STUFF: News, Technology, the cool and the plain weird

[MIKA27]

Report: Bryan Cranston Cast as Lex Luthor in 'Man of Steel'

After five seasons of playing Walter White, the chemist-turned-meth-kingpin on AMC's Breaking Bad, Bryan Cranston has racked up plenty of evil-doer experience. And according to report from Cosmic Book News, he'll boost his villian credentials even further by playing Superman nemesis Lex Luthor in the upcoming sequel for Man of Steel.

Cranston has reportedly signed a deal that includes at least six appearances (and possibly more), meaning that his character will appear in a variety of films set within the inter-connected DC Comics universe.

"Cranston is truly a dream casting for Luthor," a source told Cosmic Book News.

This news follows last week's controversial announcement that Ben Affleck has signed on to play Batman in the same film.

The actor reportedly inked a deal that includes 13 total appearances.

[Fuzz]

Somebody Needs To Make This Han Solo Refrigerator ASAP

I'd rather have this, so I'll know he'll never terrorise the SW franchise ever again.....

[MIKA27]

I'd rather have this, so I'll know he'll never terrorise the SW franchise ever again.....

No more JarJar!!

[MIKA27]

Your Laptop Looks Like It's Floating With This Magical MacBook Stand

TwelveSouth’s new GhostStand is a Houdini for your MacBook — the clear lucite computer stand looks like it has suspended your laptop in mid-air. It works for MacBooks, MacBook Airs and MacBook Pros.

Inspired by designer Philippe Starck’s Ghost Chair, the $US35 platform is available starting today. The stand levitates your MacBook six inches above your desk, to give you more room to work comfortably with a wireless mouse and a different keyboard, or maybe a second monitor.

Plus, it’s nice and modern and unobtrusive, with two silicone rails that will keep your laptop securely attached to the seemingly floating stand. Magic. [TwelveSouth]

[MIKA27]

Monster Machines: Boeing's Newer, Bigger, Less Flammable Dreamliner Is Ready To Fly

This last year has not been kind to Boeing’s fledgling 787 Dreamliner class aeroplanes, what with the repeated electrical fires, fleet groundings and bad publicity. But Boeing is confident that it’s worked the kinks out in its newest Dreamliner iteration, the 787-9, which rolled out of the factory earlier today and is eagerly awaiting its first test flight.

The 787-9 is an extended variant of the original 787-8. The new model is 6m longer than its predecessor, with room for 40 more passengers. It also features a greater fuel capacity (and therefore longer service range) thanks to an additional forward tank, although the two variants share the same wingspan. And like the original Dreamliner, the 787-9 relies heavily of composite materials in its construction as weight-saving measures. Up to 80 per cent of the plane’s volume is composed of composite material — some 300 tonnes of carbon fibre.

Air Zealand will be the first airline to incorporate the 787-9 into its fleet. The new Boeings are expected to compete head-to-head with rival Airbus A330s when the 787-9 takes to the skies in the second quarter of 2014.

[MIKA27]

MOBY1 XTR EXPEDITION TRAILER

The XTR by Moby1 is the ultimate adventure trailer. Each trailer is hand crafted and made with the highest quality components available and offers sleep quarters for 3. If you need to spread out, you can get a roof-top tent to sleep 4 more. The XTR has an extensive array of options, including heating and air conditioning, generator, and solar panels, outdoor shower, and much more to support and sustain life and comfort on your remote back country expeditions. Simply hook it up to your vehicle, head out into the wilderness and never look back.

[Fuzz]

No more JarJar!!

Already taken car of!!

[MIKA27]

Abraham Lincoln’s life mask

In 1881, sculptor Leonard Volk explained how he made the first Lincoln mask. He met Lincoln in 1858 during Lincoln’s campaign for the U.S. Senate, and invited him to sit for a bust. Lincoln agreed, but it took Volk’s insistence two years later before Lincoln came to his studio. By this time it was the spring of 1860, shortly before Lincoln received the Republican nomination for president.

Volk said, “My studio was in the fifth story, and there were no elevators in those days, and I soon learned to distinguish his steps on the stairs, and am sure he frequently came up two, if not three, steps at a stride.”

Of the plaster casting process, Volk said, “It was about an hour before the mold was ready to be removed, and being all in one piece, with both ears perfectly taken, it clung pretty hard, as the cheek-bones were higher than the jaws at the lobe of the ear. He bent his head low and took hold of the mold, and gradually worked it off without breaking or injury; it hurt a little, as a few hairs of the tender temples pulled out with the plaster and made his eyes water.” Lincoln said he found the process “anything but agreeable.”

Volk said that during the sittings, “he would talk almost unceasingly, telling some of the funniest and most laughable of stories, but he talked little of politics or religion during those sittings. He said: ‘I am bored nearly every time I sit down to a public dining-table by some one pitching into me, on politics.’”

Volk left a priceless legacy for future sculptors, as attested by Avard Fairbanks, who said, “Virtually every sculptor and artist uses the Volk mask for Lincoln … it is the most reliable document of the Lincoln face, and far more valuable than photographs, for it is the actual form.”

[MIKA27]

Mesmerising Photos of Cenote Angelita an underwater river:

No, you didn’t read the title wrong. Although it might seem like a bit of a strange concept, there is such a thing as an “underwater river,” and Russian underwater photographer Anatoly Beloshchin actually got a chance to photograph this amazing phenomenon.

The “river” Beloshchin photographed is called Cenote Angelita (Spanish for “Little Angel”), and it’s located in Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula. Inside an underwater sinkhole/cave called a cenote about 15 minutes south of Tulum, you’ll find this amazing river that flows underwater.

The phenomenon is made possible thanks to a three-foot thick layer of hydrogen sulfide that separates the 100-feet of freshwater at the top from the 100-feet of saltwater on the bottom. And the craziest part is that it looks just like an actual river.

You see banks, trees, mud and leaves strewn about in the same way you would at a normal river you might see flowing through the forest. And although Beloshchin and his buddies obviously had to be in full scuba gear to reach this particular river, they didn’t forget to bring their fishing gear:

Maya Diving describes the exploring Cenote Angelita as “a diving adventure that you will never forget,” and we don’t think they’re exaggerating. Here’s a video that Beloshchin put together in case you favor 24-pictures per second to the 7 pictures above:

To see more of Beloshchin’s photography (both under and above water), be sure to head over to his website. And if this kind of underwater cave photography is particularly to your liking, you’ll want to pay special attention to his Underwater Caves series.

[polarbear]

Awesome!

[MIKA27]

William Gaines and the Birth of Horror Comics

Through comics, films and television ‘Tales From The Crypt’ and EC Comics have proven to be an enduring pop culture franchise and one that’s dear to the heart of many horror fans. Its legacy continues to manifest itself through the innumerable writers, directors and artists whose childhoods were shaped by nights reading those gloriously gruesome early comics by flashlight under the blankets. In the first of what I’m hoping will be a series of articles on the EC phenomenon (encompassing the comics, the 1970s films and the fondly remembered HBO TV series) I’m taking a look at the man who started it all, William Gaines.

