Fanvid Friday: The Greatest Teacher, Failure Is

Last year, I shared a bit about the history of fan videos and the culture and people who make them. Today I want to share an amazing fan video from Heroes Fan Productions titled "The Greatest Teacher Failure Is" that focuses on the legacies of both Yoda and Luke Skywalker. It's a great display of masterful editing and music choice that examines the ways that Luke Skywalker and Yoda both attempted to shape new Jedi for the Jedi Order and how they both failed, and what to learn from it. It's by turns bittersweet, reflective, and uplifiting.

You can watch it here:



A tip of the keyboard to user motherboxing for cluing me in to this video's existence.

Vidders: History, Heroes Of Media Fandom & How To Be One Too

In what's one of the more novel uses of github I've seen in a while, lim, a fan artist whose work was recently shown at the Vancouver Art Gallery has released one of the definitive histories of early media fandom: Videlicet.. Like much of early media fandom in sci-fi and fantasy, its early pioneers were women. Not only does the zine look back at the past with profiles of prominent vidders, it also helps forward the future by presenting a DIY guide for your own fanvids.

Let's back up a bit. What is vidding? Vidding began in the mid-70s, after the original Star trek series went off the ait. Trekker Kandy Fong synced Star Trek stills sold to collectors, projected them on a slide projector, and synced the stills with music from a cassette player. This was the earliest version of fan-made music videos, called "vids", and vidding was often done live. For years, vids were only shown at fan conventions. While the VCR's widespread use made vidding more accessible, it still required extensive technical skill, often requiring daisy chaining VCRs together, splicing in footage and audio from many different source on-the-fly and as you needed it. Even with the rise of broadband connections and media sharing sites like YouTube, vidding still remains grounded in smaller communities, curated experiences, and smaller, more intimate exhibitions.

Videlicet covers a LOT of ground, so while I encourage a deep dive, I want to share two of my favorite parts of this zine:

• Sound and Story, an essay about sound work in vidding and in the popular Marvel fanvid 'Glitter and Gold'

It’s the soundwork that emphasizes their physicality of the characters, reminding us of the opening lyric of flesh and bone; we are cued not to think of these superheroes as 2-D comic book cutouts but as real three-dimensional bodies. The sounds of human effort are layered into the music with perfect synchronicity, so that we hear grunting, the crunch of bone, the crack of gunshots – things that mark the collision of people and things in a way that makes the fighting feel real; we can feel it in our teeth.

• Lyrical Interpretation, demonstrating lyric/clip connections through example:

Dissecting lyrical interpretation is making the brushstrokes visible. Picasso did not paint the world as he saw it. He painted it as he processed it in the same way that vidders do. Vidding is a lie that makes people see the truth. When working through a lyrical interpretation of a vidsong, aim to make choices that strengthens that truth you are trying to vid and let that drive the lyrical interpretations.

Readers, do you have any favorite fanvids? What was your favorite part of Videlicet? Have a fanvid you'd like to promote? Sound off in the comments!

It Came From YouTube: The Guild of Ambience

Working alone in a home office can be kind of isolating. Falling asleep to silence can be difficult. Finding just the right level of audio background sounds for a tabletop gaming session can be a chore. Luckily, there's a YouTube channel I came across recently than can solve all three of those scenarios and then some: The Guild of Ambience . The youtube channel is a passion project of a graphic and sound designer from Australia that focuses on fantasy-influenced environmental soundscapes for mood, sleep and relaxation.

For expample, if you're a Game Master wanting to give your players a little more immersion while everyone's in Ye Olde Tavern waiting for the adventure to begin, you could queue up this video:



 Or if some gentle nature sounds with the occasional village ambiance is your thing, you can try this:




 My favorite is this video here-- a gentle soundscape with an hour of original music that presents a gentle shifting of moods:

You can also follow along on Facebook or buy Guild Apparel here on redbubble.

Wrestling's Ultimate (Social Justice) Warriors

Honestly, I think the "not my president" t-shirt would have work-
ed even better as a "#notmypresident" shirt but that's nitpicking.

I've been a fan of pro wrestling ever since I was a little kid. And ever since I was a teen, the smaller and indie-er the pro wrestling, the better. While I've posted about pro-wrestling before, Kentucky-based Appalachian Mountain Wrestling seems to have created one of the best heel (that's a "bad guy" character for you non-wrestling fans) characters in ages: The Progressive Liberal.

Deadspin has a little bit about him, including a recap of some of his pre-match promo speech:

“You know what, I think Bernie Sanders would make a great Secretary of State,” Richards said before being jeered. Later on, he tried to persuade the crowd. “I want to exchange your bullets for bullet points. Bullet points of knowledge.”

