January 31, 2007 12:12
Webcomics Are the New Blogs: The Order of the Stick
There was a time when I felt that I wasn't nerd enough to read The Order of the Stick. It's a webcomic about a party of adventurers in a fantasy role playing game. There are a lot of in jokes about 3rd Edition Dungeons & Dragons. I mean, I barely made it to 2nd Edition.
But it's actually funny anyway. The characters are profiled here, which saves me explaining who they all are; my favorite is probably Belkar Bitterleaf, an evil halfling ranger who really, really likes to stab. Part of the fun of the strip is that it has a lot of meta-level jokes, wherein the characters get confused about various bonuses and spell rules and dice rolls and whatnot, often while they're in the middle of a melee.
What makes it work, though, besides the charming, at times surprisingly expressive art (which gets much better over the strip's lifetime -- they're on #407 right now), is the shrewd writing. Characters actually surprise you, and each other. Plots twist unexpectedly, and sometimes totally randomly. There are curious mixtures of tenderness and cruelty. Yeah, it's kinda goofy and sentimental in places. What, like you're so cool all the time.
Plus I'm really warming to The Order of the Stick's companion comic Erfworld, which was sort of a slow burn at first (it has an elaborately worked-out internal mythology that took me a while to piece together), but which now seems to be about a wargame fanatic who gets magically projected inside an actual RTS game and becomes a mighty warlord there. What with his mad strategy skillz and all.
January 31, 2007 12:00
Because She Got High
And went to this commercial shoot that her friend's dad was doing for Apple, now she's sort of famous. Meet switcherette Ellen Feiss all over again. (Attorney's note: Feiss was definitely not high for that shoot. No way.)
In other Apple news, whoever writes the genuinely funny blog The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs is claiming that legal problems are forcing him to shut it down. Now who will give us the secret backstory when Apple declares war on Norway?
January 30, 2007 5:25
Independent Game Actually Cool
The finalists for this years Independent Games Festival are up. Usually I just ignore this kind of thing, because I'm a lazy bastard and consume whatever corporate America shoves down my limp, lifeless esophagus.
But for some reason I clicked on a free Flash game called Samorost 2. Wow. It's incredibly atmospheric and beautiful and charming.
January 30, 2007 4:11
Peep Show Duo Are New Mac, PC in UK; John Hodgman So 2006
It's very hard for me to explain why it's so urgently important for me to blog about this. Short, telegraph version: Peep Show, British sitcom, insanely vicious and funny. Steve Jobs, hires two Peep Show stars, to be Mac and PC in UK Apple ads...maybe that wasn't so complicated.
If you've never seen Peep Show, it's about two guys, a nerd and a hipster, who live together. There are clips all over YouTube, including this one, about shopping, and this one, about, well, it's about hobbit porn. Warning: mildly NSFW.
January 29, 2007 4:47
Amazon's Secret Wiki
In an oddly ultra-soft launch, Amazon appears to have silently begotten a wiki entirely devoted to product reviews entitled Amapedia. This seems to me like a basically good (or at least non-evil, in the Googlian sense) idea. I just wonder a) how they're going to keep corporations from exploiting it with fake reviews (though I suppose Amazon probably has some experience with this (warning: juvenilia alert), b) how they're going to integrate it with their main site, and c) why didn't they call it Wikizon? Is it not more wiki- than -pedia?
January 29, 2007 2:12
Revenue-Sharing on YouTube: Probably Not the Apocalypse
I don't know what you were doing this weekend, but most of the billionaires I know were in Davos for the World Economic Forum. It was a pretty quiet Davos this year, as evidenced by the fact that it was pretty big news when Chad Hurley mentioned that YouTube might start sharing ad revenue with content creators.
There's been some occasional speculation about how smart Hurley and co-YouTube-founder Steve Chen were, and how much luck was involved in their $1.65 billion payday, but in this case I think they played it just right. Sure, they're giving up the pure driven-snow quality that YouTube has right now, where people just upload for the fun of it and the street cred of it. But I expect the actual amount of money people will make off YouTube videos will be pretty small, pizza-money small. (I'd be curious whether anybody has even an educated guess about order of magnitudes here?) Enough to encourage some talent that might be on the fence about posting, and keep people from departing in droves to sites like Revver, but not enough to take the anti-commercial edge off the site.
The only thing I worry about is that it'll step up the already brutal levels of comment-spam. If people will stoop that low just for bragging rights, think how low they'll stoop for $1.50 check from Chad Hurley. Click here for the surprisingly professional-sounding Comment Spam song, to the tune of "Secret Agent Man."
January 29, 2007 12:07
Nerdcore Hip-Hop Addendum
Couple people wrote in with notes about a second nerdcore documentary in the works, Nerdcore for Life. Oddly, I kind of liked the trailer better. A little rawer, a little angrier. (Though you have to feel a little uncomfortable with the basic analogy some of the rappers propose, implicitly, between the civil rights abuses that fuel some of the racial anger in hip-hop, and the social disenfranchisement to which nerds are subjected. Just a little.)
A commenter alluded to some of the nerd-metal that's around, reminding me of my love for the Cthulhu-themed The Darkest of the Hillside Thickets. Best band name ever. You owe it to yourself to try to get "20 Minutes of Oxygen" to play on this whack-ass Canadian radio site. "When you're trapped in that airtight room/Flick the red switch but not the blue..."
