Coolness: The company that did the character animations for GTA4 offers the ability to map your own facial expressions onto an avatar. [link]

And if you want it to LOOK like you, there's Big Stage.

Big Stage is a media company whose breakthrough technology allows users to easily create and integrate a life-like 3D avatar of themselves into everything from famous movie scenes, TV shows and video games, to music videos, short video clips, virtual worlds, still images, user-generated content, instant messages, emails, social networks and more - instantly. Big Stage will launch to consumers in the second quarter of 2008.

(Why yes, I am working on the metaverse, why?)

Ick. 3-D avatar space is way too uncanny valley for me already.

Coolness: The company that did the character animations for GTA4 offers the ability to map your own facial expressions onto an avatar.

Oh man, that's cool. Wow, I would like to play with that software.

One wonders if, 20 years from now, this tech will be so cheap & easy that people are making their own feature length animations. A cottage industry or just more noise to signal?

I'd guess closer to 5. And that, as with everything, 90% crap, a few % sheer brilliance.

Hey, it's been one of my wandering thoughts that someday, someone would figure out to lift the Buffy video game sets/models, and use them to create new fan episodes...

Or episodes of Willow and Spike having Big Vampire Sex!

All the GTA4 talk got me to finally install a Windows partition on my Macbook, so I could play all my windows based games, including GTA3.

Windows runs okay on the Macbook, but Leopard is so much shinier.

Oh man, that's cool. Wow, I would like to play with that software.

Second that.

Oh, T-Rex, how do you rock so hard? [link]

For my b-day, I got Legend of Zelda for the Wii (I've never played Zelda - !!!) and Mario Kart. I know what I'm doing this afternoon! Woot!