Inside the Insomnia-Inducing World of Horror Podcasting


NoWA

Art from the We’re Alive podcast. Ben Hosac



Horror fans in search of a good scare should check out the world of podcasts. The space is bursting with choices, from fiction shows like Pseudopod and Nightmare to talk shows like Horror Etc and Last Podcast on the Left . David Cummings hosts The NoSleep Podcast , which adapts stories that users submit to the NoSleep subreddit. Those stories, mostly told in the first person, are meant to have the eerie plausibility of an urban legend. They remind Cummings of local spook stories he heard as a kid.


“That’s really where I fell in love with the idea of the short-form ghost story,” says Cummings in Episode 137 of the Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast. “Or as we like to call it, ‘the campfire story,’ where you just sit around a campfire and say, ‘Let me tell you what happened to me two weeks ago, or what happened to a friend of mine three weeks ago.'”


One of the most popular horror podcasts is We’re Alive , a full-cast audio drama written and produced by Kc Wayland. Wayland got his start with animated films, but ultimately decided to scrap the animation and focus instead on audio.


“The performances felt better than the animation ever was afterward,” he says. “And then when podcasts were a way to go directly to the consumer with these stories, I was like, ‘Perfect. We have a delivery medium, we have the content, now let’s do a full sound design like we’ve previously done with film projects,’ and just all the pieces fit together.”


But creating full-cast audio on a shoestring budget isn’t easy. Wayland did it by relying on a lot of favors and volunteer labor, but a reliance on volunteers can make things tricky if cast members get busy or move away. And despite racking up 32 million downloads, the show still doesn’t earn enough to pay Wayland a salary. That tends to be true of even the most popular horror podcasts.


“I think of what we do as ‘audio community theater,'” says Cummings. “We’re not professionals. We’re accountants and bakers by day, and then they do these things as a hobby. It’s low budget. Really basic USB mics for a lot of the hosts, and they do their editing in Audacity and other open source software.”


But despite the low budgets, horror podcasts can have a profound effect on listeners. We’re Alive has inspired its own fancast, and listeners have caravaned across the country to attend the show’s finale. The show also has a devoted following among listeners with visual disabilities. Wayland points out that even in big budget horror movies, what really scares you is the audio, not the visuals.


“If you watch a horror film and you turn the sound down, it loses 90 percent of its power,” he says. “Because it’s not what you see, it’s what you don’t see that’s scary.”


Listen to our complete interview with Kc Wayland and David Cummings in Episode 137 of Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy (above), and check out some highlights from the discussion below.


David Cummings on starting The NoSleep Podcast:


“The NoSleep subreddit is basically a place where people post stories that are meant to be plausible—if you suspend your disbelief—they’re meant to be authentic and real-sounding stories, mostly written in the first-person, getting that campfire effect as well, so it’s the ‘this is what happened to me, and let me share it with you.’ And so the idea was, we’ll take some of these top-rated stories, and we’ll record them—we’ll just narrate them—and make it into a podcast. … And so I basically said, … ‘Let’s get that first episode out there, get some momentum, and then let the other people who said in the past that they would produce it and narrate it, let them step up and take over.’ So the first episode turned into the second episode, and the third episode, and I just kept producing it and putting it out there, and that was basically it. I was locked in, and kind of took it from there.”


Kc Wayland on the We’re Alive Fancast:


“That particular fancast actually arranged a convoy to go across the US to see our finale. … We had our series finale last July in LA, and the convoy started in Ohio and went all the way across the United States, and they had their stops planned, they were camping out under the stars. It was just this group of people with this love for the show, and they became life friends then. They visited the Grand Canyon, they have all these stories—they’re a little bit adventurous—and they went to rest stops that were abandoned and took pictures. They had so much fun, and they podcasted a little bit as they went, and you got to hear a little bit of their adventures and updates as they went. It was pretty cool, it was a lot of fun. And for me, as the creator of We’re Alive, it was so awesome to see the dedication of listeners in that way.”


Kc Wayland on making audio scary:


“If you’re listening to a moment where your favorite character is in a scene where you don’t know if he’s going to make it out of this, that will add suspense in a way that can’t be experienced otherwise. Because you’re rooting for the character, you want them to make it through there, and so you’re living the scene with the character. And also you can bring the experience more to the listener through that person, whether it is the fear, the voice, even the breathing of the character, and footsteps, will tell you exactly how they are experiencing the environment around them. If you can feel their breath short and tight, you’re going to start mimicking what they’re doing. There’s this weird breath-mimicking psychology thing that actually can happen. So you can tap into that when somebody’s able to close their eyes and just put themselves in these high-tension situations.”


David Cummings on upsetting listeners:


“We did a story called ‘Autopilot’—from a very popular story on the NoSleep forum. And essentially it tells a story that you see on the news every summer, and it involves a child who ends up dying because of being left in a car in the hot sun. When I read the story, it was so brilliantly crafted. I loved doing it, very emotional. But it never occurred to me that this was going to really resonate with people, because as I said you see that on the news every summer. … When that story came out I was really caught off guard, all these people were saying, ‘Hey, I really liked that episode, except for that one story.’ And a lot of them were parents, of course, and they could really relate to it. So that was a good bit of experience for me—sort of eye-opening—to realize that there are those buttons that you have to watch. And one of them that’s been reinforced time and time again is the idea of, you’ve got to watch it when children are involved.”



While You Were Offline: An Epic Supercut Celebrates 10 Years of YouTube


So, did you remember to get YouTube a gift for its 10th birthday? If you didn’t, that’s OK—it turns out that video platforms don’t celebrate in the same way as we humans, being corporate entities based around conceptual ideas. Anyway, WIRED editrix Angela Watercutter said everything that needed to be said on NPR. [Eds. Note: Oh, hi!] While Google’s all-encompassing video portal gets a couple of entries in this week’s roundup, it’s more a week for Twitter to shine, with Norm MacDonald’s SNL reminiscences, Jessica Williams taking on those looking to cast her as a victim, and Sesame Street restoring an important piece of our childhoods. Here, as ever, is what’s been popping on those tubes we call Internet over the last seven days.


Thanks for the Meme-ries


What Happened: What better way to celebrate 10 years of YouTube than with a YouTube supercut of all those videos you saw years ago?

Where It Blew Up: YouTube, blogs, media think pieces

What Really Happened: Hey, YouTube is 10 years old! The Daily Conversation celebrated that fact with a compilation of 101 of the most-viewed videos on the service during that time, and it’s something that will fill you with a strange amount of nostalgia for people you don’t know.

