Jon at EA sent me a copy of the Spore Creature Creator, a component of the new landmark title from Maxis (y’know, the SimCity guys) that’s due later this year. I haven’t installed it yet, but was amused by the consequences of Jon demo-ing it to Jonathan Ross and his family (and most especially his son Harvey).
I’m not at the level of fame yet that I get personal demos of new video games (Jon, when does that happen?***), but it’s nice to get sent stuff to play with too. I’ll be writing a bit on the C&C 3 expansion pack soon, which EA were good enough to send me last week.
We’re working on some gaming stuff at the office too. When I get those previews I’ll let you know.
*** Just spotted this. I can win the celebrity Spore experience by entering a competition with EA. Maybe I should try the Creature Creator first…
I know lego is awesome. You know lego is awesome. I even knew that some people were doing Eddie Izzard sketches in lego, which were, you know, awesome.
I didn’t know people were doing random film scene reenactments, which is, you know, awesome. Grosse Pointe Blank and Anchorman follow. I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again - the Interwebs is wonderful.
I went to the Grosvenor Victoria, a casino on the Edgeware Road, with James on Saturday. It was an interesting thing but I think I’m done with live poker for a little while.
Reasons being:
1) I don’t have the bankroll to play the averages. It may be a winnable game in the long term, especially as so many of the players don’t seem to really know what they’re doing, but you need to pay the rakes (an extortionate £3 per half hour for the 50p-£1 table of £25 NL holdem) and cope with what happens when the cards don’t come in. Which they didn’t at all on Saturday.
2) Poker’s fundamentally not that social a game. You’re trying to edge out your fellow players and part of that involves giving very little away about who you are and what you’re doing. I like the social aspect of the game played with friends and this neutered some of the fun for me.
3) I still haven’t worked out how to play cash game poker. It’s a very different beast to tournament poker which I vaguely understand after reading the Harrington books and 200 odd tournaments on Pokerstars, not to mention the odd live appearance at the (soon to be defunct?) Gutshot.
4) I don’t like the absence of women from the game. It’s somehow understandable from online poker (I guess you notice less), but the fact that the only women in the Vic were waitresses, cashiers, dealers and masseuses lent a slightly unnatural air to the evening for me.
Still, it was an interesting experience and definitely distracted me from the awfulness of Indy.
I finally finished ‘Radiant Dawn’ on Wii yesterday. It should have been on DS. It makes no sense on the Wii, even less so due to its completely random and arbitrary plotline, which I think may have been the result of an experiment involving monkeys and typewriters.
I don’t ordinarily write about clients at the weekend. Pretty much never, actually. Buy we’ve been working on a cool project with a man called Ian Kennedy at Cisco, and I spotted that Ian Forrester had been involved with the Thinking Digital conference in Newcastle last week and caught Ian K’s talk on ‘Open Innovation’ on Blip.tv.
Much interesting insight. Ian Kennedy’s a very smart guy and if you’re interested in the ongoing development of technology (well, everything really) in the UK and how one of the very big, very innovative companies in the world is approaching it, have a view:
Last.fm is wonderful - it helps me find the types of music I like based on my previous listening and on what people I know like. But it’s not that helpful for some of the bands I’ve been listening to lately.
Urusen, friends of mine, inexplicably unsigned, don’t have a lot of associated listeners. Neither do the guys who did Once, a wonderful soundtrack my brother introduced me too. The Rushes, a band who’ve covered Waterloo Sunset (it’s beautiful, really wonderful) for French Film’s closing credits, don’t have enough similar bands either. Powderfinger, who Tony introduced me to, do a great acoustic version of Sunsets. Most of their music is much rockier (which I like too, but doesn’t fit my bank holiday Monday mood).
So I have to resort to the old fashioned way. I have to talk to people about music, find gigs etc. Which is fine, and fun.
…but I wouldn’t mind if someone developed a social music app that didn’t just analyse the metadata of the song, but the tone, character, mood etc. of the song itself. A kind of intelligent version of the Moodlogic application I used oh-so-long ago would be nice.
I was an early tester for Songkick, a social music application that scans your musical tastes and finds you local gigs to buy tickets for. A friend introduced me to a founder of the service who invited me in, but it is now open to all.
It’s awesome. I’ve become determined to be a little less middle aged and do more fun stuff like this mid-week and so the emails recommending gigs all around London from bands I already like? Fantastic. It probably wants integration with Last.fm so it can draw on historical listening patterns rather than just what you’ve got in your database (I have a lot of crap music I really ought to delete/archive)…
That said, I haven’t got around to booking anything yet. Maybe I’ll start with the next Urusen gig in a couple of weeks…
There are so many thing wrong with Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skulls. Here are some of them.
1) Shia Lebouf
2) That whole thing with the Fridge. Really.
3) A “space between the spaces” ship. Seriously.
4) Shia Lebouf again.
5) Monkeys
6) Ants
7) Tarzan Lebouf
8) Gunpowder magnetic drift
9) Rocket sleds
10) Generic Stalinist supernaturalist baddies
11) Shia Lebouf
12) Steven Spielberg’s penchant for leaving no loose ends or any ambiguity about the happy ending, and the new franchise…
13) …except insofar as the rules don’t apply to non-white characters and (obviously) Communist baddies, who all end up with a bullet in the chest or an exploded brain.
They should just make a proper film version of Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis, and keep Shia Lebouf well, well away.
[Blog append: there are some brief, entertaining, familiar Indy moments. Stuff with the hat, the whip and some wisecracking. But really, not enough for 2.25 hours in the cinema hoping, dear god, for less exposition].
I’m off to see the LoTR musical tonight (through, no less, a Lastminute.com 50% discount offer), so was amused by the below viral which was forwarded to me today.
Very fun. Great idea. Well executed.
Update: LoTR musical was ok. A little too camp for LoTR and a little too fantasy adventure for a musical, but some of the songs were pretty strong and the experience as a whole was lots of fun. The staging was very creative, too. I have ordered the CD.
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