In a long NYT profile of the precipitous rise of UFC as a national pastime, Dana White, one of UFC’s owners had some choice words on what makes the bloodsport so popular: Unlike a double-play ball or a pass-interference penalty, a fist to the face requires no further explanation for a foreign audien
Over at Salon, Matt Zoller Seitz reflected on a string on surveillance-themed TV shows and argues that our current obsession with live imagery has turned us into “watchers:” Modern TV series reflect this, especially the shows that revolve around military action, national security, domestic crime and
Read the rest of Asaf Hanuka’s The Realist here. (He worked on one of my favorite animated films
The Final Fantasy series is at a crossroads: After the poor reception of the MMORPG Final Fantasy XIV, developer Square Enix chose to revisit the sporadically stunning but ultimately flawed Final Fantasy XIII, releasing a direct sequel to that game rather than introduce an entirely new installment t
I’m sure you’ve heard the complaint before. All art is a subjective experience. So what place do we have pretending to be “critics” when objective criteria for analysis doesn’t really exist? Leigh Alexander raises the question in an interesting Edge piece: People don’t talk about Ocarina in terms of
How many space marines have been capped in Halo 3 multiplayer? Enough for the entire alphabet to be recreated out of mangled corpses. The Halo Corpse Alphabet was a rather macabre project with the goal being to represent every letter of the alphabet by the twisted, curved, stretched, and otherwise
Author of The Lords of the Rings, a book which influenced exactly half of all computer games made before 1990, J.R.R. Tolkien was once nominated for a Nobel prize in literature. He didn’t get it. Why? The prose of Tolkien who was nominated by his friend and fellow fantasy author CS Lewis “has no
Escapist points out that there’s a new video going around the YouTube that’s a scene-for-scene remake of Star Wars: A New Hope, as made in fifteen-second chunks. Some chunks feature wicked stop-motion animation, including a killer thing where Darth Vader is a spontaneously emptying and refilling bot