The Takeaway: If nothing else, it’s worth it for the screaming sheep (11:17), right? Although following that up with “Gangam Style” just feels like a cruel, cruel joke. Psy, no offense, but we could’ve gone without seeing you again for quite some time.


Lean Back


What Happened: Jessica Williams says she’s not going to host The Daily Show. Certain people aren’t happy with that decision. Hilarity ensues. No, wait, what’s the opposite of hilarity again?

Where It Blew Up: Twitter, media think pieces

What Really Happened: Since Jon Stewart announced he’d be stepping down as Daily Show host later this year, there’s been a groundswell of support for current correspondent Jessica Williams to take on the gig. (Full disclosure: We’re part of that groundswell.) Turns out, though, Williams doesn’t want it, as she explained on Twitter last weekend:


This honesty didn’t sit well with one writer, who wrote a piece declaring that Williams was “the latest high-profile victim of imposter syndrome.” (“Jessica Williams, respectfully, I reject your humility,” it read. “All Williams needs is a pep talk.”)


Williams again took to Twitter to respond to the piece:




…A response that led to Time running a story that claimed that the comedian was “firing back at fans.” After Williams again had to take to Twitter to clarify what had actually happened, the piece was edited into something far more benign. Nonetheless, the exchanges launched a dizzying amount of think pieces on a number of topics, from the state of journalism and the value of knowing your limits to the ways in which women’s self-opinions are constantly open to scrutiny and disbelief.

Williams, meanwhile, has unsurprisingly been quiet on Twitter since this whole thing happened.

The Takeaway: First off, for her patience and willingness to take on this kind of thing, we can all agree that Jessica Williams wins everything, right? (Hopefully, part of that everything includes not having to deal with people overanalyzing, misunderstanding or outright hijacking what she’s saying for their own agendas.) Secondly, she might not be ready to host The Daily Show, but there’s no denying that this mess has made Williams a more vital figure in popular culture than ever before and, ironically, raised her profile to a place where she really does feel like she’d be the frontrunner for the gig otherwise…


The Fault in Our Attributions


What Happened: YA author and social media motivational guru John Green realized that an inspirational quote from one of his books—something so inspirational, he sells merchandise based on it—isn’t actually anything he wrote after all.

Where It Blew Up: YouTube, Twitter, blogs, media think pieces

What Really Happened: Really, Green explains the backstory pretty well in the video below.

His confession prompted a lot of media coverage, which went from straight reportage to quizzes where you guess whether or not the John Green quotes are real, lists of other misattributed quotes and a swift dissertation about the ways in which Tumblr makes it easy to make such mistakes. Surprisingly, no one has written an in-depth profile of Melody Truong, the teenager who did come up with the quote, but it’s surely only a matter of time.

The Takeaway: Depending on your feelings on Green, either: “Good for him for owning up to his mistake and donating the proceeds to the girl who actually came up with the quote!” or “Seriously, shouldn’t he have someone who actually checks that you wrote things before you try and make money off them in the first place?” For those of us agnostic enough to not have an opinion on him either way, both can be true.


Transatlantic Drawl


What Happened: A California teen found herself being accused of murder by fans of a British soap opera. As you do.

Where It Blew Up: Twitter, blogs

What Really Happened: British soap Eastenders ended a long-running storyline this week by revealing—spoilers, people who are following the show and somehow don’t already know this—that 11-year-old Bobby Beale was responsible for the death of his sister Lucy. The revelation immediately led to social media mockery, including some people tweeting at @bobbiebeale to condemn him for his fictional actions. The only problem: @bobbiebeale is actually a California teenager who has never seen the show.




Talking to BuzzFeed about the mix-up, the real-life Beale said that she was “definitely confused,” in part because Lucy is actually the name of her dog. “I thought it was a real-life thing and I thought Bobby Beale killed someone and I was like, ‘it’s not me.'”

The British press is loving the mix up, as you can see, and the BBC itself stepped in to reassure viewers:




As for the real, non-murderous Bobbie Beale? She’s still trying to convince people that she’s not male, not a murderer, and also not fictional:




The Takeaway: Apparently, some people on Twitter don’t recognize the difference between fact and fiction. Or geography. Or how people’s names are spelled. Maybe we should be glad that Twitter didn’t exist back when J.R. Ewing got shot in Dallas.


I Am Sitting in the Morning At the Diner On The


What Happened: As an educational tool about what gets lost when music gets made into MP3s, someone created a track made up only of the sounds that disappeared when the Suzanne Vega song “Tom’s Diner” got compressed into an MP3. It kind of sounded great.

Where It Blew Up: Twitter, blogs

What Really Happened: Although Ryan Maguire’s video is actually a few months old, it gained a new lease on life this past week when Death and Taxes posted it, leading to many other sites picking it up as well. It’s a fascinating glimpse at what we don’t hear when we listen to our favorite music in our favorite music format.

(If you’re wondering why Maguire chose this particular song, it’s because “Tom’s Diner” is the song used during the creation of the MP3 compression method.)

The Takeaway: Cue all the “Suzanne Vega never sounded so good” jokes. More importantly, though: When are we going to upgrade from MP3 to a better format already? (And, no, we don’t mean U2’s reported upgrade, thank you very much.)


Sesame Street Wins Twitter


What Happened: Big Bird used Twitter to resurrect a piece of Sesame Street lore this week, and it was kind of genius.

Where It Blew Up: Twitter, blogs

What Really Happened: To explain this properly, we need to go back into Sesame Street history a bit. Starting in 1971, Big Bird had a friend on the show called Mr. Snuffleupagus. Thing was, no one else ever saw Snuffy aside from Big Bird, which led everyone else to assume that he was Big Bird’s imaginary friend—a running joke that lasted until 1985, when he was revealed to the rest of the cast after concerns that the joke might make kids worried that adults wouldn’t believe them on certain topics.

This week, Big Bird posted this tweet:




It was one of a number of tweets he sent to that account, which just so happens to be a private account with one follower—@BigBird, unsurprisingly. In other words, only Big Bird can see what @MrSnuffleupagus is saying. An exchange between Big Bird and Billy Eichner made the joke clear for everyone:




Twitter was suitably amused:




The Takeaway: It’s a simple joke, but a smart one, and—for those who watched Sesame Street back when Snuffy was still a secret—something that warms the heart. Whoever came up with this one, well done.



Inside the Insomnia-Inducing World of Horror Podcasting


NoWA

Art from the We’re Alive podcast. Ben Hosac



Horror fans in search of a good scare should check out the world of podcasts. The space is bursting with choices, from fiction shows like Pseudopod and Nightmare to talk shows like Horror Etc and Last Podcast on the Left . David Cummings hosts The NoSleep Podcast , which adapts stories that users submit to the NoSleep subreddit. Those stories, mostly told in the first person, are meant to have the eerie plausibility of an urban legend. They remind Cummings of local spook stories he heard as a kid.


