl was in poor health, and anyway, they say, this exercise of authority is nothing George W. Bush hadn't done before. (This, admittedly, is a terrible justification for anything.)

3. Ted Cruz says it establishes a bad precedent to deal with terrorists like the Taliban, although experts Politifact spoke to said that just puts Obama in the company of Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Theodore Roosevelt, Johnson, Nixon, Carter, Reagan, Clinton, and George W. Bush (remember when we eased relations with Gadhafi?):

"There's little that's actually new here," said Mitchell Reiss, who worked in the State Department under President George W. Bush and served as national security adviser to Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney. "It may be new to certain individuals. Whether it's new or not is not as important as whether it's sound policy and promotes national security. That's the ground where there's a more legitimate debate."

4. Other commentators say this will incentivize U.S. enemies to capture or kidnap U.S. troops, but even some conservative military bloggers say that's absurd:

We all hope that the release of [Bergdahl] won't lead to more attempts to kidnap American troops to exchange for the terrorists who have been removed from the planet's affairs. But, I'm sure that Americans in Afghanistan are trained well enough that they can avoid that eventuality so I'm not going to wring my hands over something that hasn't happened yet and put my faith in the training and professionalism of the US military – like they do.

Of course... it wouldn't be new, nor a direct result of Bergdahl's release if they tried kidnapping American troops now.

5. In any case, a bunch of the conservative commentariat is trying to generally turn this episode into the next Benghazi. Obama seems to have been thrown into an untenable position by an opposition party gunning for him: Don't rescue Bergdahl, and appear weak and unwilling to uphold America's sacrosanct "never leave a man behind" philosophy. Rescue Bergdahl, and appear to be a cheese-eating surrender monkey.

Even Cody, the tweeting soldier, seems politically motivated at parts in his otherwise credible account of Bergdahl's disappearance. Cody is a political conservative who's railed against libtards, minimum wage and the government while championing Cliven Bundy and shedding no tears for the convicted killer in Oklahoma whose execution was badly botched last month. That's enough to question his opinions, if not the basic facts of the situation he describes in Afghanistan.

Will all this hurt the president in an election year?

One one hand, yes and no. It is great red-meat for the Obama-hating crowd, if generally meaningless to most voters who, regardless of the circumstances, are glad an American's back home and are anxious for the Afghanistan war to come to an end. There were no good options for Bergdahl's recovery, and defense planners went for the least bad one.

On the other hand, who gives a damn about the optics or the politics or Democrats or Republicans, really? This is less about Barack Obama, or the daily news cycle, or the future of the republic, than the fact that, true to its word and regardless of the cost, the United States didn't leave Bowe Bergdahl behind. Would that this country could keep more of its promises.

The important thing is: This was war, and war is complicated and absurd and troubles the people we sent to fight it. There are no tidy endings, just individual narratives, and we shouldn't be too quick to dismiss any of them. As Berea, the soldier in Bergdahl's battalion who calls him a deserter, puts it:

I forgave Bergdahl because it was the only way to move on. I wouldn't wish his fate on anyone. I hope that, in time, my comrades can make peace with him, too. That peace will look different for every person. We may have all come home, but learning to leave the war behind is not a quick or easy thing. Some will struggle with it for the rest of their lives. Some will never have the opportunity.

And Bergdahl, all I can say is this: Welcome back. I'm glad it's over. There was a spot reserved for you on the return flight, but we had to leave without you, man. You're probably going to have to find your own way home.

Bidding on a single lunch with Warren Buffett currently stands at $350,300, and will go much higher—two years ago, the price was $3.46 million (which goes to charity). Here, we'll save you $3.46 million: "Buy index funds."

How can we use math to answer some of our most basic questions? Mathematician and writer Jordan Ellenberg is here today to take our questions about everyday mathematics, how to teach math literacy, and the hidden math of our world.

Ellenberg's new book, How Not To Be Wrong: The Power Of Mathematical Thinking, looks at the mathematical underpinnings of our world and how we can use math to answer everything from how much extra time you should give yourself to catch a flight to how to watch baseball.

