I should probably update this thing....

Thursday 23rd January 2003

New Merch....

Not that I have an alarming amount of news. Although it turns out I was right: the morons took all the parking spots again last night. I wonder if the Citisens' Arrest clause extends to parking tickets....
I'd think it would have to. Nothing else seems to do any good. In the past, I've tried to report these idiots, and it doesn't work. There's an emergency notification number for...well, for emergencies, I guess. Apparently, having no place to park when I get home isn't an emergency.
On the bright side, I've got permission from the property owners to park behind the trespassers, and leave it to them to incriminate themselves by calling attention to the fact that they've parked illegally in my spot. I suppose that's always an option. Except that, for the same reasons that calling the cops about a moron in my spot does no good, the morons calling the cops about my car blocking them into my spot will result in my car getting towed away by someone who isn't aware that I'm the one allowed to park here.
It's a mess. There's effectively one spot per townhouse; but the only indication of that is in the lease. Have a parking permit or get towed. Except that there's nothing like a sign backing that up, and no one bothers mentioning it to anyone. Like the people who should be towing these people away. So the net result is that you can't park here without a permit, or else: nothing much will actually happen to you.
Aside from that, there's not really a lot of news at the moment. I've been working mostly behind the scenes on things. And none of that is really done enough to mention yet.
I could mention that HellhoundRecords.com is coming along. For those who have been wondering what that's all about: Hellhound are a new record company created by and for ColdMoon. Which is to say that, while there will eventually be other bands signed to this label, it's currently just for them.
Meanwhile, I appear to be the only guy living in Denver who had never heard of them before. Which is odd. Those who know Rambam will know that this guy wouldn't know Kid Rock from Kate Moss; yet he knew who these guys were. So they're somewhat popular. And not just here. There's a huge Eurasian following, too.
There is, of course, the problem.
The problem is that, to date, everyone's known to look for them at ColdMoon.cc. Unfortunately, the domain was owned by a guy who left the band recently; so now it's in limbo--expired but unbuyable to give the current ex-owner a chance to renew it. Which means that the first thing to come up on yahoo.com for a search on 'cold moon' is a deadlink.
The good news is that we're locked in to get the site the microsecond it becomes available; the bad news is that we're waiting for this idiotic grace period to end before that can happen.
Meanwhile, we're building up the new site [to which ColdMoon.cc will point once we get hold of it] to rank it higher in yahoo.com. And the easiest way to do that is to add content to board.HellhoundRecords.com to make yahoo.com more aware that it exists. So--particularly for those who know about these guys--feel free to post things there. That will help.
Otherwise, I'm mostly still working on all the preproduction for Deadache. To simplify things later, I'm trying to get most of the sets done in advance. Which means that I'm building this entire town before we ever start filming. Oddly, that helps a lot. For every building I plan, I come up with a thousand ways to use it later in the series. And, of course, I realise that we'll need characters [and therefore voices] to populate those buildings. Which means that we're always going to need people to help with this. We're looking at a Dramatis Personae of hundreds of characters--each of whom has the potential to become a major player in the storyline.
Speaking of characters: the more I think about this, the more I realise how many characters I already have for this thing, just from other projects. I don't really want to get into specifics yet; let's just say that there will be a certain convergence betwixt Deadache.com and a number of other websites I've currently got. Which, looking at some of the other websites listed to the left of this What's New, should be a pretty big hint.
More on that once I have enough finished to get into visuals. Meanwhile: the auditions are still running; EMail us .mp3s and .wavs so we'll know what you sound like; we'll find a character to fit you....
This is interesting, for those interested in evolution, palaeontology, and other aspects of reality:

22nd January 2003 Paleontologists in China have discovered the fossil remains of a four-winged dinosaur with fully developed, modern feathers on both the forelimbs and hind limbs. The new species, Microraptor gui, provides yet more evidence that birds evolved from dinosaurs, and could go a long way to answering a question scientists have puzzled over for close to 100 years: How did a group of ground-dwelling flightless dinosaurs evolve to a feathered animal capable of flying? Xu Xing, a paleontologist at the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology in Beijing, China, and colleagues suggest in the January 23 issue of the journal Nature that the species is an early ancestor of birds that probably used its feathered limbs, along with a long, feather-fringed tail, to glide from tree to tree. They argue that the animal represents an intermediate stage in the evolution of flight, from gliding much as flying squirrels do today to the active wing flapping of modern birds. Xu's work has long been supported by the National Geographic Society's Committee for Research and Exploration. The six specimens were excavated from the rich fossil beds of Liaoning Province in northeastern China. They are dated at between 128 to 124 million years old (Early Cretaceous). "To have fully formed flight feathers on the hind legs is fascinating," said James Clark, Ronald Weintraub Associate Professor of Biology at George Washington University, Washington, D.C. "There were some interesting speculations about 90 years ago that birds might have had four feathered limbs, but no one has suggested it in recent times, since all living birds use only their forelimbs," he said. "This find broadens the whole scope of thinking about the origins of flight." The Bird-Dinosaur Connection Much fossil evidence has been uncovered supporting the idea that birds evolved from a group of bipedal carnivorous dinosaurs called theropods. Within the theropod group, birds are most closely related to dromæosaurids. Velociraptor, a star in the movie Jurassic Park, is probably the most famous of dromæosaurs Earlier finds in Liaoning suggest that the earliest dromæosaurs were small, feathered animals with forelimbs similar to those of Archæopteryx, the oldest known bird at around 150 million years old, and feet with features comparable to modern tree-living birds. "This species provides another link in the emerging transition from small, meat-eating dinosaurs to birds," said Hans-Dieter Sues, curator of vertebrate paleontology and associate director for science and collections at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. "These fossils fill in a blank in the fossil record." Although the M. gui fossils are about 25 million years younger than Archæopteryx, the four-winged dinosaur is a more primitive form derived from a very early evolutionary branch of dromæosaurs. The Chinese scientists suggest that the four-winged dinosaur is the most recent known common relative shared by both birds and dinosaurs. From the Ground or the Trees M. gui, which is about three feet (1 meter) long, provides evidence that the evolutionary transition to birds included an intermediate phase when there were flight feathers on the hind limbs. The existence of such a stage in the evolution of birds was long ago postulated by naturalist William Beebe in 1915, and by the Danish ornithologist Gerhard Heilmann in 1927. Whether that means they could glide, or even that they were tree-dwellers, remains open to debate. There are two competing hypotheses that attempt to explain the origin of flight: "ground up" and "tree down." "Ground up" proponents argue that ground-dwelling dinosaurs achieved flight by developing legs designed for speed and rudimentary wings that when vigorously flapped could either increase velocity or give enough lift to enable the dinosaurs to launch themselves into the air. The "tree down" hypothesis suggests that birds' most recent ancestors were tree-dwelling creatures that took advantage of gravity and learned to glide before flapping their wings for fully powered flight. "The argument over whether birds evolved the ability to fly from trees or from the ground is oversimplified and there's no way you can test it," said Clark. It's just as likely that there was an evolutionary intermediate phase before the gliding phase that got the dinosaurs off the ground and into the trees, he said. Xu and colleagues support the tree-down hypothesis, arguing that the four-winged dinosaur was built for gliding and the long feathers on M. gui's feet would be a hindrance to running. "This time the evidence is overwhelming," Xu said. "It's hard even to imagine how these little animals could have moved around bipedally." Other paleontologists urge caution in interpreting the fossil evidence. "Xu and colleagues argue that before you could get to flight you had to go through a gliding phase," said Clark. "And intuitively it makes sense that it would be simpler for flight to evolve for a gliding creature than it would be for a ground-dwelling animal. "That's certainly a possibility, and very plausible, but interpreting function from a fossil is highly speculative," he said. "There's just a lot we aren't going to know." Mark Norell, chairman of the division of paleontology at the American Museum of Natural History, concurs. "I think you have to be really cautious about inferring biomechanical properties from fossils. However, what these fossils do tell us is that there are some really strange creatures out there, unlike anything around today. "This shows that people really have to change their conceptions of what dinosaurs are all about," he said. "They're incredibly varied, incredibly diverse, and include everything from small feathered creatures to the large dinosaurs people are most familiar with." Copyright © 2003 National Geographic News

Spam of the Day

Apparently, 'seks' is neither a typo nor or total lack of literacy. It appears to be the preferred misspelling of 'sex' by 1337 +2011$ now. Or, for those who can still read English: [e]lite trolls. Which is reducable to 'morons wot can't spell any more than they can be tolerated'.

More Later....
--Gremlin