The Culture We Obsessed Over This Month, From Tintin to Tabletop Games

Dominique Maricq, Hergé and the Treasures of Tintin
If you had even a touch of "indoor kid" about you as a youngster, then you know that the Tintin graphic novels were the best thing Belgium ever produced. Dive through the panels and into the legend with this insane coffee-table stew of biography, exegesis, and behind-the-scenes material. (Expand the gallery for more details.) —Peter Rubin Josh Valcarcel/WIRED

Dominique Maricq, Hergé and the Treasures of Tintin
If you had even a touch of "indoor kid" about you as a youngster, then you know that the Tintin graphic novels were the best thing Belgium ever produced. Whether it was the cowlicked kid's globe-trotting adventures that reeled you in or the indelible cast of characters (Captain Haddock! Professor Calculus! Thomson and Thompson!), you spent many a rainy afternoon with Hergé's staple-bound volumes. Now, a new coffee-table book blends biography, lore, and more archival sketches and unpublished panels than you ever thought possible. Title by title, Maricq unpacks the plot, context, and artwork of each adventure—the book even includes replicas of Hergé's notebook pages. I've been reliving so many favorite moments that I've almost been able to forget the racist-ass hideousness that was Tintin in the Congo. Almost. ($38, Amazon —Peter Rubin Josh Valcarcel/WIRED Isaiah Toothtaker, That's Not Relevant
There's something blessedly simple about iOS and Android's stock emoji—faces, buildings, farm animals, etc.—but Isaiah Toothtaker's are far more complex. The MC/tattoo artist/graphic designer's book is filled with the kind of emoji you wish you had for very specific texts. Hey, Tim Cook, any chance you can get these into iOS 8? —Angela Watercutter Josh Valcarcel/WIRED

Isaiah Toothtaker, That's Not Relevant
Emoji are the hippest form of communication around, mostly because they're not really hip. The joy comes in turning the little pixel smiley faces and barnyard animals into actual reactions. Isaiah Toothtaker's emojis, on the otherhand, are far more literal. The MC/tattoo artist/graphic designer's book That's Not Relevant is filled with the kind of emoji designs you wish were real, if only for very, very specific texts. A Playboy bunny wearing a "Play on Player" t-shirt, for example, or an image of Drake the inscription "No Basics Zone." There's even an illustration of a flat tire that says "I Woke Up Like This." They say the Apple Watch will have animated emoji, but I'm betting none of them will be as cool as these. ($20, Spork Press) —Angela Watercutter Josh Valcarcel/WIRED Jungle, Jungle
I've been checking for this group since early this year, but their self-titled debut in July and current world tour has kept them top of mind lately. Their global-soul sensibility sounds warm and full on vinyl, and the crisp beats inspire some serious living room dance parties. —Katie Davies XL Records

Jungle, Jungle
I can't say this is a new obsession, as I've been hungrily listening to and watching this group since early this year, but their self-titled debut in July and current world tour has kept them top of mind lately. Their global-soul sensibility sounds warm and full on vinyl, and the crisp beats inspire some serious living room dance parties (and if you need inspiration, check the the four videos they've released from the album so far). My favorite track is still their first single, "Platoon", released last year—and as many times as I’ve watched the video featuring an amazing 6-year-old B-Girl, it still doesn’t get old. Head over to their website to watch the videos, to see if they’re coming to a town near you, and purchase the album yourself. Pro tip: click on those glittery gold icons at the top to navigate and prepare those shoulders for shaking. (LP/CD/FLAC formats available at XL Records, MP3 album $6.99 at Amazon)—Katie Davies XL Records Edgar R. Murrow, Reporting World War II
Before Pearl Harbor happened, the only exposure many Americans had to the war was CBS' Edward R. Murrow, the London-based correspondent. Today, his smooth-voiced broadcasts are as much poetry as time capsule, and Murrow's verbal artistry makes this collection of dispatches as enjoyable as any new album on Spotify. —Joe Brown

Edgar R. Murrow, Reporting World War II
Before Pearl Harbor, America was largely unaware of the war raging in Europe. The only way many Americans heard about it was through the radio broadcasts of CBS' Edward R. Murrow, the London-based correspondent who lived through the 57-day Blitz alongside the city’s residents. His smooth-voiced reports were more like NPR audio postcards than the barked-out style we know from old-timey newsreels: quick stories of everyday heroes and victims, more apt to quote Marcus Aurelius than a living world leader. Today, the clips are as much poetry as time capsule, and Murrow's verbal artistry makes this collection of dispatches as enjoyable as any hot new album on Spotify. (Yes, it streams.) Murrow’s reports were among the first embedded broadcast journalism, and yet almost not journalism at all. How can you be objective if you’re a potential casualty? Pour a drink and ponder that—or just listen to a message from another time and be thankful that it exists. —Joe Brown J.P. Dunleavy, The Ginger Man
J.P. Dunleavy’s criminally underrated debut centers on Sebastian Dangerfield, a young American studying law (and alcoholism and infidelity) at Dublin’s prestigious Trinity College. Nearly 60 nears later, it remains a funny, shocking read—as fun, and boozy, as a pint of Guinness. Or ten. —Max Ufberg Josh Valcarcel/WIRED

