Superman roundup

Pictures of Kevin Spacey as Lex Luthor. You know you want to look at them.

I did not know that they were going to still be in continuity with Superman I and II. That seems... weird.

Would even Superman be able to figure out who Kaiser Soze is? Batman could do it, but not Kal El.

Robot Mayhem

Once upon a time there was a little game company in Seattle. They were called Wizards of the Coast, and before they hit the motherlode with Magic: The Gathering, they put out some board games. One of those was called RoboRally, and it is (or was) a great way to spend a Saturday evening, particularly when beer was involved.

Hasbro acquired Wizards of the Coast, and they've re-released the game. (It's been out of print for years.) Some of the changes are good—I fully support the programming boards that have a really good description of when damage locks registers, life tokens placement, etc. However, some of the changes are a little weird... They've abandoned the Phil Foglio designs for the robots (which looked great as metal figs and even better once you painted them) in favor of some generic bots in silver plastic. The boards look very generic, too.

I should probably head out to the comic shop today, in addition to kickball practice. Somebody ruined it for everybody at my shop, so they're now going to call you with nasty notes if you go 8 weeks without showing up. (There's a story there somewhere, but they wouldn't really go into it. Grrr. I hate that my fellow comics buyers continue to shaft the business that supports their habit. Evidently somebody for a while was refusing to cancel a title, but would instead take issues they didn't want and stash them in the racks...)

More things in heaven and earth

There are many lists of things to learn as a child. Colors. Numbers. Letters. The notes on a musical scale. (Never did figure that out as well as I should have.) States and countries. The planets in the Solar System.

The last one became slightly harder today, as scientists discovered a new body larger than Pluto. There have been other large bodies outside of Pluto's orbit before (Sedna and Quaoar, for example), but this one is a bit larger than those.

Given our difficulties reaching orbit or the moon at this point, it's probably going to be a while before we see any of these objects up close. Still, it's interesting to think about.

Need coffee. Stat. Time to go forage for some.

Blandy McAction! Coming to a theater near you!

The trailer for V for Vendetta is up now, finally. In a word: ho-hum.

Other than the taglines, there's not a whole lot to recommend it, from what I can see. They blew their stunt casting by showing Natalie Portman getting her head shaved in the trailer. The visuals are OK, but if you want explodo, you should really go see Stealth.

I'm reminded (as I often am) of an episode of MST3K, where Mike invents "Cowboy Mike's Original Riccochet Barbeque Sauce." It's BOLD! Only...

Mike: I'll tell you what, you hair dressing little cowpokes, you check the Umbiliport and you'll find yourself a free sample of Cowboy Mike's Own, Original, red-hot Richoche-e-e-e-t Barbecue Sauce.
Crow: It's bold!
Dr. F: Hmm, it looks, somewhat bold. Speaking of which, saucy ones, your movie today is called "Starfighters", a bold Air Force epic.
Frank: Well, how 'bout it, Clay? Is it bold?
Dr. F: It's... actually it's not that bold.
Frank: It's not?!
Dr. F: No.
Frank: It's not bold!
Dr. F: Decidedly unbold. Hey, what's the deal with this stuff not being bold?

Note to Hollywood: stop making adaptations of Alan Moore's work, since you never seem to get it. Thanks.

Anything for pie

here's the pitch...
Originally uploaded by GiantFightingBot.

Piehorse will probably finish last in our kickball league this season, but I'm not sure I mind all that much.

We're not about winning, we're all about the pie. And drinking, musn't forget the drinking.

Smacking the hell out of red ball is just the antidote to whatever ails you. Dr. Dougbot prescribes some baserunning and some fundamentals.

None of these are prefaced by a half hour of ads

delicious library -- movies
Originally uploaded by GiantFightingBot.

Rick has a good breakdown of why movies don't make as much as they used to. Back in the day, with wider screens like Cinerama and Super Panavision, etc., studios were competing with TV by being bigger.

