Taylor Swift

"The basic premise is to never have duplicate code in your program. It may sound obvious, why would anyone just copy and paste code? But code duplication is actually a surprisingly common programming problem." ...

Tokyo’s famous Harajuku neighborhood is getting a new landmark – the Kawaii Monster Cafe!

The Kawaii Monster Cafe – opening on August 1, 2015 – aims to capture the spirit that made Harajuku the most famous street fashion neighborhood in all of Asia, while at the same time creating a never-seen-before experience to overload the senses. Japanese art director Sebastian Masuda – known worldwide for creating Kyary Pamyu Pamyu’s music video visuals and running the iconic 6%DOKIDOKI “kawaii anarchy” boutique – created over-the-top visuals in Harajuku’s largest cafe space, including a giant functional merry-go-round, neon animals in a dream forest, a bar from under the sea, oversized sweets, and much more.

In addition to five different themed areas, Harajuku’s largest cafe Kawaii Monster Cafe will also star five different “Monster Girls”, each with a unique personality and costumed by Tokyo-based stylist Misha Janette. The Harajuku Monster Girls are sweet Baby, the willful Dolly, the happy Candy, the sexy Nasty, or the moody Crazy.

The five themed areas of the Kawaii Monster Cafe are described by art director Sebastian Masuda as:

Sweets-Go-Round
A cake merry-go-round: the Kawaii Monster Cafe’s symbol and a great spot for a Harajuku photo.

Mushroom Disco
A large forest with colorful, poisonous-looking mushrooms and plants from outer space covering the area overhead.

Milk Stand
Giant rabbits, sheep, and unicorn heads with a large number of baby bottles. A crazy baby room where animals drink milk.

Bar Experiment
The bar counter is surrounded by large jellyfish twinkling suspiciously. This is the experiment room for the adults that lurk at the bottom of the sea.

Mel-Tea Room
Led by the ants, once you go past the sugar signposts, you’ll be greeted by a tea party full of giant melting ice cream, chocolate, and macarons.

The Kawaii Monster Cafe – produced by Diamond Dining and Sebastian Masuda – is located on the 4th floor of YM Square Harajuku, across the street of LaForet Harajuku. The cafe will be open daily from 11.30am – 10.30pm. Check the official website and the official Instagram for more info, news, and pictures!

Kawaii Monster Cafe Harajuku Video

Kawaii Monster Cafe Harajuku Pictures

Click any of the Kawaii Monster Cafe pictures to blow them up!

Thank you to Sebastian Masuda, Diamond Dining, and all of the Monster Girls for allowing us to shoot the Kawaii Monster Cafe!

GHOSTZ recalls the virtual pet craze of the 1990s: simple digital beings in your care, marching obliquely against unchanging backdrops, whimsical of mood and utterly dependent on your actions. Death was often a part of the virtual pet experience, although according to a (real or imagined?) P.F. Magic info sheet from 1997 cited in the beginning of the game, very few players actively wanted to face the possibility.

GHOSTZ imagines a virtual pet experience about caring for a ghost. This can include offering it a bone from its former form ("DISRESPECTFUL") or punishing it with holy water. The little Twine-based game is driven by actual statistics, although these are hidden from the player, mirroring the emotionally-nuanced nature of our relationships with living things both virtual and real.

It's a simple game made by Dixon Grimdixie for Porpentine's virtual pet-themed PetJam, but what I like about it is the way it's nested in the creator's own warm personal reflections on the era of digital pets and how robust and full of possibility they felt.

Play GHOSTZ for free in your browser here.

Nintendo beat analyst expectations this week when, rather than recording a loss for the first quarter of its fiscal 2016 year, the company posted a tidy profit. ...

Negativland member died in Oakland, California on 22 July

Negativland member and radio DJ Don Joyce died from heart failure on 22 July. He was 71 years old. Joyce, who worked with the freeform collagists for 34 years, is credited with coining the term ‘culture jamming’.

