Playing with Niagara systems and blending 2D animations with 3D meshes. Bringing back MapleStory and Fiesta Online nostalgia :maple_leaf::tada: Would love to hear your thoughts! :orange_heart: Music by: Alex Laszlo -

Song-sharking companies sometimes began by offering free consultations for everyday poetsas in this 1921 advertisement in Film Fun magazine. Film Fun MagazineAs popular music grew into a mass industry in the early 20th century, a murky assortment of companies popped up and began a practice that came to be known as song-sharking. Advertisements enjoined ordinary Americans to send in their original poems and lyrics, which the company would set to music for a rather large feea few hundred dollars, depending on the year.Early song-sharking companies in the 1910s merely set customers lyrics to sheet music and mailed the sheaves to the customer as a collectors item. In later decades, sharking companies enlisted whole teams of session musicians to give peoples submissions the full-blown studio treatment and put them on records. And while many Americans were no doubt satisfied with the novelty of hearing someone on the gramophone singing their lyrics, many song-sharking advertisements dangled a further enticement: the seductive proposition that fame and success in the music business might be just a cashiers check and a postage stamp away.The advertisements, typically nestled inside popular magazines and supermarket tabloids, tended to address readers with the smarmy cadence of a door-to-door salesman, hinting at the possibility of a big payday. Mail your song-poem on love, peace, victory or any other subject to us today, announces an emblematic example from a 1922 issue of Illustrated World. We revise song-poems, compose music for them and guarantee to secure publication on a royalty basis by a New York music publisher. A 1962 ad. Some poems were quite whimsical:Yellow submarines / Corn on the cob and tangerines / I like yellow things.Radio / TV magazineOf course, most of these song-poems had no life beyond the LPs that companies mailed to paying customers. Of an estimated 200,000 songs that companies produced from the lyrics of would-be folk lyricists between 1900 and the early 2000s, when the practice petered out, not one ever became a hit. Still, the enterprise struck at a deeply rooted American desire to win fame and fortune instantly, based on ones own exquisite originality.As poetry, the lyrics could run the gamut from generic and derivative to just plain weird. But buoyed by the musicianship of studio professionals, and sharpened by the formal conventions of popular songwriting, the effect could be earnest, whimsical, even charming, and plenty of paying customers seem to have been quite happy with the results. In the 1990s, song-poems thus acquired a cult following among Americana collectors and now enjoy a second life thanks to various compilations, perhaps most notably the 2003 CD The American Song-Poem Anthologya testament to their status as an unfiltered, radically democratic form of outsider art.I love pop music, Phil Milstein, who produced that album, remarked in an NPR interview shortly after its release. But Im aware that for great pop songwriters theres always some mediation between life experience and the craft of the finished work. With song-poem music there is no such mediation. Its a much purer expression of human thought.Subscribe to Smithsonian magazine now for just $19.99This article is a selection from the December 2024 issue of Smithsonian magazineGet the latest Travel & Culture stories in your inbox.Filed Under: Business, Music, Musical History, Musicians, Songs

L'empire des Lumires,Ren Magritte, 1954 Christie's Images LTD. 2024A 1954 painting by Ren Magritte, Lempire des lumires,has just sold for $121.2 million. The painting surpassed its $95 million estimate at Christies New York this week, making it the first Magritte work ever to sell for nine figures.Magritte is known for his Surrealist style, often placing everyday objects or figures in strange scenes and scenarios.Lempire des lumires depicts a house near a pond, enveloped in the dark of night with only a street lamp and interior windows illuminating it. The treetops above the house, untouched by the light, are entirely black. However, the sky above the house is bright blue and filled with fluffy white clouds, as if it were the middle of the day.In 1966, Magritte explained the concept, per Christies:After I had painted Lempire des lumires, I got the idea that night and day exist together, that they are one. This is reasonable, or at the very least its in keeping with our knowledge: in the world night always exists at the same time as day. (Just as sadness always exists in some people at the same time as happiness in others.) But such ideas are not poetic. What is poetic is the visible image of the picture.The artist became somewhat fixated on this idea. He created 27 different versions of Lempire des lumires, and each shows the same scene: a dark house (or houses) with a bright blue sky above.The high price of this sale comes at a time when many have been fretting over a sluggish global art market. Artnets Katya Kazakinareports thattwo telephone bidders went head-to-head via Christies staffers Alex Rotter and Xin Li-Cohen.You could have heard a pin drop, Kazakina reports. Almost ten minutes into the proceeding, Rotter was on top with a $105 million bid, and Li-Cohen signaled that her client was bowing out. The room erupted in applause. The buyers premium brought the total to $121.2 million.Brett Gorvy, a founder of the art galleryLvy Gorvy Dayan, tells the New York Times Scott Reyburn that the large number could be influenced by the current political climate.The election has definitely had an immediate impact on the marketplace, Gorvy says. The stock market has made people richer. We saw in our gallery the day after the election that deals were done by clients who had hesitated before.But, Gorvy notes, it could be a honeymoon period.Two other Magritte works went up for sale at the auction. Those paintings,La cour damour(1960) and La Mmoire(1945), sold for $10.53 million and $3.68 million respectively. The impressive number forLempire des lumires stole the show and further cemented Magrittes legacy as a painter.The motif is one of the few truly iconic images in 20th-century art, Max Carter, Christies vice chairman of 20th- to 21st-century art, tells CNNs Karina Tsui.Carter adds, When icons appear on the market, they create their own market dynamic.Get the latest stories in your inbox every weekday.Filed Under: Artists, Auctions, Painters, Painting, Surrealism

Scientists Finally Identified This Glowing, Transparent Mystery Mollusk After Nearly 25 Years of PuzzlingThe newly described species of sea slug dwells in darkness in the oceans midnight zone, using a hood to capture prey with a Venus flytrap-like technique The creature lives in the midnight zone," an area of the ocean so deep that sunlight never reaches it. Monterey Bay Aquarium Research InstituteIn February 2000, scientists spotted an unusual, glowing creature swimming 8,576 feet beneath the surface of the Pacific Ocean. They were using a remotely operated underwater vehicle to explore the midnight zone off the coast of central California, an area so deep that sunlight never reaches it. The bioluminescent animal didnt match up with anything theyd seen before, so they nicknamed it the mystery mollusk.It sort of looks like it was made up from spare parts left over from making a bunch of other animals, says Bruce H. Robison, an ecologist at the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute, to NPRs Short Wave.Now, more than two decades later, researchers say theyve identified the elusive creature. Its a new species of sea slug that theyve named Bathydevius caudactylus, they report this week in the journal Deep-Sea Research Part I.After that first encounter in 2000, researchers went looking for more B. caudactylus specimens to get a better idea of what they had found. They returned to the same spot they saw the first one, called Monterey Submarine Canyon, but also explored new areas off the coast of California. The team ventured up to Oregon, and they even spotted a few of the mystery mollusks in the Mariana Trench in the western Pacific. In the end, they observed 157 individuals.Most of the creatures they found were between about 3,300 and 10,700 feet deep, where water temperatures were around 36 degrees Fahrenheit. But a handful lived even deeper, in habitats up to 13,150 feet below the surface. Many B. caudactylus were alone, but a few were found swimming near each other.To better understand the animals identity, the team collected a few B. caudactylus specimens and sequenced their DNA. This analysis showed the creature was a new species that belonged to a previously unknown family of nudibranch, or sea slug. And that, researchers say, was astounding.The deep water column is maybe the last place youd expect to find a nudibranch, Robison tells CNNs Ashley Strickland. Its sort of like finding hummingbirds near the peak of Mt. Everest. Still, he adds, almost every aspect of Bathydevius reflects an adaptation to this habitat: anatomy, physiology, reproduction, feeding, behavior; its unique.MBARI researchers discover remarkable new swimming sea slug in the deep seaWatch on B. caudactylus is an ethereal-looking creature with a gelatinous, transparent body. It has a large, bell-shaped hood atop its head; a fringed tail with between 9 and 16 finger-like appendages; and a short, cylindrical foot protruding from its middle. Its red stomach and orangish-brown digestive gland are visible within its see-through body.The creatures use their hoods to trap preyprimarily shrimpwith a technique akin to how a Venus flytrap captures bugs. To move through the water, they either drift on the current or flex their bodies up and down.Most of the time, B. caudactylus simply relies on its transparent body to avoid being seen by predators. But, if