VIDEO: REAL FOOTAGE SHOOTOUT BETWEEN DORNER & COPS

Real stuff.

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VIDEO: IF NICKY MINAJ PLAYED BLACK OPS

This is what it would look and sound like if Nicky Minaj played call of duty. I am offended.

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VIDEO: REAL FOOTAGE DORNER SHOOTING

ENJOY

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THE MOST FREQUENT LIE TOLD ON A BLIND DATE

Half the flowery comments at blind dates are lies, according to a survey by Starting Happiness & The One Noble.

The survey included 391 single men and 403 single women.

Among them, 40 percent of the men said that they paid even when they were not actually interested.

So women shouldn’t get too excited when a man is buying her a meal.

The next lie most frequently told _ 32 percent _ was leading women on that he will call.

The next _ 21 percent _ were compliments about the personality and appearance.

For women, the most frequently told lie was compliments about the personality and appearance, taking up to 41 percent.

Some 33 percent of the women kept in touch with men even when they were not interested.

Men mostly try to avoid being awkward.

Women doing so bore another reason.

They were looking forward to being asked out again.

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FREE TO PLAY IS THE FUTURE

Ani Pang, a smartphone game developed by a 30-employee startup, can teach Facebook some lessons.

While the U.S. social networking giant struggles to establish a concrete business model of its mobile platform, Ani Pang has become the biggest grossing application in Korea, generating an estimated 200 million won a day on average since smartphone messenger Kakao Talk’s game center launched in late July.

Some 16 million people have downloaded the game, nearly 10 million are daily active users, and 2 million play it simultaneously, according to the developer, Sundaytoz.

The marriage of an online game and a social networking service provider is nothing new, but Ani Pang succeeded because it understands the free-to-play business model that Korean game companies de facto invented and that has flourished for nearly a decade here. Mobile games like Ani Pang are believed to be the latest evolution of the free-to-play model.

“We’ve developed social games for the last three years. Our paid-for content is only served through micro-transactions,” said Yann Heo, director of business management at Sundaytoz.

Also called freemiums, the free-to-play model allows users to play a game for free, but they will pay when they need extra lives or extravagant in-game items.

British mobile technology consultancy Juniper Research forecast in late 2010 that revenue from in-game purchases would “overtake the traditional pay-per-download model as the primary source of monetizing mobile games by 2013” and total annual revenue will surpass $11 billion globally by 2015.

Moon Young-tae, leader of the global business team at Korean game company Dragonfly GF, says that the core element of the free-to-play model is communities.

Before social networking services appeared, Korean online games built up strong communities in which gamers intensely competed using both their own skills and purchased performance enhancers.

In essence, it manipulates the human desire to show off and outperform peers.

Now the platform has moved away from online PC games to wider social networks and now to smartphones. But the basic concept involving communities hasn’t changed, and Ani Pang is skillfully designed to make the most of it.

Players log in to the game via Kakao Talk, Korea’s ubiquitous smartphone messenger with nearly 60 million users worldwide. The game shows the rankings of the players’ Kakao Talk friends. It’s the rankings that drive many to keep playing. To this point, Ani Pang is faithful to the basic structure of a social game integrated into a social networking service.

But the game isn’t just about competition. Friends on Kakao Talk play a crucial role in helping each other play for free. Each game costs a heart, which is replenished every eight minutes. A game lasts a minute and one can only have a maximum of five hearts.

When the hearts run out, players can buy a set of “topazs” that is convertible to heart. Ten topazs are priced at $0.99. The revenue is then split among Sundaytoz, Kakao Talk and app store operators.

A large network of friends comes in useful here. Instead of buying topazs, friends on Kakao Talk can send each other a heart every hour free of charge. Users can also earn hearts by inviting their friends. It’s a clever method that has helped the network of players balloon exponentially.

Ani Pang’s strategy is different from worldwide hit Angry Bird, which is downloaded for $0.99. The Finnish-developed game partially adopted micro-transactions by charging for stronger weapons and extra levels.

Ani Pang’s sophisticated expansion strategy wasn’t developed in a day.

Korea is home to not only lighthearted casual free-to-play games but also serious online PC releases.

Nexon introduced the business model to the online game scene when it switched the payment method for QuizQuiz in 2001 from subscription- to micro-transaction-based.

Since then it has continued to make money from micro-transactions. When the Tokyo-listed company acquired a stake in NCSoft, analysts expected that the latter, which still charges players flat rates, can learn from the former’s innovative pricing system.

