Bewarethewumpus

Author : Steve Smith, Staff Writer

Martin became aware of taste of metal, then the sensation of his pulse amplified in his head. It took a few more minutes before the electric hum around him pierced the pounding, and the realization that he was bound made him open his eyes.

“Martin, you’re back, I was so worried that I’d done permanent damage there old boy.”

Martin recognized the voice, and through the haze of slowly returning consciousness found its face across the room.

“What,” he stammered, his mouth dry, “Jim, what the hell are you doing?”

“Excellent question my boy, excellent question.” Jim pulled a tray towards him on which a keyboard and display were mounted, positioning it between them “Do you know what this device is?” He gestured at the chair into which Martin was buckled, wrists, ankles and at the waist. “This is an emotion surgical machine. Isn’t it beautiful?”

Martin had hear rumours around the facility, but hadn’t believed they were true.

“You see, you competing with me for funding, for awards, those things I enjoy Martin,” he steepled his fingers and leaned forward, elbows on his knees, “however when I find you’ve been sleeping with my girlfriend, I’m afraid that’s an entirely different kettle of fish, old boy.”

Martin tried to look skyward as he rolled his eyes, but realized his head was strapped in as well. “Jim, you dumbass, Evylene is not and never has been your girlfriend, and I don’t think she ever will be, you’re delusional-”

“Shut. Up. You don’t understand how close we are, Evylene and I, and how much what you’ve done has hurt me. At first I thought I’d use my machine to remove my feelings of jealousy, anger, so that I could forgive her and love her more, but I realized you’d still be there trying to lure her away.”

Pushing back and turning to the keyboard, Jim started typing with furious intent.

“First, Martin, I’m going to remove your capacity for love, for joy and for happiness. You’ll be just as angry, jealous and lost as I’ve been these last months and she’ll never, ever be attracted to you like that.”

Jim grinned as he pressed the return key. Martin’s head was bathed in blue light and bombarded with radiation as a series of boring needles in the headpiece penetrated his skull. Nano-tech flooded in to scour his brain and strip away the specific emotional receptors and supporting memories he’d specified.

Martin heard himself screaming for quite some time, and then he didn’t hear himself anymore. Somewhere in there Jim got up and left the room, the novelty of the process having worn off. It may have been minutes or days before Martin was aware of the silence, the machine having gone to sleep upon completion leaving Martin alone with is thoughts.

The wrist straps were secure, but not very tight. He tried simply pulling his hands through at first, and then realized his thumbs were in the way.Balling his left fist with his thumb inside, he squeezed until the thumb bones gave way and shattered, then he pulled with all his might until it slipped through the wrist strap. It may have been excruciatingly painful. He wasn’t sure. It took some fumbling to undo the other wrist with only four working fingers, but before Jim returned Martin had released himself.

Jim stepped through the door into the swinging end of a fire extinguisher and sudden blackness.

When he awoke, it was Martin that stared at him from behind the keyboard and display, and he was strapped into his own device.

“Martin, there are people coming down, release me now and I-”

Martin cut him off. “The mistake you made Jim, is that the opposite of love and joy and happiness isn’t hate, it’s indifference. You know what you’ve done, and that knowledge will haunt you. I’m going to remove all of the emotions that might allow you to rationalize it. I’m going to take away hate, jealousy, greed. I’m going to strip out anger and the sting of betrayal. I’m going to leave you with just what you’ve taken from me, I’ll leave you unfiltered, unchecked love and guilt.”

As the machine started to hum to life again, Martin set it in motion, rose and walked to the door.

“Martin!” Jim screamed, straining at his bonds as the helmet bored into his brain, “Martin you can’t do this to me, you might as well kill me!”

Martin barely broke stride as he left the room, calling out over his shoulder.

“I really don’t care.”

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Have you ever happened across your high school bestie’s highly anticipated new baby-filled photo album on Facebook, but didn’t have time to scan through 200 photos? But, alas, when you went back to peruse the site later you forgot all about that album, essentially depriving yourself. Apparently, that’s a problem (if you can call it that) the engineers at Facebook have found a solution to.

The social media site recently announced on its blog a new feature called Save that lets you, ahem, save all those interesting things you see floating around your News Feed.

Users can save links, places, videos, music and other things to a “for your eyes only” tab on the site for later investigation. If you really feel the need to show others what you’re putting off, you can share your saved items with your friends.

The items can be viewed at anytime by simply going to the “More” tab on the mobile app or by clicking the link on the left hand side of Facebook’s site on a computer.

The list of saved items is organized by category and can be archived once you’ve had your fun.

And don’t worry about forgetting you saved something, either. Facebook will periodically show users a reminder of their saved items in their News Feed.

The new feature will be available on iOS, Android and the web in the next few days.

Introducing Save on Facebook [Facebook]

Screen Junkies teams up with Smosh in this honest trailer for the original 1996 Pokemon Gameboy games.

