Feedly And RSS Feeds

Xinon – Origin

I just got on the train headed for another PAX East! 70,000 gamers get together in Boston every year to play games, and you can find competition in any game there is. Last year, I took second place in the tournaments for Tetris DS and Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 2, and I’ve been training to win them both this time around. I’ll be updating Twitter just like last year.

Anyway, enjoy some high-energy Game Boy chiptunes courtesy of Xinon. This album has gotten me through some long, tiring weekends.

Source: https://xinon.bandcamp.com/album/origin via a Spotibot playlist based on my Last.fm recommendations

DemizuPosuka

It’s hard to keep up with people who post a lot. This maniac, DemizuPosuka, posts something new to pixiv three times a week. Each one looks like the cover of an indie comic book. I have no idea what most of these are called, even with Google Translate’s help.

Update: Whoa, Columbus’s resident Dr. Mario prodigy Katie provided translations in the Facebook comments. I didn’t expect that! Thank you!

Pretty sure I heard it’s around here somewhere…  (確かこのあたりと聞いたけれども)

I love it when stuff messes with gravity. Reverse gravity is fantasy enough that you'll never see it in real life, but simple enough that you can understand how things interact with it. Patema Inverted plays with reverse gravity non-stop. You should watch it.

Necessary evil and unnecessary conscience (必要悪といらない良心)

There's big cars, and then there's big enough to crush buildings and take a direct hit from the moon. NASA has that one colossal truck that carries rockets from the hangar to the launchpad. I think that's as close as we get.

What? We eating pumpkin again?! (「えっまたカボチャ食べるの」)

Here's a good desktop wallpaper. Animals and monsters, just chillin' and eating dinner. I'm cool with this. If this was a Mystery Dungeon game, that witch girl would have just picked a fight with the entire room.

10pm at an old book shop (古書店の午後十時)

Never under-estimate a pop-up book. Ashens reviewed one called Inside the Personal Computer that has a full desktop PC with a couple moving parts. I'd link to that video, but a link's title text can't have its own links. That would break the Internet. (But on Tumblr, I can link you to that Ashens video.)

Goodbye world (さよなら世界)

You've met with a terrible fate, haven't you? Sometimes things don't end well for DemizuPosuka's subjects. At least this one isn't about to be eaten by a monster.

Source: DemizuPosuka via PixivRss several times, translations from Katie on Facebook

Retro Gaming in Columbus

Columbus Underground interviewed Chris Bidwell about what’s cool about retro gaming, his invite-only tournament, the Hexadecathlon, and its expansion into a public tournament series, the Columbus Retro League. Retro games bring out a completely different crowd from the modern fighting game events, and it’s been great to get to know them. They know how to get hype, too! Come on out to Video Hockey Day in Columbus on Sunday!

This room is full of beastly players. In this picture, I'm playing Marble Madness on the NES and having the run of my life, 95610 points. It only got me third place in that game. The only high score contest I actually won was Star Fox Super Weekend. It's Star Fox with a Star Soldier-style five minute score attack mode with huge bonuses for shooting down all the enemies in a stage.

Source: http://www.columbusunderground.com/retro-gamers-celebrate-bygone-era-of-video-game-classics via JD Lowe and Columbus Underground’s RSS feed, photos via Chris Bidwell and my phone camera

Upside-down Compositions – pixivision

When you see a picture with a person upside-down, reality might be broken somehow. Maybe the room is constructed upside-down. Maybe a character isn’t falling downwards for some reason. It’s probably just a reflection anyway. I unsubscribed from dozens of my RSS feeds until I could clear my 2,500-item RSS backlog. One of the survivors is pixivision, formerly pixiv Spotlight.

Illustrations where characters are upside-down or where the background is inverted are called upside-down compositions. There’s no doubt about the fact that you’re gonna be curious about these extraordinary compositions, and will wonder “what exactly is portrayed here?”. These compositions have a light, carefree feeling to them, and will make you want to float along with the characters in them.

This time we collected a number of upside-down compositions, that will make your head turn (or you can just flip your smartphone or PC screen!). Enjoy!

Yes, I'm spelling pixiv with a lowercase P now. And just like last time I posted a pixivision article (then called pixiv Spotlight), I'm presenting this image the way it appears in my RSS feed, or at least how it used to before the format changed a little bit. I have no idea what this illustration's title translates to. Clicking the image will take you to the pixivision post.

Source: DSmile – かがやーくきぼーーがーこのまーちーをー via Upside-down Compositions via pixivision’s English RSS feed

Artist Alley Arcade Stick

I’ve always wanted to put some one-of-a-kind hand-drawn art in my Qanba Q4RAF, so at last weekend’s Ohayocon, I brought a blank template and and asked a couple of the artists there to draw their original characters. The team of Iota Soul knocked it out of the park with Killer Bee on the left side. Kuroitenshi added her D&D fighter on the right side and gave me some crucial advice on how to complete the design from there. I drew some Vewlix lines at the top, put it in the stick, and changed all the buttons out to black and white to complete the hand-drawn sketch look.

