my.bicycle

I mentioned Plucker in an earlier post, but want to throw it out here again. I really like this tool, which allows me to easily and automagically strip webpages in their current incarnation, reformat them for viewing on my Palm, and then view them there, easily. My T3 is BlueTooth enabled, but not wi-fi, so being able to keep up with my favorite sites sans connection is very nice. To topi it all off, it's available in Windows, Linux, and OS X flavors.

Magnifico comic A Softer World takes on current headlines with it's usual < a href="http://www.asofterworld.com/news/news_0.html">understated grace.

New for Playstation 2: "Daibijin" (GIANT BEAUTIFUL PERSON) Play as the Japanese Self Defense Force as they battle against a giant, bikini-clad woman who is trying to destroy Okinawa. (via waxy)

Atom 0.3 to RSS 1.0: "This is a simple Web service to convert Atom 0.3 XML feeds into RSS 1.0 ones." (via lockergnome)

Unreal Tournament now has an Alien Swarm Add-on. The aliens however, are still crawling all over the place via their BitTorrent distributions. This seems similar to the Natural Selection TC for HalfLife, except that it's top down, single-player or co-op only (not deathmatch), and apparently near-pro in execution.

[+] 0 comments  

Big worms bad, small worms good.

Sign of the Apocamon, #00583: An anime series featuring t.A.T.u. Yes, them. The Russian pop-tart band... thing. It doesn't make sense, because I thought the whole nation of Japan was fed up with them after the last couple t.A.T.u. fiascos, when they were snotty and ran away from their concert and TV engagements (because they're really big stars, and shouldn't have to share the stage with anyone, even during show intros). (this, via fark)

"Japanese porn starlet to present Xbox TV show" (link: ANSFW pic of said "starlet")

Labels: nsfw

The New York Times- From the Editors: The Times and Iraq: "Over the last year this newspaper has shone the bright light of hindsight on decisions that led the United States into Iraq. We have examined the failings of American and allied intelligence, especially on the issue of Iraq's weapons and possible Iraqi connections to international terrorists. We have studied the allegations of official gullibility and hype. It is past time we turned the same light on ourselves."

"While game reviews often have an effect on a publisher's bottom line, that effect has never been quantifiable. However, now, Warner Brothers Interactive Entertainment has begun directly tying royalty payments from licensees to ratings from game-review sites." Warner Bros. to peg license royalties to game reviews (GameSpot)(gamesindustry.biz)

On the surface, this would seem to be an excellent idea to prevent some really horrible games. On the other hand, there are so many cases where the game development studio can be railroaded into making a game that is less-than stellar, it boggles the mind. It's telling that the primary offender and commentator that articles have pointed at is Atari, and their Enter the Matrix game. The trouble is not so much that Shiny is not capable of making a good game, but that the prospect of launching an all-platforms game simultaneously with a movie's premiere, while containing live-action content from the movie is, under current game development pipeline models, almost certainly insane. I enjoyed one developer's comment on the topic from Penny-Arcade:

WB's plan is a great one. As a person that has made one or two crappy licensed games myself (even for Warner Bros.) I welcome the idea someone saying, “hey quit making shitty fucking games you asshole”. It’s good for the industry and I don’t like shitty games any more than the next guy.
Now, with that said am I going to get more time to do them? Am I going to get more money? Are the Movie studios going to quit catering to the lowest bidder and go with the quality studios? The biggest and last question, are the movies studios still going to wait until the last three months of production and insist on changing the entire fucking game because one of their fat executives played it for five fucking minutes and didn’t think he liked it? When answer to those questions equal no, then and only then with shitty movie licenses quit being produced.

My impression is that it's not the studios specifically, or the developers, or the publishers that are the middlemen in almost all of these deals. It's the dynamic that exists between all of them. The Big Ape-developed game for Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace? It was operating under the same schedule as Enter the Matrix. I seem to recall Minority Report having similar issues, which is no surprise. It's not like Treyarch can't make a good game...

According to this IGDA - Quality of Life White Paper, game developers are suffering from a low quality of life, and a related GIG News article relating to it.

Here's a bonus idea from our GDC roundtables. A TV network never sends a series into full-scale production until they have written a sample script and a "series bible", shot a pilot episode or two, and reviewed the concept in detail more than once. Movies go through a similar process, with pre-production routinely lasting years. Why don't we sign prototyping contracts more often?