necessary, it can startle predators by lighting up with bioluminescence. In some instances, it can even shed one of its finger-like tail appendages as a distraction.Those dactyls fall off like a lizard dropping its tail, Robison tells the East Bay Times Rita Aksenfeld. If they turn off the lights in the rest of the body, and just that glowing, wiggling dactyl is visible, then the predator may go for the decoy rather than the animal itself.When it needs to make a speedy escape, B. caudactylus can shut its hood quickly to propel itself out of harms way.In another adaptation to its deep-sea environment, B. caudactylus has both male and female sex organs, though researchers never observed the species mating. When its time to release eggs, the mollusk floats down to the seafloor, where it anchors itself with its foot.In the habitat where they live, opportunities to find a potential mate are few and far between, Robison tells the East Bay Times. But you double your chances of success if both individuals carry both sets of sex organs.The roughly 3,000 known species of nudibranchs come in a variety of shapes, sizes and colors. Since the animals lack shells to protect themselves, they use their coloring to either warn predators to stay away or to camouflage against their surroundings. Some have evolved the ability to steal stinging cells from their prey and reuse them.Nudibranchs primarily eat jellyfish, anemones, sponges and other aquatic invertebratesbut some are cannibalistic. Two other nudibranchs use hoods to trap their prey, but they are only distantly related to B. caudactylus. This indicates that the mystery mollusks feeding method probably evolved independently several times.Though nudibranchs live in oceans all over the world, researchers say B. caudactylus is the first known to live in the deep water column.More broadly, the discovery of B. caudactylus demonstrates just how little scientists know about the oceanand the deep ocean, in particular.For there to be a relatively large, unique and glowing animal that is in a previously unknown family really underscores the importance of using new technology to catalog this vast environment, study co-author Steven H.D. Haddock, a marine biologist at the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute, says in a statement. The more we learn about deep-sea communities, the better we will be at ocean decision-making and stewardship.Get the latest stories in your inbox every weekday.Filed Under: Animals, Biology, Mollusks, Worms, Sponges, Starfish, New Research, Oceans, Pacific Ocean, Water, Weird Animals, wildlife

The plan to break apart Google... RIP Chrome

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Why Two Point Studios returned to the office"The magic happens when we're all in the same place" Feature by Christopher Dring Head of Games B2B Published on Nov. 20, 2024 It doesn't feel that long since we last spoke to the team at Two Point Studios.In fact, it was two years ago, on the eve of the release of its second game: Two Point Campus. The simulation title had just suffered a slight delay, and one of the reasons the studio cited for the date shift was because the game had been made almost entirely during lockdown.At the time, founders Mark Webley and Gary Carr said that it wasn't until the end of development that they noticed a few issues. The sort of issues, they suggested, that would have been picked up if the team had been operating in the same space. This is a studio that's used to looking over each other's shoulders, spotting issues with how their colleagues are playing the game, or taking a brief moment to highlight a tiny bug. For the vast majority of Two Point Campus' development, that simply didn't happen.Two years on, and Two Point Studios appears similar to the one we spoke to back then. The same leaders, the same team size (around 40 people) and they're still making management sim titles set in the fictional Two Point County. The company's next game, due in February next year, is called Two Point Museum.Yet whereas Campus was made almost entirely remotely, Museum has been made almost entirely in-office."It was a much easier development process this time," explains executive producer Jo Koehler."Last time we spoke, we talked about Covid and the effect that had on the production of Two Point Campus. We went into full production about the week of the lockdowns. We thought it would be a month at home then we'd back, but that wasn't to be. With Museum, we are back in the office four days a week for most people. And having that back and forth, face-to-face has been really fantastic."Design director Ben Huskins adds: "Those little ad-hoc chats... when we are at home, someone would message you on Slack and you might not spot that for an hour, and they only wanted a two minute chat. That sort of thing is so much easier in the office."Koehler again: "We all say the magic happens when you're all in the same place. Having all those playthroughs in the office... it's been really good." Two Point Museum isn't coming to Nintendo Switch due to more enhanced tech and a larger scaleThe ability to operate in-person has also been crucial in Two Point Studios' efforts to make its games approachable.Each of the Two Point games are standalone. 