January 26, 2007 9:53
Nerdcore Will Rise Up
I've been putting off doing a nerdcore post just because I've been heavily into nerdcore hip-hop for a couple of years now, and I kind of don't know where to start. But now there's a nerdcore documentary. So my hand is forced.
For those who don't know, nerdcore is hip-hop by nerds about nerdy subjects: video games, star wars, conventions, programming, "whatevs." My first contact with the genre was The Lords of the Rhymes, which is obviously pretty Tolkien-heavy stuff. It took me a while to convince myself I wasn't being made fun of by some novelty act -- any beat-boxing Gollum must be scrutinized pretty closely before consumption -- but they actually seemed to have a pretty cool attitude about it, and their first single ended up in heavy rotation on the iPod.
Unfortunately the Lords only have a couple-three songs, so it wasn't until Penny Arcade linked to the Penny Arcade Theme Song by
Epilogue: Frontalot did an Achewood-themed song on Songfight a couple of months ago. Thus the circle is complete. (Though why, given all the characters in the Achewoodverse, would you choose to rap about Todd?)
January 25, 2007 2:52
Games People (Will Eventually) Play
GameSpot and GameSpy are both posting their Most Wanted Games of 2007 lists. Why don't they just go ahead and merge already? Ooh, I am totally registering GameSpite.com!
GameSpy is stingily doling its list out day by day over the course of this week, but GameSpot's full list is up. To wit:
BioShock (2K Games/Irrational Games - Xbox 360, PS3, PC)
Burnout 5 (Electronic Arts/Criterion Games - Xbox 360 / PS3)
Crackdown (Microsoft Game Studios/Realtime Worlds - Xbox 360)
Enemy Territory: Quake Wars (Activision/Splash Damage - PC)
Forza Motorsport 2 (Microsoft/Microsoft Game Studios - Xbox 360)
Half-Life 2: Episode Two (Valve Software - PC, Xbox 360, PS3)
God of War II (SCEA/ SCE Studios Santa Monica - PS2)
Halo 3 (Microsoft Game Studios/Bungie Software - Xbox 360)
The Legend of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass (Nintendo - DS)
Mass Effect (Microsoft Game Studios/BioWare - Xbox 360)
Spore (EA Games/Maxis - PC)
Super Mario Galaxy (Nintendo - Wii)
Super Smash Bros. Brawl (Nintendo/HAL Labs - Wii)
Tomb Raider Anniversary (Eidos Interactive/Crystal Dynamics - PS2)
GameSpy (though not -Spot) calls out a couple of game I'm especially interested in. One is Alan Wake, by the people who did the Max Payne series, which I fell for pretty hard. The graphics were nothing special, but the writing was full of this really dark, cruel horror-humor I just couldn't get enough of. (I can remember once being alone in my office, playing it late at night, with that creepy voice saying "I think I died! I think I'm dead!" That day, I knew fear.)
The other is the Crusades-era action title Assassin's Creed. I saw a really early demo of this, back when it was a 360 exclusive (before it was a PS3 exclusive, until it wasn't), and Ubisoft didn't even seem to be sure whether or not it was going to be a Prince of Persia title. The medieval street scenes, the wall-climbing animations, the edged weapon combat -- it was the first next gen title I saw that really looked next gen. Seriously, I about fell through the screen and back in time a la Time Bandits.
What's on your list?
January 25, 2007 9:00
Raw William Shatner Interview Outtakes Dump!
(This interview was conducted by my excellent colleague Clayton Neuman -- henceforth "CN" -- for this week's 10 Questions feature in Time. I threatened him with my orbital railgun until he agreed to hand over the outtakes. They're posted below in minimally-edited form -- seriously, these are raw transcripts of a phone interview, so don't expect high grammatical fidelity here. Otherwise Shatner's in fine form. Enjoy.)
CN: I was disappointed to see Show Me the Money didn't last very long.
WS: Yeah, too bad.
CN: What do you think the problem was? You showed them the money, they didn't want to see it?
WS: Well, that is the ultimate reason. I don't know. You don't want to think that people turned it off because of me, so I'll blame the game. I think there was a problem with the game, that there was something inherently not exciting about a game that people couldn't get off -- couldn't stop. I think the fun of the game is the shock and awe of seeing somebody get so greedy that they'll stay far beyond what you and the audience would reasonably think is a safe gamble. And ours wasn't a gamble -- ours required the person to stay through the whole thing, whether they won or lost, and I think maybe that was one reason. I don't know.
CN: Did you take these thoughts to the producers?
WS: We were in the process of changing the game -- making it faster, getting the explanations a little more simple -- when they canceled it. No, it's too late for thoughts. I had a good experience, I had fun, I became aware of the complexity of a game show -- what the host has to do in a game show. It's far more complex than the public at large might think.
CN: How so?
WS: Well you're responsible for the ebb and flow of the game, and you set up the drama: if somebody's feeling very comfortable, you try and make them feel uncomfortable in the game, and if they're uncomfortable you try and make them comfortable. So you try and heighten the tension, then because the people are invariably personable, you get to know them and you're rooting for them and I became involved with the people in the game. I began to enjoy the process. It was arduous because I was doing a series as well, so the number of hours, but if we could have gotten by that as we became more adept at making it, the hours would have become more feasible.
CN: How's the show [Boston Legal] going?
