Plants and Animals
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An adult female hummingbird (Archilochus alexandri) dutifully warms her eggs. Harold F. Greeney, Yanayacu Biological Station
Like fake owls perched on buildings, the presence of hawks up in trees seems to deter nest-robbers from preying on hummingbird babies and eggs, according to new findings published in Science Advances this week.
Anyone who’s ever wondered what iconic characters from 1980s movies would look like as sloths need look no further than these super awesome tattoos. Redditor SecondSuitor recently shared these photos of his outstanding sleeve tattoo by tattoo artist Eddie Stacey at Ink & Dagger Tattoo in Roswell, GA. Jareth the Goblin King from Labyrinth was the seventh and final sloth to be added to the sleeve.
This past Saturday, Juxtapoz Magazine co-founder Greg Escalante held the grand opening of his newest venture in a densely varied career in the art world, Chinatown’s brand new Gregorio Escalante Gallery. For it’s opening show, Escalante shared a selection of work from his coveted private collection, including pieces by Robert Williams, Ed Ruscha, John Baldessari, Shepard Fairey and more.
The Witcher 3’s first expansion, Hearts of Stone, comes out October 13. As if you needed more things to play. Says developer CD Projekt Red:“The expansion lets you choose your own way through an adventure that includes recruiting a crew of break-in artists, spending a night partying with a ghost and outsmarting the most bizarre creatures Geralt has ever faced.”
With another week of 90-degree-plus days settling into the Southland, we've been on a hunt for chilled treats to ease the burn. One of our favorite comes with a strong cult following and a heaping dose of nostalgia: Dole Whip. The pineapple soft serve was once available exclusively at the...
Maison&Objet 2015: this cast-iron candle holder by Norwegian designer Lars Beller Fjetland automatically puts out the flame just before the wick burns out (+ movie). (more…)
“People like saying life’s short a lot. The problem is, they don’t really mean it. It actually is short, very short, but they don’t believe in its shortness until the very end. Had they truly meant it, our world would have been a really different place. They would know what to do with their lives.”
for some reason this woman is a pariah and i have no idea why
One thing the Geyser of Awesome knows for certain is that there are many forms of awesomeness in the world. Being able to spin nine hula hoops on different parts of your body at the same time is one of them. That’s exactly the special talent that professional hula hooper Brookelynn Hoopz is demonstrating here. She’s even spinning one hoop on her hair bun:
Today the Department of Phenomenal Papercraft is marveling at the incredibly intricate animal sculptures created by paper artist Calvin Nicholls. Despite the fact that most of them are perfectly white, each of Nicholls’ paper creatures is amazingly lifelike and appears to be emerging from its matboard background. Made of countless layers of carefully cut paper, one sculpture can take anywhere from weeks to years to complete depending on its size and complexity.
“To achieve the haut-relief effect (a process he shares online), Nicholls first works from a drawing which he uses as a template for the various paper components. Using an X-ACTO knife, scalpels, and scissors he then carefully cuts pieces of paper and glues them in place.“
I guess Monkey Island turns 25 this month. It's hard to tell.
Unlike today, you didn't push a button and unleash your game to billions of people. It was a slow process of sending "gold master" floppies off to manufacturing, which was often overseas, then waiting for them to be shipped to stores and the first of the teaming masses to buy the game.
Of course, when that happened, you rarely heard about it. There was no Internet for players to jump onto and talk about the game.
There was CompuServe and Prodigy, but those catered to a very small group of very highly technical people.
Lucasfilm's process for finalizing and shipping a game consisted of madly testing for several months while we fixed bugs, then 2 weeks before we were to send off the gold masters, the game would go into "lockdown testing". If any bug was found, there was a discussion with the team and management about if it was worth fixing. "Worth Fixing" consisted of a lot of factors, including how difficult it was to fix and if the fix would likely introduce more bugs.
Also keep in mind that when I made a new build, I didn't just copy it to the network and let the testers at it, it had to be copied to four or five sets of floppy disk so it could be installed on each tester's machine. It was a time consuming and dangerous process. It was not uncommon for problems to creep up when I made the masters and have to start the whole process again. It could take several hours to make a new set of five testing disks.
