Beautiful new space sim scratches your retro itch

Look, I’ll level with you. I did not play the Wing Commander games when I was a kid. In the early 1990s, I certainly spent some time with the old Lucasarts flight sim Battlehawks 1942 (if you click through to watch, turn your speakers down), and later sunk some time into X-Wing and sunk many many many hours into TIE Fighter. Suffice to say, I have a lot of nostalgia for old-school flight and space sims, and it’s an itch that hasn’t been scratched for a long time. Enter Wings of…

Pizzeria

Not long ago, I watched Tested’s in-depth video talking about pizza stones and their virtues when it comes to making pizzas at home. Being a fan of cooking in general, knowing that Whistler and the Fish (my girls) have a ton of fun making pizza from scratch with me, I wanted to see what kind of results we’d get with a pizza stone. I was mightily surprised when it turned out that WE HAVE ONE. The Fish, the eldest, gave it a good cleaning, and both helped me make the…

The work that goes into making Spider-Man swing is incredible

Sony Imageworks, the company behind The Amazing Spider-Man’s visual effects, has done a spectacular job of making Andrew Garfield’s digital double a realistic, believable entity — so much so that a lot of the shots I expected to be a combination of live-action shots of a stuntman in a suit and animation are just straight-up digital. What they do more than most VFX houses is that they seem to trust in simulation, whether it’s simulating cloth or even muscles juggling with the force of punches or steps. It adds a realistic dimension to what may…