The EC comics brand – though unrecognizable at the time, standing as it did both in name and nature for ‘Educational Comics’ – was founded in the mid 1940s by Max Gaines, himself an important figure in comics history. Having worked on titles such as ‘The Green Lantern’ and ‘Wonder Woman’, he was bought out of Action Comics (to the impressive sum of $500,000) following a creative dispute and went on to begin his own company which very much reflected his own stoic, conservative firm-hand sensibilities. While America’s youth was preoccupied with superheroes, westerns and romances as the Golden Age of comics unfolded, former school principal Max felt that titles such as ‘Picture Stories From The Bible’ and ‘Animal Fables’ signalled the way forward. The company began losing money immediately.

EC was not Max’s only pressing concern. His son William, born in 1922, was to his mind an obstinate, clumsy and directionless mess. For his part, Bill resented his father, who he found to be a relentlessly intimidating and overbearing figure, and throughout his early life had no interest in comic books either instead spending his time pulling pranks (mostly on Max) and generally acting the fool.

Following a stint in the army that seemingly left little impression on him or anyone else, he enrolled at university with the intention of becoming a chemistry teacher. Fate changed all that however, when in 1947 a tragic boating accident took Max’s life. At his mother’s request, Bill reluctantly took over the family business which was by now $100,000 down.

Recognizing that the company couldn’t afford to continue in its current direction, Bill, no longer in the shadow of his father, perused the comic market with new eyes. To his surprise he loved what he saw – a vibrant, exciting medium with huge potential. By now slice-of-life teen comics were the order of the day and so after re-purposing the company’s initials to ‘Entertaining Comics’, Bill hired the now legendary artist Al Feldstein to begin work on a new title to capitalize on the trend. As it turned out the series ‘Going Steady with Peggy’ would never see the light of day as mid-way through its production, Gaines noticed that the teen comic trend (with the exception of the still-enduring ‘Archie’) was already on the wane. Feldstein, desperately in need of work and a paycheck, offered instead to assist Bill in redeveloping the EC line.

Westerns, romances and crime comics continued to hold a steady share of the market, so Al began illustrating and later – unhappy with the quality of the commisioned scripts – writing in the genres for EC. The company was slowly gaining a foothold in the comics business and Bill and Al’s friendship and working relationship continued to grow. The pair quickly became inseparable, writing, attending roller derby matches and dining together. It was after one such evening, while driving Bill back to the home that he still shared with his mother, that Al suggested that rather than constantly chasing trends perhaps the company could be better served by innovating.

The pair had discussed at length a shared love of horror stories in various forms. The long running ‘Inner Sanctum’ radio show was a particularly significant influence with its eerie but tongue-in-cheek host Raymond casting a malevolent eye over each story’s events. The idea was mounted to bring horror to EC, though as the genre was virtually without precedent in comics, it was decided to test the waters by slipping more macabre tales into the existing line of crime comics. The idea paid off in spades as readers snatched up the sensational issues in greater numbers than any previous EC comics. In ‘Crime Patrol #15′, Feldstein’s punning, wise-cracking and iconic Crypt Keeper made his debut appearance. The experiment was repeated when the Vault Keeper was added to issue 10 of ‘War Against Crime’. Readers couldn’t get enough, and it quickly became clear where the future must lie.

In January of 1950 Gaines announced the ‘new trend’ in comics with ‘The Crypt of Terror’ (later ‘Tales From The Crypt’), ‘The Vault of Horror’ and a third title ‘The Haunt of Fear’ precided over by The Old Witch, completing Feldstein’s trio of ‘GhouLunatics’. For the next several years Bill, fueled by Dexedrine and his own delirious imagination would consume horror novels by night and fire ideas at Feldstein by day. By 1953, Feldstein would be writing four stories a week and serving as editor on seven different comics. Artists like Wally Wood, Harvey Kurtzman and Jack Davis would all be featured, along with 26 Ray Bradbury stories.

Even Bill and Al’s fertile minds would have been boggled to think of what would follow – sixty years of film spin-offs, a TV series, endless reprints (as recently as last month’s Fantagraphics hardback collection) and a hearing in front of a Senate subcommittee that would find them charged with indecency and inspiring juvenile delinquency.

Likewise, it’s hard to imagine how Max Gaines would have reacted to seeing what had become of his beloved company.

In 1942 a New York paper published an article concerned with violence in comics including Max’s stipulations to his artists about what constituted good, wholesome material. The rules included ‘Never show a coffin – especially with a corpse in it’, ‘Never chop the limbs off anybody’ and ‘Never show anybody stabbed or shot’. By the end of their run, EC’s horror comics had (perhaps not coincidentally) broken all of these rules and more. Millions of kids remain eternally grateful.

[MIKA27]

Have You Seen The Abandoned Island In The Centre Of NYC?

Rewind to 1885 and it’s during that era that North Brother Island was used a busy hospital complex primarily designed to quarantine members of the public who had been infected with smallpox or the debilitating typhoid fever. It’s situated between the Bronx and Riker’s Island, New York City and later on in its life, the centre became a rehab clinic.

As better medical facilities with easier access have risen up, North Brother Island slowly fell into a state of disrepair – eventually becoming abandoned in around 1963.

This is what it looks like today, it’s now used solely as a bird sanctuary.

[Fuzz]

William Gaines and the Birth of Horror Comics

Let's not forget Bill also changed MAD from a comic into MAD Magazine. Bye-bye Comic Code!!

[MIKA27]

A Visual Tour Of The Research Base At The End Of The World

It’s not hard to make the arctic beautiful. But the observatories, abandoned factories and shipwrecks scattered across its white expanse? That’s tougher. For landscape photographer Reuben Wu, that was exactly the allure of the arctic archipelago of Svalbard.

Wu is a musician by trade — he’s a member of the electro act Ladytron and a DJ the rest of the time — and his success with music is part of what’s enabled his career as a photographer to blossom. Travelling the world on tour, he’s been able to visit an incredible wealth of unusual places — and shoot them, usually using his beloved Polaroid. “On my travels I’ve been spoilt by the amount of stuff I’ve been able to see,” he tells Gizmodo. “And over the years I have become more and more attracted to the dark and hidden things which most people have forgotten about, yet have their own aura of history and identity.”

Among those “dark and hidden things”? The long-abandoned Sea Forts in the English channel, built during World War II to monitor Nazi aircraft, and decaying “sound mirrors”, an early, low-tech concrete structure that concentrated sound waves to detect radar. Wu sums up his motives succinctly, saying, “basically, I’m a weird rebel tourist.”

Abandoned WWII-era Sea Forts.

In 2011, Wu traveled to Svalbard, the collection of remote islands in the far north of Norway. Though it’s been host to dozens of temporary human settlements over the centuries, it remains a largely uninhabited place. The main permanent settlement — Longyearbyen — supports a few hundred scientists, serving as a base camp for research going on elsewhere in the arctic. But Wu, in his own words, wanted to explore “all the hidden things that normally go unnoticed by tourists.” He visited sites like the Svalbard Seed Vault, an ice-encrusted bunker where scientists are amassing thousands of seed samples in case of a catastrophe, and Barentsburg, an abandoned Russian settlement that still boasts huge statues of Lenin and Social Realist artwork.