“That’s really where I fell in love with the idea of the short-form ghost story,” says Cummings in Episode 137 of the Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast. “Or as we like to call it, ‘the campfire story,’ where you just sit around a campfire and say, ‘Let me tell you what happened to me two weeks ago, or what happened to a friend of mine three weeks ago.'”


One of the most popular horror podcasts is We’re Alive , a full-cast audio drama written and produced by Kc Wayland. Wayland got his start with animated films, but ultimately decided to scrap the animation and focus instead on audio.


“The performances felt better than the animation ever was afterward,” he says. “And then when podcasts were a way to go directly to the consumer with these stories, I was like, ‘Perfect. We have a delivery medium, we have the content, now let’s do a full sound design like we’ve previously done with film projects,’ and just all the pieces fit together.”


But creating full-cast audio on a shoestring budget isn’t easy. Wayland did it by relying on a lot of favors and volunteer labor, but a reliance on volunteers can make things tricky if cast members get busy or move away. And despite racking up 32 million downloads, the show still doesn’t earn enough to pay Wayland a salary. That tends to be true of even the most popular horror podcasts.


“I think of what we do as ‘audio community theater,'” says Cummings. “We’re not professionals. We’re accountants and bakers by day, and then they do these things as a hobby. It’s low budget. Really basic USB mics for a lot of the hosts, and they do their editing in Audacity and other open source software.”


But despite the low budgets, horror podcasts can have a profound effect on listeners. We’re Alive has inspired its own fancast, and listeners have caravaned across the country to attend the show’s finale. The show also has a devoted following among listeners with visual disabilities. Wayland points out that even in big budget horror movies, what really scares you is the audio, not the visuals.


“If you watch a horror film and you turn the sound down, it loses 90 percent of its power,” he says. “Because it’s not what you see, it’s what you don’t see that’s scary.”


Listen to our complete interview with Kc Wayland and David Cummings in Episode 137 of Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy (above), and check out some highlights from the discussion below.


David Cummings on starting The NoSleep Podcast:


“The NoSleep subreddit is basically a place where people post stories that are meant to be plausible—if you suspend your disbelief—they’re meant to be authentic and real-sounding stories, mostly written in the first-person, getting that campfire effect as well, so it’s the ‘this is what happened to me, and let me share it with you.’ And so the idea was, we’ll take some of these top-rated stories, and we’ll record them—we’ll just narrate them—and make it into a podcast. … And so I basically said, … ‘Let’s get that first episode out there, get some momentum, and then let the other people who said in the past that they would produce it and narrate it, let them step up and take over.’ So the first episode turned into the second episode, and the third episode, and I just kept producing it and putting it out there, and that was basically it. I was locked in, and kind of took it from there.”


Kc Wayland on the We’re Alive Fancast:


“That particular fancast actually arranged a convoy to go across the US to see our finale. … We had our series finale last July in LA, and the convoy started in Ohio and went all the way across the United States, and they had their stops planned, they were camping out under the stars. It was just this group of people with this love for the show, and they became life friends then. They visited the Grand Canyon, they have all these stories—they’re a little bit adventurous—and they went to rest stops that were abandoned and took pictures. They had so much fun, and they podcasted a little bit as they went, and you got to hear a little bit of their adventures and updates as they went. It was pretty cool, it was a lot of fun. And for me, as the creator of We’re Alive, it was so awesome to see the dedication of listeners in that way.”


Kc Wayland on making audio scary:


“If you’re listening to a moment where your favorite character is in a scene where you don’t know if he’s going to make it out of this, that will add suspense in a way that can’t be experienced otherwise. Because you’re rooting for the character, you want them to make it through there, and so you’re living the scene with the character. And also you can bring the experience more to the listener through that person, whether it is the fear, the voice, even the breathing of the character, and footsteps, will tell you exactly how they are experiencing the environment around them. If you can feel their breath short and tight, you’re going to start mimicking what they’re doing. There’s this weird breath-mimicking psychology thing that actually can happen. So you can tap into that when somebody’s able to close their eyes and just put themselves in these high-tension situations.”


David Cummings on upsetting listeners:


“We did a story called ‘Autopilot’—from a very popular story on the NoSleep forum. And essentially it tells a story that you see on the news every summer, and it involves a child who ends up dying because of being left in a car in the hot sun. When I read the story, it was so brilliantly crafted. I loved doing it, very emotional. But it never occurred to me that this was going to really resonate with people, because as I said you see that on the news every summer. … When that story came out I was really caught off guard, all these people were saying, ‘Hey, I really liked that episode, except for that one story.’ And a lot of them were parents, of course, and they could really relate to it. So that was a good bit of experience for me—sort of eye-opening—to realize that there are those buttons that you have to watch. And one of them that’s been reinforced time and time again is the idea of, you’ve got to watch it when children are involved.”



While You Were Offline: An Epic Supercut Celebrates 10 Years of YouTube


So, did you remember to get YouTube a gift for its 10th birthday? If you didn’t, that’s OK—it turns out that video platforms don’t celebrate in the same way as we humans, being corporate entities based around conceptual ideas. Anyway, WIRED editrix Angela Watercutter said everything that needed to be said on NPR. [Eds. Note: Oh, hi!] While Google’s all-encompassing video portal gets a couple of entries in this week’s roundup, it’s more a week for Twitter to shine, with Norm MacDonald’s SNL reminiscences, Jessica Williams taking on those looking to cast her as a victim, and Sesame Street restoring an important piece of our childhoods. Here, as ever, is what’s been popping on those tubes we call Internet over the last seven days.


Thanks for the Meme-ries


What Happened: What better way to celebrate 10 years of YouTube than with a YouTube supercut of all those videos you saw years ago?

Where It Blew Up: YouTube, blogs, media think pieces

What Really Happened: Hey, YouTube is 10 years old! The Daily Conversation celebrated that fact with a compilation of 101 of the most-viewed videos on the service during that time, and it’s something that will fill you with a strange amount of nostalgia for people you don’t know.

The Takeaway: If nothing else, it’s worth it for the screaming sheep (11:17), right? Although following that up with “Gangam Style” just feels like a cruel, cruel joke. Psy, no offense, but we could’ve gone without seeing you again for quite some time.


Lean Back


What Happened: Jessica Williams says she’s not going to host The Daily Show. Certain people aren’t happy with that decision. Hilarity ensues. No, wait, what’s the opposite of hilarity again?