Born in Keene, New Hampshire, Joyce moved to Oakland, North Carolina in the late 1960s. In 1981 he founded the Thursday night radio show Over The Edge on KPFA FM, which ran for 34 years. It was there where he met the late Ian Allen (the former Negativland member who died in January this year). Since joining the group, Joyce worked on nearly 30 Negativland albums, two books and three DVDs. He stopped touring with the group in 2010 but continued working on other projects with them.

According to the Negativland website, every show of Over The Edge, totalling 5000 plus hours of air time, is currently being archived, with a view to making it available in late 2015.

Here is the wireframe for the Occult Bookstore. I know what you're saying: "Whoa, that's a lot of books, how are you going to come up with names for all those books when the player scans their cursor across the screen?"

Funny you should ask that.

I'm a big fan of the Tom Sawyer school of game design. Why paint that fence if you can get all your friends to paint it for you, or in this case, name all those books.

There are close to 300 books in the book store. They are too small to be individually touchable, so 2 or 3 books will probably make up the hotspot, which should be fine. There is a puzzle involving finding a book, but the player won't be tasked with the monotony of scanning all the books to find the one they need. There will be an object that locates the book, and that is the real puzzle. All the books having funny names is to make the store fun to explore.

And this is where you come in... We need names for all those books. The rules are:

1) The name has to be less than 35 characters.
2) It should be a book you'd find in an occult bookstore.
3) Ignore #2 if it's really funny that the book is found in an occult bookstore.
4) The title can include a "by ..." if the total length is less than 35 characters.
5) Include a "by ..." only if it is part of the humor.
6) Pay attention to #2, we're not just looking for funny book titles, but ones that would be found in an occult bookstore.
7) #6 is really important.

Post your submissions in the comments.

- Ron

UPDATE

I'm closing the comments. There are well over 1000 comments and probably 2000+ useable book titles. What great fun! Thanks to everyone for contributing! There are some really funny titles that I LOL'd at. And if you know me, I don't use LOL very lightly. When I LOL, I really mean it. LOL.

The next step will be to copy all the book titles from the comments and drop them into a spreadsheet, remove the bad ones (sorry if I hurt your feelings) and wire them in. Given the number of books, Mark is going to have to adjust the room, probably by making it comically tall. The only skyscraper in Thimbleweed Park is the Occult Bookstore.

Love it.

Please don't leave book titles in the comments of other posts, I'll delete them. Don't screw with me!

LOL

Best. Backers. Ever.

"Take a selfie with this." - Author's description

Play on itch.io (Browser)

[Via @eigenbom]

Multiple indie developers have claimed that Ouya still owes them thousands of dollars as part of their 'Free the Games' fund, none of which will be paid following Razer acquisition. ...

Twenty-two years ago, these songs blasted out of car stereos and into our lives. Unlike other years, 1993 can claim several candidates for Song of the Summer – is it “That’s The Way Love Goes,” UB40’s Elvis cover, or Tag Team’s unmentionable? We’ll see. Meanwhile the number of ballads charting in late July surprised me.

10. Rod Stewart – Have I Told You Lately

The peak of Rod Stewart’s late eighties chart resurgence, this Van Morrison cover recorded during his Unplugged session is okay in a whiskery way. Stewart sings with care and as if he means it. During the performance his voice cracked, supposedly in memory of then-wife Rachel Hunter, but I like to think it happened because Faces partner Ron Wood was next to him playing perfect accompaniment.

9. Proclaimers – I’m Gonna Be (500 Miles)

The previous year House of Pain scored a hit because brogues over pseudo-Bomb Squad screeches was a novelty; its afterlife was longer than Benny & Joon, the forgotten Johnny Depp feature it soundtracked. These Scottish brothers pledged their troth over acoustic strums, peaking with the catchiest DA-DA-DA-DA in rock history. I mind it less now that it’s no longer ubiquitous enough for buddies to show you how badly they can imitate Scottish accents.

