February 28, 2007 3:51
What Was Your First Computer?
A lovely book landed on my desk today: Core Memory: A Visual Survey of Vintage Computers by John Alderman, Dag Spicer, and Mark Richards. It starts with a reconstructed version of the Z3 Adder, a WWII-era machine that used "hole-punched movie film" to store data, and goes up through Google's first production server, which is not very vintage but somehow appropriate anyway. The photos are gorgeous -- the windy blue-white guts of a Cray-3, the humble plywood case of an Apple I, a purple-and-white portable suitcase-style Osborne...
But I was disappointed not to see either of my first two computers in there. Somewhere around 2nd or 3rd grade students in my elementary school were taken out of class, in small groups, and ushered in hushed silence into the awesome presence of a Commodore PET, which lived underground, like the Minotaur in its maze, in the school's fallout shelter (this is such a perfect period piece). Under close supervision, we were permitted to play Hunt the Wumpus for about half an hour. Thus educamated, we were returned back to our surface lives.
Later my family actually took possession of a Sinclair ZX81, a tiny little guy with a touchpad keyboard that hooked up to your TV. IIRC, it had a mighty 1K of RAM (can that possibly be right?) For storage it hooked up to my dad's boombox -- my siblings and I would play the data tapes out loud, at high volume, to annoy him. What I remember most about our beloved ZX81 was that you could program in BASIC, and it would bug-check as you typed -- if what you were saying made no sense, it wouldn't let you add the line. That kind of thing would probably annoy me now -- I always disable grammar-checkers -- but for an 11-year-old it was handy.
If I got a PC now, of course, I would never consider programming it. I would just surf the Web endlessly. But back then, trapped as we were on our little computational islands, we made our own fun.
February 28, 2007 3:35
Trek Returns, Xmas '08
Oh, snap. I may have to become a Christian just for the occasion.
Casting rumors are here. Quoth he: "the roles of James T. Kirk, Mr. Spock and Dr. McCoy may go to three very big name stars: [Matt] Damon, Adrien Brody and Gary Sinise." Sinise could use the work, but damn, those other two? I guess it's possible. Matt Damon: Kirk :: Ewan Macgregor: Obi-Wan? Make it work, people.
(I've blogged about the Abrams-Trek Industrial Complex here. Shatner himself -- the ghost of Kirksmas past -- has a few comments here.)
February 27, 2007 1:27
More Notes on Giant Aliens: Yours is Bigger
I blog today through a feverish haze, which is appropriate given the hallucinatory subject matter. In my debilitated state I'm just going to summarize comments on yesterday's post, which make clear my numerous personal and nerdly shortcomings.
-- Several readers brought up large organic space vessels from Babylon 5 and Star Trek as well as Farscape (turns out the ship on Farscape is called Moya). An earlier example of the same meme crossed my mind after I posted: the Brood, those alien X-Men bad guys, used to tool around in whale-like organic starships, which were actually a spaceborne race whom they'd lobotomized, the bastards.
-- I also missed several other living planets: Unicron from the Transformers, and Mogo the living planet, who's apparently a Green Lantern? And there's, you know, Gaia. And the living moon from John Varley's Titan.
-- re: the Cthulhu, Tripp evokes the hideous Azathoth. There's a Lovecraft quote on Wikipwedia that begs to be cut and pasted: "[O]utside the ordered universe [is] that amorphous blight of nethermost confusion which blasphemes and bubbles at the center of all infinity—the boundless daemon sultan Azathoth, whose name no lips dare speak aloud, and who gnaws hungrily in inconceivable, unlighted chambers beyond time and space amidst the muffled, maddening beating of vile drums and the thin monotonous whine of accursed flutes."
-- there's that giant amoeba in a TOS episode called The Immunity Syndrome
-- Fred Hoyle's The Black Cloud
-- lots more examples from Alan Dean Foster, Gene Wolfe, Frank Herbert, Orson Scott Card, Dr. Who...sorry, I need more Dayquil...