It's why we didn't take getting bumped from test lightly.
During the 2nd week of "lockdown testing", if a bug was found we had to bump the release date. We required that each game had one full week of testing on the build that was going to be released. Bugs found during this last week had to be crazy bad to fix.
When the release candidate passed testing, it would be sent off to manufacturing. Sometimes this was a crazy process. The builds destined for Europe were going to be duplicated in Europe and we needed to get the gold master over there, and if anything slipped there wasn't enough time to mail them. So, we'd drive down to the airport and find a flight headed to London, go to the gate and ask a passenger if they would mind carry the floppy disks for us and someone would meet them at the gate.
Can you imagine doing that these days? You can't even get to the gate, let alone find a person that would take a strange package on a flight for you. Different world.
After the gold masters were made, I'd archive all the source code. There was no version control back then, or even network storage, so archiving the source meant copying it to a set of floppy disks.
I made these disk on Sept 2nd, 1990 so the gold masters were sent off within a few days of that. They have a 1.1 version due to Monkey Island being bumped from testing. I don't remember if it was in the 1st or 2nd week of "lockdown".
It hard to know when it first appeared in stores. It could have been late September or even October and happened without fanfare. The gold masters were made on the 2nd, so that what I'm calling The Secret of Monkey Island's birthday.
Twenty Five years. That's a long time.
It amazes me that people still play and love Monkey Island. I never would have believed it back then.
It's hard for me to understand what Monkey Island means to people. I am always asked why I think it's been such an enduring and important game. My answer is always "I have no idea."
I really don't.
I was very fortunate to have an incredible team. From Dave and Tim to Steve Purcell, Mark Ferrari, an amazing testing department and everyone else who touched the game's creation. And also a company management structure that knew to leave creative people alone and let them build great things.
Monkey Island was never a big hit. It sold well, but not nearly as well and anything Sierra released. I started working on Monkey Island II about a month after Monkey Island I went to manufacturing with no idea if the first game was going to do well or completely bomb. I think that was part of my strategy: start working on it before anyone could say "it's not worth it, let's go make Star Wars games".
There are two things in my career that I'm most proud of. Monkey Island is one of them and Humongous Entertainment is the other. They have both touched and influenced a lot of people. People will tell me that they learned english or how to read from playing Monkey Island. People have had Monkey Island weddings. Two people have asked me if it was OK to name their new child Guybrush. One person told me that he and his father fought and never got along, except for when they played Monkey Island together.
It makes me extremely proud and is very humbling.
I don't know if I will ever get to make another Monkey Island. I always envisioned the game as a trilogy and I really hope I do, but I don't know if it will ever happen. Monkey Island is now owned by Disney and they haven't shown any desire to sell me the IP. I don't know if I could make Monkey Island 3a without complete control over what I was making and the only way to do that is to own it. Disney: Call me.
Maybe someday. Please don't suggest I do a Kickstarter to get the money, that's not possible without Disney first agreeing to sell it and they haven't done that.
Anyway...
Happy Birthday to Monkey Island and a huge thanks to everyone who helped make it great and to everyone who kept it alive for Twenty Five years.
Guiding spirit of black metal Varg Vikernes spent 15 years in a Norwegian prison cell for the crime of murdering his fellow black metal practitioner Øystein Aarseth (a.k.a. Euronymous) in August 1993. It is also alleged that he was involved in the burning of at least three churches, although Vikernes denies this. Charmingly...
She looks at me and she’s like, “Well listen, I have a class in about thirty minutes, can you come back and do it for them?” … I go, “Did I get the points that I’m gonna need to pass the class and get my degree?” and she goes, “Yeah, you got the points.” … So I go, “My car’s parked in the red, I gotta go!”
Not everyone was happy with the love triangle at the center of 2015’s hottest dating sim, The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt. Fortunately, the game’s developers have been listening.
After he saved his kids, of course. [ 
