#have longstanding dub industries with their own traditions and conventions | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

jakehglover · 6 years ago

Text

Refreshing Asian Marinated Kale and Kraut Salad Recipe

Recipe From Marisa Moon of My Longevity Kitchen

With summer fast approaching, you and your family are probably looking forward to enjoying as many barbecues and picnics as you can, to enjoy the beautiful weather. And what good is a picnic without a delicious and healthy side dish, like a salad? If you’re looking for an Asian inspiration, this Marinated Kale and Kraut Salad from Marisa Moon of My Longevity Kitchen is a great choice.

The tanginess of the sauerkraut and rice vinegar combines well with the sesame oil and mustard powder, creating a harmonious blend with the earthy flavor of kale. What’s wonderful about this recipe is that you can make it ahead of time without worrying about its flavor going bad — it even tastes better after a few days!

Ingredients for the dressing/marinade: 1 garlic clove, minced 2 tablespoons rice vinegar 1 teaspoon sesame oil 2 teaspoons oil of your choice (extra virgin olive oil or avocado oil are good choices) 1/2 tablespoon water 1/2 teaspoon each of fine sea salt and black pepper 1/2 teaspoon mustard powder (optional) Monk fruit to taste

Ingredients for the salad: 1 head curly kale, stemmed and ripped into 2- to 3-inch pieces (these vary in size, so start with less and add more once you see how much marinade is left) 2 to 4 tablespoons sauerkraut or tsukemono (Japanese pickles) 2 hard-boiled eggs, sliced or diced

Procedure:

Mix the dressing ingredients in a bowl big enough for the kale.

Add the kale and toss to combine.

Take your hands and get in there, squeezing the kale to break down the fibrous texture and work in the dressing.

Cover the bowl with a lid and leave at room temperature for two to three hours, or refrigerate overnight. This salad gets better with time — even days!

When you are ready to eat the salad, mix in 1 to 2 tablespoons of sauerkraut or tsukemono per serving.

Add the egg. You can go ahead and mix it in for a wonderfully messy combination of textures, or serve it in slices for a prettier presentation.

Drizzle your salad with a little extra olive oil or chili oil.

Prep time: 15 minutes Makes two servings

Kale: A Super Serving of Nutrients in Every Bite

Did you know that a 100-gram serving of kale contains 2.92 grams of protein, 4.1 grams of dietary fiber and only 0.99 grams of sugar? Its carbohydrate-to-protein ratio is 3-to-1 – an exceptionally high amount of protein for any vegetable. This is why it’s been recently dubbed the "new beef."

Kale also boasts of an impressive nutrition content, namely calcium, potassium, phosphorus and magnesium. It’s rich in vitamin C, folate and vitamin A — no wonder it’s been dubbed a superfood.

One tip when adding kale to your meals: Always buy it organic. As with other greens, kale tends to accumulate toxins present in the soil where it’s grown. Better yet, grow your own kale at home. Check out my article “How to Grow Your Own Superfood — Tips for Growing Kale” for more useful pointers.

While the recipe above can be prepared in advance, take note that this may mean sacrificing the crispiness of your kale — it stays crispy for a relatively short time, which is why it’s best used a few days after being harvested. If you like your kale with a bit of crunch, eat the salad immediately, but if texture isn’t an issue, then you can leave it for a few hours before serving.

The Benefits of Adding Fermented Vegetables to Your Meals

One of my longstanding health recommendations is to optimize your gut health by regularly consuming fermented foods, and sauerkraut is one of the best options out there. But don’t be fooled by its German name, which literally translates to “sour cabbage” — it’s surprisingly an Asian creation.

According to The Spruce Eats, ancient workers who constructed the Great Wall of China more than 2,000 years ago were said to have fermented shredded cabbage in rice wine so they would be able to enjoy this vegetable during the nongrowing season. A thousand years later, Genghis Khan brought the dish to Europe, where it became a staple, often served with pork.

Eating fermented foods like sauerkraut is an inexpensive — and far more effective — way of reaping the benefits of probiotics. Research shows that cultured vegetables can influence the microbiome, which then leads to a wide array of beneficial effects, including helping:

Combat infections caused by Helicobacter pylori bacteria

Improve symptoms of autism

Protect against neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s

Ease urinary tract infections

While you can buy ready-to-eat sauerkraut from groceries, it’s much better to make your own version at home. Try this easy, healthy classic sauerkraut recipe from Pete Evans.