Ellenberg has both a PhD in math from Harvard University and a Masters in fiction writing from Johns Hopkins University. He's a professor of mathematics at The University of Wisconsin at Madison, where his mathematical research focuses on number theory and algebraic geometry. He has also published a novel, The Grasshopper King.

He will be joining us today from 11:30 a.m. - 12:30 p.m. (Pacific time). Ask him whatever you want about mathematical literacy and what we're doing wrong in math education, number theory, the world of everyday mathematics, and what we can do to better understand it all.

Image: Carol M. Highsmith / Library of Congress.

A high schooler in Montreal accused her school of "shaming girls for their bodies" after she was suspended for wearing shorts that didn't pass the "fingertip length" test in her school's dress code.

Beaconsfield High School eleventh grader Lindsay Stocker says she felt singled out when two vice principals asked her to change her clothes.

"It was in front of my entire class," she said. "I felt attacked, it was humiliating."

"When I said no they said I was making a bad choice. They kept shaking their heads. In front of everybody. They continued to tell me would be suspended if I didn't start following the rules. When I told them I didn't understand why I had to change they told me that it doesn't matter – I don't have to understand the rules, I just have to comply by them."

She fought back by plastering her school with posters reading,"Don't humiliate her because she is wearing shorts. It's hot outside. Instead of shaming girls for their bodies, teach boys that girls are not sexual objects."

Administrators took the signs down quickly, but not before students had shared them on social media and caused a debate about the rule that got her suspended.

The "fingertip rule" bans all students—but, in practice, just girls—from wearing shorts and skirts that don't fall below their fingertips when their arms are at their sides. It was also at the center of a recent incident where a girl was kicked out of prom. Although she hadn't actually violated the rule, the teen was ejected from the dance because her dress allegedly caused "impure thoughts."

Although Stocker did violate the rule, she feels schools need to consider the rationale for the rules, which she feels unfairly make girls responsible for the reactions of their male classmates.

"People are being judged for the way they dress, they have to change because boys look at them," the told the CBC. "The boys should be the ones who have to learn to treat women better and look at them in a different light."

Steven Colpitts, director of the school board that covers Stocker's district, told Canada's Global News that calling students out for the dress code is a "learning situation," not for administrators, but for kids.

"It needs to be clear that this is always an opportunity for the school to make it a learning situation for the students," he said. "To sensitize them about hypersexualization, which is often a topic that is discussed and the students are well aware of."

"She should have known better than wearing those shorts," he added.

Stocker is back in class after serving her one-day suspension.

[H/T ThinkProgress, Photo: Global News]

A severe thunderstorm watch covering much of the state of Maine last Monday brought out the typical "this NEVER happens!" commentary, but really, how common are severe weather watches around the United States?

The Storm Prediction Center has your answer, and it's not too surprising. The SPC's Warning Coordination Meteorologist has his own webpage that keeps track of interesting maps and statistics related to severe weather in the country. Two of the maps on the page includes the average number of severe thunderstorm and tornado watches issued every year for the past 20 years.

A refresher, first: a severe thunderstorm watch is issued when conditions are favorable for the development of storms that could produce large hail or damaging winds, and a tornado watch is issued when conditions are favorable for storms to produce a tornado.

The average number of tornado watches per year might come as a surprise to some folks, with Washington County, Alabama topping the list at an average of 17 watches per year. Southern Alabama and Mississippi see a large number of watches because the area is in both Dixie Alley, the region of the southeast susceptible to violent tornadoes, and the path of many landfalling tropical cyclones, which are known to produce small tornadoes as they come ashore.

Going from watches to warnings, the average date of the year's first tornado warning is pretty illuminating with regard to the pattern of tornado activity in the United States.

Severe thunderstorm watches, on the other hand, are less surprising. The center of the country — with a bullseye on Oklahoma — is the prime target for severe weather each year, with Osage County, Oklahoma seeing the highest average number of severe thunderstorm watches, with 23 per year.

