“Get Perpendicular” amarcord
What happens when a big company dealing in hard disks decides to explain the benefits of a new technology to the mainstream public in an unconventional manner? In such a case what can happen is that the aforementioned company ends up with something like the following animation, a lump of nerditude like few have been probably seen in the entire commercial history of consumer storage.
Wallpapers on the spotlight: Trine 2
Along with the official announcement of Trine 2 release, during the E2 2010 Atlus unveiled screenshots, a teaser trailer and some artworks of the game. All the stuff regarding the sequel to the marvellous puzzle-platformer developed by the Finnish company Frozenbyte has been collected for the latest post in the Videogames highlights series, while the topic of today’s post will be one of the aforementioned artworks which in my humble opinion is worth the evaluation by any fan of games and fantasy in search for a new wallpaper to decorate one’s own virtual desktop with.
Mercedes-Benz.tv: “Sorry”
I don’t like advertising, in any conceivable form and I try to keep it away from this site as much as possible. And yet I have to admit that exceptions to the rule of banality, mediocrity and stupidity celebrated by advertising do exist. Just take this TV commercial by Mercedes-Benz for instance, a very short cutting including black humor, tale snippets, suspense, poetry flashes. Of course it’s just an illusion, that in fact goes away at 32nd second just when the German car maker logo appears and the brainwashing commanding purchase, consumption, death begins. Bittersweet…
Fun with Winamp
While I am busy installing new processors (wetting my pants because afterward the PC doesn’t work anymore), getting utility software I didn’t suspect the existence about and wasting time with really funny little games, some sort of computer epiphany happened below my unbelieving eyes. In very poor words I’ve downloaded and adopted the last version of Winamp, once again choosing it as the predefined player for running everything is music and discovering that now MilkDrop profits by the graphic card shaders for a visual experience that’s difficult to replicate otherwise.
KarmaKula chapter 8: “Flowers of Illusion”
The Karma Kula’s journey is about to end, and in Flowers of Illusion the lonely demon hunter playing as the protagonist of the live action series from Ninjai Gang finally arrives near the temple of “Queen Putah” (corrections on the name are welcome) where the unlucky monks are tortured (…) and drained of their vital semen. The oddities and the funny moments of the previous episodes are far away here, while the demon makes her appearance in a rather unfavorable situation for the health of our hero and the fulfillment of his mission.
KarmaKula chapter 7: “The Riverboat”
The Karma Kula’s journey goes on even though our hero has to be in company of the little pesty monk saved in the previous chapter. As it was widely predictable The Riverboat marks the reunion between the apprentice monk and his master, while the Karma Kula plays a little gooseberry considering that the old priest doesn’t like who “makes his living by his sword“.
Danny DeVito knows how to handle the Intertubes
That Italian-American actor Danny DeVito have decided to open his own official fanpage on Facebook is something I couldn’t mind less. The funny, or vaguely interesting thing, is how he decided to do so, with a video clip shot in his lounge (or whatever) ending up with the Italian phrase “Non più scuro della mezzanotte“. Namely a regional expression (translated in “Not darker than midnight”, meaning “It can’t possibly be worse than the worst”) that not even all the Italians are able to decode on the fly. Fascinating, anyway, even though I still have to understand why…
KarmaKula chapter 6: “Big Monk, Little Monk”
Refreshed by the bath full of blood and human haslet of chapter 5, the protagonist of the new live action series from the Ninjai Gang resumes his journey toward the cursed mountain (so to speak). But the Karma Kula is that kind of protagonist which never lacks nuisances, whereby in Big Monk, Little Monk our hero runs into a little and noisy apprentice monk fallen victim of a misadventure while he was travelling with his master.
KarmaKula chapter 5: “Finally a chance to relax”
In a charming frame made of high snowy peaks and stone lanterns, while he takes a refreshing bath in the moonlight, the Karma Kula comes back in action against the endless legion of his antagonists holding his sword and performing high athletic moves. In Finally a chance to relax, the fifth episode of the live action series from the Ninjai Gang, our hero quits the hallucinated atmosphere of the previous installment and the show once again offers prevalently martial contents to the viewer.
