The trailer for season two of Loki. The MCU has been struggling lately, but I will cautiously say that it looks promising?
The Barbie Breakup: After seeing Barbie, some women are "deeply reconsidering" their relationships. "AITA for breaking up with my boyfriend over the Barbie movie?"
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Client: "Since the issue is coming out in October, could you Photoshop a sweater on those kids in bathing suits?"
After my post about Soap Bubble Worlds yesterday, several people sent me this video of the rainbow colors that can be seen on the surface of and in the steam above a swirling cup of hot water. I was expecting a straight-forward visual display accompanied by some relaxing music (and that version does exist) but it also includes a fascinating explanation of where all these colors and swirls come from.
Scientific investigations into beautiful phenomena always makes me think of physicist Richard Feynman's thoughts on beauty:
I have a friend who is an artist, and has sometimes taken a view which I don't agree with very well. He'll hold up a flower and say "Look how beautiful it is" and I'll agree. And he says, "you see, as an artist I can see how beautiful this is, but you as a scientist take this all apart and it becomes a dull thing." And I think that he's kind of nutty.
First of all, the beauty that he sees is available to other people, and to me too, I believe - although I may not be quite as refined aesthetically as he is, but I can appreciate the beauty of a flower. At the same time, I see much more about the flower than he sees. I could imagine the cells in there, the complicated actions, which also have a beauty. I mean, it's not just beauty at this dimension of one centimeter, there's also beauty at smaller dimensions. The inner structure, also the processes, the fact that the colors and the flower are evolved in order to attract insects to pollinate it is interesting. It means that insects can see the color.
It adds a question: Is this aesthetic sense also exist in the lower forms that... why is it aesthetic... all kinds of interesting questions which the science, knowledge, only adds to the excitement, and mystery, and the awe of a flower. It only adds. I don't understand how it subtracts.
(thx, everyone)
Tags: mesmerizing · science · videoPaul Reubens, the actor best known for playing the comedic TV and movie personality Pee-wee Herman, has passed away at the age of 70. As detailed on Pee-wee Herman social media pages, the actor’s death follows a private battle with cancer that took place over six years. Reubens shared one final message with fans apologizing for his silence on the matter:
“Please accept my apology for not going public with what I’ve been facing the last six years. I have always felt a huge amount of love and respect from my friends, fans, and supporters. I have loved you all so much and enjoyed making art for you.”
Reubens’ career highlight is no doubt the time he spent entertaining the masses as Pee-wee Herman, but his career in comedy got its start in the ‘70s. It wasn’t until the early 1980s that The Pee-wee Herman Show would make its way to audiences for the first time, with additional projects like Pee-wee’s Playhouse, Pee-wee’s Big Adventure, Big Top Pee-wee, and Pee-wee’s Big Holiday following in the future. Reubens’ character and comedy quickly propelled him into becoming a pop-culture icon that managed to stand the test of time.
“Last night we said farewell to Paul Reubens, an iconic American actor, comedian, writer and producer whose beloved character Pee-wee Herman delighted generations of children and adults with his positivity, whimsy and belief in the importance of kindness,” a statement posted on the Pee-wee Herman Instagram says. “Paul bravely and privately fought cancer for years with his trademark tenacity and wit. A gifted and prolific talent, he will forever live in the comedy pantheon and in our hearts as a treasured friend and man of remarkable character and generosity of spirit.”
In 2006, photographer Mark Preuschl recreated Georges Seurat's famous impressionist painting A Sunday on La Grande Jatte in Beloit, WI with a group of volunteers. Here's the original for reference:
From My Modern Met:
In conceiving this tableau vivant, the organizers wanted to keep things modern. Thus, all participants are wearing contemporary clothes with umbrellas substituted in for the 19th-century parasols. Though the team was organized, they weren't quite prepared for what mother nature threw their way the day of the shoot. Preuschl recalls winds of 20 to 25 mph coming off the river, as well as clouds that didn't allow for the shadows they were so desperately looking for. Luckily, there was a window of about 25 minutes when the sun came out and cast those shadows.
He really couldn't have scouted that location any better...it matches the original pretty well. Who knew you could find Belle Époque Paris in southern Wisconsin?
Tags: art · Georges Seurat · Mark Preuschl · photography · remixI just really love the hell out of these iterative Lego build videos from Brick Experiment Channel and Brick Technology. In this one, a car is repeatedly modified to roll perfectly on an increasingly inclined treadmill. I started watching and in 10 seconds I was 100% invested.