February 26, 2007 9:00
A Little List of Really Big Aliens
Falling asleep last night, feeling replete and self-satisfied from an evening spent not-watching the Oscars -- yeah, I'm just a rebel that way -- I played a thought-game: What are the ten physically largest living beings in all of science fiction? Here's my list, biggest to smallest, generated -- I might add, in my defense -- without peeking at Wikipedia beforehand (though I peeked afterhand to add in links).
1) Solaris. My parents took me to see this artsy movie based on a Stanislaw Lem novel when I was a little kid. I believe they thought it would be like Star Wars. Needless to say it was not. It's an avant-garde Russian film from the 1970's. I attained near-traumatic levels of boredom. Before I blacked out I registered that a sentient planet figures in the plot somehow. I didn't see the Soderbergh remake. Should I?
2) Behemothaurs, from Iain M. Banks's Return to Windward. OK, this is a fairly obscure one, but it'll register if you're at all into Banks's Culture novels. There's a subplot in this one that deals with (IIRC) a near-weightless mass of air adrift in space (a bit like the torus in Niven's Integral Trees books) that supports a complex ecosystem, including truly stupendous blimplike entities who are basically functionally immortal. There are people I know and love who are immune to Banks's charms, but to me he's probably the greatest living SF writer -- I have an unlimited appetite for his literary, postmodernistically self-conscious space opera. Look to Windward, which came out in the U.S. shortly before September 11th, 2001, is an eerily relevant analysis of how liberal capitalist technocracies provoke acts of suicidal terrorism...anyway, yeah, behemothaurs = big.
3) I'm not enough of a Farscape scholar to even remember what their ship is called. But I do remember that it's not an artifact, it's a very large alien being. So I'm countin' it.
4) Bandersnatchi. I never got a clear mental picture of the Bandersnatch, a colossal slug-like being from Larry Niven's Known Space universe. I believe they were the product of genetic engineering, created by the Tnuctipun for the Slavers as food animals. Though the rebellious Tnuctipun secretly made them sentient, and immune to mind control...
5) The Crystalline Entity. That huge, tree-like interstellar fella who cropped up in a few Star Trek episode. A heartless world-ravager, it turned out to be rather fragile -- what with it being crystalline and all -- and the Enterprise shattered it.
6) Sandworms. Shai-hulud, yo. They're large.
7) Galactus. The awesome Devourer of Worlds from the Marvel universe. A very helpful fellow, in that he's always picking people to be his herald and giving them cool powers, thus generating an endless series of convenient origin stories (viz., the Silver Surfer, and (I think) Firelord, among many others). My memory of Galactus is that different artists have drawn him in somewhat different scales, making his true height kind of elastic. But I think eating planets tends to make you grow up pretty big and strong no matter who's drawing you.
8) The Brobdingnagians from Gulliver's Travels. You know, the big people Gulliver meets after the Lilliputians. I don't have a good mental fix on their size, but I do remember a scene where Gulliver sits astride the nipple of one of the women. So, you know, not small. (I vividly remember him being disgusted by her macro-scale skin blemishes. Ew.)
9) Um, that bad guy in Krull looked pretty tall? Even though he was kinda out of focus most of the time? (Who knew they had such a good time making this movie?)
10) And I figure some of the Cthulhu crowd have gotta be pretty burly? Help me out here.
I know I must have missed some easy shots here, and the order is totally off-the-cuff. There's probably a killer sentient galaxy out there that's going to throw this whole thing off...
February 23, 2007 11:48
Who Will Watch the Watchmen? Me! Totally!
For the last few weeks I've been working on a piece about Zack Snyder's remarkable 300, a CGI-heavy adaptation of the Frank Miller graphic novel. His next project after that is Watchmen. I had kind of assumed, after the Gilliam version died, that all future Watchmen projects were snares and delusions, but Snyder's appears to be actually happening.
I'm also allowing myself to hope that it'll actually be good. Dawn of the Dead was good. (Watch Johnny Cash rock the opening credits here.) 300 is good. And the two movies are good in very different ways. And talking to Snyder, he seems to have a really strong sense of Watchmen -- he has interesting things to say about working with big studios to make a movie that is deeply corrosive of the superhero archetype, which is awkward given that studios make lots of $$$ off of said archetype. There are some quotes from him here. Check dude out: "I have to remind them, I go, ‘look, it's much more Strangelove than Fantastic Four,’ which they don't like hearing.”
