Every time I read Bruce Sterling’s explanation of what a ‘spime’ is, I instantly forget again. The concise version goes something like this; an object that, because of the way it has been manufactured or tagged, can be tracked over the course of its lifetime in space, time, the economy, etc.
I mention it only as an excuse to embed this …
There’s always something a little surreal in the way Microsoft handles previews of its Halo franchise. The Halo 3 event this past Friday was typical: instead of, say, staging a demo at a conference room at a hotel, they rented out a bar on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, complete with a doorman outside. You go inside. It’s dark. The …
I’m under extreme deadline pressure, exacerbated by my need to get to a Halo 3 preview event this afternoon. Not that I’m complaining about that second bit. Anyway, I’m passing the savings on to you.
— The Terminator is coming back. Sans Arnold. Though is this news? They’re already doing the Sarah Connor Chronicles, with Lena Headey of …
This via Bruce Sterling: an experimental rocket engine that runs on methane instead of oxygen/hydrogen or solid fuel.
The point being that methane is cheap and plentiful in the outer solar system, so you wouldn’t have to haul all your fuel up out of earth’s gravity well:
Traveling further out in the solar system, methane becomes even
…
This is a tease. There was no hot gossip coming out of the party for the Time 100. But there were some huge power nerds there, including George Lucas, who reportedly called Spider-man 3 silly, which is something that I happen to agree with. He also mentioned the Star Wars TV shows — “they won’t have members of the Skywalker family as …
Ordinarily I don’t subscribe to a world-view that accepts that a single blog posting is sufficient pretext for my doing a blog post of my own to link to it. I make an exception for Wil Wheaton’s posts on TV Squad. Periodically Wheaton — who played Wesley on Star Trek: The Next Generation — will re-watch one of the old episodes and …
Stayed up too late last night reading Anthony Holden’s Bigger Deal: A Year Inside the Poker Boom. This is a sequel to Holden’s Big Deal, a book he published in 1990 about his year on the professional poker circuit (he played in the 1988 World Series of Poker). That was pre-poker-boom, when he was peering inside a little-known, hermetic …
It’s been about a year and a half since the last time I actually paid for the Internet. When I first moved into my apartment I slapped down my laptop, sniffed around for whatever free networks were in the air, found a few, and just settled in. That moment where I would actually suck it up and call the utilities and wait for the guy and …
I know Spider-man 3 made $148 million last weekend. I know. My fingers are clammy and twitchy because I know I should be blogging about it. I just really, really don’t want to see it.
I enjoyed the first one a lot. The second one I kind of white-knuckled my way through — I had to fast-forward (16X!) my way through the wise, melancholy …
I ran a panel about superheroes at the Tribeca Film Festival yesterday. On hand were: Zak Penn, screenwriter of the latter two X-Men movies, plus the upcoming Incredible Hulk; Andrew Cooke, who directed a documentary about comics pioneer Will Eisner; Joe Quesada, editor-in-chief of Marvel Comics; and Thomas Haden Church, who is famous, …
Funny. Though it’s probably time they retired that record-scratch sound-effect segue.
I’ve been shirking my regular work-related subway reading in favor of a new anthology entitled When I Was a Loser: True Stories of (Barely) Surviving High School, consisting of personal essays by various writers about how awful high school was.
It is, like any anthology, a mixed bag, but the good stuff is truly good, rich with period …