If my last experience at the movies is any indication, they're starting to get louder. It's like a noiserock concert at this point. Call me old, but I shouldn't wonder if I brought earplugs when the opening credits start. Factor in the explodo in place of actual plots, one wonders when they're just going to start playing footage of Painkiller instead of bothering to film anything.

I started adding items to Delicious Library a couple months ago. I'm not 100% complete, mostly because many of the items in my collection aren't in Amazon, it's source for data. Not sure if Delicious Monster is ever going to add Powells or Gamestop or other vendors to their source, but I don't think it's too likely. For one thing, few online vendors have an API for searching their data. Amazon does. Google does, too, though they're picky about how often you can use it a day.

Speaking of Google, have you tried their homepage/portal thingy? It's not bad—I really like how they've coded the elements so that you can drag them from column to column, up and down. It mostly reminds me that I really need to look into integrating RSS feeds into this project for work. Or making my own. Whee!

Meme o' the day

William Gibson wrote your book. Technology
terrifies and delights you.


Which Author's Fiction are You?
brought to you by Quizilla

For some reason, I'm not surprised.

Making biscuits

The Lipstick Librarian pointed me to the glory that is Cat News. It reminds me a little bit of Cat Town, only with more swearing and a distinct lack of catnip bus action.

Smiley Muffin will be back, according to Cat News's creator, Julie Klausner. (I really need to find a copy of Animal Party now—I'm reminded a bit of Sylvia and Dork, if they had a kid, if that makes sense.w)

Channel 102 is not to be confused with Channel 101, which had a cease-and-desist letter from Mr. Puddin' Pops himself, Bill Cosby. Evidently Bill was not fond of House of Cosbys. Which is sad, since it has some good moments. I want my own Data Analysis Cosby.

Explodo

Geez, I stop blogging for five seconds and things freak out all over. Explosions in Egypt, more in London, the President is threatening to veto bills if Congress actually follows up on their investigations, Rove is still sweating, and an Oscar(tm) winner is starring in a movie involving a killer psycho jet plane. It's like Top Gun meets Snow Dogs meets WarGames.

So instead, let us apply the scientific method in our own homes. Is our children learning?

Steve, don't eat it!
Steve eats things so that you won't have to. The corn smut is going to feature in my nightmares for years to come, I think. Then again, I've eaten natto. (Which he also delves into.) I do hope that later he tackles durian and lutefisk, as those will balance out potted meat food products and prison-style wine.

How much is inside?
Huge props to these folks, as they delve deeply into how much is inside. I'm particularly fond of the ramen entry. The pranks on this page are a treat as well. Mmmm, Bacon Churner with Fauxtatoes.

Around here we call him "the miracle worker"

It's somewhat fitting that James Doohan beamed up to that big transporter room in the sky today, given that it's also the anniversary of Apollo 11. Memorializing space on two counts today. Doohan was a class act, both personally and professionally—I'll always be mad at Paramount for cutting some of his memorable characterization from Star Trek II.

I think of him whenever I sit down at a computer. Keyboard. How quaint.

Google's celebrating Moon Day with Google Moon, an adaptation of their mapping software for our celestial neighbor. It maps all of the Apollo landings, and while incomplete is still quite interesting. (I really wish they showed some of the other impact sites, like Clementine or the Russian probes, but that's for a later incarnation.)

I think I've got some scotch lying around the house, and then in tribute, I'll catch up on me technical journals.

The boy who appointed another white guy

August said it better than I can about Bush's nominee to SCOTUS:

It's WHITE GUY!

So after three straight weeks of discussion about the relevance of the first Hispanic Supreme Court Justice, and O'Conner's statement on the need for women in the Court, and the issues over whether Democrats will filibuster a minority or not... Bush has made the daring, revolutionary decision to nominate... some white guy.

Alrighty, then.

In a vain attempt to take the heat off of Rove and his double super-secret background, Bush even has a lame-ass press conference to announce what we already knew.

Maybe I'll just watch these Makai Kingdom trailers some more instead. Nippon Ichi's games are all of a type, but I really like that type. Strange characters involved in a weird world where the tiniest item holds a world of its own. Now it looks like they've taken the same formula that made Disgaea and Phantom Brave so much fun, and turned it up to... well, they were at 11 before. So this goes up to 12.

