Zilla March - Flexing video

Flexing dance video by NextLevel Squad. The music is "Zilla March" by B'ZWAX, video by YakFilms.

Cats Yawn-screaming

Account of a "legal" bank robbery

(via BoingBoing)

Portal short film

A Portal short film made by Eisenfeuer, sound by Hamster Alliance

Occupy Hope

(poster in higher resolution)

OWS + BOA = Together, we are the 100%

How to report the news

(via hinterding.com)

Make some pancakes!

3D anamorphic street paintings

(via BoingBoing)

There is another artist who does kind of the same type of art: Edgar Mueller

The Quest For Every Beard Type

Jon Dyer is on a quest to try pretty much every beard-type out there

(via BoingBoing)

Videogame art

The art of Christian Lorenz-Scheurer

The art of Craig Mullins

The art of Deus Ex: Human Revolution

And here are some nice Videogame wallpapers (links to Dead End Thrills)

Stealth Bastard

Found a review here.

Diablo 3 preorder

Goodbye Battlefield 3, hello Diablo 3 :)

Windows 7 x64 installation on MacBook

Installed Windows 7 Ultimate N today on a MacBook from 2007 (the white one).

2 problems:

1. Booting from a "normal" Windows 7 DVD would just give me a message saying "Select CD-ROM Boot Type". The solution to this can be found here.

2. Installing the Bootcamp drivers for Windows from a Snow Leopard DVD wouldn't work, it would always tell me that it can't run under x64. Bullcrap. It can run. Here or here is how.

Sour Patch Kids & MEF

Placebos

Animated GIFs

also

Les chatons telecom

(via BoingBoing)

Glow-in-the-dark cat

Folsom Prison Gangstaz - Eazy E & Johnny Cash - DJ Topcat

NZZ travel tips

The NZZ is currently running a "summer blog", pointing out nice locations to spend a vacation (or a day-trip) in Switzerland.



I liked these:
- Warum in die Ferne schweifen?
- Zu Besuch an Frankensteins Geburtsort
- Geruhsamkeit am Val Di Campo
- Piratenburg und Gladiatorenrede
- Lost in the deep forest
- Nonchalanter Barock

Adventure / Puzzle games on the Nintendo DS

A couple of days ago I was browsing through video game articles/reviews (specifically for the Nintendo DS) and read something about the "Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney" game-series. I had often heard and read of them, but they never really caught my attention. But since many people seemed to love them, I looked up the reviews and what I read actually convinced me to give it a try. I opted for the newest one, "Apollo Justice: Ace Attorney" (22 $ shipped from Amazon).

I kept reading and browsing, one thing lead to another and I ended up finding out about a whole bunch of adventure/puzzle games for the DS from the last couple of years I had not paid much attention to. It seems like there are quite a lot of hidden gems on that system.

I checked out the "Professor Layton"-series next and I ended up getting the latest installment, "Professor Layton and the Unwound Future". (15 $ from Best Buy, using 15 $ in rewards-coupons. Best part: the cashier had trouble at check-out and ended up giving me back 10 $ in rewards for the hassle. :)

Now defunct video game developer "Cing" has a bunch of interesting games as well. I bought their second DS game, "Hotel Dusk: Room 215", a loooong time ago (must have been one of the first games I got for the DS).
Their first game was "Another Code" (titled "Trace Memory" in the US, got it for 27 $ shipped from eBay) and they later made a sequel to "Hotel Dusk" called "Last Window: The Secret of Cape West" (16 $ shipped from eBay). This one only came out in Japan and Europe because Cing went bankrupt and closed their doors before they could release it in the US.

Other games I got:
999: Nine Hours, Nine Persons, Nine Doors (28 $ shipped from Amazon)
Secret Files: Tunguska (15 $ shipped from Amazon) This is a port of a PC game, but it looks alright and I thought the price was okay.

These look like I might like them as well:
Ghost Trick
Time Hollow

A lot of these are a bit older and not all stores carry them.
What initially turned me off with these games is the graphics, they seemed to be aimed at a younger audience. But from what I read, this is a false impression for many of them.

8 hours in Brooklyn

Shot with a Phantom Flex camera (with gajillion frames per second)

8 Hours in Brooklyn from Next Level Pictures on Vimeo.

500 People in 100 seconds

Tilt-shift video of Chicago

Move

MOVE from Rick Mereki on Vimeo.

Rollerblading down a salt mine

Greg Mirzoyan - Bombing down the salt mine in Poland. from Rollerblade on Vimeo.

