davextreme: May 2006

31 May 2006

This oddly looks like it’ll compete with LiveJournal, which they also own.

Jobs' glass elevator locks in group customers - Engadget

Jobs’ glass elevator locks in group customers - Engadget

I think all elevators should do this at random intervals whenever non-crippled young people are taking them up one floor.

The Morning News - The Weathermen, by Clay Risen

Top 10 best real weatherman names.

30 May 2006

Nintendo Puts $250 Price Tag on Wii - Yahoo! News

As expected. This won’t affect the 25+ market as much, but will help a lot considering the price of the alternatives for poorer and younger gamers.

29 May 2006

Collective Nouns

Dre’s pictures of a bale of turtles got me thinking about collective nouns. There’s a snotty charm in knowing the proper pluralization of a pride of lions or a pod of dolphins, but once the subject hit the internet a few years ago the linguistic nerds got ahold of the idea and went a little bit crazy with it. Sure, it’s great to know that someone decided that a group of pupils should be called a “dilation”, but my interest lies in the more commonly accepted words.

Wikipedia has a nice list of animal names which suits most needs, along with a larger set of lists of collective nouns. I’ve added James Lipton’s An Exaltation of Larks to my Amazon Wish List. If anyone wants to buy it for me I’d be happy to become your resident expert on the matter, on call whenever you need to know the given collective noun for something and aren’t near a computer.

26 May 2006

Mr. Jefferson, meet Mr. Jefferson. By Akhil Reed Amar

“What the framers would say about raids on congressional offices.”

Surprise move: NBC reshuffles fall schedule

I link to this because it shows that not all TV executives are idiots. Putting a new show against CSI was dumb, but putting it against CSI plus Grey’s Anatomy would have killed it. I’ll totally watch Studio 60 on Monday nights.

25 May 2006

Answers

Yahoo! News today picks up a story called Philosopher, scientist, farmer crack chicken-egg question. According to University of Nottingham Professor John Brookfield, the answer of the “what came first: the chicken or the egg?” question lies in simple evolutionary theory. At some point there was an animal that was just one mutation from being what we now call a chicken. This animal laid an egg. In that egg was the first generation of the first chicken, therefor the egg came first.

Of course, as my dad, appropriately amused, retorts, from a creation science/intelligent design point of view, the chicken came first. Genesis speaks of God creating animals, not eggs.

But that’s not so bad, is it? Now we don’t have to worry about chickens or eggs, just about religion and science. Science says it was an egg, religion says it was a chicken. Choose your outlook and you have your answer.

House Judiciary passes Internet access measure

20-13 vote preserves net neutrality, preventing service providers from being able to intentionally slow down or block access to sites.

24 May 2006

Wired 14.06: The Myth of Superman

Neil Gaiman on Superman.

18 May 2006

FACTBOX-Hayden would be fourth "active-duty" CIA director

FACTBOX-Hayden would be fourth “active-duty” CIA director

I was wondering about this this morning.

17 May 2006

Innovation

Despite lots of rhetoric, the next-generation video game landscape is lining up basically like the last one did: one system comes in early (this time Microsoft instead of Sony), two go for power (Sony and Microsoft), one tries to be different (Nintendo both times). The current generation will take all of that to the next level: the graphics will be sharper, and Nintendo will be even more different.

What I worry about is that basically Nintendo’s banking on innovation, and I’m not sure that’s something you can count on. Certainly a game can be visually stunning without having the most polygons. World of Warcraft was never the most graphically intense, but the art direction is so through the roof that it doesn’t matter. Not evenyone liked The Windwaker’s cell shading, but it was effective. Still, can you count on all your developers to hire great visionary artists that can overcome the temptation to just push for photo-realism in lieu of real art? Probably not. Likewise for game design. A generic shooter or brawler can always be fun, but the Wii seems to be begging for something different on each title, and different might not always work. What’s going to happen is that some developers will take chances with the new controller, and it won’t quite work. Hopefully others will find the sweet spot and succeed. Needless to say, the first few waves of games will see a lot of cool stuff, and there will be some amusing changes as the platform matures.

