- logging coolness from 127.0.0.1, daily.
Since we were talking about the best idm/bleep radiostations over at the messageboard, perhaps the results could be pasted here? In no particular order, there's staticbeats (idm), dc5 radio (ambient-ish), kohina (oldskool game and demo), nectarine (retro demoscene stuff), and somafm (multiple yummy ambient/indie/idm/etc.) Oh, and a couple of extra ones with on-demand archives - neouija streaming mixes (_great_ idm stuff), and monofunk.net (nice d+b/house/etc.) Oh, and how about solid steel (the original eclectic mix)? We could go on, and on, and on..
You've probably at least seen it linked to and browsed it, but just to re-iterate - textfiles.com is amazing. It may be pretty US and PC-centric, but the top 100 is a great place to start. But have you dug further into the site? Under construction and looking better all the time is the textfiles artscene database. But the only place to go for kickass Amiga ASCII art (yay Mortimer Twang, yay Ramon(e)!) is still thuglife.org. And it seems weird, but there's still an active ASCII zine scene going, and it's riveting. Talking of which, here's a deep, dark secret - my very own textfilez release for uXu back in '94, 'The 'Land'. Umm.. yeah :P
Some arenas of videogame history are getting extremely collectible, generally due to the continued high quality of the label/company in question. One is, of course, Infocom, but it's another which has spawned the obsessive but amazing Origin Museum. The makers of 'Ultima' have dedicated fans, for sure - just look at the beautifully displayed array of Origin titles. And what home would be complete without the original sketch for a portrait of Richard 'Lord British' Garriott? Oh, and I too thought the Ultima crossbow was 'vaporware' (?!) Finally, a delightful story about the faux pas to end them all. HINT: when the creator of the greatest adventure game series ever has just spent days reconstructing his Apple to copy you his first ever game, don't pull another copy out of your pocket!
Possibly the best _quality_ music video site on the Net, Sputnik7 is an oft-overlooked gem, covertly but subtly representing Chris 'Island Records' Blackwell's' cool new media ventures such as Palm Pictures and Manga Entertainment whilst hooking up with Res Magazine for cutting-edge short films and music video selection. And they have the _best_ features, on amazing music video directors like Shynola or Spike Jonze. Lord knows how they make money (presumably, they don't!), but long may Sputnik7 continue!
The wonderful Evan Dorkin is a genius writer/artist, perhaps best renowned as the creator of those miscreant, homicidal dairy products Milk And Cheese or his comic/Cartoon Network animation 'pilot' 'The Eltingville Club', all about the geekiest comic book/roleplaying club, like, evah. But did you know Evan and his partner Sarah Dwyer wrote for the epochally brilliant 'Space Ghost:Coast To Coast', or that Evan has a peachy and pithy new weblog, in which he plays the lovable curmudgeon to a tee? Thought not.
The Internet Archive is an amazing non-profit organisation formed by alexa.com's Brewster Kahle. It operates the multiple award-winning Wayback Machine, which has literally terabytes of data documenting the history of the Internet by archiving ALL of the web from 1996 to date! Also run by the Archive is the wonderful Internet Bookmobile project, which travels round the country allowing children to print out and bind their own out-of-copyright books, and shows how literacy projects like this can be done cheaply and efficiently. I've just volunteered to take charge of their CD-ROM archive, comprising many titles from the classic age of multimedia, and I'm going to be attempting to organise the collection and make more of it available online over the next few weeks. Progress reports here soon..
The text adventure, or to give it its proper name, interactive fiction, has been around since the late 1970s, with all-time classic companies like Infocom making amazingly packaged, amazingly good text adventures. Even now, past the golden age, here are plenty of great archives, and even a the yearly XYZZY competition to decide the best NEW interactive fiction. And we've got to love any medium which has games like 'Being Andrew Plotkin', which is, yes, a 'Being John Malkovich' parody about a famous Interactive Fiction writer. Seriously bizarre.
The history of Factory Records and its founder Tony Wilson is 
an amazing one, encompassing, as it does, Joy Division, New Order, The Happy Mondays, and the birth of rave culture in the UK. Just released on DVD in the States (and forthcoming in the UK next week), Michael Winterbottom's amazing film '24 Hour Party People' stars the genius Steve Coogan as Tony Wilson himself, and is a joyous, thoughtful, seminal trip through the Madchester of the 70s, 80s, and 90s - let's face it, any movie with Bez in it _has_ to rock.
One of the best NES-related websites anywhere is the wonderful TheRedEye.Net, which deals with unreleased, pirate, and just plain messed-up bootleg Nintendo carts. Most of the good and crazed bootleg stuff is found in the (NES nudity ahoy!) release archive, including classics from a bizarrely cultish Asian company called Sachen. And the horribly hacked version of classic fighters like 'Street Fighter 2' or 'Mortal Kombat' are genius. :)
It seems that the investigation into the US anthrax mail attacks has subsided to a murmur, but with so much rumor and innuendo, it's good to see one site compiling all the evidence and articles into one place. The site seems a little vehement in its defence of the only named suspect, Dr. Steven Hatfill, who has definitely been the victim of an over-zealous press at times. But much of the other information on this site, such as the fact the letters were cut down so they could be pharmaceutically folded, and that there were at least two mailings of anthrax, and the second mailing occurred after the anthrax had been further refined, is all extremely intriguing. Of course, there's always some blatantly crazed conspiracy theory (scroll down to the bottom of the page), but at least it's presented sceptically.