Where It Blew Up: Twitter, media think pieces

What Really Happened: Since Jon Stewart announced he’d be stepping down as Daily Show host later this year, there’s been a groundswell of support for current correspondent Jessica Williams to take on the gig. (Full disclosure: We’re part of that groundswell.) Turns out, though, Williams doesn’t want it, as she explained on Twitter last weekend:


This honesty didn’t sit well with one writer, who wrote a piece declaring that Williams was “the latest high-profile victim of imposter syndrome.” (“Jessica Williams, respectfully, I reject your humility,” it read. “All Williams needs is a pep talk.”)


Williams again took to Twitter to respond to the piece:




…A response that led to Time running a story that claimed that the comedian was “firing back at fans.” After Williams again had to take to Twitter to clarify what had actually happened, the piece was edited into something far more benign. Nonetheless, the exchanges launched a dizzying amount of think pieces on a number of topics, from the state of journalism and the value of knowing your limits to the ways in which women’s self-opinions are constantly open to scrutiny and disbelief.

Williams, meanwhile, has unsurprisingly been quiet on Twitter since this whole thing happened.

The Takeaway: First off, for her patience and willingness to take on this kind of thing, we can all agree that Jessica Williams wins everything, right? (Hopefully, part of that everything includes not having to deal with people overanalyzing, misunderstanding or outright hijacking what she’s saying for their own agendas.) Secondly, she might not be ready to host The Daily Show, but there’s no denying that this mess has made Williams a more vital figure in popular culture than ever before and, ironically, raised her profile to a place where she really does feel like she’d be the frontrunner for the gig otherwise…


The Fault in Our Attributions


What Happened: YA author and social media motivational guru John Green realized that an inspirational quote from one of his books—something so inspirational, he sells merchandise based on it—isn’t actually anything he wrote after all.

Where It Blew Up: YouTube, Twitter, blogs, media think pieces

What Really Happened: Really, Green explains the backstory pretty well in the video below.

His confession prompted a lot of media coverage, which went from straight reportage to quizzes where you guess whether or not the John Green quotes are real, lists of other misattributed quotes and a swift dissertation about the ways in which Tumblr makes it easy to make such mistakes. Surprisingly, no one has written an in-depth profile of Melody Truong, the teenager who did come up with the quote, but it’s surely only a matter of time.

The Takeaway: Depending on your feelings on Green, either: “Good for him for owning up to his mistake and donating the proceeds to the girl who actually came up with the quote!” or “Seriously, shouldn’t he have someone who actually checks that you wrote things before you try and make money off them in the first place?” For those of us agnostic enough to not have an opinion on him either way, both can be true.


Transatlantic Drawl


What Happened: A California teen found herself being accused of murder by fans of a British soap opera. As you do.

Where It Blew Up: Twitter, blogs

What Really Happened: British soap Eastenders ended a long-running storyline this week by revealing—spoilers, people who are following the show and somehow don’t already know this—that 11-year-old Bobby Beale was responsible for the death of his sister Lucy. The revelation immediately led to social media mockery, including some people tweeting at @bobbiebeale to condemn him for his fictional actions. The only problem: @bobbiebeale is actually a California teenager who has never seen the show.




Talking to BuzzFeed about the mix-up, the real-life Beale said that she was “definitely confused,” in part because Lucy is actually the name of her dog. “I thought it was a real-life thing and I thought Bobby Beale killed someone and I was like, ‘it’s not me.'”

The British press is loving the mix up, as you can see, and the BBC itself stepped in to reassure viewers:




As for the real, non-murderous Bobbie Beale? She’s still trying to convince people that she’s not male, not a murderer, and also not fictional:




The Takeaway: Apparently, some people on Twitter don’t recognize the difference between fact and fiction. Or geography. Or how people’s names are spelled. Maybe we should be glad that Twitter didn’t exist back when J.R. Ewing got shot in Dallas.


I Am Sitting in the Morning At the Diner On The


What Happened: As an educational tool about what gets lost when music gets made into MP3s, someone created a track made up only of the sounds that disappeared when the Suzanne Vega song “Tom’s Diner” got compressed into an MP3. It kind of sounded great.

Where It Blew Up: Twitter, blogs

What Really Happened: Although Ryan Maguire’s video is actually a few months old, it gained a new lease on life this past week when Death and Taxes posted it, leading to many other sites picking it up as well. It’s a fascinating glimpse at what we don’t hear when we listen to our favorite music in our favorite music format.

(If you’re wondering why Maguire chose this particular song, it’s because “Tom’s Diner” is the song used during the creation of the MP3 compression method.)

The Takeaway: Cue all the “Suzanne Vega never sounded so good” jokes. More importantly, though: When are we going to upgrade from MP3 to a better format already? (And, no, we don’t mean U2’s reported upgrade, thank you very much.)


Sesame Street Wins Twitter


What Happened: Big Bird used Twitter to resurrect a piece of Sesame Street lore this week, and it was kind of genius.

Where It Blew Up: Twitter, blogs

What Really Happened: To explain this properly, we need to go back into Sesame Street history a bit. Starting in 1971, Big Bird had a friend on the show called Mr. Snuffleupagus. Thing was, no one else ever saw Snuffy aside from Big Bird, which led everyone else to assume that he was Big Bird’s imaginary friend—a running joke that lasted until 1985, when he was revealed to the rest of the cast after concerns that the joke might make kids worried that adults wouldn’t believe them on certain topics.

This week, Big Bird posted this tweet:




It was one of a number of tweets he sent to that account, which just so happens to be a private account with one follower—@BigBird, unsurprisingly. In other words, only Big Bird can see what @MrSnuffleupagus is saying. An exchange between Big Bird and Billy Eichner made the joke clear for everyone:




Twitter was suitably amused:




The Takeaway: It’s a simple joke, but a smart one, and—for those who watched Sesame Street back when Snuffy was still a secret—something that warms the heart. Whoever came up with this one, well done.



Game|Life Podcast: Awkward VR Porn Conversation, Then Kirby


kirby 1000

Nintendo



On this week’s episode of the Game|Life podcast, Bo Moore and Peter Rubin join me for what can only be called a wide-ranging discussion.


Peter’s coverage of all things virtual reality continues in WIRED’s sex issue, on shelves now, with a story about the very very near future of VR porn. Then I dial it back a little and talk some more about Kirby and the Rainbow Curse on Wii U. And a bit about The Order: 1886 for PlayStation 4. And a bit about game reviews.



