August 31, 2007 11:35
Now in Paper-Vision: An Early Look at Halo 3
This week in the print magazine I wrote a lengthy piece on Halo 3 and the Halo franchise in general. It's written for the non-gamer, so readers of this blog probably won't glean too much news from it. There's virtually nothing in there about new features, or the new level editors, or anything like that. Basically I wanted to try to explain to people outside the culture (i.e. a lot of Time readers) why Halo is so important to gamers. Sample snippet:
The face of the Master Chief is never revealed. His visor is solid reflective gold, like the faceplates of the Apollo astronauts. Halo's designers see the Master Chief's facelessness as a dramatic device, a way of allowing players to place themselves in the game's leading role, to map their own faces onto that of a blank protagonist. "If he takes off the helmet, he should be you," says Marty O'Donnell, Halo's audio director. "I mean, that's the big deal. Taking off the helmet is unacceptable." Engineering lead Chris Butcher agrees: "It's your experience. You have to be able to pour yourself into that icon." When nongamers look at the Master Chief's helmet, they see a forbidding, anonymous mask. But when gamers look at it, they see a mirror. They see themselves
If you're a gamer, you already know that stuff.
I should add a note about how cool it was to visit Bungie HQ. I've spent a lot of time playing Bungie games. After-work Marathon deathmatches were a major major thing for me for about a year, and when Myth came out it became an even more majorer thing for me, for quite a bit more than a year. That was more of a during-work habit. (My Myth phase coincided with my stint as a Web producer for Pathfinder. And they wonder why it failed. (And on another note: oh my God, I can't believe that Pathfinder URL is still live, complete with a Pathfinder logo. That's just creepy.)) And then Halo happened.
So it was great to discover that the people who work for Bungie are smart and funny in pretty much the way you'd think they would be:
The cliché about gamers is that they're antisocial, if not sociopathic, but Bungie is very much a community. There's a Foreign Legion quality to it, as if the company had been created as a refuge for smart people who wouldn't or couldn't fit into more conventional professions. Environment artist Dave Dunne started out as an architect. In a past life, O'Donnell wrote the We Are Flintstones Kids vitamin jingle. Designer Paul Bertone was a structural engineer who inspected bridges. And so on. "The people who play Bungie games tend to sense that there's something behind the games that's attractive to them," says O'Donnell. "Then they become fans of the games. And then they become rabid fans. And then they become employees of Bungie."
Apparently I missed out on that last part. But the rest is all true.
August 30, 2007 11:42
Nerdcore Could and Did Rise Up
Last night I went to this nerdcore hip-hop show in Brooklyn. Nerdcore differs from conventional hip-hop in two ways: a) it's about video games and computers and Star Wars and other nerdy stuff, and b) in place of hip-hop's traditional boasting/self-aggrandizing rhetoric it substitutes weird self-deprecating/self-loathing rhetoric. It's funny, but not so funny that it doesn't kinda rock out. I've posted about it before.
I've been listening to nerdcore for years now -- three years, anyway -- but I'd never been to an actual live show. This one started with Schaffer the Darklord, whom I'd never heard of. When I turned up I was a little daunted by the scene -- a basement room, bar at the back, tiny stage, a bunch of people standing around looking too self conscious to dance or be rocked out in any way. But Schaffer absolutely killed. There's something disconcerting but also primally right about watching a skinny white guy with glasses, wearing a dark suit and tie, alone except for some kind of compact digital thingummy, just dancing and sweating and relentlessly pouring out rhymes on stage.
Schaffer closed out with Attack of the Clonef___er -- audio here, video here -- by which time everybody was loose and generally sold on the whole proposition and ready for Jesse Dangerously, a great Nova Scotian rapper during most of whose set I had to take a phone call. Sorry.
I came back for MC Frontalot, who's the first nerdcore rapper I ever got into, and quite possibly the first nerdcore artist period. He had an actual band backing him -- drummer, bassist, keyboards -- all wearing ties, the bassist (I believe) actually wearing a backpack. They were fresh off a triumphant appearance at PAX and put on an unbelievably tight, slick, funky, enjoyable show, complete with Front's trademark gawky-white-boy popping-and-locking. The set list was determined by a series of on-stage dice-rolls. I could list the actual songs, but most of you have probably never heard of them -- suffice to say that it was a mix of old stuff and new stuff, and it all sounded ridiculously great live, the climax being a thunderous ska-inflected version of Frontalot's Penny Arcade theme. Front is not a novelty act, he's a real musician.