8. Exposé – I’ll Never Get Over You (Getting Over Me)

The chart’s biggest surprise: the late eighties freestyle trio, shorn of all but one of its original members, got a sizable pop and A/C hit in 1993. “With a Diane Warren ballad,” you’d add. I know this because there isn’t a single memorable image or surprising melodic/chordal twist – the Diane Warren trademark. It isn’t even as good as “Seasons Change.”

7. Onyx – Slam

DA DUH DUH, DA DUH DUH. Busta Rhymes was nowhere near the pop chart in 1993, but Sticky Fingaz and Fredro Starr’s impersonations and a Jam Master Jay production that samples the Mohawks were strong enough to launch them into the top five. Song of the summer?

6. Robin S – Show Me Love

Four years before another Robyn would hit the top ten with her own “Show Me Love,” this Robin couldn’t have known that this spare, percolating pop house number would become one of the most influential records of its generation. Today a crew of British producers and artists from Katy B to Gorgon City have done wonders with 808 programming and an unstudied vocal.

5. H-Town – Knockin’ Da Boots

Amazingly, I didn’t hear “Knockin’ Da Boots” for another few months, long past its peak (and as a tip of the hat in A Tribe Called Quest’s “Electric Relaxation”). I didn’t have MTV and Y-100 didn’t play it. In a chart replete with bangers, the Connor brothers kicked back old school, singing with grit if not much imagination; a throwback is all it is, to a time when Teddy Pendergrass wasn’t making top ten pop hits.

4. Janet Jackson – That’s The Way Love Goes

Okay, so maybe this is the Song of the Summer. This year’s “No Sleep” represents Janet Jackson’s attempting a chart return with a smoocher, a slow jam way too cool for school; that’s partly why “That’s The Way Love Goes” surprised us in 1993. Although I prefer “If,” “Because of Love,” and “Anytime, Anyplace,” it’s better than “Again” and a decent showcase for Jackson’s lower register. Number one for eight weeks.

3. Tag Team – Whoomp! (There It Is)

So is this the Song of the Summer? Judging by its recurrent play well into Bill Clinton’s second term, I might say yes. Like “Celebration,” Tag Team’s hit is a catchphrase more than a song. If you were too old for this shit, you thought it was obnoxious; if you were twelve, maybe not.

2. SWV – Weak

I forget this hit #1 the previous week, a break in the clouds between two chartbusters. The success of En Vogue lifted Jade and SWV’s own albums, and It’s About Time is a solid collection of post-New Jack R&B, its thwacking percussive tracks staring longingly at hip-hop. I’ll take “I’m So Into You” and “Right Here/Human Nature” and so will you.

1. UB40 – Can’t Help Falling in Love

Neil Diamond, Smokey Robinson, and Al Green wrote the three numbers that UB40 had taken into the top ten; now a Blue Hawaii track originally recorded by Elvis followed. Recorded for a Sharon Stone thriller that everyone forgot about three minutes later, this cover sounds closer to “That’s The Way Love Goes” than I thought: Jackson and UB40 undersing to the point of disappearing into the groove (in UB40’s case the groove is a preset). In 1993 I preferred it to their other covers; Ali Campbell’s melodic lift breaks the lull in the “As a river flows gently to the sea” middle eight. I’ll vouch for the Sliver soundtrack, by the way – my introduction to Massive Attack’s “Unfinished Sympathy,” Heaven 17’s “Penthouse and Pavement,” and Neneh Cherry’s “Move With Me.” And I’m delighted it introduced Lords of Acid’s “The Most Wonderful Girl” to millions of Americans. Why couldn’t it have been the hit?

In this timeless feature from the March 2010 issue of Game Developer Magazine, we revisit the mighty kludges and well-meaning hacks that are sometimes required to get our games out the door on time. ...

Steve Reich has released a Clapping Music app

Steve Reich has released a Clapping Music app. It’s based on his 1972 composition Clapping Music, which involves two performers clapping a constantly shifting rhythmic pattern. The app teaches the user to play the piece by tapping along to the composition on screen.

Only available to iOS users, the app also includes educational videos looking at the compositional technique in Clapping Music and Electric Counterpoint. Those users who get really good at it can enter a competition to perform live with London Sinfonietta’s percussionists. More information here.

