Virtual Mammon

Couple of interesting snippets on the burgeoning virtual metaverse out there from the ever-brilliant Boing Boing.

First is a review site for Virtual Prostitutes in Second Life. As BB puts it:

In-game prostitutes buy or make customized genitals, bodies, wardrobes, etc, and then conduct chat-based cybersex with johns while guiding their tricked-out characters through virtual sex acts.

Full story here, along with a link to the review site in question. Oh, and when they say the link is NSFW, they mean it.

Meanwhile, the MMORPG of the masses, World of Warcraft is attracting unwelcome attention for shutting down gay-oriented guilds. They're doing it with all the best intentions - officially anyway - but queer rights groups are upset and launching action.

Wonderland reckons WoW ought to have a Pride festival just to make up for it. Top idea.

Update: And of course, as the pic proves, the gay community is taking things into its own hands already. Respect!

Flash gaming crack

Today's aide to productivity disaster: Yetisports 10.

I used to do some work once upon a time, then I got fixated with catapulting a penguin up 12 metres of rock face. Which would be no bad thing if my record wasn't just over 11 metres.

Argh etc.

And is it just me, or the first time you read that headline do you assume it's rude?

The 400 get movies

Telewest's legendary, near mythical 400 HD subscribers get their first movies beamed to them this week. According to HDTVUK the first break from endless repeat screenings of The Blue Planet will be Sin City and The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, which aren't bad choices to start anything with. Be interesting to see how it all goes down with the punters.

Tomb with a view

After many years gaming, I still think the first couple of Tomb Raider titles on the PS1 were some of the best ever made. Put them in context of the available technology, the game culture of the time, and they really were the veritable shining beacons of light. Interviewed the Core peeps a couple of times too, and am mystified how they a) managed to let their own creation get so mauled by Hollywood and b) how they managed to shag up the franchise quite so badly.

So, while normally I'd decry any nostalgia, back to basics trip, I can't quite help getting just a tad excited by new developer Crystal Dynamics's Tomb Raider Legend. The music, the puzzles, the moving boulders, the evenings of shouting 'Shoot straight you big-titted bitch' at the TV a la Simon Pegg...looks like Lara's back and not before time either. Take that XBox 360.

Remix and rewind

Another good one from that bastion of all things interesting, Wired.

Wired 14.01: PLAY

Basically, indie filmmaker Michela Ledwidge is uploading all the rushes of her 10-minute SF short, Sanctuary. That way, she's hoping, people will sift through the 9 hours or so of rushes, 90 minutes of sound effects and all the other plethora she's put up on www.modfilms.com and come up with their own modded version.

Neat, huh? Now, having interviewed a few over the years, I've come to realise that film editing is one hell of an artform, so improving on the original isn't going to be easy. But that's not really the point of modding. Just imagine a Tom Cruise film where he dies repeated horrible deaths and smile...

Work - Interesting stuff from Broadcast

First up, the Beeb is thinking of scrapping Jupiter after several years and around £11m. Was meant to be up and running in September 2004, but 'the newsroom still relies on older systems for back-up'.

Looks like April's the crunch date. Says Mark Thompson: "It's time to make our mind up. We need to decide if it can work or not."

The Beeb is also trying to get Channels 4, 5 and ITV onboard to help pressure the government to release parts of the spectrum for HD transmisison once the analogue signal is turned off. 12 frequencies would be needed to transmit 5 HD channels via Freeview (two more are being sold off, perfect for DVB-H really).

Enjoyed this quote from 4's CE Andy Duncan: "It's very hard to see that, even by 2020, HDTV will be in a majority of hmes."

Hmmmm...sounds like a negotiating position to me.

Lights, camera etc

Wired News: Machinima for the Masses

Extremely cool story from Wired. Essentially, the gist is that people are using a new computer game, The Movies, to make their own films. Some are political statements, such as The French Democracy (pictured, hope you don't mind too much, Lionhead), which is a 13 minute short depicting the citizen's rage during the French riots of last year, some are genre movies that Hollywood isn't going to touch in a very long time (lesbian sci-fi).

Either way, The Movies has got the sort of GUI that means that anyone can basically do it (as opposed to hacking a Quake engine, which was how the whole Machinima genre took off. The game started as a strategy title a la Lionhead founder Peter Molyneux's previous opus, Theme Park. Looks like it's taking on a life of his own.

Clever bugger is that Molyneux. I still go to sleep at night sometimes with an Amiga-generated wind from Populous echoing in my ears.