I got to talk to Frontalot a bit before the show, while he loitered by the merch table. His real name is Damian Hess, and he's incredibly nice and sort of imposingly tall and used to work as a Web designer for USWeb, though he's a musician full time now. I bought a t-shirt. It's weird: by my calculations he's been Frontalot for 7 or 8 years now, but he still hasn't gotten anything resembling major- or medium-sized-label attention. Movies and TV have acknowledged nerds as a major demographic category for years now. Wonder why music studios haven't figured it out?
August 29, 2007 3:26
Why Did Stardust Tank?
Maybe that's unfair. It has earned $26.4 million in the U.S., according to IMDB. That's against a budget of $65 million or so. Given foreign sales and DVD it'll probably make some money, so I guess it's unfair to say that it tanked. But I never thought that after three weeks it'd be down there at #8, with Mr. Bean's Holiday taunting it cruelly from #4.
What happened? Stardust has ridiculous numbers of big stars in it, including Robert De Niro, Claire Danes, and Michelle Pfeiffer. It has hordes of Gaimanistas to go see it. It has action for the dudes and romance for the ladeez and fantasy for the nerds. Moreover it's actually good. Or I thought so. In the movie studio in my mind, I would have greenlit it. What happened?
The conventional thinking is that the studio didn't know how to market it. It looked too nerdy for the ladeez and too sappy for the nerds not really that action-y at all. I suppose that must be it. I can only hope it develops a cult following and lives on for years on the USA network, like Princess Bride before it. Am I the only one who saw it?
August 29, 2007 11:32
They Won't Be Giving You the Time of Day
Fascinating article in the LA Times -- via Slashdot -- about the discontinuation of AT&T's dial-the-time service. Apparently it dawned on somebody that it's now completely useless, since clocks are sprinkled into every imaginable gadget now like some kind of inexpensive digital condiment. But the original telephone-time-telling technology was clearly some kind of absolutely fantastic retro-kludge:
Richard Frenkiel was assigned to work on the time machines when he joined Bell Labs in the early 1960s. He described the devices as large drums about 2 feet in diameter, with as many as 100 album-like audio tracks on the exterior. Whenever someone called time, the drums would start turning and a message would begin, with different tracks mixed together on the fly.
I am here and now putting out a call for any images or video of this device. And there's a human story, too:
Time ladies -- and a few gentlemen -- came and went over the years. Then, in the 1950s, a woman named Mary Moore emerged as the nation's leading time-teller. Her reading of hours, minutes and seconds was delivered in a distinctive if somewhat prissy tone. Moore's odd pronunciation of the numbers 5 ("fiyev") and 9 ("niyun") influenced a generation of operators, much as flying ace Chuck Yeager's West Virginia drawl is said to have been adopted by innumerable airline pilots.By far the most prominent time lady was Jane Barbe, who succeeded Moore at Audichron in the 1960s. A former big band singer, Barbe (pronounced "Barbie") went on to become the voice of recorded telephone messages in the 1970s and '80s in the United States and elsewhere...
Barbe died of cancer-related complications in 2003 at age 74. It's estimated that at the height of her fame, Barbe's voice was heard worldwide about 40 million times a day.
August 28, 2007 12:42
What Happened at PAX
I didn't go to PAX. You probably didn't go to PAX. But there's some amusing footage from Nerdstock up at Penny Arcade, including Jonathan Coulton singing "re: Your Brains" and the audio from Wil Wheaton's keynote. I'm embedding below footage of the Minibosses doing what is actually a pretty wicked cover of the Halo theme, segueing into the final round of the Omegathon. If none of that means anything to you, I wouldn't worry about it too much.
August 28, 2007 11:39
Roomba Diary: A Boy and His Robot
I always imagined my first robot would be something more along the lines of an Iron Giant scenario. But ya know, you go to war with the robot minion you have, that being, in my case, the Roomba.