In another article that goes deeper into the genesis of the character, Deadspin points out that while it's a gimmick that might have a limited shelf life, it is a perfectly-tailor-made hell gimmick that can work to make you want to boo him no matter what side of the aisle you're on politically:

The details really make the gimmick, and they’re not as obvious as the “Not My President” shirt. It’s the way the Progressive Liberal says “Appalachia,” pronouncing the third syllable with a hard A as in “ate,” instead of the flat A preferred by locals. The audience immediately understands that he’s not from here. Richards was originally billed out of Richmond, Virginia, his actual hometown. But he and James realized that when performing in Kentucky, which has a Richmond of its own, the crowd would become confused. So his origin became Washington, D.C. 

The [pro wrestling] industry has always been replete with guys working effete liberal gimmicks, but this is the perfect place and time, and Dan Richards has built a sustainable meal ticket, at least within the limited scope of the indie circuit. Test your mental constitution and imagine for a minute if Hillary had won; this character would still be popular and paying customers would still project their frustrations onto him, for a different reason. 

Commenter semangeloph1 points out that he hasn't even scratched the surface of what sort of heelish things the character could do:

This schtick could be milked for so much. He could challenge the women’s champion to a match because he doesn’t see gender. He could steal the belt and give it to some other heel loser to “redistribute” the wealth. Every time he loses a match, he could appeal it to some fake wrestling governing body and get the match turned over to him... When he wins, he could give the loser gift-certificates to Whole Foods and yoga sessions. He could refuse to fight championship matches unless assured that the ring is carbon neutral. I think if done right, this character could be one of the all-time great heels.

I haven't enjoyed stuff like this since Daniel Bryan cut a hell of a heel promo about how much he loved being vegan:
Of course, if that's not on-the-nose enough for you, there's also a wrestler literally billing himself as a Social Justice Warrior. Meet Leon Scott, the Social Justice Warrior, who wrestles in leagues in Central Florida. I've never wanted to have so much in common with a wrestler before: patches include Eat the Rich and Black Lives Matter, as well as anti-fascist and pro-trans messages. His Twitter account even re-tweets anti-fascist/anti-racist memes of the current administration. 

VIDEO: Fan Makes Working Cortana Hologram In Real Life

Sure, you might be a big Halo fan. You've beaten every game in the franchise, have series-accurate battle armor and Master Chief pajamas. You've still got nothing on this brilliant tinker and fan. Microsoft named its virtual assistant program, Cortana, after the AI that assists Master Chief over the bulk of the Halo series. But Micosoft's virtual assistant existed only as a disembodied voice on your device of choice. Until now, because this guy and his wife teamed up and made a freakin' working holographic Cortana! Check it out:

VIDEO: What The Heck? Nintendo PlayStation Console Brought To Life!

Description: Looking like a cross between a CD-ROM drive and a Super
Nintendo console, the Nintendo/Sony CD-ROM protoype unit was thought lost until a
chance discovery a few years ago. Proof of Sony & Nintendo's ill-fated team up in
the Sony logo in the console's lower left corner.

There's a missing link that connects Nintendo's Super Nintendo Entertainment System (SNES), its successor the Nintendo 64, and its rival console the Sony Playstation: the SNES-CD, also code named the Play Station. The console was supposed to be launched as an add-on for the standard SNES, as well as a stand-alone hybrid console by Sony called the Play Station. The partnership between Nintendo and Sony crumbled, so Sony developed their own solely CD-ROM based console, the Sony PlayStation.

About two years ago, one of the original Nintendo Play Station prototypes was found after it was purchased in a bankruptcy auction of the assets from a software company. The protype was tested, and while the top-loading test cartridge of the unit worked, the CD-ROM drive didn't work, nor did the audio output. Vlogger and console model Ben Heckerdorn, aka Ben Heck, got his hands on this prototype unit in July of last year, and did a meticulous disassembly, tear-down, documentation and reassembly. He was able to get a lot of information on the inner workings of the system and was able to determine that while the Super Nintendo part of the console still worked, but the CD-ROM drive was completely self-contained and seemed to require some sort of boot disc to access the audio output or anything else on the CD. A little while later, gaming enthusiast site Retro Collect announced that an anonymous source sent them the necessary boot disc.

