May 29, 2007 3:06
Nerd World Is On Vacation
There comes a time when a blogger must cease to write about nerdish things, and he must go out into the world and do them. For me that time has come.
When that time has passed I will return to my computer and blog once more. Until then.
May 25, 2007 12:36
Nerd Video: It's Wrong to Laugh at Gay Robot
I'm pretty sure it's wrong to laugh at Gay Robot. I mean, I know it is. Which means there's something wrong with me. (Not very SFW. Depends on where you W.)
Spoiler alert: Gay Robot's date ends badly. Watch at your peril. Pass the tissues, we all got issues.
May 25, 2007 10:51
Facebook vs. MySpace: Round One, Fight!
This announcement -- the one about Facebook partnering with a bunch of other companies that are going to make widgets -- is one of those pieces of technology news that's kinda hella boring to read about, but reflects a really interesting macro-level dynamic in the evolution of Web 2.0.
I find it helpful to think about these huge Web communities as countries, each of which has to manage its foreign relations (i.e. its openness to interactions with other websites) and its domestic policy (i.e. what community members can and can't do). Both are balancing the human need for civil liberty with the countervaling need that any political state has for order. Facebook has historically been tight on policing its borders and maintaining civil order -- I think of it kinda like medieval Japan -- but with this new development it's showing signs of loosening up. MySpace is more like the U.S. right now: huge, free'n'easy and chaotic on the inside, and reasonably relaxed about its borders, with a few exceptions. (I think its history of openness is exactly the reason people freak out when MySpace does introduce restrictions, like the ones that apply to the ad-supported video site Revver.)
I figure once the real-world federal government inevitably crumbles, we'll just be left with massive online communities as our primary political affiliations. MySpace and Facebook will become distributed nation-states along the lines of Neal Stephenson's burbclaves in Snow Crash. Let the new Cold War commence.
(As a side-note, the co-founders of MySpace stopped by the Time offices last week for an off-the-record chat. They claim that 12% of all time spent on the Web is spent at MySpace. Yeesh.)
May 24, 2007 11:33
A Little Nerd Music: The Klein Four
It's official: you can never be the biggest nerd in the world. Because the Klein Four are nerdier than you.
May 23, 2007 3:42
The Top 10 Science Fiction/Fantasy Novels That Really Need to Get Made Into Movies
If you have any contact with people in the film industry, you know they're constantly desperate for ideas -- what's the next "hot" "property" they can "option," etc. So how to explain all the fantastic SF and fantasy books that just lie around unproduced? Here are my top 10. If you're reading this, and you're the assistant to a Hollywood "bigwig," maybe you could, I dunno, print it out and fax it to him.
1. Orson Scott Card, ENDER'S GAME. I hear rumors about this every few years. They never turn out to be true. C'mon, it's like Hogwarts in space! Dragon, your ass is draggin'!
2. Larry Niven, RINGWORLD. It was Halo before Halo was Halo! I would seriously love me some CGI Puppeteer action. And what's the rating board's position on rishathra?
3. Roger Zelazny, NINE PRINCES IN AMBER. Seems like a perfect Peter Jackson project to me. Random is some character actor's dream...
4. Joe Haldeman, THE FOREVER WAR. A brutal, surprisingly tear-jerking Vietnam-era rewriting of STARSHIP TROOPERS, complete with some very, very dope powered armor.
5. Anne McAffrey, THE WHITE DRAGON. If Shia LaBueof were a younger man, he'd be all over this.
6. Iain Banks, The Culture Novels. Far-future space opera as cultural critique...somebody with major technical chops could make this huge. I see it as a late-career redemption property for George Lucas.
7. Neal Stephenson, SNOW CRASH. I can only assume this is snarled in some massive legal imbroglio or somebody would have made it. I pray that Stephenson is at least collecting option checks.
8. Bruce Sterling and William Gibson, THE DIFFERENCE ENGINE. A gorgeous slice of alt-history Victoriana, with somebody -- Thora Birch? -- stealing the movie with a cameo as Ada Byron. They could probably use the sets from the Pullman movies...
9. Fritz Leiber, The Fafhrd/Grey Mouser novels. You'd really just need to pluck a short story or two from this series -- I guess "Ill-Met in Lankhmar" would do as good as anything, but you're spoiled for choice. And they're buddies! It's like Rush Hour in Middle-earth. I foresee the first Oscar speech to feature the word "widdershins"...