WS: Well I like the character, I think he's a fun, somewhat unique character. I think that the writing this year does not enhance him as much as it could and it might. There are a lot of characters that are in the series now that need to be serviced. We always want more to do, and deeper and funnier. So that's my feeling, and I'm sure that at some point in time they'll come around to it.
CN: The exchange between you and James Spader reminds me of the exchange between you and Leonard Nimoy.
WS: No, I understand what you're saying. We're polar opposites in both cases -- that's the writing, it's invented that way, and so the characters say the things that reflect what they represent. And they're friends because they are opposites and enjoy that difference. I understand the nature of your question, but as an actor, no. There's no real connection there.
CN: Richard Branson's Virgin Galactic said you'd sign on to take one of the first flights.
WS: Well I really hadn't. That wasn't the case. They were trying to get as much publicity for their venture as possible, so they made this statement that I'd signed on, but in fact nobody had ever contacted me until much later. And I said no, I wouldn't pay that amount of money to go into space. Then they began to make signs of, well, if you won't pay maybe there's something else we can do.
CN: Would you want to do it?
WS: I've been approached to do some things with astronauts and the preparation that astronauts go through. And as you probably know as a result of writing that article, they have a Boeing plane that does an outside loop so you're weightless for about 30 seconds --
CN: The vomit comet
WS: It's called the vomit comet. The vomit comet is not something I'd like to pay for. Throwing up is a lonely sickness. I wouldn't want to pay for it.
CN: What if they offered it?
WS: That would certainly be a good negotiating position. They would have blinked first. It's not something that I'm going to run to do, but if it's thrust upon me maybe it might be a good adventure.
CN: This Space Camp gala?
WS: It's interesting, I'm not quite sure the nature of what I'll say there, but those are interesting appearances -- get to know a group of people. The whole idea of space of course, my image with Star Trek lends itself for me to go there, so it's interesting.
CN: One interesting thing I read about is this video game I did.
WS: Star Trek Legacy, yes.
CN: I read that you were begged to do it
WS: I've never said that I was begged to do it. I mean, that's awful. I did it because it was a Star Trek thing, they asked me to do it, and all the people who played Captains on the series did it, so…
CN: How was that experience?
WS: Well I've done other games. It's rather an arduous experience. As you may know, making a game, there's a lot of branching, they call it, where if you turn left it's one thing, if you turn right it's another. Having turned right then you've got a whole other plot to deal with, which finally has to evolve back to the main spine of the story, where you make a whole other turn. So there's a lot of saying yeses, and a lot of saying nos. So the actor is playing many parts. It's not like a story or script, it's rather deductive, it's mechanical.
CN: Fun?
WS: Yes, it's interesting. It's an interesting challenge
CN: The new Star Trek movie.
WS: Well I'm talking about it, but I don't know what I'm saying because I really know nothing. I did have a talk with JJ and he outlined what he wanted to do. And then the problem of getting a character who is dead to talk to his younger version is a storytelling problem. That is, it's a challenge, and I don't know how he's going to solve it. How is he going to get me, the older actor who played the part of Captain Kirk to talk to the younger actor who is playing the part of the younger Captain Kirk, how does he make that happen with any logic? And that's a tough one.
CN: And you would obviously only do it if he solves that problem to your satisfaction? You wouldn't just be there for the sake of being there?
WS: That wouldn't be good for anybody.
CN: How does it feel on a personal level? You are defined as Captain Kirk, how do you pass on the torch?
WS: Well, you light a match…I don't see the transfer of -- I love watching football, and to see the younger quarterback take over from the older quarterback, and the older quarterback keeping his game face on and offering advice to the younger guy and teaching him the nuances it took many a sack for him to learn, it's inspiring. But I don't see how that transfers from actor to actor.
CN: I suppose the metaphor could extend through different Star Trek series, but you're literally giving away a character you've shaped over the past 40 years.
WS: Well, no, I'm not -- JJ Abrams is. I have very little to do with it, or none really. I've been writing Star Trek books about the Kirk character, and what I would have done if the character hadn't died and if they had still been making movies. My books all reflect the Captain Kirk character along with some of the other Star Trek characters. I've started a new series of books -- I've got a contract for two of them from Pocketbook -- to do the young Captain Kirk, so I've got young Kirk and young Spock just beginning their naval career. That's my take on Captain Kirk and Mr. Spock. What JJ is going to do, I really don't know. And I really have nothing to offer -- I can't say to some young actor, play it this way, because he's going to play it his way.
CN: Who would you want to play Kirk? There are rumors JJ is looking at Matt Damon.
WS: Well Matt Damon is young enough, and athletic enough, and good-looking enough. You've gotta be young and good-looking and rich. And charming. No, they'll probably go with an unknown, and I'm not conversant with the young talent that's out there.
CN: Would you prefer an unknown?
WS: Probably an unknown would be best, because a known face brings a pre-determined attitude on the audience. This way you get a fresh face and you might make a star, and I think that's what they're after.
CN: Then there's the ultimate danger of being typecast. You're really almost alone in that you've managed to move your career beyond Star Trek.
WS: I think if you take a poll of young actors who are out of work, whether they would sacrifice being known as Captain Kirk, and being employed for several years as against not wanting to be typecast, you'd get a real plethora of votes for the typecast.
CN: How is it you've managed to avoid that?
