Taylor Swift

Hello! Matt Kap here again, posting on the day some of you have been waiting for…

CASTLE IN THE DARKNESS IS NOW AVAILABLE ON STEAM FOR $4.97 UNTIL FEB 12TH, AND $5.99 AFTERWARDS!

For those who are just seeing this, I am Matt Kap, a pixel artist at Nicalis. I’ve worked on 1001 Spikes, Legend Of Raven, and was the lead artist on The Binding Of Isaac: Rebirth. All throughout the dev cycle of those projects and the last 3 years I’ve been working on my own project, called Castle In The Darkness! I’m proud to finally have it complete and released on Steam!

For the price of a McCombo you can enjoy several hours of retro goodness, so please give it a try :). Also, I should mention that the soundtrack can also be purchased as a download here for $3, or 50 cents per track! I will be putting the profits from the soundtrack back into making music for future games and other soundtracks, so please support it if you like what you hear :).

Finally, I should mention that some people cannot start the game because they are missing DLL files. I will fix this as soon as I can in the next update, but in the meantime you can fix this problem by updating DirectX, and also installing the DLLs that you can get from this installer.

Anyway, thanks for reading, check out the game, and come back soon! There will be more blog posts and announcements about this game :D! Bye!

Jonathan Chait is a professional Democrat writing for New York magazine. This means he makes a decent living excoriating, often well, Republican attacks on the president. It also means he’s obtuse, often horrifyingly so. In his defense, it’s often more irksome fending off attacks from people ostensibly on one’s own side than from the enemy; but there’s no reason why this quarrel with Ta-Nehisi Coates turned into the Battle of the Somme.

Internecine squabbles have the effect of airing pieties, exposing jargon behind which we hide specious or non-existent arguments, and forcing us to clarify positions. Alex Pareene exposes the mendacity of Chait’s bleating about the malevolence of political correctness. To me the term means an acknowledgment of thoughtlessness, a questioning of assumptions. I’m not blameless. It’s taken years to accept tremors in the canon. To study slave narratives alongside Mansfield Park isn’t to create an equivalence between them; it’s to suggest how a story meant for a handful of readers written by people responsible for the comforts of Austen’s characters can offer an additional gloss on the novel. While my experiences and education define me, there are many things in heaven and earth undreamt of in my philosophy. I need strangers to attack me. So long as they don’t succumb to jargon and doublespeak themselves, I don’t accuse them of bad faith.

Thanks to social media, men like Chait can no longer take for granted the assumptions undergirding their beliefs. This is hard for a man over thirty. Check out this passage:

If a person who is accused of bias attempts to defend his intentions, he merely compounds his own guilt. (Here one might find oneself accused of man/white/straightsplaining.) It is likewise taboo to request that the accusation be rendered in a less hostile manner. This is called “tone policing.” If you are accused of bias, or “called out,” reflection and apology are the only acceptable response — to dispute a call-out only makes it worse. There is no allowance in p.c. culture for the possibility that the accusation may be erroneous. A white person or a man can achieve the status of “ally,” however, if he follows the rules of p.c. dialogue. A community, virtual or real, that adheres to the rules is deemed “safe.” The extensive terminology plays a crucial role, locking in shared ideological assumptions that make meaningful disagreement impossible.

The clammy tone, reminiscent of All About Eve‘s Addison DeWitt explaining the difference between a theater producer making a buck versus taking a risk, is the first thing I noticed. The other oddity is the abjuring of responsibility for his words. Chait doesn’t have to explain why he was accused of bias — he’s Jonathan Chait, he’s liberal, he’s on their side. That’s the most pathetic inference I drew from this excerpt. Chait:

As we get to the end of Chait’s essay, we can tally up the casualties of political correctness. One anti-abortion protester was shoved and had her sign vandalized. A few millionaires were disinvited from college campuses, and performances of two plays were canceled. Various people feel disinclined to engage in online debates. Participants in a Facebook group had to deal with a Bad Thread. And a college student was fired from his school newspaper. That’s one person whose life was in any meaningful way made materially worse by the scourge of political correctness, in nearly 5,000 words of dire warnings about the philosophical threat posed by left-wing speech policing.

Jonathan Chait, fan of The New Republic of the nineties (a venal sin), supporter of the Iraq War (mortal sin), has himself made blinkered decisions, decisions of stupefying banality, stemming in part from membership in a claque of pre-Internet polemicists. In 2015 he’s asked to explain them. And he can’t handle it.

How it worked before:

• She's her own label, and owns the copyright / publishing rights on her own songs.
• She registered her songs with Youtube, saying "these are mine". (That's different than posting the songs publicly.)
• Because of that, when someone else uploads a Youtube video that uses her music as the soundtrack, she's the one who receives the Content-ID notification.
• She then gets the choice to block that video, or to run ads on it.
• She generally chooses the latter, which means she gets 1/3 of the revenue generated by the ads on the video that has her music in it, and gets her name on the page.

