AUSTIN—According to a groundbreaking report released this week by researchers at the University of Texas, tens of millions of citizens across the United States are bravely resisting the relentless pressure from the media to be thin and active. The 8...
Do I really need to say anything after an image so full of perfection as that? Do you really need more convincing to give permadeath comedy survival horror Death Road to Canada a chance? Do you even need to know about the possibility of teaching dogs to drive to check out the Kickstarter? Do yo- (YES – Ed.) alright fine. Along with your common or garden procedurally generated maps, characters which join your zombie battling group are also randomised. So where one time you had a whole squad of sane humans, now you might be half dogs, or three dogs and a bloke pretending to be a horse. Or Elvis. Or a panda. A trailer if you’re somehow unconvinced after the jump.
With such astonishing claims as “More dogs than the Fable series or Call of Duty: Dog Edition” I’m glad it looks like they can back it up. What’s more interesting on the design side is a keeping to the concepts used in Choose Your Own Adventure books. Characters and traits available to you will close off and enable certain passages. Surprisingly rare in games, which usually ascribe to a simpler, more friendly “you can do everything if you have the time” route.
I’ll leave you with this quote from the press kit:
Find a dog, teach it to drive. Have all the humans in your party die. Make the dog recruit other dogs until your band of survivors consists of 5 dogs driving a muscle car.
Saturday Night Live’s Jay Pharoah does great impressions of everyone from Barack Obama to Jay Z, and he’s pulled his best Kanye West out for a funny new clip. Pharoah’s “I Am A Dog” is a smart, hairy takeoff of standout Yeezuscut “I Am A God,” and features both an actual French Bulldog and Pharoah in Rowlf The Dog-type ears chasing a mailman. It’s a silly little concept, but the video is executed so well that it works.
Meet the Judge Who Just Gave a 30-Day Sentence to a Teacher Who Repeatedly Raped His 14-Year-Old Student
How long does a teacher get for exploiting his position of power to rape a troubled teen who then committed suicide? Did I hear 30 years? More like 30 days. If you're banging your head on your desk over and over again, this is the appropriate reaction.
Stacey Dean Rambold taught high-school in Yellowstone County, Montana and at the age of 49, he started regularly raping his 14-year-old student, Cherice Morales. According to the Daily Mail, he was arrested in 2008 after authorities found out that he had been grooming Morales, a vulnerable freshman, for sex.
The Billings Gazette reports that the teen took her own life a few weeks before turning 17, right before the trial was set to begin. The mother of the young now deceased girl, says that the relationship with her teacher was a "major factor" in her suicide.
Stacey Rambold repeatedly raped the teenager and only got 30 days in jail. Why you ask? Because the teenager who's wasn't old enough to consent, wanted it.
The judge said that since Morales had a troubled youth, she was "older than her chronological age" and was "as much in control of the situation" as the man who raped her, it was fine to let the man off with a measly 31 day sentence. Oh actually, make that 30 since he will be credited for the one day he served before the end of the trial. Apparently, prison works on the same principles as trial gym memberships. Although his entire sentence is 15 years for sexual intercourse without consent, he'll only spend 30 days of it actually in jail.
Montana District Court Judge G. Todd Baughe rationalized his outrageously low sentence by saying that the ex-teacher had already lost his house, his wife, his teaching license, and had become the "scarlet letter of the internet." The judge essentially said that a long sentence wasn't necessary because he had been "punished enough."
Yes, poor rapists! It's enough that they lose their jobs after admitting to raping children. We shouldn't further victimize them with verdicts that would actually reflect the severity of their crimes! Making criminals serve time for their felonies is just not fair, SAID NO JUDGE EVER.
Why is it just in the case of rape that the perpetrator gets more empathy than the victim? More importantly, why do we feel bad for rapists? Why don't we hold them accountable for their actions like we do with other criminals? A teenage girl has been abused and has died here. Why doesn't she matter?
This judge is not the first to empathize with rapists. Our society does it all the time. Whether it's in the way the media tells stories about rape or in the way we talk about consent. It's everywhere, but it becomes that much palpable (and scary) when it pops up in our justice system.