KarmaKula chapter 4: “BOGI YOGI”
What can I say: if there is a series that always repeats itself, with no thrills or continual stylistic variations this surely isn’t Karma Kula! After the first two episodes full of swordfighting and the third chapter with an horror/mysticism setting, on June the Bellord family and all the crew that made the live action project annihilates any possible expectation by releasing another surprise, a sort of hallucinated journey among strange characters and situations that are far beyond the boundary of insane humour.
KarmaKula chapter 3: “Harvesting the Ohas”
KarmaKula, the new episodic series from the Ninjai Gang expressly developed for the web goes on as scheduled. On the last Friday the Gang has released the third chapter, Harvesting the Ohas, with which the series has shown yet another trait after the splatter ninjitsu of The Ninjas and the spaghetti western The Frog in the Well. The new episode features horror elements and Eastern mysticism, acting more like an introduction for the events to come than like a self-finishing tale as the two previous chapters.
KarmaKula chapter 2: “The Frog in the Well”
As previously scheduled, on Wednesday, April 8 the Ninjai Gang has released on-line the second chapter of KarmaKula, the live action series that made its debut at the end of March and that represents, after Ninjai, the last achievement of the Gang’s many creative energies. The book is more or less always the same, though this time it’s worth reporting a definitely different gore level compared to the first chapter and the introduction of new directing gimmicks for a series that takes more and more the shape of some kind of cold steel fantasy western.
Two on-line bloody series to follow closely
Internet has always been a wonderful place, and so it remains: while the owners of mainstream contents hurry to stretch out their shadow on any single particle of the existing web or the one yet to come, turning a space of expression free from the power games into something disgustingly similar to commercial television, music and movie industry, somewhere there still is interesting stuff to go after that is exclusively born from and for the Net.
Sony’s firm faith in the Blu-ray format corpse
Replying to the speculations of analyst Mike Hickey, which forecasted the marketing of a cheaper PlayStation 3 edition without the costly embedded Blu-ray drive, Sony was resolute in specifying that the simple idea would be absurd and would kill “the backbone” of the console because games are built just upon the BD format. “Blu-ray will always be part of PS3“, Sony says, but the market environment and the slow, too much slow growth of high definition disks sales allow to easily predict the fact that within the years to come such model will be only valid for the videogames of the Japanese console and very little more.
Will Blu-ray die at Christmas 2008?
The worldwide recession is getting worse, wasting economies and laying off employees that will find themselves with no salary hence without money to spend in home entertainment. In such a scenario what was a balance leaning between hope and pessimism turns in a sword of Damocles dangerously close to deadly hit Sony’s Blu-ray, that maybe will get through this Christmas but could not be able to see the dawn of the next one.
The uncertain fate of Blu-ray between hope and pessimism
Blu-ray, the optical format for high definition that won the commercial and technology war against Toshiba HD DVD, continues to be the great question mark of the multimedia market. If the inquiries highlight how consumers aren’t presently interested to the new technology, the disk “in blue” brings controversy also and foremost among the giants of consumer electronics, alternatingly foreseeing for Blu-ray the perspective of a bright future or a short run which soon will take it into oblivion, replaced by more advanced contents delivery channels.
Blu-ray? Nobody wants it, yet
Since the past 19th of February, when Toshiba announced the forsaking of HD DVD, the Sony Blu-ray format has became the only standard for the distribution of Hollywood blockbusters in high definition. But at the end of the commercial war between the hi-def formats, after almost three years of hits below the belt and arid controversy, what remains is a market unwilling to go conquered by the (presumed) marvels in 1080p and consumers not particularly interested. However the majors believe in it, and the tech companies continue to invest into the improvement of devices and disks based on the “blue” standard specifications.
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