OK, let me rethink this...

Ars Technica's John Siracusa pens the most hardcore review of Tiger ever. This is like their USB key drive shootout, only on steroids and driving 100 mph the wrong way down I-80 with the top down. The pages on metadata totally revised my decision to skip upgrading. (OK, so maybe metadata isn't that sexy to most folks, but damn if this UTI stuff awesome.

Those of you who are intrested should read it. The rest should skip to page 18 which is a nice bit and has a Simpsons quote in it.

(Dashboard sexyness aside, I'm still sticking with Konfabulator. I like widgets that are always there. Plus, they are good people.)

If it weren't for my horse...

I never would have spent that year in college.

I felt a lot like Lewis Black today—nearly wrecked my car twice on the way home, attempting (unsuccessfully) to listen to Fearless Leader give a press conference.

The first near-wreck was caused by an exchange in which Bush was asked if he would support a Social Security bill that did not include private accounts. (You know, the thing he's been wasting our tax dollars on for the last two months, torching that political capital by messing with the third rail of politics...)

So then he comes up with this magic reason that we need private accounts: "I feel that private accounts are important because... because we have a lot of debt."

EXCUSE ME? Who was it that is running that trillion-dollar deficit again? Whose administration is spending $100 million/day in Iraq to find WMD that never existed in the first place? So that was near-accident #1.

Turned the radio off for a while, turned it back on again to see if the press had grown a spine. I get this bit:

"We want to have a nukular-free peninchular."

NUKULAR. FREE. PENINCHULAR.

I'm going to say that again, because it appeared in 30-foot high letters of fire atop the highway in my mind: nukular-free peninchular. The leader of our country, elected by a tiny, tiny fraction of the folks who could be bothered to vote that day, cannot speak the language he's been around all of his silver-spoon life. Nukular-free peninchular.

This was just two random samples of the magic. The DKos folks and Atrios have more, I am sure. But seriously, what was so important that we had to nearly kill me on the way home? Was he announcing Rumsfeld's arrest for Abu Ghraib? His resignation? The fact that nearly 1600 Americans died for a lie? No?

A friend of mine told me once that when they couldn't find a use for somebody at Rutgers anymore, they'd give them an office in an obscure part of the building and tell them to go publish something. Perhaps we should just give this guy a pair of hedge trimmers and have him go clear brush on his "ranch." The one without any horses.

Of course, that would leave Cheney in charge, but would that be any different than it is now?

The new math

Dell's got a weird idea of what staggering an order means. To wit: Work bought a ton of new machines.

"Could we stagger their delivery?" we asked.

"Sure!" said Dell.

Here's how they broke this order up:

One computer and monitor shipped via FedEx on Wednesday
64 computers and 64 monitors shipped via gigantic truck on Thursday
One computer and one monitor shipped via FedEx on Thursday

That's not quite what we meant by staggering, but that's the beauty of Just-In-Time ordering, I guess. Good thing our driver was kind enough to help us out with his pallet jack. We'd still be moving those things otherwise. (On a side note, I am also very glad we decided to move from CRTs to LCDs, as is my lower back.) I took some crappy futurephone photos of the exercise.

But no Photoshop-fu for you today. This is the first time I've sat down since about 10:30, and I have a meeting in about four minutes.

Housekeeping

Added a few blogs to the blogroll. Some of them should have been there a long time ago (Xoverboard and Bob Harris, for example). Others are new-ish to me but recommended reading (SUPERFRANKENSTEIN and Dave's Longbox.) The latter reminds me of my It Came From the Longbox series, only, you know, good.

Maybe if you're all lucky I'll fire up Photoshop on my lunch hour.

Kung Fu Grip!

Like August, I am not all that thrilled with the Serenity trailer.

I never really liked Buffy nor Angel. When one of the most positive recommendations I heard for the former was, "Try it, once you get past a couple of episodes it's OK," I knew it was probably not for me. Plus, and this is just a personal note, I wanted to smash most of the cast flat with a hammer.