10. Miracleman. Partisan plug for a personal favorite. To me this comic is up there with Watchmen -- I think the Golden Age may even be the greater book. And how can you not love a character who was written by both Alan Moore and Neil Gaiman? But I hear the legal ownership of poor MM is a nightmare...
May 22, 2007 4:23
The Golden Compass Trailer: It's Victoriantastic
I have a grotesquely horrible deadline right now, so everybody go watch this. It's the trailer for The Golden Compass, based on the first volume of Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy.
This is one of those joints where I'm betting on the movie being better than the book, of which I'm not a huge fan. I find Pullman's anti-religious sentiments to be unbelievably overbearing (and this is from somebody who basically shares them), his characters thin, and his plotting opaque. But he's a mad genius at creating visual panoramas, and the prospect of actually seeing them is pretty appealing. The director, Chris Weitz, has no track record with technical filmmaking on this scale, but the trailer is full of pretty things: clockwork, dirigibles, clipper ships, polar bears, Nicole Kidman. On the evidence, he appears to have pulled it off.
No clever kicker. Like I said: deadline.
May 21, 2007 10:27
Neuromancer Is Finally Going to Be a Movie
I love how Variety softballs this announcement:
William Gibson's prescient sci-fi bestseller from the '80s, "Neuromancer," will get the big screen treatment from vet producer-distributor Peter Hoffman, whose own Cannes exploits go back some 25 years.
Hoffman said the project is not just a good sci-fi adventure but a story full of hot topics --issues like artificial intelligence, bio-engineering and alternate theories of immortality will be dealt with dramatically. There'll be a sort of love interest as well.The $70 million pic is essentially being fast-tracked to replace the Paul Verhoeven project "The Winter Queen." Latter is being pushed back until at least next spring because leading lady Milla Jovovich is pregnant.
Like Peter Hoffman -- who? -- is the story. Oh, and Milla Jovovich got knocked up. And then, oh, by the way, the greatest science fiction novel of the last quarter-century -- quite possibly the greatest novel of the last quarter-century period -- is finally going to be a movie. That's some good sci-fi adventure! With sort of a love interest!
My little nerd heart is being rent in twain right now, because they're handing the movie to a hack, one Joseph Kahn, whose principal credit is a biker movie starring Ice Cube. OK, fine, he also directed Britney Spears' "Toxic" video, which is a legitimately great video, and La Spears does rock a bit of a Molly Millions vibe in it. But no fair casting her in the movie, Joe. Seriously, I should be beyond surprise at this point, but it's still stunning to me the callousness with which Hollywood can treat the gems of geek culture. Neuromancer is the jewel in the crown of contemporary sci-fi. The Sprawl Trilogy should be SF's answer to The Lord of the Rings movies. It needs a Peter Jackson at the bare minimum. It does not need Joey Torque.
We've all been through the heartbreak of Johnny Mnemonic, the only other Gibson property to make it to the screen. We've watched Ice-T in full man-kangaroo makeup. Haven't we suffered enough? Back in the day the rumor was that Neuromancer would be the debut feature for Kubrick acolyte and F/X adept Chris Cunningham, whose video for Bjork's "All Is Full of Love" is still probably my favorite video of all time. After 8+ years -- the earliest credit I can find for it is 1999 -- that video still looks like an artifact from the future of nerd cinema. I'll embed it below as a memorial to what might have been:
May 18, 2007 12:32
Nerd Cinema: I Am an Involuntary Transformers Movie Shill
I don't even want to see the Transformers movie. I just want to watch this trailer. Over and over again:
I'm loving the jump-jet guy. It's like the Harrier from Schwarzenegger's True Lies woke up and realized it needed its own movie.
Why? Why is this movie good? The Transformers were a B-list toy franchise. Michael Bay is an action hack. This can't be happening -- it's like Pirates of the Caribbean all over again. (It's a done deal that we'll be lining up for Transformers 3 in 2009, followed by Transformers vs. Terminator, followed by Transformers vs. Rutger Hauer.) But -- wow. All movies should be about a big spiky guy who shoulders his way sideways through a bus. Seriously. That should be an MPAA guideline.
May 17, 2007 9:43
Actual News Alert: Amazon to Sell Digital Music DRM-free
That's about it. The press release says they'll offer music in plain-old MP3 format from 12,000 music labels, which I had no idea there were even that many. The release specifically mentions EMI, which suggests -- circumstantially -- that EMI is the only major on board. In a way this was an inevitable development: Amazon has been selling DRM-free music for years, in large quantities, in an obscure technophile format known as the "CD."
