Ireland - Attractions & Landmarks

Schmap.com is using a photo I took of the Bank of Ireland in Dublin. I had elected to share the photo under a Creative Commons License, and Schmap very conscientiously asked me if they could use it and gives me a credit for it.

Shooting for Realism

Shooting for Realism: How Accurate are Video-Game Weapons? goes into the thought process behind making a gun in a game resemble the actual gun. Should an Uzi be less accurate ingame than real life because players expect it to be a blunt instrument?

-10 to 10

In high school I theorized that movies should be rated on a scale from -10 to 10 stars. (Nowadays I’d make it -4 to 4.) A truly great movie is one you want to watch over and over and always get something out of it. A truly terrible movie—a -10—is one that’s so bad that you want to watch it over and over; want to invite your friends over so they can enjoy how bad it is. A movie that’s poorly made, that might have bad technical flaws such as lighting or sound editing, or terrible acting, or a script that just doesn’t work, might be a 1 or 2 or 3 or -1 or -2 or -3, but only a truly awful movie could earn a zero. That’s a movie that’s not so bad it’s good, it’s just bad. You don’t want to watch it ever again, and you don’t want to share it with others. Though not a zero, I spoil The Village whenever I can for this reason (the movie’s actually set in modern day!)—I just don’t want my friends to have to have to subject themselves to it. Joe Queenan, writing for The Guardian, describes this sort of “worst movie ever” in his piece on The Hottie and the Nottie.

WiiWare: Anti-Consumer Out of the Gate?

With its very first big title, Nintendo has already set a bad precedent for its WiiWare service. Square Enix’s Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles: My Life As A King costs $15 to download, but you only get one playable army. To get the rest, you’ll have to pay $1-3 for each extra feature. This was an issue with Lumines on XBOX Live a year-and-a-half ago. I believe in that case you had to buy four different products to get the entire game. Arguably you can look at it along the rationalization that you only have to pay for features you want, but most people saw it very plainly as nickel and diming. Nintendo should have seen that happen and avoided it for WiiWare, but they were probably too busy back then not manufacturing enough Wiis to care (or perhaps swimming in piles of DS money). Offering bona fide extra content for a fee is fine, but selling an under-featured game and expecting players extra for stuff that should have come in the box is not. Developers can levy whatever arguments they’d like about what content justifies coming in the original package and what should be extra, but as a consumer it’s pretty easy to apply the “I know it when I see it” test.

Penny Arcade! - The Guitar Hero Thing

Apropos of yesterday’s posts about Rock Band, it also bears stating that, while unfortunate, it’s not Harmonix’s fault that Activision won’t let them use Guitar Hero controllers with their game. It probably is their fault they didn’t want to cough up the money for the licensing, but that’s an argument for three months ago.

Secret Invasion Preview

Marvel has a short prologue to its Secret Invasion story up on its website. You might need to log in to see it, but Bug Me Not can help you there. This is the exact right way to use the internet to promote their publications. They could have gone even further by doing a series of these, one each week, like some TV shows have done with webisodes.

Green Lantern Sinestro Corps Checklist

Over the past few nights I’ve reread the big Green Lantern event from last year, The Sinestro Corps War. I really liked the story, finding it to be the perfect sort of fun, widescreen superhero action you want in comics. The story was designed to be very easy to read, with minimal tie-in issues. Despite what by my count adds up to 23 books, that’s actually very low for many summer “events”, like Marvel’s Civil War. In fact, while the main two books telling the story were Green Lantern and Green Lantern Corps, the subplots are split up properly such that you can easily start with the initial special and then read only one or the other title and still get a coherent read out of it. Of course, with any crossover, if you want to get the whole picture, it can get hard to know which books to read in what order.

The story is very much foreshadowed in both titles from the very start, beginning with Green Lantern: Rebirth and popping up here and there in both Green Lantern and Green Lantern Corps. You’ll see Batman get offered a yellow ring, you’ll see the Zamorans’s purple rings, you’ll meet Ranx the sentient city, and a new direction for Black Hand, but none of it is required reading. Below are the books that bear the official “Sinestro Corps” logos, plus a story from twenty years before the crossover started that’s absolutely essential to it. I’m actually very surprised the didn’t reprint it in one of the issues.

