Remember Atari? They used to be good. Actually they were rather great and pretty much defined my childhood. Anyway, Kotaku do too and have uploaded a rather cool catalog of Atari stuff from 1981.
Those sure were the days…
Ex-Test Icicle Lightspeed Champion performed their track Galaxy of Lost Souls in full Star Wars garb at this week’s NME Awards show. Unfortunately I couldn’t find a video of it online anywhere but did instead stumble across this gem. Lightspeed Chamption performing the Imperial March and Star Wars theme. Lovely.
Update: There’s now a video of them performing at the NME Awards on YouTube. Enjoy.
“Artoo and the shiny guy.”
“Obeekenobee sometimes moves things around. Sometimes he disappears.”
I think becoming a parent has made me go soft… but isn’t this adorable? (via Geek Parenting)
Yezzer has been working all hours on something, but wasn’t allowed to tell me anything about it. Now that Alice has spilled the beans over at Wonderland and Kotaku are all over it I can finally check it out… and it certainly explains a few things!
Created to accompany the Channel 4 TV drama City of Vice around the beginnings of the police force in Georgian London, Bow Street Runner is a Flash-based game reminiscent of those point-and click “multi-media adventure games” like Return to Zork in the 90s. Except that it’s actually good (and on a web page instead of 5 CD-ROMs).
In what may be considered by some to be an incredibly extreme attempt to copy Boing Boing, I have the utmost pleasure in announcing the birth of Milo Jefferson May. He arrived after an extended labour (that I will not go into detail of for fear of digging up already buried memories of a delivery bed that transformed into what can only be described as a futuristic torture device, ventouse caps and blood, lots of blood) at 1:59pm today, weighing in at 7lb 14oz.
Both Cassie and Milo are now doing well.
I’m off to bed to enjoy my last uninterrupted nights sleep… ever!
Over two hundred people freeze for five minutes inside NYC’s Grand Central station.
I didn’t give any instructions in advance. I just told everyone to be doing something realistic and not jokey. One guy dropped an entire briefcase full of papers the second before he froze, leaving his papers scattered before him for five minutes. Many froze midway through eating or drinking. A few froze while taking off a jacket. One couple froze kissing.
(via Kottke)
I always love looking at optimistic views of the future from the past… and here’s a good one. The Usborne Book of the Future: A Trip in Time to the Year 2000 and Beyond, which was originally published in 1979. Chapters include “Robots: Science and medicine”, “Future Cities: Homes and living” and “Star Travel: Transport and travel”. (via Boing Boing)
It reminds me of the old EPCOT attractions from Walt Disney World like Horizons and Spaceship Earth that were also built around that time.
If you like this it’s also worth checking out the Paleofuture blog for all kinds of fantastic retro visions of the future.
I had read about this some time before Christmas, but hadn’t checked it out until today. RCRD LBL is an online network of record labels by Engadet/Gizmodo co-founder Peter Rojas and Josh Deutsch from Downtown Records… which sort of poses as a kind of blog thing.
A lot of the music is free to download as DRM-free 196kbps MP3s and bands are paid through the website’s sponsorship. You’re welcome to download anything you like from the site and use it in any non-commercial way you want under a Creative Commons license.
The whole thing is stuffed full of RSS feeds to allow you to follow pretty much anything you’re interested in following and Ivan Pope will love that they have whole bunch of widgets to grab, like this little fella (which, uh, sadly seems to break with the Antikewl Daily stylesheet. Oops! Hopefully they’ll fix that at some point!)…
It’s always interesting to see new distribution ideas in the twisted and scary world of the music industry and I’ll definitely be keeping my eye on this one to see how it pans out. (via Wired)
“There aren’t enough Youtube video re-posts around here,” you say? Here’s another one.
Mike Long, a self-proclaimed “social rocktivist”, plans to perform once dance a day around the world and post each video up on YouTube for the next two years. I can’t think of a better idea. (via It’s Nice That)
Normal service will resume shortly.
With a slight danger of AKD becoming a YouTube video dumping ground, here’s a clip of Cornelius performing Count Five or Six live on hipster kids TV show Yo Gabba Gabba.
There’s a higher quality version of the video over at Jezebel.
With Bill Murray.
“It’s such a sadness when you think you’ve seen a film in on your fucking telephone.” (via Boing Boing)
To conclude my end-of-2007 music post trilogy (well, 2.5-ogy) I intended to do a top ten albums of the year. I wrote a list, but it was too long. I pulled a few out… it was still too long. So I gave up on the top ten idea.