So now Youtube is about to launch a new paid streaming service. If I'm understanding her post correctly, it goes like this:

• Participation in the new service requires that your entire catalog be available for streaming, at high resolution.
• Participation requires that you not release your music elsewhere earlier, e.g., no early releases for fans or backers.
• You no longer get a choice of whether to do nothing, block a video, or run ads. Ads are mandatory.
• Five year contract.
• If you don't participate in the new service, then the option to obtain Content-ID ad revenue from the free version of Youtube no longer exists.
• If you had previously been getting Content-ID ad revenue and choose not to participate in the new service, your channel will be deleted and all videos using your music will be blocked.

This means that, for all of those people who were making a little money off of their music by letting Google run ads on it, the options now on the table are:

1. Agree to all the terms of the new service, including publishing your entire catalog on it, and continue making money on ads;
2. Block all the videos using your music (and have your channel deleted);
3. Allow those videos to use your music for free (and have your channel deleted).

It's another bait-and-switch: "We had been paying you for your work for years, under these terms. But now we have altered the agreement. Pray we do not alter it further."

This sounds like Google using the same strategy they used with Google Plus: instead of creating a new service and letting it compete on its own merits, they're going to artificially prop it up by giving people no choice but to sign up for it. Except in this case the people being strong-armed are the copyright holders instead of the end users. (So far, that is! Wait for it.)

I think you can expect to see a lot of old videos on Youtube getting blocked in the near future because of this.

"The music terms are outdated and the content that you uploaded will be blocked. But anything that we can scan and match from other users will be matched in content ID and you can track it but won't be able to participate in revenue sharing."

"All music content has to be licensed under this new agreement. We can't have music in the free version that is not in the paid version"

I had them explain it again to be sure.

"Wow, that's a bit harsh," I said.

"Yeah, I know," they said.

Previously, previously, previously, previously, previously.

If I wrote an op-ed that said my ideology created policy preferences that might lead to the execution of the rich but, hey, we have to make trade-offs, I would not only not get that op-ed published, but I’d probably be reported to the FBI.

If I wrote an op-ed that said my ideology created policy preferences that might lead to the death of the poor, but, hey, we have to make trade-offs, I’d be Fred Hiatt’s new best friend. Such as Michael Strain of the American Enterprise Institute:

Say conservatives have their way with Obamacare, and the Supreme Court deals it a death blow or a Republican president repeals it in 2017. Some people who got health insurance as a result of the Affordable Care Act may lose it. In which case, liberals like to say, some of Obamacare’s beneficiaries may die.

During the health-care debates of 2009, Rep. Alan Grayson (D-Fla.) brought a poster on the House floor: “The Republican Health Care Plan: Die Quickly.” In the summer of 2012, when Obamacare was threatened by a presidential election, writer Jonathan Alter argued that “repeal equals death. People will die in the United States if Obamacare is repealed.” Columnist Jonathan Chait wrote recently that those who may die are victims of ideology — “collateral damage” incurred in conservatives’ pursuit “of a larger goal.” If these are the stakes, many liberals argue, then ending Obamacare is immoral.

Except, it’s not.

In a world of scarce resources, a slightly higher mortality rate is an acceptable price to pay for certain goals — including more cash for other programs, such as those that help the poor; less government coercion and more individual liberty; more health-care choice for consumers, allowing them to find plans that better fit their needs; more money for taxpayers to spend themselves; and less federal health-care spending. This opinion is not immoral. Such choices are inevitable. They are made all the time.

Saying of the ending of Obamacare, even if it leads to the deaths of thousands of poor, “it clearly would not be immoral,” Strain goes on into absurd comparison country, throwing out the type of arguments by brother did when he was 10. It swings from “we let people drive cars and sometimes people die in them so why bother with a good healthcare system” to “oh yeah libs, well what would you say to spending 3/4 of our GDP on health care,” i.e., arguments no one is making except in American Enterprise Institute drinking parties.

I mean, I guess I shouldn’t be surprised that “kill the poor” is now something you can say in the op-ed section of the Washington Post. I look forward to this argument becoming a central tenet of the 2016 Republican primaries.

[SL] Shorter:

@edroso @jesseltaylor @elongreen Comedy is when people die for lack of health coverage. Tragedy is when billionaires go to bed with less $.

— I.F. Thunder (@IFThunder) January 25, 2015

Does this 1945 advertisement make you want to eat corn or curl up in a ball and hope the nightmare goes away?

