Here is a tip for increased success in life, which I give to you, my faithful reader (or perhaps even “readers”) out of the goodness of my extensive heart. Following this rule faithfully will guarantee a less troublesome life. The tip is this:
If you have recently moved house, and your new house is – literally – next door to a primary school, do not, under any circumstances, get out of bed at about nine o’clock and wander round in front of your open bedroom window in nothing but your boxer shorts.
This tip was brought to you by I Hate Sheep – making the world a better place, one idiot at a time.
There are two great things about Paul Kerensa. Actually, there are probably more than two, but I only know about two so I’m going to tell you about them. First of all, he knows tiny bubbly sexpot of comedy loveliness Lucy Porter. Secondly, his website features the utterly brilliant Comedy Tube Map, which is so damn clever it makes my eyes cross.
Peter Rasmussen was one of the cornerstones of the Machinima community. He died earlier today.
Hugh and I have already put up a short tribute to Peter on the Machinima For Dummies blog, but I want to take a few lines to add my personal thoughts as well. I Hate Sheep is my personal blog, covering whatever subjects I happen to be interested in at the time and containing no opinions but my own. This particular post is as personal as it gets.
First of all, a little about the man himself for those who didn’t know him. Peter was a very independent guy, a loner in many ways. I got the impression that he couldn’t help but furrow his own unique path through life – he was one of those people who simply couldn’t have done it any other way. I wouldn’t want to leave you with the impression that Peter was unsociable or uncommunicative, though. Far from it: he was immensely likeable and always eager to help others, and to share his considerable experience and expertise. Like many Machinima heroes, he did all of this willingly and with no expectation of any sort of payment or reward.
He was also a superb – simply superb – director. He possessed an inate feel for camerawork and way of simplifying characterisation down to the pure minimum. You can see his skill in pieces such as Killer Robot or Stolen Life. Stolen Life, in particular, is a flagship piece, and easily amongst the best machinima ever created. It was a deserving winner of the Best Picture award at the 2007 European Machinima Festival. To my eternal chagrin, I still haven’t got around to buying a copy of the DVD.
I didn’t know Peter very well, if I’m being honest. I have no doubt, though, that he’d be staggered by the amount of people who held him in the highest possible regard. I have an email thread in my in-box between Peter and myself, and a note on my to-do list reading “Contact Pete R to finish conversation”. I’ll never be able to tick that box now, and I have no doubt I’ve missed out on a fascinating and worth-while conversation.
The final, absolutely definately last cut of the BloodSpell feature has now been released onto teh interwebx. What’s that I hear you cry? A trailer to whet your appetite? Why, certainly, Sir, Madam or Thing.
The full meaty BloodSpell goodness can be downloaded for free from www.bloodspell.com, as if you didn’t already know.
The title of this post will make no sense to anybody outside of the UK, by the way, so don’t even try.
Apologies to anyone reading this via the Machinifeed, who must by now be thoroughly sick of hearing that Machinima For Dummies has been published. Between us, Hugh and I have announced it on darn near every Machinima site on the net.
Most of my Rails apps site on a CRUD backend, which I usually generate using Rails built-in scaffold, just to get things going. Inevitably, I’ll rewrite 9/10 of the code, because the default scaffold is clunky and decidedly non-scaleable.
ActiveScaffold scales like vectored gold. What’s more, it reads your Models and dynamically generates an AJAX-powered CRUD interface for them, including their relationships. So, if your Farmer model has_many :cows, and your Cow model belongs_to :farmer, you’ll find the ability to create a new Cow, or add an existing one, has been baked in to the interface for creating a new Farmer. Awesome.
I’ve known about this for quite some time, but I’ve been under a Non-disclosure Agreement that prevented me from telling anyone. It’s been hard to keep my mouth shut, but now I no longer have to.
Moviestorm, which already has the potential to be the best Machinima platform in existence, will be retailing for the princely sum of $0.00. Zero, nil, nada, ziltch, zip, diddly-squat – NOTHING. That’s right. Moviestorm is going to be free.
This is awesome news, and it means that the barriers to entry-level Machinima creators have been lowered even further.
Watch this space for more exciting Moviestorm-related news in the near future. For now, go pester Short Fuze and beg them to let you join the beta test. Tell them I sent you, if you like. That’s unlikely to carry any weight, but it’ll make my ears tingle.