I've been a Roomba user pretty much from day one. I'd been seeing tech demos of robots for years, and the one constant theme from one demo to the next was that the damn robots couldn't do damn anything. They could only operate in the most specialized environments, they constantly had to be prompted and nudged and rescued and debugged, and even then they tended to crap out mid-demo. I agreed to meet with iRobot because of their distinguished pedigree, but my expectations weren't high. And lo and behold: they had an actual robot that ran around by itself, didn't break every 10 seconds, and accomplished a useful task. Impressive. I've gone over the guts of a Roomba with these people, and it's unbelievable the engineering that went into this thing.
Since then I've used my Roomba steadily, about once every couple weeks, and as a guy who lives by himself and loathes housework, it's been a trusty sidekick. It's never broken down, and it actually does get your room very clean, though I have to do a little supplemental broomwork in the corners. I upgraded only once, to the second-gen model. You do have to prepare your room fairly carefully: tuck rug-tassels under rugs, hide power cords and shoelaces -- Roomba loves to choke on shoelaces -- and block off rooms where Roomba shouldn't go. (I don't bother with the infrared Virtual Walls that come with Roomba -- a chair does the trick.) Roomba has an incredible ability to slip back behind my busted-ass futon, where it finds a hellish crevice that it can't extricate itself from (though it does become a very clean crevice). Oh, and the battery is pretty much shot, it can only run about 20 mins on one charge at this point (the fact that this doesn't particularly bother me should give you a rough sense of the size of my apartment).
This post is apropos of the fact that I just got my hands on a new Roomba: the excitingly named 500 series. Apparently this gleaming robotic titan possesses the cosmic secret of "anti-tangle technology," which I'm pretty stoked about. Sounds like they also did some incremental design improvements, like upgrading its spinny side-brush, and refining its navigation algorithm (which I seem to remember is based on some old-tyme minesweeping algorithms -- this is your peace dividend at work, people!)
I feel sorta bad about 86ing my old Roomba, but he had a good run, and he'll be happy in Roomba paradise, where there are no shoelaces or power cords. Anybody else got one?
August 27, 2007 11:46
Now in Paper-Vision: Why People Hate the Web and Love Facebook
August 27, 2007 10:45
More on the Speed Racer Cartoon
OK, I'm still not excited about the Speed Racer movie, but it's getting harder to be all cool and jaded. This comes from an interview with Susan Sarandon, who I guess is playing Speed Racer's mom. She's talking about the newfangled camera the Wachowski brothers have:
They’re using some high def thing that comes with guards and it’s beyond anything I’ve ever…. They’re doing something where they’re layering film so that the front and the back are in focus like a cartoon and they’re also doing two dimensional and three dimensional stuff and mixing and everything is very, very saturated with some new kind of film, so they actually have to treat the actors in some way so we can hold our own with the background. So it’s every color that wasn’t in The Matrix is seriously in this film.
So I guess the idea is that the whole frame, background and foreground, is completely in focus at all times? I can't picture it. But I want to see it.
Jeez, I can't even tell which movies are bad and good anymore. Even the new Alien vs. Predator trailer looks sorta not-bad. (Warning: ultra-violence, my droogies.)
August 24, 2007 2:15
The Jane Austen B(i)o(sh)o(c)k Club
Because if Jane were alive, she'd be splicin' up a storm.
This game is giving me immense pleasure. And I say that in italics, so you know it comes from here (places hands over heart). I spend weird amounts of time thinking about the Bioshock-verse. I find myself rewarding small daily achievements -- brushing teeth, remaining upright, blinking eyes successfully, etc. -- with little 15 min. Bioshock mini-sessions. The disease has taken hold. I'm killing my cravings at the circus of value!
