Taylor Swift

This excellent guide is full of gentle, direct scripts pulled from real situations.

Speak Up: Responding To Everyday Bigotry

Motivated by an instinct to avoid the usual suspects because as of two this morning we live in unusual times, I compiled a list of songs that protested boundaries, legislative and sexual.

1. Public Enemy – Fight the Power
2. Sam Cooke – Chain Gang
3. Bobby Fuller – I Fought the Law
4. Bronski Beat – Smalltown Boy
5. Merle Haggard – I’m a White Boy
6. Billie Holliday – Strange Fruit
7. Killer Mike – Reagan
8. David Bowie – Fantastic Voyage
9. Creedence Clearwater Revival – Don’t Look Now
10. Funkadelic – If You Don’t Like the Effect, Don’t Produce the Cause
11. Prince – Controversy
12. Nas – America
13. X-Ray Spex – The Day The World Turned to Day-Glo
14. Kendrick Lamar – King Kunta
15. Bruce Springsteen – Badlands
16. Pet Shop Boys – It Couldn’t Happen Here
17. Dead Prez – Hip Hop
18. Sonic Youth – Youth Against Fascism
19. Pulp – Common People
20. Lupe Fiasco – Words I Never Said
21. Grimes – Realiti
22. The Isley Brothers – Fight The Power (Part 1 & 2)
23. John Lennon – Working Class Hero
24. Gil Scott-Heron – Winter in America
25. Staple Singers – I’ll Take You There
26. Curtis Mayfield – (Don’t Worry) If There’s a Hell Below, We’re All Going to Go
27. Pearl Jam – World Wide Suicide
28. Sly & The Family Stone – Don’t Call Me Nigger, Whitey
29. Queen – I Want to Break Free
29. John Coltrane – Ascension
30. Sleater Kinney – Step Aside
31. Sylvester – You Make Me Feel (Mighty Real)
32. Public Image Ltd – Rise
33. Sterling Void – It’s Alright
34. Alex Anwandter – Siempre Es Viernes En Mi Corazón
35. Madonna – Into the Groove

more from Soft Object

modern animation techniques presented like a 1950s Disney short

Of all the genres that have made a resurgence as of late, rogue-likes sit atop the list of ones I’m glad to see back. Games like FTL, The Binding Of Isaac and even XCOM to an extent scratch an itch I didn't even really know I had until recently. So when SpaceHeist entered the fray touting co-op of all things I was interested to say the least.

In SpaceHeist, you and up to two friends captain a variety of ships through the cosmos whilst avoiding asteroids, enemy ships and solar flares that look more like miniature stars than anything else. It reminds me a lot of Pulsar: Lost Colony on the PC which shares a similar premise.

While you can play solo it’s really not advised, as even on the earlier levels you’ll soon find yourself overwhelmed by the amount of screens you have to jump between and the numerous problems flying (or floating) your way. There's little difference between the two and three player experience.

This course looks fine to me. What could go wrong?

The game has three ships which can be earned by completing all the missions with the previous ship or by purchasing them via an IAP. Unfortunately only one of the ship's allows three people whilst the other two are affairs strictly for dynamic duos. The fact that the three player ship is one of the ones behind the £1.80/$2.13 paywall feels a little manipulative, but the flip-side is that only one person needs to own the ship for all three of you to play. You'll notice that ships also have more stations than there are people – four on a two-person ship, six on a three person. Simply put, staying at one station for the duration of a run can be rather boring so being able to switch between all of the stations helps alleviate that.

The gameplay itself is smooth if a bit simple. Going round all the stations on the first ship we have the laser station where you drag your two beams individually onto whichever target you please and they will do damage over time. Purple lightning bolts float by from time to time, nabbing and activating them overcharges your lasers allowing them to do extra damage for a short period. Next is shield control, which rather than having you manage energy bars, or something like that, has you spawn little shields in space that deflect dangers. You can deploy three at a time and they can only deflect one thing before disappearing so you have to use them wisely.

"Did we hit something?" "Err... no."

The repair station is undoubtedly my favourite of the bunch: you select a damaged section and then have to do a quick word puzzle to repair it. None of the puzzles I’ve encountered were very challenging but it’s still an interesting way to handle that mechanic. Lastly we have the pilot station which involves you tapping out a path on the map, trying your best to avoid obstacles and such. This is easily the most lacklustre of the lot and it only really needs a quick glance every now and then to make sure you haven’t bumbled into an asteroid field.

It’s quite apparent that SpaceHeist is a low key project. The the sound effects are well done, but the door noise every time you start a game is louder than everything else for no reason and the game is utterly devoid of music. I’m aware not every game requires heart-wrenchingly beautiful soundtracks that took the composer an eon to complete but even some generic background music would help the game feel less empty and dead.

The lack of story and context are things I think I’m going to bring up ad nauseam on this site but SpaceHeist doesn’t even pretend it’s got either of those at all. I only realised the reason for the game’s name when a friend pointed out that the enemy ships you fight are likely police ships and so you’re probably robbers or thieves. There's no intro sequence going over the story and the only character is a woman in the tutorial who teaches you the basics and then rides off on her proverbial space bike, never to be seen again.

It's different, but it works.

Lastly we come to the weakness hidden within SpaceHeist’s strength - local co-op. Now I don't pretend to know a lot about net code or running servers, and I appreciate this can be a nightmare especially for less experienced devs or ones who only do it part time. But with all that being said I genuinely feel SpaceHeist would greatly benefit from proper online play. At the moment the game does allow you to play online by sharing your public IP address with friends but this systems seems a bit unruly and is also not even mentioned on the store page. As it is the only time I could see myself and some friends playing this game casually would be when we’re out and waiting for someone to arrive or when we’re on a train/bus journey which isn’t all that often in my case. I am glad to report the game does allow android and IOS uses to play together though, which is something.

At the end of the day even if you’re vehemently disagreeing with everything I’ve just said about the game the one thing I want you to take away from this review is to give the game a shot. It’s free and a miniscule download so anyone can play it. Pockethop’s rather spartan site still says they are working on SpaceHeist and I hope that means they plan on supporting it for a while as I believe with a bit of elbow grease and love this it could turn into a nice little gem.

The last Wii U console will reportedly be manufactured Friday, ending the production of the console after just 4 years. ...

Cristian Ombra is a London-based Italian model who we met on the street in Harajuku. Ombra was in Tokyo to model for Japanese designer Michiko Koshino.

Ombra is wearing a Michiko Koshino jacket and t-shirt with mesh pants and velcro sneakers. His silver rings are mostly from Tokyo Humanexperiments with one from the Fangophilia x Legiomade collection. He also has multiple tattoos and piercings as well at tattooed eyeballs.

Find Ombra on Instagram and Facebook for more pictures and information.

Click on any photo to enlarge it.

“Furtado Archipelago”… rolls off the tongue well, don’t it?

