Kickstarter Guess

28/10/2022

Photographers spotted Tesla CEO Elon Musk in northern Mexico meeting with economic officials. Local media suggested Musk could be looking for plant space or meeting with suppliers.

27/10/2022

Dishonest dealers will just ignore the rules, continue to attract customers, and be the primary source of complaints to the Federal Trade Commission.

26/10/2022

https://www.autonews.com/automakers-suppliers/gm-ford-q3-earnings-preview-what-wall-street-wants

Wall Street suspects both companies could fall short of their 2022 forecasts, or underperform next year, with consumer demand dented by rising interest rates, higher oil prices and global economic slowdowns.

25/10/2022

A working group within Toyota has been charged with outlining plans by early next year for improvements to its existing EV platform or for a new architecture, four sources told Reuters.

20/10/2022

Five grand doesn’t buy anything new these days. But a bit of bravery can get you something chunky second-hand

19/10/2022

Nothing more than £10,000 or less interesting than juggling chainsaws on a rollercoaster

18/10/2022

https://www.topgear.com/car-news/retro/here-are-11-possibly-rubbish-things-we-miss-old-cars

How did we manage to do things so much better back in the day?

27/08/2022

YouYou might not assume there’s a huge overlap between drag and fighting games. One involves dressing up to express extreme caricatures of gender expectations that’s associated with LGBTQ+ culture; the other involves knocking seven shades out of each other with hyper-violent adrenaline and where b***y female characters are often designed for the gaze of pubescent boys. But perhaps fighting games, with their larger-than-life flamboyant rosters, are actually more drag than you think.

“Fighting games are so known for these really hyper-feminized versions of women or hyper-masculine versions of men, so it kind of plays with gender in ways that you didn’t really think of,” says Jessica Antenorcruz, narrative designer at Fighting Chance Games. “So it makes total sense to me when we talk to a lot of drag queens or kings, they look up to fighting game characters as being very dramatic and beautiful — and then kick the crap out of them!”

But even if the LGBTQ+ community may embrace Mortal Kombat’s Sindel, who uses both her voice and hair as weapons, as a drag icon, much of that has been dependent on the audience projecting their interpretation of any scant q***r-coded signifiers available. And while q***r representation has been gradually improving in mainstream gaming, from Ellie in The Last of Us to the bisexual paradise of Hades, these are still games led primarily by cis-hetero men.

Drag Her, in comparison, doesn’t hide the fact that it is proudly camp and q***r. It’s a 2D fighting game featuring a cast entirely of drag performers, while the core of the new indie studio behind it, Fighting Chance Games, is comprised of LGBTQ+ folk, women, and people of color, with a deep love for the drag community. More importantly, the fighters aren’t just drag characters (with the exception of Lemonade, a prototype Dolly Parton-esque country queen designed for the demo). Instead, each will be based on and voiced by real-life drag artists, many of which fans may recognize from RuPaul’s Drag Race or The Boulet Brothers’ Dragula.

A Kickstarter campaign launches today.

25/08/2022

Kickstarter CEO Aziz Hasan is stepping down. In a blog titled “Moving Forward, with Gratitude,” Hasan says COO Sean Leow will be interim CEO and that the search for a permanent replacement is already underway.

In an interview with Fast Company, Hasan says “personal reflections” and a desire to spend more time with his family informed his decision to leave Kickstarter after three years.

“I am so proud of the work we’ve done together,” Hasan writes. “Leading such a passionate, skilled, and dedicated team through intense moments of change, milestone victories, and complex challenges has been a humbling and rewarding experience.”

He touted the company’s successes under his leadership, including reaching $6 billion raised in pledges by 20 million backers.

Hasan’s announcement comes a few months after the company announced it would develop a decentralized version of Kickstarter and move on to the blockchain. Backlash soon followed, forcing the company to issue a follow-up statement saying it would slow down the rollout to “listen to [the] feedback” and address concerns from creators and backers.