Chron.com | Hate Lost repeats? ABC's solution is to take it off the air

Chron.com | Hate Lost repeats? ABC’s solution is to take it off the air

ABC is moving to a move British style schedule for Lost: run a shorter series, then another show, then the rest of the season, so there are no repeats in between new ones.

Macworld: First Look: Apple's new MacBook

Macworld: First Look: Apple’s new MacBook

16 May 2006

Curmudgeon Gamer: History of Console Prices (or: $500 ain't the worst...)

Curmudgeon Gamer: History of Console Prices (or: $500 ain’t the worst…)

The bottom chard is the inflation-adjusted price. NES was expensive, but it still doesn’t compare to the PS3.

Apple - MacBook

New iBook.

Timeline of CGI in film and television - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

15 May 2006

The New Verb

The Wii will require the creation or adaption of new verbs to describe gameplay.

How to Bypass Most Phone Menus and Get to a Live Operator

I usually just mash a combination of # and *.

panopticist: There Is Something Weird Going on With the Clock on 24

This must be part of a conspiracy.

13 May 2006

The West Wing

The West Wing ends tonight after seven seasons, two of which were amazing television, plus a few more that ranged from “good” to “less than amazing” to “out of ideas” to “dumbed down to try to appeal to more people”. Still, this season has been one of the best, and so far it’s done a wonderful job of ending the series with good character development for most of the cast.

Notice I didn’t mention politics anywhere in that brief eulogy. As I’ve said before, The West Wing is no more a show about politics than Sports Night was about sports or Star Trek was about science. Sure, you can learn a good bit about those things if you’re paying attention, but you could find better sources if you’re just looking for a lesson. The point of the show has always been its characters and its drama, and on those notes it’s done very well in its closing episodes.

Still, there’s fun in talking about how the holodeck would really work, and there’s fun in comparing the fictional White House to the real one. Turns out that the building itself, like the administration that inhabits it, is actually nicer than its real life counterpart. Here’s a link to the floorplan of the TV version of the West Wing, and here’s how the real life building is laid out. Note that the Vice President’s office is in another part of the building on the show to make room for more of Josh and Leo/CJ’s staff, the press room is much closer to the Oval Office, and the very cool door that the Chief of Staff has to the Oval doesn’t really exist. Such is the price of the quest for knowledge and his bastard son, truth. Next thing you know someone will tell you there’s only one bathroom on the Enterprise.

Last Will and President (washingtonpost.com)

Washington Post talks to the cast of the West Wing. Richard Schiff: “No matter what those &%$! scriptwriters make him say, Toby would never, ever have been the one to leak classified information.”

12 May 2006

Wii impressions: the E3 experience - Joystiq

Good piece on how Nintendo doesn’t need to go all Wiimote all the time. IMO they should have made the specs a little bit hardier and encouraged companies to 3-way port their games, anyway, if they don’t want to develop special Wii versions.

IGN: Superman Returns: Daily Planet Details

About designing the newsroom of the Planet.

Telephone Companies Could Be Liable For Tens of Billions of Dollars For Illegally Turning Over Phone Records

Good luck trying to demonstrate you were harmed by this.

11 May 2006

Sequels to Certain Sequels

I’m pretty excited about the upcoming Superman Returns. Bryan Singer did a great job with the first two X-Men films, and all signs point to Superman living up to the hype. Of interest to me is the premise of the film itself. Everyone knows that Superman III and IV come after Superman II. What this film presupposes is: what if they didn’t?

Superman, released in 1978 and directed by Richard Donner, is a wonderful film. Donner was actually hired to film both the first movie and the sequel, and did in fact shoot almost all of Superman II, but because of problems with the production and the studio, he was fired from the picture and replaced by another director who reshot the majority of the footage. According to Wikipedia:

Marlon Brando filed suit over his percentage of the first film’s profits, so as a response his scenes were excised from the second film. Director Richard Donner argued with the producers over their attempts to make the film “more campy,” in his opinion, which led to his removal and replacement on the project by Richard Lester. Following that, Gene Hackman declined to return for any reshoots by Lester, which cut down the number of scenes in which he appears in the final cut (or with a few scenes where a body double was obviously being used).
Another reason behind Richard Donner’s removal may have been because the Salkinds were upset that Donner went over their originally planned budget for the movie. Warner Brothers ended up getting more and more involved in the race to complete the film, allowing the studio to receive more profits from the film’s box office take than the Salkinds had originally agreed to. With their power slipping away, Donner was unfortunately made the scapegoat.

