Latest news with #JessicaCurry
Yahoo
14-07-2025
- Automotive
- Yahoo
Aussie drivers stunned after little-known car hack goes viral: 'Cute little feature'
Countless Aussie drivers have shared their delight and amazement to learn their cars have a little-known feature after a viral trend on social media alerted many motorists to the hidden capability. Videos of drivers showing off their concealed headlight washers have been doing the rounds online in recent weeks, with people realising they have small jet sprays which appear under the headlights after a sequence of buttons is engaged. West Australian resident Jessica Curry told Yahoo News she spotted one of videos and soon discovered she unwittingly discovered she had the feature on her 2022 Nissan Patrol. "I remember seeing a video ages ago about somebody using a little sprayer," the mum from Geraldton told Yahoo. "So I asked my husband about them. He's like, 'Yeah, they're sprayers." Up until this point, Jessica had mistaken them for parking sensors. She joked the discovery process had been "hilarious", while also praising the feature for how handy it has been ever since the revelation. "We do a lot of long drives and night driving, so it's good to have as an option!" she said. "It's quite a masculine car to have a cute little wash feature. It was absolutely hilarious [when I saw it the first time]." The sequence of buttons can change from car to car, but those who have showed off their headlight washers online have followed this process with their Nissan Patrol: Turn the headlights on. Turn the high beams on. Turn and hold the window wipers on for three seconds. The sprayer pops out from under the headlight and sprays water and windscreen detergent to clear dirt and debris from the lights. Another Australian driver shared a video of her putting the instructions to the test and was in disbelief to spot the washer arms popping out to spray her headlights. 🛞 Drivers warned of destructive trend on roads inflicting 100,000-tonne problem ⚡️ Tradie lucky to be alive after ute struck by lightning while driving 👀 Major change prompts warnings of $2,500 fines for new road users Thousands of motorists have now admitted to running out to see if their car has the nifty feature too, and the feedback has been a mix of delight and disappointment. "My 2008 Outlander has it!" one driver said, while another 2017 Ford Escape owner claimed his vehicle had it. However, others had their hopes dashed. "Ma'am my car was made in 1990, my automatic headlight washer has two arms, legs and is named me," one Aussie joked. The feature is reported to be one more modern cars, in particular larger 4WD and SUVs and vehicles with bright high-intensity discharge (HID) headlights. Do you have a story tip? Email: newsroomau@ You can also follow us on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Twitter and YouTube.
The Guardian
28-06-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
‘Trauma is messy, but music will come of it': Jessica Curry on her new album, Shielding Songs
For the fortunate among us, the Covid lockdowns have, years later, become a memory – if not distant, then certainly ever-so-slightly faded. We have had a few years now, to get out there, to rebuild careers and relationships, to travel, to live in the world again. That's not the case for everyone. Award-winning composer Jessica Curry, who crafted the beguiling, elegiac soundtracks to games such as Everybody's Gone to the Rapture and Dear Esther, has only just emerged. Diagnosed with a degenerative disease in her mid-20s and seriously immunocompromised as a result of her condition, she began isolating at the start of the pandemic, and for the next five years barely left her home. While there, unable to work or write, her world began to collapse. 'Like many people I had an extraordinarily painful and difficult pandemic,' she says. 'I watched my dad die on Zoom, and then my auntie and more family members. Then they found a tumour in my ovary, and I had major abdominal surgery, but the operation had gone wrong, so I nearly died in 2022. While I was recovering from the third operation, the roof of our house fell in. It felt like a metaphor for everything. If a novelist had written this, no one would believe the story. And things just kept going wrong. So I wasn't writing music, I wasn't even listening to music. All of a sudden, I couldn't bear it. I'm still trying to work out what that rejection was about – I was just in too much of a mental crisis. I wasn't even feeding or dressing myself.' One day last year, however, Curry made the decision to start listening to her music again. Not yet ready to compose, she began cataloguing her work instead, putting it in some sort of order after years of manic productivity. The result is Shielding Songs, an album mostly made up of new versions of her favourite pieces, arranged as lusciously ethereal choral works featuring the acclaimed London Voices choir. 