Perhaps someone needs to remind Judge G. Todd Baughe that under the law, children under the age of 16 cannot consent to sex. Perhaps someone needs to remind him that women never ask for rape. Perhaps someone needs to remind the judge of a concept called rape culture and that he's not only a product of it, he's perpetuating it.
The young girl's family was seeking a 20-year sentence so naturally, while the judge read the verdict, Morales' mother yelled "You people suck!" as she exited the courtroom in fumes. Later, she issued a statement saying that she had lost all faith in the justice system. "I guess somehow it makes a rape more acceptable if you blame the victim, even if she was only 14," she said.
"As I looked on in disbelief, Judge Baugh stated that our teenage daughter was as much in control of the situation as her teacher was," Hanlon said. "She wasn't even old enough to get a driver’s license. But Judge Baugh, who never met our daughter, justified the paltry sentence saying she was older than her chronological age," the mother said in her statement.
The judge's comments have predictably sparked major outrage in the Billings community. A demonstration is scheduled for Thursday at 12:15 at the Veterans Memorial Park in downtown Billings. The organizer of the march, Sheena Rice told the Billings Gazette that the judge's decision reflected a broader culture that blames victims of sexual assault.
"What angered me is that the judge said the victim was older than her chronological age,” Rice said. "I don’t care if she wore makeup. I don't care if she dressed provocatively. She was a 14-year-old and he was in a position of power."
The judge who's responsible for this horrifying verdict also happens to be up for re-election and so far he's running against an empty seat. If he's re-elected, he'll be running the show for another six years. I don't know about you, but the idea of him presiding over other court proceedings literally sends chills down my spine.
Share this story with your friends and sign Jaclyn Munson's change.org petition asking Judge Baugh to resign to make sure he never gets to let another rapist walk free.
You can also contact his office and complain. Take action!
Hon. G. Todd Baugh 217 N. 27th Street, Rm. 601 P.O. Box 35042 Billings, MT 59107. 406-256-2922; 406-256-2970 fax.
“V12 Laraki” by artist Eric van Hove is a non-working replica of a Mercedes V12 engine in which every part was handcrafted by Moroccan artisans. The engine’s 465 components, from the cylinders to fan belts, were replicated in 53 traditional materials like tin, goatskin, and terra cotta. For more photos of the sculpture, see van Hove’s Facebook photostream.
On the most recent episode of Breaking Bad, Walter White confirmed he’d finally lost touch with all vestige of his humanity by coldly refusing an order of table-side guacamole, soullessly turning his back on the appetizer without a second thought as to how it might affect his family. And yet, while Breaking Bad has proven to be a negative influence on its audience, inspiring copycat drug dealers to murderers, in this case it’s having the opposite effect. Garduno’s, the real-life Mexican restaurant seen at that tense family dinner, has noticed an uptick in sales of table-side guacamole since the episode aired, with its general manager Warren Gaustad reporting a “surge” from 30 percent of customers ordering it to 35 percent.
Leaving aside for the moment that “5 percent” is hardly a “surge,” it’s still enough to be indicative of Breaking Bad’s incredible power of suggestion ...
The Xbox One's ability to listen to your sultry, sensuous voice and translate those mouth noises into a command to watch New Girl on Netflix will only function in five markets at launch. Specifically, those markets are the United States, Canada, United Kingdom, France and Germany. This means that Xbox Ones sold in Australia, Austria, Brazil, Ireland, Italy, Mexico, Spain and New Zealand will be without this functionality on launch.
The news was mentioned at the very bottom of this lengthy Xbox One overview on Xbox.com. No further information was given beyond the fact that "Xbox voice commands will not be available in all markets on the product release date," so exactly when voice commands will make it to the remaining launch markets is anyone's guess. Earlier this month, Microsoft scaled the Xbox One's launch from 21 to 13 territories, with later reports citing Kinect localization as the main reason for this delay.
redkemper writes with this news from BGR.com (based on a report at Hacker News), excerpting: "Android might be targeted by hackers and malware far more often than Apple's iOS platform, but that doesn't mean devices like the iPhone and iPad are immune to threats. A post on a Russian website draws attention to a fairly serious vulnerability that allows nefarious users to remotely crash apps on iOS 6, or even render them unusable. The vulnerability is seemingly due to a bug in Apple's CoreText font rendering framework, and OS X Mountain Lion is affected as well."