Juana Giaimo: In opposition to the magnificent style of The Spirit Indestructible which, as its title points out, aimed for vibrant songs full of energy, in “Islands of Me” Nelly Furtado is completely perplexed. “Islands of Me” is characterized by instability, shifting from bright moments — like those playful synths imitating her voice after the chorus — to the depth of herself. She advances carefully, not relying on a solid structure. It carries me back to my younger self, who thought that when high school would be over, I’d finally be free and I’d magically find happiness. Almost four years later, I am asking the same questions Nelly Furtado is asking this time. I picture her trying desperately to find new paths, not giving up because she owes it to herself — and because everything is better than to still keep on daydreaming — but sometimes being just too tired to continue trying, especially when you know that in the end there is only one thing you can find: islands of me.
[9]

Joshua Copperman: I was expecting something trend-chasing like The Veronicas’ “In My Blood,” but instead, I got something quite low-key. She sounds like she’s been paying attention to people like CRJ here, going for a slightly left-of-center pop sound, but without blatantly trying to emulate the style of other artists. Sure, the opening is a little bit unsettling, but I had no idea John Congleton produced it until the day this blurb was published. It’s bizarre that the man who produced albums for Swans and crafted that guitar sound for “Shut In” by Strand of Oaks would do something so shockingly simple.
[6]

Olivia Rafferty: The sparse, wobbly production almost seems like an intellectual parody of pop. That, combined with Furtado’s soulful delivery, makes me immediately jump to a Mozart’s Sister comparison. It’s clever, understated and weird — and by god, it grows on you.
[9]

Katie Gill: This is wonderfully weird! It’s a drum machine backing mixed with something vaguely chiptune mixed with Furtado’s detached vocals mixed with a bassline that wouldn’t surprise me if it came from Kylie Minogue. You’d think that this mess of a song wouldn’t work but weirdly, it does. It’s just a pity that Furtado’s vocals occasionally get swallowed by the electronic everything surrounding her.
[7]

Will Adams: The dark synth pulse that opens “Islands of Me” was mesmerizing, and I had fully prepared myself for a world in which Furtado went full-on hazy electro. The choppy drums and plinky major arpeggios barged in, and I awoke from my dream.
[5]

Alfred Soto: I appreciate the Jenny Lewis impersonation, the keyboard lines sound as if someone took the time to play melody lines on them, and the squelchy percussion track goes on its merry way. Too spare and eccentric to give Furtado a comeback, but I hope it attracts Shura fans.
[7]

Cassy Gress: I hate to be one of those “she changed it, now it sucks” sorts of assholes, but this is a mess. It’s Disney lyrics (“Is this the meaning of being free / When the only one on this island is me”), bad scanning (“making time FOR day DREAMin”), wobbly out-of-tune synths, sporadic distorted bass drum, and a C-Dm-Em-Dm chord progression in the chorus that reminds me of how disappointed I was when I binged on all the songs I could remember from the radio as a small kid (mid-to-late 80s) and realized how many of them were not that great. I listened to the swampy fireflies of “Turn Out the Light” so many times when I was 18 and “Maneater” still bangs. Dammit.
[1]

Because the CD-ROM version of The Manhole sold in relatively small numbers in comparison to the original floppy version, the late Russell Lieblich’s surprisingly varied original soundtrack is too seldom heard today. So, in the best tradition of multimedia computing (still a very new and sexy idea in the time about which I’m writing), feel free to listen while you read.

The Manhole

Were HyperCard “merely” the essential bridge between Ted Nelson’s Xanadu fantasy and the modern World Wide Web, it would stand as one of the most important pieces of software of the 1980s. But, improbably, HyperCard was even more than that. It’s easy to get so dazzled by its early implementation of hypertext that one loses track entirely of the other part of Bill Atkinson’s vision for the environment. True to the Macintosh, “the computer for the rest of us,” Atkinson designed HyperCard as a sort of computerized erector set for everyday users who might not care a whit about hypertext for its own sake. With HyperCard, he hoped, “a whole new body of people who have creative ideas but aren’t programmers will be able to express their ideas or expertise in certain subjects.”

He made good on that goal. An incredibly diverse group of people worked with HyperCard, a group in which traditional hackers were very much the minority. Danny Goodman, the man who became known as the world’s foremost authority on HyperCard programming, was actually a journalist whose earlier experiences with programming had been limited to a few dabblings in BASIC. In my earlier article about hypertext and HyperCard, I wrote how “a professor of music converted his entire Music Appreciation 101 course into a stack.” Well, readers, I meant that literally. He did it himself. Industry analyst and HyperCard zealot Jan Lewis:

You can do things with it [HyperCard] immediately. And you can do sexy things: graphics, animation, sound. You can do it without knowing how to program. You get immediate feedback; you can make a change and see or hear it immediately. And as you go up on the learning curve — let’s say you learn how to use HyperTalk [the bundled scripting language] — again, you can make changes easily and simply and get immediate feedback. It just feels good. It’s fun!

And yet HyperCard most definitely wasn’t a toy. People could and did make great, innovative, commercial-quality software using it. Nowhere is the power of HyperCard — a cultural as well as a technical power — illustrated more plainly than in the early careers of Rand and Robyn Miller.

Rand and Robyn had a very unusual upbringing. The first and third of the four sons of a wandering non-denominational preacher, they spent their childhoods moving wherever their father’s calling took him: from Dallas to Albuquerque, from Hawaii to Haiti to Spokane. They were a classic pairing of left brain and right brain. Rand had taken to computers from the instant he was introduced to them via a big time-shared system whilst still in junior high, and had made programming them into his career. By 1987, the year HyperCard dropped, he was to all appearances settled in life: 28 years old, married with children, living in a small town in East Texas, working for a bank as a programmer, and nurturing a love for the Apple Macintosh (he’d purchased his first Mac within days of the machine’s release back in 1984). He liked to read books on science. His brother Robyn, seven years his junior, was still trying to figure out what to do with his life. He was attending the University of Washington in somewhat desultory fashion as an alleged anthropology major, but devoted most of his energy to drawing pictures and playing the guitar. He liked to read adventure novels.

HyperCard struck Rand Miller, as it did so many, with all the force of a revelation. While he was an accomplished enough programmer to make a living at it, he wasn’t one who particularly enjoyed the detail work that went with the trade. “There are a lot of people who love digging down into the esoterics of compilers and C++, getting down and dirty with typed variables and all that stuff,” he says. “I wanted a quick return on investment. I just wanted to get things done.” HyperCard offered the chance to “get things done” dramatically faster and more easily than any programming environment he had ever seen. He became an immediate convert.

With two small girls of his own, Rand felt keenly the lack of quality children’s software for the Macintosh. He hit upon the idea of making a sort of interactive storybook using HyperCard, a very natural application for a hypertext tool. Lacking the artistic talent to make a go of the pictures, he thought of his little brother Robyn. The two men, so far apart in years and geography and living such different lives, weren’t really all that close. Nevertheless, Rand had a premonition that Robyn would be the perfect partner for his interactive storybook.

But Robyn, who had never owned a computer and had never had any interest in doing so, wasn’t immediately enticed by the idea of becoming a software developer. Getting him just to consider the idea took quite a number of letters and phone calls. At last, however, Robyn made his way down to the Macintosh his parents kept in the basement of the family home in Spokane and loaded up the copy of HyperCard his brother had sent him. There, like so many others, he was seduced by Bill Atkinson’s creation. He started playing around, just to see what he could make. What he made right away became something very different from the interactive storybook, complete with text and metaphorical pages, that Rand had envisioned. Robyn:

I started drawing this picture of a manhole — I don’t even know why. You clicked on it and the manhole cover would slide off. Then I made an animation of a vine growing out. The vine was huge, “Jack and the Beanstalk”-style. And then I didn’t want to turn the page. I wanted to be able to navigate up the vine, or go down into the manhole. I started creating a navigable world by using the very simple tools [of HyperCard]. I created this place.  I improvised my way through this world, creating one thing after another. Pretty soon I was creating little canals, and a forest with stars. I was inventing it as I went. And that’s how the world was born.

