New 2007 Shows

I’ve checked out a bunch of new shows this season. Still waiting for the debut of Pushing Daisies, and I didn’t see Dirty Sexy Money, which I hear is good.

Damages

This one’s almost over, but it’s the best new show on now. FX re-runs it periodically. It’s worth catching up on.

Back to You

Do you miss Everybody Loves Raymond? Don’t get newer sitcoms like The Office and 30 Rock? Get confused when there’s no laugh track to tell you where the jokes were? Back to You is right for you.

Snap judgement: I was ready to delete the season pass before the cold open was done. It’s not bad, but you might as well be watching re-runs of better traditional sitcoms.

Gossip Girl

As an OC fan, I was hoping for more from Josh Schwartz’s new show, but nothing about it really grabbed me. I guess if you just find rich Manhattanites inherently interesting, this show might do more for you. Every new show needs to show me why I should care about its characters. Stuck up rich kids and teenage politics aren’t enough anymore on their own.

Snap judgement: As much as I’m ready to embrace any project involving Kristen Bell, Gossip Girl gets one or two more episodes before I cancel it, but it’s going to need to work hard.

Chuck

Josh Schwartz’s other new show. Also the other new spy show, this one featuring a nerd who gets classified information emailed to his brain. Also there’s a hot blonde. It’s an hour-long action sitcom, which is a hard format to get right. Sitcoms depend on their casts, but there aren’t many standout characters here.

Snap judgement: For it to work, Chuck has to be a lovable loser, but so far he’s no Seth Cohen.

Journeyman

It’s a serious Quantum Leap, but the main character gets to leap home every day and deal with his struggling marriage. I liked Kevin McKidd on Rome, and he’s about the same here, but doing an American accent. Somewhat distant, a bit too serious, not reaching but pulling it all off.

Snap judgement: best pilot I’ve seen this year, pending Pushing Daisies and not counting Damages, which was a summer show. Nice enough twist to the “mission” back in time, nice idea that he runs into his now-dead ex-fiancee, and compelling enough relationship story in the present. Time travel stories can be pretty hokey, but I think it’s going to pull it off.

Bionic Woman

Another British lead actor playing an American. Apparently this show was retooled a little bit from the original pilot, which could be bad or good. Word is the producers have already had some creative spats, so hopefully David Eick can rub some of Battlestar Galactica quality off here.

Snap judgement: I expected this show to be okay, it ended up being pretty good. Definitely going to keep watching it, but it needs to keep its momentum going or it’ll fade behind as just another she-spy show with a female lead, and those Alias DVDs are still damn good.

Big Shots

Watched this one because I liked Michael Vartan on Alias and Joshua Malina on Sports Night. Picture Desperate Housewives without the dark, compelling sideplots of the first season, subtract any depth from the characters, and they’re sexy male executives instead of sexy women.

Snap judgement: yawn.

Layer Tennis: Inman vs. Cornell

Graphic designers Shaun Inman and Kevin Cornell are competing in a Layer Tennis match right now. Every 15 minutes they email an image back and forth, modifying it each time. Color commentary for each volley provided by John Gruber.

TV Heroics

Last night’s premier of Bionic Woman had a neat, though quite a bit heavy-handed, girl power moment in it. In a typical fantasy movie trope, a little girl spies the Bionic Woman running at super speed. She tries to tell her mom, who gives the pat “of course, dear” line. The little girl then proudly says something like, “it’s just cool that a girl can do that.” It’s total girl power, there to show that, yes, girls can idolize super heroes, too, but it throws into contrast the lack of admirable protagonists on TV these days.

Heroes like Superman don their bright tights to inspire people. The recent Green Lantern relaunch specifically shows the chest insignia leaping off their bodies as a badge, so that people can see the Green Lantern coming and know that help is on the way. TV heroes don’t act like this. Characters like Jack Bauer are designed to be always in the shadows. Badass though he is, no one should think of Jack Bauer cutting off criminals’ heads with a hacksaw as an American hero to be idolized. Heroes is cast specifically with the idea that its characters will wear plainclothes and never try to be heroic, though they may end up that way by accident or fate. Hiro, the only one on the show who actually wants to do good, is usually played for laughs as he aspires to actually be great.

