Even though Jurassic World came out on DVD last October, the official YouTube page has continued to fill up with featurettes, behind-the-scenes footage, and what in-process footage looks like. Also? A video of Vincent D’Onofrio kissing a velociraptor.
Kudos to Peter Sciretta from Slashfilm for noticing what the of the rest of did not: the continued life of the official Jurassic World YouTube page. It looks like they’ve been uploading dozens of videos each month. Personally, I’m a big fan of the previs videos that make really tense scenes utterly hilarious:
There are also some shockingly long featurettes:
But of course, the real highlight is acclaimed actor Vincent D’Onofrio making out with a raptor puppet:
I’m also a big fan of the videos on the dinosaursounds, but it really is dealer’s choice over there. Head on over to the page and peruse all of them they’ve got up—they’re seriously worth the time.
A brief history for those who are new to Kotaku and our on-again, off-again obsession with this game. Destiny is a first-person action game in which players fly around the solar system fighting with aliens, evil cyborgs, and occasionally each other. Collectively, our staff has played over 2,000 hours. I account for more than half those hours on my own.
I have been playing Destiny diligently since it launched in fall of 2014. I’ve devoted full weeks in aggregate to raiding and striking and grinding along with my core cadre of friendly fellow players. I’ve played every mission and map and mode countless times, stopping and stalling and restarting and quitting in frustration. I’ve written thousands of words across dozens of reviews, interviews, and critical essays. I played and played until finally, in late 2015, I burned out.
Here we are, one year later, with Rise of Iron. Hello again, Destiny.
Throughout the many sea changes of the past couple of years, a few things have remained constant. Destiny still has some of the best first-person shooting of any console game. The control scheme and ever-elusive “game feel” are tuned to near perfection. Bungie’s art direction and sound design are so consistently good it’s easy to forget how much work goes into them. The gun names are still fantastic.
Destiny remains unpredictable and thrilling in the moment, and becomes increasingly predictable the farther you zoom out. In a given ten-minute boss fight, any number of exciting things could happen. A small mistake could call for an act of reckless heroism. A strong team strategy could lead to a gratifying, total victory.
Zoom out, and things feel thinner and more repetitive. The boss will fall, and some loot will drop. Some of it will be good. Most of it won’t be. You’ll fight the same boss six more times in the next few days, and you’ll get similar loot each time. I’ve probably killed the Archon Priest a hundred or more times, and those victories have blurred together at at this point. He cries out and vanishes in a tower of flame. Maybe he would’ve been better off in the Prison of Elders.
Zoom further out, and things become still more predictable. Daily and weekly challenges become a calming to-do list. Leveling up is an exercise in micromanagement and inevitability. Your routines become herd-like and predictable. You feel yourself being fed through the machine.
Zoom all the way out, and you’ll notice the ways the game has crept into your life. I have played more than a thousand hours of this game. I look at that number with wonder. Where did that time go? How did I do that? How many times have I replayed the same levels, the same bosses, the same maps? How can I still feel like I’m getting something out of my relationship with this oiled, mathematical mechanism?
This is how Destiny has been since it came out. The gears are just shinier now.
Rise of Iron is Destiny’s last substantive expansion for the foreseeable future, until an overhauled Destiny 2 launches in late 2017 or beyond. It consists of a brief new story campaign, a new patrol zone, a new competitive mode, a few new multiplayer maps, a couple of new or remixed cooperative strikes, and a new six-player raid.
It took me just one hour to wolf down the new story missions. The undercooked narrative spans five missions and barely has time to make any sense before it abruptly concludes. It centers on the Iron Lords, a group of ancient warriors best known for having their names attached to the Iron Banner weapons that PvP-minded Destiny players have been using for the past two years. I’ve been killed by a gun called “Felwinter’s Lie” a hundred times. Sure, I’d love to meet the guy it’s named after.
In Rise of Iron’s opening cutscene, we learn that Felwinter, Jolder and the rest of the Iron Lords died fighting off a self-replicating terraforming technology called SIVA that malfunctioned and turned into a cyber-plague.
The rest of the story is mostly conveyed over your earpiece during loading screens and is delivered with a stately dullness that harkens back to the misplaced mythic tone of Destiny’s first year. The swashbuckling swagger of 2015's The Taken King has evaporated, replaced with the chilly, mournful tone of a History Channel miniseries. Actors Lance Reddick and Nathan Fillion’s charming banter as Commander Zavala and Cayde-6 has been replaced with a couple of muttering action figures named Lord Saladin and Shiro-4. They are poor substitutes.
Saladin is the Iron Lords’ sole surviving member. After two years of overseeing the Iron Banner tournament, he enlists your character, a guardian, to help him fight off a SIVA resurgence. Your quest sends you careening from a snowy mountaintop to a hillside anti-air emplacement to a nifty final mission that pits you against the monstrous, SIVA-possessed corpses of Saladin’s fallen comrades.
This is for year-one shot package, you fuck.
The whole thing is a brisk muddle. I had to play it several times to fully internalize what had happened or what anyone was even talking about. SIVA exists mostly as an abstraction and thus makes for a poor antagonist, and Saladin’s stoic demeanor fails to find emotional purchase. Characters intimate that our failure might mean the end of civilization, but I couldn’t take them seriously. After the pan-galactic god-battles I’ve won over the past two years, SIVA barely registers.
In fleshing out the backstory of the Iron Lords, Bungie has undone a lot of what made them evocative and interesting. I used to wonder why the shotgun Felwinter’s Lie was called that. Who was this Felwinter character, and why did he lie? Rise of Iron may not tell his full story, but his death proves far less interesting than I imagined. Some of Destiny’s best stories thrive as half-told grimoire entries, and it’s too bad that Bungie’s first attempt to actively connect players with their game’s history is so dull.
By harkening to the past, Rise of Iron also inadvertently highlights just how drastically Destiny’s narrative has changed over the last two years. Remember when this game was about the Darkness and the Traveler? Remember when they hired Paul McCartney to sing an entire song about it? Those original story missions still exist alongside tales of the House of Wolves, the fall of Crota and Oryx, and now the SIVA plague. Taken as a whole, Destiny’s narrative is incoherent. It’s the patchwork past of a world perpetually under construction.
Rise of Iron loops back on itself in non-narrative ways, as well, mostly through missions that take place after the main storyline concludes. It resurrects famous old weapons and enemies like Sepiks Prime, Gjallarhorn, Thorn, and Randall the Vandal. One quest even has you create a new, upgraded version of the Khvostov, the very first gun you were given way back in 2014.
These quests connect us not with the history we’ve been told, but rather with the history we’ve played. Because of that, they resonate with a much greater vibrancy than any story the writers have scripted for voice actors to read.
The quest to re-forge Gjallarhorn is particularly gratifying. I had been playing Destiny for the better part of a year before I finally got one of those elusive, mighty rocket launchers. I watched as every one of my teammates got one. 2014 passed into 2015, and I listened to them crow over how cool it was, how powerful it was, how fun it was to use. I knew of other players who were in the same boat as me, but it was a cold comfort.
The original and best. It will never leave my vault.
This was the first time I have ever coveted a virtual object. I didn’t know what to do with the feeling. Spring became summer, and I still didn’t have a Gjallarhorn. It became an unhealthy obsession. If I could just get this stupid rocket launcher, I could finally stop playing.
When I got one, I didn’t stop. I had a Gjallarhorn now, why would I stop?? I still remember that August, when the exotic storekeeper sold Gjallarhorn and the entire Destiny subreddit gloriously lost its mind. Gjallarhorn was discontinued a few months later in The Taken King, but it was never forgotten. I still have my original, though it has been useless for the past year.
Now players can go and build themselves a new one. The quest for Gjallarhorn culminates in a terrific sequence in which we finally construct an upgraded version of the beloved, temporarily banished rocket launcher and are given a huge field of foes to eviscerate. The music rises as enemy tanks and foot soldiers vanish in flames. Tracer rockets dance and crackle like fireworks. If a game must re-use old assets and weapons in order to give players their money’s worth, this is the way to do it.
Rise of Iron is on much sturdier ground when referencing this internal, player-driven history. Obvious fan-service remains obvious fan-service, but it’s much easier to care about gear I actually used and stories I actually had a hand in writing. Each time I watch Gjallarhorn’s signature wolfpack rounds streak toward a target, it stokes the coals of my memory.
How frequently I’ve found myself missing things that had been frustrating and miserable in the moment! I now miss the loot cave of 2014. I miss killing Crota with a LAN cable. I miss that summer of 2015 when Thorn and The Last Word were the only viable guns in Crucible. I miss the heavy ammo bug, and the very first Trials of Osiris. I miss staying up all night only to fail to defeat Skolas. God help me, I miss spending part of last summer collecting all 50 calcified fragments.
I think back on those things fondly, however irritating they may have been at the time. How fickle and foolish our memories can be.
For those who prefer to fight computer-controlled opponents, there are two Destinys: There’s the casual Destiny, a fun space shoot-em up that you can drop into and out of and play at your leisure. Then there’s hardcore Destiny, which is as much about memorizing perk trees and maintaining mental spreadsheets as it is about shotgunning alien zombies.
For the more casual player, Rise of Iron offers a few new diversions but nothing particularly exciting. There is a new three-player strike, forgettable but for its wonderfully stressful final encounter. A few remixed classic strikes have also made their way into the lineup, though the game has been disinclined to serve them to me anytime I’ve entered one of the automated strike playlists. There is a handsome new patrol area called the Plaguelands, in which resides a new cooperative arena called the Archon’s Forge. The Forge is a lot of fun if you can get a large group playing together, but absent any matchmaking is ultimately too punishing and far-flung to be a rewarding way to spend one’s time.
The meatiest part of Rise of Iron—and the thing that will keep me and my friends playing for at least the next month or two—is the very thing that separates casual Destiny from hardcore Destiny: The new raid.
Destiny raids require six players to work together in constant communication. They never explain themselves, and part of the satisfaction of completing a raid comes from figuring out how to do so as a team. (If you ever want to witness the happy head-butting of modern male group dynamics firsthand, I urge you to watch an all-male Destiny team solve a raid encounter for the first time.) Once your group determines what everyone has to do in a given encounter, you must simply complete it without dying or otherwise screwing up. At their best, Destiny raids become a heady mix of problem-solving, strategic planning, and raw execution.
Unfortunately, raids also require players to attain a high character level, measured as “light” levels in Destiny. The road from 350 light to the raid-recommended 370 has been the worst kind of slog. Destiny’s loot system has received several revisions over the years, and this latest iteration takes a decent foundation and bungles it. Your light level is the average of the number attached to each piece of gear you have equipped. The fundamental idea is that whatever your current light, any new gear you get will match or exceed it, which allows for a constant feeling of progression. But the devil is in the details, and the details are a mess.
Strap in, it’s time for some numbers. Destiny items fall into three categories: Rare blue, legendary purple, and exotic yellow. (Green does not exist. There is no green.) Most blue items only go up to 340 light—well short of the raid’s suggested 370—while others go up to a more reasonable 365. Some purple items are capped at 365, while others go all the way up to 385. Exotic items are governed by their own numerical scheme. The game explains none of this.
In order to get those handy 365 blues, you’ll need to do a particular type of strike in a particular way, hurriedly swapping out armor after beating the boss in order to maximize your gains before the timer runs out and the mission ends. A day or two after Rise of Iron came out, players discovered the fastest, dreariest workaround possible, opting as usual for mindless repetition over the fun of actually playing the game. Poor Omnigul may never recover.
At one point last night, a friend hopped into our party to ask for guidance. He was at 327 light. What was the fastest way he could get ready for the raid? I didn’t even know where to begin. It was a sign that something has gone awry with Destiny’s loot. Getting raid-ready should not be this complicated and poorly explained.
I’ve been fascinated by the evolution of Destiny raids over the last couple of years. Counting the newest one, there have been four. Each raid represents a slightly different design ethos, likely the result of different creative teams. The Vault of Glass challenged players with hard-to-spot death globes that could wipe out an entire team, which forced teams to carefully prioritize their targets. Crota’s End required players to elect a hero to carry them to victory or defeat. You could be the first guardian across the bridge, or the one to grab a sword and go toe-to-toe with the final boss. King’s Fall drowned teams in arcane rules and afflictions, to the point that the final battle was less of a firefight and more of a high-wire dance routine.
Rise of Iron’s raid is titled “Wrath of the Machine.” It represents yet another, unexpected design ethos: More than anything, this raid seems concerned with making sure everyone’s working as a team and having fun. Its encounters are governed by rules that make sense visually and narratively, rather than by the screen-corner arcana that has so often dominated raid battles in the past.
Because of that, Wrath of the Machine is likely the easiest of all four existing raids. My team was only truly challenged by the final boss, and that was mostly because our light levels weren’t high enough to do enough damage.
The raid’s second encounter has all six players driving a massive Mad Max war rig across the top of the Cosmodrome wall, at one point running out as a team to grab replacement engine parts before the whole thing goes nuclear. It is a ripping good time, more technically ambitious than anything Bungie’s designers have tried in the past. It also requires explicit and consistent teamwork in a way that feels intuitive and approachable. It’s easy to explain what to do, and fun to go and do it. It took my team three or so hours to figure out how to beat it on our first time through, but now that we know what to do we can take a couple of newbies through in less than an hour.
The Wrath of the Machine is a more relaxed, forgiving affair than past raids. After spending months memorizing and rehearsing the complexities of the Oryx fight in King’s Fall, that’s a relief. The new raid likely won’t hold the same lasting appeal as some of Destiny’s more intricate challenges. I’m fine with that.
There is a third Destiny, one which I’ve played as passionately as anything in the game. That’s the competitive player vs. player Crucible, where guardians go to shoot each other in the face and complain about red bars. So far, the year-three Crucible has proven fun in small doses, but lacks the occasional thrilling bursts of streaky dominance that I’ve enjoyed in previous iterations.
Rise of Iron brings several changes to Destiny’s PvP. It arrives in the wake of a significant weapon rebalancing, showing up with a handful of new maps, the overdue addition of private matches and a new game mode called Supremacy.
It’s high noon.
Private matches, as I’ve already written, are a hell of a good time. I haven’t had this much fun competing with my friends since my collegiate days of split-screen Halo. Supremacy is more or less a lift of Call of Duty’s long-standing “Kill Confirmed” game mode. It’s standard deathmatch with a twist: In order to get credit for taking out an opponent, you must collect a glowing crest from his or her body without dying en route. If one of your teammates gets got, you can snag his or her crest and deny the opposing team the credit.
Supremacy has been time-tested in other games but remains in its Destiny infancy, and many players haven’t quite figured out how best to play. That means matches can be fun or infuriating, depending on how well your teammates understand the game—when to rush in, when to hold back, how to bait the other team into exposing themselves, that sort of thing. It’s a nice addition to Crucible, if perhaps an inessential one. I’m still holding out for capture the flag.
If there is one breakout star of the new Crucible, it’s the announcer, Lord Shaxx. Shaxx has played the role of Crucible Dad since Destiny launched, and has long been a cult favorite among competitive players. Voice actor Lennie James appears to have been made aware of this fact, and has brought a hysterical spate of new lines to the game, each one delivered with unhinged gusto.
Go on a killing spree or win a match, and Shaxx will go apoplectic with joy. “Take their crests, Guardian!” he cries, “Take them all!”
Hell yeah, Shaxx! Your wish is my command!
I played Rise of Iron with the same mix of joy, frustration, satisfaction and disappointment that has come to define the two years I’ve spent with Destiny. In addition to those familiar emotions arose a newer one: nostalgia.
At what point does a game begin to have its own internal history? How many patches, how many expansions, how many nerfs and buffs and epochal shifts until we begin fondly reminiscing about what used to be? After two years and four expansions, Destiny has exceeded that nostalgic tipping point. These days I’m just as likely to start talking about days gone by as I am about what’s to come. We’ve reached a plateau, and the future stretches to the horizon. Looking back, the peaks and valleys of the past two years look more like bumps and ditches.
Rise of Iron is an arrival, a remix, and a remembrance. It puts a sloppy bow on the Destiny we’ve been playing for two years, introducing a final chapter that will stretch until Bungie wipes the board clean and starts fresh with Destiny 2. It’s fun, in a funereal sort of way.
At the end of one of Rise of Iron’s later missions, you will find yourself looking down on the field of abandoned vehicles where the first Destiny mission began. Your little robot Ghost asks you to stand with him and take in the view. Oblige him, and he’ll reminisce about all you’ve seen and done together.
It’s a heavy handed attempt to inspire nostalgia for a two-year story that, taken in its entirety, has been cobbled together and vaguely unsatisfying. Sure, Ghost. I remember when you woke me up in that field of abandoned cars. You sounded like Tyrion Lannister then. You took me to meet a guy with no face, and he gave me a speech about The Traveler and The Darkness. I blew up some statues. A robot lady gave me a gun and then vanished forever.
Yet I still felt something, looking out over that snowy skybox. I remembered the friends I’ve made and the challenges we’ve faced over the last two years. I remembered the first time we beat Atheon, and how psyched I was to finally earn Thorn, and how I nearly lost my mind when Gjallarhorn dropped. I remembered the arguments we had over how to make it through the Thrall maze, and the time we stayed up till sunrise glitching our way to heights we weren’t meant to reach.
I remembered all the misguided ways Bungie has angered us, the poor decisions that have wasted our time, and the ways we’ve exploited the game that exploited us right back. I remembered those things, and so many more. That was the journey, not any scripted mumbo-jumbo about the Light and the Darkness and whatever else.
Ghost was still talking. I bit my tongue. Even if he could hear me, he probably wouldn’t understand.
Conceptual image of a typhoon turbine array. (Image: Challenergy)
Typhoons are generally associated with mass destruction, but a Japanese engineer has developed a wind turbine that can harness the tremendous power of these storms and turn it into useful energy. If he’s right, a single typhoon could power Japan for 50 years.
Atsushi Shimizu is the inventor of the world’s first typhoon turbine—an extremely durable, eggbeater-shaped device that can not only withstand the awesome forces generated by a typhoon, it can convert all that power into useable energy. Shimizu’s calculations show that a sufficiently large array of his turbines could capture enough energy from a single typhoon to power Japan for 50 years.
Shimizu shows off a model of his typhoon turbine. (Image: Challenergy)
Given that Japan is currently dealing with an energy shortage—a problem incited by the 2011 Fukushima disaster—this comes as a very welcome solution. As Shimizu told CNN, “Japan actually has a lot more wind power than it does solar power, it’s just not utilized.”
A functional typhoon turbine prototype. (Image: Challenergy)
The typhoon turbine differs from conventional turbines in two important ways. It works on an omnidirectional axis that allows the machine to survive unpredictable wind patterns, and the speed of the blades can be adjusted to ensure they don’t spin out of control during a storm.
Tests of a prototype yielded 30 percent efficiency, which is 10 percent lower than propeller-based turbines. The difference, of course, is that Shimizu’s turbines can actually survive a storm. Back in 2013, Typhoon Usagi destroyed eight conventional turbines, while damaging eight.
A functional prototype was installed near Okinawa earlier this summer, and the next big step is to test the device under high-wind conditions. All that’s needed now is a typhoon.
It’s not immediately clear where all the incoming energy will be channeled, whether it be sent straight to the grid or stored in large batteries (Tesla’s large battery backup comes to mind). We’ve contacted the company to learn more.
There’s about to be a new television version of Superman on the CW’s Supergirl show. Inevitably, someone’s thrown the classic 1978 Superman score behind the already released preview footage, but the results are brilliant.
Yeah, the outrageous level of Superman hype leading up to season two of Supergirl has been a problem. But any anger around a disproportionate focus on Kal-El should fall away when you watch this preview using John Williams’ iconic score for the Richard Donner Superman movie, courtesy of YouTuber JasonVoorhees2011. The music has the impressive effect of underscoring how Tyler Hoechlin’s portrayal of Clark Kent links back to Christopher Reeve’s immortal embodiment of secret identity meekness.
Fun fact: Did you know that I can’t hear John Williams’ Superman score—or Vince Guaraldi’s “Linus and Lucy” theme from old Peanuts cartoons—without crying? This post brought to you by a box of tissues.
Sometimes going into a series, you know at some point you’re going to end up a blubbering mess when something sad happens. But sometimes, you never expect something to provoke such a strong emotional response, and it comes out of nowhere, which makes it hit you even harder. Come tell us about the moment a series suddenly and unexpectedly got you right in the feels.
It could be a show, book, comic, movie, video game, whatever. Why didn’t you expect it to get to you? What started the tears flowing? Tell us in the comments and we’ll all comfort each other.
It’s not an accident when movies look like other movies. Even when it comes to movies that you wouldn’t immediately associate with each other like Pulp Fiction and Moonrise Kingdom or Full Metal Jacket and... Moonrise Kingdom, it’s obvious that the directors are respectfully paying homage to the works that came before.
But still, it’s pretty funny to see shots and even scenes from different films that look exactly alike side-by-side. It’s especially neat when you see a movie like Requiem for a Dream share several drug shots with All That Jazz, a bathtub sequence almost identical to Perfect Blue, and a pier shot just like in Dark City.
Candice Drouet edited together various movie shots that used a similar visual composition and put them side-by-side in the video below.