J.P. Dunleavy, The Ginger Man
First published in 1955, J.P. Dunleavy’s tale of beer, sex and public indecency takes us inside the mind (and loins) of Sebastian Dangerfield, an American who comes to Ireland, wife and newborn in tow, to study law at Trinity College. “Study” is in this case a slight misrepresentation; most of the novel’s 338 pages are devoted to our lowly protagonist’s drunken exploits and escapades. There’s sex, beer, more sex, more beer, and a few fights. To call Dangerfield a protagonist doesn’t quite suit the character, as the only things he seems passionate about can be found either in a pint glass or a skirt. But what’s even more remarkable than Dunleavy’s knack for humor is his ability to make you care about a guy who amounts to little more than a monster. When Sebastian Dangerfield lulls you into some false sense of understanding, pulling a fast one on you just like he does to his growing list of landlords and lovers, you’re left questioning your own judgment and self-worth. ($11.98, Amazon) —Max Ufberg Josh Valcarcel/WIRED Edan, Beauty and the Beat
This 34-minute masterpiece from 2005 sounds old, new, and futuristic at the same time. It might as well be called “If ‘60s Was ‘90s”: Pink Floyd synths, Manzarek organ breaks, and monster riffs blend together under a lyrical flow that echoes the golden age of hip-hop. —Tim Moynihan Lewis Recordings

Edan, Beauty and the Beat
Let’s say you’ve got a time machine that’s also a spaceship. (Bear with me here.) Your launch point is Earth in 1994, and your destination is Mercury in 1968. Go ahead and super-glue this album into your vehicle’s 8-track deck, because it’s the ultimate soundtrack for that trip. Edan’s self-produced 2005 masterpiece—which shares a name with a Go-Go’s album—layers classic hip-hop on top of ‘60s psychedelic rock, and the tight production makes it sound old, new, and futuristic at the same time. Pink Floyd synths (“Torture Chamber”) transition into what sounds like Ray Manzarek organ breaks (“Making Planets”), and ultimately evolve into dinosaur riffs and Small Faces samples (“Rock and Roll”). The lyrical flow is equally diverse, with Beasties-like back-and-forths over wah-wah effects (“The Science of the Two”) and doubled-up rhymes over Hebrew crooning and strings (“Promised Land”). Just stop reading this and listen to the whole thing. It’ll only take you 34 minutes. ($8.99, Amazon) —Tim Moynihan Lewis Recordings
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Holy Crap There’s a Lot Going on in the New Hunger Games: Mockingjay Trailer

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Sony And EA Experiment With New Business Models For Older Games

This week, both Electronic Arts and Sony revealed or began to roll out new services that have been described to various degrees as “Netflix for gaming.” That description, while catchy and useful for getting the gist of what each does across, doesn’t really capture the impact that either service could have based on how they will actually be used by customers or their underlying business models.

EA announced a subscription for the Xbox One called EA Access, which would let gamers pay $4.99 per month (or $30 per year) to play a limited selection of the publisher’s titles for an unlimited amount of time — and you even get to play some titles early, though you still have to buy them after a trial period.

Sony, on the other hand, rolled out the beta for PlayStation Now, a service that lets you play PlayStation 3 games on the PlayStation 4 (and other Sony devices later this year) by streaming them from Sony’s servers like interactive videos instead of downloading them onto your device.

PlayStation Now isn’t a subscription service. While it lets you jump into a game instantly, you have to pay for access to each of its 100+ titles individually. Prices start at $2.99 for four hours of gameplay, with 7, 30, and 90 days available as longer-term options. Pricing also varies by game, so some might cost $3.99 per week while others cost as much as $14.99 for the same length of time.

Several gaming blogs have complained about the pricing structure, noting that it seems kind of ridiculous to pay up to $29.99 to have access to a game for 90 days when you could buy the game used for $20 and keep it forever. For its part, Sony has managed to brush away most criticism by noting that PlayStation Now is only in beta and that it is working to bring a subscription option to the service at some point in the future.

