As a precursor to the full game, the Spore Creature Creator was released a few days ago, and it’s really quite awesome.

The creature editor gives you essentially a blob of plasticine with a backbone that you can mould into any shape you like, adding all sorts of limbs, body features and whatnot. And with anything you create, the program figures out how to animate it procedurally. Pretty neat. Here’s two creatures I created:

Unsurprisingly, there’s a rampant proliferation of Spore cock-monsters and goatse-men. I would expect no less from my fellow ‘neters. So all I did was contribute to the trend with a suitably lewd design of my own and EA promptly suspends my Spore account! LoL, I guess I had that coming.

On an unrelated, web-design topic, I came across this humourous little video titled How to fix the Web with Greasemonkey in 3 minutes. Check it out.

I’d like to share a little javascript function I’ve been working on. Click on the folder image below:

Basically what I wanted was an interesting and animated way of displaying groups of images.

jUmble simply randomises the distance, spread and rotation of your group of images, splaying them out next to the folder. You can use as many images as you want and have multiple folders. It works well with lightbox too (as in the demo above). The image rotation part uses jQuery rotate - but it’s kinda just hacked into this plugin at the moment (one of the things to fix). The script is a bit over 3kB when minified.

Anyway, download the demo (46kB) (or the lightbox version) and have a play around with it, if you feel inclined.

Let me know what you think.

Trent Reznor is such a nice guy. He’s released a new Nine Inch Nails album, The Slip, for free from the NIN website. So go get it!

I’ve been listening to it for a week or so now and the songs have definately grown on me, though you’d probably have to be a fan to appreciate it. Highlight tracks are Demonseed and 1,000,000.

Have you heard about the alternate reality game (ARG) that surrounded their last album, Year Zero? Basically it’s a game whose clues and actions extend into real life. One in which people from all over the world try to piece together a puzzle, beginning with a coded message on the back of a t-shirt on their European tour in 2007 and revealing an immersive dystopia…the first step down the rabbit hole.

Apparently, the game isn’t quite over yet, though the trail has gone cold for now. You can read more about the Year Zero ARG on Wired. I think it’s really interesting concept to have a living, breathing and interactive narrative; particularly one with such timely allusions of totalitarianism.

So as you can see, I’m new to this blogging thing but I’m sure my style/content will improve over time! I’ll leave you with some words that have been rolling around in my head:

A stallion of passion, prancing
Behind faceless suits and ties
We glimpse the madness, dancing
In the whites of widened eyes.