They're not even really about Lego...that's just the playful hook to get you through the door. They're really about science and engineering — trial and error, repeated failure, iteration, small gains, switching tactics when confronted with dead ends, how innovation can result in significant advantages. Of course, none of this is unique to engineering; these are all factors in any creative endeavor — painting, sports, photography, writing, programming. But the real magic here is seeing it all happen in just a few minutes.
See also A Lego 5-Speed Manual Transmission, Designing a Lego Car to Cross Gaps, Engineering a Capable Climbing Lego Car, Making A Solar-Powered Billion-Year Lego Clock, and 20 Mechanical Principles Combined in a Useless Lego Machine.
Tags: Lego · videoWhile I mostly like to write about video games and anime here at The Escapist, my girlfriend and I are both major cinephiles. We watch every major new release and love to talk about each of them, even going so far as to make our own personal “Top 10 Best and Worst” lists at the end of the year just for fun. We love movies and for the past month, we’ve been looking forward to what many on the internet have called the cinematic event of the year — Barbenheimer (Greta Gerwig’s Barbie and Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer).
The two films could not be further apart tonally and stylistically, but that has made it all the more compelling to watch both movies back to back. What would it be like to watch a breezy and lighthearted comedy aimed at women alongside a gritty and somber examination of the creation of the atomic bomb that’s targeted a more masculine mindset? So this weekend, tens of thousands of people are going to watch both back to back and engage in nearly five hours of cinematic bliss. And we’re two of those people.
We first had to decide which movie we would see first. While we debated for about a week over which would come first, we eventually settled on Barbie as our first watch for two reasons. First, Barbie is a lot more energetic, so we were hoping that the energy from that film would keep us going for the three-hour endurance test that would be Oppenheimer. Second, assuming the film climaxes or ends with the Trinity test and Christopher Nolan’s impressive atomic bomb detonation, we would be like Oppenheimer and the rest of the scientists present and be so stunned and horrified by what we witnessed that we didn’t even want to risk that interfering with our enjoyment of Barbie.
And so, our plan was set. The day came, we had our wardrobe all selected for both films, (Yes, we changed in-between films.) and we went to the theater where we would see both movies. We would see Barbie in Dolby Cinema and Oppenheimer in IMAX. We pulled up to the theater, and we were ready to start our Barbenheimer journey.
Before we even stopped inside, a woman drove past us blaring Aqua’s “Barbie Girl” and proceeded to scream out the window. I had no idea if she was yelling at us since we were clearly in Barbie attire, but I decided to cheer back at her. My girlfriend just kept walking and left me to my own devices. Once inside, we were able to snag two “I <3 Barbie” pins and took our seats after taking a few pictures in front of the Barbie poster.
Immediately we noticed just the sea of pink in the leather-black Dolby Cinema seats. Pink and white dotted the entire theater with no free seats, except for one next to me for some reason, meaning I got extra legroom. Without going into too much detail about the film, Barbie was an absolute blast. At first I thought the movie was going to be a fairly simple fish-out-of-water comedy much in the same vein as Elf, but there was a lot more depth and deep philosophical exploration on ideas like self-actualization, gender, and the nature of ideas and their impact on people. All of this… from the Barbie movie. And it’s probably one of my favorite movies of the year.
And the audience seemed to feel that too. There was a lot of energy and excitement at the beginning, with the audience laughing and clapping at the moments you would expect them to. I could even hear a few tears coming from the audience at a certain montage towards the end. Granted, some of those tears may have been from my girlfriend sitting next to me, but the film easily impacted people.
When the movie ended, we were going to our car to do a quick wardrobe change and passed scores upon scores of Barbie fans. Women in white and pink, posing in front of the poster like we did, but the theater had also set up a little display with pink wallpaper and like two balloons for photos no more than six or eight feet wide. There was a legit queue for this barely thought-out Barbie display. But given that my girlfriend and I, now dressed fully in black, would stick out like a sore thumb, we decided to just go and get to the Oppenheimer screening, but not before getting a Bavarian Legend pretzel to keep us fed for the three-hour screening.
If the Barbie theater was full of young and brightly dressed people excited for what they were about to watch, Oppenheimer was the polar opposite. The theater was fully packed, as expected, but the number of people over the age of 60 was pretty staggering. I’m not surprised at all that Oppenheimer skewed towards an older audience, but I was more impressed with the fact that so many people my parents’ age would show up to the very first available screening. I was also impressed with just how hot it was in the theater, being uncomfortably warm in there to the point where my girlfriend said it was hotter than the atomic bomb detonation they showed in the film. But we endured.