Below, see a few of the highlights from the trip. And if you want a creepily appropriate audio accompaniment, check them out while listening to Jonny Cash read the classic 1907 poem, The Cremation of Sam McGee, which tells the story of an arctic miner’s ghost.

For more about Wu, check out his Facebook or visit his website.

Barentsburg, the abandoned Russian settlement on Svalbard.

The Svalbard Seed Vault.

The observatory in the Atacama Desert, on the edge of the Andes in South America.

[MIKA27]

How The US Would Attack Syria

After months of toeing the “red line” set by US president Obama regarding the use of chemical weaponsagainst his own civilian population, Syrian president Bashar al-Assad’s regime has seemingly been caught killing more than 300 Syrian civilians and sickening over 1000 more in a suspected sarin nerve gas attack. The US has already considered its air strike options. Here’s how it would get the job done.

How close are we?

Australia, France, Britain, Turkey and other NATO allies have already damned al-Assad’s government as the sarin attack’s perpetrators, with France last weekend demanding that UN inspectors be allowed immediate access to the alleged site of the attack. “The solution is obvious. There is a United Nations team on the ground, just a few kilometers away. It must very quickly be allowed to go to the site to carry out the necessary tests without hindrance,” French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius told Reuters last Saturday.

That independent UN team did receive access to the site — five days after sustained and heavy artillery shelling by pro-Assad forces — and came under sniper fire while there. And according to a CBS news report, the President Obama spent most of this past Saturday poring over evidence of the attack with his national security team, putting together “a near air-tight circumstantial case that the Syrian regime was behind it.”

CBS News further explains:

There was no debate at the Saturday meeting that a military response is necessary. Obama ordered up legal justifications for a military strike, should he order one, outside of the United Nations Security Council. That process is well underway, and particular emphasis is being placed on alleged violations of the Geneva Convention and the Chemical Weapons Convention.

An external military intervention in Syria’s two-year-plus civil war is coming, whether the Russians like it or not. Here’s what America’s role in an allied assault it will probably involve.

By sea

Between the Arab Spring uprisings, the saber-rattling of outgoing hardliner Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the US invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, and the chaos following the fall of Libyan and Egyptian tyrants, the Middle East has been an global military and political focal point for more than three years now. And wherever the US military casts its gaze, fleets of warships are bound to follow.

We’ve already got a sizable armada patrolling region in the Fifth and Sixth Fleets. The US Fifth Fleet, which is reportedly currently patrolling the Persian Gulf and Red Sea, includes two of our biggest, baddest carriers: USS Nimitz and USS Harry S. Truman. Each of these 300m, 106,000-tonne floating military bases is powered by a pair of Westinghouse A4W nuclear reactors, giving them unlimited range and nearly limitless power.

These carriers are equipped with nominal defenses — basic electronic and torpedo countermeasures — and light offensive capabilities — a few Sea Sparrows and other miscellaneous missiles — namely because they’re packed with roughly 90 heavily armed fixed-wing aircraft and helicopters. Each. That’s not even including the swarms of support ships, destroyers, cruisers and submarines that make up a US Navy Carrier Strike Group.

The Fifth Fleet wouldn’t even really need to travel into the Mediterranean to strike military targets in Syria. With the proper clearances from NATO allies like Jordan and Turkey, the Fifth could sit comfortably in the Red Sea and lob cruise missiles over allied airspace into the conflict zone.

The Sixth Fleet, on the other hand, is already currently on patrol in the Mediterranean. Interestingly, since the news of an impending strike broke, the DoD has been careful to specifically mention its four Arleigh Burke-class destroyers: the USS Mahan, USS Gravely, USS Barry and USS Ramage. Each of these 500-foot, integrated propulsion warships is stuffed with more than 90 Surface-to-Air missiles, ASROC anti-submarine missiles, and Tomahawk and Harpoon cruise missiles. They also sport two 5-inch guns, a pair of M242 Bushmaster autocannons, a host of Mk-50 torpedoes, and later builds carry a pair of MH-60R LAMPS III helicopters as well.

But the most devastating weapons of the Sixth Fleet are rarely seen — at least above the ocean’s surface. The USS Florida and USS Georgia Ohio-class SSGN cruise missile submarines are no stranger to recent Mideast incursions. The Florida reportedly fired nearly a hundred cruise missiles during the downfall of Muammar Gaddafi, decimating Libyan air defenses and paving the way for further NATO airstrikes. “Never before in the history of the United States of America has one ship conducted that much land attack strikes, conventionally, in one short time period,” explained Rear Admiral Rick Breckenridge in a DoD press statement.

Each submarine is equipped with 154 Tomahawk cruise missiles — that’s over 300 total potentially pointing at al-Assad’s forces in total from just these two ships. These $US1.4 million a pop guided missiles were developed from German V-1 technology, and have become a major component of the US arsenal. They are capable of delivering a large, 450kg warhead long distances with an exceedingly high degree of accuracy, often at high sub- to low supersonic speeds while following self-guided NOE routes.

Even more deadly than the Tomahawks is the contingent of Navy Seals deployed on these submarines. They can easily slip ashore (if they haven’t already) aboard a mini-sub or fast-attack surface pontoons. Although, unlike their tactical invasion during the Second Iraq War, our SEALS won’t be able to infiltrate Syria’s well-developed and densely populated coastline nearly as easily, not to mention the political implications of putting troops on the ground. We’re better off sending in the drones for recon duties instead.

And, yes, the Fifth and Sixth Fleets have drone capabilities. The US Navy already operates a pair of 737-sized Global Hawks, and there are unconfirmed reports that a few destroyers in the Fifth Fleet could be outfitted with Fire Scout assault drones as well.

The $US131 million Northrop Grumman RQ-4 Global Hawk is one of our biggest and best unmanned surveillance platforms. With a 40m wingspan and 33,806Nm Rolls-Royce F137-RR-100 turbofan engine, the Global Hawk can loiter at 18,000m for 28 hours at a time, capturing every detail of the battles below using its suite of synthetic aperture radar (SAR), EO, and IR sensors.

The Northrop Grumman MQ-8 Fire Scout, on the other hand, is an unmanned helicopter platform designed for lower-altitude ISR and land assault missions. The MQ-8B operates for up to eight hours with a 6000m service ceiling while scanning with its EO-IR sensor gimbal or hunting targets with its newly-deployed Advanced Precision Kill Weapon System aka laser-guided 70mm rockets.

I mean, if even the Coast Guard is getting Scan Eagles — the low-cost, 18kg catapult-launched surveillance craft Iran supposedly shot down last year — there’s a good chance they’re also being deployed to active combat areas. They may not be riding aboard the USS Florida or USS Georgia, but you can bet they’re aboard the Seawolf-class USS Jimmy Carter.

This the third and final submarine in her class, the Jimmy Carter measures nearly 30m longer than her predecessors thanks to the installation of the Multi-Mission Platform (MMP). This platform allows for the launch and recovery of Navy SEAL mini-subs, underwater ROVs, mines and aerial surveillance drones.

By air

Depending on how aggressively the international community intends to strike, the US could very easily escalate the attack from just cruise missiles to include fixed-wing aircraft as well — such as the US-based B-2 strategic bombers and the B-1 bombers based at Qatar’s Al Udeid Air Base.

