Alongside such venerable companions as grunge, the Nintendo 64 and, uh, WWE wrestling, the pen-and-paper role-playing game did not survive long in the mainstream come the turn of the millenium, but experienced huge popularity throughout the ’90s. These days, however, when most people think of tabletop RPGs they think of 20-sided dice and nerds with […]
Music Lesson 11: Sludge Metal
Apart from sounding like the heavily abbreviated notes of someone who specialises in sewage material sciences, sludge metal earns the notable accolade of being probably the heaviest genre of music that I plan to cover in these lessons. This is a well-earned spot. Classified as an “extreme” genre of music, the sludgy stuff comes mostly […]
Music Lesson 10: Riot Grrrl
Today, few topics raise the ire of so many (one way or another) than the topic of feminism. Whether for or against, moderate or extreme, proto or post-colonial, it’s a guaranteed hot topic, and like most hot topics, it has a place in the punk movement. Enter Riot Grrrl: feminism incarnate, applied directly to the […]
USB Killer
In another example of why trusting computer hardware willy-nilly is a Thing You Should Not Do, a Russian researcher by the name of Dark Purple has devised a devious and dastardly doodad that we all may have to worry about in future. Enter the “USB Killer 2.0”: an innocuous looking little flash drive, indistinguishable from the one […]
Review: SOMA
Billed as a survival horror game, SOMA consists mostly of sneaking around one-hit-kill monsters in dark environs, solving puzzles to progress. Sounds a lot like Amnesia, which is no surprise (it’s developed by the same folks), and to its credit it does have the same vibe of being mostly-defenseless against monsters that can mess you […]
Album Review: The Game – The Documentary 2
The Game The Documentary 2 Blood Money Entertainment Man. It has been a long time since The Documentary, The Game’s first big release. A whole decade, in fact: back in ’05, Game put out the album just after recovering from a three-day coma, the result of getting shot on his own doorstep. Back then, […]
The ‘ViroCap’
Late last month, medical science took a quiet but incredibly huge leap forward, and added another item to its bulging inventory of ‘Things That Might Save Your Butt One Day’: introducing, the ViroCap. First reported on in the online medical science journal Genome Research and developed in Washington University of St. Louis, Minnesota, USA, the […]
Remix Review: Noisia – Machine Gun
Once upon a time, someone decided to make the most unsettlingly weird music video ever. As it happens, this video had a pretty good soundtrack. In fact, Noisia’s ‘Machine Gun’ is so good that it’s spawned at least two remixes from prominent artists in the same scene. The original is a “typical” Noisia track: drum-and-bass-ish, with […]
Music Lesson 9: Gangsta Rap
Veteran Eminem listeners may recall a certain skit from his Marshall Mathers LP album (the first one), in which an exasperated Steve Berman “explains” Dr. Dre’s album successes: “he’s rapping about big-screen TVs, blunts, 40s (40 oz. beer bottles) and bitches”. Such is the foundation of the genre known as gangsta rap, the topic of […]
The summer highlights: Pills to Pluto
Cranial Creation Let’s open with a whopper: Last August, for the first time ever in human history, geneticists created an almost fully-formed human brain. The manufactured mind is reported to be about the size of the rubber on the end of a pencil, and is equivalent to the developing brain of a five-week-old foetus in the […]