We seem to be entering a golden era for games design. Digital distribution platforms like Xbox Live and Apple’s App store have allowed smaller, more adventurous games designers to show off their talents. They can now bypass the creative restrictions of working for a big developer and work in small bands or go it alone. Some of the results are captivating. Limbo is a completely monochrome Xbox adventure game that my wife won’t look at because it gives her the heebie jeebies. Nelson Tethers, puzzle agent is a cute iPhone game designed by the cartoonist Graham Annable. And coming on PlayStation network we have Journey, in which the player takes a gorgeous-looking hike around a mysterious desert landscape. Lovely.


Image Credit:
thatgamecompany

What food do you serve the guests at a funeral? Vol au vents, stale crisps? How about jelly? As part of the general renaissance of traditional English food, jellies have been on the up of late, appearing at trendy events, weddings, and now funerals. Driving the trend, jellymongers Bompass and Parr offer a bespoke funeral jelly-making service. The company’s pyramid-shaped funeral jellies debuted at Bistrotheque (trendy East London restaurant) on the day of Michael Jackson’s funeral and were made out of black cherry, champagne and set with 24 carat gold. What we’re seeing here is that funerals are being treated more like a celebration of life, as they are in other parts of the world (see Social story). As Michael Hutchence put it, “It’s my party, and I’ll die if I want to.”

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Earlier in the year Colombia Road’s finest Rob Ryan, was down at Somerset House. Exhibition, nah, he relocated his whole goddamn studio down there for the run of the Pick Me Up art fair. Paper cutting, printing presses, the works – oh, and you could even stop by and have a natter with Ryan too; a real one-on-one art dialogue. And that’s the point. Biographies are no longer enough; people want the real deal. And not in the Cameron gifting Obama an Eine piece way. Commissioned London graffiti for the President, really?! We want to know the story, the provenance, we want to see it all with our own eyes.

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Woah! Check this bastard out! A flying car! Can you imagine how different history would have been if I’d had been racing through the streets of Paris in one of these on that fateful night in 1997? It would have been all, “Henri Paul! Unfurl the wings at once!” and me and Dodi could have been in St. Tropez within the hour instead of all that unsavoury death stuff that actually went on. I’ve got no regrets though. Up here, the taps are all full of nectar and because I’m in the VIP section, I don’t have to rub shoulders with the normal folk and all their moaning. The blog that features the flying car says that, “you will see them in the skies of the United States or England during the next 12 months”. Fuck’s sake – you’ve got more chance of seeing me coming back and banging out Sexual Healing on The X Factor.

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The comic book adventures of Tintin are coming alive thanks to a new series of tours by travel company On The Go and Moulinsart (the ‘Tintin Foundation’). The Destination Tintin tours will take you from India, to Jordan and then to Egypt – countries in which the intrepid adventurer, his little dog Snowy and friend Captain Haddock chased all manner of adversaries. As well as epic adventures, they’re also running Tintin-lite escapades, offering weekend trips to Brussels, where Tintin author Hergé lived and worked. For the lucky, geek-fan, some trips will also be accompanied by well-known ‘Tintinoligists’ to share expert views of Hergé’s much-loved adventures. Seeing destinations through the eyes of an iconic traveller or resident gives holidaymakers a richer, guided experience and offers a new way of packaging up well-trodden terrain.

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Japanese design firm Shimizu has created plans for 7 architectural megaprojects to revolutionise the way we live using ideas from science and science fiction. ‘Luna Ring’ is a proposal to cover the moon with solar panels to beam energy back down to earth and solve the fossil fuel problem. They also have ideas for floating mushroom-shaped farms, mega-pyramid cities, a space hotel and a method for creating lakes in the desert. In case you think this is a bit far-fetched, just remember that the US recently approved designs for a flying car and life enhancement drugs. This is part of the much-needed shift we’re seeing from the worthy, tokenist, hemp-loving idea of saving the planet to it becoming a ‘creative problem’ for the most visionary scientists, architects and radical thinkers of the day. Science more than anything, seems to respond to our growing need for the certain and impossible at the same time.

