So in case you haven’t noticed (?!), it’s been pretty freaking cold outside lately – like for the past three or four months – and what better way to create a little friction than with creativity! Solve all your shivering winter woes with a new sweater hat this Tuesday, February 26th at CLP Brookline’s Teen Lounge!
Come make something new and awesome out of something old and blah! Everything you’ll need (sweaters, material, pins, etc.) to get your DIY on will be provided – and I heard a rumor that Brookline’s sewing machine comes equipped with a Game Boy! That’s right, a GAME BOY sewing machine! Keeping it vintage and classy – how awesome is that???
AND! If you happen to be allergic to late 80s 8-bit entertainment, or think you might end up sewing your hands together, don’t fret! You can try your unstitched hand at Xbox and Kaijudo, or sharpen your Magic the Gathering skills for the Brookline Teen Gaming Advisory Council’s upcoming Magic the Gathering tournament showdown!
All this madness blasts off at 3:30 PM this Tuesday and runs until 5:00 PM at CLP Brookline!
Recently, while scanning through Netflix Instant’s “New Releases,” I found a documentary that piqued my interest called “Indie Game: The Movie.” Indie Game is about the burgeoning independent video game biz and it follows the development of two games: Super Meat Boy and Fez.
These aren’t your typical multi-million-dollar-budgeted blockbuster games like Halo or Call of Duty, they’re personal projects painstakingly designed and coded (often by just a couple of people), where ingenuity in gameplay takes precedent over flashy graphics. The budgets for these games are small, too, and most of them don’t have big publishers like SquareSoft or Bethesda to promote them after the game is finally complete.
The movie does a great job of communicating the passions and frustrations of these game designers. And though I consider myself a life-long gamer (chronologically from Rogue on my first PC in the 80s, to the NES, Sega Genesis, N64, PlayStation 2, and, now, Playstation 3, with plenty of other PC upgrades and games along the way) I never really knew how games like these were made. Indie Game gives you a peak inside that process through interviews with journalists and such indie game luminaries as Phil Fish (Fez), Jonathan Blow (Braid), and Edmund McMillen and Tommy Refenes (Super Meat Boy). If the creators of Fez and Super Meat Boy are anything like other indie game designers (and I think they are), the process seems to include a lot of late nights, coding, poor nutrition, legal battles, and stress. But they make really cool games.
Watch the trailer to get a feel for the film:
This documentary is about more than the steps it takes to create a independent video game, it’s about gaming as an art form and a way of life. These guys grew up on classic games like Super Mario Bros. 3 and the Castlevania series; they want to contribute to the artform that captured their attention as kids. As they attempt to, you can see them struggle with creating just as a writer or painter might. They’re fighting to make their dreams tangible, and then, struggling to accept the opinions of the critics and gamers who suddenly have access to a part of them.
If you’re into gaming as a hobby or a possible career choice, or you just want to watch an interesting documentary, I suggest clicking over to Netflix and giving Indie Game a shot.
Beyond the story that Indie Game tells, there are indie video games themselves–they’re really worth checking out. Most are available as downloadable titles through X-Box Live Arcade, the Playstation Network, and the Wii Shop. X-Box currently has the best lineup of indie titles, but the Playstation Network is offering more all the time.
Indie Game picks:
The Unfinished Swan (platform: PS3) – The Unfinished Swan is a videogame about exploring the unknown. The player assumes the role of a young boy chasing after a swan who has wandered off into a surreal, unfinished kingdom. The game begins in a completely white space where players can throw paint to splatter their surroundings and reveal the world around them. [Metacritic]
Journey (platform: PS3) - Enter the world of Journey, the third game from indie developers thatgamecompany (creators of “flOw” and “Flower”). Journey is an interactive parable, an anonymous online adventure to experience a person’s life passage and their intersections with others’. You wake alone and surrounded by miles of burning, sprawling desert, and soon discover the looming mountaintop which is your goal. Faced with rolling sand dunes, age-old ruins, caves and howling winds, your passage will not be an easy one. The goal is to get to the mountaintop, but the experience is discovering who you are, what this place is, and what is your purpose. Travel and explore this ancient, mysterious world alone, or with a stranger you meet along the way. Soar above ruins and glide across sands as you discover the secrets of a forgotten civilization. [thatgamecompany]
Limbo (platform: PS3, XBox 360, PC) -LIMBO, a black and white puzzle-platforming adventure, puts players in the role of a young boy traveling through an eerie and treacherous world in an attempt to discover the fate of his sister.
