Taylor Swift

Emulator countermeasures are so vicious because the stakes are so low.

As it turns out, these games exploit several tricks and undefined behaviors that make emulating them challenging. This appears to be a deliberate attempt to dissuade copying these games. In the interest of accuracy, I have painstakingly investigated, implemented and chronicled all of the unusual things I've found these games to do. [...]

The processor in the Game Boy Advance has a pipeline that has three relevant stages for accurate emulation: fetching, decoding and executing. In the fetching stage, the memory bus is queried for the memory associated with an instruction. This is then passed to the decoding stage, where the processor figures out which instruction it is. Finally, the processor actually executes the instruction. A naïve interpreter may merge all three stages, either for hypothesized speed reasons, or just an uninformed idea of how processors work. mGBA was actually assuming the decoding and execution stages were combined until recently. However, an important observation was made while digging through the Classic NES Series games' code: the game was modifying an instruction that was very close in proximity to where code was being executed already. [...]

What's imperative to understanding what's going on in this block of code is to realize that, once the instruction has been fetched by the pipeline, changing the memory that backs that address is irrelevant. This is similar to how cache coherence works, but is even more stringent. This means that if your pipeline is long enough, the instruction that enters into the pipeline during the write is the one that stores 255. If it's too short, it stores 0. As it turns out, the games will fail to boot if it finds the value 0 in register r1, but boots fine if it's 255.

Previously, previously, previously.

Yoshino is a 19-year-old college student we spotted in Harajuku, wearing all black and leather.

She is wearing a Forever21 leather biker jacket over a turtleneck, with a leather mini skirt. Her studded shoulder bag is from Thrasher, and her accessories (a “Brooklyn Kings County” cap and rings) are from WEGO and Ginga. She is also wearing platform ankle boots.

Yoshino told us she likes shopping at resale stores, and that she’s a fan of Nirvana, Pink Floyd and King Crimson.

Click on any photo to enlarge it.

Preview of a new story

Several years solid, it’s David M. with the CONTROVERSY…

[Video][Website]
[3.79]

David Moore: Some of my most powerful childhood music memories were made possible by my dad. He was early to the Internet, and via his online comedy music networks in the late ’80s gifted us kids the best set of curated Dr. Demento cassettes this side of the exhaustive Dr. Demento’s Basement Tapes. In what would become a lifelong habit, I’d lie on the floor of our living room, ear close to a boombox speaker at low volume, listening to those tapes over and over again, smiling, laughing, getting bored, then getting interested again at some new little cranny into freshly discovered sounds and ideas. It was through those tapes that I learned, among other things, animal versions of popular songs and genres long before I discovered their “legitimate” sources, surveying jazz, punk, disco, new wave and more, all by way of clucks, kazoos and farts. Two standouts from those tapes in the venerable cluck-rock subgenre, to which I’ve turned my attention recently for obvious reasons, are “Psycho Chicken” by the Fools and the poultry rendition of Glenn Miller’s “In the Mood” by Ray Stevens and the Henhouse Five Plus Two. (Chuck Eddy, who formally examines only duck-rock in his genre-melting Accidental Evolution of Rock ‘n’ Roll, recently shared more chicken noises that might have introduced me to Italo disco, Belgian synthpop, or psychedelia.) This chicken-centric view of popular music squared with what I’d gleaned from The Muppet Show, from my dad’s spontaneous recollections of his own childhood popular culture (in the middle of a long drive, breaking the silence: “Be kind to your web-footed friends / For a duck could be somebody’s mother!”), and above all, from my intermittent, inchoate urges to make chicken sounds and all other manner of horrible din around the house. All of it was normal; all of it was home. My wife and I had our first child in April, so my thoughts are back in that living room, on those tapes, imagining and in some cases revisiting the stupid stuff that united my family, briefly, in shared, unrepentant silliness, even — maybe especially — in dark times. (What else was there to do but laugh?) Now I understand the appeal from the other side: it’s amazing just how silly my days have been these past few months, raising the baby. It turns out you don’t really “raise” a baby; you mostly observe and marvel at him. You lie on the floor, and smile, and laugh, and get bored, and then get interested again at some freshly discovered movement or moment. Sometimes you listen to music — a lot of novelty music, it turns out — and of course, you make lots of chicken noises. Baby laughter is manna. And you wonder: What will we share? What will keep us laughing?
[10]

Crystal Leww: 哎呀,这是给老外看的!
[0]

Iain Mew: Records for the fastest YouTube success for a Chinese-language song all got broken last month — by Jolin Tsai. Kudos to Nolan Feeney at Time for actually covering that one, and with a headline about the year’s best pop video. Meanwhile, because talking about a great pop star performing in a recognisable style but a language other than English is way too much work, far more Western outlets were focusing on an apparent “Internet sensation” that at the time had a fraction of the number of views. That focus came in the form of articles putting Wang Rong being “C-Pop” at the forefront while demonstrating zero knowledge of it — contrast to no one calling Ylvis N-Pop or Norwegian pop stars. Satire, manifestations of different pop culture niches, and probable audience-baiting deliberate weirdness all get flattened into one long “check out this Asian video, it’s so WTF!”. I usually have a policy of not reacting to the responses to a song, but the rudimentary mashing of beat and animal noises doesn’t have enough to it to support anything else.
[2]

Alfred Soto: Or: “What Does The Chicken Say?” Or: Yoko Ono and Cindy Wilson for the “Gangnam Style” age.
[3]

Katherine St Asaph: It took me 11(!) Google search result pages (PAGES!) to find someone who treated this as music and not gawkfeed. (Credit where it’s due: Adrienne Stanley for MTV Iggy.) “Chick Chick” could be the best song of 2014 and it wouldn’t outweigh that.
[2]

Sabina Tang: I last (and first) heard of Wang Rong in 2004, when she had a minor Mandarin hit titled “I’m Not Huang Rong.” Huang Rong, for the record, is the heroine of a famous wuxia novel; imagine a teenpopper named Arden putting out a single titled “I’m Not Arwen” about how she didn’t need a guy as hardcore as Aragorn or as pretty as Legolas as long as he was a suitably romantic boyfriend. The clickbait tendency existed in retrospect, though I still find the older video charming: her nasal voice burbling along out of tempo with the brass’n’b trimmings and — yes — the dinky animal costume. But Wang Rong turns 34 this year, her best-of was released in 2006, and the clickbait’s been honed to a fine point of desperation I have too much context to ignore.
[4]