I liked the Firefly series pretty well once I got it on DVD, though I could really have done without the whole "oooh, River is spooooOOOOooooky and stuff" plotlines. I also fast-forwarded through the opening credits every time. (Kinda gave the butt-rock opening to Enterprise a run for its money.) So now there's a trailer with River—by far my least favorite character, sort of the anti-every-other-character-combined, really—getting all Matrix? I'll wait for the DVD on this one.

On the other hand, I was sorely dismayed by the first Hitchhiker's trailer, and it got much better after that. So I should withhold tasting and judgement until later. (On a mythical third hand, were I Gil Halmilton, one could point to the fact the first Fantastic Four trailer was awful and they are now reshooting parts of the film.)

Nearing the end of Wind Waker, and I will be somewhat sad to see it go. On the whole, it's a bit easier than Ocarina of Time. I think the sheer drudgery of the Nintendo Gallery sidequest detracts from it somewhat, and Tingle is nowhere near as cute as they wish he was. He's creepy and disturbing, not helpful. Plus he dings me 398 Rupees a pop for something I'm trying to do to save his sorry ass, the bastard.

Whiskey Tango Foxtrot

As if you needed another reason to be a switcher.

Microsoft is paying the religious right $20,000 a month in protection money. Century Strategies is Ralph Reed's consulting business. Suddenly, their decision to pull support from the gay rights bill in the Washington legislature makes a lot more sense.

My coworkers often demand that academic freedom says they can use whatever tool they want, however they want. (Whether this is an actual, valid argument is a question for the reader.) However, carried to the logical extreme, this means I need to have work purchase a new G5 tower with Cinema Display. I cannot, in good conscience, defend this decision.

And before you start, no, I cannot defend Apple's decision to sue bloggers to stop leaking of hardware. It's stupid and I think they're shooting themselves in the foot. The company has always been their own worst enemy.

No, I am Sasaki Kojiro!

Watched part two of the Samurai trilogy last night: Duel at Ichijijo Temple. I was inspired to write the following message.

Dear Japanese directors of the 1950s:

USE SOME LIGHTS. THANK YOU.

Love, DougBot.

It's a good set of films—Mifune is magnificent as Miyamoto Musashi, the greatest fencer Japan has ever known. Musashi was also the author of one of my favorite books on strategy, which was briefly fashionable in the 80s as a management manual. Hopefully the third installment in the series will show its creation, though I'd gladly skip that for more swordfighting.

Mifune's athleticism is hampered a lot by the very dim print. The weird thing is that I was looking at a Criterion edition of the film, and they're usually a lot better about such things. The Criterion edition of Seven Samurai is magnificent, but the Samurai releases are very very bare-bones. The translation is somewhat dull and the copy of the film is not only incredibly difficult to see in places, there are artifacts all over.

It's like eating the sea

Spent the weekend at the Astoria/Warrenton Crab and Shrimp Festival.

I was reminded a lot of the bit in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, where Adams writes of the Vogons and how they spent an entire night getting drunk and smashing jewelled crabs with mallets.

Meanwhile, the natural forces on the planet Vogsphere had been working overtime to make up for their earlier blunder. They brought forth scintillating jewelled scuttling crabs, which the Vogons ate, smashing their shells with iron mallets; tall aspiring trees with breathtaking slenderness and colour which the Vogons cut down and burned the crab meat with; elegant gazelle-like creatures with silken coats and dewy eyes which the Vogons would catch and sit on. They were no use as transport because their backs would snap instantly, but the Vogons sat on them anyway.

Thus the planet Vogsphere whiled away the unhappy millennia until the Vogons suddenly discovered the principles of interstellar travel. Within a few short Vog years every last Vogon had migrated to the Megabrantis cluster, the political hub of the Galaxy and now formed the immensely powerful backbone of the Galactic Civil Service. They have attempted to acquire learning, they have attempted to acquire style and social grace, but in most respects the modern Vogon is little different from his primitive forebears. Every year they import twenty-seven thousand scintillating jewelled scuttling crabs from their native planet and while away a happy drunken night smashing them to bits with iron mallets.

This was a bit like that, only the festival gave you a plastic fork instead of a nice mallet with a bit of heft. I'll know better for next year.