After all, a publisher can fund fifty $100,000 design-prototype-and-find-out-what-really-works-for-the-player deals for the price of a single AAA game that fails in the marketplace. One of the main reasons why projects slip and fail is that we go into production without having a clue what feature will make the game fun. By funding more experimentation early on, without tying it to a full-scale production budget, not only would we experience fewer late-cycle cancellations, we probably would get more (provably successful) gameplay innovation as a bonus.

There are a lot of people working really hard all over the world who would happily trade places with most game developers with little fuss, and probably a good measure of thanks. I'm not an apologist for the situation, but I think developers are going to be screwed by outsourcing, just as textiles, garment, cell-animation, have gone that way in the past. While I recognize that there is a good deal of skill and talent involved in making games, and the garment and textile industries are primarily trades that can be accomplished by the minimally educated, I feel I've also seen a lot of non-Japanese and non-US success stories lately. The Eastern Bloc nations seem to be putting out PC-based first person shooters faster than a chain-gun; Serious Sam did well, You Are Empty looks great, and S.T.A.L.K.E.R. may even have some story in it. I can't help but wonder how much effort it would take to voltron together a team using one of those sexy engines with an experienced game design effort, and put together something stunning and relatively inexpensive. Moreover, I wonder if any of the major publishers are already moving on it, rather than just talking about it.

We need to think very carefully about the coming wave of transnational business practices. I've no idea what the future holds, but I fear there is no way to compete with the wages paid to outsourced labor. NAFTA was small beans. It's more likely that the populace will have to petition the government to impose restrictions on companies that want to end-run national economies. Of course, that's about as likely as the Feds putting the brakes on companies that abuse State-level governments, even when the states are unable to hold their own against them.

BTW, yes: "The job of a puzzle designer is to make people feel smart." – Scott Kim, Casual Games Summit.

Using my blog as a bookmark file again:
Pic: The whole "Spanky" thing probably should have been a tip-off.
The Day My Mother's Head Exploded.
Baby Art: Trevor Jones (I think this was on Scattershot a month or two ago, but it bears repeating for sheer ero-creep-out)
Pan-o-ramas of Fut-u-rama (via the ever-more-luscious Waxy)

Labels: nsfw

Michael Moore's Farenheit 9/11 may be distributed via BitTorrent; this is the first instance I'm aware of where an artist has chosen to release their entirely original work over this P2P format.

Did anyone else know that the Shrub is outsourcing his campaign calls as well? Seems like a typically un-local-business, pro-profit, utterly right-wing republican way to deal with things. Of course, Kerry could just as well be doing it too.

"The producers of 'Gilligan's Island' are teaming with the producers of the 'The Bachelor' and 'The Bachelorette' to bring Gilligan's Island to reality TV." (via waxy)

Picture this: I'm in E3's Intel-sponsored Wireless Lounge on my AirPort equipped iBook, checking my home and work mail for the first time in three days. I was beginning to go through email withdrawal. As I sit on a small couch around a low table, alongside a number of people using the freely available laptops to check their mail, I foolishly click a link in one mail, causing a wave of techno sound and trekkie-geekness to issue out of my tinny, built-in speakers. (thanks, kristen)

"Much like a fortress built upon the sea, surrounded by high walls, the island possessed an air of a small kingdom, where its denizens boasted 'There is nothing we don't have here.' They were right. They did have everything within their miniature kingdom - except a cemetery. But the irony of it was proven by the passage of time. Already, the island had been doomed to turn into an enormous graveyard."

95% of Americans like cereal. 57% like sex. We've got cereal.

Cereality, a cereal bar and café for grain addicts. (via waxy.org/links)

This reminds me of the scene in Virtual Light:

He said he couldn't tell the difference anymore between the 'programs' and the 'commercials,' whatever that meant.

I was checking to see how my Atom feed (site syndication feed) looks in Kinja, when I noted Nike's new series of advertisements short films. Are these on the air in the US, or is this like the American Express "Adventures of Jerry Seinfeld and Superman," where the entire presence of the campaign is web-based? If this reaches a significant enough market, no wonder radio and broadcast TV stations are soiling themselves over the future of advertising...