Another striking pattern that shows up on the map is the influence that the mountains have on severe weather. The Rocky Mountains act as a sharp dividing line for severe weather, with the almost all severe weather in the United States occurring east of the continental divide. The Appalachian Mountains also have a strong effect on severe weather from northern Georgia through West Virginia, as the mountains tend to disrupt organized severe weather as it moves through the area.

As for Maine, tornado watches are exceedingly rare, but on average The Pine Tree State couple of severe thunderstorm watches each year.

It's worth noting that the Central Plains, including the Kansas City metro area, will live up to its reputation on Tuesday as the region could see a pretty significant severe weather outbreak if the forecasts are correct.

[Top image of severe thunderstorms in Maine last week via Gibson Ridge, others by the SPC]

Human troll and inexplicably popular King of Queens alum Patton Oswalt has vowed to not use Twitter and Facebook from June 1 to September 2. With any hope, his "comedy," "jokes," and invective rhetoric will never be thrust into our line of vision ever again.

As he is wont to do, Oswalt drafted his treatise on Facebook, so far to the applause of more than 12,000 "likes." What it all really comes down to, it appears, is that Patton Oswalt, actual human adult man who maintains this Twitter account, just needs a break, guys.

I've gone down an internet/Twitter/Facebook rabbit hole and I need to engineer a summer spent in nothing but humid, skin-to-air reality for myself. If I don't, I feel like my psyche is going to suffer permanent slippage.

"Permanent slippage of the psyche" is best understood as a condition in which you are so deeply and blindly enamored by your own humor that it causes you mental distress. Or: He is just too damn good at this, this "joke-making."

And although he promises to keep his notice "short," it is definitely not brief. He accurately describes himself as a tyrant:

I was reading some — not all — but some of Camus' THE REBEL. At an airport, waiting for a flight. And this line hits me like a ton of bricks:

"Tyrants conduct monologues above a million solitudes."

I've become my own tyrant — Tweeting, and then responding to my own responses, and then fighting people who disagree with me. Constantly feeling like I have to have an instant take on things, instead of taking a breath, and getting as much information as I can about the world. Or simply listening to the people around me, and watching the world and picking up its hidden rhythms, which crouch underneath the micro and the macro. But I've lost sight of them. And it's because of this — there's a portal to a shadow planet in my right hand, the size of a deck of cards, and I can't keep myself from peeling off one card after another, looking for a rare ace of sensation.

Thank GOD Patton Oswalt is taking the time from being an asshole on the Internet so he can stop and smell life's roses. http://gawker.com/patton-oswalt-...

He has also self-diagnosed himself as having something called "the spurts:"

The Spurts: I've aggressively re-wired my own brain to live and die in a 140 character jungle. I've let my syntax become nothing more than a carnival barker's ramp-up to a click-able link where I'm trying to sell something, or promote something, or share something I had no hand in making.

So — I'm engineering a summer. From today, June 1st, until Tuesday, September 2nd. Radio silent. No Twitter, no Facebook. There'll be a few announcements here and on my Twitter feed — mostly for shows and some movies I'm about to appear in — but I scheduled these to drop weeks and months from now, without me having to do them on the day. The chairs are up on the tables, the floor's been swept, and I'm locking up my tiny, personal online nightclub until the leaves turn brown. If Chili John's in Burbank can thrive while still closing for the summer, I ought to do just fine.

I want to de-atrophy the muscles I once had. The ones I used to charge through books, sprint through films, amble pleasantly through a new music album or a human conversation. I've lost them — willingly, mind you. My fault. Got addicted to the empty endorphins of being online.

This explanation, however, seems inadequate a response to so-called "empty endorphins" like this, from last Friday:

Fellow nerds: y'know how mad we get when jocks confuse Marvel & DC? Women feel that way when men confuse rape with sex (x1000) #excelsior

— Patton Oswalt (@pattonoswalt) May 30, 2014

Though he makes one more promise to us in his closing paragraphs:

So I need to dry out, and remind myself of the deeper tides I used to be able to swim in — in pages, and celluloid, and sounds, and people.

