He’s released a free album of tracks for Xmas which you can grab over at his blog.

Here’s a video of another track of his to give an idea of the style.

Banjo or Freakout – Left It Alone from banjo or freakout on Vimeo.

[via vintage_ads]

In what seems a fair order:

DarkBASIC Pro

DBPro (along with blitzbasic) is pretty much the modern equivalent of the old AMOS and STOS BASIC languages for those that remember them. It’s a BASIC variant targeted specifically at games development and makes it very easy to get something running quickly. It’s aimed more at the bedroom coder but I think a few people have hit the casual game market with it.

They’ve release a completely free version which you can download here. The only difference is that this version is supported by advertising and from a quick play it looks like mostly advertising for their other products. Perhaps they will move to a model of providing the tools for free and selling content to use with those tools.

Not being a games developer I’ve no idea how far you could push it but it’s definitely fun to play with.

Unity3D

Getting a bit more serious, the people behind the Unity engine have started giving their entry level product away free which was previously a $200 “indie” license.  I don’t know anything about the engine beyond playing (and being impressed by) quite a few indie games developed using it, mostly using the Unity Web Player which provides pretty damn nice 3D gaming in a browser.

Gamasutra has an article for more information on this one.

It can target various platforms including wii and iPhone and I believe they will be targeting the 360 too but I imagine those would require a paid license. Still looks like a great catch for indie developers.

Unreal Development Kit

OK this one is the biggie of the three and way beyond anything I want to do, the Unreal Develpment Kit powered by the Unreal Engine 3 which clearly has been used for top end games. I imagine you could do pretty much what you like in this though it no doubt has the learning curve to go with it. It’s free for non-commercial use (and pretty reasonable licensing too) but for students, education and people just wanting to use a professional level kit I doubt you can do much better than this.

UDK is Unreal Engine 3 – the complete professional development framework. All the tools you need to create great games, advanced visualizations and detailed 3D simulations. The best tools in the industry are in your hands.

Altogether an interesting development, and a bonus for indie developers, I wonder who’ll go free next…

Partly this is because it’s not immediately clear how best to use the thing and partly because I know very few people using the thing which seems to be the key if you wish to collaborate.

This free ebook/guide can at least help with the first part of my problem and let me work out what I want to use it for and how to use it.

The plan is to sell the guide as a DRM-free PDF but the contents will remain freely available at http://completewaveguide.com. It already looks pretty comprehensive and being a collaborative document itself it should remain up to date as more features are added and documented.

The Complete Guide to Google Wave is a collaborative user manual for Google Wave written and edited by Gina Trapani with Adam Pash. Launched one month after the Google Wave preview release, this guide is the most current, comprehensive, independent user resource for the most ambitious (and confusing) web application ever created.

In the spirit of Google Wave, this guide is a bold experiment in collaboration and public iteration, as well as independent book publishing.

Oohh free album time.

Irish thrash act Gama Bomb are releasing their new album “Tales from the Grave in Space” on November 5th and are making the album freely available for download via Rapidshare.

I’d never heard of them but had a quick listen and sounds real old school thrash. Looks like they are building up quite a following and this should bag them some new fans.

There are also thrash band Top Trumps cards to download on the Earache site which would have been good but they forgot Xentrix!

Video chat rooms at Ustream

Stephen Wiltshire is an artist who draws and paints detailed cityscapes. He has a particular talent for drawing lifelike, accurate representations of cities, sometimes after having only observed them briefly. He was awarded an MBE for services to the art world in 2006. He studied Fine Art at City & Guilds Art College. His work is popular all over the world, and is held in a number of important collections.

Stephen was born in London to West Indian parents on 24th April, 1974. As a child he was mute, and did not relate to other human beings. Aged three, he was diagnosed as autistic. He had no language and lived entirely in his own world.

Seriously, tons of great old films here from all sorts of genres but Halloween gets me in the mood for bad horror and scifi movies and there are plenty of those here.

The movies mostly seem to be on Youtube and Google video so streaming is pretty nippy but quality isn’t great. Not exactly blu-ray quality films though.

