Nuclear Monster

  • Archive.org has a special on archived muzak in aisle 89:

    In the late 1980’s and early 1990’s, I worked for Kmart behind the service desk and the store played specific pre-recorded cassettes issued by corporate. This was background music, or perhaps you could call it elevator music. Anyways, I saved these tapes from the trash during this period and this video shows you my extensive, odd collection. Until around 1992, the cassettes were rotated monthly. Then, they were replaced weekly. Finally sometime around 1993, satellite programming was intoduced which eliminated the need for these tapes altogether.

    The older tapes contain canned elevator music with instrumental renditions of songs. Then, the songs became completely mainstream around 1991. All of them have advertisements every few songs.

    The monthly tapes are very, very, worn and rippled. That’s becuase they ran for 14 hours a day, 7 days a week on auto-reverse. If you do the math assuming that each tape is 30 minutes per side, that’s over 800 passes over a tape head each month.

  • John Carmack is one of those rare people who pretty much everything they write is worth reading. He’s not always right, but it is always entertaining to watch his level of genius on display. In this case, Carmack is writing about overcoming the problems he ran into while developing a custom virtual reality environment where you can watch Netflix films and shows on the Samsung Gear VR device. You should read it.

  • Firewatch Forestry mystery Firewatch from Campo Santo for Linux, Mac, Windows and Playstation 4, finally has a release date, February 9th, 2016. Get psyched.

  • A new update to Team Fortress 2:

    An extraterrestrial force threatens the planet in Team Fortress 2’s new event created exclusively by the community, for the community– INVASION! Over a (light)year in the making, we’re excited to finally hit the launch button and have the community join in on our fight against the alien menace! So buckle up, grab a space gun, and get ready to have your mind probed (and blown)!

    The TF2 team is proud to announce Invasion, a wholly community-created update featuring an animated short, 16 new cosmetic items, reskinned weapons with cool death effects, a taunt, four maps, Unusual particle effects, and even an update landing page. It represents a boatload of work from some incredibly talented members of the TF2 community. Buy your Invasion Community Update Pass today!

    The pass isn’t required for playing the new maps, just for keeping track of kills during the event and tossing some money the way of the people in the Team Fortress 2 community that made the maps and other content.