The other part of this trip involved shopping for wine with a baker's dozen of my friends. We ended up snagging a couple cases, including a bunch from Melrose Vineyards. I liked their Riesling quite a bit, though I am not the kind of person who wanders around a wine tasting with my glass on a cord around my neck. (I saw a ton of people with those this weekend, and it never stopped looking goofy. My main impulse was to take my wineglass and shatter it, shivving everyone who wouldn't get out of my way—not gesticulate with both hands with a tasting of some vinegary juice dangling around my neck.)

Like Kevin, I watched the first episode of the new Doctor Who, which is quite good. The shitty BBC special effects never really bothered me all that much, though I can see how they would. The show reminds me a bit like reading—you have to use your imagination to get around the fact the show has mostly been filmed in an old quarry with a couple of cardboard props. Eccleston's decision to abandon the role after just one season is a bit maddening. He's just so believable as the Doctor. It's like that one bit in the Hitchhiker's TV series where you can see just how blue Ford Prefect's eyes are and it's amazing. Only All. The. Time.

Away from keyboard

I am off to get the car's exhaust checked.

Then I am going to consume mass quantities of food and drink and decompress. Regular postings will resume at some point in the future.

Polyester chicken

The House celebrates Earth Day with the passage of a special-interest-laden Energy Bill.

[The bill] includes $8.1 billion in energy tax breaks and several billion in other subsidies, including $2 billion to increase research into drilling for oil and gas in extremely deep waters of the Gulf of Mexico. And there is $2 billion to makers of the gasoline additive MTBE to help them defray the cost of phasing out the product, which contaminates drinking water.

The House also called for opening the coastal plain of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska to oil companies.

Nothing reduces dependence on foreign oil like burning a shitload of it in the search for a few teacups of the stuff that happens to reside under a wildlife reserve. Not a damn thing about CAFE standards (When was the last time Congress enacted higher car fleet fuel efficiency models? When Clinton was President, I think...) or incentives for biodiesel or anything useful like that. Just a whole lotta pork.

GM acted in a similar manner by releasing a new, smaller Hummer this week. One that gets a whole 20 mpg, which is just slightly better than my first car. Only my first car was a 1980 Buick LeSabre Limited, which had factory-standard CB radio and got 14 mpg. I'd hate to see what a Hummer would do after carrying such sophisticated electronics around—it would probably just tie that 25-year-old behemoth in fuel consumption.

We expect our computers to get faster and our cell phones to be smaller, but we're still making basically the same crappy cars we did a quarter-century ago. Yeah, the instrumentation is different, but the power plant is the same.

They just like talking... to salesmen

ABC—Always be closing!

Sorry, I've been talking to salespeople all morning, looking for a new SmartBoard. Or a new Sympodium, which sounds like a drug. (Sorta like Exubera, a new inhalable insulin that's in development. Anyway, get them to sign on the line which is dotted.

Microsoft continues to think up new reasons to dislike it. Other than editing group policies, even. Yeah, group policies are read by all users on a machine unless you exclude them by specifically denying them read rights to the group policy file. OK, that makes sense, sorta, but what a colossal pain in the ass. I'm not even going to get into the arcane phrasing of policies. Do I want to enable or disable the "Don't display the Getting Started screen on logon" property? DOUBLE NEGATIVE, people.

I hear good things about the Sharknife, but I am going to be doing Car Things and so it might be a while.

Shoulda picked Giblets

I would have settled for Fafnir, even.

Finished the first volume of Planetes the other day. You should really be reading this. I gather there's an animated version, but I haven't seen that for sale in the US yet. Haven't tried Anime Suki to look for it, either.

One of the things I dig about Planetes is the detail of the world. Spacecraft look beat up. Smoking in space is a bad deal. Tiny bits of matter at orbital speeds have dire consequences. Think Cowboy Bebop meets Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars trilogy, only this time all the characters are interesting. (I really like Fee, the nicotine-addict pilot, who saves the day because dammit, there are cigarettes on that space station.)

Speaking of trilogies, I'm nearly finished with Quicksilver, the second volume of the Baroque Cycle. Sooner or later we'll get back to the pirates in the first volume, but this is a much better read than the earlier book.