Celebrate the anniversary of the powerful, popular PC platform by checking out some of its best games and reflecting on its place in history. ...

Rarma is an 18-year-old student in a pretty layered look who caught our eye on the street in Harajuku.

She’s wearing a layered deconstructed dress from the Japanese designer Nozomi Ishiguro with sheer socks and amazing unicorn heels by Irregular Choice. Accessories include a hat, a handmade doll leg necklace, a Talatta fabric ring, and a furry face bag by the Japanese brand Ahcahcum Muchacha.

Rarma’s favorite fashion brand is Bortsprungt and she likes the music of Shinsei Kamattechan. Find her on Twitter for more info and pictures.

Click on any photo to enlarge it.

I'm a sucker for the self-similar pleasures of recursion, so it was with great delight that I learned someone has put a playable version of Doom... inside Doom.

In a video posted by TheZombieKiller, you can see everyone's favorite space marine approach what looks like an arcade cabinet, and then start playing the very game he is inside. It's part of a larger effort to put a number of playable "arcade games" inside Doom; a semi-complete version of Wolfenstein 3D is also available.

Somewhere, Xzibit is smiling down upon us all.

[via Kotaku]

I realized that some of you have probably never seen any of the Sun Ra films. Allow me to alleviate this serious problem in your life.

This beautiful all black outfit with a veiled hat and gloves caught our eye on the street in Harajuku. When we spoke to the wearer, they told us that their name is 501.

501′s black top and jacket are from Alice Auaa, while the skirt was bought from the Tokyu Department Store and the carved leather handbag is from Grace Continental.

Click on any photo to enlarge it.

Original guitarist in Yoshimi's all girl group has died

The death of Kyoko, guitarist of the Japanese group OOIOO has been announced by their founder Yoshimi on Instagram. “Kyoko was 183cm tall,” she wrote. “She was on her own pace, optimistic and natural blur. I loved her very much. I do not like to believe she is no longer with us anymore. I love to see her again.”

OOIOO formed “on a whim” in 1995. Their first live shows were supporting Sonic Youth on a 1997 tour of Japan, during which Yoshimi and Kyoko navigated their way around the fretboard with sticker aids. Kyoko left the group after falling ill but remained close, occasionally helping on OOIOO’s merch stands. Kyoko was also a member of 80s goth rock group Kokushoku Elegy. She died on 19 July.

There's something striking and lawless about the bodies of moths, isn't there? Their patterns of howling eyes, bark-like patterns, haloes of bright, thin hair seem almost accidental, like fractals gone all wrong. Now, a new procedural generation bot pays tribute to the morbid maths of moths, and it's compelling.

Poet and artist Katie Rose Pipkin and multi-talented game maker Loren Schmidt (their stark, demanding 'retro'-style work Star Guard was an Independent Games Festival design finalist) have collaborated on Moth Generator (lepidoptera automata, of course). It makes moths, tweets and names them.

A dark sort of beauty wings out of such a simple idea: Sometimes there is one tiny pearlite body pinned to a slate-gray scientific sheet, and at other times, it manifests a whole board with a array of spectacular forms pinned side by side. You feel lots like you're wandering the collection of some mad biologist, skirting the line between artifice and nature. Follow @mothgenerator on Twitter to watch the dusty, incandescent life forms unfold.

If you like the project, you can buy Katie Rose Pipkin's work on itch.io, or support Loren Schmidt's ongoing work via Patreon.

"What is cybersex, and how do I get some? If that's what you're asking yourself, you've come to the right place." So begins the 1993 book The Joy of Cybersex, an early guide to the online world of sexual content, right as it was emerging into mainstream consciousness.

Back in 1993, the internet was something of an adolescent, just starting to experiment with its digital sexuality. People heard there was sex out there in "cyberspace"—the online equivalent of porn hidden somewhere in the woods—but they weren't always quite sure how to find it.