'Shielding Songs is a kind of gathering together, almost like a manifesto. I was thinking, what do I believe as a composer? What is my legacy? And I have to say, I did think it was going to be the last thing I would put out. And I was like, if it is going to be the last thing, I want it to be good. And I want it to say the things that I feel are important.' Among them are four pieces from Everything's Gone to the Rapture, a game about the apocalypse from the point of view of a tiny English village that won Curry a Bafta for her soundtrack. Created by developer The Chinese Room, of which Curry and her husband Dan Pinchbeck were co-founders, it drew praise for its lavish bucolic setting and highly emotional score, heavily inspired by Elgar and Vaughan Williams. It has been some of her most popular music. 'I still get emails about it 10 years later,' she says. 'So many people have Rapture tattoos – I often get emails that say, I only listen to death metal, but I love this soundtrack. That game has stuck with people, but I wanted to reimagine the music. The Mourning Tree is not the most played track on the score, but it's the one that people write to me about. Lots of people have played it at funerals. And I thought, there is something beautiful I can do with a purely choral arrangement here.' Another reason Rapture is so prominent on the new album is the parallel between its story of growing isolation at the end of the world and the experience of the Covid years. 'The game is about what it means to be human, what does it mean to love?' she says. 'And interestingly it has a lot of tie-in with a global event like a pandemic and how we cope with that.' Curry has described Shielding Songs as an exploration of what it means to love and grieve in isolation, but it is also a hopeful study of human endurance. Four of the tracks come from her anti-war requiem Perpetual Light, first performed in 2011 – a response to the nuclear attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, undercut with a sense of hope for the future. A piece from Chinese Room's VR sci-fi adventure So Let Us Melt is included too. The titular track is a wilting choral work inspired by John Donne, but the other tracks on the score are more experimental and hint at where she is heading musically. 'You can tell it's mine, but it's a kind of weird mix of Baba O'Riley with minimalism, with a classical bent, but it also sounds like it's from a film,' Curry says. 'It's got that sort of epic space opera feel, and everything for me coalesced into that score. I loved the sound.' Curry and Pinchbeck (to whom one beautiful new song on the album, Rest With Your Dream, is dedicated) sold The Chinese Room to Sumo Digital in 2018; Curry departed, Pinchbeck stayed on as creative director, overseeing Bafta-winning oil rig horror adventure, Still Wakes the Deep, but left in 2023. Now the duo have formed a small new studio, and are working on fresh concepts. 'Maybe we're insane,' she says. 'But I think we are good at making games, me and Dan. We have things to say.' Curry is still sick, and she still worries about going out, especially now that some people have become aggressive toward those who wear protective masks. But she is composing again. 'This is the first time in a long time that I can hear music properly, in my head,' she says. 'I didn't think it would happen again, and I think it is going to be something new. It will be Jessica Curry, but I'm not the same person that I was. When really bad things happen to you, you don't go back. The ground doesn't just solidify again. Trauma is messy and it's exhausting, but music will come from it.' Shielding Songs is out now via Bandcamp
The Guardian
24-06-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
‘Trauma is messy, but music will come of it': Jessica Curry on her new album, Shielding Songs
For the fortunate among us, the Covid lockdowns have, years later, become a memory – if not distant, then certainly ever-so-slightly faded. We have had a few years now, to get out there, to rebuild careers and relationships, to travel, to live in the world again. That's not the case for everyone. Award-winning composer Jessica Curry, who crafted the beguiling, elegiac soundtracks to games such as Everybody's Gone to the Rapture and Dear Esther, has only just emerged. Diagnosed with a degenerative disease in her mid-20s and seriously immunocompromised as a result of her condition, she began isolating at the start of the pandemic, and for the next five years barely left her home. While there, unable to work or write, her world began to collapse. 'Like many people I had an extraordinarily painful and difficult pandemic,' she says. 