WS: Well, I don't know. Hanging in there long enough, playing other things, maybe I've got some talent. A lot of things come to bear, most of which are in the area of lucky.
CN: Jeff Daniels is starting a music career, his single is called, "If William Shatner Can, I Can."
WS: N,o I haven't, nor have I heard the sentiment. Can what? Sing? William Shatner knows he can't sing.
CN: Any more albums?
WS: Both Ben and I want to. But nobody has jumped down our throats to tell us to get to work.
CN: How did the last album do?
WS: It got great notices. It was perhaps more positively reviewed than anything else I've done.
CN: [laughs]
WS: You find that funny, do you? But it didn't sell as many as we'd hoped, and I think that's probably the reason nobody is jumping at us to make more.
CN: Last year you were nominated for an Emmy for Boston Legal. What will you do this year to make sure you win?
WS: There's nothing you can do. The only thing you can do is hope that the writers write the material that would be worthy of a vote, and that I have no control over. The actor is in the hands of a lot of other people, over which he has no control.
CN: But you must have, after all this time, developed a sense of control over your characters.
WS: No, that's a public perception. The actual perception is that actor has little if any control.
CN: So the Emmy should go to the writers then
WS: In fact it should. There's interpretation of the person's writing, but it's the writer who makes the show. I mean, what you're going to do, your writing is going to make the article. Not what I'm saying. You characterize me in any way you see fit, and that will shape the article. What I'm saying is of little importance.
CN: Who is the best writer you've worked for?
WS: Probably David Kelly. He's a genius. The stories he tells, the humor he has, he's won an Emmy for the best comedy and the best drama in the same year, and he wrote all 44 shows. It's totally incredible what he's able to do. And he's writing most of the shows for Boston Legal, at the same time he's got a pilot going on. He's incredibly busy.
CN: Going back to Star Trek, there's a sentiment that Star Trek has had it's day, and maybe another movie isn't the best idea, that it's time to move on. How do you feel about that?
WS: Well, that's a good question because we don't know. There was something about Star Trek, nobody quite knows what, that sustained it all these years and made Paramount billions of dollars. It's unique -- what was that? Everybody's got another answer. But with so many entities of Star Trek out there on the airwaves all at once, the audience began to leave it. Now, almost ten years later, will the audience pick up their love affair with Star Trek? Does Star Trek have this ineffable magic that it once had, and will this new cast have the curious gura of the previous cast? We don't know. Will JJ Abrams be able to bring to Paramount what they always refer to as a cash cow? And so there's this huge experiment going on. And as talented as JJ is -- I'm driving at the same time. I'm trying to be informative and not have an accident.
CN: Please don't have an accident.
WS: Then you'd have something else to write about. As good as he is, this is the real test for him. He's got to take a known quantity, of which people have prior expectations, bring his own persona to it, give it the Abrams twist, and yet maintain the Star Trek game. It's a very complex thing he's about to begin, and a huge gamble -- because they're going to spend a lot of money on it -- and what will be the result you and I can talk after his movie opens and see what the audience thinks of it. It doesn't matter so much what the critics think of it because it never mattered. It was whether it had a magic touch that affected the audience and made them want to come see it again and again.
CN: Do you think it's possible to find that magic again with something that's so done?
WS: Well, he's going for a younger cast, so will he start off where I began, at the age I was or appeared to be? Will he go younger? If he stays at the same age, will he try to put the characteristics that were written in, or that I brought to it? I don't know. It's going to be a series of interesting artistic choices that will be made by Abrams and Paramount about how to get this very precious franchise that they have had for all these years -- and it's still doing well in syndication. I know in LA they're playing the Star Trek I was on.
CN: Right, the remastered versions. Have you been watching them?
WS: No, I don't watch any of that. What will they do to enhance it? They must be quite apprehensive. And, in addition to that, if I were they and you wanted to guarantee that the audience will come in droves, one of the potential income-producing things they might do is to include some members of the old cast.
CN: Everybody wants to go see William Shatner play Kirk.
WS: Well how do you do that? And that's the storytelling mystery.
CN: You have confidence in JJ?
WS: He's a wonderful storyteller, his series show us that. He's a director that's adept with CGI -- Mission Impossible 3 showed us that. We know he has an ear and an eye for humanistic plots. Those are all important for Star Trek -- CGI and humanity.
CN: How did you enjoy your roast?
WS: Well there was a point when I was on the dais when I was thinking, what the hell have I done? It just seemed like a good idea at the time -- they roast one person a year, they asked me and it just seemed like fun.
CN: You started to regret it though?
WS: For a couple of instances perhaps?
CN: I assume we didn't see those?
WS: I don't really remember the instances, I just remember the emotion.
CN: What should Time know about you?
WS: Oh I don't know. I can't answer that. It's constantly changing and whatever is newsworthy, you'll find out.
CN: I saw this weird thing about Claudia Christian, who worked with you on TJ Hooker. She's accusing you of making some sort of advance on her.
WS: This is now early 80s, right? 27 years later, who is Claudia Christian?
CN: She's an actress
WS: And she's saying I made an advance on her? Well, who am I to tell a lady that she's a liar. It might very well be, it was 27 years ago. I take it she's getting publicity. I have no recollection of that -- I'm sure it was memorable for her though.