Have You Ever Tasted Tsukemono?

While you may have heard of sauerkraut, you’ve probably never heard of tsukemono before. This is a type of Japanese pickle, made by soaking vegetables in brine and adding vinegar and spices. There’s no single variety of tsukemono, as each region has its own specialty, resulting in an infinite number of varieties.

According to Serious Eats, tsukemono is an integral part of a traditional Japanese meal, called a washoku, because it brings about harmony. Aside from refreshing the palate and countering the savory flavor of umami-rich foods, tsukemono components, which are often vibrantly colored, also help meet the general rule that a meal must have five colors: red, black, green, yellow and white.

You can use different tsukemono varieties for this salad recipe. Traditional examples include “gari” or pickled ginger, “beni shoga” or red pickled ginger, “misozuke” or miso pickles, and “kojizuke” or koji rice brain pickles. You can buy tsukemono from different Asian specialty stores — or, just like sauerkraut, you can make it at home.

The Finishing Touch: Pastured Eggs

Organic, pastured eggs are a great source of healthy fats, protein, nutrients like choline, and antioxidants lutein and zeaxanthin. Adding eggs to your foods is a simple and cost-effective way to add valuable nutrition to your diet.

While I prefer to eat eggs as minimally cooked as possible, such as poached, soft-boiled or over easy with very runny yolks, hard-boiled eggs are a good snack option. Added to salads, they not only pack a nutritional punch, but also impart a different texture that contrasts with the vegetables.

Where your eggs come from also matters. Free-range, pastured organic eggs are my top choice because they’re much more nutritious than conventional ones. One egg-testing project found that, compared to commercial eggs, free-range eggs contain:

Two-thirds times more vitamin A

Two times more omega-3 fatty acids

Three times more vitamin E

Seven times more beta-carotene

To make sure you’re purchasing truly organic eggs, source them from a small, local farmer near your area. You can also find them in farmers markets.

About the Author: Marisa Moon of My Longevity Kitchen is a public speaker and certified primal health coach who provides one-on-one guidance to help individuals put an end to the confusion regarding what is healthy. Marisa honors ancient practices by learning the ways of our early human ancestors — from the days before industrialized food and crazy-busy schedules — and then she adapts those lessons for modern living. Work with Marisa: MarisaMoon.com, subscribe to her recipe blog, My Longevity Kitchen, and/or visit her coaching channel “The Wild Within” through the free Aura smartphone app.

from HealthyLife via Jake Glover on Inoreader https://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2018/06/03/kale-kraut-salad-recipe.aspx

0 notes

caveartfair · 7 years ago

Text

This Village Used to Make 60% of the World’s Paintings—Now Its Future Is in Jeopardy

A so-called Chinese “urban village,” Dafen once produced an estimated 60 percent of all the world’s oil paintings. During its heyday—when the village’s reputation as an art factory rang truer than today—it almost exclusively cranked out copies of paintings in the Western art canon. These canvases found their way into hotel rooms, show homes, and furniture outlets all around the world. Not bad for somewhere that until the late 1980s was a largely overlooked and decidedly rural backwater on the periphery of Shenzhen.

Now, an array of factors, which in many ways mirror the larger picture of rapid Chinese economic development, have converged to threaten Dafen’s long-term viability. In response, the government is stepping in to try to change its image from a city of cheap fakes to a creative hub home to original artists making works to fill the homes of China’s rapidly growing middle class. But the future for these artists and artisans remains uncertain.

Building the World’s Art Factory

A view from the Dafen Art Museum looking down the east side of the village. Photo by Adam Kuehl for Artsy.

An entrepreneurial trade painter, Huang Jiang, launched Dafen’s remarkable trajectory. Upon moving his business in 1989 from his native and increasingly pricey Hong Kong across the border into mainland China, Huang recruited and trained additional, migrant workers to fulfill a glut of existing orders. Taking advantage of Hong Kong’s more mature infrastructure for practicalities such as shipping, Huang developed an assembly line process for art reproduction in Dafen.