Hey Jenny Slater talks about Ann Coulter on the cover of Time. This is probably a good point to mention the difference between scholarly and popular resources, like we talk about a lot here at the library. Only I think Time is shooting for the shitty resource. The Weekly World News is looking more respectable by the day. I wonder where "columnist who advocates death for all non-believers sits on cover of national magazine" fits in their article on 25 Signs You're Going to Hell?

Flashrobat

Adobe is buying Macromedia.

It's an interesting development—they're not directly competitors but combined they are probably the new largest force in browser development. One company now has three of the top five browser plug-ins and will have a huge influence on where things go from here.

I was originally thinking about upgrading my copy of Dreamweaver, but given recent developments I think it's probably a good idea to wait for a bit. On the other hand, it's not as if Adobe doesn't sometimes compete with itself. Premiere and After Effects, for example. Why even use Premiere when After Effects is so much better? (Then there's Final Cut Pro, which I would like to use but don't have an extra grand lying around the house.)

Addendum:
The buying continues. It appears that GameStop is buying Electronics Boutique. I sort of walk through both stores, but I personally am buying most of my games through GameFly. That is, when they give me a KeepIt option. That's been disappearing lately, either through increased demand, lowered supply, or some other factor I haven't considered.

The days of ConHugeCo are not far away.

Righteous Brothers

The season finale of Arrested Development finished about 10 minutes ago. Still no word as to whether a third season will be forthcoming, probably so Fox can file the numbers off of Family Guy and make a third repetitive season.

As I watched the first episode of the Simpsons that aired tonight, I began to wonder: at what point did the writers of that show gain such contempt for their characters and their audience?

For example: this is at least the fourth or fifth alternate future displayed for these characters, and each is more humiliating than the least. The first that I can recall, Lisa was going to be President. Now she's lucky if she can attend Yale University, sponsored by McDonalds. Marge and Homer have separated. Nobody is "gay for Moleman." Frink hangs himself. And so on.

I don't want to sound like one of those "Worst. Episode. Ever." people, but man, from the swipes at Milhouse to a lame dig at Futurama, I kept wondering why I was bothering. It's been a long time since I actually laughed at an episode.

On the other hand, Arrested Development displayed the heart that used to be a cornerstone of good Simpsons episodes—the strength of families. OK, so it's a family with a lot of abuse, fighting, lying, and dismemberment, but hearing Gob sing to Michael in the courtroom had more heart in it than all of the "very special episodes" of Blossom combined in a blender. Hey. I'd buy that for a dollar, come to think of it.

Will there be a third season? They tried to wrap a few things up tonight, though now there are more questions than ever. Will Kitty Sanchez be a regular cast member? One can hope. Not much information on TV Tome, though they do point to Get Arrested, which is run by Fox. I think. (That site is running a clip of Gob's ventriloquism act, which is... even weirder than his magic act. I do wish they'd found a way to work "The Final Countdown" into it, though.) For some reason, Television Without Pity didn't cover this show, possibly because one can't make snarky comments about a show that has the narrator do it for you.

Today in comics I picked up the She-Hulk trade and the second volume of New Frontier. Also grabbed issues 2 and 3 of Planetes, which I was pointed at earlier. For some reason, I cannot find that nor Iron Wok Jan for love nor money in this town. How I can I read the favorites of the internets if nobody here carries them?

The latter reminds me a bit of a title I read about in Frederick Schodt's seminal work on manga—Dreamland Japan. One title he speaks of is all about a sushi chef training, and I am waiting for that to make the trip across the ocean. Only it would probably make me even more hungry for unagi, and the sushi place near my house is closed now.

SWAT Monkey

A story for Beaucoup Kevin caught my eye this morning.

The Mesa Police Department is looking to add some primal instinct to its SWAT team. And to do that, it's looking to a monkey.

The department has submitted a request to purchase and train a capuchin monkey, which is considered the second smartest primate to the chimpanzee.

The department is seeking about 100-thousnd dollars in federal grant money to put the idea to use in Mesa SWAT operations.

The monkey weighs only three to eight pounds, has tiny humanlike hands and puzzle-solving skills. Police say it would be able to get into places no officer or robot could go and could unlock doors, search buildings and find suicide victims on command.

