Cool Stuff: Enigma Quest

August 19th, 2015

I know, I know, I might be slightly addicted to escape rooms at the moment. This is the second escape room Kickstarter project I’ve backed (the first being Enigma Escape a few months back), but I really love the sound of what Enigma Quest are doing!

school_of_witchcraft_and_wizardry

Here’s what they are focusing on:

We believe that there are three most important aspects to a great immersive experience, be it an escape game or a live quest: quality, immersion and innovation.

Without quality, nothing stays for long. We design every puzzle and every prop to be of high quality material, and where we can’t source what we want – we create it ourselves.

Without immersion, it would just be another puzzle hunt. We love puzzle hunts, don’t get us wrong, but to provide the highest possible value for money, we pay attention to every tiny detail to achieve deep level of immersion, until when the players lose themselves in the surroundings.

We design the puzzles with innovation in our minds, and aim to be very high-tech. There are no padlocks in our rooms, no hunt for numerical codes with tiring amount of numbers. Everything feels real and highly interactive.

I especially love the sound of no padlocks and no numerical codes. While I understand that padlocks and numerical codes are quite ‘easy’ to implement, my favourite moments from escape rooms have been discovering the more creative objects and triggers within rooms. Besides that, Enigma Quest’s first room will be the Harry Potter-esque ‘School of Witchcraft and Wizardry’.

They’re still looking for a couple more backers, so go back it if you think it sounds interesting!

Cool Stuff: The Habit Journal

February 17th, 2015

Exercise more. Drink more water. Eat more fruit. Don’t forget to floss. Drink less coffee. Every other month or so it occurs to me that I should try to be more healthier and keep up with some good habits. And most of the time I fail miserably.

I’ve tried several apps that do this sort of thing, but most of them aren’t very flexible. Timeful so far has been the most motivating for me, but the habits aren’t the main focus of the app. It’s great for scheduling and finding time to keep up those habits, but doesn’t really deal with keeping tracking and stats about them.

I love the idea of this Kickstarter project though: the Habit Journal, a simple daily journal for recording, measuring and applying lasting habits to help you achieve any goal. Here’s the Kickstarter video:

I’m addicted to notebooks and I think this could work great for me! The project is fully backed already and it’s only £15 to get a journal.

A couple months back I blogged about my first pair of United Nude shoes (see that post here). I adore that pair, so when I heard about their Christmas sale I just knew I had to take a look to see what I could find. I ended up getting one of their recurring designs, Fold (in Dark Fog):

united nude fog

These are so awesome! They’re super comfy, yet so stylish and eye-catching; I constantly get asked where I got them from.

I am so tempted to get a second pair in a different colour now though… Each year United Nude brings this design back, but in new gorgeous colour combinations. The two designs from the current collection that I like are:

united-nude-cuba-rossa

I’m not completely convinced though; there are colour designs from previous years that look so much more interesting, fun and (most importantly) more “me”. I think I’m going to have to wait till next season’s set or see if I can find the older ones still online. Either way I’ve got my heart set on getting a second pair of these!

A few weeks back I gave a 5 minute lightning talk at 300 Seconds about Being A Social Introvert. I already wrote this up as a blog post (which you can read here), but the video of that presentation is now up on YouTube as well:

I always find it feels a bit weird watching yourself back and hearing your own voice. It’s good though to see how the presentation went; from my point of view it felt as if I was speeding way more through it and that doesn’t come across (I think) in the video.

Since that presentation, I’ve given it a second time at HACKED. Both times I had people come up to me afterwards to discuss introverts and telling me about their own experiences. It’s so cool to realize that your presentation made people think about themselves in a way they didn’t necessarily before!

So do you consider yourself a Social Caterpillar?

If you’re following me on Twitter, you might be swamped by my tweets about this by now, but: I’m going to the BAFTAs! I’m getting tickets to the red carpet, the awards ceremony and the dinner afterwards. I’m super excited and still a little bit in a state of disbelief. I’m hoping I can tweet on the night itself (fingers crossed that the Royal Opera House will have good reception), but I’ll definitely be writing up a blog post about the night!

Each year BAFTA selects an illustrator to create imagery based on the five Best Film nominations for the tickets, programs and menus on the night. This year they’ve been designed by Jonathan Burton from Handsome Frank and the posters look awesome. Each of the film posters has a limited run of 100 editions for £60 (plus P&P) in the Handsome Frank shop. They don’t seem to be sold out yet, so if you really love one of these posters now’s the time to get it!

