Taylor Swift

Freshly repressed... Check your favorite wax dealer.

"This advice is meant to be for people who have never finished a game. If you're struggling with any project, no matter how big it is, you should know your destination and how to get there." ...

Why is comedy in games so rare -- and so hard to get right? Developer Zoe Quinn took the stage at GDC today to explore the topic and offer fellow developers a few potential ways to make funny games. ...

A coder on the original Crash Bandicoot explains how his first big game almost shipped with a destructive save-wiping bug -- and how he and the team at Naughty Dog eventually solved it. ...

Hardcore Devo Live! completed and released after being successfully crowdfunded last year

A new film about Akron, Ohio's finest punk progenitors has been released. Hardcore Devo Live! was successfully crowdfunded last year via Pledge music and is now available to stream or download here.

The documentary includes footage from the ten date summer 2014 tour, which took place a few months after the death of original Devo drummer Bob Casale. Various members of the group are interviewed, and a full set list for the film is online here. Watch the trailer below.

Seattle police unveil blurred, soundless body cam YouTube channel

The channel is already controversial because of its redaction tactics, and it comes as a presidential task force about the nation's policing recommended that police wear body cameras. The body cam channel features seemingly Soviet-era-like footage, and it's already being criticized. That criticism comes from Tim Clemans, the Washington state computer programmer who is redacting or blurring the video and removing voices on behalf of the police department.

"I'm having to work with people who don't want this released period. There's a number of people trying to put up every obstacle possible," Clemans said. Clemans is doing it for free. The redaction surgery usually takes about one minute per minute of footage, he said. He runs it through "five lines of open source code."

The agency is redacting more from the footage than what's required under the state's public record laws, he said.

"The department does not want to post raw video on its YouTube channel. It fears a privacy controversy," he said.

The department is burning as many as 7,000 DVDs monthly to meet public demand for information. The agency has more than 1.5 million videos taking up 364 terabytes. The footage includes dash cam video, 911 responses, and "interviews with victims, witnesses and suspects."

Clemans understands that the agency can't keep up with demands. He said that public disclosure through the YouTube channel is a "middle ground" of sorts. [...]

Clemens hooked up with the Seattle Police Department after he rattled the agency last year by filing more than 30 public-information requests on every 911 emergency call in which officers responded. The demand included dash cam and body cam footage.

I expect to see this stuff used as raw material in some Pattern Recognition-style videos. Please get right on that.

Previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously.

Amnesty Week picks come through again, knottily…

[Video][Website]
[7.12]

Patrick St. Michel: Tricot have always had the “math rock” tag attached to them, and it isn’t totally off. The trio (once quartet, but the drummer split) do all the start-stop guitar playing that is shorthand for the style, but to reduce them to being good at plotting out their sound and playing “angular riffs” misses a huge chunk of what makes them exciting. It’s all in lead singer Ikkyu Nakajima’s voice on “E,” as she goes from near whisper to yell with plenty of stops in between, blanketed by her bandmate’s background “oooohs.” Most math-rock is content to pride itself on timing, but Tricot aren’t afraid to get wild and turn “E” into something unpredictable, channeling one of their big influences Number Girl. But it isn’t just imitation — it’s them finding their own voice, and carving out a space for themselves. 
[8]

Iain Mew: Last time out I concentrated on Tricot’s formation of order from chaos. Since then, “Break” took them a bit far into order, and “E” has them lean in the other direction to suitably ecstatic effect. I love the confidence of the long set of musical stabs that start it, and from there it’s a headlong dash into some more headlong dashes, a song that keeps in the technical wizardry but is more intent to get to many different types of energy the fastest ways it can.
[8]

W.B. Swygart: The initial appeal is sort of musical chairs-y — guessing where the start and stop bits are, looking for the little fluctuations in the silences and reacting accordingly. Then the wailing begins, and that’s even better, as lead Tricot starts scrawling and daubing all over the neatly arranged modules, like a cross between Space Invaders and Tetris – a thing I’m assuming has already happened several times, only this is in ROCK FORM. Not sure what it all adds up to yet, but it’s plenty of fun.
[7]

Maxwell Cavaseno: The world’s sweetest and most forlorn band for fans of This Town Needs Guns come through once more, with complex noodling and teenish wind-up. So few math-rock bands have that sense of wistfulness. Fuck, now I’m wondering what an all-female Dillinger would sound like. That’d be so sick.
[7]