For his part, Rand had no problem accepting the change in approach:

Immediately you are enticed to explore instead of turning the page. Nobody sees a hole in the ground leading downward and a vine growing upward and in the distance a fire hydrant that says, “Touch me,” and wants to turn the page. You want to see what those things are. Instead of drawing the next page [when the player clicked a hotspot], he [Robyn] drew a picture that was closer — down in the manhole or above on the vine. It was kind of a stream of consciousness, but it became a place instead of a book. He started sending me these images, and I started connecting them, trying to make them work, make them interactive.

In this fashion, they built the world of The Manhole together: Robyn pulling its elements from the flotsam and jetsam of his consciousness and drawing them on the screen, Rand binding it all together into a contiguous place, and adding sound effects and voice snippets here and there. If they had tried to make a real game of the thing, with puzzles and goals, such a non-designed approach to design would likely have gone badly wrong in a hurry.

Luckily, puzzles and goals were never the point of The Manhole. It was intended always as just an endlessly interesting space to explore. As such, it would prove capable of captivating children and the proverbial young at heart for hours, full as it was of secrets and Easter eggs hidden in the craziest of places. One can play with The Manhole on and off for literally years, and still continue to stumble upon the occasional new thing. Interactions are often unexpected, and unexpectedly delightful. Hop in a rowboat to take a little ride and you might emerge in a rabbit’s teacup. Start watching a dragon’s television — Why does a dragon have a television? Who knows! — and you can teleport yourself into the image shown on the screen to emerge at the top of the world. Search long enough, and you might just discover a working piano you can actually play. The spirit of the thing is perhaps best conveyed by the five books you find inside the friendly rabbit’s home: Alice in Wonderland; The Wind in the Willows; The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe; Winnie the Pooh; and Metaphors of Intercultural Philosophy (“This book isn’t about anything!”). Like all of those books excepting, presumably, the last, The Manhole is pretty wonderful, a perfect blend of sweet cuteness and tart whimsy.

With no contacts whatsoever within the Macintosh software industry, the brothers decided to publish The Manhole themselves via a tiny advertisement in the back of Macworld magazine, taken out under the auspices of Prolog, a consulting company Rand had founded as a moonlighting venture some time before. They rented a tiny booth to show The Manhole publicly for the first time at the Hyper Expo in San Francisco in June of 1988. (Yes, HyperCard mania had gotten so intense that there were entire trade shows dedicated just to it.) There they were delighted to receive a visit from none other than HyperCard’s creator Bill Atkinson, with his daughter Laura in tow; not yet five years old, she had no trouble navigating through their little world. Incredibly, Robyn had never even heard the word “hypertext” prior to the show, had no idea about the decades of theory that underpinned the program he had used, savant-like, to create The Manhole. When he met a band of Ted Nelson’s disgruntled Xanadu disciples on the show floor, come to crash the HyperCard party, he had no idea what they were on about.

But the brothers’ most important Hyper Expo encounter was a meeting with Richard Lehrberg, Vice President for Product Development at Mediagenic,¹ who took a copy of The Manhole away with him for evaluation. Lehrberg showed it to William Volk, whom he had just hired away from the small Macintosh and Amiga publisher Aegis to become Mediagenic’s head of technology; he described it to Volk unenthusiastically as “this little HyperCard thing” done by “two guys in Texas.” Volk was much more impressed. He was immediately intrigued by one aspect of The Manhole in particular: the way that it used no buttons or conventional user-interface elements at all. Instead, the pictures themselves were the interface; you could just click where you would and see what happened. It was perhaps a product of Robyn Miller’s sheer naivetee as much anything else; seasoned computer people, so used to conventional interface paradigms, just didn’t think like that. But regardless of where it came from, Volk thought it was genius, a breaking down of a wall that had heretofore always separated the user from the virtual world. Volk:

The Miller brothers had come up with what I call the invisible interface. They had gotten rid of the idea of navigation buttons, which was what everyone was doing: go forward, go backward, turn right, turn left. They had made the scenes themselves the interface. You’re looking at a fire hydrant. You click on the fire hydrant; the fire hydrant sprays water. You click on the fire hydrant again; you zoom in to the fire hydrant, and there’s a little door on the fire hydrant. That was completely new.

Of course, other games did have you clicking “into” their world to make things happen; the point-and-click adventure genre was evolving rapidly during this period to replace the older parser-driven adventure games. But even games like Déjà Vu and Maniac Mansion, brilliantly innovative though they were, still surrounded their windows into their worlds with a clutter of “verb” buttons, legacies of the genre’s parser-driven roots. The Manhole, however, presented the player with nothing but its world. What with its defiantly non-Euclidean — not to say nonsensical — representation of space and its lack of goals and puzzles, The Manhole wasn’t a conventional adventure game by any stretch. Nevertheless, it pointed the way to what the genre would become, not least in the later works of the Miller brothers themselves.

Much of Volk’s working life for the next two years would be spent on The Manhole, by the end of which period he would quite possibly be more familiar with its many nooks and crannies than its own creators were. He became The Manhole‘s champion inside Mediagenic, convincing his colleagues to publish it, thereby bringing it to a far wider audience than the Miller brothers could ever have reached on their own. Released by Mediagenic under their Activision imprint, it became a hit by the modest standards of the Macintosh consumer-software market. Macworld magazine named The Manhole the winner of their “Wild Card” category in a feature article on the best HyperCard stacks, while the Software Publishers Association gave it an “Excellence in Software” award for “Best New Use of a Computer.”

Well aware that The Manhole was collecting a certain chic cachet to itself, Mediagenic/Activision didn’t hesitate to play that angle up in their advertising.

Had that been left to be that, The Manhole would remain historically interesting as both a delightful little curiosity of its era and as the starting point of the hugely significant game-development careers of the Miller brothers. Yet there’s more to the story.

William Volk, frustrated with the endless delays of CD-I and the state of paralysis the entire industry was in when it came to the idea of publishing entertainment software on CD, had been looking for some time for a way to break the logjam. It was Stewart Alsop, an influential tech journalist, who first suggested to Volk that the answer to his dilemma was already part of Mediagenic’s catalog — that The Manhole would be perfect for CD-ROM. Volk was just the person to see such a project through, having already experimented extensively with CD-ROM and CD-I  as part of Aegis as well as Mediagenic. With the permission of the Miller brothers, he recruited Russell Lieblich, Mediagenic’s longstanding guru in all things music- and sound-related, to compose and perform a soundtrack for The Manhole which would play from the CD as the player explored.