And now, Watchmen casting rodeo! I don't care as long as Jude Law = Ozymandias. He can catch a bullet, I know he can...
(In other news: German guys are sword-fighting again. Like, really sword-fighting. And chimps are making spears. Truly, these are the end times. )
February 22, 2007 1:10
The Old Gods Have Awakened, Fear Their Many Arms
I realize that Google launched a war with Microsoft today, and Apple and iPhone settled their trademark dispute, but as my 2-year-old daughter says: "guys, we have to focus." A bunch of New Zealand fishermen have landed a colossal squid in Antarctica.
February 21, 2007 10:05
Star Trek: It's Made of People
Lately I've been watching a feature-length fan-made Star Trek parody called Star Wreck: In the Pirkinning. There are dark abysms of Trek fandom that kinda scare me, but you know what? This is really very, very watchable. It was done by a small (but apparently very scrappy) group of Finnish guys, amateurs, who spent 7 years on the project. (My colleague Dietmar, who's one of Time's photo editors, tipped me off to this.)
The movie starts with our hero, the cynical, bumptious Captain Pirk, hurled back in time and stuck on earth. (His name sounds like a cross between Kirk and Stanislaw Lem's Pirx the Pilot?) Pirk eventually gets bored, says to hell with the integrity of the timeline, throws in with some callow post-Soviet Russians, builds a starship and conquers Earth. That's all in about the first 15 minutes.
It's a no-budget affair, and that shows in all the ways that you'd think it would. But it's pretty damn funny, and the effects, especially the starship exteriors, look fantastic. Samuli Torssonen, whose brainchild this is, plays Pirk with just the right mix of fecklessness and wide-eyed Finnish innocence (Finnocence?) -- he's really an appealing leading man. And even the people who obviously can't act have a good attitude about it, like you're happy to be hanging out with them even as they're puncturing the fourth wall. It's mostly tongue-in-cheek, but to see an armada of Enterprise-esque ships churning through space, in a non-eye-wateringly bad movie, revived some of my poisoned, embittered, hopelessy ironized love of the Trek franchise.
And you gotta love a bunch of Finns with a sheet of linoleum for a bluescreen and a heart-tuggingly sad render farm in their kitchen actually pulling off a watchable space epic, and reclaiming for the fans a franchise that has been sadly misused by those who profit off it. You -- you -- really are person of the year. You may snicker, but in your heart you know it to be true.
Meanwhile the Spitzer telescope has been spying on some extra-solar planets, and they're just a bunch of useless hot Jupiters.
February 21, 2007 12:06
Of Geeks and Girls
The Keymaster and the Gatekeeper will be meeting face to face at a conference in May for an unscripted chat. Thus begins the rule of Gozer. Actually, it should be pretty interesting -- maybe they'll settle that whole teachers' unions issue once and for all.
In other news, the people at Inkling magazine -- possibly being even more desperate for traffic than I am -- are hosting a Girl Geek Photo Contest. Have at it, though it's an open question whether a genuine girl geek would actually want to take part in such a contest, preferring instead to be judged on the contents of her brain. Which would be tougher to represent photographically.
First prize is a poster of Ada Byron, who's usually touted as the world's first programmer, for work she did relating to Charles Babbage's Analytical Engine (which was never actually built). Back in the day I wrote a really, really long article about Ada Byron, who was Lord Byron's daughter, for a magazine called Lingua Franca, which sadly no longer exists, and has fallen off the Web, or I would link to it. The upshot was, people are a little too quick to anoint her as a kind of programmer-saint -- she was a gifted but deeply troubled and unhappy woman, whose intellectual pursuits were passionate and scattershot, and there's a lot of very heated debate about what her work really amounts to.
Just remember: at the end of the day, we all have 200 billion of Shakespeare's atoms in us.
