And now I'll activate the 1 month in the box because I can finish the story without paying a subscription.
Star Wars: The Old Republic goes free-to-play up to level 50: UPDATE: EA confirms subscriptions now under 1m, performance "disappointing"
Tuesday 31 July 2012
10 Reasons Why Billy Ocean's "Loverboy" Is The Best Music Video Ever Made [Video]
No thanks Billy Ocean.
10 Reasons Why Billy Ocean's "Loverboy" Is The Best Music Video Ever Made [Video]:
Every now and again I miss grad school, despite the fact that my fondest memories involved drinking, watching Lost before it became completely godawful, or some combination thereof. Still, the urge to fashion an essay of substantive academic merit silently looms over me, like the world's least exciting poltergeist. (This itch is generally triggered by photos of Josh Holloway without a shirt on.)
So it is with zero apology that I'll abuse my present station and subject you to my ruminations on Billy Ocean's "Loverboy," the tapedeck dreadnought this side of Jeffrey Osborne's "Stay With Me Tonight." Why? This io9 favorite has a bafflingly uncelebrated music video that resembles Star Wars if Lucasfilm was funded solely by bingo tournaments. Feel free to submit your peer review in the comments.
1.) A Casual Strangeness
Unlike the reified weirdness of, say, a Lady Gaga — whose defining character trait is "Debbie Harry who cannot rap" — the weirdness of "Loverboy" appears mostly accidental. This is not to say that Ocean has always unwittingly dabbled in the realm of the fantastic. Indeed, two of his more memorable singles confront a phantom made flesh by means of automotive intervention¹ and a "Caribbean queen [with which whom Ocean is] sharing the same dream," perhaps through telepathy, maybe via some genus of sexy Freddy Krueger.
2. "Loverboy" Is Unadulterated Aerosolized Hard-on
Without the visuals, "Loverboy" is pure dancefloor plate tectonics. (But with the vocals, of course — the dub remix of this song competes with the dub remix of Hall and Oates' "Out of Touch" in the Olympiad of Regrettable Dub Remixes.)
3. Sensuality In A Vacuum (Of Space) But the music video? Totally gross — a horrible ungulate man who is perpetually on the verge of vomiting travels to an intergalactic taverna. Save the barbot and TV-headed cyborgs, the patrons are extremely difficult to look at, particularly the baboon sailors. Compelled by logic foreign to our human ken, the protagonist murders a Satan alien and steals his companion, who is the hybrid of Rollen Stewart and a platypus. (Are these two genetically compatible? We do not know.) In sum, there is nothing sexually enticing about this music video, this veritable R. Kelly's "Trapped in the Cabinet of Dr. Caligari," except for...
4.) Kneel Before Ocean
Unlike other early science fiction-tinged music videos — say, the robot sequence from Michael Jackson's "Moonwalker" — Ocean excuses himself from the phantasmagoria in "Loverboy."
Instead, he serenades the viewer from the safety of some sacred geometry. Did Jor-El — the known Stevie Wonder fan that he is — exile Ocean there as revenge for beating out "The Woman In Red" for the 1985 Best R&B Vocal Performance, Male? Also, is Billy Ocean Kryptonian?
5.) BrundleLoverboy
Of course not. Ocean became trapped in this pocket dimension by messing around on what appears to be a homemade teleporter platform, a recurring trope in 1980s dance videos. How do we know this? Ocean made two music videos for "Loverboy" — the original one just had him jamming on a telepod. In fact, we see snippets of the first video in the Fraggle Rock halfway house second version.
6.) This means someone — Ocean, his label, his astrologer — purposely changed the music video for "Loverboy" to make it completely insane.
And that's wonderful.
7-9.) These guys
Even though these are the shittiest Jawas money can buy, they don't make my esophagus taste like old orange juice.
10.) The galaxy's loneliest rhombus
Remember our discussion of Brecht before we all lost our appetites? In "Loverboy," the Brechtian Verfremdungseffekt ("alienation effect") is not achieved through the video's diverse cast of aliens — many of whom were presumably stymied by the velvet rope at Jabba the Hutt's Palace — but by Ocean himself, who is trapped in a hologram and directly, desperately screaming carnal promises at the viewer in exchange for freedom.
It is a jarring spectacle, the handsome troubadour pleading with the casual listener, promising anything to escape a dodecahedron's-eye-view of some distant nebula's grodiest singles bar. (That, or nobody gets laid in the Phantom Zone.) This extra, trans-dimensional subtext transforms a simple statement of sexual admiration into the manifesto of a man ensconced eternally in the intro to 3-2-1 Contact.
¹ The music video also stars a duck playing a saxophone, an unlikely sight on any occasion.
² Despite Ocean's insistence that he and the Caribbean Queen with the painted-on jeans are privy to a communal dreamtime, reality countered this claim, as such region-specific variations "African Queen" and "European Queen" so easily evince.
10 Reasons Why Billy Ocean's "Loverboy" Is The Best Music Video Ever Made [Video]:
Every now and again I miss grad school, despite the fact that my fondest memories involved drinking, watching Lost before it became completely godawful, or some combination thereof. Still, the urge to fashion an essay of substantive academic merit silently looms over me, like the world's least exciting poltergeist. (This itch is generally triggered by photos of Josh Holloway without a shirt on.)
So it is with zero apology that I'll abuse my present station and subject you to my ruminations on Billy Ocean's "Loverboy," the tapedeck dreadnought this side of Jeffrey Osborne's "Stay With Me Tonight." Why? This io9 favorite has a bafflingly uncelebrated music video that resembles Star Wars if Lucasfilm was funded solely by bingo tournaments. Feel free to submit your peer review in the comments.
Muppets of Disgust, Muppets of Eroticism: A Post-Lacanian Decalogy of Exegeses on The Extraterrestrials in Billy Ocean's "Loverboy"
In the 1939 edition of Walter Benjamin's essay "What is Epic Theater?," the author notes that:The [Brechtian] art of the epic theater consists in producing astonishment rather than empathy. To put it succinctly: instead of identifying with the characters, the audience should be educated to be astonished at the circumstances under which they function.And in the history of the music video, there is no greater example of epic theater than R&B superstar Billy Ocean's 1985 single "Loverboy." The audience is not only astonished by the circumstances under which the characters function, but the viewer also has no fucking clue what those circumstances are. Here are ten reasons why "Loverboy" is pop history's most challenging music video.
