With my current escape room obsession, I feel I ought to write up what I’ve admired, or felt disappointed in, so that I can pretend that there’s something noble coming out of my inability to say no to an escape room invite. So here we are.
“An Hour To Kill” is a James Bond themed escape room from “The Exit Room” company in Los Angeles, USA. It is, at time of writing, their newest and flashiest room – though I think they may have a few last little technical kinks to work out.
Teenie-tiniest spoilers – only for the food that’s briefly shown in the new Star Wars film, The Force Awakens!
If you’ve seen it, you may have noticed the food items that Rey earns for her scavenging, and then prepares and eats in her ramshackle, ex-Imperial Walker, home. Those little vacuum sealed packets, or ‘portions’ as Simon Pegg’s character Unkar Plut calls them, are salvaged military ration kits which contain two foods – Veg-Meat, and Polystarch.
Reference for the ‘Portions’ seen in Star Wars: The Force Awakens
I am a huge fan of sci-fi food, so of course, ever since I saw these, I knew I had to somehow make them. My adventures with creating my Version 0.1, follows… View full article »
Will I need to learn to drive a car, before the autonomous vehicle makes it obsolete?
I don’t know how to drive a car.
I’ve never had lessons, I got a provisional license around my 16th birthday that I never used, and I don’t really want to start now. In fact, I am wagering that I will never have to. Here’s why. View full article »
A bawdy tavern – full of NPCs
I’ve been thinking about characters in games a lot more recently, and specifically, the problems with NPC (non-player characters) entities in MMOs. Your typical MMO features hundreds of characters – quest givers usually – who come and go on an endless conveyorbelt of sob-stories and XP rewards. It’s hard to care for the 10th, 50th, or 100th NPC mother with a missing son, or someone needing their precious supplies gathered from the bellies of wild animals. So, with that in mind, here’s my police-suspect-inspired checklist for making a character work in a game.
Imagine a new ice age, where the only haven for humanity is a train that circumnavigates the planet once a year. Where the haves and the have-nots have their places in 1st and 3rd class carriages, and where the have-nots are rightfully chafing under the conditions they’re subjected to.
I. Will. Watch. This.
You hear that, studios? Please, hurry up and release Snowpiercer (and ideally, the original directors cut, not some sanitized-for-Americans version) and you will have my arse in a theater seat before you can blink.
Terry Gilliam, he of Brazil, 12 Monkeys, and Time Bandits fame (amongst others), will soon bring us The Zero Theorem. From the leaked trailer and other clips, its going to be gloriously mad, full of half-laughing fury, and very touchingly human indeed. There’s not enough fresh breaths of air in big movie sci-fi settings – but Mr. Gilliam delivers.
Animal Crossing New Leaf QR Code for Mabel’s Jumper in the Gravity Fall’s Intro
I’m a fan of the Disney cartoon series, Gravity Falls – it’s funny, charming, and just a little surreal. I’ve also gotten rather involved in the most recent release of Animal Crossing on the 3DS; New Leaf. So why not put these things together and re-create the amazing Mabel Pine’s light-up jumper from the intro sequence, for my character in Animal Crossing? Now you can too, if you so wish.
The intro, with the jumper/sweater in question at 22 seconds in, beneath the cut.
The Onion shows us the only news that matters – the news from THE FUTURE.
(I’m soon to run a cyberpunk-setting pen-and-paper RPG with some friends and this is just perfect setting fodder! Marvelous slang.)
Above, a trailer for a new sci-fi show, called (at least so far) Almost Human. A broken cop awakes 2 years after a terrible accident to find his world full of synthetic police persons – persons that he has a deep seated dislike and distrust of. Cue him getting a new partner, being unstable, angry and hard to get on with.
It looks so incredibly lush – with visual callbacks to things like Bladerunner, Minority Report and possibly even the credits to Person of Interest.
I would watch this SO HARD.
[EDIT: And I did – before it got cancelled 😦 Shame they showed the episodes out of order, and I’m sad they cancelled it just as it was getting really interesting!]
At 40 seconds into this ad, you can see a glimpse of the future according to ‘Under Armor’ – a women in a (terrifyingly thin) body suit interacts with some wrist mounted UI, selects a color for the bottom half of her suit, and then the top, and then off she runs. It’s cool, and I’ve been thinking about it a lot.
Myriad Whimsies 