I'm only a few hours in -- just slugging my way through Arcadia Gardens -- but I'm impressed at the way the designers keep layering in new gameplay elements to ramp up the richness. Plasmids I knew about going in, since they were sold as the big-ticket power-ups. But I'm having a lot of fun swapping the various tonics in and out, too. And I complained about the lack of weapons in the demo, but they're turning out to be satisfyingly diverse in the full game -- nothing like unloading a faceful of electric buck into one of those stupid flying-whistling security droids (and I just scored my first weapon upgrade (I upped the damage on my machine gun), which promises to be a fun little diversion.) I even get a mindless buzz out of the hacking mini-games. It's almost too rich -- this whole pseudo-crafting U-Invent-It! side of things is kinda silly. But the designers smartly don't seem to be punishing me for blowing off the aspects of the game I can't be bothered with.
I hadn't realized at first what a cruel game it is. There's a disturbing preoccupation with plastic surgery, and there are a lot of corpses, many of them pretty grisly -- when you incinerate somebody, they leave a horrible burn-victim corpse. (Not so disturbing that I won't search them for money and ammo, of course). I find the presence of the Big Daddies and their Little Sister companions gives the game an interesting rhythm, in that they sort wander around at will, and you can take them on whenever you feel like staging a mini-boss battle.
I do have quibbles. I'm kinda sick of searching every damn corpse and crate and snowdrift and whatever else I pass, but I feel guilty if I don't. There's a minor AI bug in the crazy-doctor boss that causes him to get stuck in his operating theater (not that I didn't take advantage of said bug to take his head off with a shotgun while he stood there like an idiot). Some of the plasmids don't seem that useful -- I still rely on electricity and telekinesis for 95% of my plasmid needs. And I'm hoping we'll see some bigger environments down the line. I know we're underwater and all, but the low ceilings and close horizons are starting to feel a bit claustrophobic.
But those are quibbles. Forget about gameplay -- at this point I just like to stand around and study the art deco ornaments and listen to that creepy crooning music. Anybody else playing along? Weigh in! Ryan doesn't own you!
August 23, 2007 10:44
More Halo Movie Footage Surfaces
This via Ain't It Cool and elsewhere:
Looks like more test footage. I would question the provenance, but the style does like authentically Blomkampian (Neill Blomkamp being the director attached to the Halo movie; and yes, I am the first person to ever use that word). And those are some expensive effects shots, and the hardware looks right -- there's some Warthog action, and a quick Banshee flyby.
Interesting: the idea seems to be to shoot cartoony sci-fi action in an ultra-gritty, almost documentary style. I'm a sucker fanboy, I know, but it's kinda workin' for me. Someone really ought to fund this movie.
August 22, 2007 10:22
YouTube Adds Ads: More Tube, Less You?
When Google bought YouTube last year for (some very large integer) dollars, everybody knew it would be so totally worth it. Why? Ads! Put ads on those videos and charge for them, son! Step three: profit.
But where exactly would those ads go? Before the videos? After? Nobody quite seemed to know. The key to making YouTube work is that it feel like a community, and that the videos have a fan-created, or at least fan-owned, quality to them. Sure, somewhere in your hindbrain you know it's suposed to be a business. But you don't want to think about it. Except that ads make you think about it.
The answer is now upon us in the form of a little ribbon, a fifth the height of the video window, that will snake along the bottom of YouTube videos. The ribbon is semitransparent. It disappears after 10 seconds. It means you no harm, honest it doesn't! But it does carry a paid advertising message, and if you click on it, you'll watch a video ad. Your regularly scheduled video will resume after the ad. From the Associated Press story:
Shiva Rajaraman, product manager for YouTube, said internal tests show more than 70 percent of people give up when they see a pre-roll. By contrast, less than 10 percent decide to close an overlay, which they can exit by clicking on an "X" in a corner. The overlay format also gives advertisers more flexibility, he said, because they aren't constrained to keeping a video ad at 15 or 30 seconds to avoid defection. Because a viewer chooses to watch, a video ad can run much longer - clicking on one test overlay launched a 2-minute trailer for "The Simpsons Movie."
Fair enough, mister. Don't know how users could ask for anything more. But it will undoubtedly change the experience of surfing YouTube -- it'll be much less like an alternative to TV, and much more like TV. Less grassroots, less hand-rolled. More Tube, less You.