Evo / Street Fighter 4 documentaries

Evo was last weekend and I watched almost all Street Fighter 4 matches. Even though I hadn't played the game in quite a while, I found it very enjoyable to watch the tournament. The fighting game scene is very active, there are more fans than ever before and there are quite a few Evo/SF4/SF4-player-related documentaries that are either available or in the making. Let's have a look at some of them. You'll see that each of the movies listed here focuses on a different aspect of the community.

For each movie, I'll write a little summary (with links to where to watch or get the full movie) and then post a trailer as a preview.

"I got next" by Ian Cofino came out... uh... let's see... I think sometime in 2008 or 2009. Or, I should rather say that a SHORT CUT of the movie came out at that time. This "short cut" was available to watch and download for free on the website but it's not there any more (I still have it on my hard drive). This 45-minute-short-cut (pretty respectable length for a short-cut if you ask me :) is all I've seen, so I can only base my statements on that. I enjoyed it a lot. It gives an overview of the best and most famous players in the US and introduces the fighting game scene in general.
From the info on the website, it seems like the full-length-cut of the movie is going to come out soon, even though no precise date is mentioned. I'll keep an eye out for it.



"King of Chinatown" by Calvin Theobald / Psycho Crusher Productions came out a couple of weeks ago, I ordered the DVD and watched it today. This movie accompanies player Justin Wong and his manager (at the time) Isaiah "Triforce" Johnson on their road to success through several tournaments. This movie focuses on the manner that the business-side of things went over the years for these two. Justin Wong was being sponsored by Triforce's company, "Empire Arcadia". I don't want to spoil anything here, but let's just say that I found it very interesting to watch. You can kind of see things coming over the course of the movie and then they unfold at the end. :)



Then there's "Focus" by Steve Hwang, in which the filmmaker accompanies SF4-player Mike Ross during the year 2010. (FYI: Steve Hwang, Mike Ross and Ryan "Gootecks" Gutierrez produce CrossCounter TV together, a popular fighting-game show on YouTube)
I wrote about "Focus" in a previous post, so let me just copy/paste:
The movie follows Mike Ross throughout the year 2010. We learn about his childhood, how he got into videogames, how he developed a passion for Street Fighter and started to compete. At the same time, he also earned a college degree and still plans on using what he learned to do work besides playing SF4 competitively (producing CrossCounter TV, for example). Other than that, the documentary is about his passion for the game and his sense of competition. We see interviews with him, his friends and his family.
I found the movie was well done and interesting to watch.
It's available to watch for free here.



"Arcade - The last night at Chinatown Fair" by Kurt P. Vincent is currently in development. This one is less focused on fighting games specifically than the ones above and rather shows the arcade-scene in general. But still, I find it fits into the same category. From the movie's website: "Arcade is a feature documentary about New York's famed arcade Chinatown Fair. After nearly half a century of being open Chinatown Fair suddenly closed after receiving an unexpected eviction notice, echoing the fate of many small businesses in New York City. The arcade is yet another NYC landmark to be lost."
Scheduled for release in early 2012, the movie was funded through a project on kickstarter.com, which I find a very cool idea. I'll check this movie out when it comes out.



Last but not least, we have "Evo: A documentary" by Joel Ortiz. I stumbled upon this one by pure coincidence in the comments on kotaku.com. I have no other information about it than what's stated in its description on YouTube:
"This is the trailer to my first Documentary. The film will be completed and released in Fall 2012 after next year's EVO. The documentary follows a few players from towns that have non-existent communities as they travel to, and participate in EVO. After being completely overwhelmed by acceptance by the community they return home to train harder than ever before for their return in 2012."

Delivery day!

Got a bunch of packages today!



I had found a copy of "Heart of Darkness" for PS1 on eBay (like I said I would) for 10 bucks.
Then I ordered the documentary "King of Chinatown". I'll write something about it once I'll have watched it (quite a few fighting game documentaries out there, I'll write a separate post about those).
And finally, on Evo-weekend, I ordered a Hori Real Arcade Pro V3 SA stick and a bag for it. Hori had a 20% off sale on their website (thanks again for the coupons, Alex Valle!) and that was too good to pass on.

Dwarf Fortress

I saw a couple of articles lately about this game called Dwarf Fortress.
I'll just leave this here in case anybody (or I) ever feel like getting into it... :)

Dwarf Fortress: “perhaps the most complex video game ever made”
and
Online class to teach Dwarf Fortress
and
A Candid Look Inside the Weird and Wonderful Minds Behind Dwarf Fortress

Focus - Mike Ross / Street Fighter IV documentary

I had seen the trailer for the documentary Focus a while ago (it's about Mike Ross, a professional Street Fighter IV player) and I saw yesterday that it was now completed and available to watch online for free. I just finished watching it and I gotta say it's a great piece.