While EA’s subscription service won’t offer as many games to start as PlayStation Now, it makes up for it by letting subscribers play newer titles and even get access to some games early. To start, it’s offering the current Madden, FIFA, Battlefield, and Peggle games; the trial versions of the next Dragon Age and EA’s upcoming sports titles are slated to come next. If you didn’t already buy all four games currently available, EA Access’s $30 yearly price seems like a decent enough deal considering the stubbornly high prices of Xbox One games.

If you were hoping EA’s subscription would include unlimited access to their newest games, the current “blockbuster” video game business model just doesn’t allow for it. Just as Marvel cranks out superhero films like clockwork, EA has to release a new Madden on schedule every year. Across its sports titles and flashy shooters in the Battlefield series, EA has numerous reliable hits. It simply can’t afford to give several of them to gamers every year for less than the price of just one.

It’s not easy for EA to offer much of a backlog as part of its subscription either. Both Sony and Microsoft shifted to a PC architecture for their latest consoles, so it isn’t easy to get their games from the PS3 or Xbox 360 onto their successors. You either have to rebuild the game for the newer consoles, which would be a significant effort because games are generally heavily modified to get better performance on a console’s specific hardware, or “emulate” the older console in software, which significantly hurts performance.

To give you an idea of how hard that is, the only reason PlayStation Now is able to offer PS3 games on the PS4 is by running those games on what are essentially racks of PS3s in a data center, and they need to have one console in a rack per person playing at any given time. If Sony can’t get decent performance through emulation (which would be much less expensive than their current implementation) on its own hardware, it’s unreasonable to expect EA to have much luck with that route.

It seems pretty likely that Sony can eventually offer a subscription plan for PlayStation Now that includes instant access to a decent portion on the PlayStation backlog. The economics and technology don’t seem to be there for EA to do the same for its older games for at least the next few years.

Going over the factors involved in Sony and EA’s efforts, I couldn’t help but think of another company that really should introduce a similar service: Nintendo. The company has let gamers buy titles from older consoles as individual downloads since the original Wii was released in 2006, and its backlog of beloved games goes back three decades. A subscription service for the Wii U with a big marketing push behind it could bring a lot of attention to the floundering console, and in the long term Nintendo could transition into an actual “Netflix for gaming” if the console market collapses under pressure from smartphones that we all upgrade annually.

IMAGE BY PlayStation (IMAGE HAS BEEN MODIFIED)

Boot up: Google and Skybox, Android's Quantum Paper, Apple TV games?

An aerial photograph taken by Skybox Imaging of Kiev, Ukraine, during the anti-government protests in February this year. Photograph: AP

A burst of 9 links for you to chew over, as picked by the Technology team

Robinson Meyer:

Skybox's success doesn't depend on it developing a perfect image-evaluation algorithm. It merely depends on another developer using its cloud to develop an algorithm. 

Now it joins Google. The advertising giant might use the small satellites in its quest for more and faster data for its Maps and Earth services. The company, however, gets its truly high-resolution imagery from DigitalGlobe, and it negotiated its last "multiyear agreement" with the satellite behemoth in February. Owning satellites of its own might help Google when it negotiates its next contract with DigitalGlobe, but that's now a few years off. (Whatever happens in the world of small satellites, by the way, the military will still pay for access to DigitalGlobe's enormous WorldView craft. That doesn't mean its stock hasn't responded to the news.)

No, it seems possible Google bought Skybox for two reasons.

Our new information surrounding Quantum is refreshing. There has been a lot of confusion over the past months about interface leaks and updates, with many questioning why Google isn't remaining consistent and resolute in its design guidelines for Android.

Having seen Quantum Paper, however, it is clear that not only is Google looking to be more consistent in Android design, but they are planning to provide all the pieces necessary to third party developers, and make this new interface approach consistent not just on its mobile operating system but across its web properties and perhaps more interestingly, iOS as well.

The potential here is large. You wouldn't be mistaken to think of Quantum as a sort of broad-sweep replacement for Holo, but it's even more powerful than that. The framework will include interface, motion, and interaction (as stated before) on all platforms, making for not just clearer and more consistent UI but also a more consistent user experience.

Sean Heber points out that iOS 8 brings lots of changes. Apple TV wasn't mentioned in the WWDC keynote. But it has gained lots of little extras - building blocks?

Due to AirPlay now supporting peer-to-peer connections, this means that if you bring your iPhone or iPad with you to a friend's house (or anywhere with an AppleTV such as a hotel room, school, etc), and you have all of your games in your pocket but can play them on the nearby screen if you want. You can play without needing to purchase the game on that particular AppleTV, without needing to sign in with your iCloud account to access your purchases, without needing to get their wifi password, or indeed without there even needing to *be* a wifi network to join in the first place. All without any hassle. When you go home, you take the game and any earned progress along with you in your pocket.