JAL offers a personal entertainment screen with a bunch of crap games and a number of movies and TV shows for the long flight across the Pacific. It's about 10 hours from Japan to the US, and 11 hours returning. I don't sleep on airplanes at all, so I watched a lot of movies. ANA plays one set of movies going east, and a different set going west; JAL doesn't. I forgot this tiny fact, which means I watched most of the movies during the most tolerably short leg of the journey. (Note: All "title links" go to the IMDB listing)

Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World: Yeah, you know, I actually want to enjoy this movie when I eventually see it, so I didn't watch it on a 5-inch LED screen with poor contrast. It's in theaters now in Japan, so I'll check it there.

Something's Gotta Give: Better than I would have expected; plenty of witty dialog, not too many implausible situations, and reasonably thought provoking. Keanu almost holds his own against Diane Keaton playing herself and Jack Nicholson playing the standard Jack Nicholson character. Am I damning the movie with faint praise?

The Haunted Mansion: Hey, did I mention I just finished localizing the videogame, which is based on the ride, not the movie, and the movie is also based on the ride, so it's mainly a synergistically pleasing coincidence that the game benefits from the movie's release? Did I? Excepting Terence Stamp, Eddie Murphy is the BEST ACTOR in it. It's a horror movie for the whole family. Yeah.

Gothika: Total crap. I'm tempted to leave it there, but in fairness to the curiosity that this may cause in some, further explanation to advise against viewing is in order. This movie is a poorly organized, style-over-substance mish-mash of a half dozen other, better horror movies of recent years. I like Robert Downey, Jr. and Halle Berry, but their interaction is so forced and hard to believe, it undermines even the red-herring attempts the movie makes to throw at the viewer. Despite a number of non-sequitirs and unrealistic plot points, after an overwhelming amount of stilted dialog presented through a blue-tinged shot, the movie stumbles through to a completely predictable ending. Avoid this movie, as well as anyone who has anything positive to say about it.

Shattered Glass: This was the second-best in-flight movie of the bunch. I had heard about a reporter who had been caught fabricating his stories, but hadn't remembered the name, so what was likely no surprise to anyone who'd paid to see the movie was a complete stunner for me. The same thing happened to me when watching "A Beautiful Mind."

Kisarazu Cat's Eye Japan Series: Go Major: after seeing Ping Pong on a previous flight, I've been happy whenever I can watch a Japanese movie with subtitles, because professional translators frequently provide a more thorough translation than my limited language skills can. However even with English subtitles, this movie was hard to follow. Take a made-up rock band (at least I think they're less made up than Kishidan, who also appear in this movie), throw in Yakuza with racoon-dog statue time-bombs, Gomingo (a giant monster made of garbage that has been illegally dumped into the ocean), bikini-clad amazons who fish for crustaceans on their otherwise deserted island, then trade them for sex with the marooned Cat's Eye band, and a heavy dose of Japanese Maturi-damashi (Festival SOUL!), put it in a blender, and hit "frappé."

Michel Vaillant: For a French-language movie that I watched through reading the Japanese subtitles, this was a surprisingly engaging movie. I think my head was filling in a lot of gaps with story that may have been more interesting than what was actually happening though, so if you can find it dubbed in Bulgarian or East Elbonian, I recommend it.

One Piece: The Cursed Sword: (link goes to TV series' page) I couldn't deal with more than five minutes of this thing. Good grief. I remember when I was a kid, I'd have given my milk money to see more anime than was available then. Now I can't be bothered to watch it for free.

Enter the Dragon: The best movie of the flight; it suffered only from age and budget issues. Bruce Lee's undeniable charisma somehow couldn't prevent him from sharing equal billing with John Saxon in this excellent movie. Writing this, I have just now become overwhelmed with dread that it is most likely in the remake pipe in Hollywood.

Notting Hill: Richard Curtis has been a personal hero in humor for me since Blackadder and the best Dr. Who, EVAR. I'll watch just about anything he's done, but hadn't realized that he'd written this movie until seeing it. It isn't nearly as charming as "Love Actually," but overcoming the hollywood nature of Julia Roberts is nearly enough of a recommendation for any movie. Side note: I picked up Blackadder co-writer Ben Elton's "Blast from the Past" at a used-bookstore on this trip.