Even when foreign companies expand to Korean markets, they convert their packaged console games into free-to-play online games. Electronic Arts’ FIFA Soccer series is one of the most successful examples.

While a packaged disk of EA FIFA Soccer 13 for Sony’s PlayStation 3 sells for $59.99 on Amazon.com, a similar version called FIFA Online 2 can be played for free. The famous console game was redeveloped into an online version here and even adopted the micro-transaction model. Players can buy a gamut of items ranging from a unique goal celebration and a personal trainer to a knee band that improves shooting skills. The online game grossed so much money that the relationship between EA and Neowiz, which provided FIFA Online on its game portal, soured.

The free-to-play model is spreading fast within Asia. “It is now a universal method in parts of Asia. It has been adopted in China, Taiwan and South Asian countries,” said Moon of Dragonfly, which currently services Special Force 2, known as Tornado Force in China. Japan, a console-controlled market, is also adopting it fast, he added.

In North America, the business model has been actively used by developers of casual games such as Zynga. In 2010, Facebook signed a five-year agreement with social game company Zynga to have its games exclusively released on the social networking service.

However, the payment method has been criticized for spoiling fair competition. Some in-game purchases boost the skills of players and help them outperform others. Those games are likely to lose their communities soon.

Sensible game companies instead make items purchasable with “game points” which can be either accumulated by playing the game or by being bought. Players of Ani Pang can obtain a heart by spending eight minutes on the game or by spending topazes.

One game firm official said that people, in effect, end up buying time through purchasing virtual goods or in-game lives.

“People want to do better than others in a short period of time, and free-to-play has turned that desire into a business model. If it takes one gamer an hour to finish one level, those who pay can complete 10 levels within the same time. You are buying nine levels,” the official said.

The payment model is popular for several reasons. For Moon, it is a source of innovation. Because players test the games before they make any purchases, bad products would fail in a short period of time. To keep players, companies have to keep innovating by constantly launching new events and promotions and adding more content.

“Innovation takes place when a new idea creates a product and the feedback on it leads to meaningful change,” said Moon.

“In the case of conventional products, it takes ages to receive feedback from buyers and apply it. But with online games, tens of thousands of people play simultaneously and constantly share their feedback, driving the innovation process very fast.”

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VIDEO: THE BERLIN FILE KOREAN MOVIE A MUST WATCH

The Korean movie industry seems to have to have found its next mega-hit. The action blockbuster “The Berlin File,” compared by local critics to the Jason Bourne movies, drew more than 2.24 million viewers in five days after opening, thanks to the 1.53 million tickets sold during the weekend alone.

Despite moviegoers flocking to the new release, “A Gift from Room 7,” is showing staying power in the box office standings. The comedy that follows the story of an intellectually-challenged man wrongfully imprisoned for murder and his interaction with the inmates, garnered 4.2 million viewers in its first 12 days of release. It finished second behind “Berlin” over the weekend after 1.36 million watched it.

“Berlin” is a spy flick directed by martial arts devotee Ryu Seung-wan and features an A-list cast led by Han Seok-gyu, Ha Jung-woo, Jeon Ji-hyun and Ryu Seung-beom, the younger brother of the director.

The early audience figures has producers wondering whether the attendance records held by 2006 hit “The Host” could be within striking distance.

“Berlin” and “A Gift from Room 7” accounted for more than 80 percent of all tickets sold at 897 cinemas across the nation on the weekend, the Korean Film Council said.

The Korean film sector is coming off a record year when it sold nearly 200 million tickets. Movies have been emerging as a key consumption area during the economic downturn as consumers look for cheaper ways to spend their leisure time.

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TOXO CAUSES BRAIN-MANIPULATING SUACIDAL DISEASE

What happens to a fearless mouse facing a cat? Death.

The mouse must be crazy to be that casual in front of the potential killer which is 20 times bigger than it is. Something must be off.

In this case, it really is. The parasite, Toxo, is the answer.

It manipulated the mouse’s brain into feeling what-are-you-going-to-do kind of suicidal attitude.

A Czech evolutionary biologist Jaroslav Flegr found this out a few years ago.

Since then, it became infamous among scientists. The shocking survival mechanism was the reason.

The mouse jumped from one cat to another by infecting rats.

The infection got rid of the crucial responses for survival.

All that was left of it was death by complacency.

Flegr discovered infected humans also exhibited the same behaviors.

They knew it was Toxo, but they couldn’t figure out how.

The mystery was solved two months ago.