There's no mention of pricing -- they're going to have a hard time pushing this stuff to non-copyright-freaks if it's more than the iTunes-standard $.99, even though right now iTunes is only planning to offer DRM-free music with premium pricing (i.e. $1.29). And there's no way Amazon will match the selection and ease of use on iTunes. It's gotta be a loss leader, good for internal cross-promotions, not much else. But it'll put some pressure on Apple to make DRM-free music the standard.
The discussion on Slashdot http://slashdot.org/articles/07/05/17/0316233.shtml is quite interesting, though you may want to scroll past the plaintive cries in support of Ogg Vorbis...
May 17, 2007 9:28
Ha Ha: Other People Don't Understand Technology
Via Kotaku: Kia is doing a cross-promotion in Spain with Playstation 3. As part of it they've got a website up showing what it's like to drive a Kia in a PS3 driving game. Except -- as an astute blogger noticed -- the license plate on the little virtual Kia clearly says "PGR." It's a model from Project Gotham Racing 3, a title that is exclusive to the XBox 360. So in short they're using XBox 360 graphics to promote the PS3...you get it. Unbelievable. Ha ha.
Extra bonus non-understanding: during a trial in London, involving men accused of inciting terrorism via the Internet, the judge admitted: "The trouble is I don't understand the language. I don't really understand what a Web site is." Ha -- wait, that's kind of not that funny.
May 16, 2007 11:31
The 10 Worst Trends on the Internet Right at This Exact Moment
Because it's that kind of day. You know what, don't even read this, it's just me being annoyed.
1. Rollover ads. Holy God, who thought these were a good idea? Any technology that you activate inadvertently, which then grows and metastasizes to cover up the Web content you actually want to see, should never have been devised by advertisers or accepted by the website editors who buy ads. Ditto obtrusive, nattering audio ads ("Congratulations, you have just won an iPod Nano...")
2. Google bombing. Google is an enormously powerful engine that runs largely on the good faith of those who benefit from it. So by all means, let's try to fool it for our own financial gain!
3. Second Life hype. I have nothing against Second Life. I think it's an enormously cute thought-experiment that gives lots of fun and gratification to people whose artistic itch it scratches. But to pretend that gadding about in virtual 3-space is an efficient, useful way to do anything practical is just absurd.
4. Spam, phishing, viruses, etc. Yep, still haven't solved these yet. In fact they're getting much much worse. Spam roughly doubled last year. Yep.
5. Trolls. Online communities used to be pretty niche -- just the otakus and anoraks. But with the coming of Web 2.0 they've been expanded and mainstreamed on an enormous scale. Turns out the anonymity and disinhibition of the Internet do wonderful, wonderful things for human nature. (This link is very much to the point, but not very safe for work.)
6. "Features." Let me give you an example. Say you're reading an article at the New York Times website. And you click on a word. The site has some kind of subtle layer built in that immediately pops up a new window with multiple dictionary definitions of that word. This is something that you don't want, and had no intention of getting, but here it is! Thanks a bunch. It's like those snapshot preview windows that show you what a link looks like, in a tiny, useless, illegible box, before you click on it...
7. Non-Firefox, non-Mac-friendly websites. It's amazing to me that people will still put up websites that can only be displayed by IE running on Windows. So 1997.
8. The YouTube Haters. I know it's important for studios to control their content. I know. But the proliferation of weird homebrewed video players and online syndication schemes that the TV networkds are putting out there is incredibly annoying and confusing. Can't the big boys just grow up, admit YouTube won, and work with them?
9. Top 10 lists by whiny, do-nothing bloggers. See what I did there?
10. Roll your own! Your comment here. Try it, it feels good.
May 15, 2007 2:44
The Return of the Bionic Woman
I feel like John Travolta in Grease. We had a great time together, you and I, Bionic Woman. It was a magical interlude that I'll never forget. It's just...I never thought I'd see you again.
