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Gotta Go Fast: Why Gaming IP Is Finally Taking Off in Film/TV - "The sudden embrace and success of gaming IP is somewhat of a surprise... when these films were produced, they tended to be both critical and commercial disasters... This created a vicious cycle: audiences learned video game movies were bad, making it even harder for the best film to succeed, and histories of failure meant major talent would stay away from future adaptations and IP owners were reluctant to adapt their best IP. Why, then, is everything changing so quickly and why now? I think there are seven core reasons." [more inside]
posted by kliuless at 11:59 PM PST - 45 comments

Johns Hopkins University's Coronavirus Resource Center and JHU's Center for Systems Science and Engineering have built a handy, dynamic, open-source live corona-tracking data visualization. • Mobile version here. • The World Health Organization has built a similar skin on their own data set.
posted by not_on_display at 9:52 PM PST - 77 comments

In Japan, Crash Bandicoot was promoted with an umprobably catchy and silly theme song, which was included on the disk for the Japanese release of his second game. Here it is, in all its earwormyness, with subtitled translations, or without.
posted by JHarris at 8:51 PM PST - 4 comments

According to furry historian Colin Spacetwinks in an article for New York Magazine (previously, Sonic the Hedgehog is a pop culture paradox - extremely specific in his design, yet also the ultimate blank slate who can be anything to anyone. So its fitting that after Shrek Retold, the collaborative remake of Shrek (previously), 3GI have done the same to the Sonic movie. No, not that one - the 90's direct-to-video animated movie, an oddball installment, even in a franchise consisting mostly of them. The result: Sonic Rebuilt.
posted by BiggerJ at 8:48 PM PST - 3 comments

McCoy Tyner live in 1975. (Interview at 33:52.) And in 1986. And in 1998. NPR's obituary.
posted by selfnoise at 4:23 PM PST - 37 comments

T.K. of Ask a Korean writes "Our failure to discuss Geun-sae is not because he is a spoiler; rather, Geun-sae had to be a spoiler because we are conditioned not to think about him."

Geun-sae is the most neoliberal man in Parasite, because he accepts and legitimizes the system that condemns him into the abyss. . . . The challenge of neoliberalism is to create a neoliberal man like Geun-sae. Without the millions of Geun-saes who buy into the system that crushes them, the capitalist structure cannot survive.

(Note: spoilers abound.) [more inside]
posted by Not A Thing at 2:32 PM PST - 23 comments

Ash Koosha is an Iranian-born futurist who utilizes artificial intelligence to produce music and visuals. "Virtual entertainers like YONA (an Auxuman® (Auxiliary Human) that writes lyrics and melodies and performs them, in collaboration with Ash) are meant to be the reflection of the Internet itself, so any song, melody or visual representation is coming from our human digital life. AI is utilised to facilitate such product" (interview). The product is something he likens to NPCs (non-player characters) in video games, and the sound is both glitchy and poppy, somewhere under the umbrella of IDM, as heard in his latest AI-assisted album, Bluud (Bandcamp), though this album is more organic than his previous one, 2025 (Bandcamp).
posted by filthy light thief at 2:08 PM PST - 1 comments

Even utopian communities are in need of public spaces without surveillance, where one can indulge in a little mischief and imagination; sites accommodating of misdemeanors unacceptable in the regulated public of civilized life; places to test the boundaries of the self. In rural areas, one may retreat to the mountains, the plains, the woods. That’s the beauty of rural life, the ease with which one may escape the public eye. City dwellers need this, too. Perhaps our woods, in a way, are our roofs. Ode to Rooftops by Jessi Jezewska Stevens
posted by chavenet at 1:26 PM PST - 12 comments

The Myth of the Progressive Boss — Cenk Uygur talked a good game about The Young Turks being the premier progressive media outlet. Then his staff tried to unionize. [more inside]
posted by tonycpsu at 12:53 PM PST - 41 comments

"The Popcorn Champs looks back at the highest grossing movie in America from every year since 1960. In tracing the evolution of blockbuster cinema, maybe we can answer a question Hollywood has been asking itself for more than a century: What do people want to see?" In 1981 the answer is Harrison Ford as Indiana Jones (to be fair, they named the dog Indiana) [more inside]
posted by Carillon at 10:26 AM PST - 50 comments

