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 …
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. …
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
…
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 …
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 …
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 …
(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 …
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.
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 …
You know, I’ve given more than one lifeless, stuttering corporate presentation in my life. Doubtless I will give more. And I don’t think I deserve to be mocked for it mercilessly, around the clock, on the Internet. I don’t think anybody deserves that. Unless it’s funny. Giant enemy crabs remix! This is from Sony’s 2006 E3 …
A lovely book landed on my desk today: Core Memory: A Visual Survey of Vintage Computers by John Alderman, Dag Spicer, and Mark Richards. It starts with a reconstructed version of the Z3 Adder, a WWII-era machine that used “hole-punched movie film” to store data, and goes up through Google’s first production server, which is not very …
Oh, snap. I may have to become a Christian just for the occasion.
Casting rumors are here. Quoth he: “the roles of James T. Kirk, Mr. Spock and Dr. McCoy may go to three very big name stars: [Matt] Damon, Adrien Brody and Gary Sinise.” Sinise could use the work, but damn, those other two? I guess it’s possible. Matt Damon: Kirk :: …