And now you're back, from outer space. This is the week the TV networks do their "upfronts," which means they announce-slash-pimp-to-media their fall shows, and NBC has The Bionic Woman on its fall schedule. Quoth they:
Struggling as a bartender and surrogate mom to her teen-aged sister, Jaime Sommers didn't think life could get much harder. But when a devastating car accident leaves her at death's door, Jaime's only hope of survival is through a cutting-edge, top-secret technology that comes at a hefty price.With a whole new existence and a debt to repay, Jaime must figure out how to use her extraordinary abilities for good, while weighing the personal sacrifices she will have to make. Ultimately, it's Jaime's journey of self-discovery and inner strength that will help her embrace her new life as...The Bionic Woman.
So...yeah. From this, and the various clips on NBC's site -- which I'm having decidedly mixed results playing with their hinky homegrown video player (which I can't even embed here! why won't they just give up and love YouTube?) -- it feels like they've gone and hybridized her with La Femme Nikita, for added "darkness," and tossed in some human-interest bits in the hope of snagging crossover female viewers. (And they seem to have re-spelled Jamie Sommers as "Jaime," too -- what is that, a subliminal bid for Hispanic geeks?)
Could be great. Probably it's just Aeon Flux all over again. Oh well -- we'll always have the summer of '76. Maybe they'll throw Lindsay Wagner a cameo as an aging but still comely fembot.
May 15, 2007 11:15
What Is a Spime? Never Mind, Watch the Pretty Pictures
Every time I read Bruce Sterling's explanation of what a 'spime' is, I instantly forget again. The concise version goes something like this; an object that, because of the way it has been manufactured or tagged, can be tracked over the course of its lifetime in space, time, the economy, etc.
I mention it only as an excuse to embed this incredibly beautiful video below, which tells the story of a woman's day in animated Euro-flavored infographics:
It's like a music video of a Nicholson Baker novel. Sterling tags this video as somehow spimey. Further proof -- none was needed -- that I'm not as smart as Sterling.
May 14, 2007 9:05
True Tales of the Halo 3 Beta Party
There's always something a little surreal in the way Microsoft handles previews of its Halo franchise. The Halo 3 event this past Friday was typical: instead of, say, staging a demo at a conference room at a hotel, they rented out a bar on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, complete with a doorman outside. You go inside. It's dark. The whole interior has been set up with large, expensive-looking TVs hooked up to XBox 360's running beta versions of the Halo 3 multiplayer. The bar is free -- confused bartenders man it gamely, though almost no one is drinking. Women in slinky dresses offer you hors d'oeuvres. It's like you died and went to fanboy heaven.
I'm not an especially assiduous student of multiplayer Halo -- I've spent a lot more time on the single-player version -- but here are a few scattered impressions of the game. (For a more thorough, detail-oriented rundown visit pretty much anywhere -- IGN, say.)
-- It's purty. It's great to see a new Halo on a next-gen system. Duh. They were showing of an arctic level that was particularly lovely -- some insanely detailed, photorealistic frozen snow textures. It was very Hoth. And I'm sure the single player will be even more spectacular. It's one of the hallmarks of the Halo franchise, this tension between the extreme brutality of the action and the lyrical prettiness of the landscapes and environments all around it, and the extra horsepower of the 360 only makes the contrast more striking.
-- There's a lot of new hardware. For example: spiky brute grenades that stick in things, and people, on contact (there's a great sound effect when you manage to smack a person with a spiky grenade). There's also the much-buzzed-about Spartan laser, which is devastatingly damaging but has to charge for a few seconds before it fires, which takes a lot of getting used to -- the people I was aiming the Spartan laser at tended to use those few seconds to kill me. And now you can detach a gun emplacement from its mount, pick it up, and carry it around like a chain gun, though it's so heavy it slows you down (they've done a good job with the Spartan-carrying-heavy-gun animation -- he looks slightly pissed off at how heavy it is.) There are more, plus a ton of new gadgets, like a portable gravity lift; and the smaller, sportier, bouncier version off the Warthog, the Mongoose; and the Bubble Shield, an instant hemispherical weapons-proof force field.
-- It's complicated. That kind of follows from the above. There are a lot of factors in play in Halo 3 multiplayer, which is a challenge for the creators, who have to balance them all, and also for the players, who have to master them all. It makes for a rich experience, but the learning curve is steep. I hope that doesn't have the effect of widening the already-wide gap between hardcore and casual players. Especially because...