StarCraft II might be off the radar nowadays, but that doesn't mean the pros stopped getting better and better at the game. One highlight was a recent match between two Koreans, Parting and Byul, where the Protoss veteran basically destroyed the Zerg with perfect control of only a few units.

Here's the full match below. After both players set up their bases in the first few minutes, things get intense with Parting's crazy Warp Prism and Immortal micro. It's totally one of those chilling moments, seeing someone warping the two immortals back and forth so easily during the entire game, giving the Zerg units no chance to attack.

Code S Ro32 Group F Match 1 Set 2 2014 GSL Season 2 [GomTV, YouTube]

To contact the author of this post, write to: gergovas@kotaku.com

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Captain ManGuy

Captain ManGuy

He’s got massive pecs

Captain ManGuy

Look out

Here comes Captain ManGuy*

*sung to the tune of the Spider-man theme song

 

The Comedy Central news hosts fought to see who is the truest Star Wars fan to support UNICEF Innovation Labs, which is offering supporters a chance to be in the upcoming Star Wars: Episode VII film.

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Weird Al Yankovic, the grandfather of all pop music parodies, continues his month-long media blitz for his new album “Mandatory Fun” with his third music video of the week “FOIL,” which spoofs Lorde’s 2013 hit single “Royals”.

YouTuber Twin Perfect, probably inspired by the unlockable horse in the classic arcade racer Daytona USA, rewrote the lyrics of the memorable soundtrack of the game to include Link's steed, Epona. And he also made an awesome video for it.

Here's the full edit. It's full of surprises and late 90s feels:

Epona Usa [Twin Perfect, YouTube]

To contact the author of this post, write to: gergovas@kotaku.com

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"Link isn't even his real name," a friend told me recently. We were talking about Zelda, and the way people reacted to the new trailer for the next big game in the series.

My friend is more of a Zelda veteran than I. But still, his comment seemed heretical. This is Link we're talking about! He's not some two-bit space marine. Everybody knows who he is. Even lapsed gamers were keeping an ear tuned to E3 this year, hungry for news of the guy's long-awaited console return.

Why is Link named Link? This is one of those questions every newcomer to The Legend of Zelda must face. Asking it is second only to that time-honored tradition of realizing that Zelda doesn't refer to the the guy wielding a sword and shield like a total badass in all the promotional art. I've heard many theories throughout the years. But my friend's answer is the most intriguing I've heard by far.

"Link is just what they put down at the beginning," he continued. "You change it to your own name once you start playing."

The name "Link" is just a placeholder in his view. It's an arbitrary stand-in that was made with the common understanding that players would replace it with their own mark, making themselves the hero in these legends. "Link" even sounds like the perfect referent for this. It's simple, opaque enough to sound like it could be a real name. But the word suggests a bond being established between the little warrior dressed in green and whoever's on the other side of the screen. Plus, it beats seeing "YOUR NAME HERE" plastered across the front of a game's box.

I had never played a Zelda game in any substantive way, but I knew what my friend was getting at. He was referring to the way that some games prompt players to rename a character without giving them any other options to change his or her physical or emotional constitution. It's a funny dynamic that I don't see that much anymore, since many other story-driven games now lean on voice acting, rather than text bubbles, to get their message across. Voice-over work requires names to be more firmly set in stone, because the actors in younger series than Zelda can't predict every possible name players want to assign to the hero of any given story.

The Legend of Zelda games are interesting because they haven't stopped using the old naming convention, however. When my friend began describing his theory about Link's real name, for instance, I thought back to playing Final Fantasy VII in high school. I relished the opportunity to rename that game's spiky-haired sword-wielding protagonist. He wasn't Cloud anymore, he was Yannick. He didn't look, or act, anything like me. But I didn't want him to. I wanted to become Cloud, not the other way around. Switching the names felt amazing, even if I knew it was only a surface-level change.

Things are different for Zelda, though. There was only one Final Fantasy VII. There've been a few more Clouds here and there since that game came out. But no single character in Final Fantasy has risen to the same stature as Link. Zelda has survived with a similar cast of core characters since the first Legend of Zelda came out for the NES in 1986. That means Link is almost 30 at this point, which is ancient in video game years.

He's gone through many changes since his NES days, of course. There have been young Links and teenage ones. Cute Links and serious Links. Lefties and righties. In some games, such as the Nintendo 64 classic Ocarina of Time, there are different versions of Link in the same story.

Trying to chart all these different Links is enough to make your head spin. But the incredible diversity that Nintendo has brought to this one character makes his continued relevance all the more impressive, especially when you consider the company he keeps.

Many other iconic video game protagonists have risen and fallen since the eighties. And many have gone through periodic transformations the same way Link and Princess Zelda have. But if you compare Link to other enduring characters like Mario or Lara Croft, I think Nintendo has achieved something truly unique with its Zelda games, something my friend helped me truly appreciate for the first time.