That's two more.

If you look carefully at the trailer, there's a penguin wielding a balloon. Tell me that isn't a fearsome weapon. Next week!

Banana mine!

I have a bit of a crush on every character in Banana Sunday. Three monkeys, their friend Kirby, and her new best friend Nickels, cub reporter. Talking, narcoleptic monkeys? I am so there. Oni doesn't do their summer color specials as much anymore, which makes me sad, but they continue to knock stuff out of the park with titles like this, Love Fights and Scott Pilgrim.

The new Harry Potter book is out now, I guess. There are spoilers abound, and many of the local shops were open at midnight for readers to pick up a copy and start reading. Personally, I'm waiting a bit to read it, mostly because I've been totally busy. And sick, too. Nothing like a summer cold to really suck all life force out of one. But anyway, I'm not sure I understand the rush. It's not as if Scholastic is not going to print a gazillion copies of the damn thing—it's not much of a collector's item if it's ubiquitious. Stick with the Fafblog review.

Finally got around to seeing Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle, which made me laugh. A lot.

Harold: I want 30 sliders, 5 french fries, and 4 large cherry cokes.
Kumar: I want the same except make mine diet cokes.

Every generation needs its own Blues Brothers or Ferris Bueller's Day Off or Airplane! I enjoyed it a lot more than I thought I would. I do wonder if Neil Patrick Harris's role in this inspired Elijah Wood to play a vicious killer in Sin City—it's certainly not the same kind of role we're used to for either actor and they really do break that role. NPH isn't Doogie anymore, and Wood isn't Frodo. He's a vicious, silent killing machine.

There's a great setup for a sequel to Harold and Kumar, but so far I can't find much evidence either way for it. Could they really catch lightning in a bottle again? It would be worth watching, I imagine.

About frackin' time

With not a lot of fanfare, the SciFi Channel aired the season premiere of Battlestar Galactica tonight. They were, as Ulysses Everett McGill used to say, in a tight spot.

Watching the crew of Galactica attempt to extricate themselves from bad hyperspace jumps, double-crosses, space battles, and human-looking aliens reminded me a bit of the book Everything Bad is Good For You. This isn't a standard three-act plot like on Lost in Space.

Viewers of the show are supposed to remember at least six plot threads on three separate locations, and tie them together from week to week.

• Helo's on Caprica with Boomer, who is pregnant with his child. They are running from Cylons.
• Starbuck and Lee are all over the universe.
• Tigh's got an alcoholic wife¹ who he thought was dead and is now... back.
• Adama and Rosilyn are butting heads politically. (There's also the political fights, including a convicted murderer as political rival.)
• On the ship, Sharon's dealing with the knowledge that she isn't who she thinks she is.
• Baltar's well... crazy as a shithouse rat.

And so on, and so on, and so on. You have two solar systems, 48,000 people trapped in a space fleet, and countless Cylons, many of whom are hot. (At least the female models. The male models that we've seen so far have not been as hunky. Come on, guys, how about a little beefcake for the ladies? Other than Jamie Bamber's massive guns.)


Kevin and I agree—not enough Starbuck in this episode but the season is young. I really do hope they find a way to put in the crazy-ass Dirk Benedict plotline I read about a while back, where Baltar would come up to a shadowed figure, and out pops Dirk, saying, "Hi, I'm God!"

There may no place to go from there, actually. You'd have to turn off the TV, since you couldn't top that. Unless it was a monkey fighting a bear with sharks and pirates battling a mockingbird which was also on cold fire.

¹ - This plot thread inspired the following exchange:

BeaucoupK: Now ask yourself.
BeaucoupK: "What would tigh do?"
DougBot: He'd drink a lot with his skank wife.
DougBot: Then he'd punch Lee and/or Starbuck.
DougBot: Then he'd make the right decision even through he doesn't want to and his personal demons make it difficult.
BeaucoupK: That bitch, I want her BRAINS ON THE WALLS.