-- I suck at Halo 3 multiplayer. Yeah, I racked up my share of kills, but that was mostly against the other media in the room -- in any roomful of journalists you can always count on their being a few n00bs around to beat up on. (Because my aim is lousy, I relied on a lot of melee fighting, plus short-range kills with the shotgun. I still have a lot of old Quake reflexes kicking around in my brain.) But players coming in from elsewhere in the world -- our sessions were open to the at-large Halo 3 Beta -- pretty much had their way with me.
Then again, they probably didn't have an open bar to contend with.
May 11, 2007 11:22
This Post Must Be Written in Under 5 Minutes
I'm under extreme deadline pressure, exacerbated by my need to get to a Halo 3 preview event this afternoon. Not that I'm complaining about that second bit. Anyway, I'm passing the savings on to you.
-- The Terminator is coming back. Sans Arnold. Though is this news? They're already doing the Sarah Connor Chronicles, with Lena Headey of 300 fame well-cast in the lead role.
-- Harry Knowles leads the backlash to the Spider-man 3 backlash in a thoughtful review
-- the Google Earth team now has a blog. Helpful for Google Earth users like me who are too lazy to go out and find the cool stuff themselves.
-- I saw a preview screening of Sunshine yesterday but probably shouldn't blog about it, except to say that it probably has some of the best spacewalk sequences I've ever seen. Very 2001.
-- Gaze on the ruins of what was once Tokyo.
And...we're clear.
May 10, 2007 11:28
NASA's Experimental Methane-Powered Rocket: The Movie
This via Bruce Sterling: an experimental rocket engine that runs on methane instead of oxygen/hydrogen or solid fuel.
The point being that methane is cheap and plentiful in the outer solar system, so you wouldn't have to haul all your fuel up out of earth's gravity well:
Traveling further out in the solar system, methane becomes even easier to come by. On Saturn's moon Titan, it is literally raining liquid methane. Titan is dotted with lakes and rivers of methane and other hydrocarbons that could one day serve as fuel depots. Imagine, a methane-powered rocket could allow a robotic probe to land on the surface of Titan, gather geological samples, refill its tanks, and blast off to return those samples to Earth.
Also, it looks cool. The movie was worth firing up the lameness of Windows Media Player's for OSX. NASA must be spending all that money on cinematographers.
May 10, 2007 9:19
The Time 100 Party: Hot Nerd Gossip Roundup!
This is a tease. There was no hot gossip coming out of the party for the Time 100. But there were some huge power nerds there, including George Lucas, who reportedly called Spider-man 3 silly, which is something that I happen to agree with. He also mentioned the Star Wars TV shows -- "they won't have members of the Skywalker family as characters," he said. "They will be other people of that milieu."
There's plenty of other info out there about the TV shows, most of it similarly vague -- I thought they would be a series, though in that recent interview he seems to be talking about two one-hour one-offs (I think it's possibly that's a mis-quote). I find it interesting that Lucas seems to see them as a chance to get back to the low-to-no budget filmmaking tactics of his avant-garde youth, though this time with a digital-backlot angle. May the force etc., George.
I was actually at the Time 100 party, and though I didn't talk to Lucas, I did chat with two other power nerds. Chess deity Garry Kasparov was incredibly, unexpectedly charming. We didn't talk about chess -- he's wholly committed to his career in Russian politics at this point, and he was having some mixed feelings about being seated at the same table with Henry Kissinger, who he said had made a recent public appearance with his (Kasparov's) arch-nemesis Putin. I also talked to an extremely nice, funny woman who was so young and soft-spoken I figured she must be an intern of some kind. Turned out it was America Ferrara. I need to watch more TV.
May 8, 2007 4:09
Wil Wheaton on the Making of Star Trek
Ordinarily I don't subscribe to a world-view that accepts that a single blog posting is sufficient pretext for my doing a blog post of my own to link to it. I make an exception for Wil Wheaton's posts on TV Squad. Periodically Wheaton -- who played Wesley on Star Trek: The Next Generation -- will re-watch one of the old episodes and write a re-cap-slash-behind-the-scenes account of the making of said episode. I find these posts incredibly funny and intensely nostalgia-inducing. Here is but a small sample:
Transporter Chief Buffalo Bill puts the lotion in the basket, and beams over . . . a mysterious box. What's in the box? Should they trade the red snapper for what could be inside? Red snapper is very tasty, but there could be anything inside! There could even be a boat in there!Before we get to open the box and find out what it contains, a face on the front of the box (played by Armin Shimmerman, in a cool non-Ferengi role) announces that it has a message for Troi: Lwaxana Troi and the Miller family are pretty excited for a big event of some sort. Ah! It's a Betazoid Gift box, of course, and it's there to announce the joyous joining of Wyatt Miller and . . . someone. The box then takes a big jewel s___ all over the transporter. While Tasha rubs the box's nose in it so it can think about what it's done, Troi tells Riker that the box didn't contain a boat after all. They should have kept the red snapper, because that someone getting married is her. Gulp.