Brad Shoup: I see this as a backporch annex to Rednex: the provenance don’t matter, and the intention never does. What’s important is the harvest. The screeched bit is the best pop vocalization since Nicki Minaj’s headspinning peak, and as dumb as the melodic hook is, it’s sticky as hell. Sure, they’re way too pleased with the concept, but most people don’t even get the one.
[7]

Josh Winters: *sets as morning alarm*
[7]

Anthony Easton: The sheer bizarre excess makes it my favourite chicken-themed pop song since Brad Paisley did those outtakes sometime in the last century. 
[8]

Cédric Le Merrer: Having as a very small kid been a fan of La Danse Des Canards, and still being guilty of cranking out the Giga Pudding song from time to time, I can appreciate a good novelty song when it has me surrounded. Since I can’t give it both a [10] and a [0], though, a [5] will have to do.
[5]

Edward Okulicz: Chicken noises are not inherently funnier or more ridiculous than the Western alternative, which would be Redfoo. We lived through “The Fox” and “Friday,” so this doesn’t even make me angry, it’s just below-average novelty pop.
[2]

Juana Giaimo: Repetitive songs hammering your head for three minutes are rarely worth listening to more than once — and if they are, 99.9% of the time they don’t involve a chicken.
[1]

Thomas Inskeep: Oh, so that’s what the Chicken Lady‘s been up to since The Kids in the Hall ended its run.
[0]

Jonathan Bradley: This is like the kind of dance song you might hear in a nightclub, except when the hook comes, there are animal noises! It’s very strange, because mostly in pop songs, the chorus is about love or sex or kissing u thru the phone. Usually chart hits have a singer or sometimes a rapper, but Wang Rong has a chicken. That’s so silly!
[2]

Patrick St. Michel: This has been compared to “Gangnam Style” frequently and, ignoring the head-slapping reason why — Asia, it’s all about the same, right? — it isn’t right. Psy’s massive success was an accident — “Gangnam Style” never intended to be a YouTube-breaking hit, Psy just chanced across the perfect song/video combo for the social media generation. “Chick Chick” has far more in common with “The Fox,” the first post-“Gangnam” viral hit to be totally aware of itself. “Chick Chick” is a blatant stab at the same WTF and LOL, while also cashing in on the West’s lingering obsession with “weird” Asia. But it is most notable as the mainland Chinese music industry’s first stab at spreading itself globally, to the point of apparently not being that much of a deal in China. There are definitely better pop singles in China then this, but good luck selling those to the West. But this wins itself points for doing something Psy also did on this year’s “Hangover”: “Chick Chick” revels in how off-putting it sounds, because people aren’t clicking this for the music and Wang Rong maybe knows they deserve what comes out of their laptop speakers. 
[5]

Josh Langhoff: It’s no “Holiday for Strings”!
[6]

Will Adams: Every fall my university offers a lecture about Internet law and culture. A popular option for the final project (read: the easy A) is a group project in which you demonstrate what you’ve learned about fair use and remix culture by creating a “viral” video or meme. Two years ago, my group made a video of Arnold Schwarzenegger clips set to The Wanted’s “Glad You Came” (not linking because I’m embarrassed for myself). This year’s project is a parody of “#Selfie” (not linking because I’m embarrassed for my friends and also fuck that song). These projects end up feeling forced, cynical and ultimately stupid, because they take for granted the accidental nature of viral culture, thinking that trending topics can be divined by scientific procedure. “Chick Chick” sounds like it could have been one of those projects: it’s virtually unlistenable dancepop with excruciating animal sound FX that’s neither interested in musicality nor creativity, but rather WTF and LOL votes. In a classroom, it probably would have passed. As real-life music, it fails.
[1]

Sonia Yang: This is has so thoroughly fried my brain (pun intended) that I don’t even know where to begin. Is it a poorly veiled attempt to birth a viral meme? Is there any social commentary? Or is it just ridiculous? If we’re going by how hard this made me laugh at work, I’d give this a [10] hands down. But from a musical standpoint, I’d rather listen to Regina Spektor make dolphin noises for two hours.
[2]

Zach Lyon: Sorry David =(. No idea if you had designs on it or if the readers beat you at your own game, but “Hey QT” would’ve looked so great here. “Chick Chick” fails. The aesthetics, chickens and all, actually check a lot of my boxes, but they don’t mesh enough to form into anything but a distraction and they don’t de-mesh enough to be loved in slices. The trolling, chickens and all, would — well, it would also raise my score, but this isn’t trolling. It’s just kinda trolling.
[5]

If I was a parent and two of my children were partisan pundits yelling at each other on C-SPAN, I wouldn’t want them home for Thanksgiving either. I’d also probably admit I was a terrible parent for them to turn out this way.

Oh my Lord, shut it down, here is the greatest moment in the history of C-SPAN: A (very Southern) mama called into one of their shows to yell at the guests. Not because she disagrees, but because the guests are brothers and both her sons and she is sick and tired of their shit.

This perfect moment comes via the eagle-eyes at the Washington Post. You see, brothers Brad and Dallas Woodhouse sit on opposite sides of the the aisle, politically, and so they make joint appearances to argue bitterly about things like Obamacare. And their mother has had enough, by God, and so she called into their latest C-SPAN appearance from Raleigh, North Carolina to say that she is glad they both went to their in-laws’ this year for Thanksgiving and she wants this nonsense out of their system BEFORE they come home for Christmas, goddammit. She loves them both, but she wants a peaceful Noel.

Watch and cringe as one of the brothers drops his head into his hands and bemoans, “Oh God, it’s mom.” At least they’ve got something to bond over before the trip home for the holidays.

With the first anniversary of last spring’s demonstrations and of ‘CONNECTION’ fast approaching, we present a commemorative supplement to the supplement: a playable game simulation of spring on Morningside Heights. It has been designed with the same kinds of operations research and game theory techniques that are used by mathematicians, business, and the military to generate models of interaction that can be used to predict events in real life.

Up Against the Wall, Motherfucker is an early strategy game by Jim Dunnigan. Originally published in the Columbia Spectator in 1969, players could choose to play as the administration, or radicals who had seized a university building. The winner is the side that has gained the most support from various stakeholders at the university (alumni, trustees, middle-of-the-road students, etc.). You can view it as it originally appeared in the Spectator archives here.

