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Robots are playing ASMR-infused techno at SXSW
In 2012, Moritz Simon Geist left a promising career as a research engineer in Germany to build robots and travel the world playing music full-time. He'd studied classical music in school, starting with the clarinet and piano, and toured with punk bands since he was a teenager in the '90s. That was when he started tinkering with equipment, building cheap solutions for complex audio problems and creating brand-new tools.
‘Good Omens’ and the art of avoiding Armageddon
The world will end one day. That's a plain fact; what's unknown is the exact manner in which humanity will be erased from existence. Whether the oceans will boil us from below like a massive earthenware lobster pot, or a nuclear holocaust will strip the planet bare, or biological warfare will infect our evolutionary timeline, is anyone's guess, and everyone has a theory.
Meet Macaulay Culkin, retro video game nerd
Macaulay Culkin is roughly 10 years behind when it comes to video games. The most up-to-date console he owns is an Xbox 360, which he plugs in mostly to beat Mass Effect 2 again or blast through swarms of zombies in Left 4 Dead with his younger brother. The most modern game in his rotation right now is 2014's South Park: The Stick of Truth, which he's about 15 percent of the way through. "I play more old-school kind of things," Culkin said. "I play a lot more Nintendo and Super Nintendo games than I do probably anything else."
How the creators of 'Ralph Breaks the Internet’ showed two sides to life online
Warning: May contain light spoilers. "Everything is for sale on the internet." Phil Johnston, the director/co-writer of the Oscar nominated Ralph Breaks the Internet, isn't holding back. "From the pop-ups to the videos you watch, commerce is a part of... everything."
'High Maintenance' meets 'Civilization' in 'Weedcraft Inc'
When I was a kid smoking weed in high school, I was convinced that marijuana would never be legal. The idea that it's legal now, I'm in my late 40s, it's shocking to me." Scott Alexander speaks in rapid-fire paragraphs brimming with information about modern marijuana laws, politics and culture. He's the lead writer on Weedcraft Inc, the first original video game developed and published by popular indie label Devolver Digital. Weedcraft Inc is a tycoon or world-building game, similar to Civilization or Tropico, but players start out as low-grade weed dealers and build their empires from there. It's in beta now, and the full game is due to drop some time in April.
The unfiltered joy of Christine McConnell's 'Mortal Kombat' cake
Rose is an obese, Frankenstein raccoon with a pink bow on top of her ratty head and a bent fork where her left hand should be. She's blindly self-possessed, spending her days devouring sweets and torturing men -- and often vice versa. She's died at least twice, and each time, she's been lovingly brought back to life by her creator, Christine McConnell.
The online conference that might change video games for good
Language is a tool, and just like any tool, it has equal capacity to inflict both good and bad on the world. Language is a beautiful, human thing; the connective tissue that transfers culture, knowledge and critical information across borders and generations. It's also a means of segregation and detachment, erecting invisible walls among neighbors and strangers alike, impeding coexistence on a global scale.
Patreon’s 3 million supporters are good news for independent creators
Patreon has had one clear goal since it launched in 2013: to help artists, influencers and internet creators make money by letting them offer membership services directly to their fans. And that effort seems to be paying off. Today, Patreon announced there are now over three million people supporting creators on its site, of which there are more than 100,000 to date. What's also notable is that the company was able to accomplish this milestone in a rapid manner, going from two to three million supporters (aka patrons) worldwide in just one year.
Excited and exhausted: The hours before the launch of 'Vane'
By the time our Skype call connects and Matt Smith says hello, it's already January 15th at the Friend & Foe offices in Tokyo. After nearly five years of development and public promises, his studio's first original game, Vane, is out across Europe and Asia. It'll go live in the US in about six hours. "[I'm] excited, really excited, exhausted, and kind of nervous as well," Smith said. "I think those are the main three things, but it's just -- the thing is, it's kind of hard also to turn away from it. I've got other things I should probably turn my life back to, but there's this draw to continually check Twitter, even though there's nothing interesting, nothing we need to look at there, and we can probably afford to leave it alone for a couple of days -- and probably should, just to recharge our batteries. So I'm really nervous and I really want to make sure everything goes well, so I'm sort of obsessively tracking things and checking things."
How a hackathon helped build the Xbox Adaptive Controller
A small crew of designers pieced together the first prototype for the Xbox Adaptive Controller three years ago, at Microsoft's annual internal hackathon. The event invites employees to work on experimental or pet projects and present them to colleagues for feedback, and a handful of developers were interested in building a gamepad for people with limited mobility.
Sony takes a different tack at CES 2019
Sony's CES was a different one to previous years. The company's new strategy seems to focus on its prowess in movies and music to elevate its products. That made for an unusual press event, but Sony has a plan. Head of Communications, Cheryl K. Goodman elaborates on how the company wants to make all the moving parts work together, whether that's cameras, OLED TVs, mobile, PlayStation or everything else. Goodman is joined by a second guest, robo-puppy Aibo, who's celebrating its first birthday since its reinvention. We talk upgraded robot pets and what's next.