Supposedly these ads will start running over YouTube's corporate video partners first. (I wonder if they'll eventually migrate to all videos? And will YouTube split revenue with Joe User? And will the ribbons be targeted with the same accidentally funny randomness that characterizes those Gmail print ads?) I have yet to spot one in the wild. Anybody?
August 20, 2007 3:44
The Kids in the Hall: Not Dead Yet
Apparently they're still alive. Or at least Dave Foley is, contrary to his participation in the living death that is Celebrity Poker Showdown. If you're curious what they're up to, read this. Corporate synergy!
August 20, 2007 1:43
Slate on the Harry Potter Theme Park
Some interesting tidbits are leaking out about the Harry Potter theme park that Universal is supposedly going to build in Florida. I hadn't realized that Disney pondered the project and then passed on it:
Rowling's vision supposedly was that each person would enter through the Leaky Cauldron, tap on a brick, gain access to Diagon Alley, then proceed to a platform in a version of King's Cross station and take a train to Hogwarts. Disney figured it would have had to build multiple Leaky Cauldron entrances to cycle in small groups every two minutes. Admission to the attraction envisioned by Rowling would have run north of $800 per person.
The deep dive (when did I become a management consultant?) comes courtesy of one Jim Hill, a Disney adept who characterizes the whole project as "a very, very clever re-theming of the "Lost Continent" section of Islands of Adventure."
I never much liked theme parks anyway. But everybody knows I like to pull the wings off fairies, too, so what do I know.
August 16, 2007 2:40
BioShock Inna Hizzy. Yes, the Full Game
It has been an honor and a pleasure serving with you. But right now I gotta go get spliced up.
Yeah, I know it's the middle of the day.
August 16, 2007 11:44
WikiScanner Will Save the Entire World and Then Make Us Breakfast Too
Everybody seems to be extremely excited about WikiScanner, a nifty tool for helping people peek at who's editing what on Wikipedia. It's not particularly user-friendly, but it's usable enough to have set off a lively round of Internet Gotcha. Wired has smartly crowdsourced (I feel unclean for having used that word, but whatever) this process -- check out the list of questionable edits their readers have compiled.
There's something very of-the-moment about this, don't you think? The culture of the Net has been about anonymity and identity-play and such since forever -- for yonks, as our former colonial oppressors would say -- but you can sense a sea change in the air, a mass hunger for accountability and name-naming that hasn't been there before, and which WikiScanner plays into.
I don't get why everybody is saying that this is the end of Wikipedia though. It's not like Wikipedia edits were magically untraceable before this, it was just tougher. I assume the Wikipedia people are stoked -- this is just the kind of malfeasance they hate, and WikiScanner just makes it easier to ferret out. This is going to be great for Wikipedia. "Mark my words."
I do wonder if some enterprising hacker could take WikiScanner a step further -- automate the process of matching corporations and agencies with the entries they shouldn't be editing. That would be an idea for somebody, unlike me, who has actual mad skillz.
August 15, 2007 11:29
Thorwatch: The Thorening
This IGN story lists two casting rumors for Matthew Vaughn's Thor movie, one horrible and one actually pretty great. Horrible: a pro wrestler named Triple H. Pretty great: Kevin McKidd, who played Lucius Vorenus in Rome.
Sure, Vorenus was kinda whiny at times, but McKidd clearly has chops and would lend some thespian credibility to the whole enterprise. Plus as a non-star he's probably cheap, so they can spend lots of money on a fancy CGI Jörmungandr. (Actually my first reaction was that McKidd might be too short to play Thor, before I realized that he's six feet -- he just looks small because he has all his scenes with Ray Stevenson, who's enormous (and who has just been cast as The Punisher in The Punisher 2: It's Surprising That They're Making a Sequel to The Punisher.))
Maybe Triple H can go off and play Conan in the (alleged) new Conan movies.
Meanwhile I will attempt to read this really long piece about Philip K. Dick in the New Yorker.
August 14, 2007 6:45
BioShock Shocker: It's Actually As Good They Say It Is
You've gotta earn your BioShock: the download's free on Xbox Live, but it'll take about 12 hours of your life - or your XBox's life -- to actually secure the data, give or take a month. To my surprise, the results turned out to be unbelievably worth it.
