Hurrah! At bloomin’ last I can take credit cards in my shop.

I can cover Visa, Mastercard, Switch/Maestro, Delta, Solo, Electron, and even Purchasing (if you’re lucky enough to be trusted with one of those).

http://www.matazone.co.uk/shop

Shipping dates are getting close for Christmas though:

Australia 9th
US 12th
Western Europe 14th
UK 20th

Don’t hang around!

Did you know you enter into an agreement whenever you buy a CD from $ony? The Electronic Frontier Foundation, a virtual rights campaign group, have read through the 3000 word end-user license and kindly summarised the highlights:

1. If your house gets burgled, you have to delete all your music from your laptop when you get home. That’s because the EULA says that your rights to any copies terminate as soon as you no longer possess the original CD.

2. You can’t keep your music on any computers at work. The EULA only gives you the right to put copies on a “personal home computer system owned by you.”

3. If you move out of the country, you have to delete all your music. The EULA specifically forbids “export” outside the country where you reside.

4. You must install any and all updates, or else lose the music on your computer. The EULA immediately terminates if you fail to install any update. No more holding out on those hobble-ware downgrades masquerading as updates.

5. Sony-BMG can install and use backdoors in the copy protection software or media player to “enforce their rights” against you, at any time, without notice. And Sony-BMG disclaims any liability if this “self help” crashes your computer, exposes you to security risks, or any other harm.

6. The EULA says Sony-BMG will never be liable to you for more than $5.00. That’s right, no matter what happens, you can’t even get back what you paid for the CD.

7. If you file for bankruptcy, you have to delete all the music on your computer. Seriously.

8. You have no right to transfer the music on your computer, even along with the original CD.

9. Forget about using the music as a soundtrack for your latest family photo slideshow, or mash-ups, or sampling. The EULA forbids changing, altering, or make derivative works from the music on your computer.

This all seems massively draconian, but it also makes me wonder what other products have similar restrictions on them that I may have unknowingly broken.

Source here.

Additional: $ony are now being sued over the rootkit software.

I’ve had a fair few emails from people asking for Matazone stuff over the last few weeks and I’ve finally got my hands on the remaining stock of Little Goth Girl things from Blue Banana. I’m not going to keep going with them, so everything made by them in my shop is the last stock: if you miss it then it’s not coming back.

http://www.matazone.co.uk/shop/

Sorry chaps, the tops are all for ladies, that’s just the way that Blue Banana did things!

To get things rolling I’ve got a deal going on the Little Goth Girl ‘bowling bags’, which have a cool retro-50s style to them. Usually they are £12 but I’ve knocked them down to £7.50. This offer will only be running until the end of this month (November) so grab them up before they go back to their usual price!

The offer on corsets is still running, that’s 10% off their usual price and every 21st corset I sell will be free (I’ll refund the price
of the corset). That’s probably the best deal on professionally made corsets going on the web! If you’re thinking of getting one as a Christmas present I’d ask if you could please order as early as possible (in the next two weeks preferably) because they are only made when the order is placed so time has to be allowed for that and for shipping.

I’ve written here about The Burning Man festival/event/thing before, but here’s a really nice 17 minute video by Jen Friedberg that does a good job of showing how difficult it is to explain the appeal of the place:

http://www.jenfriedberg.com/burningManIs/burningManIs.html

There are quite a few interview pieces in the film, which give some nice background to individuals’ Burning Man stories and experiences, but for me I think it’s just seeing some of the art pieces moving that really makes the video capture some of the feel of it… whatever it is!

Once again, I think I’m failing to put the pull of that desert into words, but I think the three person mobile ferris wheel at the start of the video probably does a good job of summrising it, as does the naked guy dancing with two umbrellas 14min 30secs in. His little section, with slightly off-rails interview, summarises some of the contradiction about the event too: you want to go and do things by and about yourself, but half the time you also want to constantly be recording things to show others who aren’t there. It’s sometimes tricky to get the balance right between taking part there and then and taking it home outside of your memories.

If you’ve got the time, it’s a nice little film.

I remember the first time I ever saw anything from the Burning Man. It was some sort of global new-culture documentary show and there was a small section of a man dancing in the desert as the sun came up. I think he was naked, it was pretty clear he’d been dancing a long time, and I suspect that there wasn’t any music outside of his head. I couldn’t tell you why that left such a powerful impression on me, but I wanted to be there.