Labels: mashup

"The Japanese software market has entered into a traditionally quiet period after the Golden Week national holidays at the beginning of May, with the top ranked title being a Pachinko game which sold only 81,000 units. (...) In hardware terms, the PlayStation 2 continues to dominate with over 52 per cent market share, leading from the Game Boy Advance which had just under 39 per cent, and the GameCube with just under 8 per cent." (via gamesindustry.biz)

aiwaworld has a piece by Tokyoplastic to promote, um, something. It's very good, in that hypnotic, "happy I have nice headphones" kind of way.

It appears even my beloved Max OS X is susceptible to goofily permissioned script attacks.

Even though Google bought Blogger months ago, Google itself hasn't had a blog. Now it does. Today's post involves their guide for getting rid of spyware/malware, which they refer to more comprehendibly as "deceptive internet software." (via MIT TechReview)

As of 18:00 last night I'm back in Japan; as of 10:00 today I'm back in the office. As with every trip home, I'm struck by the differences between Japan and the USA. There are a number of things I want to write about, but I've not got time to go in depth, so I'll start with a list of things I didn't do in Los Angeles

• Drink coffee at a Peet's Coffee
• Eat breakfast or lunch at Kokomo in the Farmer's Market
• Eat a Krispy Kreme Donut
• Visit a comic store
• Visit a new bookstore
• Drink enough good, inexpensive, Californian wine
• Visit a strip club
• See several friends I still miss
• Have a bad time in Los Angeles

The last is easily the most stunning revelation for me of anything else. Most LA-aware readers are probably prediciting it would have been the Krispy Kreme, but no. I actually enjoyed being in Los Angeles. Sure, it's not hard to accidentally fall into a Krispy Kreme store in Los Angeles; they've grown to be nearly as ubiquitous as Japan's Mr. Donuts (and are arguably better, dependent on your tolerance for refined sugar), but somehow I didn't get into one. O! Elusive MAPLE BAR! One day you will be mine. Yess you willll -- but enjoying LA? That's unheard of.

Maybe it was the odd way people were willing to smile and say "hello," or a willingness to think outside the proscribed societal norm (whatever that may be in SoCal). People were friendlier than I remember, traffic wasn't as horrid as I recall, and the water didn't even taste as bad as my memory insisted it used to be. It leaves me wondering how much of this is a change in LA, and how much in myself.

I just noticed a "PC lessons" post in the My.Bicycle RSS feed. I can't picture Blogger/Google sticking unrelated stuff into their automatic site feed, so I think it's resident in the Atom2RSS conversion that is run through an outside service.

Hopefully most of you are using Atom-friendly aggregators, and have no idea to what I'm referring.

More news about E3, Los Angles, Japanese vs. American culture, etc. in a week or so.

Reason #17 of "Why I miss America" - Live Action Evil Dead performance.

My.Bicycle is on semi-hiatus for the next two weeks. I'm not dead, just busy with E3.

Mr. Bush claims that, "That's not the way we do things in America," and "They must also understand that what took place in that prison does not represent the America that I know." Well, of course not. It's not America at all. It's Iraq; even vague familiarity with a map will preclude such a misunderstanding. I wonder what America he does know, though. He further says that those who inflicted the abuse, "do not reflect the nature of men and women we sent overseas" -- I don't see how this can be true. They're there. You sent them there. They apparently have all this in their nature.

It dawned on me that I'm an elitist bastard. As a life-long Left-Coaster, it's really easy to simply dismiss backwater hicks, and what appears to be the commonality of the American South until they start showing up in the news as executors of our foreign policy. The sad truth is that generally Americans are poorly educated about tolerance and acceptance of other cultures. And as long as the backward billies stay in their prefixed hills, we can usually rest easy that our fellow citizens' ignorance and "charm" will remain a little dirty secret. But then we send them off as soldiers, sometimes the only Americans in any area will ever meet, and BANG, the cat is out of the bag. I mean, did no one see this coming? (via DPH)

Update: A Salon piece mentions that the torturers used the pics as screensavers and desktops. I feel like I'm going to puke.

