Thomas was Alone, or how little quadrilaterals can have personality

So I've been playing Thomas was Alone this week. All I can say, is wow Humble Bundle, for showing me this game. I never thought it was possible to develop such an emotional attachment to a small rectangle. Despite the minimalist style and story, it's these characters still can be seen to develop, with each speaking lines the size of twitter posts. My personal favourite post (although morbid) comes from James, a previously overconfident, green rectangle: "James hoped that he would be eaten next. He didn't want to be alone" So there you go. More character development then some big budget blockbusters in that line there. Proof that you don't have to write a hundred pages to develop interesting and distinct characters. Plus I find the backstory really interesting- the birth of AI is a seriously fasinating possibility, and the possibility for storytelling is huge- at least, now that we seem to have abandoned the "computers are scary" phase of our development.

Youtube Poop: Internet Junk, or Experimental Film?

For those of you who are not familiar with Youtube's stranger side, let me first give an example of what youtube poop is:



Whilst certainly strange, this kind of remixing appears to be far from unique to YouTube. It seems analogous to the long-running practice of remixing music, with which I'm sure you're all familiar. And then I realised, I'd seen this sort of thing before.



What you just saw, was a piece of ww2 era propaganda. So remixing films is hardly a new thing. But is youtube the new tape recorder? Just as remixes only became big once it was possible share tapes, so is video remixing only possible en mass recently, now that we have it's possible to share videos. With that being said, it occurs to me, that there's still a legal problem with this- since technically, such videos might be infringement (or fair use- the jury's still out- pardon the pun.)


So what do you think- would you watch remixed videos? Or do you get annoyed at meme GIFs already? Let me know in the comments!