SWAT monkey. This movie writes itself. It could be a comedy, an action film, or a K9-esque buddy film. SWAT Monkey. The "find suicide victims on command" directive is a little weird. Are AZ suicides prone to booby-trapping themselves?

Off to the comic shop later this morning, where I am certain to pick up a copy of New Frontier Volume 2. I mean, how can one resist that cover? OK, if DC had issued the damn thing as one complete unit.

If you're blue...

And you don't know where you go to, why don't you go where fashion fits?



*does a softshoe dance*

Ministry of Silly Walks

Watched one of my favorite Monty Python sketches last night. (It's in the same episode with the Ministry of Silly Walks sketch, which is not terribly funny on paper but hilarious when you see Cleese do his silly walk.) Doug and Dinsdale Pirahna are master criminals afraid of a giant hedgehog named Spiny Norman. For a while we thought about getting a hedgehog, but since they're mostly outdoorsy animals we eventually decided against it.

Now we have three cats. Or, rather, three cats have us. The one has trained me well enough that I wake up to feed him when he starts knocking things off the dresser. It's like a wake-up call, only with gravity.

I had a dream the other night where I was filling out financial aid forms for graduate school. For some reason, it was running into the tens of thousands of dollars. Maybe it's people asking me when I'm getting my library degree. Which happens about once a day, it seems.

Best review ever

I'm eagerly awaiting the release of LEGO Star Wars. There was a review on your Internets that I enjoyed, which read something like:

Playing LEGO Star Wars is an if-then equation: If, upon unleashing your lightsaber and force-pushing your way past droids that split into a mess of LEGO bits, you are not all smiles and best described as giddy, then you are an old turd.

One does not want to be an old turd, does one? Just say no to being Bantha fodder.

The world is covered in darkness

The opening lines from Final Fantasy I seem appropriate today.

There was a story a few weeks ago that 2/3 of the Earth's resources are used up. (You know, the planet we live on and the only place that we know of so far than can support our lifeform.)

What's the main story today? Some pop star tart is pregnant. Hooray! A miracle that only occurs thousands of times a day has happened, this time to a famous(?!) person! Really, what is Britney's talent, other appearing on Go Fug Yourself?

I guess I'll just go look at Spider-Man remixes. This one is still my favorite.

Right now Stephen Chow is kicking ass

And I am in the bead shop. OK, when I say "bead shop," I am really talking about "work." Speaking of bead shops, one could bid on this eBay lot and never have to buy beads again. (Link courtesy of the lovely and talented Lunesse.)

As I waited for my coffee to brew this morning, played through the first level or two of Sly Cooper. The game does give me a little furry vibe that is slightly creepy, but it is very well-done. The animation on Sly is well-executed (little details like Sly grabbing his all-purpose cane in his mouth while climbing a ladder, for example) and really brings life to his character. The voice acting is also good, only slightly awkward in the "here's how to do this thing with the controls" moments.

I could do without the animation in the cut scenes--it feels a little like an animatic that got spiffed up in place of a pre-rendered thing. We're not talking Clutch-Cargo-or-70s-Hanna-Barbara-bad animation, but the colors are a little too garish and the art style is just different enough that it's noticeable.

I'm also less fond of the one-hit kills, though it does make the game more realistic. If a game about a thieving raccoon who's wandering the world to avenge the theft of his family's heirloom book that will teach him to be a Master Thief while avoiding a French police inspector Fox and whose best friends are a talking hippo and an asthmatic turtle "realistic."

Speaking of realistic, Ron Moore's blog about Battlestar Galactica raises some interesting issues about some events in the series.

Galactica is both mirror and prism through which to view our world. It attempts to mirror the complexities of our lives and our society in turbulent times, while at the same time reflecting and bending that view in order to allow us to extrapolate on notions present in contemporary society but which have not yet come to pass, i.e. a true artificial intelligence becoming self-aware and the existential questions it raises. Our goal is to examine contemporary culture and society, to challenge (and sometimes provoke) our audience, but not to provide easy answers to complex problems.

I'm not entirely comfortable with a lot of the actions taken by the characters. (Neither is Moore.) Each of the interrogation scenes reminds me a lot of Guantonomo or Abu Ghraib. Granted, these folks are really fucked up in the head since almost everybody they know is dead and their mortal enemies can look exactly like them.