2018's Two Point Hospital, 2022's Two Point Campus and 2025's Two Point Museum feature some cross-over elements and characters (I am told there's a fan community built around in-game radio DJ Sir Nigel Bickleworth), but they are distinctly their own experiences. Two Point Campus, for example, focused on building a relationship with the students in the game, whereas the upcoming Two Point Museum is less about the characters and more about going on adventures to find exhibits to display.And each game has its own fans. There are those that move from game-to-game, but Huskins and Koehler tell us that there are plenty who come in for the specific experience of running a hospital, or setting up a school. That means, the team has to approach each game as if its audience has never played one before.And just generally, Two Point Studios is proud of the fact that its games appear welcoming. Its simplistic but characterful visual design, the chunky UI it's all part of the company's focus on making sure its games are not off-putting to more casual users."We spend a lot of time thinking about the onboarding process for the game, and ease people in," Huskins tells us."And that's not just about [existing] Two Point players vs new players, but that's also us trying to deal with hardcore management players and those who want a more relaxing experience and might feel overwhelmed loading up a management sim. That is a real pillar of our studio, which is having that depth to the game, but trying to make it as accessible and approachable as possible. We spend a lot of time thinking about how we gradually introduce these features. We have it so the game still works with the base set of features, but then we layer things on."And the key to that is testing, watching, tweaking all of which are easier to do when you can see people playing the game, whether that's in an office or even at events."We do a lot of iteration on things like that," Koehler explains. "We do a lot of playtesting as things go along. And events like Gamescom, it's great to look over people's shoulders and see how they play.""With Two Point Museum, we are back in the office four days a week for most people"Jo Koehler, Two Point StudiosTwo Point Museum continues the studio's penchant for creating management sims that are based on everyday concepts, but with an added layer of humour and fantasy on top. In the case of Museum, you might discover a caveman in a block of ice and put it on display, but if you're not careful, the ice could melt and the caveman would escape."It's the idea that it's grounded in reality to an extent, but it allows us to put our own twist on it, and our own style of humour on it as well," Huskins explains.I've always thoroughly enjoyed the Two Point games, and my playthrough with Museum left me with little doubt that the series' signature style, humour and quality remain intact. Where I was a little disappointed was to see the absence of a Nintendo Switch version (which is how I played the first two games). The Switch version of Campus was a priority for Two Point Studios due to how successful Hospital had been on the platform. So why skip it this time around?"With each game, we've pushed the tech each time," Huskins tells us. "And there's a few things that we're doing this time like the lightning effects [for the exhibits]. And we've also got quite a lot of depth to each museum, which gives you reasons to come back to them. Whereas previously, you would get three stars [on your creation] and you felt like you'd move on. Whereas, with this game you can play the museum for much longer, so you can end up with lots of things going on and lots of characters."Huskins did suggest more platforms could come up down the line a hint, perhaps, that a Switch 2 version would be on the cards. Two Point Museum takes place in the same fictional universe as Two Point Hospital and CampusFor now, the team has its hands full, not just with Museum, but it has vibrant communities still playing Hospital and Campus, too."[Expanding the universe] definitely affects our focus in terms of where we do updates," admits Huskins. "We don't have as many people focused on a particular game."Koehler cuts in: "We have to think quite carefully about making sure we're doing the right things. So doing the things the player wants. So when we do the post-release roadmaps, we listen very closely to the community."Huskin concludes: "We have a list for every game of the quality of life updates we'd like to do, here is some feedback from the community, any bugs we've not been able to fix... and then it's just a case of prioritising it in terms of what gets the focus."For now, we're managing it, and certainly being back in the office has helped us with that."