“In such an operation, the United States would be able to carry out standoff attacks beyond the range of Syrian air defenses, while B-2 bombers could stealthily penetrate the Syrian integrated air defence network to drop bunker-busting bombs with minimal risk,” an analysis by intelligence firm Statfor declares.

Standoff attacks would be carried out with the AGM-158 JASSM (Joint Air-to-Surface Standoff Missile), a semi-stealth missile with a 900kg warhead — twice the destructive power of a Tomahawk. These $US1.37 million, GPS-guided long-range cruise missiles built by Lockheed can be launched from any number of US aircraft including the B-2 Spirit, F-15E Strike Eagle, the F/A-18(E/F) Hornet and Super Hornets, and the new F-35 Lightning II. As for the bunker busters, well, who can forget the MOP?

As for the list of potential targets, there are many. According to reports from the Washington Free Beacon, Free Syrian Army Commander Salim Idris fingered the Al Mazzah Military Airport outside of Damascus as the launch site of the SAMs used in the chemical attack. Say goodbye to that airport. Other targets could include reputed chemical weapons storage facilities and artillery batteries.

The biggest question of all, of course, is whether this show of solidarity with the Syrian rebels will end reasonably peacefully, like Libya, quiet down for a bit before exploding in chaos again, like Egypt, or start World War III. We’ll see in the coming days.

[MIKA27]

A Creepy Tour Of Russia's Decrepit Abandoned Summer Camps

When kids love camp, they really, really love camp. And they’re not hard to spot since they never shut up about it — often into adulthood. So for those of you who relish the nostalgia of those carefree, summer days of yore, you’ll probably want to look away now. The blog English Russia has posted a collection of gorgeous, haunting and totally creepy photos of abandoned Russian summer camps. Because golden childhood memories, it seems, don’t age so well.

Taken at various camps along the bank of the Desna river, the photos show just what can happen when a place meant to provide comfort to so many gets its good deeds rewarded with neglect. What makes these scenes particularly unsettling is the fact that, simply due to the nature of summer camp itself, we know that these buildings were once bustling with screaming youngsters. Like in the void of a rec hall below, you can almost feel what must be a now-suffocating, unnatural silence.

Now, it seems as though the camps’ only guests are the occasional vagabonds who might happen to wander through their mould-choked doors. That, or Russian campers were once bestowed with a questionably liberal (i.e. any) vodka ration. But as eerie as these pictures seem in their own right, it’s hard to even imagine how stark the contrast might be between photos of the camps’ sunny halcyon days and these skeletal spectres of former glory.

[MIKA27]

Monster Machines: The Ryan Firebee, Grandfather To The Modern UAV

America’s fleet of surveillance and attack drones are far older than most people realise.

While the unmanned platforms have certainly come into the spotlight since the start of the War on Terror, they’ve actually been dutifully getting shot out of the sky on behalf of our national interests since World War I. And one of the most impressive — and impressively named — of their ranks was the Ryan Firebee.

After the close of the World War II, the US Navy found itself in need of a jet-powered aerial target for gunnery practice and air-to-air combat training. The Navy contacted Teledyne-Ryan Aeronautical, a pilot school-turned-aircraft manufacturer located in San Diego, CA, and contracted the company to design and build a craft suitable for simulating tactical enemy threats — mimicking both piloted aeroplanes and missiles. The Ryan Firebee that the DoD received in 1951 would prove to the most revolutionary tool in its armada, more valuable than cruise missiles and integrated electric propulsion combined, and one that would eventually change the very nature of how wars are fought.

The first Firebee prototype delivered in 1951 was known as the XQ-2. These 7m long pilotless drones were powered by a 475Nm Continental J69-T-19B turbojet engine providing a top speed well in excess of 800km/h. These prototypes could either be launched from the under-wing of a modified Douglas A-26 Invader while in midair or from the ground using a solid fuel RATO booster.

Content with the results of the prototype’s test flights, Navy ordered the XQ-2 into production, renaming it the Q-2A. The Navy also ordered a slightly smaller variation, the Q-2B, which had a more powerful engine and could operate at higher service ceiling, as well as one powered by a 4448Nm Fairchild J44-R-20B turbojet dubbed the KDA-1. The KDA line, specifically the KDA-4 variant, went on to be the most popular of the first generation Firebees and the only version produced in significant quantities.

By the end of the decade, the US Navy realised that the Firebee could be used for so much more than target practice and, as such, contracted Ryan to build a bigger, better second generation UAV. Known around the Teledyne-Ryan campus as the Model 124, this new aircraft debuted in 1963 and was designated the Q-2C by the Navy — later renamed the BQM-34A.

The BQM-34A was the premier aerial target system throughout the 1960s. It measures nearly 7m long with a 4m wingspan and was powered by a single 7562Nm Continental J69-T-29A engine. It was capable of topping 1126km/h (that’s mach .97), flying as low as 3m above the water and as high as 18,000m for over an hour on a single tank. 7G turns while evading simulated fire were no problem thanks to an advanced microprocessor flight control system.

And instead of an Invader, the BQM-34A launched instead from the under-wing pylon of a DC-130 Hercules drone controller aircraft, which could carry and command up to four drones. From the ground the Firebee employed a Aerojet General X102F solid-fuelled rocket booster. The BQM-34A also came equipped with scoring and countermeasure systems, radar enhancements to help mimic the signatures of larger aircraft, and thermal flares on its wingtips so that heat-seekers would lock-on and destroy the wing, not the engine. After the drone was blown out of the sky it would deploy a parachute and wait to be plucked from the air by a specially equipped catcher helicopter or float on the ocean’s surface until a recovery crew arrived to collect it.

During the 1960s, the Firebee evolved again into potent unmanned surveillance platform, swapping its conventional air intake screen with one specially designed to reduce its radar signature and donning radar-absorbing blankets and pain along its fuselage.

These detection countermeasures helped significantly improve the drone’s survival rates to over 80 per cent. This iteration, known as the AQM-34, also launched from DC-130s and landed with the aid of a helicopter. Over the decade between 1964 and 1975, the AQM-34 flew more than 34,000 ISR sorties over Southeast Asia during the Vietnam War — from Japan and China to Vietnam and Thailand.

One specific variant, the AQM-34Q, alone flew some 268 missions around North Korea between 1970 and 1973 monitoring radio transmissions. It was developed for super-high altitude reconnaissance — its Continental 12,455Nm J100 turbojet engine allowed it to loiter at 23,000m for up to eight hours — in response to the destruction of an EC-121 and the loss of its 31 crew members at the hands of North Korean MiG fighters. It too launched from under a C-130 and could either follow a pre-programmed route or be commanded directly by a pilot from up to 480km away.

There were still plenty of BQM-34A drones not converted to reconnaissance duty, mind you. In the early 1980s, many 34As were updated with more powerful 8452Nm J69-T-41A engines and improved avionics. The Navy cancelled production of the BQM-34A between 1982 and 1986, however brought the platform back as the BQM-34S target drone. And, since then, both the US Navy and US Army (which purchased its own versions of the BQM-34A throughout the 1960s and ’70s as practice targets for its new-fangled Stinger missiles) have been updating them with better engines, avionics, GPS, and chaff-dispensing capabilities (which were put to use in the 2003 Iraq invasion when the Firebees laid anti-SAM chaff corridors for following, piloted planes).