There's a lot in the commentary track on the miniseries about 9/11 and how the show is kind of a reaction to that--so much so that it's a drinking game for next time I watch it, I think. So it's quite realistic in that respect. There are some fairly goofy bits. For example, folks on TV Tome and Television Without Pity have poked fun at the overwhelming gaggle of reporters on the show--just how many media people do you need with 49,700 people left in the world? Why does nobody call Baltar on his insane behavior? I'll accept for story purposes the existence of FTL drives and extra-solar humans. But man, they gotta find some more attractive liquor. Every time they show the Galactica crew drinking, I'm reminded of NyQuil.

I am a bad person for liking this

This morning I was reading the new Fillerbunny and laughing. It's from the mind of Jhonen Vasquez, who writes as if he needs a Prozac the size of a Vanagon but still manages to make with the funny.

There are bees, and Fillerbunny (I have the Fillerbunny inna jar that used to live on my desk when I worked as a tech writer) and lots of shots of an interior office and... Aborto, the fetus thingy that is sick and wrong.

Oh, and lots of vomit jokes. Did I mention there were bees, too?

Don't ask me why this one made me laugh when the second one didn't. The first one was sort of a one-shot, the results of an all-night bender the likes of which I can't do anymore. (In college, I was nocturnal, going to bed when the birds starting chirping and sleeping until noon. Man, I miss those days sometimes.)

Anyway, for a character created to fill one page--replacing an ad for a small press convention in a reprint of Squee, Fillerbunny has had a pretty good run. He's killed more than Kenny and he keeps on dancing, dancing for our amusement. Plus, he's a little bit more upbeat than most of Vasquez's other work, if that can be said about a rodent who gets mauled and impaled on every page...

Nearly finished with the Hollow Chocolate Bunnies of the Apocalypse by Robert Rankin. I was introduced to this book through Dorian, and I'm enjoying it. Rankin gets mentioned in the same breath as Douglas Adams and Terry Pratchett, but he reminds me more of Tom Holt. I'm a huge fan of Expecting Someone Taller, which taught me everything I ever needed to know about the Ring of the Neibelung that wasn't covered by Gil Kane. I was at a wedding with Gil Kane once--I even gave him a soda. My one claim to fame, I guess. Well, that and being the number one search for "naked cartoon women destroying cities." (Come to think of it, not any more. Other sites have clamed that... dubious honor.)

There are new shots of the Miller/Lee All-Star Batman. I cannot wait to see the finished version of this.

I think the Star Wars tie-ins have finally jumped the shark. And this is from a franchise that had a couple thousand Jar-Jar products for Episode I.



Star Wars M&Ms. There are 72 different packages. Collect them all, it says.

72 packages
$3.49 a package
------------------
$251.28

At 220 calories per serving, and approximately 9 servings per bag, that would be 152,560 calories, the equivalent of two months of caloric intake. (I am basing these off of the peanut Jedi mix that I grabbed the other day.)

Assuming, of course, you'd violate the mint-in-box packaging by actually eating the things.

HOVERCRAFT!

Watching Krypto the Super Dog. Somehow an alien flea has also survived in the Kryptonian space capsule. The power of the yellow sun gives it indestructibility as well. The show is aimed at a fairly young audience, so we don't see it suck earth animals dry or burrow through the skull of Krypto's young human pal Kevin.

The cat Streaky is pretty cool. (I'm beginning to think that my cat Archie is channeling him when he runs at 300 mph thorugh the house.) Haven't seen Ace the Bat-Hound, alas. I am amused that the heavy in the show is Lex Luthor's evil iguana. And really, a bit of levity is nice after the dreary self-inflicted mess that was Identity Crisis.

Binder pointed me to this site, where I found this photo. I could have used something like this the last few days. Summoned at the last minute to work the technical side of a conference--I've been poking around with wires and third-hand hubs and poorly-maintained hotel infrastructure. But I did manage to make life easier for a few people and I met a lot of interesting people. I guess whatever I did made an impression--they already want me to do the next two years of state-wide conferences.

Still recuperating from running around like a madman for the week. I may be more interesting later.