The veteran localizer discusses his process, working with Japanese puns, and how Phoenix was nearly named "Roger."

This is Honami, a stylish girl wearing an all black outfit with a pop of color, who we spotted in Harajuku. She told us that she works in fashion sales.

Her blazer is from Yohji Yamamoto, worn over a dress from Y’s. Her red origami clutch is from No, No, Yes! paired with Y’s pointy loafers. Her spike ear cuff is from Mame. Other accessories include a stones ring and nail art.

Honami told us her favorite designer is Yohji Yamamoto/Y’s and that she’s a fan of The XX.

Click on any photo to enlarge it.

Unlike many of the games we’ll be gushing over during these awards, there’s nothing about our Action GOTY Runner-up that particularly endears the fantasy roguelike to touch devices–nothing that jumps out, at least. You could take the same basic ingredients–meaty top-down action, a handful of classes, procedurally constructed stages, permanent and semi-permanent upgrade systems–and plop them onto a PC, or Xbox, or Super Nintendo, and you wouldn’t lose the effect. A cynic might look at this game and say its best achievement is doing virtual sticks right.

And yet, there’s an intimacy to Wayward Souls. It’s the heir to handheld classics of yore, with a pickup-and-play accessibility paired with the sort of lore-building that throwaway action titles forego to afford more exclamation points after the blood-red “ZOMBIES!” text advertising their man-shoots. There’s a world here, a lore that’s specific but never overwhelming, and a story which reveals itself over multiple (so, so necessary) playthroughs with each of the game’s characters.

Does it matter that we don’t experience the events which lead the Warrior to chase down a necromancer in Wayward Souls’ abandoned mines? No. But try and hold back a smile the tenth or eleventh time you’re “ambushed” by his skeletons near the end of the first act, knowing full well that you can handle what’s in front of you (and that much, much worse is yet to come).

The play of the thing gets clearer with time as well, familiar enemies and rooms popping out from the white noise of seeming randomness. This is the dance you do with bats and magic books zooming at your head, this is the dance you do with the giant steamwork robots and gargoyles charging at you, and this is the secret dance you save for your close, special friend: the boss at the end of the stage.

For all its simplicity, Wayward Souls demands a serious chunk of your time. Not just small discrete moments when you’re free on the train or killing time before the takeout arrives, but a series of quests, mainly failed, all laid in a row on a single personal timeline and contributing to a larger narrative. That demand, that a player invest more than a few minutes at a time in a game (even if they’re only playing for a few minutes at a time), isn’t common among self-proclaimed action games on mobile–Wayward Souls just shows why it should be.

• Wayward Souls on iOS
• Wayward Souls on Android

 

To see all of the games recognised in the Pocket Tactics Best of 2014 Awards, visit the 2014 Awards Index page.

We usually see Japanese shironuri artist Minori around the streets of Harajuku several times a month.

These photos are from several weeks ago when Minori was gathering items for a photo shoot with one of the photographers with whom she regularly works. She told us the inspiration for this look – which features a handmade/remake jacket and an oversized scarf, a headpiece, studded gloves, leather pants, a purse and heeled lace-up boots – was oil. In addition to the black fashion, her shironuri eye makeup is also darker than we are used to seeing from Minori.

Minori was also excited to tell us about her new official online shop where she is selling handmade goods.

For more information on Minori, please check out our short documentary movie about Minori’s life and also visit her official website, Facebook, and Twitter.

Click on any photo to enlarge it.

Late to the party, I overcompensated. During a two-month period in 2006, I scarfed down every Funkadelic album reissued. This lover of freestyle and Miamian didn’t need to dance his way out of his constrictions: he had just grown up with people who knew George Clinton as dude with the weird-ass wig, author of “Atomic Dog” and “Flashlight” and “Tear the Roof Off the Sucker” and that’s that. Then he found a CD copy of You Shouldn’t-Nuf Bit Fish for three bucks used—a rare prize.

For ILM’s poll not long ago, I contributed my favorite P-Funk stuff, although sadly it’s heavier on the funk. I’m not as enthusiastic about Chocolate City and Funkentelechy Vs. The Placebo Syndrome as I am about Standing on the Verge of Getting It On or Let’s Take it To The Stage (or even the eponymous debut, home of a single that sounds as bottomlessly weird as the first time). Lots of wisdom to glean too: “If You Don’t Like the Effect, Don’t Produce the Cause” has entered my lexicon and sounds only too appropriate after the Senate torture report.

Is it wrong to prefer the solo in “I’ll Stay” to “Maggot Brain”‘s? OK. So I prefer it. Is it wrong that I listen to The Electric Spanking of War Babies more than to One Nation Under a Groove? Spank me.

1. Funkadelic – I Bet You
2. Funkadelic – Can You Get To That?
3. Funkadelic – Jimmy’s Got a Little Bit of Bitch in Him
4. George Clinton – Quickie
5. Funkadelic – Cosmic Slop
6. Parliament – Chocolate City
7. Funkadelic – I’ll Stay
8. Funkadelic – Shockwaves
9. Funkadelic – (Not Just) Knee Deep
10. George Clinton – Last Dance
11. George Clinton – Man’s Best Friend/Loopzilla
12. Funkadelic – Let’s Take It to the Stage
13. Funkadelic – Funky Dollar Bill
14. Funkadelic – If You Don’t Like The Effect, Don’t Produce the Cause
15. Funkadelic – No Head, No Backstage Pass
16. Funkadelic – One Nation Under a Groove
17. George Clinton – Double Oh-Oh
18. Parliament – Mothership Connection (Star Child)
19. Parliament – Wizard of Finance
20. Funkadelic – Maggot Brain
21. Parliament – Give Up the Funk (Tear the Roof off the Sucker)
22. Parliament – Dr. Funkenstein
23. Parliament – If It Don’t Fit (Don’t Force It)
24. George Clinton – Do Fries Go With That Shake?
25. Funkadelic – The Electric Spanking of War Babies
26. George Clinton – One Fun at a Time
27. Parliament – Testify
28. Funkadelic – Get Off Your Ass and Jam
29. Parliament – Up For the Down Stroke
30. George Clinton – Nubian Nut
31. Parliament – Aqua Boogie (A Psychoalphadiscobetabioaquadoloop)
32. George Clinton – Atomic Dog

(THEY’VE STILL GOT IT)

….courtesy of Fort Worth’s COMPLETE :

Great news everyone, our first official album Beginning Of A New Era will be releasing this weekend on over 30 digital music stores including Itunes! Physical copies will be $19.99 in the U.S. and that includes free shipping, add shipping costs outside of the U.S.

