Tag: 5things

Things of note for the week ending Friday, November 7th, 2014.

(t-shirt from Hero & Cape)

1. 3D-printing machines make awesome Tattoo artists.
Not. Kidding.

This is staggering.

The machine actually reads the the surface of your arm as it ‘prints’ (by prints, I mean punctures your skin at up to 150 times per second) ensuring that it moves smoothly along your chosen limb.

There’s a video too, natch.

Amazing.

2. Turning the Game Around
This, believe it or not, is 13,000 words on what makes the storytelling at the centre of the 2008 version of the Ubisoft video game, Prince of Persia, so compelling.

This is has been open in one of my tabs since August - that’s how long it’s taken me to get around to reading it.

But it was worth it.

There are many reasons why you might not want to read this essay. First: ‘Da-yam! Dat word count!’ Get over it. Second: ‘I’m not really a gamer, so I know I won’t be that interested’. Wrong. The piece is about not only how to tell a story but also gaming as art. It really is great to see gaming deconstructed in this way and, while it may give away the ending (I’d completed it, so I didn’t mind – but really, does it matter?), the intelligence in the writing makes everything OK. Make the time, then read the essay.

If you’re a gamer, you’ll love it (obvs).

3. The Christopher Nolan Profile
I’ve written about him before in these webpages of mine however, with the release of Interstellar right around the corner (I’m seeing it at the IMAX tomorrow), it seems fitting that I should write about him again. Well, I would, except The New York Times have done such a good job of it that I’ll link you to that instead.

This bit, on Insomnia, is great –

After that, when he came across the script of “Insomnia,” a remake of a Norwegian psychological thriller, Warner Bros. had the option. Nolan was interested but couldn’t get a meeting. His agent, Dan Aloni, called Steven Soderbergh, an early fan of “Memento.” Soderbergh told me that he “just walked across the lot and said to the head of production, ‘You’re insane if you don’t meet with this guy.’ My sense even then was that he didn’t need our help except to get in the door.” Everything happened very quickly. Nolan made the film on a budget of $46 million, and Soderbergh and George Clooney signed on as executive producers. Soderbergh visited the set in Alaska. “I got there and was having a conversation with Al Pacino: ‘How do you feel? How’s it going?’ Al said, ‘Well, I can tell you right now, at some point in the very near future I’m going to be very proud to say I was in a Christopher Nolan movie.’ ”

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: we are lucky to be alive at the same time as this particular film maker. His passion and vision for the final delivery is something that, come the end of his career, will be held up alongside Kubrick, Spielberg, and Scott. Nolan’s body of work is already excellent.

So go read his profile piece; it’s really very good.

4. Alternate Universe Movie Posters

These are great.

5. More Monument Valley

Ever played Monument Valley? If not, why not? It is honestly one of the best iPad games I’ve ever played (it’s now available across iOS, Android, and Kindle) and you should absolutely play it! Beautiful to play and look at; it really is that good.

That being said, if, like me, you’ve already played Monument Valley and wish it could’ve gone on longer or are hankerin’ for the next version/sequel/expansion pack – then hanker no more! ‘Forgotten Shores’ is the official name of the forthcoming next part and it’ll be hitting iOS on November 13th. Hurrah and hurrah again.

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Bonuses this week are three random things that I picked up this week:

• Prostitute or City Trader: how do you want your workspace?
• Note to self: don’t go to Mars.
• Ever read this and wanted to write your own? Steve Waddington has published an e-book entitled ‘Blogging for Beginners‘, and you might find it useful.

Until next time,

JW x

Things of note for the week ending October 31st, 2014.

1.Twitter does Video (or how to predict the future).
Two Five Things ago – aka ‘Five things on Friday #94‘ – I told you all about the new Audio Twitter Cards from Twitter.

I ended the bit saying:

Reminds me a lot of how the YouTube app works on Android which in turn says to me that you could expect Twitter’s video cards to follow a similar set up in the very near future. Maybe.

Well, low and behold, it has happened!

That’s right, in the exact same way that you can listen to audio tracks in Twitter and then continue to scroll through Twitter, video content now acts in the same way.

The interesting thing about this is that the content is actually playing through a Twitter Player card. That’s right, Twitter’s own native video upload – NOT YouTube. This is the first sign of a trend, ladies and gents.

Josh Constine, pictured (and author of the TechCrunch article where I first read the news), spotted an even better idea. Especially when you start taking the above feature into tablets…

The bigger opportunity might be in long-form video. Imagine following along with a docked video of a sports match or awards show as you read and post tweets about the event. Twitter’s long been seen as a companion to TV. But by ditching the television set and subsuming its video content, Twitter could be the only screen you need to step up to the global watercooler.

Now you can see the future too.

2. Polyamory is boring.
Apparently.

3. The Grand Canyon. From space.
I don’t know when the first ‘let’s stick a camera on a weather balloon and do something cool with the footage’ video first appeared but I really am nowhere near getting tired of them (yet). The next one is always better than the last…

John Flaig is the man behind ‘the next one’, and yet again I am not disappointed.

Not only are the photos amazing but the video is pretty darn cool too.

Yeah.

4. The Realisation
Another Five Things, another Leo Babauta post. But this one is super worth it. Promise.

It is a great read. If you only click on one link this week, make it this one.

5. NASA does Volcanos
This is excellent –

“A fortuitous orbit of the International Space Station allowed the astronauts this striking view of Sarychev Volcano (Kuril Islands, northeast of Japan) in an early stage of eruption on June 12, 2009. Sarychev Peak is one of the most active volcanoes in the Kuril Island chain, and it is located on the northwestern end of Matua Island. Prior to June 12, the last explosive eruption occurred in 1989, with eruptions in 1986, 1976, 1954, and 1946 also producing lava flows. Ash from the multi-day eruption has been detected 2,407 kilometers east-southeast and 926 kilometers west-northwest of the volcano, and commercial airline flights are being diverted away from the region to minimize the danger of engine failures from ash intake.”