Another writer I read some of, before nervously refreshing my Twitter "@" mentions or updating my e-mail Inbox, was Garret Keizer. An essay in Harper's from 2010. Luckily, Keizer writes the kind of sentences that, even in the all-night casino floor of a world we live in now, can punch through the din like God's gun. The line that stuck with me was this:

"For fear of becoming dinosaurs we are turned into sheep."

I don't want to be either. But whatever options are left? They're on the other side of the silence bath I'm about to take.

Have a good, safe, fun summer. It's upon us. Stay cool when it comes down.

May this vow of silence prove the most calming and benevolent of silences for Patton Oswalt, so that he may take upon himself a new, more worthwhile and spiritually fulfilling vow: to never, ever tweet again.http://gawker.com/patton-oswalts...

[Image via AP]

After the brutal final scene of last night's Game of Thrones, it's nice to see that the actors who play Oberyn Martell and the Mountain get along in real life.

Pedro Pascal, who plays Martel, posted a photo with the absolutely huge Hafþór Júlíus Björnsson to his Instagram this morning.

Of course, that's not quite as good—or as spoiler-heavy—as the photo Lena Headey, who plays Cersei Lannister, posted to her Instagram last month.

It's Jefferson Davis Day in Alabama, but the Wall Street Journal reports not everyone wants a holiday for a slave-owning traitor: "There are so many more worthy people to honor—like Waldo Semon, the inventor of vinyl," one Alabamian says. Maybe y'all can just skip the day off and work harder?

Ubisoft's latest open world game, Watch Dogs, lets players assume the role of a hacker named Aiden Pearce. Pearce uses a cellphone app to learn more about the strangers roaming Watch Dogs' version of Chicago—and some players are using this information to kill digital minorities.

If you've seen screenshots or footage of Watch Dogs, then you already know what sorts of information Pearce cellphone app, the Profiler, tells the player. Here's one example:

You'll note that the Profiler tells you a character's name, their age, their occupation (and sometimes their income), as well as one random fact about the character. The fact can be anything, from interests and hobbies to sexual preferences and everything in-between. It might not seem like much, but this information is genuinely changing the way people play and think about the game.

This was apparent before the game even officially out. Back when the game had leaked ahead of its release, Kotaku received an email about players who hunted down certain characters in Watch Dogs. Most footage of this nature was taken down by the time we caught wind of it, but there were still at least one screenshot floating around that purported to show characters that players targeted...

It wasn't long until more footage like this popped up, though. Here's an unsettling video titled "Making the World a Better Place," which was uploaded by user Moopoke. It shows players gunning down characters based on the information the Profiler displays:

Of course, not everyone is playing Watch Dogs like this. In fact, most people probably aren't. And just like a gay character might become a target for players like this, so might characters who play video games or watch hentai. I don't sincerely believe that a player that would do this sort of thing is always, without question, actually hateful towards certain groups of people in real life. But just because some part of the whole thing seems to be in jest, or perhaps a ploy to seek attention, doesn't make the "joke" any less unnerving.

Call me cynical, but the fact some players would do things like this doesn't surprise me. I doubt it surprises Ubisoft, either. Open-world games are highly popular in part because players use massive worlds as playgrounds to cause havoc in, and NPCs have always suffered at the hands of jerk players. There's no way Ubisoft couldn't anticipate that players would go on rampages. This predilection for havoc makes it hard to give kudos to Ubisoft for including underrepresented characters. Sure, they're included—but at best the most they can be is potential victims, not interesting or complex characters.

More recently, Ethan James Petty, a scriptwriter on Watch Dogs, tweeted that he "can't wait to see how you guys abuse our poor npcs in #WatchDogs . Be sure to take screenshots!" When confronted by game developer David Gallant about the fact that players were using the Profiler in disgusting ways, Petty seemed to shrug it off. "[That's the] sick reality we live in - people's privacy reduced to facts," he explained. "Profiler at its core *should* be offensive to everyone."