Bootlegs of the Donner version of Superman II, reconstructed from unused footage, have been floating around for years, but are currently hard to get due to legal threats from Warner Bros. Singer, who’s directing Superman Returns, is a huge fan of both the original and the Donner sequel, and even includes un-used footage of Marlon Brando shot by Donner.

Of course, it’s a widely believed fact that there are actually four Superman movies, not two. Superman III was released in 1983 and attempted quite poorly to cash in on the franchise and the popularity of Richard Pryor. Superman IV: The Quest for Peace drove the final nail in the coffin, delivering almost nothing worthwhile aside from a token “no nukes” message. Singer has has little love for III and IV, and has explicitly set his new film after II, choosing to pretend that the later sequels simply never happened.

To recap, June’s Superman Returns is meant to be the third film in the series, a sequel to a version of Superman II that was never released in theaters. Not that you need to know any of this to enjoy the film, but I think it’s pretty wild.

Edit: Interview with the screenwriters on this very topic.

the cool hunter - VOLKSWAGEN's NEW CAR EXPERIENCE

the cool hunter - VOLKSWAGEN’s NEW CAR EXPERIENCE

20-story vertical stacking of VWs. Wow.

steven berlin johnson responds to the serendipity article

I think TiVo’s bad for letting you find new stuff, but I agree that the internet is great for it.

Perspective: The endangered joy of serendipity

I tend to agree with this, but I’m not about to waste all the trees needed to get a daily newspaper, either.

Overheard at E3: Japanese don't accept first-person shooters - Joystiq

Overheard at E3: Japanese don’t accept first-person shooters - Joystiq

Do cultural differences really play this big a difference in gaming preferences? I believe it.

IGN: Spore Trailer, Videos and Movies

I haven’t found Spore info I didn’t link to yet…

Bad Break Ups and a Kangaroo: Bendis Talks "New Avengers: Disassembled"

Bad Break Ups and a Kangaroo: Bendis Talks “New Avengers: Disassembled”

Comics Continuum: Saturday, May 6 -- Superman Returns' Kal Penn

Comics Continuum: Saturday, May 6 — Superman Returns’ Kal Penn

Interview with the Superman Returns costume desiners.

10 May 2006

World of Warcraft: The Burning Crusade → Draenei

New Alliance race confirmed, and not as lame as expected.

Interview: Jeff Kaplan on World of Warcraft Expansion - New York Times

hollowindigo: Page A7 mysteriously goes missing from the break room...

hollowindigo: Page A7 mysteriously goes missing from the break room…

The Hanso Foundation took out an ad in the Washington Post today. I really need to start looking into Lost’s alternate reality game.

The Official Spore Trailer

09 May 2006

Wiishlist

One thing I’d love to see on the Wii (and all the next-gen gaming platforms): a global setting for invert mouse (where relevant, not sure how it’ll be with the Wiimote). There’s no reason why every game needs to have its own setting for things like this.

Nintendo Wii

Official website.

Kotaku: E306 Clips: Playstation 3 Controller First Look

Motion sensing is a good idea, but, like with Wii, implementation will be what matters.

08 May 2006

An Uncanny Solution

As an addenum to yesterday’s post about the comic book magazine format, I’ve often struggled with what the best way to store the damn things is. Conventional wisdom is that you bag and board them and put them in boxes, alphabetically by title. But then you just have a bunch of boxes sitting around that invariably get stacked up or get stuff stacked on them, making it very hard to go back through them and discouraging you from filing new stuff away, leading to the common occurance of having two months’ worth of books just sitting around somewhere.

Today the solution occured to me: 3-ring binders. Punch holes in the issues, yank out the staples, and take a paper-cutter to the spines. In a 2” notebook you could probably get 25 issues of a comic, and then just stick the binders on a shelf with all your other trades. Voilà!