January 24, 2007 3:13
More People Who Could Beat You Up
Matthew Polly's new book American Shaolin comes with this memorable epigraph from Snow Crash, which I can't quite transcribe verbatim on Time's website:
Until a man is 25, he still thinks, every so often, that under the right circumstances he could be the baddest motherf____er in the world. If I moved to a martial arts monastery in China and studied real hard for 10 years. If I just dropped out and devoted my life to being bad.
So true. Though I think 35 would be a bit more accurate. Maybe even 37.
American Shaolin is about how Polly dropped out of Princeton to spend two years studying kung fu with Shaolin monks in China. It's about as cool as you think it would be. Though as far as I know he still doesn't have a nuclear sidecar like Raven in Snow Crash.
In other news: weird shark.
January 24, 2007 11:11
Dude, I'm Gettin' a Chumby
Is that meme funny again yet? No? OK.
I had a visit from the Chumby people today. The Chumby is a little gadget that's supposed to live in your couch or your kitchen or your bedside table -- I'm thinking of it as a clock radio replacement right now. It's soft and squishy and talks to the Net and runs widgets: weather, music, pictures, news, however you want to set it up. My Chumby has various clocks on it right now, plus a dorky Matrix joke widget, and another one that makes it talk like HAL 9000.
The interesting things is they're trying to be very open source about it. They're making the hardware and the software (it runs Flash) very aggressively open and hackable, and they're trying to grow a developer community around it. It's kind of the reverse of the gleaming, hermetically sealed iPod ecology. Plus they know journalists are suckers for open source stories.
Chumby launches this spring for $150. Should be interesting. Personally I plan to get an iRobot Create and make them fight.
January 23, 2007 9:17
The Oscar Nominees: Meh
To save you the scrolling, for visual effects we have:
- Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest
- Poseidon
- Superman Returns
January 23, 2007 7:19
Fool's Mate: Or, My Big Chess Porn Problem
I've never been very comfortable with the fact that I'm crap at chess. As a lad I self-identified as a smart kid, but when I stepped up to the board, I had nothin'. I just told myself I had other strengths and went back to drawing Thor on my math notebook. But an uncomfortable feeling lingered.
Despite this, or maybe because of it, I have a vicarious chess-porn thing: books about chess, movies about chess, whatever you got, it all works for me. I once even went to a professional match and pretended I knew what the hell was going on. Though granted there was also free booze, and it was a match between Irina Krush and Almira Skripchenko. Still, I felt creepy.
My current chess-porn of choice: Michael Weinreb's The Kings of New York, out this coming March, a very engaging group portrait of the top-ranked chess team at Edward R. Murrow high school, which is half high-ranking Russian immigrants and half ghetto prodigies. On the back Chuck Klosterman calls it "the Friday Night Lights of high school chess," so there you go.
January 22, 2007 10:28
Webcomics Are Still the New Blogs: A Bit More on Achewood
I'm going to add a short addendum to my Achewood post the other day, since it got mad comments, and I could use the traffic.
Most of the comments were people saying, in various eloquent ways, that Achewood is awesome. With which I concur. Someone pointed out that I didn't mention the blogs for the various characters, which is totally true. Achewood's creator, Chris Onstad (did I even mention his name?), on top of writing and drawing the strip, maintains blogs in the voices of his various creations. Which, you know, holy crap, I can barely blog as myself, and I'm not even fictional. (Roast Beef also publishes a zine called Man Why You Even Got to Do a Thing, and Nice Pete has written a couple of books.) The sheer richness and vitality and thought-out-ness of the Achewood universe, the living detail in which it exists and evolves, are just remarkable. The only comparable undertaking I can think of is the Homestar Runner universe.
A lot of people posted favorite strips and story arcs. I guess I'll call out a few of mine, some of which I mentioned last week. My favorites tend to be the sad ones...
-- Roast Beef goes to the moon.
-- Ray goes to Hell. There is balm in Gilead.
-- Nice Pete Takes Off with Philippe. Beautiful. Nobody does rain quite like Achewood.
-- Cartilage Head. In which Ray is exposed as a coward. Some of that beautiful art I mentioned.
-- The Great Outdoor Fight. Three days. Three acres. Three THOUSAND men! There's some disturbingly gorey art in this sequence, at least by my wussy standards, but otherwise: rude. (And I'm sorry I called Beef a loser. I just meant -- never mind. In this one he says a true thing about nerds.)
-- Philippe goes searching for his lost couch at the transfer station. Philippe, a 5-year-old otter, is the baby of the Achewood family, and there's something brilliant about the way he's written: very sweet, but occasionally selfish and spiteful, the way real little kids are. Please don't read this unless you're prepared to cry. Actually cry. To love, to hurt! Is life!
(And just to clarify: I'm a staff writer at Time, mostly doing this blog in my spare time. It's just me, no editors, so you'll see it deviate in places from the usual Time style and Time voice and Time editorial tone.)
January 22, 2007 9:58
More Nerd Book News: What Happened, I Used to Be Cool
The shortlist for the 2006 Arthur C Clarke Award is up. I always try to keep an eye on the Clarke, which skews a little more literary than its colonial equivalents the Hugo and the Nebula. In the past they've given it to China Mieville (sorry, too lazy to do the accent) twice, and to Mary Doria Russell's amazing The Sparrow, and Neal Stephenson's Quicksilver.