Naturally, a "user's guide" emerged; The Joy of Cybersex promised "a peek into the future of cybersex and teledildonics" in a book that came packaged with the games Strip Poker 3 and Jigsaw Pinups while also quoting Winston Churchill in its forward. ("The empires of the future will be empires of the mind.")

Two years before Angelina Jolie and Johnny Lee Miller made dial-up seem sexy by cavorting through a luminescent virtual city in Hackers, this online manual promised a world of similarly vivid digital eroticism:

"Just imagine yourself in the near future getting decked out in your cybersensual suit for a hot night on the nets. You plug your jack into your cybernetic interface device, which then enables you to receive and transmit realistic tactile sensations. Suddenly, you are in a strange new world where you can run your hands through virtual hair, touch virtual silk, unzip virtual clothing and caress virtual flesh."

Ooooh.

The Joy of Cybersex is very much an artifact of its time; it begins by explaining to readers what a CD-ROM is, before delving into the world of "erotic disks" and sexy computer games, and extensively profiles the individual adult bulletin boards you could dial into with your 9600 baud modem. (As Anthropy notes, this survey is filtered through the perspective of a female author, and "paints a really familiar portrait of what it's like to exist as a woman online.")

It's a fascinating glimpse of the lost, floating cities of digital sexuality, and the early, sometimes awkward forays into online sexual connection that would one day evolve into Tinder, sexting, and well, the entire internet porn industry. It even explores the sexual applications of virtual reality headsets, more than twenty years before the Oculus Rift.

The book—which as you might guess is often sexually explicit—was recently scanned and made available for download by game developer Anna Anthropy. She's been preserving and archiving early internet documents, particularly around video games, for nearly two years now; her "Annarchive, which is supported via Patreon, features scans of everything from manuals for the interactive fiction classic Zork to design documents for the 1986 adventure game adaptation of The Black Cauldron.

While some of the documents are PDFs, others like The Joy of Cybersex are in CBZ format. Anthropy recommends using a free CBZ reader like Cdisplay, "or you can rename the file from .cbz to .zip and open it as a zip archive to extract the images."

I visited M&Ms World in Leicester Square this Tuesday, for the first time in rather a long time, but to be honest with you I’m not sure why they bother calling it M&Ms World at all anymore. The whole thing is just Minions.

As many of you will know, I’ve thought and written quite extensively about the M&Ms store in the past. From the moment I first saw the M&Ms store, in October 2011, I was completely fascinated with it. Posing as an amusingly left-field attempt to market a hard-shelled chocolate candy, the M&Ms store in fact represented the attempt to replicate the entire world, in M&Ms form. Aside from the sweet itself, you could buy anything at all in the M&Ms store, filtered and distorted through the prism of the five M&Ms character-candies: not just food but clothing; domestic appliances; farming equipment; all of the most terrible engines of torture and mass destruction ever contrived by man; the great works of western art and literature; pornography representing every fetish (so long as it involves fucking the Green M&M); all animals real, extinct, and imagined; the eight planets of our solar system; and God.

As I argued in my 2013 essay, the M&Ms store represented a new development in the dialectic of capitalist reification: it utilises a five-fold ‘character-ontology’ to more effectively reduce all things and qualities in the world to itself. Since an M&M is, of course, a capitalist product, this means that all things will, in turn, have been rendered into money and thus made exchangeable and fungible. In my essay I wrote as if the transformation of all things into M&Ms, a process kickstarted by the M&Ms store, was pretty much an inevitably. This was something I sincerely believed: I was not being ironic. But I now know that I was wrong.

I know I was wrong because, in the M&Ms store today, you cannot buy any M&Ms t-shirts. You cannot buy any M&Ms keyrings, or golf clubs, or any statuettes of all the M&Ms characters in a band. There is no machine that will tell you which M&M you are if you stand in it, and no pictures of the M&Ms dressed up as all the great figures from history on the walls. And there certainly isn’t any hard-shelled chocolate candy about. Instead, all you can buy is Minions. A Minions t-shirt, a Minions keyring. A statue of all the Minions in a band. A diamond-studded Minions leather jacket. The Minions as the Beatles. A machine which when you step into it, it tells you that you are a Minion, in the coldly bored voice of someone repeating the most banal and indisputable fact on Earth. Even the shop itself is not in a building anymore: I don’t know how I didn’t notice this when I entered but on Tuesday, as I stepped outside of it, I realised that my whole shopping experience had just taken place inside the mouth of a giant Minion.

