Time in Motion.

about 3 years ago, I was working in Europe, far away from Blighty, when during a night of random net surfing in happened across a collection of audio plays called FANZ

FANZ is about the misadventures of a group of Doctor Who fans and often took surreal and unexpected twists, a bit like spaced or the mighty Boosh but with longer scarves. I downloaded them all to my mp3 player and lo, it was good.

But then my .mp3 player died. I managed to get a new one and went to the website to re download the fanz episodes. They where not there. It was just like something out of a fantasy story, where the hero buys something from a shop which isn’t there the next day….

For the next 2 years I scoured the Internet hoping against hope to find a link, any link to FANZ.
A few nights ago my search was succsessfull and I found FANZ new home! YAY!

iF you want to hear what all the fuss is about then check them out here:

www.plasticgirafe.co.uk

now if you’ll excuse me. I got to get my FANZ on!

Second Life!
Yes second life the oh-so-open MMORPG that the world and its dog is jumping on.

first up its not a game. really there are no goals, no missions, nothing all you can do is customise your avatar and maybe build a bit of a house on some land. Essentially its animal crossing with all the charm surgically removed.

secondly your avatar is limited to a terrible humanoid model of a human, but surely the point of an avatar is that it is a digital representation of you and therefore can be anything, a ball of wool, a dog a floating sphere. Yes you can customise your avatar by giving it a custom texture, if you can find the templates by trawling on the net you can make your own textures and uploading them for 10 L$
L$? what That’s right SL has its own currency that you have to buy and it costs for you to upload stuff. I notice When you first start SL Linden labs do not credit you with a bunch of L$ for having downloaded the installer its ab it like going to Disneyland buying a load of Disney dollars and then having to pay for tie up your shoelaces or breathe

thirdly, and admittedly this is a personal gripe of mine, animation, SL offers you the chance to upload custom animations to SL Sounds good? well not quite, The animations have a limit of 30 seconds at 30 fps which give us a limit of 900 frames right? WRONG there is also a file size limit of 240k which would in real terms means a 10 second piece of mocap

10 seconds of mocap? what’s the point i could roto 10 seconds and save a bundle on mocap expenses
finally support offers technical support via a ticketing system, if you have a basic account then don’t bother asking anything other than “how do I log into Second Life” because unless you want to upgrade your account to a premium account, technical support is non-existant

So step up Second life and receive the 2008 most-dumb-ass-designed-piece-of-software award