There was a guy on my right though, and as the movie began, he mumbled to whomever he was with that this was “the movie event of the year.” And after seeing Oppenheimer, it’s really hard to deny that claim. The tension that was slowly built up and developed over the film was palpable and really drove home the impending sense of dread that Christopher Nolan wanted to convey with the advent of the nuclear age. While the film didn’t end as I predicted with the culmination of the Trinity test, it instead ended on probably an even graver and somber note that left us speechless. The audience gently applauded as the credits rolled, and people silently left. No raucous applause and cheers like in Barbie. Just stunned silence.
When we left, we were once again inundated with the Barbie horde, still ready to party with their favorite girl. I couldn’t even muster up a conversation with my girlfriend. We just silently walked out and made our way to our car. My girlfriend was recovering from the nuclear heat of the Oppenheimer theater, and I was just tired. Leaving, we saw a Crumbl Cookie and decided to treat ourselves to a plethora of cookies as we began to drive back home, debating the merits of both movies.
We agreed on several things after experiencing Barbenheimer. First, we agreed that we correctly decided on which movie to see first. Barbie had a bright and uplifting ending, with the coda the movie left us on being pleasant and generally feel-good. It made it easy to go into Oppenheimer and become acquainted with the mood the movie was going for. If we decided to do Oppenheimer first, there was no way we could go into Barbie with an open mindset. The oppressive atmosphere would have infiltrated our experience, and there was a chance that our enjoyment of Barbie would have indeed been hindered by Oppenheimer.
We also both agreed that this was the best double feature either of us have seen. Weirdly enough, the movies complement each other. Yes, from a production standpoint these movies share virtually nothing in common, but both movies are about one thing: death. The thoughts of death and the specter of the end that hangs over us all, be it from our own insecurities, anxiety, and depression, or from a fiery explosion that would render our flesh and end us within an instant. Death is omnipresent, but each film approached it in one of two ways. We could either quietly accept it and let us consume our every thought and action like with Oppenheimer or let it help us live our life to the fullest and enjoy every second of it like with Barbie.
So as we settled down for the night, thoughts of toys and nuclear armageddon fresh in our minds, we knew that this would not be the end. Both films are excellent and deserve your time. It’s a miracle that this double feature actually turned out as well as it did and that both movies are going to probably be discussed for the rest of the year, especially come awards season time. And when that time comes when Barbie and Oppenheimer are nominated for Best Picture, Barbenheimer will be back. And we will have to decide which movie is better. It’s too soon to say which movie is the “winner,” but I’ve opted to take Cillian Murphy’s stance on the Barbenheimer phenomenon: It doesn’t matter which movie is better. Both movies are great, so the ultimate winner in this whole endeavor is cinema in general.
MerijnI think it would be Duke Nukem Forever for me. I waited for that game for so, so very long. And it was such an absolute piece of shit, start to finish. I've never preordered a game again after DNF.
Hey, all! We’re trying something new at The Escapist, something I’ve slapdashly christened “Burning Questions with The Escapist,” and it is exactly what it sounds like. I gave our large stable of Escapist writers and content creators a simple prompt: “What is the angriest a game has ever made you?” And below is an incredible variety of answers, from outright hilarity to somber lessons about the creation of art. I’m pretty proud to be able to showcase the diversity of voices we have at The Escapist, so I hope you’ll enjoy reading through them, letting us know which stories are your favorites, and sharing your own answers in the comments section!
Nothing quite grinds my gears like playing Ultimate Team on FIFA. Every match is tense and makes me want to throw my controller every time I concede a goal, and with my opponents rubbing it in with a lovely emote each time, that only throws fuel into the fire. Even if you stick it out through the matches and earn yourself some nice packs to open, FIFA will just kick you while you’re down, and you’ll pull absolutely nothing of value while you watch videos of countless people opening up insane players left and right. It’s incredibly frustrating.
Even if you do push past all of that, get to a decent rank, put together a solid team, and think to yourself, “Alright, now I’m in with a shot,” well, FIFA has other ideas there too. As soon as you start winning, you’ll just be put up against the sweatiest player with the most people named Ronaldo you’ll ever see in one place and have to eat goal after goal while you fume away as your opponent kicks away your sanity piece by piece. Yay, FIFA.
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Yakuza 0 is a game filled with powerful moments. But nothing could prepare me for the harrowing unease I felt when it revealed a character with stress-induced blindness. (SPOILERS!) As one of the protagonists, you form a special bond with this person across the game’s interwoven story arcs. She unknowingly inherited the contested Empty Lot in Kamurocho, making her a target for the Tojo Clan and the Omi Alliance, two of the game’s biggest Yakuza groups. One gunshot to this woman was all it took for my enemies to witness a purge.
