Tag Archives: popular culture

r/place

sudoscript: Last weekend, a fascinating act in the history of humanity played out on Reddit.

r/place timelapse

For April Fool’s Day, Reddit launched a little experiment. It gave its users, who are all anonymous, a blank canvas called Place.

The rules were simple. Each user could choose one pixel from 16 colors to place anywhere on the canvas. They could place as many pixels of as many colors as they wanted, but they had to wait a few minutes between placing each one.

Over the following 72 hours, what emerged was nothing short of miraculous. A collaborative artwork that shocked even its inventors.

Above, some of my favourite little areas // Below, a static look at the ‘finished’ piece

The final form of r/place

Read more

  • Sudoscript: When Pixels Collide — But at its core, the story of Place is an eternal story, about the three forces that humanity needs to make art, creation, and technology possible.
  • Waxy: This Must Be The /r/Place — Every tiny patch of the Place is a story. Every piece of real estate represents a hard-fought battle, drawn from the collective activity of hundreds of smaller communities teaming together, and often against each other.
  • The r/place Atlas

And here’s a video timelapse that shows areas in detail →

Life on the Internet

r/place: a social experiment on a large canvas

“On April Fool’s Day, when the rest of the internet devolves into a cesspool of unfunny press releases and fake product launches, Reddit becomes the most interesting place online by unleashing a social experiment on its enormous community.” — Andy Baio / Waxy

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Zelda original game map

Take a look behind-the-scenes with design documents from The Legend of Zelda!

Nintendo: It’s The Legend of Zelda’s 30th anniversary this year, and so we thought you might appreciate a look at some illustrations created during the development of the first The Legend of Zelda game, originally released on the Nintendo Entertainment System!

These design docs include a video of the hand drawn overworld map and show how some of the original dungeon sketches translated into the game.

(via Gamasutra)

See the video showcasing the Zelda overworld map →

Light-based media

Nintendo’s design documents from The Legend of Zelda

Some of the hand-drawn maps Takashi Tezuka and Shigeru Miyamoto used when designing the original Legend of Zelda. A fascinating glimpse at Nintendo’s game design process from days gone by.

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Star Trek Original Series Set Tour

Boldly Go to Upstate New York to Board the USS Enterprise

Wired: [In] Ticonderoga, New York, in a former supermarket. There, at 112 Montcalm St., a valiant would-be commander named James Cawley has constructed a precise replica of the original starship set used for Star Trek: The Original Series.

Cawley began construction in 1996, crafting set pieces in his grandfather’s barn-turned-workshop. Over the past 20 years, he has spent an “astronomical” (he said it, not us) sum painstakingly rebuilding the Enterprise. Some items, like Scotty’s wrenches and a Klingon costume, are originals from the show. Others, like Captain Kirk’s chair, Cawley built from scratch.

The Star Trek Tour is permanently housed in Historic downtown Ticonderoga, New York. The sets are full recreations based upon original blueprints. ⋮ The recreated sets achieve a high-degree of accuracy based on original blueprints, hundreds of hours of serious research and thousands of photos – both period images and images culled from extensive review and capture from latest Blu-ray images.

See also: Other posts on this blog tagged ‘Star Trek’, including many on the restoration of the original USS Enterprise model at the Smithsonian.

Craft and creativity

Tour replica original Star Trek sets in upstate New York

Visitors can sit in Captain Kirk’s chair and punch buttons just like William Shatner did 60 years ago, or perhaps gaze into Spock’s scanner and search for signs of life. Everyone has to make that decision at some point. — Wired

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How a Word gets into the Merriam-Webster dictionary

To decide which words to include in the dictionary and to determine what they mean, Merriam-Webster editors study the language as it’s used. They carefully monitor which words people use most often and how they use them.

See also

Use your words

Merriam-Webster: How a word gets into the dictionary

This is one of the questions Merriam-Webster editors are most often asked.
The answer is simple: usage.

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Use your words

South Park: Language and censorship

Video

South Park – Language and Censorship

Kaptainkristian: A look at the animated series that used vulgarity in language to reflect the reality of our lives.

“As a former child myself, I can tell you that awareness overpowers ignorance.”

See also: The Philosophy of South Park — Wisecrack explores South Park’s themes of politically correct (PC) culture, gentrification, advertising, social justice, safe spaces and narcissism.

Tetris, by Box Brown

Tetris: The Games People Play, by Box Brown

Alexey Pajitnov had big ideas about games. In 1984, he created Tetris in his spare time while developing software for the Soviet government. Once Tetris emerged from behind the Iron Curtain, it was an instant hit. Nintendo, Atari, Sega—game developers big and small all wanted Tetris. A bidding war was sparked, followed by clandestine trips to Moscow, backroom deals, innumerable miscommunications, and outright theft.

In this graphic novel,New York Times–bestselling author Box Brown untangles this complex history and delves deep into the role games play in art, culture, and commerce. For the first time and in unparalleled detail, Tetris: The Games People Play tells the true story of the world’s most popular video game.

See also

Craft and creativity

The true story of the world’s most popular video game: Tetris

This is a lovely book too. Mine came with a bookmark and numbered print.

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