1.) A Casual StrangenessUnlike the reified weirdness of, say, a Lady Gaga — whose defining character trait is "Debbie Harry who cannot rap" — the weirdness of "Loverboy" appears mostly accidental. This is not to say that Ocean has always unwittingly dabbled in the realm of the fantastic. Indeed, two of his more memorable singles confront a phantom made flesh by means of automotive intervention¹ and a "Caribbean queen [with which whom Ocean is] sharing the same dream," perhaps through telepathy, maybe via some genus of sexy Freddy Krueger.
2. "Loverboy" Is Unadulterated Aerosolized Hard-onWithout the visuals, "Loverboy" is pure dancefloor plate tectonics. (But with the vocals, of course — the dub remix of this song competes with the dub remix of Hall and Oates' "Out of Touch" in the Olympiad of Regrettable Dub Remixes.)
3. Sensuality In A Vacuum (Of Space) But the music video? Totally gross — a horrible ungulate man who is perpetually on the verge of vomiting travels to an intergalactic taverna. Save the barbot and TV-headed cyborgs, the patrons are extremely difficult to look at, particularly the baboon sailors. Compelled by logic foreign to our human ken, the protagonist murders a Satan alien and steals his companion, who is the hybrid of Rollen Stewart and a platypus. (Are these two genetically compatible? We do not know.) In sum, there is nothing sexually enticing about this music video, this veritable R. Kelly's "Trapped in the Cabinet of Dr. Caligari," except for...
4.) Kneel Before OceanUnlike other early science fiction-tinged music videos — say, the robot sequence from Michael Jackson's "Moonwalker" — Ocean excuses himself from the phantasmagoria in "Loverboy."
Instead, he serenades the viewer from the safety of some sacred geometry. Did Jor-El — the known Stevie Wonder fan that he is — exile Ocean there as revenge for beating out "The Woman In Red" for the 1985 Best R&B Vocal Performance, Male? Also, is Billy Ocean Kryptonian?
5.) BrundleLoverboy
Of course not. Ocean became trapped in this pocket dimension by messing around on what appears to be a homemade teleporter platform, a recurring trope in 1980s dance videos. How do we know this? Ocean made two music videos for "Loverboy" — the original one just had him jamming on a telepod. In fact, we see snippets of the first video in the Fraggle Rock halfway house second version.
6.) This means someone — Ocean, his label, his astrologer — purposely changed the music video for "Loverboy" to make it completely insane.And that's wonderful.
7-9.) These guys
Even though these are the shittiest Jawas money can buy, they don't make my esophagus taste like old orange juice.
10.) The galaxy's loneliest rhombusRemember our discussion of Brecht before we all lost our appetites? In "Loverboy," the Brechtian Verfremdungseffekt ("alienation effect") is not achieved through the video's diverse cast of aliens — many of whom were presumably stymied by the velvet rope at Jabba the Hutt's Palace — but by Ocean himself, who is trapped in a hologram and directly, desperately screaming carnal promises at the viewer in exchange for freedom.
It is a jarring spectacle, the handsome troubadour pleading with the casual listener, promising anything to escape a dodecahedron's-eye-view of some distant nebula's grodiest singles bar. (That, or nobody gets laid in the Phantom Zone.) This extra, trans-dimensional subtext transforms a simple statement of sexual admiration into the manifesto of a man ensconced eternally in the intro to 3-2-1 Contact.
¹ The music video also stars a duck playing a saxophone, an unlikely sight on any occasion.
² Despite Ocean's insistence that he and the Caribbean Queen with the painted-on jeans are privy to a communal dreamtime, reality countered this claim, as such region-specific variations "African Queen" and "European Queen" so easily evince.
Goodbye BBFC, hello PEGI – All change for the official UK games ratings system
Goodbye BBFC, hello PEGI – All change for the official UK games ratings system:
Yes, it’s time to say a fond farewell to those bright 15 and 18 logos on games. PEGI is now in charge with a completely different set of age ratings – 12+ to 18+ with a few pauses in the middle to let teenagers legally shoot some stuff in the face too. Let’s take a closer look at the new rules, and remember some of the highs and lows of the BBFC’s tenure as gaming’s moral protectors.
To be clear, for those outside of the UK specifically, over here game ratings aren’t a voluntary or unofficial thing – as soon as games were deemed to be graphic enough to fall under the British Board of Film Classification’s remit, selling or renting them to anyone under the specified age became a crime, with the current penalties going to £20,000 in fines and six months in jail. That said, the enforcement of this was never particularly strong, and shops would sell to parents who didn’t care if their kids were playing Rip Gandhi’s Tits Off II: Praise Satan as long as it kept them quiet for a bit.
The main reason to switch things to PEGI is one of consistency; being pan-Europe, it means developers and publishers only have to worry about – and of course, pay for one logo. For parents though, it’s a little more informative – as well as being more granular and not assuming that controversial content only becomes okay at 15 (or 16 in this case), it offers a few hints as to why it got that rating – violence, bad language, sex related content and so on. You can see the full set at the official PEGI site. Sadly, there’s no rule that bad games – say, anything that goes under 50% in PC Gamer – have to emblazon themselves with the icon of a big pair of stinky pants as a warning to less discerning buyers.
But it’s early days. Feel free to start a petition to get that fixed.
Now that's a bad example to set to kids. Think first, THEN murder! It's just common sense!Will this change-over mean much different for customers? Not really. In most cases, the logo will still be ignored by the people it’s intended to help, and the rules haven’t changed that much for people who pay attention. There is however one potential bonus, which is that PEGI ratings are specifically geared towards games instead of sharing with movies. That offers much more flexibility in reacting to the medium directly instead of asking “what if” questions, though it remains to be seen if that will actually happen. As it stands, the examination is primarily done via the publisher/developer filling in a questionnaire to declare its content, then that being checked, rather than simply having someone in a room play it through and decide “Yeah, that’s not too bloody. Let’s call it a 12.”
