davextreme: August 2008

28 August 2008

Futurese (JBR Precoglang)

Neat article on what English might look like in the future.

IGN: Killing Batman And The DC Universe

Lengthy interview with Grant Morrison about Final Crisis and Batman RIP.

I have to hand it to DC Comics for having the guts to publish the comics they’ve been putting out lately. In a summer where parent company Warner Bros. released a widely successful Batman movie, one would have expected them to try to parlay that success by publishing some watered down, accessible Batman comics. Instead they give Grant Morrison the keys to the kingdom and let him put out stuff that’s as crazy as you could possibly expect. Why not? As he says, “the success of any superhero movie doesn’t affect the sales of the monthly comic one bit. We always sell more trades of stuff like The Killing Joke or Arkham Asylum but numbers on the monthly issues don’t really change when a film comes out.” So they let him run wild with the monthly, because few people who didn’t read comics before The Dark Knight came out are going to start, and this is what DC publishes:

Superman Beyond, a 3-D comic in which Superman and Nazi Superman from Earth-10 travel to comic book limbo (where forgotten characters go) in a multi-dimensional yellow submarine. In 3-D!
Batman R.I.P., in which Bruce Wayne suffers a psychotic break, villains inject him with heroin, and he wanders the streets of Gotham hallucinating and then drops into a back-up persona that Bruce Wayne saw fit to invent just in case he was ever driven insane by a villain.
Final Crisis, where no one really knows what’s going on yet, but features a Japanese superhero named “Most Excellent Superbat” and a fight between Wonder Woman and an evil dominatrix Mary Marvel with pink hair.

In other words, crazy crazy stuff. Either you love it and you’re willing to pour into these fairly difficult books, or you think it’s stupid because you just like the ones where Radioactive Man punches things.

25 August 2008

Paul Levitz: DC Comics and the Sustainable Forestry Initiative

TVs and PCs

Penny Arcade hums a few bars of refrain I often sing:

There are many things I find unacceptable in this universe, I won’t provide an exhaustive list, but watching full television programs on my monitor has a…”texture” I don’t like. […] I don’t want to hook my PC into a television, and I shouldn’t have to. All these machines are wired into a hundred megabit switch, and when they don’t talk to one another, I feel like I’m mediating some Goddamned playground dispute.

I was wondering last night as the Olympics closed how home entertainment might have changed by 2012 when the next summer games come along. I hesitate to get too optimistic. The AppleTV already technically does everything I want from a TV set top box type thing. The idea of being able to pick any TV show or movie off a menu and watch it soon thereafter is right there, waiting in the Apple Store for me to buy it, but pricing structures don’t make sense yet and media conglomerates stand in the way of, well, me being able to actually give them money to watch their stuff.

22 August 2008

Anthem Arrangements Raise A Red Flag Over Authorship - washingtonpost.com

Funny to read about this. I don’t like the version of the Star-Spangled Banner they’re playing at the Olympics, either. Sucks that it’s a rip-off, though.

21 August 2008

MLB, umpires approve implementation of replay - MLB - SI.com

Because games don’t take long enough as it is.

Focus on art: Dan Havel, Dean Ruck | David Airey » Graphic and Logo Designer

Crazy art project that looks like a house being sucked into a wormhole.

The vexed question of punctuation

Includes rules for typesetting emoticons.

20 August 2008

Warhammer 40,000: Dawn Of War II - Rhino Diary 1

THQ, makers of the 40k game Dawn of War, are making a life-sized Space Marine Rhino to show off at a con and promote their game.

Endor Holocaust

Apparently there’s a fan theory that the destruction of the Death Star in Return of the Jedi causes an extinction level event on Endor, killing off the Ewok species. From what I can read, it hasn’t been explicitly described in any canonical book or game, but some works do refer to what might have been its effects. Also, there’s this darling image in the Wookiepedia article about it.

Meet Leland Chee, the Star Wars Franchise Continuity Cop

“At the climax of Return of the Jedi, Death Star II explodes while orbiting a forested moon called Endor […] the sheer tonnage of debris its destruction […] must have rained death and nuclear winter onto the teddy-bear tribe.” It’s called “The Endor Holocaust”.

18 August 2008

I Beg You To Be A Little More Observant - The Comics Reporter

Great, great piece about how DC Comics treated Superman’s creators early on. Read the linked articles at the top if you don’t know the background. Amazing how the mistreatment of these artists led to a resentment that’s still being played out in court 80 years later.

Lego Olympics

Olympic Fever 2

Thoughts from the first week of the Beijing Olympics:

I really like the type treatment of “Beijing 2008” in the official logo.
I like the idea that the picture of the man in the emblem is based on the Chinese character for the “jing” in “Beijing”, but the picture itself doesn’t look that cool to me.
I can’t take volleyball seriously. Sorry. I won’t go as far as Slate does and call it not a sport, but it doesn’t look Olympic to me and, bikinis aside, I don’t think it merits prime time coverage instead of, say, bastketball.
I wish instead of showing entire volleyball matches they’d use the time to show highlights from less popular sports. They seem to want to fool us into thinking everything is live, but viewers are pretty used to highlight reels. I think we’d be okay with it.
I finally figured out why I don’t like women’s gymnastic floor routines: they’re forced to pretend to dance, but aren’t forced to do anything on beat. If there’s music playing, I want them to have to hit landings on rhythm. I admit I’m mostly uneducated in gymnastics, but I know music pretty well and don’t like it being there just for mood so a nymphet can prance around. In this regard I think the men are treated much more like adults who are respected athletes. Why not just let the women do actual gymnastics?
Once you figure it out, NBC’s Olympic coverage website has lots of good stuff on it. You will have to install the Silverlight plug-in, which doesn’t run on non-Intel Macs.
The Michael Phelps stuff really was exciting. The interview with him and Mark Spitz was amusing because it contrast Spitz, who’s clearly made a life of making inspirational speeches to young swimmers, with Phelps who could only muster cliches like “if you put your mind to it you can do anything”. I wonder how he’ll handle the burden of role modeling. Anyway, the best of his racing was the 4×100m freestyle relay, but the photo finish from Friday night was damn exciting. Sports Illustrated has a good set of pictures of that, and this piece discusses how the timekeeping technology works.
Despite all that, Phelps’s last event couldn’t match Golden Girls spin-off Empty Nest in ratings.

14 August 2008

Condiment Gun

Exactly what it sounds like. Why use a bottle when you can fire ketchup at your hot dog from a gun?

13 August 2008

Countries That Don't Use Metric

Countries That Don’t Use Metric

Mac 101: Pressing F5 in a text field - The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW)

Mac 101: Pressing F5 in a text field

Good tip, via Daring Fireball.

TuneCore: Get yourself on iTunes for $30: Page 1

Ars Technica review of a record label that accepts literally any band and publishes them to iTunes, AmazonMP3, and others.

12 August 2008

Olympic Fever

Olympic Fever had gripped our household over the past few days, with no end in sight. Be sure to check out _The Big Picture_’s pictorials _2008 Olympics Opening Ceremony_, _Beijing 2008 Preparations_, and _Anti-Terrorism Exercises in China_.

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