Sonia Yang: Lesser bands would choke at the task of integrating start-and-stop rhythms into a continuous flow, but Tricot delivers richly textured aural delight. There’s a wilder, looser quality to this compared to their previous work — looks like experimenting with five(!) different drummers really expanded their horizons. I love the different shades of Nakajima Ikkyu’s voice; she flips flawlessly between ethereal whisper, passionate cry and wry drawl. You’d think putting a proper hook over the dueling-in-harmony bass and guitar lines and raining drums would be overwhelming, but these girls are master jigsaw puzzlers.
[9]

Brad Shoup: Prog thresh on a plastic kit: everything’s hollowed out except for the vocalist. I’m sure they’ll find a decent full-time drummer eventually, but that knuckled-up riffing and those close harmonies can almost cover the gap.
[6]

Ian Mathers: This is the first band in a long time to kind of remind me a bit of Life Without Buildings (more instrumentally than vocally), although with maybe a bit more aggression. It’s not quite gelling for me yet, but LWB were also unintuitive at first, so I might just need a little longer to get on their level.
[6]

Will Adams: The trick is to avoid figuring out what’s behind the curtain. My musician’s brain wants to count the beats and determine the mixed meter. My music-lover’s brain wants to stage dive.
[6]

Project lead Brandon Dillon walks us through what went right and wrong during development of Double Fine's Hack 'n' Slash, an open-world exploration game about hacking and reverse engineering. ...

Because Spock is one of those pop culture touchstones visible behind every bush but these bushes aren’t in front of my property, I’m looking for good retrospectives. Matt Zoller Seitz, whose obit has a polish that tickles my suspicion (“do you think Seitz had that [partly] in the can?” a poster wondered on ILE). He posts Spock as a minority hero:

But he also became immensely popular with African-American, Latino, and Asian viewers (including Bruce Lee, reportedly a huge fan of Spock); all of whom had more than theoretical experience with trying to be — to paraphrase Groucho Marx — part of a club that wouldn’t have somebody like them as members. The sense of belonging yet not belonging, to both the dominant culture and one’s own, was especially acute among mixed-race viewers, and Spock struck a powerfully resonant chord with them. In More Than Black: Multiracial Identity and the New World Order, G. Reginald Daniel writes of his trepidation at contemplating his own mixed-race heritage while reading an Ebony article about “mulattoes … Like Mr. Spock on Star Trek! Like twilight, that zone between day and night that we all pass through at dusk and dawn.”

Nimoy and Spock inspired many such “Eureka!” moments; this made him, in a strange but vivid way, as much of a “minority” character in the original cast as George Takei’s Japanese-American Lt. Hikaru Sulu, or Nichelle Nichols’s Swahili-named Uhura, a character so symbolically important that the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King talked the actress into staying on the show when he learned that she was thinking of quitting. The show’s affinity for Shakespearean flourishes is well-documented, but in in a sense, Spock himself might be the most Bard-like character of them all: He’s a green-blooded Othello who has to be twice as good as the full-blooded human officers to earn their respect, and who must tamp down his natural passions despite constant racist needling and doubts about his loyalty.

It’s, as Frank Black once sang, educational. All I remember about the deadly The Search for Spock is Judith Anderson as a Vulcan, casting a cold eye on Laurence Olivier’s thundering, nimbus-anointed performance as the Father of the Gods in Clash of the Titans, shouting gibberish to Shatner and his embalmed men.

But anyway — now I understand a little Zachary Quinto’s attraction to the part.

It’s also in Polish, and should serve to inspire Anglophones! As my colleagues in Ubu’s homeland explain:

Last November, the independent Polish publishing house Korporacja Ha!art devoted an issue of its quarterly to the demoscene, a hacker subculture dedicated to creating multimedia computer programs on retro platforms. What we attempt to chronicle is a half-forgotten, mostly European scene of hard-core coders and ephemeral groups, who dedicate hundreds of sleepless nights with their Amigas and Spectrums, trying to outdo one another, to write terser code, to come up with new visual effects, to wow the audience. In the pre-Internet era, they even came up with their own publication and distribution channels. Always eager to present what is little known and under-researched, we trace the roots of the movement in the 1980s and its growth in Piotr Czerski’s exhaustive article; we look more closely at various platforms that formed the core of demoscene (Amiga, ZX Spectrum, Commodore) and at Polish wizards of code (some of whom, interestingly, looked up to Russian hackers); our authors tackle all sorts of ideas from the interplay between demoscene and glitch to schizophrenia as a tool of interpretation in media analysis. They also ponder the problematic relations between flashy, seemingly puerile demoscene productions and digital literature in an attempt to find the missing link in the evolution of electronic art. Trips down the memory lane by Jakub Noniewicz and Yerzmyey let us see demoscene forays into the world of (often irreverent) short stories and generative poetry. In fact, this kind of textual approach to demoscene has not been attempted before. We show how coders, working collaboratively, used computationality and tried multiple genres to bring the lexical and the audiovisual together. Last but not least, the perspectives of guests from across the Atlantic, Val Grimm and Nick Montfort, show how demoscene is, at heart, about breaking free from societal constraints. The issue is part of Korporacja Ha!art’s effort to present seminal scholarship in digital media.

Pictured here on my vintage top loading dishwasher (my kitchen table is currently the temporary home to two vintage computers), you will see three albums released by the record label "Mr. Pickwick". I bought these albums for one sole reason... They each have a song by a character named "Disco Dog". When I came across these, the endless possibilities rolled through my mind of how songs by "Disco Dog" would sound. At worst, my guess was that it could be a dog howling to Disco music. I wasn't too far off with this suspicion. The only thing I was wrong about was the disco music. That's right, Disco Dog doesn't sing along to disco music. He's simply Disco Dog in name, appearance, and theme song only. What a bloody fucking disappointment.

It's quite evident that these albums were made for children with ADD. Every song on the album is interrupted with really terrible jokes. I suppose Mr. Pickwick thought he was a funny guy. There are literally no gaps between the songs, because Mr. Pickwick doesn't need the children's attention going toward something more interesting, like a set of keys laying near an electrical outlet.

I'm missing Volume 4, so sadly we may never get to hear the swan song of our friend Disco Dog. Perhaps the reason I didn't find Volume 4 is because creepy Mr. Giddles murdered Disco Dog before the recording of it. At least that's the impression I get from the cover of Volume 2.



So now, I bring you three songs by the incredibly annoying Disco Dog!

Comin' Round The Mountain
Strollin' Through The Park
The Whistler and His Dog

My apologies for being incredibly absent lately. I'm in the middle of the winter blahs and haven't been modivated to do much other than surf the skies for interesting satellite wild feeds. Spring will soon be around the corner and garage sales will be popping up, and my already expanding queue boxes will be bursting at the seams.

As a side note, I've also begun hosting some of my own videos instead of having Youtube remove them. I can finally feel more confident in tackling the swaying pile of VHS tapes I have.

It’s Dance Music Thursday and Will can’t stop shouting about it…

[Video][Website]
[5.33]

Will Adams: FAIS DES RONDS AVEC TON BASSIN! DES RONDS AVEC TON BASSIN! DES RONDS AVEC TON BASSIN! DES RONDS AVEC TON BASSIN! FAIS DES RONDS! DES RONDS! DES RONDS! DES RONDS! DES RONDS! DES RONDS! DES RONDS! DES RONDS! DES RONDS! DES RONDS! DES RONDS! DES RONDS! DES RONDS! DES RONDS! DES RONDS! DES RONDS! DES RONDS! DES RONDS! DES RONDS! DES RONDS! DES RONDS!
[9]

Katherine St Asaph: I guess Fergie really DID book a Paris ticket! Or at least one to Igloo Australia.
[4]

Alfred Soto: It’s not her fault the cadence mimics “All About the Bass” but I’m entitled to my biases.
[3]

Cédric Le Merrer: The opening synths are sharp, cutting stabs whose edge progressively disappear under an avalanche of plushy house piano. Somehow it builds into a dizzying hula hoop dance, and there’s surf guitar involved for some reason. I can listen to it with eyes closed and imagine a great Winamp-style visualisation. I don’t really know why it works so well, but this could certainly do as the soundtrack to a variety of bizarrely themed parties.
[8]

