firehose

ESPN's streaming service, WatchESPN, hit a record concurrent viewership of 1.7 million people yesterday during the second half of the USA's World Cup game against Germany. The previous record was set by Super Bowl XLVIII, which hit a peak concurrent viewership of 1.1 million on Fox's streaming service, Fox Sports Go, earlier this year.

The number of people using WatchESPN, either through app or browser, was so great that some users were unable to log on to the service until minutes into the game. In comparison to the Super Bowl numbers, WatchESPN's concurrent viewership suggests a huge upswing in US interest in its men's national soccer team — but there are some caveats.

The previous USA match was one of ESPN's most-watched programs of all time

The 1.7 million figure quoted includes all users of WatchESPN at the time. Viewers could have been watching the Portugal versus Ghana game that was being played at the same time as the USA versus Germany match, or watching another sport entirely through the service. Pete Vlastelica, head of Fox Sports' digital division, also pointed out that the Super Bowl — the first "big" event to be streamed on Fox Sports Go — was not available to watch on mobile devices, cutting down on the number of potential viewers.

The record number shows an increasing American acceptance of both soccer and streaming services, but when it comes to streaming viewers, traditional sports are lagging far behind e-sports. Riot Games' League of Legends LCS finals last year were seen by 32 million people, 8.5 million of whom were watching at the same time. So too does ESPN's streaming total pale in comparison to the number of viewers the channel pulls in through its traditional TV broadcast. The match between Portugal and the USA that aired last Sunday was watched by 18.2 million people, making it the channel's most-watched program ever outside of NFL and college football broadcasts. The TV broadcast of Super Bowl XLVIII was watched by an average of 111.5 million people.

“I am not your Manic Pixie Bookworm. My pastime is not your sexual preference. If I’m sexy when I read, it’s no more sexy than when I eat or breathe or fart or do any of those other things that mark me out as human. Now can we please shut up about how hot it is for a girl to like books, because I’m trying to finish this chapter.”

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I Am Not Your Manic Pixie Bookworm

my other favorite bit:

I’m a 31 year old woman with an English Lit degree, of course I read. I don’t need a prize to congratulate me for doing something I learned when I was four.

In the summer of 1989, primed by “Kiss” and “Alphabet St.” and “Sign ‘O’ the Times” to expect brilliance from the first taste of new Prince music, I raced out to buy “Batdance,” the first single to be released from his soundtrack to Tim Burton’s Batman. It seemed like a great idea at the time.

I remember my feeling of dazed disappointment the first time I heard “Batdance” lurch to an end. “Batdance” isn’t even a song, as such, but a cluster of unrelated chunks of underdone rhythm tracks, ineptly pasted together with chopped-up samples of film dialogue, a couple of lines flown in from other songs, Prince singing the hook from Neal Hefti’s ’60s Batman theme, and (in its album mix) a very aggressive guitar solo that has almost nothing to do with what’s going on around it. Prince and Batman together? How could that not be awesome? What just went wrong here?

Batman was the most anticipated movie of 1989, and Prince had spent the decade making a string of albums that were drop-dead classic at best (Purple Rain, Sign ‘O’ The Times) and fascinating overreaches at worst (Lovesexy, Around the World in a Day). He also really wanted to establish himself as a film composer — he’d been working on the Purple Rain sequel Graffiti Bridge for years. So when Burton asked Prince for two songs to go where he’d used “1999″ and “Baby I’m a Star” in the rough cut of Batman, Prince offered to record the entire soundtrack, and whipped up a bunch of material almost entirely by himself in his studio Paisley Park.

Both “Batdance” and the album went straight to the top of the charts — and then vanished from public consciousness once everyone realized what an underfed, heartless, awkward shrug of a record Prince had made. You never hear its singles on the radio any more; they were omitted from Prince’s greatest hits sets because of licensing issues, but weren’t missed. Absent the names of a huge star and a huge movie emblazoned across the front of Batman-the-album, it’s hard to imagine many people having endured it multiple times.

The problem may have been that Prince only really thrives in his own little pocket universe — coming up with musical accompaniment for somebody else’s vision is not his strong point. Burton ended up barely using Prince’s songs in the movie (parts of “Partyman” and “Trust” are audible, and that’s about it), and Batman-the-album is so far removed from the tone of Batman-the-movie that io9′s Charlie Jane Anders came up with a hilarious plot summary of the totally different film that its soundtrack suggests.

Some of the songs that ended up on Batman weren’t written for the movie at all, and the intrusive snippets of film dialogue haphazardly dropped all over the album can’t hide how out-of-place a lot of its material is. “Electric Chair,” “Scandalous” and “Vicki Waiting” all predated Prince’s involvement with the movie; the last of those had been written as “Anna Waiting,” an 18th-birthday present for his girlfriend-of-sorts Anna Fantastic (who was also supposedly the subject of “Lemon Crush”). The album’s only real keeper is “Partyman,” whose bizarre video is worth watching or a sense of Prince’s take on what he apparently thought a Batman movie could be.

Still, there’s a handful of decent Prince material that was recorded for Batman, or released on its singles. “Dance with the Devil,” a long, unnerving song about the Joker, was cut from the album at the last minute (and has only ever appeared on bootlegs). “200 Balloons,” the source of the fast beat in “Batdance,” surfaced as a B-side; so did the deliciously funny 1986 outtake “Feel U Up” and a terrific, pervy slow jam called “I Love U In Me.”

The most ambitious piece of music that came out of Prince’s involvement with Burton’s movie is “The Scandalous Sex Suite,” the 12-inch version of “Scandalous.” It’s a late-1989 re-recording that runs almost 20 minutes, and begins with an extended, flirtatious conversation between Prince and Kim Basinger, who’d played Vicki Vale in Batman. (The rumor that circulated at the time about the sex noises in the “suite’s” final few minutes was that they involved Prince, Basinger, and a jar of honey that somehow ended up having to be cleaned off the mixing board at Paisley Park.) “The Scandalous Sex Suite” makes no pretense of belonging to Burton’s Batman; it’s Prince being his grand, freaky, sui generis self. That’s the only approach that’s ever worked for him.

Something is amiss in the original Assassin’s Creed trailer from 2006. First revealed at that year’s E3 trade show, the game presents itself as a stealth action title that revolves around stabbing people in the neck with a hidden wrist blade. But that’s not really what’s going on. Throughout the video, the screen occasionally flickers as if it’s suffering from an electronic glitch. This comes off a bizarre design decision that is totally incongruous with the first game’s 1191 setting, but that’s the point. The Assassin’s Creed games are actually one long con—fictional simulations within actual simulations—so they’re never really about what they appear to be about. The first game doesn’t take place in 1191, that’s just a virtual reality that your character is supposedly experiencing in the present day.

Every subsequent entry in the series has ...

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Bay 12 Games, Dwarf Fortress, Stonsense, Tarn Adams.