Official Track Listing!
1 Stimey
2 Dreaming
3 The Wish
4 Eve
5 Beautiful Sunrise
6 Into the Night
7 Power Down
8 F.I.N.E.E
9 Loneliness
10 Roll On
11 Hoogie Boogie Land

With two major updates over the spring and summer, we have continued to improve the developer experiences available in IE's F12 developer tools and today we are excited to provide details around our latest update.

This update addresses concerns that many users had with the vertical navigation model we introduced in IE11, and provides a more traditional horizontal model.

Changes to the F12 user interface

Overall design

When we introduced the vertical navigation model, our goal was to optimize for vertical real estate. Your feedback validated that we successfully achieved that goal. However, it also became clear that using a vertical navigation model with icons identifying complex tools, lead to hesitation and confusion for novice and expert users alike.

In order to address those issues, we implemented a more traditional navigation interface that sits horizontally at the top of the tools. As part of this change, the tool icons were removed and replaced with the tool’s name. We retained the tool notification badges—like the debugger pause icon or the console error count—and removed tool names from their respective toolbars to make more space available to the tools themselves.

Overflow experience

When the tools window isn't wide enough to fit all of the tool names, a drop-down menu provides access to the tool names that didn't fit and provides the same notification badges available in the full-width version of the tools.

Undocked experience

When the tools are undocked, they retain the same experience and functionality of the current tools. In this design, the window “grab area” is in document title region along the top and the window resize area sits along the sides of the tools.

We are grateful for all the feedback you have provided to date, and we want to encourage you to continue to provide suggestions as you find issues, bugs, or experiences you believe could be improved in order to make your daily development activities easier and more impactful.

Try this new change and let us know your thoughts. Leave a comment below, reach out on Twitter, or visit our new User Voice site to share your feedback.

— Ruben Rios, Program Manager, Internet Explorer

I reviewed about four hundred songs this year – a new record – and listened to five hundred. The finalists haven’t changed much since a third quarter update I posted a couple months ago. My criteria: I could recall a few bars on command, they hung out on my phone for weeks or months, and, most important of all, they sounded real fucking good every time I played them. This was the case with my top finalist. Unless I get bored before Xmas, the top ten will be what I send to P&J – if there is one.

As usual I avoid singles from albums likely to make my albums list unless I had “Adorn”-level undeniability. But I heard a surfeit of goodness in 2014.

1. Migos ft. Young Thug – YRN
2. Ledisi – I Blame You
3. Junglepussy – Fuck Texting
4. Usher – Good Kisser
5. Kira Isabella – Quarterback
6. Kiesza – Giant in My Heart
7. Brantley Gilbert – Bottoms Up
8. Schoolboy Q – Man of the Year
9. Tamar Braxton ft. Future – Let Me Know
10. Eric Church – Give Me Back My Hometown
11. Charli XCX – Boom Clap
12. Gordon City ft. MNEK – Ready for Your Love
13. Moko – Your Love
14. Young Thug ft. Freddie Gibbs and A$AP Ferg – Old English
15. Lorde – Yellow Flicker Beat
16. Kate Tempest – Circles
17. The Pretty Reckless – Fucked Up World
18. Beyonce – XO
19. Juicy J ft. Nicki Minaj, Lil Bibby, & Young Thug – Low
20. Crystal Kay – Dum Ditty Dumb
21. Kate Boy – Self Control
22. Future – T-Shirt
23. Cam & China – Do Dat
24. Block B – Her
25. Tinashe ft. Schoolboy Q – 2 On
26. Lady Antebellum – Bartender
27. Jhene Aiko – To Love & Die
28. Haim – If I Could Change Your Mind
29. Katy B – Crying For No Reason
30. Dierks Bentley – Drunk on a Plane
31. Javiera Mena – La Joya
32. K Michelle – Can’t Raise a Man
33. Kevin Gates – Arm and Hammer
34. Keyshia Cole – Next Time (Won’t Give My Heart Away)
35. Rochelle Jordan – Follow Me
36. Tim McGraw ft. Faith Hill – Meanwhile Back at Mama’s
37. Hedley – Crazy for You
38. Duke Dumont ft. Jax Jones – I Got You
39. Mia Martina ft. Dev – Danse
40. Isaiah Rashad – Soliloquy
41. Justin Timberlake – Not a Bad Thing
42. Future ft. Pharrell, Pusha T & Casino – Move That Dope
43. Taylor Swift – Blank Space
44. Kem – It’s You
45. Karmin – I Want It All
46. Jenny Lewis – She’s Not Me
47. Sky Ferreira – I Blame Myself
48. Paramore – Ain’t It Fun
49. Keyshia Cole – She
50. Sinead Harnett – No Other Way

ANGELA SAWYER is simply the best. Better than all the rest. She runs the holy place known as WEIRDO RECORDS and performs in groups like DUCK THAT, GRIZZLER, and PREGGY PEGGY AND THE LAZY BABYMAKERS. A hero to the weirdos of Boston, and New England at large, you should buy records from Angela because she personifies the underground of Boston, and indeed far beyond, stretching out across the US and the world. She is also an incredible performer at whatever she sets her mind to, which in terms of latest projects for Angela, would mean her foray into stand-up comedy. Know this amazing woman!! – Dan Shea

Top 11. Because sometimes ten ain’t enuf.

1. The Meridian Brothers Salvadora Robot (Soundway)
Delightful & captivating textures explode everywhere when Elbis Alvarez, working out of his own studio in Bogota Colombia with a pile of friends, sails back into your ears after a 2 year break following the breathtaking ‘Desesperanza’. Songs that are more like cartoon sci-fi beakers broil over with wobbly, dizzying synthesizers, and those percussion twitches are giddily stolen off the last 50 years of Latin rhythms. The band is always keen to balance otherworldly smears and 4th-dimensional itches, and there are precursors to be found in the Residents or Raymond Scott. But Alvarez is also glad to just throw up his hands & use laughs, grunts, bird screams or sheep bleats as instruments. Not as surfy as before, but a worthy follow up and a genuine monster of a record. Let it befuddle you, as these are what the good times sound like.