The BBFC however will be continuing to rate certain ‘linear’ content, which could cover anything from machinima on a disc to Making Of documentaries. There’s more on that over on their site, and plenty more on the new ratings at Ask About Games. Check them for everything you need to know about what the new ratings are, mean, and how they’re going to be decided from now on.
But how did the BBFC do between getting into games in 1986 and yesterday? Here’s the abridged history, ignoring a vast number of non-silly examples because who wants to read those?
1986: First game to be rated 15: Dracula. A cynic might suggest that this was mostly a publicity stunt, and that cynic would be right. Why? It was a text adventure with a few graphics. You know how books aren’t officially rated by the BBFC? Right. There was no real reason for this to be either.
1994: Ecstatica. 18 rated for many reasons, including nudity, torture, violent deaths and religious symbols. It’s hard to argue with the rating on content grounds. That said, it did look like this…
Goodness, what a load of balls.1997: Shadow Warrior. Due to the same rules that turned the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles into the mere Hero Turtles, this ninja themed shooter couldn’t be released in the UK unless it removed the main character’s shuriken weapon for more morally defensible darts. Handfuls of darts. Because it doesn’t hurt to get hit in the face with darts. And they’re much harder to get hold of on UK streets than ninja stars.
1997: Carmageddon became the first game to be refused a certificate, with the BBFC deciding that it didn’t want to put even an 18 rated sticker on a game specifically about hitting people with cars. It got around this by replacing the pedestrians with green-blooded zombies. Players got around this by downloading a patch. Even the zombies were preferable to the German version though, which like many games was only released in a sanitised version that replaced the people with floating bin like things.
2003: UK journalist Richard Cobbett asked to show proof of age to purchase copy of PC Gamer magazine by stupid clerk in WH Smiths due to some trailer or something on the disc, despite being in it and quite clearly over 18. Luckily, did not hold grudge for next decade or so.
2005: Picking individual moments does make the BBFC seem more reactionary than it actually was (honestly, most of the time, it’s been fine and got much better over time), so here’s the other side of the coin. When the Grand Theft Auto Hot Coffee furore kicked off a firestorm of controversy in the US, the BBFC’s response was, more or less, “Whatever. We said it was for adults anyway.” Correct.
2006: And another one. When modders released a patch for The Elder Scrolls: Oblivion to remove the female characters’ normally welded on bras, the ESRB flipped its lid. The BBFC simply shrugged and showed it was paying attention by responding “”Were it the case that the developer themselves had included and failed to disclose certain modifications of content, a recall may be required, but not as a result of a patch that has been placed on the Internet by a third party.” The game’s original 15 rating was retained in the UK, but it was boosted from “Teen” to “Mature” in the US.
Unnecessary roughness AND an unnecessarily large syringe? Ban this sick filth!2007: Manhunt 2 becomes the second game refused certification, though this is ultimately overturned long after everyone stopped caring about Manhunt because it was a bit crap, frankly.
2011: PEGI originally scheduled to take over game rating duties.
2012: End of an era, and according to some crackpots, the world!
Yes, it’s time to say a fond farewell to those bright 15 and 18 logos on games. PEGI is now in charge with a completely different set of age ratings – 12+ to 18+ with a few pauses in the middle to let teenagers legally shoot some stuff in the face too. Let’s take a closer look at the new rules, and remember some of the highs and lows of the BBFC’s tenure as gaming’s moral protectors.
To be clear, for those outside of the UK specifically, over here game ratings aren’t a voluntary or unofficial thing – as soon as games were deemed to be graphic enough to fall under the British Board of Film Classification’s remit, selling or renting them to anyone under the specified age became a crime, with the current penalties going to £20,000 in fines and six months in jail. That said, the enforcement of this was never particularly strong, and shops would sell to parents who didn’t care if their kids were playing Rip Gandhi’s Tits Off II: Praise Satan as long as it kept them quiet for a bit.
The main reason to switch things to PEGI is one of consistency; being pan-Europe, it means developers and publishers only have to worry about – and of course, pay for one logo. For parents though, it’s a little more informative – as well as being more granular and not assuming that controversial content only becomes okay at 15 (or 16 in this case), it offers a few hints as to why it got that rating – violence, bad language, sex related content and so on. You can see the full set at the official PEGI site. Sadly, there’s no rule that bad games – say, anything that goes under 50% in PC Gamer – have to emblazon themselves with the icon of a big pair of stinky pants as a warning to less discerning buyers.
But it’s early days. Feel free to start a petition to get that fixed.
Now that's a bad example to set to kids. Think first, THEN murder! It's just common sense!
The BBFC however will be continuing to rate certain ‘linear’ content, which could cover anything from machinima on a disc to Making Of documentaries. There’s more on that over on their site, and plenty more on the new ratings at Ask About Games. Check them for everything you need to know about what the new ratings are, mean, and how they’re going to be decided from now on.
But how did the BBFC do between getting into games in 1986 and yesterday? Here’s the abridged history, ignoring a vast number of non-silly examples because who wants to read those?
1986: First game to be rated 15: Dracula. A cynic might suggest that this was mostly a publicity stunt, and that cynic would be right. Why? It was a text adventure with a few graphics. You know how books aren’t officially rated by the BBFC? Right. There was no real reason for this to be either.
1994: Ecstatica. 18 rated for many reasons, including nudity, torture, violent deaths and religious symbols. It’s hard to argue with the rating on content grounds. That said, it did look like this…
Goodness, what a load of balls.
1997: Carmageddon became the first game to be refused a certificate, with the BBFC deciding that it didn’t want to put even an 18 rated sticker on a game specifically about hitting people with cars. It got around this by replacing the pedestrians with green-blooded zombies. Players got around this by downloading a patch. Even the zombies were preferable to the German version though, which like many games was only released in a sanitised version that replaced the people with floating bin like things.
