The first art book released by French MMORPG team Ankama has been a staple in our collection since we were lucky enough to snag one at E3 a few years ago. According to Worlds in Motion.biz, Ankama has launched their closed beta for Wakfu, the follow-up to Dofus.

Due to my addictive personality, i’ve avoided the more “hooky” or “hardcore” MMOs, and have likely saved a lot of pennies over the past few years. But when Wakfu is released, regardless of whether it’s even a good game or not, i may shell a few coppers for a chance to stare, goggle-eyed, at their horribly gorgeous artwork:

Be sure to visit the Wakfu site for full-screen shots that will make you weep!

Imagine taking a peurile joke that you told when you were six years old, and then rendering it in careful, loving detail with sky-high production values. Now stop imagining.

No, seriously - stop.

Have you stopped imagining yet?

…

Okay. i’ll give you a few more moments.

….

…

There. We good? Okay.

There’s a series of shorts coming out of the Savannah College of Art and Design that blew my mind. They’re incredibly immature and fantastically funny. The care and attention paid to each short is tantamount to taking stunning, full-colour photos of dog nuggets.

Here are two of my favourite SCADshorts:

The thing that excites me most about technology is when it makes impossible things possible - like 3D baby ultrasounds or giving me sixpack ab muscles. While i’m still waiting on that one, let me share this:

It took me the whole video to figure out the voiceover guy was saying “MIDI”, and not “meaty”. Anyway, Direct Note Access is a feature of a sound software plugin called Melodyne. It takes an audio waveform and splits it up so that you’re viewing individual notes more like musical notation than technical scribbles. That’s cool enough already.

Now buckle up: the plugin takes a single chord and separates the notes inside so they can be tweaked individually. So if you have a major chord played in the standard format, you can tweak that middle note down so the chord becomes minor. This isn’t MIDI (or “meaty”) - it’s on a live recording.

Can i get a “holy crap”? If you’re not a musician or someone who works with audio, this might be lost on you. But trust me when i say this is huuuge.

What’s in it for you? Well, more money-minded fathers can buy plastic surgery for their little girls and pimp them out as recording artists, using this software to correct their music so that it sounds like they can sing and play an instrument.

That’s what i’m planning to do with the software, anyway, but my daughter’s a little green. Is 2 years old too young for a boob job?