An important difference separates the way the music worked in the CD-ROM version of The Manhole from way it worked in virtually all computer games to appear before it. The occasional brief digitized snippet aside, music in computer games had always been generated on the computer, whether by sound chips like the Commodore 64’s famous SID or entire sound boards like the top-of-its-class Roland MT-32 (we shall endeavor to forget the horrid beeps and squawks that issued from the IBM PC and Apple II’s native sound hardware). But The Manhole‘s music, while having been originally generated entirely or almost entirely on computers in Lieblich’s studio, was then recorded onto CD for digital playback, just like a song on a music CD. This method, made possible only by evolving computer sound hardware and, most importantly, by the huge storage capacity of a CD-ROM, would in the years to come slowly become simply the way that computer-game music was done. Today many big-budget titles hire entire orchestras to record soundtracks as elaborate and ambitious as the ones found in big Hollywood feature films, whilst also including digitized recordings of voices, squealing tires, explosions, and all the inevitable rest. In fact, surprisingly little of the sound present in most modern games is synthesized sound, a situation that has long since relegated elaborate setups like the Roland MT-32 to the status of white elephants; just pipe your digitized recording through a digital-to-analog converter and be done with it already.

As the very first title to go all digitized all the time, The Manhole didn’t have a particularly easy time of it; getting the music to play without breaking up or stuttering as the player explored presented a huge challenge on the Macintosh, a machine whose minimalist design burdened the CPU with all of the work of sound generation. However, Volk and his colleagues got it going at last. Published in the spring of 1989, the CD-ROM version of The Manhole marked a major landmark in the history of computing, the first American game — or, at least, software toy (another big buzzword of the age, as it happens) — to be released on CD-ROM.² Volk, infuriated with Philips for the chaos and confusion CD-I’s endless delays had wrought in an industry he believed was crying out for the limitless vistas of optical storage, sent them a copy of The Manhole along with a curt note: “See! We did it! We’re tired of waiting!”

And they weren’t done yet. Having gotten The Manhole working on CD-ROM on the Macintosh, Volk and his colleagues at Mediagenic next tackled the daunting task of porting it to the most popular platform for consumer software, MS-DOS — a platform without HyperCard. To address this lack, Mediagenic developed a custom engine for CD-ROM titles on MS-DOS, dubbing it the Multimedia Applications Development Environment, or MADE.³ Mediagenic’s in-house team of artists redrew Robyn Miller’s original black-and-white illustrations in color, and The Manhole on CD-ROM for MS-DOS shipped in 1990.

In my opinion, The Manhole lost some of its unique charm when it was colorized for MS-DOS. The VGA graphics, impressive in their day, look just a bit garish and overdone today in comparison to the classic pen-and-ink style of the original.

The Manhole, idiosyncratic piece of artsy children’s software that it was, could hardly have been expected to break the industry’s optical logjam all on its own. Its CD-ROM incarnation, for that matter, wasn’t all that hugely different from the floppy version. In the end, one has to acknowledge that The Manhole on CD-ROM was little more than the floppy version with a soundtrack playing in the background — a nice addition certainly, but perhaps not quite the transformative experience which all of the rhetoric surrounding CD-ROM’s potential might have led one to expect. It would take another few excruciating years for a CD-ROM drive to become a must-have accessory for everyday American computers. Yet every revolution has to start somewhere, and William Volk deserves his full measure of credit for doing what he could to push this one forward in the only way that could ultimately matter: by stepping up and delivering a real, tangible product at long last. As Steve Jobs used to say, “Real artists ship.”

The importance of The Manhole, existing as it does right there at the locus of so much that was new and important in computing in the late 1980s, can be read in so many ways that there’s always a danger of losing some of them in the shuffle. But it should never be forgotten whilst trying to sort through the tangle that this astonishingly creative little world was principally designed by someone who had barely touched a computer in his life before he sat down with HyperCard. That he wound up with something so fascinating is a huge tribute not just to Robyn Miller and his enabling brother Rand, but also to Bill Atkinson’s HyperCard itself. Apple has long since abandoned HyperCard, and we enjoy no precise equivalent to it today. Indeed, its vision of intuitive, non-pretentious, fun programming is one that we’re in danger of losing altogether. Being one who loves the computer most of all as the most exciting tool for creation ever invented, I can’t help but see that as a horrible shame.

The Miller brothers had, as most of you reading this probably know, a far longer future in front of them than HyperCard would get to enjoy. Already well before 1988 was through they had rechristened themselves Cyan Productions, a name that felt much more appropriate for a creative development house than the businesslike Prolog. As Cyan, they made two more pieces of children’s software, Cosmic Osmo and the Worlds Beyond the Makerei and Spelunx and the Caves of Mr. Seudo. Both were once again made using HyperCard, and both were very much made in the spirit of The Manhole. And like The Manhole both were published on CD-ROM as well as floppy disk; the Miller brothers, having learned much from Mediagenic’s process of moving their first title to CD-ROM, handled the CD-ROM as well as the floppy versions themselves when it came to these later efforts. Opinions are somewhat divided on whether the two later Cyan children’s titles fully recapture the magic that has led so many adults and children alike over the years to spend so much time plumbing the depths of The Manhole. None, however, can argue with the significance of what came next, the Miller brothers’ graduation to games for adults — and, as it happens, another huge milestone in the slow-motion CD-ROM revolution. But that story, like so many others, is one that we’ll have to tell at another time.

(Sources: Amstrad Action of January 1990; Macworld of July 1988, October 1988, November 1988, March 1989, April 1989, and December 1989; Wired of August 1994 and October 1999; The New York Times of November 28 1989. Also the books Myst and Riven: The World of the D’ni by Mark J.P. Wolf and Prima’s Official Strategy Guide: Myst by Rick Barba and Rusel DeMaria, and the Computer Chronicles television episodes entitled “HyperCard,” “MacWorld Special 1988,” “HyperCard Update,” and “Hypertext.” Online sources include Robyn Miller’s Myst postmortem from the 2013 Game Developer’s Conference; Richard Moss’s Ludiphilia podcast; a blog post by Robyn Miller. Finally, my huge thanks to William Volk for sharing his memories and impressions with me in an interview and for sending me an original copy of The Manhole on CD-ROM for my research.

The Manhole: Masterpiece Edition, a remake supervised by the Miller brothers in 1994 which sports much-improved graphics and sound, is available for purchase on Steam.)

1. Activision was renamed Mediagenic at almost the very instant that Lehrberg first met the Miller brothers. When the name change was greeted with universal derision, Activision/Mediagenic CEO Bruce Davis quickly began backpedaling on his hasty decision. The Manhole, for instance, was released by Mediagenic under their “Activision” label — which was odd because under the new ordering said label was supposed to be reserved for games, and The Manhole was considered children’s software, not a traditional game. I just stick with the name “Mediagenic” in this article as the least confusing way to address a confusing situation. ↩

2. The first CD-based software to reach European consumers says worlds about the differences that persisted between American and European computing, and about the sheer can-do ingenuity that so often allowed British programmers in particular to squeeze every last ounce of potential out of hardware that was usually significantly inferior to that enjoyed by their American counterparts. Codemasters, a budget software house based in Warwickshire, came up with a very unique shovelware package for the 1989 Christmas season. They transferred thirty old games from cassette to a conventional audio CD, which they then sold along with a special cable to run the output from an ordinary music-CD player into a Sinclair or Amstrad home computer. “Here’s your CD-ROM,” they said. “Have a ball.” By all accounts, Codemasters’s self-proclaimed “CD revolution,” kind of hilarious and kind of brilliant, did quite well for them. When it came to doing more with less in computing, you never could beat the Brits. ↩

3. MADE’s scripting language was to some extent based on AdvSys, a language for amateur text-adventure creation that never quite took off like the contemporaneous AGT. ↩

