These Mysterious Symbols Have Been in 19 Video Games and No One Knows Why

A strange sigil has been cropping up in (mostly indie) games and, thanks to some amazing detective work on the part of some redditors, it appears to be pointing to some kind of ARG. Is this Frog Fractions 2? Is lowbrowculture.com Frog Fractions 2? If you want to get deeper down the rabbit hole of this, I can recommend the /r/gamedetectives subreddit which consumed a lot of my productivity last week, especially their work on Overwatch’s apparent “Sombra ARG”, where it’s perfectly reasonable to take a random line of source code from a web page, run it through a Vigenére cipher (using the passphrase gained from a previous bit of detective work) and then diff’ing the resulting “datamoshed” image with an original image to get even more clues. I love this stuff. (Incidentally, this is the second week in a row an article from Patrick Klepek has been making me happy. He’s doing amazing work at Vice.)

Fake human sacrifice filmed at Cern, with pranking scientists suspected

Let’s just take a look at the lede to this story:

Spokeswoman at high temple of particle physics suggests ‘scientific users’ of the Geneva facility ‘let their humour go too far’ with staging of occult rite

Holy shit. Something about the phrase “pranking scientists suspected” doesn’t fill me with confidence.

Disney’s Practical Guide to Path Tracing

Walt Disney Animation studios have put up a primer on a super-technical high-tech subject presented as if it was a 1950s documentary. It’s really informative and really charming. See also Disney’s Practical Guide to Snow Simulation.

How much faster would it be to render Toy Story in 2011 compared to how long it took in 1995?

Speaking of Pixar, Quora has some real gems hidden away deep in its belly. Like this fascinating 2011 answer from Craig Good, Pixar boffin, about the render times for the original cinema release of Toy Story vs the 2010 remaster.

All Mapped Out

Popbitch goes deep into the Yeah Yeah Yeah’s Maps, digging into the music theory behind what makes it so unique and why it turns up under so many pop songs. Why did the Black Eyed Peas sample the intro? Let’s take a look at the drum tab to find out, shall we?

Spaceplan (game)

I’ve got a real soft spot for ‘clicker’ games. Things like Cookie Clicker and Candy Box just hoover up my productivity (honestly, I went to look up the URLs for these and I just lost 20 minutes to Cookie Clicker again). Spaceplan does nothing new with the formula, but it’s very slickly done and, unlike most other games of the genre, this one actually has a well-written story.

No Man’s Sky (game)

No Man’s Sky is a peaceful, colourful slice of sci-fi. When people ask me what it’s like, I say it’s very Minecrafty. You travel to galaxies to collect resources that allow you to travel to more galaxies and collect more resources. And you do this again and again until you’ve explored the universe. The act of doing this is so serene and calming, it’s a lovely refresher from the usual hyperkinetic games that come out this time of year. Also, there’s a lovely story doing the rounds of people naming the planets they find after dead relatives as a way to remember them. Pull-quote: “It’s one of 18 quintillion planets now and no one else may ever find it but I know it’s there and it has her name on it. That’s good enough for me.”

Hikea (video)

Web series where people take drugs assemble Ikea furniture. In the first episode, Giancarlo and Nicole take acid and build a chest of drawers and it’s actually super sweet.

A Burglar’s Guide to the City (book)

Geoff Manaugh (BLDGBLOG) is one of my favourite writers. In his book A Burglar’s Guide to the City, he talks about how burglars have used architecture to plan their robberies. If, like me, your favourite parts of heist films like Ocean’s Eleven are the bits where they construct elaborate recreations of the places they’re about to rob, then this book is right up your street.

Phone Sex Operators (article)

A series of portraits of the people on the other end of phone sex lines. Their stories are fascinating

“My first night was on a Saturday at midnight. It was a gentleman who I believe called himself Bob. He told me about his first experience with a glory hole. He explained that he had no one he felt comfortable telling this to, and I felt a strange intimacy between us, though it was rooted in a fantasy. I think it’s easier to release repressed desires to a non-judgmental, fictional person, because there are no consequences in the outside world.”

In an effort to push out the jive and bring in the love, I’m going to more of an effort to talk about the things that are bringing me joy.