Not that I want every good guy on TV to be a boring boy scout, but give me someone who puts away his troubles when he puts on his cape. Smallville is trying to show us how Clark’s eventually going to get to this point. It’s not enough to put on Plato’s Ring of Gyges and be a hero in secret, people need to see him doing good to know that the world’s not as bad as it could be.

There’s more to superheroics than just saving lives. Superman and Captain America have been built up over the years to not just be the ones who save the world every month, but also to be icons for people to believe in, to inspire people. JLA: The Nail is set in a world where Superman never became a hero, and the entire world is a gray place because of it. I’m the first to admit that the flawed and brooding atmosphere of Battlestar Galactica is what makes it great, and I don’t actually expect that Jaime on Bionic Woman will become this sort of icon—it’ll be a fine show without that—but it’d be nice somewhere on TV, for once, to see a hero people can look up to.

Geoff Johns on Sinestro Corps

Interview with Geoff Johns about the Sinestro Corps story in Green Lantern

Hotel Chevalier on iTunes

Wes Anderson’s short film Hotel Chevalier is now available for download free from iTunes. Buzzfeed has some more info about it.

More on How the Weak US Dollar Affects the Comics Publishing Industry in Canada

More on how the weak US dollar affects the comics publishing industry in Canada. Image and Marvel say they’re going to address the issue, while some artists are taking effective pay cuts whenever the US dollar sinks.

Steampnk Magazine Interview with Alan Moore

The latest issue of Steampunk Magazine, available as a free download, has a short interview with Alan Moore about League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, literature, and steampunk.

Amazon MP3 Store

Amazon has launched its own music download store, offering 256 kbps mp3 files with no copy protection for 89¢-99¢. Daring Fireball has a review, and Buzzfeed has links to a few more articles and reviews about it.

One More Day Delays

Paul O’Brien’s analysis of Marvel’s month-to-month sales for August 2007 are up. I’ll quote at length from his writeup about Amazing Spider-Man, but there’s a lot of good analysis here about other stuff, too:

For all practical purposes, this was the last month of the three separate Spider-Man titles. Amazing, Sensational and Friendly all tied up their storylines, leaving the way clear for One More Day.

The original plan, you’ll recall, was that One More Day would run weekly through all three Spider-Man books in September. Sensational and Friendly would then be cancelled [sic], and in October, Amazing would come out three times a month instead. In other words, the three existing Spider-Man monthlies are going to be merged into a one book, shipping 36 times a year.

Unfortunately, One More Day has gone off the scheduling rails, and so the new Amazing has been pushed back to December. That book can hardly ship extra issues to catch up, so effectively the delay to One More Day has cost two months of Spider-Man sales. It’ll have to perform very well to justify that.

Now, as we all know, Amazing sells a lot better than its two siblings. Plainly, the hope is that Spider-Man fans will buy every issue of the merged title, while before they just bought Amazing nine times a year, and ignored the two satellite books. But it’s also likely that some existing readers of Amazing will decide that they don’t want to buy 36 issues a year, or that they’re jumping ship with the outgoing creative team. So, how well does the new Amazing need to sell, in order to be judged a success?

Well, the short answer is that Marvel will come out ahead if the merged title shifts more copies than Amazing, Friendly and Sensational are presently managing between them. But then, Amazing doesn’t ship twelve times a year—it misses issues all over the place and never catches them up. So let’s take the whole last year as our comparison. Between September 2006 and August 2007, the three existing Spider-Man titles sold an estimated total of 2,284,676 copies in the direct market. At 36 issues a year, the new Amazing can equal total by selling an average of 63,463 copies per issue. Which isn’t really that much. It can do that without making the top 30. I’d be very surprised if the merged book fails to beat that target.

I’m not a fan of the One More Day concept, but I think the idea of moving to a single Spider-Man book that ships more often, rather than three separate, unrelated ones, is very interesting. That said, I don’t think that I’ll buy 36 issues of Amazing Spider-Man a year.

Coming Soon: A New Take On the Old Double Bill

The Wall Street Journal reports that Wes Anderson shot a short film called Hotel Chevalier starring Natalie Portman and Jason Schwartzman, a year before making his new feature film The Darjeeling Limited, which he will be releasing online Wednesday through Apple’s Quicktime site. The feature, starring Schwartzman, Owen Wilson, and Adrien Brody, opens this weekend in New York. I really do like the charm of bundling shorts with longer movies. Pixar does a great job with this.

