SlyCat's Journal

I've always been a fan of the original Tron film. Sure, it may have dated since it's 1982 release but it was state of the art for it's time and it was a great concept for the internals of a computer system to be represented by characters, vehicles and the like. So since the announcement of the sequel at the 2008 San Diego Comic-con, I've been very excited to see what they've come up with using today's modern technology. It seems like it's been a lifetime since that announcement and the trickle feed of stills and trailers did it's job of only building my excitement. I got the soundtrack when it came out a few weeks back and have listened to it many times, having been very impressed with what Daft Punk came up with.

Anyway, the day finally came and I saw the film during the midnight showing Thursday night/Friday morning at my local cinema. I wouldn't normally plan to see a film at midnight when I have work the next day but I would be on call and would have to wait until Xmas Eve before I could see it so I made the effort to see it when I could. Was kinda fun attending a special viewing like that as all the other people who came for the screening were geeky types of my age too :)

I was initially concerned that I would be disappointed after being taken in by the hype machine, but I was not let down. As the soundtrack played and I saw the visuals for the first time, I had a big grin on my face. The soundtrack I had heard previously fit perfectly with what I was seeing on screen. The visuals of the film were absolutely top notch, the only down side really being the young Flynn at the start of the film as he's supposed to be real but clearly looks like CG. The 3D was used to good effect for the scenes taking place inside the system while the real life scenes were portrayed in 2D which worked well as a cinematic device to distinguish the two worlds. I liked the story as it fit in well with the original film and gave a reason for the events to unfold however it wasn't perfect. There were a lot of references to the previous film so I'm not too sure how someone who hadn't seen the first film would enjoy this sequel. Personally however, I really enjoyed it as a result of being a fan of the first.

They created this fantastic world and I felt they could have done a lot more with it. It's possible there could be a sequel but I imagine that will only happen if the film makes enough money. While the film serves the fans of the original very well, I'm not sure if the film will get the mass audience appeal it needs. I'd really like to see a sequel though or even a TV series to explore the world further but I guess we'll see.

In conclusion, I'd thoroughly recommend this to any fans of the original but if you didn't like it or haven't seen it, I'm not sure if you'll enjoy it as much as I did. Personally, I'd give the film 5/5. Easily my favourite film of the year :)

I'm a bit behind on writing this as I'm normally rather punctual in updating LJ for my birthday. Anyway, it was my 30th birthday last Monday (1st Nov) and how did I celebrate it? Well on the day itself, I had been sent off to London for work so I spent the whole day not seeing anyone I knew or cared about.

Fortunately, it's not as bad as I'm making out as I did get to celebrate my birthday on the weekend prior by firstly meeting up with folk at the LondonFur meet. As with most meets, I only knew a small number of people and so I ended up just hanging out with the regular crew, who this time were durandal2uk, devilwuff, gaz_a and lazerus101 who had travelled up with me. I did see other people at the meet but most people seemed to be busy doing their own thing. I was rather surprised to receive a birthday card from Aura Firelight, a local Hantsfur who embarrassingly, I didn't even know their name when they gave me the card. I was rather taken back by being given a card from someone I didn't really know that well :) After the meet, I brought a group of people to the Sartaj Balti House in Seven Dials which yarwick had taken me to before and I was quite impressed by. Between us, we had the house speciality, the "family naan" which is a gigantic naan bread which everyone tears bits off of while they eat :)

After the meet, I travelled back to Southampton and attended beaitchtwo's Halloween party where I was able to see more furs including arakinuk who had made me a delicious chocolate cake (which I couldn't eat until the customary birthday song was sung!) as well as getting me Fallout: New Vegas and Back To The Future (pre-order) games for the PC! Saturday really was a good day to see everyone and I was glad I was able to fit in both events.

On the Sunday, I saw family for another birthday meal, again another curry but a home made one. Also more delicious chocolate cake was served and more candles were blown out :P After food, andysquirrel and I went to the cinema to see RED, which was an enjoyable film but I should have had a caffeine based drink rather than Fanta as I found myself feeling rather tired in the theatre and missed a bit (quite like I did with Inception. Maybe falling asleep during films is a part of getting old!).