The movie follows Mike Ross throughout the year 2010. We learn about his childhood, how he got into videogames, how he developed a passion for Street Fighter and started to compete. At the same time, he also earned a college degree and still plans on using what he learned to do work besides playing SF4 competitively (producing CrossCounter TV, for example). Other than that, the documentary is about his passion for the game and his sense of competition. We see interviews with him, his friends and his family.
I found the movie was well done and interesting to watch.

Below is the trailer and here's where you can watch it (for free).

FOCUS: A Documentary Full Length Trailer from Steve Hwang on Vimeo.

Eric Chahi

There was an article on Kotaku about the game Another world (also known as Out of this world in the US), programmed by Eric Chahi as a one-man-project. The article was accompanied by the following video, which is a full walkthrough:



All this made me think of another game Eric Chahi worked on: Heart of Darkness. I have it for PC somewhere at home but I can't get to it now. I think I never finished it, I played it for a bit but haven't seen the ending. Now I'm thinking I should find a copy for the PlayStation and play it again (since my PS3 can play PS1 games).

Eric Chahi is currently working on a new game called From Dust. It's coming out now (or soon) for Xbox360 and PC and a PS3 version will follow later, I believe. I saw a video of it and it looks interesting.

Free Beats!

He brings the beatbox, you bring the rhymes!

(found on BoingBoing)

New rig

I decided to build a new PC with enough Ooomph to run current games and do some video-editing with Vegas or Premiere. It's been a while since I had my last desktop PC (only had MacBooks in recent times). So I spent some time in the last weeks reading articles on tomshwardware.com to get some inspiration. Their "system builder marathons" were especially useful. They seem to do them every 3 months and they build out systems for 500, 1000 and 2000 $ each time. My target was 1000 $, I ended up going slightly over that, but that's okay. :)

Here's what I picked, placed the order yesterday:
http://secure.newegg.com/WishList/PublicWishDetail.aspx?WishListNumber=16722405

I bought the case, the CPU cooler and the motherboard at Fry's since their price was the same as Newegg's after shipping (the CPU cooler was even cheaper at Fry's). And I added two 200mm fans for the case.

A thing I didn't expect to spend much time thinking about but still ended up doing so is a keyboard. I was first gonna go for a Logitech G110 or G510, but then a couple of articles about mechanical keyboards caught my attention. At Fry's, they had a Razer Blackwidow Ultimate on display and I tried it. It felt fantastic. Right then I decided I'd get one of those and I was debating between a Das Keyboard (possibly the Ultimate version, without labels) or the Blackwidow Ultimate. I ended up going for the latter because of the backlighting and the fact that Newegg had a 30$-off coupon for it.
I might still get a Das Keyboard at some point in the future (maybe for work?) and I'm also thinking about getting one for my dad as a surprise.

Eclectic Method - The Dark Side

Eclectic Method - The Dark Side from Eclectic Method on Vimeo.

GTA4 enhancements

I saw 2 things related to GTA4 today: One is a series of screenshots (enhanced, probably) taken from GTA4 running with various mods that make it look really sleek. The other is pretty much the same thing, but in motion:

Ponies and The Epic of Griffith

Permalink to the video in case YouTube takes it down.
(Here's the original music-video by Reggie Watts)

The creator of this video mentions YouTube user MonkeyKingGhost. I checked his videos out and saw this awesome one he made:

Snow monkey relaxing in a hot spring

Abandoned structures

Urban infiltrators explore a 50-story abandoned tower in Bangkok Abandoned Australian Deco power-station, rusting and covered in graffiti

Screaming self-portrait

(seen at BoingBoing)

Elemental Kombat

Stuck - Two guys exploring the Dallas airport at night

STUCK from Joe Ayala on Vimeo.

Here's an interview with the creators of the movie.

Vancouver Riot Kiss

Outland

Outland is finally out on the US PSN (came out in EU almost two weeks ago). I had played through the demo and loved it, made it a day 1 purchase for me. The animations are as smooth as butter and the in-game atmosphere is great.
Here's a "behind the scenes with Housemarque":

Star Wars and Portal Art

Star Wars posters by Olly Moss Permalinks: [1], [2], [3] Portal 2 70s-style movie poster Permalinks: [poster], [wallpaper] (created by ShineyBlueShoes on kotaku.com)

Brink vs. Real World (Parkour)

Heat problem in MacBook Pro solved... NOT!

Update at the bottom.