Clone Wars Interview

TV Guide has published a two part interview with George Lucas about his upcoming Star Wars TV series. Part one, part two. It’s crazy what he can pull off with his vast fortune. He’s producing each series in its entirety before shopping it around to anyone to actually put it on the air. Fake Steve points out that we’re just about at the stage where we don’t even need shows to be broadcast. Just sell them on iTunes and DVD directly to consumers. Of course, you can do that anyway and still make money selling ads on broadcast TV, but if you avoid the networks you don’t have to answer to them creatively, either. What I’m not sold on, though, and I think the newer Star Wars movies show this, is that we’d be better off leaving everything to the creators. Sure, studios often have stupid notes and really do mess with shows, but they also deal with what works and what doesn’t all the time, so there is some advantage to having their input. If a show’s totally falling flat for some reason, you can sometimes fix the problems by bringing in script doctors and audience data. If Lucas has already produced the whole thing, you’re stuck with it. The problem with the new Star Wars wasn’t that they never needed to be made, it’s that no one was around with the force to make Lucas to change stuff.

I don't know

There needs to be a corollary to Godwin’s Law for when someone starts a conversation about the nature of art. Whenever someone asks if something or other is art, they should get slimed.

Dollars and Sense: American vs. Canadian Prices

Interesting article by Don MacPherson about the weak American dollar versus Canada’s. Periodicals will often have both US and Canadian prices printed on them, but publishers rarely adjust the prices according to inflation. A “$2.99 US” book printed today should also read “$2.99 Canadian”, but since they don’t, retailers have to spend extra money on the books from their wholesalers, and thus have to overcharge their customers.

We Are Opening the Social Graph

We Are Opening the Social Graph

Post from Six Apart about how they’re using Microformats and OpenID to make it easier to describe who your friends are and control your privacy.

Alan Moore's Green Lantern Tales

In 1985-1987, Alan Moore wrote three short Green Lantern stories for DC. All three were about various Green Lanterns who were not the major characters starring in the books at the time, allowing Moore to come up with whatever crazy sci-fi stories he wanted. Recently Geoff Johns and Dave Gibbons have latched onto Moore’s stuff, making them very important works to the current Green Lantern and Green Lantern Corps titles. Johns’s backup story about Sinestro Corpsman Despotellis is a straight riff on the Mogo story, the villains from Tygers have all been introduced, Mogo has been given a recurring role in Green Lantern Corps, and the prophecy told to Abin Sur is starting to occur.

The three stories have recently been collected (along with For the Man Who Has Everything and Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow?, considered to be some of the best Superman stories ever told, and seminal Joker story The Killing Joke) in the DC Universe: The Stories of Alan Moore trade paperback. 4ColorHeroes also has the original issues for sale at reasonable prices.

Scans Daily has copies of all three stories if you want to read them: Tygers, from Tales of the Green Lantern Corps Annual 2 is here, and Mogo Doesn’t Socialize and In Blackest Night are here, from Green Lantern 188 and Tales of the Green Lantern Corps Annual 3, respectively. I’m probably going to pick up the trade paperback at some point, but the scans serve as a nice preview of Moore’s mainstream stuff.

While I was poking around Scans Daily, I also found this post showing how a one panel throwaway scene in Green Lantern 22 references a story from eleven years ago. None of this is stuff you had to know to follow the plot, but I love that the creators are going back through the older books and picking out these little gems.

Arrowette's Diary

If you’ve been keeping up with DC Comics lately, you’ll probably find Arrowette’s Diary hilarious. Recent delightfully crass (but SWF) entries include DC Artists, it’s OK; you have my permission. You can draw Mary Marvel’s vagina and The Dan Didio Advisory & Warning System.

BloodRayne 2

Somewhere, a movie producer actually heard this pitch and said, yes, I’ll finance the creation of BloodRayne 2: Deliverance:

Things get even wilder in the already Wild West when Billy the Kid (Zack Ward) and his band of cowboy buddies—vampires one and all—arrive in Deliverance, Mont., to establish their kingdom. Now, it’s up to the half- human, half-vampire Rayne (Natassia Malthe) to use her fearsome powers to stop them. Along for the ride is reporter Newton Pyles (Chris Coppola), whom Billy spares so he can tell the bloodsuckers’ story.