Take Lara Croft, for instance. Her physical appearance has varied throughout the years as she's appeared in video games, comics, live-action movies, and rebooted versions of all these things. But she's always remained Lara Croft and only Lara Croft. A trailer for the latest Tomb Raider reboot proclaimed that we're all Lara Croft in some idealistic sense. But as much as I loved the new Tomb Raider, I didn't buy that tagline for a second. I like playing as Lara Croft, much in the same way I like playing as countless other heroes in games. But I still know Lara as Lara, the same way I know Mario as Mario.

These games are fun because they allow you to become a famous and superhuman character. Zelda does that. But it also does something else, I'd argue. Something far more profound. The games don't just invite you to become Link. Link also becomes you. Every time one of the Zelda games prompt you to rename the famous hero, they're also inviting Link into a deeply personal inner sanctum of one's own fantasy.

It's a tricky maneuver, and one I'm honestly not sure anyone else has achieved in video games. Part of me has to wonder if Nintendo would have even established the same pattern of allowing players to rename Link if they started making the series today. In either case, the people behind Zelda have made a deliberate choice to keep the tradition alive. The first option you are presented with in A Link Between Worlds, last year's 3DS game and the most recent installment in the main Zelda series, is one asking once again if you'd like to rename Link.

This might all sound basic to seasoned Zelda fans. But the reason I love the detail my friend pointed out, even as someone with limited experience actually playing these games, is that it explains why longtime fans of Nintendo's series hold Link so near and dear to their hearts.

Remember, the only reason I was talking about Link in the first place with my Zelda-playing friend was because the trailer Nintendo brought to E3 had kicked off some serious speculation. People took to the internet immediately after the trailer ended to begin debating what they had just seen. Some wondered if the person in the trailer was Link at all. Most notably, others proposed that Link was going to be a girl in the new game.

This confused me. As a relative outsider to the series, Link has always struck me as a bit androgynous. I assumed this was a deliberate aesthetic choice on Nintendo's part, a way to accentuate the waifish, boyish innocence that makes him such a charming protagonist.

I don't want to put words into the mouths of any Zelda fans. But my friend's argument helped me understand why so many people got caught up in a flurry of excitement about who, or what, the next Link is going to be. Because they were also wondering, on some level, who they were going to be in this new adventure as well.

So: what is Link's real name? He doesn't have any single name. Maybe, slowly, he won't even have a single gender. He's a gathering point for many aspiring heroes, a point people can fixate on but also see themselves reflected in.

Images by Sam Woolley

To contact the author of this post, write to yannick.lejacq@kotaku.com or find him on Twitter at @YannickLeJacq.

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Artist and beekeeper Ren Ri employs bees in the construction of these amazing encapsulated sculptures. The artist first builds transparent polyhedrons and cubes with an inner framework of wooden dowels, at the center of which he places the queen. After introducing the rest of the hive, he then rotates the sculpture every seventh day based on the roll of a die, an act that he says references the biblical concept of creation. Not only does the dice roll create an element of randomness, but it also changes the effect of gravity, causing the bees to build in different directions resulting in more evenly dispersed forms.

While we’ve seen several artists using honeycomb as a medium such as Aganetha Dyck and Tomáš Libertiny, Ri seems to put slightly more emphasis on the beehive itself as being the primary form on display. You can see a few more photos over on his website. (via iGnant, Huffington Post)

Al "Weird Al" Yankovic has been making music for 38 years. His newest CD—and probably his last traditional album—drops today. Here's Word Crimes, the wonderful video for his great send-up of Robin Thicke's Blurred Lines.

"You should never / write words using numbers / unless you're seven / or your name is Prince."

Hear that, video game title writers everywhere?

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There's something surreal and sometimes nighmare-ish about Maaden Ramos' fantastic Pokémon art. I can almost imagine a dream to go along with each piece.

It looks like Ramos is going through every letter in the alphabet and drawing up a Pokémon to go alongside each letter—and here are some stand-out illustrations from this collection. Fair warning, though: a couple of these images feature partial nudity. What, you never had a Pokémon dream where you were naked?

---

You can check out more of Madden Ramos' work here—including in-progress shots and commentary to go along with some of the pieces featured here.

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Artist Joe Hogan and Mike Vasquez's crossover series are the best example that Adventure Time and its style is just perfect for mash-ups. Their latest piece has really serious and funny-looking Game of Thrones characters.

Their prints will be available at this year's Comic Con or, alternatively, you can grab them on Etsy.

Here's the full piece. It's easy to recognize everyone.

And here's a bonus, Smash Bros X Adventure Time. That's a weird Donkey Kong:

Game of Adventures by Joe Hogan and Mike Vasquez [DeviantART]

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Say what you will about the good ol’ “suggestive collision” trope that never fails to appear in high school romance anime and manga series, but these things apparently do happen in real life.