Disoriented by this discovery, I stumbled through Leicester Square, trying to get away from the Minions, but it was impossible. It wasn’t just the M&Ms store the Minions had usurped: everything else was Minions, too. Minions on the buses. Minions in the windows of every shop. Children covered head-to-toe in Minions clothing, and adults in what looked like giant Minions suits. Little fucking Minions scurrying about everywhere on the floor. Burger King across the road from what had used to be the M&Ms store, but now it was called Minions King, and when I reached into my pocket to get the money out to pay for the Bacon XL Cheeseburger I’d just purchased, hyperventilating, to comfort-eat and steady my nerves, I realised that I didn’t have any money in it after all: I just had Minions. My burger arrived, and was handed to me, but I froze, unable to pay for it, until from the box there emerged a chattering, scurrying Minion. At this point, the floor melted.

We all know what happened next. This was the day that all of reality turned into Minions. What I once had feared would be wrought upon us by the M&Ms, had now been successfully accomplished by the Minions. Everything is Minions now: when you read this, all you will see is a steady stream of Minions; as I type it, on the Minions in front of me, I simply launch more Minions into creation. We are all Minions now, and I am yellow, and named Stuart, and wear dungarees, and I have a single giant stupid perspectiveless eye. And, as with everyone and everything else under the sun, my only purpose now is to incompetently serve evil.

But why were the Minions able to do this, when the M&Ms apparently could not? In what follows, I want to sketch a few things towards an understanding of the Minionification of reality.

My analysis here proceeds from an excellent article written by Brian Feldman, published a few weeks before the disaster on The Awl. As Feldman’s article points out, Minions were in fact originally characters in a film called ‘Despicable Me’ before being given their own film, released recently, simply entitled ‘Minions’. It was originally as an attempt to promote this film that the Minions started being everywhere, with the disastrous results we now experience at all times.

According to the films, a ‘Minion’ is a creature older than humanity, that emerged from the proverbial primordial soup fully-formed, and has not undergone any substantial development since: indeed, it is suggested by the films that no new Minions are ever born, and none die. The Minions, thus, always have been, and always will be. They are universally tubular, and yellow. They all wear goggles to correct poor vision, though some only have one eye and some have two. The Minions have buttocks, but no sexual organs: conceivably, however, they are all male, since they all have names like Kevin or Norbert or McKyle.

Just as a dolphin needs the sea or a polar bear needs the snow, the Minions need at least one major environmental factor in order to maintain themselves, and to flourish: it is a matter of biological necessity for the Minions to serve an evil master. T-Rex, the Pharoahs, Napoleon, Hitler: it is ‘Minions’ canon that the Minions have served them all. The comedy, however, emerges from the fact that the Minions are completely incompetent: their idiot antics always undermine their evil masters’ schemes, frequently leading to said masters’ demise. Despite their idiocy, however, the Minions themselves are never the victims of their own pranks: and so they persist.

I myself first became aware of the Minions when they started appearing in adverts for the Sky package (or some aspect of it). I think probably the first time I saw them was in an advert on TV shown during the French Open tennis final. I can’t say they left a particularly powerful impression on me. But then all of a sudden, after that, I started seeing them everywhere: on posters on public transport, on the internet, in magazines – advertising not just Sky but a whole range of other products, including their own film. Then they were emblazoned on apparently every internet meme, usually shared by norms. The kicker was when I saw, on twitter, an image that simply read ‘Keep Calm and Minions’. That was when I knew they were taking over. Although even I didn’t think the whole thing would be over so fast…

