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Innig contact met de maan dankzij de details die kunstenaar Erika Blumenfeld zichtbaar maakte

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Astronomie: De astronauten van de Apollo-missies hebben sinds 1969 vele stenen van de maan naar de aarde gebracht. Kunstenaar Erika Blumenfeld nam het initiatief om die stenen digitaal te reconstrueren. „Elke steen heeft een verhaal.”

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Wounded orangutan seen using plant as medicine

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It is the first time a creature in the wild has been seen using a medicinal plant to treat a wound.

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UK Hobby Horse Championships – in pictures

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The event features young enthusiasts trotting, galloping and cantering on toy horses in various disciplines such as jumping and dressage. Its popularity has surged in recent years, especially during Covid, and is growing in appeal

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A song about immigrants whose music, vocals and artwork were entirely generated using artificial intelligence has made the Top 50 most listened to songs in Germany, in what may be a first for a leading music market.

Verknallt in einen Talahon is a parody song that weaves modern lyrics - many of them based around racial stereotypes about immigrants - with 60s schlager pop.

The song is No 48 in Germany, the world's fourth largest music market. Less than a month after its release, the song has 3.5m streams on Spotify and is No 3 on the streaming platform's global viral chart.

Its creator, Josua Waghubinger, who goes by the artist name Butterbro, said he made the song's chorus by feeding his own lyrics into Udio, a generative artificial intelligence tool that can generate vocals and instrumentation from simple text prompts.

He used the music tool to add a verse after the chorus had gained a favourable response on TikTok. "I think there's still enough creative freedom in the song to make it a creative project," the IT professional and hobby musician told Die Klangküche (The Sound Kitchen), a German music production podcast.

The song has drawn attention in German media not only for the production technology used but also its lyrical content. Translating as In Love with a Talahon, the song references a Germanised version of the Arabic expression "taeal huna", meaning "come here" but now commonly used in Germany to describe groups of young men with immigrant backgrounds, often with derogatory overtones.

The lyrics parody the classic "good girl falls for bad boy" storylines of songs of the 1960s, such as the Shangri-Las' Leader of the Pack. The object of the AI-generated singer's desire wears "a Louis belt, a Gucci bag and Air Max trainers" and "smells like an entire perfume shop".

When her lover gets angry, she ponders, "he's as sweet as baklava" - presumably an attempt to identify him with Turkish culture.

Waghubinger said he wanted to make a song that made fun of overtly macho behaviour "with a twinkle in the eye and without discriminating", but added that his overriding motivation had been to produce a track that would go viral on social media. "That was the challenge I set myself," he told Die Klangküche.

But Marie-Luise Goldmann, culture editor of conservative broadsheet Die Welt, said the song walked a fine line between parody and discrimination.

"The mixing of migrant youth culture with German schlager conservatism alone will thrill as many listeners as it offends," she said. "The talahon [in the song] doesn't hide his backward gender image but it's debatable whether he [Butterbro] is trivialising, glorifying or attacking it."

Felicia Aghaye, a writer for the music magazine Diffus, called the song's popularity "doubly problematic" because "talahon" was firmly established as an insult among young Germans and Austrians against migrants.

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"Rightwing groups, for example, use the term to create a bogeyman and stoke Islamophobia and xenophobia," she said. "What's problematic is that Butterbro doesn't seem to understand the negative issues around the term.

"His track is to a certain extent aiding and abetting making the term mainstream."

Numerous AI-generated songs in a similar style, mixing the sweet sound of MOR schlager pop from the 1960s with crudely sexualised lyrics, are circulating on German social media.

Artificial intelligence is being increasingly used by music producers to generate vocals in the style of well-known singers. In 2023 the Beatles released Now and Then, a track that used the assistance of AI to extrapolate John Lennon's vocals.

A track featuring an AI-generated version of Tupac Shakur's voice was uploaded on Canadian rapper Drake's Instagram account in April, but disappeared after lawyers for the late rapper reportedly threatened to sue.

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AI-generated parody song about immigrants storms into German Top 50

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Artist Butterbro accused of walking fine line between parody and discrimination and helping make racial slur mainstream

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Rescued baby hedgehog turns out to be hat bobble

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Rescued baby hedgehog turns out to be hat bobble

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A wildlife rescue was handed the ornamental tuft by a well-intentioned rescuer.

