my.bicycle

I’m going dark for the next two weeks, for a trip to the USA. Blog postings may be substantially decreased during this time. If so, have fun in the archives. On the other hand, I may end up dregding through old Drafts, and posting in a flurry.

I leave you with this thought: Have you ever noticed that Christopher Lambert and Ren Hoek have exactly the same voice? Ever notice that they never appear in public together? Hmmmm...?

I cannot possibly be the only one who wants see Steve Jackson Games’ Frag adapted as a videogame. Oh, the delicious irony...

Handmade masks, and not quite as outrageously expensive as one might find them at various faires.

This short film, Cathedral, looks intriguing. It apparently garnered an Academy nomination, but it has never even blitted on my radar. As gorgeous as the imagery is, the website is short on details and common (web) sense: the Press page is rendered as graphics, and has broken links to press materials, and appears to intentionally override the status-bar display of where a link will lead. </whine> Still, very pretty and I hope to see it somehow, someday. (via LiveJournal)

Blizzard’s World of Warcraft MMORPG has posted a proposed character name guideline, which has apparently caused both rejoicing and berserker behavior. If I’m playing and paying for it, I don’t want to break immersion by seeing the sultry drow before me is named "BRitNEYsPEaRzR0x0rz" or "Titfu©K3R" -- but I think this could be handled via a "Allow Lame Names" toggle in an Options menu, defaulted to “off.” Players who didn't conform to the rules could be seen as “Peon” by players who do not want to see exotic names. (via gamasutra)

At a pre-TGS announcement party, Sony finally showed off their new, long-rumored PS2 (apparently not “PStwo” as many have speculated). It has reduced the overall volume of the previous form factor by 75%. It has a built-in ethernet adaptor (and an analog modem in the North American version). Holy crap, Sony can make hardware sexy; I own a PSX, and I still want this new thing. If they ever make one in milk-white, like my PSX and iBook, I'm doomed.

How to Become an Obnoxious Internet Camwhore in Five Easy Steps (via bites the sun)

ComingSoon.net has a mess of clips for Shaun of the Dead, the British zombie comedy. I must see this movie soon.

The P2P telephony/voice-chat service, Skype, first came to my attention several months ago via a “What are those KaZaA madmen up to after causing the MPAA and RIAA collective bloodpressure to shoot through the roof?” article in MIT’s TechReview. However it didn’t get installed until today, because Skype has finally offered an OS X flavor!

As of 25 minutes ago, “it’s my birthday too, man.”</beatles>

Begin with the doting.

I found this DPH entry quite funny:

Watching Batmen practising their grimaces on the corner outside the hotel?
Watching Stormtroopers spank scrawny girls in bad lingerie?
Trying not to smack an in-character faux-Jack Sparrow in the face just on principle?
Well, that's just a convention.

But couldn't stop laughing when this was an apparently unrelated followup. (note that “mistersleepless” is the sparrowpuncher in question)

If you’re needing more reading material, Neil Gaiman’s Hugo-nominated, Lovecraftian, Sherlock Holmes short story, Study in Emerald and Vernor Vinge’s The Cookie Monster, and Charlie Stross’ Elector are available online for free. This seems like a good moment to reiterate my nearly unqualified love for Plucker, the Palm OS app that lets me synch pages and pages of web/text content to my handheld, for reading away from my desktop machines. Sadly, my cradle is at work, and I've not got the BlueTooth synch sussed out as yet, or they’d be on my T3 already.

Warren Ellis’ livejournal presence, “mistersleepless” has a post collecting all his SCREAM TALKING bits. For the few people who read this blog and don’t follow Ellis’ stuff, here is your chance to peruse some excellent, shocking short fiction. Especially the pig one.

These aren’t from the Tokyo Game Show, but since I will be attending on the Professional Day (Fri) and one of the Public Days (Sat) I thought I’d give you all an unpleasant taste of what I will be facing on the Public Day. The booth babes are very hot, but sometimes the cosplayers will cause an unpleasant double-take, like when one grabs a can of Coke, but forgets that you finished the Coke an hour ago, and refilled the can with water. It’s not so much that water is horrible, but it’s not Coke. Masamania has more here (Masamania, who is wild, was finally featured at Boingboing.net for this very page.)

Friend of this blog, m. christian, has an interview promoting The Bachelor Machine, his excellent collection of science-fiction-themed erotica up at Suicide Girls. Though the SG interview page is safe for work, SG is a an adult site. If you wander off the interview page and find girlies, don’t come complaining to me: you’ve been warned.

BBC link. Just bookmarking for now. (via whumpdotcom)

The Lone Gunmen had a plot about the US government planning to crash airliners into the World Trade Center? Good grief. (thanks, KD)

If you’ve got a QuickTime movie that you only want to listen to (like, say, a music video), you can add it to your iTunes Library by dragging the file to it. Then to save space, you can right-click on the file and Convert to AAC, which will save a new file that contains only the sound.

Wikalong is a wiki that embeds itself in the Mozilla Firefox browser sidebar. Use it to make a running wiki-commentary of the web, or see what others have said about sites. My favorite mail program, Mozilla Thunderbird, has implemented RSS reading in a recent nightly build. Sam-I-Am, I don't know why this isn't being implemented in Firefox instead; mail application to read a stream of articles that most commonly reference web pages? While I know that RSS can be used for just about anything (e.g.: easily tracking the latest BitTorrents), but in general doesn’t this seem more web-centric than mail-centric? (via waxy and del.icio.us/revgeorge)

Labels: administrivium, web

Holy crap: a pop ditty inspired by The Silence of the Lambs, Greenskeepers’ “Lotion” is creepily delicious. (.mov) (Insert witty, Anthony Hopkins’ voiced cleverness here.) (via waxy)

If you watch Rejected (.wmv), don’t drool. It’s hypnotic. Details about it are at Bitter Films, where the artiste describes his experience with Big Business. (via tokyopia forums)

Fictionwise is giving away 18 non-encrypted e-books for free. On a side note, they usually have the Hugo Award nominees for short fiction available just before and a just a bit after the awards are given.

