Father Died Search Results

News: The Amazing PVC Pipe Music of Kent Jenkins (aka Snubby J)

There's a ton of videos on the web of musicians playing homemade PVC instruments, but I just recently stumbled upon the impressive work of PVC pipe player Kent Jenkins, aka Snubby J. His most recent video features a duet with his faux-twin, playing "Wizards in Winter" by the Trans-Siberian Orchestra. Turns out, he's been a PVC maestro for awhile now and even auditioned for his inspiration, the Blue Man Group, at the age of seventeen. Though he wasn't picked, they saw potential in him and aske...

Games That Act Like Films: Are They Really 'Bastard Half-Children'?

Many gamers see the film industry as the premier model that video games should follow, and it's no surprise. Movies are seen as the most legitimate and profitable of all artistic visual mediums, which is certainly qualities practitioners of any new medium would desire. Big budget games like Heavy Rain and L.A. Noire strive for the same level as film by aping its techniques, focusing on storytelling in a cinematic fashion, rather than creating compelling gameplay experiences.

News: MyndPlay Gives Mindf*** Movies a New Meaning

Were you horrified when Gwyneth Paltrow's head ended up in a box in Se7en? Do you share Harrison Ford's opinion that Han Solo should have died in Return of the Jedi? Think Kurt Russell could have handled aliens better in The Thing? Well, sorry—you're out of luck. There's nothing you can do to prevent William Wallace's beheading or Carrie's mayhem. But thanks to MyndPlay, controlling the plot to future films is totally possible.

WARNING: On Public WiFi? Your News May Be Hacked

Meet Newstweek, a hidden device engineered to hack news items being read at public WiFi hotspots (cafes, libraries, airports, etc.). Both nefarious and tech-saavy, the ingenious mechanism wasn't fathered by a group of web hackers, but rather a pair of Berlin artists, Julian Oliver and Danja Vasiliev. The duo are interested in exploiting the "trustworthiness" of big media outlets in order to demonstrate the vulnerability of relying on just a few dominant networks.

News: The Cheap Thrill of Flirting With Death On Stage

From an episode of the Frank Sinatra Show in 1951, Larry Griswold performs death defying stunts in the name of entertainment. Griswold, an American gymnast, entertainer, and co-inventor of the trampoline, proved again and again that flirting with death is sure to please a crowd. Meanwhile, in the parallel universe of Julie Taymor's accident prone Spider-Man musical, the New Yorker makes a similar case in point. The production has been plagued with injury after injury- broken wrists and ribs, ...

News: The Hideous "Buy" Button

Buy, buy, buy. Buy this, buy that. Many wizards are buying crowns and earning or buying gold points to buy an in-game item. I, myself am saving up for the Great Fortress, a giant 50,000 coin Dragonsyre house. But right now, I still have to face the hideous greyed-out Buy button:

How To: Keep Stroke Patients Active at Home w/ Wii Fit

My father recently suffered a stroke. Now in Neuro Rehab at Cedars Sinai, he is enduring daily physical therapy, recreational therapy and occupational therapy sessions to help improve his balance, mobility and fine motor skills. I was initially worried about how I could incorporate his current PT regime in his daily life after he's discharged. That was until I saw the devices he used in the PT gym. Despite their "medical device" designations, the high tech stuff is remarkably similar to what ...

Tweens 'n' Teens: Charlie St. Cloud

Hey editor Mike here from thesubstream and I would like to welcome our newest contributor to the site, our tweens 'n' teens cinema specialist, my little sister Amanda. We're going to make her go watch all the movies that we don't want to see ourselves and then make her tell us and you about them. Up first: the Zac Efron vehicle Charlie St. Cloud.

News: Impromptu Tear Gas Chamber

Step 1: Have most of the Jackass crew think they are doing a photo shoot for the upcoming movie. Schedule the shoot in a tear gas chamber that is dressed to look like a photo set. Have secret film cameras planted in the chamber so you don't have any obvious camera men walking around with gas masks on inside the room.

News: Friday Indie Game Review Roundup: Old-New School

This week's FIGRR is all about games that are old-new (or new-old, if you like) school. Each celebrates a different vital, yet largely taken for granted, aspect of video game history in the decidedly new-school world of indie games. Their titles betray them. Blocks That Matter is all about blocks. Recettear: An Item Shop's Tale is all about item shops. Neither are particularly sexy aspects of gaming, but both are ubiquitous elements of great games that can stand on their own.

Realm of the Mad God: A Free Indie Browser Alternative to World of Warcraft

World of Warcraft has been on top of the world for seven years. No other MMO has come close to challenging its dominance of the genre, and it has generated billions of dollars for Blizzard. They have spent a lot of money adding more and more content, to the extent where the full game with all the expansion packs takes up 65 GB of hard drive space. It is a beautiful game; well balanced, and a milestone in the history of the medium.