Petty went on to note that the Profiler also opened up the option of letting players protect minorities from crimes, and that the game actively punished players for killing civilians—though the latter fact is hardly reassuring. It's not like "the cops might come after me" really stops someone from committing crimes in an open-world game; part of the thrill, I'd say, is figuring out how to deal with the consequences of breaking the law.

In that sense, what we're seeing in Watch Dogs isn't entirely new: some people still approach open world games with an unhinged attitude. The difference now is that the characters/victims can be actively profiled, and that can make certain kills in the game more disturbing than they'd be if the character was just a nameless NPC.

It is worth noting that, in general, players seem to use the information for "good"—or at least, as defined by their own moral system. Mike Williams of US Gamer, for instance, has written about how the Profiler influences what sorts of things he does in the game:

That NPC is an investment advisor making over $100,000 who just got back from vacation; I'm fine skimming a bit off the top of their bank account. Is that thug an animal lover making under $25,000? I'll just knock him out instead of putting a bullet in his head. Hey, that's a nice car and you don't believe in evolution; I'll take that $500 off your hands. There's whole sections virtual Chicago where I try commit no crimes: the high-poverty Wards and the blue collar Brandon Docks. I figure they have enough issues, without me taking their money, vehicles, and lives.

In an informal Twitter poll, people liked to tell me about the ways the Profiler allowed them to "Robin Hood" the game, as it made it easier for players to tell what characters "deserved" to be robbed/killed/hacked.

You'll probably hear a lot about the moral ways that people use the Profiler. Just don't be surprised if you occasionally hear about the unsettling ways people use it, too.

To contact the author of this post, write to patricia@kotaku.com or find her on Twitter @patriciaxh.

Here's Donald Rumsfeld walking in the @Princeton P-Rade (photo by @princetonian) pic.twitter.com/7MIZdQwPny

— Henry Rome (@hrome2) June 2, 2014

Happy 60th Reunion, Mr. Secretary.

Tall socialist and New York City mayor "Bill" de Blasio is in the process of moving from his "regular guy" Brooklyn home into the "fancy guy" mayoral residence. He left some free crap on the curb, just like you did when you moved.

DNAinfo has what is, not to be bashful, the single hottest news story of the day in America's largest metropolis: Bill de Blasio just leavin a bunch of old crap out front cause he's moving acting like he doesn't even need to properly put that shit out on the right garbage day and shit cause he put a sign on it that says "FREE" as if that makes it all okay, even though nobody even want that dirty old shit, take it from me cause I tried that shit with a busted old Ikea table one time and that shit just sat out there like it had bedbugs even though it didn't, lol.

Among the items reportedly left for "FREE" outside of Bill de Blasio's home:

-A Christmas tree stand

-A crappy old bookshelf

-Some candles

-"plastic bins — one of which was marked 'fabric.'"

Regular old unwanted crap, or all the makings of an anti-Christian Pagan bonfire ceremony? Either way, you still gotta put your garbage out on the right day De Blasio, I got a ticket for that shit before.

[Photo: AP]

Mosi Secret, the New York Times' incredibly named "sin and vice" reporter, has found a sex club and lost his innocence. Fortunately, he also found Naiad, a willowy Columbia student who poses as a mermaid from the Hudson and does sex things, to restore his faith in humanity.

The club in Manhattan's theater district, Secret tells everyone, is "known informally as Bliss Bistro [and] is like an underground lap dance party"—but, he adds with a breathless bit of surprise, "For those who pay enough money, the experience is more like that of a brothel." Which is to say: You will get women to have sex with you if you pay them money for said sex.

This requires deep, sustained investigation, Mosi clearly told his budgeting editor:

The New York Times was introduced to the club by its owner's lawyer and was allowed to visit under the condition that Bliss's location would not be revealed and that both its clients and those who worked there would not be identified by their full names. In conversations with patrons and workers during four visits to the club over the course of a month, the reporter identified himself as being from The Times.