Sketch2Photo: Internet Image Montage from Tao Chen on Vimeo.

The book has a cliffhanger every other chapter or so, all several billion of them. Most of the supporting characters exist as barely a job description, appearing for a few characterless minutes to drive the plot on to the next inevitable cliffhanger.

The “science” and tech stuff was dreadful which shouldn’t really annoy me in a book which is loosely based on reality but since Dan Brown states much like before in the introduction that all the science is real you’d expect some of it to be, well real.

There was an awful lot of guff about science not really discovering anything, just rediscovering ancient wisdom that had been forgotten, and some pretty weak coincidences between modern science and ancient texts that supposedly back it up. The IP address tracing bit was pretty funny too complete with pointless hacker who appears and disappears swiftly from the tale.

Noetic science? I’m not even going to bother with the claims made on that one. Sure it’s ‘real’ in the same way that homoeopathy is ‘real’, it exists as something some crazy people believe in. None of it is proven in the way that is claimed.

Maybe I’m just too much of a science/skeptic geek. Maybe I’d be less annoyed if the stuff wasn’t sold as being “true”. Or maybe it was all a bit dull and this is the most interesting thing I can say about it. Regardless the man knows how to make money so he must be doing something right.

It’s a ridiculously formulaic action movie with some frankly hilarious French gangsters but it does contain some utterly amazing action sequences based around parkour rather than the usual CGI effects. Really impressive stuff and I can see why it has drawn comparisons with Ong Bak given some of the stunts.

Basically it’s undercover cop must infiltrate walled-in future ghetto to disarm a nuclear bomb set to kill everyone inside. He also gets a partner he doesn’t get on with (but of course is destined to be his best buddy) who wants revenge on the people holding the bomb for kidnapping his sister and treating her like a dog.

If you can ignore what plot there is (PS. Snake Plissken wants his plot back) and try not to laugh at the ridiculous characters it’s actually worth watching.

Some cracking science fiction in there too with some big name authors so well worth a read if you fancy some short stories.

StarShipSofa now invites its listeners to celebrate its first 100 programs in the most traditional and classic of ways: by reading some of the excellent works it has been privileged to present in audio form. This exceptional collection offers a reminder of all that StarShipSofa and its contributing authors and narrators have accomplished in the field of SF; it also stands as a promise for the next 100 episodes of Aural Delights and all of the wonder they will share.

StarShipSofa Stories Volume 1

1. “Into The Blank Where Life Is Hurled” by Ken Scholes
2. “London Bone” by Michael Moorcock
3. “The Second Coming Of Jasmine Fitzgerald” by Peter Watts
4. “Lester Young and The Jupiter’s Moons’ Blues” by Gord Sellar
5. “Vampire Kiss” by Gene Wolfe
6. “Vinegar Peace (or The Wrong-Way Used-Adult Orphanage)” by Michael Bishop
7. “Godzilla’s 12 Step Program” by Joe R Lansdale
8. “Jesus Christ, Reanimator” by Ken MacLeod
9. “The Sledge-Maker’s Daughter” by Alastair Reynolds
10. “Mars: A Travelers Guide” by Ruth Nestvold
11. “The Empire of Ice Cream” by Jeffrey Ford
12. “The Ant King: A California Fairytale” by Benjamin Rosebaum
13. “In The Olden Days” by Spider Robinson
14. “Tideline” by Elizabeth Bear
15. “Little Girl Down The Way” by Lawrence Santoro

The film has more brains than the usual scifi film fodder and even though the residents of South Africa in the film seem completely oblivious to the irony in segregating and hating an alien race it’s still an interesting idea and makes a change from all alien invasions happening in large US cities.

BORAG THUNGG, EARTHLETS! I am The Mighty Tharg, and I welcome you to this special edition of the Galaxy’s Greatest Comic, featuring a selection of the ?rst appearances of some of my most iconic characters! This handy sampler allows you jump in right at the beginning of such series as Judge Dredd,Rogue Trooper,Strontium Dog,Nikolai Dante, A.B.C. Warriors and more. Enjoy!

