firehose

BBC Radio 1 has convinced all sorts of artists to cover tracks for its Live Lounge video series. Haim took on Miley Cyrus, Angel Haze did Beyoncé, and now Donald Glover has taken his turn. The former Community star known as Childish Gambino turned in a solid cover of P.M. Dawn’s 1992 hit “I’d Die Without You.” It’s so good, in fact, it kind of makes you wonder why Glover—if he's off TV comedy now—doesn't pursue more of a straight R&B sound instead of hip-hop. But as always with Glover, the heart wants what the heart wants, we guess.

Gambino's latest record, Because The Internet, is out now. 

[via Consequence Of Sound]

Responding to the demands of primarily Nick Cannon, VH1 is rebooting Drumline. Nick Cannon will executive produce and co-star in Drumline: A New Beat, a sequel to the 2002 original that put him on the movie map. A New Beat will take place at a fictional New Orleans university and tell the story of Dani Bolton, “an upper-class Brooklyn girl who defies her parents in order to attend a college in Louisiana so she can join—and revitalize—their once-prominent drumline.” The character’s attempt to become the first female drumline section leader will be thwarted by both upperclassmen and, since she’s a woman, her romantic feelings for a fellow member. There’s no word on who Cannon will play, but let’s just assume it’ll be some sort of coach or something.

VH1’s Susan Levinson said the network is “excited to revisit that Drumline magic,” and ...

Google said today that Susan Wojcicki, an early employee who has been serving as a senior vice president overseeing advertising and commerce, will now run YouTube. Salar Kamangar, who has run the video service since 2010, will stay at Google working on unspecified "early-stage projects," according to Re/code. As Re/code noted earlier, the move puts a prominent advertising executive at YouTube in the wake of publishers on the service complaining about the difficulties they have making profits on the site.

In a statement sent to Re/Code, Google CEO Larry Page was vague on what the change might mean for YouTube. "Salar and the whole YouTube team have built something amazing," Page wrote. "YouTube is a billion person global community curating videos for every possibility. Anyone uploading their creative content can reach the whole world and even make money. Like Salar, Susan has a healthy disregard for the impossible and is excited about improving YouTube in ways that people will love."

Wojcicki is employee No. 16 at Google, and in 1998 she housed the young startup in her garage as it built its search engine. Wojcicki is the sister of 23AndMe CEO Anne Wojcicki, who is also the wife of Google co-founder Sergey Brin. (The couple began living apart last summer.)

Basically, I have a big pile of stuff I haven't looked at in years (because I'm bad about not throwing things away). I was looking for some old CCG collections of mine (old-school Rage), but instead, I came across...well, this stuff.









And finally...



Those are the highlights; I did leave out a lot of the reference cards, plus some miscellaneous games that were extra obscure (like Tegel's Mercenaries and Strike Squad). Also, I left out Chaos Overlords for some reason, and I genuinely like that game, weird and flawed as it is.

I know this isn't all that surprising; after all, I'm sure a lot of people here hoard that kind of stuff and have a bunch of old game materials squirreled away somewhere. Still, it was sort of a (pleasant) surprise to stumble across all of that stuff, most of it in not-terrible shape.

It also made me realize that, even though I don't miss the waste and added printing expenses, I DO miss elaborate boxed copies of PC games, with all of their weird maps and in-universe inserts (and that I am old).

If you’re the type of person who makes electronics purchases on a whim but then agonizes over which shipping to choose, you may be happy to hear about Newegg Premier.

Taking a page out of Amazon’s playbook, the venerable electronics retailer launched its “Newegg Premier” program on Tuesday. For $50 per year, subscribers will get “free expedited shipping” of three days or less, early-access to sales, free and no-fee returns, and a “dedicated customer service telephone number” (all similar benefits to Amazon Prime). But unlike its competitor, Newegg Premier won’t give you access to Alpha House (sorry, John Goodman) or any of the company's other online media.

"We always seek ways to improve the customer experience, and implementing a benefit program is the latest example of how we're making it easier and more rewarding to shop at Newegg.com," said Soren Mills, chief marketing officer of Newegg North America, in a statement. "Free expedited shipping is in itself a great benefit, but beyond that we're including many other perks to enhance the shopping experience."

FarSight Studios, developer behind The Pinball Arcade, is currently working on designing and bringing to life its own original pinball tables, reports BBC.

According to FarSight vice president of product development Bobby King, the company is planning to produce its own tables and has been in talks with "some of the famous pinball designers from the past." King noted that video games could be a low-cost way to test out tables' popularity, with the more successful tables being adapted into physical machines.

"Those cost considerations [of the past] are irrelevant when machines are designed only to be built in the virtual world, so imagine what these guys could do if they were given carte blanche," King said. "If we made a digital table and it sold a million copies and it was feasible to build it in the real world, then I think that design would have to be of interest to a manufacturer like Stern [Pinball]."

California-based FarSight Studios has purchased the licenses to dozens of pinball tables created by two companies, Williams and Gottlieb. The digital re-creations of these tables are included in the company's Pinball Arcade suite, currently available on consoles, mobile devices, Mac and Windows PCs, as well on PlayStation Vita and Ouya. King said it "made sense" to reproduce these classic tables, and as a result a wider audience is being exposed to them.

"We are introducing classic pinball tables to people who would otherwise never get an opportunity to play them, and we are also preserving these machines and their culture," King said.

Some guy has reimagined the NFL taking place in the Star Wars universe and redesigned all the helmets. And they are awesome.


Of course.


Makes sense.


Probably the most fitting one.


Scarily prescient if you think of what happened to both the Broncos and that Tauntaun.


That is one badass helmet.

After spending the past two years in prison, Pussy Riot members Nadya Tolokonnikova and Masha Alyokhina are now doing the U.S. publicity circuit. The duo is in the country to tour our prisons and talk with human rights activists, leading up to tonight's appearance at an Amnesty International benefit in New York.

Luckily for the non-incarcerated and/or benefit-going masses, the duo (accompanied by a translator) also popped up on last night’s episode of The Colbert Report. And as anyone who has watched the excellent documentary Pussy Riot: A Punk Prayer might have guessed, the results were downright charming, with the soft-spoken Tolokonnikova and Alyokhina going barb for barb with Colbert. The duo told the host they’d been arrested for “[singing] a fun song in a church,” and after Colbert threatened to search them on the way out of the studio, quipped they’d “had two ...

Aimee Mann, David Wain, and Dave Foley have teamed up for a funny new video for charity. “I’m Cured” depicts Mann as a puffy-headed version of the common cold who’s struck down with heartache and loss after Wain’s character, a scientists, finds a cure for her existence and wins a “major science award.” It’s cute, weird, and funny, but that’s to be expected when you deal with anything made by Wain and Mann. 

“I’m Cured” is available for digital download now, both as a single song and as a music video. Proceeds from the sale of the track go to OneKid OneWorld, an international organization that uses micro-loans to try and make a difference in the lives of impoverished children.

Pro-Syrian hackers have produced evidence that they intercepted the sensitive communications of eBay security personnel as the employees responded to a recent hack of the company's UK websites. The incident underscores the lack of success some of the world's most powerful tech companies have withstanding everyday attacks.

An image posted over the weekend shows an e-mail purportedly sent by Paul Whitted, whose LinkedIn profile lists him as a senior manager at eBay overseeing "incident management and resolution of major site issues." The February 1 message addresses other eBay employees and raises the possibility that one or more of their computers—or at least one of their e-mail accounts—was compromised as they were discussing a hack last Saturday on eBay and PayPal websites.

It reads: