Project: Apollo 1201 Project

The Apollo 1201 Project is a mission lead by Cory Doctorow from within the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) to abolish the practice of using digital rights management (DRM) inside the next decade.  The "Apollo 1201" title of the project is a reference to the Apollo Moon missions and section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), which governs citizens' rights to unlock DRM.

The details of the project are still under wraps, but in broad strokes, we will use the incredible skills of EFF’s lawyers, technologists, and policy specialists to challenge the law that protects DRM, section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, and, in so doing, set in motion a chain of events that will discredit the whole idea of designing computers to control their owners, for any purpose.

News Round-Up: Charlie Hebdo

January 19th Cover of The New Yorker drawn by Ana Juan

The New Yorker has always had extremely topical covers under Mouly’s art direction, and this is a prime example.  Juan's use of red sponged like blood over the street level to draw attention to the fact that the top of the tower is drawn as a pencil is inspired.

Interview: The cartoonist Luz, who’s on staff at Charlie Hebdo but was late to the fateful meeting, says the cartoons have taken on a significance they were never intended to have: “In the end, the symbolic weight is exactly what Charlie has always worked against: destroying symbols, breaking down taboos, bursting bubbles of fantasy. It’s wonderful that people are giving us their support but it’s going against Charlie’s cartoons.”

Interview: MAD Editor John Ficarra's appearance on CBS's Sunday morning news

Interview: Robert Crumb, who lives in France and drew a cartoon about the Prophet Muhammad for the newspaper Libération, gives his take on Charlie Hebdo, which he compares to the underground comics of the 1970s.

Interview: Robert Crumb’s old publisher Ron Turner, stands up for satire’s right to be offensive.

Link Round-Up: Gamergate

Source: Spectralninja

Interview: Reddit is hosting an AMA with a female game developer who's giving some very well-grounded answers about her own feelings on Gamergate.

BioWare developer Damion Schubert has posted an enlightening survey of the major gaming news outlets and where they’ve stood on Gamegate. 

Damion Schubert has been busily collecting the stories from women from all “sides” of Gamergate, proponents as well as targets and others completely uninvolved, who nonetheless have been subject to harassment, doxxing and other attacks.

Erik Kain and Nathan Grayson have both written articles about the Shadows of Mordor fiasco.

At First Person Scholar, Katherine Cross examines how the Gamergate groups differ from the typical radical extremism in that they view themselves as an apolitical "consumer movement."

A Former FBI Agent On Why It’s So Hard to Prosecute Gamergate Trolls. "The light penalties attached to many of these online crimes also deter officials from taking them seriously, because the punishment doesn’t justify the resources required to investigate and prosecute them. “It will never work if it feels like a catch and release program,” Ryan says. “Spending a month getting subpoenas and doing wiretaps for a case where the sentence is six months of probation just doesn’t make sense.""

Gamergate reached the front page of The New York Times this week, due largely to a school shooting threat called in over a scheduled appearance by Anita Sarkeesian. With the NYT coverage, many game news outlets have come forward officially denouncing Gamergate. However, just ahead of this development, Jetta Rae DoubleCakes published this strongly-worded editorial at Ravishly which urges news writers to properly frame their Gamergate coverage.

GaymerX has effectively repudiated #Gamergate after initially attempting to carve out a more nuanced stance on the matter.

Gaming Round-Up: September 22, 2014

"The poster for Halfway" by Pervandr

This is poster for game Halfway from Robotality.

News: The D.A. in Marin County, California is giving away free ice cream for turning in your “violent” video games. I'd love to see a list of the games they end up accepting.

News: In probably the biggest news of the week, Microsoft successfully purchased the Minecraft IP from owner Markus Persson for the tidy little sum of 2.5 billion dollars. That should put to rest any speculation about Microsoft killing off their gaming division anytime soon.

News: The Video Game History Museum — a traveling collection of over 20,000 items representing 25 years of games — has found a permanent home at an exhibition space in Frisco, Texas. The exhibit should be open by next April.

