The Muppets/2001 mashup

Animal and Kermit in 2001 by Jim Unwin.

*Buy Muppets toys at eBay.

Link roundup

1. Fascinating look at the life of prowrestler Ravishing Rick Rude.

2. From a lengthy review of the game Darksiders, this meditation on the original Legend of Zelda game:

Zelda is not a game in the spirit of Adventure, even though it contains bats, swords, keys, castles, and, eventually, chickens. Its main deviation from Adventure is that the vast majority of the player participation part is in trying to discover what they are supposed to be doing, and where things are. Zelda, if anything, and possibly somewhat ironically, is the console’s best attempt at the Adventure genre, as beaten to death by Roberta Williams et al. You start on a screen, there is a hole. You navigate into the hole. You are given a thing. The thing is used to stab. Never are you given the kind of information you might logically need to progress, such as ‘someone sells a candle, it shoots the fire, senor leenk, perhaps some booshes will burn?’ No, that never happens. What you have, instead, is a world built with layer after layer of proudly standing contradictions. If a set of statues appear to be inert, then, eventually, on some screen, one of them will start to move if you stand near it. Presumably, when it moves, it reveals stairs, though, I can’t recall if every statue that came alive was guarding stairs or if it was just a couple of them, and therefore, the other stood as a kind of weak and ambiguous hint that, if you want a statue to move, it might. If, from that, you learn that, sometimes, stairs may be hiding under something that is not stairs, then you are smarter than me. The first time you had access to a bomb it seemed like an awkard weapon. How would you know that the 4th tile from the left on some clifface could be a door?

We now make assumptions about bombs and walls, and, granted, in those days, there was a lexicon of bizarre icons that we documented as we explored the NES. Balloons could be worth points, they could also be fragile. If you had a balloon, then you needed to protect it. If the enemy had a balloon, it was a weak point. If a balloon was unattended, you need to capture it. The entry for balloon in the encyclopedia of gaming was one of the easier, less obtuse examples, and it was still somewhat of a mystery. The entry for bomb took up page after page, and ranged from a specific key that opened a very particular place, to a dangerous thing not to be touched, to a tool that could backfire on you, to any number of other uses. In wrecking crew, bombs not only didn’t break anything, they interfered with your attempts to break things. Bombs could even be worth points and have no function at all. A bomb, really, could be anything. It’s not that the Zeldas bomb is internally inconsistent, just that, now, we know what bombs are for. They’re for feeding to triceratops, and widening cracks. A bomb, now, is defined to within an inch of its life in the mythology of the zelda context, which, as mentioned before, does not really exist.

3. Cool animated gif of the monolith from 2001.

*Buy 2001 posters at Amazon.

Hurley, HAL 9000, and luchador paper toys

Hurley, HAL 9000, werewolf, robot and more paper toys. Some are available for download here. Via.

*Buy 2001 posters at Amazon.

Yuki 7 meets HAL 9000

Lee Bretschneider made this Yuki 7/2001 mashup for me as part of a swap. Lee has some great prints and t-shirts on sale here.

*Buy 2001 posters at Amazon.

Carlos Ramos's tribute to Stanley Kubrick

A few of my favorites from Carlos Ramos's Stanley Kubrick-themed show at Copro:




The Shining



Eyes Wide Shut




2001



A Clockwork Orange

*Previously: HAL 9000 t-shirt.

*Buy 2001 posters at eBay.

Who are we supposed to be scared of in 2001? (link roundup)

2001 space suit via these sites.

And a few more links:

1. Funny line from Obama's speech at the Correspondent's Association dinner:

Apparently Massa claimed that Rahm came up to him one day in the House locker room, stark naked, started screaming obscenities at him -- to which I say, welcome to my world.

2. Frankenstein poster by Steam Crow.

3. This looks like a good site for easy access to content at the Hello Flynn Tron Legacy site.

*Previously: HAL 9000 t-shirt.

*Buy 2001 posters at eBay.

April 1 news roundup

Hard to keep up with all of the big news of the day:

Bioware revealed the Sarlaac Enforcer player class:








Google announced the Google Reader rewards program:





Flickr unveiled the FlickrPad:






Starbucks unveiled the Plenta and Micra size options:






ThinkGeek announced a bunch of products that will presumably be available by the holidays:

Monolith action figure set from 2001:






Canned Unicorn Meat:




Dharma Initiative Alarm Clock:



My First Bacon:




Tell Me Your Secrets Bear (for spying on kids):





Comics Alliance scooped everyone with the latest League of Extraordinary Gentlemen comic:





Platinum Games announced an 8-Bit version of Bayonetta:






Nike placed several fake news stories about its helping athletes achieve stupendous results:





Games Workshop announced a heavy duty spray gun that paints entire regiments in one blast:





Hot Wheels announced its newest toy - - Wonder Woman's Invisible Jet:



Via these fine sites

*Buy Sarlaac Pits at eBay.

New Last Exit to Nowhere t-shirts

Two new t-shirts from Last Exit to Nowhere. The HAL 9000 t-shirt is available now. Anyone know what the other shirt is from?

UPDATE: Per the comments it's from Vanishing Point (which apparently features naked motorcycle riding):



Thanks, Shane and Cameron.

*Previously: 2001: A Space Odyssey poster.

*Buy 2001 posters at eBay.