February 20, 2007 2:53
The Simpsons Movie: The Trailering
There's a third trailer out for The Simpsons Movie, which shows every sign of being the longest, widest Simpsons episode ever. This is the first trailer that gives a sense of the tone and scope of the movie, which is basically no different from the TV version, though I assume somebody somewhere will swear to prove it really is a movie, a la Data's immortal curse in Star Trek Generations. Contrary to the earlier trailers, the animation is very pretty -- more three-dimensional and modeled, more colored lighting, more detailed (to the point where the bland, untextured Simpsons faces start to look a little odd and flat). The snow scenes reminded me a bit of Tintin in Tibet (click here for a look at every car in every Tintin comic ever. Hey, we never had Tintin Chez les Soviets when I was little!)
And I don't know why nobody told me that the dude who made Shaun of the Dead has another movie, the less amusingly titled Hot Fuzz. It appears to be a "spoof" of police thrillers. Whatever, just take my money now.
February 20, 2007 10:08
Sure, When Britney Shaves Her Head, It's News. But When I Do It...
I just had to say that, and now I've said it, and we can all move on.
Barenaked Ladies have released a video featuring a pretty impressive all-star cast of YouTube celebrities. Brookers and Geriatric1927, together at last! (Am I the last person on the Net to find out that Geriatric1927's real name is Peter Oakley? When did that come out? I thought his real identity was a closely-guarded secret.) (And what the %$#%$, why are YouTube user pages slowly turning into MySpace pages, which look to my 37-year-old eyes like the worst of the dancing-frog, seizure-inducing background pages of the Web circa 1996?)
I always find moves like this interestingly risky. Big-name media players have trouble coming across as genuine when they get involved with grass-roots geek media like YouTube. They get perceived as exploitative, as trying to hijack a free, spontaneous phenomenon for personal gain. Quite often this perception is correct. Look at Diddy, who's took the campaign for his last album to YouTube, where he is now a running gag.
And then there's a deeper layer to it: geeks have spent so much of their lives getting spat on, when the mainstream turns around and tries to embrace them, they/we don't always want to be embraced. Again, for damn good reason. As somebody who writes about this stuff for a huge corporate behemoth, I run into these issues all the time. I have not solved them. At least now I know that the commenters who heap contempt on me are merely the victims of a design flaw in their orbitofrontal cortex. I pity them.
However, for some reason I don't mind this stuff coming from the BNL, who I realized about a year ago, way way after the fact, are not in fact a one-hit novelty band. Check out the plangent "Call and Answer," for example -- a great song about trying to save a relationship poisoned by bitterness. I would happily swap the entire works of Raymond Carver for "Call and Answer."
And you gotta give them some geek cred for releasing an album on a flash drive.
February 19, 2007 1:26
Image Dump: Of Interest to Nerds With Eyes
This post will strain my primitive HTML skills to the very breaking point.
1. This is the new universal symbol of radiation, generated by the best creative minds at the International Atomic Energy Agency and the International Organization for Standardization. So it's very, very international. Note the strangely happy, toothless skull -- he loves his work!
And note that that trefoil sun shines on all parties equally. Radiation will scathe the living and the dead!
2. Via Paleo-Future, a blog of unending interest, pictures of a dead resort-of-the-future in Taiwan that embody the lost promise of future earth once it has been ravaged by happy toothless skulls. Drill through to the Flickr archive for more pix, some of which feature a scantily-clad model. The effect is not erotic; rather, it heightens the pathos.
3. Some guy bought a property in Portugal. The property had a locked barn on it. He smacked off the padlock and opened the barn and found these. His is a happiness that you will never know. (Via MetaFilter.)
4. Kotaku has screenshots from the new Lord of the Rings MMO, which is being done by Turbine, the developer of Asheron's Call "fame." Amazingly, they look exactly like screenshots.
February 16, 2007 3:23
Webcomics are the New Blogs: The PvP Edition
I'm a late convert to PvP, which has been online since, god, like 1998 or something. I've always been a big Penny Arcade fan, and Tycho made fun of PvP in his newsposts, and I just never got around to reading it. Then I realized that they're all pals, and Tycho was just taking the piss, and that PvP is actually funny.
PvP is set at a financially troubled gaming magazine. Our hero is Brent, a funny, cynical office monkey who never takes his sunglasses off. Having read PvP every day for a year and a half, I still don't know what he does. Also, he sometimes gets attacked by pandas. Brent is dating Jade, one of those unreasonably good-looking comic strip dames, like Dennis the Menace's mom (come on, you know what I'm talking about). Other characters include Brent's boss, Cole, a solitary voice of reason at the office, and Francis, an obnoxious game-addled teenager (he happens to be my favorite character). Oh, and there's a big, semi-imaginary (?) blue troll named Skull.