See, now that is some good writing and acting.

Shoulda done this last year...

This has been a day of ups and downs, but this is good news:

The NHL and the players association are close to closing a deal.

A hockey season? On this continent! Woot! (Not this woot, a general woot of huzzah.)

TV. Is there nothing it can't teach us?

Through the miracle of Japander, I now know how everyone can run for days straight on 24. The answer? Calorie Mate! There's an extended story about it on Tokyo Times, which includes links to a couple of the commercials, too.

Other things TV has taught me:

• Pachinko is good! SANYO PACHINKO I'M COMIN!
• Shooting a .50 cal sniper rifle into a pool makes a big explosion
• Adam Sessler likes dressing up as Hunter S. Thompson
• What double-super-secret background is. (Infinity plus one on opposite day, indeed.)

Also, since I was looking it up for work, I thought I'd post a link to the Anne Elk sketch here.

Anne Elk: What is my theory that it is? Yes. Well, you may well ask what is my theory.
Presenter: I am asking.
Anne Elk: And well you may. Yes, my word, you may well ask what it is, this theory of mine. Well, this theory, that I have, that is to say, which is mine,... is mine.
Presenter: I know it's yours! What is it?
Anne Elk: ... Where? ... Oh! Oh! What is my theory?
Presenter: Yes!
Anne Elk: Ahh! My theory, that I have, follows the lines that I am about to relate. (starts prolonged throat clearing)
Presenter: (under breath) Oh, God! (Anne still clearing throat)
Anne Elk: The Theory, by A. Elk (that's "A" for Anne", it's not by a elk.)
Presenter: Right...
Anne Elk: (clears throat) This theory, which belongs to me, is as follows... (more throat clearing) This is how it goes... (clears throat) The next thing that I am about to say is my theory. (clears throat) Ready?
Presenter: (wimpers)
Anne Elk: The Theory, by A. Elk (Miss). My theory is along the following lines...
Presenter: (under breath)God!
Anne Elk: ...All brontosauruses are thin at one end; much, much thicker in the middle and then thin again at the far end. That is the theory that I have and which is mine and what it is, too.
Presenter: That's it, is it?
Anne Elk: Right, Chris!
Presenter: Well, Anne, this theory of yours seems to have hit the nail right on the head.
Anne Elk: ... and it's mine.

I have a cold today, it's supposed to be quite hot, and I have two things scheduled almost simultaneously this evening. Maybe now is time to start looking into my alternate dimension theory again...

Google Doogle Fo Foogle

There's a political cartoon from the 1920s that I recall about Standard Oil, where it's depicted as a monstrous octopus with a tentacle in every pie.

Google has adopted this as a business model, I swear. New to me is Google SMS, where you can query Google from your cell phone. Still, it's kind of useful for people like me who don't pay for internet access on phones and are not near a laptop and/or wireless network all of the time..

Then Rick pointed out Google Transparencies, which is also pretty cool. Take the Google satellite images, and overlay the map on top of it.

As long-time readers may know, the price of academic journals is rising faster than my blood pressure listening to the White House spin the Plame scandal again and again. (Seriously, the price of journals is rising faster than the price of gas, housing, puppies, or health care. It's INSANE.) Google's taking a stab at it, with Google Scholar. It may not replace academic journals or databases for the short term, but it's certainly a more familiar interface for students.

Though really, what we all really want is a large button marked, Give me what I'm thinking of.

Pointing at Science Fiction, part III

Part I

Part II

Other writers who deserve more recognition...

I haven't read a lot of James H. Schmitz, but there's a sample of his work in the anthology The Good Old Stuff. Schmitz wrote a ton of books, some of which are still in print thanks to Baen. I keep meaning to look up the rest of his work, but I gather it's hard to find. What I've read, I've really liked. His female characters are decades ahead of their time. Smart, funny, independent women—very different than the dependent baby factories most of his contempoararies were writing.