There’s only one problem worse than too much work: not enough. And Frank Cho is trying to juggle an overflowing work schedule while letting off a little steam on his artblog. Cho, who’s drawing Marvel’s new event X-Men: Battle of the Atom, describes himself as at a “crossroads” in his career. He’s been Marvel-exclusive since [...]
The live-action, Americanized Akira movie was cancelled, then resurrected from the dead. Unable to be killed, the monster lives on with mass collections of rejected concept art and storyboards in its wake. This latest batch of unconfirmed concept art shows how Hollywood envisioned the gaggle of telekinetic forever children, The Espers.
Why didn’t my gramma and I ever make a fucking space quilt? I should make one in her honor. Definitely going to do this when I unpack the sewing machine.
San Francisco freelance artist Scott Petterson has custom created a realistic series of 12″ action figures based on characters from the 1982 sci-fi thriller film Blade Runner. Scott says that he works in wax when he sculpts to get such incredible details. He plans on making more characters from the film, such as: Dr. Eldon Tyrell and Gaff. Unpainted head sculptures of some of Scott’s Blade Runner characters are available to purchase online from his art blog.
“The finished heads are made out of resin — the kind I use is a clear, translucent color, so I cast it in a light color and then build onto that with different flesh tones. With all of them I use airbrush and there’s a lot of blending, a lot of thin, thin layers — I think on mass-produced figures all the paint is opaque and nothing is done with layers so it’s not as realistic.”
Pettersen takes two to three months to produce one of his reproductions. “The hardest part is getting the sculpt right — I think it looks right and then I come back and think it’s not even close and I come back to it.” He even created “end of the movie” versions of Deckard and Roy Batty, with the characters covered with battle wounds and sweat — a combination of super glue and varnish.
UPDATED. Wow. A lot of folks were angry with me about today's comic. I really thought that this cartoon was funny. I thought the girl came of like she thought that the whole "fake nerd girl" thing was stupid. She wasn't worried about what people called her, she likes comics and if you can't get with that then that's on you. I thought we were done with "fake nerd girl" and that we all agreed it was a stupid term coined by the simple-minded to exclude others. It is and I thought that the girl in today's comic came off like she was over it and that her wording was really funny. But I see that didn't come across and I blew it.
Look, Our Valued Customers was never meant to upset or offend anyone. I'm not the kind of person who looks to start fights or hurt anyone's feelings and I certainly don't want my comic to be thought of as a tool to do so. I work really hard on Our Valued Customers and I am incredibly grateful for every single fan I'm lucky enough to have so it is not and has never been my intention to offend or alienate anyone.
I've done over 1000 of these comics and face it, they're not all gold. Sometimes I don't do a great job bringing the humor across but I'm trying and if one of these comics doesn't really seem right, you've got to trust me that after all these years I'm not trying to give any of you guys the finger. I'm really sorry that I bummed you out with todays comic, it was never my intention to do so. I work very hard to make you guys laugh with Our Valued Customers everyday and please trust me when I say that I would never knowingly try to burn any of you.
Your ol' pal, MRTIM.
(Also, thanks for all the emails, personal messages and comments calling me (to name a few), "dickless, coward, faggot, mother fucker, pussy, bitch ass, fuck-tard, hate monger, conservative, asshole and shit head. Also thanks for the threats of physical violence and hopes that some kicks my "hate filled ass.")
'The fact of Reddit and other sites like it is value-neutral. But as a practical matter, I suspect the fact of Reddit-like sites makes it easier for aggregate troll action.
(We could have an entirely different discussion about how Reddit embodies the Walmart-ization of online communities — migrating communities which used to exist disconnectively online under a single roof — and what that’s meant for the dynamics of online discourse, but it’s a big topic and I don’t want to get distracted. Nevertheless, put a pin in that concept. It’s worth thinking about.)'
'With regards to a personal blog, before anything else, it is a place for the blog’s proprietor(s) to speak their mind. It does not automatically follow, blogging software defaults aside, that anyone else should have that same privilege in that space. Everyone is free to speak their own mind online — in their own online space. When they are in your space, you have the right to say whether you want them to speak, or indeed to have anyone else speak.
