The Video Game Soda Machine Project — Obsessively Cataloging Video Game “Pop” Culture [screen caps]

•March 31, 2018 • Leave a Comment

In 2016, Marshall University professor Jason Morrissette was playing Batman: Arkham Knight. While sneaking around the shadows, Morrissette stumbled upon a soda machine. Like many games, Akrham Knight doesn’t feature any real-life soda products; that’d cost money. Instead, the developers simply made up their own: Sparkle Fizz. “It was so colorful in an otherwise gloomy corner of Gotham City that it caught my eye,” said Morrissette in a recent email exchange.

After joking on Twitter that someone catalog the various ways video games choose to represent soda machines, Morrissette decided to take it on. Thus, the Video Game Soda Machine Project was born, and as of March, it reached an important milestone: the blog cataloged its 2,000th soda machine.

Morrissette, who admits to preferring the term “soft drink,” isn’t just collecting these random images as a pet project anymore—it’s incorporated into his research. He even presented a paper at an academic convention called “I’d Like to Buy the World a Nuka-Cola: The Purposes and Meanings of Video Game Soda Machines:”

Full PowerPoint presentation in Dropbox PDF: https://t.co/SN5MrFgWTK

If you’d like to point Morrissette towards some undocumented soda machines, you can get in touch with him over Twitter.

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Lindsay Lohan Loses In GTA 5 Lawsuit (Again)

•March 29, 2018 • Leave a Comment

Actress-slash-burnout Lindsay Lohan’s drawn-out suit against Grand Theft Auto publisher Take-Two Interactive fizzled out today after a New York court rejected her appeal.

Lohan brought the lawsuit four years ago, taking issue with GTA V featuring a young woman named Lacey Jonas. Jonas is a white woman with strawberry blonde hair who, in one image, wears a red bikini and flashes a peace sign — reminiscent of a photo of Lohan doing the same thing:

Big whoop right? Well get this, it was actually part of the original complaint; “The Plaintiff has been using the peace sign hand gesture for years before and after its use in the video game.” Fame, must be nice, wasting precious time insisting that her “unequivocal” similarity to Lacey Jonas, a minor character in GTA 5, entitles her to compensation.

“[…] Lohan’s respective causes of action under Civil Rights Law § 51 “must fail because defendants did not use plaintiff[s’] ‘name, portrait or picture’ ” (see Costanza v Seinfeld, 279 AD2d 255, 255 [1st Dept 2001], citing Wojtowicz v Delacorte Press, 43 NY2d 858, 860 [1978]). 

[…] Even if we accept plaintiffs’ contentions that the video game depictions are close enough to be considered representations of the respective plaintiffs, plaintiffs’ claims should be dismissed because this video game does not fall under the statutory definitions of “advertising” or “trade” […] “(l)ike the protected books, plays, and movies that preceded them, video games communicate ideas” and deserve First Amendment protection]). This video game’s unique story, characters, dialogue, and environment, combined with the player’s ability to choose how to proceed in the game, render it a work of fiction and satire.”

In 2016, a five-judge panel ruled that the suit had no merit. Today, New York Court of Appeals rejected Lohan’s appeal, too, referring to Grand Theft Auto‘s as Jonas character a “generic. . . twenty something woman without any particular identifying physical characteristics.” Ouch.

That said, the court did find that computer-generated images, like avatars or NPCs, can be legally called “portraits.” It’s just that Jonas wasn’t a portrait of Lohan, the court decided.

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Virtual Self — “Ghost Voices” [♬]

•March 11, 2018 • Leave a Comment

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Seeing STELLAR* Live [F]

•March 10, 2018 • Leave a Comment

Went to see this Kiwi band perform live last night, who reformed after an 8 year hiatus. The audience was the most diverse I’ve ever been among, both young and old. My lasting impression of the night was just how amazing a voice Boh Runga has. Such an amazing range. Stellar* had a great track list, and my favourite of the night had to be signing along to Part of Me. A good night. I do recommend experiencing the atmosphere next they play.

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DarkintheBoy — “GLITCH” [♬] [F]

•February 22, 2018 • Leave a Comment

Com Truise’s FAIRLIGHT video reminded me of something I made, which I will paste here because #selfpromotion. I make music in my spare time. Only like, three people will ever hear my stuff nowadays and that’s how I likes it, except for this is one track that I thought deserved some visual aid to accompany it. So I edited together some random found footage to form some semblance of a narrative. I used FL Studio to make this track — GLITCH:

Thanks for listening!! 😀 Although I pay it little maintenance, I have a Soundcloud account if anyone is interested. I love the digital footprints we leave behind. Interactive time capsules encapsulated by source code that traces back to our unwritten personality traits.