The 2006 list is as follows:
End of the World Blues, by Jon Courtenay Grimwood
Nova Swing, by M. John Harrison
Oh Pure and Radiant Heart, by Lydia Millet
Hav, by Jan Morris
Gradisil, by Adam Roberts
Streaking, by Brian Stableford
I've heard of exactly one of these books -- the Millet -- and read approximately .15 of one of them -- that would be how far I got in the Millet.
On the other hand I'm halfway through Joe Hill's Heart-Shaped Box, which is coming out in a few weeks, and am finding it pretty remarkable. I can't remember the last time I read a genuine top-notch creepy ghost story. If you don't know the poorly-kept secret of Hill's identity, click here.
January 19, 2007 9:11
Webcomics are the New Blogs: The First of a Series of at Least One
There came a time not long ago when I realized that a goodly percentage -- not 50, but like, you know, 15 or something -- of my media intake consists of webcomics. A quick census of the sites in the toolbar hovering over the browser window in which I write this post would include links to Penny Arcade, Order of the Stick, Achewood, PvP, Flintlocke, Questionable Content, and Control Alt Delete.
I always loved comic strips -- that was the sole reason my family ever bought the Boston Globe growing up -- but now, freed from the choking confines of the comic strip syndicates and the space crunch and family values guidelines of newsprint, they've truly manifested their latent mutant powers and come into their own. They are all, after all, what the Web was built to do: display text and image. Though I guess originally it was supposed to be, like, data and stuff.
My current feverish webcomic obsession is Achewood, a comic about, um, a bunch of cats, and some robots, and stuffed toys, and an otter who's 5. The alpha and omega of Achewood are Ray Smuckles, a cat who's incredibly rich and successful at everything he does, but whom you can't quite hate; and his best friend Roast Beef, who's a loser and suffers from crippling depression. This is a continuity-heavy strip, so it requires a certain investment to get up to speed -- the current arc has to do with Nice Pete, a psychotic killer who lives in a state of uneasy truce with the cats of Achewood. He formed a band called Mister Band -- "It is a good, honest name that people can believe in" -- which consists of Pete howling about wizards and dwarves over an unadorned bass line. Later he caught Ray and Teodor (I believe Teodor is supposed to be a bear; the artwork is a little crude, though at times also intensely, almost lyrically beautiful) making fun of him, so he tied them up in his room. Nice Pete had invented a USB peripheral that would enable the Internet to murder Ray and Teodor -- "They can't call me guilty! Not with millions of hands on the blade!" -- but unfortunately he had driver issues and ended up getting stabbed by his own peripheral....
That pretty much brings us up to the present day. I think the striking thing about Achewood is its enormous emotional range -- it's incredibly funny, but some strips are really achingly sad -- check out, for example, the arc where Ray goes to hell (he's forced to drive a 1982 Subaru Brat there) and meets bluesman Robert Johnson. Or the infamous Cartilage Head sequence.
It kind of expands your understanding of webcomics, the way Maus did with graphic novels. Except this time it's with cats.
January 17, 2007 2:49
Killing Me Softly With His Song of Ice & Fire
I don't know whether to be happy or sad that George R. R. Martin's Song of Ice & Fire is going to be an HBO mini-series. Not that it's up to me. HBO has repeatedly proven itself to be capable of creating quality content, one example of which is Rome, which I sometimes watch, and one of the Rome producers is working on the Martin project. (The other producer is a guy named D.B. Weiss -- the only credit Variety gives for him is "Halo," which isn't exactly promising, given the current deadness of the Halo movie project.)
But dammit, I wanted to see Martin's work on the big screen, with big stars and a big budget. I want to see Peter Dinklage, playing Tyrion Lannister, on a big, big screen. I bow to no one in my Martin fanboyism. I think he's the premier contemporary writer in the Tolkien tradition, and I would have liked to see him get his due as a serious movie property. Maybe Martin feels more comfortable with this -- he wrote for TV for years. Maybe premium cable is the only place to deal with his edginess -- he's fantastically cruel to his characters, and he's not prissy about sex, or decapitation, or burning people alive. Maybe a mini-series is the only form (besides a series of novels) to lay out his insanely complex, woven storylines (I met him once, and he told me it's all in his head -- he hasn't written down an outline of the rest of the series, for fear that some hack will be hired to finish it for him if he's hit by a bus).
Well, whatever the format, it's time. Martin is the major fantasy writer of our era. Just remember: get me Dinklage. Or face the wrath of my huge railgun.
January 17, 2007 11:27
Gawell the Mage is Level 70 and You're Not
Probably most of you are aware that the World of Warcraft expansion The Burning Crusade came out at midnight two nights ago. It raises the maximum possible level from 60 to 70. The first character to max out the new level cap hit it this morning at 4:04 AM. Dude is Gawell, a gnome mage, who is played by a 24-year-old French guy. There's an interview with him here. It took 28 hours of playing time and the full backing of his guild, Millennium. Pretty impressive, actually. All hail Gawell: dude is 70th level.
On the opposite end of the spectrum is my fellow Time writer Ta-Nehisi, who has an excellent piece here about his struggles with Warcraftaddiction.