I think PvP was originally supposed to be a comic about gaming, but it has strayed from its core mission and just generally become a strip about the workplace, and dating, and general geekery. And the car from the Dukes of Hazzard. Which is fine. It's occasionally semi-serious, and amusingly vicious, and thoroughly marinated in the kinds of pop-culture references 30-something dorks like myself get. The whole thing is infused with the jovial spirit of its creator, Scott Kurtz, who seems like one of those people who can't really stop being funny. It's also updated every day, like clockwork, which I find pretty impressive.
Of late Kurtz has launched an animated version of PvP, which I haven't seen, because you have to pay for it, but I probably should. The thing that first got me into the comic was actually its early experiments with animation. Crude, but effective.
February 16, 2007 11:14
The Weekend in Nerd Cinema
Featuring two movies I'm definitely going to see five years from now when they're being rerun on basic cable for the 90th time.
-- Ghost Rider, starring Nicolas "I Probably Could Have Been Iron Man" Cage as a dude who turns into a dude with a burning skull for a head, who rides a motorcycle, which is also burning. It's currently rocking a 29% score on Rotten Tomatoes. Hey, wait a minute -- this is from that guy who made Daredevil. When did they let him out of movie jail?
-- Bridge to Terabithia, which as discussed has nothing to do with the Narnian island of Terabinthia, though I always find myself listening for that missing 'n.' Instead it's about two kids who stumble into a hidden fantasyland. See the difference there? Actually, it's mostly about the relationship between two alienated kids, and critics seem to be pretty impressed. But it's probably two young-adult and heartwarming for my cold, blackened, bitter heart.
Maybe I'll stay home and watch lightbulbs burn out instead (scroll down for a non-color-adjusted version of this rather striking image).
February 15, 2007 3:03
Bad Tech Blogger No Donut
This rant at Gizmodo is right about gadget-bloggers, and technology journalism in general. It's also pretty amusing.
February 15, 2007 11:08
The RFID Epidemic
I can't help but think that the whole RFID tag phenomenon is just going to get weirder. You know, those miniature data tags that are getting stuck in everything. Hit 'em with a radio signal and they ping you back with a tiny scrap of info. Companies like Wal-Mart stick them in products to help with supply chain management. They're in smart cards and lift tickets and car tires and airline baggage tags and library books. They've been in stray dogs for years. As of Jan. 1 of this year they're in every U.S. passport. (I hear you can disable them by smacking them with a hammer.)
They're so cheap and so tiny and so useful, it's getting to the point where you're looking for reasons not to stick them in things. Every car, appliance, dish, paper document. You can imagine an omniscient RFID-reading eye that could see all the tags at once, globally, in a huge, glittering, circulating mass (I picture it like those gorgeous orbital light pollution images, or the original Gibsonian idea of cyberspace as a kind of congested superhighway of data).
I've had some dealings with VeriChip, a company that makes human-implantable RFID tags, an idea so obvious and so bad that somebody had to implement it. In this country they bill it as a way of easily accessing a patient's health records, though I think they're having trouble getting it adopted (the tags are too small to hold the actual records, but they'd store a unique ID number, which the hospital could use to access a national database); in South America, where kidnapping is epidemic, they've been billed as a Lojack-like human tracking device. There have even been rumblings about the Verichip as a means of immigration control. The company went public last Friday; looks like shares have fallen off a tad. Nice NASDAQ symbol though: CHIP.
Personally I picture the human-implantable RFID tag as merging with social networks -- the RFID tag becomes a geospecific form of traditional Web 2.0 tagging. People will walk around enveloped in the tags that others have slapped on them -- "hot," "douchebag," "gives to the homeless," "good at math," "poor impulse control," etc. (Of course you'll need your retinal implants to see all that.)