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A secretive US Army unit was honoured on Thursday, 80 years after their special effects saved tens of thousands of lives during World War Two. The group received the Congressional Gold Medal, the highest honour from the US Congress.

The BBC spoke to surviving veterans and their families to hear how these artists contributed to the war with creativity, not violence.

Video by Alexandra Ostasiewicz and Eva Artesona

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The 'Ghost Army' veterans who fooled the Nazis in WW2

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Members of the secretive military unit, which once used inflatable vehicles as a ruse, were honoured by Congress.

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GitHub Gist: instantly share code, notes, and snippets.

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Odysseus landing POV through fish eye

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SLIM on the moon, pic by JAXA

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Indian police have cleared a suspected Chinese spy pigeon and released it into the wild after eight months in detention, according to reports in the Press Trust of India.

The pigeon's ordeal began in May when it was captured near a port in Mumbai with two rings tied to its legs, carrying a message that was said to look like it was in Chinese, local media said. Police suspected it was involved in espionage and took it in, later sending it to Mumbai's Bai Sakarbai Dinshaw Petit hospital for animals.

Eventually, it was revealed that the pigeon was an open-water racing bird from Taiwan that had escaped and made its way to India. With police permission, the bird was transferred to the Bombay Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, whose doctors set it free on Tuesday.

Mumbai police could not be reached for comment.

It is not the first time a bird has come under police suspicion in India.

In 2020, police in Indian-controlled Kashmir released a pigeon belonging to a Pakistani fisher after a probe found that the bird, which had flown across the heavily militarized border between the nuclear-armed nations, was not a spy.

In 2016, another pigeon was taken into custody after it was found with a note that threatened Indian prime minister Narendra Modi.

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Flight risk: suspected spy pigeon released after eight months in detention in India

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The pigeon was found last May with a message that was said to look like it contained Chinese characters

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Japan's hopes to become the fifth country to land a working spacecraft softly on the moon ran into difficulties on Friday after mission controllers said the probe was unable to generate electricity after touchdown.

The Smart Lander for Investigating Moon (Slim) was trialling new technologies for pinpoint landings, but after an apparently flawless approach and descent, the mission hit a glitch when the probe landed soon after 3pm UK time.

Although the space agency was receiving signals from Slim and a tiny rover it released moments before touchdown, a problem with the lander's solar panels meant it was operating purely on existing battery power. It was possible the lander's solar panels were not angled correctly towards the sun, officials said.

"Slim is now operating only on its battery, and we are prioritising the transfer of its data to Earth," Hitoshi Kuninaka, the head of the Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency (Jaxa)'s space lab, told reporters at a press conference two hours after the lander touched down.

The lander's battery is expected to drain within a matter of hours, but it may be possible to generate electricity onboard if the sun's movement in coming weeks casts light on the solar cells.

The space agency believes Slim achieved a soft landing, but it is expected to take a month or so to confirm whether the lander touched down within 100 metres of its target site near the Shioli crater, just south of the lunar equator - a major goal for the mission.

If the probe achieved the hoped-for precision, it would mark a shift from an era of "landing where we can" to "landing where we want", Jaxa said. Such high-precision landings will be crucial for the future exploration of the moon.

It is unclear how serious the solar panel problem is, but the glitch is a disappointment for Jaxa, which abandoned its first attempt to touch down on the moon in 2022 when it lost contact with the Omotenashi lander. Last year, a private lunar mission from the Tokyo-based company iSpace crash landed on the surface.

Slim swung into lunar orbit on Christmas Day after taking a fuel-efficient, months-long route to the moon. At about 3pm on Friday UK time, it began its "powered descent sequence", using AI-based image recognition to spot patterns of craters on the surface and locate its landing site.

All appeared to be going smoothly, with data from the spacecraft suggesting a steady descent and touchdown, but officials were initially unable to confirm the lander's status when it reached the surface.

Moon missions are back in favour with major space agencies amid plans to return humans to the surface and exploit water and other resources found there. But while the Soviet Union and the US both nailed soft landings in the 1960s, the Soviet Luna 24 mission in 1976 was the last to do so until 2013, when China's Chang'e 3 touched down. India became the fourth nation to join the elite club in 2023 with its Chandrayaan-3 lander.

