William and Sly 2 is a gorgeous, ethereal fantasy exploration game wherein you play a nimble fox tasked with finding the scattered pages of your human friend's journal, while gathering mushrooms, finding keys to unlock mystery boxes, and freeing rune-bound spirits and pixies trapped in frost along the way.
[more inside]
posted by taz
on Jan 16, 2012 -
14 comments
The London Geographical Journal, the preeminent publication in its field, observed in 1953 that “Fawcett marked the end of an age. One might almost call him the last of the individualist explorers. The day of the aeroplane, the radio, the organized and heavily financed modern expedition had not arrived. With him, it was the heroic story of a man against the forest.” Fawcett was none other than
Percival "Percy" Harrison Fawcett,
British soldier, trained as a surveyor of unknown lands, doubling as a British spy. But
his true love was exploration, and not simply to mark boundaries on a map. His final goal was the same that had been the demise of many explorers:
a mighty lost civilization in South America.
[more inside]
posted by filthy light thief
on Dec 29, 2011 -
6 comments
Built as part of the fifth
/dev/fort developer retreat,
Spacelog.org allows you to explore early space missions via the original NASA transcripts. Currently live are
Mercury 6 which made John Glenn the first American in orbit, and the 'successful failure'
Apollo 13 (The transcribed
key moment and the
original). Alongside the transcripts are supporting materials from the NASA archives including
photography and descriptions of the
mission phases. The developers are
looking for help to digitise the Gemini 7, Apollo 8 and Apollo 11 missions.
posted by garrett
on Dec 1, 2010 -
11 comments
Fifteen years ago this week, programmer
Ron Britvich launched version 1.0 of
Active Worlds. Started as an autonomous project of
Worlds, Inc. (a spinoff of educational gamesmaker
Knowledge Adventure), Active Worlds was one of the first and most ambitious attempts to create a 3D virtual community on the web.
Built on the architecture of Britvich's
Worlds Chat beta, Active Worlds
debuted in the form of
Alphaworld, a sunny green infinite plane open to
public building. In its opening years Alphaworld experienced
a land rush of construction, resulting in
an anarchic starfish sprawl larger than the state of California. A sister company, Circle of Fire, was soon founded to craft
additional themed hubs, and once individual ownership of worlds became possible the AW community spawned a veritable universe of
hundreds of worlds.
Although
the company has seen its
ups and downs since those heady times and its fortunes have slowly dwindled, the
Active Worlds platform survives to
this day. Look inside for a simple guide on how to log in to the (free) service, rundowns of the best worlds, links to essays analyzing the program's legacy, and other content summing up
its venerable community.
[more inside]
posted by Rhaomi
on Jul 4, 2010 -
18 comments
Early in the days of
exploration of Antarctica, Australian geologist
Douglas Mawson turned down an invitation to join Robert Falcon Scott's
Terra Nova Expedition in 1910 (
Cool Antarctica previously). Instead, Mawson lead his own expedition, the
Australasian Antarctic Expedition (December 1911 to December 1913), an expedition to chart the 2000-mile coastline directly south of Australia, one of the least-visited parts of the continent throughout the early years of Antarctic exploration.
The group's efforts and activities are well documented, and many remnants of the expedition remain on Antarctica.
The conservation of Mawson's Huts is now an ongoing effort from
Association of Australasian Palaeontologists (AAP)
Mawson's Huts Foundation. While most efforts were focused on the recovery and treatment of artifacts inside the main hut, the group also searched for the
Vickers (
Aviation)
monoplane that was modified to become an "air tractor", or motorized sledge. The remains of the plane were last seen in 1975.
Now the plane has been found, thanks to an exceptionally low tide and a bit of luck.
[more inside]
posted by filthy light thief
on Jan 5, 2010 -
11 comments
MAN is one of a number of animals that make things, but man is the only one that depends for its very survival on the things he has made. That
simple observation is the
starting point for an
ambitious history programme that the BBC will
begin broadcasting on January 18th in which it aims to tell a history of the world through 100 objects in the British Museum (BM). A
joint venture four years in the making between the BM and the BBC, the series features 100 15-minute radio broadcasts, a separate 13 episodes in which
children visit the museum at night and try to unlock its mysteries, a BBC World Service package of tailored omnibus editions for broadcasting around the world and an
interactive digital programme involving 350 museums in Britain which will be available free over the internet. The presenter is
Neil MacGregor, the BM’s director, who has moved from the study of art to the contemplation of things. “Objects take you into the thought world of the past,” he says. “When you think about the skills required to make something you begin to think about the brain that made it.”
via The Economist [more inside]
posted by infini
on Dec 30, 2009 -
36 comments
Spacehack "A directory of ways to participate in space exploration. Interact and connect with the space community."
posted by chrismear
on Aug 4, 2009 -
6 comments
NYC Grid is a photo blog dedicated to exploring and discovering The City of New York block by block and corner by corner. Updated every weekday, each post covers a new block with a focus on the mundane and ephemeral. An optimistic snapshot of New York as it is now.