Out today on DVD!

Death of Superman

An animated version of The Death of Superman story from the 90s is coming out this week. That story is arguably what killed the comic book industry for over a decade. Urban legend holds that DC got very lucky (as Marvel did this year when it killed Captain America) when it revealed that Superman would be dying on what turned out to be a slow news day, causing a huge interest in the plot. Its marketing for the storyline was very shrewd, culminating in releasing Superman 75 sealed in a plastic bag to keep it in permanent mint condition. Customers were encouraged to buy two copies: one to read and one to keep as an investment. This was later parodied in The Simpsons wherein an issue of Radioactive Man would self-disintegrate if ever read. Some retailers even refused to sell the issue at sticker price, instead (in the pre-eBay days) selling them for $60 each to their customers suckers. The truth was that DC was printing millions of copies of the issue, and there was no chance it was ever going to be scarce. But this sort of idea that comics were a commodity to be traded and not art to be enjoyed poisoned the industry for years to come. Variant covers ahoy!

So Wizard Entertainment, itself guilty of shady trading deals when it somehow had tons of issues of Captain America 25 already on eBay the morning the issue hit the stands, does a weekly report on which comics are selling well in the sucker commodity market. This week, with interest in the Death of Superman storyline piqued by the new cartoon, the original comics are hot items. The asking price for a still sealed in its bag Superman 75: a mere $12.

Bestå

One of the things I wanted to get when we moved was a proper bookshelf for storing DVDs. Most standard bookcases are too deep for DVD storage and don’t come with enough shelves. There are lots of flimsy wire and plastic things out there, but it’s hard to find a good wood or even wood-like unit. After quite a bit of searching, we discovered Ikea’s Bestå, which is only 7 7/8″ deep. Order three extra shelves and the unit is perfect for DVD storage. We actually found that we have fewer movies than we thought once we were able to display them efficiently.

NY Times to Stop Times Select

The New York Times will finally stop charging for access to its archive content, ending the “Times Select” program. I’m sure they won’t reveal it, but I’d like to know a year from now how much money they end up making from advertising versus from the subscription model. Clearly they wouldn’t be switching if they didn’t think they’d make more money, and they’ll be allowing millions of people to read their stories in the process.

Todd Klein Batman and Superman Logo Studies

Comic book letterer Todd Klein has written a fantastic five-part look at the Batman logo over the years, from Detective Comics 27 in 1939 all the way to the recent masthead that debuted with the Hush storyline in Batman 608. See: part 1, part 2, part 3. part 4, part 5.

And a similar series on Superman and Action Comics: one, two, three, four, five, six. Related: Frank Quitely and Grant Morrison’s failed attempts to change the “S” chest logo.

"iTunes"

In the tiny way that such things can, it bothers me that the button on my iPhone that lets me listen to music is called “iPod” instead of “iTunes”. An “iPod” is a thing you hold in your hand, “iTunes” is a program that plays music. If I want to run the music program on my iPhone, I should be launching the music program, right?

The new iPod touch (and soon the iPhone) lets you buy music online. The button for doing that is labeled “iTunes”, but it’s just the store, not the whole program.

So now the program that’s called “iTunes” on your computer is a program that lets you play music (and videos), lets you buy music, and lets you sync stuff to your iPod/iPhone. The program that’s called “iTunes” one your iPod is just a store. Somehow this naming bothers me. iTunes is more than just the store, but Apple seems to want people to think it’s just that. But really you can use it without ever entering the store or buying any music. Most people have much more music that they’ve ripped from CDs than they’ve bought from the store.

Femtroopers

Buzzfeed has a little roundup of links to stories about girls who dress up as sexy Star Wars stormtroopers, which led me to SFGate’s In defense of those dudes who dress up like Stormtroopers. A lot of work goes in these costumes, and while that doesn’t make them any harder to ridicule, it does make them a little easier to respect, says author Peter Hartlaub. I’ve spent some time with some massive dorks in my day, and there’s a neat, somewhat liberating openness at the bottom of the barrel.