2003: UK journalist Richard Cobbett asked to show proof of age to purchase copy of PC Gamer magazine by stupid clerk in WH Smiths due to some trailer or something on the disc, despite being in it and quite clearly over 18. Luckily, did not hold grudge for next decade or so.
2005: Picking individual moments does make the BBFC seem more reactionary than it actually was (honestly, most of the time, it’s been fine and got much better over time), so here’s the other side of the coin. When the Grand Theft Auto Hot Coffee furore kicked off a firestorm of controversy in the US, the BBFC’s response was, more or less, “Whatever. We said it was for adults anyway.” Correct.
2006: And another one. When modders released a patch for The Elder Scrolls: Oblivion to remove the female characters’ normally welded on bras, the ESRB flipped its lid. The BBFC simply shrugged and showed it was paying attention by responding “”Were it the case that the developer themselves had included and failed to disclose certain modifications of content, a recall may be required, but not as a result of a patch that has been placed on the Internet by a third party.” The game’s original 15 rating was retained in the UK, but it was boosted from “Teen” to “Mature” in the US.
Unnecessary roughness AND an unnecessarily large syringe? Ban this sick filth!
2011: PEGI originally scheduled to take over game rating duties.
2012: End of an era, and according to some crackpots, the world!
 |  |
Monday 30 July 2012
Don't worry, people! NASA has a plan for moving the Earth. [Space]
Don't worry, people! NASA has a plan for moving the Earth. [Space]:
In half a billion years, the sun will swell up like a blowfish and cause the Earth to become a parched moonscape, devoid of all but microbial life. But don't worry about it. NASA has a plan for moving the Earth to a more habitable zone. And all it'll take is ten million years.
Moving the Earth may be the only way to save humanity, once the sun's outer layers expand. If the Earth doesn't get out of the way, its water and atmosphere will boil away into space, and then our planet will fall into the sun itself. That's not going to work for us — so sometime before then, if we want to keep using the Earth as a home base, we're going to have to move it back a bit. Working from the theory that you should never put off for a billion years what you can do today, NASA came up with a plan.
The good news is that the principle behind this plan has not only existed but been in use since the 1970s. It's called a gravity assist, and we've been using it to get satellites to change their trajectory, and speed up or slow down, since then. The first major use was when Voyager 2 got a boost from Jupiter to get to Saturn, then got an assist from Saturn and Uranus to make its way outward. This principle has been used to slow down satellites — Galileo was slowed down by Io so it could pass by Jupiter — and to get satellites that have mistakes in trajectory, like a geosynchronous satellite that didn't quite sync up, to the right speed and position. Gravity assists provide maximum bang for the buck, and can get satellites going at speeds far greater than any actual fuel could.
The idea is simple. Get a satellite close to a planet and the planet's gravity will grab hold of it. If the satellite is heading straight towards a planet, it will just fall right into the planet and go splat on the ground. (Or whoosh through the gas, or sizzle near the center, or crack on the ice, depending on the planet in question.) If it's moving at an angle to the planet, though it'll still get pulled by gravity, which will add to its momentum — but it'll fall around the curve of the planet, and escape back into space. It would be a little like grabbing hold of a friend as they ran by you. You might be able to pull them towards you, changing their direction and even speeding them up, but then they'd tear free and speed away from you again.
Since the satellite is gaining new direction and more momentum, the planet is also changing direction and momentum. Since the planet is so much bigger than the satellite, we won't much notice the planet's change. The NASA plan is to increase the size of the satellite, to rope in a big asteroid, and sling it around the Earth. The asteroid would be the size of Long Island and have solar powered rockets. The asteroid's nearby flight will cause the Earth to change momentum, tugging it away from the sun and out of the danger zone.
The bad news is this is neither a fast nor an easy process. It would have to be repeated no less than six thousand times. Some estimates say it could take up to a million times. In between passes, the asteroid would have to go to Jupiter or Saturn, which would gravity-assist the asteroid back to Earth. Each pass would take the asteroid between 16,000 and 10,000 miles away from the Earth. Any mistake would either lose the asteroid, or would cause the asteroid to hit Earth, killing every single thing on it, with the possible exception of microbes. Still, compared to a fall into the sun, it's gotta be the best option, right?
Not if you live on the coast. The asteroid's pull on the tides would be ten times the pull of the Moon. It would cause storms, tsunamis, and chaotic seasonal changes. We'd also have to calculate its passes, so it wouldn't change the rotation of the Earth and give us, say, a twenty-three-hour day. Even if we did move the Earth, ideally to about where Mars is right now, we'd have a different orbit around the sun, and we'd have Mars as a freaky new neighbor, which might also play hell with our own orbit. What's the possible up side? Another five billion years of habitability on Earth. Right now, it looks like we might have, at the outside, about three billion — with things getting bad at the half a billion mark. I don't know about you, but five billion more years on Earth seems like it would be worth, say, forty million years' work. Who wants to get started on those solar powered rockets?
Top Image: NASA/NOAA/GSFC/Suomi NPP/VIIRS/Norman Kuring
Galileo Image: NASA
Asteroid Image: NASA/JHUAPL
Via NASA twice, CNN, and How it Ends.
In half a billion years, the sun will swell up like a blowfish and cause the Earth to become a parched moonscape, devoid of all but microbial life. But don't worry about it. NASA has a plan for moving the Earth to a more habitable zone. And all it'll take is ten million years.Moving the Earth may be the only way to save humanity, once the sun's outer layers expand. If the Earth doesn't get out of the way, its water and atmosphere will boil away into space, and then our planet will fall into the sun itself. That's not going to work for us — so sometime before then, if we want to keep using the Earth as a home base, we're going to have to move it back a bit. Working from the theory that you should never put off for a billion years what you can do today, NASA came up with a plan.
