We the Robots

While I’m on the topic of cool new webcomics, do go check out We The Robots.

Portal a Feminist Game?

This link’s a bit old, but I just love the Freudian theory here. Heroine Sheik makes the case that Portal is a feminist/lesbian game:

We’re dealing with a reshaping of a highly masculine genre, the FPS. If that itself weren’t “queering” enough, there’s the whole holes issue. We’ve talked before about how the guns in first-person shooters act as phallic avatars—that is, as penises. But in a world of women, this gun doesn’t shoot bullets. It shoots orifices. Openings. Fine, vaginas. Vaginas you, a female character, have to enter/exit to solve puzzles. I don’t say this often, and almost never with so much support and enthusiasm, but that is so gay.

Stuff like this makes me so damn thankful I went to a liberal arts college.

The Superest

This might be the Link of the Month: The Superest. Artists Kevin Cornell and Matthew Sutter compete in a continually running game of My Team, Your Team. The rules are simple: Player 1 draws a character with a power. Player 2 then draws a character whose power cancels the power of that previous character. Repeat. Not only are the strip ideas mighty clever, the site itself is very nicely designed.

Update

A little background from Cornell, based on an idea from here.

See also: Layer Tennis.

Thanksgiving and Christmas Shopping

People tend to act like each year’s Christmas shopping season is the Worst One Yet, with America eternally in danger of dropping off a cliff into Total Commercialism. It’s an easy news story to write I guess. Pretend that this year it’s really bad and ignore that you wrote the same thing last year, but in fact it’s always been the case that Thanksgiving signaled the start of the Christmas shopping season, and stores have always tried to move that date up earlier in the year. From the FDR Presidential Library’s website, The Year We Had Two Thanksgivings:

At the beginning of Franklin Roosevelt’s presidency, Thanksgiving was not a fixed holiday; it was up to the President to issue a Thanksgiving Proclamation to announce what date the holiday would fall on. However, Thanksgiving was always the last Thursday in November because that was the day President Abraham Lincoln observed the holiday when he declared Thanksgiving a national holiday in 1863. Franklin Roosevelt continued that tradition, but he soon found that tradition was difficult to keep in extreme circumstances such as the Great Depression. His first Thanksgiving in office, 1933, fell on November 30th, the last day of the month, because November had five Thursdays that year. Since statistics showed that most people did not do their Christmas shopping until after Thanksgiving, business leaders feared they would lose money, especially during the Depression, because there were only 24 shopping days between Thanksgiving and Christmas. They asked Franklin Roosevelt to make Thanksgiving one week earlier. President Roosevelt ignored those concerns in 1933, but when Thanksgiving once again threatened to fall on the last day of November in 1939, FDR reconsidered the request and moved the date of Thanksgiving up one week. Thanksgiving 1939 would be held, President Roosevelt proclaimed, on November 23rd and not November 30th.

More stuff, including scans of primary sources, in the link.

20 Great Halloween Stories

Defective Yeti offers a list of twenty great Halloween stories. Of them, I’ve read only four: The Lottery, An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge, The Tell-Tale Heart, and The Yellow Wallpaper. Humbling. I thought when it came to short fiction I was pretty well read.

Twin Peaks and My So-Called Life

There’s a new boxed set of Twin Peaks out on DVD. I already have both seasons, but this is the one to get if you don’t.

The Washington Post has a review of the set. It includes the original pilot for the first time in American release, which is important as the European version contains spoilers in the form of extra footage incorporated from later episodes in a bizarre attempt to make the pilot a self-contained movie. Here’s the best resource about the series I’ve found online, which helps explain some of the mythology in the series. Many people consider season two to be far inferior to earlier episodes. Either you’ve built up a love of the characters and you’ll enjoy it, or you can stop watching after episode 16. Personally I love it all the way through. Also, the movie, Fire Walk with Me, should only be watched once after you’ve finished the whole series.

Speaking of new releases of DVDs I already own, there’s a new collection of My So-Called Life out which includes a book with essays about the series by series creator Winnie Holzman as well as Joss Whedon, Janeane Garofalo, and Michele Byers. Here’s IGN’s review of the DVD.

Mac tip: scroll arrows at both ends of scroll bars

Open up Terminal (in Applications/Utilties) and type this in:

defaults write "Apple Global Domain" AppleScrollBarVariant DoubleBoth

It’ll place a pair of up/down buttons at both ends of your scroll bars, instead of just at one end.

Leopard vs. DivX

I encountered a small hiccup while upgrading to Mac OS 10.5: when I first started up after the upgrade, the Finder wouldn’t launch. Other programs would run, but I couldn’t get to my desktop or navigate to any files. Turns out that DivX was to blame. If you’re upgrading, delete your DivX player first and the file in /Library/Application Support. If you’ve already upgraded and the Finder just gives you a beachball, you can do a few things:

1. If you have another Mac and a Firewire cable handy, plug them together and reboot the affected Mac while holding T. This will restart the computer and mount its hard drive on your other Mac. Open up the disk and go to /Library/Application Support. Delete DivXNetworks or rename it DivXNetworks.prev. Unplug the Firewire cable, reboot your Mac, and you should be set.
2. If you don’t have another Mac, you’ll have to use the Terminal, which might be hard to get to without the Finder. If you already have it in your Dock or have it in a Stack you can just launch it. Otherwise, you might need to wait for Spotlight to index your drive, then search for “Terminal” and run it from there. Once in Terminal, type:

sudo mv "/Library/Application Support/DivXNetworks" "/Library/Application Support/DivXNetworks.prev"

Then right-click/ctrl-click on the Finder and tell it to relaunch.

More info in this support thread.

Will Wright on Wii, PS3, XBOX 360

Will Wright, speaking about “next generation” gaming consoles:

Somebody asked me what I thought next generation meant and what about the PlayStation 3 was next generation. The only next gen system I’ve seen is the Wii—the PS3 and the Xbox 360 feel like better versions of the last, but pretty much the same game with incremental improvement. Bu tht eWii [sic] feels like a major jump—not that the graphics are more powerful, but that it hits a completely different demographic. In some sense I see the Wii as the most significant thing that’s happened, at least on the console side, in quite a while.

More in the short interview with Guardian Unlimited.

Everything You Never Wanted to Know About Crohn's Disease

So there’s this thing called 24 Hour Comics Day that’s been going on for a few years. It’s like a Case Day, except instead of drinking 24 beers in a day, cartoonists draw a full 24-page comic in one day. Tom Humberstone’s entry this year is amazing. It’s about his daily battle with Crohn’s Disease. Check out Everything You Never Wanted to Know About Crohn’s Disease.