Bear in mind there are a lot of people out there who like to claim censorship or whatever if they can’t comment exactly how they want on a personal or privately-owned site. But you can ignore them because they are either ignorant on how free speech works, or they are intentionally pretending not to know how it works in order to pressure you to allow them to bother you in your own space.
Either way, screw ‘em. You don’t have to give them a platform.'
Because I’ve been thinking about this topic a lot recently, but it’s not resolved itself into a coherent narrative. So to hell with the narrative, let me just toss out some thoughts I’ve been having on the subject, in no particular order.
1. Comments and comment threads have been problematic roughly as long as the ability to comment online has existed; the phrase “Oh God don’t read the comments” didn’t just come out of nowhere. That said, from an anecdotal point of view things seem to be a bit worse these days; the trolls and assholes, who were previously free agents, appear to have organized themselves and picked targets.
Someone with more time on their hands than I have (or who has a need for a thesis project) can examine the root causes for this, but if I were going to guess, I would suspect that sites like Reddit (which not are not only link aggregators but allow development of very specialized communities) have made it easier for trolls and assholes to congregate and co-ordinate.
This isn’t meant to be a blind slap at Reddit and sites of its kind — the same format also makes it easy for people who aren’t assholes to congregate and co-ordinate, often to very good effect. There’s good with the bad. The fact of Reddit and other sites like it is value-neutral. But as a practical matter, I suspect the fact of Reddit-like sites makes it easier for aggregate troll action.
(We could have an entirely different discussion about how Reddit embodies the Walmart-ization of online communities — migrating communities which used to exist disconnectively online under a single roof — and what that’s meant for the dynamics of online discourse, but it’s a big topic and I don’t want to get distracted. Nevertheless, put a pin in that concept. It’s worth thinking about.)
2. Comments can be a way to build community and increase stickiness for a site, but I think that only works to a degree. If your comments are unmoderated and toxic (or moderated poorly and toxic because of it), people will avoid your site because it makes them feel unclean to drag their eyeballs over that sort of crap; people will avoid commenting there to avoid associating with creeps. It’s a variation of Gresham’s Law, as it applies to sites and commenting.
I also suspect at this point many sites need comments less than they did before, because there are so many other ways for people to air their opinions, Twitter, Facebook and Reddit being the best examples of this. If you want your comments seen by people you care about — and most people do — then you’re going to comment where you know your community already is. This migration of personal observation to social media doubly leaves the comment threads of many individual sites the realm of toxic commenters who either want to troll or want to attach their soapbox to a high-status site without regard to making actual conversation in the comments.
If a site has comments only as a means to an end — i.e., making the site “sticky” so that eyeballs pass over ads — then whose eyeballs they are may not matter to the site. Creeps are creeps, but their eyeballs count for CPM as well as anyone else’s. But inasmuch as I believe horrible comment sections have a high potential to drive out readers/viewers, I do wonder if in the long run these comment sections are penny wise and pound foolish.
3. With the above said, you know what I think would happen to the traffic of, say, the New York Times or CNN sites if comments were generally disabled? Not a damn thing. People don’t go to news sites for community, they go there to read the news. The people who do comment there, I suspect, don’t feel like they belong to a “CNN community,” they’re just the people that the British press call the “green ink brigade” — cranks who want a platform.
From a logistical point of view, to the extent that any news site is obliged to have moderators for the comment sections, it would probably be cheaper and easier to make this new era green pixel brigade submit their letters to the editor the way they did in the old days, and then have some poor bastard pick the ones worth airing on the site, rather than making several poor bastards crawl through the already-published comments of a bunch of cranks to make sure they’re not egregiously racist, sexist, homophobic or whatever. Basically, recreating a letters page for a new era, for news sites, wouldn’t make the news sites worse, and might even make them better.
4. Barring that, sites with commenters might considering doing what I see Boing Boing doing now, which I think is actually very smart, at least in terms of readability: putting the comments into their own special place (Boing Boing goes old school and calls theirs a BBS), a click away from the originating entries.
This is smart because, one, it means that if all you’re there for is the article, that’s all you have to see; two, conversely, it deprives the cranks and trolls their immediate goal of using Boing Boing’s high traffic for shock value. As a result, both Boing Boing’s main site and the comment threads have a much better chance of not being smeared with crap (and, Boing Boing has another place to put in advertising if they want, which it does not appear they do to date).
