Gaming
1000 Words, 1000 Days: Day 377: My Story Pitches For The Upcoming Hungry Hungry Hippos Movie
by Marty Schwartz on February 18, 2013
Back in October, a news item plopped onto my desk like a sack of wet rubber thimbles. Perhaps you remember it. Hasbro, the toy company behind Nerf, Play-Doh and Catchphrase, announced that their film division, which runs out of a tiny yet surprisingly whimsical windowless office on the Universal Pictures lot, would be following up the immense lack of success from last year’s Battleship film with a new three-picture deal.…
Read the rest
2 comments
1000 Words, 1000 Days: Day 244 – Blockheads Of The World, Unite!
by Marty Schwartz on September 2, 2012
It was the summer of 1989. Tone Loc was doing his Wild Thing on the radio, western civilization was somehow finding its way forward after the series finale of Moonlighting, and a 14-year-old me wandered into an arcade on the University of British Columbia campus in Vancouver. I remember the room, it was like an abyss of studious concentration, except the studies here involved Italian plumbers, Formula-1 racers, and pinball. …
Read the rest
Leave a comment
1000 Words, 1000 Days: Day 159 – Playing With Your Pee
by Marty Schwartz on June 10, 2012
Tired of peeing like a common schnook? Do I have a treat for you.
If you’re like me, and I believe wholeheartedly that you totally are, you find urinating to be a dull, uninspiring task. “Why is it,” I have often asked myself, out loud and in a mezzo-soprano Scottish brogue so as to confuse and alarm whomever may be within earshot, “that we can control our garage doors …
Read the rest
Leave a comment
1000 Words, 1000 Days: Day 74 – Lesser-Known Weirdness From The Monster Manual
by Marty Schwartz on March 18, 2012
At my high school, the kids who played Dungeons & Dragons were looked upon as outcasts, rejects from popular society, miscreants who couldn’t or wouldn’t adjust their hobbies to fit in with the mainstream. Of course, back then the mainstream looked like this:
This leads me to believe that the D&D-ers may have been on to something. I tried playing once or twice, but I didn’t have the patience to …
Read the rest
Leave a comment
How Video Game Characters are Created
by Tony Longworth on January 14, 2012
This sounds about right:
Leave a comment
Man Makes a Working PIP-Boy 3000
by Tony Longworth on September 2, 2011
Checkout this sweet model of a PIP-Boy 3000 from Bethesda’s Post-Apocalyptic ‘Fallout’ series. The Pip-Boy is a wrist computer used throughout the game as an interface for maps, data, and inventory. The model uses a HTC Desire HD for the screen and an Arduino Uno to control it. After all the electronics were attached, though, he could no longer put his arm through. Well, onto the PIP-Boy 4000, I guess. …
Read the rest
Leave a comment
Watch: Amazing Fan-Made Portal Film
by Tony Longworth on August 23, 2011
Commercial director Dan Trachtenberg’s fan film, ‘Portal: No Escape’ is arguably better in some ways than many theatrically release feature films… ‘Skyline’ and ‘Battle: Los Angeles’, I’m looking particularly in your direction. Moody, atmospheric, with dazzling effects for the budget.
The film stars Danielle Rayne, with music by Mike Zarin.
Via Reddit and Io9…
Read the rest
Leave a comment
Watch: Urban Pacman
by Tony Longworth on August 21, 2011
Urban Pacman from Sergej Hein on Vimeo.…
Read the rest
Leave a comment
Kevin Slavin ~ Life In The Algocenic Period
by Nick Glossop on July 27, 2011
We are running through the United States with dynamite and rock-saws so that an algorithm can close the deal three microseconds faster – all for a communications network that no human will ever know – that’s a kind of manifest destiny…
In this riveting TED talk, Kevin Slavin the co-founder of Area/Code games delivers a zoology, sociology and political-economy of the new species on the planet – the algorithm.
Here …
Read the rest
3 comments
The Orgasmatron and the Search for the the Apocalyptic Orgasm
by Laurence Miall on July 9, 2011
The Guardian has reviewed a book so weird that it cries out to be read tout de suite: Adventures in the Orgasmatron: Wilhelm Reich and the Invention of Sex. It’s a history of Wilhelm Reich, a pupil of Sigmund Freud, who invented the orgone energy accumulator – dubbed the Orgasmatron by Woody Allen – and thereby influenced a generation of intellectuals with his advocacy of orgasmic potency as the …
Read the rest
7 comments
The Tragedy of Angry Birds
by Craig Elliott on February 22, 2011
There is a war going on, a war between birds and pigs. So far as we know, it all started when the pigs stole and ate the birds’ eggs, though there are pig historians who claim that such a thing never really happened, that it’s all just bird propaganda. Most regard them as propagandists themselves, of the worst kind.
But this is a war that’s grown more and more ugly …
Read the rest
Leave a comment