More than 7000 Firebees have been built since the start of the program and many are still serving militaries around the world — including the US, Canada, Japan and other NATO member nations — more than 50 years after their invention.

[MIKA27]

30 Years, 20 Passports: Untold Stories of Steve McCurry’s Photographic Life

Women gathering clover in Wadi Hadhramaut, near Shibam, Yemen, 1999

‘When I first arrived in Shibam, I was astonished – it is extraordinary. It perfectly illustrates what a unique place Yemen is in terms of architecture, environment and landscape.’ The sixteenth century buildings ‘look like mud skyscrapers rising out of the flat desert plain. The city is surrounded by mountain escarpments on the far horizons – it’s one of the most unusual, interesting landscapes in the world.’

“Flying low over Lake Bled, on assignment in Slovenia in February 1989, the pilot took the plane dangerously close to the water’s surface. The wheels caught and we went down, the propeller shattering as we hit the water. The plane flipped, and the fuselage began to sink in the icy lake. My seat belt was stuck, but an instinct for self-preservation kicked in and I was able to wrestle free. The pilot and I swam under the aircraft to the surface. My camera and bag are still 65 feet down.”

So begins Magnum photographer Steve McCurry’s latest book, Steve McCurry Untold: The Stories Behind the Photographs (Phaidon). The book spans 30 years of McCurry’s career and includes fascinating ephemera from his travels: diary entries, photos of him at work and some of the 20-plus passports he’s gone through over the decades. McCurry survived the Slovenia plane crash, as well as armed robbers and bombings in Afghanistan, but what comes through in his images is wonder, rather than suffering. He manages to make the world seem enormous and quite small; exotic, and somehow familiar.

Growing up in suburban Philadelphia, McCurry was a wild child who preferred playing in the woods to studying. His first encounter with photography, at age 11, was through a LIFE magazine photo essay by Brian Brake on India’s monsoons.

Steve McCurry photographing in Nepal, 1983

“It just transported me to another world,” he told TIME. Inspired by photographers like Dorothea Lange and Walker Evans, he knew he’d found his calling.

“My first good photograph was in Mexico City,” McCurry once told CNN. “There was a [homeless] man sleeping in front of a furniture store … below this brand-new sofa in the window. The juxtaposition was, I thought, a perfect kind of image. That’s what set me on my way to being a professional photographer.”

After graduating college, McCurry spent a few years at the Today’s Post in King of Prussia, Penn., shooting high school graduations and Kiwanis meetings, honing his skills — but he knew it wasn’t for him. He left for India in 1978, intending to stay for three months.

He stayed for two years.

“India was like another planet to me,” he told CNN. “I’ve been back 80 or 90 times … and there’s still many places I haven’t seen.”

A year into his time abroad, he met Afghan refugees who told him about the brewing mujahedeen resistance to the violent pro-Russian government. He agreed to document their plight; they disguised him in traditional dress and brought him into the country illegally.

“My possessions included a plastic cup, a Swiss Army knife, two camera bodies, four lenses, a bag of film and a few packets of airline peanuts,” he recalls. The conflict — and McCurry’s professional profile — escalated dramatically when the Soviets launched a full-scale invasion. Their jets were flying “so low and close they would fill my lens,” McCurry writes. “We just prayed they wouldn’t see us and start strafing.”

Portraits of Steve McCurry taken in a local photo studio in Kabul, Afghanistan, 2006

As dramatic as his adventures have been, McCurry has always focused on the human cost of war, rather than conflict itself. It’s important, he says, to maintain a rigorous detachment in the face of suffering in order to do the job—and it also probably helps that he isn’t married and doesn’t have kids.

McCurry’s detachment, however, is hardly a form of callousness.

“People, wherever they are in the world, want to be respected and loved. If you respect people, doors open,” McCurry told Al Jazeera. Another key lesson is patience. He researches a place before picking up the camera, visiting five to ten villages in a given country before focusing on the most interesting one. He also rarely works alone. “I can’t stress how important it is to work with a trusted assistant or guide. That person really has your life in his hands, and he can make or break your story.”

Not all of McCurry’s work carries him into war zones. Pirelli, the Italian tire company, commissioned McCurry to shoot its 2013 calendar in Rio. Most fashion photographers shoot nude female models for these corporate calendars. McCurry’s models not only wore clothes, but he selected women associated with humanitarian causes. Commissions like this, he says, allow him to make strong work without compromising his vision.

“There’s a meditative aspect to it,” McCurry told Art Space. “When I’m walking around photographing, I get into a particular mindset where I become much more attuned to the world around me. It’s a joy to be alive, and maybe that’s what come through.”

Steve McCurry has been a photojournalist for over 30 years. He is the recipient of the Robert Capa Gold Medal, the National Press Photographers Award and four first prize awards in the World Press Photo contest. Steve McCurry Untold: The Stories Behind the Photographs will be published by Phaidon in September 2013.

Boys in the boot of a taxi, Kabul, Afghanistan, 1992

Concerned about the plight of the Hazara people of Afghanistan, McCurry helped establish a non-profit called ImagineAsia. ‘It’s an attempt to get warm clothes, textbooks, pencils and notebooks to the Bamiyan region of Afghanistan, where the Hazara people live. Maybe most significantly, we’ve helped to set up classes for children and their mothers in Kabul. In addition, ImagineAsia has sponsored a young Hazara woman who is studying for a university degree in the United States.’

Train station platform, Old Delhi, India, 1983

‘The station is a theatre, and everything imaginable happens on its stage. There is nothing the trains haven’t observed.’

Men praying in the Hazratbal mosque, Srinagar, Kashmir, 1998

‘I can’t stress how important it is to work with a trusted assistant or guide. That person really has your life in his hands, and he can make or break your story.’ For his project in Kashmir, McCurry worked with friend and journalist Surinder Singh Oberoi, who went by the nickname Lovely. ‘Lovely is a big, burly Sikh and the main person who helped me on the story. I sat with him virtually every night going over different ideas and story possibilities, making notes and lists of potential locations and subjects to photograph.’

Mother and child sleeping on their houseboat on Tonle Sap Lake, near Angkor, Cambodia, 1998

'Part of it is just being patient and waiting until people decide to look somewhere else or get bored with you. It might be 80 percent of your time isn't productive, but if you get a couple of times in the course of the day where you can get what you need, that's good enough.'

Workers turning ropes of sugar paste into hard candy, Kabul, Afghanistan, 2007

‘I wanted to do the story because the Hazaras were clearly a people suffering persecution they did not deserve. They are considered heretics by the Sunni majority, and their social standing is similar to that of the Dalit or ‘untouchable’ caste in India. Now, with growing Taliban influence despite a decade of American and NATO intervention, the Hazaras are probably going to suffer again.’

Man reading the Qur’an, Sana’a, Yemen, 1997

‘With its biblical oriental flavor, its markets and its ancient walled cities, Yemen is exotic, but there’s much more to it.’

Welder in a ship-breaking yard, Bombay, India, 1994

‘The ships are absolutely huge, and these people are like termites, slowly breaking them down. The vessels are reduced to scrap within three or four months, and then just gone.’