I felt defeat wash over me as I rushed the injured character to an underground clinic. Known for his ruthless combat prowess, my one-eyed protagonist knelt and broke down in tears right at the door. This furious man then heads to the office of the Yakuza family responsible for this. The rampage through a patriarch office puts you in charge of single-handedly clearing dozens of men with your fists and a trusty dagger. Taking down a Tojo Clan lieutenant and a Chinese assassin with multiple health bars taught me the catharsis and desperation of a defeated man. And while you eventually learn that your blind friend lives, delivering justice with my fists is an experience I’ll never forget. Bearing his burden as my own was more exhilarating than any competitive multiplayer experience.
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I have never, ever hated another game like I hate Heavy Rain. Games do sometimes annoy me every now and then, but whether I push through or give it up as a bad job, the memory usually fades. My hatred for Heavy Rain has only become more potent, more white-hot over time. And it’s all down to that late-game twist.
Don’t think of this as a spoiler; it’s me saving you from experiencing this narrative abomination firsthand. Playing Heavy Rain, I grew particularly attached to private detective Scott Shelby. He wasn’t your typical hero; he used an inhaler when he was out of breath, and he certainly wasn’t going to win slimmer of the year anytime soon. But he was going to nail the Origami Killer to the wall.
I tolerated the other three playable characters, but each time I stepped into their shoes I was counting the minutes till I got to play as Scott. In particular, I loved the budding but awkward romance between him and Lauren Winter, mother of one of the victims. And I cheered as he, or rather I, dragged her out of a sinking car.
But then the game delivered the biggest middle finger I have ever experienced playing a game. It revealed that Scott was in fact the Origami Killer, and he’d been collecting evidence to dispose of it. Screw you, David Cage. I was Scott Shelby, and that sure as hell wasn’t my agenda.
It’s what convinced me that, to this day, David Cage sees himself as a film director. That twist might have worked in a movie, but in a game, where the character in question had been under my direct control? How dare he undermine everything I’d been accomplishing as Scott, pissing on every choice I’d made?
Heavy Rain can burn in hell.
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Remember in Ninja Gaiden for Xbox 360 / PS3, after slamming your head over and over into a Ghost Samurai Boss for hours and finally beating him, you move into an area stuffed with floating Ghost Piranhas that materialize out of thin air, bite you, stun-lock you, and then swarm you until you die? I remember. I REMEMBER.
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This feels like a super basic answer because all the cool kids still love to hate on Resident Evil 5, but that final boss fight against Wesker was a pisstake for the ages. I already wasn’t enjoying the game all that much, but I persevered because I started it and I was damn well going to finish it… I think this is the game that actually cured me of that mindset.
The funny thing is that the fight isn’t really all that difficult. It’s bog-standard pattern recognition and basic combat. For some reason, though, I just couldn’t crack it. It starts with the frustrating juxtaposition of abilities between Wesker and Chris. He catches rocket-propelled grenades and moves like Neo from The Matrix, while I was stuck as a plodding nincompoop. But that’s just the first stage. In the second stage, the action moves to a volcano, Wesker becomes a tentacle monster, and you have to shoot his yellow pustules. But there’s a big problem with readability, made worse by Sheva going critical. I don’t know how many times I died, how many times I had to take a break and walk away, but the sheer nonsense involved in that fight is seared into my memory. I’m not sure if it epitomizes the ludicrousness of the Resident Evil series, but it surely comes close.
Oh, and let’s not forget that Chris has to punch a boulder in the middle of it… Just go away.
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I have no idea what possessed us to rent Shrek 2 (the video game) from Blockbuster, but somehow, I ended up in my mum’s living room playing Shrek 2 co-op with my sister and a friend. Most of the game was unremarkable licensed game stuff, but since it was co-op, we were having a decent time until we hit the rhythm game portion.
So, Shrek 2 features a bunch of random minigames sprinkled into the campaign, and most were pretty easy. But for some reason, the rhythm game was so goddamned hard that even with all three of us, we kept losing. We must’ve spent half an hour replaying the same minute and a half of gameplay, growing more and more frustrated. Eventually, everyone was ready to give up except for me, furious at being so utterly destroyed by a Shrek video game, of all things. My friend and sister took a break to walk the dog, but I refused to leave, convinced that I could beat it if I only kept trying. Through some miracle, I beat it a few minutes later, but was it worth it?
I have no idea if the game was actually hard or if I just sucked at games as a 10-year-old. But regardless, I’ll always remember the rage-inducing rhythm minigame of Shrek 2.
