No, said Aziraphale, it's ineffable.

gamescreenshotsaaa

#49: Sonic the Hedgehog (Sega, Mega Drive, 1991)

Part V: Never Fade Away (Starlight Zone)
And lo, a light at the end of that long, long tunnel. Emerging from the deep, dark pit of despair that is the Labyrinth Zone into the bright and shimmering city of the Starlight Zone feels, in every way, like a reward for forging through and not giving up. The Starlight Zone is a little slice of platforming heaven, the one level in the game, besides the Green Hill Zone, that removes the shackles and lets Sonic loose to achieve the dizzying speeds of which he is capable. The one place where his true potential really shines.
But this is, to be clear, not a knock on the three zones we have just journeyed through, or indeed, those that are yet to come. They all serve a particular function within the game, and part of that function, especially in the case of the Labyrinth Zone, is to frustrate the player. This is not a mistake on the part of the developers; it is, I think, a very deliberate building of tension. It is the increasingly severe restrictions on Sonic’s speed throughout those zones that make the Starlight Zone shine so very brightly.
Basically, if every level played like this, it would seem like nothing special. Just another level where you run fast. Yawn. But with the game sequenced the way it is, the Starlight Zone is a sudden burst of adrenaline, just when it’s needed most. It’s a pick me up after the grueling gauntlet of the Labyrinth, and equally, it’s the calm before the storm of the endgame.

feynites

The hilarious thing about watching people talk about their experiences with pokemon go is that I just keep remembering all the edgy ‘realistic’ pokemon reinterpretations that used to go around, and how ‘no the pokemon world would be SO DARK you guys’.

And now there are people going around IRL catching pokemon and they’re just like ‘I WENT OUT AND MADE TWENTY NEW FRIENDS AND FOUND AN EEVEE AND EEVEE IS ALSO MY FRIEND!!!’

So it seems the pokemon setting actually was pretty damn accurate.

corseque

I was just at a park by a lake with crowds of people as thick as if there was a fair, all playing Pokemon Go. People rode by on bikes, trying to hatch eggs (one was playing the bicycle theme song on a speaker). The only thing people talked about was Pokemon.

It looked and sounded exactly like I was actually walking down a Route in a Pokemon game. The whole thing was completely surreal.

Study proposes explanation for how cephalopods see color, despite black and white vision

For years, camera-makers have sought ways to avoid chromatic aberration—the color fringes that occur when various wavelengths of light focus at different distances behind a lens.

But where photographers see a problem, some sea creatures see possibility.

A new study, co-authored by the father-and-son team of Christopher and Alexander Stubbs, suggests that chromatic aberration may explain how cephalopods—the class of animals that includes squid, octopi and cuttlefish—can demonstrate such remarkable camouflage abilities despite only being able to see in black and white. The study is described in a July 4, 2016 paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

“Spectral discrimination in color blind animals via chromatic aberration and pupil shape”, PNAS, www.pnas.org/cgi/doi/10.1073/pnas.1524578113