Science & Technology

Jul.16,2013

touchEternity

Mobile game which became popular in 2015. The object is simple, to keep your finger pressed on an onscreen button for as long as possible. Points are accrued the longer your finger is held and reset to zero if it is removed.

The game became a sleeper sensation after a viral video emerged of the prime-minister of Denmark playing it covertly during a United Nations summit, and soon it was being downloaded and played across the whole world. The game remained fiercely popular for several weeks, with many players buying second devices specifically for games and others forced to completely adapt their lifestyle to accommodate their newfound mono-dexterity.

Eventually the craze died down after a host of imitation “staminapps” such as taptaptap and KeepWatchingTheDot diluted the marketplace, but a hardcore fanbase remains with the most dedicated players currently on upwards of 14 billion points. Some of these are convinced …

Dec.17,2012

Humphrey Woodspring: Space Pioneer

Humphrey Woodspring was a British space-travel pioneer who conducted the first rocket experiments of the Edwardian era. Woodspring was raised in Barnsley and apprenticed as a carpenter in his father’s furniture manufacturer’s company, finally taking it over in 1903 at the age of thirty-one. That same year, Woodspring paid an enlightening visit to the cinema tent at the county fair which included a screening of the early French science-fiction film Un voyage en fusée pour visiter les dames grandes bosomed sur la surface de la lune (A trip by rocket ship to visit the well endowed ladies on the surface of the moon). Soon after he placed an advertisement in the Barnsley Echo which stated that Woodspring and Sons would henceforth dedicate itself to pursuing excellence in the twin fields of space exploration and home furnishings.

Seven years later, Woodspring was satisfied that he had finally constructed a rocket ship …

Aug.28,2012

Vibe

The fourth primary colour, and an exceptionally brilliant one (hence the now-familiar term ‘vibrant’), that was popular up until the mid 1930s, when it was aggressively marketed out of existence by the Technicolor corporation whose 3-strip colour film process was unable to reproduce it. After the global success of Technicolor Hollywood films such as The Wizard of Oz, Gone with the Wind, and Sir Henry Drummond’s epic King of King of Kings, countries around the world scrambled to remove any traces of vibe from their homes, so as to make them look “more like the movies”. The only country to retain vibe in some form was the unimpressed France, which still claims to hold the world’s only collection of vibe-based paintings and plant-life. When any non-French person requests to view these artefacts however, they get all sniffy and pretend they don’t understand.

May.31,2012

The Genesis 12 Experiment

The Genesis12 experiment was an unorthodox scientific experiment carried out in the year -2567012 by an extra-dimensional super-being and laboratory technician named Ya*howah 25j. Ya*howah was interested in exploring the properties of a small droplet of compressed space-time he had discovered in the laboratory toilet. Utilising powerful ultra-microscopic equipment, he discovered that this droplet contained an immensely array of elements which seemed to be in constant motion. Mapping out the arrangement of structures within, Ya*howah found that many of the elements took the form of spherical structures which seemed to spin around each other in a complex pattern Ya*howah dubbing this discovery the ‘uuniv`rse’, and on the night of Blensbury the unth he conducted the following experiment, described in his journal:

Day 20-two. I have been observing the uuniv`rse for some time now, and have determined that it follows a regular cycle of steady expansion, followed by a sudden contraction to near-invisible level …

Mar.8,2012

Josef Heinzberg

World renowned physicist who accidentally succeeded in travelling back in time by one year, and proceeded to spend the next 12 months working alongside his past self in order to recapture the secret. Having finally cracked the formula the day before the present Heinzberg was due to travel back in time to help the past Heinzberg work it out, the future Heinzberg decided to take the present Heinzberg for a drink to wish him off. A rowdy celebration of their unprecedented scientific breakthrough ensued, resulting in the present Heinzberg sleeping in the next day and forgetting to travel back in time, thus severing the time loop and triggering the past and present Heinzberg’s to promptly forget how they had done it. The two are now said to be in a passionate relationship that the scientific community has roundly condemned as being a reckless and irresponsible distortion of the laws of …

Nov.1,2011

Nintendo Playa

Super-high-definition video console released in 2017 featuring unique interactive controllers. One of the console’s most innovative games was “Kicking a Ball Against a Wall”, a game requiring players to repeatedly simulate the action of kicking a ball against a wall. The lifelike wall graphics could be projected from the console onto any flat surface, such as a wall, and Nintendo developers created authentic football-style balls that could be propelled against it by players’ feet in order to almost exactly recreate the experience of kicking a ball against a wall. Though praised for its realistic design, the game was also criticised for its prohibitive retail price and its failure to add multiplayer and online modes, which might have enabled “Kicking a Ball Against a Wall” to become a widespread social phenomenon akin to Nintendo’s previous smash-hit virtual reality game “Walking to the Shops”.