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Berlin’s Temporäre Kunsthalle art space has gotten a brand new face, sourced from the crowd. The gallery enlisted one of those Berlin-based artist/musician/designer’s Carsten Nicolai to design a new look for its exterior, and he in turn enlisted the help of passersby, turning the job into a live crowdsourced art project. Rather than hand over full creative expression to the amateurs, visitors to the gallery were invited to apply Nicolai-designed stickers onto the exterior. Aerial work platforms were installed at the location so people could go as high as they liked to decorate the building. The happy gallery has described this as a “permanently changing facade whose appearance is shaped by a dynamic, interactive process”.

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Mother is helping to bring to life an exhibition that looks at the changing culture of our home turf. The East End Promise exhibition, which launched to press last week and goes public in October, will explore the ‘cultural migrants’ who have made this their home. This includes the wave of artists and squatters who moved into the derelict East End of the 80’s and 90’s, starting the warehouse rave scene, urbanising galleries, and spreading a DIY ethos that’s made it a creative capital and home to the mullet/legwarmer/tattoo on neck look. East End Promise manager Ernesto Leal says he’s astonished at the calibre of real deal artists, musicians, movers and shakers from the East End’s heyday who are coming out of the woodwork to take part in the exhibition. Many offering to exhibit work that has never been seen before drawn by a desire to tell people what the area means to them. He refers to the project as important cultural ‘re-mapping’, a bid to expose preconceptions, and to showcase a side of London that has never before been seen altogether. There are plans to show elements of the exhibition in Mother’s gallery space and of hosting East End Promise youth culture events towards the end of the year. We’ll keep you posted.

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Years ago to settle an argument I was having in the loaded office about Crisps I concluded “Listen there’s no way Kettle Crisps are better than Walkers cheese and onion and to prove it we’ll have a Crisps World Cup.” The resulting 64 bag head to head knock-out tournament was a defining moment for the magazine. It was the first true representation of my belief that trivial things should be treated seriously and vice versa. With Sabotage Times we wanted something similar. So we’ve been creating Pie Chart break downs on the War On terror, Tour De France, World Cup and the mind of Raoul Moat. Sometimes they’re brilliant, other times crass and provocative, other times genuinely interesting. It’s where maths meets the talk of the public house. I call it Boozernomics.

Fashion branding agency Saturday, who live one floor up from Mother and are part of the Mother family of businesses, have long been our source of what’s hot and what’s not in the world of fashion. But now it seems they can be everyone’s resource as last month they launched their very own fashionista magazine called INDUSTRIE. The Business of Fashion, a site dedicated to, as you’d guess, the business of fashion, reported how there was huge anticipation for the new magazine amongst industry followers, since the magazine’s first cover, featuring Anna Wintour, was leaked on the web ahead of the launch. At the time there was rampant speculation about what the magazine, dubbed the “culture of fashion”, might actually be like. Industry site Styleite said they were ‘waiting with bated breath to thumb through its 196 pages’; Sassybella implored its readers to ‘hunt down a copy and find out who’s on the masthead’; whilst members of fashion forum The Fashion Spot wondered who took the cover photo of Wintour. Everyone seemed to agree that this was going to be a unique magazine for the fashion business. And it is . The Business of Fashion reported that it ‘is the first and only media title dedicated to going behind the scenes to chronicle the personalities, stories and defining moments in the world of fashion’. They further explained ‘It’s like the fashion industry’s version of a high-school yearbook, except seriously more stylish and elegant, showcasing the fashion industry’s stars in their best light’. The second issue is due out in October, although exactly when is yet to be revealed. Luckily for SFTW readers our friends at Saturday have promised to give everyone a heads up, so you too can be industry insiders.

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