October 31, 2007 12:33
League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: This Warn You
There are very few things printed on paper that give me the same sense of wild, borderline-creepy anticipation as a new League of Extraordinary Gentlemen volume. You probably know the basic premise: (writer) Alan Moore and (artist) Kevin O'Neill assemble a cast of heros out of 19th and (early) 20th Century literature (Captain Nemo, Alan Quatermain, Mr. Hyde, etc.) into a super-group that battles various retro badnesses in a creepy, twilight counter-world England where science and politics are slightly askew. Besides being effing genius, the conceit allows Moore to run amok in the basement storage of Victorian culture, plucking out the strange and angry and contradictory bits that underlie so much of the culture we live and think with today.
I haven't finished the new volume, subtitled The Black Dossier, but I've read enough to see that Moore has pushed the timeline forward, to post-WWII, with Quatermain and Mina (I won't spoil the secret of her identity) legging it here and there in an Orwellian fascist England. They've been disbanded and disavowed, but they've recovered a file detailing earlier incarnations of the league (think Orlando, Gulliver, Prospero -- no one is safe) which presumably is important to the plot in some way.
I want to type something into the record here. It's the warning label affixed to the first page of the file Quatermain and Mina steal. (This seems to be the titular Black Dossier.) It's written in 1984-style Newspeak and printed in tiny 6-point jewel-type, and if you ever wondered whether it's possible to write a masterpiece in 150 words, now you know.
THIS WARN YOU
Docs after in oldspeak. Untruth, make-ups only. Make-ups make THOUGHTCRIME. Careful. Supervisor rank or not read. This warn you. THOUGHTCRIME in docs after. SEXCRIME in docs after. Careful. If self excited, report. If other excited, report. Everything report. Withhold accurate report is INFOCRIME. This warn you. Are you authorised, if no stop read now! Make report! If fail make report, is INFOCRIME. Make report. If report made on failing to make report, this paradox. Paradox is LOGICRIME. Do not do anything. Do not fail to do anything. This warn you. Why you nervous? Was it you? We know. IMPORTANT: Do not read next sentence. This sentence for official inspect only. Now look. Now don't. Now look. Now don't. Careful. Everything not banned compulsory. Everything not compulsory banned. Views expressed within not necessarily those of publisher, editors, writers, characters. You did it. We know. This warn you.
October 30, 2007 5:07
The Sad Decline and Imminent Fall of WHOIS
A couple of outlets are reporting that the WHOIS database is on the chopping block, over privacy and administrative concerns. (That's the public database where you can go to see who registered what Web domain, where they live, their hair color, etc.) Which seems like a shame. Sure, WHOIS is where spammers go to gorge themselves on free personal information until their repulsive bellies are round and bloated. But surely there's a competent way to run those databases so they can't be crawled for profit? That's also where journalists go to track down reclusive sources, don't you know.
October 30, 2007 12:04
Wanted: Does Anyone Want?
Man, I'd love to know how the meeting went down that put Timur Bekmambetov in charge of Wanted, due out next spring, starring Angelina Jolie, Morgan Freeman and Scot-of-the-moment James McAvoy, who is in every single movie released in 2007.
Not that I think it's a bad idea. Bekmambetov is the Russian action-auteur behind the beguiling, frustrating Night Watch and Day Watch, which I've blogged about before. He's got a wild visual imagination and some very Russian ideas about storytelling, which who even knows if they'll translate to the West. The storyline involves an office drone-turned-super assassin. Not bad for a start. Could be The Matrix, could be Ballistic: Ecks vs. Sever. (No, he didn't go there! But he did.)
But I'm eager to find out what Bekmambetov will do with an actual budget and big stars. Apparently somebody else is too. Some striking early stills from Wanted are here.
Update: Trailer is here.
October 29, 2007 11:45
Hulu Has a Stupid Name
But the site is pretty slick. I just poked my head into the beta for Hulu, the big corporate-type video site that will carry content from NBC and Fox. It is in fact, as advertised, crawling with clips and full episodes from 30 Rock, SNL, the Simpsons, etc. And Hulu has absorbed the First Lesson of YouTube, which is: allow embedding, or you will die.
Playback was a bit stuttery, but I blame my overtaxed corporate network. The ads are quite jarring, though -- they're inserted more or less arbitrarily, not at the commercial breaks around which the show in question was originally written. And there's none of the cozy fuzzy user-created stuff around the edges -- no tagging, no comments. But, you know, it's The Simpsons. I think I learned something today: that I am a whore for video content, and I have no loyalty to any particular site or brand.