JonathanBurton_BAFTA_Argo_LowRes

JonathanBurton_BAFTA_LesMis_LowRes

JonathanBurton_BAFTA_LifeofPi_LowRes

JonathanBurton_BAFTA_Lincoln_LowRes

JonathanBurton_BAFTA_ZeroDark30_LowRes

I can’t wait to see which of these will be on my program! My favourite is the Argo one, even though that wasn’t my favourite film. Which one is your favourite?

Via FirstShowing

This marketing campaign from Lego is awesome. To celebrate Lego’s 55 year anniversary Montreal-based creative agency Brad has created 55 illustrations using Lego to represent movies, songs, books and more.

Geek In Heels has featured all 55 of them and I can recommend having a look and see how many you can figure out. Here are my six favourite ones:

Yellow Submarine

Kill Bill

Peter Pan

Moby Dick

2001

Stairway To Heaven

Via Geek In Heels

Cool Stuff: Four Stories

November 28th, 2012

Yesterday I got invited to the premiere of Four Stories, the result of a world wide competition to give aspiring screenwriters the chance to bring their vision alive and turn their scripts into 10 minute short films. The four winning scripts were chosen by Roman Coppola and a panel of judges from over a 1000 submissions. The brief: each story had to take place at one of the W hotels and Intel’s Ultrabook had to be a central plot component.

Yeah… that doesn’t sound contrived at all. But I actually think they’ve made it all work. The four winning scripts do all feature a W hotel and an Ultrabook, but in almost all of them it does feel as if they belongs and not something tacked on for the sake of it.

There’s also a funny fifth movie called “Die Again, Undead One” which was directed by Roman Coppola and stars Jason Schwartzman, but it will only be released once the YouTube page gets 3000 shares.

Here are the four winning short movies:

Eugene

Eugene was written by Adam Blampied from London and filmed at the W Washington D.C. with director Spencer Susser and actors Michael Govier and Karolina Wydra. This one turned out to be my favourite of the four!

Modern Love

Modern Love was written by Amy Jacobowitz from Los Angeles and filmed at W Doha with director Lee Toland Krieger and actors Robert Schwartzman and Naomi Scott. I really enjoyed this one too, it’s sweet and romantic:

El Tonto!

Written by Ben Saveg from Brooklyn, N.Y., it was filmed at W Mexico City with director Lake Bell and actor Kyle Mooney. I’m not sure I “got” this one. It was funny-ish, but didn’t seem to have a real point to it.

The Mirror Between Us

Kahlil Joseph from Los Angeles wrote and directed “The Mirror Between Us,” filmed at W Retreat & Spa Maldives with actors Nicole Beharie and Dan’ee Doty. I honestly didn’t understand this one at all. Is it just me?

Cool Stuff: Toys Unleashed

November 17th, 2012

Last Tuesday I got invited to the launch of the Toys Unleashed app from Barclaycard. It’s a cute little game to tie in with their latest Christmas ad campaign:

Using Augmented Reality, Toys Unleashed places three adorable toys to play with in the palm of your hand. You can play with Mr B the monkey, where you have to aim bananas into the monkey’s hand. You can feed different types of food to Chomp the dinosaur. And you can protect Mike the robot from attacking UFOs. The games seem pretty simple, but they’re trickier than they look!

The cool thing during the launch though was that they painted a gigantic street art hand, exactly opposite where LeStudio52 used to be! It was fun playing the game on such a huge hand and seeing part of it being painted. Here’s a time lapse of the street art painting (I appear very briefly round the 49 second mark!):

24 Hours, 24 Offers, 24 Books!

The Book Depository has another 24 Hour sale! I’ve missed out on this promotion the last couple of times, each time completely forgetting that it was on. Starting at noon GMT (aka now), they’ll have a book on sale on their homepage, with a new offer appearing every hour. The first book is the LEGO Star Wars Character Encyclopedia… not something for me, but I’m sure they’ll have other interesting books!

Last time they had some great books on sale, so I’m going to try and keep a close eye on what goes on sale every hour! I quite like The Book Depository as an Amazon alternative; I’ve often found books cheaper here and actually in stock.

Cool Stuff: Licence To Drive

October 26th, 2012

Yay, Skyfall is out today in the UK! So I’m celebrating that today with a couple of Bond related posts. I’ve got myself some tickets to the IMAX tomorrow, and can’t wait to see it!

This is a cool infographic from Evans Halshaw featuring the different Bond cars through the years. They’ve also got a pretty cool interactive version which you can check out here.

James Bond 007 Cars Evolution

Everyone has a favourite Bond – and a favourite Bond girl – but what’s your favourite Bond car? Infographic by Evans Halshaw. View the interactive version here.