Shown in the UK over Christmas, and in the US last weekend on PBS, the new TV presentation of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's 'The Hound Of The Baskervilles' was both well-acted and intriguingly adapted, with Richard E. Grant keeping the overacting largely at bay, and some surprising nods to the needle-impelled drug addiction of the main character, Sherlock Holmes himself. Excellent in that role was Richard Roxburgh, surprising many of us who mainly remember him as the villainous Duke from 'Moulin Rouge'. But it looks like Roxburgh's forthcoming movies will distinguish him even further, with an intriguing part in the adaptation of Alan Moore's League Of Extraordinary Gentlemen, and a stint next year in the next Universal 'classic horror' update playing, of all things, Nosferatu himself.
Originally completed in 1986, in time for the 900th anniversary of the English survey by William The Conqueror, the Domesday Book, the BBC's own attempt to document contemporary life, the Domesday Project, garnered a lot of press recently for being less easily accessible than the original 1000-year old book, since it was made on old BBC-model computers with proprietary laserdisc hardware. However, as this excellent feature shows, the contents of the laserdiscs are being backed up to a modern medium and emulated, thanks to the work of digital archivists like Camileon. I remember using the Domesday Project when I was at school.. ahh, beautiful retro technology, *drool* :)
Historically, it's been proven that the best thing since sliced bread is Netflix, where you pay a fixed monthly fee to rent as many DVDs as you like within the US. These DVDs are then mailed to you, and when you're done, pop them in the prepaid envelope and mail them back. But.. why don't you do the same with videogames? Well, a few months ago, a company called RedOctane announced just such a service. But it swiftly got a BAD reputation for mailing out slowly and having most titles out of stock, despite RedOctane making cool Dance Dance Revolution pads on the side. However, there are a whole host of new companies springing up such as GoVoJo and Spunel. By far the highest recommended is Gamefly, though - if you're a gamer who wants to try out LOTS of titles for a fixed fee each month, seems like a great bet.
The Muppets are heroes to most, as Chuck D would put it. But if you like Kermit, Piggy, Animal and friends, you have several options. You could go with authoritative but straightforward sites like Muppet Central, and learn all about who the Henson Company may be being sold to (nobody exactly knows.) Or you could go to possibly the best fan site for ANY subject on the Net, and check out the sassy, heartfelt and hilarious Tough Pigs. Where else could you find the Muppet Ugly Toy Contest, the from-the-start story of famous celebrity couple Ernie and Bert section, and even an almost controversial 'Bear in the Big Blue House' commentary titled 911 Is A Joke? Wow.
If you're a fan of retro-styled music, then it's a delight to see a revival of a music scene involving composition on retro consoles, spearheaded by sites like Vorc. Yes, it may seem decadent, but making music under intriguing constraints with unique-sounding hardware.. rocks. And just recently launched is a page devoted to Nerdtracker II, where you can use a DOS 'tracking' interface to compose your own Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) soundtracks, complete with vibrato, arpeggiation, tremolo, and a host of other cool effects. Think this is only for the hardcore? Well how about MCK, the Japanese's NES music editor of choice, which doesn't even have a GUI - you compose in Notepad, code-style! And yes, if you're a supa-dupa badass, you can listen to your music on a NES.
Yes, yes, I know you've all heard of Charlie Kaufman, he of the biggest screenwriting buzz in Hollywood right now for his work with "Adaptation" and "Being John Malkovich". But if you want to know a lot more about this remarkably unhinged writer, you may not have seen Being Charlie Kaufman, a superlative website documenting his entire career, even obscurities like his unused adaptation of Philip K Dick's "A Scanner Darkly" or the sadly under-promoted "Human Nature", which is out on DVD now and is worth seeing for both Rhys Ifans _and_ the mice with impeccable table manners.
Researching for a different entry (on the unofficial, customisable PC versions of those catchy+cool beat-based console games like 
Dance Dance Revolution, Beatmania, and Pop N Music), we stumbled on official, playable Japanese demos for the PC and Mac! Often, you need J-Win (Japanese Windows) to run these PC products, but these demos work fine after clicking through the Japanese Installshield. These differ from the console versions, since you press buttons in time to the music for half the song, and then type in Japanese phrases against the clock for the other half, heh. There's one song available in each demo, and here are the demos: "Pop 'N Music Da!" PC and Mac (18mb) [the 9-button version targeted at a more female audience in Japan!], "Beatmania The Best Da!" PC and Mac "Beatmania Da!" plus PC and Mac (12mb) [the original 5 buttons and a scratch-pad version!] And look out for more updates soon on the best 3rd-party and fan-created Bemani 'tributes'. :P
Mark Romanek is one of the most intriguing music video directors around, particularly known for his work with Nine Inch Nails and his recent feature-film debut starring 
Robin Williams, "One Hour Photo". His latest work, playlisted on VH1 and MTV2 in the States despite the religious imagery, is a beautifully poignant video for Johnny Cash's cover of "Hurt" by NIN - seemingly depicting the twilight of Cash's remarkable career, even as it shows his renaissance. You can view it uncut here on Romanek's excellent website.
Firstly, a hearty welcome to FFWD - as you can see, there's a gripping selection of, uhm, welcome messages to browse through right now. But thanks to the wonderful people at Movabletype for their 'personal publishing system', which has turned out to be extremely user-friendly and rather yummy. Additional thanks to Nullsleep for the excellent FFWD logo, utilising his cool 8-bit stylings. So.. the point of this page? To find unique popculture things that you might not have seen online, and to present them to you. Or that's the theory. And we're going to shut up and do just that.