The good news is that the principle behind this plan has not only existed but been in use since the 1970s. It's called a gravity assist, and we've been using it to get satellites to change their trajectory, and speed up or slow down, since then. The first major use was when Voyager 2 got a boost from Jupiter to get to Saturn, then got an assist from Saturn and Uranus to make its way outward. This principle has been used to slow down satellites — Galileo was slowed down by Io so it could pass by Jupiter — and to get satellites that have mistakes in trajectory, like a geosynchronous satellite that didn't quite sync up, to the right speed and position. Gravity assists provide maximum bang for the buck, and can get satellites going at speeds far greater than any actual fuel could.The idea is simple. Get a satellite close to a planet and the planet's gravity will grab hold of it. If the satellite is heading straight towards a planet, it will just fall right into the planet and go splat on the ground. (Or whoosh through the gas, or sizzle near the center, or crack on the ice, depending on the planet in question.) If it's moving at an angle to the planet, though it'll still get pulled by gravity, which will add to its momentum — but it'll fall around the curve of the planet, and escape back into space. It would be a little like grabbing hold of a friend as they ran by you. You might be able to pull them towards you, changing their direction and even speeding them up, but then they'd tear free and speed away from you again.
Since the satellite is gaining new direction and more momentum, the planet is also changing direction and momentum. Since the planet is so much bigger than the satellite, we won't much notice the planet's change. The NASA plan is to increase the size of the satellite, to rope in a big asteroid, and sling it around the Earth. The asteroid would be the size of Long Island and have solar powered rockets. The asteroid's nearby flight will cause the Earth to change momentum, tugging it away from the sun and out of the danger zone.
The bad news is this is neither a fast nor an easy process. It would have to be repeated no less than six thousand times. Some estimates say it could take up to a million times. In between passes, the asteroid would have to go to Jupiter or Saturn, which would gravity-assist the asteroid back to Earth. Each pass would take the asteroid between 16,000 and 10,000 miles away from the Earth. Any mistake would either lose the asteroid, or would cause the asteroid to hit Earth, killing every single thing on it, with the possible exception of microbes. Still, compared to a fall into the sun, it's gotta be the best option, right?Not if you live on the coast. The asteroid's pull on the tides would be ten times the pull of the Moon. It would cause storms, tsunamis, and chaotic seasonal changes. We'd also have to calculate its passes, so it wouldn't change the rotation of the Earth and give us, say, a twenty-three-hour day. Even if we did move the Earth, ideally to about where Mars is right now, we'd have a different orbit around the sun, and we'd have Mars as a freaky new neighbor, which might also play hell with our own orbit. What's the possible up side? Another five billion years of habitability on Earth. Right now, it looks like we might have, at the outside, about three billion — with things getting bad at the half a billion mark. I don't know about you, but five billion more years on Earth seems like it would be worth, say, forty million years' work. Who wants to get started on those solar powered rockets?
Top Image: NASA/NOAA/GSFC/Suomi NPP/VIIRS/Norman Kuring
Galileo Image: NASA
Asteroid Image: NASA/JHUAPL
Via NASA twice, CNN, and How it Ends.
Dishonored’s Dishonourable Pre-Order Rat Trap
FFS. I was really looking forward to this game. Now I think I should hold off buying it in protest.
Dishonored’s Dishonourable Pre-Order Rat Trap:
We had thought Ubisoft’s Assassin’s Creed III six separate releases was confusing. The plans for the game everyone at RPS is most excited to play this year, Dishonored, now makes that move look positively bland. In a display of eye-rolling pre-order bonus alchemy, Bethesda have announced a divisive and flat-out bizarre set of retailer-dependent exclusives. It takes the form of a handy guide for publishers to see exactly how they shouldn’t promote a game, as you can see below.
(more…)
Dishonored’s Dishonourable Pre-Order Rat Trap:
We had thought Ubisoft’s Assassin’s Creed III six separate releases was confusing. The plans for the game everyone at RPS is most excited to play this year, Dishonored, now makes that move look positively bland. In a display of eye-rolling pre-order bonus alchemy, Bethesda have announced a divisive and flat-out bizarre set of retailer-dependent exclusives. It takes the form of a handy guide for publishers to see exactly how they shouldn’t promote a game, as you can see below.
(more…)
"In a second test, a researcher snuck up behind the penguin while it wasn’t watching and banged..."
SCIENCE \o/
"In a second test, a researcher snuck up behind the penguin while it wasn’t watching and banged...": “In a second test, a researcher snuck up behind the penguin while it wasn’t watching and banged two metal bars together loudly.”
- How We Changed Penguins Just by Watching
"In a second test, a researcher snuck up behind the penguin while it wasn’t watching and banged...": “In a second test, a researcher snuck up behind the penguin while it wasn’t watching and banged two metal bars together loudly.”
- How We Changed Penguins Just by Watching
Half-Life 2 art director left when Valve "stopped making AAA games"
Oooooh, controversial.
Half-Life 2 art director left when Valve "stopped making AAA games": Viktor Antonov says Valve was his "second education," joined Arkane Studios to work on risky, creative projects
Half-Life 2 art director left when Valve "stopped making AAA games": Viktor Antonov says Valve was his "second education," joined Arkane Studios to work on risky, creative projects
Sunday 29 July 2012
Saturday 28 July 2012
Ruin Movies with Inappropriate Music - Dark Knight - YouTube
Hahahahaha :D I would watch all 3 films again with this done to it if I could.
Ruin Movies with Inappropriate Music - Dark Knight - YouTube
Ruin Movies with Inappropriate Music - Dark Knight - YouTube
Friday 27 July 2012
A man carries on a snarky conversation with himself from 20 years ago, via VHS tape [Video]
A man carries on a snarky conversation with himself from 20 years ago, via VHS tape [Video]:
This is the greatest thing. Jeremiah made a video tape of himself, at age 12, speaking to himself in The Future. And now, 20 years later, the grown-up Jeremiah has made a video of himself carrying on a conversation with Young Jeremiah. If you've ever fantasized about going back in time and meeting yourself, this is a pretty hilarious vision of what might happen. [Thanks, Meredith!]