She sends kisses…

Leonel Manzanares: Dua Lipa is keeping a pretty solid batting average — not only she hasn’t released a bad single, but every new track feels like an improvement. “Blow Your Mind” gives us Dua’s lush, hefty voice set to some crunchy nu-disco beats and her signature in-your-face drums. It’s quite catchy, and the sassy lyrics sell it completely. The way she goes: “We fight and we argue, you’ll still love me blind/ If we don’t fuck this whole thing up / Guaranteed, I can blow your mind” in the chorus is a bad-ass display of confidence; it’s the kind of confidence you need to ride those gorgeous synth-bass hits. 
[7]

Iain Mew: Last time out Dua Lipa’s powerful vocals wrung a lot out of material that couldn’t match her intensity. This time there’s no need to work so hard, but as she relaxes into a fun song with a hint of The Fame about it, she’s just as impressive turning her skills to keeping it playful with a suggestion of more.
[8]

Thomas Inskeep: I’m not exactly sure how, but this is simultaneously subtle and widescreen; the dynamics here are almost like (early) Pixies-level pop: restrained verses and a big chorus. And that “mwah” gimmick shouldn’t work but totally does. 
[7]

Ryo Miyauchi: While some may save the “mwah” as the secret weapon of a pop hook, Dua Lipa’s kiss off sounds more of an afterthought. And it sounds even cockier this way. Her character is already written with enough of a personality for her to not rely on any catchy ad lib to make her theme song pop. But she blows the kiss anyway for the simple fact that she can, like just another of her throwaway gestures to put the attention all on her.
[6]

Peter Ryan: The “mwah” is a shameless bit of flexing — “and tonight I’m alive in a dollar sign/guaranteed I can blow your mind” is already some top-notch earwormery, but with punctuate it with the actual sound of kissing the haters goodbye and I am fully vanquished. I’m guilty of finding some of her previous singles a bit leaden, but from go this has a healthy dose of kineticism, building from the bed of accented sixteenth picking that underpins the verse up to a syncopated sunburst of a chorus. It crackles with easy confidence, but above all else it works because Lipa sounds like she’s having way more fun than the critics.
[8]

Joshua Copperman: Part of what made Dua Lipa’s “Be The One” so good is how effortless it was, and while follow-up “Hotter Than Hell” definitely sounded fussier, it still left enough space for Dua’s yelps to stand out. This new one is clearly a result of too much effort, with none of the playfulness of her other songs. That “mwah” tries to be playful, but it doesn’t work. The backing track seems to ignore the “mwahs” — why not have it drop out every fourth bar? Or add some Swiftian “heys” in the first half of the chorus, because for all the percussion, it still sounds like it needs more layers? It’s possible that this is a grower, but I expected something more interesting from Dua.
[5]

William John: A serviceable bop with one curiosity; the post-chorus hook, delivered with delightful nonchalance, almost sounds like Lipa is celebrating being in a dollar sign, which I initially regarded as some sort of anti-“Cheap Thrills” teenspeak for 2on-ism with coin. Closer inspection reveals that Lipa is asserting that she “ain’t,” in fact, “a dollar sign,” which is perfectly sensible in context (her album, after several push-backs, finally has a release date; the bad news is it’s 10 February 2017, still four months away, which smells strongly of corporate industry idiocy). Whether this pop Esperanto was merely coincidental or a cleverly disguised cry for help is anyone’s guess, but I find Lipa’s voice likeable enough to be impressed by the double entendre.
[7]

Tim de Reuse:  A lot of pop is unconvincingly braggadocious in that paradoxical “Here’s three verses about how great I am but I still don’t care what you think” kinda way, you know? Dua Lipa sidesteps that by being less confrontational and more confident, teasing and grinning the whole way through. My favorite little detail: the titular “mwah” is replicated in both stereo channels, tweaked to be unpleasantly crisp, with its highest frequencies pinching at your eardrums. It’s a cocky production move, to be sure, but it’s a friendly challenge instead of a “fuck off.”
[8]

Edward Okulicz: Best “mwah” in a song since Holly Valance danced in her pants. It’s so casual that she can’t be doing anything other than laughing at you, especially the very last one in the song. Elsewhere it’s a crisp bit of electropop which bowls me over with a quality chorus, and then unleashes the gimmick immediately. There’s something about her accent that I find a bit dorky but still brash and confident at the same time.
[8]

Adaora Ede: Dark moombahton merging into electropop may be more conventional than appears. It’s songs like this from teenage/twentysomething talent that make me yearn for 2013, where Young Pop’s perspective was altered by the introduction of artpop in the realm of Lorde. “Mwah” is not as visceral as the introductory music implies; Lipa quickly skips beat into a chorus that can be compared solely to something out of a Zayn song; whether that is a good or bad thing is entirely up to y’all. There’s nothing alternative about chambré tropical house anymore, kids! Still, Dua Lipa delivers her self-imposed indietronica kid sound through her vocals, which offer more than enough bombast to get through a dicey cliché of a bridge.
[6]

Alfred Soto: Proud of her husky cyborg drag queen, Dua Lipa goes for the open Kesha-Britney market using Weeknd synths for the verses and K-pop sawtooth synths for the choruses. As generic as it looks on paper, Lipa gives the impression that she blows air kisses around your cheeks and actually says “mwah.”
[6]

You know how pasta with butter is unjustifiably good? Like, something so simple shouldn’t be so delicious and satisfying, but it just is. Well, cabbage is the same way. Sauté it down until tender, add some butter, salt, and pepper and I’m in heaven. Someone a long time ago (hundreds of years, I imagine) in Eastern Europe realized that noodles and cabbage together with butter is even better, and Halusky was born. Of course their Halusky was undoubtably made with homemade noodles, but I’m not picky. Using egg noodles is the fastest, easiest way to this simple and satisfying dish. So, if you’re the type who can’t be bothered with fixing anything more than buttered noodles for dinner (you know who you are), try adding a little shredded cabbage next time. It’s a great way to turn buttered noodles into a legit meal.

Traditional Halusky also has a ton of butter (because YUM), but my 21st century mostly-sedentary lifestyle can’t support copious of butter, so I cut back a little. I used just enough butter to sauté my onion and cabbage, then added a touch more at the end to drench the dish with creamy goodness. Adding butter at the end gives it a nice little buttery pop without having to use a pound of the stuff. If you want to go extravagant, though, you could even crisp up some bacon first and use the bacon fat in place of butter. Bacon is cabbage’s best friend, after all.

One last thing. Halusky isn’t traditionally served with an egg on top, as pictured below. But if you know me then you know my motto is “put an egg on it” so that’s what I did here. Halusky is also great with sausage, like kielbasa, or just about any grilled or roasted meat.