I've had this annoying heat problem with my 15" MBP (it's a "Sandy Bridge" model from August 2007). If there's heavy load on the CPU (for instance when importing/editing/exporting footage in iMovie), the CPU temperature will go up to 100°C and stay there. The fans will then kick in and rev up to 6000 rpm (the maximum), but it doesn't bring the temperature down. (I assume it helps keeping it there, though, otherwise the laptop would probably catch fire)
I've already tried putting the laptop on 4 little plastic-bottle-caps to make the air-flow underneath the laptop easier, but it doesn't make any difference in terms of temperature. The MBP doesn't have fans underneath, so that was kind of expected. But I still like to use this method to keep the extremely hot bottom of the device away from the desk, it can't hurt.

This is really annoying, since a side-effect of the high temperature is that the CPU will clock itself down (thinking it will bring the temperature down). That means that, besides the high temperature (which certainly isn't good for the parts inside) and the noise, I have less CPU power than I normally would, at the time I need it most.

So yesterday I tried running an iMovie-import after taking the battery out (still using the 4 bottle-caps).
And lo and behold: Problem solved!
I could have sworn that I tried this before, but apparently I hadn't.

Without the battery in and with the CPU at full load, the temperature stays just under 60°C. At that temperature, the fans don't even go over 2500 rpm. (barely over idle-mode) If I manually turn the fans into Typhoon-mode (6000 rpm) with smcFanControl, the temperature goes down to under 50°C.

That's incredible, given that usually, with the battery in, my MBP runs at about 60°C (idle, that is).

Update: I noticed a couple of days later that performance was really bad when playing Flash-videos (YouTube HD, etc.). I did some digging and apparently all Apple Laptops automatically clock themselves down if they run on a power adapter without the battery being inserted. (my processor is a 2.2 GHz and it clocks itself down to 800 MHz, I think) There are tools out there that can circumvent this, but I really don't feel like fooling around with this. So back in goes the battery and up goes the temperature. :(

Russian Prison System documentary

Interview with Dylan Cuthbert of Q-Games

The kid who trained with the Masters of Nintendo during a gaming golden age

Portal 2 - Insane Cube Tricks

Happy Samurai

New virus targeting Iran?

Reports of a new virus, "Stars," hitting Iran: son of Stuxnet?

GTA

The humble beginnings of Grand Theft Auto - article on kotaku.com, with a link to this nice photo gallery of GTA art.

Crysis 2 concept art

Crysis 2 concept art

List of free games on Steam

I found this forum post that lists free games available on Steam.

Anonymous vs. HBGary

Here's an article that sums up what happened last month with the whole "Anonymous vs. HBGary"-thing.
Aaron Barr, the CEO of HBGary, pisses of Anonymous, they teach him a lesson and, in the process, find a lot of juicy material and make it public.

Also:
Article on BoingBoing entitled "How Anonymous decides: inside the lulz-sausage factory"

Gemini Rue

There was an article on Kotaku a couple of days ago about a new point and click adventure game called Gemini Rue. It looks interesting and there's a demo available. I might give it a shot.

The boy who stole Half-Life 2

Eurogamer has an article about Axel Gembe, who stole the Half-Life 2 sourcecode back in 2003:
The boy who stole Half-Life 2
Can't believe that was over 7 years ago already.

Recent games

I found a guy on Craigslist who was/is selling new (sealed) PS3 games for 35 bucks a piece. Must have fallen from a truck, no doubt, but who cares?! Got Gran Turismo 5 and Need for speed - Hot Pursuit from him.
Then, a couple of days later, a guy was selling Mass Effect 2 for 40 $ (new & sealed).
I had planned to get all those games eventually, but wanted to wait until prices had dropped. Little did I know that I'd be able to get them shortly after their launch at those fantastic prices. Craigslist rules for these kinds of things.

After a long, long time, I finally FINISHED a couple of games: Heavy Rain and Bionic Commando: Rearmed. I only saw one ending of Heavy Rain, I'll get back to it later to try and see some of the other endings. It's definitely more of an interactive movie rather than a traditional game. But taking it for what it is, I enjoyed it. BCR was great fun and since I finished it just a couple of days after its sequel came out on PSN, I bought BCR2 right away.

I played Dead Nation a lot in January and am loving it. I eventually got stuck at the cemetary (if you've played the game you probably know which spot I'm talking about) and died over and over again. Lost my motivation for now, I'll get back to it at some point, when I feel like it.
I'd like to try it in co-op mode too, but I have no one to play it with. (Tried it with my friend in Dakar, but it's too laggy)

I dug Demon's Souls out from the shelf and played it for a couple of hours, having only played the tutorial many months ago). The game is incredible. It's old-school, hard as fuck, addicting and beautiful. And I haven't even finished world 1-1! Its successor, Dark Souls, is already in the making.

The making of EVE Online

PCGamer has an article about "The making of EVE Online", an interesting read.