This is the greatest thing. Jeremiah made a video tape of himself, at age 12, speaking to himself in The Future. And now, 20 years later, the grown-up Jeremiah has made a video of himself carrying on a conversation with Young Jeremiah. If you've ever fantasized about going back in time and meeting yourself, this is a pretty hilarious vision of what might happen. [Thanks, Meredith!]
Reality Check: There are only about half a dozen A-list superheroes [Movies]
Reality Check: There are only about half a dozen A-list superheroes [Movies]:
Spider-Man is back on the big screen, with more attitude and a better hairstyle. But this time around, the friendly neighborhood web-slinger is facing J. Jonah Jameson levels of hate... and not just because people remember the jazz hands from Spider-Man 3. A lot of people seem primed to dislike Amazing Spider-Man, just because it's rebooting the character so soon after the Sam Raimi trilogy.
Maybe Sony could have waited longer, or tackled a different character. But the truth is, we're in the middle of a superhero movie boom, and there are only about half a dozen well-known superheroes.
The longer the current superhero craze goes on, the more we're going to realize how shallow the talent pool of heroes actually is, as far as being able to launch a movie. Even the Incredible Hulk, who had a pretty successful television series back in the 1970s, had lukewarm box office for his two solo films — although the fact that neither movie was especially watchable probably didn't help.
When it comes to characters who have massive public levels of recognition, and thus the ability to justify a $200 million movie, you're probably looking at Batman, Superman, Spider-Man, the X-Men, the Fantastic Four, and the Avengers, collectively more than any single member. Of those, only the first four are really in the top tier.
And then there are the "B" list heroes, who can probably support a big movie if the circumstances are right. Like, if you cast Robert Downey Jr. in the lead, right when he's in the middle of a huge career comeback. Or if you get a particularly celebrated director on board, or when it's part of a series of movies set in a shared universe that people are pretty jazzed about. Or even if — you never know — the movie seems to be especially decent, judging from the early buzz and trailers and stuff.
The "B" list heroes are too many to list. But off the top of my head, there's Iron Man, Wonder Woman, the Hulk, Green Lantern, Daredevil, Dr. Strange, Thor, the Flash, Captain America, Green Arrow, and any version of the Justice League that doesn't include both Superman and Batman.
How can you tell if a hero is an "A" lister? It's partly about exposure beyond comics, including things like Saturday morning cartoons that help get a particular character into the minds of children. Or just the sheer amount of merchandising a particular character spawns at Toys 'R' Us. But also, the real "A" list heroes have already had multiple films at this point — and in the case of Superman, there was a TV show that lasted 10 years.
But also, just look at how many actual comics titles a character has been able to support — Spider-Man has been pretty much weekly for a long time. Batman and Superman tend to have four or five monthly titles, plus spin-offs. The Avengers have traditionally had a couple monthly comics, but they're in the midst of expanding. The X-Men often have at least one title a week. Green Lantern sometimes has a couple titles, sometimes just one.
It's pretty rare for a character or team to support two or more titles a month for a while — but the number of properties that have supported multiple monthly titles consistently, for decades, is much tinier. Basically, the fingers on one hand. If a character or team has had one monthly comic — but not more than one — for decades without serious gaps, they're probably a decent "B" lister. Maybe a "C" lister, in some cases.
So for as long as superhero movies remain a major genre, with three or four big studio productions per year, you're going to have a feeling of deja vu. Obviously, you'll also see lesser-known characters getting movie deals — Hollywood is launching films based on graphic novels that nobody's ever even read, so why not a movie based on a comic that has tens of thousands (but not hundreds of thousands) of fans? But the engine of the genre will continue to be the same few characters.
Also, some of the biggest characters, like Spider-Man and the X-Men, are held as licenses by outside studios, like Sony and Fox. It's commonly reported that if the studios go too long without making a new movie with these characters, they lose the license. So for the real cash-cow properties, the studios have an incentive to keep the pipeline going.
It will be really interesting to see how well the rumored Guardians of the Galaxy movie does — given that those characters are barely "C" list heroes. And it could easily suffer from the same perception that hurt Green Lantern: that you have to have read decades of obscure comics to know what's going on.
The logic of reboots
But why a reboot? Even if the logic of churning out a Spider-Man movie every four or five years is hard to dispute, why not just do a James Bond, and keep making sequels with a new lead actor every few years? I think there are a few reasons why this maybe doesn't work as well as it used to.
For one thing, people do like the illusion that superhero movies consist of serialized storytelling. (It's usually mostly an illusion, because each movie has a brand new villain, and good luck watching the X-Men trilogy or Raimi's Spider-Man trilogy and trying to discern a single story told across three movies. Even Marvel's shared-universe films are largely standalone stories.) If you recast the characters every few years and tell completely unconnected stories, it destroys that illusion.
For another, it's hard to think of a successful example, within superhero films, of a character being recast multiple times in sequels. The main time it was tried was in the post-Tim Burton Batman films. (There's also X-Men: First Class, which I'd argue was a reboot masquerading as a prequel, given how much it contradicts the other films in the series.)
And finally, when you're recasting the main character and bringing in a new creative team, you kind of want the story to be "We're delivering a fresh take on the character." Not so much with, "We're delivering a pale imitation of what the previous creative team delivered." And it's a lot harder to argue that you're creating a "fresh take" when you're not retelling the origins. Plus, origin stories are easy — they're the main thing superhero movies know how to do well.
The sort of good news is, maybe studios will realize at some point that they might as well be making up superheroes from scratch, if they're not dealing with one of the handful of really recognizable properties. Is there a major benefit to making a movie about a character whose comic gets 20,000 readers a month, instead of just inventing a brand new character with less baggage? Hancock did pretty well, after all. So did The Incredibles.
Superheroes aren't really a genre
It may seem sad to contemplate the idea that only a handful of superhero properties really have the kind of instant recognition that makes movie stars — and a slightly larger handful have enough recognition to launch a movie, with some extra luck and actual buzz.