Halusky (Cabbage and Noodles)

4.8 from 13 reviews

Halusky (Cabbage and Noodles)

 

Save Print

Prep time

5 mins

Cook time

20 mins

Total time

25 mins

 

Total Cost: $3.41

Cost Per Serving: $0.57

Serves: 6

Ingredients

• 8oz. wide egg noodles $1.00
• 3 Tbsp butter, divided $0.33
• 1 yellow onion $0.25
• ½ head green cabbage, shredded (5-6 cups) $1.78
• Salt and pepper to taste $0.05

Instructions

1. Cook the egg noodles according to the package directiosn (boil until tender) and then drain in a colander.
2. While the noodles are cooking, thinly slice the onion. Remove any dirty or damaged outer leaves of the cabbage. Cut the cabbage into wedges, remove the core, then slice thinly to shred.
3. After draining the noodles, add 1 Tbsp of the butter and the sliced onions to the pot used to cook the noodles. Sauté the onions over medium heat just until they begin to soften (about 3 minutes). Add the cabbage and continue to cook until the cabbage is tender (5-7 minutes).
4. Return the drained noodles to the pot with the cabbage and onion. Add the remaining 2 Tbsp of butter and stir until the butter is melted and everything is evenly coated. Season the cabbage and noodles liberally with salt and freshly cracked pepper. Serve warm.

3.5.3208

Step by Step Photos

Cook 8oz. wide egg noodles according to the package directions, then drain in a colander. While the noodles are cooking, thinly slice one yellow onion and shred 1/2 head of cabbage (about 5-6 cups shredded). After draining the noodles, use the pot to cook the onion and cabbage. Place 1 Tbsp butter in the pot along with the sliced onions. Sauté over medium heat until the onions begin to soften.

Add the shredded cabbage to the pot and continue to sauté until the cabbage is tender.

Add the drained noodles back to the pot with the cabbage and onion, along with 2 Tbsp butter. Stir until the butter is melted and coating everything. Season liberally with salt and freshly cracked pepper. The salt and pepper really make the dish, so don’t skimp! :)

Enjoy your Halusky as a side dish, or “put and egg on it” and make it your meal. You never have to feel guilty about eating buttered noodles for dinner again. ;)

The post Halusky (Cabbage and Noodles) appeared first on Budget Bytes.

Enormously Heavy

By Alix Alto

A poet with an enormously heavy head

Who liked to be stroked quite gently in bed

And all of the terrible things she said

Upon which my mind predicates.

Beckoning feverish might with the tips

Of small, dexterous hands and gossamer lips

Renders volition conceptual, rips

Me toward her but she or I hesitates.

Verdant torment seeps from her tender face,

Or was it cerulean – no, lighter – or base?

Was this several occasions or was it one case?

What evidence hereby elucidates?

Preoccupation with the disjunction between

Tangible impulse and forces unseen

Will surely bind us to dynamics unclean

– One claims and one prevaricates.

Featured in Basement Babes, Issue 16

My first experience with Kate Bush was listening to “Don’t Give Up,” her duet with Peter Gabriel: a top ten in the UK and a lesser one in America. My second experience was her ebullient sample in Utah Saints’ immortal “Something Good,” adapting the best lyric of her career (“I just know that something good is gonna hap-PEN!”) for lubricious ends. 1993 was not a good time for English eccentrics who peaked with concepts and Fairlights six years earlier, which is why I overrate The Red Shoes. A finalist in my top ten that year, 2005’s Aerial suffers from muddled execution on its song side; “Pi” and “Joanni” sound like B-sides in search of a home and context (I love’em anyway). The second disk — a depiction of aesthetic and sexual actualization set like Virginia Woolf’s The Waves to the chronology of the tides — dawdles for fifteen minutes before “Nocturne” and the title track demonstrate how much Bush has learned about dynamics; her mastery of pitch and song form find their correlative in compositions that churn with a palpable sense of relief and release. “I feel I want to be up on the roof,” accompanied by rhythm guitar chugging, is as weird a hook as the one in “Cloudbusting,” ranking just below the part in “Get Out of My House” in which she mimics a donkey. Too bad 50 Words For Snow lacked songs for a concept. No matter: Kate Bush is worth the wait.

Here are my favorite Kate Bush tracks. I wish I owned The Kick Inside and Lionheart. Her induction into Stylus’ Hall of fame inspired a few excellent appreciations, not least of which is Thomas Inskeep’s of “Experiment IV,” one of the best songs recorded expressly for a compilation (The Whole Story). I also recommend Single Jukebox colleague Katherine St. Asaph’s One Week One Band omnibus.

1. Hounds of Love
2. A Coral Room
3. Breathing
4. Get Out of My House
5. Cloudbusting
6. The Big Sky (The Meterological Mix)
7. Experiment IV
8. The Sensual World
9. Rubberband Girl
10. King of the Mountain
11. Army Dreamers
12. Nocturne
13. Running Up That Hill
14. Big Stripey Lie
15. Under the Ivy
16. Suspended in Gaffa
17. Violin
18. Sat in Your Lap
19. The Man with the Child in His Eyes
20. And So Is Love
21. Joanni
22. Heads We’re Dancing
23. This Woman’s Work
24. Wuthering Heights (New Vocal)
25. And Dream of Sleep

But wait, why aren’t they covering this song on Fr[JOKE REDACTED; EDITOR TERMINATED]

Will Adams: Don’t call it a comeback; in the five years since that song, Rebecca Black has trickled out singles and developed a considerable (and supportive) audience as a YouTuber. It’s the least she deserves after bearing the brunt of the backlash for so long. But “The Great Divide” has piqued interest on the basis of “wow it’s actually good” as if that were somehow shocking, as if Black herself had some inherent inability to be competent at music. Just as there’s little use in shitting on her for still surfing on the success of “Friday,” there’s little use in applauding her for clearing a perceived low bar. Especially when “The Great Divide” is good on its own merits. Not perfect — namely, Black’s vocals follow the Perry-Lovato school of thought that exertion = impact — but good. Crash Cove’s remix swaps the original’s appeal to serious artistry with exactly what it needed: booming, obvious dubstep that, in line with today’s pop M.O., is designed to heighten emotion to its extreme via swoops and plunges and electronic fripperies. The inextricable legacy of “Friday” may mean that Black will never be taken seriously as a pop star, but in light of her YouTube success I question whether that’s even her objective anymore. “The Great Divide” makes a strong case for the line between novelty and disposability; being the latter is not necessarily a bad thing.
[7]

Tim de Reuse: The circumstances that led to this song’s existence are inseparable from the experience of listening to it in 2016 and, unfortunately, much more interesting to think about than the song itself.
[5]

Alfred Soto: As a mild admirer of “Friday,” I wish the metaphor were more than a line she drops at the end of a chorus, and I wish the electronic taffy-pulling of the production didn’t substitute for a commitment she couldn’t muster anyway.
[4]

Joshua Copperman: It’s hard to imagine something similar to “Friday” happening today, where everything is think-pieced to death and the only viral videos are utter nonsense. So years after “Friday” and various other songs, Rebecca Black returns not as a novelty, but as an Emotional Serious Artist Person. And so, the original piano-based version is “Skyscaper,” and the remix is “In The Name of Love.” If I had never heard the former or latter, both of which I really like, I would give “The Great Divide” a higher score. So maybe it’s poor timing, but this definitely feels derivative and maybe not as epic as Black or Crash Cove thought it was. I’ll give this a good score anyway, because Rebecca Black deserves at least a little bit of respect for her performance here, even with the Melodyne artifacts in that “i-i-i-i-i-ide” vocal run. She really does belt, giving it what she couldn’t when she first became famous at a perilously young age.
[6]

Thomas Inskeep: I’m old and crotchety enough to feel that YouTube-created “celebrities” are not actually celebrities at all. Especially when they have little-to-no talent other than over-emoting and looking doe-eyed in their music videos. P.S. the song’s terrible.
[0]

