Kickstarter Review: OneBowl to rule them all!

Today the Conversation is taking a look at the OneBowl project. Justin Herd, the creator of OneBowl, had an interesting idea, "what if you could cook, strait, eat, and store food all in the same container?"  Instead of just going, "huh" and moving on like most people do, Justin began prototyping and trying to make good on his idea and the OneBowl was born. 

 

First off, lets look at the concept of a "single bowl solution" to cooking and eating noodles.  As someone who lived the "Ramen Noodle Diet" back in my younger days I can see the appeal of this project.  Place your noodles and water in the bowl, heat, strain without a separate colander, enjoy, and even save the leftovers all in one go.   At first glance this is the perfect item for college students and single people in general, then again like any good "as seen on TV" type product this one quickly breaks down beyond a limited use case scenario. 

There's nothing wrong with creating products for limited case situations, there are plenty of products that fit that mold, but the OneBowl definitely feels  like something you'd see for $19.95 being pitched by a pitchman of some kind and the actual Kickstarter Campaign taps into that fact quite well.  From kitschy edited event scenarios to the $20 price tag the campaign is designed to match "As Seen on TV" feel and energy in a great way.  Justin seems to know his target audience and has aimed appropriately.

 

In the end would I back the OneBowl?  No, but that's not really a knock on the project as I am most definitely not the target audience.  The question then becomes, is the target audience large enough to get them over the $50,000 target?  Honestly I think it is, but the problem becomes reaching that target audience and I'm not sure they've got the critical mass of internet attention to get them there.  I hope they can make it, or through this campaign gain the attention of one of the "As seen on TV" manufacturers looking for their next big idea.  I would love to see this product in Target the next time I'm at the checkout line.  

Final Review:

Product Review  4 out of 5

The OneBowl is a "limited use/situation product" but in that situation it seems well designed and thought out.  If you have limited time/space available for microwave cooking items this might be great for you.  Even beyond the dorm those with limited storage at work (like in you cubical) might also want to give this one a look.  

Campaign Review 4 out of 5

The campaign is very well laid out with lots of pictures and story along with some funny videos.  My only knock against the campaign is the lack of a budget breakdown and non-college related use scenarios.  I think the campaign has a slightly larger market then is being aimed at, but other than that it is doing a great job!

Never Underestimate the Power of a Great Cookie

Welcome back to the Conversation!  Today I am rejoined by Vera Greentea and her accomplice Allison Strom who have come to talk about their latest Kickstarter Recipes for the Dead Issue 3.  Thank you for coming back Vera, and welcome Allison to your first visit to the conversation.  

Vera: Thanks so much for inviting us!

Allison: Thanks so much, Hi there!

Lets start with the basics, can you tell us a bit about the Recipes for the Dead series?  

Vera: Recipes for the Dead is an adventurous fantasy romp of an ambitious young pastry chef whose bakery is about to go bankrupt. In a desperate effort to save RocoCookie Shop, she steals a cookbook that seems to have the perfect recipes for bringing in customers. However, the book does a little more than offer instructions for cookies – it also seems to attract unsavory and rather demonic characters. Recipes for the Dead has a bit of everything; action, humor, a bit of horror and romance.

Now for full disclosure I am a backer on this project because the story sounded fun and the art was gorgeous.  Who do I get to thank for each of those things?  

Vera: Thanks, James! We love having you on board! Even though I’m the writer of Recipes for the Dead, Allison and I share many creative decisions on the flow of the storytelling. But, yeah, that art – that is all her. Allison does it all; the layouts and pencils, the incredibly radiant coloring that shines right out of the page, the imaginative character and Victorianpunk fashion design. She is amazing to work with – her brain concocts the most beautiful things I’ve ever seen on a comic book page.

Allison: The art for recipes is a bit of a mix! I’m the only person currently drawing and coloring, but a lot of the character designs and aesthetics were begun by Recipes’ first artist, Ein Lee, back in Dark Delight with Cranberries. I’ve tried especially in the latest issue to synch a little better with the look and feel of the first volume. It’s been a huge challenge, but I’m so happy with how far it’s come since my first crack at the series in Apricot Asylum. I’m still really new to drawing comics and get very overwhelmed by the workload sometimes. It’s a constant learning process.

The campaign describes the series as “Victorianpunk-manga-ish comic” where did you get that description for the comic?  Were you trying to be descriptive without being pigeonholed?  

Vera: The hardest thing about describing this comic in shorthand is trying to align it with a style. That phrase I chose hopefully gives people a bit of a visual impression of what the comic might be about. I consider Recipes for the Dead to be born and heavily influenced by the aesthetics and content of manga – but it’s not exactly that. There’s so much westernized culture imbued into it because that’s what I grew up with. It’s a broad mix of silly action-adventure, Burtonesque romance a la The Corpse Bride, and all kinds of fun oddities that struck my fancy.

