Taylor Swift

from the creator of the popular Augmented (hyper)Reality short  

Today at Google I/O, the company announced that its popular computing platform will soon support Google Play -- letting a huge world of games onto the PCs. ...

I'm sure most of us have at some point encountered the cliché anecdote of someone missing a stop on public transit because they were too absorbed in whatever mobile/handheld game they were playing. I always chalked it up to hyperbole. “I’m too neurotic about missing my stop and getting to places on time for that to happen to me,” I thought. I was wrong. Last week, I blew past my L stop on the way home from my day job because I was engrossed in Michael Brough’s latest game, Imbroglio.

Imbroglio is Brough’s follow-up to 2013’s excellent 868-HACK. It riffs on some key elements of 868, such as a focus on positioning and the use of the environment itself as a resource. The key difference between the games is their approach to character-building. Success in 868 required improvisation based on your assigned class, programs and resources. Your character developed over the course of the game depending on the generated tiles and resources. Imbroglio does away with the random assignments of 868 and has you selecting a class and building a “deck” of weapons to use that comprise the grid of the game board. Imbroglio is basically the Magic the Gathering to 868's Ascension.

In Imbroglio, your goal is to collect as many purple gems as possible before succumbing to one of the six types of monster. You swipe to move your character around on the 4x4 board made out of the weapon deck you constructed, navigating through a maze that is generated every time a gem is grabbed. Monsters spawn from each of the four corners of the board, with each corner spawning a specific monster type (the other two types have specific spawn conditions). Bumping into a monster will attack them with the weapon of the tile your character is on. Each monster kill fills up an upgrade bar for that tile, which can enhance damage or add other effects to the weapon with every four kills. Each weapon level-up also gives a rune, which can be spent to activate your character’s special power. Your character has two health meters, denoted by the hearts and diamonds on either side of your character. Monsters are color-coded by the type of damage they do: orange monsters take a heart with each hit and blue monsters take a diamond. Weapons are coded in the same manner. I know there’s a lot of moving parts here and they look disjointed when spelled out like this, but in play they all mesh together into something beautiful. Every turn has an interesting decision to make. Do you head straight for the gem to bump up your health, or take a roundabout path to kill an enemy on a weapon that’s one kill away from an upgrade? Monster spawn rates increase with turn count, so there’s always some pressure to keep moving.

Backing up a bit, the first thing you do in a game of Imbroglio is pick a character. There are eight characters in total—four to start and another four locked behind score goals. Each character has a different “flaw” to play around and a special power. The first four’s flaws all limit their available weapons in some way, while the final four have flaws that tweak other aspects of the game. It’s amazing how well the flaws and powers differentiate each character. Despite there being “only” six monster types, their relative threat levels vary radically from character to character and they completely change how you approach each type.

After choosing a character, the next step is to build your dungeon, so to speak. With the first four characters, deck-building is wisely limited until you’ve collected at least 32 gems in one game with that character. This eases you into the game without overwhelming with the full deck-building experience. 32 might seem like a high number for your first couple of games, but once you grok the core concepts of the game and the quirks of the starting characters, 32 gems should be fairly simple to get.

 

The deck-building itself can be a little overwhelming at first thanks to the largely pictographic interface and sheer number of options available, but after some fiddling it becomes second-nature. Just drag weapons from the bottom of the screen to place or swap out tiles, and the game will automatically grey out weapons that are unusable due to your chosen character’s restrictions. Red and blue weapons can be filtered with buttons on the side of the screen, and there are also clear and undo features. The number of weapons available can make the prospect of finding synergies and developing strategies daunting, but Imbroglio has a clever trick up its (card) sleeve.

After unlocking deck-construction on a couple characters, I found myself paralyzed by all the options suddenly available to me. I was considering asking some developers on Twitter that I knew had been testing the game for some strategies when I accidentally opened the high score list. Luckily, I had gone through the convoluted process of getting Game Center temporarily working again (thanks to the dreaded Game Center Bug, seemingly fixed in iOS 9.3.2) earlier that day and discovered that the game shows the boards of each high score on the leaderboards! I was able to learn from the best and immediately saw an uptick in my scores after applying some freshly-learned strategies. 868 had a similar feature, but in Imbroglio the information is immediately applicable to your next game. Entire boards can even be copied from the leaderboards with the push of a button, provided you have all of the necessary cards (more cards unlock with each character). It’s an excellent learning tool, and it’ll be fun to check up on as more people get their hands on the game.

