Blood Sport: Fusing Blood Donations And Violent Video Games

Out there, right now, there are people with a dire need for your blood, and 99.98% of them aren’t vampires. Instead, they’re in need of medical attention. Donating blood is a good thing to do because it can save lives and preserve the vampire race. If they die out now, the last major vampire pop culture moment will be Twilight and the final season of True Blood and that’s just unacceptable. The problem with blood donation is that it’s not much fun, and while there are many, many more pressing problems in the world, a small group of people decided to fix that one.

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Blood Sport uses modified rumble packs to make you bleed when your character bleeds in a video game. That’s right, when you get shot in Battlefield, this device will automatically remove some of your blood. Of course, a medical professional will be standing by to make sure the game doesn’t take too much, because the whole point of simulating combat is that nobody actually dies. It just doesn’t seem entirely fair to me though, as it doesn’t appear that any of your blood gets put back when you grab a health pack. It’s much better for the wounded and the vampires that way.

Blood Sport is looking to raise $250,000 on Kickstarter to create mobile gaming blood drive trucks in coordination with charities and gaming groups.

[via Kickstarter]

OnePlus boss details why it’s so hard to get the One

oneplus-1-600x338If you want a OnePlus One, you understand how rough it can be. Invitations, flash sales, and terribly misguided (read: offensive) marketing schemes get in the way of us just being able to buy a phone. At $299, though, the headaches are more than worth the wait for some. Offering top-end specs with a low-end price, the OnePlus has sat … Continue reading

The Nostalgia Nerds Who Rescue Old Games From Oblivion

The Nostalgia Nerds Who Rescue Old Games From Oblivion

Do you remember the first computer game you played? What about the first program you downloaded? Unless you’ve just emerged Brendan-Fraser-in-Encino Man-style from the earth, wholly unaware of computers (in which case, I have several questions for you), your early digital distractions are probably years, if not decades old by now.

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How to Share Your Notes in Google Keep

How to Share Your Notes in Google Keep

Is Google creeping onto Evernote’s lawn? Probably not, but Google Keep is slowly adding one or two very handy features to encourage you to make it your simple note-taking app of choice. This week Mountain View engineers added the option to share notes with other people , and here’s how it works.

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Google's internet balloons can stay aloft for 100 days thanks to fluffy socks

While some high profile Google projects (*cough Glass*) have been withering on the vine, Project Loon is a bright spot and even has a carrier partner. Mountain View says it can now autofill the internet-enabling, weather-tracking balloons in five…

3D talking map can help the blind find their way

The Perkins School for the Blind in Massachusetts just got a high-tech installation to help keep their students from getting lost around campus: a three-dimensional map that talks. Its miniature Monopoly-like buildings and other elements (which were…

Messless Indoor Snowball Fight “works” as advertised

indoor-snow-fightWinter is coming for those of us living in the northern hemisphere, and for certain areas, there will be the wonders of snow to dive into. You can always enjoy yourself with family and friends by building a snowman, but why not take things one step further by engaging in a snowball fight? Those might end up as one of the more memorable moments in the long run, but they do leave quite a mess. If you would like to enjoy a snowball fight without the mess, then the $29.95 Messless Indoor Snowball Fight would certainly make plenty of sense.

The Messless Indoor Snowball Fight happen to feature puffy and plush snowballs, except for one very important fact – none of it will result in slush-soaked walls and carpets from the real deal, making it perfect for a snowball fight behind closed doors, regardless of what season it is at that point in time. All 30 of these picture-perfect snowballs happen to be made from 100% polyester plush, and not only that, they are machine washable and dryable. Being soft to the touch, they also come with a satisfying “crunch” texture whenever it is squeezed, similar to the real thing. I do wonder whether it will jive with the Arctic Force Snowball Crossbow or not though.
[ Messless Indoor Snowball Fight “works” as advertised copyright by Coolest Gadgets ]

El Anatsui, King Of Trash Art, Explores His Minimalist Side

In 1990, a man named El Anatsui was among the first batch of sub-Saharan Africans ever to present at the Venice Bienniale, the grand ball of the art world. By 2007, the Ghanaian artist was the beau of the very same ball, having transformed the end of the Bienniale’s main hall, the Arsenale, into a corridor of disorienting light, beamed off the sort of ingenious piece that would become his calling card: a suspended sheet woven of flattened liquor bottle caps.