Luke Cage has been around for 44 years, originally conceived as a character to pull in readers and money from the 1970s blaxploitation film craze. Whole swaths of his publishing history are filled with poorly executed stories cranked out on deadline, but even these offer some surprising moments of poignancy.
Over the last few weeks, I’ve been re-reading as many Luke Cage comics as I can get my hands on in preparation for the Friday debut of the TV adaptation. By 1978, Luke Cage had adopted the superhero sobriquet of Power Man, as a way of marketing his crimefighting-for-cash business and masking his past as an ex-con. There are metric tons of unmemorable stories in the character’s back-catalog, filled with goofy villains-of-the-month, overheated romantic melodrama, and wince-inducing attempts at portraying black life. The intentions were noble, by and large, but lacked the kind of sustained commitment and creative staff that made titles like Amazing Spider-Man standouts of the era.
In many stories from this series, Cage got clients asking him to be a bodyguard or investigate odd goings-on. Occasionally, he got a side order of thinly veiled racism with his freelance work, as in Power Man #18. It wasn’t enough to have construction-worker-themed villain Steeplejack throw punches at Cage; he called him boy, too, and dissed his distinctively black features:
Steeplejack dies at the end of this issue so one could say that he got what was coming to him. But he’s not the target referenced in the headline above. The story where Cage is contacted to see if he’ll kill someone happens in Power Man Annual #1.
Most of that extra-sized installment—written by Chris Claremont, with art by Lee Elias and Dave Hunt, lettering by Denise Wohl and color by B. Wilford—is standard-issue 1970s superhero comic fare. This story happens when Cage was still in his hot-tempered, jive-talking hero-for-hire mode and is largely concerned with Power Man’s efforts to stop C-list villain Moses Magnum, a mad scientist-type who’s building an earthquake machine. The best part of the story is the flashback showing how Cage got the gig.
Power Man’s assignment comes at the behest of Amanda Sheridan, a rich, elderly black woman looking to protect her sole remaining family member, geophysicist granddaughter Samantha:
Mrs. Sheridan doesn’t take kindly to Cage’s refusal, exploding with anger and then a surprisingly emotional entreaty that recounts the trials she’s been through.
It’s the last panel in the page above that really hit home for me. In particular, two parts are especially effective. When Mrs. Sheridan mentions family and says that Luke understands things like that, it’s very likely that Claremont was gesturing at how institutional racism has historically torn black families apart. The second spike—the offhand mention of a lynching—buttresses the first, making it clear that Mrs. Sheridan is referencing their common background to make her case to Power Man. Cage takes the case after hearing all of that because, really, how could he say no?
Those pages are the best elements in an otherwise unremarkable package and show some glimmer of what could be accomplished with a black character in mainstream superhero comics at the time. Characters like the Black Panther were fighting racism explicitly by battling the Ku Klux Klan, but this use of blackness was different. As a wealthy black woman advanced in years, Amanda Sheridan is already an anomaly. Her exchange with Cage is even more anomalous because it humanizes both characters by calling on the more tragic aspects of the black experience in the United States. By this point in Luke’s career, the reader doesn’t know much about his family or personal history. Parents and siblings won’t show up for a long while yet. Nevertheless, Claremont seems to trust that the reader will believe Cage has had similar losses in his past. Maybe it’s because the novel Roots had become a best-selling fictionalization of author Alex Haley’s lineage stretching back to America’s days as a British colony.
Or it might be because the increase of black representation in mainstream TV, movies, and literature allowed for more depth in portrayals of black life. Whatever the reason, the result comes out pointedly in the character of Amanda Sheridan, who has a uniquely specific motivation for wanting to safeguard her granddaughter. Luke Cage is the best superhero for this story, not because he’s fighting racism but because, somewhere deep in his background, he knows the toll it can have on a family.
Film director Alfred Hitchcock is seen in 1968. (AP Photo)
The legendary Alfred Hitchcock is best-known for cinematic thrillers like Psycho, Vertigo, and Rear Window. But he was also a big presence on the small screen, hosting Alfred Hitchcock Presents for 10 years. Now a new project, with full cooperation of the late director’s estate, will bring Hitchcock to TV once again.
Universal Cable Productions, which is owned by NBCUniversal, has a show called Welcome to Hitchcock in the works; it will be an anthology series that will cover one mystery or crime over a single season. Furthermore, it will “re-imagine classic tales from the iconic horror filmmaker” and “be an homage to his work,” according to Variety.
There’s no word yet on which Hitchcock properties might provide inspiration (probably not Psycho, since Bates Motel is already on the air), but the pilot already has a big name attached to direct: Chris Columbus (Home Alone, the first two Harry Potter movies), who will also serve as one of Welcome to Hitchcock’s executive producers.
After completely wowing us with its new line of Marvel and DC Comics “secret identity” and “alter-ego” formal wear, Fun.com is back with a line of winter coats and snowsuits that will make you envious of every 10-year-old who’s out sledding while dressed like Iron Man, Batman, the Hulk, and other superheroes.
Even the Superman, Thor, and Captain America versions are fan-freaking-tastic, despite those characters being less of a fan favorite. Each coat is completely water-repellent and insulated, but also feature custom-shaped zipper pulls and buttons, pockets for electronics and lift tickets, a removable hood, wrist gaiters to keep the sleeves pulled down, and adjustable straps so it always fits snugly. They range in price from $80 to $100 if you pre-order, with delivery expected sometime in November.
Fun.com has also added a collection of Marvel and DC-themed winter gear for adults, but the designs are a little more toned down and aren’t quite as role-playing-compatible as the kids’ coats are.
However, there is an adult version of that Iron Man snowsuit you will undoubtedly happily wear the next time you go snowboarding. It will set you back $120 for the coat, and $100 for the pants, but don’t pretend for a second that even a steep price tag is going to stop you from grabbing this set before the winter arrives.
Lev Grossman is best-known for writing The Magicians trilogy, the story of young adults honing their magical skills at a fantastical college, and the basis for Syfy’s popular adaptation, the second season of which will air next year. Now Grossman’s just announced his next novel, a spin on the King Arthur story.
According to Viking, the publisher:
The Bright Swordis a novel of King Arthur unlike any other, which starts where most stories about King Arthur end: with the fall of Camelot. The king is dead, the legendary heroes like Lancelot and Galahad are gone. The only surviving knights are minor figures from the margins of Arthurian mythology. Together with Merlin’s rebellious apprentice, and a brilliantly talented young knight, this band of leftovers must fight to reforge their broken land, in spite of being broken themselves.
Like The Once and Future King and The Mists of Avalon, The Bright Sword radically reimagines the Arthurian epic for a new era. This is a stranger and darker Arthur: a Camelot for the new millennium.
There’s definitely a trend afoot involving new takes on the King Arthur legend, but The Bright Sword, which doesn’t yet have a release date, is the most promising one we’ve about heard yet.
We need to learn a lesson about needless consumerism from this auto repair shop in Gdansk, Poland. Because it still uses a Commodore 64 to run its operations. Yes, the same Commodore 64 released 34 years ago that clocked in at 1 MHz and had 64 kilobytes of RAM. It came out in 1982, was discontinued in 1994, but it’s still used to run a freaking company in 2016. That’s awesome.