So yeah, my actual birthday was quite a crap day, but I had fun seeing friends and family the weekend before. 30 is quite a milestone and so I did want to do something special for it so part of me regrets not doing anything more but with the London Expo and countless Halloween parties going on in the country, I wasn't going to be able to get everyone I knew together. Next year tho, I plan to take my birthday off work as I'll be damned if I'll be sent off somewhere for work again!

Since being inspired by The Social Network to do more with my site to get more people using it, I've been hard at work adding a few new features and I've got ideas for more as well. Some of the new features are now online:


The above buttons now feature on every event page. The share buttons were easier to do than I had expected, though I would really like to be able to have people add an event to their Facebook calendar rather than just share the page URL. Google Calendar link was rather easy too as it's just a URL. My next task is to get the site to build ICS files so you can import them into the calendars of most popular mail clients. Looking forward, I could also do ICS files you could subscribe to so you automatically get all future meets for a given group appear in your chosen calendar application.

Ultimately, I think I'll need to be able to allow people to sign in to the site so they can create meets and then edit them too. Other registrants could say they're attending or not and leave comments regarding the meets tho considering the UKFur forums are generally used for meet discussion, I'm not sure if there would be much interest in this feature. There's also a possibility that with user logins, people could create their own groups (and edit the details for them accordingly, and also control if anyone can make meets for those groups or just a restricted list, etc) and going beyond that, there's no reason why I couldn't make it work for the whole world and not just the UK assuming people are effectively generating the content themselves.

So yeah, lots of ideas for the site, however I'm not as professional coder and am very much still learning as I go so don't expect any big changes in a short time! It's clear from the existing code I've used to write Furmeets UK that it's very untidy so I'll probably recode the entire site before adding any more major features.

So, today marks my last day on annual leave. I can honestly say that I've spent the bulk of my time off doing absolutely nothing. I had planned to either work on some video production (still got my EF video to edit), fully tidy my flat (only partially did this and it needs to be done as I've another flat inspection next week) or do some web dev. However, I mostly had some very lazy days, long lie-ins and much game playing or movie watching. Today was an exception as I went to London for the Eurogamer Expo with arakinuk and lazerus101 :)

The venue had moved to Earl's Court (not the main hall) and as such was a lot larger than last year. However I did kinda feel there were around the same number of games on offer to play. I pretty much played everything I had intended to play other than the Kinect games. They had Kinect Adventures, Kinect Sports, Joy Ride and Dance Central on display, none of which really excited me but it would have been nice to see how the system responds. I can wait to make my decision on Kinect after it's out I imagine.

The full list of games I played are as follows:

• Brink


• Crysis 2


• Fallout: New Vegas


• Hunted: Demon's Forge


• Kirby's Epic Yarn


• Little Big Planet 2


• Marvel Vs Capcom 3


• Motorstorm Apocalypse


• Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit


• Saw II


• Vanquish


• and some random Indie Games

I didn't have a go on The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword which was also there as there was a long queue for it due to them only having 2 demo pods behind a veil and to be honest, if you've played one Zelda game, you've played them all. I did however get into the Deus Ex: Human Revolution developer session which to be fair I didn't know much about however I was very impressed with the game. So much that I'm almost definitely going to be putting it on my to buy list.

Of the games I did play, I'm going to be getting the new Need For Speed: Hot Pursuit for sure as Criterion, the people behind Burnout, have taken a tired old franchise and made it fun again. I also want to get Marvel vs Capcom 3 even though fighting games aren't normally my thing. It's just as great as the original game I had on the Dreamcast. Lots of fun and lots of madness! Finally, I'll probably also get Fallout: New Vegas. It's pretty much more of the same as Fallout 3 but in a new location. There's some variations in terms of gameplay but the original was so good, more of the same isn't a bad thing.