Ringtones of the 1970s Future

A reader of The New York Times’ David Pogue, responding to his post about ringtones:

If you told me 20 years ago that, in 2007, we would have online worldwide maps/satellite photos and downloadable ringtones, I would have believed you. But if you told me that the former would be free, and the latter would cost money, I would have said you were nuts!

Vox Adds Snap Previews

Ugh. I *really like* Vox, so it saddens me to see they’re [adding in Snap
previews][1], even as an opt-in preference. I *hate it* when I drag my mouse
over a page and all sorts of shit jumps out at me. It’s like they’re trying to
turn the whole internet into _Slate_’s annoying giant fly-out menus. If you
want me to follow a link, convince me to go there with your writing.

[1]: http://team.vox.com/library/post/release-notes-5.html (Release Notes - Team Vox)

The Ringtones Racket

It’s no real secret that the ringtones racket is a racket, but [this Daring
Fireball piece lays it all down very clearly][1]. What’s funny is how even
though Apple’s screwing people here, they’re still better than Sprint, whose
ringtones cost $2.50 and *expire in 90 days*.

[1]: http://daringfireball.net/2007/09/the_ringtones_racket (Daring Fireball: The Ringtones Racket)

Mario Level that Plays Itself

According to this video, there’s a level in Super Mario World that plays itself. Just let go of the controller and all of the enemies and platforms will move Mario all on their own. I always really liked that game. Never knew about this.

J.H. Williams III on Drawing Batman

News Corp. (Fox) will be keeping its shows on iTunes. I actually agree with president Peter Chernin’s barb, But let me say this, we’re the ones who should determine what the fair price for our product is, not Apple. It is weird for a store to be dictating prices of the products it sells. The problem, of course, is that there’s no chance a TV network would establish a reasonable price. Really the market would settle this just fine, if not for multi-year exclusive contracts, DRM, and technology barriers preventing online stores from really competing head-to-head.

Secret Invasion: Why a Mini-Series?

I’m sure that Brian Michael Bendis’s Secret Invasion is going to be fun, but why make it a mini-series? Why not just make it a huge arc in New Avengers, or maybe crossover with Mighty? It’s working with Green Lantern, with Corps. basically being its Frontline. DC isn’t hyping it as much as they could be, and I guess if it were a mini-series it might get more attention, but it also does away with the problem where the mini gets all the attention while the main title has to tread water.

Official teaser trailer for Iron Man

Official teaser trailer for Iron Man.

TypePad iPhone Portal

Very nice custom iPhone portal for TypePad. Emailing in posts was easy enough, but this is great for making edits or approving comments on the fly. Update: and one for Movable Type.

Green Lantern Color Speculation

Green Lantern has been lots of sci-fi fun lately. It kind of sounds silly to write it all out, but in the comic book world Geoff Johns makes it work beautifully. When he and Ethan Van Sciver rebooted the title a few years ago, they added in the beginnings of a concept that there are different energies in addition to the Green Lantern’s green energy, all of which are keyed differently. Green Lanterns harness willpower to make it work, and the energy comes out green. Sinestro uses fear, and it comes out yellow. Recently Johns wrote a story about Star Sapphire and the Zamorans, hinting that their major motive is love, and that the Star Sapphire power works the same way as the Green Lantern and Sinestro energy. This led to the big reveal at the end of that issue, showing three pedestals holding a green, yellow, and violet lantern, and a bunch of empty pedestals, along with a “gotta catch ‘em all” line. Internet speculation is that eventually we’ll see an entire emotional energy spectrum.

The Sinestro Corps Special contains the following dialog which is widely believed to be the tip-off to what the other emotions are going to be:

Cyborg Superman: Without life, there will be no fear or avarice or hate.

Ganthet: Without life there is also no hope or compassion.

Sayd: Or love.