Due to a massive lack of funds caused by international trade issues out of my hands, the economic slowdown in the UK, and goodness knows how many other things, I’m re-opening my on-site shop.

http://www.matazone.co.uk/shop

At the moment I’ve only got corsets by Snobz in there and some badges left from the last time I was running the shop. Little Goth Girl bags and T-shirts will turn up at some point in the next two weeks, but I’m not sure when.

I’m really pleased with the deal I’ve got on the corsets. They’re really good ones and I’ve got them for 10% cheaper than you’ll find (decent ones) elsewhere, plus there’s the chance that you won’t even have to pay for it…

I’ve decided that after every twenty corsets that I sell the next person will get theirs free, so I’ll refund the money for the corset and pop it in the post to them. You’ll never know if it’s going to be you, but you won’t find other websites giving away free corsets!

As usual, I’m pretty sure that I’ve got it all tested, but if you do have any problems with the shop please let me know as soon as possible!

In other news: I’ve got the Halloween animation written, and so I’m going to try and allocate some time to making it over the next few days. I’m really pleased with the way the story has panned out, so I hope that I can give it at least reasonable graphics in time for Halloween. It may end up with a lot of static shots: they also take up a lot of time to draw, but they’re usually faster than animation.

After the massively successful recent series of Doctor Who there will be a new series next year. After that series has finished there will be a new 13 episode series called Torchwood starring the Captain Jack character.

It will be shown on BBC3, a slightly off-mainstream branch of BBC television that generally aims its programming at a slightly more cult audience. The programme is described as being aimed at adults so it will be shown after 9pm. Unlike Doctor Who, that travels around many locations, Torchwood will be set in Cardiff, keeping the same location each week. “The drama features investigators solving human and alien crime.” Who would have thought that so much alien crime happens in Cardiff?

Actually, having met a few people from Cardiff… 😉

“It’s going to be a dark, wild and sexy roller-coaster ride…I can’t wait to explore Captain Jack even more,” says John Barrowman, the chap who plays Captain Jack. Given Jack’s flirting with the Doctor and the writer Russel T. Davies’ history of writing scripts about gay issues (Queer As Folk, for example) I’m going to be very interested to see how this turns out. It should be a good laugh, and Davies hasn’t done anything bad yet. Even his very early work on the children’s sci-fi series Dark Season was fantastic.

Torchwood should be on screens at the end of 2006 after next year’s Doctor Who series has been shown. More details here (BBC News) and here (official announcement with links to interviews).

I’ve been working on a Mr Snaffleburger advert for a little while now. It’s looking pretty good, and I finally finished the animation on it today, so now I have the tedious job of brushing up the audio and doing the interface stuff (buttons at the end, intro blurb, HTML stuff, that kind of thing). It’s strange, because sometimes it’s very engrossing and other times I just want it to be over. I think at the moment I’m itching to get back to my PhD so I just want to get this finished, but these are things that you just can’t scrimp on otherwise the whole animation suffers. There’s no point in spending days (or weeks, or months) on something if you’re just going to rush the details. It’s also at this point in proceedings that it’s easy to overlook something. Quite often I upload a new animation at least twice because there’s always something I notice I’ve missed after the first upload.

I’m not at all certain what I’m going to do about Halloween this year. I’ve got one really great story that I’m very excited to tell, but, to give it the presentation that it deserves, it may take a lot of work to produce, and I’m planning on handing in a PhD thesis chapter on the 31st too. I do have another idea that’s suitable thematically for Halloween, but it’s very silly and I’d rather make something scary. We’ll see.

It looks like gamers are being nice and charitable. Loads of gaming related companies are doing nice things to try and support the Red Cross and other related Hurricane Katrina related groups.

Bungie (makers of Halo) are selling T-shirts on their site and all profits from their shop in September go towards aid
Everquest II has got a new command added, ‘/donate’ that takes players to the donation site
Even Penny Arcade are auctioning original artwork on eBay

Who says that all gamers know how to do is kill and kill again?

Okay, it’s not very good, but assuming for a quick play:

The Flying Spaghetti Monster Game