In the same vein as 33RPM Jolene, ever wonder what the original Alvin and The Chipmunks songs sounded like before being sped up? Clickbait: the result will surprise you.
Evidence of both a great song and a great performer.
Harriet Tubman is more a hero than anything Marvel can brainstorm.
And now for something a little more chill.
On a narrative level The Shawshank Redemption is a movie about the power of hope in the face of extraordinary hardship. But underpinning Andy Dufresne’s story we also find a blistering critique of the prison system and criminal justice policy in the United States.
It’s possible to build a Turing machine within Magic: The Gathering
It may be a highly unlikely scenario, but a recent paper posted on the physics arXiv proves that it’s possible in principle to build a simple computer within this massively popular tabletop game using just the right combination of Magic cards. While the inputs must be pre-programmed, “Literally any function that can be computed by any computer can be computed within a game of Magic,” said co-author Alex Churchill, a longtime Magic fan who has been working on the problem for several years.
Anti-apartheid prog rock from 1980s South Africa, via Bandcamp.
Listdown: Are we in an RPG resurgence?
I could swear there’s more talk about role-playing games than ever. My gut tells me that popularity is rapidly increasing. A few facets of thought:
- Critical Role — a show chronicling the dramatic adventures of voice actors lead by the amazing Matthew Mercer as Dungeon Master — has been exploding on YouTube and Twitch.
- People are starting to 3D print their own game miniatures and have built strong communities on Reddit and YouTube.
- There’s a brand new Dungeons & Dragons starter set coming out, and it’s exclusive to Target (yeah, where you buy your hand soap and towels).
- LitRPG is a new fiction genre that’s only a few years old, but is growing and has become quite popular in audiobook format. The genre features stories about the characters players become inside a game, whether they know so or not.
It’s all circumstantial evidence and intuition on my end. What do you think?