Disney snaffles Pixar

For a meagre $7.4bn, Disney's managed to buy Pixar in a move which has surprised approximately no one. Of course, this now means Steve Jobs is on the board of Disney, so cue lots of pointing at Apple Macs and calling them Mickey Mouse computers etc.

BBC NEWS | Business | Disney buys Pixar in $7.4bn deal

Disney's earnings from Pixar's six films are estimated to be about $3.2bn so far and each has been a hit. Let's hope the Curse of Mickey doesn't strike with this one as the next film, Cars, comes out in the summer and from the trailers so far looks a bit US-centric. I mean, Nascar sucks...

High def dumbed down

As the industry wakes up to the knotty 'We love it, but what will the punters think of HD once Sky has squeezed the bandwidth' question, it already looks like consumers are perhaps not going to get HD in its full on 1920 x 1080 glory.

According to this article in Video Business Online, HD DVD and Blu-ray players will downconvert the output to a measly 960 x 540 for analogue outputs? Why analogue? Because it's not encrypted, that's why. And how many of those HD-ready sets out there have analogue only inputs? Yup, you guessed it, lots.

Industry 1 Consumer 0

Nepalese news

Keeping a weather eye on the situation in Nepal, and the FCO's latest statement says:

During this tense period other scheduled events such as 1 February anniversary of the King's takeover, 13 February anniversary of the People'’s War, and 19 February Democracy Day may be occasions for further political unrest and violence.

So, that'll be Feb 13, the anniversary of the People's War, when I land in Kathmandu, right? Hmmm...People's War, that's when the whole Maoist uprising started in 1996, isn't it?

Ah well, I wanted an exciting life and at least it isn't the tenth anniversary or anything. Oh wait...

Update: The Foreign Office is now advising against all but essential travel to Nepal up until Feb 8. Expect this will have implications of some sort or another...

new meeja rights

A meeja Grauniad story on Channel 4 taking a tough line with Pact over rights. Seems that the BBC has negotiated a seven day window for exclusive exploitation of content before it hits the interweb, while C4 is after 30 days. Or something like that anyway, I'll just bittorrent the programme they make about it ;-)

MediaGuardian.co.uk | Broadcast | Channel 4 reasserts tough line on new media rights

Invade Iraq, Zork-style

Can't remember where I came across this, but truly it is a work of genius: a Zork-style text misadventure that sees Bush try to invade Iraq in the manner of a 1970s computer game. It starts like this:

Oval Office
You are standing inside a White House, having just been elected to the presidency of the United States. You knew Scalia would pull through for you.

There is a large desk here, along with a few chairs and couches. The presidential seal is in the middle of the room and there is a full-length mirror upon the wall.

What do you want to do now?

> INVADE IRAQ
You are not able to do that, yet.

> LOOK MIRROR
Self-reflection is not your strong suit.

> PET SEAL
It's not that kind of seal.

More at :defective yeti: Xyzzy

And hallelujah, Zorks I, II & III seem to be available for download here. Okay, that's my winter sorted...

Update: Or perhaps not. A mere 5 minutes of Zork-style gaming almost had me seperated from my PC via an open window and I was googling feverishly for a walkthrough already. Modern gamers, eh? They're all nesh.

Eh?

Just to inject a slightly personal note; so here I am in my room of an evening listening to the radio and doing my homework. Okay, so it's 6Music now and not Caroline, and it's Open University work rather than O-level stuff, but really, what exactly was the point of the intervening 25 years, eh?

I want my PS3

Two decades ago it was Dire Straits whining on about how they wanted their MTV, but then I guess that's progress for you...

Rumours are starting to circulate via GamesDigest and others that the PS3, that shiny object of beauty and fable, has slipped fairly severely and is now not expected to be released till the summer in Japan followed by a November launch in the US.

Europe? That makes us around March 2007. Stiffed by Sony once again. Maybe we should all get a badge...

On Mars, on Mars, on Mars

Wired News: One Giant Leap to IMAX

Wired, bless it, is more than happy to report a new Imax movie, Roving Mars, and I for one am more than happy to read about it.

Seems like all those high res pics the Martian rovers have been snapping away wrap rather nicely round an Imax screen, so the Nasa/Disney military entertainment complex put two and two together and came up with the highly unusual answer of four and Roving Mars is the result.

Shiny!

