Well, after my rocket launcher example the subject of functional, rapid-prototyped weapons came up on several blogs that linked to my entry. It also came up again after a more recent entry of mine updating that earlier effort. The issue also came up when the RepRap project was first announced; and I expect it will be raised repeatedly until at some point it reaches the evening news. And now it might make the MSM. Via this entry on We Make Money Not Art, comes word of one working example of an rp’d weapon. While I have no doubt that there have existed previous examples somewhere, this is the first one I’ve seen. Took long enough.

You can see the full photostream of images from the Royal College of Art project that spawned this thing at this Link.

{Image Copyright © 2005 Sascha Pohflepp}

In an earlier post I commented on how virtual objects could be coded to do things you don’t expect an object to do in real life. Well, here’s a great example (with some corrected punctuation and spelling) from the Second Life forum:

A girl came onto my land and offered to give me a blackjack table. I took it and put it out the table. It asked for permission to take money like all the other games do. I said “yes” to it and we played a few hands. She won then I won etc. Then the table paid her 10,000 lindens. I grabbed the table real quick.

Imagine going into a Las Vegas casino and literally having a conversation with the blackjack table. And during that conversation, you tell the table all your personal information – from your name to your bank account number and password. Then imagine the table wipes your account and wires the money to its creator. That’s what happened here; costing the unsuspecting owner of the turncoat object about US$40 – real money. This could become a classic example.

Reuters has added another article to the increasing pile of news(?) discussing ads in videogames. You can read it at this Link or over on this Yahoo webpage. Nothing really worth quoting; it’s mostly the same old “billboard” discussion with a dash of “visit our website to get the cheat code to unlock this special content” thrown in for good measure. Oh, and it’ll have the brand plastered all over it. I guess subtlety isn’t a strength in the advertising community.

Via a Clickable Culture entry I just read a New York Times article carried over on the International Herald Tribune called “Boring game? Hire a player“. For anyone who hasn’t read some of my past posts concerning virtual “gold farmers” (people who make a living playing videogames and selling the virtual items they win on sites like eBay) it’s a good read. What struck me however is that this whole set-up is ripe to be gamed by these hired players. I fully expect that we’ll soon be reading stories relating how some of them set up their own accounts on the side and funnel some of their in-game winnings to those accounts.

And if you know about this activity, it’s still worth the read if only for the one quote near the end: “They all know how to play online games, but they’re not willing to do hard labor.” Refreshing to know that Chinese and Americans aren’t really so different.

{Updated – WorldChanging has added an entry on this story and the comments there are usually worth reading. Here’s the Link.}

Car Design News has posted a nice little piece covering the University for Fine Arts at Braunschweig degree show 2005. The best part for me is their discussion of the the ‘Microcar’ concepts presented by eight other(?) students. Fun stuff. And while I liked the brash VW Scrambler concept, I would have also enjoyed something in the article about Malte Hammerbeck’s concept (shown above). Both were nice.

{Image Copyright © 2005 Car Design News Ltd}