Kickstarter and company leadership also faced criticism in 2019 — just months after Hasan was named CEO — for its refusal to voluntarily recognize Kickstarter United, its employee union. Workers voted the following year to unionize, becoming one of the first tech unions in the US. That same year, Kickstarter lost about 40 percent of its workforce to layoffs and buyouts as the company grappled with a steep drop in new projects early in the pandemic.

Hasan will remain on as an advisor for the next several months as the Kickstarter Board of Directors looks for a new CEO. His last day will be April 4th.

His last day will be April 4th.

23/08/2022

Prolific fantasy author Brandon Sanderson has just broken the Kickstarter record for the most successful crowdfunded project of all time, cracking the $20,338,986 milestone set by the Pebble Time all the way back in 2015.

Sanderson’s achievement isn’t just notable for the sheer amount of money raised but for the speed. The project — for four new novels that the author wrote in secret over the course of the pandemic — was announced on Tuesday, March 1st and broke the record by early Friday morning, March 4th.

The project’s original goal was to raise $1,000,000 in 30 days; Sanderson hit that number in around 35 minutes, according to The New York Times. The campaign currently exceeds 82,000 backers and still has 27 days to raise additional contributions. The Pebble Time ended its record-setting campaign with contributions from 78,471 backers.


The top three most funded kickstarters in history from left to right. Image: Kickstarter
There are actually two halves to the Kickstarter project: the aforementioned four novels, which Sanderson will be releasing directly to fans on a quarterly basis throughout 2023 in ebook, print, or audiobook formats; and a larger “Year of Sanderson” subscription box that pairs the four book drops with an additional eight boxes of swag themed across different Sanderson series and novels.

THE NEW KICKSTARTER KING
Pledges start at $40 for just the four ebooks, $160 for hardcovers, $360 for ebooks and the rest of the swag, and a full $500 for the four books in all three formats and the eight swag boxes.

The previous record holder was the Pebble Time.

21/08/2022

Accessory-maker Shargeek has launched an Indiegogo to fund a 35W USB-C charger shaped like a tiny Apple Macintosh computer. The page for the Retro 35’s crowdfunding campaign is very careful not to mention the name of Apple’s classic computer, but it’s drawn some very obvious inspiration, from the beige color scheme down to the placement of the disk drive. The device is eventually set to retail for $49, with Indiegogo “early bird” pricing starting at $25.

As increasing numbers of phone manufacturers have stopped shipping charging bricks with their devices, aftermarket chargers are becoming more popular. Often, these bricks offer additional ports or higher charging speeds compared to their first-party equivalents, but it’s fun to see Shargeek go in a different direction and focus on looks rather than specs.


The Retro 35 alongside a range of devices it can charge. Image: Shargeek


Retro vibes. Image: Shargeek
That said, all of Shargeek’s images of the Retro 35 show it being plugged into power strips laid flat on desks to ensure it’s the right way up. But I’d wager most chargers spend their time plugged into a wall outlet, which would force the charger to be laid sideways. It would still look pretty cute like this, but less ... aesthetic than Shargeek’s promotional images.

35W of power for your modern devices.

19/08/2022

The smart home has an interface problem, and six undergrads from Duke think they’ve solved it with a Raspberry Pi and Apple’s U1 chip. They believe most of today’s methods for controlling smart devices — voice control, fiddly apps with multiple menus, motion sensors — are cumbersome and sometimes frustrating. What the smart home needs, they say, is an intuitive control interface and automations that fire off based on where you are in your home. Basically, one app to rule it all. And they’re not wrong.

Fluid One is their solution. A smart home app that leverages ultra-wideband technology in Apple’s iPhones, Fluid can control connected lighting, locks, cameras, thermostats, and more in two ways: a point-and-click control interface and location-based automations.

Just point your iPhone at a smart light bulb, and the correct controls automatically appear to brighten, dim, change color or turn the light on or off. Or, flick your phone up or down to control a device, no touch required. “It’s like the HomePod Mini / iPhone handoff but for any compatible device,” Tim Ho, one of the six co-founders of Fluid, tells The Verge.

Fluid One uses Apple’s UWB and AR features to solve home automation’s control problem