Mother and child looking in through a taxi window, Bombay, India, 1993

‘I was in a taxi waiting at a traffic light during the monsoon, and a woman brought her child up to the car window. I raised my camera, took two frames, the light changed, and off we went – it all happened in about seven or eight seconds. Two months later, I came across these two frames when I was editing the pictures in New York. I was delighted that the picture came out as well as it did. It seemed to symbolize the separation between my world and hers – I’m in this air conditioned bubble, she’s out there in the heat and the rain – and how those two worlds came together for a moment.’

Three monks climbing to the Mingun pagoda, cracked during an earthquake in 1839, Mandalay, Burma, 1994

'There is something deeply appealing about Buddhist countries. I am endlessly intrigued by the way the monks live, by the way Buddhist philosophy emphasizes compassion, as well as by the iconography. The ethics and the aesthetics of Buddhism are melded in a unique way.’

Agra Fort Station, Agra, India, 1983

‘Each time a train rolled in, I would try to capture the incredible swirl of life there, all the time stepping over people camped out on the platforms, and working my way around mountains of luggage. India’s stations are a microcosm of the country. You see life being lived out right in front of you. Everything is on view – eating, sleeping, washing, caring for children, conducting business. Chai wallahs sell tea, cows and monkeys forage for food, people compete for tickets – the noise of the crowds is like an assault. Someone may be repairing shoes, another might be cutting hair or shaving someone. Many of the barbers who operate in stations have just a chair and a dish with a little water in it.’

Struggling camels silhouetted against the oil-fire, al-Ahmadi oil field, Kuwait, 1991

‘The darkness caused by the burning oil wells was like a moonless night. The exposure on my camera was about a quarter of a second on f2.8.’ The photographs show a scorched, infernal place, ‘but they don’t convey the fine mist of oil that hung in the air and coated my cameras, or the deafening roar of the burning wells. Nor do they show the unexploded bombs and mines that dotted the desert. I’ll never forget the moment I got out of the car to stretch my legs and caught a glimpse of an allied lawn-dart mine behind the vehicle with our tire tracks running right over it!’

McCurry’s 35mm slides from Angkor, Cambodia

Pages from McCurry’s ‘Kashmir’ journal

Letter from Elie Rogers, Illustrations Editor, National Geographic Magazine, 17 December 1983

Cover and pages from McCurry’s ‘Monsoon’ journal, 1983

Cover and pages from McCurry’s ‘Monsoon’ journal, 1983

Photo page from McCurry’s Passport, 1996–2006 (l)

Cambodian Visa, 2003, from McCurry’s Passport ®

[MIKA27]

President Obama 'sure Syria behind chemical attack'

President Barack Obama: ''I have no interest in any kind of open-ended conflict in Syria''

US President Barack Obama says the US has concluded that the Syrian government carried out a chemical weapons attacks near Damascus.

He said the use of chemical weapons affected US national interests and sending a "shot across the bows" could have a positive impact on Syria's war.

But in the interview with PBS, said he had not yet made a decision about whether to intervene militarily.

His comments follow a day of behind-the-scenes wrangling at the UN.

The UK had been pushing for permanent members of the UN Security Council to adopt a resolution which would have authorised measures to protect civilians in Syria.

However, Syrian ally Russia refused to agree to the resolution and the meeting produced no end to the diplomatic stalemate which has long characterised the UN position on Syria.

The US State Department criticised "Russian intransigence" and said it could not allow diplomatic paralysis to serve as a shield for the Syrian leadership.

Critics have questioned what purpose a limited strike on Syria could serve, but Mr Obama said it would send the government of Bashar al-Assad "a pretty strong signal that it better not do it [use chemical weapons] again".

The US has yet to produce the intelligence it says shows Mr Assad's government is guilty of using chemical weapons, and UN weapons inspectors are still investigating inside Syria.

UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon has said they need four more days to complete their investigations and has appealed for the team to be "given time to do its job".

Syria denies using chemical weapons and blames opposition fighters for the attack on 21 August, which reportedly killed hundreds of people near Damascus.

It accused the West of "inventing" excuses to launch a strike.

"Western countries, starting with the United States, are inventing fake scenarios and fictitious alibis to intervene militarily in Syria," Prime Minister Wael al-Halqi said on Syrian state television.

In a separate development, Syria's ambassador to the UN, Bashar Jaafari, asked for the inspectors to investigate what he said were three cases of the use of chemical weapons in the last week against "dozens" of government troops in Damascus suburbs.

'Consequences'

President Obama told the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) that the US had concluded that the Syrian government carried out the chemical weapons attack.

Public opinion remains weighted against any military intervention both in the UK (above) and in the US

"There need to be international consequences, so we are consulting with our allies," the president said.

There was "a prospect that chemical weapons could be directed at us - and we want to make sure that doesn't happen".

But Mr Obama said he was still evaluating options for possible military retaliation, and had come to no final decision on what course to take.

The BBC's David Willis in Washington says this is the most unequivocal that Mr Obama has been that the Syrian government was guilty of deploying chemical weapons.

Despite that, our correspondent says, Mr Obama looked cautious and spoke in a measured way, and he was clearly concerned about getting Congress on board as well as the American public.

Opinion polls until now have shown very little interest among the US public in getting involved in the Syrian conflict.

The US has said it will not take action alone - but one of its primary allies, the UK, has agreed to wait until UN inspectors report back before taking a final parliamentary vote on potential action.

Russia rejected a UK push to try to agree a resolution on Syria among permanent UN Security Council members on Wednesday, with Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov saying the UN could not consider any draft resolution or proposed action in Syria before the UN weapons inspectors reported back.

The use of force without a sanction of the UN Security Council would be a "crude violation" of international law and "lead to the long-term destabilisation of the situation in the country and the region", Mr Lavrov has said.

Models for possible intervention

• Iraq 1991: US-led global military coalition, anchored in international law; explicit mandate from UN Security Council to evict Iraqi forces from Kuwait
  
• Balkans 1990s: US arms supplied to anti-Serb resistance in Croatia and Bosnia in defiance of UN-mandated embargo; later US-led air campaign against Serb paramilitaries. In 1999, US jets provided bulk of 38,000 Nato sorties against Serbia to prevent massacres in Kosovo - legally controversial with UN Security Council resolutions linked to "enforcement measures"
  
• Somalia 1992-93: UN Security Council authorised creation of international force with aim of facilitating humanitarian supplies as Somali state failed. Gradual US military involvement without clear objective culminated in Black Hawk Down disaster in 1993. US troops pulled out
  
• Libya 2011: France and UK sought UN Security Council authorisation for humanitarian operation in Benghazi in 2011. Russia and China abstained but did not veto resolution. Air offensive continued until fall of Gaddafi
  

UN 'moment'

The meeting of the five permanent members has now finished, but the UK, US and France are continuing talks.

The UK will want to be seen as exhausting every diplomatic avenue, says the BBC's Nick Bryant at the UN headquarters in New York.

For the UK, there needs to be a UN "moment" - despite the fact that UN action will likely be blocked by Russia or China.

But even without UN backing the US and its allies have been clear that they see the military option is still open to them, our correspondent says.

