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A feature in yesterday’s NY Times charts the tale of an amateur baller who found his way to Brooklyn from Florida via Portland, seeking “the city’s mythical ownership of pickup basketball.” Intent on discovering the “city’s truths” in basketball, Isaac Eger found out how to take a hit, dance around
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In his review of the pseudo-subversive Spec Ops: The Line for Grantland, famed game writer Tom Bissell lists 13 potential reasons why we play a genre of games whose volume of violence surpasses that of most mediums up to this point. From passages to personal stories to jotted notes, the review is as
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Beyond videogames, simulacrum, shady politics, and even the best watch-dog journalism, independent filmmaker Alex Rivera (Sleep Dealer) wants us to realize drones as the synecdoche of present civilization. In a recent interview with the senior editor of New Inquiry, Rivera waxes polemic about how th
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It’s no retina scan, but with the new Android OS, codenamed Ice Cream Sandwich, all you need is a good look to unlock your data-treasure chest of a phone. The New York Times reports: This comes under the general heading of “biometrics,” a highfalutin way of saying the phone has the ability to recogn
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Variety is reporting that the next Batman from Rocksteady, makers of the Arkham series, is going back to the chromatic ’50s. New, highly stylized title is being developed as a prequel that revolves around Batman’s first meeting with the Joker. It’s based on the Silver Age of DC’s comicbooks from th
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The ideal scientist is addicted to research. But when time is of the essence, crowdsourcing with games of pattern-finding in a real world context has proved an efficient way to get the world to do research for you. Following suit, Britain’s Wellcome Trust, a global charity for the advancement of bi
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It’s been confirmed that Trent Reznor has composed the theme song for Call of Duty: Black Ops II, a game set in the future where the U.S. is in a cold war with China, which will surely heat up, considering fans would probably be disappointed with a game of ceasefire. Whether Reznor was inspired by d
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Kill Screen columnist Michelle Young, on her way through Rio De Janero to study the legalization of street art, took a moment in Terra Encantada, another abandon amusment park whose play crossed the line into death. She took the full story to Untapped Cities. By now, you might be used to seeing aban
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If you dream of walking across the words of a poem as you read them, building maps of metaphor that you play in your head, see how New York poet Jon Cotner willled this into realtiy with the work of a Japanese master of the haiku. We’re Floating is a new interactive walk designed by artist and poet
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Because not everyone can fulfill their childhood dream of being left completely alone in an empty city with a really fast, agile car, we have people like Ken Block—the man behind the wheel of this rally car who shut down entire streets of San Francisco for what looks like the loneliest, best joyride
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Wired‘s senior editor, Adam Rogers, loves postapocalyptic science fiction—not for the allure of eschatology, but because he thinks these stories are imminent. As he says in the video, we need “not stories set 20 years in the future, but to quote Max Headroom, 20 minutes in the future.” What used to
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The iconic pixel camo—or the Universal Camouflage Pattern—of our war-torn 2000s is on its way out. As told by Daniel Engber at Slate, the great digital experiment by the U.S. Army is a long story of high-fashion and high-hypothesis. If it never made sense to you either, don’t worry—the theory behind