Signs and portents

Feeling a lot of deja vu, since I have been working at this conference all day. I'll be at it all day tomorrow, and the day after that. Then I'll probably collapse with a bottle of Booker's or something.

It's probably a good sign that they're already asking me to be on the committee for next year's conference. "Hey, you are demonstrating simple competence! Do this again!"

Re-reading Noble Causes again, and I am still missing some vital bit of explanation about Race Noble, I think. But it's a good title and I cannot recommend the trades enough. I may have to pick up the Family Secrets trade, as that was originally printed in black and white--the new trade has been completely colored. It's a bit like the super-deluxe versions of Powers a while back.

I used to enjoy Powers quite a bit, but the relentless darkness is getting to me a bit. Sorta like The Pulse and Secret War and Ultimate Spider-Man, come to think of it. Somewhere along the line, all the Ultimate titles stopped being fun. Maybe it was the Gwen Stacy action figure. It might have been Ultimate Six. Or the fact that Secret War has been published with about the same frequency as Leave it to Chance.

Is that series finally dead, by the way? What is Robinson doing these days?

But which one plays Shining the Holy Ark?

Ars Technica fires another shot in the PSP/GBA DS handheld war.

It is often said that when competition begins, the primary winner is the consumer, and Nintendo has ruled portable gaming unopposed for too long. While I've enjoyed every Game Boy product and I love my DS, there is no doubt that they aren't pushing any real technological barriers with their systems. They lay back and play it safe with rehashed software and underpowered systems. Why? Because they can. No one is trying to eat their lunch. On March 24, 2005 that changed, in a big way.

I have neither a PSP nor a DS. I've been interested in both. This review goes a long way towards delineating the differences between the two consoles. Both have their pros and cons, and I'm not sure either has dealt a death blow to the other.

Still, it makes things a lot more interesting. Nintendo has beat the pants off of all comers for decades, even when their machines might not be the most technically interesting of their generation. I suspect that their backwards-compatibility may be the reason. For example, one of the reasons the PS2 was such a success is that at launch, in addition to new titles, it already had a couple hundred PSX titles. Sony keeps making noise that the PS3 will not be backwards-compatible, but I think they do this at their peril.

Older games are still fun to play. Heck, I spend time on the Visor playing Sub Hunt, which is basically a port of an 80s arcade game. Only without the funky case design that made it look like you were peering through a periscope.

The DS does play all the GBA games. Whether people really want to play Tetris Plus on the DS is a matter of some conjecture. On the other hand, if you wanted to play anything on the PSP besides the $50 launch titles, you're SOL.

The PSP is aiming at a different market, of course. There are already a bunch of software packages for ripping DivX movies to USB media so you can watch it on the PSP. Personally, I'm not sure I'd want to spend half a grand to watch TV on the bus. But I see the appeal.

Super-busy lately, so I'm mostly playing Wind Waker when I'm not working.

How I hate Daylight Savings Time

A conversation K and I had last night:

K: What would NPR be like in the world of Sin City?
Me: Prairie Home Companion would be different, that's for sure.
K: Garrison would certainly endorse something else.

So this is what we came up with. Presented for your approval:

Now it's time for the to hear from the sponsor of our show, Powder Black Bullets! Made of pure lead by Norwegian bachelor gunsmiths, they give shy persons the strength they need to go out and kill who needs to be killed.

Has your family tried them, Powder Black?
Has your family tried them, Powder Black?
If your family's tried them, you know you've satisfied them
They're the real find, Powder Black.

Powder Black Bullets. Good heavens, they're lethal and expeditious.

There's a bit in Stephen King's novella The Body (Used as the basis for Stand By Me--holy shit is Wil Wheaton young. They're all young. Where does the time go?), where the kids are sitting around talking about a pie-eating contest. It's a tale of "revenge, revenge, puking, and revenge." I was reminded of it yesterday, though I'm struggling to come up with a good adaptation.

It could be the whole hour-ahead thing. My brain says that it's not even seven yet. But my watch and the computer clock and everything else says it's almost eight. One wonders if the cumulative cost of increased accidents, reduced productivity, and the like during this adjustment period make up for the savings in power that DST is supposed to provide. Or whatever benefit it theoretically has.