In 2002 I wrote a piece for Time about the Jacobs family of Boca Raton, Fla., who were Verichip's test family, the first humans to get the implant. They seemed very nice, especially their son Derek, who at 14 was already a Microsoft-certified systems engineer. Last year I heard that Derek died in a motorcyle accident. It's a damn shame. The world needs more good geeks.
[Update: trolling BoingBoing mere minutes after posting, I came across this: Hitachi has a new RFID chip that's .05x.05 mm. It's basically fine-ground-pepper sized. Stuff's gonna be everywhere. Whoops, found a better source here.]
February 14, 2007 4:33
Obligatory Valentine's Day-Related Post
I'm not doing one. I'm not feeling it. I'll leave it to someone else to make fun of Google's L-less Valentine's Day logo. (Googe responds to the controversy here.)
Note that with a little Firefox-related cleverness you can permanently endow Google with an Achewood logo. I don't know, there's a little too much cat-tongue in it for me. Do I want to see Ray's tongue 90 times a day? I'll wait for the Cartilage Head version.
February 14, 2007 8:00
Hot Hot Hot Virus-on-Virus Action
I find computer viruses endlessly fascinating. This is partly because as a smug, self-satisfied Mac user, I don't see them very often. It's also because my first cover story at Time was about the Love Bug, the 2000 megavirus that at the time seemed like the harbinger of the coming cyberapocalypse. (I still don't see why, given the relative weakness of anti-virus software and the enduring ignorance of so many computer users, there hasn't been a more severe outbreak, with more devastating consequences -- there has never been, for example, a really seriously malicious and widespread virus that really goes after your hard drive and eats your data wholesale, though such a bug wouldn't be that hard to write. Score one for the basic benevolence, or laziness, of script kiddies everywhere (are there still script kiddies?))
As far as I know The Love Bug remains one of the worst-selling Time covers of all time. But that didn't stop me from getting excited all over again when I saw this (yeah, I read Slashdot): a virus that launches a DDos attack against the domains of its creators' rivals. This feels to me like a sea change: virus-on-virus action. What I'm ready for is rival worms fighting each other directly, on mail servers or on my hard drive. The Net has been an Edenic petrie dish for viruses for too long -- it's time for some Darwinian selection! One pictures a whole eco-system of worm-on-worm violence, red in bit and byte, replicating and chewing each other to pieces and evolving. Maybe that's the primordial tidepool out of which true machine sentience will finally emerge? The ghosts are gonna mix it tonight! (A No-prize to the commenter who can trace this quote -- and, if I'm misquoting, correct it.)
At any rate, that should amuse us till they fire up the Large Hadron Collider this fall, and we all get eaten by black Saturns.
February 13, 2007 11:24
Heart-Shaped Box, by Joe Hill
I reviewed it. I reviewed it here.
It's interesting to watch reviewers chew on this book -- the New York Times liked it here and didn't much care for it here. Partly because of Hill's parentage -- he's Stephen King's son -- but partly because Hill isn't a wordsmith. Book reviewers -- and I'm one -- like writers who toss out lapidary phrases, because they're easier to quote, and they're easy to talk about, and to praise. There's a ready-made critical language for talking about that kind of high lyrical verbal intelligence, and it has a certain unproblematic cultural value.
That's not the stuff Hill has. He is, however, an exceptionally gifted storyteller, and an orchestrator of frightening, highly visual scenes. That makes him a genre writer, and of no particular value to the literary mainstream. Ah well.
If you're curious, the first chapter is online here.
February 12, 2007 5:20
Spider-Man: We Always Hurt the One We Love
Bookslut points me to this -- to all appearances -- justifiably savage review of Spider-man: Reign #3. The Reign mini-series is set 35 years in the future, with a middle-aged Spidey -- yaar, spoilers -- mourning the death of his beloved Mary Jane. (There's a 10-page preview from the first issue here.) What killed Mary Jane? Cancer. From? From prolonged exposure to Peter Parker's, ulp, bodily fluids. The review quotes actual dialogue from the comic: "Loving me killed you!"
This is A) the very definition of bathetically bad comics writing. B) a limp rip-off of Niven's original take on Superman and Lois Lane's love life, "Man of Steel, Woman of Kleenex" ("Superman would literally crush LL's body in his arms, while simultaneously ripping her open from crotch to sternum, gutting her like a trout..." C) Implausible, no, nonsensical, in so many ways. Yeesh. It's just amazing what gets perpetrated in the name of a once-proud franchise.