January 16, 2007 10:09
Book News: Faeries, Nanobots, Naked Underwater Drumming
I'm in the middle of Susanna "No H in My Name" Clarke's The Ladies of Grace Adieu, which is pummeling me relentlessly with its greatness. Clarke's Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell is one of the best fantasy novels I've read in years, though her publisher savvily packaged it like straight literary fiction, so non-nerds won't feel the shame of carrying around a paperback with an embossed cover (they weren't fooling anybody, apparently, since it won the 2005 Hugo and was up for the Nebula). The stories in Ladies are set in the same world as Strange, and they each follow the same arc, beginning as arch Victorian drawing-room farce, and then -- I never see it coming -- taking a curious 90-degree turn into Clarke's sad, sinister version of Faery. Apparently she's down with Neil Gaiman's crue, since one of the stories puts the Duke of Wellington into Gaiman's Stardust continuity.
I only wish she'd given the book a different title. It sounds like a cozy mystery translated from the French.
In other book news, Neal Stephenson's The Diamond Age is going to be a Sci-Fi Channel miniseries, produced by George Clooney's company (they did Good Night & Good Luck). This was his first book after Snow Crash, and I remember the sick, febrile excitement I felt when I bought it (I was a grad student at the time and definitely couldn't afford to be buying hardcovers), and the delicious pleasure of some conspicuously brilliant passages (the fine black dust that condenses out of the air, that tells you that nano-bots are fighting and dying) but in the end it left me a little cold -- Stephenson lost me somewhere in the naked underwater drumming tunnels. I realize any decent hero must descend into the underworld, as Juanita did in Snow Crash, but golly.
Or maybe I was just too cool and single to get into a novel that is, essentially, about parenting. I didn't rekindle my sick lit-crush on Stephenson till Cryptonomicon. It smolders still.
Strange but true: one of Stephenson's rare short stories appeared in this very magazine. How cool are we.
January 15, 2007 11:50
Star Trek to World: I'm Not Dead Yet
I can't quite get my mind around the fact that J.J. Abrams now basically owns the entire Star Trek franchise. After the success of Alias Paramount handed him the whole thing, like a Hummer or a couple extra points on the back end. Star Trek is a living, breathing cultural entity. You can't just give it to somebody.
Except you can and they did. Abrams cleaned house, ousted all the old franchise stalwarts, and last week he told EW that his plan for Star Trek XI will focus on the early post-Academy years of Kirk and Spock, and that he's got a complete script in hand. Quote: ''On the one hand, for people who love Star Trek, the fix that they will get will be really satisfying,'' says Abrams. ''For people who've never seen it or know it vaguely, I think they will enjoy it equally, because the movie does not require you to know anything about Star Trek. I would actually prefer [that] people don't know the series, because I feel like they will come to it with an open mind.'' Lots of good intel and linx here.
Playing oddsmaker feels a little ghoulish -- I'm like a Roman soldier shooting dice at the foot of the cross here -- but it's worth noting the following:
-- Abrams was also handed the Mission Impossible franchise to revitalize. He made MI3. Boo.
-- The track records of the screenwriters are awful (incidentally the co-screenwriter is Alex Kurtzman, not Alex Christian, as EW reports)
-- on the other hand, he could take the franchise in a darker, crueler, grittier direction, the way Bond went this year. Let's hope Abrams was taking notes when he saw Casino Royale.
At the very least I think cleaning house was a necessary first step. I've been on Trek strike since Insurrection, when the rot really set in. (Really, Jonathan Frakes, how could you light Gates McFadden so unflatteringly?) Someone is going to make Star Trek XI, there's too much money to be soaked out of eternally hopeful Trekkers. If there's a nuclear holocaust, and only cockroaches survive, those cockroaches will make Star Trek XI. I don't see how Abrams can do worse. Let's light this candle. Less talk, more synthohol.
January 12, 2007 11:19
Robert Downey Jr.'s Hieroglyphic Love Affair
I was going to blog about Harrison Ford turning down a Han Solo spinoff, but the story feels off to me -- the sourcing's not so good. I don't buy it. Let's all be quiet and maybe he'll make Indy 4.
So instead...here's Robert Downey, Jr! Every year Time does a piece about great performances from the past year. Because we're geniuses we call it Great Performances. I only had one nomination: Downey as a paranoid tweaker in Scanner Darkly. I could blab about how awesome he was, or you could just watch a clip on YouTube. He's not a nerd per se, but he did give the best performance in the best SF movie of 2006. (Yes, that sentence was comment-bait. But I do actually believe it.)
I didn't do the interview, my excellent colleague Amy Lennard Goehner did, but she graciously loaned me her outtakes. (And let us not forget, Downey is going to be playing Tony Stark in Jon Favreau's Iron Man. Kind of interesting, because Stark had a drinking problem, and Downey has a history of addiction...anyway.)
TIME: What was your reaction upon receiving the script?
DOWNEY: This is going to be a freak show. This is going to be a blast.
TIME: What's Linklater like as a director?
DOWNEY: We're holed up in a hot conference room, and whatever happens during the day or whatever comes to light or whatever funny or dark or serious or poignant stuff we say winds up being in the next draft. He retrofits the script to the people playing the characters. On the other hand. he's a complete taskmaster and he calls the shooting days the ground war. With Linklater, there is no stone unturned in the entire quarry by the time you're done shooting every day. You feel like you've wrung out the sponge out of every possible idea.
TIME: Had you read the book before?
DOWNEY: I was somewhat familiar with it. I left the bookwormy stuff to people who were a little more essential, like Keanu who was asking for translations of the German words. I basically showed up, put on a pair of fluffy pink slippers and started thinking about how dark and weird and poignant we could make these guys and gals.