In 2017, photographer Mary Beth Koeth rented a car and drove from New York City to Edison, New Jersey, for the erotic arts convention Exxxotica Expo. Her goal was to meet mothers working in the adult film industry, to try and answer some of the questions she had about their lives. How do they balance motherhood with their work? How are they treated at school gatherings?
posted by Etrigan at 10:14 AM PST - 19 comments

Black Mesa [YouTube][Game Trailer] [Digital Foundry Comparison/Review]“Black Mesa was once a humble video game mod — but as of today, it’s a full-fledged remake of Half-Life, newly released out of Steam Early Access. Developer Crowbar Collective finally launched a 1.0 version of Black Mesa, which updates the 1998 first-person shooter with smarter enemies, levels built from scratch, and a level of detail that wasn’t possible two decades ago. Black Mesa has been sort of playable for some time. It launched as a mod for Half-Life 2 in 2012, earning overwhelmingly positive reviews. Then, Valve granted permission to make a standalone commercial game, and an incomplete version appeared on Early Access in 2015. Late last year, Crowbar Collective released the ending — a dramatic reworking of the infamous Xen levels, one of Half-Life’s weakest areas. Now, in 2020, the whole game has been polished into an official non-beta release.” [via: The Verge] [more inside]
posted by Fizz at 10:03 AM PST - 32 comments

“ The response of the SSCC to the proposed job losses was to go far beyond the norms of militant trades unionism as, in 1976, it put forward an alternative Corporate Plan for production across the company. The Plan, which had been drawn up by workers on the shop floor, contended that Lucas should shift from a concentration on military hardware towards the production of socially-useful goods. It was two years in the making and drew on the technical expertise and detailed knowledge of the production process of the workforce. Altogether it contained over 150 ideas with detailed plans filling more than a thousand pages.” Lucas Aerospace- When Workers Planned Production
posted by The Whelk at 9:03 AM PST - 3 comments

Future of Transportation Tony Seba Keynote at the 2020 N.C. DOT Transportation Summit. [more inside]
posted by Lanark at 8:50 AM PST - 21 comments

The evidence for evidence-based therapy is not as clear as we thought (Aeon): "Is the credibility of the evidence for ESTs [empirically supported treatments] as strong as that designation suggests? Or does the evidence-base for ESTs suffer from the same problems as published research in other areas of science?" Of the 70 ESTs listed by the Society of Clinical Psychology, researchers found that 20% performed well, 30% had mixed results, and 50% had subpar outcomes. [more inside]
posted by not_the_water at 8:44 AM PST - 6 comments

Social media platforms work to fight coronavirus myths, but they may not be able to win against your DMs. With the Covid-19 coronavirus outbreak still so new, fear of the death and disruption it could cause rapidly mounting, and treatments for it still a big question mark, rumors and misinformation about the outbreak are starting to spread. A wary public might be especially susceptible to believing unverified rumors about how the outbreak began (nope, the new coronavirus wasn’t created in a lab) or taking misguided measures to protect themselves (unless you’re sick or caring for someone who is, face masks aren’t the answer!). And buying into alarmist falsehoods can be dangerous. The spread of misinformation is already commonplace on social media, where the sharing of content from biased sources frequently outpaces whatever fact-checking and moderation safeguards are in place. Which is why coronavirus myths are starting to crop up on both Facebook and Twitter, along with YouTube and TikTok and messaging apps like WhatsApp.
posted by Homo neanderthalensis at 8:04 AM PST - 93 comments

Ahead of #InternationalWomensDay, and for your Friday amusement, might I interest you in several blogs about medieval women? Of course I might! (Oh you better believe it's a thread.) From the wonderful Dr Eleanor Janega of Going Medieval.
posted by adamvasco at 5:47 AM PST - 14 comments

"Like all forms, the skate video survives—is destroyed and remade—thanks to the innovations of its avant-garde. A recent attempt to remake this form premiered on the Thrasher website this October: Verso, an eleven-minute solo video part compiled by skateboarder Mark Suciu and cinematographer Justin Albert." [more inside]
posted by ZipRibbons at 1:51 AM PST - 18 comments

The second LP I ever bought, which I thought was by The Beatles, turned out to be, when I got it home and put it on, a Music for Pleasure record with orchestral renditions of Beatles songs. At age 9 or 10 I'd been fooled by the cover which had 'THE BEATLES' in very large letters and 'songs performed by the something or other orchestra' in very small font. To say I was disappointed, or deeply embarrassed, would be an understatement. [more inside]
posted by toycamera at 1:03 AM PST - 35 comments