“If I had remained invisible, the truth would remain hidden.”

So speaks one of the characters from Cloud Atlas. It’s also a line that Lana Wachowski quotes in her speech at the Human Rights Campaign Gala where she accepted their Visibility Award. In July she and her brother appeared in an intro video to the 5 minute trailer for Cloud Atlas, making it their first public appearance since The Matrix and making it Lana’s first public appearance as Lana. In her HRC speech Lana tells about her choice of “coming out” to the public and about the fine lines between visibility and invisibility. It’s a beautiful, inspiring and moving speech:

I love the dresses from Karen Millen, but they’re all just a bit too expensive for my tastes. Still I love the designs; the dresses look so modern, sleek and pretty. This geometric dress is a bit unusual, but I love the combination of the print and the black and white panels:

You can get it on the Karen Millen website for £160. As I said before, it’s a bit too pricey for my tastes (I won’t spend more than £60 on a dress, unless it’s for a very good reason), but it’s so gorgeous and fits my style exactly!

Karen Millen also has a couple of other dress that I think would suit me. Here’s a tweed dress with cool panelling on the front (for £190):

I also like this colourblock knit dress with a zipper at the shoulder (for £125):

What do you think of the dresses? Would you buy them?

I’m not really much of a Lord of The Rings fan and I’m not excited for The Hobbit at all, but this video from Air New Zealand and WETA is pretty cool:

Did you recognize Peter Jackson? There are also some other cameos in the video, like the grandsons of Tolkien, but I have a feeling I’m not recognizing some of the more obvious ones.

I love geeky jewellery. I’ve been slowly building my collection of geeky yet pretty necklaces, but still don’t own any geeky rings or earrings (unless you count an ankh as geeky, which in this case it sort of might be since it comes from my teen obsession with Egyptian mythology and history).

Anyways, this Kickstarter project looks great and shall hopefully find a place in my geeky jewellery collection: Dice Rings! They’re spinner rings where an outer smaller ring spins in a grooved inner ring. I’ve seen these before but never with dice featured on them. So handy!

They are several type of pledges:

• $5 Immortal Word Smith: a personal quote on their website
• $15 Lone Adventurer: Any 1 ring, any size or available color.
• $40 Gambler: 3 rings (rCards, r%, 2r6),  any size or available color.
• $42 Gamer Lite: Your pick of any 3 rings, any size or available color.
• $70 Multiclasser: Your pick of any 5 rings, any size or available color.
• $90 Classic Player: 7 rings (r4, r6, r8, r10, r12, r20 and r%), any size or available color.
• $130 Game Master: Your pick of any 10 rings, any size or available color.
• $1000 Hands of Royalty: You will be their hand model. You’ll get every type of ring, but you’ll need to take photos.
• $5000 Battle-Hardened Comrade: Come and hang out with the founders for an entire weekend.

What do you think of the Dice Rings? Cool or too geeky?

You’ve all heard the news, right? Disney bought Lucasfilm yesterday for $4 billion… and they’re bringing out Star Wars Episode 7 in 2015, with plans to release more Star Wars movie every other year: so Star Wars Episode 8 in 2017 and Star Wars Episode 9 in 2019 (wow, that feels so far away still).

George Lucas sat down with Kathleen Kennedy, the new president of Lucasfilm, and talked about the future of Star Wars:

I’m surprised by the news (as everybody is), but I’m excited by this move! I think Marvel and Pixar have done quite well under the Disney brand, so I’m curious to see what they’ll end up doing. Plus George Lucas won’t be as involved as he was as the previous 3 Star Wars movies, which is only a good thing in my eyes.

What do you think of Disney buying Lucasfilm? Good move?

TeeFury has another TwoFury Battle! This time it’s Daft Punk versus Ash from the Evil Dead trilogy. I love both designs, but I think the Daft Punk one is my favourite!

Currently the Daft Punk is winning almost twice as many sales. Both designs are only available for the next 10 hours from TeeFury. Which one would you choose?

Assassin’s Creed III is coming out tomorrow! I loved the previous 4 games and I can’t wait to get my hands on it and play it. This is a completely fanmade video, but it looks pretty good. The acting is not super (and WTF at the end credits!), but the choreography of the fights is pretty cool and not what you’d expect from something fanmade:

Do you want to be a supervillain? Here are some tips that might be of use:

10 Ways to Be a Better Super Villain – An infographic by the team at Jacamo

Two weekends ago I attended this year’s Playful at Conway Hall. I’ve been attending the Playful events since they started in 2008 and they’ve always been a lot of fun. It’s a one-day conference all about games, play, interaction, behaviour and everything that comes with looking at the world through fun eyes. Each time they bring a cool group of speakers together to talk about games and play from unique perspectives.

I said “I attended” this year, what I actually mean is volunteered. That meant arriving at the venue at 8:30 and helping out with setting various things up. As usual I also headed registration, trying to make it as quick and easy as possible. I’m not really sure why, but I really love doing registration at events. Here we had about 300 people all arriving within the first hour, but I think we dealt with them all quickly and nobody had to queue for too long.

Because I was volunteering though I didn’t get to see all the talks. I ended up seeing 9 out of the 12, only missing 3 talks, which isn’t too bad a ratio. I should have planned it a bit better though, cause looking back two of those talks seemed to be quite interesting to me (Mark Sorrell’s talk on Computer Games (Not Video Games) and Siobhan Reddy from Media Molecule presentation on Learnings from New Ideas). The other 9 talks were great though too; here are the ones that stood out most to me:

Mint Foundry — Toys With Purpose

The Mint Foundry is Mint Digital’s graduate scheme and this year it had tasked four designers to “Make a toy that has a reason to exist”. They came up with Dough Globe: a sourdough game controller. It’s a hollow ball in which you can “grow” your sourdough and then uses an accelerometer and ethanol level to control a custom built game. The game features Doug, the little guy that lives in your Dough Globe and by playing the games with Doug you can unlock recipes for your sourdough.

Holly Gramazio — Clapping Games

I used to love clapping games as a kid; there were so many different ones that I sort of remember playing. Holly Gramazio from Hide & Seek talked about clapping games, their origin and how we should be playing clapping games more. “They’re Guitar Hero without the technology”. At the end of the presentation she explained the rules of the Danish Clapping game, which I now really want to try out.

Bennett Foddy — Confusion & Frustration in game design

Bennett Foddy is an Oxford University professor and the creator of iOS games QWOP and GIRP. Foddy talked about how games need a certain amount of suffering in them to fully enjoy them. He gave an example of a friend buying an iPhone game and being disappointed in it when he finished it in one go. It’s the suffering in the game that makes failure matter and makes you want to play on and master the game. Games need different dimensions of suffering to be fulfilling: pain, frustration, confusion, humiliation.

I really enjoyed Playful this year and definitely look forward to next year’s one! Did you go to Playful? What was your favourite talk?

I never quite know whether I should watch The Nightmare Before Christmas before Christmas or before Halloween… Either way I’d love to have a Sally costume one time for Halloween:

This one you can get from the etsy store Smarmy Clothes for $175 (it will be custom made for your size).