Artistically, RftD has Victorian elements mixed into its visuals, but I wouldn’t go as far as calling it steampunk. There are no airships or any kind of focus on machinery (or that cowboy impression you get when one reads steampunk novels). Allison seized on the idea of Victorianpunk and then gave it a baroque streak, interweaving shimmering brass curls into the buildings of Bluerouen or adding tiny ornate gold details into the clothing of the characters - inevitably giving the comic a visual language that is a deep blend of many older traditions but still comes out being its own thing.

Kangaroo Cup: The Return!

Welcome back to the Conversation!  Today I get to welcome back Joe Born who is here to talk about the latest evolution of the Kangaroo Cups: Plastic.  Thanks for coming back to talk to us again Joe.  

Sure, thanks for helping us spread the word

Lets pick up where we left off back in 2012 by talking about how you raised $6,750 to produce the first Kangaroo cups based on your daughter Lily’s design.  What has happened since then?  Did the cups get to the backers?  Is it available in stores?

We actually raised over $20k because we had a simultaneous indiegogo campaign, but that’s a long story.  Yes we did get the cups to backers (though we are still working on a few of the custom ones and special orders).  We actually took a big detour by trying to get the cups made in the US which turned out a LOT harder than we expected, and that cost us almost a year, but we’re finally back on track and expect to have the cups back in production and yes in stores too.

What brings you back to Kickstarter?  Is it just the original Kangaroo cups done in plastic or have you adjusted the design at all?

We totally redesigned the cups for plastic, that manufacturing is a lot different in many respects, the tooling for plastic is hard steel and a very different process than the plaster molds that made the porcelain ones.  These are also a different size, so really quite different, besides there were a number of things we learned and we wanted to make the handles more comfortable and the shape a bit more comfortable to drink out of.

Are you ready for Adventure?

Welcome back to the Conversation! Today I am joined by Kristin Brumley one of the talented folks behind Basic Adventuring 101.  Thank you for joining us today Kristin.    

You’re very welcome! Thank you for having me.

Basic Adventuring 101 is a webseries with an interesting premise, would you care to tell us about it?

Basic Adventuring 101 is a fictional webseries that features a group of Live Action Role Players.  It is done in a positive way that represents LARPing the way we feel is accurate and appealing! We follow the story of a new LARPer, Karen, and a hilarious adventuring team that is faced with saving their kingdom when Karen accidently releases a terrifying evil from a mysterious treasure box.

You can watch our pilot episode here.

As a long time supporter of all things roleplaying and acting I have a natural curiosity about LARPing, could you tell us a bit about LARPing?  

LARPing stands for Live Action Role Playing, and it’s a type of game where you act out a character that you have created. It’s really a hobby that involves many different interests--from acting and role play to combat, puzzle solving, costuming, and storytelling.  

Your campaign says that you want to “produce it in a way that makes our fellow LARPers proud to be called LARPers.”  What do you mean by that?  Is there a negative stereotype to LARPing and why do you think that is?

I feel that in the movies and TV-shows I’ve seen featuring LARPers, we’re often made out to be something we’re not.  Socially inept psychopaths and drug addicts isn’t a pretty picture when trying to convince new people to try a game.  I like to think of LARPers as extremely intelligent and creative people who are courageous enough to do something they love, despite the fact that it isn’t “normal.”

I know very few people who have given LARP an honest chance and came away from it disappointed. If more people were willing to play I think they’d find that they like the game just as much as we do! The trick is trying to convince people to make that step--which means fighting the stereotypes that exist because we’re part of the minority.  Without experiencing LARP in person it can often be misunderstood. Plus, I think Hollywood likes the idea of weirdos in the woods. They believe it’s more interesting than the reality.

I live life by example.  Showing people what makes LARP incredibly fun by creating a webseries is my way of doing that.

TWEAK your dish washing routine

(Editor’s Note, English is not the first language of the interviewees so answers have been edited slightly for understandability.)  

Welcome back to the Conversation!  Today I’m joined from the other side of the planet by Nitzan Shafat and Aviv Rozenfeld in Israel to talk about a wonderfully simple product called TWEAK.  Thank you for joining us today good sirs.  

Thank you for writing about us.

They day I discovered TWEAK I had just finished dealing with a backed up kitchen sink due to it not having a garbage disposal so of course your product spoke to me.  Would you tell my readers all about it?

We invented Tweak just because of what you just described. We all hate to dispose of leftovers from the sink or hairs from the bathtub and Tweak allows you to do so easily and gracefully.    

What gave you the idea of making a squeezable strainer system that also doubles as a way of ejecting the leftovers out of it and into the garbage?  

We are both industrial designers, and during our studies we got a design brief, to design something to deal with the kitchen garbage.

I (Nitzan) always hate cleaning the sink and that time I lived with a roommate, which made the task even more unpleasant, so immediately I knew I was focusing on trying to solve this nasty problem I lived with daily. After few mockups, I came up with the flexibility concept and everybody liked it so we focused in on developing it to a nice looking product, that worked perfectly. We got a lot of help from Ani Dwilanski (product designer as well) in the design process, and she was the one who thought about doing the Tub-Tweak (woman input). We think it came out very well.

Strong Happy Healthy Free

Welcome back to the Conversation!  Today I am joined by Aaron Trumm who is here to talk about his 4th rap/rock/fusion album, Strong Happy Healthy Free.  Thank you for joining us today Aaron!