To be sure, small businesses around the world often use technology that’s a bit more outdated than what the rest of us use in our daily lives but damn, flexing a Commodore 64 for work in a time when babies are given smartphones before pacifiers is pretty damn bad ass.
This C64C used by a small auto repair shop for balancing driveshafts has been working non-stop for over 25 years! And despite surviving a flood it is still going...
I know where I’m going if my car ever breaks down in Poland.
Behold the first trailer for Slash, a new film from Clay Liford (Wuss) about a young erotic fan fic writer who runs the traditional gamut of all young cinematic nerds: first he’s shamed by his popular peers, then he discovers a larger world which contains people who accept him for his interests as well as who he is, and then he gets a hot girlfriend based on his initial nerdy interest. Plus, space sex!
The “live-action erotic fan fic” aspect seems to be Slash’s most notable quality, although it doesn’t seem to actually be X-rated (nor does it star the male leads of Sherlock, Supernatural, or the Marvel Cinematic Universe, which make up about 73 percent of the internet’s erotic fan fiction stockpiles to my estimates, which is another knock to the film’s authenticity). But while Slash may look like a traditional loser-finds-acceptance/love story with a salacious “nerds like weird sex!” veneer, there’s a bit more to it in that apparently Michael Ian Black’s character has an ulterior motive regarding the young protagonist.
That could go somewhere unexpected or it could go somewhere very expected, which would be a bummer. But on the optimistic side, the film’s gotten a bevy of good reviews, and you can see in the trailer how many festivals it’s been shown at—which isn’t necessarily proof that it’s a masterpiece, but also isn’t a bad sign at all.
Slash opens in select theaters and VOD on December 9.
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We’ve all had to throw away leftovers or cuts of meat and cheese that spent a little too much time in the fridge or freezer, but vacuum sealing your foods can keep them safe from freezer burn pretty much indefinitely, and dramatically extend their shelf life everywhere else.
It sounds like an expensive proposition, but today, Amazon’s selling this well-reviewed FoodSaver FM2435 starter kit for $91, or about $45 less than usual. There are cheaper FoodSaver models out there, but the 2435 justifies its cost with a retractable vacuum sealing hose, allowing it to vacuum seal specially designed zipper bags, in addition to the usual heat-seal bags.
Of course you can use this to store meats in the freezer for a long time, but it can also keep cheese from molding, lettuce from wilting, or cookies from going stale, just to name a few examples. Think about how much food you throw away, and you’ll get a sense of just how quickly this purchase could pay for itself. Just note that today’s price is part of an Amazon Gold Box deal, meaning it’s only available today, or until sold out.
Amazon just refreshed its Fire TV Stick with a faster processor, 802.11ac Wi-Fi, and most importantly, a voice remote that can now summon Amazon’s excellent Alexa voice assistant in all her glory, in addition to searching for content and apps on your TV.
The Stick ships on October 20 for $40, the same price as the old model without a voice remote. But if you preorder, you’ll also get two months of Hulu, a month of Sling TV (both for new accounts only), and a $10 Amazon Instant video credit to spend on whatever movies or TV shows you choose.
Your favorite USB car charger just happens to be the smallest one you can buy, and you can grab it on Amazon for $8 today with code A2CHARGE (black) or A3CHARGE (white). We’ve seen it go as low as $6 on a few occasions, but this is the best deal we’ve seen in about a year, if it’s been on your wish list.
The Dyson V6 Absolute (as in, absolutely cord-free) is ideal for cleaning rugs, hardwood floors, cars, ceilings, shelves...pretty much anything really, and you can get a refurb for $310 on Amazon today, or $120 less than buying it new. My boss was given one as a warranty replacement when his Dyson DC56 died, and he seems to love it.
For a limited time, Newegg will sell you the murdered-out Blackout Edition for $110, and throw in a $40 gift card for good measure. For the sake of comparison, that’s actually a few bucks cheaper than Amazon’s current list price, without a gift card.
Update: To get the deal, you’ll need to scroll down to the bottom of the product page, and purchase it from the Adorama listing. Once you do that, you should see the gift card in your cart.
These promotions differ from most Subscribe & Save coupons in that they apply to your subscription in perpetuity as long as it’s active, rather than just the first deliveriy. Even if you don’t have any kids yourself, be sure to these along to your friends and family members who could take advantage.
Ready to get fit? For a limited time, Amazon’s taking an extra 15% off a huge array of EAS protein products. Inside, you’ll find dozens of powders, shakes, bars, and more in a variety of flavors and formulas. Just note that you have to use Amazon Subscribe & Save to get the discount, and you won’t see the final price until checkout.
Laundry detergent is one of those things you need to buy anyway, so you might as well stock up and save. For a limited time, Amazon’s taking $2 off various Tide PODS and Tide detergent products. Why aren’t they just combined into a single coupon offering? Beats me, but just click both links to see all of your options, and remember that you won’t see your discount until checkout.
Today’s ultra-thin laptops have largely dispatched with ethernet ports, and possibly don’t have as many USB ports as you’d like. Luckily, this attractive and affordable hub will give you both whenever you need them.
Obviously, you won’t enjoy the full charging speeds and data throughput capabilities of USB-C with these microUSB adapters, but they’re still a cheap and easy way to convert your older cables for use with newer devices. Plus, they include key rings, so you can always have one handy if you need to borrow a friend’s charging cable.
Pretty soon, it’ll be dark at 5, freezing all day long, and you’ll have no motivation to schlep to the gym. But this resistance band set from AmazonBasics make it easy to get a workout in any room of your house, and at $8, it’s never been cheaper.
Lowepro’s Flipside 300 DSLR backpack is a top choice for photographers, as evidenced by its stellar 4.5 star review average, and Amazon’s marked it down to an all-time low $49 today. It generally sells in the $70-$80 range, so I’d snap this up while you can.
Obviously, you won’t enjoy the full charging speeds and data throughput capabilities of USB-C with these microUSB cable adapters, but they’re still a cheap and easy way to convert your older cables for use with newer devices. Plus, they include key rings, so you can always have one handy if you need to borrow a friend’s charging cable.
Whether you spend a lot of time outdoors, or just want to be prepared for extended power outages, $35 is the best prices we’ve ever seen on a 25W USB solar charger. It’s not enough to get you to Mars, but it’ll at least charge a couple of phones at the same time.
When the Taliban took control of the Swat Valley in Pakistan, one girl spoke out. Malala Yousafzai refused to be silenced and fought for her right to an education.
On Tuesday, October 9, 2012, when she was fifteen, she almost paid the ultimate price. She was shot in the head at point-blank range while riding the bus home from school, and few expected her to survive.
Instead, Malala’s miraculous recovery has taken her on an extraordinary journey from a remote valley in northern Pakistan to the halls of the United Nations in New York. At sixteen, she has become a global symbol of peaceful protest and the youngest nominee ever for the Nobel Peace Prize.
I am Malala is the remarkable tale of a family uprooted by global terrorism, of the fight for girls’ education, of a father who, himself a school owner, championed and encouraged his daughter to write and attend school, and of brave parents who have a fierce love for their daughter in a society that prizes sons.
I am Malala will make you believe in the power of one person’s voice to inspire change in the world.