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I think it has to be when I first went through the remaster of the original God of War on PlayStation 3. (I never played the original PS2 release.) There’s something about the quick-time events in that version of the game that feels off, and I’m pretty sure it wasn’t my controller, as God of War II wasn’t nearly as much of a struggle when I had to perform the same actions. From the button-mashing moments that needed me to destroy the face buttons to strings of inputs for finishers that almost never registered properly, the controls rarely worked as intended during bits that were supposed to be monumental.
As a result, many major encounters quickly went from Greek epic to Greek comedy, with PS2-era Kratos hilariously failing over and over again to perform the simplest of (murderous) actions after pulling off some sick moves with the Blades of Chaos. Sadly, this also meant I died many times because enemies kept beating the shit out of me while I faced a “trial and error” penance that would make Atlas shudder until the controller chose to accept my half-circles and whatnot. Needless to say, some of the later stages in the game had me shaking my fists at the Gods of Mount Olympus, nearly as angry as Kratos.
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I wasn’t angry as much as I was disappointed.
In 2008, my friend and roommate got a copy of Silent Hill: Homecoming. He knew I was a Silent Hill fan. He knew Silent Hill 1 introduced me to horror as a genre in any medium and started my love for psychological horror. He was a guy I’d spent so many conversations with talking about symbolism and story beats and game design regarding the first four Silent Hill games.
To sit with a friend and fellow fan and play through something that felt so empty and so far removed from the passion and imagination of the thing I fell in love with brought up all seven stages of grief.
It wasn’t anger at the developers. It wasn’t even anger at the publisher. It was anger at human limitations. The fact that talented folks with resources, understanding, and a solid foundation could still create something so misguided — regardless of the source and the product — meant no matter how hard I tried to create art in any medium, I could suffer the same fate. I could be the one showing off something I worked hard on that people didn’t appreciate for completely justifiable reasons.
For a while, I was angry that no matter what I or any of us do, who we do it with, or what we try to create, no one is above the possibility of failure.
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There are few games that have ever broken me, but it should come as no surprise that the game to break me was a broken game itself, the infamous Ride to Hell: Retribution. Back in college, my roommate and I had a fascination with the game and did everything in our power to beat what was considered the worst game of all time. And there were sections that made us rage, but none were as infuriating as waiting for an elevator to come down and then ride it up. During that agonizing wait, we had immortal bikers wearing Jason Voorhees masks swarm us and kill us repeatedly, driving my roommate and I to literally break a TV. It wasn’t the TV we were playing the game on, but rather a TV that some guy left in our room, but we screamed so much and threw such a violent fit that the TV fell off the bed and shattered on the floor.
We both agreed to stop playing the game due to this, but one year later, we went back and finished the job after finding the game at a GameStop. We knew we had to finish what we started, so we purchased it for $5. Unfortunately, we had deleted our old save files, so it was back to square one for us again. One rage-filled week later, we proceeded to break the disc into a million pieces and throw them into a field once we finished it. Better than it deserved.
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I’ve played my fair share of punishingly difficult games and chased some challenging achievements, but oddly enough, The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim is responsible for the most frustrating moment I can recall. I adore games that allow you to customize a “home base” area, so as a new Skyrim player, I was immediately enamored with the Hearthfire homesteads. I selected Lakeview Manor as my primary estate and began decorating its shelves with the treasures and trinkets I’d collected — potions, skulls, insects in jars, Daedric artifacts, dragon claws, and bowls of gemstones, all carefully curated and meticulously organized despite the extreme finesse required to place objects precisely using a console controller. One day, I returned from a quest to find that the shelves’ original contents (pots, goblets, plates, and the like) had respawned, causing my prized possessions to effectively explode all over the house. With hours of work nullified and some items seemingly lost forever, I abandoned that save file completely, and my enthusiasm for virtual interior design never quite recovered.
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Final Fantasy X had unskippable cinematics and a turn-based sports minigame called Blitzball that it introduced for the first time after one of those long cinematics. You didn’t have to win this minigame, and it wasn’t even mandatory to play after this first instance. But I wanted to win. I was playing at two disadvantages: I missed a special ability I could have gotten earlier in the game, and the opposing team is just outright better than that of the player. I understood the game well enough though, so when I lost, I felt compelled to sit through the cinematic and try again. I lost. So I sat through the long cinematic and tried again. I lost. So I sat through the long, long cinematic and tried again. I tied! I might’ve tied more than once! But ties weren’t allowed for this game, and then I lost. Finally, I had lost so many times that I got up out of my chair, clenched every muscle in my face, and felt my eyes narrowing… narrowing… narrowing.