It does seem sort of lame that all this video content is in different places, in different mini-networks. I still don't see what the networks gain with Hulu that's so important that they had to split from YouTube, with its massive pre-grown community (and NBC pulled its content from iTunes, too). I remember an anecdote about the early days of phone service in an African country, the name of which I'm forgetting. There were different competing phone companies, each with its own network of phone lines, so you'd have to keep, like, eight phones on your desk, and use the right one depending on which network the person you were calling was on. That couldn't last, of course. Can this?
October 26, 2007 10:37
Mac OS X: Leopard Is My King-Size Bed
I have Leopard. Have had for a few days now. But I also have a colossal deadline hanging over me, in the form of Time's Best Inventions issue. So I'll plan on running another in my "The Last Review" series next week. Meantime I'll perform the most important service a blogger can serve: linking to the roundups of the reviews. Apple 2.0 has the best, though it's worth peeking at Valleywag's.
The bulk of the attention seems to be aimed at Apple's remarkable, whimsically hypnotic backup system Time Machine. Never have I so powerfully wanted to get stoned and recover earlier versions of my documents.
And one more thing. Per the New York Times, Apple is remaking a fan-made ad for the iPod Touch into an actual grown-up TV ad. The fan version is below, and yes, it really does look like an Apple ad. You can see why they went for it -- it's just a little naughty, but not too too naughty. Plus it's hella catchy. It may not be possible to watch this just once. You were warned.
October 25, 2007 11:06
Microsoft and Facebook: Their Love Will Go On
There isn't much I can say that will add to the basic facts of the story, as reported by, oh, let's say, the New York Times:
The two companies said on Wednesday that Microsoft would pay $240 million for a 1.6 percent stake in Facebook. The investment values Facebook, which is three and a half years old and will bring in about $150 million in revenue this year, at $15 billion.
(Notice how I italicized Times, above, and left "New York" plain. That's what they teach you here at Time magazine. We're professionals.)
I was on the call yesterday for the press conference, which was a predictable hash of analyst-speak and somewhat embarrassing intercorporate love. Certainly there were no surprises -- nobody wanted to dish about whether the partnership will go further than the ad-selling deal that's already on the books (as I understand it, Microsoft was already selling ads on Facebook for users in the U.S., and splitting the revenue with Facebook; now it will sell ads for international users, too. If some enlighted commenter can tell me why Facebook needs M$ to sell ads for it, I'd be quite curious. How hard can it be?) Nobody wanted to dish even the tiniest bit on how the courtship played out, or why Facebook turned down Google and Yahoo.
Two minor notes. The obvious: it takes some stones for Facebook to have turned down Google in this situation. Maybe I'm overly reverent of Google, the way tech journalists often are, but its resume in the online advertising space is just out of everybody else's league. Expertise is more important than money in this early stage of the game, and $240 million is just not that much money in the grand scheme anyway. Was it just because of the extraordinarily high valuation Microsoft was willling to put on Facebook? Or is there some subtle wrinkle to the (eye-bleedingly boring) online ad game that I'm missing? I'd shoot a man in Reno to know what Google offered.
And the other obvious: wow, do people in Silicon Valley have the hots for Facebook. I mean, I think on some level they actually believe the basic myth of Facebook: that the Internet is heading toward a post-apocalyptic end-state in which Facebook is the dominant social network, having choked off its competitors and subsumed within itself many of the basic functions of the Internet itself as we know it (e-mail and so forth). What else could justify those towering numbers? The attitudes of hushed reverence? The sour flop-sweat on the brows of executives competing for Facebook's favors? It's the last chopper out of Saigon! It's Thunderdome!
Except it probably isn't. Relax. Now who's up for a little Scrabulous?
October 24, 2007 1:37
I Am Legend: The Re-Trailering
Will Smith one-man show I Am Legend is one of three movies I'm really really excited about in the next couple of months. (The other two are -- obvs -- Beowulf and The Golden Compass.) I Am Legend has a new trailer up, which gives us a glimpse of the heretofore-merely-speculated-about bad guys, the vaguely vampire-like infected.
Plus Will Smith meets a mountain lion in Times Square. Damn tourists.
October 24, 2007 12:38
Scrabulous? I Hardly Know Us
I'm facing a massive deadline here at Nerd World Heavy Industries, also known as Time magazine, and I'm running low on ways to procrastinate. My drinky-bird desk toy can only do so much. So if anybody out there wants a round of Scrabulous on Facebook, consider the gauntlet thrown.
October 24, 2007 10:16
The Video Game BAFTAs: Apparently British People Play Video Games!
The BAFTA Video Game Awards! They're the British Oscars. Of video games. BAFTA stands for "British Academy of Film and Television Arts." Oooo, was Jade Raymond wearing Stella McCartney? (For some reason that was the only fashion designer I could think of.)
