I got three versions. I got threeee versions #blonde pic.twitter.com/c8F5bNoFlA
— Genius (@Genius) August 21, 2016
Frank Ocean loves playing hard to get. After almost a year of teasing, rumors, and false release dates, the R&B prodigy finally released his second album Blonde (Blond?) on Saturday. (Eds. Note: It’s spectacular.) Coming just two days after his visual album Endless dropped, Ocean’s new LP came out alongside a book/oversized magazine/zine titled Boys Don’t Cry. But while Blonde was easy to find on Apple Music, Boys Don’t Cry was only available at special pop-up shops in New York, London, Chicago, and Los Angeles.
The publication, which came with a copy of Blonde and had contributions from folks like James Blake and Kanye West, was free for fans who got to the pop-ups in time to get one. But capitalism being what it is, those once-free copies of Boys Don’t Cry have already started showing up on eBay— and they’re not cheap. As of this writing, auctions for the magazine/thingamabob were running between $300 and $2,000. If that’s too rich for your blood, there may be hope on the horizon. Ocean’s mother, Katonya Breaux Riley, tweeted early this morning “Don’t pay those ridiculous prices for the mags on eBay. Just hang tight a sec.” Does that mean Boys Don’t Cry will be more widely available soon? Seems like it—but again, this is a Frank Ocean project, so we won’t know until it’s already happening.
I Am 8 Bit
How’s your collection of Rez stuff? Do you have the original Dreamcast edition of Tetsuya Mizuguchi’s innovative, trippy musical shooter game? Do you have the Japan-exclusive “Trance Vibrator” controller that shakes your whole body in time with the music? Well, get ready to add to that small pile a physical edition of Rez Infinite for PlayStation 4, plus some sweet-looking merch from I Am 8 Bit.
Alongside a $40 physical version of the game, which will play in both standard and VR modes on PS4 when it launches October 13, there will also be a $75 limited-edition vinyl set with the game’s soundtrack on two LPs, which also includes a book of art from the game and stories from its developers.
The merch line is rounded out with a pair of T-shirts, one designed by Fez creator Phil Fish, and some enamel pins with the different versions of the player character from the game.
Pottermore
Nerdy Muggles, rejoice: There’s a new set of extra Harry Potter textbooks for you to read, just in time for fall term at Hogwarts.
On Sept. 6, Pottermore, J.K. Rowling’s official portal to her Wizarding World, will release three e-book shorts on the secret history of Hogwarts. Each story will combine details from Pottermore archives with new material from Rowling to give new background on the school. So if you ever wondered how a witch becomes a portrait or longed for a biography of Care of Magical Creatures teacher Silvanus Kettleburn, you’re in luck.
These three shorts join a ever-expanding universe of Rowling-sanctioned Harry Potter ephemera (in addition to plenty of fan fiction): Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, the script of the play which premiered in July; Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, the movie which will be released in November; and three supplementary books published alongside the original series. Rather than write new material set in a new world, Rowling continues to elaborate on her original wizarding one, providing a literary Pensieve for readers to return to the Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. And that will always be Rowling’s greatest trick: keeping ’em coming back for more.
At Gamescom today, Konami announced the latest entry in its flagship Metal Gear series, the first since the departure of series creator and director Hideo Kojima. It’s not what you were expecting.
Metal Gear Survive is a four-player cooperative survival game, set in an alternate reality wasteland where former soldiers serving under series protagonist/antagonist Big Boss must fight for their lives. Are there zombies? There sure are! In a press release, Konami insists that this game will “continue the pedigree of Metal Gear Solid V‘s highly praised gameplay design,” but it’s hard to overstate just what a departure this is for the stealth action series.
How will Konami explain the significant shift in tone and style for the new entry? Wormholes. No, seriously, watch the trailer—it’s wormholes.
Get your root beer rags ready, because Colorado College has put together an event that Joelheads around the country have been clamoring for. The school’s music department is hosting “It’s Still Rock and Roll to Me”: The Music and Lyrics of Billy Joel, a symposium—(thankfully) open to the public—being held Oct. 7-8 that delves into the cultural impact of Joel and his music. There will be 24 lectures over the course of the weekend ranging from “If I Only Had the Words (To Tell You): Billy Joel Lyrics in Medical and Legal Scholarship” to “Billy Joel and the Language of Pecuniary Aspiration” and back to “Jesus and Billy Joel: A Musicotheology.” Incredibly, the event will end with a live phone interview with the Piano Man himself.
We at WIRED are very excited about this celebration of Mr. Long Island’s opus. Yet there seem to be a lot of missed opportunities in the symposium’s lineup. Here are six lectures we wish were on the bill:
“Pianos and Men”: On Manhood and Pianohood in Post-War America
“You May Be Right”: Billy Joel’s Influence Upon (and Lyrical Reflection of) the Reagan Revolution of the ’80s
“Oyster Bae”: The Hyper-Sexualization of Billy Joel’s Long Island Roots
“Only the Good Die Jung”: Billy Joel’s Rejection of Analytic Psychology
“Paul Is Dead”: Reading the Real Estate Novel Through a Barthesian Lens
“Bread in My Jar”: Billy Joel, Body Image, and the Complexities of the Early-’90s Carb-Awareness Craze
Katherine Johnson is a human computer. No, like really. She calculated numbers for the agency that would become NASA; her actual title was “computer.” That was in 1953. By 1962 she was crunching the numbers that would allow John Glenn to become the first American to orbit Earth. If you’ve heard of Katherine Johnson it might be because she was awarded the National Medal of Freedom in 2015. Next year, she’ll get another acknowledgement: She’ll be played by Empire’s Taraji P. Henson in a movie about her work with NASA. And she won’t be alone. Hidden Figures also follows the careers of two other African-American women who worked with Johnson at the agency during the Space Race: Dorothy Vaughan (Octavia Spencer) and Mary Jackson (Janelle Monáe). If this is already sounding like your kind of movie, just wait until you see the trailer, which premiered last night during the Rio Olympics. In addition to Henson, Spencer, and Monáe, the movie also stars Kevin Costner, who looks like he’s a 1960s NASA scientist even when he’s out of character, and Glen Powell, who you probably know as A+ sleaze bag Chad Radwell on Scream Queens but who is playing John Glenn here. Hidden Figures, directed by Theodore Melfi (St. Vincent), hits theaters Jan. 13, 2017.
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Frank Ocean’s Boys Don’t Cry Is Already Going for Big Bucks on eBay