Foursquare turns nightlife into a social-media MMOG

Forget those so-called social-media games like Farmville and Mafia Wars, which are really just a way to junk up your friends’ feeds and irritate them. Someone’s figured out a way to make social media into something like a nightlife MMOG (Massively Multiplayer Online Game). Think Twitter meets World of Warcraft,…

The Broncos’ taste in music sucks

This weekend I went and watched the Broncos beat up on the perpetually bottom-of-the-barrel Browns in my annual debt-inducing, professional-sports pilgrimage. The game was fun, but I couldn’t help but notice that the music was … well, my parents would consider most of it oldies, and they aren’t exactly hip…

Running the government? There’s an app for that…

Government 2.0 is just around the corner. This week, the White House announced the launch of the government’s very own app store, a place for various arms of the fedeal government to get their assorted IT needs met. It’s an effort to streamline and lower the cost of said IT…

Freaky Friday: Jesus Loves the Little Stereotypes

Today’s video is an object lesson in how good intentions (bringing the diverse children of the world to Jesus) combined with raw ignorance and ethnic insensitivity can, with the benefit of a little time, lead to pure, unbridled hilarity. It’s a clip reportedly taped off a public access show some…

DCTC reaching out to YouTube generation

The Denver Center Theater Company is reaching out to audiences with a new tool — YouTube. Using the interactive functions of the ubiquitous video-hosting service, which allow people to click on elements within a video to go to a link such as another video, the DCTC has created a choose-your-own-adventure…

3OH!3 becomes a game-show question

There are many measures of an artist’s success, but how do you know you’ve truly arrived? Riches? Groupies? Nah, you’ve really made it when you’re so well-known you get turned into the answer for a game show. That’s just what’s happened to 3OH!3, as captured in the filmed-from-the-TV-screen clip embedded…

Critical Thought

Join director and former film critic Gerald Peary and host Howie Movshovitz of Colorado Public Radio tonight for a special screening of For the Love of Movies: The Story of American Film Criticism at the Denver Film Society’s Doc Night. The documentary is a look at the fine art of…

Satoshi Tomiie at Vinyl

DJ Satoshi Tomiie (due at Vinyl Saturday, September 19) is a truly distinctive voice in house music. The Tomiie sound is built on tribal percussion circling crisp, steady beats — driving, but not too pushy. Track selections lean toward the dark and brooding: moody slices of dance-floor euphoria haunted by…

More tweetup do-gooders party for a cause

While ignorant outsiders are busy slandering Twitter as a place to talk about what you ate for lunch, the social networking service is quickly becoming the place to organize informal fundraisers. These aren’t fancy nonprofits, with their fancy high overhead and administration costs. Instead, they’re just regular folks using technology…

Flier of the Week: Lipgloss

Bold abstraction is the order of the day on this week’s top flier design. The interlocking lines and squiggles on this bold, largely black and white flier come together to strongly suggest circuit boards, computer parts and other high-tech concerns. The big circle puts me in mind of a record…

Twitter Tuesday: Space station, sex advice, slanket

Back again with more great Twits to follow for your burgeoning Twitter feed. As always, follow us at @denverwestword, @cafewestword, @westword_music and @casciato. @satsight: Growing up obsessed with space travel led directly to my current fascination with the ongoing march of technology. The collision of these things makes me all…

RIP Mike Freeman

Just got word that Mike Freeman, frontman of Gina Go Faster, died of brain cancer yesterday morning. Freeman had been battling cancer for a couple of years and this is a great loss not just for his friends and family, but for the Denver music scene as well. Freeman’s fiancee…

Boulder electro-savants Savoy are giving it away

Due to MSTRKRFT’s last-minute Monolith no-show (the flu, I guess) I caught a set from Savoy, Boulder’s answer to MSTRKRFT/Justice, after they were moved to the SoCo stage and I had a slot open up in my schedule. And I have to say I was well and pleasantly surprised –…

First look video for Mr. Anonymous “Some Gal a Move”

The mysterious Mr. Anonymous, one of the standout artists on Boulder-based label Black Bridge, has a new tune out called “Some Gal a Move,” a shuffling, smile-inducing, head nodding slow jam with autotuned vocals and ridiculous lyrics. And to accompany this fine new song, he’s dropped a fun and weird-ass…

Help get Colorado universal broadband — and see how fast yours is!

The Governor’s Office of Information Technology has joined up with Connected Nation, a nonprofit group trying to create a map of broadband access — and those areas that still can’t get it — throughout the country. If you’ve currently got broadband access, you can test your speed and tell the…

Monolith: all our coverage in one place

Over the course of this week, we’ve delivered a ton of Monolith coverage, so you’d be forgiven if you managed to overlook something. But because we care, we’ve taken the time to round everything up in one spot for you. Every Q&A, the stories in the paper, our special list…

Our top 5 Monolith can’t-miss acts

There’s roughly a gazillion bands playing at Monolith over the next two days and there’s no way you can see them all (see, there aren’t a half-gazillion hours in a day), so we’ve come up with this handy list of five can’t-miss acts at Monolith. These are the bands that…

Freaky Friday: Van Canto – “Wishmaster”

There is very little that needs to be said to put across the basic idea of Van Canto. Three words, in fact, are really all I need: a capella metal (er, is that two words? whatever). Not that I’m going to stop there — there’s no way I can resist…

Suburban Home Records giving away free albums

To celebrate the label’s 14th anniversary, Suburban Home Records is giving everyone one free, downloadable album, with no obligation and no hoops to jump through. That’s right. Free album — no bullshit. You will have to supply an e-mail, but that’s just so they can mail out the authorization code…

Denver gets $6 million in stimulus money to go green

While it isn’t nearly as cool as neighboring Boulder going all “city of the future” (and yes, we are jealous, thanks for asking), Denver is getting its own energy improvements in the form of a $6 million dollar stimulus check, reports the Denver Business Journal. In addition to boring stuff…