Jonathan Bradley: “The Great Divide” is Rebecca Black’s grueling trudge back from meme status, having already failed to alchemize her accidental fame into intentional stardom. Her vocal exertions seem premised on redemption: see, I can sing now. Please may I have my dignity back? The effort is neither necessary nor pleasant: high-speed nostalgia has finished transforming Black from viral bathos to warmly remembered pop-cultural ephemera. She can’t be faulted for taking another shot at a musical career — after all, she wanted it enough in her younger years to have her parents send her to Ark Music Factory’s pop singer fantasy camp, and time has proved again and again that great singles can come from anywhere. One hasn’t come from this all-grown-up animated GIF: it’s telling that the most appealing moments of “The Great Divide” are when Black allows one of her familiarly warped vowels to slip through.
[2]

Iain Mew: The verses set up Rebecca Black as a decent Iselin Solheim-like singer for the right kind of track; the right blend of light and precise to go with elemental slow trance. “The Great Divide” isn’t quite that track, because the chorus reaches too far to justify her name being the one up there and comes off the worse in a contest with waves of bubbly drops.
[5]

Edward Okulicz: I could believe Rebecca Black as a plausible but not particularly accomplished or charismatic pop star based on this alone. That said, I’m not sure what the payoff could be here, certainly not a proper hit or a long career.”The Great Divide” is too lifeless, the chorus too awkwardly stuck between Leona Lewis’ “Collide” and Years and Years’ “Without,” and her voice too plain for the theatrics of the former or the yearning of the latter. It’s a nicely produced track but like the vocals, plain and lacking emotion. Given an actual melody she doesn’t sound too bad, but the lack of emotion means she still sounds like a robot, just in a different way to before.
[5]

Who are you, and what do you do?

I'm Jason Shiga. I'm most well known for the children's book Meanwhile, an interactive comic where the readers make decisions that lead them through different story paths and endings. My newest comic is Demon, about an actuary who checks himself into a filthy motel room in Oakland to kill himself but then discovers that he cannot die. The first chapter is available on my website for free.

What hardware do you use?

I pencil with a Paper Mate ballpoint pen on normal letter size copy paper; I enlarge the "pencils" to ledger size on a photocopier and then ink over them on a lightbox using a Windsor Newton size 222. Again on copy paper. I letter by hand with an 08 Micron by lightboxing over computer lettering that I printed out ahead of time. I go through pens, brushes and paper like Kleenex so for me it's about using the cheapest crappiest materials and getting them to look as good as possible.

For printing, I use a RISO RP3700 Risograph Duplicator that I bought off Craigslist a few years ago. Getting that machine to work is like alchemy. There's always something misregistered, faded or some weird red stripe going down the middle of each page. But I guess that's the charm of it too.

And what software?

Photoshop for the coloring. These days I'm doing mostly 2 color coloring. I have a palette of all the different combinations of red, white and black. After everything's colored, I use the Pelt plugin to flatten my colors for printing. Then I separate them into a red layer and a black layer using a ridiculously long Photoshop action I set up long ago.

What would be your dream setup?

A drawing desk 3 feet deep that stretched 10 miles long and a pedal-powered chair that rolled along a track.

Thanks for reading! If you're enjoying the interviews, you can help keep this nerdy lil' site independent for as little as $1 a month!

Won’t you come and take me out of this black hole?

Josh Winters: As someone who named her most recent album Ten Love Songs yet often associates her amorous desires with savage impulses, Sundfør portrays herself more as a siren than just a simple romantic, alluring prey into her dangerous web to do whatever she pleases to them. When Röyksopp invite her into their mad scientist laboratory, she becomes a megalomaniac surging with power, gripping on to exposed cables as tightly as she is onto her unfortunate lover. She’s the same as she ever was; all that’s different is her disguise, and she’s just as dangerous.
[8]

Iain Mew: I don’t know how much of it comes from associations with Sundfør’s own work, but I hear so much depth and darkness under the surface in her vocal. There are leagues lurking within “I’ve been dying to see you,” and whether I hear the last line of chorus as either a cheerful “now that I’m in love” or “not that I’m in love,” the implications are disturbing. And all that is beneath a surface so dazzling it would be satisfying on its own, even before Röyksopp and Sundfør use the bright chunky synth sounds and chopped-up vocals to go on an expansive tour through pure pleasure in sound. It matches the giddy joy of the bridges in Robyn’s “Indestructible” or Perfume’s “Spring of Life.” and the only question left is the fact this is tagged as an edit of a complete version — could it really get any better?
[10]

Katherine St Asaph: A perfectly fine, if slight, reprise of “The Girl and the Robot.” But I prefer the Sundfør of “Accelerate” and the Röyksopp of “Compulsion“; the Sundfør tracks on The Inevitable End disappointed me for not being that, and this isn’t it either.
[6]

Alfred Soto: When she writes and produces for herself, Susanne Sundfør mixes melancholy and a grand manner with uncanny power; working with the Norwegian electro pop act she’s Ellie Goulding with a catch in her throat.
[5]

Cassy Gress: Man, this is a [10] with some stupid stylistic choices bringing it down. The entire song sounds like a rocket, but not the initial explosion of liftoff or the silent soaring through space; it’s the part where it’s shuddering and shaking through the atmosphere. It’s fiery and forceful and expansive, and Susanne Sundfør’s voice sounds like a meteorite. Then Röyksopp fucks it all up by jolting things to a stop in every chorus on “I don’t wanna cry,” then flatly ending the song on the downbeat. Either fade it out or end it on the upbeat — otherwise, the last memory I have of your song is of being suddenly underwhelmed.
[8]

Edward Okulicz: “Never Ever” is catchy and professional, and that is definitely enough. But the slight lack of satisfaction comes from those moments where Sundfør rises as if towards an emotional peak, and this song is much less full-blooded than anything on Ten Love Songs, so it never demands the same level of physical or visceral surrender. It’s not that there’s anything wrong with it — it’s just that the stakes and payoff are lower. The imperious terror hiding behind the fairly open, simple lyrics doesn’t emerge, and I badly want it to.
[7]

Peter Ryan: This begins with a malfunction: “get (get) / get you / (I) / I don’t / (get you) / I don’t / oh / oh / oh / oh-ohhhh”. It’s at odds with the jaunty surroundings, but from artists that traffic in various poppy shades of doom it’s a welcome signal that we won’t be subjected to any unnecessary levity. What follows is nothing but gloriously bad news — infatuation from afar transmogrified into “NOW THAT I’M IN LOVE!”, tacit acknowledgement of the prospect of rejection amid active efforts to will it out of existence — another entry in the storied tradition of putrefied crushes set to deceptive arrangements. A master of hooks in even her artiest solo work, Sundfør tempers Röyksopp’s meandering impulses — they’ve created a precise racket with her vocal stitching everything together, lending itself at once to choppy robo-treatments and moments of soaring human desperation. It’s my new favorite thing to stomp down the street to.
[9]

Cédric Le Merrer: Probably a great cardio training song. Röyksopp and Susanne Sundfør go hard and fast, treating the beat like a punching ball. Or maybe the “you” in the song is the one being punched. “Never ever let you go now” sounds as much menace as promise.
[8]