Here's a quote:

"Nobody has the display capability in their homes you'd need to really see these images in all their grandeur," said Mars Rover lead scientist Steve Squyres. "One panorama we created was 4,000 pixels high and 24,000 pixels around, and your laptop just can't display that. But on an IMAX screen five stories tall, you're standing on the edge of the crater. You're there."

Oddly enough directed by George Butler, who was also the man behind The Governator's Pumping Iron biopic way back when, the movie is out Jan 27 in the US.

And the award for best use of Philip Glass in a science fiction TV serial goes to...

Battlestar Galactica

Very stylish.

And the piano piece is called Metamorphosis if you're interested

Shiny! Yes, it's an isochronic Tube map

Via those ever-wonderful people at Inky Circus, comes this: a Travel Time Tube Map. Most neat.

Isochronic maps basically have temporal contour lines, so that points further away in travel time are depicted as being further away on the map (there's a famous one for the Pacific that has Sydney and LA basically next to each other, while places like Vanuatu are effectively on Mars). This one morphs depending on which starting station you choose, which is fairly cool IMHO.

The write fesses up to making up the times for the DLR and says it's very much a work in progress, but has got synching with realtime Tfl data on the wishlist, so there might be more good stuff to come.

More Mobile stuff

And just to muddy the waters, here are the interim results from the Oxford trial being given a very happy clappy spin in the official press release:

OXFORD TRIAL REVEALS STRONG CONSUMER DEMAND FOR MULTI-CHANNEL BROADCAST TV ON MOBILE PHONES


· Clear consumer demand for the creation of a nationwide, mass-market, multi-channel mobile broadcasting service

· Usage and viewing duration are exceptionally high and the vast majority of consumers are satisfied with the services


Interim results from the Oxford Mobile TV trial of multi-channel broadcast TV to mobile handsets have revealed a high level of consumer interest in a commercial Mobile Broadcasting service in the UK. The first phase results from the Oxford Mobile TV trial, a partnership between Arqiva and O2, which offers 24 hour, live access to 16 TV channels, show that 83% of triallists are satisfied with the end-to-end service provided. In addition, 76% of triallists indicate that they would take up the service within 12 months.

Highlights from the trial to date include indications that the 375 triallists, all O2 customers representing a wide range of demographics, are choosing to access TV on their mobiles for an average of 23 minutes per session, with 1 to 2 sessions per day. Overall, triallists are viewing for around an average of 3 hours per week, with one group of enthusiasts viewing over 5 hours per week. Demand is high in the morning and in the early evening, with viewers using the service mainly in the home, at work and on the daily commute. For 31%1 of triallists, the trial has given them their first access to multi-channel TV not currently available to them on their normal TV - heralding mobile broadcast's role in bringing digital TV services to the mass market in the UK.

Interestingly, the results also demonstrate a lunchtime viewing peak higher than the normal TV pattern, suggesting that viewers are enjoying news, sports and their favourite daytime soaps while on their lunch break.

The strong channel line-up on offer in the Oxford Mobile TV trial, which includes a selection of terrestrial channels from the BBC, ITV, Channel 4 and Five, coupled with programming from Sky, MTV and other content providers, has proven to be a key factor in the high satisfaction levels. Ease of use and high picture and sound quality were additional factors.

As well as having the choice of 16 channels, viewers benefit from a wide selection of content genres suitable for viewing on their mobile handset. The most popular being: news, soaps, music, documentaries and sports. 33% of triallists also indicated that they are looking for some made for mobile programming, and even some long-form content (e.g. movies) is proving suitable for watching on mobile handsets.

Demand for additional multi-media services is high including digital radio, interactive services and 'live' links to channel web-sites. 7 out of 10 triallists would like to have digital radio channels included in a commercial service.

(snip - quotes and guff)


Arqiva and O2 expect to announce final results from the Oxford Mobile TV trial in the spring of 2006.

First TV to mobile trial data breaks cover

Guardian Unlimited Business | Mobile TV is not a turn-on, BT trial finds

So, is TV to mobile going to be the huge moneyspinner it's hoped to be, allowing the broadcast industry to start ordering the Krug again? Erm, perhaps not. New data from a BT/Virgin mobile trial includes the following:

59% say it's appealing or better (65% say the same for Digital Radio).

Average viewing per week is a mere 66 minutes (95 for radio).

And how much are they willing to pay? A measly fiver per month, half what the industry has built its business plans on.

Ah well, back to the Asti Spumante lads.

If I blog it...

...I won't lose it.

Or that's the theory anyway.