In 2013, Bjork released her heightened, futuristic album Biophiliaas an app. That album's follow-up, Vulnicura, leaked months ahead of schedule earlier this year, and Bjork already has some innovative plans for it. In a recent interview with Fast Company, the musician talked about her decision to keep Vulnicura off Spotify, her upcoming retrospective at MoMA, and the music video for her song "Stonemilker." The video, directed by Bjork's longtime collaborator Andrew Thomas Huang, will be available for Oculus Rift.
Apps are punk, Oculus Rift is not
When asked about how she chooses to pair technology and music, Bjork said, "It can’t just be working with the gadget for the sake of the gadget. But also it’s about budgets. You can do apps cheaply. Apps was kind of punk, actually. It was like starting a punk band again. Filming for Oculus Rift is not."
There's no word yet when the "Stonemilker" video will be released or what it will look like. Bjork's MoMA retrospective will open on March 8th.
They are violent and tragic. Cities and skyscrapers represent a kind of mortification of the flesh. Tolman draws cities as hierarchical, rising from the filth at their base to gleaming penthouse pinnacles in the sky. The suburbs, by comparison, are soul-crushing in a different way. Nothing happens. Throughout, his works are darkly comic—fine, touching moments rendered in fine ink lines can be found everywhere, when you look closely. In that sense, the drawings are very human.
I would imagine just having this item would make the NES game easier. This presumably rare collectible was sold on Yahoo! Auctions for 23,490 yen ($196), so somebody likes Solomon’s Key that much, at least. Via Famicom no Neta.
Arnold Rothstein was so egotistical he actually invited journalists to write about him — and he was so powerful he didn’t worry about the police reading it. He owned them.
ISIS supporters on Sunday called on jihadists around the world to kill Twitter employees because of the company’s frequent blocking of their social media accounts.
Half of all millennials don’t affiliate with either major political party. The good news for Republicans is, that leaves plenty of potential hearts and minds to win.
This is my submission for the APB - Artists Against Police Brutality book - with John Jennings and Bill Campbell. Please take the time to read about the victims in the subsequent posts.
CBR recently ran a contest to identify the 100 greatest comics writers and artists. That’s 200 slots.
Guess how many were women?
Go head.
Did you guess two? Two out of 200 slots?
Gail Simone made the writer list and Fiona Staples made the artist list.
That’s 1%.
Kelly Thompson is working with Brian Cronin of Comics Should Be Good to identify the 50 best female writer and artists. She writes
It’s not really surprising that given only 200 precious slots to fill, and with all the absolutely stunning comics creators over the years that women almost never made it into people’s ballots. Women just haven’t historically had the comics credits to their name and that’s for a variety of reasons both reasonable and less reasonable. But this post is not about examining the past and the how and why we got here, it’s about celebrating what we do have, and what we have had.
We hope this raised awareness of the great work done and being done by women in comics will be one small drop in the bucket toward eventually having a Top 100 list that includes more than just two women.
“Transgender children as young as 5 years old respond to psychological gender-association tests just as consistently as children who do not identify as trans, according to a groundbreaking study released this week by researchers at the University of Washington.
“Our results support the notion that transgender children are not confused, delayed, showing gender-atypical responding, pretending, or oppositional,” says the study being published in Psychological Science. “These results provide evidence that, early in development, transgender youths are nearly indistinguishable from cisgender children of the same gender identity.””
Winter Lodgings, by John Warner, National Geographic Your Shot, 2-26-2015.
A solitary beaver pauses at dawn on its way home from a night of chewing off tree branches, newly within reach under the weight of freshly fallen snow. Your Shot member John Warner explains that the beaver, a mate, and two kits appeared late in the fall on Montana’s Lake Elmo and hastily built a lodge before the winter freeze.
'And then there was Kate McKinnon’s stellar turn as Ruth Bader Ginsburg. McKinnon, by dint of her ability to inhabit her characters so completely, has placed herself as SNL’s most valuable player, and her Ginsburg, played the Supreme Court Justice as the strutting, trash-talking judicial ass-kicker her supporters imagine her as. McKinnon playing a character to the hilt is a thing to behold, and her repeatedly dancing under her flowing robe as she delivered lines like “I’m living an 81-year-old’s dream, I get paid to sit on a bench all day and judge people” is the sort of thing I could watch all night.'
“I’m not an actor, I’m a [movie/TV] star!”
For all her Fifty Shades Of Grey currency, Dakota Johnson made her best impression yet as the co-lead of the undeservedly short-lived sitcom Ben And Kate, where her winsome charms as a capable single mom coping with both her irresponsible brother and her perpetual personal abashment provided a showcase for her not-inconsiderable comic gifts. Having not seen her new starring vehicle (I may be allergic to movies based on nigh-illiterate erotic fanfic—the tests haven’t come back yet), I can’t speak to Johnson’s abilities therein, but, in her first hosting gig, she exhibited a winning gameness that brought some colors to the indifferent sketches she was given. In her monologue and in the inevitable Fifty Shades sketch, Johnson knowingly betrayed a distance from the movie’s hype that lifted her above the predictability. And, in the ...
Two People Shot At T.I., Jeezy, And Yo Gotti Show In Charlotte The Urban Daily Both USA Today and ABC News report two people were injured during a CIAA Tournament Weekend show featuring performances by T.I., Jeezy, Yo Gotti and others. The shots occurred at approximately 7:00 pm in a venue within the N.C. Music Factory ...