Short version, they went absolutely insane over Wii Sports. If you're curious what actually won, here's what actually won:
ACADEMY FELLOWSHIP
WILL WRIGHT
ACTION AND ADVENTURE
CRACKDOWN (Xbox 360) - Development Team (Realtime Worlds/Microsoft Game Studios)
ARTISTIC ACHIEVEMENT
OKAMI (PS2) - Atsushi Inaba (Clover(Capcom)/Capcom)
BEST GAME
BIOSHOCK (Xbox 360) - Development Team (2K Boston/2K Australia/2K Games)
CASUAL
WII SPORTS (Wii) - Development Team (Nintendo/Nintendo)
GAMEPLAY
WII SPORTS (Wii) - Development Team (Nintendo/Nintendo)
INNOVATION
WII SPORTS (Wii) - Development Team (Nintendo/Nintendo)
MULTIPLAYER
WII SPORTS (Wii) - Development Team (Nintendo/Nintendo)
ORIGINAL SCORE
OKAMI (PS2) - Atsushi Inaba (Clover (Capcom)/Capcom)
SPORTS
WII SPORTS (Wii) - Development Team (Nintendo/Nintendo)
STRATEGY AND SIMULATION
WII SPORTS (Wii) - Development Team (Nintendo/Nintendo)
STORY AND CHARACTER
GOD OF WAR 2 (PS2) - Cory Barlog, David Jaffe, Marianne Krawczyk (SCE Santa Monica Studio/Sony Computer Entertainment Europe)
TECHNICAL ACHIEVEMENT
GOD OF WAR 2 (PS2) - Tim Moss, Christer Ericson (SCE Santa Monica Studio/Sony Computer Entertainment Europe)
USE OF AUDIO
CRACKDOWN (Xbox 360) - Development Team (Realtime Worlds/Microsoft Game Studios)
BAFTA Ones To Watch Award in association with Dare to Be Digital
RAGNARAWK - Voodoo Boogy (Malcom Brown, Robert Clarke, Peter Carr, Lynne Robertson, Finlay Sutton)
THE PC WORLD GAMERS AWARD
(The only award to be voted for by the public)
FOOTBALL MANAGER 2007 (PC) (Sports Interactive/SEGA)
A big "oi oi oi!" to Football Manager 2007 for its gutty grass-roots win! Click here for the full list, including nominees. And two questions: God of War 2 gets Technical Achievement? It's a PS2 game! And correct me if I'm wrong, but I think Halo 3 was eligible. It doesn't turn up even in the nominees. A No-Prize for anybody who has a blurry cell-phone shot of the Master Chief crying in the bathroom after the ceremony.
October 23, 2007 1:41
Nigeria's Home-Made Helicopters
You couldn't pay me to ride in it, but speaking as somebody who couldn't make a pile of old car parts out of a pile of car parts, this seems pretty cool:
Mubarak Muhammad Abdullahi, a 24-year-old physics undergraduate in northern Nigeria, takes old cars and motorbikes to pieces in the back yard at home and builds his own helicopters from the parts.
"It took me eight months to build this one," he said, sweat pouring from his forehead as he filled the radiator of the banana yellow four-seater which he now parks in the grounds of his university...
October 22, 2007 10:28
Dumbledore = Gay
Time's Gina Elliott was present at Carnegie Hall for Rowling's appearance there. The full transcript is up at The Leaky Cauldron:
The question was: Did Dumbledore, who believed in the prevailing power of love, ever fall in love himself?
JKR: My truthful answer to you... I always thought of Dumbledore as gay. [ovation.] ... Dumbledore fell in love with Grindelwald, and that that added to his horror when Grindelwald showed himself to be what he was. To an extent, do we say it excused Dumbledore a little more because falling in love can blind us to an extent? But, he met someone as brilliant as he was, and rather like Bellatrix he was very drawn to this brilliant person, and horribly, terribly let down by him. Yeah, that's how i always saw Dumbledore. In fact, recently I was in a script read through for the sixth film, and they had Dumbledore saying a line to Harry early in the script saying I knew a girl once, whose hair... [laughter]. I had to write a little note in the margin and slide it along to the scriptwriter, "Dumbledore's gay!" [laughter] "If I'd known it would make you so happy, I would have announced it years ago!"Jo also said after revelation: "You needed something to keep you going for the next 10 years! ...Oh, my god, the fan fiction now, eh?"