Brad Shoup: I’m going to treat this like a swat at novelty gold, rather than Yelle’s attempt at some Peaches-style neurodevelopmental tragedy. But to really make this work, the MIDI house has to hold a lot more — and more weird — dioramas. Moving your pelvis while eating an apple in Rome is just a dumb Beats sentence.
[4]

Maxwell Cavaseno: You’d think that with their career approaching a decade, this group would’ve learned some new tricks. I just can’t get how electro-rap, a genre that was never that edgy or creative, sustains itself on more bad ideas with time. House pianos? You use house pianos now?! Yelle, the entirety of EDM is laughing at you from above in their lofty airships of decadancing, shouting “LIGHTWEIGHT” at you guys while spilling Red Bull-and-whatever mixtures on your heads. Get it together, or get out of here already!
[2]

David Moore: The dollar’s precipitous deflation has only been exacerbated by Kesha’s abandonment of the currency altogether, so here’s Y€ll€ to cash in before the Fed takes inflationary action. The result is a pop pied-à-terre; empty use of the signifier doesn’t result in any meaningful contribution to the U.S. pop economy, but at the same time I don’t begrudge the French for having a little fun abroad.
[6]

Luisa Lopez: Mercifully free of Dr. Luke’s handprints until that extended vocal distortion, which feels like a descent into hell and, I imagine, sounds similar. Everything else around it is so funny, kicking its colorful trash around the room until the movement becomes an arabesque, that it’s almost forgivable.
[6]

Patrick St. Michel: It is far funnier spelled out, perhaps a bit too literally, here, the whole song an instruction manual of seduction that basically boils down to one direction repeated ad nauseum. As catchy as this gets, it also burns itself out by the end, which is impressive given a pretty scant three minute playtime. But for about 60 percent of this, it is delirious fun in any language. 
[6]

Love requires scrutiny. Madonna, Karen Carpenter, Robert Palmer, and Mariah Carey writhed before Kim Gordon’s ruthless gaze. She understands what they wrote and sang about such that when they appear in Sonic Youth material the songs are homages and critiques of methods of presentation. The likes of “Tunic (Song for Karen Carpenter)” and “Mariah Carey and the Arthur Doyle Hand Cream” accept the subjects on their terms, but thanks to Thurston Moore and Lee Ranaldo’s tunings and Gordon’s blank-frank affect they get examined, poked, turned over, like archeologists at a dig site. I like Lindsay Zoladz’s review of Gordon’s memoir Girl in a Band because she gets Sonic Youth’s egalitarian spirit. Pop treated as punk noise. The detritus of pop culture turned on a spit over a quiet flame:

But the glittering, electric, hot-pink power that Gordon wielded in Sonic Youth was something rare and completely of its moment. We get so stuck in our internet echo chambers now, only listening to the people who already share our ideologies and occasionally ganging up on those who don’t. Gordon, though, did something braver than just preach to the choir — she fucked shit up from inside the machine. We are talking about a woman who slyly snuck Kathleen Hanna onto MTV, who signed a major-label deal only to write a song about a secretary who’d been sexually harassed at that very record label. Gordon’s feminism was the kind that made waves, scrambled frequencies, changed minds. And that’s probably because her perspective was never treated as niche “woman’s issue” but simply another personality within a complex and beloved band.

Which is why Gordon should go one better than her ex-husband: stick with the beau ideal of a band. Please stick with Body/Head.

I’ve been playing Marvel Puzzle Quest for the last several weeks, especially in waiting rooms and during quality time with my family. It’s a free to play, match 3 puzzle game (think Candy Crush Saga) blended with Marvel super heroes. One of its key mechanics is building a roster of heroes, which you do by getting random comic book cover drops. Find a Spider-Man cover, for example, and you can recruit him to your superteam. You want as many heroes as you can get, since you never know when you’ll encounter an in-game event where you will benefit from having a particular character.

This being a free to play game, there are two pain points associated with this system that can be alleviated by spending in-game currency. First, you can only have so many heroes on your roster, but you can expand that limit by purchasing additional character slots. Second, the new hero covers that you find have a time limit; you have to use them or watch them go away forever. So you may find a 3-star Rocket & Groot card, but you can’t actually use it unless you pay to make room for it in your roster. You can also sell the new card (or an old one to free up room), but that’s essentially the same as letting it expire given what little you get for it. Each time you find a new cover you have 5 days to to act or it’s gone. This sets up a well documented psychological quirk that makes people more likely to part with their money.