Landing on the moon is far from straightforward. On Thursday, the private US Peregrine moon lander fell back to Earth and burned up over the south Pacific Ocean after it developed a fuel leak soon after launch. Last year, Russia's Luna 25 spacecraft crash landed on the moon nearly 60 years after the Soviet Union's Luna 9 made the first soft touchdown on lunar soil.

Moments before landing, Slim released two palm-sized lunar excursion vehicles, or Levs. The first, Lev-1, was designed to hop around and take measurements with an onboard thermometer, radiation monitor and slope sensor, and send signals back to Earth. The second, a ball-shaped mini-rover designed with Takara Tomy, the toy firm behind Transformers, uses the same shape-changing technology to pop open, revealing two cameras and turning the two hemispheres into wheels.

For mission controllers, any science the mission can perform will be a bonus. One hope is for an onboard camera to study exposed mantle material at the landing site, to see if it supports the theory that the moon formed in a giant impact with Earth.

Katherine Joy, a professor in earth sciences at the University of Manchester, who has studied lunar samples from the Apollo programme, said the fact that Slim was sending and receiving signals implied Japan was now the fifth country to achieve a soft landing on the moon. "That's wonderful news," she said. "However, the solar panels are not charging up as planned. What this means for mission longevity or to achieve the science goals is to be seen over the next few hours to days."

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Japan's Slim spacecraft lands on moon but struggles to generate power

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Jaxa space agency says lander's solar panels may not be angled correctly, after apparently flawless descent

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He is famous for discovering elements of the periodic table, for inventing a lamp in 1815 that would save the lives of hundreds of thousands of miners and as an electrochemical pioneer.

But it is the unpublished poetry of the British chemist Sir Humphry Davy - and the intriguing connections between his poems and scientific breakthroughs - that is now electrifying academics.

Researchers at Lancaster University have discovered that Davy secretly penned hundreds of poems in the same notebooks he used to record his groundbreaking electrochemical experiments, discoveries and revelations.

Almost all of these poems - including the one published on Sunday in the Observer for the first time - have never been read before and offer fascinating insights into the inner workings of one of the most extraordinary scientific minds of the 19th century.

"The poetry is just everywhere," said Sharon Ruston, an English professor at Lancaster University, who, with the help of nine other academics and nearly 3,500 volunteers worldwide, has spent the last four years transcribing 11,417 pages of Davy's numerous 200-year-old notebooks.

"You do get a real sense of the man himself and his thought processes as he's working his way through things."

A friend of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and the poet laureate Robert Southey, Davy was born, said Ruston, "before we had this idea that there was a dividing line between the arts and science", and only published a few poems in his lifetime, for which he was praised by his famous friends.

One of the scientific notebooks containing Sir Humphry Davy's poems. Photograph: Royal Institution of Great Britain/HD/CN

But the notebooks reveal that his commitment to his craft was so strong that lines of poetry "jostle for space, sometimes, with accounts of chemical discoveries", and are found on "pages where you can tell, from the state of the page, that he's doing chemical experiments".

These pages, which are torn, burned or have "various stains on them from what he's working on", suggest that Davy even wrote poetry in his laboratory, where he pioneered the field of electrolysis.

Ruston said: "He's writing about nitrous oxide or galvanism. But then there are lines of poetry as well. These two things are happening simultaneously for him. He is trying to figure out what the world is and how to understand the world."

One of the most exciting finds is a poem Davy wrote about the ruins he saw in Greece and Rome while on a continental tour between 1813 and 1815, which is interspersed with scientific notes about the materials used in the ruins and sculptures.

"This tour is quite an important moment in Davy's life," said Ruston.

It was during this tour of Europe with his protege Michael Faraday, who would go on to invent the first electrical generator, that Davy proved the elemental nature of iodine and that diamonds are made of carbon.

She said: "It blew their minds because you start to realise that one substance can have very different forms. So Davy has this real worldview, that there's nothing in the world that can be created or destroyed. All the matter that we have is all around us, but it's continually, very slowly changing into new forms." Ruston sees a "symbiotic relationship" between Davy's science and his poetry. "They work with each other."