The premise is nonsensical -- I've read that this game was a tough sell to developers, and I can see why. you, a plane crash survivor, are plunged into an underwater city, built by an egomaniacal genius madman, where the inhabitants can alter their DNA more or less at will, giving themselves superpowers. Yeah, I know. You, for reasons that become clear, sort of, are obligated to shoot some of those inhabitants.
But the vision, man, the vision of it all: everything in the city, and the game, is done in swanky 1920's style, down to perfect period music, carpeting, architectural ornaments, the works. You're always stumbling on crackly retro black-and-white propaganda videos. Even the future technology is dominated by retro polished brass fittings, and there's always somebody crooning some Jazz Age standard in the background -- I guess culture didn't evolve much in the sunken city. It's just perfectly, gorgeously done -- the art direction is beyond spot on. It reminds me a bit of Starship Titanic, except reconceived as a shooter with a horror vibe.
And, you know, actually fun to play. The audio and the graphics are ridiculous, thanks to the Unreal engine, the water effects in particular. Weapons are quite basic, at least in the demo: a wrench, coupla pistols, a rattley old-school machine pistol. But there's that DNA-rewriting thing to keep things lively: you pick up "plasmids" -- whatever -- and inject them, stabbily, into your wrist to give yourself various offensive powers: I scored incineration (the fire is quite nicely animated) and electrocution; deeper in the game it looks like telekinesis, cold, and others come into play. (The physics of it has clearly been thought through -- electrocution works better, for example, if your target is standing in water.)
I have some quibbles. They only throw two kinds of enemy at you in the demo, and I only see two more in the offing -- some creepy little girls and a stumpy, gorgeously designed beast in a klugey-looking pressure suit. So I hope things stay interesting, gameplay-wise. But it's already a must-play on the strength of the demo. See lousy blurry YouTube trailer below if you're still not convinced.
August 14, 2007 10:31
Indiana Jones and the What of the Thing
Slashfilm has a very nice little scoop. Apparently there's some kind of filmy rule whereby you have to register the title of a movie with the MPAA before you release it, and somebody got ahold of the titles Lucasfilm has registered for Indy IV. To wit:
Indiana Jones and the City of GodsIndiana Jones and the Destroyer of Worlds
Indiana Jones and the Fourth Corner of the Earth
Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull
Indiana Jones and the Lost City of Gold
Indiana Jones and the Quest for the Covenant
Will they choose well, or poorly? City of Gods still has the ring of truth to me. Then again if somebody had focus-grouped Raiders of the Lost Ark on me in 1981 I would have snorted and gone back to brooding over the Dark Phoenix saga.
August 13, 2007 12:41
Speed Racer, Voltron: It's Saturday Morning All the Time Now
Ain't It Cool has a rough account of the screenplay for Speed Racer, which is the next project for the fabulous dancing Wachowski brothers, of Matrix fame. This seems to me sort of like having the catering menu of the next Spider-man flick: the Speed Racer script may be a work of the highest literary sophistication, but if this movie has any hope of not-sucking, it will be because the Wachowskis totally reinvent the way we experience cars driving fast through cinema. Which I have no doubt they're capable of doing. And I'm sure at some point while they're doing that, somebody will say something, but I'm not dying to know what it is.
I'm just not convinced that all these cartoon franchises, however beloved, actually have any kind of a beating heart within them. Case in point: Voltron, which according to Variety is currently in the process of being resuscitated. There is just no way you can put this on the big screen without getting the bad kind of laughter. Because however much money you pour into it, at the end of the day you've still got a giant robot with robotic lions for hands and feet. And those creepy, oddly full white lips. Shudder.
August 10, 2007 3:37
It's a Nerd, Nerd, Nerd, Nerd World, Part 7
Dance, attractive cosplayers! Dance for your lives!
p.s. Belgium, don't be a stranger
August 10, 2007 12:21
Some Old-School Marvel Comics Action: Hulk and Thor
The redoubtable Harry Knowles drops the leak-hammer on the upcoming Thor movie. To wit:
This isn't a Donald Blake, doctor on vacation story. Instead, this is a genuine TALES OF ASGARD story. In the first few pages the creation of everything takes place... the origin of the gods, their universe and how midgard (that's are [homonyms, Harry, homonyms! -- ed.] place in the universe) came to be.