Review: Ctrl+Alt+Del offers a very concise explanation of the genre confusion surrounding the latest time-sucking AAA game addiction, Destiny.  I have nothing to add, but if you check my post timeline, you'll see that there was a significant downturn in posts just about the time of Destiny's release.

Dan Stubbs writes about his attempts to create, what he calls, a “dynamic narrative system” in his horror game The Hit.  Elsewhere, Edward Smith suggests that, by designing a horror game that subverts standard game rules, P.T. submerges players in a truly nightmarish experience.

Sweets: Ghostbusters Donuts

To help celebrate the classic movie’s 30th Anniversary, on September 29th, Krispy Kreme will be rolling out two Ghostbusters themed doughnuts!  The first, appropriately dubbed the "Ghostbusters Doughnut," features a marshmallow creme filling and a green slime "splat," topped with the Ghostbusters logo in the form of a sugar piece. The second option, the "Stay Puft Marshmallow Doughnut," also features a marshmallow creme filling and is topped with a frosting Stay Puft marshmallow face.

They’ll be available nationwide until October 31st.

Short Film: Project Greenlight Top 20

After almost a decade off the air, earlier this year Matt Damon and Ben Affleck announced the return of Project Greenlight with a fourth season set for HBO. With advances in technology since the originally three-season run, it seems like the ideal time to find talents across the country. First, they opened a call for submissions and have now pared down the selection to 20 films, all available to view online. Beginning today on the official site (and lasting until September 26th), anyone can vote for their favorite film.

In honor of Project Greenlight’s return, we've posted all twenty short films here, in one place, for your convenience.  It's basically like a free, one page film festival.   Take a look and cast your vote!

These are all really good shorts, some are obviously better than others, but each one of them has a certain unique charm that makes them stand out.

"Project Greenlight: Promo (HBO)" by HBO's channel

Gaming Round-Up: September 15, 2014

"While Sitting On The Friend" by Yury Krylou

Review: Destiny Is Great, raves Chris Kohler, if You Can Ignore Your Life

At The New Yorker, Simon Parkin profiles Zoe Quinn in the wake of the harassment campaign against her, as does Alex Hern at the Guardian.

Colin Campbell of Polygon considers the question of whether or not violent video games actually reduce real world crime?

Edge's Nathan Ditum examines how the growing overlap between cinema and games in the way that films like Edge of Tomorrow borrow the language and grammar of the video game medium.

Gamopolis is the name of a new podcast about games and politics by Daniel Ziegener and Yasmina Banaszczuk, who also wrote this lovely piece about kids growing up in post-apocalyptic worlds.

Hey Microsoft, Acquiring A Hit Game Is Stupid.  Josh Constine wonder why the world's most ubiquitous software company has learned nothing from Zynga, Rovio, King and Dong.

In a recent piece on Paste Games, “The Last of Us: How Sexism Survived the Apocalypse,” Ed Smith argues how one of the main characters, a middle-aged male named Joel, brings sexist tendencies and a “destructive masculine ego” into the post-apocalyptic game setting to restrict that of the other main character, the teen female Ellie. Haniya Rae of Paste argues that There's Nothing Sexist About The Last of Us.

Nathan Snow of The Spectrum calls Destiny "a turning point in the evolution of video games" while Peter Suderman of Reason.com reflects upon What Destiny Tells Us About the Future of Video Games.

A new study suggests an hour of video games a day makes kids better-adjusted.

Over at the Post Product Dev, Jim Crawford discusses the how and why of Making Games More Mysterious.  "You need to be careful that you don’t provide answers that are worse than leaving the question unanswered. Think about how you felt after seeing a magic show versus how you felt after you found out how the trick was done. Magic tricks imply bad secrets, by design. This is how they stay secret. If the secret was awesome then you would get a thrill from telling your friends about it, rather than a groan."

Shira Chess writes about moral panics, Slender Man and the “Tulpa Effect” at Culture Digitally.