2. Various Picaro (Grumete)
Somewhere stinky, in a second-hand land between stupid exotica and even stupider novelty singles, lies an everest of leftover records that re-appropriate the cultural excesses America stole from her immigrants in the first place, aka the Euro twist trash 45. Climb the mountain of this prodigious non-genre invented by the University of Vice label and continued expertly here, now with color pix and something like informative notes. Is a Frenchie tune about large fruits supposed to be about a boob parade? Or is it just a cover of Herbie Hancock’s ‘Watermelon Man’? Landlocked surf, mangled language mixups, mutilated mambos, and cheap knockoffs of already cheap frat stomp like ‘Alley Oop’ or ‘La Cucaracha’. A glorious world where doo wop is masticated by fat & greasy moustache twirlers with too many rings, or where people from Spain fail to mimic racist Speedy Gonzales Spanish. Compiled by Spanish DJ Don Sicaliptico.

3. Los Punk Rockers Los Exitos de Sex Pistols (Nevada)
Great gobbbing almighty of punk exploito records, issued in Spain where the actual ‘Never Mind the Bullocks’ was not allowed to be sold. Lousy sound, lousy playing, & a lousy understanding of English all add up to complete incoherence & a record far more distorted & insurrectionary than the original. Flat out incredible sneering & grunting throughout. And the fucked up compression on the treble end of this record is it’s own musical experience. Lots of lyric mishaps, but my favorite is ‘don’t wanna know what I want but I know what’s in it’ from ‘Anarchy in the UK. Prog band Asfalto (who also played Pink Floyd covers) is long rumored to have performed the sessions, but no one’s ever figured out for sure.

4. Various Schnitzelbeat Vol. 1 (Digatone)
Crude schluchtenscheisser who snuck blundering garage trash, torrid tiki tunes, butterfingered surf & stupid Elvis impressions to the hapless twist fans of the alps while schlager zombies raged on the charts. Vienna was a place where the local Beatles cover band wore hulking wigs & called themselves, with all the clobbering subtlety they could muster, the Vienna Beatles. Rare but awkward covers of already awkward Bill Haley ditties. Extensive notes try tactfully to answer the question of why clumsy novelty shouters were so goddamn popular in Austria, but of course they get nowhere, nicht zuletzt wegen hilarious.

5. Martoc Music for Aliens Ears (EM)
Using either a vocoder or his flat & nerdy deadpan, Martoc makes Kraftwerky electro-plod but leaves the yucky teen acne in the tunes where it belongs. Martin O’Cuthbert (which might or might not be his real name) is also really into scifi, and so began as a musician by drawing his own superhero comics. His current website has an interview with Iain Banks too. Arp, Crumar, Roland & creepy, crippling insecurities abound.

6. Piero Umiliani Smog (Doxy)
Franco Rossi directed this sad little mondo movie about an Italian traveler who is stuck in Los Angeles for 24 hours & finds it an unhappy paradise, but the flick itself is hugely outclassed by it’s dead gorgeous soundtrack. Chet Baker, who hadn’t yet sufferred his first arrest for using smack, lends still, vibratoless solos that cauterize their way through the score. Sultry & ultrafeminine Helen Merrill, who had recorded so many flawless vocal performances before she turned 30 that she had nothing better to do than move to Italy, slides through notes breathlessly and proves a perfect complement to Baker. Piero Umiliani (‘Mah Na Mah Na’) must’ve been over the moon from getting to work with the jazz stars of his childhood dreams. He pulls out every instrument he can (especially from the percussion section) while still leaving deferential space for his two big soloists.

7. Residue of the Residents (Superior Viaduct)
As with all great Residents records, a lurching, conceptual carnival that really puts the mental back into organ instrumentals. Outtakes & b-sides that haven’t been around in a long time, including a huge chunk from 1979′s ‘Babyfingers’. In place of melodies, vocals feature 2 or 3 different guys each whispering their impression of a different muppet in a Louisiana accent. Backwards tapes of each note of a keyboard are spliced right alongside the same keyboard playing the same note frontways, and drums are made out of someone hammering a wood plank or typing on a typewriter in the next room. Sometimes everything gets squeezed into a cover, like ‘Jailhouse Rock’ ‘Space Is the Place’ or ‘Daydream Believer’, but other times the frankensongs are left to try & breathe on their own. Title of this album initially sparked a lot of frightened rumors among fans, because there wasn’t any easy way to get information about the band in the early 80s, and ‘Residue’ seemd to indicate that they’d broken up.

8. Sandro Brugnolini Underground (Sonor)
I dunno about the architecture or the bishops, but when it comes to sounds there’s no place on earth sexier than Rome. Brugnolini was an Italian alto sax player who’d been in a cutting edge jazz ensemble circa 1960 or so called the Modern Jazz Gang. He eventually, as did almost every musician in Italy, worked for the state tv orchestra RAI, and in between making scores for Australian sailboat races, or backing breathy singer Helen Merrill (be sure to look her up, she’s incredible), he made some masterful & wooly library recordings on the side. That sick wah-fuzz comes from Silvano Chimenti’s guitar (‘Four Flies on Grey Velvet’, ‘My Name is Nobody’, Gianni Ferrio’s backup band). Released a month after a similar record called ‘Overground’, with many of the same session players. Oozing organ, sharp trap breaks, ribbon after ribbon of funk bass, & fluid electric guitar that mixes jazz & psychedelic moves constantly (also makes Gabor Szabo look like a bit of a schlub).

9. Shoes This High Straight To Hell (Siltbreeze)
Wellington, New Zealand primo art damage. They only ever put out a single (that coulda been on Flying Nun, but the label didn’t exist yet). Tape of a live show found in the collection of archivist Bob Sutton, who’s known for videotaping hundreds of shows all the way through the 1990s. Sound quality is fantastic, and the performance is harsher than their single even, with a few calls out to the Fall or the Birthday Party that are pretty fair game for the time. Volatile singer Brent Hayward has the menace that makes the band, and he slides constantly between pitches, shouts, talking, and sheer psychotic hysteria. Hayward went on to a milder solo project called Smelly Feet, & also a folk duo (that’s darn hard to imagine while listening to this) with a girl singer called Kiwi Animal.