Game|Life Podcast: Awkward VR Porn Conversation, Then Kirby


kirby 1000

Nintendo



On this week’s episode of the Game|Life podcast, Bo Moore and Peter Rubin join me for what can only be called a wide-ranging discussion.


Peter’s coverage of all things virtual reality continues in WIRED’s sex issue, on shelves now, with a story about the very very near future of VR porn. Then I dial it back a little and talk some more about Kirby and the Rainbow Curse on Wii U. And a bit about The Order: 1886 for PlayStation 4. And a bit about game reviews.



The BlackBerry Classic: Brain or Blunder?


The BlackBerry Classic.

Give the people what they want? The BlackBerry Classic. Courtesy of BlackBerry



“Someone stole my BlackBerry yesterday. It has since been returned.” … “What did the iPhone say to the BlackBerry? iWork.”


Admit it. You’ve made fun of a BlackBerry user before. It might’ve been a smug smile to a fellow subway passenger or a covered smirk at your uncle. The uncle whose BlackBerry is from corporate and goes well with his trusty IBM ThinkPad, also from corporate. You know the one.


The issue for BlackBerry is that even your uncle doesn’t have one anymore. Such is the current enterprise landscape for mobile, with an ever-increasing amount of corporations and government agencies dropping the troubled mobile company in favor of iPhones and Androids. While BlackBerry’s attempt to compete with the likes of the iPhone and Android for the consumer market has been undeniably ill-fated, its true consequence has been the loss of its enterprise clients, a base that was more profitable for the company then its consumer segment. Enter Monday’s launch of the BlackBerry Classic.


The Classic is a reverting of sorts back to the iconic phones of old. The trademark keyboard, the navigational buttons above it, the thumb-controlled trackpad- it’s all back, while keeping the advancements of the BlackBerry 10 mobile operating system. It is an appeal to BlackBerry’s faithful, the ones who appreciate and miss a familiar face. “It was inspired by you, our loyal BlackBerry customers,” said Jeff Gadway, director of product marketing. “I’m not going to stand here blind to the fact that we’ve lost some of you. But with the BlackBerry Classic, we’re going to win you back.”


Now, I’m not entirely convinced that the Classic’s conception was truly a calculated business decision and not just the result of a (understandably) drunken night out with Gadway and Chief Exec John Chen reminiscing back to a happier time. I imagine it went something like this:


Gadway: Remember 2009? When we had the Bold and the Curve and 47% market share?


Chen: Yeah. Man…those were the days.


Gadway: Ugh. I wish we could go back to that.


Chen: Huh…why can’t we?


Strategic move or hopeless nostalgia aside, the Classic, to be offered with multiple enterprise and security bundles, is BlackBerry returning to the prioritization of business users with perhaps some hardcore Bold-fans sprinkled in. One thing is certain: BlackBerry is going back. Whether this is progress or regress, only time will tell. Give it a little, check in with your uncle, and let me know.


Amit Kumar is a content editor and marketer for Fueled.



Virus-cutting enzyme helps bacteria remember a threat

Bacteria may not have brains, but they do have memories, at least when it comes to viruses that attack them. Many bacteria have a molecular immune system which allows these microbes to capture and retain pieces of viral DNA that they have encountered in the past, in order to recognize and destroy it when it shows up again.



Research at Rockefeller University described in Nature offers new insight into the mysterious process by which this system works to encode viral DNA in a microbe's genome for later use as guides for virus-cutting enzymes.


"Microbes, like vertebrates, have immune systems capable of adapting to new threats. Cas9, one enzyme employed by these systems, uses immunological memories to guide cuts to viral genetic code. However, very little is known about how these memories are acquired in the first place," says Assistant Professor Luciano Marraffini, head of the Laboratory of Bacteriology. "Our work shows that Cas9 also directs the formation of these memories among certain bacteria."


These memories are embedded in the bacterial equivalent of an adaptive immune system capable of discerning helpful from harmful viruses called a CRISPR (clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats) system. It works by altering the bacterium's genome, adding short viral sequences called spacers in between the repeating DNA sequences. These spacers form the memories of past invaders. They serve as guides for enzymes encoded by CRISPR-associated genes (Cas), which seek out and destroy those same viruses should they attempt to infect the bacterium again.


Cas9's ability to make precision cuts within a genome -- viral or otherwise -- has caught the attention of researchers who now use it to alter cells' genetics for experimental or therapeutic purposes. But it is still not well understood just how this CRISPR system works in its native bacteria.


Some evidence suggested that other Cas enzymes managed the memory-making process on their own, without Cas9. But because of the way Cas9 goes about identifying the site at which to make a cut, the researchers, including co-first authors Robert Heler, a graduate student, and Poulami Samai, a postdoc in the lab, suspected a role for Cas9 in memory making.


In addition to matching its CRISPR guide sequence up with the DNA of the virus, Cas9 needs to find a second cue nearby: a PAM (protospacer adjacent motif) sequence in the viral DNA. This is a crucial step, since it is the absence of a PAM sequence that prevents Cas9 from attacking the bacterium's own memory-containing DNA.


"Because Cas9 must recognize a PAM sequence before cutting the viral DNA, it made sense to us that Cas9 would also recognize the PAM sequence when the system is forming a memory of its first encounter with a virus," Heler says. "This is a new and unexpected role for Cas9."


To test their hypothesis, Heler swapped the Cas9 enzymes between the immune systems of Streptococcus pyogenes and Streptococcus thermophilus, each of which recognizes a different PAM sequence. As a result, the PAM sequences followed, swapping between the two bugs -- evidence that Cas9 is responsible for identifying the PAM during memory formation. In another experiment, he altered the part of Cas9 that binds to the PAM sequence, and found the microbes then began acquiring the target viral sequences randomly, making them unusable.


Samai, meanwhile, looked at the relationship between Cas9 and three other Cas enzymes: Cas1, Cas2 and Csn2. Components of the same CRISPR system, these enzymes were already suspected to play a role in memory making without help from Cas9.


Samai expressed these enzymes together, then tagged each one and attempted to purify it. But each time, the other three came out as well. "This indicates there is some kind of interaction between the four; most likely they form a complex during the acquisition of memory," she says.


"Because of its importance to biotechnology, Cas9's has attracted a great deal of interest for its action targeting and cleaving viral genomes. Our work reveals an overlooked role for Cas9: forming the memories that make adaptive immunity possible for bacteria," Marraffini says.




Story Source:


The above story is based on materials provided by Rockefeller University . Note: Materials may be edited for content and length.



The BlackBerry Classic: Brain or Blunder?


The BlackBerry Classic.