Gaming Round-Up: September 8, 2014

"Portal 2" by JenPenJen

News: The Sims 4 might not support toddlers, but its replaced them with something even better—demon babies.

BioWare developer Damion Schubert suggests that gaming’s troll culture arose with early MMORPGs and suggests that the genre’s success only arrived when developers learned to mitigate user harassment.

Eurogamer’s Tom Bramwell writes about how he wishes more games were just a vertical slice; ie, shorter and more focused towards a particular experience.

At Geekwire, Mónica Guzmán talks about her vicarious experiences with Twitch game streaming, to perhaps explain the Amazon acquisition to a confused audience, and in the proess relate sweet stories of passionate gaming amidst family life.

Gaming Round-Up: September 1, 2014

"Damsel in Distress: Part 2 - Tropes vs Women in Video Games" by FeministFrequency

News: The big story of the week is the harassment of game critic Anita Sarkeesian of Feminist Frequency.  Since launching a successful Kickstarter for her "Tropes vs. Women in Video Games" video series in 2012,  Sarkeesian has received a steady stream of harassment, but with the release of the second video in the series, Sarkeesian began receiving death threats and was forced to call the police and leave her home.  Melbourne-based video game critic Dan Golding wrote a thoughtful article examining where these misogynistic attitudes come from, and why so many male video game fans hold such entrenched sexist attitudes.  When Mother Jones asked Sarkeesian why the backlash to her videos was so intense, Sarkeesian offered this explanation:

"The gaming industry has been male-dominated ever since its inception, but over the last several years there has been an increase in women’s voices challenging the sexist status quo. We are witnessing a very slow and painful cultural shift. Some male gamers with a deep sense of entitlement are terrified of change. They believe games should continue to cater exclusively to young heterosexual men with ever more extreme virtual power fantasies. So this group is violently resisting any movement in the direction of a more inclusive gaming space."

The Verge argues that Sarkeesian's detractors are hurting games more than her criticism ever could.  Meanwhile, Samual Sales thinks that the problem lies with the media, and while he has a point about the media need to take a more responsible approach to the story, it's hard not to believe that Every Hater Proves Anita Sarkeesian Right.

Of course, This is one of several sexist incidents in the world of video gaming this week. Independent game designer Zoe Quinn was also subjected to severe online harassment, including threats of murder and rape and the leaking of her personal details after a spiteful blog post by an ex-boyfriend.

News: Open Letter to Aaron Diaz

"The Progression" by Mary Cagle

Three days ago, Mary Cagle of the webcomic Kiwi Blitz recently posted a comic she entitled "The Progression," in which she satired the disingenuous male feminism of artists who create highly sexualized "empowered" female characters.  While the comic doesn't refer to any specific artist, many people believed that Blitz's comic was triggered by cyborg-themed amputee pinup sketches artist Aaron Diaz posted to his Tumblr blog about a week ago, which he deleted shortly after Cagle's comic was posted.  (If that last link goes dead, just scroll down.)

Aaron Diaz, author of the popular Dresden Codak web comic and outspoken critic of sexist character designs, took this quite personally, responding both on Tumblr and Twitter.  Diaz has a strong reputation for being a genuinely good guy who comes out on the right side of most issues; however, Diaz's uncharacteristically terse response has garnered a great deal of negative attention.  Over the past few days, multiple women in the webcomics community have weighed in, culminating in Magnolia Pearl writing an open letter to Aaron Diaz yesterday: "You’re allowed to make art with male gaze. But please call a spade a spade."

Of course, this isn't the first time some one else has called Diaz out on his heavy-handed use of the "male gaze."  Solomon's Your Webcomic Is Bad and You Should Feel Bad blog (Part 2) addressed the issue back in 2008.

Personally, I hope Diaz continues his comic, and I hope people continue reading his comic.  For all of its excessive use of the male gaze, Dresden Codak does feature some genuinely awesome female characters, along with plagiarizing bears, nerds who play philosophical tabletop RPGs, and a lot of other fun silliness.