Meanwhile I've been reading DMZ. It's a little in love with its own darkness/political revelance, but it's almost totally free of radioactive semen.
February 12, 2007 9:51
In Other News, World Almost Ends
I know I'm coming late to this story, but is it intriguing to anyone else that someone or -ones tried to kill the Internet last week? Last Tuesday, at 5:30 in the morning, a massive denial of service attack was directed at the root servers that route traffic on the Internet. The Internet did not, of course, perish, but three of the servers were fairly overloaded, and some users may have seen a slowdown. No one has any idea who mounted the attack. (And this is after Google announced that IPTV could cripple the Internet all on its lonesome.)
This raises all kinds of questions to me. One, it's great that there's enough anonymity build into the Netweb that people can get away with this stuff -- it bodes well for the future of privacy -- but still, it also sucks that people can get away with this stuff. Two, who would possibly have a stake in this kind of an attack? Even terrorists benefit from an intact Internet infrastructure -- look at the efficient way the Web multiplied the horror of September 11th.
And three, the Internet is run on 13 root servers? What, did Tolkien design this thing?
February 9, 2007 11:15
New Tolkien: More Morgoth
On April 17 Houghton Mifflin will publish The Children of Húrin, a "new" work of fiction by J.R.R. Tolkien:
Apparently this is a narrative he noodled with extensively during his lifetime but never completed to his own satisfaction, though he left behind a lot of manuscript pages; I think some version of it also appears in The Silmarillion. His son Christopher spent three decades piecing together a complete, if Frankensteinian, version of the story, which takes place in the First Age, a period I don't know much about, except that it ended badly (I never finished The Silmarillion -- there, I said it).
Christopher had this to say about the project: "It has seemed to me for a long time that there was a good case for presenting my father's long version of the legend of The Children of Hurin as an independent work, between its own covers."
Shyeah - a case FULL OF MONEY. Then again who knows, it's probably really good.
February 8, 2007 11:29
Quantum Computers: Unimaginably Powerful, Also Kinda Hot
My knowledge of physics and engineering is shaky enough that sometimes I forget that stuff like neutron stars and superconductors is actually real and not made-up. (If Slaver stasis fields are real and not made-up, somebody needs to tell me.) Scheduled to cross the fiction/non-fiction barrier shortly is a commercially available quantum computer. The British tech rag linked to here says that the new machine "can carry out 64,000 calculations simultaneously (in parallel 'universes')." There cannot be enough scare quotes/scare parentheses around that last phrase to make me comfortable with it.
Gleaming, technogorgeous pictures of the device are here. I think I'm actually attracted to it. If you haven't read Greg Egan's Permutation City, you are a) hugely missing out and b) unprepared for the new reality of ubiquitous, unmeasurably powerful computing capacity.
Also strange but true: there is now such a thing as a tactical biorefinery, i.e. a portable device for turning trash into energy, i.e. that thing Doc was using to power his Delorean at the end of Back to the Future.
(Sadly, Nike still doesn't make self-tying sneakers like Michael J. Fox wore in the future. If that bothers you, join the McFly Project!)
February 7, 2007 9:39
Manhunt 2: Electric Snuffaloo
I remember being assigned a review of Manhunt with the warning that it would be the next great hyper-controversial lawsuit-engendering game, a la Grand Theft Auto. And it is pretty brutal, what with, you know, the slitting of throats with stray shards of glass and such. But as with Bully, it never actually generated much legal paperwork (though I think they ended up banning it in New Zealand or something. Bloody kiwis.)
The idea is that you're cast -- against your will -- in a snuff film, and a hidden director gets his sick jollies watching you slaughter murderous gang members. It's all involuntary, and you're supposed to be horrified by your own actions, but you're also supposed to -- and I did -- be quietly conscious of how fun it was to off these dudes (you're egged on to execute the kills in as stylish a manner as possible). Internal conflict! There's some authentic tension in Manhunt, and it's one of those rare games that actually builds to a scary climax, rather than pootering out with some mechanical boss-battle and a tacked-on cut-scene that looks like it was executed in 20 minutes by Jolt-addled coders desperate to ship product. (Best final level of all time? The Warthog race in Halo?)
