“An iPad-only steampunk adventure game published by Bungie and developed by Harebrained Schemes, a games company founded by Jordan Weisman, whose past work game players might be familiar with—BattleTech, Shadowrun, and Crimson Skies.” Wow, I really haven’t been paying enough attention to Bungie news these days. Must get this. (via)
Newsweek cover article
yet he added “NOOOOOOO!” to Jedi for the Blu-Ray release
brief interview with the creators of the chatbots-arguing video
thanks Beau
“Another world is not only possible, she is on her way. On a quiet day I can hear her breathing.”
onion insta-gold
bookmark this page for your next yearly review.
rare is something people don’t access, as opposed to can’t access (via)
oh no. so sad.
leading up to the launch of Glitch
amazing (via)
cool image: a skyscraper that is half covered in plants
fascinating
how the mighty are falling. Nintendo’s stock price spiked up on rumours there was going to be a Pokemon for iOS, and went back down when they denied it. Did I mention the 3DS price drop after only a few months on the market?
(via)
In 1970-ish, “The Italian Elvis” Adriano Celentano recorded a song called “Prisencolinensinainciusol”. To the Italian ear it sounds like English, but to the English ear it sounds like gibberish, which is what it is. If the Joycean slurry of near-meanings wasn’t awesome enough on its own, it’s set to a stripped down, crazy-funky droning four-on-the-floor arrangement so that the whole setup prefigures both rap and disco. (That said, I think James Brown and Bob Dylan are the real influences, and there’s nothing magical about the song’s foreknowledge, but that doesn’t make it any less thrilling). Add to that the boss dancing, and you have a timeless classic on your hands.
I tried to figure out how the internets learned about this, but I can only trace back so far. There’s this, announcing an edit of the song, and giving a bit of history. (Here’s the mp3 of Greg Wilson’s edit BTW.) There’s this, which gives us the black and white original:
Which is then picked up by Sasha Frere Jones, then Metafilter, then BoingBoing, and then years later, your unreliable narrator stumbles into the whole mess via an Easter egg in the game Glitch. Anyway, the important part is when you search Youtube for Prisencolinensinainciusol and uncover gems like these versions with different sets of subtitles, all set to a mashup of the two videos:
Precinct Calling Ace Vantuso / Prison Colon ends in I choose all / Freezing culmination I choose all.
hope something / poke something / awesome babe!
It’s amazing to see how we project meanings onto sounds. It’s worth adding that in Celentano’s words, from the intro to the TV show staging, the theme of the song is incommunicability, that “we don’t understand anything anymore”, and prisencolinensinainciusol means “universal love”. I also love this karaoke staging of the song for drunken Portlandians, which seems to sum it all up.
Let me just say that when I added the song to iTunes, I chose the genre “heaven”.
one of the implications of 3D printing tech is that you can make an action figure of yourself. In Japan, anyway. (via)
“In Rohrer’s mind, his game would share many qualities with religion—a holy ark, a set of commandments, a sense of secrecy and mortality and mystical anticipation. This was the idea, anyway, before things started to get weird. Before Chain World, like religion itself, mutated out of control.”
CrumblePop on the new FCP. BTW I’ve spent about a half hour playing around with FCP X, and so far I think it’s a good thing. The new timeline is a real timesaver. Much less fuss about codecs. Still getting my head around the new bin display though.
Waxy on the history of the board game, which is a near-copy of earlier games