Procrastic Fantastic

Will Wright’s burgeoning masterpiece Spore may have been in development for what feels like an eternity, but we finally got to mess with the toys he had teased us with all those years ago, today. The Spore Creature Creator is available to download as a trial or buy with a full set of creature features (the price is refundable against the full game, due in September… around my birthday… *cough*). You take an amorphous blob, fiddle with the spine, add a mouth (or two), a few legs (or a dozen) and virtually anything else you can think of, then watch as your Noodley Appendage sculpts a brand new creature. I tried to run it on Ubuntu with Wine, but there were some graphical glitches. Oh well, on to Trina’s Vista laptop, at least the Creature Creator gives the awesome guys at Wine 3 months to get everything running smooth!

Of course, as a dino-geek (you know you’re one, when your daily reading includes Darren Naish’s Tetrapod Zoology) most of my creations have been of a decidedly ancient variety.

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Facebook is great fun, its everything MySpace and Bebo promised to be but never quite made it. Right now, everyone’s (lazily) remaking profiles and migrating to Facebook, and messing with some of the fun applications that Facebook allows 3rd Parties to create. I myself am working on on of these, but more on that later. My favourite application so far is Scrabulous, a turn-based implementation of scrabble that you can pick up and start and leave off at will. However, one of the dictionaries appears a little too lenient….

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Thanks to the guys from Cyanide & Happiness @ Explosm.net!

This one is slightly more serious.

Dr Phil,

You have a lot to answer for.

You went on national television a day after a tragedy took place at Virginia Tech and, unjustifiably, diagnosed the gunman. You had no idea what the motivation for his actions were and yet you made assumptions about what led him to commit these atrocities. That in itself is ethically reprehensible. This isn’t your little made-for-tv family arguments. In doing so, you lent yourself to the side of Jack Thompson and the like who shamelessly place the blame for these epically tragic events on the gaming industry, and showed true disregard for less easy-on-the-ears reasons for the killing.

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