Do We Already Have a Skyrim Killer?

It's called Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning, and it looks amazing.

Gibraltar Chess Festival Gets a Stamp

The Gibraltar Chess Festival has become one of the premiere events on the chess calender, drawing some of the top talent to the Rock for 10 days, from 24th January to 2nd February, 2012. For the tenth anniversary, they're issuing a set of stamps depicting classic games from past years:

The games featured on the stamps have been specially chosen as representing the best of the many thousands contested in Gibraltar over the past decade. All the players shown are grandmasters. Two are women. Pia Cramling (Sweden) has played in all ten Gibraltar festivals, while Natalia Zhukova (Ukraine) won the top female award in 2010. Michael Adams, Nigel Short (both England) and Vassily Ivanchuk (Ukraine) are all former Gibraltar champions. Viktor Bologan (Moldova) and Fabiano Caruana (Italy) are elite players with aggressive styles popular with the public. Chess legend Viktor Korchnoi (Switzerland) fought two World Championship matches with arch-rival Anatoly Karpov.

My children were puzzled when they first learned about stamp collecting. I explained that it was something we had to do before fun was invented.

You can follow the Gibraltar games live if you like.

h/t: Wayne Schmittberger

Star Wars: The Exquisite Corpse Version

This is about to go very viral, very fast. Star Wars Uncut divided the entire original movie into 15-second intervals. Fans from around the world claimed each of those intervals and made their own versions of those 15 seconds. These were then stitched back together into an entire film.

Why post it on a game site? Because it is, essentially, a high tech variation on the parlor game called exquisite corpse, in which someone makes a drawing, folds the paper so only the edge of the drawing can be seen, and then others continue the drawing without reference to the entire picture. The result looks like this:

Drawing by Yves Tanguy, Man Ray, Max Morise, Joan Miró, c. 1926.

Star Wars has such profound cultural capital that everyone can understand these moments no matter how crudely recreated, and they flow together into a surreal, ever-shifting, experience. It's almost impossible to watch all at once, but there are real moments of genius here and there. It is Star Wars re-imagined by the hive-mind of the internet fan community.