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The eerie stop-motion game that's 'better than sex with Jesus'
When I first talked with Anders Gustafsson and Erik Zaring in 2012, they promised their creepy, psychedelic, stop-motion game, The Dream Machine, was going to be "better than sex with Jesus." They had a lot of work ahead of them -- they were building the game by hand, with physical materials, and the stop-motion process was inherently time-consuming. Plus, they had to wrangle episodic installments of an intimate yet sprawling story inspired by LSD trips and theories of alternate realities. Five years later, as the sixth and final installment of The Dream Machine finally lands on Steam, I ask Gustafsson and Zaring if they think their game delivers on its sacrilegious promise.
This is what AI sees and hears when it watches 'The Joy of Painting'
Computers don't dream of electric sheep, they imagine the dulcet tones of legendary public access painter, Bob Ross. Bay Area artist and engineer Alexander Reben has produced an incredible feat of machine learning in honor of the late Ross, creating a mashup video that applies Deep Dream-like algorithms to both the video and audio tracks. The result is an utterly surreal experience that will leave you pinching yourself.
LSD makes you think like a baby
Researchers at Imperial College London believe that they know what effect LSD has on the human brain. After pumping test subjects full of the stuff and shoving them in an MRI, the team learned that the drug makes our brains behave similarly to that of a baby. In order to understand this, imagine that your mind is the single floor of an office, with cubicles running as far as the eye can see. Each cubicle is responsible for different jobs, such as memory, balance and hearing, only talking to each other on the annual company retreat. LSD is like a disgruntled former employee, temporarily smashing down the plyboard dividers and forcing everyone to collaborate.
Timothy Leary-developed video games found in New York Public Library archive
The New York Public Library recently discovered a treasure trove of video games in its archives created by psychedelic evangelist Timothy Leary. Over 375 floppies (talk about flashbacks) containing a "dozen or so" games developed by the LSD-advocate in the '80s -- some are playable via emulation -- are now on display in the library's rare books and manuscripts division, according to The New York Times. The good doctor's digital works had a self-help bend to them, advocating self-improvement by interactive means as opposed to pharmaceuticals, and apparently recreational drugs as well. If you fancy yourself a cyberpunk, Leary also had an in-progress project based on William Gibson's Neuromancer, replete with writing by William S. Burroughs and a soundtrack by Devo. He had more than just prototypes, too: His Mind Mirror was commercially released in 1985 and sold 65,000 copies for publisher Electronic Arts. If you can't make it to the NYPL, a version has been adapted to Facebook so you can glean your personality profile from your... profile. [Image credit: Jaycobs / Flickr]
Completely bizarre 'LSD' game coming to PSOne Classics
So, LSD: Dream Emulator is the weirdest game ever made by anybody. After becoming entranced by the hours of footage from the game currently on YouTube, we feel like we can make that statement with complete certainty. The game features no plot or any goals to speak of whatsoever -- it only tasks the player with taking short, ten-minute jaunts through areas inspired by a dream journal kept by a staff member of its Japanese developer, Asmik Ace Entertainment, who may or may not have been tripping on LSD at the time. If that sounds like something you can get behind, you'll be pleased to learn the game's creator, Osamu Sato, recently announced on Twitter that the game would be coming to the PSOne Classics storefront on PSN. Of course, it's unlikely the game will come to the U.S. store, as the title was never localized for the States. That's no problem, though -- you might be able to find it at your favorite online auctions site for upwards of $200. That's a small price to pay for immeasurable weirdness!