My feeling about this is that it's a lot less surprising than the headlines make it sound. I'm pretty sure it crossed my mind once or twice while I was reading -- there's always been something very confirmed about Dumbledore's bachelorhood. (I think subconsciously the connection was hurried along by the fact that Gandalf -- the proto-Dumbledore -- is played in the movies by the gay, and very out, Ian McKellen.) Though I suppose it would have been just as logical to have him carrying on with Minerva McGonagall after hours. After all, if memory serves, the sex lives of the Hogwarts faculty are left almost totally blank? And who knows what really goes on in the Room of Requirement?
Bottom line, good for Rowling for making the courageous and politically progressive choice to out Dumbly-dore. But I find something a little frustrating about her continuing to muck around with the books after she wrote the final words. If she really wanted Dumbledore to be gay -- and Neville to marry Hannah Abbott, &c., &c., &c. -- why didn't she just write him that way?
Update: way more insightful piece here, from my colleague John Cloud, who is also a huge nerd.
October 19, 2007 10:27
Robotic Cannon Loses Control in South Africa
Wired is doing a really good job of covering this truly shocking incident. Apparently a week ago a group of robotic cannons -- capable of acquiring targets and reloading themselves -- was being tested in a line on a firing range in South Africa. One unit unexpectedly swiveled too far to the left and opened up on the rest of the line. With one 1/8 second burst it killed nine soldiers and wounded 15.
The Mail & Guardian, a South African paper (I think), has more.
October 18, 2007 11:08
Is Steve Jobs Going Soft?
I couldn't quite muster the energy to be upset, or even surprised, when Apple released a software update earlier this fall that crushed iPhones which users had modified in unauthorized ways. I mean, I feel bad for anybody whose phone got bricked, but honestly: what did they think was going to happen? Apple is very very cautious about other people getting their vile, grubby code all over its perfect hardware. Don't they know who they're dealing with?
Then again, I'm starting to wonder if we really do know who we're dealing with in Steve Jobs anymore. I was definitely surprised, pleasantly so, when Jobs posted an open letter on the Apple website announcing that Apple would in fact be opening up the iPhone to developers:
Let me just say it: We want native third party applications on the iPhone, and we plan to have an SDK [software developer’s kit] in developers’ hands in February. We are excited about creating a vibrant third party developer community around the iPhone and enabling hundreds of new applications for our users. With our revolutionary multi-touch interface, powerful hardware and advanced software architecture, we believe we have created the best mobile platform ever for developers.
Jobs even added, in a flirty little postscript, that you'll be able to use the SDK to create programs for the iPod Touch, too. How did he know? It's just what I wanted!
It's not that I'd call this a "smart" move on Apple's part, since it's so clearly vital to the healthy growth of the iPhone as a platform, not just a gadget, that third party developers be allowed to create software for it. You couldn't call it a massive business insight. But it does exhibit a spirit of openness and flexibility that Apple hasn't consistently embraced in the past. Up to this point Apple had been encouraging developers to create Web apps for the iPhone, that would run within the safe sandbox environment of the Safari browser. But now non-Apple coders will be able to get their hands on the real platform, and start filling on that blank black space on the iPhone's desktop with all kinds of pretty little icons. Hooray.
But I also feel uneasy about it. Worried, even. This comes on the heels of Apple's announcement that iTunes will sell its "iTunes Plus" songs -- the ones with the higher sampling rate, and without the DRM -- for 99 cents, the same price as regular music. In this, too, Apple has responded to the whining of its users (and assorted members of the media)...by caving, and gratifying our demands.
And don't forget how quickly Jobs responded to the outcry over the iPhone price drop, from those who'd already purchased it at full price. And before that, when he responded to Greenpeace's criticisms? Of course, all these may have been pre-planned course corrections, nothing more. But maybe not. Apple has always been attentive to users' needs -- user interface design is what they do -- but I'm not used to Apple hopping to it in quite so sprightly a fashion. Is there an implicit admission here, that Apple was wrong and the public was right? That's not the when-I-want-your-opinion-I'll-give-it-to-you leadership style we're used to from Steve Jobs. It feels different. Kinder and gentler. What's next, a two-button mouse?
I'm just saying: I worry.
October 18, 2007 10:34
The Wilhelm Scream: An Anthology
This hypnotic artifact, marbled with rich thick veins of nerdiness, comes to us from YouTube via Ain't It Cool. "I'll just fill my pipe."
(It includes a clip from the horrific-but-oddly-riveting basic cable staple Small Soldiers, a movie I've seen parts of dozens of times, though I never knew its title till now...)
October 16, 2007 3:59
Harder Better Faster Stronger
No time for proper post today. Too much to do. But:
-- this is amusing: What if Google had to design its user interface...for Google?
-- EW has a preview of the new League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. I can't say that enough times: EW has a preview of the new League of Extraordinary Gentlemen.