Huang Jiang’s relocation of his business nearly three decades ago was opportune in several ways. Shenzhen proper was already a burgeoning Special Economic Zone (SEZ), a designation rolled out in the early 1980s as part of sweeping economic reforms that provide tax and business incentives in order to attract foreign investment. But in 1989, Dafen was positioned just outside of this lucrative region.

Although later swallowed up by the expanding SEZ in 2010, at the time, Dafen quite literally sat at the gateway to the massive export economy on which modern-day China was built. The result was fast urbanization thanks to incoming cheap migrant labor and Shenzhen’s sprawl. But in Dafen, grassroots, bottom-up industries—propelled by cheap labor and land—could develop away from the pressure cooker-like policies and conditions of the SEZ proper. For Dafen, that industrialization took the form of art.

A view of Dafen Village’s kindergarten located in the central square. Photo by Adam Kuehl for Artsy.

An artist studio in Dafen. Photo by Adam Kuehl for Artsy.

At its peak, Dafen was jam-packed with sizeable, factory-like studios, all employing Huang’s production line process. Individual workers each focused on a specific compositional element—background details, or eyes, or trees—dutifully painting their part and then passing the canvas along the chain.

In the mid-2000s, Dafen’s copy industry was booming. It was at this point that auxiliary commercial avenues began to take root in the village. Quaint cafes, as well as more accessible “gallery shops” (predominantly fronts for anonymous art workers and addresses from which to tout for business both wholesale and retail) lent the village lucrative tourist appeal.

By the decade’s end, Dafen was well and truly on Shenzhen’s map, its success story absorbed into the city’s broader narrative. To that end, at the World Expo 2010 Shanghai, Shenzhen’s Urban Best Practice pavilion featured a mosaic of 999 panels painted by more than 500 art workers to recreate what was dubbed the Dafen Lisa.

Around the same time, Dafen began to see a dip in international demand, which—combined with rising property costs, plus China’s broader aspirations with regard to soft power—has resulted in complex, and sometimes conflicted, development. Throw into the mix the spending power and growing taste for art of China’s expanding middle class, and several distinct drivers soon emerge.

By far the loftiest ambition of the various players currently invested in Dafen is for the village to become an authentic creative hub, and above all a place for original art and culture.

Today, this branching of paths—from copy art, to original art, to shining national example—feels tangled. Case in point: During my stay, I was corrected and chided for referring to copyists as artists, or yì shù jiā in Chinese. They’re huà jiā, painters or art workers, and the difference in social hierarchy is made extremely apparent.

Artist collective the Chaospan Copy Painters work in a narrow alley between buildings on the east side of Dafen. Photo by Adam Kuehl for Artsy.

City at a Crossroads

I visited Dafen in March 2017, taking an hour-long subway ride north from the cosmopolitan bustle of Hong Kong. A large sculpture of a hand holding a paintbrush marks the entrance to the village: a gated development of just under half a kilometer square whose narrow streets are laid out in a grid. At its outer edges, sawdust mingles with the metallic clinking of hundreds of staple guns as framing stores prep a constant stream of blank canvases before stacking them in wooden pallets. Towards the village’s center, the wood smell is replaced by the distinctive headiness of oil paint and turpentine.

Around half of the low-level buildings accommodate stores selling a bewildering (but for the most part, homogenous) mishmash of paintings. Framed pictures of pastoral idyls, Van Gogh replicas, and photorealist portraits of Trump, Putin, and anonymous tourists cover every available inch of wall; canvases are stacked clumsily on the floor between layers of cling-wrap; and outside, tourists rifle through bargain bins of small paintings and prints priced from just ¥10 a pop (roughly $1.50).

Other storefronts are rented directly by painters—the working studios serving as a useful shop window for their respective niche, be it pets, Picassos, or Pop art. Case in point: Zhan Xin Xiang, who considers his diminutive studio space, shared with three artworker friends, to be a kind of advertisement. Loud music blares from the radio; all four men sit at canvases and meticulously copy images from their iPads. He explains that buyers for Chinese online art galleries—most of which reside on T.Mall, the B2C spin-off of e-commerce giant Taobao—frequent the village looking for talent. Such commissions earn Zhan in the region of ¥10,000 ($1,500) each month, he estimates.