With the final piece of the puzzle in place, Ben Heck got to work, and with a little bit of hard work, a little bit of luck and a lot of engineering analysis, he was able to get the prototype working and even ran a homebrew game on it. Check out the whole video here:

"So Goth, I Was Born Black": Screamin' Jay Hawkins & Goth Music

Musician Jay Hawkins originally had the idea to record "I Put A Spell On You" as a slow, mournful blues ballad. The original, un-issued version recently surfaced on YouTube:

 If the above version was what had been originally issued, the world would have missed out on a song that laid the foundation for Shock Rock and Goth music. Without "Screamin'" Jay Hawkins' raw power, deep-throated growls and groans and powerful operatic delivery, it would have flown under the radar. It certainly would never have been picked as The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame's 500 Songs that Shaped Rock and Roll and not been covered by artists ranging from Nina Simone to Credence Clearwater Revival to Nick Cave. It turns out, however, that Hawkins' recording session of "I Put A Spell On You" that influenced rockers from Alice Cooper to Rob Zombie ended up happening completely by accident. As the book "All Music Guide to the Blues: The Definitive Guide to the Blues" recounts in Hawkins' own words, it all happened because the producer for Okeh Records brought along a bunch of food and alcohol for the band and Hawkins gave the recording session a go when he was three sheets to the wind:

"[The producer] got everybody drunk, and we came out with this weird version … I don’t even remember making the record. Before, I was just a normal blues singer. I was just Jay Hawkins. It all sort of just fell in place. I found out I could do more destroying a song and screaming it to death.”

Serene Pristine has a great essay on how when Hawkins went from just plain ol' Jay Hawkins to "Screaming" Jay Hawkins, kicked off the Shock Rock aesthetic and can truly be called the Grandfather of Goth Music.

For a song that's been so influential and had dozens of covers, debates over which version is best still rage on today. Do you have a favorite, or can nothing stack up to the original? Sound off in the comments and share your favorite!

The Last Game I Make Before I Die: Crashland Dev's Amazing Talk

This video is the full GDC 2017 talk given by Sam Coston of game studio Butterscotch Shenanigans. It details the story of Crashlands, the large-scale 2D action-RPG crafting game that Sam worked on with his brothers and talks about his struggles in dealing with developing the game and his own cancer diagnosis. The talk doesn't just touch on Sam's deeply personal story but also offers a very insightful look at the game development process.

Retro Video: Classic DOS-era Art Step By Step

For your morning retro-game pleasure, I humbly present to you the following: A video from the wonderful channel "DOS Nostalgia"containing time-lapses of all of the background art from a Sierra On-Line classic "The Colonel's Bequest". Until the widespread adoption of VGA color modes in computer monitors, the designers at Sierra stored background art for their games in a special vector format.

One especially neat thing about this format (at least if you're a behind the scenes graphic design nerd like I am) is that the background screen art can be displayed and drawn in a sort of step by step fashion-- essentially letting you see just how it was imagined, laid out and created by the game's artists. All in all, it's a fascinating peek at the artistic process in an otherwise long-lost game format.

Please enjoy this gorgeous, dark, and detailed art set to the beautiful MT-32 music from the game below.

Helluva Composer: Behind The Music of DOOM and more

PC Gamer has a great interview (and over-view) of the work of Mick Gordon, who most recently won praise for the bone-crunchingly, demon-slayingly hard rocking soundtrack to the recent DOOM reboot. As they introduce him:

“Back when Bethesda and id Software were making announcements about the recently rebooted Doom... [it was announced that] Mick Gordon was onboard to compose the soundtrack  His work on Wolfenstein: The New Order and Killer Instinct is cherished among those games’ playerbases, and the intensity of both owe a lot to his anarchic (but still impressively subtle, when it needs to be) approach to getting visuals and music swinging to the same beat. Based in Australia, Gordon’s been around for a while. He’s worked on two Need For Speed games, as well as Shift 2 Unleashed and ShootMania Storm, to name a few examples. Currently he’s working with Arkane Studios on its Prey reboot, which—as he relates below—will mark a departure from his recent, foot-to-the-floor audio rampages.” 

I'm not kidding about the DOOM soundtrack being awesome. One of the few complaints about the handling of the game's release was "why wasn't the soundtrack released on day one with the game?"-- though that was eventually rectified with the release of an official soundtrack. Gordon himself released an in-depth look at his process behind the music in a two part video series on his official youtube channel, available below:

[VIDEO] Holy Crap! Atari 2600 Emulator Runs In Minecraft

Description: Screenshot of aerial view of  a grass field in Minecraft
with grooves carved out to spell "Holy Crap!!!"

We interrupt your whatever you are doing to bring you this amazing video from user SethBling showing all of the work that went into getting the popular sandbox-construction Minecraft to run an Atari 2600 emulator INSIDE the game using nothing but the existing tools and blocks available in Minecraft itself. Seriously, like, he has a memory cache built out of blocks of dirt and stone.