Go and grab a free ebook

It’s a PDF and I’ve not had time to test it on my ebook reader yet but it’s definitly worth a read if you haven’t already, and the first in a series if you decide you want some more.

We know everyone’s excited for Scott Westerfeld’s new book Leviathan, coming out in October. What to do while you wait?
Get caught up on his amazing Uglies series, starting with a free book download of Uglies. Everybody gets to be supermodel gorgeous. What could be wrong with that?

Tally lives in a world where your sixteenth birthday brings aesthetic perfection: an operation which erases all your flaws, transforming you from an ‘Ugly’ into a ‘Pretty’. She is on the eve of this important event, and cannot wait for her life to change. As well as guaranteeing supermodel looks, life as a Pretty seems to revolve around having a good time. But then she meets Shay, who is also fifteen – but with a very different outlook on life. Shay isn’t sure she wants to be Pretty and plans to escape to a community in the forest – the Rusty Ruins – where Uglies go to escape ‘ turning’. Tally won’t be persuaded to join her, as this would involve sacrificing everything she’s ever wanted for a lot of uncertainty. When she is taken in for questioning on her birthday, however, Tally gets sent to the Ruins anyway – against her will. The authorities offer Tally the worst choice she could ever imagine: find her friend Shay and turn her in, or never turn Pretty at all. What she discovers in the Ruins reveals that there is nothing ‘pretty’ about the transformations…And the choice Tally makes will change her world forever.

First up then is “The Martian War : A Thrilling Eyewitness Account of the Recent Alien Invasion as Reported by Mr H.G. Wells” by Gabriel Mesta which for those who don’t know is a pseudonym of Saga of the Seven Suns author Kevin J. Anderson. The rather lengthy subtitle probably gives a little clue to the story and tone to expect, this being a fictional account of the author H.G. Wells’ inspiration for his most famous book along with many of his other. Indeed half the fun is spotting the characters from his novels as they crop up in this story as supposed “real” characters from his past.

The book follows two threads. One being the story of Wells’ fictional Dr. Moreau with the very real, mars canal loving, Percival Lowell and their contact with visitors from Mars which are told largely in journal entries from Dr. Moreau. The other thread follows H.G. Wells himself along with “Darwin’s Bulldog” the famous evolutionist T. H. Huxley and their adventures which culminate in a trip to Mars to tackle the Martians directly with the aid of the previously mentioned Moreau’s Journal. It’s all quite silly when compared to modern science fiction and reminds me in places of the John Carter Mars stories in what is probably a knowing nod, though that’s no bad things since I do enjoy a Burroughs book now and again.

It rattles along at a fair old pace and characterization is pretty non-existent but for me it is pure, pulpy, scifi joy of the best kind. I’m a bit of a fan of fictional history and of course a huge Wells fan so I’m probably not the best person to ask for a balanced review of this book. That said I think anyone with a taste for classic science fiction who wants an easy read to just enjoy rather than challenge will probably get something out of this book.

When a hungry astronomer falls asleep while working on a problem, he discovers a solution not in outer space, but in the surreal food-chain of his subconscious mind.
An animated film by Malcolm Sutherland, with sound by Leon Lo. Made in 2009.

The Astronomer’s Dream (2009) from Animalcolm on Vimeo.

Anyway it’s a nice idea, throwing up a short installment of fiction and then asking for the readers to vote on the direction before the next installment is published.

I’ve no idea what the story is about but Underland Press say they are into the macabre and darker side of fantasy so I may give it a try if the big pile of books I’ve just received isn’t too distracting.

Every week, the author posts an installment. Installment length hits the sweet-spot of online reading—long enough to get interested, short enough to read in the cubicle at work. At the end of every installment, the author writes in a plot branch point. Does the heroine kill her lover? Will the zombies catch the soldier? Is the box empty, or is it filled with bees?

THE READERS DECIDE.

On Monday, the post goes up. Voting is open through Thursday. The author writes Thursday and Friday. The editors edit Friday and Saturday. The post goes back up on Monday. Part literature, part exquisite corpse. The pace of print journalism, the imagination of fiction, the spark of reader participation.