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News

TIS3 in production17 October 2008

Over at Arkhamsoft, the production team for Quin's Intern's Story - part 3 project is now up and running. The team currently comprises Quin, Bud, DarthKiwi, Sylv, Warge and myself. There may still be a couple more names to add to that in the coming weeks but work is already under way with maps, models, scripts, music and artwork all starting to appear. This third part of Intern is by far the most ambitious yet and, under Quin's direction, should turn out to be a very memorable addition to the annals of Lovecraftian videogaming.

1400 Alt Names10 October 2008

The Book of Alt Names passed another couple milestones recently. With the ongoing contribution of lots of creative folks there are now over 1400 original names for Cthulhu Mythos deities, monsters and spells and over 4000 votes have been cast.

Image Retargetter21 April 2008

Image Retargetting, or "Content Aware Image Resizing" is a term coined by Drs Ariel Shamir and Shai Avidan in defining a process where by images can be stretched or squashed, horizontally or vertically without important parts of the image being distorted.

In simple terms, Image Retargetting allows you to make images wider, narrower, taller or shorter without smooshing up the important details. Normally, if you were to stretch or squeeze a family photograph, the people in the shot would look too wide/tall/thin/short and it'd be obvious to anyone looking at the image that it had been distorted. With Image Retargetting, you can stretch (or shrink) the image, without your distorting your folks out of shape!

The Image Retargetter is a sleek, powerful and feature-packed tool that'll allow you to resize and change the aspect ratio of your images in exactly this way. You can even export unique image display applets that, placed on any website, will allow your images to stretch - without distorting - to fit any layout.

Allicorn Links

The Book of Alternative Dead Names

The bizarre deities and freakish monsters of H.P.Lovecraft's Cthulhu Mythos are frequently known by many names. At The Book of Alternative Dead Names you can look up the ingenious alternate names for Deities, Monsters and forbidden knowledge that folks have submitted. You can vote on which you like most. Best of all, you can submit your own!

In Remote Places

My album inspired by the spectacular horror fiction of H.P.Lovecraft. You can download a couple free tracks, find more information and buy the album for as little as £3.99 at the In Remote Places page.

Music at Last.fm

The monolithic MP3 monster that is Last.fm probably contains more music than you could listen to in an entire lifetime. You can hear a whole heap of my material on there including the entire In Remote Places, Emancipation, Network and Pareidolia albums, all for free. Here's my Last.fm page.

Music at The61

The61 is a great little music appreciation social network with some of the slickest DHTML+AJAX interface ideas you'll see anywhere. Here's my profile there.

MySpace profile

MySpace hardly needs an introduction eh? You can find more nifty music on my MySpace profile page too.

DeviantArt profile

DeviantArt is a whopping great vault full of art of many kinds. It provides one of the better examples of a user-content-driven, AJAX-heavy "Web 2.0" site (IMHO) and - of course - is stuffed full of excellent arty content. Here's my DeviantArt profile page.

Arkhamsoft

Styling ourselves as a Cthulhu content collective, Arkhamsoft is a loose band of various creative sorts who all happen to be far too fascinated by H.P.Lovecraft and enjoy producing digital media - especially video games - with Lovecraftian themes.

Peppermill

One of my companies, Peppermill Marketing design and build websites, bespoke software and digital media. We specialise in custom web services, content management and Intranet systems.

Gilt-Edged Management Systems

Another company I'm involved with. At GEMS, we apply cutting edge web technologies to develop unique solutions for specific business needs. Our star product at the moment is GEMS Help, an expert-system driven online customer support service that reduces costs, boosts customer satisfaction and lightens the load on your customer services personnel with a stylish and super-simple interface that customers can use to solve their own product issues automatically and to communicate with helpdesk staff.

Borderlands Sussex

Check out this site belonging to a friend of mine who can liven up your garden with some really eyecatching and colorful fence designs.