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- Awful 1962 marriage textbook speaks out against feminism, communism and interracial dating
- Wearable hummingbird feeder: they'll think your eyes are juicy, delicious flowers!
- Please release me: Rock Band iPhone, Small Worlds, Eufloria, LostWinds, Space Invaders Extreme
- Dioramas "captured" from nature
- The Work Office: WPA-inspired participatory performance art
- Saturday Morning Science Experiment: Pachyderm Dental Care
| Awful 1962 marriage textbook speaks out against feminism, communism and interracial dating Posted: 24 Oct 2009 11:18 PM PDT  This 1962 high-school textbook, "When You Marry," is a long, mind-bendingly awful manual for marriage, including sticking to traditional gender roles, staying away from race-mixing, resisting communism and saving yourself for your wedding night. |
| Wearable hummingbird feeder: they'll think your eyes are juicy, delicious flowers! Posted: 24 Oct 2009 08:03 PM PDT A face mask with which to attract hungry, curious hummingbirds, $80 from heatstick.com. The masks do look silly, and the website is nothing if not homebaked. But if the maker's YouTube videos are to be believed, these contraptions do attract the little buggers and make for amazing eye-to-eye encounters with one of the most magical winged creatures on the planet. I'm kind of dying to try one out.
Video embedded above: "Chris Makes a New Friend" [YouTube] Product: "Eye to Eye Wearable Hummingbird Feeder." The guy behind it lives in California's Humboldt County, and has invented some other neat earth-gadgety stuff, too, like the Veg-a-Lot growing shelter [heatstick.com]. (Thanks, Dean Putney!) |
| Please release me: Rock Band iPhone, Small Worlds, Eufloria, LostWinds, Space Invaders Extreme Posted: 24 Oct 2009 02:34 PM PDT  This week has seen a number of excellent and much publicized and high profile releases -- Rockstar's conversion of Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars from DS to PSP and Gearbox's post-apocalyptic co-op sandbox shooter Borderlands -- but no game has eaten as much of my time this week than a downsized iPhone version of a rhythm favorite. Rock Band [Harmonix/EA Mobile, iPhone] EA Mobile's downsized port of Harmonix's rhythm-standard enters an App Store dominated by clones and competitors (the Tap Tap series chief among them), and what sets Rock Band apart from the rest is a subtle but massively important distinction. With Harmonix's access to a staggeringly large library of original masters, the iPhone game is able to do what none of the others can: make the music itself reactive to your play. By comparison, Tap Tap plays as a transparent overlay on top of any given track: keep your hands away from the screen and the music cheerily plays on, unperturbed by your quiet failing. That Rock Band gives you its now embarrassingly too-familiar skronk on every missed note is key to sustaining the illusion that you're participating in the performance, even just by slapping a thumb onto a glass sheet. The iPhone version, unlike Rock Band Unplugged -- Backbone's similarly excellent PSP version released a few months back -- only lets you play one instrument or vocal track at a time, which allows for RB's least publicized and surprisingly well implemented feature: in the absence of three additional people to play its Bluetooth-enabled local multiplayer, players can send out invites to Facebook friends to participate in asynchronous "band" play. With it, each of the 2-4 players complete their individual instrument on their own time, submitting their score back to the 'band' afterward, at which time a total score and fan-increase is tallied and push-notification submitted back to each, making you feel far more connected than you would expect from such an otherwise solitary game. Losing the plastic-instrument charade might at first seem a down-step too far for more casual players, but with its promise of a continually refreshed music library (its in-app music store already includes six two-packs of add-on tracks), Rock Band is a long, long overdue and essential musical addition to the App Store.  Small Worlds [David Shute, web] The week's other best surprise -- going off indie-circle buzz -- is David Shute's Small Worlds, a Flash game entered into the Casual Gameplay Design Competition hosted by free/web powerhouse site JayIsGames. Like so many indie efforts, the less said about the game up front the better: this CGDC's theme was 'Explore', and it's the play on exploration that makes Worlds so unique. Know, at least, that what it does best is take the iron-grip compulsion to 100% map screens in exploratory games like Castlevania: Symphony of the Night or Metroid and bring it directly to the fore of the game itself, making it its own reward. If this seems too frustratingly vague, it's because the Small Worlds experience is short, sweet, and immediately available: don't miss carving out some 20 minutes of your weekend for it. Eufloria [Rudolf Kremers & Alex May, PC] Elsewhere, Rudolf Kremers and Alex May have finally released their Indie Games Festival finalist Eufloria, formerly known as Dyson. As you can see above, it's a game that'll feel familiar to any iPhone gamer that's taken part in the arcade-strategy planetary invasions of Galcon, but with a fantastically gorgeous ambient score (courtesy Brian 'Milieu' Grainger) and visual design that soothes you into and through its dizzying floral battles, it's truly in a league of its own. Find it either via the official homepage, or through its Steam release. LostWinds: Winter of the Melodias [Frontier, Wii] Frontier's platformer LostWinds marked the stateside debut of Nintendo's console downloadable service WiiWare, and its long-awaited sequel also marks the services 100th release, and arguably remains the best exclusive