Will Adams: Sundfør’s terrifying and fatalistic vision of love is still here, but it’s the contrast with Röyksopp’s peppy arrangement that makes “Never Ever” even more sinister. “I’ve been dying to see you,” she begins over the bright electropop, making her intentions clear. From there, she distorts the love story until the central line — “Never ever gonna let you go now/Now that I’m in love” — has become a taunt. She’s already won by the final chorus, and the funk guitars and astral synths carry you to your grave.
[9]

Though they crafted a signature — and endlessly copied — style, Pixies’ music never stayed in the same place for long. During their early years, the band relished change, moving from Come on Pilgrim‘s scrappy apocalyptic visions to Doolittle‘s gleaming pop to Trompe Le Monde‘s riff-rock at a rapid pace. Indeed, it could be argued that part of the reason their 2014 comeback Indie Cindy underwhelmed was because it tried too hard to recapture the past. On Head Carrier, Pixies usher in more than a few changes, the biggest being bassist Paz Lenchantin. Replacing a member may be inconsequential for some bands, but for this one, it’s a big deal (pun intended): Founding bassist Kim Deal departed prior to Indie Cindy, and the use of a session player on the album only underscored…

320 kbps | 80 MB  UL | MC ** FLAC

…that a vital part of the group’s appeal was missing.

Thanks to Lenchantin, Pixies sound like a full — if slightly different — band again, whether she’s sweetening “Oona”‘s crunch with her harmonies or helping shape the album’s character in general. The rest of the band’s ease at having her in the fold is audible, and Head Carrier is a surprisingly nice album. “Classic Masher” and “Bel Esprit” recall the amiable jangle of “Here Comes Your Man” and the band’s cover of “Winterlong,” and the easygoing vibe continues on “All the Saints”‘ slo-mo surf and “Plaster of Paris.” However, the niceness turns strange on “All I Think About Now.” A musical thank-you note to Deal written by Black Francis and sung by Lenchantin that shamelessly borrows from “Where Is My Mind?,” it manages to be both jarring and overly nostalgic. As on Indie Cindy, when the band looks back too much, it feels forced; “Baals Back” is shrieky and Biblical, but lacks the true oddness of their best songs about fire and brimstone. Fortunately, the high-speed chase that is “Um Chagga Lagga” and the roaring title track are in the vein of Pixies’ classic rockers without feeling contrived. “Talent” is even better, a piece of satirical, snotty garage-rock that reaffirms Francis doesn’t need to sing about the Bible or aliens to let loose.

While it feels like Pixies are still figuring out how to continue their legacy, Head Carrier‘s best moments suggest they’re heading in the right direction.

I own an Apple TV 4, Apple TV 3, Roku 4, Chromecast, and a Firefox OS TV.  From that you can probably gather that I love streaming content, particularly sports and movies.  I obviously also love coding, which is why I loved being a Partner Engineer for Mozilla’s Firefox OS TV — I was enthusiastically testing out TV apps and exploring edge APIs and responsive techniques.

I’m always interested in finding a way to do interesting stuff with JavaScript and streaming instantly hit me.  I can’t do anything with a closed ecosystem Apple TV but there are known ways of working with a Roku so I set out to do something interesting with the Roku and Node.js — create remote control functionality.

Node.js Roku Remote

There’s a nice utility out there called node-roku which discovers Roku devices, providing the IP address of each Roku so that you can network with it.  The node-roku utility also provides an API to retrieve device information and app listing from the Roku.  I chose to create a script which, once started, allows the user to use their computer’s keyboard to navigate around a Roku, select and launch apps, and more.

Let’s start with version 0.1.0 with the source code:

const readline = require('readline');

const request = require('request');
const Roku = require('node-roku');
const xml2json = require('xml2json');

// Will be populated once a device is found
var address;

// Map to this URL: http://******:8060/keypress/{key}
const keyEndpoint = {
  // Arrow Keys
  left: 'Left',
  right: 'Right',
  up: 'Up',
  down: 'Down',

  // Standard Keys
  space: 'Play',
  backspace: 'Back',
  return: 'Select',

  // Sequences (shift key)
  H: 'home',
  R: 'Rev',
  F: 'Fwd',
  S: 'Search',
  E: 'Enter',

  // Other
  r: 'InstantReplay',
  b: 'InfoBackspace'
};
const xmlToObject = xml => {
    return JSON.parse(xml2json.toJson(xml));
}

readline.emitKeypressEvents(process.stdin);
process.stdin.setRawMode(true);

console.log('Looking for the (first) Roku...');

// Find the Roku
// TODO:  Allow for selection of multiple Rokus; current assuming only one
Roku.find((err, devices) => {
  if(err) {
    console.log('`roku.find` error: ', err);
    process.exit();
  }

  if(!devices.length) {
    console.log('No Roku devices found.  Bailing.');
    process.exit();
  }

  address = devices[0];
  Roku.getDevice(address, (err, deviceDetail) => {
    console.log('Connected to Device: ', xmlToObject(deviceDetail).root.device.friendlyName, ' (', devices[0],')');
    console.log('Press keys to navigate the Roku and select content!');
  });
});

// Start the keypress listener
process.stdin.on('keypress', (str, key) => {
  var endpoint;

  // Ignore everything until we're connected
  if(!address) {
    return;
  }

  // "Raw" mode so we must do our own kill switch
  if(key.sequence === '\u0003') {
    process.exit();
  }

  // Handle commands
  endpoint = keyEndpoint[key.name] || keyEndpoint[key.sequence] || 'Lit_' + key.name;

  // Ignore undefined keypresses (no name or sequence)
  if(endpoint === 'Lit_undefined') {
    return;
  }

  // Send command!
  request.post(address + '/keypress/' + endpoint);
});

Now let’s explain what’s going on with the source code above:

1. xml2json is required because device information is returned as XML
2. Interaction with the Roku is done via POST requests with the URL format of http://******:8060/keypress/{key}; a POST is sent on each keypress
3. readline.emitKeypressEvents(process.stdin); and process.stdin.setRawMode(true); directs Node.js to operate outside of normal shell operation, thus we need to explicitly check for CONTROL+C to shut down the remote and Node.js process
4. The keypress logic is this:  we use an object, keyEndpoint, to map logical keypress events to known endpoints; if a key isn’t designated, we pass it along to the Roku as a keypress (i.e. a key to a search box, for example).

Get roku-remote

I’ve published my Roku Remote code to both GitHub and NPM — install and usage instructions are available in both places.  Please give it a run, file issues, and I’d love contributions if you have them!

A web interface for roku-remote would be sweet; it could have different Roku’s you could direct, a listing of apps which could be clicked to launch, and so forth.  I’m happy with this first step because it fits my needs, is easy to use, and there’s plenty of room to grow.  Happy streaming!

The post Node.js Roku Remote appeared first on David Walsh Blog.

We met Ayaka – sporting suspenders and trousers – on the street in Harajuku. Ayaka is an 18-year-old student and member of the Japanese EDM idol group Stereo Tokyo.

Ayaka’s look features resale fashion clothing that includes a white button down shirt, brown suspenders and striped, silk trousers from Me. Platform creepers and a canvas tote bag complete her look.

Ayaka’s favorite brand/shop is Romantic Standard and she loves shopping at used/resale shops. Follow her on Twitter for more of her info.

Click on any photo to enlarge it.