Wally Wood's "22 panels that always work" (via DPH)

Link-rich Slashdot thread on E3 and its to-be-shown games. Will there even be enough hours in the day to see all this? And how do the "booth babes" fit in? (via waxy.org/links)

PARAMETERS, US Army War College Quarterly: Lessons from the LA Riots: "Police officers responded to a domestic dispute, accompanied by marines. They had just gone up to the door when two shotgun birdshot rounds were fired through the door, hitting the officers. One yelled `cover me!' to the marines, who then laid down a heavy base of fire. . . . The police officer had not meant `shoot' when he yelled `cover me' to the marines. [He] meant . . . point your weapons and be prepared to respond if necessary. However, the marines responded instantly in the precise way they had been trained, where `cover me' means provide me with cover using firepower. . . . over two hundred bullets [were] fired into that house."

THQ announced three new WWE-licensed titles. Yuke's is making "WWE Day of Reckoning" Nintendo Gamecube game and the new-ish "Smackdown vs. RAW" PS2 game. Studio Gigante is working on "WrestleMania 21" for Xbox. A "WWE Survivor Series" is being produced for GameBoy Advance. (For some reason, not all of the the newly available, per-SKU game pages were linked in the initial article)

Powell's Books - Review-a-Day - Lincoln's Constitution by Daniel A. Farber, reviewed by The New Republic Online: "Today, self-styled constitutional pragmatists and defenders of broad executive power in wartime have little patience for the technical details of the arguments that Lincoln offered to justify his actions. The president should be able to do whatever he likes to defend the country against a serious threat, they argue, and the legal justifications for his actions are little more than retrospective window-dressing that should not be allowed to constrain his options in any meaningful way. But this cynical view of the malleability of constitutional law was not Lincoln's view. Legal arguments were central to the formation of the policies that allowed him to achieve greatness as president. They constrained him from committing excesses and also liberated him to take extraordinary action when the exigencies of the threat required it."

The Amazon reader reviews of Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings movies are a testament to the fact that there is just no pleasing some people.

Bart's Preinstalled Environment (BartPE) bootable live windows CD/DVD: "Bart's PE Builder helps you build a 'BartPE' (Bart Preinstalled Environment) bootable Windows CD-Rom or DVD from the original Windows XP or Windows Server 2003 installation/setup CD, very suitable for PC maintenance tasks.
It will give you a complete Win32 environment with network support, a graphical user interface (800x600) and FAT/NTFS/CDFS filesystem support. Very handy for burn-in testing systems with no OS, rescuing files to a network share, virus scan and so on. This will replace any Dos bootdisk in no time!"

The Shrub encourages Japanese people to learn English. (via kissui)

I can apparently invite new people to use Gmail, Google's new webmail service. So if you've been considering chasing down gmail accounts on ebay, you can just post a comment here instead, and I'll invite'cha. Badda-bing, badda-boom.
Update: I only had two invites to use up. They're gone, now...

Transcript of Press grilling Bush spokesman Scott McClellan on Bush's National Guard service:

"Q: Scott, that wasn't my question, and you know it wasn't my question. Where was he in December of '72, February and March of '73? And why did he not fulfill the medical requirements to remain on active flight duty status?

MR. McCLELLAN: These records -- these records I'm holding here clearly document the President fulfilling his duties in the National Guard. The President was proud of his service. The President --

Q: I asked a simple question; how about a simple answer?

MR. McCLELLAN: John, if you'll let me address the question, I'm coming to your answer, and I'd like --

Q: Well, if you would address it -- maybe you could.

MR. McCLELLAN: I'm sorry, John. But this is an important issue that some chose to raise in the context of an election year, and the facts are important for people to know. And if you don't want to know the facts, that's fine. But I want to share the facts with you.

Q: I do want to know the facts, which is why I keep asking the question."

I had thought the whole thing would be self explanatory, but strippers have a FAQ. Stuff I never would'a thought of, such as: What kind of shape you're in makes a bigger difference in your earnings than anything else. An hour of exercise a day can mean $200 more a night. It's important that you understand that your body is how you earn a living, as such you have to take very good care of it. In the world of strip clubs the name of the game is low bodyfat. Sure some men like extra padding but no one likes cheese. It's an unfortunate truth but the slimmer you are the more money you will make. You don't have to be fashion model skinny but you do have to be tight if you expect to make good money. I personally find that a combination of yoga and weight training is ideal for the kind of look that men like.
I do Ashtanga yoga four days a week, run one-day and weight training one day. The most effective weight training exercises for woman are squats, lunges and stiff-leg or sumo deadlifts. None of these lifts should be done on machines- free weights only. Machines are no where near as effective. Train heavy and train hard. Yoga and dancing are both very catabolic activities (they break down muscle tissue) you will not get bulky.