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Anatsui’s new work looks familiar, but tackles fresh concerns.

The New York Times declared him a “global star,” one of a few African artists on which every critic in the Western world is compelled to make some kind of judgment. In Anatsui’s case, the reviews tended to be as glittery as the work — witness the blitz surrounding his sweeping retrospective last year at the Brooklyn Museum of Art, the launch of which prompted the Times anointment. His, after all, are beautiful sculptures rich with innuendo, not only about the detrimental effects of colonization (European countries were the first to introduce, and reap handsome profits from, the sale of liquor in parts of Africa — a continent now plagued by alcoholism), but also in terms of environmental concerns such as recycling and waste. Then there is the poetic commentary on the shiftiness of a work of art: Anatsui’s are made with much help from local workers, and draped according to the whims of each setting’s curators.

But a new show overturns many of those expectations. One year later, Anatsui has picked a wholly unpredictable setting to debut a quietly daring exhibit. “Metas,” at the Mnuchin Gallery in Manhattan’s Upper East Side, might at first glance seem to present more of the same: Bottle caps? Check. A closer look, however, reveals an artist grappling with the fixations of a different place and era than his own.

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The legacy of abstract expressionist Carl Andre, who famously worked in a grid pattern, is evident in several of Anatsui’s newest pieces.

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From a series of flattened steel plates to sculptures strung of caps of a single color, the works at Mnuchin represent an artistic “leap,” says Sukanya Rangarajan, a partner at the gallery who worked closely with Anatsui on the exhibit. The conversation begun in Venice is morphing into “a more art historical dialogue,” in Rangarajan’s assessment, one that loops in the voices of American minimalists like Donald Judd (the subject of a recent exhibit at Mnuchin), and 20th century European cubists.

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Metas III, by El Anatsui, 2014. Courtesy Mnuchin Gallery.

What were once shimmering portals into African history are now experiments in form and line. Just as Pablo Picasso entered a blue period as a way to explore the dimensions of a single color, Anatsui is “moving away from color into a grey palette,” Rangarajan points out. Pinned onto the walls of Mnuchin — an unconventional gallery space, set inside a townhouse — these new bottle cap sculptures recall the oeuvre of artists not typically associated with Anatsui. The clarity of geometry and color, the shocking simplicity of the work’s direct placement onto the walls, it all calls to mind the phenomenon of Kazimir Malevich, the Russian abstract expressionist who in 1915 stunned war-weary audiences with the purity of the first totally non-representational painting in Western art, titled simply, Black Square. The subversion here is circumstantially different. Set against the townhouse’s innate decorum, Anatsui’s sculptures seem vaguely revolutionary, the gallery version of a child’s wild scrawls on the walls of the wealthy parents’ brand new home.

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Womb of Time, by El Anatsui, 2014. Courtesy Mnuchin Gallery.

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Disciples, by El Anatsui, 2014. Courtesy Mnuchin Gallery.

Anatsui was inspired in part by the space itself, according to gallery notes. The historic townhouse is full of the sort of architectural details popular in romantic comedies set in New York City: high molding, a grand rotunda, and an arched stairway curling up the building’s three floors. According to Rajaratnam, Anatsui welcomed the chance to design for a space so different from any he’d shown in, where the simple fact of the juxtaposition of his work inside creates drama.

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A few pieces span curved walls. One clings to the stairwell side, like some sort of jewel-encrusted cobweb, creating what Rajaratnam calls an “interface with the environment.” Anatsui typically builds work that can be folded into a suitcase and shown anywhere, but these works are meant for Mnuchin. It’s an ideal match. “We are not a traditional white box,” Rajaratnam says. “And El is not your typical artist.”

Metas is presented in collaboration with the Jack Shainman Gallery, and runs through Dec. 13 at the Mnuchin Gallery.

The Mayo Wars

Around 77 A.D., Pliny, an army commander of the early Roman Empire, first wrote of a condiment that has been at the center of a lawsuit this week. “When garlic is beaten up in oil and vinegar, it swells up in foam to a surprising size.” That ancient condiment, called “allioli,” which has evolved into the mayonnaise slathered on your burger, was made without chicken eggs — requiring only garlic, olive oil, and salt.

Hellmann’s, chicken egg and all, first went into production in 1912.