An artist studio (with a copy of Jacques-Louis David, Napoleon at the Great St. Bernard, 1801) and framing shop in Dafen. Photo by Adam Kuehl for Artsy.

There are also more conventional galleries, generally showcasing the work of—and often owned by—a single artist. One such space is Ease Gallery, established in 2006 by Ethan Lau, an artist and teacher from Huanggang, Hubei province. An exponent of Dafen��s more recent turn to artists creating original paintings, Lau says designers, homeowners, hotels, and clubs are the most frequent buyers of his large-scale ink works, inspired by traditional Chinese calligraphy. He also works with more studious collectors, he explains. (Lau declined to disclose how much he makes from his sales, but when I asked his staff the price of a particularly striking work on canvas at the gallery, I was told around ¥10,000.)

Surrounding these studios and galleries in Dafen are art supply stores and a handful of whimsical cafes, some of which offer painting classes to visitors. There are also a more workaday street-side sellers of málàtàng, a type of hot pot in which skewers of various meats and vegetables are cooked in a spicy broth; a Lanzhou noodle shop; a post office; and a primary school. It’s a dense, colorful, bustling place.

At the village’s eastern edge is the Dafen Museum: All angular grey slate, the impressive architecture is fronted by a plaza intermittently occupied by pop-up markets, careening children, and older generations performing evening exercises. Opened in 2007, the museum was built by Urbanus, the same Shenzhen firm behind the city’s ultra-contemporary OCT Art Terminal Shenzhen and Artron Art Center. The museum shows predominantly modern and contemporary art from China.

A large mural outside of the Dafen Art Museum. Photo by Adam Kuehl for Artsy.

A view of Dafen. Photo by Adam Kuehl for Artsy.

In stark contrast to the of-the-minute museum, an adjacent stone frieze some 30 meters in length depicts Western art classics: There’s a snippet of Michelangelo’s Creation of Adam, Picasso’s Dreamer, and a longstanding Dafen best-seller, Van Gogh’s Sunflowers. Like the Old Master busts dotted about the village (Da Vinci is to be found staring beatifically at the primary school), the frieze points to Dafen’s candidness and pride in a global reputation founded on reproduction, even as it strives to be known for original production.

All signs point to an impending identity crisis.

A Shifting Economy

Replica Rembrandts and mock Modiglianis continue to serve Dafen well—in 2015 revenues in the village were estimated to be ¥4.29 billion ($630 million). However, its “global painting factory” moniker is now not only overwrought, but for the most part outdated. Production has declined as the internet and online retail has removed the necessity for its centralized form of production. Rising rent prices in Dafen itself have further exacerbated the issue, with a copy-art boom now occurring in cheaper cities like Xiamen and Yiwu.

Meanwhile, cheaper and more efficient production methods have been developed. Many copies are now first printed onto canvases in high-definition, after which art workers apply just enough paint to make it appear as if they were painted by hand, a process which requires significantly less skill and produces a more consistent result.

A freshly painted copy of Vincent van Gogh, Starry Night, 1889. Photo by Adam Kuehl for Artsy.

Among the remaining owners of large-scale production and export businesses in Dafen is Miles Tang, director of B&C Arts, whose business can be found on the e-commerce platform Alibaba. The Henan native first arrived in Shenzhen in 2001. He launched B&C in 2006 out of one of Dafen’s gallery shops. Finding the retail market to already be both saturated and fiercely competitive, a year later he switched his focus to international wholesale. This came at a precarious time: Many of Dafen’s sellers saw a significant downturn in international orders during the global financial crisis. But Tang’s business boomed.

Today, Tang rents a capacious factory some 20 minutes’ walk from Dafen proper. But despite its expansive floor space, only half of his workforce of around 30 painters is based there. The rest, he explains, have left Dafen for their respective, and generally more affordable, hometowns. Tang emails orders for artists to complete off-site and send in upon completion. At the factory, their finished canvases are rolled into compact shipping cylinders, with most winding up in furniture shops in the U.S. and Mexico. Tang estimates his operation’s total output is usually in the region of 500 canvases per week, with numbers reaching up to 1,000 during peaks in demand, such as Black Friday.