Escort’s 4.4 star rated Passport 9500ix Radar/Laser Detector is Amazon’s top-seller in the category, partially thanks to its built-in GPS and accompanying red light camera database. While we don’t condone speeding or driving recklessly, if you have been known to drive with a lead foot, this could pay for itself in the long run.
Today’s $280 deal is the best price Amazon’s ever offered, and one of the first times it’s ever dipped below $300. Just don’t use it in Virginia or DC.
Cuisinart’s 14" pizza pan boasts a 4.7 star review average from nearly 500 satisfied chefs, and Amazon’s marked it down to an all-time low $11 today. If you don’t already own something like this, it’s just one of those pans that should be in every kitchen.
Lane Bryant, with their designer collaborations involving Christian Siriano and Melissa McCarthy, have dominated the plus size fashion game. And right now, you can grab a whole new wardrobe’s worth of clothing during Lane Bryant’s BOGO 75% off sale. This includes everything from the aforementioned designer collabs to all new arrivals.
Obviously, it’s larger and more expensive than USB-only battery packs with a similar capacity, but RAVPower’s new 27,000mAh portable charger still only weighs 1.9 pounds, and can charge your laptop via a 100W AC outlet. That’s an amazing convenience for long trips, conferences, or anywhere else that power is at a premium. And of course, you also get a pair of 2.4A USB ports, and a USB-C port as well.
At $120 (with code CG2U3Q38), you’ll certainly be paying a premium for that power outlet, but if you’ve been waiting for a product like this for years, it’ll be money well spent.
Anker’s SoundCore line of Bluetooth speakers dominated our recent Kinja Co-Op, but the largest member of the family just got its biggest discount ever.
The Anker SoundCore Sport XL features the same one-meter waterproofing of the original SoundCore Sport, plus added dust resistance, making it even more rugged. And since it’s the “XL” version, it improves upon the original Sport with dual 8W drivers (vs. a single 3W driver), 15 hours of battery life (vs. 10), 66' wireless range (vs. 33') and a USB power output to charge your phone from anywhere. Simply put, it seems like a perfect speaker for your summer barbecues, hikes, and beach trips.
The SoundCore Sport XL debuted just a few months ago at $60, but while supplies last, you can save $12 with promo code ANKSPORT.
You might not have an immediate need for a pack of multicolored Sharpies, but they’re great to keep stocked in your home office, and Amazon’s currently selling a 24 pack of fine points for only $9 today, an all-time low.
Amazon now produces its own line of iPhone cases for the iPhone 7, 7 Plus, and 5/5s/SE, and if you buy any one of them today, you’ll get a $5 Kindle eBook credit emailed to you automatically once it ships.
Most cases are priced at $10 or less, and definitely skew towards minimalist than bulky and ultra-protective. A few options are listed below, but click this link to see them all.
Smart outlet switches have exploded in popularity in the years since Belkin released the original WeMo switch, and we’ve spotted a great deal on Aukey’s version today.
Functionally, the Aukey Wi-Fi switch is basically what you’d expect. You plug it into a standard AC outlet, and use a smartphone cut or enable the power to essentially any appliance. The main downside is that you can’t control the Aukey switch with IFTTT (WeMo), Alexa (TP-Link Smart Plug), or Siri (Koogeek), but it does include two USB charging ports, which is a nice little bonus for the price.
Every modem rental fee you pay to your ISP is padding for their bottom line, and a total rip-off for you. Fortunately, you can buy your own modem for a relatively small upfront cost, and knock a few bucks off your monthly bill.
If you have any old speaker systems lying around your house, you can bring them into this decade with Mpow’s new $13 Bluetooth receiver. Much like the Chromecast Audio, this little puck plugs into a speaker system via a 3.5mm cable, and lets you stream to it wirelessly from your phone. Just use promo code BOHQXOVD at checkout to get the discount.
TENS (Transcutaneous electrical nerve stimulation) massagers seem a bit like pseudoscience, but every time we post a deal on this thing, we hear nothing but rave reviews. In fact, I use one occasionally after exercising, and I’m pretty sure it helps reduce muscle pain. At the very least, it feels cool.
25 years later, Timbuk2's Classic Messenger Bag remains a staple of many a commute, and with code KINJA30 you can get 30% off all the available colorways right here, resulting in best ever pricing on most.
With ample storage and a waterproof TPU liner, the Classic Messenger will get you and your gear to the classroom, boardroom, gym, or short haul destination in one piece. The padded, easily adjustable shoulder strap features air mesh to reduce your sweating, while a side entry pocket makes getting to your essentials no sweat. Little touches like a key fob, an organizer, and integrated compression straps make it even better.
Here’s a dirty little secret YETI doesn’t want you to know: All of those vacuum-insulated stainless steel cups are basically the exact same thing. So instead of dropping $30 on a Rambler, spend $15 on this Homitt alternative, which includes a handle, a lid, and two stainless steel drinking straws.
Steaming your clothes might not get them as crisp as ironing, but it does a decent enough job in a fraction of the time, and for $16, why not? It’s even small enough to pack away in your suitcase.
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Yes, Justin Lin also directed this year’s Star Trek Beyond. However, I think it’s safe to say that when Legendary Films was looking for some to make a movie based on Mattel’s tiny metal racing car toys, they might have looked back a little bit further in his resume.
Lin’s boarding injects some nitrous oxide into the project; Lin, his partner Troy Craig Poon, and Legendary will begin a search for a writer to take Hot Wheels back to the starting line. The project is in the early development stages and will not be Lin’s next movie.
Hot Wheels is one of the world’s biggest toy brands, with Mattel claiming that it is the best-selling toy in the world, with more than 5 billion toy cars produced since 1968. Mattel creates nine million cars every week and sells 10 every second.
Best-selling or not, that’s a lot of toy cars over the last half-century. Which means if Lin can bring over even a fraction of his fast and/or furious magic to the film—he directed the third through sixth films in the F&F franchise, turning it into one of the highest-grossing movie properties in existence—he’ll be creating not just a mega-hit, but a series with the potential to appeal to young kids pretty much forever. Given that the Fast and the Furious movies have always been basically Hot Wheels movies anyway, I think he’s probably got this one in the bag.
At Furcadia’s September town meeting, a hundred humanoid animals lounged on purple pillows in a lush, 32-bit meadow. Emerald Flame, Executive Producer of the oldest social MMORPG, was explaining Furcadia’s largest update since its 1996 founding to the motley pile of furry avatars, known in-game as “furres.” It was called the “Second Dreaming.”
“We do have to modernize,” Emerald Flame said. “If we don’t modernize, we cannot survive as a game. That’s just the way it is.” In Furcadia, though, “modern” is a controversial thing.
Leading up to and following the “Second Dreaming’s” August rollout, Furcadia residents have been trickling out of the MMO. It is the titanic virtual worlds World of Warcraft and Final Fantasy XIV that set the tone for MMOs in 2016, and expectations calibrated to these giants have made change in Furcadia, free-to-play, a hard thing to digest.