Diane Duane wrote the best treatment of the Romulans in Star Trek, and it's a damn shame that Paramount ignored her work in favor of... whatever they ended up using. Denise Crosby clones, vague allusions to Spock and revolutions, something like that, but not anywhere near as good. Plus, her non-Trek fiction is good. (And I give her extra double bonus points for writing some of the best Trek comics ever, including the inspired Ajir/Grond storyline.)

Armor was written by John Steakley back in 1984, and it's still one hell of a read. Aliens, the futility of war, lost princes, hidden identities, armor suits, it's got a lot of stuff worth reading. They adopted his novel Vampire$ into a James Woods vehicle back in the day, but I've not read that one.

Richard C. Morgan's book Altered Carbon has an intriguing premise: what is everyday life like when you can download your consciousness, memories, and skills into any body. Part murder mystery, part thriller, part cyberpunk, part dystopia, part utopia, Altered Carbon is the tale of Takeshi Kovacs, ex-UN Envoy, ex-criminal, ex-lots-of-things, downloaded into a double-cross deal where he has to find out why a wealthy guy killed himself. By the wealthy guy. There's also a sentient hotel called the Hendrix, lots of shooting, and a bunch of more shooting. Not for the squeamish.

If I could live in any one society in a book, it would have to be Iain M. Banks's Culture series. The best place to start might be Player of Games, where the Culture (a galaxy-wide civilization with mile-long starships, worlds, hypersmart AIs, and a bunch of rivals) sends one of its citizens to troubleshoot what to do with an alien society. The Use of Weapons and Excession are also quite good. (Fun fact: Banks writes his regular fiction under the name "Iain Banks" and his SF under the pseudonym "Iain M. Banks.")

Downbelow Station is probably my favorite C.J. Cherryh novel, telling the story of a multi-faction struggle, spacestations, and human societies at the breaking point. It won the Hugo award, so it's perhaps fairly known...

The new Dozois anthology was just published, so I should have some thoughts about it as soon as I get my mitts on it.

He's the Cooler King

While shopping at Kinokuniya yesterday, I found two items that went from me having no idea they existed to wanting to own them right now.

The first was a Domo-kun hoodie, the other was a t-shirt with a Kubrick Domo-Kun on it.

I've been looking for images of both of those this evening, and while I have not been very successful, I did find this:

Kubrick Great Escape Series A

Just when you thought Steve McQueen couldn't GET any cooler, now he's made of ABS plastic and designed by Medicom.

That sorta makes up for the injuries I sustained at kickball practice, I think. I am getting old, I guess.

Giant! Fighting! Robots!

Gamespy has their coverage of Supreme Commander up on the Web now.

Um. Excuse me. I think I need to go lie down for a minute.

When Black and White first came out, one of the things that blew me away is that they had the ability to zoom in on an apple sitting in a village, out to a map of the continent. Supreme Commander expands on this sense of scale, allowing you to zoom in on units in the battlefield, or out to a world map. You know, where you can direct forces to target geographic regions.

All games are hyped like crazy before they come out, but this really does feel like taking Total Annihilation (still one of my favorite games) to the next level. There's an interview with Chris Taylor that's worth a read.

GameSpy: Take us back to the concept phase of Supreme Commander. You always wanted to do a Total Annihilation 2, but that didn't work out. What was the thought behind moving to a "spiritual successor?"

Taylor: As a game designer I have my own view of what I think an RTS is all about. When I sat down to design Supreme Commander, I tried to visualize the experience in fresh and interesting new ways. The first was my realizing that although we call this genre "Real-Time Strategy," it should have been called "Real-Time Tactics" with a dash of strategy thrown in. The goal with Supreme Commander was to really deliver the strategy, by opening up the game to an enormous theatre of war, with some incredible, never-seen-before Super Units, that absolutely require the player to think strategically before attempting to deploy them into the field.

I wonder if he's interested in my idea for an RTS, where it's all about sharing and hugs!

Cycle of felines

anticipation
Originally uploaded by GiantFightingBot.

No matter where we go in this city, there's always a neighborhood cat that hangs around us.

