Freshly back from vacation, I’m going to “kick things off” with a pro forma link to some piece I wrote for the magazine! Actually this is a hugely important piece to me, in a personal way, because it’s about Douglas Hofstadter, the guy who wrote Godel, Escher, Bach (no, we’re not doing umlauts today), an incredibly brilliant, funny …
New Halo Wars Screenshot
Another gorgeous screenshot from Halo Wars — the Halo world RTS game — has calved off the great secret Halo Wars iceberg and floated into the warm public waters of the Internet:
This is something called a Sparrowhawk – some kind of short-range Harrier-type VTOL unit? – caught in the act of stirring up circular whorls of dust. …
Wil Wheaton: A Tribute
If you read this blog, you should really be reading Wil Wheaton’s blog. In fact you should probably read his blog first. Then, if you have some free time and nothing better to do, you should read this blog. He is, along with Tycho at Penny Arcade, the gold standard of nerd bloggers.
I assume you already know who Wheaton is — he …
Watchmen, Tintin Tidbits. Crumbs!
A while ago I gave up reading Ain’t It Cool News. I don’t know why, maybe it was those big chunky sans-serif fonts. But I’ve come back to the fold lately, and I gotta say, they have the stuff. I hadn’t heard about this curiosity: a test-image of Rorschach from Watchmen buried in one of the 300 trailers. You can tease it out of the …
Captain America Lies A-Mouldering in the Grave
So Captain America is dead. I know this not because I’ve read the comic, but because I’ve read the news reports about the comic.
Oddly enough I’m a fan of Captain America. I say ‘oddly’ because when I was a kid old flaghead wasn’t considered one of the ‘cool’ comics — he wasn’t dark and edgy like the X-Men. He wasn’t secretly a nerd. …
Priceless Nerd Memorabilia Priced, Sold
Obi-Wan Kenobi’s cloak — the one that slumps to the floor, mysteriously empty, when Darth strikes him down — has been sold at auction for 54,000 pounds. You can check out the auctioner’s announcement here, official press release here. This odd detail jumps out from a BBC report:
While Sir Alec’s cloak was missing, it was loaned to
…
Update: More on Sony’s Playstation Home
Here’s the demo:
OK, so this is cooler than I expected (though the Second Life-meets-XBox Live thing was essentially correct): a fairly clean, sane 3D environment for socializing, multi-player matchmaking, and sharing media. All to a chill-out ambient soundtrack, narrated by some chick with an anglo-australian accent.
For …
Gaming News: Sony Makes a Move Online, Apple Maybe Sorta Does Something
There’s an incredibly vague piece in the New York Times today about Playstation Home, Sony’s answer to Xbox Live. “As players progress through a game, they will unlock various virtual prizes that they can then show off to friends and rivals, the executives said.” According to an earlier Kotaku post, this is implemented as a little …
They Don’t Know Dick. As in Philip K.
I got a funny feeling the other day as I opened a package and found inside one of the stately grey pre-publication galleys the Library of America sends out. The last five authors to be enshrined in the Library of America were Hart Crane, Saul Bellow, John Steinbeck, Capt. John Smith, and Thornton Wilder. If that sequence were one of …
Firefly News: It’s Always Summer…in My Heart
(More bits and pieces today, as I continue to cope with a debilitating illness and a brutal deadline, both. Keep those cards and letters coming.)
I’m a sick Firefly fan. I barely watched it when it was on — lay its premature death at my feet, go ahead, I didn’t ‘get’ it — but I wore out the DVD set. And now I always get a pleasant …
Lego MMO News: There’s a Lego MMO!
As the Kotaku post implies, this could actually be a really good idea. A sweet spot between the flying-phallus total anarchy of Second Life, and the over-structured, resource-farming grind of World of Warcraft?
Or it could, like most things, suck. At least this way we get to find out.
Now Available in Paper-vision: My Piece on 300
My piece on 300 is in this week’s Time. You can shell out for the print edition, or you can enjoy its pallid digital ghost here.
I knew I wanted to write about 300 the minute I saw the trailer — the minute I saw the shot where the Spartans are slowly, inexorably backing the Persians off a seaside ledge — bodies tumble off the ledge …