The Slip (album)

The Slip is the seventh studio album by American industrial rock band Nine Inch Nails, released on July 22, 2008. It was the fourth consecutive Nine Inch Nails release to be produced by frontman Trent Reznor with collaborators Atticus Ross and Alan Moulder. The album was released for free under a Creative Commons (BY-NC-SA) license, with the message from Reznor, "this one's on me".The Slip was initially released digitally via the Nine Inch Nails official website without any prior advertisement or promotion. A limited-edition, physical version followed two months later, though this iteration of the album was not free.

The Slip was originally intended to be an EP, but eventually grew to be a full-length album. It was recorded and released in three weeks; Reznor released the album's single, "Discipline", to radio stations himself, less than 24 hours after it was mastered by Moulder. Critical reception of the album has been generally favorable, and its unorthodox method of release attracted significant media attention. The album peaked at number 13 on the Billboard 200.

999

Year 999 (CMXCIX) was a common year starting on Sunday (link will display the full calendar) of the Julian calendar. Depending on how one defines a millennium, 999 was either the last or second-to-last year of the first millennium.

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Flappy Bird

Flappy Bird is a 2013 mobile game, developed by Vietnam-based developer Nguyễn Hà Đông (Dong Nguyen) and published by .GEARS Studios, a small, independent game developer also based in Vietnam. The game is a side-scroller where the player controls a bird, attempting to fly between rows of green pipes without hitting them. The developer created the game over several days, using a bird protagonist which he had designed for a cancelled game in 2012.

The game was released in May 2013 but received a sudden rise in popularity in early 2014. It was criticized for its level of difficulty and alleged plagiarism in graphics and game mechanics, while other reviewers found it addictive. At the end of January 2014, it was the most downloaded free game in the iOS App Store. During this period, its developer claimed that Flappy Bird was earning $50,000 a day from in-app advertisements as well as sales.

Flappy Bird was removed from both Apple's App Store and Google Play by its creator on February 10, 2014, due to guilt over what he considered to be its addictive nature and overuse. The game's popularity and sudden removal caused phones with it pre-installed to be put up for sale for high prices over the Internet. Games similar to Flappy Bird became popular on the iTunes App Store in the wake of its removal, and both Apple and Google have removed games from their app stores for being too similar to the original. The game has also been distributed through unofficial channels on multiple platforms.

Portal 2

Portal 2 is a 2011 first-person puzzle-platform video game developed and published by Valve Corporation. It is the sequel to Portal (2007) and was released on April 19, 2011, for Microsoft Windows, OS X, Linux, PlayStation 3, and Xbox 360. The retail versions of the game are distributed by Electronic Arts while online distribution of the Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X and Linux versions is handled by Valve's content delivery service Steam. Portal 2 was announced on March 5, 2010, following a week-long alternate reality game based on new patches to the original game. Before the game's release on Steam, the company released the Potato Sack, a second multi-week alternate reality game, involving 13 independently developed titles which culminated in a distributed computing spoof to release Portal 2 several hours early.