Marc Andreessen:

Progressive and smart economist Jared Bernstein has explored the productivity puzzle of robots eating all the jobs (or not). He points out that productivity growth was up 1% last year, and has averaged 0.8% since 2011. But what he really focuses on is the smooth trend that tracks through the numbers.

The trend suggests that the pace of productivity growth has decelerated since the first half of the 2000s. That begs an important question that the robots-are-coming advocates need to answer: Why a phenomenon that should be associated with accelerating productivity is allegedly occurring over a fairly protracted period where the [productivity] trend in output per hour is going the other way?

My own take. We're still coming out of a severe macroeconomic down cycle, the credit crisis, deleveraging, and the liquidity trap. The prevailing pessimistic economic theories — the death of innovation, the crisis of inequality and yes, robots eating all the jobs — will fade with recovery.

Brad Greenberg, intellectual property fellow. Columbia Law School:

assuming Tesla offers nothing more than a public promise not to sue "good faith" users, this announcement may be of little social benefit. Worse, it seems to me that such public promises could provide a new vehicle for trolling.

Sure, Tesla may be estopped from enforcing its patents—though estoppel requires reasonable reliance and this announcement is so vague that it's difficult to imagine the reliance that would be reasonable—and Tesla isn't in the patent trolling business anyway… But what if Tesla sold its patents or went bankrupt. Could a third party not enforce the patents? If it could, patents promised to be open source would seem a rich market for PAEs.

Tesla is not to first to pledge its patents as open source. In fact, as Clark Asay pointed out, IBM has already been accused of reneging the promise. (See: IBM now appears to be claiming the right to nullify the 2005 pledge at its sole discretion, rendering it a meaningless confidence trick.") The questions raised by the Tesla announcement are, thus, not new. And, given enough time, courts will have to answer them.

Logically, Tesla is making this promise about its patents because its business doesn't depend on its patents.

Carolina Milanesi:

The big source of buzz about the iPhone 6 is its larger screen size-the lack of which, many experts speculate, has caused Apple to lose appeal and customers over the past year.

Kantar Worldpanel ComTech data, however, tells a different story when it comes to the US market. When looking at the US consumers who upgraded their devices over the past year, only 14% of iPhone users moved from Apple to Android, and of those, only 2.1% opted for a screen of 5.5 inches or larger.

Chinese consumers have turned to larger screen sizes over the past year, so it is no surprise that these numbers are higher: Among consumers who upgraded their devices over the past year, 39% left iOS for Android. Of those, 12.3% opted for a screen of 5.5 inches or larger.

The potential upside of moving to a larger screen is certainly considerable for Apple in China, with customers to be retained and won over, but the impact will not be lost in the US, either.

The gap between expert - or "expert" - speculation and consumer behaviour is often telling. The article has some fascinating statistics too about ownership movement between Samsung and Apple.

Next time someone demands your digits and you want to get out of the situation, you can give them this number: (669) 221-6251.

when the person calls or texts, an automatically-generated quotation from feminist writer bell hooks will respond for you.

protect your privacy while dropping some feminist knowledge when your unwanted "suitor" calls or texts.

Awesome idea. Donate if you use it. Or set one up for UK numbers.

|Pitted a black cab (via Hailo), Addison Lee and Uber, from the WSJ Europe offices in Fleet Street to the Shard.

Uber's driver wasn't familiar with The Shard, a towering glass structure that is one of the most recognizable landmarks in London. The driver took a different route from the other two, which ended up taking twice as much time. The fare was 60% more than the other trips because of a premium Uber charges for busy times.

Slower and more expensive? What's not to love?

As a biomedical computing student at Queen's University seven years ago, Justin Lee knew he wanted to build his own "internet of things" device — but he didn't want it to be any old "smart" lamp, toaster, or light switch. "I wanted to put a computer into one of the most ubiquitous objects in the history of the human race," he says. He chose the cup. Then, he enlisted Yves Béhar, the esteemed designer behind Jawbone and the OLPC, to build it.

The result is Vessyl, a 13-ounce cup that recognizes any beverage you pour into it, displays its nutritional content, and syncs all your drinking habits to your smartphone. Let's cut to the chase: while I only had an hour with a Vessyl prototype, I tried nearly a dozen beverages in it — and it successfully identified all of them. Within 10 seconds, the device, which currently resembles more of a Thermos than a finished product, recognized Crush orange soda, Vitamin Water XXX, Tropicana orange juice, Gatorade Cool Blue, plain-old water, and a few other beverages, all by name. Yes, this cup knows the difference between Gatorade Cool Blue and Glacier Freeze.

The internet of drinks! Now if it could identify contaminants - or whether someone had spiked your drink - that would make it a lot more interesting.

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