February 24, 2011
Takashi Miike (b. 1960) is a highly prolific and controversial Japanese filmmaker. He has directed over seventy theatrical, video, and television productions since his debut in 1991. In the years 2001 and 2002 alone, Miike is credited with directing fifteen productions.
His films range from violent and bizarre to dramatic and family-friendly. He gained international fame in 2000 when his romantic horror film Audition (1999) played at international film festivals. He has since gained a strong cult following in the West that is growing with the increase in DVD releases of his works.
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February 24, 2011
Cibo Matto (meaning ‘crazy food’ in Italian) was a New York City-based band formed by two Japanese women, Yuka Honda and Miho Hatori, in 1994. The lyrics in their songs are primarily concerned with food and their sound has been described as a combination of Jazz, Hip-Hop, Brazilian music, African Drumming, and Disco samples. While the two founding members of the group are Japanese expatriates, they are not especially popular in Japan; the group did not gain nearly as large a following in Japan as it did in the United States.
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February 24, 2011
The Go! Team are an English sextet. They combine indie rock and garage rock with a mixture of blaxploitation and Bollywood soundtracks, double dutch chants, old school hip hop and distorted guitars similar to the style of Sonic Youth. Their songs are a mix of live instrumentation and samples from various sources. The band’s vocals vary between performances: while live vocals are handled mostly by Ninja (with Tsuchida and Fukami-Taylor also singing some solos), vocals on record consist of sampled and guest voices, not just Ninja’s.
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February 24, 2011
Miike Snow are a Swedish indie pop band formed in 2007. The band consists of producing team Christian Karlsson and Pontus Winnberg, also known as Bloodshy & Avant. The name ‘Miike Snow’ is said to have come from one of their friends called Mike Snow, with the spelling of ‘Miike’ coming from the Japanese film director Takashi Miike.
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February 24, 2011
Vinyl emulation software allows the user to physically manipulate the playback of digital audio files on a computer using the turntables as an interface. Vinyl emulation normally uses special vinyl records which are played on conventional turntables. The result is digital audio playback that feels like it can be manipulated like a vinyl record.
However, there is always a short delay between the needle’s reading of the time code and the software’s playback of the audio. This delay is usually between 6 and 30 milliseconds. The delay is treated as a figure of merit for vinyl emulation products. A shorter delay allows the DJ to have better response and control of the music. In some countries, including the United Kingdom and Finland, a digital DJ license is required to legally play copyrighted music with vinyl emulation software.
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February 24, 2011
The Pacific Northwest Tree Octopus was an internet hoax created in 1998 by Lyle Zapato. This fictitious endangered species of cephalopod was given the Latin name ‘Octopus paxarbolis.’ It was purported to be able to live both on land and in water, and was said to live in the Olympic National Forest and nearby rivers, spawning in water where its eggs are laid. Its major predator was said to be the Sasquatch.
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February 24, 2011
The ear pull is a traditional Inuit game which tests the competitors’ ability to endure pain. In the ear pull, two competitors sit facing each other, their legs straddled and interlocked. A two-foot-long loop of string, similar to a thick, waxed dental floss, is looped behind their ears, connecting right ear to right ear, or left to left.
The competitors then pull upon the opposing ear using their own ear until the cord comes free or one player quits from the pain. The game has been omitted from some Arctic sports competitions due to safety concerns and the squeamishness of spectators; the event can cause bleeding and competitors sometimes require stitches.
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February 24, 2011
Gadsby: A Story of Over 50,000 Words Without Using the Letter ‘E’ is a 1939 novel by Ernest Vincent Wright. The plot revolves around the dying fictional city of Branton Hills, which is revitalized thanks to the efforts of protagonist John Gadsby and a youth group he organizes. The novel is written as a lipogram: a constrained writing or word game consisting of writing paragraphs or longer works in which a particular letter or group of letters is avoided. Though self-published and little-noticed in its time, the book is a favorite of fans of constrained writing and is a sought-after rarity among some book collectors.
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February 24, 2011
Retroactive continuity (often shortened to retcon) refers to the alteration of previously established facts in a literary work. Retcons may be carried out for a variety of reasons, such as to accommodate sequels or further derivative works in the same series, to reintroduce popular characters, to resolve chronological issues, to reboot a familiar series for modern audiences, or to simplify an excessively complex continuity structure.
Retcons are common in pulp fiction, especially comic books published by long-established houses such as DC, Marvel and leading manga publishers. The long history of popular titles and the plurality of writers who contribute stories can often create situations that demand clarification or revision of exposition. Retcons appear as well in soap operas, serial drama, movie sequels, professional wrestling, video games, radio series, and other kinds of serial fiction.
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February 24, 2011
Green Lantern is the name of several fictional characters, superheroes appearing in comic books published by DC Comics. The first (Alan Scott) was created by writer Bill Finger and artist Martin Nodell in All-American Comics #16 (July 1940). Each Green Lantern possesses a power ring and power lantern that gives the user great control over the physical world as long as the wielder has sufficient willpower and strength to wield it. The power ring can generate a variety of effects, sustained purely by the ring wearer’s imagination and strength of will. The greater the user’s willpower, the more effective the ring.
Stories in 2006 retconned the ring’s long-established ineffectiveness on yellow objects, stating that the ring-wielder need only feel fear, understand it and overcome it in order to affect yellow objects (however, it is a learned and practiced ability, making it a weakness to some Green Lanterns), giving retroactive credence to the explanation of the ring’s real but surmountable weakness to yellow.
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February 24, 2011
A placebo button, also called an idiot button, is a push-button with apparent functionality that actually has no effect when pressed, analogous to a placebo. In other cases, a control like a thermostat may not be connected. Although non-functional, the buttons can give the user an illusion of control. In some cases the button may have been functional, but may have failed or been disabled during installation or maintenance. Only in relatively rare cases will the button have been deliberately designed to do nothing. In many cases, a button may not appear to do something, but in fact cause behavior that is not immediately apparent; this can give the appearance of it being a placebo button.
Many walk buttons at pedestrian crossings were once functional in New York City, but now serve as placebo buttons. Some door-close buttons in elevators are placebo buttons, although some of them do in fact change the timing, and others are functional only when activated with a maintenance key. It has been reported that the temperature set point adjustment on thermostats in many office buildings are non-functional, installed to give tenants’ employees a similar illusion of control.
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February 24, 2011
Stadium Events is the English title of the video game ‘Running Stadium’ by Bandai. The game was released for the NES in Japan in 1986, in the United States in 1987. It was one of two games released in North America that were designed and branded for the Family Fun Fitness mat, a short-lived running pad accessory for the NES. The North American, or NTSC, version of Stadium Events is universally accepted as the rarest and most valuable licensed NES game. A copy sold January 2011 on ebay for $22,806.00, the highest price ever paid for a video game
The two Family Fun Fitness-branded games that had already been released, as well as Bandai’s version of the running pad accessory, were pulled from shelves and presumed destroyed. Because of this odd sequence of events, only 2000 copies are believed to have been produced, of which it is estimated that 200 copies reached consumers before being recalled. Today, collectors who follow the online sale of rare video games believe that fewer than 20 complete copies of the game exist, only two of which are known to be factory sealed.
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