Dozens of copies of Vincent van Gogh, The Starry Night, 1889 are delivered to a gallery on the eastern edge of Dafen. Photo by Adam Kuehl for Artsy.

Some retailers benefited from an uptick in domestic trade when international market fell out in 2008: Today, hotel chains in China have become Dafen’s biggest customers. A four-story shop on a prime corner of Youhua Jie (“oil painting street”) claims both the Westin and the Marriott in Shenzhen as customers, as well as a host of interior designers in Hong Kong.

Xu Mei Juan, who owns another gallery nearby, explains that the increase in domestic trade can partly be attributed to a newfound appreciation of art among Chinese consumers. Roughly translated as “Starry Sky,” her business specializes in Monet and Van Gogh replicas, all painted by her husband.

“Between 2008 and 2010, most orders were coming from abroad. But now, I mostly sell to Chinese hotels and also regular customers,” she says. “For Chinese, it has become much more normal to have art hanging on your walls at home.”

In a village so abundant with Sunflowers, the heavily textured creations she offers are palpably superior—and notably more expensive—specimens. Xu quotes ¥1,000 ($150) for a framed painting measuring 30 by 40 inches, and estimates that, including drying time, each takes around 20 days to complete.

Artist collective the Chaospan Copy Painters work in a narrow alley between buildings on the east side of the village. Photo by Adam Kuehl for Artsy.

To a Westerner audience, the desire to vaunt what is so obviously a fake may be difficult to grasp. But in a Chinese context, it’s sobering to remember that for much of the country’s recent history, and in particular during the Cultural Revolution of 1966 to 1976, it was simply impossible for “bourgeois” artworks to exist. The government dictated that the only permissible art should be hóng, guāng, liàng, or “red, bright and shining.” And while such thinking may have since been resolutely stamped out in cities, the same still cannot be said for the Chinese countryside. As such, Xu’s domestic market continues to have room to grow.

Government Intervention Spurring Original Work

By far the biggest shift in Dafen’s recent history is the move toward promoting original art. Two things have driven this change. First, the aforementioned competition from cheaper locations offering comparable products, combined with a decline in global demand, is forcing painters who once worked exclusively in the field of copy art to diversify their offering. And rising rents mean these copies are no longer sufficient for survival; even with high domestic demand, their market value remains low.

As such, many painters have begun to create both replicas and original works, which they can sell for a higher price. The development isn’t always smooth, and there’s often friction with Dafen’s guard of original artists. Lau explains that plagiarism is rife.

“I have had embarrassment all these years because of copying, duplication, and even copyright breaches for printing my artwork in bulk. It never stops,” he says.

An artist paints in his studio in Dafen. Photo by Adam Kuehl for Artsy.

A more powerful catalyst for original art production has been the Shenzhen government, whose ambitions to pitch the city as a cultural center extend to Dafen. In 2004, the government launched an organization called the Art Industry Association of Dafen Oil Painting Village to promote initiatives such as the National (Da Fen) Youth Oil Painting Exhibition, co-organized by Longgang District committee since 2012, and a national Dafen art competition. It also acts as an umbrella association for Dafen’s participation at trade fairs and expos, including Shenzhen International Cultural Industries Fair, Guangdong International Hotel Supplies, and a Shanghai Furniture fair.

Beyond promoting the Dafen brand, the Art Industry Association of Dafen Oil Painting Village also supports the upgrading and diversification of the village’s art industry and recently hosted a meeting between its members and the e-commerce platform JD.com. Reinforcing how the internet and e-commerce in particular continues to shape Dafen, a representative explains that changing conditions have necessitated innovation on the part of Dafen’s workers, particularly by way of leveraging the internet as a sales channel.

“The traditional channel is not conducive to the development of oil painting. The business model has changed [so] Dafen oil painting village must also change,” he says. “Dafen enterprises engaging in e-business platforms is a trend.”

As opposed to the Western art market, in which online art sales outlets are typically seen to sell lower-end artworks most effectively, the association’s representative says that their interest in e-commerce retailers like JD.com is the access to more upwardly mobile consumers.

“The JD.com platform reaches high-end customer groups, so art as lifestyle, not only as culture,” he says.

