A happy Silk Road customer enjoys his new package.

I think drug simulation should be a vibrant genre of video games. There’s an endless well of experiences waiting to be coded and shipped to a screen near you. From the serene to the stupefying to the satisfying to the running around naked, human beings plus drugs equals interesting if nothing else. Books and movies do it enough — why can’t video games get in on the fun of first person drug use?

Kill0u has crafted Drug Hunt to simulate three intoxicants: pills, powders and mushrooms. The drug dealer is so high that he’s not sure which is which. He’ll also probably give you the wrong drug. But you take it anyway and then you’re strapped in for the ride.

Your trip is a series of challenges to overcome. Only, there’s no instruction manual and maybe the rules are changing. There are a lot of colors flashing, the music (by LeoL) is bumping and weird sounds are crying out. You have to hit the space bar at exactly the right time — which you figure out by intuition — and then you’re either inching closer to overdose if you miss or a happy heart if you do good.

The game is immediately reminiscent of Wario Ware (but on drugs!).

Be safe, travelers. And if you enjoy the game, rate them highly in Ludum Dare.

Programmer Glen Chiacchieri has released a curious new app with an interesting goal: to humanize numbers.

Randall Monroe explained why he took a shine to the project:

I don’t like large numbers without context. Phrases like “they called for a $21 billion budget cut” or “the probe will travel 60 billion miles” or “a 150,000-ton ship ran aground” don’t mean very much to me on their own. Is that a large ship? Does 60 billion miles take you outside the Solar System? How much is $21 billion compared to the overall budget? (That last question is  why I made my money chart.)

The solution: build a Chrome extension that converts raw numbers into something a human can understand.

• A 300,000 acre forest fire is about the size of Hong Kong.
• A $21 billion budget cut to NASA is about the net worth of Larry Page or Sergey Brin of Google. It’s also the size of the American video game industry.
• 3,000 people killed is about the population of the Falkland Islands.

It’s a really interesting tool that might be worth giving a try. I’m going to give it a grace period to get used to it and see what use I really get out of it. So far, I’ve been loving the search feature. Being able to easily obtain context like that is very useful.

The other two features –  entering numbers directly onto websites and giving suggestions during writing — both feel seriously obtrusive.

The extension can even be surprisingly funny, like when it seems to be making an oblique suggestion for how to solve a problem—e.g. “The telescope has been criticized for its budget of  [≈ Mitt Romney assets in 2011].” It can also come across as unexpectedly judgmental. Glen told me about complaint he got from a user: “I installed your extension and then forgot about it … until I logged into my bank account. Apparently my total balance is equal to the cost of a low-end bicycle. Thanks.”

You can grab the extension here.

The New Yorker is using Tor to launch an anonymous whistleblower submission system called Strongbox.

Strongbox is a new way for you to share information, messages, and files with our writers and editors and is designed to provide you with a greater degree of anonymity and security than afforded by conventional e-mail.

To help protect your anonymity, Strongbox is only accessible using the Tor network (https://www.torproject.org). When using Strongbox, The New Yorker will not record your I.P. address or information about your browser, computer, or operating system, nor will we embed third-party content or deliver cookies to your browser.

Boing Boing has the story.

The New Yorker’s own blog explains things further:

This morning, The New Yorker launched Strongbox, an online place where people can send documents and messages to the magazine, and we, in turn, can offer them a reasonable amount of anonymity. It was put together by Aaron Swartz, who died in January, and Kevin Poulsen. Kevin explains some of the background in his own post, including Swartz’s role and his survivors’ feelings about the project. (They approve, something that was important for us here to know.) The underlying code, given the name DeadDrop, will be open-source, and we are very glad to be the first to bring it out into the world, fully implemented.

Strongbox is a simple thing in its conception: in one sense, it’s just an extension of the mailing address we printed in small type on the inside cover of the first issue of the magazine, in 1925, later joined by a phone number (in 1928—it was BRyant 6300) and e-mail address (in 1998). Readers and sources have long sent documents to the magazine and its reporters, from letters of complaint to classified papers. (Joshua Rothman has written about that history and the magazine’s record of investigative journalism.) But, over the years, it’s also become easier to trace the senders, even when they don’t want to be found. Strongbox addresses that; as it’s set up, even we won’t be able to figure out where files sent to us come from. If anyone asks us, we won’t be able to tell them.

Related:

• Hear Ye, Future Deep Throats: This Is How to Leak to the Press by Nicholas Weaver in Wired.
• How to submit material to Cryptome anonymously

I’m happy to see people still reading this site.

Many of you came to the site to read articles about the deep web and strange happenings on the internet. You may be wondering why those articles stopped coming and what to make of these recent video game reviews.

