Certainly The Hunger Games and Twilight are very different media experiences, but how do the YA series differ in their actual vocabulary and sentence structure? Slate put together a textual analysis of Suzanne Collins and Stephenie Meyer's series, alongside J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter novels.
    
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This past week, comic book writer Alan Moore turned 60, and in his honor, songwriter and cartoonist Jeffrey Lewis set Moore's biography to pictures and music.
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What is going to fill the television-viewing hole left by Breaking Bad? It may very well be a TV adaptation of Garth Ennis and Steve Dillon's foul-mouthed, blasphemous, supernatural road comic Preacher.
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Doris Lessing, who died today aged 94, wasn't just a Nobel Prize-winning literary author — she was also a major hero of science fiction. She was one of the first authors with mainstream acclaim to embrace, and her fiction is worth more than a hundred writing workshops, for aspiring SF authors.
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Autun Purser's brightly colored travel posters invite us to the usual science fiction and fantasy destinations like Arrakis and Barsoom, but he also reaches farther into the fantastical canon, dreaming of otherworldly vacations great and terrible.
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While we tend to associate death with stillness, the short film Danse Macabre explores the ways in which a human body can move in the hours and days after death, giving its subject an unexpected grace.
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A look inside Valve's Steam Machine prototype originally appeared on Joystiq on Mon, 04 Nov 2013 12:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
This fragment of an iron "curse tablet" was written by a magician 1,700 years ago in Jerusalem, for a wealthy Roman woman named Kyrilla. Calling upon the gods, the magician writes in this section: "Come to me, you who are in the earth, chthonic daemon, you who rule and bind…"
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October, better known as Shocktober, has disappeared in a flash. We hardly knew ye, but I’ve gotta admit I’m a little burned out on talking about horror games so much. Even I need a break.
It was fun to open up the Spookin’ With Scoops floodgates this week to the whole Giant Bomb audience, since the website was down and, thus, the premium video player wouldn’t work properly. It pushed me to play for nearly three hours, and made me think 24 hours of horror might be a worthy goal in 2014. Who wouldn’t want a reason to play through every Fatal Frame game?
What makes Japanese horror so creepy? Fatal Frame got me thinking. (For the record, if you were wondering if a horror game from 2003 holds up, a decade hasn’t made a dent in Fatal Frame II: Crimson Butterfly’s ability to be scary as hell.) Maybe it’s because so much of Japanese horror doesn’t try dressing up what’s most plausibly scary: the people around us. The Ring, Ju-on, Pulse, and others are so terrifying because it makes us running for the hills from the closely familiar, not a mummified creature. It’s why zombies work.
Fatal Frame, especially, was so ahead of its time. The camera “weapon” was Tecmo recognizing the genre’s advantages in limiting player agency against enemies, but unlike the current trend in horror, it didn’t make the player completely helpless. Let me tell you, though, when a ghost is screaming and running at you, a camera doesn’t make you feel very powerful.
I’ve said it a million times before, but I’m hoping for the Beetlejuice effect here: Nintendo and Tecmo should make a Fatal Frame for the Wii U. The GamePad makes way too much sense.
Please.
(At the very least, I’m excited the developer of the Siren series hopes to return to horror.)
Part of the beauty in Grand Theft Auto comes from what players do within the seemingly infinite freedom provided by the world built by Rockstar Games. But GTA does not simulate everything, and it only builds in particular directions, the ones Rockstar wants to encourage. When it comes to player expression in other forms, you’re limited. Within those limitations, however, is where magic can happen. On the Media’s producer PJ Vogt passes on his intimate experience with another while playing Grand Theft Auto Online, and it gives you pause about what Rockstar might be able to do in the future, should it choose to give players more opportunities to interact with one another. (Also, On the Media is a terrific podcast about media coverage.)
“ProX drove me to an airfield and showed me a military helicopter I’d never seen before. The police were still chasing us. We left his car and flew off towards the sunset and the Pacific Ocean, out of the law’s reach.
This is the point where I realized that maybe, perhaps, I was on a date. Players in GTA rarely cooperate, with the exception of those situations where the game makes it literally impossible not to. ProX had saved me from death or arrest. And now he was peacocking, flying the helicopter low over the Pacific Ocean, and then threading it through the mountains around GTA’s version of Los Angeles.”
One of the features I’ve been kicking around is a look as cosplay. I don’t know anything about the world of cosplay, and given the gender issues I’ve written about in the past, I’m left with some questions about it. It's about empowerment, it's about a fantasy. What else? This essay by cosplayer Maddy Myers begins to fill in the gaps. Myers is a regular cosplayer, even going so far as to participate in masquerade competitions that require entrants to develop comedic skits and pre-record audio. That’s hardcore, and sounds utterly terrifying. Her commentary on what she gets out of it is interesting:
“The high of getting to embody a character I had already pretended to be in virtual form (and longed to be in real life) felt addictive—as addictive as escaping into a videogame’s power fantasy. Everybody had recognized me, had known me, and had seen me as a hero, just as the world of Final Fantasy X-2 loves Yuna. I had performed for a crowd to applause, and I had walked around the hallways getting treated like a magical, world-saving pop star. It was easy to forget that the “me” everybody recognized and respected wasn’t me at all.”