Stranger Things

It never quite shakes off its influences (basically all of Spielberg’s early 80s films - Jaws, E.T., Close Encounters and Poltergeist), but as a piece of summer fluff, Stranger Things was surprisingly entertaining. It’s less cliffhanger-y than the other Netflix original shows, but it’s managed to achieve a pretty compelling vibe that draws you back for more. I’m interested to see what they do for season 2 now that they’ve basically tapped the 80s Spielberg well dry.

Sleeping Giants by Sylvain Neuvel

Sleeping Giants is a big dopey sci-fi thriller about the discovery of huge pieces of a statue from an ancient civilisation. And the whole thing is told in an epistolary manner, where each chapter is the transcript of an interview. So the information is drip-fed to the reader, increasing the tension. It’s not going to win any literary awards, but it’s so fast-paced and cinematic, it’s a great summer read.

Brie Larson as Captain Marvel

Call me Captain Marvel. pic.twitter.com/IgqRIb9ijM

— Brie Larson (@brielarson) July 24, 2016

A lot of great news came out of Comic Con. We got a rad Doctor Strange trailer, a pretty decent Wonder Woman trailer. But my absolute favourite news so far has been the announcement that Brie Larson will be playing Carol Danvers in the Captain Marvel film. This is some perfect casting.

Films You’d Love Your Kids to See

The Lighthouse Cinema here in Dublin are running a “Films you’d love your kids to see” season. Now, I question the logic of programming for kids and scheduling shows way too late for kids to actually attend. Still, I’m not going to turn up an opportunity to see The Goonies in the cinema.

Preacher

If, four months ago, you had asked me about my expectations for AMC’s adaptation of Preacher, I would have probably given you the vocal equivalent of the poop emoji. But the finale this week capped what turned out to be an unexpectedly great season of an unexpectedly great show. It’s not a straight one-for-one adaptation of the comic, but they absolutely nailed the tone of the books. Definitely worth checking out.

Last week, I began the process of moving this site from Jekyll to Hugo. Jekyll is great. Really great, actually. It was my first real experiment with static sites and it was really fun and taught me a lot. But I’ve been starting to feel its limits. I pumped in everything from the past iterations of my blog, through Wordpress and Tumblr, leaving me with over 1,400 posts. So building the site with Jekyll each time I wanted to update it was slowwwww. Jekyll’s other big draw – its GitHub integration is amazing – is great if you’re hosting your site there. But I’m not. I’m self-hosting. So I started looking at Hugo.

I also had a look at Middleman, which has some impressive names using it, but was just a deeply unpleasant experience as an end-user¹.

So for funtimes, I wanted to see how long it would take a fresh, vanilla install of the three most popular static site generators – Jekyll, Middleman and Hugo – to render the 1,400+ individual markdown files that make up this blog.

Jekyll
35.35 real 31.04 user 2.50 sys

middleman
22.47 real 30.61 user 3.97 sys

hugo
8.12 real 8.96 user 1.45 sys

It’s hard to argue with this kind of performance improvement, but what sealed the deal was the fact they include a built-in hugo import jekyll command that can get you started migrating your site across. I had my entire site migrated across in less than an hour.

Recently, I’ve fallen in love with Pico-8. It has completely replaced Processing as my go-to tool for creating toys in code. If you’re of the same vintage as me (i.e. you lived through the 8-bit era and your year of birth seems distressingly far down web forms), then you might get a kick out of it too. Here are some of the reasons I like it so much.

1. It has everything you need

It’s got a built-in editors for code, sound effects, music and levels. You can construct an entire game without ever leaving the application.

2. It’s web-aware

With the touch of a button¹, you can generate a gif of your program as it’s running. A small, perfectly-sized gif that’s perfect for tweeting. Speaking of which…

3. < 140 characters to do cool things

The #pico8 hashtag on Twitter has some great examples of the things people are doing with Pico-8. In less than 140 characters, you can have an entire program.

4. It reminds me of the good old days

I still remember sitting in front of a Commodore 64 for hours and typing out a program from Commodore User Magazine. It was a great way of learning a language and, looking back I realise, a great way of teaching patience. Well, the Pico-8 Fanzine also has a