 

Brough’s games in the past have mostly stuck to a “glitch art” aesthetic that can be divisive. I remember 868 in particular receiving a lot of pushback from people claiming that the art was “too ugly” for a $6 game. Well, if you bounced off of 868 or any of his other games because of the graphics, Imbroglio might be more your cup of tea. Here, everything is hand-drawn. It looks like a digital conversion of a physical board game that doesn’t exist in the best way. The sound design is also unique: there’s no musical soundtrack to the game. Instead, every sound effect is a different acoustic guitar sound. The guitar sounds and hand-drawn art give the game a uniquely rustic feel. Even with a change in art style from Brough’s other games, Imbroglio still manages to look uniquely his.

The last time I was this taken by an iOS game was Dream Quest back in 2014. There’s no feeling like the one you get when you discover a card synergy or stumble upon a strategy that destroys your old high score, and Imbroglio has been giving me that feeling constantly in the few weeks that I’ve been playing it. Every individual element of Imbroglio’s design coalesces into an elegantly complex whole. Nothing is out of place. It’s the kind of game that I just want to think and talk about all the time, and I’m very excited that others are now able to play and explore this brilliant game. I’ll see you in the Imbroglio discussions on the forums, but for now, I’ve got some more Imbroglio to play.

History repeating itself.

[Video][Website]
[8.33]Alfred Soto: This year’s Eurovision winner has a chalky high end reminiscent of ’80s Aretha, and the rhythm track nods towards Burial. It makes sense: Jamala’s writing and singing about Soviet Russia’s deportation of Crimeans during the Second World War, buried history for the rest of the world, a living reality for Jamala.
[6]

Scott Mildenhall: If it wasn’t for her allegations of dubious practice in Ukraine’s 2011 Eurovision selection, Jamala may have already represented her country at the contest with this jaunty yodelathon, and “1944” may never have happened. The difference between “Facebook Song” Monetta and “Crisalide” Monetta is but an illusion, but it’s fortunate that this time the world got the latter. It’s very hard not to be glib when talking about this – maybe impossible – but it doesn’t feel wrong to say that whether on record or live, it is completely compelling. A lot of performances looked curiously empty on the seemingly infinite Stockholm stage, but Jamala made the most of it: she was in the eye of a storm.
[9]

Leonel Manzanares: Mugham singing — a cultural staple of the peoples of the Eurasian steppe — is the crux of this track’s colossal resonance. According to tradition, mugham is both mournful prayer and lullaby, as it’s transmitted from mother to baby. It serves as a perfect expression of honor to Nazylkhan, Jamala’s ancestor, and it carries her message. She was a Crimean Tatar who lost a child while being deported to Central Asia by Stalin’s USSR in 1944. Jamala’s devastating take on this subject, accompanied by duduk and a beat that feels close to Burial’s Untrue record, or William Orbit’s Ray of Light ethno-explorations, is a breath of fresh air in Eurovision history; a beam of light in a contest so obscured by both understated hostility and aggressive neutrality. This is not politics, it’s a History lesson. It’s the sound of pain, personal and collective, but also of hope. A message to all displaced peoples, that they’ll too be home soon.  And now that Crimea is, once again, an occupied territory, “1944” feels twice as powerful. 
[9]

Cassy Gress: We’re all going to talk about that bridge and final chorus, right? The part where this turns from an cold and huddled lament into some sort of psychic channeling of the abraded, raw spirit of every displaced people? “I couldn’t spend my youth there,” they wail, “because you took away our peace.” Jamala’s out-of-nowhere perfect whistle register is a cry out of time.
[9]

Edward Okulicz: Lost in the furore about this song’s charged political ramifications, I first took to how you could almost body-pop to the beat. That’s an important contributor to how the song moves you, because it rescues it from being just a downer. Though it’s a big downer anyway; nothing says universal sadness like the duduk, even Jamala’s almighty wail. The Tatar chorus, absent of context and my reading of a translation, would have sounded like a lullabye to me, and the triumph of “1944” is how it takes history that’s been slept on, particularly throughout Western Europe and the Anglosphere, and makes us open our eyes. Her howl at the song’s close nearly brought the house down on Saturday night. Kangaroo-toting flag-wavers in the crowd told me that they were disappointed by the last-minute reveal of Dami Im’s defeat, but they were salved because it was to Ukraine.
[9]

