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Best Fwends -- Alphabetically Arranged

Best Fwends are some sort of chiptunes/pop-punk conglomerate from Texas made up of two dudes, some machines, and an iPod. They were recently signed to Moshi Moshi, and none of the 34 (!) songs on their first LP, Alphabetically Arranged, is over two minutes. Brilliant. In their own words:

Anthony was borrowing a 4 track from our friend and we were bored at his house. The first Best Fwends 4-tracks were born, using a toys r us keyboard, a guitar effects processor, and our annoying voices. We punished those songs for being bad and have locked them away for now... They were improv chipmunk-voice noise jams, I believe. We thought they were cute and fun so we continued recording track after track of retarded/ridiculous sleep-deprived delirious noise for several months afterwards (using gameboys, live drums, cookie monster vocals, flutes, etc!) on the side, anthony was making total club bumpin dance tracks. While listening to them one day dustin had a funny vision. he was all like, "DUDE! we could SING on top of those you know?! and uhh, record guitar and keyboards on top of them?! and before you know it, We were in our underwear in our friends' basements, yelling through megaphones at unsuspecting teenagers and forcing them to dance and give us money.

now, we seek to travel the world with our obnoxious noise, sleeping in people's living rooms and on their couches."

But, y'know, every time you write 34 songs, there are, inevitably, going to be some flops. For every charming, addictive, brilliant pice of sonic noise Best Fwends, there tend to be two or three that either forgettable or grating. So, here is my version of a sleeker, svelter, and sexier Alphabetically Arranged. Enjoy.

Here's the tracklist:

• 02 Adultnap
• 05 Cloud of Hope (f. The Death Set)
• 08 Days Seem Shorter
• 10 Dream Off
  
• 11 Dump in the Dark
• 13 Get Away from Me
• 16 House Ghost
• 19 Little Robo Wan
• 25 Sing to Live
• 26 Skate or Live
• 30 Aaww-some (Johnny Siera Remix)
  

P.S. -- I forgot to add a song called "Zwzzt," but here's a link to the song.

Who gets to decide which mediums are appropriate for political discourse?

One of the most interesting (at least, on the domestic side) by products of the civil unrest in Iran has been, of course, the way mainstream media outlets like CNN and BBC have responded to and reported on it -- that is to say, with varying levels of success.

BoingBoing's Xeni Jardin seems to think that we're getting the short end of some sort of journalistic stick, explaining that "[...] cable news networks seem to be having a grand time pointing to random Facebook and MySpace status updates, for lack of better understanding of Iranian online culture," before linking people to a reading list compiled by Iranian-American journalist Cyrus Farivar.

Farivar's list is fine, and includes some of the sites I've been using to keep up ... except that it contains several links to Twitter feeds, Time, Wired, and HuffingtonPost. The very types of sites Jardin was railing on in her previous post.

So, because Facebook and MySpace are the laughing stocks of web-savy e-hipsters, Twitter, Flickr, and tumblr blogs represent a "better understanding of Iranian online culture?" I hate to break it to you, Xeni, but Facebook status updates are every bit as valid as Twitter feeds (because they're the same goddamned thing), and making some arbitrary distinction -- because one is cool and the other isn't -- isn't fair or even logical. Either there's a social media revolution going on or there isn't -- I think there is, and it certainly isn't confined to @persiankiwi.

My larger point, however, is that mainstream media's appropriation and utilization of Facebook and MySpace is a positive thing. In an industry that so often thumbs its nose (as Jardin does towards Facebook) at any non-traditional news source -- and even, according to Anil Dash, people who don't speak Standard English -- media's willingness to take social media into account is a step forward.

[image via Boston.com; pithy title courtesy of Cadence Weapon]

I can heterosexually say that Persian dudes are firehot.

In a case of historical irony, the baby boomer generation that the Ayatollah Khomeini bred to fight Iraq in the eighties are the very same young adults that are now trying to topple the government he estrablished during the Iranian Revolution.

According to this Slate piece, 60% of Iranians are under thirty (which explains their effective and compelling use of social networking sites like Twitter, Flickr, and YouTube) and are becoming increasingly moderate.

[via andrea, photo via Tehran24]

At GDC earlier this year, to absolutely no fanfare, Square Enix announced Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles: My Life as a Darklord. During E3, they released a trailer, to equally little fanfare, even though the WiiWare title will be out later this month. It's the lastest in the Crystal Chronicles series,

In a market flooded with knockoff tower defense games and Final Fantasy spin-offs with ridiculously long titles, it's hard to care about a game that combines both. Especially when the entire gimmick (you're evil instead of good) was already fleshed out by games like Codemasters' Overlord.

Nevertheless, I really like the character designs, even if the whole I'm-an-evil-harlequin-bitch vibe is neutered by all the kawaii.