This replaces my previous art on that stick, which is all about Kohaku from Melty Blood, a series of really nice doujin fighting games that never made it out of Japan.

(What follows is the mouseover text for all seven images, edited slightly because they’re plain text on Tumblr now.)

So many photos on this blog lately. Maybe I should have made a Tumblr instead. Problem is, hitstun.tumblr.com is already taken. Some jerk registered my name, posted once, and abandoned it. (Four years later, I checked and hitstun.tumblr.com was available again, so I snatched it up and moved this post there.)

For this post, I'm actually doing the Facebook cross-post as a photo upload instead of a link post. Since it's a photo, I get to tag Killer Bee and Fighter to include links to their creators. (Closest I can do on Tumblr is a link to Kuroitenshi’s fighter.)

Here's a scan of the finished design that is now in the arcade stick. Click the image for the full 300dpi version.

I retired the Melty Blood stick art last night at Fight Night at Donatos on OSU campus. I played Melty Blood for the first time in months.

For some reason, Wordpress is having trouble with my full size designs. Click the photo for the 300dpi version.

Also, here’s the template I printed out for Ohayocon. Click the template below for the 300dpi version, and it will print at just the right size for the Qanba Q4RAF.

You'll want to actually click this for the 300dpi version that fits the Qanba Q4RAF. If you’ve got an Eightarc Fusion, just remove the Start button. (Not sure if Tumblr corrupts the DPI settings on these images, but just make sure it’s 300dpi before you start working with it.)

Sources: A white and red Qanba Q4RAF, buttons, and bubble top from Video Games New York, replacement plexiglass from Focus Attack (out of production), Iota Soul, Kuroitenshi, Melty Blood Actress Again Current Code PC version, Zerochan, and the Qanba thread at Shoryuken

Street Fighter II: Mastering Great Combinations and Strategies

Oh, Capcom. When Street Fighter II Turbo came to consoles in 1993, they put out this campy VHS tape of totally valid strategies from old school Street Fighter legend Tomo Ohira. LordBBH compiled a highlight reel of all the character intro voiceovers. If the cartoonish racial stereotypes were any worse, this would be Punch-Out!! Underneath it are the full VHS tape and Mike Z’s parody from the BlazBlue Calamity Trigger limited edition DVD.

Source: SF2 HF – Capcom USA is silly – YouTube and its source Street Fighter 2: Mastering Great Combinations and Strategies (VHS); also BlazBlue Strategy: Iron Tager – YouTube

Codecademy

If you ever wanted to learn a new programming language from nothing, Codecademy is the place to start. It taught a 12-year-old kid and a homeless guy to code, and it can teach you too! I’ve been using it to learn jQuery, and I’m impressed with how it introduces new concepts and drills them into your head with practice.

You'll be doing this a lot. I actually like how it eventually makes you start the code from scratch in every section. It's good practice.

Looks like my schedule is finally consistent again. You can see a new post here every Friday night sometime, and it will probably have nothing to do with whatever the Internet is obsessed with at the moment. My Instagib stream is back on Wednesday nights now, but at 9pm EDT.

Source: Codecademy via I think Wired

Stupjam – Swingin' with Swabbie

(I’ve actually met a few acquaintances by way of Sayonara Umihara Kawase’s North American leaderboards.)

Source: Stuplr via Yumi’s Odd Odyssey leaderboards (records) and his comment on my video

Europe and Oceania April 24th

CrystalForce & NutellaFrenchToast – The Concept of Plastic Love

Sometimes, SiIvaGunner’s crack team of mashup artists goes beyond the memes and makes something that’s really good on its own. This one combines Hideki Naganuma’s The Concept of Love from Jet Set Radio Future, Mariya Takeuchi’s Plastic Love from YouTube recommendations, and a few other songs. This was made for the final round of SiIvaGunner’s King for Another Day Tournament, which DJ Professor K won. I keep coming back to this banger, so it’s good enough to post here!

Source: Bandcamp and YouTube via YouTube Music/Google Assistant “play some music”

Katrina Yu – Witching Activities

When foraging for /r/FloatingIsFun content, sometimes I find something with a special mass appeal. Katrina Yu is a crazy talented photomanipulation artist that loves levitation. This gallery on Bored Panda features her as a witch going about her daily life. There’s plenty more from her on Reddit, Behance, Flickr, Tumblr, Instagram, and Redbubble.

Have you ever wondered what witches do on their ordinary days? I like to think that they’re always there, living among us and witnessing the world’s ordinary miracles. So this for Halloween, I imagined a daily life of a witch and tried to recreate it through my work.

Source: Katrina Yu