Thomas Inskeep: I’m kinda shocked that this won the annual cheesefest known as Eurovision: “1944” slinks through the shadows, a quiet shuffle-beat from an early ’00s UK garage record joining forces with some trip-hop sonics and some dark, dark lyrics sung by a singer who can really emote. I’ve not read up on the politics referred to herein on purpose, because I wanted to judge this purely on its musical merits, and on those, this is a damned good record.
[7]

Will Adams: Jamala’s force-gathering performance of “1944” sent shivers down my spine at each stage of the contest, but in a way the song works just as well in recorded form, without the ball lightning effects and wind. It’s quieter, building atmosphere through windy pads and dusky breakbeats, and Jamala waits until the spellbinding bridge to cry to the heavens. The English lyrics would seem hollow like they so often do in typical Eurovision entries if it were not a lived reality for Jamala and her family. Adding even more weight (and an extra point) is the devastating blow that comes from uncovering the Tatar chorus: “I couldn’t spend my youth there, because you took away my peace.”
[9]

Iain Mew: Last year, Måns Zelmerlöw’s “Heroes” got to #11 on the UK charts. Fair to say nothing from this year’s will even match Loïc Nottet‘s #69, and it’s not just because of the introduction of streaming to the charts since. We’re an imperfect barometer, but a lack of songs with wider immediate appeal, it makes sense for something at least striking to get through to win. “1994” is really striking. The recorded version can’t match the intensity of performance, staging, or context from the night of course; it doesn’t silence me and have me holding my breath in the same way. It’s still impressive in its own right, as anything which has me thinking of positive comparisons with both La Roux’s “In for the Kill” and Ayumi Hamasaki’s otherworldly epic “Brillante” probably has to be. Jamala powers the small scale sections but keeps enough in reserve to make the grand moments jump out too. And somehow it’s done in three minutes!
[8]

Katherine St Asaph: That a major Eurovision contender would have a message of “fuck you, USSR!” was unsurprising, though perhaps not its win. That it would get genuinely, casually operatic? Also not a surprise — it’s Eurovision. That it would sound remarkably like Burial or Maya Jane Coles? The best sort of surprise.
[9]

Once upon a time, the radiation safety officer (RSO), let’s call him Bob, had been out performing the inventory of source material* and ran across a bit of excitement.

In this particular lab, they had approximately 10 grams of uranyl acetate, a very common contrast stain for electron microscopes.  The poor unfortunate grad student who was trying to wrangle things for the RSO presented the uranyl acetate to Bob for him weigh and verify, but Bob ignored him.  Bob was looking over the grad student’s shoulder at the fume hood behind him.  Bob took a picture of it for us all to enjoy later, evacuated the lab, and told the grad student to get the department chair down here RIGHT NOW while Bob called the chemical safety folks to come up and help.

Flash forward to the staff meeting as Bob presents his pictures.  I may have let out a pained yelp of terror when this one came up on the screen.  I apologize for the lack of detail for this picture, but the brown bottle has a handwritten label that reads “PICRIC ACID, SAT. SOL., 3/18/69, *happy face*”

Bob: “So, does anyone see any problems with this picture?”
Me: “YES!  There’s a four fucking liter bottle of picric acid!”
Bob: “Note that the bottle says ‘Sat. Sol.’  How would we know if it weren’t safe?”
Me: “Well, I suppose if it wasn’t safe they would’ve labeled it with a frowny face instead of a happy one.”
Bob: [gives me a glare] “Right, no more four day weekends for you.  You get sarcastic if we give you too much time off.  I was referring to the crystalline sediment in the bottom of the bottle that shows this is clearly a supersaturated solution now.”
Me: [emits another yelp of terror]
Co-Worker 1: “Jeez, they haven’t cleaned their lab in 40 years if that’s been lying around since it got labeled.”
Co-Worker 2: “No…the building they’re in now has only existed for 17 years.  The had to move it here from somewhere else first…*trails off into contemplative horror*”

Supersaturated picric acid is a shock & light sensitive bomb, similar to unstable crystallized ether.  There have been an awful lot of lab explosions over the decades due to forgotten picric bottles which is why it is pretty much banned in anything other than microquantities.  A 4L bottle is a job that even the bomb squad is reluctant to touch.

As a nice bonus, if you look closely you’ll notice that there’s a bottle of 70% percholoric acid next to it, which is another potential bomb. At the very least, a POWERFUL oxidizer to help promote the coming firestorm when everything goes sideways.