Braid (platform: PS3, XBox 360, PC) - Braid is a puzzle-platformer, drawn in a painterly style, where the player manipulates the flow of time in strange and unusual ways. From a house in the city, journey to a series of worlds and solve puzzles to rescue an abducted princess. In each world, you have a different power to affect the way time behaves, and it is time’s strangeness that creates the puzzles. The time behaviors include: the ability to rewind, objects that are immune to being rewound, time that is tied to space, parallel realities, time dilation, and perhaps more. Braid treats your time and attention as precious; there is no filler in this game. Every puzzle shows you something new and interesting about the game world. Braid is a 2-D platform game where you can never die and never lose. Despite this, Braid is challenging, but the challenge is about solving puzzles, rather than forcing you to replay tricky jumps. Travel through a series of worlds searching for puzzle pieces, then solving puzzles by manipulating time: rewinding, creating parallel universes, setting up pockets of dilated time. The gameplay feels fresh and new; the puzzles are meant to inspire new ways of thinking. [Microsoft]
Super Meat Boy (platform: Wii, XBox 360, PC, iOS) - Super Meat Boy is a tough as nails platformer where you play as an animated cube of meat who’s trying to save his girlfriend (who happens to be made of bandages) from an evil fetus in a jar wearing a tux. [Metacritic]
Fez (platform: XBox 360, PC) - This quirky platformer stars a little white creature with a bright red fez. Gomez is a 2D being living in a 2D world. Or is he? When the existence of a mysterious 3rd dimension is unveiled, Gomez embarks on a journey that will usher him to the very end of time and space. Utilize your ability to navigate 3D structures from 4 distinct 2D perspectives. Explore an open-ended world full of secrets, puzzles and hidden treasures. Re-open the mysteries of the past and discover the truth about reality and perception. Alter your perspective and see the world in a different way. [Metacritic]
I have a confession to make. I am a video game addict. I actually had to disconnect my Playstation because I was staying up til 3 or 4 in the morning playing Madden. It’s been over 5 years since I touched a video game system, but I think my streak will end in one week when Assassin’s Creed 3 is released. I feel like this game was created just for me as it combines some of my favorite interests: early American history and first-person shooters.
The historical setting of Assassin’s Creed 3 has always been one of my favorite topics to read about, too, so that makes it especially exciting for me. The revolutionary war period was turbulent, violent, and a lot of it happened right around Pittsburgh. There are a lot of great books about this era; some of my favorites are: Wilderness Empire by Allan Eckert, Patriots: the Men Who Started the American Revolutionby AJ Langguth, and 1776 by David McCullough.
We are also lucky to have the Fort Pitt Museum right here in Pittsburgh! This is a great spot where you can learn about the French and Indian War and other aspects of colonial history.
When I was a teenager, I couldn’t stand those back-to-school advertising campaigns that seem to kick in while summer is still in full swing. And how about the stores that start selling fall jackets when it is still 90 degrees outside? For me personally, the count down to the new school year was such a drag that even a full scale-gratuitous-shopping-binge didn’t prove therapeutic. So now that the Teen Department at CLP Main is hosting an End of the Summer Celebration on Friday 8/24 from 2 pm to 5 pm, I feel like such a traitor.
But really- we’re on YOUR side. We’re not trying to pour salt in the wound, we simply want to reward you all for your participation in this year’s Teen Summer Reading program (which, by the way, it’s not too late to sign up for….). And the truth is, we’ll use any excuse to throw a party here in the Main Teen Department. So, come- despite yourself- and just try to enjoy the last sliver of summer….
In 1868, the journalist James Parton described Pittsburgh as “hell with the lid off.”
Fast forward a century, as well as a complete reinvention from a smoggy steel town to a revitalizing medical research center, and you know what people think of when they think of Pittsburgh?
The end of the world.
No, really. Over the last few decades, Pittsburgh has been the focal point of a number of different apocalyptic wastelands, each more dire than the last, and it seems that filmmakers and video game programmers have striven to see how far they can envision Pittsburgh’s urban enclaves of abandoned buildings into a hopeless, desolate place. Warning: the end of the world is not, as you can imagine, a pleasant place. The following clips might contain curse words or reasons to be scared of ever venturing into the tunnels.
