An Inexorable Entity

Welcome to the Land Dolphin Collective. This is a spot where we can cast our collective creative unconscious onto the internet with such insurmountable and superlative force that its impact can be felt in the far reaches of the cosmos… or it might just be a spot where we can upload some posts about development and some projects we’re working on. I’m not sure which sounds more exciting or hyperbolic.

First thing’s first: what is a (the) Land Dolphin? While most would see it as a simple application of “adjective animal noun” conjunctive in the vein of a “Naughty Dog” or a “Big Rooster” or a “Battle Goat” or perhaps I’ve overestimated the amount of development companies with that kind of name; there is actually a highly uninteresting story behind it. It all goes back to the buck’s weekend of one of the Land Dolphin stalwarts, about a year ago. Cue dream-sequence theme.

I’m not sure if anyone actually remembers this, but PETA started a campaign probably 18 months ago to start bringing to our attention, the plight of our fair sea-faring friends: the fish. This isn’t exactly anything out of the ordinary for PETA, but the way they did it was most perplexing. Likely attempting to feed off the popularity of a popular internet meme; which I’ve subsequently found had a different meaning entirely; they sought to shine a spotlight on the horrific treatment of the noble “Sea Kitten”.

Like their surface-dwelling cousins, the land kittens, sea kittens enjoy being petted. Their lack of arms makes it difficult for them to pet back, but they often gently rub against each other as a sign of affection.

That quote is taken directly from PETA’s website about Sea Kittens and I’m sure you’ll agree: it’s f’ing insane; and not in the psuedo-positive context either. We would talk, sometimes at great length about how utterly ridiculous the whole concept was, in fact, this was exactly the case when the legend was conceived.

“What about pigs? Why don’t people care about pigs?” one of us, while enjoying a feast of Germanic delicacies, exclaimed. “If people should give an s about ‘Sea Kittens’, then they should certainly care about pigs!” another cried out, to which Simon; another stalwart; who is generally quite reserved, solemnly declared: “If only everyone understood the plight of the noble Land Dolphin.” The legend was born.

If you weren’t following along, basically what Simon did was take the ridiculous moniker of “Sea Kitten”; a term used to associate something not quite so cute and cuddly with something that is; break it down into its major parts and then change “Sea” to “Land”, because pigs live on land and “Kitten” to “Dolphin”, because dolphins are pretty cute and awesome and who would ever want to hurt a dolphin? You’ll have to imagine the blank look on my face as I type these words to get the full effect.

Farcical? Ridiculous? Absurd? Whatever the term, the criteria was met and Land Dolphin was born. It’s a name that we’ve attached to everything we’ve done as a group for the past year and now that something that we’ve been working on is finally almost ready to be revealed, it’s time to unleash the fury on everyone else.

What we’re about is software development. We’re aiming to create unique and personal experiences in the realms of Silverlight, Windows Phone 7, XNA and maybe a little bit of Android too. Not only that, but we’re developing things that we actually want to use and think are cool, and surely that’s the best thing that a small development group can do. This blog will be used to update everyone on the progress of the various projects that we’re undertaking as well as release some useful open source-type stuff to help other developers out because hey, we’d probably struggle a lot more than we already do if it weren’t for those things; so it’s nice to give things back.

The Land Dolphin Collective consists of four members at the moment, each more incredible and wizard-like than the other:

- Simon Palmer @sigh71
- Chris James
- Andrew Micenko
- Ben McCormick @thenoumenon