Through fundraising, Dragon’s Eye Productions raised over $250,000 to develop “The Second Dreaming,” Furcadia’sfirst true overhaul. For two decades, Furcadia was rendered with 8-bit graphics. Residents logged in with plaintext passwords and insecure INI files. Furres were attached to computers, not accounts, so upgrading hardware could be the death of a ten-year-old avatar.For the “Second Dreaming,” over a dozen Furcadia volunteers labored nearly four years, cobbling together together taken-for-granted features of modern MMOS: e-mail-linked accounts, safer log-in protocols as well as a less modern 32-bit graphics editor for user-generated content. “The Second Dreaming” has been long overdue, Furcadians believed, especially four years after the first round of fundraising. Most loved it. But some furres thought the scope of the changes didn’t justify the time and price tag, while others were put off by even simple alterations to Furcadia’s archaic UI.
Furcadia is its own cyberspace terrarium, a vestige of early virtual worlds and all their virtues. It’s a vintage dream, crystallized by its community, from when players and developers were of the same caste and user-generated content was the very fabric of online gaming. That DIY ethos has preserved Furcadia for two decades; but has also stagnated it—an accusation waged by frustrated Furcadians exposed to modern MMORPGs.
In 2008, Furcadia’s user count peaked at around 75,000 users, representatives say; in 2016, the furry MMO still attracts about 15,000 “furres” whose time in-game is dominated by text-based role-play. Basic furre animations are limited to walking, sitting, lying down and using items—but Furcadians can breathe context into the most subtle motions. On a chat client much like AOL Instant Messenger, furres describe imaginary actions their role-playing characters take. Humanoid animals are, at one time, geishas entertaining clients in a mountain onsen, or at another, darkly sadistic sex fiends hunting for wolfish pleasures. What users want from Furcadia is dictated in their descriptions, which sometimes link to Deviantarts loaded with detailed fan-fictions.
User-created content is the lifeblood of Furcadia, manifested as “dreams,” Furcadia’s name for handmade, self-contained zones where furres role-play. The people who make them are “dreamweavers.” Pokemon role-playing dreams, Middle-Eastern desert dreams, hazy purple space dreams, murder mystery hotel dreams and sprawling, sexy beach dreams are all open-access, carved out from meticulous 8-bit (or 32-bit, now) pixel art. Hub maps host these dreams, appearing as innocuous signs or portals. Furres—and, here and there, a human—populate them, a facet of Furcadia that creator Dr. Cat says was never a bid for furry fandom: “We love animal characters,” Dr. Cat told me, referencing Sonic or Bugs Bunny. But, of course, the most popular dreams on Furcadia are 18+.
Furcadia. Credit: Kasimira
Lisa Frank would envy Furcadia’s avatars. Cotton-candy manes and prismatic dragon wings trim the same Furcadia resident, a hybrid horse-dragon, or something less discernable. “If we’d gone more generic, maybe we would have gotten bigger,” Dr. Cat explained, referring to the popularity of the Sims or Second Life. “A lot of the general public doesn’t want wizards or space ships. They want real life—well, real life, except they have millions of dollars; the fantasy they can imagine living out if they won the lottery. Living in a spaceship or being a talking cat isn’t something you can buy with lottery money.”
A 34-year games industry veteran, Dr. Cat cut his teeth on Ultima before he and his game-making partner ‘Manda went on to design Dragon Spires. “We both had spent years doing hack-and-slash dungeon crawls, knights with swords. It was boring to us,” Dr. Cat said. From a gameplay perspective, when combat was a possibility, it dominated communication. Role-playing in online games with combat was eclipsed by requests for clerics or tanks to round out a party. Hoping to solve the problem of emotional engagement, Dr. Cat thought back to the role-playing cultures on text-based multi-user-dungeons (MUDs) like LambdaMOO. The vital thing, he thought, was user-created content.
The panda furre Juliet and I sat cross-legged on wide, floating purple flowers that ushered us down a river. Trees, rendered in impeccable 32-bit pixel art, lined the shore. Juliet, 25, is a welcomer to Furcadia, and was giving me a tour of the MMO’s sights, some of which were a decade old. She estimates that she greets 20 new players a day, despite the drop-off in Furcadia’s player base over the last few years.
“As a dream artist myself, I really enjoy visiting dreams like this,” Juliet said of our surroundings. We were swept under a bridge. The animation propelling us forward was cut up like a glitched-out gif, but it was hard to concentrate on anything other than the rainbow greeting us at the end of the river. The dream was a sleek facet of the latest update, far beyond what a capped 256 colors could render. Teleporting out, we entered a deep pool framed by a mural. A lion’s mouth spewed water, and behind us, a hill of flowers tumbled into the ocean.
In the pool, we met Furcadia’s Art Director, a grayish-purple fox with five tails. Majas, 26, was searching for an online version of Giga Pets when she stumbled upon Furcadia in middle school. She’s been on the game for 15 years, filling a variety of volunteer roles before spearheading art updates for “The Second Dreaming.”
“It’s like a home on the internet,” Majas explained. In 2008, Majas became a volunteer artist, and, after years sharpening her pixel artistry, eventually emerged as one of Furcadia’s go-to commissioners.
Furcadia. Credit: Ridere.
Majas helped design the “The Second Dreaming’s” 32-bit client, and then redesign it because it was too laggy. She likens working on Furcadia to being a 2016 indie developer running a game designed in the ‘90s. Only about four members of Furcadia’s team are paid (Dr. Cat says he hasn’t taken money since 2009). The rest are paid on and off from money pooled from premium content purchases, like fancy avatars.
“Not only do we have to make new stuff—we’re also keeping the old game running,” Majas explained. Majas has another job, and before that, went to school full-time. Her enormous contributions to Furcadia don’t go unnoticed by the community—she is publicly celebrated by Furcadians throughout online forums and dreams. In fact, “The Second Dreaming’s” 32-bit update and image-making client are perhaps the most popular part of the update (a phoenix I met named Different Turret proudly showed off the rainbow sheen of his 32-bit avatar).
Other parts, like the UI change, have proven less popular. In modern MMOs, online character editing would be unheard of. Aspects of the game that lived, well, in-game migrated over to the internet. Character editing was in-game until recently, when it became web-based. A few longtime players had gripes with the switch. “For altering colors and descriptors,” a Furcadia resident told me over e-mail, “I think it is a waste of time having to [open the client] in a web browser rather than the old in-game methodology. And that ultimately saving information for character descriptions and color is a huge pain in the ass.” On the other hand, the new web-based editor is much more sophisticated, albeit detached from the actual game. It’s separate, I hear, because it will tie into Furcadia’s upcoming mobile client, the status of which is unknown.
Additionally, dreams and graphics soon will increase in size as Furcadia’s dimensions expand: Currently, Furcadia lives in a client about a quarter the size of a desktop screen. Full-screen for MMORPGs is standard now, and a client as tiny as Furcadia’s is difficult to believe until you see it. In the updating process, furres fear that their pixel machinations will blur or dissolve. Hearing concerns about stretched art, however, the Furcadia staff is compensating by redrawing several properties in the game.
On Reddit last year, “The Second Dreaming” was rumored to launch Summer, 2015. It was about three years after Furcadia’s successful Kickstarter, which raised $170,000, and shortly after their second fundraising push, which added another $80,000. A couple new avatars had been released promptly after Furcadia’s funding goals were met, along with a new map, some items and a test client for the 32-bit update. However, residents were concerned that, years after the funding flood, the game was still stuck in the ‘90s. Furcadians wondered where their money had gone. Many were concerned that the community, Furcadia’s greatest asset, would continue leaking out into other virtual worlds if innovation didn’t persist.