But you know, part of it is that most superheroes are derivative as hell. There are a few original superheroes, like Superman and Batman, and then a huge number of copycats. You don't have to spend much time reading up on the history of the genre to know that back in the early 1940s, every comic-book publisher was trying to develop its own version of Superman. (But I do recommend Gerard Jones' excellent book Men of Tomorrow.) Green Arrow was transparently a bow-wielding version of Batman, for years before he got more or his own distinct personality. Even today, when people create new superheroes, there tends to be a clear Batman analogue, a clear Superman analogue, and maybe a family that resembles the Fantastic Four.
Remember when there was lots of talk about a Shazam movie, with the Rock playing Black Adam? It's not a terrible idea — it could be a fun, kid-friendly movie, if someone genuinely charismatic plays Captain Marvel. But you're definitely up against the fact that this version of Captain Marvel was intended as a Superman copycat, plus there's a lot of goofy mythology to shove down people's throats. Shazam is a perfect example of a property that you wouldn't want to spend much more than $100 million on for a first movie, unless you had a major star in the lead role. (Channing Tatum as the Big Red Cheese? It could totally work.)
Plus a lot of superheroes are endlessly redundant, even if they're not exactly like one of the "A" listers. Both Marvel and DC have their own bow-and-arrow-wielding hero. DC has Zatanna, Marvel has the Scarlet Witch. DC has Aquaman, Marvel has the Sub-Mariner. There are multiple heroes in suits of high-tech armor. There are tons of heroes based on mythology, and random bits of history. And then there's the fact that any unique hero tends to get a slew of sidekicks and derivative heroes, like the way Batman has Batgirl, Batwoman, Robin, Nightwing and Huntress.
There's also the fact that "superheroes" aren't really a genre. They're an agglomeration of genres, as we've mentioned in the past. Superhero comics, in their prime, strayed with bold abandon into the territories of cowboy stories, ghost stories, paranormal adventure, mythology, space opera, and countless other genres. It's hard to describe any set of stories that includes Dr. Strange and Adam Strange as being the same genre, except for a super-broad "science fiction and fantasy."
Some people are rooting for Amazing Spider-Man to fail, to teach the studios a lesson about their habit of endlessly rehashing the same characters and stories over and over. But in fact, if Amazing Spider-Man did fail (and it won't), it'd just mean the superhero boom was finally running out of gas. We speculated a while ago about how we'd know when the superhero movie craze was coming to an end — but really, there are a couple possible signs that would be really clear.
We'll know the superhero movie boom is drawing to a close when the studios try to reboot a few of the "A" list heroes and it fails, really badly, at the box office. Or when they just give up on trying to milk those small number of cash cows, and we start seeing only movies about heroes who are somewhat less overexposed.
Spider-Man is back on the big screen, with more attitude and a better hairstyle. But this time around, the friendly neighborhood web-slinger is facing J. Jonah Jameson levels of hate... and not just because people remember the jazz hands from Spider-Man 3. A lot of people seem primed to dislike Amazing Spider-Man, just because it's rebooting the character so soon after the Sam Raimi trilogy.Maybe Sony could have waited longer, or tackled a different character. But the truth is, we're in the middle of a superhero movie boom, and there are only about half a dozen well-known superheroes.
The longer the current superhero craze goes on, the more we're going to realize how shallow the talent pool of heroes actually is, as far as being able to launch a movie. Even the Incredible Hulk, who had a pretty successful television series back in the 1970s, had lukewarm box office for his two solo films — although the fact that neither movie was especially watchable probably didn't help.
When it comes to characters who have massive public levels of recognition, and thus the ability to justify a $200 million movie, you're probably looking at Batman, Superman, Spider-Man, the X-Men, the Fantastic Four, and the Avengers, collectively more than any single member. Of those, only the first four are really in the top tier.
And then there are the "B" list heroes, who can probably support a big movie if the circumstances are right. Like, if you cast Robert Downey Jr. in the lead, right when he's in the middle of a huge career comeback. Or if you get a particularly celebrated director on board, or when it's part of a series of movies set in a shared universe that people are pretty jazzed about. Or even if — you never know — the movie seems to be especially decent, judging from the early buzz and trailers and stuff.
The "B" list heroes are too many to list. But off the top of my head, there's Iron Man, Wonder Woman, the Hulk, Green Lantern, Daredevil, Dr. Strange, Thor, the Flash, Captain America, Green Arrow, and any version of the Justice League that doesn't include both Superman and Batman.
How can you tell if a hero is an "A" lister? It's partly about exposure beyond comics, including things like Saturday morning cartoons that help get a particular character into the minds of children. Or just the sheer amount of merchandising a particular character spawns at Toys 'R' Us. But also, the real "A" list heroes have already had multiple films at this point — and in the case of Superman, there was a TV show that lasted 10 years.
But also, just look at how many actual comics titles a character has been able to support — Spider-Man has been pretty much weekly for a long time. Batman and Superman tend to have four or five monthly titles, plus spin-offs. The Avengers have traditionally had a couple monthly comics, but they're in the midst of expanding. The X-Men often have at least one title a week. Green Lantern sometimes has a couple titles, sometimes just one.
It's pretty rare for a character or team to support two or more titles a month for a while — but the number of properties that have supported multiple monthly titles consistently, for decades, is much tinier. Basically, the fingers on one hand. If a character or team has had one monthly comic — but not more than one — for decades without serious gaps, they're probably a decent "B" lister. Maybe a "C" lister, in some cases.So for as long as superhero movies remain a major genre, with three or four big studio productions per year, you're going to have a feeling of deja vu. Obviously, you'll also see lesser-known characters getting movie deals — Hollywood is launching films based on graphic novels that nobody's ever even read, so why not a movie based on a comic that has tens of thousands (but not hundreds of thousands) of fans? But the engine of the genre will continue to be the same few characters.
Also, some of the biggest characters, like Spider-Man and the X-Men, are held as licenses by outside studios, like Sony and Fox. It's commonly reported that if the studios go too long without making a new movie with these characters, they lose the license. So for the real cash-cow properties, the studios have an incentive to keep the pipeline going.