US State Department spokeswoman Marie Harf said the US could "not be held up in responding by Russia's intransigence - continued intransigence - at the United Nations".

"This is the first use of chemical warfare in the 21st Century," said UK Foreign Secretary William Hague. "It has to be unacceptable... or we will confront even bigger war crimes in the future."

More than 100,000 people are estimated to have died since the conflict erupted in Syria in March 2011, and the conflict has produced at least 1.7 million refugees.

[MIKA27]

'Mugabe toilet paper': Zimbabwean acquitted

A Zimbabwean court has acquitted a man charged with intending to use a poster of President Robert Mugabe as toilet paper in a bar, his lawyer says.

Prosecutors had accused Takura Mufumisi, 26, of violating election laws by destroying a campaign poster.

However, the court ruled that it had failed to prove its case, Mr Mufumisi's lawyer said.

Mr Mugabe, 89, won a seven term in office after beating his rival, Morgan Tsvangirai, in elections on 31 July.

Mr Tsvangirai denounced the election as a sham, claiming he had been cheated of victory.

Mr Mufumisi was arrested at a bar in the southern city of Masvingo less than a week before the election.

He was acquitted by a magistrate's court because of a lack of evidence, his lawyer, Shumba Phillip, told the BBC.

"The state had one witness only, whose testimony was to the effect that he only saw the accused person in the toilet," he added.

Mr Mufumisi was acquitted on 5 August, but his case has come to light only now and has become a talking point among many people in Zimbabwe, reports the BBC's Brian Hungwe from the capital, Harare.

Another lawyer, Kumbirai Mafunda, said there were a growing number of cases of people accused of insulting Mr Mugabe.

"We believe this is an infringement of their freedom of expression," he said.

In March, a senior member of Mr Tsvangirai's Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) party, Solomon Madzore, was arrested after being accused of calling Mr Mugabe a "limping donkey" at an election rally.

He denied a charge of insulting the president.

Mr Mugabe has ruled Zimbabwe since independence in 1980.

He won with 61% of the presidential vote against 34% for Mr Tsvangirai in the 31 July election.

The poll ended the power-sharing government the two leaders formed in 2009 to end conflict in Zimbabwe.

[MIKA27]

How a Near-Death Experience in the Jungle Inspired a Blockbuster Zombie Game

Dean Hall was close to death in the jungles of Brunei. It was December 2010 and the officer cadet in the New Zealand army was alone on a survival-training mission. Given only two days’ worth of food for 20 days, he supplemented his diet with raw fish and ferns. He slept on a bed of sticks, and by the end of the mission he’d lost 44 pounds from his already lean frame. There were other trainees out there, and he started to plot raids on their food supplies. He thought of himself as an honorable person, but he was too hungry for honor. As he approached one man’s camp, the guy spotted him and tossed him some rancid ramen. Hall boiled the noodles and wolfed them down.

That night, as water pooled around his bed and ramen roiled his stomach, he imagined himself inside his favorite videogame, a military simulation for PCs called Arma 2. He had been playing it since its release in 2009 and often spent three to four hours a day on the game. Now, lying on the jungle floor, his feverish imagination turned Arma 2 into something different. He visualized a new kind of game, one in which there were no missions, no objectives, and no ability to simply be respawn when killed. You had one life, and if you lost it, you lost everything.

Physically, Hall was a mess when he emerged from the jungle — he underwent emergency surgery for an intestinal blockage. But intellectually, he was energized by his visions and inspired to build a new Arma 2 modification. Amateur game mods have been popular since the 1990s, when players adapted first-person shooters like Wolfenstein 3D and Quake to create entirely new games.

Mods can’t run on their own — they operate in conjunction with the underlying game — and are usually given away online by the \0xFCberfans who code them. The high-water mark came in 1999, when two gamers turned the science fiction world of Half-Life into a terrorist-versus-soldier battle zone called Counter-Strike. It was so popular, gamemaker Valve bought it in 2000 and released it as a stand-alone title, eventually selling more than 25 million units.

A savvy programmer, Hall had created lots of Arma 2 mods, adding new weapons and vehicles to the game, and even new missions.

But what he had in mind now was fundamentally different. Typically, games try not to frustrate players; if your character is killed, you aren’t forced to start over from the beginning. But Hall thought this stripped gaming of emotion and drama. He wanted to reproduce what he had experienced in the jungle, something filled with agony, frustration, and fear. “I wanted it to be brutal,” he says.

In a hotel room in Singapore, Hall began coding. In his new game, players would begin with almost nothing, stranded in the middle of a barren land, forced to hunt for supplies. If they were killed, they’d lose everything and have to start over. The only mission: Survive.

Eventually he hit on the idea to replace Arma‘s terrorists with zombies, but the undead would actually be the least of a player’s concerns. Hall was designing the game as a social experiment: Every time a player logged in, they’d be pitted against other players also hunting for supplies. Players would compete for limited food, water, and weaponry, and their anxiety would make them more deadly than the brain-eaters. The gameplay re-created his feeling of isolation in the jungle, surrounded by dozens of starving strangers, any of whom might be plotting to steal his meager supplies just as he was plotting to steal theirs. Hall wanted the possibility of dying and losing everything to drive players to kill other survivors in order to steal their rations. He would call the game Day Z, a twist on D-Day.

Bohemia Interactive, the Czech company behind Arma 2, actively encourages fans to mess with its game, so there were already hundreds of Arma 2 offshoots. When Hall was building a mod, he would frequently contact a Bohemia developer named Ivan Buchta, usually with an esoteric code question. But after returning from the jungle, Hall had become bored, and this time, while working to finish Day Z in his spare time, he wrote to ask whether Bohemia was hiring. “I was impressed with the mods he’d made in the past,” Buchta says. “We needed help on Arma 3, so we agreed to bring him on.”

It wasn’t a great deal for Hall. He’d have to buy his own ticket to the Czech Republic, take a leave of absence from the New Zealand army (which allows two-year absences), and be paid less than he had been making as a lowly second lieutenant. But he took the job; he was thrilled at the prospect of being in the birthplace of his favorite game. It was like a die-hard Star Warsfan getting hired by Lucasfilm.

Still, when he arrived at Bohemia, he decided not to tell Buchta or anyone else about what he was working on. “I knew they’d think zombies were stupid,” he says. “They’re all hardcore realism military junkies, so I kind of felt embarrassed that I was making a zombie mod.” He decided just to put Day Z online. He figured a few hundred people would play and no one else would notice.

Within weeks, though, players flocked to the game. By the end of its first month, Day Z had attracted 10,000 users, and Hall decided he’d better mention it to Buchta. Sure enough, Buchta was dismissive. The company was gunning to finish its latest Arma release. He didn’t have time for zombies.

But days later Buchta loaded Day Z to check it out. The game placed him near an old warehouse. He had a baseball cap and not much else. He quickly found an old handgun with no bullets. There were zombies in the distance and the threat of other players killing him for his gun. The scenery was just like Arma 2, but everything seemed different. “I felt really naked,” he says. Most first-person shooters equip newbies with guns and enough ammo to survive a sustained firefight. Now Buchta was scrounging for bullets and counting them carefully. “I’m a professional game developer, but I was immediately scared and tense,” he says. “Games don’t usually work like that on me.”