It was found out by Antonion Barragan and his fellow researchers at the Center for Infectious Medicine at Karolinska Institute in Sweden.

The key was white blood cell. To travel to the brain, Toxo hijacked them.

The very cells designed to fight foreign invaders were doing the exact opposite.

It was just like a Trojan horse.

Toxo also turned the white blood cells into tiny chemical factories.

The infected mouse was left with the following symptoms: reduced fear or anxiety, lethargy.

Dr. Barragan and his team draw the conclusion by examining the Toxo in mice’s blood.

Toxo usually lives in cats. But humans can’t be complacent.

Contact with litter boxes, contaminated water, or undercooked meat infects people.

The parasite can be disregarded most of the time.

Pregnant women, however, are the exception.

If infected during pregnancy, they face increased risk of miscarriage or birth defects.

The Center for Disease Control and Prevention explained.

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REAL LIFE BARBIE CLAIMS TO BE AN ALIEN

When pictures of Ukrainian living doll Valeria lukyanova emerged on websites last spring, people questioned if they are genuine or made out of clever photo editing.

Some felt them bizarre and frowned over her obsession with turning herself into the splitting image of the iconic blonde Barbie doll. Yet, she has more than 668,000 “Likes” on her Facebook page and portrays herself as “the most famous Russian woman on the Russian-speaking internet,”

Surely with her incredibly thin waist, plastic-like skin and eyes and an unrealistic body proportions did she rise to a global stardom. But, what is less known is that she doesn't belong to this planet.

In a report with The Sun, her friend and lookalike Olga "Dominica" Oleynik said,"Me and Lera (short for Valeria), we come from the constellation of Pleiades. There, such looks are normal.”

She lives on a liquid-only diet and is planning to drink only water. In a series of video blogs for her fans, she furthered to say that her “ultimate goal is to be powered only by solar energy”. She believes she will rely on “prana”, which in Hindu tradition means life

solar energy”. She believes she will rely on “prana,” which in Hindu tradition means life force, to nourish her

She wasn't always like what we see her now. The daughter of a former DJ and builder dad and a mum who works in the military sector, Valeria spent rather ordinary teenage years, less interested in turning herself into human Barbie and more interested in drinking and smoking.

She studied architecture at college and holds a masters degree in architecture and urban planning. However, she confessed she always had a fixation with dolls, and as she grew older that fixation, she gradually started to dress up as a living doll.

As for the “unrealistic” comments of the public, Valeria said she took them as compliments. Because, her look is hard earned from daily gym visits, starving herself and a boob job. She also added that she had the operation only once to increase her breasts by two sizes, but everything else is natural.

This former Miss Ukraine contestant claimed to have mastered the art of time travel through space. She told fans: “I also teach people to leave their physical body and travel in the endless expanses of the universe.”

Worryingly, the petite model is fearful of putting on weight despite being slight. She said: “I am afraid that I am gaining weight.

“Now I’m 45kg, although before I was 42kg. With time I will learn to adjust the weight in my mind.”

When asked how many plastic surgery ops she has had, she replied: “Only one — to increase my breasts by two sizes.

But Lera does not bat a cartoon-like eyelid at the criticism. She said: “It’s hard work but they dismiss it as something done by surgeons or computer artists.

Her interests include travelling and “esoterics and meditation.”

And in true beauty pageant speak, the former Miss Ukraine contestant also says her mission is “improving the world.”

She believes beauty really is only skin deep, and that is why she is so interested in her cosmic side.

In a series of video blogs for her fans, she said her “ultimate goal is to be powered only by solar energy”. And she claims to have mastered the art of time travel through space.

She told fans: “I also teach people to leave their physical body and travel in the endless expanses of the universe.”

But there have been dark moments in Lera’s life as well.

At 14, she tried to commit suicide by taking an overdose of prescription pills. Her desperation was apparently down to a boy.

Before, Valeria Lukyanova used to like drinking and smoking

Now she is happily married to Dmitry Shkrabov although it is not clear whether her view of an “open relationship” is simply about honesty or monogamy.

“Dmitry is always on my side,” she said. “He loves and supports me. He likes me with make-up and without. He became a strict vegetarian even earlier than I did.

“He is fond of mountains — he conquered Mount Elbrus. We were on Everest, went to Nepal and the Himalayan mountain range. In general we support an open relationship.”

Lera does not want kids, because that is not what they do in her universe. “I don’t feel the desire and the capacity to be a mother,” she said. “I’m from another universe.

“There, everyone is asexual — in our dimension there’s no such thing as children.”

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