Jack Dorsey talks NBA Twitter and Kevin Durant's burner account
Fresh off the announcement of a new partnership between Twitter and the NBA, today CEO Jack Dorsey sat down with the league's Commissioner Adam Silver at CES 2019. They talked about NBA games coming to Twitter for the first time, which won't be like any sports stream. Rather than watching a typical NBA broadcast, the Twitter camera feed is going to focus on single players, and users will be able to vote to choose whose view they want to get during a game. Dorsey said these livestreams are designed to be a "great complimentary experience" to the games you're watching on TV, rather than the primary source of entertainment.
How Impossible Foods cooked up Impossible Burger 2.0
Inside White Castle on the Las Vegas Strip I met David Lipman, Impossible Foods's Chief Science Officer, whose father was a butcher. It's a funny quirk for someone who's working to sell a plant-based product to replace ground beef. Impossible Burger 2.0, revealed this week at CES, is a major upgrade, with an improved nutritional profile and crucially, a taste and feel closer to the beef burgers that you and I eat.
PAX Labs CEO on how technology will demystify cannabis
PAX makes some of the most popular cannabis vaporizers around. By fusing technology, with innovative software, the company hopes to take the mystery out of getting high. But, there are problems. Many people don't know where to start, it's still illegal in many states, and even the organizers of CES aren't quite sure how to handle companies like PAX. In our stage interview with CEO Bharat Vasan, we take a quick tour through cannabis' digital revolution.
Twitter will test new conversation features out in the open
Twitter is launching a new program to let users reshape how conversations on its site look and feel, the company announced today in an interview with Engadget at CES 2019. The idea is for users to try out new organization and context features with their followers, such as the status updates and "ice breaker" tweets we saw being tested last year, which are designed to encourage people to talk to each other. Twitter is set to start testing the program in the coming weeks, and while anyone will be able to apply to join, only a few thousand users are actually going to get in.
The Xbox One's original indie game is finally here
Patience. Below is a game steeped in time, from creation to consumption, and it demands patience from developers and players alike. Capybara Games revealed Below during the Xbox E3 conference in 2013, suggesting this beautiful, dark and expansive adventure game would be out soon. So, fans waited. And waited. Another trailer dropped, showing a tiny character fighting its way through massive dungeons filled with supernatural secrets, but no release date appeared. Fans waited some more.
Twitter's chronological timeline button is here to stay
Nearly two months ago, Twitter began testing a feature that made it easier for users to see the latest tweets on their feed first, rather than the ones pushed by the company's algorithm. It's a toggle dressed as a sparkle icon that lives above the home timeline, which keeps you from having to go deep into your Twitter settings to get that purely chronological view. Certain iOS users have had access to this since October, but today Twitter is making the change permanent and rolling it out to everyone on Apple's platform. Twitter's Android app as well as its website are getting the new magic button, too, but that won't be coming until after the holidays.
The studio behind 'No Man's Sky' has a new, bite-sized game
Hello Games is known for No Man's Sky, an expansive space-exploration game that received heavy marketing from Sony ahead of its launch in 2016, and rocketed studio founder Sean Murray to infamy and stardom. No Man's Sky endured a turbulent release period, but developers continued to roll out updates and deliver on their most ambitious promises, and this year it was nominated for Best Ongoing Game at The Game Awards. But before No Man's Sky, Hello Games was the home of Joe Danger, a cartoony racing title that found great, yet comparatively mild, success in the early 2010s. Hello Games' new project, The Last Campfire, is a lot more like Joe Danger than No Man's Sky.
Ben Wander's quest to become a household name
Even casual video game fans know Sid Meier's name. They've seen it countless times, printed in sturdy text across every box in the Civilization series for the past 27 years, the most recent one being 2016's Sid Meier's Civilization VI. It's come to the point where most gamers can't hear "Civilization" without immediately thinking, "Sid Meier," and vice versa. "People know who Sid Meier is because his name's on the front," indie developer Ben Wander said on the busy Tulsa Pop Culture Expo show floor. He was showing off his first game as independent developer The Wandering Ben, a noir murder mystery called A Case of Distrust.
Bit Brigade, the rock band that plays classic NES games on-stage
Bit Brigade could be more famous if they wanted to be. They're a five-man rock band, but one of their members doesn't play an instrument -- instead, he speedruns through a classic NES game while the remaining four bandmates play its soundtrack, live and completely attuned to the pixelated action projected above the stage. Bit Brigade has a built-in audience of nerds and nostalgia fiends, especially in an era dominated by live streaming, but they don't even have a Twitch channel. There is a YouTube page named "bitbrigade," but it has just four videos, all of which are more than 10 years old.