Here’s a bunch of albums I liked in 2007 in no particular order. There’s more than ten, and I probably missed some really good ones.
The Fiery Furnaces
Widow City
Thrill Jockey Records
thefieryfurnaces.com
myspace.com/thefieryfurnaces
Ex-Guru music video
Fabchannel: Live show video
Modest Mouse
We Were Dead Before the Ship Even Sank
Epic
modestmouse.com
myspace.com/modestmouse
Kings of Leon
Because of the Times
Hand Me Down
kingsofleon.com
myspace.com/kingsofleon
The National
Boxer
Beggars Banquet
americanmary.com
myspace.com/thenational
Battles
Mirrored
Warp
myspace.com/battlestheband
Justice
†
Ed Banger
myspace.com/etjusticepourtous
Arcade Fire
Neon Bible
Rough Trade
www.arcadefire.com
http://www.myspace.com/arcadefireofficial
The Go! Team
Proof of Youth
Memphis Industries/Sub Pop
www.thegoteam.co.uk
http://www.myspace.com/thegoteam
New Young Pony Club
Fantastic Playroom
Modular
wearepony.com
myspace.com/newyoungponyclub
!!!
Myth Takes
Warp
chkchkchk.net
myspace.com/chkchkchk
Of Montreal
Hissing Fauna, are you the Destroyer?
Polyvinyl
ofmontreal.net
myspace.com/ofmontreal
Simian Mobile Disco
Attack Decay Sustain Release
Wichita
simianmobiledisco.co.uk
myspace.com/simianmobiledisco
What have I missed?
In what’s now becoming an annual tradition, here’s what last.fm considers my top 20 most listened to artists of 2007. Some serious surprises in there. I’ve listened to a lot of music this year and some of these I hardly remember hearing at all.
1. The Fiery Furnaces
2. Beastie Boys
3. New Young Pony Club
4. Kings of Leon
5. !!!
6. The Go! Team
7. Cansei de Ser Sexy
8. Broken Social Scene
9. Prefuse 73
10. Hot Chip
11. Death From Above 1979
12. The Arcade Fire
13. Ratatat
14. Four Tet
15. Klaxons
16. Ikara Colt
17= Man or Astro-man?
17= Disney
19= Django Reinhardt
19= Justice
19= MSTRKRFT
Massive oddities include Disney (playing the Musical History of Disneyland just once accounts for 65 tracks!) and Django Reinhardt (his haunting version of La Mer/Beyond the Sea from Bioshock made me search out more by this Jazz great. More Bioshock soundtrack tips here, incidentally).
Some old favourites like Man or Astro-man? and Ikara Colt have re-entered as well, thanks to iPod shuffle.
It doesn’t look like DoCopenhagen have compiled their own list of top music videos for this year so you’re going to have to make do with this top 50 from Pitchfork. Still marvellous. | Comments (1) »
It seems sitting on the Disney board gets you all kinds of perks. Distant Creations report that an audio-animatronic (1970s, in-garage) Steve Jobs has been added to EPCOT’s Spaceship Earth attraction as part of its recent face-lift.
Spaceship Earth is scheduled to re-open in February with a new theme (more about technology and less about communication), narrated by Judi Dench. (via The Disney Blog)
City 7: Toronto Conflict is an interesting looking mod, produced as part of the first thesis project from the Game Design program at George Brown College in Toronto, for Half-life 2.
City 7: Toronto Conflict, is an action packed Half-Life 2 mod with a variety of unique levels and game play. Explore what has become of City 7 in areas like Dundas square, Eaton Center , Mel Lastman square, St. Michael’s Hospital and TTC system under the Combine rule. This version features Gordon Freeman as the main character, stuck in Toronto due to a teleporting accident in Kleiner’s lab. Try to escape this war torn city by finding any type of teleporting technology and send him back to City 17.
Despite our small development team and short production time, we managed to get halfway to the CN tower and have already created 2-3 hours of fun and action packed game play! We want to finish this mod the way it was intended it to be, as a glimpse at what happen to a part of North American during the Combine invasion.
I’ll have to check this out at the weekend… Though I still haven’t played through Episode 2! (via Boing Boing)
Seeing as we’re on the topic of Half-life 2: Episode 2, here’s a bunch of cool stats that Valve released on the game (that I meant to write about before, but forgot). There’s some cool new stuff in there like a heat map of where players have died the most.
Mr T (above) and William Shatner star in commercials for Blizzard’s World of Warcraft. They really play. No, really, they do.
