Big things are coming! Coming before the end of this month, in fact: watch this space.

And it’s not just Strange Company that has exciting news: here’s a quick round-up of the other things that have caught my eye over the last month or so.

Virtual Bipeds Teach Themselves To Walk. This video has done the rounds of the Internet mostly on the grounds that there’s a lot of amusing falling over in it, but the technology’s actually quite remarkable. I’ll be talking more about this soon, as I start to get into considering what’s next for Machinima after the motion capture revolution:

Flexible Muscle-Based Locomotion for Bipedal Creatures from John Goatstream on Vimeo.

Blitz.io: for finding out if your website can hack it. If you’ve launched anything on the Internet that has been moderately successful, the chances are you’ve experienced the “oh god, the servers can’t handle it” moment. I’ve spent more time than I care to think about on launch days screaming at unresponsive websites. As a result, I love this service that lets you easily simulate a massive - and I mean MASSIVE - rush of traffic to your site, so you can make sure nothing will go wrong before that New York Times article goes live.

http://www.blitz.io

Virtual Reality Is Getting Awesome Faster Than Expected. Someone’s claiming that Valve Software’s new VR tech demo is incredible. They’re saying it’s like “lucid dreaming”, and “like a holodeck”. Overblown hype, right? Well, probably not - given the person saying it is their direct competitor, Palmer Luckey, the inventor of the Oculus Rift, who says that Valve’s experience is “like playing an XBOX compared to the Oculus’s “8bit Nintendo”“.

Yeah, VR is only going to get more interesting over the next couple of years.

Here’s the press piece

Finally, on the subject of interesting things: I’m dragging Strange Company kicking and screaming into the early 2000s as far as letting people know what we’re up to! Yes, as you’ll see below, you can drop me a line with your email address, and I’ll keep you updated with the latest big news from SC. Emails won’t come more than once every few weeks, and they’re likely to include stuff I’m not sharing anywhere else - I’ll be asking for feedback, sharing bits and pieces from behind the scenes, and talking about things that might not be ready for full-blown public disclosure yet. If that sounds interesting, drop your email address in below!