News: Separating Google+ Photos

Google has consistently improved and expanded its photo service lineup over the past few years.  Unfortunately, no matter how elegant and and useful the platform has become, it have always been hampered by the caveat that the photographs you edit must be tied to the Google+ account that absolutely no one seem to want.  That may be changing soon though, according to a recent report from Bloomberg.

According to Bloomberg, Google is on spinning off its photo services to draw in users who don’t want to be a part of Google+, which is just about everyone old enough to have jumped aboard the Facebook bandwagon or anyone young enough to still value their privacy.

Google hasn't confirmed the rumored spinoff officially, but a Google spokesperson told Engadget in an e-mail that, "Over here in our darkroom, we’re always developing new ways for people to snap, share and say cheese."

Let's all keep our fingers crossed!

News: Rebeccapurple

Rebeccapurple

Those of you who aren't graphic designers probably don’t know the name Eric Meyer, but among developers, he's kind of a big deal.  Meyer is among the foremost advocates of CSS, the code that has ushered in the age of aesthetically pleasing web design.  Without Meyer, CSS would be neither as well developed nor as widespread as it is, and there's a good chance that much of the web would still look like a GeoCities homepage.

Meyer's daughter Rebecca recently lost her battle with cancer - on her birthday, no less.

In honor of Rebecca's memory and Eric's many contributions, the CSS Working Group, which is responsible for overseeing CSS specification, agreed last week to add “Rebeccapurple” to the official CSS specifications as the name for hex value #663399, a shade of purple that was Rebecca's favorite color.

Originally, the color was going to be dubbed "Beccapurple," but Eric requested that the color bear his daughter's full name.  “Rebecca informed us that she was about to be a big girl of six years old, and Becca was a baby name.” he wrote, “She made it to six. For almost twelve hours, she was six. So Rebecca it is and must be.”

This is among my favorite comments on the resolution: "Usually when I’m crying reading computer spec’s it’s out of frustration, not sadness and sympathy."

News: Warhols Found on Floppy Disks

"Andy2" by Andy Warhol, 1985.

©The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc., courtesy of The Andy Warhol Museum

A multi-institutional team of new-media artists, computer experts, and museum professionals have discovered twenty-eight never-before-seen digital images from a dozen previously unknown experiments by Andy Warhol (BFA, 1949) on aging floppy disks from 1985. The purely digital images, “trapped” for nearly 30 years on Amiga^® floppy disks stored in the archives collection of The Andy Warhol Museum (AWM), were discovered and extracted by members of the Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) Computer Club, with assistance from the AWM’s staff, CMU’s Frank-Ratchye STUDIO for Creative Inquiry (FRSCI), the Hillman Photography Initiative at the Carnegie Museum of Art (CMOA), and New York based artist Cory Arcangel.

Warhol’s Amiga experiments were the products of a commission by Commodore International to demonstrate the graphic arts capabilities of the Amiga 1000 personal computer. Created by Warhol on prototype Amiga hardware in his unmistakable visual style, the recovered images reveal an early exploration of the visual potential of software imaging tools, and show new ways in which the preeminent American artist of the 20th century was years ahead of his time.

The works were only discovered, however, because artist Cory Arcangel remembered seeing the disks in Warhol’s studio in 1991 and asked Matt Wrbican, chief archivist at The Warhol, to look for the them. “In the images we see a mature artist who had spent about 50 years developing a specific hand-to-eye coordination now suddenly grappling with the bizarre new sensation of a mouse in his palm held several inches from the screen,” Wrbican told the Telegraph. “No doubt he resisted the urge to physically touch the screen — it had to be enormously frustrating, but it also marked a huge transformation in our culture: the dawn of the new era of affordable home computing. We can only wonder how he would explore and exploit the technologies that are so ubiquitous today.”

News: CGHub has Shut Down

Online art communities around the web have been shocked to learn that CGHub has officially shuts its doors for good.  CGHub was a rapidly growing community born of necessity following the decline of Marko Djurdjević's popular Conceptart.org.  In the wake of a DDOS attack protesting the site's new premium memberships and a hack that rerouted traffic to the domain CGHugs.com, site developers posted an announcement on Facebook that CGHub was closing it's doors for good yesterday.