Give the people what they want? The BlackBerry Classic. Courtesy of BlackBerry



“Someone stole my BlackBerry yesterday. It has since been returned.” … “What did the iPhone say to the BlackBerry? iWork.”


Admit it. You’ve made fun of a BlackBerry user before. It might’ve been a smug smile to a fellow subway passenger or a covered smirk at your uncle. The uncle whose BlackBerry is from corporate and goes well with his trusty IBM ThinkPad, also from corporate. You know the one.


The issue for BlackBerry is that even your uncle doesn’t have one anymore. Such is the current enterprise landscape for mobile, with an ever-increasing amount of corporations and government agencies dropping the troubled mobile company in favor of iPhones and Androids. While BlackBerry’s attempt to compete with the likes of the iPhone and Android for the consumer market has been undeniably ill-fated, its true consequence has been the loss of its enterprise clients, a base that was more profitable for the company then its consumer segment. Enter Monday’s launch of the BlackBerry Classic.


The Classic is a reverting of sorts back to the iconic phones of old. The trademark keyboard, the navigational buttons above it, the thumb-controlled trackpad- it’s all back, while keeping the advancements of the BlackBerry 10 mobile operating system. It is an appeal to BlackBerry’s faithful, the ones who appreciate and miss a familiar face. “It was inspired by you, our loyal BlackBerry customers,” said Jeff Gadway, director of product marketing. “I’m not going to stand here blind to the fact that we’ve lost some of you. But with the BlackBerry Classic, we’re going to win you back.”


Now, I’m not entirely convinced that the Classic’s conception was truly a calculated business decision and not just the result of a (understandably) drunken night out with Gadway and Chief Exec John Chen reminiscing back to a happier time. I imagine it went something like this:


Gadway: Remember 2009? When we had the Bold and the Curve and 47% market share?


Chen: Yeah. Man…those were the days.


Gadway: Ugh. I wish we could go back to that.


Chen: Huh…why can’t we?


Strategic move or hopeless nostalgia aside, the Classic, to be offered with multiple enterprise and security bundles, is BlackBerry returning to the prioritization of business users with perhaps some hardcore Bold-fans sprinkled in. One thing is certain: BlackBerry is going back. Whether this is progress or regress, only time will tell. Give it a little, check in with your uncle, and let me know.


Amit Kumar is a content editor and marketer for Fueled.



How to Build a Ski Mountain from Scratch…in 80-Degree Weather


The 150-foot tall slope takes shape, next to the Rose Bowl stadium. (Image: Alison Piasecki)

The 150-foot tall slope takes shape, next to the Rose Bowl stadium. (Image: Alison Piasecki)



The Arroyo Seco in Pasadena, California is a dusty depression, where shrubs and cacti hold hillsides together and highway bridges cross overhead. Like elsewhere in Los Angeles, the water that does flow down the streambed is confined to a concrete ditch; most of the year, only a thin, slimy ribbon trickles down its center. As its namesake implies, it’s a dry, desert-like area, more Sahara than Steamboat. And yet, as the Arroyo broadens to reveal the Rose Bowl, a 16-storey tower of snow appears like a mirage.


This is the Air + Style snowboard ramp, the marquee feature of an ambitious weekend festival that seeks to merge big-air snowboarding with indie and rock music festival – X-Games meets Coachella, all nestled among the Crafstmen houses of Pasadena.


“It doesn’t snow much down here,” says superstar athlete / guitarist / business mogul Shaun White, who has brought Air + Style to the U.S. for the first time, “so I say you gotta bring the mountain to the people.”


That undertaking fell to Chris Gunnarson, who, through his company Snow Park Technologies, has worked with White for years. “We grew up together,” he explains, as he and White reminisce about Gunnarson’s half-pipe architecture at Big Bear Ski Area in the late ‘90s, “and we’ve traveled the world together. Shaun has really had the foresight to push the level of performance advancement, and it’s changed the sport.” Perhaps most famously, Gunnarson helped design and build Project X, the infamous private half-pipe sequestered deep within the Colorado Rockies.


But over the course of the last two weeks, crews have been hard at work on a 16-story, 150-foot tall scaffold whose plywood profile traces a massive jump. It’s among the highest several buildings in the city for the next few days, and athletes can expect a 75-foot airborne journey. When the competition begins on Saturday, one and a half million pounds of ice will have been sliced into snow to coat the track. “To make the jump a fluid thing is very difficult,” says White, noting that a too-sharp transition from ramp to lip can cause big problems as you set up for a triple flip jump. Gunnarson champions the power of a solid base layer on the ramp, hoping that the insulating power of snow will keep it from becoming a waterfall in the Rose Bowl’s 80-degree February weather.


It’s an incongruous site, but in many ways White embraces the artifice. For a detail-oriented competitor, constructing a jump from scratch is the ultimate manifestation of consistent, predictable conditions, void of pesky geomorphological nuance. “It’s actually more inviting to try tricks when the snow is soft,” White explains. “It’s partially a mental thing – you’re warm, you’re feeling good, ready to go.”


White will not be competing in the big air event – his band Bad Things will be appropriately time-slotted in the music festival, which also includes Kendrick Lamar, Steve Aoki, and Edward Sharpe – but he indulges in a mental run-through of what he’d be thinking before dropping in. “I would basically make sure there’s someone behind the scenes making the board fast,” he says, and he’d get snow texture intel from guys like Gunnarson, “the inside scoop on what’s going on.”


“You can tell that Shaun is a strategist,” Gunnarson interjects, stating the obvious. White is bringing the same strategic mind that’s garnered two Olympic and 15 X Games gold medals to this latest business venture. Now that the summer X-Games have ditched LA for Texas, White saw an opening. He’s also eager to incorporate more of what he characterizes as a European approach to snow sports, where cultural elements like music and artistry are more intimately linked with skiing and snowboarding. The opportunity to grow the fan base for two of his many pursuits – music fans who may get hooked on snowboarding, and vice versa – is also not lost on White.


“So in keeping with the European tradition that started Air + Style about 20 years ago,” says White, “I thought, let’s have a big snowboarding event, and we’ll have a big show and party afterward.” Of course, it wouldn’t be LA – or White – if it also wasn’t bigger, more extreme, and flashier than ever. “We’ve never done it to this extent before,” he explains, “and it’s going to be killer.”



This Card Game Just Raised More Money Than Veronica Mars


Exploding Kittens-STORY

Exploding Kittens



Two weeks ago, Elan Lee got a call that made him feel like he was living in the movie Jaws. It was about two weeks into the highly successful Kickstarter campaign for his new card game Exploding Kittens, and one of his potential suppliers called “to see if you were still interested in that order for 500 decks of cards.” By that point he already knew he was going to need about 500 thousand.