For example, he would write about the chemical reasons why leaves change colour and then a few pages later compose a poem about the colour of leaves. He was thinking and writing about his ideas, said Ruston, "in both ways: poetry and science. And in his poetry, you can see his scientific knowledge, and in his science you can see poetic language and persuasive rhetoric, and his facility for expressing himself."

Mark Miodownik, professor of materials and society at University College London, said the discovery of Davy's poems was significant because it demonstrates that "you can't be a great scientist and not be a creative person. The idea that the creative industries are solely for the arts and humanities is a modern fallacy."

Poetry was a private part of Davy's creative process. "I think he couldn't help himself. He's so full of wonder and amazement that he had to do it - things were running around and around in his head and he had to get them out," said Miodownik.

The notebooks also contain doodle-like sketches of landscapes and faces, and notes about buying candlesticks and other mundane matters. "We've got the pages where he actually isolates potassium using electrolysis. But in the middle of that, he mentioned this person and their address," said Ruston.

Her team discovered it was a reference to a tailor. "We think he was thinking about how he's going to announce his amazing discovery at the Royal Society and he would need a new suit in order to do that," she said.

One of the poems found in Davy's notebooks, published for the first time
Ye grand memorials of the fate of Man; That rise a moral lesson to our eyes More strong and more impressive than the lore Which Sages teach and ponderous tomes enfold.
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To raise a temple and to gratify Imperial pride and luxury. The world Was ravaged as a million slaves were taught to raise the pole Fitted for barbarous sports. In which the blood Of Man was shed. The master of the globe The image of eternal majesty Torn by the fangs of the relentless beast The rack was brought from Egypt. Ancient Greece was robbed of all her gods Her temples spoiled. And the divinities which Phidias framed Were brought in bondage to the capital What now remains, pillars & broken shafts A heap of ruins. Witness those massy walls Where once a hundred thousand voices hailed The dying gladiator; silence reigns And awful solitude - yet a spirit dwells Within these ruins.

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Reams of secret poetry by pioneering British scientist finally come to light

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Sir Humphry Davy's unpublished verse - including one published below for the first time - was found in notebooks alongside details of his groundbreaking experiments

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Max Kolo on Instagram: "It’s Mayra’s world, you’re just living in it.
Music: @milescoplin #art #design"

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619K likes, 2,462 comments - cool_lookin_bug on October 31, 2023: "It’s Mayra’s world, you’re just living in it.
Music: @milescoplin #art #design" 

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View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Max Kolo (@cool_lookin_bug)

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Yael Martínez, Abuelo Estrella, 2021. Courtsey of the artist and Magnum Photos, and Patricia Conde Galería. Photograph: Yael Martinez V/Yael Martínez

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Poëzie is een Daad on Instagram: "Garnalen, Sophie de Jong, hier in: Dag taart op tafel: 156 gedichten van mensen met een verstandelijke handicap (De Stiel/Special Arts, 2014)"

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315 likes, 4 comments - poezieiseendaad on September 26, 2023: "Garnalen, Sophie de Jong, hier in: Dag taart op tafel: 156 gedichten van mensen met een verstande..."

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Whether opulent or minimalist in style, the houses that Jana Sophia Nolle photographs are displays of wealth. Plush rugs cover hardwood, hardback editions line built-in bookshelves, and tall windows reach from floor to ceiling. Even the stark rooms with few sculptures and seats signify a choice, rather than a necessity, and demonstrate the ability to furnish a room with just significant objects.

Within these residences, though, Nolle reconstructs a contrasting shelter to illuminate a growing disparity. In her series titled Living Rooms, which culminated in a book published by Kerber Verlag, the artist situates the shelters of those experiencing houselessness within the dwellings of affluent folks in San Francisco. (Houseless refers to lacking a specific kind of structure, while homeless does not.) The single-occupancy structures often are formed with rain-resistant tarps, cardboard boxes, shopping carts, and other small objects.

Nolle started the affective series as a way to raise awareness about disparity, gentrification, and income inequality by explicitly comparing differences in living spaces, wealth, and security. "Art cannot, unfortunately, solve problems or change society: at least one work on its own cannot. It does not provide solutions, but it can wake up people," she says. Although the photographs shown here were shot throughout 2017 and 2018, income inequality has only worsened. Recent reports state that while the wealthiest Americans have seen significant gains during the last few months, people with lower incomes have not rebounded to even pre-pandemic levels. According to the Federal Reserve's data collected through the end of March, the richest 1% of Americans own 31% of wealth.