-- Is the guy who did Friday Night Lights remaking Dune? Ain't It Cool News doesn't know. But it knows more than I do. I don't know how I feel about this. Like most people, I have a love-hate thing about the David Lynch version, but it's mostly love. (I have mostly hate for the Sci-Fi Channel version.)
October 15, 2007 10:44
Halo 3: Here's What Sucks
I know you guys are all out there rolling around in your Orange Boxes and haven't thought about Halo 3 in weeks. But I'm not done yet. Yeah, I know, a real games journalist would have whipped the Brutes on legendary by now, but I just got to the part where the Flood shows up. Shut up.
That's why I'm just getting around to posting my gripes. Here are a few:
1. I wasn't done with that gravity hammer. Why does the game forcibly revert my weaponry at the start of a new chapter? Here I am being a good Master Chief, conserving the charges (or whatever they're called) on the fancy Gravity Hammer that I just took away from some Brute Chieftain. And then the level ends, and I'm redeployed somewhere else, holding nothing but a plain-vanilla assault rifle/battle rifle combo. What gives? I recognize that this is probably necessary to preserve the purity of Bungie's precious gameplay balance or whatever, but it beggars plausibility. What, does some quartermaster somewhere confiscate my looted weapons after each battle? Where's the weaponry sergeant who's gonna take a gravity hammer away from the Master Chief?
2. What's going on? The Halo universe is rich, and the Halo narrative is deep and resonant, but the single-player campaign does not do a particularly good job of explaining what's happening. This isn't my point, it was made first and better by Gabe (the one who draws) of Penny Arcade:
The story in Halo 3 simply doesn't make a lick of f___ing sense on it's own and they make zero effort to help players that might be new to the series...Honestly though it's Halo. You can play through the thing, shoot a bunch of guys skip all the cut scenes and have a damn good time. It's just sort of sad that there's such a rich universe there that the games aren't conveying.
3. Yo Marine dudes -- wait up. Halo 3 confronts the player with a feast of rich strategic and tactical challenges -- weapons choices, level routes, etc. Every skirmish is a chance to pick apart a chess-like melee from a new angle. Unfortunately your allies don't give you a chance to enjoy any of it, because they go charging into every battle at a full-on sprint, pushing the pace so that every encounter becomes a run-and-gun shoot-'em-up. Basically you have the choice of taking your time and really enjoying a fight, and watching your buddies get turned into bloody chum by the Covenant, or just charging up the middle and saving a few bots from certain death. Gimme a break. I've been choosing door number one, with the result that I spend a lot of time fighting solo, and getting helpful hints barked at me by the AI ("Let's pick up the pace, Master Chief!")
And so on. I also miss fighting the Elites. Wort wort wort. Anybody else?
October 12, 2007 1:09
Trekwatch: The Bridge Team Takes Shape
More casting news for J.J. Abrams' Star Trek: The Previous Generation. John Cho from Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle will play Sulu, and Simon Pegg -- Simon Pegg! -- will be Scotty.
I love Simon Pegg. I loved him in Sean of the Dead, and I forgave him for Hot Fuzz. He doesn't seem young enough or fat enough to play young Scotty, but I don't really care. Maybe he can wear his fat suit from Run, Fat Boy, Run.
And according to the Hollywood Reporter, some guy named Chris Pine is in the running for Kirk? Seems like sort of a Chris Evans type. Why not just get Chris Evans? (I've always liked Evans, though dude cannot seem to get cast in a decent movie.)
October 11, 2007 12:36
Golden Compass Mega-Trailer
I can't wait to see this movie! Except now I feel like I already have. Click for a lengthy trailer for The Golden Compass. For a beautiful woman, Nicole Kidman sure has an ugly monkey.
Also, check out this ultra-high-concept offering from Doug Liman, a director I revere for having done the first Bourne movie:
Sorta like Scanners, but with teleportation instead of telepathy. And just a soupcon of You Got Served. Bamf.
October 10, 2007 3:17
The Bar Exam
Every morning when I get to work the first thing I do is mash down the COMMAND key with my left thumb (we're in Firefox/Mac-land here) and click on each of the websites on my toolbar. That opens each site in a different tab, the end result being a nice fat windowful of twenty tabs all loaded up with delicious morning content.
Does anybody else do this? In the great holy spirit of transparency, I thought I'd share what's on my toolbar every morning. What do you think? Am I missing an essential source of nerd news? This is strictly unedited, by the way, so any links to Time magazine content are just, you know, me doing my job. Ahem:
Critical Mass (this is the blog of the National Book Critics Circle, where I'm on the board of directors)
Paper Cuts (this is the NY Times's books blog)
PvP (now we get into the webcomics)
Order of the Stick/Gobwin Knob
Popwatch (that's Entertainment Weekly's blog)
Facebook/Scrabulous (I'm scared of Facebook, because I really don't need another way for the Internet to puke messages at me. But I do like to get my Scrab on.)