If there's any question as to why we're so disliked abroad right now, think on these shining examples of diplomacy:
Abuse of Iraqi prisoners of war, covered in the Baltimore Sun, New York Times (free reg req'd), and CBS
(note: I originally Drafted this post on the 30th, April; I've NO idea if this is major news in the US, but it's been on the Japanese news with regularity in the intervening time.)

Killer Bowie mash-up (iTunes Music store link) by Go Home Productions, available "legitimately" through iTMS.
Plus: Reset Music, another mashup site. (via Thousand-faced Moon)

Update: Wired article on bootleg backlash against bowie's co-opting of the form for self-promotion. (via futurismic)

Labels: mashup, music

GODZILLA RETURNS: "We tend to think of 'Godzilla' as a cheesy monster movie, thanks largely to heavy re-editing in the Burr version that dispensed with nearly 40 minutes of director Ishiro Honda's original vision, two dozen or so sequels that got goofier and goofier, and rivals like 'Mothra' and 'Rodan.' But seeing the original version -- produced by a culture with still-fresh memories of atom bombs at Hiroshima and Nagasaki and a feeling of being caught in the middle of Cold War paranoia between the United States and the Soviet Union -- it's clear that it's time for a major reappraisal. 'Godzilla' is one of the great anti-nuclear films, made by a onetime prisoner of war and documentary filmmaker, with an original vision as well-imagined and chilling as 'Dr. Strangelove.'"

Gearbox readying Halo Custom Edition: "According to Gearbox, Halo CE will be a free, stand-alone, 170MB.exe based on v1.04 of the PC Halo, and will include netcode adjustments and fast shaders. While it doesn't require gamers to have Halo PC installed to play it, Halo CE does require the original's retail key to unlock. Halo CE will also be strictly multiplayer, and it will not include any of the original Halo's single-player maps. As it has not been through Microsoft and Bungie's testing process, it will be supported solely by Gearbox." Also check the FAQ.

Update: Sorry, I spazzed out, and didn't RTFF before hitting submit.

"Will HaloCE be a seperate and completely self sufficient game? Do I have to have the original HaloPC installed for it to work?
HaloCE is completely stand alone. You do not have to have retail HaloPC installed. However, you MUST have a retail Halo disc to install and play HaloCE. "

Nerve.com essay: The doctor grabbed my dick then shook his head and said "What the hell did you do to this thing?"

Full preview of Warren Ellis' Ultimate Fantastic Four #7. (via ellis' BAD SIGNAL mailing list)
Related: No one told me Bill Willingham is writing comics again; what's this Sandman-related Thessaly: Witch for Hire? I was a huge fan of Elementals through most of its incarnations. Ooh! Sequential Tart interview...

Timothy McSweeney's Daily Reason to Dispatch Bush (via sdemory)

DAY 22:
In speeches to the Veterans of Foreign Wars and the American Legion in August of '01, Bush promised reforms and improvements to health care benefits for veterans.
However, in January '03, the Bush administration's Department of Veterans Affairs announced that it would reduce access to its health care system in order to block over 150,000 veterans from enrolling in that fiscal year, due to a backlog of vets still waiting to receive treatment.
In March '03, Bush's VA budget was passed. It included raised charges for primary care and drug prescription co-payments, raised enrollment fees -- which had never before existed in veteran's health care -- and complete blockage of care for what the VA considers lower priority vets.

Terry Jones wrote an Op/Ed for the Guardian UK:

One of the chief problems with the current exciting adventure in Iraq is that no one can agree on what to call anyone else.

In the second world war we were fighting the Germans, and the Germans were fighting us. Everyone agreed who was fighting who. That's what a proper war is like.

However, in Iraq, there isn't even any agreement on what to call the Americans. The Iraqis insist on calling them "Americans", which seems, on the face of it, reasonable. The Americans, however, insist on referring to themselves as "coalition forces". This is probably the first time in history that the United States has tried to share its military glory with someone else. (via goblin cartoons)

See also:

• Invade Iraq? It's a No-Brainer
• Tony Must Try Harder