For instance, thanks to George Romero and his 1978 movie Dawn of the Dead, the world bore witness to a world in which hordes of zombies, rapidly overtaking the living, surrounded a ragtag group of hapless survivors taking refuge in… Monroeville Mall.
Trust me. These people aren’t banging down the doors looking for a sale. They’re looking for your brains.
Another couple of decades later, and Pittsburghers who played Fallout 3 were treated to a dystopian Pittsburgh in which the rivers became irradiated by nuclear fallout, causing genetic mutations, social upheaval, and a grimy industrial slave trade.
Not long after, Pittsburgh and the Western PA area debuted as a place where dread and desolation reign, and where cannibals run amok as the setting for the film version of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. You might even recognize a number of shots from the film from this stretch of abandoned Pennsylvania Turnpike.
Finally, enter Naughty Dog’s upcoming game for PS3, entitled The Last of Us. The Last of Us features a world in which the Ophiocordyceps camponoti-balzani fungus, which infects ants’ brains and forces them to climb up to places where it can shower its spores onto the rain forest floor, has somehow found its way into humans. Players play as a man who, along with a 14-year-old girl, must match brutality for brutality as they attempts to survive in a world turned upside-down.
If you’re in high school, you’ve probably spent a lot of time imagining how you’d survive a variety of different apocalypses, from natural to zombie alike. Well, if the last few years of entertainment are any indication, you’re going to have a lot of people doing the imagining for you.
Here’s a shout-out to East Liberty, Homewood, Friendship, and Shadyside on Sunday during the Pittsburgh Marathon! I am particular to them because they carried me through all 6.1 miles of my relay leg. Everyone was out enjoying the beautiful weather, cheering us on as we thundered through their neighborhoods in our running shoes and sweat. Music blasting from the street corners, lyrics joining the cheers and encouragement as it pounded through our blood. Even now, a few days later, I am still affected by the support of the neighborhoods, and as spectators they certainly deserve 1st place!
As you may have already guessed, cross-country runningis my go-to, but it doesn’t stop me from enjoying many other recreational sports or activities. (WARNING: I like them but it doesn’t mean I’m any good ) What’s got you hooked, your heart-racing adrenaline taking over? As a spectator or a contender, the emotion of an event can be rather exciting! Whether it is basketball, football, hockey, golf, tennis, volleyball, or some other cool activity, you’ll be sure to find fans and players alike are all rooting for the big WIN! If you are the type that prefer to do computer whiz fun, getting artsy, or gaming (don’t worry, I didn’t forget you either) check out the sweet things that will get you up and running, too! (Well, maybe not literally…)
Sixteen original sports stories featuring young men and women playing basketball and football, running track and cross- country, and training for the triathlon, as well as participating in water sports, raquetball, tennis, boxing, wrestling, and the ultimate sport of the future.
All you need to get started camping, dayhiking, backpacking,
mountain biking, sea kayaking, canoeing, river running,
cross-country skiing, and climbing.
“An athlete cannot run with money in his pockets. He must run with hope in his heart and dreams in his head.” ~Emil Zatopek
So, how many of you got new video games over the holidays? And how many of you have spent every waking minute absorbed in these games? I’m not even a gamer, but since Christmas morning, I have spent all of my non-eating, non-sleeping, and non-working time playing The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword(a super amazing game, by the way). Apparently, I have a husband (who is lost in his own world of Saint’s Row: the Third)… and animals… but I don’t think I’ve seen any of them for at least 3 days. So, I decided yesterday that I wanted to put down the controller and immerse myself in a good book; one that would tear me away from my new game (for a little while, at least).
