The 404 156: Where we animate Scaley McGrabAss

Stone Newman drops by the studio today to tell us about an awesome Web site that allows you to create your own custom Flash animation without all the tech nonsense! Go!Animate is all about simplicity. You can choose from a variety of locations and a ton of different characters, or even upload a picture of your own! Very cool, I can't imagine how many times Wilson, Jeff, and I have gotten ourselves into situations so sticky that we wish a camera had recorded it all, but since that can't happen (404 TV? hmmm), Go!Animate will work just fine.

As a matter of fact, we're having a contest to see who can use Go!Animate to create the best short story about The 404! It could be about anything 404 related: space beer guy? Gollum? sex pig? panda love? You're only limited by your imagination and creativity, and best of all, it's totally free! The winner will be invited to come on the show and guest star on The 404 and we'll also hook you up with a 404 T-shirt! And attention local listeners! Stone also informed us that the winner will also be eligible for an (unpaid) internship at the Go!Animate office in New York! This is an awesome opportunity for our younger listeners to get a foot in the door and gain experience in the creative tech industry.

Entering our contest will also place you in a larger pool of contestants competing to win Go!Animate's own competition, with the grand prize winner receiving $5,000! You can also win $2,500 by having the most popular animation. You have until Tuesday, August 12, to submit your entries, so good luck! To get you started, here's some inspiration: some funny Photoshop jobs from listeners Ryan and Zen:

Speaking of animations, we also talk about this new trend of Spore porn (aka Sporn) emerging from the Creature Creator software in Spore. Although this early design tool was created to encourage the public to check out the real game, it's no surprise that users are creating characters like a giant talking pair of boobs or one simply called "The Phallic Fornication Machine." Very clever. You'd think that the developers would've expected this to happen, right? Never expect the Internet to play clean!

We also talk about a company out of Australia that's offering "novelty" sick notes for $38. Notice that they do not condone forging doctors' signatures or using the sick note for anything else but comedic display. Yeah right! I'm sure there's a huge market in the art world for fake sick notes, but if I had access to this service in high school, well...I'd probably still be there. Let's be real, I still ditched a lot of school without a doctor's note; kids these days are far too concerned with accountability. An alibi? Isn't that what they put in sushi?

EPISODE 152