5. In a general sense, though, I think it’s well past time for sites (and personal blogs) to seriously think about whether they need to have comment threads at all. What is the benefit? What is the expense? Blogs have comments because other blogs have comments, and the blog software allows comments to happen, and I suspect everyone just defaults to having comments on.
Comments can be a good and useful thing, but if the end result of having them open is that the person running the blog is drained and enervated by them (and by having to deal with them), then that person maybe should not have comments on. If the end result of having comments on a blog is that the site is over run with trolls and assholes, some of whom are systematically attempting to silence the blog’s owner, then that site maybe should not have comments on. If having comments makes a desired audience avoid a site or blog because they don’t want to have to deal with trolls and assholes, that site maybe should not have comments on.
6. With regards to a personal blog, before anything else, it is a place for the blog’s proprietor(s) to speak their mind. It does not automatically follow, blogging software defaults aside, that anyone else should have that same privilege in that space. Everyone is free to speak their own mind online — in their own online space. When they are in your space, you have the right to say whether you want them to speak, or indeed to have anyone else speak.
Bear in mind there are a lot of people out there who like to claim censorship or whatever if they can’t comment exactly how they want on a personal or privately-owned site. But you can ignore them because they are either ignorant on how free speech works, or they are intentionally pretending not to know how it works in order to pressure you to allow them to bother you in your own space.
7. Here on my own site I am giving some thought to how I manage comments, primarily for troll/asshole mitigation. I already actively monitor and moderate my site, of course, but there are only so many hours of the day and I have other things I need to do (like generate pay copy). So I’m thinking of ways to keep things manageable while still keeping comments and handling all my other responsibilities.
One thing I’ve begun doing is really rather simple: With contentious threads that will sprout trolls if left untended, I now off comments when I go to sleep. This means when I wake up in the morning I don’t have to deal with a bunch of troll spoor, or responses by non-troll commenters to said troll spoor. This has been a surprisingly useful tool, since in some cases it was clear to me some of these obnoxious commenters were timing their commenting so it would go up when I wasn’t around. The flip side is that it temporarily locks out non-trollish commenters, but I suspect some of them who really want to talk about the piece in the comment thread will check in later, i.e., they are reasonable people and reasonable people react reasonably.
Another thing I think I’m going to start doing more of is put a timer on threads with contentious subjects. For example, with my “Feminist” post of the other day, I decided to turn off the comments after two days. The reasons for this: One, most comments for any entry here tend to come in the first couple of days; two, after the few 400 comments or so threads here tend to repeat itself and/or devolve into a few people arguing past each other; three, because these days I find my tolerance for monitoring a contentious thread at the expense of other work I have running out at the two-day mark, and, brothers and sisters, that is a sign.
I don’t see that I will ever pull general commenting from Whatever. There is an actual community here, which I cherish, and I like the fact this is one of the places online where actual conversation happens in the comment threads. But again I am mindful of the cost, in time and opportunity, that it requires from me to keep commenting open and functioning. It’s something I keep checking back on.
"He’s got pain," Whedon said. "And the way that manifests is not going to be standard robot stuff. So we’ll take away some of those powers because at some point everybody becomes magic, and I already have someone [Scarlet Witch] who’s a witch."
Marvel has announced that James Spader has been cast in Joss Whedon's "The Avengers: Age of Ultron" as the film's antagonist, the villainous robot, Ultron.
"All Things D is reporting that Barra was dating another Google employee who is now romantically involved with (still married but now separated) Google co-founder Sergey Brin."
Hugo Barra was the guy in charge of the day to day Android operations at Google. But suddenly he’s leaving for Xiaomi, popularly known as the “Apple of China,” which has grown astronomically into a major manufacturer of Android-based smartphones that is now worth more than Lenovo, the world’s largest PC maker.
Xiaomi no doubt made Barra a handsome offer and he’s probably jumping ship because executives at hard-charging companies like Google tend to be the kind of people who seek out ambitious new challenges. But coincidentally—or not—All Things D is reporting that Barra was dating another Google employee who is now romantically involved with (still married but now separated) Google co-founder Sergey Brin. According to a report by Valleywag, Barra’s ex is the marketing manager for Google Glass, and the inventor of the voice command “OK Glass,” which activates the soon-to-launch wearable computing device. For what it’s worth, sources told All Things D that Barra’s resignation “came before a recent thorny personal situation related to the end of a romantic relationship he had with another Googler.”