10. Hailu Mergia & the Walias Tche Belew (Awesome Tapes from Africa)
Mergia learned music in the army & soon worked his way into clubs around Addis Ababa. His band the Walias Band was one of the first to own it’s own instruments, and one of the first to tour the USA. After the Derg government took over Ethiopia, most bands (which had been heavily sponsored by the previous government, now considered never to have existed) were forced to break up. Mergia kept his together and managed to become self-sustained by playing at the local Hilton and calling in favors to get into studios. Few full length lps were issued after 1974, and none were all-instrumental like this one. Mulatu Astatke’s vibraphone undulates like a palm tree against the lapping waves of Mergia’s organ. Luscious, hypnotic large ensemble groupthink that’s part jazz, part tropical, and always swaying as each musician slides independently up & down the peculiar local half-tone pentatonic scale.

11. Ennio Morricone Milano Odia La Polizia Non Puo Sparare (GDM)
A spectacular, slimy place to start with Italian police movies or their soundtracks, aka ‘Almost Human’, ‘The Death Dealer’, & ‘The Kidnap of Mary Lou’. Story of a criminal who constantly solves each crime’s loose ends with an even crueler crime, culminating in a huge shoot out that kills everyone except him and the one detective as merciless as he is. Tomas Milian began here as an Al Pacino lookalike (opposite Henry Silva’s effortlessly beautiful cheekbones), but quickly grew his extremely manly moustache and was able to stake out a territory all his own, and he went on to star in 6 more flicks directed by Umberto Lenzi after this first pairing. Bruno Nicolai conducts trap drums and the left end of a piano to pirouette around each other so tightly you’ll never keep track of them. Sexy seventies saxes slide like blood down a drain. Not as well known as Morricone’s horror or spaghetti scores, but one of his greats. I listen to some part of this score about once a week. It’s like a face that can’t see itself.

WEIRDO RECORDS
844 Massachusetts Ave
Cambridge MA 02139
weirdorecords.com

The post 11 RECORDS YOU CAN GET NOW by ANGELA SAWYER appeared first on The Boston Hassle.

Read the full article at: Change Tab Title with JavaScript

Changing the tab (or window) title is an age old practice.  Gmail does it to notify the user of a new chat message and this blog does it to update the tab title after a new page loads via AJAX.  How is it done?  By setting a property on the document object, of course:

That property, of course, is document.title:

document.title = 'Hello!'; // New title :)

One common misconception is that you change the window.title property, but you must use the document object, otherwise you’ll see no effect.  You’ll oftentimes see a setInterval used with document.title to quickly change title to get the user’s attention.

Narumi is a stylish girl who works in the fashion industry in Harajuku. We often see her around the streets and she always looks cool.

Narumi is wearing a top from Nakid x G.V.G.V. and a UNIF leather skirt. Her backpack is from Fjallraven Kanken and her tote is Pameo Pose. She is also wearing a choker, necklace, glasses, a triangular pouch from Dr. Martens, a cross ring, fishnet stockings and Dr. Martens patent boots.

Narumi’s favorite places to shop are Barrack Room, Bubbles Harajuku, and Vivienne Westwood. Find out more about her on Twitter and Instagram.

Click on any photo to enlarge it.

Many games have loot. Usually this drops randomly. Loot drops are a pretty mundane topic, but one that almost every designer runs into at some point. Here are some best practices I've encountered over the years. Many thanks to everyone who contributed to these tips and tricks.

Your basic loot table

The goal is to drop some set of items at a given probability. Let’s say when you defeat an enemy, you have a chance of getting shield, a rare sword or nothing at all.

Example
lootTable
  item:
    name: sword
    weight: 10
  item:
    name: shield
    weight: 40
  item:
    name: null
    weight: 50

Setup

• Item: An item is something you want give the player.
• Loot Table: A set of items is put into a loot table. This is just a bucket of items. For example a loot table might include: Sword, Shield, Null.
• Weight: An item has a drop weight: 1 to 10,000. For example a sword might have a drop rate of 10.
• Null items: One of the items in the loot bucket is 'null' which means if that is rolled, no loot is given

Rolling for loot

• Total probability: First, sum all the weights in the bucket. In the example above, that's 10+40+50 = 100. They don't need to add up to 100 since these aren't percentages.
• Next assign each item a range. Sword = 1-10, Shield = 11 to 50, Null = 51 to 100
• Generate a random number from 1 to 100.
• Compare that number to the ranges. That's the item that drops.
• Reroll: Generate multiple random numbers to simulate multiple rolls.

So what does this look like to the player? We've got a 10% chance of dropping a sword, a 40% chance of dropping a shield and a 50% chance of getting nothing.

As the designer, I could go in and change Null's weight to 100 and now I've got a 6.6% (10/150) chance of dropping a sword, a 26% (40/150) chance off dropping a shield and a 66% (100/150) chance of dropping nothing.

Mapping onto other common random systems

This system is a simple restating of many other familiar methods of randomness. It is a fun superpower to train your designer brain to be able to switch between understanding any randomness issue in terms of loot tables, cards or dice.

Cards
Imagine deck of cards that you can shuffle and draw from.

• Each type of card in the deck is an item.
• The number of cards of a given type is that item’s weight
• Shuffling the deck is equivalent to assigning each item to a range and generating a random number.
• Drawing a card is the equivalent of selecting the item that drops.

Now a normal deck of cards has 52 cards, but with loot tables, you don’t need to operate with that constraint. Your decks could have 1000's of cards and a vast array of types. Or they could have tiny decks that are the equivalent of a typical poker hand.

Dice
Dice also map onto loot tables.

• Each individual die is a loot table.
• The sides (1-N) are items (labeled 1 through N)
• Each side gets a weight of ‘1’. (Unless you are using weighted dice!)
• Multiple dice can be represented as rolling the same loot table multiple times. So 2D6 is the equivalent of sampling a 6 item loot table twice.

Variations

Now that we’ve defined a basic loot table, what else can we do with it?

Variation: Items sets
You can also drops sets of loot. An item doesn’t need to be a single thing. For example, I could extend it so that the players gets a shield and a health potion if that option is selected.

Example
lootTable
  item:
    name: sword
    weight: 10
  item:
    name: shield
    name: healthPotion number: 2
    weight: 40
  item:
    name: null
    weight: 50

Variation: Always drop
A common need is to flag an item so it always drops. One convention is that items with weight '-1' always drop.

