Onelargeprawn
White Ninja Comics is a comic about a ninja, who is white, and who has many adventures, and saves the world over, and over, and over again, and gets the ladies, and is searching for a way to return to reunite with his father on Mount Olympus.
White Ninja has over 800 comics to date. See them in the White Ninja Archives – via Cracked.com.
For his masters degree in industrial design, Tom Ballhatchet, 29, has developed an environmentally-friendly paper shredder that runs on hamster power. The rodent has to run flat out for 45 minutes to shred one sheet of A4 paper, but the rewards are great – the the shredded paper that falls onto the base of the cage provides fresh bedding.
The London-based design consultant said:
I wanted to come up with a product that would capture people’s imagination while addressing issues of topical concern such as climate change, recycling, and identity fraud.
Several companies have apparently expressed an interest in turning the working prototype into a full scale production.
Read the full article at the Daily Mail – via Bits & Pieces.
I’ll be getting Mirror’s Edge for the PS3 this weekend, and I’m really looking forward to playing it seeing if it’ll make me vomit. In Mirror’s Edge, I’ll be a sexy Asian woman (that’ll be a nice for a change) making use of parkour to deliver black-market messages in a locked-down, police state.
I’ll be running on rooftops some 40 stories in the air, leaping across vertigo-inducing gaps, tight-rope walking on pipes, and wall running like the Prince of Persia, all the while being chased down by the cops who’d loved to pop a cap in my ass. All this frenetic action may cause discomforting simulation sickness and result in me bringing up the pizza lunch I had earlier.
Only 15 minutes into the game, Clive Thompson over at Wired.com said that his mouth began overproducing saliva, and he had to pause the action for a few seconds to avoid carsickness. Other FPS games hadn’t affected him in this way, and he thinks Mirror’s Edge felt so visceral because it is the first game to hack into his proprioception.
According to wikipedia, proprioception is a sense of one’s own body – it is the sense that indicates whether the body is moving with required effort, as well as where the various parts of the body are located in relation to each other.
Most FPS games don’t create a proper sense of proprioception because you can’t see all the limbs of your character and can’t get a sense of the dimensions of your in-game body. In Mirror’s Edge, however, you can see your arms pumping up and down as you run, and your legs come into view when you make a jump. Clive says the game is not merely graphically realistic; it’s neurologically realistic. He feels he is the character, there is a strong sense of physicality, and the speed at which his character moves now means something and affects his brain as if he were really travelling at speed.
In any case, when I eventually get to play Mirror’s Edge, I’ll have my bucket nearby in case of emergency ;)
You can read Clive’s article on Mirror’s Edge and proprioception at Wired.com.
It’s not as clear cut as you would think. Click play or go to Youtube.
Happy New Year! A quick note from me and the copy/paste elves, Hack and Slash, wishing our readers (the whole 3 of you) a very happy, prosperous, and disease-free New Year!
We wish you the best in your endeavours, be it getting fit, taming the bulge, quitting smoking, getting out of debt, or just being a better person. Make 2009 the best year of your life!