(Needless to say, I’m not one who concerns himself with the “worth” of comics. We’re not talking about rare stamps with misprints on them here. The #1 you think is “going to be worth something some day” was printed at least 200,000 times. You might be able to make some cash speculating on comics, but why not just buy stocks with that money, or learn to play poker instead? Regardless, I do still bag and board all my books, but that’s because the flimsy paper makes them fragile enough that you have to preserve them if you ever want to read them again, not because I’m protecting my “investment”.)

A Game For All Ages

TIME magazine gets a first look at the Wii.

Showdown at Google Gulch

Google Earth’s images of Baghdad captured a battle, and you can see the tanks.

Light cone

I remember seeing this before and didn’t link to it. If news of your birth traveled at the speed of light, this RSS feed will tell you when various stars will hear about you.

07 May 2006

Waiting for the Trade

I never would have guessed that as technology improved, it would actually make me consider being less up-to-date with things. It’s not uncommon for me to record a new show on TiVo and wait a few days before watching it. If I don’t do that, I could just wait until the fall and use Netflix to watch the shows on DVD. Likewise for movies. I’ll usually rush out to see the ones I’m excited about in the theater, but my home system is good enough for the B-list. As the technology has improved, it’s let me be less crazy about having to see everything right away, because I know I can catch it later and not miss out. This is also true of comic books, where almost every series is collected into trade paperbacks.

Trades weren’t as common even five years ago, when only the biggest montly sellers were guaranteed to see collection status. Now, Marvel puts out new trades only a few months after a story arc concludes, and DC only lags by about a year. This makes good business sense for them, as they’re able to employ The Long Tail to pick up sales on titles long after they’re out of print in comic book format. Aside from the lament that if people stopped buying comics in their natural format instead of as trades that all comic book creators would vanish like Tinkerbell when no one believes in her, it’s quite conceivable that you could buy all your titles as trades, and, though you’d always be a half a year behind, you’d still have a nice flow of new trades every month.

And really, magazine format comics are basically just plain inferior products to trade paperbacks. Trades are often printed on higher quality paper. They’re bound books that sit nicely on shelves, instead of the storage mess that comes with putting comics in boxes, and you can easily see the spines to find things. You get one nice collection that you can read easily, rather than having to pick up a new issue every few minutes, and it’s easier to loan out to people (and easier for them to return one book instead of six). A trade is asturdy item that’s not easy to rip and tear like a comic, and you don’t have the guilt associated with a comic if you do, born from a fantasy that comics “will be worth something some day” (they probably won’t). If you pre-order from Amazon, you even get a nice discount. And, to top it all off, no ads every few pages.

If trade paperbacks are superior to magazine format comics in basically every way, why don’t I just wait for the trade on everything? Mostly, it’s sentimentality. I like having the actual comic book. Gone are the days (for me at least) where everything had to be a graphic novel, something to be taken seriously. A comic is fun. You read it, you put it down, you read it again in a few months. I like going to the store and picking up a stack of loot that I can read over the next few days. Plus, I hate having mixed formats. If I started reading it in comic form, I want everything to be in comic form. If I started reading it in trade, I want everything in trade.

There’s also this: comic books are about local business. There are, to my knowledge, no large chains of comic book stores. You find your local store, set up your box, and you go there every few weeks. It’s not some corporation taking your money, it’s some geek who decided to risk everything and enter the scary world of the small business owner. Maybe he’s a really nice shop owner. Maybe he’s a fat, sarcastic jerk. Either it’s sincere or it’s funny, but it’s one of the last vestiges of the genuine American Dream, using an authentic American art form as its medium.

06 May 2006

Marvel Marketing

Forgive me for being on a comic books bent here but, well, it’s my weblog and it’s supposed to be about things I like, right?

Anyway, Marvel’s doing a clever job of promoting themselves lately. Here’s a press release of sorts about their New Civil War Trailer. The trailer itself is a Ken Burns Effect style montage of images from the first issue along with some taglines. What’s clever is this:

The new trailer features the comic shop locator info, Civil War Checklist and will be available through Marvel.com as well as Youtube.com so you can share it with friends, post it on your MySpace page, or simply just watch it over and over.