Nolle's project is also empathy-driven, serving as a reminder of our shared humanity. "While working on Living Room, I noticed that unhoused people said that they feel invisible to the housed residents of the city," she writes. "For most Americans, homeless people are barely visible, somehow on the edge of our vision in most urban areas." Her time working in San Francisco was both arduous and gratifying and inspired her to join the Coalition for Homelessness. She formed bonds with about 15 people, who she later witnessed being forcibly removed by officials. "This was one of the hardest parts of the project. It is about people. It is about individuals' lives."

Prior to the pandemic, Nolle planned to replicate the project in Paris and Berlin. Her time photographing the French city was cut short by the lockdown measures, sending her to Berlin, where she's been building relationships with people who are experiencing houselessness and those who aren't. "While housed people can 'go home' and close their doors and do everything possible to protect themselves, I met many unhoused individuals who described how their networks and support structures changed dramatically due to the pandemic," she writes. People who are experiencing houselessness are increasingly worried about being infected with the virus and struggling more because they report receiving fewer monetary donations.

Nolle also tells Colossal that she's noticed differences in the materials people across the globe use to build their homes. While the structures in San Francisco generally are covered, those in Berlin tend to be open on top and use more mattresses for bases. She attributes these differences to both weather conditions and to the varying rules and landscapes of the cities. In terms of photographing large, lavish residences, Nolle says that due to the pandemic, a lack of connections, and other reasons, she's had more difficulty finding wealthy people willing to open their living rooms to her in Germany. "Sometimes I get the feeling they do have money and wealth in the background but they seem to have trouble admitting it. Being wealthy/privileged seems sometimes also linked to feelings of shame," she says.

The San Francisco-based series is currently on view through October 24 at Torrance Art Museum in California, while those captured around Berlin will be part of a solo show at Haus am Kleistpark staring in March 2021. Until then, follow Nolle's work on Instagram. (via It's Nice That)

Do stories and artists like this matter to you? Become a Colossal Member today and support independent arts publishing for as little as $5 per month. You'll connect with a community of like-minded readers who are passionate about contemporary art, read articles and newsletters ad-free, sustain our interview series, get discounts and early access to our limited-edition print releases, and much more. Join now!

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Shelters of People Experiencing Houselessness Are Photographed within Affluent Residences to Demonstrate Inequality - Colossal

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Whether opulent or minimalist in style, the houses that Jana Sophia Nolle photographs are displays of wealth. Plush rugs cover hardwood, hardback editions line built-in bookshelves, and tall windows reach from floor to ceiling. Even the stark rooms with few sculptures and seats signify a choice, rather than a necessity, and demonstrate the ability to furnish a room with just significant objects.

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Midwestern flora and fauna are the foundation for Carol Long's lavishly adorned sculptures, which elegantly meld Art Nouveau embellishments with natural motifs. The Kansas-based artist ( previously) continues her process of pushing and pulling the sides of a thrown vessel to achieve exaggerated proportions. Bublous bases, thin, curvy handles, and wobbly openings are characteristic of her ceramic sculptures, which she garnishes with slip-trail textures evoking fungi gills or bushy bunny tails.

Long has pieces in several shows, including at the Salina Art Center through October 15, 2023, and Fuller Craft Museum through January 28, 2024. She's currently experimenting with adding molds and casts to her process and preparing to send a few sculptures to the National Council on Education for the Ceramic Arts conference this spring with In Tandem Gallery. Explore an archive of her works on Instagram.

Do stories and artists like this matter to you? Become a Colossal Member today and support independent arts publishing for as little as $5 per month. You'll connect with a community of like-minded readers who are passionate about contemporary art, read articles and newsletters ad-free, sustain our interview series, get discounts and early access to our limited-edition print releases, and much more. Join now!

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Fungi, Feathers, and Insects Spring from Carol Long's Art Nouveau Vessels - Colossal

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Midwestern flora and fauna are the foundation for Carol Long's sculptures, which meld Art Nouveau embellishments with natural motifs.