October 8, 2007 12:25
iPod Touch: The Last Review
Photo courtesy of Apple
Whenever a new product comes out there's a massive rush by the media to get the first review up. Which makes sense, because we-the-media are like that, but it's also kinda lame, because everybody knows you have to live with a gadget for a while to truly grok its tiny electronic soul. That's why I imagine a series of reviews called "The Last Review," which would appear weeks or months after a gadget comes out, instead of 7 seconds after it's announced. This will never happen, because it's commercially unviable, but it would be kinda cool. That's why I'm doing it on my blog. Because I'm cool like that.
I've been using an iPod Touch for a couple of weeks now, and I'm pretty chuffed about it. The shock of how thin it is still hasn't gone away -- it's Hershey-bar thin, barely thicker than the port for the headphone jack, which suggests that unless they switch to a non-standard port, Apple has gone just about as thin as they can go. The bezel around the Touch's edge is not re-curved, the way the iPhone's is, which makes it seem even thinner -- it's got a sharp edge to it.
All the major functions perform fully as advertised. The mini-iTunes store is a lovely touch, though I don't find myself using it much. It almost feels like a symbolic gesture, pointing toward some ecstatic future when iPods will be wholly emancipated from servitude to the PC mothership. Browsing and photo management are gorgeous and indistinguishable from the iPhone experience. Ditto video and audio playback. I don't see the "cover flow" interface as a game-changer, exactly, but I'm sure getting used to it. Is the click wheel done for? I wonder if this time next year they're even going to be manufacturing non-touch iPods anymore.
(Point of order: I watched the Wes Anderson short Hotel Chevalier on my Touch, and in some shots the always-compelling Jason Schwartzman appears to actually be shorter than Natalie Portman. Is that possible? I've met her, and she is tiny, which would mean that Schwartzman is, like, nano.)
The iPod Touch is, unquestionably, the best iPod ever made, which means it's the best portable digital media player ever made. It's not everybody's iPod, because of the size, but if you're going to watch video you wouldn't want it a pixel smaller. And I've gone running w/ it, and didn't find that it interrupted my cheetah-like stride. (Cheetah in question is wounded and about to be culled from the pack.)
And now that I've said that, I can do my quibbles. I'll try to be constructive with my feedback.
Quibble #234454 (they're coded for easy reference): I miss the hardware volume buttons from the iPhone. Boo hoo.
Quibble #667934 (quibbles numbered non-sequentially): Why aren't there more apps? No email, no Google Maps app, not even a basic text editor (even tho there's keyboard functionality in the browser). You look at all that velvety black space on the Touch's desktop (touchtop? podtop? palmtop?), and it's like an aching void in your own blackened soul, howling to be filled with happy colorful icons. I talked about this w/ an Apple exec, who explained that their guiding principle with the iPod Touch was that it's an iPod, not a phone, so it's about consuming media, not creating or broadcasting. Which seems fair enough, from their point of view. But from the user's point of view, more is more! I feel like there's untapped capacity in my iPod Touch.
Quibble #908432: For fellow Touch users interested in playing at home, here's an interface quibble. Play an audio track, then turn the iPod sideways, so that the display flips (sometimes a bit sluggishly) to landscape view. You get a different version of the audio playback interface, with no volume control and no progress. Why? Why should I have to flip it back to vertical to change the volume, or jump around w/in a track?
October 8, 2007 11:46
Futurama: Not Dead Yet!
I can't believe this is actually happening, but it looks like there's a feature-length straight-to-DVD Futurama product coming for the holidays:
Sightings: drunk Amy, talking Nibbler, hypnotoad, Fry's ass. Good stuff. Though the narrator sounds so much like Phil Hartman it's almost creepy. Do they have his reanimated head in a jar?
October 5, 2007 3:04
Serenity 2: It's Not Definitely Not Happening
According to Alan Tudyk, aka Wash, who seems to be having the best year among the Firefly alums, it's just possible they might greenlight a straight-to-DVD sequel to Serenity, on the strength of DVD sales of the first one. Nobody jinx this.
October 5, 2007 11:29
RIAA Wins Lawsuit Against Really Unlucky Woman
The RIAA has successfully sued a woman in Minnesota for downloading and sharing music. Following the first actual jury trial in the RIAA's anti-piracy legal campaign, one Jammie Thomas of Brainerd, Minn. has been ordered to pay $220,000 for 24 songs she downloaded and shared using Kazaa -- that's $9,250 per song.