Cleanliness is next to managerliness

Watching the SpongeBob SquarePants movie this evening. So far it's pretty good--SpongeBob with an ice cream-over is hilarious. The DVD does have the irritating quality in that you can't fast-forward through the commercials at the beginning. I mean, if you buy the DVD you should be able to determine how you watch it.

Then again, this is the same theory behind region-encoding. You don't own the movie! Nickelodeon does!

Earlier today, went to dim sum and then watched Sin City. Go see this. Now. Stylish, brutal, darkly funny in places. The group we were with laughed our asses off in places. The best use of color and style since Sky Captain or Pleasantville. What can I say about Mickey Rourke as Marv? Whether it was the prosthetic face or his voice or what--such an amazing performance. And Clive Owen? Totally great. Loved him in the BMW films, but now he's got an American accent and he's totaly kicking ass. Confession time: I never read the comic, though I am wondering if this surpasses the source material.

The weird thing is the idiot woman behind us who took her kids to a film with loads of nudity, murder, dismemberment, sex, multiple castrations, and a whole bunch of other exciting stuff.

"What's with all the boobs?" asked one of them.

Man, what the hell was she thinking? Take the kids because it's based on a comic book? Dumbass.

One wonders what the hell she wouldn't take them to. I have a suggestion for her--MEET THE FEEBLES. Your kids will love it! Particularly the end sequence! It's got puppets! At least they started to get scarred after a while and stopped talking.

Um. Uh...

Remember how last week I said I was going to pick my brains up off the floor? Multiply that by like 2000% and that was my reaction this evening to the season finale of BSG.

Moore has nerves of steel--as he wrote in his blog, there was no plan of what to do if the second season didn't happen.

I just proceed as if it were already a done deal. I wrote the miniseries as a pilot for a series, without ever considering how to cover my bases if it didn't get picked up and I wrote the Season One finale as a cliff-hanger without any backup plan whatsoever if we didn't return.

Sometimes you just gotta roll the hard six.

Consider it rolled.

Removed the CSS goofing I did earlier today. For those of you who don't use IE or Firefox on the Mac, visitors this mornign found something like this:

For some reason, Firefox on Windows and Safari are smart enough to know not to use an all-symbol font as a typeface, but the same cannot be said for Firefox on the Mac or IE. Weird.

Coming soon to a theater near you. Or not.

I've been working on this off and on for a while--now that I've posted it maybe now I can move on with my life.

These pretzels are making me thirsty

(Note--if you can read this, your browser is probably not IE or you're using the RSS feed. Good on you.)

Watched Stop Making Sense last night--it's been a while since I've seen young David Byrne and so it was a bit of a shock. More like Jim Henson's Talking Heads Babies than anything else. The DVD includes some songs not in the film, which are of lower picture quality but the sound is still quite good. I'm guessing they didn't go through the post-processing the rest of the film had.

Finally making progress in Wind Waker--I released Tingle and found the four boys in Hide-and-Seek. While I have the sail, I'm still monkeying around on the island, looking for the camera I hear rumors of. And I have to say, the Battleship game you can play is one of the funniest bits I've seen in a game in a long time. Almost as good as the Chain Blade commercial in Ratchet and Clank 2.

The Pope is ailing as I write this. Can the time of Pope Giblets be nigh? I have only vague memories of any previous pope--I recollect the smoke showing that he'd been chosen, which makes for great drama. John Paul II has had a huge impact on the church--he's added more saints than almost all the other popes combined, he's been everwhere, but I have to wonder about the state of the Church. Hopefully a new pope will bring the church into the modern era (you know, one where there's an acknowledgement of women as people and birth control and a stop to shielding criminals in the clergy). However, given the conservative bent of religious figures today, I'm not gonna hold my breath.

Google's new beverage Google Gulp is almost as awesome as their pigeon-ranking technology. I also see that Kevin is the best SF and comics fan on the Intarnets ever!

EDIT: I would be remiss if I didn't mention this awesome Boing Boing parody. It is missing a couple of things--Xeni and Disney--but had me laughing quite a bit.

EDIT REDUX: Removed the April Fool encoding.