1. Tales of the Green Lantern Corps Annual 2: Tygers, a 1986 story by Alan Moore and Kevin O’Neil, upon which Geoff Johns draws heavily. It’s been collected in DC Universe: The Stories of Alan Moore, and can be read online here.
2. Green Lantern 18: Tales of the Sinestro Corps back-up story about Despotellis
3. Green Lantern 19:Tales of the Sinestro Corps back-up story about Karu-Sil
4. Green Lantern 20: Tales of the Sinestro Corps back-up story about Bedovian
5. Sinestro Corps Special 1: Sinestro Corps War, part one
6. Green Lantern 21: Sinestro Corps War, part two
7. Green Lantern Corps 14: Sinestro Corps War, part three
8. Green Lantern 22: Sinestro Corps War, part four
9. Green Lantern Corps 15: Sinestro Corps War, part five
10. Green Lantern 23: Sinestro Corps War, part six
11. Tales of the Sinestro Corps: Parallax 1
12. Green Lantern Corps 16: Sinestro Corps War, part seven
13. Tales of the Sinestro Corps: Cyborg Superman 1: includes Tales of the Sinestro Corps back-up story about Kryb
14. Green Lantern 24: Sinestro Corps War, part eight
15. Tales of the Sinestro Corps: Superman Prime 1
16. Blue Beetle 20
17. Green Lantern Corps 17: Sinestro Corps War, part nine
18. Green Lantern Corps 18: Sinestro Corps War, part ten
19. Tales of the Sinestro Corps: Ion 1
20. Green Lantern 25: Sinestro Corps War, Finale
21. Green Lantern 19: Sinestro Corps War Epilogue
22. Green Lantern/Sinestro Corps Secret Files 1: includes Tales of the Green Lantern Corps story about Morro

I don’t necessarily recommend reading everything up there. You’ll probably enjoy the story much more just reading the main books (bolded above). The Blue Beetle tie-in is entirely inconsequential to the main conflict, but presents another angle to the big fight on Earth and fits in nicely with that book’s characters. The four Tales of the Sinestro Corps books fill in the characters some, but weigh down the narrative flow more than they help I think. The Epilogue isn’t too important, and the Secret Files book is a cool thing that I would have loved as a kid (and still do!), but doesn’t add to the story much. Finally, the events of Green Lantern 26-28 spin directly out of the War story, as do Corps 20 and 21, but I haven’t listed them above.

Superbad

You probably didn’t notice, but when a movie came out last year called Superbad, the URL for its website was: www.sonypictures.com/superbad. Superbad.com is a site I’ve known about for over ten years (if memory serves), and has housed a strange little art project all along. It’s just tons of pictures and animations with links hidden in them that take you to different pictures and animations. No idea why a site like that still exists, but it’s super cool that it does, especially considering the possibility that they may have denied a big cash offer from Song Pictures for the domain.

Recolored The Killing Joke

DC has released a new hardcover of Alan Moore’s famous Batman story The Killing Joke (only $10 on Amazon). If features new colors by original artist Brian Bolland. You can see side-by-side comparisons here. It looks very nice, and interestingly mostly that’s toning down the colors on most panels. I already own the story as part of an Alan Moore collection DC did, but it’s a good book and this edition looks great.

Rock Band for Wii, Two

Joystiq comes through with the rest of my questions about the Wii Rock Band. In addition to not having downloadable content, you can’t create your own characters and you can’t use your Guitar Hero III controller. Yet it costs the same as the 360 and PS3 versions. Seems like they should at least knock $10 or $20 off the price tag, being that you’re getting fewer features. I get that maybe the online stuff wasn’t possible because Nintendo’s been inexcusably slow at developing that portion of the console, but the lack of character creation just reeks of laziness, and the price of greed. At this point I can’t see myself buying this game. Maybe they’ll get it right for 2.