“I had flashes,” Lee says, “to that scene where Roy Scheider (Brody) sees the immense great white for the first time and says in a stupor “you’re gonna need a bigger boat.”


When Exploding Kittens—a tabletop card game that’s essentially Russian Roulette with cats—ended its Kickstarter run tonight, it had raised more than $8.7 million. (They’d initially asked for $10,000.) For context, that’s about $3 million more than Rob Thomas scared up to make a friggin’ Veronica Mars movie. It got more than 200,000 backers—more than any other Kickstarter project, by a longshot—and is the most funded game in the site’s history (the Ouya raised just a little bit more, but that was a console, not a game). “Until Exploding Kittens came along, we hadn’t seen the Internet at large descend on a project and embrace it at this crazy scale,” says Luke Crane, Kickstarter’s lead for games projects.


So what caused thefuror? For one, Lee is not only a veteran of Microsoft Game Studios, but also one of the co-founders of 42 Entertainment, the ARG company that created the ilovebees promotion for Halo 2. Then there are his colleagues on the project: Matthew Inman, who created comics web site The Oatmeal, and Shane Small, who previously worked with Lee on the Xbox. Basically, these guys know the Internet. They also know games well enough to gamify their Kickstarter, getting many of their backers to try to earn rewards by doing stunts like taking pictures of people in cat ears. (That one, Lee says, briefly crashed Dropbox when people tried to upload their photos.)


But for all of the audience engagement and such, they’re still just three guys who made a goofy card game that lets you attack with “thousand-year back hair” and “bear-o-dactyls.” (Check out some of the cards and gameplay above.) So why is it so popular? Here’s how Exploding Kittens came to be and a few clues as to why it’s the new Cards Against Humanity ($15,570 on Kickstarter).



Tech Time Warp of the Week: The 1968 Computer That Sings ‘Daisy Bell’


The music reminds you of the oldest arcade video games. But it’s even older than that. Those computer-generated sounds date to 1968.


Yes, computers could make music in the late 60s. And other art too. That’s the message delivered by the classic film above, a look inside Bell Labs, AT&T’s old blue-sky research division, which produced such inventions as the laser, transistor, the C programming language, and the Unix operating system.


Today, we use computers in just about every creative field, from design to music to photography. But in 1968, computers were thought of primarily as mathematical tools. The Bell film seeks to explode this notion.


As the film begins, we see a pair of engineers using light pens to draw circuit board designs onto the screen of a computer called Graphic 1, and the machine simulates the circuit to see if it works as expected. Then we witness other machines doing art, music, even speech. Machines created the entire score for the documentary, and at one point, we hear a computer-generated voice singing “Daisy Bell.”


One of the most interesting sequences is a collaboration between a graphic artist and a computer scientist working to create to a film via computer. “What spellbinds me as an idea is that I’ll be able to sit someplace in a railroad station and write a movie or maybe pick up a telephone eventually and write a movie,” the designer says.


Given that mobile phones were still, well, under development—and smartphones were still decades away—his view of the future is rather impressive. But that was Bell Labs.



Bacterial Memories: Host influences bacterial metabolism

Bacteria are masters in adapting to their environment. This adaptability contributes to the bacteria's survival inside their host. Researchers at the Vetmeduni Vienna now demonstrated that the bacterial pathogen Listeria monocytogenes adapts its metabolism specifically to the host genotype. The bacterial metabolic fingerprint correlated with the susceptibility of the infected mouse strain. The researchers published their results in the journal Plos One.



Bacteria are known to specifically adapt to host environments. Understanding these adaptation mechanisms is crucial for the development of effective therapeutics.


Mouse lineage influences bacterial metabolism


Monika Ehling-Schulz's group from the Institute of Microbiology, together with Mathias Müller's group at the Institute of Animal Breeding and Genetics studied the influence of host organisms on bacterial metabolism. The researchers infected three different lineages of mice with the bacteria Listeria monocytogenes. The mouse strains showed significant differences in their response to the infection and in the severity of the clinical symptoms.


The researchers isolated the bacteria days after infection and analysed them for changes in their metabolism. They used a specific infrared spectroscopy method (FTIR) to monitor metabolic changes. The chemometric analysis of the bacterial metabolic fingerprints revealed host genotype specific imprints and adaptations of the bacterial pathogen.


"Our findings may have implications on how to treat infectious diseases in general. Every patient is different and so are their bacteria," first author Tom Grunert states.


Memory effect in bacteria


After isolation from the mice, all bacteria were cultured under laboratory conditions. After prolonged cultivation under laboratory conditions all three bacterial batches switched back to the same metabolic fingerprint. "Based on our results it can be assumed that bacteria have some sort of memory. It takes some time under host-free laboratory conditions for this 'memory effect' to vanish," explains the head of the Institute, Monika Ehling-Schulz.


Vibrating molecules decipher bacterial metabolism


The researchers employed a technique known as Fourier-transform infrared (FTIR) spectroscopy to monitor the metabolism in the bacteria. An infrared beam directed through the bacteria causes molecules such as proteins, polysaccharides and fatty acids to vibrate. The molecules variably allow more or less light to pass. The different molecular composition in the bacteria yields different spectral data providing information about the molecules inside.


"This method is used especially in microbiological diagnostics to identify bacteria. But we refined the method to decipher and monitor differences in the metabolic fingerprint of the same bacteria," says Grunert.


In the future, the researchers want to extend the concept to other species of bacteria and further study the impact of host organisms on pathogens. In a next step, the team plans to find out what exactly it is, that leads to metabolic changes in bacteria.




Story Source:


The above story is based on materials provided by Veterinärmedizinische Universität Wien . Note: Materials may be edited for content and length.



How to Build a Ski Mountain from Scratch…in 80-Degree Weather


The 150-foot tall slope takes shape, next to the Rose Bowl stadium. (Image: Alison Piasecki)

The 150-foot tall slope takes shape, next to the Rose Bowl stadium. (Image: Alison Piasecki)



The Arroyo Seco in Pasadena, California is a dusty depression, where shrubs and cacti hold hillsides together and highway bridges cross overhead. Like elsewhere in Los Angeles, the water that does flow down the streambed is confined to a concrete ditch; most of the year, only a thin, slimy ribbon trickles down its center. As its namesake implies, it’s a dry, desert-like area, more Sahara than Steamboat. And yet, as the Arroyo broadens to reveal the Rose Bowl, a 16-storey tower of snow appears like a mirage.