The titular lord of this fiefdom of fuck is Tony, "a strapping 24-year-old from the South Bronx" who sort of inherited the business from his mentor, "Chummy," a nickname that seems both comical and ominous in the context of a sex club. Here's how the $30K-a-week biz works:

Men pay a cover charge at the door, usually $40. Women have to pay a $60 tip to the house by the end of the night, but keep the proceeds from lap dances. If they agree to take a man to a private area, they keep two-thirds of what is essentially a rental fee for the space — $200 for every 20 minutes. The women keep 100 percent of whatever they charge for services rendered behind the curtains.

How's that work out for the ladies? Let's check in with one:

On another night, one of the women, a Columbia University student who called herself Naiad after a water nymph from Greek mythology, floated around the room in an airy silk robe over matching undergarments. It was her second night at the club. She asked men, "What's your story?" When they asked her the same in turn, she told them she was a mermaid from the waters of Riverside Park.

Mosi did a good job obscuring his sources' identities. Garb aside, this could be any conversation in 1020 on a Friday night.

"I only grow limbs in the nighttime," she said. "And I enjoy what being a woman below the torso offers, because I don't take it for granted as much."

A man asked her to go to a private room after a couple of dances.

"It was really weird having sex with someone I didn't know and had zero attraction to," Naiad tells Mosi Secret in this, the best of all possible Harlequin novels:

"I was like, 'Oh, my God, what's going on?'" But the $250 she said she had earned helped with her unease; she has since returned.

"I want to eat good food and pursue life's pleasures and have it come from my own work," she said, adding that she did not want to ask her parents for money. As an international student, she cannot work legally off campus.

How's she doing on the pay scale? Better than a low-level VICE writer, it seems, and on par with her peers; a New York-based "self-employed escort can earn $150 for sex and can keep it all, while an escort who uses a "blue-collar agency" gets 60% of a typical $350 charge," according to a 2011 report by Bro Bible, which is as reliable a source as any I know of.

Anyway, it's not about the money! Say the really, really, really rich older men who are coughing up coveted Benjamins to ladies who need it badly enough to manipulate said men's members. It's about a chemical, intellectual connection with these ladies; just ask the "derivatives lawyer from Manhattan" who "said he had talked with a woman who was a student of design and neuroscience":

"Don't put the economic imperative right in my face," he said. "It's all about the je ne sais quoi."

[Photo credit: AAR studio/Shutterstock]

The only thing more expensive than a duplex is a triplex, and that's exactly what Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss just shelled out for, the New York Observer reports: just an ordinary, 4,300 Manhattan condo for two 32-year-old men to both live in.

The Observer noticed the purchase after matching the buyer's address to another Winklevoss operation:

The buyers, going in city records by the name Casterlirock Holdings LLC, give a business address in Delaware shared by Cameron and Tyler Winkveloss' Bitcoin fund Winklevoss Bitcoin Trust.

Bitcoin and a Game of Thrones reference? Don't let their faces and arms fool you: these monozygotic dudes are nerds. Curbed wonders if "they're actually planning on living out a sitcom by moving in together or something," but given that the two currently share a New York apartment, there's no reason to believe they're going to split up this time around.

Twelve-week-old German shepherd puppy Rosie is clumsy and not entirely in control of her faculties: She accidentally "drove" her owner's car into a pond near Boston this weekend.

"The dog jumped in and hit the gear shift and the car jerked and she fell on top of the gas pedal," Rosie's owner John Costello told WFXT. "It was just scary."

Police, too, were confounded by the 911 call Costello made asking for help. "I've never heard of a puppy driving a car into a pond," Officer Robert Quirk of the Canton police said.

Frightened, Rosie retreated to the back seat of the car, where Costello and a kind stranger in the park that day were able to rescue her before the car was submerged in the pond.

The car, which is actually Costello's daughter's, is totaled.

The perp says he was just going with the flow of traffic. pic.twitter.com/DDLzyziRBR

— Rob Quirk (@RobQuirk1) June 1, 2014

[Image via WFXT]

Yesterday's New York Times had a long story about misogynist spree killer Elliot Rodger, with the main takeaway being this: many people who knew Rodger as a kid were not in the least bit shocked that he ended up murdering six people.