The next thing I remember is that my body was wedged between a bed and a desk, a scrape on my arm from where it had banged into the desk. What had happened was I had gotten so angry at Final Fantasy X Blitzball that I literally blacked out in rage and lost consciousness. It was arguably the dumbest moment of a life that has been filled with cartoonish decisions.
And the kicker? I never lost another game of Blitzball afterward. I was a killer at the sport!
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If I ignore highly competitive titles like Smash Bros., Rocket League, and Street Fighter (which I think says more about me than those games), then weirdly enough, I think it could be the adventure game Genesis Noir that made me angriest. This abstract story-driven experience takes you from the creation of the universe straight through the entirety of human history as well as the heat death of the universe, and I truly enjoyed it. But during my review, I ran into a strange connect-the-dots-style puzzle that I was unable to solve for several hours. I’m unsure why, but I became unreasonably agitated at the idea that I couldn’t figure it out. I reloaded the chapter numerous times and called in my non-gaming fiancée to try her hand at it, only for it to sort of solve itself without me knowing exactly what was done differently. It’s a testament to the overall experience of Genesis Noir that my affection for it wasn’t changed by whatever was going on with that puzzle, but it took me to a dark place.
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I love Zelda games. My dog is named Zelda. I replay Ocarina of Time every year. I only play Tears of the Kingdom when I can guarantee I have an uninterrupted hour or two to truly get into it. But I hate The Legend of Zelda: Spirit Tracks. It’s the source of my most frustrated moment in gaming because, up until the final boss, blowing into my 3DS’s microphone worked fine. However, after defeating Malladus, I had to play the flute one final time — except my microphone decided to no longer work, registering each huff and puff as strange warbles as Zelda berated me for messing up the tune. I ended up not finishing the game, frustrated beyond belief, and watching the ending on YouTube. To this day, it’s my least favorite Zelda game because of that mechanic.
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Banjo-Kazooie is my favorite Nintendo 64 game, my favorite 3D platformer, and probably one of my 10 favorite games ever. Which is why it pains me so much whenever I have the finish line in sight during a replay, only to once again subject myself to “Grunty’s Furnace Fun.”
The penultimate challenge in the original Banjo is a quiz-show board game where you have to navigate a gauntlet of tasks that test your knowledge of the game. While some of these are simple time-based challenges from earlier in the game, others are trivia questions where you have to identity a level based on a zoomed-in screenshot, a character based on a bite-sized sound snippet, or a piece of trivia that you’d only know the answer to if you spoke to every NPC in the game and took careful notes. If you get enough questions wrong, you have to start the entire thing over. If you get a single question on a skull space wrong, you have to start the entire thing over. And it isn’t a set board either, so you can’t just memorize the path through.
This challenge was the bane of my existence as a kid, and it frustrated me just as much last year when I replayed the game on stream. The first 95% of Banjo-Kazooie is perfection. But “Grunty’s Furnace Fun” can go straight to hell.
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Did you know that there were Mega Man games on the PC? No? Good. You’re better off for it. Because no game has ever made me angrier than Mega Man’s PC port. Back in 1990 when the game came out, little seven-year-old me, oblivious to its true nature and the horrible reviews surrounding it, excitedly got this craptacular port made by some random guy Capcom paid to move the Blue Bomber to PC. I think my dad may have bought it for me to be precise, in which case I should probably call him up and tell him I hate him. Five minutes with the game and I was frustrated I couldn’t get past the first enemy, 10 minutes and I was bashing the keyboard, 15 and I was in full-blown tears of anger and rage. My seven-year-old brain became apoplectic at the poor controls and bad design, though at the time I had no idea what was going on. My dad came in and took the game away. I spent probably 20 minutes with this game 33 years ago playing no further than the first enemy in it, and yet it is seared on my mind like some form of PTSD (Pixelated Terror Stress Disorder).
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Every time I see Meta Knight — that metal-masked, edgy tryhard — I am filled with rage. I don’t hate him because of any of his appearances in the Kirby games, mind you. To me, as far as his home series is concerned, he is nothing more than an admittedly cooler version of his round, pink counterpart, just with less sucking. It’s because of Super Smash Bros. for Wii U that I find myself looking at that winged menace with disdain.
My Meta Knight trauma traces back to 2016. I was younger and more naïve, but that didn’t stop me from being the king of Smash among my friends. I dominated the skies with Jigglypuff. I dunked on hundreds of competitors as Mario. I controlled the competition as Mewtwo. I even perfected each Mii Fighter’s combat style. I could spot-dodge and dash dance with the best of them, but one mountain I had yet to climb was Meta Knight. Something about his hummingbird-like fighting style had always turned me off to the point that I never took him into battle… ever. Naturally, I thought I could pick him up and master his combat in an afternoon.