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A light display created using drones in New York before the UN general assembly and climate ambition summit. Photograph: AFP/Getty Images

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Susan Murabana estimates that she has shown the wonders of the night sky to more than 400,000 people since she set up her social enterprise, Travelling Telescope. ‘We hope these experiences can widen their views about the world and the opportunities beyond Kenya,’ she says. Photograph: Daniel Chu Owen

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#duckhat #lowbrowhighbrow

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The Magic Flute – 'Pa–, pa–, pa–, Papageno' duet (Mozart; Gansch, Williams; The Royal Opera)

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shower of chopped onions fall into a bowl of broth, making little plinks on its surface. They are joined by thick ribbons of noodle, and then ... an entire raw steak, which flops off the table. Then everything begins to levitate and pulse with multicoloured light.

Everyone I know is playing either Baldur's Gate or Starfield, and here I am playing with my food. Nour: Play With Your Food is a strange wee game that I first played years ago at a video game convention, and it's finally been released. The game presents you with delicious little scenes - a burger tray, a sushi set, a bath full of ice-cream with a shower that sprays colourful sprinkles - and then you press buttons to make delectable objects fall from the sky. Do it in time to the music, and weird stuff begins to happen. The lettuce will start dancing, or a jellyfish will show up.

It is disproportionately hard to make a straightforwardly delicious looking dish in Nour. It favours chaos. On the pizza level I got fed up of trying to make tomato sauce fall on to the pizza base properly and instead busted out a knife and a blowtorch, slicing everything up into pieces and then flambeing the remains. Food dyes and hammers and spells are nestled away in menus for you to use and see what happens.

Sometimes it feels like a very niche technological experiment to see exactly how many individual pieces of glistening bacon a PlayStation 5 can simultaneously render, as you spam the buttons. But really this is a piece of delicious interactive art, a kind of foodie stress dream where you can shoot a ray gun at a mushroom to make it quadruple in size, and doughnuts and pastries coalesce into a gently pulsating morass in a blue ether. The more you mess around, the more you discover; each level holds odd little secrets that you can only find if you experiment.

This probably sounds absurd, and it is, but I love it. Nour is part of a long tradition of strange, satisfying interactive tech art experiments - the type of game I used to enjoy playing in the early days of the PlayStation 3, when the nascent PlayStation Store was full of bizarre things such as .deTuned, in which you were presented with a sad-looking balding man in a chair and then experimented with the buttons to deform him and make him dance around in front of smiling blue robots. Or Linger in Shadows, a technology-transcending interactive nightmare of smoke and strangeness designed to wring impossible things out of the PS3's architecture.

Some of these are what's known as demoscene games: pieces of interactive art intended to display a programmer's superlative abilities with the hardware. They emphasise music and audiovisual impact, don't have any of the traditional things that games prioritise like objectives or enemies. Instead, they have interesting, beautifully rendered components that do weird things when you poke at them.

I find this type of interactive art very soothing. They free me from the constraints of "gamer brain" - the idea that play always has to have a point. Another classic of the genre that Nour brought to mind was Noby Noby Boy, by Katamari Damacy designer Keita Takahashi, in which you play a stretchy caterpillar snake slithering around pastel-coloured playgrounds, eating doughnuts and wrapping your squiggly body around things. Sometimes little humans or turtles or cows hop on and ride you around for a while. You play with it like a toddler would, bashing things together to see what will happen.

Like experimental poetry, or sculpture, or visual art, you have to open your mind's eye to things like Nour and appreciate them aesthetically without searching for structure. Finding that mindset is the biggest challenge. The bonus of experimental games, though, is that they tend to make you laugh more than any of those other art forms, as you poke at the controller (or blow on it) to see what nonsense will occur on the screen.

If this sounds appealing, download the game and just make a mess. You might enjoy it.

What to play

More surrealism this week from Spanish director and animator Nacho Rodríguez in the form of The Many Pieces of Mr Coo, an absurdist point-and-click adventure blessed with sublime hand-drawn animation and a range of artistic, musical and cultural influences. It's short - over in less than an hour if you know what you're doing - and you have to finish the whole thing in one go, or it'll make you start again.

Our critic Phil Iwaniuk loved it, writing in his review: "It bobs along on a dream logic that makes sense while you play and then evaporates immediately after. Why did stealing a coin from that one-eyed lady end up giving you a sword to slay a crocodile? And how did you end up inside that egg with an unborn chick? It matters not. They're vivid memories now, the kind that your brain will randomly turn over decades down the line when you're trying to get to sleep."