Its parent company, Unilever, is one of the world’s largest companies with revenues of more than $60 billion a year. Unilever claims that Hampton Creek is violating the standard of identify for mayonnaise — stemming from pre-World War II regulations — because we’re using plants instead of chicken eggs in what is now America’s most popular condiment. Unilever filed a lawsuit last week to remove Hampton Creek’s mayo from Walmart, Safeway, Target, ShopRite, The Dollar Tree, Costco, Whole Foods, Kroger — more than 22,000 locations in all.

This mayo war has started a national conversation about a regulatory framework that could be more helpful than hurtful to the types of innovations required to solve obesity and environmental stress. And at the heart of the lawsuit is a Hampton Creek belief that requires a different, but ironically traditional, approach to food: The only way the good food choice wins is when the good choice is better. Stated simply: If it’s not affordable and delicious, it’s completely irrelevant to solving the problem. Just ask your dad.

That belief is the reason why data scientists from Google, and biochemists from Stanford, and chefs from Food and Wine’s top 50 restaurants call Hampton Creek home. And to make Just Mayo, we use plants — including a hint of garlic — instead of factory chicken eggs. The plants we use, including a varietal of the Canadian yellow pea, are 48 percent more cost effective than chicken eggs, are more carbon-efficient, and use less water. For Hampton Creek, mayo is just the start. And our plant screening technology is closer to the ingenuity of a few thousand years ago than to the mindset spurring this lawsuit on.

With the media attention over the past several weeks, let’s not forget that while Unilever and Hampton Creek may be in conflict at the moment, there’s far more that unites the two companies. We admire how it’s often strived to solve urgent needs — from water scarcity to malnutrition and gender equality. We “cannot close our eyes to the problems the world faces,” its corporate ethos reads. The thousands of human beings that make up Unilever have names. They have families. They have goofy dogs and insane cats. They are you. And much like you, they are just trying to figure things out. And it was in response to an avian flu outbreak in 2006, an internal R&D effort was rightfully launched to emulate what the Romans did centuries ago: whip up mayo without the chicken egg. Today Unilever still proudly states that it’s exploring “plant-based protein sources through the use of egg-replacement ingredients…”

Here’s what the world should know: Hampton Creek was founded to open our eyes to the problems the world faces. This moment has only validated why.

Anonymous Release New Video Warning Ferguson Police And KKK: ‘We Are The Law Now'

A video surfaced Thursday reportedly released by the hacker group Anonymous warning Ferguson, Missouri police officers and the Ku Klux Klan to remain peaceful and refrain from using violence against local protesters.

Anonymous, an unidentified group of online activists against racism and violence, published the video after they took over the KKK’s website and seized two Twitter accounts earlier this week in response to deadly threats the white supremacist group made to demonstrators in Ferguson.

The hacker collective refers to this series of attacks — which has also unmasked the identities of KKK members — as part of a campaign recognized as #operationKKK or #opKKK.

“To the KKK and police, be peaceful or you will face the consequences,” the video stated. “To the protesters, do not be afraid. We are here for you and will protect and serve you. We are the law now.”

The video also retaliates against direct threats reportedly made by Frank Ancona, the leader of the Missouri-based KKK chapter who appeared on a widely-criticized live MSNBC segment last week and defended claims of using “lethal force” against peaceful protesters.

Ancona’s threat to Anonymous allegedly claims that members of the group will be “strung up next to the chimps.” In response, Anonymous stated that the collective has no tolerance for Ancona’s warning.

“When the grand jury indictment is announced soon, we will take every precaution needed to defend ourselves. The protesters will take to the streets peacefully, as they always have,” Anonymous stated in the video. “Your violent ideology will not prevail in this fight.”

As for statements directly addressing the police, Anonymous warned law enforcement to maintain the peace and discouraged the use of any violence.

“If you use violent acts against the protesters as you have before, you should know that you are being watched very closely,” the video states. “You can not get away with anything.”

In an Anonymous Internet Relay Chat Monday, a member of the group named “SiX” told The Huffington Post:

“We want the KKK gone, forever. Don’t worry, we know what we’re doing.”

Aside from this newly-released video, members of Anonymous have sent messages through various social media outlets including Twitter and Instagram along with posts published through their website.

And while they are active on several public platforms, their main message resonates in solidarity — as the group stated in the video:

“We are Anonymous. We are a legion. We do not forgive. We do not forget.”

Watch the video above.