When the Cubicle 7 web site goes from mentioning Dr Who to not mentioning at all – not on the front page nor the Our Games – one must assume some ‘complications’ have arisen. As the site is down for ‘Spring cleaning’ it’s tough to get a real grip on what be happening – but the department responsible for licensing concepts at the BBC never seems to work particularly quickly. The lawyers linger in that area, and they’re all about mind-boggling processes and delays.
I hope I’m grasping at the wrong straws here and that the game’s release schedule has not slipped to somewhere in the distant future (as opposed to Summer 2009, which was the last update).
Update: Poking around RPG.net other people have noticed the downtime (given that it started more than three weeks ago) and there have been posts from Cubicle 7 associated individuals to indicate all is well.
However, having a site/forum/development blog closed down for so long can’t be good for a business – especially if people come looking and they don’t hang out at places like RPG.net.
I rescued an article about Torchwood Series One at h2g2 a couple of months ago – and while I mentioned it in passing, it seems a little silly not to unearth it again just before the start of Series Two.
h2g2 is ‘an encyclopaedic project… written by people from all over the world’, conceived by Douglas Adams, launched in 1999, named after The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and absorbed into the BBC stable of community sub-sites in 2001. I write and subedit there as The Apprentice – and found this article on Torchwood languishing it what the site calls the Flea Market – a dumping ground for almost articles and promising ideas that need care and attention to get them into a state suitable for consideration as Entries in the Guide.
I found it quite enjoyable to drag together the various bits and bobs of information needed to fill out the detail of this article, as well as the range of quotes for each episode. I did stick with as much of the original entry as possible – which led to certain episode overviews reading a little differently to the ones I specifically re-wrote or expanded – but did do a considerable amount of work myself. I took a few liberties trying to guess around the knowns and suggest a few unknowns – like where the team park the car, when exactly the series takes place, and how the heck that pterodactyl gets in and out of the Hub.
Do have a read… and if you find anything alien, it’s theres… any errors are probably mine.
I am really gagging for more news about the second series of Torchwood, especially because I tend to be the last one to know. I just don’t watch enough TV to catch the adverts or read enough newspapers to see the preview articles. If I got any less media savvy, I’d best move into a cave and have done with it. I mean, I try… but, it just doesn’t interest me. I dislike advert breaks – though I think my partner hates them, which makes us a perfect pair for missing pretty much everything. So, could the primary TV networks drop me some sort of note ahead of time with new releases – along with precise dates and times – so, I can get myselves organised and prepared? I don’t really want to miss anything… but you all make it so tough to keep up!
My entry on Torchwood – expanded significantly from a half-complete piece found in the site’s Flea Market – appeared on the front page of h2g2 two days ago having become an edited part of the Guide. For those who haven’t visited, h2g2 offers a user-generated encyclopedia akin to the Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (as created by Douglas Adams) with a little more content and editorial control than Wikipedia. Very entertaining site that I have contributed to on and off for the last 8 years…
