One great site that is always on top of the latest in customization news is Shellcity. Check it out!

For the past few months I haven't been around quite as much as usual. The reason being I've been working on Stardock's strategy game, Galactic Civilizations. Well it's finally nearly complete and Gamespot and Toms Hardware have recently done full blown previews of it as well as other websites and magazines.

Check out the preview at Gamespot by clicking on the link below!

Here is the link to Toms Hardware:
http://www.tomshardware.com/game/20030208/index.html

And the GalCiv home page is here:
https://www.galciv.com

The game will be released in mid March and be available at a store near you. It's available for pre-order from Amazon.com, EB, Gamestop, and elsewhere.

GalCiv's website was designed by Pixtudio and the artwork in the game was created by AlexG (one of the major DesktopX theme makers) and one of the ship models featured in full motion cut scene were done by Dangeruss.

There's an interesting article at http://www.shirky.com/writings/powerlaw_weblog.html that talks about how consolidation occurs in any on-line community. For his example he used the growing trend of Internet blogging (one such blog: https://www.joeuser.com).

But his data applies to all types of communities that exist on the net. Most people on this site are probably not that familiar with the "history" of skinning let alone the lower level constructs of the "skinning community" but oh boy, there is and it follows much the pattern of other internet trends.

The trend is that in the beginning you start out with a small group of relative equal. But as it grows, consolidation occurs and it starts to fill out a specific geometric pattern in which the top 10% or so of the sites in such a community have 90% of the traffic. Blogs are seeing this and so have customization sites where the top few sites get all the traffic.

Highly recommended reading.

Quotes from Monty Python here:

"We demand a shrubbery!"

I found out about this on the USS Clueless (http://denbeste.nu). It's a Magic the Gather style card game for the current Iraq crisis. It savages all side equally but is hilarious!

A week from this next Friday we hope to start making on-line videos demoing various sminnable programs and such.

So what kinds of things would you like to see shown? What would you find interesting or helpful or fun?

You visit most sites that have themes and skins and you'll notice that have a gazillion wallpapers. You come here and you see fewer than 3000. Why is that? It's because we reject 9 out of 10 submissions.

Now, most of the moderators here are nice. They send out often lengthy emails to the authors of these wallpapers explaining why they were rejected. In return, they regularly get flamed, personal attacks and occasionally threatened.

I'm not nice. I don't send moderator notices. I'm the "Simon" from American Idol. I don't like spending time on a thoughtful email to have the author resond by attacking me. I just delete them. Sorry. I know that lots of these wallpapers are pretty good that get rejected. I know that many people spent many hours on these wallpapers. But there are dozens of sites that you can submit them too. Our goal here is to keep the number low. So that it's the "best of the best". Sure, occasionally something mediocre will get through and we are biased in favor of WALLPAPERS as opposed to works of art. But in general we try to ensure that the wallpaper section is kept as small as possible.

I know this upsets some people based on the emails that our poor VOLUNTEER moderators get. But I'm going to recommend that moderation emails become rare. It's just too discouraging for our VOLUNTEER moderators to get trashed in email for trying to gently tell them why their wallpaper didn't come up. Wallpapers that don't meet our criteria will simply be deleted. We hope you understand that with hundreds of wallpapers submitted every few days that this is the only way to reasonably get through them and provide a fair way for everyone.

For those of you who have been wanting to be able to download all your stuff from a single UI:

http://draginol.stardock.com/images/sc.jpg

It's almost here.

The Recruit, starring Al Pacino and Colin Farrell opens today and uses DesktopX, WindowBlinds and CursorXP during the movie for their computer interface effects.

The DesktopX theme was based off a very well known one, so if you see the movie, you may be able to tell which one it is.

You can get DesktopX here: http://www.desktopx.net and CursorXP here: http://www.cursorxp.com

And you can get WindowBlinds at http://www.windowblinds.net

This month's issue of WinCustomize Magazine features a preview of DesktopX 2, Coolest goodies of 2002, A look at the Samgung A500, a WindowBlinds 4 preview, a look back at skinning in 2002 and more! Check it out.