News: Netflix as Popular as Cable

A recent xkcd comic illustrates how people’s feelings of smugness and embarrassment when they say “I don’t own a TV” have changed from 1950 to today. As usual, xkcd is right on the nose with this one.  A recent Mashable article revealed that "Netflix is creeping up on cable in the race for young adult subscribers in the U.S. Among those between the ages of 18 and 36, 46% of paid TV subscribers choose cable, while 43% are Netflix users." 

As someone who studied economics and television production in college, I get disproportionately excited by news stories like this.  I find the prospect of the internet overtaking cable television very exciting.  It feels as if my generation is making entertainment a more accessible medium for small artists, and I sincerely hope that, one day, television will operate on a paradigm that resembles YouTube's business model more closely than the current broadcast model.  

Posters: 50 Years of Avengers

"50 Years of Avengers" by Daniel Acuna

December is the 50th anniversary of the Avengers, and Marvel has a big plan for Avengers #24.NOW, also known as Avengers #1 for the purposes of All-New Marvel NOW! (Just go with it.). To celebrate the milestone, the publisher plans to sell a special polybagged edition of Avengers #24.NOW and bundle it with a “Avengers 50th Anniversary Mega Fold-Out Poster” that’s over six feet wide. For the curious, that’s about 11 comic pages strung end to end.

Illustrated by Daniel Acuna, the poster features Earth’s Mightiest Heroes from across the team’s 50 years, including mainstays like Captain America, Thor and Iron Man, as well as newer additions like Wolverine, Spider-Man and the Thing.  It even feature members of the Dark Avengers, like Ares.

Avengers #24.NOW goes on sale December 14.  No news as to the retail price, but I'm guessing this thing will move quick, so call in your reserve order now.

News: Banksy Residency (Part 2)

Banksy gave an email interview to the Village Voice to discuss his #BanksyNY residency, "Better Out Than In" which will be taking place on the streets of New York this month.  In other news, Nelson Saiers has announced that he’ll donate $100,000 to victims of Hurricane Sandy if Banksy paints something that raises awareness about the storm and its victims.

News: Asteroid named for XKCD Creator

The International Astronomical Union (IAU) has named an asteroid after Randall Munroe, creator of the uber-nerdy web comic, xkcd.

The IAU, which assigns designations to celestial bodies, was accepting name suggestions for small solar system objects, and xkcd readers Lewis Hulbert and Jordan Zhu submitted Munroe’s name for asteroid (4942) 1987 DU6. The recommendation was accepted, and the asteroid is now officially designated 4942 Munroe.

“The first thing I did was try to figure out whether 4942 Munroe was big enough to pose a threat to Earth,” the cartoonist writes. “I was excited to learn that, based on its albedo (brightness), it’s probably about 6-10 kilometers in diameter. That’s comparable in size to the one that killed the dinosaurs — definitely big enough to cause a mass extinction! Unfortunately Fortunately, it’s in a fairly stable circular orbit between Mars and Jupiter, so it’s unlikely to hit the Earth any time soon.”

News: New Harry Potter Covers

In case you haven't been on the internet this week... Scholastic Books has announced the release of a new series of covers for the Harry Potter series in the U.S. illustrated by Kazu Kibuishi to commemorate the fifteenth anniversary of its publication.  Read the press release at Scholastic.

Tech: Robot Fighting YouTube Channel

"Robot Fighting YouTube Channel" by SupaRobotAttack

As part of YouTube’s Geek Week, The Gadget Show host Jason Bradbury is launching "SupaRobotAttack," a YouTube channel dedicated to robot fighting, in partnership with the Shine Group-owned online video network ChannelFlip. Unlike previous attempts at robotic sports such as Robot Wars, this channel will feature robots programmed with with a wide variety of individual fighting styles including boxing, karate, and Mexican wrestling.