Barra’s intimate knowledge of Google’s long-term strategy for Android along with its supplier relationships, strategic partnerships, etc. will no doubt be enormously valuable to Xiaomi, which is locked in a titanic battle against Samsung, HTC, Sony, ZTE, Huawei and countless other makers of Android phones.
The dominance of Android in the global smartphone market has not always been a positive for Google, which gives the software away for free. Google does not make a dime from Xiaomi or most other mainland Chinese-made Android phones, since they do not carry the Google Play store and use search engines other than Google’s.
So while Google has put the gloss on Barra’s leaving, saying that the company is glad he’s staying in the “Android ecosystem,” it’s hard to see his departure as a positive—especially since the details of Sergey Brin’s love life are involved.
"I am pretty sure everybody here knows what YouTube is: a cat-video discovery engine"
" I do wish someone closed up the kerning on both sides of the "T" and on the "Y" before Maru uses them as tunnels to jump through"
Flat as a Cat's Whiskers
I am pretty sure everybody here knows what YouTube is: a cat-video discovery engine founded in 2005 by three former employees of PayPal and purchased for 1.65 billion cats dollars by Google. Some other facts that would make Grumpy cat smile: More than 1 billion unique visits a month, over 6 billion hours of video watched each month, and 100 hours of video are uploaded every minute. Yet with all those people paying attention, YouTube hasn't formally acknowledged a new logo that they have introduced on their Facebook page (76 million likes) and their Twitter page (32 million followers) but not on their main website. I rarely post a logo change without official confirmation but I am thinking that this is a full-on change in the making.
Update Aug. 30: The Verge received confirmation from YouTube that it is NOT changing its logo. "Our main logo is a core part of YouTube and is not going away. We are increasingly using our play button for apps and icons." So, instead of going with a single, nicer logo they are just going to create confusion. That makes sense.
Logo detail.App icon.Pattern on Twitter page.
I've never been a fan of the YouTube logo. It's fine and much less annoying than most of the start-ups that went on to dominate the internet (i.e., PayPal, eBay, Google, etc.) so I have no qualms in seeing it go away. In exchange, they are establishing their big play button inside its own recognizable shape as the main identifier for YouTube, which is a perfect strategy since every time you watch a YouTube video it's the first thing you see. It's similar to Twitter going with the blue bird.
The minimal shading inside the play button might feel familiar to those who went through the Google Visual Assets Guidelines I posted in June that showcase Google's commitment to visual simplicity and sophistication — this new YouTube logo and the pattern fall exactly within this aesthetic. It's what a lot of people are calling the "Flat" trend — I call it the "Let's Drop the Bullshit Volumizing and Do a Good Logo" trend, but I guess it's just a matter of semantics — and it feels nice to have more and more visual simplicity on the web. The typography is unassuming and appropriately playing a supporting role. I do wish someone closed up the kerning on both sides of the "T" and on the "Y" before Maru uses them as tunnels to jump through but it's a perfectly acceptable wordmark. Overall, Google and YouTube seem to be going in the right direction and I'll take this new logo over the old one any day of the week.
curtwoodward writes "Uber has just raised a monster investment round that valued the company at some $3.5 billion. And it looks like some of that cash will have to be earmarked for more legal expenses. The startup, which offers an easy-to-use mobile app for hailing "black car" sedans and other rides, is being sued in federal court over allegations that it's illegally skimming the tips paid to drivers. The lawsuit also claims that Uber is misclassifying its drivers as contractors, rather than employees. The upshot: If the federal judge certifies this as a national class action, Uber could be facing millions of dollars in potential damages. Oh, and the lawyer behind it? She's made a career out of suing companies for exactly these kind of violations."
Okkervil River’s Will Sheff grew up playing games like Maniac Mansion and King’s Quest, and as part of the release of his band’s new album “The Silver Gymnasium,” he’s teamed up with Eyes And Ears’ Benjamin Miles to build his own point-and-click adventure. The game features basic but beautiful 8-bit graphics, a chiptunes soundtrack composed by Miles based on music from the album, and can be played in any desktop browser.