Rock Band for Wii

Rock Band will finally be out for the Wii on June 22. That’s the good news. The big question is whether or not the game will support the ability to download new songs. No Wii game yet has featured major downloadable content. The Wii itself has a small hard drive that’s not really suited to adding much stuff to it, but it also has a SD Card expansion slots, so files could go on there. From the Rock Band forums:

The feature-set is a lot closer to the PS2 version of Rock Band which was also developed by Pi Studios. We’ve decided to focus on getting the core gameplay on to the Wii and focus on making that awesome.

This almost certainly means that it won’t feature downloadable content. It was recently reported that Harmonix had sold six million songs for Rock Band. Being that the Wii is the top-selling video console now, it seems strange that they don’t want a piece of that pie. I have two guesses here:

1. They phoned in the Wii version. Clearly they didn’t consider it enough of a cash cow to justify developing for the game’s launch. I’m assuming that, once the Wii turned out to be a huge hit, they reversed course and threw some resources at it to get it out onto another platform. Either they just want the quick sell and don’t care about making money via downloads to Wii owners (unlikely), or they didn’t put the resources into developing downloadable content for the Wii because no other Wii game has it; or
2. Nintendo’s not cooperating, or hasn’t made it easy to offer downloadable content. I can see it being possible that Nintendo has a rule in place prohibiting third party companies from taking microtransactions, but doesn’t yet have their own first-party payment service set up yet. Or maybe the Wii’s file system can’t read that sort of stuff off of the SD cards. Harmonix may well have tried to offer downloadable content on the Wii and been stopped by Nintendo.

I’m a Wii owner and fan, but I’m also a Wii skeptic. Frankly, Nintendo has botched a lot of stuff with this system and ceded a lot of features to Microsoft, especially in the online arena. If it does indeed turn out that Rock Band won’t let you download new songs on the Wii, it’ll be easy to blame Harmonix, but it could well be Nintendo’s fault. Question is, is the game even worth owning if you can’t add new songs to it? To me, that’s the attractive part. No matter what, you’ll get sick of the songs that come with the game, and with a $170 investment to play, it needs to be able to justify that it has longer legs than the stock configuration.

Another tidbit:

The instruments don’t use the Wiimote. They function the same as our peripherals on the other platforms.

This likely means that you won’t be able to use the Guitar Hero III guitar, as it does use the Wii Remote.

Game companies tend to send out PR guys to do their press, and frank interviews with the right people are hard to come by. Video game “journalists” often agree not to talk about a game until it comes out for fear of losing access, stories of people getting fired for writing bad reviews are common, and game companies usually spit out only talking points, but it would be very nice for someone to get in there and find out why such half-assed products make it to market.

Update: Kotaku follows up with a response from Harmonix that sound a lot like my #2 above:

Regarding downloadable content: During Rock Band for the Wii development Harmonix focused on making the core gameplay experience as solid and enjoyable as possible while tailoring it specifically to the strengths of the platform. The Wii version still contains the robust four-player band experience and all the fun at the core of other versions of Rock Band. However, because the Wii’s online capabilities and potential have yet to be fully realized, we wanted to wait before we explored online functionality for Rock Band to ensure that players get the high-quality of online performance they’ve come to expect.

It may well have been a question of shipping the game in the summer or waiting until the fall or later for Nintendo to get its act together and release programming hooks for their online stuff.

SNL on Hulu

I’ve been watching some Saturday Night Live sketches on Hulu. There are lots of classic sketches missing (no Andy Kaufman Mighty Mouse?), but here are some greats that I’ve found:

• Word Association, Richard Pryor and Chevy Chase
• Mr. Robinson’s Neighborhood, Eddie Murphy
• White Like Me, Eddie Murphy
• President Reagan Mastermind, Phil Hartman
• George Bush Debate, Dana Carvey
• Cooking with the Anal Retentive Chef, Phil Hartman
• Wayne’s World with Aerosmith, Mike Myers, Dana Carvey, Tom Hanks, and Aerosmith
• The Chris Farley Show, Chris Farley and Jeff Daniels
• Down by the River, Chris Farley
• Clinton at McDonalds, Phil Hartman
• Celebrity Jeopardy: Tom Cruise, Adam Sandler, and Sean Connery, Will Ferrell, Ben Stiller, Jimmy Fallen, and Darrell Hammond
• NPR’s Delicious Dish: Schweddy Balls, Ana Gasteyer, Molly Shannon, and Alec Baldwin
• Celebrity Jeopardy: French Stewart, Burt Reynolds, and Sean Connery, Will Ferrell, Jimmy Fallen, Norm MacDonald, and Darrell Hammond
• Census Taker, Christopher Walken and Tim Meadows
• Inside the Actor’s Studio, Will Farrell and Alec Baldwin
• Pranksters, Seth Myers and Robert DeNiro

Time Machine with AirPort Extreme AirDisk

Yesterday’s updates now allow you to back up to an external drive attached to an AirPort Extreme base station, a feature that was previously announced, then yanked, then recently only available through Apple’s Time Capsule. TUAW reported it last night, and now MacWorld and Gizmodo both have the story as well. I set it up last night on my iMac, and the feature works as expected. Attached a drive to your base station, open up the drive in the Finder to mount it, and then go into Time Machine’s preferences and you can select that drive from the list. What I haven’t tested is what will happen when a laptop enters and leaves the network frequently. I’ll be playing with that this weekend.

Caprica

IGN reports that the Battlestar Galactica prequel Caprica will get a two-hour pilot episode, which will air in the fall.

Energy to Make a Hybrid

Slate debunks the myth that it takes more energy to make a hybrid car than it saves.

Hulu

NBC and Fox have launched Hulu, which has free streaming video of their TV shows and many movies, with limited commercial interruption. It’s nice actually to have a permalink to a TV show, like if you want to reference a joke on The Simpsons, you could link right to it. I’d like to see Google build a good index of what’s available, though, so that I don’t have to remember what network a show was on to find its videos.

Does Cuteness Get Cuter with Better Graphics?

Does Cuteness Get Cuter with Better Graphics?

60

If you’re playing Super Mario Galaxy, I recommend fighting Bowser as soon as they give you the chance (at 60 stars, I think). You can’t unlock the purple comets until you do, and it’s best to not have to do all those at the end.

Games in Star Trek

A short page about games in Star Trek. What, no 3-D chess?

On the St. Elsewhere Multiverse

St. Elsewhere (spoiler!) ended with the reveal that the entire series happened inside the imagination of Tommy Westphall, an autistic child in the series. Homicide featured an episode in which one of the doctors on St. Elsewhere was investigated. Thus, both shows share a continuity, and, since St. Elsewhere was a figment of Westphall’s imagination, so must be Homicide. Turns out that 278 other shows cross over with Homicide.

Very neat, but I do have some qualms with their methodology. They include a show, with some exceptions, whenever a character or event crosses over with another show, or when a character, event, or item from a show is mentioned within another show. The first is a given. The second, I’m not so sure.

Direct character crossovers certainly apply and confer status that two shows exist within the same multiverse. All the events of Friends coexist with the events of Joey, as do those of Mad About You, via sisters Phoebe and Ursula.

All of the Star Trek series feature character crossovers, but I don’t buy this connection: “John Larroquette Show referenced Yoyodyne. Many years in the future the same Yoyodyne built starships for Starfleet in the 24th century, including the U.S.S. Brattain and the U.S.S. Phoenix on Star Trek: The Next Generation, which features the adventures of the crew of the U.S.S. Enterprise-D.” They also use Yoyodyne to connect to the Buffyverse. Must it be the same Yoyodyne? It’s not just a funny name that happened to be in all the series?

