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)

Maybe you haven't heard of lewd visual novel Sakura Spirit, which is currently available on Steam. That's OK, because Sakura Spirit's Steam reviews are here to help.

Even if you have no interest in playing it, it's hard not to be struck by the reviews of Sakura Spirit—most are silly. And given that the game is, as one reviewer calls it, the "closest thing to hentai in steam," a lot of the reviews reference sex. Fair warning!

First, so you get a sense of what the game looks like, here's a trailer:

Granted, once in-game, the stuff you see might be a little less, err, wholesome. Still, the game looks like standard fare as far as visual novels of this type go, right? It's not that the game is of particular note, or that the game is good/worth playing, but rather that it was recently released on Steam—so there are a bunch of fresh Steam reviews for it. Most are reviews are rather silly. Some are kind of uncomfortable.

Let's take a look at what people are saying about the game, shall we?

I think my favorite part is the constant allegation that the game is short, and yet there are a number of people with a ridiculous number of hours in the game. Obviously its easy to just leave the game running, but still—kind of funny.

You can read more Steam reviews of Sakura Spirit here.

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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]

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

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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.

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You know what makes everything better? Adding Levi from Attack on Titan to everything. Yes. Everything.

Below, you can see what Levi Ackerman looks like in the Attack on Titan anime. If you are unfamiliar with Levi, this wikia can hopefully bring you up to speed.

In the past few years, Attack on Titan has become incredibly popular in Japan and abroad. Last year, Japanese Twitter users began, in earnest, to add Levi's face to other anime and different images. The results, which were often rounded up on Naver, were quite amusing.

The king (or queen!) of the Levi face-swaps was Twitter user Kagayake_rivai, whose work spread outside of Japan to China and the West. Let's have a look back at some of the standouts.

[Photo: Kagayake_rivai]

[Photo: ATURN_sendai]

[Photo: sznmix]

[Photo: hey_cho_cleanUp]

[Photo: xma73sanx]

[Photo: Kagayake_rivai via 3captains1piece]

[Photo: momo_no]

[Photo: Kagayake_rivai via 3captains1piece]

[Photo: trk_1200]

[Photo: Kagayake_rivai via 3captains1piece]

[Photo: hey_cho_cleanUp]

[Photo: Kagayake_rivai via Weibo]

[Via Naver]

To contact the author of this post, write to bashcraftATkotaku.com or find him on Twitter @Brian_Ashcraft.

Kotaku East is your slice of Asian internet culture, bringing you the latest talking points from Japan, Korea, China and beyond.

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YouTuber Karma Town provides this very realistic MLG montage-style PSA demonstrating the dangers of smoking marijuana.

via http://26.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lf6iemPHes1qzls9yo1_500.jpg

After racial slurs in NSA materials leaked, White House asks security agencies to clean up

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[awesomeparker]

Christopher Wilson is a 22-year-old computer science student with Asperger's syndrome. He's also facing six months in prison for refusing to hand over the encryption keys to police during the course of an investigation. Wilson first found himself on...

Nearly four years after the last great war between 4chan and Tumblr, the two heavyweights of the memesphere are once again butting heads over their opposing political stances.

This week I have a somewhat topical essay over at Medium.com. Warning: political.

Zack Danger Brown of Columbus, Ohio wanted $10 to make some potato salad, so he went to Kickstarter. Now he has more than $2,000 to make potato salad, proving a long-standing theory here at Snacktaku — potato salad is pretty great.

Read more...

The review was undertaken by Barton Gellman, Julie Tate and Ashkan Soltani for the Washington Post, working from a cache of previously undisclosed primary surveillance data that Edward Snowden took with him when he left the NSA.

In many cases, it's clear that the NSA has good reason to be concerned about its surveillance targets, but it's also clear that the collateral targets -- who far outnumber the first group -- have intimate, totally irrelevant information about their lives collected and retained by the spies, where it is routinely accessed by spies, analysts, and private-sector contractors.

Almost everything in the NSA cache is haystack, in other words, with just a few needles. And the hay is deliberately collected and retained, even though it consists of things like love notes, baby pictures, medical records, and other intimate data belonging to people who are under no suspicion at all.

And while foreigners -- myself included -- are justifiably anxious about the possibility that the NSA faces no legal hurdles to collection of our data, it's significant that the NSA deliberately targets Americans in the USA and abroad. That's because the NSA is legally enjoined from spying on Americans, and the proof that the agency is flouting this prohibition is evidence of illegal activity and strengthens the case for more oversight, reform and intervention from the US Congress.

The NSA uses laughably sloppy tools for deciding whether a target is a "US person" (a person in the USA, or an American citizen abroad). For example, people whose address books contain foreign persons are presumed by some analysts to be foreign. Likewise, people who post in "foreign" languages (the US has no official state language) are presumed by some analysts to be non-US persons.

When the NSA does determine that it is intercepting US persons' communications, it is required to take "minimization" steps on any data it retains. However, many of these minimization steps are likewise laughably inadequate -- for example, in early 2009, the files refer to "minimized U.S. president-elect," rather than Barack Obama, but you hardly need be a surveillance mastermind to make sense of this.

The documents reveal how the controversial "section 702" of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act has become the go-to basis for surveillance, 702 further lowers the bar for conducting surveillance from the already generous height at which it had been previously set. In the cache, the Post reporters see evidence that analysts whose judicial surveillance authorization warrants have expired then switch to 702 as their basis for continuing spying, rather than demonstrating to a judge that their cause is good.

Snowden says he released this cache to the Washington Post to better inform the debate about 702. The NSA's allies in Congress talk about 702 as something used in special cases and with due care. But it's clear from these documents that 702 is a legal back-door that lets spies avoid the very generous and casual oversight of the FISA court, a veritable rubberstamp factory that grants virtually every NSA request.

Last week's revelations about the NSA's "targeted" surveillance program showed us that NSA wordsmithing has distorted the word "targeted" beyond all recognition, but that was about a largely automated system that spied on people based on stupid, automated rules (albeit rules that a human being had created and put in place).

In this story, we see that even when a trained NSA analyst is making individual, case-by-case decisions about which people to target, s/he can be expected to get it wrong nine times out of ten.

Nice shooting, Tex.

-Cory Doctorow

In NSA-intercepted data, those not targeted far outnumber the foreigners who are [Barton Gellman, Julie Tate and Ashkan Soltani/Washington Post]

(Image: Archery, Vassilis, CC-BY-SA)

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