Anyhow, the video below shows the emulator in action as well as goes into the fascinating technical explanations of how he worked to pull it off. It also doubles as a clear technical explanation of how early cartridge based systems and consoles worked.

Science YouTubers' Tribute To Hamilton

No, no, not not the politician Hamilton-- the scientist Hamilton. They do use a pretty awesome homemade acapella cover of the first song from the play Hamilton to do it, though. It's arranged well and diversely cast, too, Check it out!




So what did William Rowan Hamilton discover? He discovered quaternions, which are an extension of complex numbers: rather than just one number (i) that equals -1 when squared, these use thee (i,j,k). Also in that formula, multiplication is no longer commutative (the order in which things are multiplied matters, so a times b is not the same as b times a). They can be used to represent rotations.

Video: Diversity Makes Cooler Games For Everyone

Youtuber MrBtoungue took a break from his usual fare to expound upon the biggest complaint had had about gaming in 2015: it wasn't diverse enough. How did that affect him, a dude who described himself as "a comfortable cis white male with a lump of coal where my heart should be"?

Part of the reason is that two of his favorite games of the year, the Witcher 3 and Bloodbourne, could only have happened as unique products of their respective developer's times and culture. As he puts it, diversity is an asset:

I see something like an undiscovered country's worth of talent. Right here, within our own borders, a country full of people who want to make and play games-- and would be making and playing games in greater numbers if we didn't keep throwing obstacles in their path. I always wonder over the years how many From-Soft's-worth of talent we've driven off by us constantly asking to see their tits. How many projects' worth of creativity have we driven off with behavior that's racist or homophobic and transphobic or just generally abusive?
The cost of unequal representation and games is not only unfairness but wastedpotential.

You can watch the entire video below:

DIY Kill-Bot: A.I. Plays Dark Souls PVP

Description: A screenshot of a giant headless rock creature (golem) kicking an
armored knight square in the butt. Heehee, butt.

The Dark Souls series is known for its punishing difficulty in single player mode (and making it even worse for pirates who accessed it early) and its cut-throat competition in player versus player strategies. One user on gitHub going by the handleMetal Crow decides to combine his love of programming, his passion for playing Dark Souls PVP and desire to have an AI do his bidding into making his own bot that can play Dark Souls PVP and shared it with the world.

What's really interesting to me, coming at it from a non-technical viewpoint, is how much of this project was complicated by the fact that for all the strategy talk surrounding Dark Souls, the system is a closed system, making it sort of akin to trying to peer into a sealed black box. As he explains, he had to pretty much reverse-engineer the game:

In order to have the AI do anything, i needed to be able to feed it data about the game state. The simplest and most direct way of doing this is would be to have it watch various variables in the game code, such as the enemy's x and y location, and then use that with the AI logic. However, since the game's code isn't open source, i needed to reverse engineer anything i wanted to use.

Ok, so maybe that doesn't sound that surprising, right? Just point a program at a game, observe it crunch some numbers, and you're done? As it turns out, writing a bot to play against a human is really tricky-- and not just because us humans can be highly illogical. Nope, Metal Crow had to teach the bot to avoid backstab damage, and he had to create a sort of neural network to do it. He explains:

{In PVP]...the primary combat isn't standard attacks, but the backstab metagame. This is a beautifully complex mechanic, which allows players to instantly damage another player if they manage to get behind them and close to their back. Unlike standard attacks, an AI cant dodge this very simply, because it is executed instantaneous, there's no windup the AI can see and roll away from. The backstab metagame with humans revolves around identifying if a person is about to go for a backstab, then dodging it or countering it ahead of time. Unfortunately, even though I can easily identify backstab attempts when I play, I cannot for the life of me translate it into discrete logic. Its just something I know from experience, I cant really explain it. However, it is vital the AI be able to detect and dodge backstabs, so I needed to figure out a way to teach it.

So how well does it work? You can watch a teaser video of it in action below:

Everything Old Is New Again: Video Through 136 Yr Old Lens

French photographer Mathieu Stern has a fascinated series called "The Weird Lens Challenge" on his youtube channel, and he recently shared what I think is his most fascinating experiment yet. He look a large-format stationary camera from the 1800s, carefully removed the iris lens, mounted it on his Sony A7II camera, and then posted the video results, which you can watch below:


How well did it work for him? Well, as Stern tells it,

"The lens is incredibly sharp for a 136 years old simple metallic lens, from my test it’s even sharper than most of my modern Canon lenses, the results are amazing … but it also gives some strange lens flares and light leaks that are pretty dreamy".

He also took some still images with the lens, which you can take a look at here.

