skye
Coronavirus: Author Neil Gaiman's 11,000-mile lockdown trip to Scottish isle
Author Neil Gaiman has admitted breaking Scotland's lockdown rules by travelling 11,000 miles from New Zealand to his holiday home on Skye. The Good Omens and American Gods writer left his wife and son in Auckland so he could "isolate" at his island retreat. He wrote on his online bog: "Hullo from Scotland, where I am in rural lockdown on my own." The science fiction and fantasy author has since been criticised for "endangering" local people". The SNP's Westminster leader Ian Blackford, who is the MP for the island, told the Sunday Times the author's journey was unacceptable. He said: "What is it about people, when they know we are in the middle of lockdown that they think they can come here from the other side of the planet, in turn endangering local people from exposure to this infection that they could have picked up at any step of the way?" Mr Gaiman - whose main family home is in Woodstock in the USA - has owned the house on Skye for more than 10 years. The English-born author wrote on his blog that until two weeks ago he had been living in New Zealand with his wife, the singer Amanda Palmer, and their four-year-old son. He said the couple agreed "that we needed to give each other some space". The 59-year-old said he flew "masked and gloved, from empty Auckland airport" to Los Angeles. He then caught a British Airways flight to London before borrowing a friend's car and heading for Skye. "I drove north, on empty motorways and then on empty roads, and got in about midnight, and I've been here ever since," he said. "I needed to be somewhere I could talk to people in the UK while they and I were awake, not just before breakfast and after dinner.
'Skye' exists in the soothing space between 'Spyro' and 'Journey'
Here's how Puny Astronaut describes Skye on the back of the game's information card: "Glide through a gentle and charming world that couldn't be happier to see you." And it's true -- in Skye, there are no evil monsters out to destroy the world, no weapons to find, no traps to avoid and no enemies to slaughter. In fact, there's no way to lose Skye at all. This is a hug in video game form. The game itself involves traversing the land as a flying dragon, playing with giant suspended pianos, solving puzzles, soaring through fields of flowers and chatting with the townsfolk.
CeBIT 2016: The Aerotain Skye Could Be Your Friendly Floating Camera Drone
Editors Note: This week IEEE Spectrum is covering CeBIT, the enormous information and communications technology show that takes place annually in Hanover, Germany. For up-to-the-second updates, you can follow our CeBIT Ninja, Stephen Cass, on Twitter (@stephencass), or catch daily highlights throughout the week here. Once upon a time there was a very odd British television show called The Prisoner, which featured a secret agent repeatedly attempting to escape from a mysterious village. One of the biggest threats the agent faced was a giant balloon called Rover, which would pursue and subdue rule-breaking villagers. Now Rover has been brought to reality, albeit in a much more adorable version, thanks to the engineers at Aerotain and their Skye inflatable drone.