Last October, I blogged about a Kickstarter to create "a video game with no graphics, played entirely using audio." The game is Blindside, and it's finished! Now available through the App Store for iPhone4/iPad2+. The project was inspired by co-creator Aaron Rasmussen's temporary blindness as a result of an explosion in high school chemistry.
BlindSide is an audio adventure game, set in a fully-immersive 3d world you’ll never see. Put on headphones, hold your iPhone, and face the direction you want to go. Listen as the world rotates around you and explore the darkness.
You play as Case, an assistant professor who wakes up blind, to find his city destroyed and mysterious creatures devouring people. Will you and your girlfriend be able to find your way without sight? How will you escape? Run for your life, save the girl, and uncover the mystery of the apocalypse--all in the dark!
Scott Matthews shared a photograph with me, and I'm sharing it with all of you, with his permission. His daughter Sasha
handed him this note yesterday. Sasha is a pretty special girl, in no small part because she's already been on Boing Boing once before.
What, indeed, does it really mean?
The late actor James Doohan, best known for his role as "Scotty" on the original Star Trek series, left instructions in his will that he wished to be buried in space. His family worked hard to fulfill that wish, and made arrangements with Celestis, Inc., a subdivision of the Houston-based company Space Services that offers "post-cremation memorial spaceflights."
Those remains became part of the payload for a 2008 SpaceX Falcon 1 launch attempt that didn't reach orbit because of technical problems.
Each failed attempt was newly agonizing for family members, prolonging their grief and lack of closure.
Doohan’s ashes – which also were launched to space in 2008 as part of an unsuccessful mission -- were part of a secondary payload included on the second stage of the rocket, not on the Dragon itself. That payload separated from the capsule at the 9-minute, 49-second mark and is now orbiting, on its own, above the Earth. It’s expected to stay in orbit for approximately a year before descending back to Earth and disintegrating during re-entry.
Wende Doohan, James Doohan's widow, was on hand for the launch with the couple’s daughter, Sarah, now 12. Doohan posted a photo on Twitter and tweeted the following comment early today. “Sarah and I enjoyed watching a beautiful rocket launch this morning - certainly a first for her.” Also, on May 18, Doohan tweeted the attached photo of Sarah at Cape Canaveral with a caption that read “Following Daddy’s footsteps?”
This 1978 clip features the eternally popular Raffaella Carrà (now pushing 70) singing Cole Porter’s “Night and Day” as bald, mustachioed eye-patch wearing sci-fi weirdos, um, assist her..
That’s only the “night” part, just wait until the troupe of caped, dancing “Aladdin Sane” clones show up near the end!
[Video Link] What is this I don't even. The artist is HGich.T, the song "Tutenchamun." Original video sans subtitles and explanations are here. It's several years old, but new to me. (HT: @treyka)
My friend Sean Bonner just pointed me to a wonderful music history project, put together by Brian Stefans: at lapostpunk.blogspot.com, an MP3 compilation of post-punk and experimental pop music in the Los Angeles area from the mid-seventies through the mid-eighties.
I kind of think of this as a portrait of the city at the time more than a collection of tracks that will change the world (though more than a handful I think are unfairly neglected). I’m wondering if someone like Rhino Records would want to do a Nuggets-type collection from the period? They already have one of Los Angeles from 1965-1968 called Where The Action Is.
Incredibly comprehensive. What a labor of love. There's a Volume one, and a Volume two.
Leigh Alexander, Gamasutra editor-at-large, Kotaku and EDGE mag columnist, and NYLON Guys games editor, is on Twitter.
Ravens are a big deal in the Game of Thrones universe. They’re used to transmit information from one place to another, and often seem to be portents of death. This week’s episode begins with a whole dead basket of ‘em, as Prince Theon, in his latest act of swaggering idiocy, has killed all of Winterfell’s birds so that no one can send word to Robb Stark.
Of course, sending notes tied to birds is generally a slow and imperfect form of info transit, especially in the world of this story, which is well-established as massive and hostile to easy passage. I’ve previously written that one of the reasons the series appeals in our current clime is its bold, dialog-provoking approach to patriarchy and sexuality – I wonder if its lavishing upon the preciousness of information and the incredible conveniences we now enjoy in the internet age is another?
Unless you've recently had a bag on your head to be specially renditioned, are related to murdered Israeli athletes, don't like lesbian kisses, cock, dildo or pussy jokes, and unless you think that cancer, torture, dwarves, Jews, Arabs, infanticide, paedophilia, prostitution, incest, rape, anti-Semitism, casual racism or misogyny are inappropriate subjects for jokes, then it really is hard to find that much to be offended by in The Dictator.
Except, maybe, the pinko-commie rant towards the end implying that the USA is as 'good' as a dictatorship. Shocking.
From multiplesources today: One of the three Bee Gees has died. Robin Gibb was 62 years old, and was diagnosed two years ago with colon and liver cancer that responded to treatment, then returned and spread.
What was is like to be gay during the 1960s on Madison Avenue? David Leddick (who was worldwide creative director for Revlon at Grey Advertising and international creative director for L'Oreal at McCann-Erickson) wrote an entertaining essay for Huffington Post about his personal experience of being a gay mad man.
After I left BBDO, a friend told me he'd overheard comments about me in the elevator, along the lines of, "So, they were in a lot of trouble here when the queer that was writing all the great stuff left. But then they found another queer who could write just as fancifully."
When I finally hit Hockaday Associates, a small agency specializing in high-end fashion, furniture, cosmetics, and the like, it was a different world.
All the art directors were gay, and all the account executives were women. The agency president was in fact a Miss Hockaday, and she had her own take on the 1960s. Everyone really dressed to the nines. Everyone was good-looking, and there was wall-to-wall green carpeting in the foyer. A lady with a cart served tea every afternoon at 4 o'clock. Clients came in and were overwhelmed by the chic and wonder of it all. We were famous in the advertising world because Miss Hockaday dropped the Elizabeth Arden account. After Miss Arden kept her waiting for an hour for a meeting, Miss Hockaday swept in and said, "Miss Arden, you are a tyrant. We do not want to have this account," and swept out.
Can we please have more scenes like this on Mad Men?
Summer was born and raised in Boston, and first sang in her church's gospel choir. She went on to perform in the touring production of "Hair," and met producer/songwriter and electronic music pioneer Giorgio Moroder in 1974.
About "I Feel Love," the synth-driven club anthem she recorded with Moroder in 1977, Brian Eno said at the time: "This is it, look no further. This single is going to change the sound of club music for the next 15 years.”
Like many punk teens growing up in Virginia in the eighties, I discovered this DC-rooted genre of black American music by accident—a go-go band opened up for a hardcore group I'd traveled from Richmond to DC to see. But it just took once to fall under the spell of that heavy, funky beat.
After I left BBDO, a friend told me he'd overheard comments about me in the elevator, along the lines of, "So, they were in a lot of trouble here when the queer that was writing all the great stuff left. But then they found another queer who could write just as fancifully."