In Day Z, players traverse a bleak landscape, dodging zombies and one another. The only mission: Survive.

Buchta messaged Marek Spanel, who co-owned Bohemia with his brother Ondrej, and told them to try the game. The brothers had formed the company in 1999 and spent most of their lives playing videogames together. Now they spawned into the game simultaneously and discovered that they’d been placed miles apart. They began to move toward each other, dodging zombies and other players. It took more than an hour of nail-biting evasion to rendezvous. “Walking for half an hour in a game would usually be boring. But just doing that, I felt stronger emotions than I’d ever felt in Arma,” Marek Spanel says.

To play Hall’s game, users had to buy Arma 2 for about $20. At that point, Arma 2 had been out for three years and was nearing the end of its life cycle. Arma 3 was supposed to jump-start the company’s sales, but suddenly purchases ofArma 2 started ticking up.

By June, around 20,000 players were using Arma 2 to play Day Z. By early July, there were 405,000 users, and it didn’t stop there.

In August more than 1 million people were playing Day Z. Arma 2 was suddenly a top-selling PC game. In the three years before Hall put Day Zonline, Arma 2 had sold 1 million copies. Now it sold a million more in just a few months.

The guy who’d arrived at the company as a junior designer five months before now seemed to hold the keys to its future. Bohemia, meanwhile, had raked in millions from the boom inArma 2 sales, and Spanel wanted to build on that success. So when Hall said he wanted to turn Day Z into a stand-alone game, Spanel offered him a promotion from junior designer to project lead, the top spot.

Hall was ecstatic. He now had a large team of people implementing his every idea. He requested a discharge from the military and started refining the Day Z world. Originally supplies appeared in the open, lying on the ground. Now those necessities were harder to find, hidden in cupboards or under beds. He also populated the game with hundreds of public domain books like War of the Worlds and Moby-****. Maybe players would find a quiet place to read away from the zombie apocalypse.

He had been in the Czech Republic for only a few months — he was still living out of a suitcase — but his signing bonus gave him enough money to buy a house. The problem was, he wasn’t sure where he might settle. His military discharge was pending — he could go anywhere. Plus, he was powerfully interested in collecting experiences that might inform his gameplay. In 2006 he had climbed Mount Cook, New Zealand’s highest peak, and thought that it would be interesting to explore the idea of coding a mountain-climbing game. He also felt he was capable of much more than the lowly 12,316-foot peak, so he decided to pay $100,000 to climb Mount Everest. “Dean is part crazy,” Spanel says. “In the middle of the most successful project of his life, he leaves for two months to climb Everest.”

Using a Sabre portable satellite modem he brought to Nepal, Hall approved design changes and budgets and IM’d with the coders building the game. “So here I am, at Everest Base Camp,” he posted to the Day Z development Tumblr on April 15, 2013, and then, from 17,717 feet, offered a rundown of the new features his team was coding into the game: The world would look more battered, there’d be radios for communicating with other players, and the zombies’ movements would be more, um, realistic. Though he’d arranged the mountaineering trip in a burst of enthusiasm, he tried to convince everyone otherwise. “Although the timing is poor for my sabbatical, it is not something planned on a whim and involves nonrefundable costs of up to $100K.”

On May 16 he began his summit attempt. The weather was clear, and he made good time: By 12:01 am on the 21st, he was less than four hours from the peak. The Hillary Step, a 40-foot wall of rock and ice and the last obstacle before the summit, loomed ahead. He started to move toward it when he heard a distress call from his climbing partner up above. “There’s a guy dying here,” the voice crackled over the radio. “What do I do?”

Hall ascended to the dying man’s position; it was a Bangladeshi climber from another group who had been left for dead. He was clipped into the same rope they were ascending, and he wasn’t moving. Hall’s sherpa grabbed the man’s hand. It was limp; he couldn’t tell if the man was breathing. “His position and posture symbolized absolute desperation and sadness,” Hall wrote later in a blog entry.

They were only an hour from the summit, and they debated whether to abort their climb to try to save the man. Hall’s partner was distraught — he wanted to help even if that meant abandoning the climb. Hall had no such ambivalence. “I thought I would have reacted differently, but when I looked at him, I realized that there was just nothing we could do,” Hall says. “I felt really sad, but I figured he was dead or he was about to die.” Hall persuaded his partner to keep moving, and they scrambled past the dying man. “It was a Day Z moment,” Hall says grimly. The man died, and his body was left behind, encased in snow and ice.

An hour later, Hall reached the summit. “The sight was so breathtaking it was like being slapped in the face,” he recalled on the blog. “I immediately started crying … I’ve thought a lot about how to summarize that feeling, and the best I can do is to say that if there is a God, then it’s like looking upon his face.”

Four days later he was back in Prague, funneling the experience into the haunting, morally fraught environment of the new Day Z. The game, he hopes, will force others to confront their own humanity. It comes out this fall.

[MIKA27]

Lamborghini Accademy:

You don't have to be rich to drive a Lamborghini. You just need to sign up for the Lamborghini Academy.

Available year-round, this unique experience includes the Track Academy, which has you hitting the pavement at tracks like Silverstone, Imola or Hockenheim alongside instructors, the Winter Academy, which teaches you to push the all-wheel drive systems to the max across snow and ice, and a Race Academy featuring V10 Super Trofeo race cars. Any of the three are available as one- or two-day programs, but no matter which you choose, you're sure to emerge as a better driver — even if you're arriving home to pull a Prius out of the garage.

[MIKA27]

Ring Clock:

Whether you're averse to wearing things on your wrist, or you're just looking for an interesting way to start a conversation at parties, the Ring Clock ($185) is the timepiece for you.

Made from surgical-grade, allergy-free stainless steel, this ring shows the time using either blue or orange LEDs when you spin its face. Its thin battery charges wirelessly by placing it on the included dock, and will last for up to one week of average use. Its water-resistant exterior will also shed the odd splash or water drop, so you won't have to worry the next time you venture out into the rain.

[MIKA27]

Four Roses 125th Anniversary Bourbon:

There are certain things that signal the start of the fall season.

Leaves change color, football season begins, and Four Roses releases a limited edition small batch bourbon. This year marks the 125th for the historic distillery, and while they are celebrating year round, the 125th Anniversary Limited Edition Small Batch ($85) might be cream of an already prestigious crop. It's an enticing blend of three of Four Roses unique bourbon recipes bottled at barrel strength that smells and tastes like a creamy vanilla, brown sugar dessert. Only 8,000 bottles will see retail store shelves, so don't miss out on this autumn masterpiece.

[MIKA27]

Sigmo Voice Translation Device:

If you've spent any amount of time traveling abroad, you've likely run into a language barrier, making it hard to get the most out of your trip.

With the Sigmo Voice Translation Device ($50) you can avoid those issues, without resorting to learning a new language. This device connects to your iOS or Android device over Bluetooth and, using existing services, translates your voice into one of 25 different languages. Just speak into the microphone and it will translate everything you say, playing it back over the speaker. It's small and light, so you can bring it anywhere, attach it to your clothes, or hang it around your neck.