The happy ending is that everything worked out nicely and nothing had to be detonated with a sniper rifle from a safe distance. This time.

 

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* Source material is defined as naturally occurring or depleted uranium or thorium materials which could, potentially, be refined and enriched.  In practice, this normally translates to “anything we feel like nailing you for not having on your inventory already” as this is stuff any member of the public can buy, but as license holder you have a responsibility to keep track of it.

The post The Picric Acid Tale or “Why I Can’t Have Four Day Weekends Anymore” appeared first on .

"Survive in an ever-shifting labyrinth filled with vicious monsters and valuable gemstones." - Author's description

Purchase for $3.99 on the App Store (iOS)

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"Void Pyramid is a post-apocalyptic RPG set in the spacefaring Egyptian empire." - Author's description

Download here (Windows)

Download here (Mac)

Download on Google Play (Android)

Download on the OUYA store (OUYA)

Trailer

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Published on May 18, 2016 ADDAC503 Marble Physics - Part II "Newtonian physics on a modular synth! The ADDAC503 Marble Physics is a CV generator based on the mechanics behavior of a marble on a tray. Through this realtime physics simulator you'll be able to control several parameters that will affect the behavior of a model of a spherical object against a plane. You can tilt the plane or

"By peeking through the window of a supported handheld device, you can explore, discover, and create using digital objects and creatures that you place in physical space." ...

augmented reality toy with Keita Takahashi art  

Ellen caught our eye on the street in Harajuku.

His look features a jacket from the Japanese brand Monomania over a colorful Dog Harajuku top, Monomania pants, and New Rock platform boots. Accessories include a hat, a cow skull ring from Tokimeki Teikoku no Momoiro Gabriel, a Hamsa necklace, and an eyeball bag by the Japanese designer Malicious.X.

Ellen’s favorite shop is the Harajuku subculture boutique Dangerous Nude. Find him on Twitter for more pictures and info.

Click on any photo to enlarge it.

Threshold Entertainment's Larry Kasanoff still holds the rights to make a live-action Tetris movie, and now he's cut a deal to co-produce an $80 million Tetris film which could become a trilogy. ...

from the creator of the Sex Fantasy sketchzine  

2016 is turning out to be a big year for digital board games. Already we've had games like Tsuro, Patchwork, Glass Road, and the cream of the crop Pathfinder Adventures. Twilight Struggle on iPad should be out fairly soon, and we heard from Vlaada Chvátil on CGE's plans for more Galaxy Trucker, Codenames, and the long awaited Through the Ages all coming before New Year's. With all those goings-on, it's possible I might have forgotten about one or two. Searching Twitter yesterday, I discovered it's more than possible, I did forget about one major board game port: The Castles of Mad King Ludwig. If you were one of many waiting for Suburbia's medieval cousin, you won't have to wait much longer; last night the publishers tweeted that it's being submitted to Apple this week.

If you're not familiar with CoMKL, it's a spin on the gameplay we saw in city-builder Suburbia, however in this game you're building castles. Change of venue isn't the only difference, however. CoMKL has a unique mechanism in which, each turn, one player is the master builder and can set prices on the different rooms that are available. Obviously, you want to set rooms that you need as cheap as can be while forcing your opponents to spend through the nose. Of course, they might just buy the cheap thing that you needed, so finding the right middle ground is where the fun lies.

When Suburbia launched, it had online multiplayer as well as pass-and-play. It also featured a cool campaign mode for single player, allowing you to travel the world, building famous cities, and trying to reach a specific goal. We're not sure about the multiplayer aspects of CoMKL, but we do know that it will have the solo campaign, similar to Suburbia's.

Barring any unforeseen issues with its review, we should be seeing Castles of Mad King Ludwig on our iOS and Android devices in 2-3 weeks. No video of the digital version, but if you want to see how the game plays you can watch Kaja and Joanna from Starlit Citadel give you a run-through.

semantic style transfer turns doodles into fine art  

When I come home on leave from the trenches, all shell-shocked and dazed, or upon returning from a particularly gruelling dungeon crawl, my back aching from all the loot and my fingers charred from casting fireballs, I sometimes need to unwind and do something completely different. I usually go down to the local arcade hall for a game of pinball or two, or I clear my troubled mind by putting the brush to the canvas. From now on, I can combine the two and fire up INKS, the latest game of State of Play Games, who you’ll remember as the creators of the miniature world of Lumino City.