There’s actually a constellation of mental foibles centered around our reluctance to part with things we feel like we own. The endowment effect, for example, happens because we value something more the instant we feel like we own it. Dan Ariely and his colleagues once did a study showing that Duke University students were willing to pay an average of $170 for coveted college basketball game tickets. When demand for tickets outstrips supplies, Duke holds a lottery where you can win a chance to buy one of the limited number of tickets. But once students from the same population actually won a lottery that gave them the right to buy the tickets, they were only willing to sell for an average price of $1,400. Simply owning the tickets made people value them almost ten times as much.1

Ariely and his colleague Jiwoong Shin also did another study on aversion to loss and reluctance to give up options.2 The study has to do with what’s called “psychological reactance.” In short, we hate to lose options and will often give up more than an option is worth in order to retain it. The researchers created a little computer game where participants could choose between three doors –red, blue, and green. Players had only 100 mouse clicks to “spend” in the game by clicking to navigate between doors and then clicking in the rooms on the other side of each door. Clicking once inside a room yielded a random amount of money within a certain range. The red room, for example, could pay between 3 and 9 cents for each one of the player’s limited clicks, but the blue room may pay between 8 and 16 cents per click. Only the players didn’t know the ranges; they had to experiment to determine the optimal way to play the game and maximize their payout. But here’s the trick that the makers of Marvel Puzzle Quest would appreciate: If a player ignored a certain room for 12 turns without clicking on it, the door to that room would shrink and eventually disappear –gone was that option forever! But players could “reset” the door by clicking on it just once before it disappeared (an act that cost 2 clicks without generating any money).

So what did people tend to do? Even after discovering which room yielded the highest payout they STILL tended to go back and waste clicks on lower paying doors just to keep those options open even thought they didn’t intend to actually exercise them. This was totally irrational, but psychological reactance made them reluctant to lose those options.3

Similarly, when I look at hero covers in Marvel Puzzle Quest that are about to expire, I hate to lose that option, and I don’t want to substitute one loss for another by deleting an existing character from my roster. Instead, I’m more likely to spend money to just keep it around. I am not speaking in hypotheticals here; twice I’ve spent $5 to buy enough “Hero Points” to bring a hero in from the cold before the timer ran out. I may not even LIKE the hero or ever end up using him or her. But I want to have the option.4

But could we use psychological reactance in a truly evil way? Yes. Yes we could! If the developers of this game wanted to be really evil, they would offer me an option to immediately recruit a hero for 200 Hero Points. And then to really take advantage of psychological reactance, they could gradually raise the price the closer the hero gets to expiring so that it would cost, say, 350 when I have only a couple hours left. Maybe 400 in the last 30 minutes.

I bet revenue would go up, and THAT would be something truly worthy of a comic book villain.

Follow me on Twitter, Facebook, or RSS.

Nepro Japan acquires the stalwart Japanese RPG developer and longtime console studio for expertise that will help it jump into new genres, according to reports. ...

Did you ever want to be a hole? Gamasutra speaks to Ben Esposito about Excellence in Visual Art nominee Donut County, its pleasant pastel visuals, and its gentle provocation. ...

Doom mod adds Instagram filters and a selfie stick  

A 2015 sign of the times: Apple highlights games that let users "enjoy hours of uninterrupted fun" if they plunk down cash up front. ...

We’re the first English-language publication to get this news, which has already been revealed in a French magazine, a Klingon Usenet group, and an Esperanto skater zine: Mi-Clos Studio’s next major release will be Sigma Theory, a turn-based political espionage game with a sci-fi-flavoured contemporary setting. If you don’t want to play a House of Cards-inspired spy thriller from the team that made Out There, you need to talk to your doctor about adjusting your meds.

Details after the break.

“For a long time I wanted to put the player into a character that carries a lot of responsibility, who has power but is accountable, like a CEO,” Mi-Clos founder Michael Peiffert told Games Magazine earlier this month. “[That kind of person] is subject to a lot of pressure, and might be forced to make immoral decisions. Imagine something like House of Cards, where the higher you climb the greater the fall if you fail.”