Detail of a copy of Vincent van Gogh, Self-Portrait, Spring 1887, at Star Arts (Van Gogh / Monet Gallery). Photo by Adam Kuehl for Artsy.

The picture of Dafen today is far more nuanced than it once was, both in terms of opportunities available to its workers and the ambition the local authorities have for its future. The village is host to an ongoing negotiation between feeding a domestic market still hungry for the copied artworks it has long produced and recognizing that, in the very near future, that market may not be sufficient to support the artists who feed it. At times, the urban village’s future can feel extremely precarious.

As the cost of living rises, Dafen’s initial life force—its migrant painters—are most at risk. While the Chinese middle class may be growing rapidly, the shift from a volume-based model of selling cheap copies to businesses, to selling relatively much more expensive original paintings to consumers, will mean that fewer artists and art workers will be supported.

—Frances Arnold

Translation assistance provided by Mo Fanlin.

Cover image: An artist paints in his studio in Dafen. Photo by Adam Kuehl for Artsy.

from Artsy News

#Artsy News

0 notes

symbianosgames · 8 years ago

Link

The following blog post, unless otherwise noted, was written by a member of Gamasutra’s community. The thoughts and opinions expressed are those of the writer and not Gamasutra or its parent company.

[Video Game Deep Cuts is a weekly newsletter from curator/video game industry veteran Simon Carless, rounding up the best longread & standout articles & videos about games, every weekend. This week's highlights include a GDC talk on 'the aesthetics of cute', the hidden story of TOSE, & the return to car wrecking of key Burnout developers.

Another interesting week of longer-form 'things', and I've been ruminating a bit on how these videos and articles intersect in weird but neat ways with 'breaking news' or 'hottest games'. Seems like you'll get at least _some_ bleed-through - for example, this week we have Battlegrounds, Signal From Tolva & Night In The Woods again, all of which are newish or interesting releases.

But many of these pieces are evergreen & exist separately of the 'hot reactions' grind. Which is good. Exist too close to the 24-hour hype cycle, and you'll miss trends and more thoughtful takes like some of these good folks. VGDC aims to reverse that. We hope you think we do a good job.

- Simon, curator.]

-------------------

Guild Wars 2’s art style passes from father to son (Philippa Warr / RockPaperShotgun) "Recently I had the chance to talk to ArenaNet (and thus Guild Wars 2) art director Horia Dociu about his work at the studio. One of the interesting things about his promotion to the role is that he succeeds his father, Daniel."

We’ve been missing a big part of game industry’s digital revolution (Kyle Orland / Ars Technica) "Last year, the Entertainment Software Association's annual "Essential Facts" report suggested that the US game industry generated $16.5 billion in "content" sales annually (excluding hardware and accessories). In this year's report, that number had grown to a whopping $24.5 billion, a nearly 50-percent increase in a span of 12 months. No, video games didn't actually become half again as popular with Americans over the course of 2016. Instead, tracking firm NPD simply updated the way it counts the still-shadowy world of digital game sales."

Warren Spector believes games 'need to be asking bigger questions' (Alex Wawro / Gamasutra) "Gamasutra sat down with Spector at GDC last month to catch up on how the process is going, roughly a year into his full-time gig at OtherSide. It was an interesting conversation, especially if you're at all interested in where games are at these days, where they came from, and what sorts of stories they're best at telling."

A Rare Look Inside Nintendo (Otaku / Game Escape / YouTube) "This clip is an excerpt from the French documentary film "Otaku" by director Jean-Jacques Beineix from 1994. It appeared dubbed on German TV some time later, which is the version you are seeing here. It has, to my knowledge, never been released in English. The subtitles are my own. Content is the intellectual property of the original rights holders."

An Interview With One of Those Hackers Screwing With Your 'Black Ops 2' Games(Patrick Klepek / Waypoint) "He's not there to ruin your stats. He's there to sell you software that'll let you launch a DDOS attack from your Xbox 360. [SIMON'S NOTE: this is crazy - modded Xbox 360s that find other player's IP addresses and can DDOS them?! I had no idea.]"

Put a Face on It: The Aesthetics of Cute (Jenny Jiao Hsia / GDC / YouTube) "In this 2017 GDC session, Hexecutable's Jenny Jiao Hsia explains why cuteness as an aesthetic may be worth exploring for developers who want to push against current trends in game design."