There seemed to be a lot of hype surrounding Brink tho I personally didn't know anything about it. Potentially because I mentally kept on confusing it for Braid... So there was a massive queue for Brink and I figured I should see what the hype's all about and joined it. The queue moved painfully slowly as they were taking on 2 groups of 8 at a time as it was a multiplayer demo. When I got to play the game, it felt like a team based FPS in the Borderlands world (just without the stylised visuals). I'm not convinced on it yet as I found it remarkably easy to die. I'm sure there's a knack to it that I wasn't able to pick up in the 15min demo I played.

To summarise, it was another fun expo and I'll be sure to do it all again next year :) Was just a shame there weren't more freebies! Get down there if you can, they still have buy on the door afternoon tickets (3pm entry, 7pm close) available and it's on until Sunday.

On my first day at EF, I managed to lose the conbadge I was wearing. I knew the holder was a little torn but I only realised it was missing when it was too late. Oddly it was never handed in either to con-ops or reception so I guess it was binned. I doubt there's someone who would want to be wearing badges which say SlyCat on them. It wasn't a massive loss as one was a digital print by Muzz of my character overlaying the Union Jack however on the reverse side was an original sketch done by Jen "Spunky" Seng which is now lost for good :(

As I was lacking a visual identity, I went to the Dealer's Den to get a new badge commissioned. I settled on korrok as she hadn't done me one before and she had the cutest toony style in the den. I just gave a basic overview of my character and let her decide on the pose and this is what she came up with:



PS. I'm lacking a scanner right now so this is actually a photo of the badge.

I've had much time to weigh up all the options, but I think I've decided now that I shall not be bringing my fursuit to EF. The first and obvious reason is that to bring the whole suit, I'd have to bring 2 bags and as seems to be the trend recently, you have to pay extra to bring a second bag. With my airline, I'd have to pay an extra £27 each way (£56 in total) to bring a second bag. So I could buy a larger bag and try to fit everything in one bag or even take the suit as a partial, but I had come to the conclusion that I'd rather be an observer than a participant this year.

I brought my fursuit to ConFuzzled but I never had the motivation to wear it. Instead, I ended up filming or photographing stuff and ended up with a rather nice video as the result. Other people generally perform in fursuit a lot better than myself and when there's a huge number of fursuiters present, it's hard for me to be original and stand out. I generally prefer to let the pros get on with it and I'll film/photograph it.

There's also things like the fact that I've had the fursuit (or at least bits of it) since 2006 meaning it's less something to show off now and I've had ongoing niggles with the suit since I got it due to things like the body not fitting brilliantly (and showing a gap at the neck) and the inside of the head kinda needs re-doing due to ventilation and visibility. I can't last very long in my current fursuit due to partially my own personal fitness (or lack of) but also due to the fact that it's very hard to get air into the suit which makes me run out of breath easily and also the eyes mist up with sweat which makes it difficult for seeing where I'm going. Considering this year's EF doesn't have the wonderful outside area it used to, it'd mean being cooped up inside too so not a lot of great photo ops or fresh air!

Ultimately, I think I'm going to semi retire my fursuit for the time being until I can get it renovated. I still love the way it looks on the outside, but it's such a bitch to wear on the inside! Sometime in the future however, I'd like to get me a new fursuit and most likely a new character too :)

Back in January 2009 when I signed up for Twitter, I was sad (but not completely surprised) to see that @SlyCat had already been taken and so I did what I normally do in this circumstance, and went with @SlyCatUK. The old @SlyCat account had one tweet in it from 2008 and 7 follows from equally dead accounts. Had the account been in active use I wouldn't have been quite as annoyed, however as it had clearly been abandoned, I wondered if I could claim it for my own. I only really decided to look into this possibility this evening and a bit of Googling didn't really help and so I ended up raising a ticket with Twitter. Amazingly, in the same evening, I have now renamed my account to simply @SlyCat. The definitive article!

Here's how I did it -

1) Log in to Twitter and then visit http://twitter.com/help/escalate. Raise a question regarding "Inactive username" and put some text in the box, but it's not that relevant what you say as you get a robotic auto-response.

