Further proof of the quantified nostalgia we extract from the hardware that projects an original story: According to Examiner, an original prototype of The Legend of Zelda will find a new, undisclosed home after selling for a record-breaking $55,000 on eBay. The price is the highest-ever for a Nintendo title. – – – According to seller Tom Curtin, the offer price was not the only factor in his choice to sell. “I care about the collecting community and giving it a good home was important,” he said. “I feel as though that was accomplished. It was also important getting prototype…

When the Brooklyn-based, band-of-electro-brothers Yeasayer received word that their album was on “the verge of…being leaked through the cracks of the digital universe,” they spread their own tendrils into that digital universe to co-opt illegal trafficking by—for lack of a better word—gamifying the album’s promotion. With songs supplemented by video-artist Yoshi Sodeoka, the band challenged fans to scavenge for the songs just like torrenters scavenge for aggregated mp3 fragments. Animal New York is up on the race: The first, “Blue Paper,” debuted on Wired’s Underwire blog this morning, and ravenous Yeasayer fans have already uncovered a few more. Here’s a…

If thousands of armed, unmanned, and GPS-reliant drones buzzing over our borders ever seemed way too precarious to believe they were making us safer, here’s why: Researchers at the University of Texas’ Radionavigation Laboratory led by Professor Todd Humphrey took command of a UT-owned UAV, because Department of Homeland Security thought it’d be a good time to see how easy it was, RT reports. – – – After being challenged by his lab, the DHS dared Humphreys’ crew to hack into a drone and take command. Much to their chagrin, they did exactly that. Humphrey tells Fox News that for…

Marching one step closer to a future of feeding-tube monitors or subwoofer footbaths, the Black Element Cyclone Edition is a mouse that wields a 6000rpm fan aimed to send cool, dry air through the slimy crevasse between your palm on the plastic. According to Engadget, the creators TT eSports, the gaming product underling of Thermaltake, plans to release the mouse this month for $80. The patent pending design promises to keep noise down to a sub-environmental 21.7dB, while delivering an airflow of 2.6 cubic feet per minute — which, if you’re lucky, should be enough to not only keep your…

Foursquare’s society turf-war was a scary investment for many who feared constant oversight of their daily activities. Now those anxieties might relax in light of a new iOS app that overlays a pixelated, Wes Anderson storybook over Foursquare’s interface. Turf Geography Club takes its cues from Monopoly and a kindergarten scavenger hunt, asking players to discover new locations and treasures, own them, and then charge other players fake, yet weirdly real, rent. Verge has more: The game has been available in a private beta for several months now, and the results were encouraging enough to attract $600,000 in funding from…

The Olympics are rigged—not the games themselves, but the presentation, at least for those of us watching TV in the U.S.A. Over at The A.V. Club, Ryan McGee’s coverage of NBC’s coverage isn’t redundant—it’s warrented criticism of how NBC’s monopoly on broadcast narrates the Olympics in a very literal sense. Purer, unspoiled streaming is available but not exactly economically accessible or technically reliable. So in trying to balance exposition with drama, NBC choked the information, and the internet is throwing up. It boils down to the way NBC treats this four-hour block as a narrative it has to shape rather…

Because games are always better when you can brag about how good you are at them, Kamcord lets you record gameplay and immediately share to Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and email. A large part of what made Instagram so successful was its ability to capitalize on memory-making. You saw something you loved, added a filter, and shared for posterity. For games, such experiences are only second-hand—telling someone about your amazing run in Diablo III not nearly as profound as showing them what took place. There are certainly tools available on the PC side for this sort of thing, but simplified capture-and-share is…

Four Badminton teams, two from South Korea and one each from China and Indonesia were disqualified from the Olympic badminton event because—according to sections 4.5 and 4.6 of the Badminton World Federation’s (BWF) Player Code of Conduct—the players “did not use the best efforts to win,” the New York Times reports. Surely, the BWF means physical, perhaps ethical, efforts—because after all, this is the Olympics and not an easily exploitable system of rules that causes transgression known to occur in pool play, which was just introduced into Olympic badminton this year. Presumably, each team threw their matches with hopes of…

Perhaps foregoing the necessity of getting a native English speaker to translate the copy selling your cartoonish, human-scale mech toy, Suidobashi Heavy Industry has revealed to the world their diesel-powered, piloted robot via a public showing at Japan’s 2012 Wonder Festival and several self-parodic (hopefully) commercials. The robot’s name is KURATAS, and among dystopia-signifying features are 3G control, a gatling BB gun, and a rocket-launcher water gun, which will “from time to time hit its targets.” The BB gun is the most maniacal: “The system will fire BBs when the pilot smiles. Be careful not to cause a shooting spree…