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#Everest asks if you’d die for the selfie that gets you famous

First you tested your Olympic skills from your seat, now you can summit Mt. Everest from the safety of your home—and take some bomb selfies along the way. The latest from independent game studio Team Dogpit, survival sim #Everest challenges you to climb the highest mountain on Earth and get internet famous along the way. Equip yourself and your guides with everything you need to make it to the top and look awesome doing it. Your objective is simple: rack up a high score by getting as many social media likes on selfies taken during your ascent as humanly possible. But…

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A professor attached emoji to selfie sticks to help us combat vanity

Selfie sticks are extensions of a person’s power more than their arms. They are tools of conquest, a way for their owners to claim dominance over a larger swath of space in the name of better self-portraiture. If you frequently give in to the siren song of thinkpieces, you’ve seen this selfie shtick before. What you have not seen is Pablo Garcia’s antiquity-inspired solution to the selfie stick scourge. An Assistant Professor in the Department of Contemporary Practices at the Art Institute of Chicago, Garcia found inspiration in the ancient Roman practice of handing out memento mori—reminders of death—to victorious…

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Selfies are your only weapon in this videogame

The invading army carried selfie sticks, or maybe those were just their arms. At this point, aren’t all arms just selfie sticks anyhow? Aren’t all arms just selfie sticks anyhow?  In Selfie Assault, an entry to the Ludum Dare 32 game jam, your army of one is armed only with a cellphone. You walk around a white pavilion trying to kill green boxes. Those boxes, in turn, can only be killed by being captured in a selfie. And not one of those cheating selfies that you can do with an iPhone’s second camera, either. In Selfie Assault, only an old-school…

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Composite photograph of average gamer is the saddest selfie ever

The average RuneScape player is pudgy, white, male, and severely depressed, according to a composite photo that melded together over 1000 faces of attendees at an event for the game held in London. OK, so the locale and choice of game might have skewed the results, but it still is interesting to think that as a demographic, videogame players can be represented by some shadowy, archetypal, amorphous person. I mean, this ethereal figure is pretty much the soul of British MMO players. But there’s more to the prototypical RuneScape player than meets the eyes. Aside from the somber photo, they…

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Scrambled books of Shakespeare illustrate the travesty of digital photos

Digital photos are great, except when they’re not. As this series of books containing digitally compressed copies of Romeo and Juliet show, Jpegs are gradually turning the Web into a sinkhole of blurry, bad photography.  Because Jpegs are lossy, whenever you save or edit a digital photo in the format, a smidgen of the original quality is degraded. That’s why Google images is flooded with such crap.  But the phenomena is hard to pinpoint in photos because it happens so gradually, so the hactivist artist Tom Scott scanned the pages of Romeo and Juliet and transcribed them in a series…