Thanks for having me!  I’m honored.

This looks like it’s going to be a personal kind of interview so why don’t we start off by telling us a bit about yourself there Aaron?  When did you start singing and what got you into rap/rock fusion?

It’s a long road!  I was break-dancing and listening to hip-hop from day 1 of rap (well I was probably 6 months behind the curve since I lived in Taos, NM), as well as all the standard rock’n’roll of the time,  plus my dad was always playing old country and western swing stuff.  So the fusion of what I do is from how I grew up.  I started making pause loop tapes and bad rap around 1989 (when I was 14) and part of the reason I was rapping was because I was afraid to sing!  Singing was too intimate for me.  Like pulling my pants down in front of everyone.  It’s still like pulling my pants down, I just down care as much about being pantsed.  I got into slam poetry for similar reasons - rapping on stage with beats or a band seemed more difficult to pull off, whereas slam was “just talking”.  I couldn’t have been more wrong.  Just talking on stage with no help and no music, pouring your heart out - that’s not only like pulling your pants down, it’s like taking every stitch of clothes off, plus your skin, and revealing to everyone the color and size of your intestines.

Not only were you born with Cystic Fibrosis and all that entails, but you nearly died quite recently, yet you say these are good things?  Why is that?  What have you learned with your chat with the reaper that you’ve put into your music?  

Well first of all I’ve been chatting with the reaper for a long long time.  When I was a kid, life expectancy in CF was about 20 years.  I was very much not interested in that.  I have a song on my last record, “Bleed”, which I may even cover in a completely different way on this record (I like to do that), which in one part goes:

“but I guess it’s not too late to make amends, and maybe we can still be friends… Just as long as you understand I don’t wanna come with you where you’re going”

The point is, I tried to make a deal with death.  I wouldn’t bad mouth him or have a hatred for him, hell I might even stop running from him, but I had no intention of going with him yet.  Death seems to have been cool with that agreement so far.

In 2013, though, I thought maybe the term of our deal would be up - my lungs tanked hard and I spent six months in and out of hospitals, and quite a few evenings it was not certain I’d make the night.  Then I got this double lung transplant and almost as soon as I woke up I realized I had wanted it.  I was tired of living with the limitation of bad lungs.  I’d done a lot with that - played ice hockey at two colleges, martial arts all my life, 4 sport athlete in high school, and performing all over the country - but I wanted to be better.  Now I don’t have a limitation in my lungs.  I breathe as well as anyone.  Without even practicing for a year, I could do most of the raps on this new record without even trying, whereas before it was a real trick to get through them with any breath.

I could be pissed off that I had the limitation in the first place, and I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t a little, but there’s always multiple ways to see something.  The Christians say “God works in mysterious ways”, Zen has the story of the father who keeps having things happen and when someone says it’s good or bad he says “maybe”.  It’s even becoming a cliche Facebook trend now to say life doesn’t have its own meaning other than what we put on it.  It was not fun to have the reaper come and renegotiate our deal, I admit.  But now I feel lucky, grateful and frankly, I don’t think I could have learned certain things like how to deal with pain and how to relate beautifully to things and people and what it really means that we aren’t in this alone, without that experience.

Plus now I breathe BETTER than most people and I feel like a badass with a bunch of wicked scars!

The Hollywood Home of Science Fiction

Welcome back to the Conversation!  Today I am once again joined by Huston Huddleston who has returned to both Kickstarter and the Conversation to talk about his proposed Hollywood Sci-Fi Museum.  Thanks for coming back Huston!

Absolute pleasure and glad I’m actually alive and here to talk about something that’s so meaningful to me, and to others.

When last we spoke it was October of 2012 and you had raised an impressive $68,611 dollars to restore the Enterprise D’s bridge.  What have you been doing since then and how has that restoration project gone?  

A lot and all over the place. The 68k we raised was only ¼ of the money we needed to restore the entire bridge, but more importantly, our original plan of touring the bridge to other museums proved not legally possible by the rights owner of Star Trek. Which (as we say in our video) left us with very few options, and not enough money, and no big companies really caring about our “Bridge Restoration”. So after taking the chairs and computers of our Bridge to 22 conventions around the USA, we had to create a new plan, creating our OWN Science Fiction Museum in the heart of Hollywood.

After all of that you’ve returned to Kickstarter to create a Sci-Fi Museum in Hollywood.  Which begs the question, why isn’t there already a science fiction museum in Hollywood?  

A lot of reasons. We have a board of directors that is made up of Hollywood and sci-fi geniuses, Ronald D. Moore, Rick Sternbach, Andrew Probert, David Gerrold to name a few, and we learned from them, and from their experiences with Star Trek The Experience in Las Vegas among others. There is no bigger way to fail in this day and age than creating a static museum of memorabilia that has no interactivity. Hollywood has tried numerous times throughout the years and always failed. Our Hollywood Sci Fi Museum is nonprofit and interactive AND educational, teaching real space and science through science fiction. That’s the unique part, and studios love what we’re doing because science fiction is the most successful genre in films.