I picked up Ready Player Oneby Ernest Cline– and though I haven’t finished it yet, it is quickly becoming one of my favorite books of the year. It is the best of both worlds, great literary fiction and video games. If you’re at all familiar with 80′s culture or share a deep affinity for John Hughes, as I do, you will love this book. It takes place in the not-too-distant future when the world is ravaged by an energy crisis, constant war, and where everyone just yearns to step out of reality and into OASIS. OASIS is an open-source virtual reality that offers the bonds of friendship, school, entertainment, and sometimes even some money (comforts that don’t exist in the bleak reality of 2044). Wade Watts (named so because all great superheroes have alliterative names), eighteen and overweight, spends all of his time in his OASIS avatar and is a self-proclaimed expert on all things James Halliday (OASIS’s creator). When Halliday dies, he leaves a message to the users of OASIS telling them that he has buried 3 secret keys within the worlds of OASIS and only the most knowledgeable will be able to find them. Whoever finds these keys will inherit his fortune of $240 billion. Wade, and a couple million other people, are on the hunt for these keys, and a better life.
This got me looking into other video-game themed reads, of which there are quite a few. Here are some of the ones that I thought looked fairly intriguing.
So, if your eyes are going blurry, your thumbs are cramping, and your Xbox controller is slowly melting away from overuse, pick up Ready Player One or any other of these great books about gaming. Also, check out Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh’s Teen Services website for their Get Your Game On booklist– which features even more titles to keep the gamer in you reading.
On August 30th, like a lot of people, I walked down to my local video game store over my lunch break and forked over some change for the next iteration of EA Sport’s Madden NFL, which we now have available at the Main library for any of our gaming programs!
I turned it on, ready to whoop some serious Raven tailfeathers, when I was greeted with a very interesting musical collaboration: Korn and Skrillex.
The song between 90s nu-metal angst-rockers Korn and the polarizing newly-christened wunderkid of electro/dubstep Skrillex “Get Up” debuted at Spin.com and reminded me to revisit his most recent EP Scary Monsters and Nice Sprites (coming soon to your TEEN library music collection).
While listening to the song, you might notice a very enthusiastic “OH MY GOD!” sample and be wondering where it comes from. According to Skrillex in an interview with the Nashville Nights blog:
This girl on youtube who does this cup stacking thing. She filmed herself breaking her record and freaking out saying “OMG OMG OMG” a thousand times. One of the best videos on youtube for sure! It was the perfect sample before the drop. Her voice really pumps you up! Here’s the link http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j54yGxuk0yo
So then I was left wondering what in the world she was doing, which led me to the world of sport stacking and the website http://www.speedstacks.com/. Speed stacking is the process of arranging a set of cups (with holes cut in the bottom to decrease air resistance) as fast as possible; according to Speed Stacks:
Sport stacking originated in the early 1980′s in southern California and received national attention in 1990 on a segment of the “Tonight Show”, with Johnny Carson. That was where it first captured the imagination of Bob Fox, who was then an elementary classroom teacher in Colorado.
When I searched for and tried to download the song, I was greeted with an image that should be familiar to you all:
This gateway to Internet fun is, as you probably know, called reCAPTCHA. But did you know that by filling these out, you’re actually helping in a massive book digitization project? Thousands of books written before the internet are now in the public domain and being digitized by Google through a process called “optical character recognition” (OCR for short) in which after books are scanned, they are analyzed and automatically converted into a word processing document.
However, there are cases in which the machine can’t analyze a word properly. And that’s where you come in:
reCAPTCHA improves the process of digitizing books by sending words that cannot be read by computers to the Web in the form of CAPTCHAs for humans to decipher. More specifically, each word that cannot be read correctly by OCR is placed on an image and used as a CAPTCHA. This is possible because most OCR programs alert you when a word cannot be read correctly.
But if a computer can’t read such a CAPTCHA, how does the system know the correct answer to the puzzle? Here’s how: Each new word that cannot be read correctly by OCR is given to a user in conjunction with another word for which the answer is already known. The user is then asked to read both words. If they solve the one for which the answer is known, the system assumes their answer is correct for the new one. The system then gives the new image to a number of other people to determine, with higher confidence, whether the original answer was correct.
Little did you know that just by surfing the web and signing onto websites, you are helping to make information more accessible to the world! Little did I know that by firing up Madden to throw TD passes to Mike Wallace I would end up learning all this stuff!