And my point was what? Oh, they're making a sequel. The only really surprising part is that Manhunt 2 is shipping on the oddball lineup of Wii, PSP, and PS2. Bizarre. They go with one next-gen console, and it's the cute one? I'm so paying this guy to make me a Piggsy Mii.
(Afterthought: interesting that a game with a sophisticated take on violence like Manhunt really alters my feelings about virtual killing not a whit. Whereas the recently leaked footage of a friendly-fire incident that cost the life of a British soldier, seen from the cockpit of the U.S. warplane that did the shooting, has really changed my experience of gaming lately, to the point where I just haven't had the heart to get my Gears on. It's on YouTube, Part I and Part II. Warning: strong language, hidden horrors. I couldn't bring myself to watch Part II.)
February 7, 2007 9:19
Industrial Robots Are Cooler Than You
Somebody hooked up a big industrial arm to a Wiimote, then gave it a sword.
Then they strapped a guy on it.
Meanwhile, these robots spin records. Not shown: the robots' emo phase, when they put on turtlenecks and cried.
February 6, 2007 3:07
Another Party I Wasn't Invited To
People who work at Bungie are happier than you. Somehow it seems wrong that 4x4 Halo 3 matches are being played somewhere in the world, and I am not at that place. All I can do is press my nose against those smeared-out .jpegs and whine like a whipped puppy.
But remember, happy Bungie people: it's all fun and games till somebody finally releases Killzone2. (If you somehow haven't seen the amazing Killzone2 trailer Sony showed at E3 in 2005, you might as well watch it now, and weep for things that never were, and probably never will be.)
February 6, 2007 9:18
Doonesbury Shows the Nerd Love
I don't know if anybody but me followed this story arc in Doonesbury, or indeed whether anybody besides me under the age of 50 reads Doonesbury anymore. Anyway, Trudeau seems to be paying more attention lately to Mike's nerdy daughter Alex, who goes to MIT. Granted, the whole Battlebots-esque scenario is about 9 years out of date. Man, that is some serious late-1990's nostalgia right there.
And yes, if you didn't click, some Web page is actually still being served up at Battlebots.com -- the organization appears to still be extant. Maybe those are old retired Battlebots up there, thriving in the dangerously overcrowded orbital debris field. Oooo, Biohazard, watch out for the KillSaws!
February 5, 2007 9:33
Whedon Ankles Wonder Woman
"Ankles" being Variety slang for "bails." According to Whedonesque, and subsequently every entertainment trade outlet in the 'verse, Joss Whedon is off the Wonder Woman project. Let's see, how much can I legally quote?
Let me stress first that everybody at the studio and Silver Pictures were cool and professional. We just saw different movies, and at the price range this kind of movie hangs in, that's never gonna work. Non-sympatico. It happens all the time. I don't think any of us expected it to this time, but it did. Everybody knows how long I was taking, what a struggle that script was, and though I felt good about what I was coming up with, it was never gonna be a simple slam-dunk. I like to think it rolled around the rim a little bit, but others may have differing views.
That seems about right.
Whedon stresses that it wasn't a big evil studio thing, he's not mad, and also that contrary to multitudinous rumors, nobody had been tapped to don the bustier: "Finally and forever: I never had an actress picked out, or even a consistant front-runner. I didn't have time to waste on casting when I was so busy air-balling on the script. (No! Rim! There was rim!)"
The one time I got to interview Whedon (he was exactly as smart and funny as you would think) he pointed out that there really hasn't ever been a truly kick-ass incarnation of Wonder Woman, so he didn't feel there was some great legacy to draw on, nor was there a great legacy there for him to screw up. I tend to concur. There was something dangerously earnest and humorless about WW, and also something gimmicky and not quite organic about her various attributes -- she's an Amazon! With, um, an invisible plane! And a rope! And bangles! Like they kept adding and adding till she was powerful enough, but by that point she'd stopped being a coherent character.
So it's not like it feels like some great opportunity was missed here. But still, one hopes the script will leak...