If a recent Instagram post is to be taken at face value, Limp Bizkit guitarist Wes Borland is somewhat ambivalent about his band’s legacy and space in the current cultural climate (AND WHO CAN BLAME HIM?).  As Metal Injection reports, Borland would seemingly rather schedule root canal than participate in the ShipRocked cruise alongside other iconic düde-metal purveyors :

Getting all packed up this week for Broatchella 2015. It’s the same as Brochella but it’s off land. Can’t wait to see me some roided out tribal tattooed spray tanned Jell-O shot filled bohunks do their best drunk MMA impressions in the top deck mosh pit. Whenever we aren’t on stage, I’ll be curled up fetal position in my cabin, palms up, while I desperately cling to the last week of my thirties as it slips through my hooked fingers. So, I’d like to give a shout out now to all the other over-the-hill late nineties/early 2000s bands going on the cruise: Let’s give these people the raging alcohol fueled nostalgia fest they’re paying for guys! I know we can do it if we tune down low enough!”

"Well, if you only need to do minimal things like record footsteps or trinkets, then you could use something that is compact, effective, and also portable... for about $60.00 - $70.00." ...

Meet Rino, a cutely styled 19-year-old student with a bangs hairstyle who we recently spotted in Harajuku.

Rino is wearing a leather sleeve “Sparkle Worlds” stadium jacket with shorts and a blue sweatshirt over a red shirt. She accessorized with a Prada backpack, sheer tights and heeled platform ankle boots with buckles.

Click on any photo to enlarge it.

Elite co-creator David Braben shares the motivation behind and genesis of the genre-defining space flight sim, which stood against industry demands for another arcade-patterned game. ...

fuckyeahanimesubs:

from Brave Express Might Gaine

Can the original Zelda game still have things to teach designers? Mike Stout (Skylanders) dives back into the 1986 classic to see how Miyamoto handled pathing, challenge ramping, and more. ...

One of the first good albums I’ve heard this year, released next Tuesday. The Singles Jukebox reviews this single too. What a symbiotic match of song, artist, and performance. Some of us have waited twenty-eight years for the response to Alexander O’Neal’s “Fake.”

Hello! I am going to answer your question, and then I am going to talk a little bit about GENDER IN COMEDY, because this is my tumblr and I can talk about whatever I want!

The vast vast vast majority of the animal jokes on BoJack Horseman (specifically the visual gags) come from our brilliant supervising director Mike Hollingsworth (stufffedanimals on tumblr) and his team. Occasionally, we’ll write a joke like that into the script but I can promise you that your top ten favorite animal gags of the season came from the art and animation side of the show, not the writers room. Usually it happens more the second way you described— to take a couple examples from season 2, “Okay, we need to fill this hospital waiting room, what kind of animals would be in here?” or “Okay, we need some extras for this studio backlot, what would they be wearing?”

I don’t know for sure, but I would guess that the croc wearing crocs came from our head designer lisahanawalt. Lisa is in charge of all the character designs, so most of the clothing you see on the show comes straight from her brain. (One of the many things I love about working with Lisa is that T-Shirts With Dumb Things Written On Them sits squarely in the center of our Venn diagram of interests.)

NOW, it struck me that you referred to the craft services crocodile as a “he” in your question. The character, voiced by kulap Vilaysack, is a woman.

It’s possible that that was just a typo on your part, but I’m going to assume that it wasn’t because it helps me pivot into something I’ve been thinking about a lot over the last year, which is the tendency for comedy writers, and audiences, and writers, and audiences (because it’s a cycle) to view comedy characters as inherently male, unless there is something specifically female about them. (I would guess this is mostly a problem for male comedy writers and audiences, but not exclusively.)

Here’s an example from my own life: In one of the episodes from the first season (I think it’s 109), our storyboard artists drew a gag where a big droopy dog is standing on a street corner next to a businessman and the wind from a passing car blows the dog’s tongue and slobber onto the man’s face. When Lisa designed the characters she made both the dog and the businessperson women.

My first gut reaction to the designs was, “This feels weird.” I said to Lisa, “I feel like these characters should be guys.” She said, “Why?” I thought about it for a little bit, realized I didn’t have a good reason, and went back to her and said, “You’re right, let’s make them ladies.”

I am embarrassed to admit this conversation has happened between Lisa and me multiple times, about multiple characters.

The thinking comes from a place that the cleanest version of a joke has as few pieces as possible. For the dog joke, you have the thing where the tongue slobbers all over the businessperson, but if you also have a thing where both of them ladies, then that’s an additional thing and it muddies up the joke. The audience will think, “Why are those characters female? Is that part of the joke?” The underlying assumption there is that the default mode for any character is male, so to make the characters female is an additional detail on top of that. In case I’m not being a hundred percent clear, this thinking is stupid and wrong and self-perpetuating unless you actively work against it, and I’m proud to say I mostly don’t think this way anymore. Sometimes I still do, because this kind of stuff is baked into us by years of consuming media, but usually I’m able (with some help) to take a step back and not think this way, and one of the things I love about working with Lisa is she challenges these instincts in me.