~Joseph
Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh, Main – Teen
Paolo Pedercini, a local game designer and professor at Carnegie Mellon University, recently released a new game called Phone Story. It features NES-style graphics, mini games, slave labor, and suicide…wait, what?! That’s right, your eyes did not deceive you:
Phone Story is a game for smartphone devices that attempts to provoke a critical reflection on its own technological platform. Under the shiny surface of our electronic gadgets, behind its polished interface, hides the product of a troubling supply chain that stretches across the globe. Phone Story represents this process with four educational games that make the player symbolically complicit in coltan extraction in Congo, outsourced labor in China, e-waste in Pakistan and gadget consumerism in the West.
Keep Phone Story on your device as a reminder of your impact. All of the revenues raised go directly to workers’ organizations and other non-profits that are working to stop the horrors represented in the game. (www.phonestory.org)
The game compels us to acknowledge the unsightly origins of our consumerism rather than simply accepting the completed piece of machinery at face value. Phone Story critiques the way in which companies such as Apple, Nintendo, Sony, and others gloss over the ugly origins of the raw materials that power their devices, so it may come as no surprise that Apple removed the game from its App Store. Apple’s censorship of the Phone Story app has again brought issues of intellectual freedom to the fore. In this case, why do apps get policed so much more harshly than music or books? Is it because it’s a newer medium and Apple can get away with it (the censorship of books and music would cause a much larger stir)? Or simply because this game is critical of the industry Apple lords over?
But Paolo Pedercini isn’t simply throwing stones–PhoneStory.org doesn’t just offer the game for download, it also features an overview of the controversial topics surrounding the creation of our smart phones, links for more info on those topics, and even more links addressing what can be done to alter these harmful practices. From information on slave-like warlord-run coltan mining, to the terrible work conditions and suicides in China’s factories, tech obsolescence (the idea that we need to keep updating our technology because new gadgets are available), and, the product of obsolescence, eWaste.
The amount of money spent on advertising and the sheer ubiquity of these gadgets help to hide the troubling past, the exploitation, and the creation of desire which makes these gadgets possible. Many consumer electronics could be said to have been “designed for the dump” – in that they are designed from the start to only be used for a short span of time before being tossed into the trash as you buy a new model. (www.phonestory.org)
Smart phones are great, but we shouldn’t ignore the origins of our favorite gadgets. Go ahead and explore Phone Story, learn more about where your phone comes from, and, if you’re so inclined, get involved in creating positive change.
What is it about supernatural creatures that draws us? I will pick a book about vampires, werewolves, fairies, unicorns, leprechauns, you name it, before just about anything else. My current favorite supernatural creatures?– zombies.
Though I don’t think this information is proven, apparently zombies originated in Haiti with the use of voodoo. They believed that the bokor, or voodoo sorcerer, would steal a persons soul and leave them a shambling undead. Zombies have been found in movies and television shows since the early 1930′s. When you think about it, zombie applies to a really wide range of possibilities. Zombies can be the anything that resists death, people brainwashed to follow the orders of others, or people who have been infected with some rage virus, ala 28 Days Later.
Recently, zombies have moved far beyond the horror movie. Zombies have become sources of comedy, video games, and even the odd teen romance novel. I find myself being drawn to all things zombie related, so I’ll give you some of my favs and you can see if you love them too!
This is one of my current favorites. Benny Imura, a 15 year old living in a post-zombiepocalytpic world, needs to find a job. Unfortunately nothing is working out of him so he’s left to join the family business– zombie hunting. He apprentices with his older brother Tom, one of the most revered zombie hunters in all of Mountainside. Benny soon learns that the world he has lived in all his life is not what it seems.
Through twists and turns of fate, orphaned Mary seeks knowledge of life, love, and especially what lies beyond her walled village and the surrounding forest, where dwell the unconsecrated, aggressive flesh-eating people who were once dead.
Max Brooks outlines all the precautions to take in order to suvive a zombie apocalypse. This parody on the survival guide covers topics such as weapons, surroundings, escape routes, etc.
In this companion to the above-mentioned Zombie Survival Guide, Max Brooks chronicles the zombie war from the perspective of some of the people who experienced it first hand. This book on audio is AMAZING. There is a full cast of speakers to encompass the different nationalities of the characters.
So, go enjoy some zombie books. Check out AMC’s The Walking Dead because its my favorite tv show– and enjoy this clip from the BEST ZOMBIE MOVIE EVER MADE.
) What’s got you hooked, your heart-racing adrenaline taking over? As a spectator or a contender, the emotion of an event can be rather exciting! Whether it is 
