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Throbbing Hive with John Moe: Digital Cats and Hip Hop Remakes

Ten cats in a game of Neko Atsume
Ten cats in a game of Neko AtsumeAnne Heidemann via Flickr; CC BY 2.0
  Play Now [5:36]

by John Moe

March 01, 2016

Every Tuesday at 7:30 a.m., John Moe stops into the Morning Show to share the latest news in Technology.

This week, John Moe stopped by The Current's Morning Show to talk to Jade and Sean McPherson about the feline-themed game, Neko Atsume. "In Neko Atsume, you get a little section of a yard or garden," John explains, "and then you buy various cat toys with money within the game, and you do that to attract cats to come to your yard, and you see how many and which cats you can get to show up."

Jade says, "It's amazing, and I don't know why I love it so much."

"I hesitiate to even call this a game though," John says. "There doesn't seem to be any object to it; it's more of an activity."

Supporting the activity idea, this video demonstrates how to make hand-crafted Neko Atsume cats.

Elsewhere on the internets, late last week and over the weekend, #trapcover seemed to be busting out all over. "This is sort of a response to all those emo covers of rap songs," John says. "It goes in the opposite direction: This is people turning non-rap songs into hip hop songs. It seems to have originated with a Twitter user named Captain Kirk, and he did a hip hop remake of a Vanessa Carlton song. And then it spread to people doing 'Hey Jude,' doing hip hop 'Star Bangled Banner'."

John's favorite is a hip hop "Bohemian Rhapsody," seen here:

"The old days of a big label spending a million dollars to put out Journey's last album — that's gone," John says. "It's now all about something that happened the day before yesterday in somebody's dorm. [That's] now taking the music world by storm."

John Moe co-hosts the podcast Conversation Parade (with Open Mike Eagle) on the Infinite Guest network, and is an author of a number of books, including The Deleted Emails of Hilary Clinton: A Parody and Dear Luke, We Need To Talk, Darth: And Other Pop Culture Correspondences.