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.
10 September 2007
09 September 2007
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.
07 September 2007
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
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.
06 September 2007
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.
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