Match after match, my friends put me in my place. They mopped the floor with 2016 Michael. Fighting with Meta Knight felt like speaking a language that everyone understood but me, and unfortunately for my fragile ego, I didn’t want to give up so easily. “Again!” I yelled after each match drew to a close, hoping that the Meta Knight-shaped light bulb above my head would finally click on. Any outsider could see my brute-force tactics were only making me worse at Smash, not better.
Still, I continued on until joking anger became a fit of frustration as my friends mocked my fall from grace, leaving me to sling my controller against the wall. There were some… choice words helicoptered around the room, and I haven’t played as the character since. I still see him from time to time, gliding across my social media feeds, lazily hiding in a pile of stuffed animals at a store and, yes, in Smash Bros. Like a cold message from an old friend, his razor blade glare still haunts me every… single… time.
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Oh, I found it. I was thinking on my angriest gaming moment and couldn’t figure it out, but now that I have I regret it. Star Wars: Battlefront II (the good one) had its hooks in me from the moment I started playing it. This was absolutely a vice. They say you don’t have a problem until it starts making your life worse, but I was so addicted that it improved my life. I became more studious so I could get my homework done faster so I could play more. I kept a strict bedtime so I could have more waking time so I could play more. That was the only year I ever had perfect attendance in school. Nothing was getting in the way of my playing Star Wars: Battlefront II.
But I had two problems. I didn’t have a memory card, and I grew up with an overly religious and overly Hispanic mother. The Star Wars: Battlefront II campaign isn’t that lengthy, but if I played too long in a single sitting, she’d drag me out for fear of bringing shame to God and the Virgin Mary. Single sittings were the only way I could make any progress, because my mother demanded all the electronics be turned off when you leave a room. If I left to go eat, I’d come back to a turned-off PlayStation 2 and all my progress gone.
During that summer I hid the PlayStation with my game still running. I plugged it in a different place so she wouldn’t glance in and see it. I put a towel on it to drown out the hum. I was finally making progress, but I grew careless. I forgot to place the towel on the console before heading out to church, and when I returned I saw it neatly folded on my bed. My Star Wars: Battlefront II was turned off, and I felt an anger that’s never resurfaced since. It wasn’t the type of anger that drives people to break monitors and controllers. It was pure defeated grieving anger where you finally realize it doesn’t matter how hard you try to push the boulder; your mother will always send it rolling back down, so you lay down, let it roll over you, and it drags you with it to rock bottom.
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Back in the olden days of Tiger Woods PGA Tour, I was ranked in the top 3 on Xbox in the Alternate Shot mode in both Tiger Woods PGA Tour 13 and 14. The top few players messaged each other, and we decided to have a best-of-7 of the best Alternate Shot teams in the game. It was great and really close — we were tied after six matches — and the final match was really close too.
I had the approach shot for my team on the final hole and made a good shot — so good, in fact, that it hit the pin in the air. Normally, the ball would deflect just a few feet and land near the pin with an easy putt for my teammate ahead on the next shot. This time, however, the ball reacted as if it had been shot out of a cannon and rocketed straight into the lake.
I’m not the type to get super upset when I play a game, but that was the exception. Not because of that thing alone, but because we put so much time into playing to decide the best team, only to have it decided by that utter garbage.
If the game had been a digital copy, it would have been uninstalled on the spot. What ensued was the type of rant where my dog was trying to calm me down.
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Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Illustrator Kevan Atteberry created the Clippy character that was introduced in Microsoft Office 97. There was a ton of backlash when the character was introduced, but as time has passed, many people have begun to think fondly of him.
Tags: computing · interviews · Kevan Atteberry · Microsoft · videoHe's a guy that just wants to help, and he's a little bit too helpful sometimes. And there's something fun and vulnerable about that.
MerijnIf you've seen a clip of a stickman battling the letter 'e', this is the full video.
MerijnAmazing! Very beautiful. I'm touched.
The length of a human life is around 80 years. You might get 100 if you're lucky. The universe is about 13.7 billion years old. The vast difference between a human lifespan and the age of the universe can be difficult to grasp — even the words we use in attempting to describe it (like "vast") are comically insufficient.
To help us visualize what a difference of eight orders of magnitude might look like, Wylie Overstreet and Alex Gorosh have created a scale model of time in the Mojave Desert, from the Big Bang to the present day. This is really worth watching and likely to make you think some big think thoughts about your place in the universe and in your life.
