Vice News: There are many things considered to be common knowledge about Hitler. He was vegetarian, partial to the toothbrush mustache, a failed fine artist and a Nazi despot responsible for the reprehensible, systematic murder of six million Jews. What has only recently surfaced is the assertion that Hitler was also high off his face for the entirety of World War II. As was most of the third reich. That’s according to Blitzed by Norman Ohler, the international bestseller that’s been translated into 26 languages.

See also: How to play Secret Hitler

Craft and creativity

Blooms: Strobe animated sculptures

BLOOMS: Strobe Animated Sculptures Invented by John Edmark

John Edmark: Blooms are 3-D printed sculptures designed to animate when spun under a strobe light. Unlike a 3D zoetrope, which animates a sequence of small changes to objects, a bloom animates as a single self-contained sculpture. The bloom’s animation effect is achieved by progressive rotations of the golden ratio, phi (ϕ), the same ratio that nature employs to generate the spiral patterns we see in pinecones and sunflowers. The rotational speed and strobe rate of the bloom are synchronized so that one flash occurs every time the bloom turns 137.5º (the angular version of phi).* Each bloom’s particular form and behavior is determined by a unique parametric seed I call a phi-nome (/fī nōm/).

(via @5tu)

Narita Boy

An incredible-looking game from Studio Koba, coming to Kickstarter soon!

Narita Boy

You are Narita Boy, a legendary digital hero in an epic quest through simultaneous dimensions. The digital kingdom is under attack and you are called as their last hope of survival. Explore a vast world to find the techno sword, the only effective weapon against the threat.

The aesthetic of the game is inspired by retro pixel adventures (Castlevania, Another World, Double Dragon) with a modern touch (Superbrothers, Sword and Sorcery) and an 80s plot homage (Ready Player One, He-Man, The Last Starfighter), accompanied by the retro synth touch of the old glory days.

Sherlock: How to film thought

Sherlock: How To Film Thought

Nerdwriter: Today I want to look at how Sherlock gets from point A to point B－from problem to solution; mystery to clarity－in one of the show’s most extraordinary visual revelations. It’s a sequence that lasts 3 minutes and 42 seconds with a fresh, weird idea in almost every beat.

Animated GIF pixel art tutorials by Pedro Medeiros

Pedro Medeiros: “My focus with this Patreon is to fund pixel art and other game development tutorials. I post a new 256×256 gif tutorial every Monday [on Patreon], and on my twitter.”

The Big Hex Machine is a giant, yet simple, 16-bit computer designed by staff and students at the University of Bristol to explain how a computer works.

The giant machine, based in the Merchant Venturers School of Engineering, measures over eight square meters. It is built out of over 100 specially designed four-bit circuit boards, which enables students to be taught about fundamental principles of computer architecture from just a few basic components.

Tech Spark: David May (pictured right, above), Professor of Computer Science in the Department of Computer Science (pictured right, above), designed the Big Hex Machine with education in mind. David says, “You cannot understand how a computer works by taking one apart!”

“In our giant machine, all of the structure is clearly visible – as is the movement of information as it executes programs. It demonstrates the principle used in all computers – general-purpose hardware controlled by a stored program.”

(via HN)

Miscellany

The Big Hex Machine

The ‘Big Hex Machine’ is a giant, yet simple, 16-bit computer specifically designed to explain how a computer works. Its instruction set requires a very small compiler, but it is powerful enough to implement useful programs.

Light-based media

How Shovel Knight gets nostalgia right

Shovel Knight and Nailing Nostalgia

Mark Brown: Some games are all about nostalgia – a reminder of how games used to be. No game nails this sensation quite like Shovel Knight, which expertly picks and chooses the right bits to emulate from old games. Here’s how Yacht Club Games pulled it off.

The business of GIFs: Then and now

Vox: The GIF was invented in 1989. And since its beginning, the GIF has been used to make money. At first, GIFs were sold as placeholders for the web of the ’90s and early 2000s. But after web design became informed by professional standards, gifs lost their role as placeholders. Eventually they became tools of expression, turning snippets of video from popular culture into bite size communication devices. Today, a few big tech companies are trying to capitalize on this new use of GIFs, partnering with brands who want their content to be used as communication.

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Death in Space

Thomas Lucas created these two second moments of depicting ways in which we might meet our ends in space. I don’t know how, but I really feel like this should be a series!

See also: The Philosophy of Rick and Morty

Humans and other animals

Danielle: a study of the aging process

Danielle

Anthony Cerniello: I attempted to create a person in order to emulate the aging process. The idea was that something is happening but you can’t see it but you can feel it, like aging itself.

Anthony Cerniello took photos of similar-looking family members at a reunion, from the youngest to the oldest, and edited them together in a video to create a nearly seamless portrait of a person aging in only a few minutes.

(via kottke.org)

Miscellany

New tag: Animated GIFs

Lately I have been creating animated GIFs for some posts on this blog, mainly because they are just a lot of fun to make.

So I’ve created the tag ‘GIFs’ just for these posts.

And now you know.

How To Make A Clock In The Home Machine Shop

Chris from Clickspring is building a John Wilding Large Wheel Skeleton Clock from raw stock!

Chris: All parts of the clock (other than the mainspring), will be made from raw stock, using home shop equipment. I will also be making a lot of the tools required to complete the project, so there will be a fair bit of general machining as well as clockmaking.

These are all incredibly satisfying to watch.

(via O’Reilly Radar)

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Craft and creativity

How to make a clock from scratch

Chris from Clickspring is building a John Wilding Large Wheel Skeleton Clock in his home shop.

Light-based media

Portal: The world between two portals

Crushed between two portals experiment

Crowbcat created a Portal setup that had Chell, the game’s heroine, trapped between two portals that crushed her. The results were an astounding wonderland of psychedelic visuals

From Cory Doctorow on BoingBoing, who adds:

I don’t know what would be cooler: if this were an emergent property of the game’s programming, or if the designers hid it in the code and waited for an adventurous sort to discover it.

I know that in Portal when a surface with a portal on it moves, the portal is usually removed, so I was suspicious of this. But apparently:

For the record: Portals can move. In Chapter 5 (The Escape) at the thirty-third level of the game, you have to place portals onto moving panels to cut neurotoxin generator tubes by using a laser. This gameplay mechanism is not activated by default, so a special command was used to achieve the experiment.

Rave Beans

Connor Kerrigan’s YouTube channel Who Cares Again? deserves more subscribers.

Humans and other animals

History of Japan

By Bill Wurtz.

The Chickening

An insane remix of The Shining by Nick DenBoer and Davy Force.

Official selection TIFF40 and Sundance 2016!

Light-based media

A history of ‘Doom’

RetroAhoy: Doom

Stuart Brown: Doom is a massively important step in the development of 3D action games. One that defined the first person shooter and changed gaming forever.