2) When you receive the automatic response, it tells you they only contest ownership of accounts for copyright use, etc. However it goes on to say if you're trying to claim an abandoned account, reply with simply the username you want them to remove, and they will assess the account.

3) In my case, probably because the account had been unused for over 2 years, had one tweet and wasn't following anyone, after around 3 hours, I was emailed again to say the account had been purged. I then simply logged into Twitter, then settings and changed my username to the one which had been purged and the job was done!

I see a number of other furs have usernames which they may want to change for the same reason so I hope this handy guide comes in handy!

If you're not currently following me, as you can probably tell by now, my username is @SlyCat :)

I'm happy to say I've finally decided what to do with http://www.fursuit.co.uk. You may have noticed that I'm quite a fan of websites that update themselves which are rather low maintenance. This is certainly true of http://www.furmeets.co.uk/ and more recently http://www.slycat.co.uk/. I had been trying to work out the best approach to making a similar user generated site for fursuit.co.uk.

I've decided that the best thing I can do with the site is to effectively make it a link index. I know this isn't exactly a new idea but with the site being focused on fursuiting related sites. The idea of the site is that people can come onto the site and submit their own links (without needing to log in, but I will need to manually approve the links before they are viewable). As for the existing links, people can rate them up or down like with how YouTube does it's ratings these days. With that information, I can order the sites in order of their "score" to ensure the most popular sites sit on the top of the lists. I'll be writing a check that makes sure that people can only vote once per site so I don't encounter the situation of people voting for their own sites over and over. The dislikes should also be useful for people who want to warn about unreliable service from particular sites or vote down dead sites. I've also got a click through counter so people can see how many times the sites have been visited. Finally, each site is illustrated by a thumbnail of the site so you get an idea of what the site looks like.

If you're curious to see what I've done so far and don't mind looking at a pre-pre-pre alpha site (not all the features are there yet such as the ability to add sites or CSS styles), feel free to take a look at http://www.fursuit.co.uk/links/.

I'm quite excited about this new project and am keen to get all my ideas for the site out of my head. There's also scope for further additions like comments and things like most clicked site or most popular site but I just want to keep it simple and functional for the time being. Hopefully I should be able to launch in the next week or so :)

Those that know me know I like my tech. I often search high and low to find the device that best suits my needs and for the right price and once I do, I obsess and obsess about that device until I find a good deal on it and then I put my money down on it. This is probably the main reason why I have the debt I have (but also the gorgeous telly I have!), and I've been doing it again recently. This time it's been about headphones.

Now normally, headphones haven't really been a big deal for me. I know for a fact that I'm not a fan of in ear headphones as I often find them uncomfortable and they don't always stay in. I had been using a set of Sony MDR-NC6 noise cancelling headphones which I had bought in a vending machine at San Francisco airport back in 2006 for $75 and I was very impressed with the noise cancelling effect and comfort of the headphones. However, the headphones aged and had been damaged. I had to get the plug replaced after accidentally ripping it off having getting the cable snagged while in a hurry and more recently, the left channel decided to no longer produce any noise. This made me resort of my Shure in ear headphones which were bought during a Play.com sale for £35. Shure have a good reputation for quality of headphones but these were the cheapest model Shure did (and I don't think they even do them any more). They're "noise isolating" headphones which means you have to jam them in your ears to block out outside sound, but I just find them uncomfortable and the sound quality wasn't as good as the Sonys. Therefore, I have been looking for a new over ear headphones to replace my now dead Sonys. I knew I wanted to get noise cancelling as it's nice to be able to block out the outside world when listening to music.

A few weeks back, I went to check out the new Best Buy which had opened locally and they had headphones called Beats by Dr. Dre Studio (Made by Monster Cable) on demo. I had a go and despite the fact they were only hooked up to an iPod Nano, they produced the most fantastic detailed sound I had ever heard from a set of headphones. The whole background of the shop and all the hustle and bustle was cut out by the noise cancelling and I was immersed in the music. They were playing Jazz. I don't even like Jazz but I fell in love with the quality of sound and this opened my eyes to high end headphones. As it was opening weekend at Best Buy, they were on offer at £279.99 with a free 8gb iPod Nano. That seemed rather steep for headphones and I had no interest in getting an iPod Nano and so let it lie.

