Month: April 2018

Once upon a time, illicit recordings of Pink Floyd concerts were actually collectable among fans. Those were the days when in order to hear these recordings, you’d have to have a friend who had caught one on tape or something. A select few seem to have even been printed on vinyl and sold, I presume illegally, with all the weird logistics that must have entailed.

As we all know, the web, and more specifically Youtube, changed everything. That includes making Pink Floyd bootlegs available for all to listen, a possibility which for some reason hadn’t actually occurred to me until very recently.

I never thought I’d listen to them live like this — raw, unedited, a genius band in their best years. How emotional it must have been to be there and see the Floyd live, when concerts had power outtages, when fans would just never shut the hell up (and throw fireworks at that!), when bands would play unreleased, unfinished songs in front of huge audiences… it feels like unearthing beta versions of famous games. I mean: versions of Echoes with a saxophone solo?! It seems crazy that these treasure chests could have been kept in the (relative) dark for so long!

I just had to share this with you, whoever you are, wherever you may be. If you can understand the importance of being able to listen to these recording now, 45 years later, just know: we are not alone, you and I.

9 hours! 4 days of concerts in Feburary 1972 — preview versions of the full, unreleased Dark Side of the Moon from back when it was called Eclipse (with some renditions better than what’s on the record, honestly) and brilliant second sets with lots of my favourites from their previous work, like the afore-mentioned Echoes, One of These Days, Careful with that Axe Eugene and A Saucerful of Secrets.

Check out On the Run, or The Travelling Song, on the pre-release version of Dark Side of the Moon above, and in the concert below, three years later, after it had become a worldwide hit. Can’t decide which one I like more.

“This one – taken from the band’s 1975 tour supporting Wish You Were Here – is a legend amongst bootleg collectors for two reasons. Firstly, there’s its track list. Featuring most of the WYWH album, a full run through of Dark Side and a mammoth closer of Echoes, it is perhaps most intriguing for its two opening songs. “Raving and Drooling” and “You’ve Gotta Be Crazy” are early – and markedly different versions of “Sheep” and “Dogs” from the then-unreleased “Animals” album. Secondly, legendary bootlegger Mike Millard made this recording and the sound quality is absolutely phenomenal with a you-could-hear-a-pin-drop audio fidelity that belies its bootleg status. Essential listening.” (source)

For a merry change, the Youtube comments down this way are pure gold. Happy hunting.

All rise and no fall: how Civilization reinforces a dangerous myth –Article from Rock Paper Shotgun — One of the things I’ve been consistently wondering about the direction the franchise has taken is “what is the true cost of my actions?” The negative penalties tied to pollution, global warming and limits to growth  that made older games kind of frustrating have mostly been replaced in newer itterations with choosing just one of several buffs best fit for your playstyle and merely missing out on all the other ones. The world doesn’t work that way.

“It’s just a game,” you might say, “and it doesn’t have to model the world precisely.” I disagree. What we choose to model in games is what we want, or don’t want, our fun to signify—which is why games like Rapelay, Postal etc. get shunned, which is not because they’re not fun to play.

Navigating “the 8th Era” and steering your civilization into deindustrialization after, while, or hopefully before it’s converted the planet into a hollow, lifeless, plastic-ridden husk sounds like tons of fun to me, and even I and my zero hours of experience in game design have thought of great ways sustainability could be added into Civilization, e.g. by turning the late-game into reverse 4X and a kind of survival game. Now THAT would be the breath of fresh air into the franchise Firaxis has been desperately trying to puff out.

No; all this is not about keeping the game fun: it’s about keeping the fantasy intact. Make no mistake: it is clearly political. Just imagine how many Trump supporters and climate change denialists (who are very vocal about it in the comment section in the article above) would just boycott the game if it implented ecology and you’re closer to the real heart of the issue here.

The Story of H What’s up with the letter H? Here’s a very interesting article. Bonus points if you’re a linguist.

This man knows a language spoken by the Sephardite Jews who were kicked out from Spain the same year Colombus (‘Colόn’, who I always like pronouncing in my head as ‘colon’) set out to discover an alternative sea road to the Indies. These Jews settled in the same Ottoman Empire we Greeks have learned to think as ‘intolerant’. As the saying goes, Spain grew poorer and Turkey became richer — and I’m not (just) referring to the financial social niches Jews would occupy historically.

This man is a descendant of those Jews who first settled in Thessaloniki. His family escaped being sent to Auschwitz. He speaks Ladino, a language that’s just like 15th century Castillian Spanish, just without the purifications that it went through over the centuries and with some Hebrew and Turkish words thrown in.

This is what history looks and sounds like.