O2 ‘to get iPhone contract in UK’: Not so handy for me because I’m already on the O2 network and the best phone deals always seem to go to new customers.

Why Second Life will never go mainstream: For me, this biggest thing that put me off was the enormous learning curve. When I first played World of Warcraft I was up and playing like a noob that thought he was a pro in minutes. Second Life had me fumbling around for half an hour before I got fed up and uninstalled it.

To promote the Simpsons Move a 7-Eleven in Burbank, California has been dressed up as Apu’s Kwik-E-Mart, complete with Slurpee machines and Krusty-Os.

Aleks has a round-up of Secondfest, the Second Life virtual festival that happened over the weekend.

Nintendo announce that they’re going to be offering a WiiWare development platform so independents can create their own games which can then be made available via the Wii Shop Channel. Hopefully, then, we’ll get to see some of these delights in the near future.

Unlike everyone else, I didn’t bother to blog the dramatic chipmunk video (Pedantry: it’s a prairie dog) the other week, but I thought I’d take the time to reveal it’s Japanese TV-show origin… and a Victorian-style re-imagining.

Not new news by any stretch, but this is the first time I’ve seen the infamous rejection letter that Disney sent in response to a woman who applied for a job as an animator with my own eyes: “women do not do any of the creative work in connection with preparing cartoons for the screen in making animated cartoons, as that is performed entirely by young men”. (via Boing Boing)

According to Ain’t it Cool News, Samuel L. Jackson has joined the cast of the Iron Man movie as S.H.I.E.L.D. agent Nick Fury. I guess that means he won’t now appear in a Spider-man or Fantastic Four movie thanks to them all being distributed by different studios.

SoftBank Pantone mobile phone: A perfect gift for the design geek. (via NOTCOT)

A new Vending Machine Red video has just gone up. This time he has a chance encounter while crossing the road.