I don't know anything about the legal aspects of the case (though I would guess -- indeed hope -- that this is largely a media victory for the RIAA, and that Thomas, who doesn't appear to be massively wealthy, won't ultimately be liable for the full amount -- maybe she can declare bankruptcy?) But whether or not the letter of the law has been scrupulously observed, in the verdict and in the amount of damage awarded, I feel a lot of sympathy for Thomas, who got randomly singled out and made an example of by the RIAA. I'm not one of those people who's been radicalized on the subject of copyright, but the technology for moving media around has progressed to the point where it really is kinda confusing -- downloading a song is so easy and so common that it just doesn't feel illegal. There's no resistance there -- the act itself is just not framed that way. The context and the mechanism have been stripped of any cues that would ordinarily twig you that you're doing something wrong.
And the way the music industry is structured doesn't help: you've got relatively unwealthy people consuming IP created by an overclass of sultanically rich celebrities. How are you supposed to work up a decent head of shame over swiping a copy of a song from a multi-millionaire? Especially when you're already sitting on a big pile of legally purchased, quite expensive music, which I understand Ms. Thomas was.
And yeah, I get it. We're not children. We're responsible for our actions. I produce IP for a living, and my salary depends in some small part on an economy where it's still possible to charge for said IP. But the damage award was just grotesque in this case. And it's not just consumers who get caught in the ethical grey zone of the information economy. Take a look at this excellent NY Times story, about an ad campaign that Virgin Mobile Australia ran. The campaign is based on an image that some guy posted on Flickr, under the Creative Commons license. Virgin Mobile just swiped it, photoshopped out a bystander, and stuck it on a billboard. The family of the girl in the image is suing. You almost want to say, "look, everything is really complicated and weird right now. Let's all just take 5 years and sort this stuff out without impoverishing consumers and making a bunch of lawyers really rich."
October 5, 2007 11:11
The Rumors Are True: Bungie Is Splitting from Microsoft
Nothing too surprising about this -- it's an open secret that Bungie and Microsoft were never able to merge their corporate cultures successfully, to put it ridiculously mildly. One wonders if Bungie was under pressure to puke out more Halo sequels,but wanted to work on new IP...who knows. What is clear: Bungie got a much-needed infusion of cash out of the acquisition, and Microsoft got a hilariously good deal -- I've often heard it said that Bungie was Microsoft's most profitable acquisition ever.
Amusingly euphemistic press release after the jump. Or oh, wait, we don't do jumps around here:
Microsoft and Bungie Studios to Evolve RelationshipCompanies to forge new long-term relationship.
REDMOND, Wash. — Oct. 5, 2007 — Microsoft Corp. today announced a plan for Bungie Studios, the developers of the “Halo®” franchise, to embark on a path to become an independent company. Microsoft will retain an equity interest in Bungie, at the same time continuing its long-standing publishing agreement between Microsoft Game Studios and Bungie for the Microsoft-owned “Halo” intellectual property as well as other future properties developed by Bungie.The critically acclaimed Xbox 360®-exclusive “Halo 3” achieved $300 million in global sales in its first week. Released on Tuesday, Sept. 25, “Halo 3” is the fastest-selling video game ever and already one of the most successful entertainment properties in history.
“Our collaboration with Bungie has resulted in ‘Halo’ becoming an enduring mainstream hit,” said Shane Kim, corporate vice president of Microsoft Game Studios. “While we are supporting Bungie’s desire to return to its independent roots, we will continue to invest in our ‘Halo’ entertainment property with Bungie and other partners, such as Peter Jackson, on a new interactive series set in the ‘Halo’ universe. We look forward to great success with Bungie as our long-term relationship continues to evolve through ‘Halo’-related titles and new IP created by Bungie.”
“This exciting evolution of our relationship with Microsoft will enable us to expand both creatively and organizationally in our mission to create world-class games,” said Harold Ryan, studio head for Bungie. “We will continue to develop with our primary focus on Microsoft® platforms; we greatly value our mutually prosperous relationship with our publisher, Microsoft Game Studios; and we look forward to continuing that affiliation through ‘Halo’ and beyond.”
Bungie Studios will remain in its current location in Kirkland, Wash.
October 4, 2007 1:38
How Slashdot Happened
I was going to post about the X-Wing that actually flies (but doesn't land very well), or make some argument about how, oh, I don't know, maybe the Zune isn't such a bad idea after all. But instead I got sort of misty-eyed over Slashdot's 10th anniversary instead. There's a post there describing how the site first got started, that delivers a bracing, eye-stinging, high-proof dose of Web nostalgia.