There’s a video of the eruption on the website. But it was too big and I didn’t want to upload it so I made it into a gif for you.

Email me and say thanks or something.

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Bonuses this week are all HALLOWEEN-themed:

• Dizzee Rascal does Halloween
• Minimalist posters of scary films (Carrie is my favourite)
• IKEA does The Shining

Until next week.

Have a great weekend everybody.

Things of note for the week ending October 24th, 2014.

1. I like this

This Superman art wasn’t originally going to be one of my Five things of the week but I wanted to share it with you because a) it feels like the week that I’ve just had and b) it’s just so darn awesome (via SuperPunch).

Onwards!

2. Orange Juice: you’re doing it wrong
Planning on pouring yourself some juice this weekend? Don’t glug, pour.

And do it like this:

Yeah, probably the best gif I’ve seen all week.

(via Lifehacker)

3. Michael Ironside
Great actor. You’ve seen him in a ton of stuff.

You definitely know him.

This guy:

See?

You recognise him from films such as Top Gun to Total Recall to Starship Troopers and everything in-between. He did an AMA on Reddit recently and it was superb.

Here’s one example response [re Highlander 2]:

There’s a scene in the movie where my character comes to earth, and literally lands by going through the city streets and through the roof of a subway car, and lands on the subway. My stunt double had never been anywhere in the world where cocaine was so cheap. And he got absolutely hammered out of his mind for a week, and ended up running through the streets naked in Buenos Aires, and was arrested the morning of that sequence. So I had to do the stunt, because we had nobody in that part of the world who looked anything like me. So I had to hang on the roof of the subway car, and land on the floor, without any pads, and it was about a 12 foot drop, straight down, and in costume as the character. In the actual movie, you’ll see me slowly get up, and the character checks both his knees as he’s standing, he checks his back, his arms, and then throws his head back with a joyous scream knowing that he hadn’t broken anything.
That was not acting. That was me. Because i realized I had done it, and I didn’t have to do it again! From that moment, we just walked forward with the scene. It’s one of my favorite sequences of that film, because it’s where real life and acting come together in such a joyous moment, and it’s captured.

Brilliant.

Featuring anecdotes from almost his entire filmography, Ironside is a fantastic AMA participant and gives bloody brilliant answers. The Christian Bale one might make you feel a bit ill mind.

YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED.

Michael Ironside – AMA

4. Game Theory and The Dark Knight
This dissection and analysis of all the games that are at play during The Dark Knight is a fantastic read. Good for both fans of Batman and Game Theory.

5. Supermovies: 2014 – 2020
Fan of awesome films? Fan of some of the best awesome films ever made? That means you probably like SUPER HERO films. Not only are they going through a huge resurgence but they’re also, in the main, turning out to be totally brilliant.

The whole thing is about shared universes. But whatever. The important thing is the future. And ladies and gentlemen, this is what your [known] superhero film future looks like –

Batsh*t crazy.

_____

Bonuses this week are all long form articles that I’ve picked up from other newsletters over the past six months and have only just got around to reading/finished:

• Six Inches is a fairly NSFW short story from Charles Bukowski. Boy meets girl. Girl shrinks boy. Cue: dark hilarity.
• Who wants to shoot an elephant? Horrible reading.
• What [leading industrial designer] Frank Nuovo did next [after Nokia]

Things of note for the week ending September 26th, 2014.

An image heavy week this week, kicking off with this utterly brilliant collection of mental photography featuring the one and only John Malkovich. Seriously.

Let’s dive in –

1. Audrey Hepburn

Speaking of amazing photography sets, I came across this collection of ‘rare’ Hepburn photos earlier this week and, well, they’re absolutely gorgeous.

Thing I learnt from this post? Audrey Hepburn had a pet deer named Pippin.

Lovely.

2. On Geeks
‘Geeks. You are no longer victims. Get over it.’ is the title of this provocative debate piece in last week’s New York Times (you read it regulalrly, right?) –

Popular culture right now frequently appears to be a large-scale experiment in cognitive dissonance. By any rational measure, the geeks — fans of comic books, science fiction, video games and fantasy — are utterly triumphant. Economically, the genre in the media is dominant, earning billions of dollars a year. Critically, it is celebrated, getting sympathetic reviews in the stuffiest publications and winning national awards. In every meaningful sense, geeks are the overdogs.

Believe it or not, the comments are actually well worth reading

3. What is El Niño?

Ever heard of El Niño? If you’re not in the US of A, it might be on the periphery of your weather-based awareness. If you’ve got a spare two minutes and seventeen seconds, you could increase your knowledge of the meteorological phenomenon right now by watching this video.

4. Zelda Art
If you’re a gamer of any shape or form, then you’ll probably agree that set of original Legend of Zelda this is unbelievably cool.

Beautiful.

5. Mark Ritson on Oreo
Mark Ritson is a professor of brand and one of the smartest people I’ve ever had the good fortune to meet. If you’ve known me for a while, I may’ve shared this with you before.

What with it being the end of Social Media Week, I thought it was a good time to share to again. This deconstruction of that Oreo Tweet is utterly fantastic. It’s 90mins long but I implore you – watch it, listen to it, put it on your Chromecast this weekend, or have it playing in the background while you work this afternoon.

Just consume it, and take it in.

Please.

No bonuses this week.

Whatley out.