It will be really interesting to see how well the rumored Guardians of the Galaxy movie does — given that those characters are barely "C" list heroes. And it could easily suffer from the same perception that hurt Green Lantern: that you have to have read decades of obscure comics to know what's going on.
The logic of reboots
But why a reboot? Even if the logic of churning out a Spider-Man movie every four or five years is hard to dispute, why not just do a James Bond, and keep making sequels with a new lead actor every few years? I think there are a few reasons why this maybe doesn't work as well as it used to.
For one thing, people do like the illusion that superhero movies consist of serialized storytelling. (It's usually mostly an illusion, because each movie has a brand new villain, and good luck watching the X-Men trilogy or Raimi's Spider-Man trilogy and trying to discern a single story told across three movies. Even Marvel's shared-universe films are largely standalone stories.) If you recast the characters every few years and tell completely unconnected stories, it destroys that illusion.
For another, it's hard to think of a successful example, within superhero films, of a character being recast multiple times in sequels. The main time it was tried was in the post-Tim Burton Batman films. (There's also X-Men: First Class, which I'd argue was a reboot masquerading as a prequel, given how much it contradicts the other films in the series.)And finally, when you're recasting the main character and bringing in a new creative team, you kind of want the story to be "We're delivering a fresh take on the character." Not so much with, "We're delivering a pale imitation of what the previous creative team delivered." And it's a lot harder to argue that you're creating a "fresh take" when you're not retelling the origins. Plus, origin stories are easy — they're the main thing superhero movies know how to do well.
The sort of good news is, maybe studios will realize at some point that they might as well be making up superheroes from scratch, if they're not dealing with one of the handful of really recognizable properties. Is there a major benefit to making a movie about a character whose comic gets 20,000 readers a month, instead of just inventing a brand new character with less baggage? Hancock did pretty well, after all. So did The Incredibles.
Superheroes aren't really a genre
It may seem sad to contemplate the idea that only a handful of superhero properties really have the kind of instant recognition that makes movie stars — and a slightly larger handful have enough recognition to launch a movie, with some extra luck and actual buzz.
But you know, part of it is that most superheroes are derivative as hell. There are a few original superheroes, like Superman and Batman, and then a huge number of copycats. You don't have to spend much time reading up on the history of the genre to know that back in the early 1940s, every comic-book publisher was trying to develop its own version of Superman. (But I do recommend Gerard Jones' excellent book Men of Tomorrow.) Green Arrow was transparently a bow-wielding version of Batman, for years before he got more or his own distinct personality. Even today, when people create new superheroes, there tends to be a clear Batman analogue, a clear Superman analogue, and maybe a family that resembles the Fantastic Four.Remember when there was lots of talk about a Shazam movie, with the Rock playing Black Adam? It's not a terrible idea — it could be a fun, kid-friendly movie, if someone genuinely charismatic plays Captain Marvel. But you're definitely up against the fact that this version of Captain Marvel was intended as a Superman copycat, plus there's a lot of goofy mythology to shove down people's throats. Shazam is a perfect example of a property that you wouldn't want to spend much more than $100 million on for a first movie, unless you had a major star in the lead role. (Channing Tatum as the Big Red Cheese? It could totally work.)
Plus a lot of superheroes are endlessly redundant, even if they're not exactly like one of the "A" listers. Both Marvel and DC have their own bow-and-arrow-wielding hero. DC has Zatanna, Marvel has the Scarlet Witch. DC has Aquaman, Marvel has the Sub-Mariner. There are multiple heroes in suits of high-tech armor. There are tons of heroes based on mythology, and random bits of history. And then there's the fact that any unique hero tends to get a slew of sidekicks and derivative heroes, like the way Batman has Batgirl, Batwoman, Robin, Nightwing and Huntress.
There's also the fact that "superheroes" aren't really a genre. They're an agglomeration of genres, as we've mentioned in the past. Superhero comics, in their prime, strayed with bold abandon into the territories of cowboy stories, ghost stories, paranormal adventure, mythology, space opera, and countless other genres. It's hard to describe any set of stories that includes Dr. Strange and Adam Strange as being the same genre, except for a super-broad "science fiction and fantasy."
Some people are rooting for Amazing Spider-Man to fail, to teach the studios a lesson about their habit of endlessly rehashing the same characters and stories over and over. But in fact, if Amazing Spider-Man did fail (and it won't), it'd just mean the superhero boom was finally running out of gas. We speculated a while ago about how we'd know when the superhero movie craze was coming to an end — but really, there are a couple possible signs that would be really clear.
We'll know the superhero movie boom is drawing to a close when the studios try to reboot a few of the "A" list heroes and it fails, really badly, at the box office. Or when they just give up on trying to milk those small number of cash cows, and we start seeing only movies about heroes who are somewhat less overexposed.
Gary Gygax: The Father of Games Design
Gary Gygax: The Father of Games Design: On the 74th anniversary of Gary Gygax' birthday, Tomas Rawlings looks at the legacy left by the designer of Dungeons and Dragons
Google enters cable/Internet provider war
That's interesting, but stupid expensive.
Google enters cable/Internet provider war: Google Fiber puts cable companies on notice... and could change cloud gaming forever
Google enters cable/Internet provider war: Google Fiber puts cable companies on notice... and could change cloud gaming forever
Thursday 26 July 2012
Brooklyn hipsters try to guess what the Higgs Boson is [Video]
Brooklyn hipsters try to guess what the Higgs Boson is [Video]:
If you've been following the excitement about yesterday's Higgs Boson discovery, now's your chance to feel vaguely smug. Vice Magazine's Motherboard went out in Brooklyn and asked hipsters what the Higgs Boson is — and their answers may alarm you somewhat. Science literacy is taking a back seat to hairstyle mechanics in this country, judging from this gang. [Motherboard]
If you've been following the excitement about yesterday's Higgs Boson discovery, now's your chance to feel vaguely smug. Vice Magazine's Motherboard went out in Brooklyn and asked hipsters what the Higgs Boson is — and their answers may alarm you somewhat. Science literacy is taking a back seat to hairstyle mechanics in this country, judging from this gang. [Motherboard]
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