Tag Archives: culture

It took Billy Basso seven years to make Animal Well, the dense, dark Metroidvania game that crashed onto Steam’s top-seller chart earlier this month amid a flurry of player hype. The game is a labyrinth exercise where players wander a world inhabited by sometimes friendly, sometimes not-friendly creatures as a …

Years ago, when people still used Boolean search and I was a cub reporter, I worked with photographer Nick Ut at the Associated Press. It felt like being in the presence of one of the Greats, even though he never acted like it. We drank the same office coffee, even …

On its surface, Marvel’s new “immersive story” What If…?, available to Apple Vision Pro users starting Thursday, seems like a win-win. Marvel gets to mess around with how to combine storytelling and spatial computing, and Apple gets a big-name experience to appease everyone who ponied up $3,500 for their new …

Limitations can, paradoxically, be a boon for artists. Such was the case with the original Paper Mario on the Nintendo 64. The system could handle only so many polygons, and it’s difficult to make a collection of polygons cute, so Nintendo opted to design a world around simple, flat planes. …

One night this past February, over drinks and moody bar lighting, Eric Green and his friends were swapping stories of their recent hookups when one mentioned they’d used the app Sniffies to have public sex. A 30-year-old tattoo artist who works in Bushwick, Brooklyn, Green identifies as a bottom, is …

Forty-seven years ago today, everything changed. True believers might already know what it was: On May 25, 1977, Star Wars hit movie theaters and irrevocably altered nearly everything pertaining to the act of moviegoing. Lines around the block, overly excited nerds, an appetite for action figures. Star Wars taught Hollywood …

There is a distinct moment in the Marvel Cinematic Universe when Black Widow became a hero for the everyfan. It happens early in 2012’s The Avengers: She’s tied to a chair. Agent Coulson calls. A nondescript military leader who has been interrogating her hands her the phone. Coulson explains that …

The US Department of Justice has sued Ticketmaster and its parent company, Live Nation Entertainment, for abusing their alleged monopoly in the ticketing market to trample competitors. Filed on Thursday in the Southern District of New York, the lawsuit focuses on Ticketmaster’s long-term exclusivity contracts with many of the largest …

The title card that opens 1979’s original Mad Max places the action in a very near future, looming just “a few years from now.” George Miller’s cult action-thriller captured the edginess of a world teetering on the brink. The film depicts a not-quite-postapocalyptic Australia, where gangs of high-octane galoots rove …

“Netflix” was always a bit of a misnomer. In a well-worn piece of Silicon Valley lore, cofounder Reed Hastings once said, “There’s a reason we didn’t call the company DVD-by-Mail.com,” noting that the service was always meant to evolve into a streaming platform. In choosing that moniker—rather than, say, Netshowz—the …