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Imagine being stranded in a harsh, gun-crazy, pyramid-obsessed alternate reality with your immediate family — think you'd be in the mood for a little desert two-step while on the run for your lives? More »
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I've been seeing a lot of fliers around San Francisco advertising something called the "Aquatic Thought Foundation," which promises to give you dolphin therapy by hooking your brain up to a dolphin. Really, the fliers weren't all that much kookier than the usual Marin County yoga levitation psionics stuff you see. But finally I decided to check out the dolphin therapy website because, well, it was just SO weird. And it turned out to be one of the coolest and most mysterious ARGs I've come across in quite some time. More »
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Worldbuilding is the art of creating an alternate universe where the rules of present-day Earth life don't apply, and you have been appreciating that art for as long as you've been reading or watching science fiction. Some worldbuilding is epic in scale, and requires thousands of people: the Star Wars universe is like that, if you think of all the people who have helped create the movies, books, art, TV and games from that world. But other worldbuilders work alone. Ursula Le Guin wrote several novels set in her "shared worlds" universe without any help and without spawning any spinoff tales by other people. But worldbuilding doesn't have to be something that just the pros do. You can get in on the cool create-your-own universe action any time you want, and fast. Just follow our five simple rules for whipping up a universe in your spare time. More »
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Welcome back to MangoBot, a biweekly column about Asian futurism by TokyoMango blogger Lisa Katayama. While Dr. Wong was putting dental dam in my mouth, I was watching three hot women singing the penis song in a Chinese restaurant downtown. It happened last Thursday, when I discovered a gadget that can warp my brain to a blissful alternate reality. That was the day that I had to visit my own personal dystopia, which happens to involve dentist chairs, root canals, and lots and lots of hellacious oral drilling. Though I took an inevitable trip to this dystopia, I miraculously evaded doomsday by using a device that made me forget the pain without any drugs at all. More »
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Though this looks like some kind of insane mushroom growth, it's actually special, die-cut cardboard strips put together by the Ball-Nogues Studio for an installation at Rice University. The artists created a digital mockup of the shapes they wanted, ordered 20,000 strips of cardboard cut to the perfect prefab sizes, and put the whole thing together in four days. It's strong enough for people to stand on. Want to see more of it? More »
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We've written before about the Sarah Connor Chronicles alternate reality game (ARG), where players film themselves acting out the roles of workers at a corporation called Einitech Labs. Enitech has discovered a way to photograph pictures of the future using "tachyons." At first they just see newspapers that are several months in the future, but slowly they begin getting pictures of San Francisco in a post-apocalyptic state. And then they start getting stalked by robots. Each episode contains a puzzle, and this special BoingBoing TV episode of the ARG is no exception. Peek below to get the secret subliminal message. More »
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In the movie Onigocco or The Chasing World, a Japanese teenager gets flipped into an parallel world where everyone who has the last name Sato is being ruthlessly hunted down. Of course, that just happens to be his last name. While trying to evade the smiling cyborgs, he encounters alternate versions of his girlfriend and school buddies, and finds himself protecting them and trying to escape from the clutches of the King of Japan. Check out the trailer below, and find out more. More »
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