There should be a universally-accepted "Internet Time". And it should be decimal, just because. eg: "Tune in to my thing, at 0.1138 IT"
— Dan Marshall (@danthat) October 31, 2013
finally, 3000 years after the first Videogame War, we have rediscovered the lost science of Games for Girls
— ITS ME PORPENTINE (@aliendovecote) October 31, 2013
An alternate title for Sony’s PS4 FAQ: A list of features we won’t be offering in order to maximize profits.
— Chris Plante (@ctplante) October 30, 2013
First time Gawker Media ahead of http://t.co/5KHlQU2u5a. Comscore had us at 44m in US in Sep, to Times' 41m. pic.twitter.com/Ken7ohT8FY
— Nick Denton (@nicknotned) October 31, 2013
Slenderman a pretty popular costume choice among elementary school boys if my daughter's school Halloween parade is any indication.
— Greg Kasavin (@kasavin) October 31, 2013
Four years ago, Marvel announced they had the rights to the classic MarvelMan (a.k.a. MiracleMan, after a Marvel-ous lawsuit forced the publisher Eclipse to change the name) comics, but not Alan Moore and Neil Gaiman's dark and epic '80s relaunch of the superhero. That changed this weekend.
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Dark Horse's new Serenity comic miniseries will finally take us past the tragic—and heroic—events of the film. So what can we expect for our slightly smaller group of Big Damn Heroes?
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If you have the fear over the upcoming Thief, then I have a soothing salve to help alleviate the symptoms. The Dark Mod, a fairly well-known Doom 3 modification, has been freed from the sci-fi prison of Doom 3 ownership: the modders fulfilled the promise they made years ago and used the source code of the engine to turn their wonderful Thief restoration into a free download. Now all you need is a capable PC, an internet connection, and a cowl. That last one is non-negotiable.
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Sometimes it's clear who in a story will be the Chosen One—the character who gets to wield some awesome power or save the world from certain destruction. But sometimes destiny cheats or gets sidetracked along the way.
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Some of the world's most beautiful buildings have risen up, only to be destroyed or demolished just a few years or decades later. Here we remember some these great structures for what they once were.
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Continue reading WRUP: In another world Half-Life 3 happened
WRUP: In another world Half-Life 3 happened originally appeared on Joystiq on Fri, 27 Sep 2013 23:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
Guillermo del Toro is directing the opening sequence of The Simpsons' "Treehouse of Horror." This year's Halloween episode will kick off with a del Toro-created opener featuring monsters from the past several decades of horror movies. The episode airs on October 6th.
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A remastered Day of the Tentacle seems doomed to lie at the bottom of the ocean, despite being "80% done," according to a Kotaku source. A source reportedly "close to the project" told Kotaku that Day of the Tentacle was being remade with updated art and cutscenes, much like when its 90s adventure game sibling The Secret of Monkey Island got the same treatment in 2009.Report: Day of the Tentacle remake '80 percent' done before LucasArts shutdown originally appeared on Joystiq on Sat, 28 Sep 2013 10:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
The marginalia of illuminated manuscripts is weird. When monks weren't complaining about their jobs as they hand-copied line after line, they were inserting fart jokes into the margins. But one weirdly persistent image is of knights battling snails. Why?
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Hollywood is finally answering your "please turn this into a TV show" prayers: Constantine the comic series is becoming a TV series. ABOUT DAMN TIME.
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GOG sale: 50% off Wing Commander series, 60% off RPGs originally appeared on Joystiq on Fri, 20 Sep 2013 19:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
The Humble Indie Bundle 9 has, as you would have expected, updated. And I feel safe in saying it’s now likely the best bundle there’s ever been. Before you could pick up Trine 2, Mark Of The Ninja Eets Munchies Beta, Brutal Legend, FTL and FEZ for just a few coins. It was already pretty astonishing. A week in, and over half a million sales later, it’s now added four new games, Rocketbirds: Hardboiled Chicken, A Virus Named TOM, Bastion, and LIMBO. Good heavens.
EuxinusCOMPRAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA
To hear Valve tell it, the mega-developer’s Seattle lair is a boundless, endlessly blossoming field of creativity – not some rigidly structured hive of hirings and firings. People clamber into the top secret treehouse, and then they affix themselves to whatever project strikes their fancy, or so the story goes. But it’s a bit tougher to bite those claims hook, (company) line, and sinker when not-so-good-old-fashioned layoffs strike. Earlier this year, Valve let go of around 30 employees, many of whom were allegedly involved in hardware and Steam Box endeavors. Rumblings suggested the sudden turn of events signaled a change of focus for Valve, but all we got beyond that was the world’s longest “no comment” from Gabe Newell. As it turns out, however, Valve’s Steam Box survived the Great Valve Purge of ’13, and now some sort of reveal is just around the corner.
