Taylor Swift

One of my favorite Badu jams. Happy Sunday.

A new translation of an old story documents (in an exaggerated way) the working conditions at a prominent developer on a landmark game, and offers a slice of history we don't often get to see. ...

We often see Minori around the streets of Harajuku. This time, she was wearing a cream and golden outfit. In case you don’t know her yet, you can check out her site here or watch a short documentary about her on YouTube.

Minori is wearing a handmade and vintage outfit – including a corset, lace shorts and tights, a gold kimono with floral sleeves, tassel necklace and heeled boots. As usual, Minori is wearing her signature shironuri makeup in colors that match her outfit.

In addition to Minori’s personal website, she is also active on Instagram, Twitter, Tumblr, and Facebook.

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We met Miki and Yudai – both specialty school students – on the street in Harajuku.

Miki, 19 years old, is wearing a pastel outfit. Her top is from WEGO and the shorts are Swankiss, worn with a pink coat on top. Her tote bag is Nile Perch and her heart creepers are Bubbles Harajuku. She also mentioned that her accessories are from Nile Perch, and that she likes shopping at Bubbles.

Yudai is 20 and he’s wearing a Raf Simons jacket over a H&M Sweatshirt and Lad Musician pants. His backpack is Marc by Marc Jacobs and his sneakers are Adidas. His bracelets are by his favorite designer, Marc Jacobs.

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We spotted this cute mother-daughter duo in Harajuku recently and couldn’t help noticing their matching outfits.

Mom is wearing a Milk biker jacket with a resale white shirt and a red dress. Her bag is Vivienne Westwood and her shoes are Dr. Martens. Her necklace is also Vivienne Westwood, her favorite designer. She also told us she likes techno music.

Daughter is wearing a biker jacket, a tutu skirt and red pants. Her plush Snoopy backpack and lace-up boots are resales while her cute colorful accessories are from Harajuku’s 6%DOKIDOKI.

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Sizuru and Mari are a resale fashion-loving couple who we met on the famous Cat Street in Harajuku.

Mari, on the right, is a 19-year-old student. Her look includes a quilted oversized jacket from the Tokyo resale shop Santa Monica with green overalls from Otoe over a Cotton Candy top, and cute Hug Harajuku platform shoes (with striped socks). Accessories include a plaid cap from the resale shop Flamingo, several cute buttons, and a large decorated bag from Kinji Harajuku. Mari likes to shop at Otoe, Hitch Hike, and Cotton Candy. Her favorite bands include Creephyp, Yuki, and Good on The Reel. Find Mari on Twitter or Instagram for more pictures and info.

Sizuru, on the left, is 21 years old and works in the apparel biz. He is wearing a resale acid wash coat over a resale Los Angeles Street Ball top, Dickies shorts, and Nike sneakers. Accessories include a headband, glasses, and a Dickies backpack. Sizuru’s favorite shops are Hitch Hike and Cotton Candy, and he likes the music of Yuki. For more info, find him on Twitter or Instagram.

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An anonymous agent has made a choice piece of game industry history available to the public by buying a copy of Toshio Iwai's unreleased SNES music game Sound Fantasy and sharing it with the world. ...

Facts and figures about developing for the popular smartwatch and the state of its games ecosystem, and a look at the creation of RPG PebbleQuest, a "labor of love." ...

Elizabeth Warren is wonderful, and at the moment I don’t want her anywhere but in the Senate. To run for president means soliciting money from the people whom she’s opposed; it means thinking like them. Little by little her distinction would vanish. It’s worth remembering that far from being a radical Warren wants an efficient, fairer capitalism — liberalism’s two favorite adjectives. That’s why I’m with Janelle Bouie:

A Warren who leads the Democrats in the Senate isn’t a Warren who, for example, could derail a White House pick for the Treasury on the basis of his Wall Street ties. As soon as she took the position, she would lose her voice as a vocal and influential liberal, lest she alienate her colleagues and fracture her caucus. Reid’s trajectory is instructive: He entered office as a pro-life Democrat and will leave it as operationally pro-choice, a result of his place in leadership.