 

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Com Truise — “Brokendate” & “Fairlight” [music video]

•February 20, 2018 • Leave a Comment

This sweet retro-futuristic tale directed by Will Joines, compliments BROKENDATE perfectly with its Blade Runner-esq eighties cop-nior ambience. It takes me back to a time that only exists in memory now, and I’m not concerned at all that that sentence shouldn’t have made any grammatical sense… BROKENDATE is rad.

Director: Will Joines / Producer: Sarah Romney / Cinematographer: Zoë White

How great a name is Com Truise — one of the many pseudonyms of New Jersey designer/musician Seth Haley. Love his melodious synth and the depth of atmosphere he’s able to create with minimal sounds. Here is another favourite — FAIRLIGHT:

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BLACK PANTHER Night! [F]

•February 15, 2018 • Leave a Comment

My local comic shop held a screening of BLACK PANTHER tonight and it was good. Now, I don’t read reviews, I find them redundant when you know what you yourself like, but since I have seen the movie I am now reading into the hype, and I think it is deserved. For a superhero movie it definitely treated its fictional source material and correlative ties with Africa with dignity. There is a dynamic character arc, a thoroughly developed antagonist, kick-ass supporting roles and a decent soundtrack. All of which I can’t be assed to write on further, so I’ll let you vibe to Kendrick Lamar & SZA instead:

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A Bittersweet Day [F]

•February 14, 2018 • Leave a Comment

Happy Valentine’s — I handed in my resignation letter today! I should be relieved, really, but if I have to be honest with myself, I am feeling a bit, grey, about the overall experience and my time spent there. …I guess there are more than a few faces I will miss.

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A Burst of Deep Sea Fireworks: Halitrephes Jelly (Nautilus Live)

•February 9, 2018 • Leave a Comment

It took a trip 4000 feet under the sea off Baja California, Mexico to witness this underwater reflective light show, but the payoff was worth it — as the lights of the E/V Nautilus‘ remote-operated Hercules submarine revealed the colorful tentacles of the Halitrephes maasi jellyfish:

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Artificial Taste Has No Expiry Date [F]

•January 23, 2018 • Leave a Comment

But it freaking should! Bought me an energy drink from a little old women who owned a dairy along Ponsonby Road, even though I could have gotten two for the price of one at the Countdown three blocks back. Nothing wrong with supporting local business owners. At least that’s what I was cool with earlier today, but now I’m not so sure. No, sir. Fuck that!

So I was eating pizza, bored with the lack of visual stimulation in the vicinity, when I decided to take interest in the bottle. The original “V” brand logo I expected to see was replaced with a letter “E”, odd, but there was a comic bubble with promotional guidelines next to it that explained it, stating; SPELL IT, SHOOT IT, SHARE IT. #VCHAT Ends 31.01.16.

That’s right — 2016!!! The promotion ended at the start of 2016, meaning the liquid in the bottle was produced in 2015, or earlier considering the shelf-life for these types of drinks is ludicrously long. Knowing that, I wasn’t really gagging or anything. Several questions popped in my head though, such as, how much energy is contained in a bottle of energy drink from 2015/16, should I bother walking back up the road to waggle my finger in the old lady’s face, and was I going to die? Well, I’m still alive. Old lady lost herself a customer though and one who doesn’t care enough about her business to enlighten her. I should have suspected something was amiss when I saw her giant jelly crocodile plastic bucket was empty, save for four green crocodiles. Bitch needs to restock and get her shit together, for real. I’m back to drinking water for the next few weeks in the meantime, that’s for sure…but I’ll probably ease into relapse with ginger beer.

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Musical Retrospective Looks Back on 100 Years of Japanese Animation

•January 22, 2018 • Leave a Comment

2017 marked the 100th anniversary of Japanese animation. From crude drawings, puppetry and stop motion, anime has evolved ever since it started back in 1917.

Namakura Gatana, a silent short anime from 1917, is regarded as the oldest piece of Japanese animation with a surviving print, and using it as a starting point for the medium makes anime 100 years old. In celebration, the Association of Japanese Animations has released a 15-minute video (122 works are featured) that looks back on landmark Japanese animated works of the century since Namakura Gatana was released:

The Association of Japanese Animations had two major criteria for inclusion in the video: historical significance and permission to use the footage. As such, if your favorite anime isn’t part of the retrospective, it is likely because of licensing issues, or simply because even as long as the video is, there’s still not enough space for every great anime of the past 100 years.

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Boundary Breaking Video Games — Off Camera Secrets: METAL GEAR SOLID

•January 21, 2018 • Leave a Comment

YouTuber, Shesez, breaks video game code in order to show us neat easter eggs and development tricks that were deliberately made in order to save on memory by not rendering everything all the time. In his latest episode, the epic Metal Gear Solid:

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