Variation: Repeatable randomness
Sometimes you want to be able to repeat a random roll. For example, when a player saves a game and then is able to reload to avoid a bad loot drop, it can lead to very grindy player behavior. If there is an exploit that ruins the game for them, most will happily go for it.

Most contemporary pseudo random number generators use a seed value. As long as you can save that seed value, you can run the random number generator again and get the same result.

Variation: Rolling without replacement
The problem with the system above is that players may, through chance alone, always roll 'null'. This is a common complaint by players. “I played that encounter 3000 times and never got the MegaGoldenLootGun!” This can happen.

In statistics, there are two fundamental types of sampling:

• Sampling with replacement: You pull the numbers out of the bucket and then after you've recorded what you got, you put them back in. So you have the same chance of getting the same thing again in the next draw.
• Sampling without replacement: You pull the item out of the bucket and once you’ve recorded it, you set it aside. You have a lower chance of getting that item again and thus a higher chance of getting the remaining items.

Tetris uses sampling without replacement. Each set of Tetris pieces is in a loot table. Every time you get a specific piece, it is removed from the bucket. That way they guarantee that you’ll always get a long piece if you wait long enough.

Here’s how you implement rolling without replacement in a loot table.

• When you roll an item, reduce its weight by 1. This shorten its range by 1 and shortens the max range by 1 as well.
• Keep the player's modified loot table around for the next time you roll.

Variation: Guaranteeing specific drops
Sometimes even rolling without replacement isn’t fast enough and you want to guarantee a loot drop. Blizzard does this for certain rare drops so that players don’t grind for very long times.

You could just increase the weight, but a low chance of getting something with a guarantee can feel very different over multiple plays than a slowly increasing chance of getting an item.

Here’s how you implement guaranteed loot drops.

• When you roll any non-guaranteed item, reduce all non-guaranteed items weight by X%
• X = 100 / Max number of rolls you before the guaranteed items drop.
• Keep the player's modified loot table around for the next time you roll.

Example

• Suppose you want the sword to always drop after 5 turns even though it it only has a 10% chance of dropping.
• So X = 100 / 5 or 20%.
• So every time you don’t roll the Sword, the weight for the Shield drops 8 (40*0.2) and the weight for null drops 10 (50*0.2)
• After 5 turns, the weight for all the other items will be 0 and the sword will have a 100% chance of dropping.

Variation: Hierarchical loot tables
Loot tables are generally source for new resources. However, you can easily run into situations where you are dropping too much or too little of a particular resource. Some sort of constraints would be helpful.

One solution is to use hierarchical loot tables without replacement. When a particular resource runs out, the player doesn’t get any more. We’ve used this for our daily coin awards. We want to give out 100 coins a day, but no more. But we want to do it as part of the loot system.

• Create two tables: Rewards and DailyCoins.
• Have the main loot table reference the Daily Coins bucket.
• When Daily Coins get picked, roll that table and see how many coins you get.

Example
lootTable: Rewards
  item:
    name: sword
    weight: 10
  item:
    name: dailyCoins
    weight: 40
  item:
    name: null
    weight: 50

lootTable: dailyCoins
  type: noReplacement
  refreshRate: Daily
  item:
    name: coin, number: 1
    weight: 10
  item:
    name: coin, number 10
    weight: 4
  item:
    name: coin, number: 50
    weight: 1

In the example above, a player has a 40% chance of getting coins. Then we roll the dailyCoins table and see that they can win a maximum of 100 coins a day with 10 awards of 1 coins, 4 awards of 10 coins and 1 award of 50 coins.

When the dailyCoins loot table is emptied, they’ll get nothing until it refreshes after a day.

Variation: Conditional drops
Sometimes you want to test if you should drop the items base off some external variable. In Realm of the Mad God, we wanted to avoid free riders getting loot for a boss kill without doing at least some damage. So in the loot table, we added a check. If a valuable item in the loot table was rolled, then we'd check to see if the player had done more than X% of damage to the enemy.

You could also build in switches for which loot it valid based off player level or even enemy level. I tend to instead use multiple smaller loot tables, but the system is flexible enough that you can easily architect your data with a few large tables and use of conditionals.

Variation: Modifiers
You can also modify the quantity or weight of a drop based off some external logic. For example, a player with a skill in harvesting could yield 2x as many of a particular item drop compared to a player without that skill. Or you could modify the weight. A high level character might have a -50% weight for all items marked lower than their level. (Thanks to a Reddit commenter for this idea)

Other uses

Drop tables are commonly used for dropping loot. But I also find them useful in other areas.

• Procedural generation: Use a table to build weapons or characters from components
• AI: Use a table to select behaviors such as attacks or moves.

This may seem a little silly..surely there are better ways to model AI! However, one way to think about randomness is that it is a very rough first order model of any system. How does the human brain model a system? We make an observation about a system. We note the frequencies and tendencies for those observations to reoccur. It is only much, much later that we start to understand ‘why’ something happens or the causal relationship between parts.

In physics, we often joke that in order to model a cow, a complex biological organism, the first step is to ‘imagine a spherical cow’. By creating a simplistic, easy to work with model, we can often generate useful insights at a very low cost.

Many times, a drop table is a ‘good enough’ human-centric approximation of a complex system. For many systems, most players will never move beyond a basic probabilistic understanding so modeling more complexity is a waste of time. Efficient game design is an exercise in modeling elements only to the minimum level necessary to create the desired experience.

Consider: D&D modeled entire universes with what were essentially loot drop tables. That was a deliberate focus on minimizing systems that were in many ways just secondary flavoring to the core roleplaying.

A loot drop table isn’t the only tool you need, but in many scenarios, it is good enough.

Procedural generation thought experiment

Here’s a simple procedural generation system using drop tables. There are lots of other ways to do this, but this is more to get your brain thinking.

Let’s say you want to build a procedurally generated enemy

• Start by making a list of unique enemy parts. Maybe your enemy is made up of a type of movement, a type of attack, a defensive buff and a type of treasure.
• Make loot tables for each one of those parts.
• For each item in the loot table, give it a power value based off how powerful you think it might be. for example, a knife attack might be weak so it only has a power of 5. But a large hammer attack might have a power of 15.
• Create another loot table of buffs. These are modifiers to various attributes. For example, ‘Strong’ boost a value on an attack by 20%. You can have debuffs as well ‘Weak’ might diminish a value by -50%. These have reduce the power value of a part.