the service has to offer (sitting happily alongside 2D Boy's World of Goo and Gaijin's BIT.TRIP series). Still unrivaled in its split approach to Wii-mote and joystick play, the game gives you both direct control over its vulnerable child-hero Toku, who's helped through his journey by Enril, a spirit of the wind, here represented by the flourishes of your Wii Remote. Its Melodias sequel brings every bit of the quiet charm of the original, and adds new seasonal powers giving you the ability to turn frozen ponds to deep-diving pools and a 'cyclone' ability to help puzzle your way further into its world and should be on top of the weekend download list for any Wii owner. Space Invaders Extreme 2 [Taito, DS] Finally, this week also saw the stateside release of another highly anticipated follow-up with Space Invaders Extreme 2: Taito's retro-futurist re-imagining of its arcade classic, still one of the finest reworkings in game history (edging out even their own masterful iPhone re-invention Space Invaders Infinity Gene). Following down the same disco-dance road as Q Entertainment's cult-classic Rez, Invaders Extreme is classic play done up in techno-rave clothes, each shot contributing to the deep-thumping remix beat that runs underneath. Its sequel adds the still perplexingly devised 'Bingo mode', and remains as essential an experience as the first. |
| Dioramas "captured" from nature Posted: 23 Oct 2009 08:24 PM PDT  Painter/sculptor Gregory Euclide starts his gorgeous diroamas by pouring blue resin onto the forest floor in Colorado. He then builds his lovely landscapes around that cast of nature. Euclide is showing his "Capture" series at Denver's David B. Smith Gallery until November 14. Video and more details after the jump. From the show description posted at Hi-Fructose: Euclide explores the difficulty of escaping the cultural lens from which we view nature. Images from traditional landscape paintings, wildlife documentaries and travel guides construct our cultural expectations and define how we view land. Euclide's work explores the conflicts between these images of idealized, picturesque views and the desire to truly experience nature as it is. The pieces in this exhibit contain a mixture of painted images shaped into sculptures with imagery drawn from memory, photo transfers based on traditional nature photography, abstract areas of raw paint, and actual artifacts such as pine needles and moss. The use of materials that are non-biodegradable, such as foam that has been weathered by nature, further emphasizes the invasiveness of the commercial world in which we live. It is this tension between the realistic and the representational, between the pristine and the changed, that makes the work so engaging. Pools of thick, blue liquid paint mimic the properties of the rivers and streams they are used to represent, calling into question the illusion of representational art. Similarly, the exaggerated folds of thick watercolor paper transform the flat, framed image of the traditional landscape into a dimensional topography with many points of view. The three-dimensional forms of these pieces-painted on both sides and containing hidden vignettes and small treasures-encourage the kind of exploration and excitement that might be found in experiencing nature rather than in viewing a traditional picture, further mixing and confusing the untouched and the idealized."Gregory Euclide literally Captures Nature" (Hi-Fructose) Gregory Euclide online gallery (David B. Smith Gallery) |
| The Work Office: WPA-inspired participatory performance art Posted: 24 Oct 2009 07:42 AM PDT  The Work Office in New York City is a participatory performance art installation inspired by the Works Progress Administration of the Great Depression. Over the summer, the two administrators of The Work Office -- Katarina Jerinic and Naomi Miller -- interviewed, hired, and assigned creative types to do various, er, odd jobs, like reinterpretng a newspaper photograph, start an American tradition that you'd like to be preserved, or giving a concert for your houseplant. A week's wage is $23.50 and the paychecks are distributed at public parties/openings. Jerinic and Miller are currently seeking funds via Kickstarter to re-open The Work Office again soon. The Work Office (Thanks, Miss Heather Sparks!) |
| Saturday Morning Science Experiment: Pachyderm Dental Care Posted: 23 Oct 2009 08:23 PM PDT Elephant Toothpaste is the name of a classic chemistry experiment that's all about getting hydrogen peroxide to quickly break down into water and lots of oxygen. The result: Thick spirals of super-awesome foam. There's lots of videos of this on the Internets, but I chose this one (despite the head-shakingly awkward co-host) because it demonstrates two versions of Elephant Toothpaste--one of which you can do at home with easily available materials. Fun! As usual, if you've got a video you'd like to see on Saturday Morning Science Experiment, email me! Thumbnail image courtesy Flickr user mauren veras, via CC. |
Using and enjoying the feeder is a two step process. The first is to acquaint the hummingbirds with the feeder. We set an old can of paint on a small shelf on the side of the barn and slipped the feeder onto the can. It wasn't long before the hummingbirds found it, and after a little searching, found the feeding station. Then we let them get familiar with the feeder for a few days. Finally we set a chair next to the shelf, removed the feeder from the can, slipped it on and waited. One never forgets the first time a hummingbird suddenly arrives at the feeder right in front of your eyes. | You are subscribed to email updates from Boing Boing To stop receiving these emails, you may unsubscribe now. | Email delivery powered by Google |
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