I feel like I can confidently say that this isn’t just a me problem though— this kind of thing is everywhere. The LEGO Movie was my favorite movie of 2014, but it strikes me that the main character was male, because I feel like in our current culture, he HAD to be. The whole point of Emmett is that he’s the most boring average person in the world. It’s impossible to imagine a female character playing that role, because according to our pop culture, if she’s female she’s already SOMEthing, because she’s not male. The baseline is male. The average person is male.

You can see this all over but it’s weirdly prevalent in children’s entertainment. Why are almost all of the muppets dudes, except for Miss Piggy, who’s a parody of femininity? Why do all of the Despicable Me minions, genderless blobs, have boy names? I love the story (which I read on Wikipedia) that when the director of The Brave Little Toaster cast a woman to play the toaster, one of the guys on the crew was so mad he stormed out of the room. Because he thought the toaster was a man. A TOASTER. The character is a toaster.

I try to think about that when writing new characters— is there anything inherently gendered about what this character is doing? Or is it a toaster?

ASK ME QUESTIONS ABOUT BOJACK HORSEMAN.

"As each ship is built from components, so too is the music. There are currently close to 200 components in the game and each component has its own musical motif." ...

Thichan and Murakami are two cool girls who we met on Cat Street in Harajuku after dark. Their colorful outfits – one featuring Pokemon, the other Akira – easily caught our eye!

Thichan – on the left with dip dye twintails and lots of Pikachu – is wearing a Pikachu cap, a Pokemon hoodie dress from Spinns, white tights, Pikachu socks, and Spinns flats. Accessories – some of which came from Park Harajuku – include a Pikachu earring, a face mask, a leather choker, and a Pokemon backpack from Village Vanguard. Thichan’s favorite shop is Gunifuni Koenji and her favorite band is Hachi Ju Hachi-Kasho Junrei. For more info, follow Thichan on Twitter!

Murakami – on the right with the bob hairstyle – is wearing a distressed Akira t-shirt that she bought resale under a Nylon bomber jacket from Spinns, a sheer skirt over stockings that she ripped herself, and black YRU platform shoes. Accessories include a choker, a Manhattan Portage backpack decorated with various buttons/charms, a spike bracelet, and a Jeremy Scott x Swatch wristwatch. Her favorite place to shop is at vintage and resale shops including Chicago and Kinji. She also likes the music of Tokyo Incidents. For more info, find Murakami on Twitter.

Click on any photo to enlarge it.

#truedetectiveseason2

This Spring, Andrew Plotkin (a.k.a. Zarf) is the Trope Tank’s writer in residence. Andy will be at the Trope Tank weekly to work on one or more of his inestimable projects — as a game-maker, programmer, and platform developer, he has been working furiously for many years. (His home page is modest in this respect; See also his latest game, Hadean Lands.)

Squirrel in cider, from Frank Kohler’s 1961 book Wild Fowl Game Cookery, replete with cute drawings of the animals you are going to eat.

The New York Post’s Jonathan Letham describes Lacey Noonan’s e-book, “A Gronking To Remember” as “a sequence of punishingly graphic fantasy female masturbation scenes based on watching the muscular and excitable New England Patriots tight end.”  Hey, you had me at “sequence”!  The Amazon.com sales pitch for Ms. Noonan’s literary debut (?) takes a slightly less cynical approach to what should be a great gift for every Patriots fan in your life :

Leigh has a serious problem. And it’s driving a “spike” between her and her husband Dan.

When Leigh wanders into the room where her husband and his friends are watching a football game, her life changes forever, because at that exact moment, NFL’s one-man wrecking ball, Rob Gronkowski of the New England Patriots, scores a touchdown and does his patented “Gronk Spike”—his notorious monster smashing of a football. When the ball shoots into the stratosphere, Leigh’s heart goes apitter-patter and she becomes seriously turned on.

Now normally-sheepish Leigh can’t stop thinking about it. She’d never given a second thought to football, but now the primal power of the Gronk Spike, and this raw monster of a man, Rob Gronkowski, is all that she wants, and she’ll stop at nothing until the romance of a lifetime is hers!

Find out the lengths people will go to fulfill their fantasies in this super-sexy, sex-filled story of wanton lust with a super-sexy, sex-filled happy ending.

If you read one book about Rob Gronkowski this year, make it “Growing Up Gronk.” But if you read two books about Rob Gronkowski this year, make the second one “A Gronking to Remember!”

Warning: Contains some sexually graphic scenes as well as the misuse of American footballs that will leave you wet, hard and everything in between. Sports!