Nullary Sources

The game gained controversy when a designer inserted sprites of shirtless “himbos” (male bimbos) in Speedo trunks who hugged and kissed each other, who appear in great numbers on certain dates. Their fluorescent nipples were drawn with a special rendering mode usually reserved for fog-piercing runway landing lights, so they could easily be seen from long distances in bad weather. An unintended emergent behavior of the code caused hundreds of himbos to swarm and crowd around the helicopter, where they would be slashed up by the blades, and then need to be air-lifted to the hospital — which earned the player easy money.

First off, what.

Secondly, what.

Ray Barnholt wrote an great piece for 1UP.com on the use of FM synthesis in video game music. Writing on this kind of thing can be really dodgy, but this is pretty accurate and also pretty comprehensive, going over arcade games and Japanese PCs too. Check it out!

And I can’t recommend enough the Ubiktune albums mentioned at the end, FM FUNK MADDNESS!! and FM FUNK TERRROR!!. Also pretty much every other Ubiktune album released in the last year and a half.

So far, RZA’s exceeding my expectations for this. Pretty amped.

You may have heard that Jerry Sandusky of Penn State was convicted on forty-five child sexual abuse counts last week. I was reading an article on it from the Associated Press in the paper and this passage jumped out at me:

The accuser known in court papers as Victim 6 broke down in tears upon hearing the verdicts. Afterward, a prosecutor embraced him and said, “Did I ever lie to you?”

I kind of choked up a bit.

Reuters:

Lonesome George, the last remaining tortoise of his kind and a conservation icon, died on Sunday of unknown causes, the Galapagos National Park said. He was thought to be about 100 years old.

…

George was believed to be around 100 years old and the last member of a species of giant tortoise from La Pinta, one of the smallest islands in the Galapagos, the Galapagos National Park said.

A very sad day. :(

Jeneen Interlandi, writing in the New York Times Magazine:

We were on something like the 15th round of rummy, and my father was winning decisively. He cracked a wide, toothy grin as he laid his cards on the table. “That’s 321 for BaBa, and 227 for String Bean,” he said, tallying the ledger we were keeping on a piece of scrap paper.

Before he finished writing the numbers, he began a rapid succession of anecdotes about his first car. And his second. And his third. He reached for a magazine to show me the vintage Mustang he said he was planning to buy my mother for their 45th wedding anniversary, which, he reminded me, was just six months away. Then he began speaking Sicilian, instructing me to repeat after him: “Napeladan mangia pane!” (“People from Naples eat bread.”) “Calabrese testa dura!” (“People from Calabria have thick heads.”) My father has the most amazing blue eyes, and right then they were wide and eager, like an overexcited child’s. He was rambling, and the inflections of his voice betrayed sheer manic joy. It was a mood completely incongruous with our setting.

We were playing our card game at the Psychiatric Emergency Screening Services, or PESS, a small locked-down unit in the community hospital near my parents’ apartment in Somerville, N.J. Harsh fluorescent lighting fell on cracked and faded yellow walls. A disheveled, rail-thin woman paced and wept in the room across the way. Down the hall, a police officer guarded locked double doors.

Absolutely gripping article. Weaves together the story of her father’s harrowing battle with bipolar disorder, the story of her and her family trying to navigate the health care and court system for the mentally ill, and the history of health care for the seriously mentally ill in the US. Really can’t stop gushing about this piece, you guys.

Linking rather than embedding so you can skip the rest of Dipset and get straight to Cam. Incredible two verses — plus he counts money the entire time. Cam is paid!