Since then I've been looking over various high end headphones like the Sennheiser PXC450s and the Bose QC15s as well as the Beats. The general consensus from reviews of the Bose headphones seem to state that they offer the best sound of any noise cancelling headphones and the noise cancelling feature cannot be beat, but they were £100 more than any of the other options so I really couldn't justify paying £300 for a pair of headphones. I'm a big fan of Sennheisers having owned a set of PX 200s previously and obviously I'm aware of their reputation and while the Sennheisers got some great reviews, a number of them commented on the lack of a punching bass and while I know it's not that relevant, they didn't look that great. I much preferred the look of the Bose ones but as I've said, couldn't justify the cost of those.

So the choice came back to the Beats, and I scoured a lot of reviews about the Studio variety of headphones. All the legit reviews I could find praised the quality of sound on all ranges, some aired concern over build quality and only people posting in forums who hadn't tried them seemed to be complaining about over powered bass. It seems after doing further investigating, the Beats which had the overpowered bass were the cheaper Solo variety of Beats and not the Studios. I know they're made by Monster Cable, the same people who get away with selling digital cables which cost over £100 that do the same thing as the £10 equivilents. However the reviews account for this and still praise the headphones.

So having made my decision, price then became a factor. The official site still lists the headphones as having an RRP of £279.99 but many site were selling them for around £220. About 2 weeks ago, Amazon were selling them for the rather remarkable price of £175 and so I thought to myself I would pick them up at the end of the month for that price. However, it seems that was a time limited deal as they went back up to £230. So back to scouring the internet for deals and I finally found them going for £174 and free delivery from a place called Odds and Pods. I had never heard of the place before and so had to do some more research to find out if they were a reputable reseller. Turns out they had very positive reviews and so today, I finally decided to put my money down on the headphones and so I should get them later this week.

Now back to what the subject of this post refers to, the Beats by Dr. Dre Studio are very "fashionable" headphones. So much so, people may think I would go for them for their looks over their quality, however as I had said previously, I had tried them and fell in love there and then with the sound. I'm aware of the marketing for the headphones as they appear in artist's music videos and also they're obviously called Dr. Dre headphones. I have to be honest here, I'm no fan of Dr. Dre and don't really care for his opinion on sound quality. The headphones could be called anything and they'd still have the sound quality I enjoyed. Of course, due to their cost, marketing and desirability, they could end up making me a target for mugging like the white Apple headphones can do, but I think this will just mean I shan't be wearing them at night while walking around London. Ultimately, they tick all the boxes of requirements I have from a new set of headphones. They have rather good noise cancellation, look rather stylish rather than bulky like the Sennheisers, and they have other cool features like the fact the cable connects seperately to the headphones meaning it'd be very hard to break the cable due to getting it snagged like my last headphones. Of course, part of me thinks I maybe should have gone for the cheaper Sennheiser PXC350s, even if they are bulkier :P

OK, I had heard there was some sort of adult comedy featuring animal puppets upcoming on BBC Three but I hadn't really paid much attention to the chatter. However, I did happen to catch the first episode that was on this evening, and I thought it was hilarious. It was a superb blend of great writing, violence, swearing, singing, cultural references and celebrities being taken advantage of. Obviously the show was brought to my attention due to the fact they use animal puppets, but the style of comedy they use was very similar to that of South Park in that non-human (or animated) characters can get away with a lot more than normal actors.

If you're in the UK, catch the first episode on iPlayer. If you're not, well I'm sure you can find somewhere to download it from. I really couldn't recommend it more, it's the first TV show that's made me laugh out loud while I'm on my own for a long time :)

Here's the trailer:

More info about the show on BBC's Site.