Unknown 9 developer Reflector Entertainment lays off 18% of staffUpdate: Studio says affected employees "aren't assigned to roles that our active projects require" News by James Batchelor Editor-in-chief Published on Nov. 20, 2024 Update: Reflector Entertainment has confirmed 18% of its workforce have been laid off in a post on its website.The studio attributed this decision it entering a new phase of development, and the people affected "aren't assigned to roles that our active projects require."The company has said that it is supporting those who have been laid off by "providing them with severance packages as well as access to medical, emotional, and career planning support."Original story: Reflector Entertainment has reportedly laid off an unknown number of staff, just one month after the launch of its debut title, Unknown 9: Awakening.The job cuts were first reported by Kotaku reporter Ethan Gach via BlueSky, with GameDeveloper noting that some of the affected employees have also spread news of the layoffs via LinkedIn.It's unclear how many staff have been cut, although it is believed the QA, marketing, art and narrative teams have been impacted. Narrative and game designer Anna Karina Bermudez and brand manager Manou Deneuvel are among those who are now seeking new employment.Reflector Entertainment is the developer behind Unknown 9: Awakening, the first in a series of action adventure games with a transmedia universe built around it. Other Unknown 9 outlets include a podcast audio drama, novels and a comic book series.The studio landed Bandai Namco as publisher, with the Japanese company acquiring Reflector back in 2020 ahead of Unknown 9's release.Unknown 9: Awakening was originally due for release this summer, but was delayed to October 18, 2024. It released to mixed reviews, and it unclear how well it has sold.GamesIndustry.biz has reached out to Bandai Namco for confirmation and comment.

Farlight's AFK Journey just released on iOS and Android last month, and it's already been crowned Google Play's best game of 2024.In celebrating the best apps and games to grace the storefront this year, Google commended the mobile-RPG for its "expansive roster of characters and satisfying tactical battle system. [...] Its vast explorable world and beautiful art style also helps it stand apart from its peers." According to its store listing, the game has over 5 million downloads on Google Plays since its launch."AFK Journey blew us away within its opening minutes, showcasing exceptional visuals and a fantasy world packed with satisfying things to explore," Google continued. "The choice for Best Game of 2024 was obvious: We just couldnt get enough of [it].Meanwhile, Supercell's Clash of Clans took the win for best multi-device game. Earlier this year, the free-to-play title released on PCs and Chromebooks, becoming "optimized across everywhere you play, however you want to play. [It] may have been around for over a decade," said Google, "but this year, it went even bigger."Fellow games to receive "Best of" awards this year include Squad Busters ("Best Multiplayer"), Yes, Your Grace (Best Indie), Solo Leveling: Arise (Best Story), and Honkai: Star Rail (Best Ongoing). Last year, Honkai took home Google Play's Best 2023 Game, preceded by Apex Legends Mobile in 2022.Changes afoot for the Google Play StoreGoogle also used the 2024 awards to tout its changes to the Google Play Store throughout the year. Along with updating its discoverability features and "ensuring timely content delivery," it worked to "better support the developers who power the platform. We look forward to seeing how developers and publishers continue to help people discover new apps, games and bookswherever they are, on whatever device."The full list of Google Play's best games and apps for 2024 can be read here.