When we lived in the apartment, we had three next-door neighbor cats that would come in, get a snack, hang out, and then go home. One of them even helped my cat Zelda get out of a tree after she'd been chased there by dogs—the cat meowed encouragement for her to come down.

Now that we're in the house, we're on our fourth set of neighborhood cats as visitors. The first three sets have all moved away, sadly. I still miss Sammy (I'll upload some pictures of him later), as he basically tried to move in with us. For example, when I found out that his owners were moving, I went over there to say goodbye. Sammy followed me back home, ignoring his owners.

Now that the last round of cats have moved away, we have three new visitors, one of whom is very, very interested in the birdfeeder in the backyard.

Eventually we'll learn their names. Not sure who they belong to yet, but there's a lot of turnover what with the housing market ballooning into a bubblegum crisis. OK, not that Bubblegum Crisis.

Blitz mentality

The Tube is running again for the most part. Buses are out and about. And then there's this statement from the mayor of London:

In the days that follow look at our airports, look at our sea ports and look at our railway stations and, even after your cowardly attack, you will see that people from the rest of Britain, people from around the world will arrive in London to become Londoners and to fulfil their dreams and achieve their potential.

They choose to come to London, as so many have come before because they come to be free, they come to live the life they choose, they come to be able to be themselves.

Now if only housing prices in London weren't so amazingly insane—I wouldn't mind moving to London to be myself.¹ But changing my monthly mortgage payment for weekly rent? Don't think I can do that quite yet, alas.

On the other hand, I can probably afford a video game or two. The new issue of Play magazine has a huge spread on Shadow of the Colossus. I am a huge fan of Ico—the first game put out by this development team. So I'm a understandably curious as to what they can do four years later with another title. The screenshots and video I've seen so far have been amazing.

¹ - Obligatory Mister Miracle reference for Kevin: Let me be Scott Free and find myself!

Never rains but it pours

Via August at xoverboard.com:

Oh crap, oh crap, oh crap

I was just sent a media advisory to expect a possible statement from Chief Justice Rehnquist between 10:00 and 11:00 am tomorrow morning.

Maybe he, too, is in LOVE with Katie Holmes and is going to fight Tom Cruise, MD to the death for her!

Thoughts from Whiskey Bar and Kung Fu Monkey on the London attacks. There was also a thread on the Flickr photo pool about the bombings that turned into a giant trollfest. "We need to kill all the sheet-heads." I swear that's a direct quote from one of them. It's like I'm on the playground in kindergarten and I'm hearing one of the snot-nosed kids repeat what his drunken father rambled on about the previous night, trying to scare the other kids into submission.

Foreign policy as a playground brawl. I'm sure I'm not the first to suggest it, nor the last.

To balance out all this carnage, there is a nice story about Brian Lee O'Malley's Scott Pilgrim. If you haven't read it yet, go out and snag it. If you want to borrow my copies, let me know. I'll be glad to lend them out.

This message was brought to you by awesome rat graffiti and the sound effect SHLURP.

The news for wombats

This is how you break news?

London has been rocked by a series of explosions on the buses and Underground. I'm not in London -- I'm in Michigan teaching. So far, all of my loved ones are fine, too. Thanks to everyone who wrote in asking after me.

Yes, because it is ALL ABOUT YOU. Dozens of people died today and hundreds more were hurt, but you've got your priorities straight.

BoingBoing used to be all about the fun stuff, but lately? When did you jump the shark? Spatch has suggested it was the piece about a guy whose earwax looked like a little face. He's on to something...

The Prime Minister then ate some delicious mulberry leaves. Yum, yum.

New York? Madrid? No, London

Six explosions rocked through London today, hitting the Tube and buses during rush hour traffic.

Resources and news of use:
BBC coverage
BBC blasts-at-a-glance
Blast locations (map)
Guardian coverage
Guardian newsblog
Flickr photo pool (!!)

Despite the incredibly weak response from our President and our government (blah blah continue war on terror blah blah No, we don't plan to raise the alert level to Ernie), our hearts are with the people of London and those worrying themselves sick about friends and family living there. You deserve better than platitudes from this side of the pond.