News: Man Immortalizes Dead Fiancée in Virtual World

Death is tough for the living, and those who mourn do all sorts of odd things to cope with it. Some keep mementos, some build towering statues, others create memorial paintings or write sad songs, all of which are healthy in moderation. Honoring the dead has been around for so long, it's part of what makes us human. Recently, the practice of memorializing the dead has spread from the arts, religion, and ceremonial burial to video games.

News: Final Fantasy 14 Final Thoughts

Spending five days with the game is enough to know it's not to my liking. Is it a horrible MMO? Yes, yes it is. There are better Free to Play MMOs launched years ago that are better than this. As a fan of the Final Fantasy series (I am currently playing and liking Final Fantasy 13), this MMO is so bad that at some point I couldn't justify the awful environment, game play, and interface.

News: Make Insulating Glass Conductive with a Blowtorch!

Have a few light bulbs and a blowtorch? Then join the folks over at Harvard in a cool science experiment on the conductivity of glass. As you well know, glass is an insulator with low conductivity and high resistivity. In the video below, they flip the switch, demonstrating how heating the glass fuse enclosure from an incandescent light bulb can create a conductive material that completes the series circuit and lights the second light bulb. In the video, the two light sockets are wired in ser...

News: Curbing our Hubris

"The suspect is based out of Joint Base Lewis-McChord in Washington state. He has been identified as a staff sergeant in the Stryker brigade who was taking part in a village stability operation in Afghanistan. He is a 38-year-old married father of two on his first deployment to Afghanistan after three previous deployments in Iraq.", reads an article from MSNBC.

WTFoto News Scoop Sundays: Puttin' It to Putin!

For those of you behind on their international politics, Vladimir Putin has once again been elected as President of Russia. And right now, there are over 20,000 protesters in Moscow yelling about election fraud. Now, whether or not you think they're right, or whether or not you think Putin is a badass (he is, for the record), you have to admit he is an amazingly interesting cultural figure. And what do we do with amazing cultural figures? Why, we make fun of them with Impact-laden photos, of ...

How To: Hack a Radio to Pick Up Different Frequencies - Including Law Enforcement & More

Hardware hacks are something I feel we don't get enough of at Null Byte, so today I figured I would introduce a fun one. I've always been a curious hardware hacker. Taking things apart and learning how their internals work has always been a part of my nature. Quite some years ago, my father showed me a really cool trick on how to hack normal radios to scan frequencies that are normally non-listenable. This little hack allowed us to scan frequencies belonging to law enforcement, and even frequ...

StarCraft 2 Drama: Eve - the First Female Pro

Wow, this story, written by Becky, is riveting. I know we've got some StarCraft 2 fans in here. I'm glad that Eve seems really stoked to be playing StarCraft 2, and I think a lot of the grief she's getting is from jealous players who are mad that they didn't get selected for a pro-gaming teamE.

Octodad: An Award Winning Game… From College Students

Fatherhood is difficult, especially when you're an octopus. That is the moral of the 2011 IGF Student Showcase winner Octodad, available for free from its website. This hilarious little title was created by a team of interactive media students at DePaul University in Chicago, and is the latest in a stream of successful indie games to come out of collegiate video game design programs. In fact, it's so successful that a sequel is in the works.

News: 11.3 Million Video Game Deaths Visualized

Nope, it’s not the McDonalds menu, but close enough. Jim Blackhurst has mapped 11 million deaths onto a 3-dimensional point cloud for video game Just Cause 2. The result is an amazing virtual heat map of a world where every white dot represents a death on impact: The millions of deaths formulate a detailed outline of major structures and roads in the game, visually mapping "extractions" at every square inch. In most traditional games, this would not be possible—players more often than not sta...

News: The $25 USB Stick Computer

Earlier this month, game developer David Braben and his Rasberry Pi nonprofit foundation revealed a $25 USB PC. The computer can connect to an HDMI monitor on one end, and a USB peripheral on the other (such as a keyboard or a USB hub). You can use the USB hub to connect multiple items, such as a keyboard, mouse, printer, USB ethernet/wireless, creating a fully functional computer.

News: Keysmash Your Way to Convincing Hacker Code, Just Like in the Movies

Hacking can't be that hard, can it? At least, that's what it seems like thanks to movies like Hackers, The Net and that last Die Hard flick. Even the Jurassic Park girl's got some game. They all look like they're typing 20wpm, yet can generate a screen full of code in the blink of an eye. Amazing. As long as they're some isolated computer nerd who's glued to their PC all day long (which is pretty much all of us these days, thanks Internet), they're a bona fide hacker.