SlyCat's Blog
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Posted: 28th Aug 2010 15:31
Fursuiting at EF
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 :)
Posted: 28th Aug 2010 14:53
Scott Pilgrim vs The World
Thought I'd make a post here as things on Twitter don't "stick" due to disappearing within an hour. Anway, I saw the latest film last night from the guy behind Spaced, Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz, Scott Pilgrim vs The World. It's an adaptation of a series of comic books which I have to say that while I was aware of them, I hadn't really paid any attention to them (Which I regret in retrospect) due to them not looking like something I'd be interested in. Therefore, I was interested in this film as one by Edgar Wright and not what it was based on.
So anyway, I saw the film last night and have to say I absolutely loved it. It was easily my favourite movie of the year, beating previous holder of that title, Kick-ass. The film was very much more of the same feel as Spaced than Shaun or Fuzz due to the absolute tonne of references to video games, movies and comics all crammed into the film. However, this was Spaced with a Hollywood budget! Needless to say, I absolutely loved the videogame and comic book styled visuals, but this film wasn't just eye candy, I really loved all of the characters too. Everyone was so well cast, even Michael Cera who I had reservations over. While I loved his role in Arrested Development (If you've not seen it, check it out. You won't regret it), I didn't think he would fit this kinda role however I was proven wrong. I also have to mention that the humour was all spot on. The film had me giggling from start to finish, but I guess it appeals to my sense of humour :)
In summary then, I would have to say that I recommend this film to anyone in their 20's & 30's who loved Spaced and fondly remembers playing video games when they were younger. I wonder if it will be able to hold on to it's title of my favourite film of the year when Tron:Legacy comes out however!
Oh, as an addendum, thanks to Forbidden Planet having a deal on, I now own the full set of Scott Pilgrim books. Only read a little so far but they've used bits line for line from the books in the film :)
Posted: 18th Aug 2010 18:48
Three Easy Steps For Claiming An Abandoned Twitter Account
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 :)
Posted: 14th Aug 2010 18:38
Fursuit Related Sites Needed!
I've been working hard on the new version of Fursuiters UK today and now have it looking a bit nicer, but more crucially, I've added an option to add new pages. While I'm still working on the site design and features, all that is needed for creation of new sites is there already. So, I would like to ask that if anyone has any fursuit related pages which fall into the 6 categories set out (fursuit makers, costume shops, personal fursuiter sites, materials, guides & conventions), please visit the following link and click the "Add it!" button :)
http://www.fursuit.co.uk/
Note that when you add the site, it won't appear immediately as I have to set it to enabled. It's a good, fairly simple way of preventing the site filling with spam and ensuring quality through the submitted links.
I'm open to comments and ideas for improvements or features (not the layout tho as that's far from done). I've removed the like/dislike thing and ordered the pages by clicks for now while I work out the best way to do the rating system.
Posted: 13th Aug 2010 19:55
Fursuit.co.uk
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 :)