The player will be cast as the head of a covert organization (Peiffert specifically namechecks Saul from Homeland here) in a world where competing superpowers are racing to gain a technological edge on one another. The player will work to sabotage other countries’ efforts, and some of the options will be less savoury than others — like arming terrorist groups.

“As a teenager, I played games where you were a knight or a hero with supernatural powers,” Peiffert said to Games. “Today truth is stranger than fiction. Snowden’s case is even more incredible than any novel of espionage. Kim Dotcom, a character that could have come from a gonzo comedy movie, gave us a glimpse of what might be the organized crime of the future. The human adventure is a thousand times more exciting than [the stories we grew up with].”

Peiffert told me today that they’ll be supporting iOS, Android, and PC for this one, which is already in prototyping. Peiffert’s writing partner FibreTigre already has a 200-page bible written for Sigma Theory. Mi-Clos has got a couple of irons in the fire right now: the expanded Out There Omega Edition is due to drop very soon, which will be a free update for existing owners of that remarkable sci-fi adventure. They’ve also got Out There Chronicles, an interactive fiction adventure in the same universe nearing completion.

We’ll keep our ears to the ground for more Sigma Theory details.

Mikey IQ Jones has written a really nice primer on YMO and YMO-related music at FACT. Just the tip of the iceberg to be sure, but still worth a read. Even includes an obtuse reference to this blog at the end--I think.

http://www.factmag.com/2015/01/22/the-essential-yellow-magic-orchestra/

@erowidrecruiter: A Markov-powered mashup of Erowid trip reports and tech recruiter emails.

moaning, holding ourselves to quell the inner pain: we are experiencing incredible growth.

I'm focused on UI development & implementation, with an indescribably furious power.

I remembered more of it, I see a desolate wasteland, and a wellness program --- our office is located in San Francisco

Good morning, I saw your profile looks like a very long profile and thought it looked like monsters and I am an executive recruiter

Hi Zachary. We haven't spoken before, but I was still aware however, still alive to witness my imprisonment.

Hope your week is going to explode.

Kyle, My name is Jen Burns and I wanted to just follow the birds

Zachary, Apologies for the future.

Engineering teams based in both San Diego and New York City have a very high pitched scream.

front end engineer would literally make or break the next hour, I walked through this area for a while and then my face ended, and the rats.

Hi Kyle, My name was a river flowing, and a fan spinning in front of me

Full Stack RoR engineers to join and sacrifice babies, or kill me or join their expanding engineering team at Riviera Partners.

Your Specialties: Obsessed with keeping up-to-date with the underlying consciousness grid, god, gaian supermind, universal consciousness

Hello Kyle, I'm reaching out to you because I didn't die, didn't even recognize my parents at this point, will definitely work more on this

Hi Zachary, Hope your week is going horribly slow, i want this to end.

the doctors and nurses looked like worms or centipedes crawling in and we found your information online

We began to melt with the founders to learn more about what you think

The dose was for the team.

Candidate must be able to deal with the drug that i made

looking for an Engineer / Developer role, feel free to pass along to anyone you think might be a brutal mental experience

the power to aggregate all of his family's toothbrushes and put them in my penis so that I find all this very, very frightening

Hadoop or MongoDB Express or other persistence, and I'm abjectly terrified.

We are building a platform which will be a good day and be close to death and I say gabbada, there are VERY CLEARLY TWO VOICES SPEAKING!

My pupils have literally engulfed my corneas; I look forward to hopefully working with 15 or 20 recruiters, but without the BS.

Previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously.

"It is a game about cooperatively building crazy Swedish modular furniture without instructions. It has been played over 20,000 times. In a week, its trailer has been viewed over 100,000 times on YouTube." ...

bizarre copyright story from 2011, new to me  

I'm so sick of Big Automotive hiding the truth  

A forgotten but crucial second tier R&B artist, Karyn White scored four consecutive pop tens between 1988 and 1991, peaking with the number one “Romantic.” Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis produced that track, which made sense: White seemed to want Janet Jackson-type hits from L.A. Reid and Babyface. Their greatest composition for her was “Superwoman,” still on adult R&B rotation, a mature and clear-eyed articulation of the muddle caused by the gender wars; it’s a working woman’s lament. I’m also fan of the posted track, although not of the jheri curls flung hither and yon in the video.