This is a followup of the scale model of the solar system they built and a video they made about people seeing the Moon through a telescope for the first time.
See also a behind-the-scenes: How We Built a Scale Model of Time. (via colossal)
Tags: Alex Gorosh · infoviz · science · time · Universe · video · Wylie OverstreetFor the last two days, Elon Musk has claimed that Twitter is under attack from “several hundred organizations” who were conducting “EXTREME levels of data scraping,” forcing them to bring “large numbers of servers online on an emergency basis” and enact emergency measures.
Yesterday, Twitter started blocking all logged-out access to Twitter, requiring signing in to view any tweet or profile. Elon Musk called it a “temporary emergency measure,” claiming they “were getting data pillaged so much that it was degrading service for normal users!”
Apparently, it didn’t stop the crush of traffic and, this morning, Musk announced they escalated their actions against supposed “extreme levels of data scraping” by rate-limiting the number of tweets you can view.
Immediately, Twitter users started seeing “Rate Limit Exceeded” messages and every trending topic was about the collapse of Twitter:
Are shadowy AI companies scraping Twitter for training data? Maybe!
But on Mastodon this morning, web developer Sheldon Chang noticed another source of unusual traffic: a bug in Twitter’s web app that is constantly sending requests to Twitter in an infinite loop:
This is hilarious. It appears that Twitter is DDOSing itself.
The Twitter home feed’s been down for most of this morning. Even though nothing loads, the Twitter website never stops trying and trying.
In the first video, notice the error message that I’m being rate limited. Then notice the jiggling scrollbar on the right.
The second video shows why it’s jiggling. Twitter is firing off about 10 requests a second to itself to try and fetch content that never arrives because Elon’s latest genius innovation is to block people from being able to read Twitter without logging in.
This likely created some hellish conditions that the engineers never envisioned and so we get this comedy of errors resulting in the most epic of self-owns, the self-DDOS.
Unbelievable. It’s amateur hour.
He posted a video of the bug in action, sending hundreds of requests a minute.
On Twitter, software engineer Nelson Minar independently reproduced the bug with his own video capture.
It’s currently unclear when this bug went into production, or how much it’s actually impacting their traffic, so it’s hard to determine whether this bug inadvertently inspired Twitter to block unregistered access and add rate limits, or if the bug was triggered by the rollout of those changes.
On Bluesky, Twitter’s former head of trust and safety Yoel Roth wrote, “For anyone keeping track, this isn’t even the first time they’ve completely broken the site by bumbling around in the rate limiter. There’s a reason the limiter was one of the most locked down internal tools. Futzing around with rate limits is probably the easiest way to break Twitter.”
Sheldon suspects the bug was related to yesterday’s decision to block unregistered users from accessing Twitter, but in a followup, wrote that it’s “probably not the cause of their scraping panic and most of these requests are being blocked.”
It seems very likely that killing free access to the Twitter API led to a big increase in scraping, since countless businesses, organizations, and individuals used it for their projects. It’s also plausible that these issues are entirely unrelated.
Still, how funny would it be if this “emergency,” from start to finish, was brought on by a Javascript bug that caused Twitter to DDOS itself, spawning all of these truly terrible decisions? At this point in Twitter’s downward spiral, nothing would surprise me.
If you know more, leave a comment or get in touch. Confidentiality guaranteed.
MerijnI've waited almost 8 years for my kid to finally ask me to play Sea of Thieves with him. Two months ago it finally happened and I couldn't be happier. :)
Tonight I had my proudest ever moment as a parent. 9 year old daughter requested to play Streets of Rage with me. She was competent and loved it. Was just like playing with my mates as a kid.
I'm a video editor who's worked on some notable stuff, but my greatest claim to fame is having a TikTok account that posts AI-generated videos of Boris Johnson eating raw vegetables.
Merijnlast WEEK!
We recently got an electric car which means I cannot hear my wife driving up our drive. This has dire consequences when I am wanking. She has caught me six times last week.
My wife died last year. During an evening when I was really feeling down, I put into Chat GBT all of our WhatsApp messages and asked it to respond to my messages in her manner. Words cannot express how much I regret this.
Blue checks being boosted in replies has totally destroyed one of the best parts of Twitter. Now replies on popular tweets are just a reminder of the mediocrity of people who pay their way in life
My wife was in a coma following a car accident. When I visited her in hospital I took the opportunity to squeeze the blackhead on her forehead that had been bugging me for weeks, but which she wouldn't let me touch.