Warren is best where she is: a valuable and influential senator who pressures the party from the left. No, it doesn’t come with a title, but it isn’t a small thing. In his eight years in the Senate, South Carolina’s former Sen. Jim DeMint was hugely powerful as an ideological leader, using his base in the conservative movement—and later, the Tea Party—to pull Republicans to the right during the 2012 presidential election. He enforced ideological discipline, and it worked. Warren doesn’t have to lead the Democrats—or run for president—to make the party more liberal. She can build power from the outside.

The DeMint comparison makes sense, but DeMint, alert to shifting political winds, did push his party in his direction. It remains to be seen whether the Democratic Party has any interest in representing any but a corporatism with humane social policies.

Nopi is an 18-year-old student in a black beret who we spotted in Harajuku.

Her black plush jacket is from WEGO, worn over a baby blue dress and white turtleneck. Her white satchel is Honey Mi Honey while her neck bow and rings are from H&M. Her loafers are WEGO, worn with printed tights. We also noticed her polka dot nail art.

Nopi told us she likes to shop at Bubbles Harajuku and that she’s a Sexy Zone fan. To find out more, visit her Instagram and Twitter accounts.

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Kyosuke is an 18-year-old Japanese fashion student. He has become highly visible as one of the most avant-garde dressers in the newest generation of Harajuku street fashion kids.

Kyosuke is wearing a feather jacket from Harajuku’s most influential underground boutique Dog, along with a black sweater, patent pants, and buckle boots. His accessories – most of which also came from Dog Harajuku – include a large wicker(?) hat, and a huge silver metal necklace.

Kyosuke’s favorite shop is Dog Harajuku. For more information and more pictures, check his personal Instagram or Twitter.

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Cool. Cool cool cool.

We don’t usually talk about price drops too often, but when the game in question is one of the best turn-based tactical games ever made we tend to pay attention. Today, 2K Games dropped the price of XCOM: Enemy Within down to only $5 from its usual $13. Getting XCOM for $13 is, frankly, a steal so getting it for $5 is pretty much like getting it for free.

If you haven’t played XCOM on your iPad before and you’re thinking, “This can’t be the same game that I have to pay $60 for on Steam,” then you’re in for a treat, because it is. Yep, the base game + the Enemy Within expansion will run you $30 a piece on Steam, but on iPad today you can get them both for $5. Now, sure, with the iPad version you can’t go back and just play vanilla XCOM, but that’s a small price to pay, wouldn’t you agree?

Other than Hearthstone, I can’t think of any game on my iPad that I’ve sunk more time into [What about me? -Pinball Arcade] and I cannot recommend it highly enough, especially if you’re using an iPad Air or Air 2. It runs like butter on those. Then again, I’ve even played it on my iPad 2 without too much difficulty.

XCOM: Enemy Within is for iOS Universal and Android, but the sale appears to only be available on the App Store. Trailer after the break.

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NEW YORK METS BULLPEN CART, CIRCA 1967

Dimensions:
Height: 79”
Width: 69”
Length: 112”
Wheelbase: 85”

A fantastic example of whimsical Major League Baseball marketing from the late 1960s, used intermittently at Shea Stadium for more than 20 years. Highlights of its use include a memorable appearance at the 1986 World Series versus the Boston Red Sox and then again in 2003 when Mets Captain John Franco drove Mets legend Tug McGraw onto the field as part of the team’s celebration of the legendary 1973 team.
Immortalized by its dramatic appearance at the monumental 1986 World Series Championship in which it entered the field of play following the culmination of the Game Seven win, it promptly ran out of power adding further delight to the victory celebration.

Presented in largely original condition and displaying a lovely patina throughout, it is fully operational and represents an iconic of piece of New York sports history celebrating one of the City’s most memorable and important World Series Championship wins.

(Sotheby’s link courtesy Joel Hunt)

I’m glad to share the first Web edition of Des Imagistes, which is now back on the Web.

I assigned a class to collaborate on an editorial project back in 2008, one intended to provide practical experience with the Web and literary editing while also resulting in a useful contribution. I handed them a copy of the first US edition of Des Imagistes, the first Imagist anthology, edited by Ezra Pound and published in 1914.