In some respects, INKS continues the trend of zen-like games which are visually stunning and offer a relaxing gaming experience. All of them elegant offerings with minimalistic design, suitable music and/or sound effects which enhance the overall experience and provide the player with a sense of accomplishment while putting him or her in a relaxed state of mind. And experience is the keyword here, drawing the player into little self-contained worlds and taking full advantage of the touchscreen interface for which they were designed. Some of them are puzzle-based and others focus more on action-oriented gameplay, but generally speaking they all have their own unique visual style with distinctive gameplay. In many ways, INKS has managed to place itself squarely into this category, if it weren’t for a few tiny details.

As you might have guessed by now, INKS is all about pinball, but with a twist. While playing a table, you get to paint it as if it were a canvas and in this way create a visual representation of that particular session. Each table has a certain amount of blocks or circles filled with paint which explode when you hit them with the ball. The harder you hit them, the more paint comes splashing out, covering the surface of the table. The longer you manage to keep your ball in play, the more colorful the canvas becomes, all the more so because the ball also leaves a trail as it rolls through the painted areas. The color effects are quite nicely done: as with real paint, the colors mix to create secondary colors and become darker every time the ball (which takes on the color of the mixture as well) passes through. It all looks wonderful and I think it’s a great concept, even if it’s only aesthetic and doesn’t have any impact on the gameplay.

To clear a table you need to pop all the colored blocks, whereupon a giant black hole opens up near the bottom of the table and automatically swallows the ball. You have to aim carefully and find the right angle to reach all the blocks and sometimes it almost felt like I was playing Peggle or a Breakout clone (which is not a bad thing, mind you!) There’s really no pressure because you get an unlimited number of balls to complete the level, although if you want to score the gold ball, you’ll have to clear the table on your first try. After losing the gold ball, the next one is of silver, then bronze and then various shades of black. Apart from this reward, there’s no scoring system and scoring gold balls will not win you anything tangible like unlocking new tables or power-ups (apart from personal satisfaction, of course.)

Things got a lot more interesting the moment I figured out how to win the gold star for each level. Each table displays the minimum amount of shots needed to complete it, and here lies the real strength of the game in my opinion, because this is where things finally get challenging. Like I said earlier, you’ll have no trouble completing all the tables, even if you’re not a whiz at the pinball machine. However, if you want to earn the gold star on each level, well, that requires a lot of practice in some cases and and considerably more skill. And when you do finally pull it off on a particularly difficult table, you’ll get that sense of satisfaction I was referring to earlier.

The tables themselves are a mixed bag. Some of them are quite cleverly designed and need to be “figured out” before being able to solve them, while others can be completed in less than two seconds, without even using the flippers (I’m not kidding.) The base game includes 72 tables, divided into three level packs (with elusive names such as Dawn, Melody and Campfire,) all of which are accessible right off the bat. Because of this, there’s no real sense of progression throughout the game and I think it would’ve been better if you had to unlock these through playing (by winning gold stars for example.)

Though generally well-designed, the tables offer little variety regarding their visual aspect, not even from one level pack to another. They all look pretty much the same. On the one hand I can see why, I mean the whole idea of the game is that you create your own masterpiece by using it as a canvas and so create a unique table with each playthrough. But still, I can’t help thinking more could have been done in this regard. Why not include a black table with fluorescent paint for example, or use different types of paint, or “filters” to create a retro look or different patterns… The possibilities are endless and it would have brought some aesthetic variety to the overall experience.

Another minor quibble is the lack of gameplay elements. I’ve mentioned the likes of Breakout and Peggle, which, aside from offering different layouts and backgrounds and themes, also included a ton of “powerups” or abilities to alter gameplay and enhance the overall experience and replayability. Apart from the standard bumpers and ramps, the only features the tables offer are small black holes and secret tunnels. That is, unless you count the two power-ups which are available as consumable IAP’s… Uh-oh.

I’ve already mentioned the level packs you can buy, and although they offer more of the same, I’m cool with that. But there are also consumable “cheats” which can help you beat a level or get that perfect score. There are two: one will slow down your ball and help you aim your shots and the second will create a stopper in the outhole so you won’t lose the ball. These cost credits and the only way to get credits is to buy them with real life cash (ranging from $1,99 for 350 credits to $11,99 for unlimited credits.) As far as I’ve seen, there’s no way to earn credits in-game. And I’m not OK with that. It doesn’t sit well with the zen-like nature of the game and frankly, with unlimited balls for each level, you don’t need them just to win a gold star with which you can do nothing. It would be cool to have more of these “power-ups,” but then give us the opportunity to unlock them in-game. But that’s just my opinion.