[more inside]
posted by netbros
on Aug 1, 2009 -
8 comments
Cool Antarctica is a site dedicated to all things Antarctic. There are
pictures (
penguins),
videos (including, among much else, an old
documentary about Edmund Hillary's and Vivian Fuchs' Transantarctic Expedition),
a history section focusing on the famous explorers (e.g.
Amundsen,
Scott,
Shackleton,
Charcot and
de Gerlache) and a
fact file, which includes what may be my favorite section, an
Antarctic slang dictionary (
degomble: removing snow that's stuck to clothing before going inside -
monk-on: a term for being in a bad, usually introspective mood, "he's got a monk-on" -
poppy: alcoholic beverage that is chilled with natural Antarctic ice). All this is but a taster of what's on the website.
posted by Kattullus
on Apr 29, 2009 -
20 comments
Hints to Travellers served as the
Royal Geographical Societies unofficial bible, used by late 19th and early 20th century British explorers such as Shackleton, Scott, Richard Burton, Col. Perry Fawcett and other legends who carried it into the field as a practical state of the art manual of gentlemanly exploration. Indiana Jones no doubt has his own copy too. Don't leave home without it!
[more inside]
posted by stbalbach
on Feb 3, 2009 -
19 comments
On Oct. 27th, 1915.
Sir Ernest Shackleton gave the order to abandon ship, moving the crew and supplies off of the
ice bound Endurance. The Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition would never achieve it's goal of crossing the continent, instead Shackleton would become famous for somethings far greater: his masterful and amazing ability at leadership and survival for himself and his crew of 27 men under the harshest conditions imaginable.
[more inside]
posted by mrzarquon
on Oct 27, 2008 -
59 comments
"Skin painted bright red, heads partially shaved, arrows drawn back in the longbows and aimed square at the aircraft buzzing overhead. The gesture is unmistakable: Stay Away. The apparent aggression shown by these people is quite understandable, for they are members of one of Earth's last uncontacted tribes." [more inside]
posted by Rhaomi
on May 29, 2008 -
88 comments
In 1897, pioneering Swedish balloonist Salomon August Andrée and two companions took off for the north pole in a hot air balloon. In 1930 their bodies were found, along with records of their expedition.
This archive of newspaper articles tells their story.
(So does Wikipedia, of course.) Many of the photos they took are
here, along with a lot of text in Polish that I can't read any more than most of you can, so don't come complaining to me.
posted by dersins
on Oct 8, 2007 -
12 comments
A heroic sculpture of explorer Christopher Newport recently unveiled at the university of the same name is
drawing criticism because of the decision of the university and the sculptor to depict Newport with his right hand manfully resting on his unsheathed sword--even though he lost that arm two decades before the founding of Virginia. Sculptor Jon Hair ("AMERICA'S MOST HIGHLY COMMISSIONED MONUMENTAL SCULPTOR"
according his website) isn't winning any friends with his explanation of the blunder. "I wouldn't show an important historical figure like this with his arm cut off . . . We don't show our heroes maimed."
[more inside]
posted by LarryC
on Sep 9, 2007 -
61 comments
Illicit Ohio has a wide range of photos and essays of
abandoned places in Ohio, from the
Cincinnati subway system (yes, there really
is was one, and it's been
discussed here before), to
various and
sundry prisons,
government installations,
hotels,
hosiptals,
houses and more. And don't miss the
old vs. new galleries, either.
posted by dersins
on Aug 29, 2007 -
20 comments
Cane Hill
^ is an abandoned
state run lunatic asylum (link contains tons of photographs) in South London. Built in 1882, the hospital for years housed Charlie Chaplin's mother (before he became wealthy enough to rescue her). Shuttered since 1990, the locations' inherent creepiness continues to fascinate urban explorers. Inside Out has a series of interesting pieces on the location, including
music &
paintings inspired by Cane Hill, an
essay on the location, detailed
floorplans and further
photographs.
posted by jonson
on Aug 26, 2006 -
18 comments
