news.buyenne.com

All imagery © 2016 Rebellion A/S. All rights reserved.

Judge Dredd was created by John Wagner and Carlos Ezquerra, but the Spanish artist was working for a different comic and didn't actually come back to Dredd for many years. This work is by Mike McMahon, who drew much early Dredd.

6 more images in gallery

2000AD is the one of the most influential comics in the world, but if you grew up in America you've probably never heard of it. It's time to right that wrong, courtesy of a documentary called Future Shock! It's recently been released in the UK, but Amazon will ship you a region 2 copy—and it's well worth the three-week wait if you are a comic fan.

It tells 2000AD's back story from the comic's birth during the time of punk, through heights of popularity and lows of corporate neglect. Launched in 1977, the comic was meant to cash in on Star Wars' popularity and then die a little while later. Instead, it became a vehicle for Pat Mills and the team he assembled to warp young minds with subversive, often ultraviolent science fiction.

Future Shock! interviews almost all the important figures in 2000AD's history—minus Alan Moore as he's busy being a wizard in Nottingham—tracing its influence on wider popular culture. Comics—particularly superhero comics—are ascendent today due in large part to creatives who cut their teeth on 2000AD, and the documentary offers great insight into how so many of them ended up working for Marvel, DC, and other American imprints. Watching Mills is a particular joy—especially his paternal fury at the various mistreatments suffered by his colleagues and the comic.

Taken at a Seattle-area VR film festival in 2015. (credit: Sam Machkovech)

Did you hear? Virtual reality is legitimate now, because filmmakers have found it.

Forget those childish toys that you call video games, and think beyond those little 360-degree videos captured at concerts. VR is now a place for capital-F Films, complete with New York Times celebrations and dedicated exhibits at Sundance. Recent VR films have some impressive sounding premises, too: immersion in the wilderness alongside bison and cheetahs; trippy, sense-filling music videos; stark, racially charged drives through poor neighborhoods; and much more.

VR filmmakers have taken some pretty diverse approaches, but most of them have one unfortunate thing in common: an overreaction to the form. In their rush to put viewers inside their concepts, these burgeoning creators forgot about the importance of directing and cinematography—a fact that I, a devout believer in VR's future, can no longer stomach.

(credit: Savioke)

It’s easy to look at your smartphone and think you live in the future. But the past’s imagining of the future promised us a lot more robot butlers.

Robots have slowly made their way into the workplace via telepresence hardware like Double Robotics or Beam, but a company called Savioke recently completed a $15 million series A funding round that will allow it to expand its operations for building the Relay robot—a hospitality-focused ‘bot that brings towels, toothpaste, and Starbucks to guests’ room.

According to the Los Angeles Times, Savioke has 12 Relay robots in hotels in the US and is looking to expand.

(credit: Ingmar Zahorsky via Flickr)

The persistent suggestion that video gaming leads to violent behavior prompts innumerable eye-rolls and Internet rants from gamers. But it’s persistent because it’s surprisingly hard to nail down a solid answer to the question. A lot of the research just raises more questions, so consensus remains elusive, despite claims to the contrary.

A fair number of studies suggest that there is a link, but those can be contrasted with other research that says there isn’t. The problem is that there are so many different factors to take into account, along with a swiftly-changing medium and difficulty in obtaining high-quality data—we'd need an avalanche of research to answer the question definitively.

While it's not an avalanche, a group of researchers, led by biological psychologist and video game violence skeptic Peter Etchells, has published an analysis suggesting that players of violent games might face a very small increase in risk for behavioral problems. They’re the kinds of small results that would be met with disappointment by authors who were hoping to find an effect, but they’re there. And yet, as always, this analysis isn’t the final word.

A Perseid meteor is seen entering Earth's atmosphere from the International Space Station. (credit: NASA)

Indian officials say a meteorite struck the campus of a private engineering college on Saturday, killing one person. If scientists confirm the explosion was due to a meteorite, it would be the first recorded human fatality due to a falling space rock.

According to local reports, a bus driver was killed on Saturday when a meteorite landed in the area where he was walking, damaging the window panes of nearby buses and buildings. Three other people were injured.

On Sunday, various Indian publications, including The Hindu, reported that the chief minister of Tamil Nadu, Jayalalithaa, issued a statement confirming the death: "A mishap occurred yesterday when a meteorite fell in the campus of a private engineering college in Vellore district's K Pantharappalli village." Tamil Nadu is located in southern India, and has a population of more than 70 million people.

Linguist Nick Farmer tells us more about some of his favorite Belter words. (Video edited by Jennifer Hahn) (video link)

OAKLAND, Calif.—It all started when Nick Farmer bought George R. R. Martin a drink, but the plot really thickened when the linguist met Martin's then-assistant Ty Franck. Franck was one half of the writing team behind the novels that fuel SyFy's incredible new series, The Expanse. And the author soon discovered that Farmer was a talented polyglot, a master of over two dozen languages who worked as a linguistic sellsword for financial research companies desperate to translate global business news for analysts. Farmer also happened to be just the kind of expert that Franck and his co-author Daniel Abraham needed to bring their novels to the screen.

The Expanse series takes place two centuries from now in the Belt, a ring of asteroids that orbit the Sun between Mars and Jupiter. People who have migrated to the Belt come from all over Earth speaking dozens of languages, and they're often isolated for years at a time on remote mining stations. To communicate, they evolve a creole called Belter, which becomes the lingua franca for what is essentially the solar system's new proletariat. The problem? In the book, Belter could be referenced. But now that The Expanse was coming to television, people would actually have to speak the damn thing. SyFy suddenly needed a linguist who could build a language out of dozens of parts. Luckily, Franck knew a guy. He soon recommended Farmer, who delivered a lot more than they bargained for.

That Dragon, Cancer is a game about love, hope, and letting go.

9 more images in gallery

“You have to let me feel this!”

Ryan Green is half-shouting, half-sobbing at his wife Amy. They’re fighting over the way that Ryan is dealing with the knowledge that their son’s diagnosis will lead to a future of palliative care and grief. We never see their faces, never get more than that solitary audio clip, but it’s a powerful, poignant moment that ends with us plunging Ryan deeper into an ocean of light.

That Dragon, Cancer is not an easy game to experience. It’s a eulogy, an autobiography, a cry into the dark. It’s one family’s endeavour to make sense of a looming tragedy, to press pause on a life that is—was— running out of time. Joel, the tow-headed child at the heart of the whole endeavour, died in March last year. He would have turned seven on the game’s January 12th launch.