Harry Potter and the Invisible People of Color

Description: From left to right are screenshot of the character of Lavender Brown from the Harry
Potter movie series In the first two pictures, she is played by a black girl. In the 3rd picture, the character
is portrayed by a white girl. A comment sarcastically asks "Did she get a haircut".

The Harry Potter film series has been a worldwide blockbuster, spanning 8 films and a cornucopia of related merchandising tie-ins. The entire series has many allegories for hatred, genocide and racism. Which, as the Every Word Spoken project points out, is really weird considering that there are so few characters of color in the movie series, and the characters of color that are in the movie barely have any speaking lines. They released a video supercut tallying up how much screen and speaking time people of color got across the entire 19 hours & 39 minutes of the films. POC speaking time, in comparison, was just a little over 5 minutes and 40 seconds. Here's the video:



The tally:

• Total POC talk time: 5 minutes and 40 seconds
• Total run time of all films: 1,207 minutes
• That comes out to 0.47% of screen time in which POCs speak throughout the entire series. This is split among 12 characters and 13 actors (Parvati Patil was played by two actors, Sitara Shah & Shefali Chowdhury)
• Of these 12 characters, 2 were CGI bodies voiced by POC actors (Firenze & Shrunken Head)
• On average, each POC character speaks for 28.33 seconds. 

The books aren't that much better, sadly. Looking at the 200 most mentioned characters in the series, here’s what you’ll find:

• Number of POC characters: 9 (4.5%): Cho Chang, Dean Thomas, Angelina Johnson, Parvati Patil, Lee Jordan, Kingsley Shacklebolt, Blaise Zabini, Padma Patil, Hassan Mostafa 
• Number of POC characters in the top 50: 2 (#44 Cho Chang, #45 Dean Thomas)
• Number of non-human characters in the top 200: 26 (13%)
• (4 more characters are described as being part giant or part veela, but are white-appearing.)

As they point out this means that even in the books, there is better representation of centaurs, house-elves, giants, and goblins in this series than there are of human characters of color. Dobby and Kreacher in particular get way more page time and deeper character development than any of the POC characters. And unlike the series you can't fixit by waving a wand, but maybe we can address it better by pointing it out so the next fantasy series has plenty of different kids from all sorts of backgrounds, too.

Classic Macs, Memories & Facts, Simulated Hijacks

Multimedia artist Jesse English is more well known for his creation called the Sincerity Machine-- a working  ink-ribbon typewriter reworked to actually type in Comic Sans-- but he also considers himself a bit of a new media archeologist. So when he was trying to look up a barely remembered game he played on an AppleII in his 7th grade social studies class. He remembered it was part of a larger lesson plan on terrorism, and reproduced it here:


Using an emulator to create artwork that would look similar to the artwork style that would be generated for Mac Classic is pretty impressive. Also impressive is that a mere 3 weeks later, he found the game in question, and did a Let's Play run of it!

Wander Over Yonder Crew Explains WHY They Go On Hiatus

... and teaches everyone a little bit at all the various people, places and processes that go into just ONE 11-minute cartoon in this fun, zippy and funny little video here.

US Challenges Japan To Mecha Robot Duel. Seriously.

Description: A man stand next to a anime style robot approx.
12 feet tall. Superimposed over the scene are the words "Response
to robot duel challenge".

While Boomers growing up with the Jetsons decry a distinct lack of flying cars in the future they were promised, Gen Xers and Millenials raised on Voltron, Power Rangers and Alien might bemoan the lack of personal mechanized robot fights. Don't get me wrong, the show Battlebots and Robot Wars were fun, but those competitions look like we just taught a bunch of Roombas how to fight.

One US company, MegaBots Inc, has dreamed of a day where personal giant mecha robots compete in stadiums as a spectator sport. They even attempted a Kickstarter to make it happen that was ultimately unsuccessful. So while they do have a paintball-shooting,full functional wearable mech, what can MegaBots Inc do with them aside from selling them to the niche collector market? They can challenge their Japanese rivals in this niche market, Suidobashi Heavy Industry to a duel!



3 days ago, Subarishi Heavy Industries fired back with a response:


Not just accepted, but gauntlet THROWN DOWN.

Space Weird Thing: Charming Take On David Bowie's "Space Oddity"

Randall Munroe draws funny pictures. He also writes books. One book he wrote is named "Thing Explainer: Complicated Stuff in Simple Words" and is all about explaining large ideas using only the ten hundred most used words. On YouTube, one group of people who like music and the funny pictures with words he drew called "Up Goer Five" made "Space Weird Thing", a do it yourself moving picture with music to take on a David Bowie song. It is very well done and I wanted to share it with all of you, too!