Anyway, Wheaton just did another one. If I were you I'd go there now. No, really, I understand. Just go.
May 8, 2007 11:55
Nerds : Poker :: Moths : Flame
Stayed up too late last night reading Anthony Holden's Bigger Deal: A Year Inside the Poker Boom. This is a sequel to Holden's Big Deal, a book he published in 1990 about his year on the professional poker circuit (he played in the 1988 World Series of Poker). That was pre-poker-boom, when he was peering inside a little-known, hermetic subculture. Now that poker is big, commercial, mainstream territory, he goes over the same ground.
It's a little depressing to read, since the scene has completely changed since Big Deal -- now it's dominated by hordes of sullen indistinguishable frat boys with buzz cuts, backwards baseball caps, iPods and wraparound shades, who pound the table and do a dance when they win, instead of colorful old-timers with good manners who give good quotes. And because tournaments are so much bigger, luck necessarily plays a bigger role than skill. Still, Holden is smart, cultured -- he's the music critic at the Observer in London -- appealing, and neither annoyingly good nor cringingly bad at poker. (Though at one point he plays poker with Martin Amis and David Mamet -- why isn't my life like that?) And he gets what's compelling about poker books, which is poker -- lots and lots of dramatically-narrated card-by-card poker hands.
Personally, I love poker, though I suck at it -- partly because I tend to drink too much, so that I can't do proper arithmetic in my head, and partly because I'm generally lousy at reading people. In fact, I've always found it a little ironic the way geeks are drawn to poker. Sure, we tend to be good at the quantitative stuff, and we tend to have disposable income lying around. But as a class we're horrific at picking up on non-verbal cues from strangers, which is what you really need to do to get out of the basement w/ Hold 'Em. Or so I'm told. I wouldn't know.
May 7, 2007 2:31
Confessions of a Bandwidth Bandit; or, I'm One of Those People
It's been about a year and a half since the last time I actually paid for the Internet. When I first moved into my apartment I slapped down my laptop, sniffed around for whatever free networks were in the air, found a few, and just settled in. That moment where I would actually suck it up and call the utilities and wait for the guy and actually pay for Internet access? It never arrived. I know it's wrong, but where -- I'm looking pleadingly at the director here -- where exactly is my motivation?
Oh, it's been a rough ride at times. Neighbors come and go, and their delicious free bandwidth goes with them. For a year I suckled off a network named after a long random-looking string of letters and numbers (anybody know what generates those? I see them all the time.) Sometimes I can tell exactly who I'm freeloading off of, when they give their network their own last names, or even their address. Lately I've relied on two generic networks, "linksys" and "NETGEAR" (all caps in original - I imagine them like paired cartoon characters, Itchy and Scratchy, Punch and Judy), who haven't been quite as reliable -- they come and go like willow-the-wisps, according to their own mysterious logic, even when I engage Airport's excitingly named "interference robustness" feature. (I've often wondered why they fade in and out like that -- some local atmospheric effect that causes signal strength to ripple and waver?) The care and management of my tenuous connection to the datasphere has become a subject for neurotic obsesssion. Sharp-eared friends have scolded me for endlessly, spasmodically clicking on that little Airport icon while I'm talking on the phone.
But sometimes even that inconsistent trickle of data dries up. I'm in the middle of my worst dry spell yet -- almost a week without the Net. NETGEAR has been MIA, and linksys is occasionally up but isn't letting me in. I can see a few stable networks, but they're all password-protected -- thanks for nothing, BROOKLYNMEDICAL. I've wandered all over my apartment looking for sweet spots, but no luck.
So I've been offline all night every night for a week, which does at least have the effect of motivating me to get to work earlier, since I'm jonesing for my e-mail every morning. Is this it for me? Are users just too well-educated now to leave their networks open? Sigh. I know Internet access is a privilege, not a right. But come on, Google -- forget San Francisco. Isn't it time you wired Brooklyn?