Jason Begy, Audubon Dougherty, Madeleine Clare Elish, Florence Gallez, Madeline Flourish Klink, Hillary Kolos, Michelle Moon Lee, Elliot Pinkus, Nick Seaver, and Sheila Murphy Seles, the Fall 2008 workshop class, did a great job. The project was prompted, and indeed assigned, by me, but it’s the work of that group, not my work. The class put a great deal of editorial care into the project and also attended to principles of flexible, appropriate Web design. The cento they assembled and used for an alternate table of contents made for a nice main page, inviting attention to the text rather than to some sort of illustration. I’m not saying it would have been exactly my approach, but what they did is explained clearly and works well.

I told the class that the licensing of their project was up to them. They chose a CC BY-NC-SA license, more restrictive than I would have selected, given that the material was in the public domain to begin with, but a reasoned choice. They were similarly asked to decide about the hosting of the work. They just had to present what they’d done in class, answer questions about it, and let me look at and interact with it. While I would be glad to place a copy on my site, nickm.com, it was up to them as to whether they would take me up on the offer. They placed their work online on its own domain, which they acquired and for which they set up hosting.

After announcing this edition, readers, scholars, and teachers of Imagist poetry commented and thanked the class for it work. But as I bemoaned last October, Des Imagistes was no longer online a few years later. I asked around for files, but asking former students to submit an assignent six years later turns out to be a poor part of a preservation strategy.

Now, working with Erik Stayton (who a research assistant in the Trope Tank and is in the masters in CMS 2015 class), I’ve recovered the site from the Internet Archive. The pages were downloaded manually, in adherence to the robots.txt file on archive.org, the Internet Archive’s additions to the pages were removed, and something very close to the original site was assembled and uploaded.

Some lessons, I suppose, are that it’s not particularly the case that a group of students doing a groundbreaking project will manage to keep their work online. As much as I like reciprocal and equitable ways of working together, the non-hierarchical nature of this project probably didn’t help when it came to keeping it available; no one was officially in charge, accepting credit and blame. Except, of course, that I should have been in charge of keeping this around after it was done and after that course was complete. I should have asked for the files and (while obeying the license terms) put the project on my site – and for that matter, other places online.

Would you like to have a copy of the Des Imagistes site for your personal use or to place online somewhere, non-commerically? Here’s a zipfile of the whole site; you will also want to get the larger PDF of the book, which should be placed in the des_imagistes directory.

Japanese company Square Enix is working with Nexon Korea to develop a mobile version of its long-running MMORPG Final Fantasy XI that it hopes to bring to market in 2016. ...

Like the boys you flirt with and sneak a kiss from before settling into The Real Thing, Depeche Mode reminds me of my high school pretensions. The American capital of freestyle welcomed “Strangelove” and “People are People,” and at the time my friends and I were impressed by how the beats—with the guitars and the synths programmed and manipulated as Musique concrète —matched the unsubtle articulation of sexual politics. By the time Depeche Mode dropped “Personal Jesus” top forty radio was ready for them: the industrial-indebted thwack of Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis’ Janet Jackson productions, Babyface’s mechanized balladry heavy on the snare, and every remix of Like a Prayer singles were welcome chart mates. And DM were a balm when the chart mates threatened to give us a rash. I mean, “Enjoy The Silence” sounded sexy as hell playing after Roxette’s “It Must Have Been Love.”

Wearing its twenty-five years as coolly as Don Draper does his gelled hair, Violator sounds less hindered by the need to posture than Achtung Baby, also distinguished by divebombing guitar lines, synthesized orchestral swells, and a mix that flattered the singers’ lovesexy patter. Which is why, with all due respect, I’ve got my cavils about any piece that includes the following observation: “In less than a decade, they’d gone from swiveling their butts to their new-wave gem “Just Can’t Get Enough” to creating the brooding, cinematic and mysterious post-goth masterpieces of Violator.” What they did in 1989 was create brooding, cinematic and mysterious post-goth masterpieces to which boys and girls swiveled their butts.

In this classic feature, designer Brian Green pulls at the MMO trinity -- Tank/Healer/DPS -- to examine whether this pillar of combat design can be pulled apart, modified, or fundamentally changed. ...

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In an interview with TIME, Nintendo president and CEO Satoru Iwata sheds some light on how Nintendo plans to make mobile games with DeNA and what it thinks about free-to-play vs. premium pricing. ...