[Via SiliconEra]

Post 217, as envisioned by Edison Yan

I didn't think anything would be able to best Scribblenaut's Kraken x Stegasaurus x God x Einstein E3 shenanigans, but perhaps I was wrong: the now widely-ciruclated "Post 217" by NeoGAF-user Feep launches a valiant salvo:

But I reached a level with zombie robots, and the zombie robots kept killing me. Rayguns didn't work, a torch didn't work, a pickaxe didn't work. In my frustration, I wrote in "Time Machine". And one popped up. What the fuck? A smile dawned on my face. I hopped in, and the option was given to me to either travel to the past or the future. I chose past. When I hopped out, there were fucking dinosaurs walking around. I clicked one, and realized I could RIDE THEM. So I hopped on a fucking DINOSAUR, traveled back to the present, and stomped the shit out of robot zombies. Did you just read that sentence? Did you really? I FUCKING TRAVELED THROUGH TIME AND JUMPED ON A DINOSAUR AND USED IT TO KILL MOTHERFUCKING ROBOT ZOMBIES.

The picture above right was drawn by 5th Cell artist Edison Yan.

And here's an equally creative, albeit more restrained, quip from 5th Cell's Jeremiah Slaczka in a Eurogamer interview:

Just the other day, in the tree level, somebody wrote ‘anvil’, which doesn’t seem like much help. But then they wrote ‘glue’, and stuck the glue to the anvil, and then stuck the anvil to the Starite, and it pulled it down out of the tree.

And finally, Scribblenauts in this month's Nintendo Power.*

Lookit his rooster hat! Lookatit!

 
This might be the first game I've ever pre-ordered. :D

[Via TinyCartridge]

*Incidentally, the ability to read most of Nintendo Power's content on their site, for free, via hi-res .jpgs is a really fucking cool idea. That is how to save traditional media.

Great Wave off Kanagawa

I can't seem to escape the influence of Katsushika Hokusai, famous for his Thirty-six Views of Mt. Fuji series of woodprints: it seems like everywhere I look, for whatever reason, Hokusai is there.

I was flipping through Amanda Cruz' Takashi Murakami: The Meaning of the Nonsense of the Meaning (great chiasmus!), and found an entire section on Hokusai's influence on contemporary Japanese art,* a link explicitly evoked in Murakami's Superflat. 

"The Great Wave off Kanagawa," arguably Hokusai's most famous print, is the cover of Stanley Lombardo's excellent Essential Homer, which I used in both Humanities 101 and Representative Masterpieces. Using early 19th century Japanese art with Homer is anachronistic, but, given the importance of sea-faring to the Achaeans, it seems approrpriate. Indeed, anachronism has become Lombardo's trademark: His translation of the Illiad features a photo of the moon; his Odyssey "Into the Jaws of Death. June 6, 1944," a view of the D-Day invasion in Normandy; and his Aeneid the Vientnam Veteran's Memorial.

Vanillaware: riffing on Hokusai

According to the screenshot above, at least one of the levels of Vanillaware's Muramasa: The Demon Blade (a game I've blogged about twice in as many days) was also influenced by Hokusai's art. In fact, it was Vanillaware's gorgeous sprites that finally broke the proverbial camel's back -- this random confluence of Japanese art is making my head spin.

*In another cosmic coincidence, Murakami's 727 is on the cover of the May issue Modern Trends in Art, which I paw at every day when I should be working.

Sephiroth x Aerith

The chiastic structure of Tetsuya Nomura's concept art is striking, given the narrative elements of Final Fantasy VII, dont'cha think? Long, flowing hair and clothes, the eye drawn to each character's shoulders, two sets of bright blue eyes ...

I like that the sword and the staff make a giant X, as if to mark the spot that changed videogame history.

[Via Edge]

Famitsu Taiwan: BioShock 2

First off is the new cover of the Taiwanese-market Weekly Famitsu, which features anime-ized Little and Big Sisters from 2K's upcoming BioShock 2. As GameSetWatch points out, this isn't the first time the decidedly gaijin BioShock has been given such a treatment: artist Shuugo did his/her own last year.

[Via GameSetWatch]

Secondly, a hi-res version of this pixel poster was given out to Edge subscribers as a goodwill token. The poster was created by British illustrator Gary Lucken and is rife with too many visual allusions to popular videogames to count. At a glance, I see: Doom, Pokemon, Sonic the Hedgehog, Street Fighter, Mario, Final Fantasy VII, Katamari Damacy, Advance Wars, Pac-Man, and Space Invaders, as well as plenty of other generically game-y pixel art.

[Via Edge]

Gary Lucken's pixelposter for Edge

Dunnys

A nice shot of some Dunnys--I'm not familiar enough to be able to identify which ones--from artist Chris Lange, whom I recently featured on Destructoid's Art Attack Friday column.

[Via Chris Lange]