May 7, 2007 10:56
Why I Haven't Seen Spider-man 3
I know Spider-man 3 made $148 million last weekend. I know. My fingers are clammy and twitchy because I know I should be blogging about it. I just really, really don't want to see it.
I enjoyed the first one a lot. The second one I kind of white-knuckled my way through -- I had to fast-forward (16X!) my way through the wise, melancholy Aunt May bits and the agonized, conflicted Harry Osborn bits (where is the funny, no-bull James Franco of yore?) and the logic-free pseudo-science mad scenes of Doc Ock. For sloppy plot mechanics and way-overblown motivational backstory, I have had few more painful moviegoing experiences.
And Spider-man 3 -- for all its amazing cast (my fondness for Tobey Maguire is a matter of public record) and, yes, its great director -- shows so many of the same warning signs. It's wildly overstuffed with three villains, each of whom, I just know, will have his own lugubrious, rushed-but-still-too-long psychological exposition. From what I hear there's a lot of crying. I'm getting too old to sit through movies where you, the viewer, have to "pay" for each high-carbon CGI action sequence with a lengthy bit of sensitive dialogue. I'm at peace with my need to be adrenalized/amused by movies, I don't need to do penance for it by sitting through the boring grown-up artsy bits.
I'll be interested to see how Spider-man 3 does on the second weekend. I wouldn't be surprised to see a steep drop-off. I'm still waiting for somebody to turn up who'll tell me, in good faith, that they loved every minute of it. When that happens, I'll go. Probably. Or maybe I'll wait for the DVD.
May 4, 2007 11:21
My Superheroes Panel: Reliving the Glory
I ran a panel about superheroes at the Tribeca Film Festival yesterday. On hand were: Zak Penn, screenwriter of the latter two X-Men movies, plus the upcoming Incredible Hulk; Andrew Cooke, who directed a documentary about comics pioneer Will Eisner; Joe Quesada, editor-in-chief of Marvel Comics; and Thomas Haden Church, who is famous, and who played the Sandman in Spider-Man 3. Kevin Smith was supposed to be there too, but he was [insert doobie-toking gesture here] not feeling well and had to bail.
The takeaway:
-- it's very important for any bald panel-moderator to have no-shine matte paste applied to his forehead before ascending a brightly lit stage
-- Thomas Haden Church was actually born Thomas Richard Quesada -- but he is not related to Marvel editor in chief Joe Quesada. True story.
-- Church was very smart and funny and self-deprecating, and gave a dazzlingly fluent pseudo-science explanation of how the Sandman got his powers. Apparently director Sam Raimi gave him a present of a mint copy of Amazing Spider-Man #4, in which the Sandman first appears.
-- We all talked about how superheroes have gone from being sunny, untroubled, invulnerable characters to being troubled, tormented, conflicted, vulnerable characters (though as Cooke pointed out, the original Superman wasn't nearly as invulnerable as he later became); and how, conversely, comics villains have gotten more human and relatable (viz., Magneto, Sandman, etc.)
-- Penn talked about his plans for the new Hulk movie, which will focus (if I'm remembering this right) more on Bruce Banner as a Bourne-like fugitive from justice, struggling to keep his angry superhuman alter ego under control. And there won't be any Hulk poodles. Good stuff. Penn also spontaneously admitted that Elektra, which he wrote, "sucked," and they might have done better by just following Frank Miller's vision of the character.
-- Under close questioning -- and this is where my keen journalistic instincts came into play -- Joe Quesada allowed as how, yes, the Hulk was probably the physically strongest hero in the Marvel universe.
-- Penn and Quesada talked about how difficult it is to launch commercially viable movie franchises that are either a) rated R, and/or b) based around minorities and female superheroes, the X-Men being the notable semi-exception. Quesada noted his affection for, and hopes for, a relatively new deaf, half-native American, half-hispanic superhero called Echo.
It went on in this vein for quite some time and was actually quite fun and interesting, much funner and interesting-er than I'm making it out to be. I'll link to the video if the festival posts it.
May 3, 2007 11:35
Robot Chicken on Star Wars
Funny. Though it's probably time they retired that record-scratch sound-effect segue.
May 3, 2007 11:08
Nerd Words: When I Was a Loser
I've been shirking my regular work-related subway reading in favor of a new anthology entitled When I Was a Loser: True Stories of (Barely) Surviving High School, consisting of personal essays by various writers about how awful high school was.