Proc. Gen. and Pleasant Land | Sir You Are Being Hunted (Robert Seddon / Heterotopias) "It was a perfect rustic idyll, in its way. Perfectly lovely, nestled between the grassy fields. Perfectly quiet, as only dead places can be. Perfectly still, because a player careless enough to create a disturbance might attract the robotic hunters. Big Robot’s Sir You Are Being Hunted had, through the digital governance of its landscape generation algorithms, somehow perfected the British countryside."

How video games were made - part 3: Marketing and Business (Strafefox / YouTube) "In this final chapter we cover the business side and marketing of 8 and 16 bit games. [SIMON'S NOTE: Lots of archival footage in here & SO much work cutting it all together - and the other entries in the 'how video games were made' series look pretty good too!]"

Video Games Are Better Without Stories (Ian Bogost / The Atlantic) "A longstanding dream: Video games will evolve into interactive stories, like the ones that play out fictionally on the Star Trek Holodeck. In this hypothetical future, players could interact with computerized characters as round as those in novels or films, making choices that would influence an ever-evolving plot. [SIMON'S NOTE: lots of responses to this all over the Internet - here's a couple of good ones from the Waypoint folks.]"

'Burnout' Series Creator Talks Remaking Crash Mode for 'Danger Zone' (John Davison / Glixel) "Spend longer than a few minutes talking with fans of driving games about which series they'd love to see revived, and invariably someone will bring up Criterion's Burnout. Unlike contemporaries that were leaning harder into realism and officially-licensed cars as a response to games like Gran Turismo, the first Burnout – released by Acclaim for PlayStation 2 in 2001 – was unapologetically action-focused."

Famitsu Special Report – The Mystery of TOSE (Famitsu / One Million Power) "This is the real story behind TOSE: The game development company that’s been making games for nearly 38 years (since 1979), but hardly any gamers know. [SIMON'S NOTE: Brandon Sheffield covered TOSE for Gamasutra back in 2006, but by and large, they've been PRETTY vague about what they work on - which is fascinating.]"

How Three Kids With No Experience Beat Square And Translated Final Fantasy V Into English (Jason Schreier / Kotaku) "One day in the late 1990s, Myria walked into the Irvine High School computer room and spotted a boy playing Final Fantasy V. There were two unusual things about this. The first was that Final Fantasy V had not actually come out in the United States."

Night in the Woods is Important (HeavyEyed / YouTube) "An analysis of the recently released game - this video contains very minimal spoilers but watch at your own discretion.."

Designing the giant battle royale maps of Playerunknown's Battlegrounds (Alan Bradley / Gamasutra) "For Brendan "Playerunknown" Greene, the creator of Battlegrounds, the vision for his game world was born from extensive experience creating and manipulating environments that direct players to play his games the way he intends them to be played."

All We Have Is Words (Matthew Burns / Magical Wasteland) "Sometimes I give the impression of knowing Japanese, but I really don’t. I have no claim to it. I never made a real study of the language, I don’t know kanji and thus can’t read at all, and even in speech I can’t exchange more than pleasantries or the most rudimentary logistical information. [SIMON'S NOTE: I believe this is a subtle 'subtweet'-style article response to the recent Persona 5 translation furore? Maybe?]"

Changing the Game: What's Next for Anita Sarkeesian (Laura A. Parker / Glixel) "Anita Sarkeesian’s talk at this year’s Game Developers Conference in San Francisco falls at an unfortunate time: 10am on the last day of the conference – a Friday. Most attendees – a mix of indie programmers, mainstream publishing teams and media – are still bleary eyed from the night before. And yet, at five-to-ten, the small room on the third floor of the Moscone Convention Center is standing-room only."

The quest to crack and preserve vintage Apple II software (Leigh Alexander and Iain Chambers / The Guardian Podcast) "Why has the quest to hack old Apple II software become the best hope we have of preserving a part of our cultural history? How do these floppy discs – still turning up in their box-loads – shine a light on the educational philosophies of the 80s? And do a new generation of gamers risk losing whole days of their lives by playing these compelling retro games in their browsers?"