Phew, that’s a load off my chest! And maybe I shouldn’t be overanalyzing things here, because there’s a lot to enjoy, so let’s focus on that. If you’ve ever found yourself even remotely attracted to pinball but feel daunted by the complexity of the great pinball tables, or you think you don’t have the reflexes, give this one a shot. You’ll get plenty of enjoyment out of it. And who knows? It might even help you become better at it and serve as a springboard to full-blown pinball simulators such as Pinball Arcade or Zen Pinball. And if you enjoy visually appealing, relaxing gameplay experiences, or you’re looking for a well put-together lighter game in between two heavier gaming sessions, this one will do very nicely. As for me, it’s back to the trenches and down into the dungeons once more.

Super Mario hacked into a Twitter client with a custom wireless "modem"  

I’d have expected more from a band whose name sounds like the title of a mid-00s cartoon about teenage witches…

[Video][Website]
[2.78]

Cassy Gress: Bands like the Strumbellas sound like they belong on empty rail cars, the kind that runaways jump into in stories, with a little bit of scattered straw around, stomping their feet and singing and passing around a jug of something or another. While the train chugs away from me.
[3]

Iain Mew: I get that someone’s really proud of their indie mixtape, but I wish they’d stop skipping between tracks. I’d rather listen to Magic! or The Lumineers or Of Monsters & Men or Mull Historical Society(?) than disjointed sections of each of them.
[3]

Claire Biddles: A song that absolutely lives up to the teeth-grindingly awful half-pun of the group’s name, which I can’t bring myself to repeat. The increasingly watered-down course of earnest indie-folk can be traced directly from Arcade Fire’s first album through to the emotions-as-floor-toms-and-woahs of Mumford and Sons and The Lumineers, to this lowest-common-denominator dirge which feels like the inevitable death of this wave of the genre. The singer claims the group as “strange” before launching into an unremarkable chorus, surrounded in the video by a group of self-consciously “kooky” characters that resemble the most boring attendees of fancy dress hellhole Bestival circa 2007. Sugar skulls! Pirates! How weird!! I am 100% certain that every member of this group has brought an acoustic guitar to a party on at least one occasion and that alone is enough for me to despise them. 
[1]

Will Adams: It’s easy to shit on the pleasant blandness of the Of Mumfords and Lumineersmen sound that was so omnipresent four years ago, but to those bands’ credit, they never sounded this flimsy. The chorus melody here seems better suited to a kids’ cereal commercial, while these folks’ performance would probably get shot down at a house party.
[2]

Patrick St. Michel: Now I know what Will Oldham would sound like if he wrote music for BuzzFeed.
[4]

Sonia Yang: This is definitely written to be a sing-along crowd pleaser; the set closer before the inevitable encore. In a live setting, it would be the peak of performer-audience synergy. On record, it starts strong and loses steam around the bridge. The lyrics teeter on the border of profound in simplicity and heavy-handed due to repetition, but the “fighting your inner demons” theme is one I enjoy no matter how many times it’s been done. 
[6]

Brad Shoup: Conscientiously objecting to this off-key, room-temp tribute to Viva la Vida.
[1]

Josh Langhoff: Reckoning with survivalist neighbors and the ghosts of her parents, the narrator of Margaret Atwood’s Surfacing — “ice-clear, transparent, my bones and the child inside me showing through the green webs of my flesh” — wanders into a production of Rent and, um, learns how to be a good person or something.
[3]

Alfred Soto: They got guns in their head, bats in their belfry, and acoustic guitars in their hands. Hide your children.
[2]

Game industry veteran and Twitter bot enthusiast Darius Kazemi has developed a new browser-based game, Bubble Burst Bernie, for CBS' The Late Show with Stephen Colbert. ...

This is pop music, we say.