The world became briefly American after 9/11, a sentiment which has totally evaporated in the face of our ongoing adventures around the world. Today, sadly, we are all British. Rule Brittania. God save the Queen.

Independence hangover

Fun research project time:
After listening to the innumberable rockets, mortars, shells, sparklers, snakes, bottle rockets, etc., launched last night, I got to wondering how much gunpowder did the nation use last night? And how that filtered through the air, into the water, etc. (Bonus question: if we'd all bought our explosives through Halliburton and KBR, how much markup would we have received?)

Most of the holiday can be summed up by the following three things I saw on the campus grounds while walking to work:

• An empty beer can
• An empty packet of Camel Lights
• A spent rocket, with scorch marks on the pavement

Now if the unknown reveler had just left a gnawed T-bone on the ground, the portrait would be complete.

The folks who so dearly loved the Iraqi Information Minister have a new site: TomCruiseIsNuts.com. And since the Library of Congress urges you to Read More About It: everything you ever wanted to know about Scientology is at Operation Clambake—after a visit, you might be like me and be unable to restrain yourself from making little open-and-shut clam motions with your hands.

Celestial Fireworks

NASA and the ESA's mission Deep Impact had a fairly impressive explosion today. Their 802-pound impact module hit at something like 6 miles/second, causing an explosion equivalent to 4.8 tons of TNT.

Man, I love science.

I really went into the wrong field. Between Stardust, the Mars rovers, Cassini, and now Deep Impact, there's some really cool shit going on. None of these robots are giant nor fighting, but they do OK.

A whole different level

Watching the tail end of the Davenport-Williams final at Wimbledon. When I was a kid, I wondered what you had to do to be a ball boy there, since I always liked how they ran out after an errant shot by Connors or McEnroe.

If course, there are probably downsides. "See this bruise? 103 mph serve, volleyed right into my head."

Your genius cover for this holiday weekend:

Captain America meets this guy, see... And then it gets weirder from there.

Update: Dial B for Blog has the back cover!

Also, removing some crap since it violates the "be funny, not angry" example set by John rogers...

I'm off for a weekend of kickball, beer, and being with friends. Probably pretty quiet over in this neck of the woods for a while.

Gaming like it's 1999

In a fit of retro-gaming after seeing the buzz for Supreme Commander, I reinstalled Total Annihilation today. They're claiming it's a "spiritual" successor to TA, since Atari owns that intellectual property and they don't want to give it up to Chris Taylor.

Total Annihilation rocks, even after all these years.

What still works:

• Musical score is great
• Commanding units—command queues still haven't been equaled in newer games
• Giant fighting robots!!
• Lots of the big explodo
• The depth and breadth of units (flying, walking, driving, building, defense, walls, hovercraft, artillery, cloaks, power units, reactors, radar, sonar, naval vessels, amphibious vessels)

What doesn't work:

• The voiceovers (bombastic doesn't even cover it)
• The story's a bit... weak
• Two sides are balanced by being basically the same
• No deformable terrain (dammit, if I have artillery, I wanna blow up a hill!)
• Such a large array of mostly similar units that there is no reason to build a lot of them

Speaking of Chris Taylor games, I see from the perfectly cromulent blog of Pete that Uwe Boll is making a Dungeon Siege movie. Terrifying. DS was a pretty good alternative to Diablo, but I'm not sure I'd sit through two hours of either if they were non-interactive. Let alone a projected 3-hour running time.

All this is basically me trying not to think of Justice O'Connor retiring. I'm looking forward to which nutjob Bush will nominate, though part of me is still thinking he's going to go with Condoleezza Rice. The only bright side is that this probably means that Bolton's recess appointment to the UN ambassadorship won't go through, for fear of poisoning the water. On the other hand, what with the price of gas, Afghanistan, and the judicial retrospectives, they might slip it under the radar as their Friday surprise.

It's probably time to go blow up some more robots, I guess.