We’ve already seen that fear’s color is yellow, and love’s color is violet, so mapping the remaining emotions to colors, we get:

• Hate: red

• Avarice: orange

• Fear: yellow

• (neutral): green

• Hope: blue

• Compassion: indigo

• Love: violet

Which also sets up a nice set of dueling pairs:

• Love vs. Hate

• Compassion vs. Avarice

• Hope vs. Fear

This puts green in the middle. Green Lantern rings work on sheer willpower alone, and require their bearers to set all emotions aside. What’s interesting also is that the Zamorans are villains, so it doesn’t look like Johns is setting up one side of the spectrum to be good versus evil. Love can be destructive, hope can be false, and so on. If each color gets a lantern corps of its own, that will mean the Green Lanterns are going to be stuck battling off colors from all sides.

A scene in an early issue of 52 contained a chalkboard on which Rip Hunter had written a jumble of things, many of which turned out to be clues to the series later plot development. Booster Gold 1, released a few weeks ago and written by Johns, featured a similar chalkboard, on which the words “Beware the Red Lantern” were written. Pair this with statements by Van Scriver that he an Johns are going to do another big GL some time after the Sinestro Corps stuff, and it seems that they have a whole rainbow coalition war planned for down the road.

Apple as High Roller

Apple as High Roller

Ringtones

Far be it from me to get my legal advice from Engadget, but there’s an interesting nugget in this piece about the legality of making your own ringtones:

[T]he RIAA wanted to be able to distribute ringtones of its artists without having to pay them big money to do so (surprised?), and it won a decision last year before the Copyright Office saying that ringtones weren’t “derivative works,” meaning they didn’t infringe on the copyright of the songwriter.

If you want to sample a song, or create a new mix of it (a “derivative work”), copyright law requires you to obtain the permission of the artist who wrote the song. It’s set up that way to allow artists control over what happens with stuff they write, but it ends up kind of sucking for rap artists. On the one hand, there’s tons of cool new art you can make by sampling other people’s songs (see The Beastie Boys, lots of other early hip-hop, and tons of techno), but on the other hand if you make tons of money with a song based around someone else’s hook, and don’t pay the person who wrote it originally, that’s pretty unfair for them (see: Ice Ice Baby vs. Under Pressure). A good solution to all of this would be compulsory licensing, but at the moment, if I write a song that you want to remix, you can’t do it unless I give you my permission.

The question of ringtones came up because the record industry wanted to be able to sell them without negotiating new contracts with artists. If ringtones are derivative works, then the artists own the rights to them, and record companies would have to pay for the rights to sell the songs as ringtones in addition to selling them as albums. If ringtones are not derivative works, the record companies can make a killing selling them and the artists don’t see any additional cash.

As a consumer, this is one of the few times the RIAA’s greediness pays off. There’s no reason that you shouldn’t be able to play a song, once you’ve bought it, anywhere you want, even on the crappy speaker built into your cellphone. But the RIAA didn’t ensure that ringtones weren’t derivative works just to be nice and kindly let you copy them from your computer to your phone, they did it so they could sell you the separate file, and spend a lot of time making sure that their contracts with cellphone makers required that the phones refuse to play any file they didn’t sell you. So it’s all kind of funny. The RIAA worked to make sure it was legal to create your own ringtones, then worked to make sure that you couldn’t do anything with them once you did, hacks aside.

david.ely.fm

david.ely.fm

I'm mostly posting links now on my actual weblog. I may well end up linkblogging back at del.icio.us, but for now I'm enjoying the added flexibility.

Checkers solved

In my high school computer science class we wrote tic-tac-toe programs, such that the computer would always either win or tie against a human player. For tic-tac-toe it’s pretty simple—there are only like four things to check for when deciding where to place your next move. Recently the BBC reported that Checkers had been similarly “solved”. Gelf Magazine looks at how computers are doing against humans in other games.

Apple to give $100 in store credit to iPhone owners

Apple - To all iPhone customers: $100 in store credit.

Update: Claims for $100 can be made on Apple’s website through November 30. I’ve tried it now and it works fine. You enter in your phone’s serial number and they send you a text message with a code. Confirm the code and you can print out a sheet which you can take to an Apple Store.

Jack Kirby Cover Gallery

Jack Kirby Cover Gallery, selected comments by Marvel editor Tom Brevoort, with his comments, on the occasion of what would have been Kirby’s 90th birthday.