Now let’s generate an enemy

• Set a target: Set a target power for your generated enemy. Say you want an enemy of power 40
• Roll: Roll each of the parts once and add them into a list.
• Score: Add up all the power values to get a score.
• Adjust: If the sum of the parts is over the target, add a debuff or roll for a lower power part. If it is under, add a buff or roll for a higher power part.
• Repeat: Repeat this process until you hit a desired error threshold (distance from power 40) or you've exhausted the number of iterations you are willing to spend.

You now have a procedurally generated enemy. There are tons of tweaks you can do to this basic system, but it works most of the time. As an exercise, think about:

• Exclusion lists: If two parts are picked that are on the list, throw the enemy away and reroll.
• Multiple constraints: Parts are scored on multiple criteria. Note, the more constraints you add, the less likely you are to converge on a viable result.

Conclusion

Any time there’s a discussion of randomness, there’s a huge number of secondary issues that come into play. I recommend the following for further reading:

• Understanding randomness in terms of mastery: http://www.lostgarden.com/2012/12/understanding-randomness-in-terms-of.html
• Richard Garfield on Luck: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=av5Hf7uOu-o

Resist being dogmatic about randomness. Be a broadly educated designer whose aesthetic choices are based on hands on experimentation. A good rule of thumb is that you can't intelligently critique a design tool until you've made a couple games that use it successfully.

Anyway, this is just how I've done loot tables; a mundane part of any working designer's life. I'm curious if other folks have other ways of managing loot (and randomness) that they love and live by.

(And before I forget – I've recently freed up some time to do some games consulting. Ping me if you need help with your games!)

take care,
Danc.

the Puppet documentation meets H. P. Lovecraft  

Daisuke works at the Monomania boutique inside of LaForet Harajuku. When we ran into him very near LaForet, he was wearing a wide brim hat and oversized scarf.

Daisuke’s jacket is from Unplugged, bought at Monomania, and his skinny jeans are from LHP (Lazy Hazy Planet). His leather tote bag is also from Monomania, as are his accessories. The lace-up boots he’s wearing are from a Raf Simons x Dr. Martens collaboration collection.

Daisuke told us that his favorite shops/brands are Monomania and Yaponskii and that he’s active on Twitter.

Click on any photo to enlarge it.

  An erie look at the ISS at night.   more at BLDGBLOG

 

 

As a punk band, The Coolies know it is probably best to not make too many apocalyptic claims about the state of the genre. So on their latest EP, for once, punk is not dead, “Punk is Bread”. The eponymous track is proof of this, a heavy song that grinds along without rest, establishing a melancholy mood. The rest of the songs are a collection of equally sludgy punk rock, often digressing into moments of lighter pop tone. As a result the album lands somewhere between fuzzy punk and slow, pop shoegaze.

Heavy bass lines fill the background, thudding with ominous intensity. The drums crash along in every song, uninhibited and unfiltered by any special effects. This recording is of lo-fi quality, but is nonetheless dense. Layers of sound are punctured only by the occasional guitar, which emerges clearly through the murk. And then there are the experimental noise-rock interludes; shorter sound bites made up of vocal shrieks and sporadic and formless drum banging. These moments are interspersed throughout, creating a more chaotic mood overall. The switch between the song songs and these small anti-songs further play with genre expectations, adding another mysterious layer to the band’s sound. The noises from these interludes are crafted from samples, and are woven throughout, creating an interesting album length thread .

The Coolies export their tunes all the way from New Zealand via Epic Sweep Records.

The post THE COOLIES – PUNK IS BREAD appeared first on The Boston Hassle.

Grindcore from Massachusetts. This is most of the known undeniable fact regarding Worcester/ Cape Cod’s EATEN. Add to that list the fact that the band released one of the heaviest, gnarliest records that I heard all year. That album is the above mentioned DEPRAVED. And, you can’t judge a book by its cover, but, more or less, you can get a grip on the basics that are coming at you when a band called fucking EATEN releases an album called DEPRAVED. 12 tracks on this tape. They blast back and forth between towering sludge coated riffage and a lightning fast grind assault. Guttural vocals and insane drumming round out the whole package. These guys can play and their un-ornamented music is as ugly as any of us ugly persons could ever hope for; and idiosyncratic enough to cause this picky, amateur metalhead to stand up and pay attention.

The longest of these 12 sonic barrages is 1:42, the shortest is :09 (that’s “Wolf Bite”, and well, fuck). “Chaos Coffin” is where I am at. This ones got an undeniable chugging metal groove that has to fight its way into existence, and then breaks to pieces before the track’s time is finally up. I am damaged post-listening (I stand, damaged, pre-listening too, but I am without question, more damaged, after listening to this monster band’s transmissions).

This tape came out in this year’s first quadrant, and I had it sitting in my bag for months before I managed to listen (thank you to whichever member of the band gave me the tape). Then I finally pulled it out and this shit almost broke my walkman. I listened to this tape A LOT. But I never wrote about it. Well, now I finally have, and all is good in December. Get that dose of evil that you need in your life  from these guys. Peddlers of seriously heavy from right here in MA.

The post EATEN – DEPRAVED appeared first on The Boston Hassle.

All albums by Christian Vander's sprawling prog rock project to be made available on vinyl again

Greetings Kobaïans! Jazz Village are planning an enormous Magma dump, pressing all the group’s original albums to vinyl and releasing two new recordings. A new extended recording of “Rïah Sahïltaahk”, which originally appeared on 1001˚Centigrades is out now on CD and vinyl. Also in the pipeline are vinyl only reissues of Köhntarkösz Anteria, Köhntarkösz, and Ëmëhntëhtt-Ré. In January, a new recording of Axiom will be released, which contains a new recording of Slag Tanz, which has previously only been heard live.

To mark the 45th anniversary of the group’s creation, Magma will also be performing a series of live concerts, with a three week stint lined up at the Triton in Paris, before heading further afield. No dates are confirmed yet but there are plans for performances in South America, UK, Germany, Scandinavia, Japan and the United States.

Over 100 members have passed through the group, with the first incarnation assembled by the group’s leader Christian Vander in 1969 as a direct response to the death of John Coltrane in 1967. Vander famously created a new language for his group, Kobaïan, a reference to the fictional planet Kobaïa, the backdrop for Magma’s prog-ventures. More info incoming here.