The band CHVRCHES have created some excellent music, and this live performance on KEXP back in October of 2013 makes that very obvious. Some folks just have to go ahead, so everyone else has a blazed trail to follow. Enjoy.
This fun little power pop/punk/indi tune by Sleater-Kinney, A New Wave, was done as a Bob’s Burgers animation, and I like both the music and the artwork in this presentation. That wasn’t the first connection between an alt rock band and the show; back in 2013 St. Vincent also made an appearance with their song Bad Girls. Thanks to Nerdist for the heads up on this one.
Play a game to save lives; what an excellent approach. This was a solution put together by the Cancer Research UK team, after their exposure to GameJam, a project based on the concept of using games to translate/process data. Figuring out what kind of game would draw people in, to make them want to play, was not that difficult. Figuring out how to map that game space to the data set in a meaningful way, that would present the data to the players as game challenges, and collect their responses as statistically significant paths through the data to the best solutions, was noticeably more difficult. The brainstorming must have been intense, and the results are amazing; thanks to Scientific American for the heads up on this one!
I thought I would post a few pictures of myself and a friend of mine hanging out on my Balloon House. I generally keep it parked a hundred meters above sea level somewhere above an island paradise. You have to love Virtual Reality environments like Second Life; they can be so whimsical.
Neil Gaiman gave the 13th Douglas Adams Memorial Lecture earlier today. It was broadcast live online, and you can watch it right now. I am truly sorry I will never again have a new Douglas Adams book to read, but these events are worth watching, and the causes they bring you are worth supporting.
This week we get Chappie, the latest tale of evolution and injustice from Neill Blomkamp. This one looks to be a fitting followup to District 9, in the same spirit and filmed in the same area.