They wanted a 2016 MMO on a AAA timeline, or at least what they felt was their money’s worth, a never-before-waged criticism against the free game.
Given the absence of a sizable, professional full-time staff, “The Second Dreaming’s” jagged rollout is justified—but, in 2016, how can developers of a 15,000-strong virtual world be so irreverent of today’s expectations?
A near-idolization of user-generated online content is something specific to Furcadia, as well as circa-2000s social virtual worlds like Second Life and The Sims Online, and the reason why its developers are level with players. It’s what binds Furcadia’s community. As a result, the onus to make a better game is on players’ backs, and the onus to accommodate them is on Furcadia’s scrappy team of devs. “We have had people talk about ‘wanting to come visit the Dragon’s Eye office someday,’” Dr. Cat told me, “not realizing that’s better known as ‘my house.’”
Furcadia. Credit: Trindor
For Furcadia, Dr. Cat developed a custom scripting language called DragonSpeak. It’s easily readable; the scripts are variations of cause-and-effect commands, sort of half-sentences. Furcadia residents all affirm that even a 12-year-old can master the scripting language—many of them were that age when they started cutting out their virtual dreams. Players piece together these dreams with DragonSpeak and 8 or 32-bit pixel art, which they use to animate shop keeps with voice lines or render a full Five Nights at Freddy’s mod complete with gaming elements.
User-generation, a principle of Furcadian life and a facet of its scrappiness, also applies to its developers: Majas and several other “Second Dreaming” shepherds learned graphics design or programming through the MMO itself. And what skills they gained from Furcadia, they invested back in—a speciality that few AAA MMORPGs can boast. Leading up to the “Second Dreaming’s” rollout, players’ status as developers, and vice versa, has—in some Furcadians’ minds—lent an unprofessional air to the “Second Dreaming” rollout: traditionally, Furcadia’s biggest draw.
“When will Furcadia not suck and actually put the 200k it stole to use?” a disgruntled Furcadian wrote on Reddit last year. “Don’t they understand that if they actually invested in the company that it might not permanently die and they could actually make money?”
Frustrated furres took to forums to bemoan the modern status of the oldest social MMORPG. Some longtime players abandoned the game entirely, although I could not find any to speak with first-hand. I could only find one current Furcadia user who still harbored resentment.
“I’m not holding my breath,” a Redditor said about a Summer, 2015 launch. “I’ve found a lot of their promises seem to be empty words.”
“I felt a little duped,” one Furcadia resident wrote on a forum four years after the Kickstarter began. “Well, a lot duped. Like my money had been taken, not to better a game that I’ve been on and off playing and supporting through micro-transactions for the last 17 years. . . Please give me a reason why I should continue putting my faith, and my paycheck, into this?”
Furcadia. Credit: Majas
Furcadia personalities like Majas and Emerald Flame hit the pavement, countering accusations of financial foul play with counter-claims that the team is small and, in general, volunteer. Furcadia’s development team is mostly volunteers; its lead programmer, Treeki, a college student. Scrappiness had always been a Furcadia virtue. An extra $250,000 didn’t change that. Dr. Cat, who developed Furcadia from scratch, was the most defensive:
“We’re an indie developer and not a AAA developer. This is true, and has always been true. Furcadia was originally made by two people (me and Talzhemir [’Manda]) in one year with a budget of $50,000. MMORPGs from the AAA world are made with dozens (or hundreds) of people and tens of millions of dollars. I guess it’s flattering that there’d even be a question about whether we’re triple-A or not—we’ve done more than most small indie developers could with a small number of people and a small amount of money. . . We stretch $250,000 to cover a lot more development than a AAA shop would do,” he said.
When we spoke, Dr. Cat asked me not to inquire about the delays for Furcadia features. Later, when pressed, he reiterated to me that he thinks “People’s expectations for games in general are often set by AAA games & companies.” Echoing his views, Furcadia’s design director, Gar, explained on a forum that it can cost $10,000 to “seat” a developer for a month, citing funds used for pay, equipment and software licenses. “If the Second Dreaming had a team of 6 the full Kickstarter funds should have lasted about 2 months of full development. . . We’ve managed 2.5 years of sustained development,” he said.
Furcadia’s scrappiness and democratic ideals are why most furres I met whiled away their entire childhoods in the furry MMO. It’s a rare world in which the user-developer barrier is thinned to nothing, in which monetization would be an affront to its virtues. Ten years ago, I stumbled upon Furcadia in a feverish quest to test out every virtual world imaginable, and can say with confidence, that, after ten years, it has only grown to be more of itself. No amount of bells, whistles or chew toys will change that.
According to his Instagram, Kristian Nairn has been keeping busy with his DJ career now that he’s no longer needed on Game of Thrones. But that doesn’t mean the fan-fave actor has completely left his life as Hodor behind, as he discovered when he returned to his parents’ home in Belfast and saw this.
Now I wonder what might be waiting for Iwan Rheon, who played Ramsay Bolton on the show, when he visits his parents. I’m sort of worried it may be a sausage.
There is nothing funny about the real Donald Trump, a raisin company mascot channelling the spirit of an internet commenter. What is funny is the voice actor behind Futurama’s Zapp Brannigan reading some of Trump’s dumbest quotes in character. UPDATE, SEP 28: Now featuring snippets from the first Presidential debate.
ORIGINAL POST, AUGUST 11:
Billy West—who also voices Fry, Prof. Farnsworth and Zoidberg—tweeted some of the clips earlier today.
The first trailer for Peter Chelsom’s The Space Between Us focused mostly on the mission to Mars and the troubles faced by Gardner (Asa Butterfield), the first boy born on Mars, when he comes to Earth. This trailer focuses a lot more on his relationship with Earth girl Tulsa (Britt Robertson).
The Space Between Us is a teen romance with a science fiction plot, which isn’t so unusual nowadays. What’s more intriguing is that the two star-crossed lovers aren’t from different races, but both humans—just with vastly different experiences growing up. The whole film is a race against Gardner’s Mars-adapted body failing on Earth, even though he’s human.
Maybe Gardner is exactly what humans’ll look like if Elon Musk ever really does get to Mars.
The Space Between Us hits theaters on December 16.
If you can watch this and not desperately wish that there was an Indiana Jones cartoon to accompany it, then you are a stronger person than I.
In his free time over the past five years, artist Patrick Schoenmaker has been putting together this wonderful trailer for an animated Indiana Jones adventure, and now the final thing is here and we desperately, desperately want there to be more..
It’s got the Indy vibe down to a pat (even without the stirring John Williams music), but the best part is the awesomely slick transitions between different scenarios as Indy whips, dodges, and rolls his way through various perils. It really sells the “globetrotting adventurer” vibe in a brilliant way.
![Zapp Brannigan's Voice Actor Reading Stupid Donald Trump Quotes [Updated]](http://i.kinja-img.com/gawker-media/image/upload/s--8yT12g2y--/c_scale,fl_progressive,q_80,w_800/fffg0fkcp7xkyamsjzia.png)