It is, like any anthology, a mixed bag, but the good stuff is truly good, rich with period music references, infrequent and incompetent sex and eye-watering acts of adolescent cruelty. It confirms for me two things that I always suspected: 1) it was just as horrible for girls as it was for guys, and 2) reading stories about former losers is kind of like sitting at an AA meeting where everybody is trying to one-down each other with stories of alcoholic excess. I'm convinced that I was a way bigger loser than any of these people.
May 2, 2007 3:20
"I'm a Marvel." "And I'm a DC!"
A well-done comics-themed parody of the Mac/PC ads. Contents: one joke. But I like the second-order geekness of this.
May 2, 2007 9:22
Google Giveth, and Google Taketh Away
I'm not a Web retailer, and if I were I would probably find this exchange more painful than fascinating, but as it is I can just sit back and enjoy the weirdness of it. Forbes has a piece up about "Google Hell," which is where Web retailers end up when they fall out of the top Google rankings and into the search engine's less accessible "supplemental index" of low-scoring Web pages. This can cause a severe drop-off in business, and often retailers don't know why their sites have been re-ranked. One example Forbes cites is a diamond retailer called MySolitaire.com:
MySolitaire.com, another online diamond business, spent January to June of 2006 in the supplemental index. Amit Jhalani, the site's vice president of search marketing, says he figures that cost his business $250,000 in sales, and he says he still doesn't know why the site's pages got Google's thumbs-down.
It gets more interesting when you read the blog response by one of Google's search czars, Matt Cutts, who calls MySolitaire.com out on some shady system-gaming tactics they pulled that were designed to fool Google's ranking system, and which probably got them shoved down the list. And don't miss the comments on Cutts's post, full of tales of woe and rough justice from rankings-hungry webmasters complaining about how they've been treated. The whole exchange pulls back the veil on how directly Google rankings can be turned into cash, and how desperate that makes people.
I think it's clear that Google has an insane amount of control right now over who and what gets read on the Internet, but it's worth pointing out that a) Google has come by its power honestly -- it's consumers who have given Google that control; and b) the Googlers have been pretty good stewards of that power so far (though there's very little compelling them to be good, and if they get hit with black kryptonite and turn evil, that could be horrible for the Web as a medium). Also, c) it's beyond me why somebody would try to build a business on Google rankings, something a non-Googler ultimately has no control over, in the first place. It's like building your house in a flood zone. (Or is that what we're trying to do at Time.com? Don't answer that.)
May 1, 2007 12:06
The X-Files Sequel: Why Won't You Die?
It never fails to surprise me when I see once-extinct franchises getting re-animated -- you think they're dead, then somebody finds a scrap of intact DNA trapped in amber, and before you know it you're back to the box office all over again. Arrogant fools -- have we not learned to leave Mother Nature alone? I thought the rumors of a new X-Files movie were just that, rumors, but this post on Ain't It Cool, referencing a post on Gillian Anderson's personal website, gives the idea some weight. The pertinent quote has to do with whether she and David Duchovny got along on the X-Files set:
Did David and I hate each other? At times yes like any brother and sister, husband and wife, co-worker and co-worker forced to spend that much time together under such strenuous circumstances.Do we hate each other now? Not in the least.
Do I imagine that when we do the film together we won't hate each other for a few hours during the filming? No. We will. Vehemently. As David waits patiently, again and again for the hair dryer to calm my frizzy hair between takes so it matches the beginning of the scene... he will undoubtedly be thinking "what the hell was I thinking agreeing to shoot with her f****** frizzy hair again?"
So wow, another X-Files movie? I don't know if I'm ready. My crush on that franchise went dormant in the mid-late 1990's, a sunny, prosperous time when it was genuinely fresh and amusing to play with the idea that conspiracy theories might be true. Now, with all the chilly geopolitical realities of the aught-decade upon us, I'm just not sure that game is fun anymore. Prove me wrong, kids.
Meanhile the new Fantastic Four movie just gets siller with the new trailer. Now it's a power-swapping, fantastic Freaky Friday!
About Nerd World
Lev Grossman
Lev Grossman blogs about anything and everything that could be plausibly labeled geeky--science fiction, fantasy, video games, comic books, tech stuff, and so on. If it could get you beaten up in junior high, it's fair game. About the Author
Matt Selman
Matt Selman has worked on eleven seasons and over two hundred episodes of The Simpsons. He currently serves as an Executive Producer. About the Author
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