Kill Screen Magazine's Blog, page 322

The demo of Octopus City Blues is both Kafkaesque and charming

And filled with puns.

Mario Von Rickenbach’s games are just that: games

Murdering style with the creator of Drei.

The Whiteness Project and why we should listen to white people talk about race

Whiteness does not exist in a vacuum.

Listening to white people talk about race may be hard to swallow, but it's important.

The pitch-black plaguescapes of Orihaus

Where Riven, witchhouse, and architecture meet.

The dreamy, underground worlds of Lilith

Bad taste, brokenness and ineptitude have their day.

Watch a crowd of digital people cheerfully run into a giant metal propeller

Digital artist has created a cheery glimpse into hell this Monday morning. Utilizing the 3D animation software Maya, he's created a video of what happens when a crowd breaks out into a run, the only issue being that there is an enormous metal propeller in their way. You can guess what happens from there, but perhaps not the sometimes-frightening, sometimes-slapstick sense of variety with which the video plays out. 

There are a lot of questions here. What are they running from? Why don't they run in any direction away from the giant metal propeller? Was this some sort of sporting event in a post-apocalyptic future? Is that Waldo? These questions have no answers. 

Still, if you're planning to spend portions of the rest of your day watching this video, letting it slowly fill your heart with warmth like a mug of hot cocoa, as I so very dearly am planning, I recommend spending a couple viewings picking out individual characters and watching them throughout the :45 runtime. The realism fades away, becomes less generally frightening, and more and more comical. There's this one guy in a red shirt who seems to jog eagerly into the fray right at the close of the video that I am currently composing a sonnet about. 

Update: Consider that sonnet made, sort of: Andy Baio has added a delightful soundtrack to the video here. Refresh to hear a new track. 

You can see more of Fothergill's work here. 

Sky Burial proves that drones can be macabre even when they aren’t deadly

A virtual—and literal—death of the artist.

Break free from the boundaries of traffic symbols in the 2D platformer Sign Motion

There is life outside your yellow diamond-shaped world.

One of the best design agencies in the world just reinvented chess

A set for the ages. 

This playable music video conjures the slacker-raps of the '90s

I sometimes fear that Basehead's Play With Toys is lost to time. Originally released in 1992, the record got a lot of acclaim and little else: an immaculately low-key live-instrument take on hip-hop, with songs that seemed to have ambled into existence. On the microphone, Michael Ivey split the difference between singing and rapping, not really paying attention to which he was doing, but the effect was more Nick Drake than, like, Drake. 

But the best thing about Play With Toys was its equally low-key conceptual bent, which seemed largely based on getting drunk and thinking about shit and occasionally hanging out. It's a proto-Gen-X record, in some ways—Slacker had only come out the year before, and Reality Bites wouldn't hit until 1994—and, like most things at the beginning of a movement, it's a lot better than what succeeded it. I mean, have you listened to Odelay! recently? Don't do it. 

Producer/emcee London O'Connor doesn't look like he was even born when Play With Toys came out, but his new single and playable music video "Oatmeal" tap perfectly into that slacker-rap tone. Taken on its own, the track taps into a hazy sense of yearning, all eye-crust verses and big yawning choruses. But the video/game (term patent pending) connects the dots the rest of the way: you're literally trapped inside, making it through an endless hallway, evading endless couches and TVs and then suburban sameness.

Weirdly enough, despite the sonic and topical similarities, it ends up flipping the message of the 90s slacker ethos, which looked at non-ambition as a form of protest. "Oatmeal" is, dare I say it, a call to arms. It has an agnostic take on videogames: while it almost literally demonizes television, it treats music (and so this videogame) as a release, not an escape from that lifestyle but a means to transcend it. 

You can play the game here.