Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark: Gammell vs. Helquist
Did you ever read Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark? Collection of American folk scary stories written by Alvin Schwartz and frighteningly, staying-awake-all-nightingly illustrated by Stephen Gammell.
HarperCollins has reprinted a thirtieth anniversary edition of it, with new illustrations by Brett Helquist. Here’s a kind of rage-y comparison of the art changes.
This is “The Dawn And The Embrace,” by When The Clouds (Francesco Galano) off the EP The Longed-For Season.
I found this completely by accident. It’s pretty neat.
Swarm of Bees Delays Giants-Diamondbacks Game
As part of our continuing coverage of bees, here’s a report from the Associated Press:
The Diamondbacks’ grounds crew used a combination of cotton candy and lemonade to help disperse a swarm of bees that delayed the San Francisco Giants split squad’s 11-1 win over Arizona for 41 minutes in the second inning Sunday.
With runners on second and third and one out in the second inning, a dark cloud appeared in right field, sending Diamondbacks center fielder Chris Young sprinting toward left.
“I didn’t see them at first I just heard them,” Young said. “I am not afraid of one or two of them. I wouldn’t flinch at that. When you start talking about 500, 600 of them yea, I am afraid of that. …”
INTERRUPTING OUR NATIONAL PASTIME
WE MUST PUT AN END TO THIS MENACE
Here’s an absolutely wonderful animated short named Out of Sight, a final project by students at the National Taiwan University of Arts.
Taiwan Today has an interview by Grace Kuo with Yu Ya-ting, the director of the film.
Here’s “Etrange,” a photo taken by Mathieu Guy in Sermu, Franche-Comté, France.
Never Saying “We can’t do that.”
Two programmers of the SNES game EarthBound, Koji Malta of APE and Satoru Iwata of HAL, in an interview from the September 9, 1994 issue of Weekly Famitsu:
Malta: In that sense, APE really owes a lot to the team at HAL Lab. Even when we brought up some unreasonable, difficult-to-implement request, they never brushed it off by saying, “We can’t do it.”
Iwata: Once a programmer says they can’t do something, future games are done for. What we’re considering nowadays are ways for us to avoid that. Instead we think about how we, as producers, can clearly portray our thoughts and ideas to the recipient customer without saying “We can’t do that.”
THANKS FOR MAKING THE JOB MORE DIFFICULT FOR THE REST OF US, JERKS
Nah but this is actually pretty inspiring.
Iowa town welcomes back China’s next president
David Pitt for the AP:
The last time China’s soon-to-be leader visited Iowa, he slept in a bedroom with green shag carpeting and Star Trek character cutouts on the walls. He ate eggs with a spoon because his host forgot the chopsticks.
But apparently Xi Jinping remembered the 1985 stay fondly because he insisted on returning this week to Muscatine, a small farming community he toured to learn about crop and livestock practices.
Back then, he was a young Communist Party leader seeking ideas to help his agriculture-rich region of northern China. Now the nation’s vice president, he made certain to add Muscatine to his jam-packed itinerary so he could reunite with the same Americans who showed him around the region’s hog and cattle operations and its abundant corn and soybean fields.
Adorable.
James Murdoch gives up News International role
Yinka Adegoke and Mark Hosenball on a story we haven’t posted about on NS in a while:
James Murdoch resigned as executive chairman of News International on Wednesday, raising new doubts he can succeed his father Rupert as CEO of parent company News Corp in the wake of a phone hacking scandal at the unit he oversaw.
…
James will remain deputy chief operating officer of News Corp with a focus on its international TV business, a New York-based post he was promoted to last year.
The Leveson Inquiry on the whole hacking/payouts/miscellaneous fuckery thing is still ongoing. The Reuters article focuses more on the corporate ramifications of James Murdoch’s resignation and wholly uninteresting power struggles.
Asshole of the Week: Aris Bakhtanians
Patrick Klepek at Giant Bomb has a transcript of a recent episode of Capcom and IGN’s webshow Cross Assault. The transcript is of an exchange between Jared Rea, community manager of the streaming video site TwitchTV, and Aris Bakhtanians, a competitive fighting gamer and head of Cross Assault’s Team Tekken.
Rea: Can I get my Street Fighter without sexual harassment?
Bakhtanians: You can’t. You can’t because they’re one and the same thing. This is a community that’s, you know, 15 or 20 years old, and the sexual harassment is part of a culture, and if you remove that from the fighting game community, it’s not the fighting game community—it’s StarCraft. There’s nothing wrong with StarCraft if you enjoy it, and there’s nothing wrong with anything about eSports, but why would you want just one flavor of ice cream, you know? There’s eSports for people who like eSports, and there’s fighting games for people who like spicy food and like to have fun. There’s no reason to turn them into the same thing, you know?
You can’t go to the NBA and say “hey, I like basketball, but I don’t want them to play with a basketball, I want them to play with a football.” It just doesn’t…it doesn’t make sense to have that attitude, you know? These things are established for years. That would be like someone from the fighting game community going over to StarCraft and trying to say “hey, StarCraft, you guys are too soft, let’s start making sexual harassment jokes to each other on StarCraft.” That’s not cool, people wouldn’t like that. StarCraft isn’t like that. People would get defensive, and that’s what you’re trying to do the fighting game community, and it’s not right. It’s ethically wrong.
You giant shitmonster.