Notice anything particularly interesting about this image? When Redditor cdos93 posted it, I didn't see why, but yep, there it is. That's today's date, the starting point in 2012's XCOM: Enemy Unknown.
Apparently, yesterday, alien probes landed in some city and took a bunch of humans hostage. Then, literally overnight, a council of nations convened the XCOM project to beat back this enemy incursion. If we're proceeding along schedule, beam weapons should be developed by sometime this summer and, hell, the U.S. Navy already is working on that. Next stop: psionics.
My first casualty was an assault specialist, big ol' lumberjack of a guy from Washington state, named for a friend. The squaddie hurled himself at a chryssalid to save our lieutenant. It was hard typing up the KIA notice. Every time I went to the memorial wall I'd see his name and feel sad that my poor decisions got him killed.
So let's relive that blood-pumping intro, and then pause to remember the men and women we all lost to save this planet. Over and over again.
Crush your enemies. See them driven toward you. Hear the lamentation of the player.
There are some puns that not even I will go near. “Barbara-Ian” [official site] is henceforth to be counted among that number. Name aside, though, this glass-cannon dungeoneering experience looks like it could be a giggle if it makes it out of Greenlight.
We’ve been experiencing a glut of dungeon-crawlers of late, and in many ways Barbara-Ian is ticking a lot of the same boxes we’ve seen ticked so many times before. Procedurally generated dungeon environment? Check. Retro visual style? Check. Gelatinous cubes somehow proving threatening? Check.
Familiar foundations aside, quite a few of the ideas that developers Owlbear have stuffed into Barbara-Ian sound pretty cool. The “one hitpoint” concept outlined in that second video means that death is only ever a single mistake away, with quick restarts (a la Super Meat Boy and Gunpoint) intended to minimise frustration and get you right back into the action.
I’m also rather fond of Barbara-Ian’s visual style, which has seized the look of early 90s polygons and run with it, bellowing all the way. I like the idea of a focus on pure action, too, with skill systems and inventory management following the health bar into the barbara-bin. This all seems terribly appropriate for a game starring a mighty-thewed female barbarian whose most notable characteristic is her boundless rage.
Even the utterly ridiculous song in the first trailer up above has grown on me (admittedly, largely because of the guy who cracks up right at the end of the video).
'Christopher Cosmos to write a brand new script. ... Details of Cosmos' take were not revealed.
'Cosmos began as an assistant at Benderspink, the management-production concern involved with such movies as We're the Millers and The Incredible Burt Wonderstone, before becoming a vp. He left to pursue his passion, screenwriting, and sold his first script, a post-apocalyptic thriller titled The Fall, to QED in 2012. He is also developing an actioner titled Scouts and Raiders, which Benderspink is packaging, and is prepping to go out with his comic/movie project Langley High in the coming weeks.'
According to The Hollywood Reporter, Nu Image/Millennium’s long-delayed Red Sonja movie has a new writer, suggesting that maybe it’ll actually happen now. Red Sonja, for anyone who doesn’t read comic books about beheading people, is a series that stars a red-haired and mostly naked barbarian woman—the eponymous Red Sonja—who does the sort of things a barbarian would do. She’s mostly known for having red hair and wearing a metal bikini, though. Shockingly, she was created by two men, Roy Thomas and Barry Windsor-Smith, who worked on Marvel’s Conan The Barbarian comics in the ‘70s. An earlier Red Sonja movie came out in 1985 that starred Brigitte Nielsen as Sonja and Arnold Schwarzenegger as a guy who was clearly supposed to be Conan, and Robert Rodriguez tried to get a remake off the ground recently that would’ve starred his then-girlfriend Rose McGowan ...
Venus Williams and Svetlana Kuznetsova played a tennis match with puppy ballboys and they were very very good ballboys and should get lots of little scratches behind their ears.
This video of Venus Williams and Svetlana Kuznetsova playing a tennis match with ballpups is from January, but it's new to me. Three million people saw this and not one of you told me? What the hell, guys? (UPDATE: It appears my coworker James Dator saw this in January and didn't tell me. I'm going to fight him now.)
Here are the pros to ballpups:
-- Faster than human ballboys and ballgirls
-- Will work for treats and affection
-- Love tennis balls so so so so so so so much
-- Adorable
Here are the cons to ballpups:
-- Don't understand the rules of tennis, therefore don't have innate understanding of when to fetch balls
-- Easily distracted, might run on court at random times
-- Sometimes they grab Svetlana Kuznetsova's towel and refuse to let go
-- poop
Considering the cons, we doubt ballpups will be adopted by any actual tennis event, which is a shame. It works for minor league baseball teams! BRB, gotta go start our own tennis tournament to make this happen.
nothing sends me fleeing like "with the creator of Shadowrun ... Jordan Weisman"
Necropolis, which blends third-person combat with procedurally generated dungeons and presents it all with very stylish animation, just released the first look at its gameplay, with a series of screenshots and .gifs. Necropolis is a work of Harebrained Schemes, the studio founded by Jordan Weisman, the creator of Shadowrun, and other series.
Necropolis, according to its factsheet, places the player in command of an adventurer infiltrating a looting "a huge complex constructed by magic." Those who enter and perish end up working for this machine, either "repurposed as Automatons" or operating the machinery that changes the dungeon. The game is planned for release on Windows PC, Mac and Linux, with console versions listed as "TBD" for now.
It's something of a high concept, so these images should help piece together what Necropolis is going for.
There's plenty more on the game to be seen here, and for those who are going to be in Boston in two weeks, the game will be showcased at PAX East March 6-8.
Super Opinionated.
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