Author: Savannah Tanbusch

Savannah is a freelance journalist from Baltimore. She's really into games about lawyers and detectives, and sometimes refers to herself as \the man
Article

The rocky path to widespread internet access in India

This article is part of a collaboration with iQ by Intel. If you’re reading this, you probably have internet. In fact, you may rely on the internet for a significant portion of the day. You may wake up in the morning and check the weather on your phone, or use your laptop to type out a message to your boss or coworker. You’re one of the lucky 43 percent. In India, you’re one of the 29 percent. Facebook launched Internet.org in India alongside Indian mobile company Reliance Communications in early April, hoping to discover an efficient way to provide free…
Article

The glorious return of The X-Files, TV’s greatest science show

There was one point in my life where I thought about becoming a member of the FBI. In the months prior to my graduation from college, I had decided that I could put the 200+ hours that I had invested into The X-Files to good use. Of course, after I learned of the trials and tribulations one had to go through to get there (like a fitness test, and the ability to overcome the fear of being near a gun), my weak noodle arms and I dropped the idea. I also played with the idea of becoming a Ufologist for a…
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Blur’s new, brightly coloured music video is a Super Mario dreamscape

If you ever wanted to see Gorillaz and Blur frontman Damon Albarn dressed up as a giant ice cream cone, now’s your chance. Britpop group Blur have re-envisioned Super Mario World in their music video for “Ong Ong,” replacing Mario and Peach with Mr. and Ms. Okay, two smiling yellow circles. The video follows the journey of Mr. Okay as he tries to rescue Ms. Okay, who has been taken from him by the evil forces of Mr. Cream, Mr. Brown, Mr. Red and Mr. Black—also known as Damon Albarn, Graham Coxon, Alex James and Dave Rowntree of Blur. The…
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Decaying New York Pavilion reminds us of the 1960s vision of the future

In 1964 and 1965, people flooded into the newly built, brightly-coloured New York State Pavilion in Queens, N.Y., to get a glimpse of new innovations, like telephone modems and computer terminals with keyboards, for the 1964 World’s Fair. Today, the New York State Pavilion resembles the ruins of an amusement park. The colours of the Tent of Tomorrow have faded to an eerie murk of “what-used-to-be,” the roof, which used to resemble the interior of a 1960s home, has been completely blown off, the world’s largest map of New York sprawled across the floor has been obliterated and the space…
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The terror of surrealist films stripped down to a traumatizing bone

Frank wakes up covered in blood and I may never sleep again. Game developer Daniil Ermakov, also known as Da Neel, combines the horrors of cult surrealist directors David Lynch and Alejandro Jodorowsky and produces a mish-mash of terror and humor in the face of human trauma. A Box Full of Joy is a surreal adventure story where you play as Frank and, through the poetic justice of the story and plot, you learn absolutely nothing. It perfectly emulates works like Jodorowsky’s fantasy The Holy Mountain and Lynch’s psychological thriller Lost Highway. While a lot of games evoke these director’s…
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Night Terrors will use augmented reality to turn your home into a horror house

Over the past year the horror genre has revitalized fear. Films like David Robert Mitchell’s It Follows, a film featuring a sexually transmitted haunting, and Jennifer Kent’s storybook monster film The Babadook, have received unexpectedly raving reviews and high ratings on Rotten Tomatoes. In 2013, indie horror survival game Outlast allowed you to see through the eyes of investigative journalist Miles Upshur with the Oculus Rift. It was terrifying. Novum Analytics’s 17-month project Night Terrors should achieve something similar, drawing on the immersion of modern tech such as the Oculus Rift and amplifying it a hundredfold. The game is designed…