[Video][Website]
[7.88]

Jibril Yassin: Temi’s great at standing out amid the fantastic production; her vocals twist and turn in a way that doesn’t feel laboured. “School Your Face” is a lazy, funky strut until that fantastic slow burn of a bridge and rap breakdown comes around the corner to melt you down. Consider me schooled. 
[8]

Jonathan Bogart: I try really hard not to have platonic ideals of what pop music should be because pop music is a moving target, and I don’t want to be another Unfrozen Caveman Pop Critic forever claiming things were at their best when they meant the most to me personally. But Temi Dollface so deeply satisfies my ideals, with her catchy, hooky, witty, multiphonic, fleet, and rhythmically sophisticated songs, that I have to listen extra hard to make sure she isn’t just making me nostalgic. But I don’t think she is. She raids Africa’s pop past — South African jive, Nigerian jùjú, Ghanaian highlife — for sounds that in their bright unfamiliarity (to Western ears) are transformed into sleek cut-n-paste futurism in sync with the best past-raiders around the globe today. “School Your Face” turns a grandmotherly reproof of the impolite stares or giggles of childhood into a warning about keeping up appearances within the war zones of grownup relationships; as someone who worries that his poker face belies a poker heart, it’s only just starting to mean a lot to me personally.
[10]

Jessica Doyle: “School Your Face” takes a more eclectic approach to structure than did “Pata Pata” without skimping on the beat or the wit. There’s the argument for listening on if you need one, if you somehow have managed to get past her self-deprecating deadpan delivery of “UV protection” without being won over.
[7]

Cassy Gress: There’s a choir of Temi Dollfaces a-gun-gun-gun-a-chika-chun-chun-ing a guitar line, and in the pre-chorus (“there’s something that you should know, but I’m afraid to tell you so”) the upper harmonies drop down to a surprise E natural instead of an E-flat. The organ, the clicks, the groove — I could listen to this, like, a thousand times. 
[9]

Alfred Soto: The tapdance and yell breakdown recalls early ’00s Missy Elliott, but the nervous rhythm and Temi Dollface’s stentorian command are her own.
[7]

Crystal Leww: Temi Dollface has a lot of personality, and it’s on full display in “School Your Face” as she warps and drawls and elongates words and phrases. The comparisons to Janelle Monae have tons of merit — both are artists who are not interested in adhering to any kind of genre or standard of music without abandoning the basic rule of making things catchy. This is extremely catchy.
[7]

Brad Shoup: I’m hearing Prince in all the voices she’s assembled, but the track patters instead of pops. And the coda could’ve withstood way more vamping.
[6]

Anthony Easton: The speed of the production and the slowness of Dollface’s voice work as a kind of doubling effect, which complicates a song that could be a little simple. The work isn’t needlessly complex but has a green, lush, freshness. 
[9]

fascinating thread that speaks volumes about Y Combinator culture  

Big country hit has a great new metaphor…

[Video][Website]
[3.67]

Cassy Gress: I wonder if the concept of love being an intoxicant came originally from people who liked intoxicants, or from people who were trying to sell love as a more noble alternative to the harder stuff. How old is that metaphor, anyway? Google probably knows. These are the things I think about when listening to yet another drunk/high on lo–oh for fuck’s sake, he just said “I’m, so, drawnnk.“
[3]

Iain Mew: The washed out intro being wiped out “the second she walked in the door” is a nice touch in a song that’s presenting someone as transformative. It’s funnier still when the same accordion sounds only come back for a final “I’m so drunk,” like the whole thing was the product of being too drunk to realise that it wasn’t on love. It’s at least a slightly more unusual way round to play the metaphor, and Eldredge bundles through the song with a convincing edgy ebullience.
[6]

Anthony Easton: Eldredge hasn’t quite broken through yet, which is a shame. Though the production is a little repetitive, his voice is warm and he knows how to work a phrase. 
[5]

Patrick St. Michel: The concept is already pretty well-worn, but geez, Brett Eldredge barely tries to do anything with it. “Drunk, drunk,” “love, love, love,” “why, why,” this is an exercise in laziness.
[1]

Alfred Soto: I thought he was signing “drunk on your truck,” which, you know, fine.
[2]

Brad Shoup: Eldredge’s lovedrunk is as wooze-inducing as an afternoon nap: he’s repeating a bunch of words, but that’s just slight disorientation. A promising arrangement of mandolin, accordion and bongos ends up humming like an AC unit.
[5]

"VA DA is a trivial animation/drawing​ program. " - Author's description

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neural network-generated web nostalgia [via] 

real micro hardware for playing and coding games for the wonderful PICO-8 fantasy console  

command-line tool to download the entire Wayback Machine archive for a URL