Weirder Web will continue to produce content about the deep web and all the subject matters that made it popular in the first place. You’ll begin to see most of that type of material return next week. In addition to that, I’ll dabble in the gaming world. Recent posts (What to play today) have been recommending good games. I’ll also be interviewing indie developers.

On top of all of that, I’m hoping to include more and more strange stuff from around the web. The hope is that the content can be diverse. WW will be establishing a regular interview series and I hope you give it a chance. You’ll catch that next week as well.

That’s all coming up very soon. How long will it last? That’s for the big guy upstairs to know. Right now, though, I’m having fun posting about fun video games. I hope you can enjoy a few!

If you have any suggestions or questions, feel free to leave a comment or contact me in private.

Thanks for sticking around. Talk to you all soon.

You and your party are stranded on a barren planet. You’ve got to worry about hunger, disease, morale, madness and the occasional local predator coming into camp to eat. Oh, and you better keep that fire burning — it’s cold on this planet at night

Gods Will Be Watching has been called “bleak and beautiful“, “the saddest survival sim.” Fans and critics are comparing the game to a dark, sci fi take on the Oregan Trail. The gushing press that Gods has received is passed only by the growing fanbase. In fact, it’s been received so well that the team is already at work on expanding the universe of these unfortunate travelers and their dog.

It’s a frustrating game. You’ll forget the fire — oh I promise, you will — about a thousand times. The engineer and the psychiatrist in your party will cry, cry, cry until they can’t be consoled and go mad. The soldier will get in the fetal position, rocking back and forth as he cries. The god damn doctor in the turtle neck will keep smoking his cigarettes. But as much as I am frustrated with these characters — as much as I want to use the ‘kill’ command on them — I also am deeply invested in their well being. So much so that I’ve spent hours trying to figure out how to nurse the sick and somber back to health. It’s all be futile but fun.

Play it here.

If you’re a fan of QWOP, this is one you’ll enjoy failing at too!

Called “maddeningly simple” by Jason Kottke, Rebound takes Ludum Dare’s minimalistim theme to heart.

The idea is easy as can be: bounce your pole as far to the right as possible. Your job is the balance the pole, manage the landing angles and avoid hitting the same squares twice or risk falling to your doom (also known as a restart).

Rebound is easy in, not-so-easy out fun. It’s only 200′ to the victory line. Good luck getting past 100.

Play it here. Rate the Ludum Dare page here.

For the data-is-beautiful crowd, here’s “Bitcoin has a pulse” from Manly_dude.

The main character is a single pixel, and the left analog joystick is the only control. The game’s environment is populated with entities that actively seek to attack you, as well as creatures that follow and protect you. You may also encounter ambivalent hazards and innocuous inhabitants going about their own pixellated business. The idea was to create a dynamic world with complex interaction while using very simple input.

You’re going to get lost in Stdbits.

As a single pixel, you travel through a universe of abstraction: psychedelic, colorful, pulsing, bright and quick moving objects are moving and living here. Some chase you and end your journey, forcing you back to the start. A crunchy 8bitten sound is the soundtrack for your journey into new and always dangerous screens.

Created for the purposefully low-res Gamma 256 event in December 2007, stdbits operates at a resolution of 100×54, writes creator Mark Johns. That Mark is able to do so much with so little is impressive to witness. It’s even better to float inside of it, eyes wide and fearful for your life the whole way through. Oops, you died.

The best ideas seem obvious in retrospect. GeoGuessr is just that sort of smart new idea that make sense immediately to players and developers alike. A great idea plus brilliant execution from developer Anton Wallen yields a great game.

GeoGuessr uses Google Maps to drop the player into a random spot on the world. It’s up to the player to find out where he or she is. You can use clues like the landscape, architecture, road signs, advertisements and even the sort of people walking around — if you’re lucky enough to be dropped in a populated place anyway. You can take Google Maps for a drive to try to figure out exactly where you are. If you’re so inclined, you can take to Google itself and use the search engine to turn clues into a certain answer. The way you play is up to you.

Google Maps and the technology that surrounds it has longed seemed like fertile ground for games. It’s the perfect environment — the real world in great detail — to let players loose in. Whatever took developers this long, one can only hope this is a catalyst for more brainstorming about gaming inside Google Maps.

If that’s not enough, there’s more on the horizon. Most exciting is the competitive mode in which you face off against friends at the same location. Depending on who guesses closer and faster, you win and lose and, eventually, find yourself having sunk hours into exploring distant continents and exotic locales.

Finally, the game is travel inspiration. There’s nothing quite like being dropped next to an incredible mountain vista or in the middle of a vast steppe. Until I save up a few hundred bucks and buy the plane tickets, I’ll happily stick with GeoGuessr travel around the globe.