Available on: PC, PlayStation 4/5
Estimated playtime: 1-2 hours

What to read

Allow me to briefly puff out my chest with patriotic pride and recommend the Scottish Games Sale on Steam, to benefit Glasgow's children's hospital. Some standout games: sci-fi chiller Observation, snappy card-game Reigns, photography puzzler Viewfinder and silly stretchy puppy puzzler Phogs!

One of my favourite games of last year, Stray (the cyberpunk cat game), is to be made into a "hopepunk" movie directed by Nick Bruno of Nimona.

Nintendo has put out a video clarifying Charles Martinet's new role as "Mario ambassador" - the character's creator Shigeru Miyamoto puts in an appearance to talk up Martinet's immense contribution as the former voice of Mario.

More bad news for E3: last year's event partner ReedPop is out, there will be no LA event in 2025, and we are promised a "total reinvention" of the show for 2025. I am not tremendously optimistic.

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Game developers furious as Unity Engine announces new fees The quest for Sky Skipper, the rarest Nintendo arcade machine in the world How a decade of playing Final Fantasy XIV has helped me through life and motherhood - Danielle Lucas How Call of Duty: Modern Warfare III was written: 'you start with sticky notes'
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Question Block

Question Block fixture Iain provides this week's query - but before we get to it, if you have a question, even (especially?) if it's a silly one, send it in by hitting reply on this newsletter.

Iain asks: "Your issue about the demise of classic games brought a tear to my eye - mainly because at one time I owned most of the titles mentioned (including Panzer Dragoon Saga!). Are there any titles you regret letting go?"

I'm one of those people who experiences a drastic urge to rid myself of possessions every few years, but I do hold on to books and treasured video games. Unfortunately all the games of my childhood came in fragile cardboard boxes with paper manuals, most of which were thrown away, so I now have a bunch of rare 90s video games with absolutely no value beyond the sentimental.

I regret not taking better care of my games' packaging when I was young, but not as much as I regretted lending my prized copy of the original Conker's Bad Fur Day to a friend's boyfriend, who never gave it back. It would cost a couple of hundred quid to replace it now. Few games that have disappeared from my collection over the years - misplaced, lent out and forgotten, squirrelled away after a breakup - are truly irreplaceable. If something happened to my signed copy of Rez on the Dreamcast, I'd be raging.

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Pushing Buttons: Nour is more food art than video game - and it's a deliciously surreal treat

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In this week's newsletter: Unconcerned with things like enemies or objectives, this experimental game is chaotic yet oddly soothing

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International Space Station on Instagram: "Welcome home, #Crew6! 🪂

NASA astronauts Stephen Bowen and Woody Hoburg, UAE (United Arab Emirates) astronaut Sultan Alneyadi, and Roscosmos cosmonaut Andrey Fedyaev, aboard the SpaceX Dragon Endeavour spacecraft, splashed down off the coast of Florida on Monday, Sept. 4 at 12:17 a.m. EDT. 

Prior to their return home to Earth, the quartet spent 186 days in space, orbiting our home planet a total of 2,976 times.

#nasa #international #space #station #splashdown #astronaut #cosmonaut #spacex #UAE #roscosmos #dragon #spacecraft"

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89K likes, 426 comments - iss on September 3, 2023: "Welcome home, #Crew6! 🪂

NASA astronauts Stephen Bowen and Woody Hoburg, UAE (United Arab Emir..."

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#bootsriley #autism #innerworldouterworlddissonance #translation

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Ukraine War Factory: Plastic, wood, foam and metal are skilfully shaped into copies of weapons to fool Russian attackers

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Ukraine War Factory: Plastic, wood, foam and metal are skilfully shaped into copies of weapons to fool Russian attackers

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‘A psychological weapon’: inside a Ukrainian factory making decoy kit

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Plastic, wood, foam and metal are skilfully shaped into copies of weapons to fool Russian attackers

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Cats dressed like their owners for cat fashion week in Banda Aceh, Indonesia. Photograph: Chaideer Mahyuddin/AFP/Getty Images

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Rho Ophiuchi cloud - James Webb - Nasa, ESA, CSA and STScIorGetty Images