Sugarshock

The second “issue” of Joss Whedon and Fabio Moon’s Sugarshock! is up now for your free online viewing. First one’s here. This is all part of Dark Horse’s new Dark Horse Presents experiment on MySpace, and I’m going to go ahead and call it unsavory. The works themselves are great, but the Web just isn’t the place for long form comics. (Comic strips work great.) Whenever I read anything online, I’m usually in “skim” mode. It’s already very easy to skim comics when reading them in physical form. You just read the words and skip over the pictures once you have the general idea of what’s going on. In doing that, you’re missing a lot of the work, like watching TV with the picture turned off. Online, it’s even easier to do this, with your finger on the scroll wheel. I’d even go so far as to say that this movement by Dark Horse will weaken people’s impressions of the comic book format. Get them used to skimming comics on the web in 30 seconds each and they’ll start to think of comics as something not substantial, not worth spending money on. The webcomic strip works great because it’s designed to be read in under a minute, and you can put one out a few times a week.

Whedon and Moon’s work is good, though. I’d like to see it printed.

Color vs. Colour - The Great Spelling Battle

Color vs. Colour - The Great Spelling Battle

Google Reader Adds Search

It’s somewhat strange that it never had one until now, but Google Reader finally added the ability to search your feeds. I’ve gotten the feeling using it as my feed reader for the past year and a half that it’s like a side project at Google, except that it’s also the most popular web-based RSS reader out there. Other features I’d like are support for authenticated feeds and I’d like for it to sort entries by their timestamp, not the time that Google Reader indexed them.

Apple Slashes Prices on 4gB iPhones

Apple slashes prices on 4GB iPhones to $299 while they last

A Comprehensive Review of the '07 Shower Caddies

Man, I actually kind of want to read A Comprehensive Review of the ‘07 Shower Caddies. What advances have been made since I was in college?

Apple Releases 2007-09-05

Apple’s releasing new stuff right now. You can read about it on Engadget and Ars Technica. The thing where they’re going to charge for ringtones is bullshit. Clearly the iPhone’s technology could just let you assign a ringtone from a song in your library. I understand that there’s tons of money in the ringtone business, but it blows. Here’s a good take on that.

Facebook opens up limited profiles

Facebook announced today that very limited versions of profiles will soon become open to search engines and visible to non-members. This is a good thing. It means that Facebook can become, as GigaOM says, the quasi-White Pages of the Web. Naturally, Facebook has put up the proper privacy options so that you can exclude your profile from public searches. All they show to non- members is your name and picture, so there’s not a huge reason to stay hidden, but it’s good to have the option there. I’d actually like to have even more control over what becomes public. The ability to show my profile to search engines along with certain public information (what school I went to, my current city of residence, who my friends are) would allow me to make Facebook my primary profile page online, as opposed to having one on Vox, one on TypePad, one with TypeKey, etc., all with different settings and all of which need to be updated when I move.

One quibble: their little privacy setting box says “everyone” when it means “all Facebook members.” On a page where you’re talking about delineating between the entirety of the Web and just your own members, these things should be explicit.

Movable Type Supports OpenID

The new version of Movable Type has built-in support for OpenID commenting, which is great. I like the approach of presenting people with familiar icons to communicate the idea that the already have OpenIDs, and being able to hide all but the username and fill in the rest, they don’t even need to know that they’re using an OpenID. I’d like to see TypePad and Vox (and Blogger) add in OpenID support like this, too.

History of Labor Day

Cool piece about the History of Labor Day. Labor Day was created by unions to give workers a day off. Apparently the reason we celebrate it in the fall instead of in May is that we wanted to distance ourselves from Europe, where the holiday was a communist creation.

MarsEdit 2

A new version of MarsEdit is out, sporting what seem to be nice new features. I love MarsEdit. It’s one of those programs that makes you mad you can’t use a Mac all the time. Ars Technica has some info about the new release.

Apple's PR for the People

What amazes me whenever Apple takes a stand regarding its model for iTunes (everything costs the same, you own the song/video) is that it always manages to come out with the appearance that it’s doing this all for you, the consumer. Of course, it’s not hard to appear to be the one looking out for the little guy when you’re standing next to record companies and network executives.

To argue that subscriptions are the future of music

To argue that subscriptions are the future of music is to argue that DRM is the future of music, and the evidence points to the contrary. — John Gruber.