They’re using Youtube to host the video. Cllearly Marvel’s web team could roll its own video player, but they’re hoping to get some cred from Youtube’s popularity, and they want to encourage people to spread it on the MySpace that’s so popular with the kids these days. I like it. They’re saying, “we’re proud of our product. We’re going to advertise it, but we’re hoping that our audience likes this book enough to do the viral stuff, too.” To top it off, they include info on the Comic Shop Locator Service to make it easy to go buy it.

And, at least according to this most-likely biased but nonetheless true release, it’s working. Whether it’ll live up to the hype the Mark Millar set for himself and change everything in comics forever is yet to be seen, but I’m impressed with how Marvel has handled the fans, the mainstream press, and the internet potential so far.

Turf Battle

Washington Post article about the rise of green roofs in DC, and how the new ballpark isn’t planning on having one.

YouTube - Spore - E3 2006 B-Roll

E3 footage of Spore.

Mothers expect Damien on 6/6/06 - Sunday Times - Times Online

Man, having 6/6/06 as your birthday would be the coolest.

Joe Quesada on Peter Parker and Mary Jane's Marriage

Joe Quesada on Peter Parker and Mary Jane’s Marriage

Good bit here about why Peter and MJ’s marriage is a story-telling problem.

Spore Preview for PC

Mmmm.

Daring Fireball: Using .htaccess Redirection to Standardize Web Server Addresses

05 May 2006

Bureau of Engraving and Printing

What large bills look like.

04 May 2006

Free Comic Book Day 2006

Tomorrow is Free Comic Book Day. Each year there’s kind of a mixed bag of free selections, often reaching a little young in hopes of grabbing the kids and getting them hooked for life. Of course, retailers don’t just want you to come in, paw some merchandise, and then walk out with just the freebies. Here are my current five top picks, along with some suggested further reading if you like what you find:

Ultimate Spider-Man: Constistently good for 90+ issues now. An “ultimate” book, meaning that it’s part of a small group of Marvel books that basically reset the story to day one. Instead of having been Spider-Man for years now, Peter is just starting out, trying to learn the superhero game while juggling high school and girl troubles. Further reading: all the Ultimate Spider-Man back issues are out in trade paperback, Invincible, Powers.
Civil War: A seven part mini-series that just started this week, and issue one was great. It’s gotten some mainstream press, but if you haven’t heard, the basic premise is this: a group of amateur superheroes botches an attempt to stop some escaped villains, leading to an explosion resulting in the death of hundreds of school children. This event moves forward a bill already in Congress to require all heroes to register and reveal their identities. Iron Man backs the plan, Captain America opposes it. Further reading: The Ultimates, New Avengers.
Y: The Last Man: not a superhero book. Tells the story of Yorick who, along with his pet monkey, are the only two males of any species left alive on the planet, after something killed them all in the exact same moment, worldwide. Further reading: Fables.
Batman: Currently doing an 8-issue crossover with Detective Comics, the back issues should be easy to find. Once that story is over, one of my favorite comics authors, Grant Morrison, will be writing Batman. DC Comics is doing a line-wide “One Year Later” event, where all the stories jumped forward one year, so most of their books are pretty easy to get into, with easy jumping-on points starting with the first OYL issue. Further reading: Robin, 52, All-Star Superman.
Astonishing X-Men: penned by Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Firefly writer Joss Whedon and pencilled by superstar John Cassiday, this is the best X-book out there (and probably the only one worth reading). The new movie is based partly on the plot of the first few issues. The current team is Cyclops, Emma Frost, Kitty Pryde, Colosus, Wolverine, and Beast. Further reading: New X-Men trade paperbacks, Ultimate Hulk vs. Wolverine.

Hmm, I’m surprised that I only ended up putting one DC book on there. I read more DC than Marvel, but in a top five list I think Marvel has the edge right now.

CSPAN and YouTube

C-SPAN has nastygrammed YouTube over showing Stephen Colbert’s speech at the White House dinner, which has complied and taken the clip down. Sure, it’s within C-SPAN’s to demand it, but why bother? They’re getting more free press from the internet than they ever would anywhere else.

Here’s a novel idea: how about C-SPAN host a highlight reel on its own website? It’s not like the world needs to see everything on YouTube, Google Video, or nowhere at all, and there’s certainly no chance at all people are going to buy the video from them for $25.