It’s an episodic adventure, with the first episode out today and new ones planned for every two weeks hence. After playing through the first episode, I got on the phone with Sheff to discuss how he came up with the idea of creating a game tied to the album, and what the process was like (full audio interview embedded below).
“I always wanted to do a video game, I’m a big fan of games and grew up playing them,” he explained. “I still enjoy playing the, and I really enjoy the ability they have to sort of play with people’s imaginations and ignite people’s imaginations and to kind of put people in a dreamlike mindspace. I never knew how to actually be able to do one [...] but with this particular record since it’s very much focused on nostalgia from my childhood in the 80s and has a sort of storybook quality to it, it felt like the perfect time to try to do a game.”
Sheff said he then reached out to Eyes And Ears and connected with Miles, who had himself been thinking about making something similar to the 80s-inspired adventure title Sheff was envisioning. Miles had been considering taking a break from his day job to build that himself, but the timing was perfect and the two made a creative “love connection,” Sheff says, and have been going back and forth with the creative process around the story, graphic designs and game mechanics ever since.
The use of retro graphics and sound is a creative catalyst, Sheff says, in addition to being thematically relevant to the album’s 80s childhood inspiration. While the plot of the game isn’t tied directly to the album’s progression or anything quite so conceptual, the use of 8-bit graphics and chiptunes itself helps engender a strong creative bond between the game and the record.
“Miles would shoot me drawings and characters and the locations and we would kind of spend a long time talking about exactly what level of detail was going to be in there,” Shef said. “Because it was kind of that, ‘there shouldn’t be too little, and there shouldn’t be too much,’ and [we wanted to] find that aesthetic sweet spot.”
The choice of what is and isn’t included in the graphic depiction of characters, objects and settings is meant to help evoke a sense of somewhat eerie familiarity with an environment that’s nonetheless novel to a player. Likewise, simple, upbeat “adventure” type chiptunes compliment more somber, complex ones recorded with different tools to weave nostalgia for old-school games with a more otherworldly feeling. Hyper-realistic recorded sound effects also add an element of intentional discomfort.
For a game that’s really relatively quick, a single episode of a longer work, and essentially a promotion for an upcoming album, The Silver Gymnasium has a surprising level of depth, and definitely hits a nostalgic note for kids of the 80s. Sheff also has plenty more in terms of interesting thoughts about video games and how they affect our moods and emotions, so be sure to listen to the interview below in full to glean more.
There's a long line of strangely-named knockoffs of the margarine called I Can't Believe It's Not Butter. This picture was headlined "Saddest name for a butter substitute." The top comment had an even better joke:
The title of the Lifetime Original Movie chronicalling Paula Deen's fall from grace.
Of course, the puns fly thick and fast in the reddit thread. Link
site:lib.uiowa.edu/spec-coll [keyword] is a great method for searching our finding aids.
Dash? Really? It’s a minus symbol. As in subtracting that word from the search.
The same symbol is used for minus and dash/hyphen - the info graphics isn’t specifically incorrect - but I think I can safely say you’re indulging in a smidge of pedantry here.
The Xbox One's ability to listen to your sultry, sensuous voice and translate those mouth noises into a command to watch New Girl on Netflix will only function in five markets at launch. Specifically, those markets are the United States, Canada, United Kingdom, France and Germany. This means that Xbox Ones sold in Australia, Austria, Brazil, Ireland, Italy, Mexico, Spain and New Zealand will be without this functionality on launch.
Xbox One voice commands available in 5 markets at launch originally appeared on Joystiq on Thu, 29 Aug 2013 13:45:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
UPDATED. Wow. A lot of folks were angry with me about today's comic. I really thought that this cartoon was funny. I thought the girl came of like she thought that the whole "fake nerd girl" thing was stupid. She wasn't worried about what people called her, she likes comics and if you can't get with that then that's on you. I thought we were done with "fake nerd girl" and that we all agreed it was a stupid term coined by the simple-minded to exclude others. It is and I thought that the girl in today's comic came off like she was over it and that her wording was really funny. But I see that didn't come across and I blew it. 
