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Screamin' Jay Hawkins: "I Put A Spell On You"
Here is an absolutely stupendous video of Screamin' Jay Hawkins in full witch doctor regalia performing "I Put A Spell On You". (Thanks, Kirsten Anderson!)...
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Today on Offworld
Today on Offworld we saw Rock Band's vocal pitch recognition get trumped by some ace theremin playing on Portal theme song Still Alive, and downloaded a new unofficial theme for the PlayStation 3 featuring gorgeous HD paintings of cult Genesis shooter Gunstar Heroes. We then got more musical and listened to an album composed on DS synth Korg DS-10, as well as a one-man gadget orchestra featuring two DSs, an iPod Touch, an iPhone and a Kaossilator, and watched LittleBigPlanet creator Alex Evans go back in time to its early prototype days from a recent Wired store event. Finally, we took a look behind the design of indie adventure Aquaria, tried to decipher the code behind Subversion, an as yet un-detailed game that hopes to generatively model everything from entire cities down to a pen lying on each office desk, saw one man's new wrap-around Patapon tattoo and a beautiful motion graphics piece on the history of games, and timed how long it would take for an autonomous Katamari to clean your living quarters, Roomba style....
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The 2009 Nibbler Championship
Joshua Bearman wrote about the 2009 Nibbler Championship at the LA Weekly Blog. He says: Why is this so awesome? Nibbler, as I mentioned in a brief aside in my Harper's piece on Billy Mitchell, was an arcade game made by the jukebox company Rock-Ola in the early 1980s. Nibbler is mostly forgotten other than its historical appeal as the sole arcade machine whose counter had enough digits to display 999,999,999 and therefore turn over at 000,000,000, or one billion points. The game itself sucked -— “playing the thing is joyless,” says Dwayne Richard, the number two Nibbler contender of all time—but as the highest of all potential scores, the “billion on Nibbler” was a universal goal in the early 80s. Many tried and failed. Eventually, on January 15, 1984, Tim McVey from Oskaloosa came to Walter’s arcade and finally reached a billion after playing forty-four hours—except that instead of turning over to zeros, the counter kept going. Tim gave up at 1,000,042,270 when he realized the true milestone was ten billion points, another order of magnitude away, and sadly, well out of reach for him and all humanity. (Rock-Ola gave Tim a Nibbler machine, which he promptly traded to Walter Day's rival arcade down the street -- for $200! In tokens!) Tim is back, playing against Dwayne Richard. I put up a fairly detailed post about, talking about how Nibbler represents how obsessive classic game competition is, for the players, just another facet of human achievement. Like climbing Everest. Or enumerating Pi. And to that end, I posted the first opening to my Harper's piece, which fell by the way side for editing reasons. But it tells the story of Robert Mruczek's marathon session on Star Wars at Fascination Arcade in New York in 1984, and sets the stage for the idea of this whole pursuit as part of the epic story of man versus machine, but more importantly, man versus self....
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97-year-old Botanical Artist
I really enjoyed this interview with 97-year-old Chikabo Kumada, a botanical artist in Japan. His philosophy about life is every bit as lovely as his paintings. Here’s a snip: Mr. Kumada, when did you start drawing illustrations of plants and insects? I started to do it for work when I was twenty-six. I quit the graphic design company I’d been working at and switched careers without talking to my wife about it first. At that time, all the books had been burned in the war, and bunches of shoddy picture books had started coming in from the Kansai area and I thought, “This won’t do! I’ve got to draw some good picture books.” I love children. That’s why I started doing it. That was where my years of impoverishment began. (laughs) Sadly, the PingMagMAKE site where the interview was posted seems to have gone on an extended hiatus. I was sorry to read this, as I've enjoyed perusing their articles. --Shawn97 Year Old Botanical Art Maestro (Shawn Connally and Bruce Stewart are guest bloggers)...
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1970s humor mag predicts future
Jerry Beck of Cartoon Brew says: I received several old issues of Cracked magazine over the holidays and noticed this article predicting life in the 21st Century had become surprisingly accurate. "Today's Swinger is Tomorrow's Square," illustrated by John Severin, appeared in the 1974 annual Super Cracked (It was most likely a reprint from a 1970 issue). In it, the writer predicts that young people will embrace the "skinhead" look, home computers ("Electronic Home Teacher") and even the ipod: as "electronic brain stimulators" and a "musical computers" that young people are hooked on. I've attached one image from it... but check the whole piece at Cartoon Brew....
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