Often TV shows are produced by the same companies (as with Star Trek), and little easter eggs pop in. An example: “Charlie from Lost was in a band named Driveshaft. Alias Sydney threw a party and the music playing at the party was Driveshaft song.” Is the existence of Driveshaft’s We All Everybody on Alias enough to say that both exist in the same continuity? Probably. How about this one: “In the Jan 25th episode of Veronica Mars Veronica’s fortune contained the numbers that won Hurley from Lost the lottery.” Here I’d have to say no. The numbers are important to Lost, and their appearance all over the place on that show is a plot point, but their appearance on Veronica Mars is an homage. Inside Veronica Mars’s continuity, those numbers would just be numbers. (Battlestar Galactica, however, is explicitly reference as a work of fiction in episodes of Veronica Mars and The Office (USA).)

“Charlie of Lost once dated a girl whose father worked for a paper factory in Slough. The paper factory in Slough is the paper factory of The Office (UK).” (My memory is that Hurley also owns this company, and I think Locke worked there.) Does the mention of a paper factory in Slough necessitate that the factory is The Office’s Wernham Hogg? Again, I’d say no. It’s a coincidence, but it’s not enough for me. The Office was a BBC documentary within its own universe. If we saw characters of another show watching it, I think we could say that they share a universe, or even if we saw its logo somewhere on some stationary, but just mentioning the factory doesn’t cut it. I think a concrete crossover (a character, a direct reference to an event, a recognizable physical item) is enough to justify a link, but an homage or some sort of reference which would be mere coincidence inside the diagesis isn’t.

Now here’s a very good one: “On a balloon capsule on Lost all of its sponsors are listed and among them is Nozz-a-la Cola. Nozz-a-la Cola is a fictional product created by Stephen King & mentioned and consumed in Kingdom Hospital.” Even better, though the writers of this page don’t seem to know it, is that Nozz-a-la Cola appears in The Dark Tower, which establishes that all of Stephen King’s books are connected, and establishes its own multiverse containing “a billion” other worlds. Stephen King himself appears in the story as the author of itself. This being true, it means that not only did Tommy Westphall imagine the world of St. Elsewhere and those of all the other shows connected to is, but also Stephen King the author, all of his books, and their sprawling multiverse which all spin around The Dark Tower. And all things follow ka.

Penny Arcade! - Perfectly Reasonable

Penny Arcade! - Perfectly Reasonable

Bookmarking for later: Penny Arcade's real estate strip.

Awesome

My brother-in-law referenced two great Motivational Poster parodies (in the vein of Despair) over the weekend that I remember to look for today. They’ve probably been floating around the web for years, but this is the first I’d seen them. Enjoy.

I love Chewie playing the drums. I picture that he plays a little like Animal, but classier.

That pictures is, I think, from the show Dino-Riders. We had a VHS tape of one of the episodes when I was little, and one or two of the figures. What could be cooler than a dinosaur you can ride that shoots lasers?

Note that Despair.com now has a “Parody Motivator Generator” site up. File next to the Lolcat builder.

Losing MacBook Air

Gone, without a Trace: There will be a lot of desperate searches for lost MacBook Airs. And can you really blame a guy for losing something called Air?

Futurama Timeline

A timeline of the universe of Futurama

Brick Arms

BrickArms makes tiny guns for Lego figures.

Leonard Cohen's Hallelujah

Long, splendid piece on Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah, Jeff Buckley’s cover of it, how it became the song to play over your sad montage in TV or movies, how The OC used it and became the reflection of the mid-00s, and how aesthetics won out over the 90s.

Buffy 12

This week’s Buffy had a pretty shocking reveal early on in the story. The New York Times has the spoilers and some words from Whedon.

Update: a longer interview with Whedon. One with editor Scott Allie.

The Earth and Moon as Seen From Mars

The Earth and Moon as seen from Mars. This makes is easy to see how far away the Moon is. Great shot.

Wonder Twins, Activate!

Wonder Twins, Activate! is a short comic by Brazilian twins Fabio Moon and Gabriel Ba, who draw Casanova and Umbrella Academy, two of the best books on the shelves at the moment.

Wii Fit Sorta Works

Fairly long piece on Kotaku about Wii Fit, which the reviewer has been playing every day for a month. I like his point that you really could just go out and jog and lose more weight, but that the game gives you incentive by keeping track of your progress. Sure, you could do this with a pad and pencil, but most people aren’t and need the push.