This is the Air + Style snowboard ramp, the marquee feature of an ambitious weekend festival that seeks to merge big-air snowboarding with indie and rock music festival – X-Games meets Coachella, all nestled among the Crafstmen houses of Pasadena.


“It doesn’t snow much down here,” says superstar athlete / guitarist / business mogul Shaun White, who has brought Air + Style to the U.S. for the first time, “so I say you gotta bring the mountain to the people.”


That undertaking fell to Chris Gunnarson, who, through his company Snow Park Technologies, has worked with White for years. “We grew up together,” he explains, as he and White reminisce about Gunnarson’s half-pipe architecture at Big Bear Ski Area in the late ‘90s, “and we’ve traveled the world together. Shaun has really had the foresight to push the level of performance advancement, and it’s changed the sport.” Perhaps most famously, Gunnarson helped design and build Project X, the infamous private half-pipe sequestered deep within the Colorado Rockies.


But over the course of the last two weeks, crews have been hard at work on a 16-story, 150-foot tall scaffold whose plywood profile traces a massive jump. It’s among the highest several buildings in the city for the next few days, and athletes can expect a 75-foot airborne journey. When the competition begins on Saturday, one and a half million pounds of ice will have been sliced into snow to coat the track. “To make the jump a fluid thing is very difficult,” says White, noting that a too-sharp transition from ramp to lip can cause big problems as you set up for a triple flip jump. Gunnarson champions the power of a solid base layer on the ramp, hoping that the insulating power of snow will keep it from becoming a waterfall in the Rose Bowl’s 80-degree February weather.


It’s an incongruous site, but in many ways White embraces the artifice. For a detail-oriented competitor, constructing a jump from scratch is the ultimate manifestation of consistent, predictable conditions, void of pesky geomorphological nuance. “It’s actually more inviting to try tricks when the snow is soft,” White explains. “It’s partially a mental thing – you’re warm, you’re feeling good, ready to go.”


White will not be competing in the big air event – his band Bad Things will be appropriately time-slotted in the music festival, which also includes Kendrick Lamar, Steve Aoki, and Edward Sharpe – but he indulges in a mental run-through of what he’d be thinking before dropping in. “I would basically make sure there’s someone behind the scenes making the board fast,” he says, and he’d get snow texture intel from guys like Gunnarson, “the inside scoop on what’s going on.”


“You can tell that Shaun is a strategist,” Gunnarson interjects, stating the obvious. White is bringing the same strategic mind that’s garnered two Olympic and 15 X Games gold medals to this latest business venture. Now that the summer X-Games have ditched LA for Texas, White saw an opening. He’s also eager to incorporate more of what he characterizes as a European approach to snow sports, where cultural elements like music and artistry are more intimately linked with skiing and snowboarding. The opportunity to grow the fan base for two of his many pursuits – music fans who may get hooked on snowboarding, and vice versa – is also not lost on White.


“So in keeping with the European tradition that started Air + Style about 20 years ago,” says White, “I thought, let’s have a big snowboarding event, and we’ll have a big show and party afterward.” Of course, it wouldn’t be LA – or White – if it also wasn’t bigger, more extreme, and flashier than ever. “We’ve never done it to this extent before,” he explains, “and it’s going to be killer.”



This Card Game Just Raised More Money Than Veronica Mars


Exploding Kittens-STORY

Exploding Kittens



Two weeks ago, Elan Lee got a call that made him feel like he was living in the movie Jaws. It was about two weeks into the highly successful Kickstarter campaign for his new card game Exploding Kittens, and one of his potential suppliers called “to see if you were still interested in that order for 500 decks of cards.” By that point he already knew he was going to need about 500 thousand.


“I had flashes,” Lee says, “to that scene where Roy Scheider (Brody) sees the immense great white for the first time and says in a stupor “you’re gonna need a bigger boat.”


When Exploding Kittens—a tabletop card game that’s essentially Russian Roulette with cats—ended its Kickstarter run tonight, it had raised more than $8.7 million. (They’d initially asked for $10,000.) For context, that’s about $3 million more than Rob Thomas scared up to make a friggin’ Veronica Mars movie. It got more than 200,000 backers—more than any other Kickstarter project, by a longshot—and is the most funded game in the site’s history (the Ouya raised just a little bit more, but that was a console, not a game). “Until Exploding Kittens came along, we hadn’t seen the Internet at large descend on a project and embrace it at this crazy scale,” says Luke Crane, Kickstarter’s lead for games projects.


So what caused thefuror? For one, Lee is not only a veteran of Microsoft Game Studios, but also one of the co-founders of 42 Entertainment, the ARG company that created the ilovebees promotion for Halo 2. Then there are his colleagues on the project: Matthew Inman, who created comics web site The Oatmeal, and Shane Small, who previously worked with Lee on the Xbox. Basically, these guys know the Internet. They also know games well enough to gamify their Kickstarter, getting many of their backers to try to earn rewards by doing stunts like taking pictures of people in cat ears. (That one, Lee says, briefly crashed Dropbox when people tried to upload their photos.)


But for all of the audience engagement and such, they’re still just three guys who made a goofy card game that lets you attack with “thousand-year back hair” and “bear-o-dactyls.” (Check out some of the cards and gameplay above.) So why is it so popular? Here’s how Exploding Kittens came to be and a few clues as to why it’s the new Cards Against Humanity ($15,570 on Kickstarter).



Tech Time Warp of the Week: The 1968 Computer That Sings ‘Daisy Bell’


The music reminds you of the oldest arcade video games. But it’s even older than that. Those computer-generated sounds date to 1968.


Yes, computers could make music in the late 60s. And other art too. That’s the message delivered by the classic film above, a look inside Bell Labs, AT&T’s old blue-sky research division, which produced such inventions as the laser, transistor, the C programming language, and the Unix operating system.


Today, we use computers in just about every creative field, from design to music to photography. But in 1968, computers were thought of primarily as mathematical tools. The Bell film seeks to explode this notion.


As the film begins, we see a pair of engineers using light pens to draw circuit board designs onto the screen of a computer called Graphic 1, and the machine simulates the circuit to see if it works as expected. Then we witness other machines doing art, music, even speech. Machines created the entire score for the documentary, and at one point, we hear a computer-generated voice singing “Daisy Bell.”


One of the most interesting sequences is a collaboration between a graphic artist and a computer scientist working to create to a film via computer. “What spellbinds me as an idea is that I’ll be able to sit someplace in a railroad station and write a movie or maybe pick up a telephone eventually and write a movie,” the designer says.


Given that mobile phones were still, well, under development—and smartphones were still decades away—his view of the future is rather impressive. But that was Bell Labs.