TIME: What drew you to the character? Did you feel like with your own personal struggles with drug addiction, that you felt a particular empathy for him?
DOWNEY: You'd think that would have to be part of it and definitely an obvious thing. To me at the time it was a kind of prophetic science fiction tale, and that the substance abuse was really a metaphor. And enough time has passed between that part of my life, you'd think I'd stop at some point and go 'this reminds me of when...' But really, we were working superhard in these strange conditions...what brought me to the table to make me want to do this was that Linklater was directing it.
TIME: Who you had never even met...
DOWNEY: No, and he was sitting at the Chateau with Keanu, and when Val Kilmer and I were doing Kiss Kiss Bang Bang we pretty much had School of Rock playing on a loop in a trailer at someone's house. And in addition to all the other stuff Rick has done, we were having nerdgasms and were pretty geeked out about School of Rock, so it just seemed like someone I really like is calling and saying 'do you want to be in this movie?'
TIME: So no trepidation.
DOWNEY: It's funny, I feel it doesn't add up, the whole thing was supposed to be a way for me to [he's talking ironically here] exorcise and show that I'm...[he breaks off laughing.] It was a job.
TIME: What's it like to act in a movie where your performance is essentially traced over? Do you feel some of the acting is lost in the animation?
DOWNEY: It can cover a lot of the uncomfortabilities, its such an emasculating thing to be put in front of a camera and be told 'and in addition try not to look ugly or shiny or sweaty.'
TIME: You had this system of putting post-it notes around the set, to remember your lines? Rick said they looked like hieroglyphics to everyone else. Can you talk about that?
DOWNEY: I'd go on these long rants and he'd make them intelligible and they'd be in the next draft. And I'd be like 'ohmygod now I have to memorize this.' So I'd go from the set to the gym to dinner to the hotel and immediately write it on a poster board in acronym. So when I'm saying 'oh these gypsy grifters must have' I'd write 'TGGMH.' Then I'd study the acronym.
TIME: Because you were able to improvise so much?
DOWNEY: Yes, and also cause he's [Linklater's] so great with words, he'd take these thoughts and wordy pointless essays I spat out and he'd condense it to 25 words that meant something. He was a great editor and collaborator. I'd have a love affair with my hieroglyphics every night and then I'd bring them to the set and hang them up. It was super weird, but it works. Now I don't leave home without my hieroglyphics.
TIME: Was there one thing that was a high point during shooting, in terms of the collaborative process?
DOWNEY: There was a scene where we're all tweaking an engine outside and no one knows who to trust, and Freck shows up and we all turn on him. It just reminded me of the kind of freaky stuff that would happen when really good friends are getting too stoned.
January 11, 2007 11:52
Steve Jobs and You, like Ships in the Eternal Night of Outer Space
There's been a lot of hype lately about the rising tide of you-culture and user generated content. Much of which I wrote with my own 8 fingers.
So what with the iPhone coming out and all, it's interesting to look at Apple in that context. Because it's the least you-culture company I know of. They do no market research on new products. They don't want to hear your opinion. It's all about neatness and control, a few smart people in a locked room releasing products to the grateful (well, some of them) many. The arrow only points one way. Sure, you can bring up a command line on OS X, but how many people bother? Just stare at the pretty animations and play with your translucent beads and be happy.
While I was in Cupertino last week several execs stressed to me -- including Jobs and VP of hardware marketing Greg Joswiak -- that the iPhone is a closed platform. Closed closed closed. Nobody's harnessing the global hivemind to come up with new widgets here. It would mess up their delicate power management systems and such.
And of course, that's why the iPhone is so ridiculously great. Seriously: once you get close to this thing, you'll realize it's an artifact from the future. It's that much better than anything else you've ever seen. And it's precisely because Apple is a closed shop: their software running on their hardware, in a tiny, tight, perfectly integrated techno-eco-system. Apple is smarter than you, and you'll take your iPhone and you'll like it.
Jobs has discovered the limits of the Youniverse. You can make YouTube, and Wikipedia, and even, in a way, Firefox and Linux. But you'll never make a phone worth a damn.
January 11, 2007 10:33
The Last Blog in the World with the James Cameron News
So James Cameron is making Avatar. Or sorry, Avatar -- IMDB isn't that helpful.
I don't totally trust Cameron. Yeah, he's made some geek classics -- in fact the streak comprising Terminator, Aliens, The Abyss, and then T2, all in a row, 1984-1991, is probably one of the all-time great feats of nerd cinema. (I was going to attempt some baseball analogy just now, something to do with Ted Williams or Joe Dimaggio or somebody? But then I remembered I KNOW NOTHING ABOUT BASEBALL.) But I guess I just don't always feel that it's coming from a genuinely nerdy place. Cameron is too in love with big muscles. Must the jocks always win?
But he's certainly one of the greatest technical directors of all time. That alone makes Titanic almost watchable -- if you can somehow bracket the tween-friendly love story and think of it as an art-movie about the slow demolition of a large metal structure, it's mesmerizing. Bottom line, I don't expect that much from Avatar itself, the movie. But I bet it'll generate a lot of really great software that other people can then put to better use.
And the whole future-soldier thing reminds me: who owns the rights to The Forever War?
Update: oh, snap, I just realized that we have a Q&A with Cameron on our own damn site. This is the bestest magazine ever.