It has Thor and Loki as brothers - the best of friends... and it shows how that goes bad. The origin of the uru hammer, Thor being thrown from Asgard to being a mere mortal... it's a HUGE story - easily the most awesome script that a MARVEL project has ever had.
That's a big endorsement, that last right there. To be honest I never cared about the squabbling-brothers side of Thor's story. Yeah, yeah, one's good, one's bad, we get it -- it turns into an Asgard family values story, and who wants that? I actually liked all the Donald Blake stuff, the idea of an amnesiac god exiled on Earth whose power is accidentally restored to him. Or the Ultimate Thor scenario, where at first he's presented as a lunatic who believes he's a god, and you have to figure out if he's crazy or not. Though again, the whole idea of Thor has always been quite confusing, this thing of a god fighting among mortals. Bit of a disconnect there. If he's really a god, doesn't he have responsibilities? Shouldn't he be off, I don't know, reigning or something?
Casting will be interesting. Might be a good moment for Sean Bean to quit playing villians (note approved Internet spelling) and put that big square jaw to use. Or Aaron Eckhart? Both too old?
And is anybody else following the World War Hulk arc? Deeply, deeply awesome stuff. The premise: an alliance of superheroes does what somebody should have done a long time ago, which is exile Hulk to some other planet: he's way too strong and way too nuts to be left running around Earth. Long story short, Hulk ends up liking his planet of exile. But in a way that doesn't make sense, though you don't really care, the heroes of earth wind up destroying Hulk's new home and killing his new wife (don't think about Hulksex, don't think about Hulksex, lalalalala...) Now Hulk's really pissed, so he comes back to Earth to kick ass. End of exposition.
It's the thought-experiment we've always wanted: if Hulk really wanted to ruin every superhero on earth like a Japanese banquet, could he? Huge bonus for bringing in Black Bolt -- anything with BB in it automatically wins. (That's him in the image below -- note Hulk's fetching new partial body armor. Wee little tuning fork won't save Black Bolt from Hulk smash!)
August 9, 2007 12:01
Huge, Puffy Extrasolar Planet Located
That about says it all. It's 70 percent bigger than Jupiter, which makes it the largest planet ever found, but it's only 3/4 as massive. "That means the alien planet is about as dense as balsa wood or cork, said [Georgi] Mandushev, who is part of a planet-hunting team known as the Trans-Atlantic Exoplanet Survey." It also whips around its parent planet once every 3 days. Gorsh, that's fast. And where was I when they were choosing up planet-hunting teams?
Reminds me of the rumor that an early version of the Alien3 screenplay was set on a planetoid made entirely of wood. Apparently this idea was scrapped when someone observed that, cool as it was, it made no sense.
August 8, 2007 1:12
Star Trek: The Wrath of J.J.
Sorry about the long absence. I was off in a leafy suburb of Seattle. I leave it to your imaginations what I was doing there. Cough, Bungie, cough.
Apparently while I was out there human genetic diversity declined -- nice job, guys, thanks for that -- Erfworld continued to rock, and a bunch of Star Trek casting got done. Ain't It Cool posted the casting specs, which are quite amusing:
STAR TREK[JAMES KIRK] 23-29 Handsome,cocky self assured and earnest. Great physical condition. 6 ft or less
[LEONARD(BONES)MCOY] -28-32 Medic on the Enterprise. Smart, clever and a bit danger-loving. Dark hair, blue eyes.
[UHURA] 25ish -African American. Brilliant, beautiful, heroic and FUN!, Uhura is almost tom-boyish - as if she grew up in a houseful of brothers.
[SULU] 25-32 -Asian American male (preferably Japanese). Helmsman on the Enterprise. Extremely fit, capable and dedicated. A bit of a wildcat
[MONTGOMERY(SCOTTY) SCOTT] -28-32 a brilliant ship's engineer. Must be able to do a flawless Scottish accent!
Mr. Sulu is "a bit of a wildcat"? Is that what they're calling it these days?