There is this passage, for instance:

Cathleen Bloeser, whose son knew Elliot from elementary school, described him as an "emotionally troubled" boy who would come over to their house and just hide. "If I could have picked anyone who would have done this, it would have been Elliot," she said. "My husband and I didn't want our son to stay with Elliot."

There is also this, referring to an old principal of Rodger's, who regarded the news of his crime like an aunt would after her nephew scored a few goals in a soccer game.

Ms. Smith, the principal at Independence Continuation High School in Van Nuys, a small public school with intensive individual attention from which Mr. Rodger eventually graduated, awoke May 24 to the reports of the massacre and, later that Saturday, a text message from a teacher: "Did you see the news?" it asked. "That's our Elliot."

More recently, a poster on a bodybuilding forum told Rodger to his face that he came off like a serial killer.

As Mr. Rodger's "Day of Retribution," as he called it, approached, there were signs of what he was plotting. One poster on Bodybuilding.com, another website where he shared his views, noted that Mr. Rodger had taken down a video titled "Why Do Girls Hate Me So Much?" This person said the video had made him look like a serial killer. "I'm not trying to be mean, but the creepy vibe that you give off in those videos is likely the major reason that you can't get girls," he wrote.

Though not all people quoted in the piece put their interactions with Rodger in such stark terms, it's clear that he was seen as particularly troubled throughout his childhood.

Simon Astaire, an author and agent who has been a family friend for over 10 years and has been acting as the family's spokesman, described attending a Christmas party at Peter Rodger's hillside home in Woodland Hills and wandering out into the cool night to come across Elliot, then 12, staring into the black sky. He said Elliot had lowered his head and started sharing his loneliness before turning back wordlessly toward the heavens.

"He wasn't just a little withdrawn," Mr. Astaire said. "He was as withdrawn as any person I ever met in my life."

By all accounts, Rodger's parents were attuned to his mental state and attempted at all stages throughout his life to get him professional help. A number of people who came into contact with Rodger saw something like the shooting in his future, but no one was able to stop it, and no one seems to be at fault.

As one expert put it to the Times:

"Most people who go through these steps never act out in a violent way, never go beyond contemplation of it," said J. Reid Meloy, a forensic psychologist in San Diego and an editor of the International Handbook of Threat Assessment. "You can't predict who will and who won't."

[Image via YouTube]

You know all that fuss about how liberals love science and conservatives hate it? Well, it turns out that a sizable majority of all Americans have faith in the quantifiable, reproducible conclusions of empirical observation. As long as you leave self-identified Tea Partiers out of the equation.

Mother Jones' Chris Mooney flagged the results, which come from a survey of 568 New Hampshire residents by university pollster Lawrence Hamilton:

This is pretty striking: The first three political groups—Democrats, independents, and non-tea party Republicans—all trust scientists on the environment. But then you come to tea party members, and suddenly, distrust in scientists soars. The numbers are stark: 60 percent of traditional Republicans trust scientists on the environment, versus only 28 percent of tea partiers.

Hamilton says he's surprised by the strength of these results. "I didn't realize it would be at the level of division that it was," says Hamilton. He adds that while Republicans and tea partiers in New Hampshire aren't precisely the same in all respects as they are elsewhere in America, "in general, New Hampshire is not drastically unrepresentative." When it comes to tea partiers and more traditional Republicans on the national level, Hamilton says that he "would expect similar gaps to show up."

Basically, Tea Partiers and their ilk don't believe in climate science—and since you can't have climate science without the science, they're discarding faith in all science more generally. And they're skewing the overall look of conservatism and the Republican Party.

But in fairness to the skeptics: BENGHAZI.

[Photo credit: Lawrence Hamilton via Mother Jones]

Close to midnight on Sunday, people celebrate the formation of India's 29th state, Telangana, in Hyderabad, India. The state was officially created Monday, marking the formal division of the southern state of Andhra Pradesh. Image via Mahesh Kumar A./AP.