Roundup
I have various items of news, bookmarks, and links, so I'm going to post a whole pile of them at once, and call it an entry.
On the MMO front, World of Warcraft has launched in China, in conjunction with Coca-Cola. Here's an 11mb .mov file of an ad. It's bizarre in the way that only the ads of another culture can be.
There's a long paper titled Artificial Societies vs. Virtual Worlds here, which I've not yet finished reading, but which looks excellent. Essentially, it's arguing that research into artificial societies (that is, academic modelling of societies, economies and ecosystems) has a lot to learn from research into MMOs, although the two areas are thus far fairly distinct.
Something I had missed is that DC is bringing back Green Lantern. GL was one of my favourite characters for years, but it was impossible in rural Ireland to get any comics featuring him - I had to survive on occcasional trips to the city (and whatever money was left over after I bought Magic: The Gathering cards), borrowings from friends, and so on. I'll have to go look for this.
And here's a great toy: Starship Dimensions, a site that lets you compare and contrast the size and shape of all kinds of fictional and real aircraft and space ships.
And finally, with the next Doctor Who not coming until Christmas, I'm poking around for something else to follow. The new Battlestar Galactica sounds good - I just have to find out if any of the TV stations I have access to are carrying it, and try a few episodes before I consider buying DVDs or anything.
Posted by Drew Shiel at July 8, 2005 12:07 PM
