Spin reduces record reviews to tweet-length, and Johann Hari at GQ wants us to revaluate what critics mean to us—and how much they mean to us. When something new and startling comes along, it often baffles us, and we are tempted to drop it, pained, for easier cultural lifting. A great critic can he
video Nathan Englander (author of For the Relief of Unbearable Urges, What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank) was terrified of the phrase “Write what you know.” To him though, his fear of writing about his ordinary suburban life was a gross misinterpretation of the phrase. What he knew was
video They say you can’t cheat a cheater, which is particularly true if the cheater is a robot designed for cheating. Engineers at the Ishikawa Oku Lab, University of Tokyo have created a robot with a high-speed vision system built solely for the purpose of beating human players in rock, paper, scis
Using a traditional woodblock printing process, Jed Henry‘s Ukiyo-e Heroes come to life as tradition Japanese illustrations. Check ’em out, and watch a video about Jed’s woodblock process here. [via BuzzFeed]
video If you were anything like me as a child, your parents dragged you to LARP in the forest on weekends when you would’ve much rather been at home playing videogames. “It’s just like a videogame, except in real life!” They would try to explain, hoping you’d find the RPG-elements shared between vid
With the upcoming sequel to Octodad set for a 2013 release date, Patricia Hernandez has posted a conversation with Phil Tibitoski in which she unearths some of the creator’s motivations and musings. All cephalopodic jokes aside, Octodad may be the greatest example of how the simple constraints of a
Surely not to debase and trivialize a sacred law by making it an adolescent fantasy, a state-sponsored Iranian studio is developing a game whose objective is to kill a Salman Rushdie (author of The Satanic Verses, Midnight’s Children) avatar, because it’s definitely going to educate the youth and no
If any videogame developers still doubted the Anonymous adage “the internet is here,” the explosive protest against Mass Effect 3’s ending that brought the legendary BioWare studio to its knees has left them forever humbled. Since its release this past March, the final act of the acclaimed Mass Effe