But still, why? What exactly is the source of the Minions’ apparently enormous appeal? Feldman’s article suggests that it stems from the fact that, in an age of – often divisive – identity politics, the Minions are determinedly post-identity (or perhaps pre-identity, considering that technically they existed before humanity did). Their universally yellow complexion knows no racial difference; their genderless masculinity gives us one image of a world with all ‘gender constructions’ undone. The Minions speak a garbled mish-mash of all languages, taking elements from English, Spanish, French, and Japanese, though the end result is essentially gibberish. For these reasons, anyone can identify with the Minions, and anyone can identify anything with the Minions: a Minion can simply be a Minion, or it can be Marilyn Monroe standing over the vents, or it can be trying to fuck a fire hydrant, or it can be Hamlet, or that guy from the Big Bang Theory who says Bazinga, or Leopold Bloom, or Goya’s painting of the Nude Maja. A Minion can be a spade, it can be a gun, it can be a keyring, it can be a t-shirt, it can be a bus. They have been used to ‘explain’ everything from academia to the Decline and Fall of the Western Roman Empire. A Minion is, in this sense, infinitely fungible.

Hence we have discovered that a minion is: (1) bound to serve evil; (2) infinitely fungible. What does this sound like? What else is fungible and always serves the interests of real evil? Why, money of course! The Minions, then, are money. But of course, Minions are not quite money. The Minions are funny little characters that represent money. Particularly in an era in which physical money is increasingly being replaced by its electronic representation (as we ourselves existed in, prior to its usurpation by Minions), ‘money’ consists in something brutely quantitative, a number. But, as I have already argued in relation to the M&Ms, you cannot reduce everything in existence to a number: that would be to eliminate quality, and people will not, despite what scientistic philosophers seem to think, stand for that. Human reality consists in large part in experiences of quality, and even if you can pretend that ‘reality’ is ultimately describable in terms equivalent to numbers and thus undermine the objective purport of these experiences, you can’t really get people to discard them. So, if you want an ontology that everything in existence can be fully reduced to (perhaps in order to monetise it), you need it to be an ontology that can fit quality essentially in to it. Otherwise something that cannot be reduced to mere numbers, such as love or hot takes, will always remain in a relationship with the numbers such that it can potentially resist them.

The character-ontology of the M&Ms could effect this sort of qualitative reduction. But the M&Ms’ ontology was in truth, I suppose, always rather clunky. An ontology, like that of the M&Ms, which was consistently having to add new characters to it just to keep up with existence, by definition fails to constitute a unified framework which everything in that existence can be reduced to. The Minions, also, constitute a plurality; but it is a plurality of sameness, with any one Minion exactly interchangeable with any other (some are slightly shorter, some have only one eye, but it doesn’t really make any material difference: they are simply, in whole and in truth, Minions, neither more nor less). In this way, the Minions give us all the advantages of ‘character’ – the ability to incorporate quality in a real and full sense into our ontology – within the context of an ontological monism. The consequences are here for everyone to see: I’m a Minion, you’re a Minion. Everything is Minions. Minions Minions Minions Minions Minions.

But it worth emphasising that the definition above of Minions as bound to serve evil and infinitely fungible is not exhaustive. For a third quality inherently defines the Minions: aside from their affinity with evil and their fungibility, the actions of the Minions will always inevitably undermine their evil masters.

So what, then, are the Minions? Money, yes, but more specifically than that: they are a form of currency that, just insofar as it exists, inevitably undermines the evil intentions of its masters. The Minions, then, must be the Euro: the Euro project was devised in order to bind the economies and ultimately the governments of all Europe to the economic interests of Germany, but it is now backfiring terminally, leading to political instability and economic stagnation.

Perhaps then we should not be surprised that the two things which most define our current moment, politically, are the Eurozone crisis, and the rise of the Minions. The two go along together. And although the real and explicit transformation of everything into Minions has now caused events in Greece to develop in previously unexpected ways, the way things were unfolding prior to that should at the very least have indicated to us that the EU was already being run, at least in part, by Minions. The Eurozone’s leaders have consistently, in their attitude to Greece, proven themselves equally evil, incompetent and, at the most essential level, interchangeable with one another: a conspiracy of nothings who would condemn us all to the void, if only it might save a banker from having to write off a penny.