Of course, all those stories are basically the same: "yeah, I was just doing this thing for me and my pals, then word got out, traffic spiked, the server fell over, I quit my job. step three: profit!" Though actually it's never been clear to me how much the /. gang makes off the site. And the details are kinda touching:
I registered the domain name Slashdot.org as a joke. It was 'org' because I didn't want a .com -- those were so common. I always thought org would be cooler, and besides, I had no commercial plans in mind. (Years later this bit me on the ass since someone else registered the .com. Doh!) The URL was meant to be unpronounceable by anyone -- a joke ultimately that has backfired on me countless times when I'm called and asked what the URL is to the damn thing. Jeff 'Hemos' Bates (now a VP of something or other with SourceForge, Inc.) was in the living room when I was registering the domain name. We all wanted email addresses with a unique domain name that wasn't attached to our school, so he chipped in on the registration fee.
I owe a lot to Slashdot, including my one and only shred of Internet credibility (my low Slashdot ID: 2199. In your face, 2200!), and not to mention the 90,000,000 stories I've swiped from it over the years without proper credit. There was always something unassailably authentic about Slashdot -- its refusal to spell properly, its unabashed open source partisanship, its refusal to pander to the technically illiterate like me. I still feel like it embodied the tone and attitude of the blog revolution years before that revolution actually happened.
I don't hear people talk about Slashdot in the same hushed, awestruck tones they used to. Maybe that's because of all the lamers who comment there, or because major non-mainstream news sources just aren't as hard to find as they used to be. But I still check it multiple times a day. If you're going to steal, steal from the best.
October 3, 2007 4:02
The Bug That Dare Not Say Its Name
I have long felt that the minimal unit of computer-related annoyance, the bug, is a bit too large and unwieldy to truly and accurately express the actual experience of interacting with a computer. We all know about the regular bugs: the show-stoppers, the app-crashers and system-lockers. But what about those littler critters, the sub-bug issues -- things too small to report, or call tech support for, or even really consciously notice, but which are constantly cropping up under our fingertips.
An example: When I've got too much going on in Firefox, the hot keys start cutting out. I've learned to expect it. They just go cold. Command N no longer produces a new browser window. Command 1, 2, 3, etc. no longer assist me in cycling between tabs. You can still do what you wanna do, you just have to do it manually -- go to the file menu, select new window. Click on the tab you want with the mouse. Etc. There's nothing you can do to fix it, and barely any point in fixing it anyway. It's not a big problem, you're barely aware of it. It's just annoying, and it happens all the time.
I feel like my day is made up of such idiotic, meaningless microevents. Scroll bars that won't scroll. Links that don't feel like linking. There must be a word for these things. Critters? Microbes? Sub-bugs? Buglets? Buggles?
October 2, 2007 11:50
Radiohead's New Business Model: User-Generated Money!
I'm very very curious about what's going on with Radiohead's new album, which -- you probably know this -- they're offering in a download format, for which you pay whatever you want. It all seems very on the level: you go to the site, you type in how much you're paying, and you get a code. Then you wait till October 10, when the album officially drops.
This is hardly the Internet's first go-round with the question, 'will people pay for good content if they're not forced to?' Though we've rarely seen the question put so baldly, and from such a high-profile artist. It's a simple proposition, but it does leave a few questions unanswered:
-- Why are they doing this? Is it a protest directed against record companies that push for overly fat profit margins? Is it a Milgramesque test of human nature? A piece of performance art, meant as an extension of the album itself? Do they believe for some reason that music should be free-as-in-Freebird? Or do they think they might actually make more money this way, by cyber-busking? Which I wouldn't absolutely rule out. I kinda wish they'd given us more context for the decision. But I guess they're mysterious that way.
-- What format will they release the album in? How far are they willing to go with this? Will the music be DRMed? This information may be out there in the interverse, but I haven't seen it.
-- Will we ever know what happened? Like I said I'm super-curious about how "music fans" will respond to the offer. But I doubt we'll ever really find out -- if they're running this whole show themselves, there's no real incentive for them to release audited numbers about how many copies got downloaded, and what people paid.
As for me, I haven't pre-ordered. I've got nothing against Radiohead, they're just a bit earnest for my taste. But if you're curious, NME has compiled some YouTube clips featuring tracks from the new album.
October 2, 2007 11:33
Why I Don't Watch Heroes
A few days ago somebody asked in comments what the hell nerd culture was anyway. Good question. Nerd culture -- geek culture actually, I guess -- is the phrase I came up with in 10 seconds when the guy who designed the banner for my blog asked me what it should say on it.
It's probably fair to say that Heroes is nerd culture. I don't watch it, because I don't have a TV. But Jim -- apologies, "James" -- Poniewozik does, and he has a good post up about what's wrong with the new season here. At least I assume it's good. I don't know who these people are.