Category: Misc
Merry Christmas!
It’s now past midnight on the east coast of the United States, so I say unto all…
WOWSERS!
MERRY CHRISTMAS!
GO GO GADGET WREATH!
TweetNothing says Christmas like old floppy disk covers
It’s always an adventure to find out what packing material is used in sending an item won on eBay. In this case, the item was a Christmas present and the packing material was… crumpled-up 5.25″ floppy disk sleeves.
Here’s a sampling:
I’m amazed by the variety of floppy disk brand names the eBay seller decided to include: 3M, Broderbund, Sony, Fuji Film, Electronic Arts, IBM, and a few others. All familiar brands even today.
For those who don’t remember (or aren’t old enough to remember), 5.25″ floppy disks (or diskettes) held around 360k of data. Today, that’s about enough for a couple of low-res photos or maybe a short song clip. Years ago, 360k was all you needed for a brand new copy of Lotus 123. And yes, floppy disks were actually floppy.
The best part is the how-not-to-kill-your-floppy-disk series of pictures on the back of each one:
And yes, the eBay item arrived safe and sound. Since the sleeves are made of some kind of magic paper that can’t be torn, they did a nice job at protecting it.
TweetNew look and feel along with a simpler address.
As you’ve likely noticed already (unless you’re reading this via the RSS feed), the distant creations blog has an all-new look and feel. It’s based on a great WordPress theme called Dilectio. The posts are bigger and easier to read and the single sidebar now contains much more useful information than ever before including my latest tweets and podcasts.
I like the new look of this blog so much that it is now the home page for distantcreations.com. No need to add “/blog” to the end of the address anymore (unless you really want to – it still works). If you’re in search of what used to be found on the distant creations home page, you can always find it at the portfolio link above, though it hasn’t been updated in a few years.
To go with the new look, there will be a whole lot more fun and entertaining posts to be found here. I originally started this blog to have a place to post things that interest me, but that proved to be too random of a topic. So, I have begun to narrow down my interests to a few key topics on which I’ll be posting, hopefully on a somewhat regular schedule. But until I finalize that list, I’ll continue to post anything new or unusual that I come across.
So keep checking back to find out what the future of distant creations holds!
TweetSpector’s Junction Point Working On ‘Epic Mickey’ Title?
Gamasutra – Report: Spector’s Junction Point Working On ‘Epic Mickey’ Title?
Could Warren Spector’s Junction Point Studios be at work on a title about Disney’s seminal Mickey Mouse?
Gamasutra has seen concept art and information that indicates a title codenamed “Epic Mickey” may be in development at the Austin-based, Disney-owned developer.
Concept art from early versions of the game that we viewed showed mockups of the potential game’s environment, including pencil sketches of cities assembled from junk.
Another sketch included a surreal seashore invasion scene, in which machines wearing the faces of the Seven Dwarfs deposit old-fashioned renditions of Disney characters onto the beach with mechanical hands.
Though the kooky environmental concepts, with visible large cogs, gears and even a large fork that serves as a building’s awning, are somewhat reminiscent of Disney’s Toontown Online MMO, the images — particularly the cloud-stained seaside painting — have a distinctly shadowed, steampunk vibe.
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Family sues Disney over bassinet death
From www.chicagotribune.com:
The family of a child who died this year in a Winnie the Pooh bassinet has sued the Walt Disney Co., alleging the company allowed sales of the bassinets despite a flawed design that had been linked to another baby’s death a year earlier.
The bassinet had a drop-down side for easy access, but the design created a gap where babies could slide through and hang to death. Kennedy Brotherton Jones was 6 months old when she was strangled on Aug. 21.
Shortly after Kennedy’s death, the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission directed retailers to stop selling the bassinets, which were manufactured by Simplicity Inc. Disney’s consumer products division licensed its Winnie the Pooh name and image to Simplicity, records show.
The suit, filed in California state court in Los Angeles on Wednesday, raises questions about a common practice in the nursery products industry: Are companies that license their names and characters to other manufacturers responsible when those products turn out to be deadly?
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