And yet, if there is any comfort left for us now, it must precisely lie in the Minions’ incompetence. Everything, now, is Minions. Everything, then, serves evil. But it is, equally, inept. Thus now that everything is Minions, the machinations of every objective tendency, which previously served evil anyway, will now tend, precisely against themselves, towards the good. Evil will team up with Evil to fire a home-made cannon at Hope, but in doing so, it will backfire, and topple a big rock over itself. Communism will Win. Minions Minions Minions.

"On my business card, I am a corporate president. In my mind, I am a game developer. But in my heart, I am a gamer," began Nintendo president Satoru Iwata in this seminal GDC 2005 keynote speech. ...

We've gathered just a handful of quotes that reflect the late Satoru Iwata's personality, influence savvy, and opinion on video games -- where they are and what he thought they should become. ...

…if you call in the next ten minutes and order now!

Alfred Soto: What’s this — a “Silk” Hurley track with Robyn shedding any trace of melancholy? More, please!
[7]

Maxwell Cavaseno: Fantastic Terry-style rough-edged house banger, featuring over and underrated feminine pressures giving the tempo slices of extra tectonic fractural force.
[8]

Thomas Inskeep: A pencil sketch of a NYC house track, with way too many farty noises and sampled lyrical chunks, and precious little song structure. Robyn continues to be the most inexplicably vaunted hipster musical icon. 
[2]

Katherine St Asaph: I kind of love that Robyn’s career trajectory has gone from “Show Me Love” to “Show Me Love.” Critics’ wishes aside, the sassy alt-pop star career never seemed to be one Robyn particularly wanted, nor the best version of her, which is probably why she’s pursued everything but. My favorite Body Talk song is “Don’t Fucking Tell Me What to Do,” not just for the implied “Robyn Stress Index” but for its brutal dance minimalism. “Love is Free” has more frippery and more credits, but also more fun and imagination — certainly more than a lot of revival house.
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Scott Mildenhall: Robyn is not one to be pigeonholed. This is the clammiest thing she’s yet come up with, taking no pause for breath, and mostly because there’s no room for it. Everything is so tight and pressing, with sounds thrusting and rattling freely from all directions. It might really be only a not-hugely-imaginative rework of an obscure 80s track, but it intensifies what that source has. Rarely are there stronger expressions of what “banger” can signify.
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Juana Giaimo: With Robyn having released some of the best pop music of the last couple of years, this is disappointing. “Love is Free” is tiring and trapped in a boring pattern that doesn’t offer a good rhythm to dance to or a good vocal melody to remember.
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Brad Shoup: Robyn gets her LL Cool J on when she’s not settling comfortably into the track. This is a mid-evening club tune; I imagine it’d sound as good on the floor as on the balcony before heading back in.
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Ramzi Awn: Love isn’t only free, it’s motherfucking fun too. Robyn’s party-ready vocal is disarmingly sweet to boot, and the To Wong Foo infused collabo puts a fine point on the fact that the self-proclaimed dancehall queen knows how to make smart decisions, and sell them. No doubt — I’ll let you give it to me, baby. 
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Will Adams: Robyn’s previous attempts at minimalist house fell really flat; “We Dance to the Beat” and “Don’t Fucking Tell Me What to Do” not only stood at odds with the tight pop confections of the Body Talk series, but they just weren’t that interesting to begin with, too caught up in their sloganeering to be effective. But “Love is Free” surpasses both by avoiding the conceptual. The repeated verses, two-note bassline, and insistent piano chords are really all you need (Robyn’s and Maluca’s bracing deliveries are an added bonus). No need to think about the message here — we dance to the beat of what? What is, deep down, killing you the most? — because it’s so simple and present. Simplified, perhaps, but in the wake of recent events, “love is free” is a statement that rings powerful and true. And even if it isn’t in practice, it sure as hell feels that way during the song’s five minutes.
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