Video Games Help Model Brain’s Neurons (Nick Wingfield / New York Times) "Since November, thousands of people have played the game, “Mozak,” which uses common tricks of the medium — points, leveling up and leader boards that publicly rank the performance of players — to crowdsource the creation of three-dimensional models of neurons."

Longtime 'Star Citizen' Backers Want Its New Referral Contest to Die in a Black Hole (Leif Johnson / Motherboard) "Developers of multiplayer video games often host referral programs encouraging existing players to recruit their friends for a boost in cash flow, and in that regard, the new referral contest from Star Citizen developer Cloud Imperium Games isn't much out of the ordinary. The same can't be said of the reactions from the players themselves."

Localization Shenanigans in the Chinese Speaking World (Jung-Sheng Lin / GDC / YouTube) "In this 2017 GDC session, IGDShare's Jung-Sheng Lin discusses a wide variety of possible issues that can arise when undertaking Chinese localization for your game. These problems include grappling simplified vs. traditional Chinese, naming problems, UI & fonts, and China-specific policies that may relate to localization, political implications, and more."

Good Game/Tech/History Youtubers (Phoe / Medium) "[SIMON'S NOTE: this got birthed after a conversation I had with Phoe in the Video Game History Foundation Discord chat - he watches a lot of good retro/interesting YouTube, and there's a number of recommendations in here I was unaware of!]

Red Bull TV - Screenland (Red Bull TV) "Plug into the fresh stories within the world of video games and game design. The personal tales, wild new developments, and unexpected genres shed new light on what gaming means in the world now and what it could mean in the future. [SIMON'S NOTE: this is an entire _season_ of gaming documentaries, including with Frank Cifaldi (Video Game History Foundation), UK cult classic Knightmare, and lots more.]"

Tim Schafer tells the story of Amnesia Fortnight (Philippa Warr / RockPaperShotgun) "“I started feeling a little bogged down by the scope of [Brutal Legend],” says Tim Schafer, founder of Double Fine. “It was really huge and I felt like the team had been doing it for a long time and had a long way to go yet. I felt like they needed a break.” That break was Amnesia Fortnight, a two week game jam during which anyone at the developer can pitch an idea and, if it’s selected, lead a team to turn it from concept to working prototype."

The Signal From Tolva: The Best Game Ever (Matt Lees / Cool Ghosts / YouTube) "New video! Matt dives into a spooky robot world, to talk about some of the cool design aspects of The Signal From Tölva. [SIMON'S NOTE: Can't emphasize enough that Cool Ghosts has some of the best game criticism on YouTube. Please patronize them! (On Patreon, not by talking down to them.)"

-------------------

[REMINDER: you can sign up to receive this newsletter every weekend at http://ift.tt/2dUXrva we crosspost to Gamasutra later on Sunday, but get it first via newsletter! Story tips and comments can be emailed to [email protected]. MINI-DISCLOSURE: Simon is one of the organizers of GDC and Gamasutra, so you may sometimes see links from those entities in his picks. Or not!]

#IFTTT #Blogger

0 notes

symbianosgames · 8 years ago

Link

- Simon, curator.]

-------------------

Night in the Woods is Important (HeavyEyed / YouTube) "An analysis of the recently released game - this video contains very minimal spoilers but watch at your own discretion.."

-------------------

#IFTTT #Blogger

0 notes

symbianosgames · 8 years ago

Link

- Simon, curator.]

-------------------

Night in the Woods is Important (HeavyEyed / YouTube) "An analysis of the recently released game - this video contains very minimal spoilers but watch at your own discretion.."

-------------------

#IFTTT #Blogger

0 notes

symbianosgames · 8 years ago

Link

- Simon, curator.]

-------------------

Night in the Woods is Important (HeavyEyed / YouTube) "An analysis of the recently released game - this video contains very minimal spoilers but watch at your own discretion.."

-------------------

#IFTTT #Blogger

0 notes

symbianosgames · 8 years ago

Link

- Simon, curator.]

-------------------

Night in the Woods is Important (HeavyEyed / YouTube) "An analysis of the recently released game - this video contains very minimal spoilers but watch at your own discretion.."

-------------------

#IFTTT #Blogger

0 notes