And who will play the lissome, flame-haired, barely-legal Beverly Crusher? (Yeah, I may have my chronology off on that a bit, but still.) And it looks like Chekov is actually Russian this time. Tough gig -- I mean, good God, man, you know where this is going...
p.s. somebody somewhere suggested Firefly's Nathan Fillion as Kirk: an idea so obviously right and true that you know it's never gonna happen.
August 3, 2007 12:30
Enter...the Googlephone!
I hope this doesn't turn into a monstrous iPhonelike media bubble. Everybody writing about it, myself included, should be forced to take several deep calming breaths before setting fingertip to keyboard. But yeah, Google might possibly be making a phone.
It's not a wildly radical idea: you picture some kind of low-end version of an iPhone-like object, with basic voice and data functionality, fees to be defrayed by revenue from ads served to said object...I'm in no position to be crunching the numbers, but the numbers on the face of it do seem to be crunchable. I don't really want ads on my cell phone, but I'd opt in if the money were right, and I suppose the ads would be geographically localized, since the phone would know where I was, which would give them an additional layer of relevance. But that's about it. It could be a game-changer, but only because the cell phone game is so horribly lame and broken to begin with.
It does remind me a little of that moment in 1996 when it seemed like companies might actually be able to make money by giving away low-end PC's for free, with free Internet access, for the privilege of serving a ribbon of ads across the bottom of the monitor screen. Then somebody had the bright idea of putting a strip of duct tape over the ribbon of ads, thereby "hacking" their ad-crippled PC into a regular old PC with a slightly smaller screen. Let us pour out a splash of Vitamin Water onto our industrial grey carpeting in memory of fallen business plans everywhere.
August 3, 2007 11:36
Now Is the Summer of My Nerdy Solitude
Well, I missed Comic-Con. And E3. At this exact moment I'm missing QuakeCon in Texas, BlizzCon in Anaheim (featuring actor/comedian Jay Mohr!), and that BlackHat thing in Vegas. I will shortly miss Gen Con and PAX. Seems like you could spend the whole summer jumping seamlessly from Con to Con and never once breathe the air outside a large corporate events venue. Not that I am. But I bet somebody somewhere is, and that person is more nerd than I can ever hope to be.
August 2, 2007 4:55
The Legal Technology Gap
Will Smith and DJ Jazzy Jeff (which by the way, where is he now? still jazzy, somewhere?) said it best: movie theater owners just don't understand. This story (from the Washington Post, spotted via Slashdot) isn't surprising, just appalling: a 19-year-old woman in a movie theater takes a 20-second clip of Transformers to show her brother and is promptly arrested for it.
Sejas faces up to a year in jail and a fine of up to $2,500 when she goes to trial this month in the July 17 incident. Arlington police spokesman John Lisle said it was the decision of Regal Cinemas Ballston Common 12 to prosecute the case, a first for Arlington police. "They were the victim in this case, and they felt strongly enough about it," he said. The general manager of Regal Cinemas declined to comment yesterday.
I could quote more, but the fact is, there is no part of this story that will not make you foam with rage. It's ridiculous that the people who control the media business, but don't really understand it, can use ill-conceived legislation to punish those who do understand it. Just more evidence that nerds should control the world even more than we already do.
It's enough to make you want to move to the bottom of the ocean at the North Pole...d'oh! Damn you, Russia!
August 1, 2007 11:36
Cloverfield, Monstrous, Furious, Whatever
It sounds like J.J. Abrams may have been out filming his shaky-cam monster movie on the Lower East Side. In case you've been enveloped by a moving cloud of Peruvian Instant Darkness Powder, here's the poster (swiped from Ain't It Cool).
I'm embarrassed to say that I've been completely seduced by the trailer for this movie, and its attendant black-ops marketing maneuvers. I don't even have it in me to rail against the blatant overtones of 9/11ism -- if anything the tone of the trailer is eerily (possibly even valid-ly) evocative of that horrible day. Though I still don't get what the monster is supposed to be. Something large enough to snap off, and subsequently huck, the head of the Statue of Liberty, I guess. Are we in Creature Double Feature territory here? Gamera is friend to all children...
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