'I watched my dad die on Zoom, and then my auntie and more family members. Then they found a tumour in my ovary, and I had major abdominal surgery, but the operation had gone wrong, so I nearly died in 2022. While I was recovering from the third operation, the roof of our house fell in. It felt like a metaphor for everything. If a novelist had written this, no one would believe the story. And things just kept going wrong. So I wasn't writing music, I wasn't even listening to music. All of a sudden, I couldn't bear it. I'm still trying to work out what that rejection was about – I was just in too much of a mental crisis. I wasn't even feeding or dressing myself.' One day last year, however, Curry made the decision to start listening to her music again. Not yet ready to compose, she began cataloguing her work instead, putting it in some sort of order after years of manic productivity. The result is Shielding Songs, an album mostly made up of new versions of her favourite pieces, arranged as lusciously ethereal choral works featuring the acclaimed London Voices choir. 'Shielding Songs is a kind of gathering together, almost like a manifesto. I was thinking, what do I believe as a composer? What is my legacy? And I have to say, I did think it was going to be the last thing I would put out. And I was like, if it is going to be the last thing, I want it to be good. And I want it to say the things that I feel are important.' Among them are four pieces from Everything's Gone to the Rapture, a game about the apocalypse from the point of view of a tiny English village that won Curry a Bafta for her soundtrack. Created by developer The Chinese Room, of which Curry and her husband Dan Pinchbeck were co-founders, it drew praise for its lavish bucolic setting and highly emotional score, heavily inspired by Elgar and Vaughan Williams. It has been some of her most popular music. 'I still get emails about it 10 years later,' she says. 'So many people have Rapture tattoos – I often get emails that say, I only listen to death metal, but I love this soundtrack. That game has stuck with people, but I wanted to reimagine the music. The Mourning Tree is not the most played track on the score, but it's the one that people write to me about. Lots of people have played it at funerals. And I thought, there is something beautiful I can do with a purely choral arrangement here.' Another reason Rapture is so prominent on the new album is the parallel between its story of growing isolation at the end of the world and the experience of the Covid years. 'The game is about what it means to be human, what does it mean to love?' she says. 'And interestingly it has a lot of tie-in with a global event like a pandemic and how we cope with that.' Curry has described Shielding Songs as an exploration of what it means to love and grieve in isolation, but it is also a hopeful study of human endurance. Four of the tracks come from her anti-war requiem Perpetual Light, first performed in 2011 – a response to the nuclear attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, undercut with a sense of hope for the future. A piece from Chinese Room's VR sci-fi adventure So Let Us Melt is included too. The titular track is a wilting choral work inspired by John Donne, but the other tracks on the score are more experimental and hint at where she is heading musically. 'You can tell it's mine, but it's a kind of weird mix of Baba O'Riley with minimalism, with a classical bent, but it also sounds like it's from a film,' Curry says. 'It's got that sort of epic space opera feel, and everything for me coalesced into that score. I loved the sound.' Curry and Pinchbeck (to whom one beautiful new song on the album, Rest With Your Dream, is dedicated) sold The Chinese Room to Sumo Digital in 2018; Curry departed, Pinchbeck stayed on as creative director, overseeing Bafta-winning oil rig horror adventure, Still Wakes the Deep, but left in 2023. Now the duo have formed a small new studio, and are working on fresh concepts. 'Maybe we're insane,' she says. 'But I think we are good at making games, me and Dan. We have things to say.' Curry is still sick, and she still worries about going out, especially now that some people have become aggressive toward those who wear protective masks. But she is composing again. 'This is the first time in a long time that I can hear music properly, in my head,' she says. 'I didn't think it would happen again, and I think it is going to be something new. It will be Jessica Curry, but I'm not the same person that I was. When really bad things happen to you, you don't go back. The ground doesn't just solidify again. Trauma is messy and it's exhausting, but music will come from it.' Shielding Songs is out now via Bandcamp