Update: They’ve just offered a second wave of free ebooks.

Thought I posted this before, but I guess I did it at futurismic. Here's a simple-as-it-gets Engadget tutorial on how to disable auto-run. Auto-run is the little feature on machines running Windows OS that can automatically open a CD's Setup application, or detect that an audio-CD has been inserted and run the default player (or maybe run a cutesy-Flash application on enhanced audio CDs), and it can also be used to run copy protection software on a PC without the user consenting to it. This is clearly malware, since it is not only not requested as an install by the user, and limits the ways the media can be used. There are also cases where it has flonked a machine's operating ability, and not just Celine Dion killing Macs, either. These are cases where we are thinking we're buying an audio-CD, but we aren't.

Engadget encourages everyone to kill auto-run. It may make iTunes a little bit less handy (auto-checks for new CDs, and CDDB tracklistings must be manually started), but I like that better than the alternative.

Here are a bunch of books that US residents can’t download, thanks to the fuckuppery surrounding the Public Domain. Remember: no fair peeking!

TargetAlert is an extension for the Firefox web browser that provides visual cues for the destinations of hyperlinks. If a hyperlink points to a something that is not a web page, then TargetAlert will try to append an icon to the hyperlink that represents its destination. (via waxy)

Nevermind me, I'm just bookmarking two Gamespot articles: one where Kasavin was right-on and another where he makes a lot of wrong-headed assumptions then presents them as fact to an audience of consumers and that may not know better.

• How to Shoot Yourself in the Foot (Sept 9 entry): Recently covered in Penny-Arcade as well, the whole sales and marketing fiasco coming this holiday season by having too many good games go on sale at once, all competing for the same money.

  Let me give you a very specific example of what I'm talking about. Take Tuesday, September 21 (which is just one moment in time during a season that will be filled with many other such moments in time). On this day, the following PC real-time strategy games will be released: Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War; Rome: Total War; and Kohan II: Kings of War.

• The Dating Game: Why games should only ever ship on time, and "when it's done" is no longer acceptable.

  As a game player, I demand to know, as early as possible, precisely when I can expect the games I'm excited about to ship. I want to be able to plan my schedule around those dates. Games like The Sims 2, San Andreas, and Halo 2 set the standard--I want to be able to plan for all release dates accordingly.

That is all. Move along.

It’s hard not to root for any western games, and hope they get a foothold in the Japanese market. GTA3 and GTA: Vice City aside, the Japanese market is not friendly to yoh-gei (western games).

So it always evokes curiousity about sales figures when something like Majesco’s Bloodrayne (1, not 2) ships here two years after its western release, and charges full price for the PS2 version and typically high for the PC version (¥7140 and ¥8329, respectively). Maybe they'll time the sequel to come out with the movie here?

MTV2’s Video Mods, music videos as performed by videogame characters, are viewable online. I’m a fan of Evanescence and of Bloodrayne’s half-vampire chica in hip-cut leather, and the lyrics seem apt for the media and venue:

Just what we all need
More lies about a world that
Never was and never will be

However, the Tribes: Vengeance interpretation of Von Bondies C’Mon C’Mon is the most impressive of the lot, both for maintaining the feel of the videogame at its roots, as well as expanding, rather than emulating, the music video format.

Upcoming movie from Dave McKean, Neil Gaiman, and The Jim Henson Company: Mirrormask. Some wonderful pictures of Gaiman-esque imagery as filtered through McKean are available at Smoking Life. Anyone have further details?

I was really worried about Resident Evil: Apocalypse’s 24% on rottentomatoes.com, until I saw that the original only scored 35%. Which means I will probably be happy to go and see it, if all I want is Milla firing guns at zombies. Which I do. Oh, how I do. The MPAA warning is enough of a review for me:

NON-STOP VIOLENCE, LANGUAGE, AND SOME NUDITY

Anyone else want to make Resident Evel with me? It would be a fan movie about an indestructible zombie motorcycle rider with a penchant for flashy jumpsuits.

Update: Milla Jovovich released a alternative-folksy-pop The Divine Comedy in 1994, “(i)nspired by a love of "elves and magic trees", Milla penned the lyrics at 15, recorded it when she was 16, and released it when she was 18(...)” Like many people, I was stunned at its quality, and have long hoped for a follow-up album. In an MTV interview regarding Resident Evil: Apocalypse, they asked about her music; she revealed that her personal site has downloads of demo tracks on which she has since worked, as well as links to other music project on which she has collaborated.

Labels: music

Patriotism means to stand by the country. It does not mean to stand by the President or any other public official.
- President Theodore Roosevelt
The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.
- H.L. Mencken

Richard Forno's Weapons of Mass Delusion: America's Real National Emergency is available as a free PDF. (via cryptome)

If you want the old Doom game with the new graphics, try Doom Classic (via waxy)

• Space Invader wall stickers
  
• glowing, groping, luminescent pillow with wi-fi
  
• Adhesive mounted 5" CD/DVD hubs (for bookmounting, etc.); I don't think I want a T-Shirt that boldly states 5" though, and I suspex that this would be a better DIY project than to spend that much money on them (4 pack for US$17?!).
  
• Better pingtimes when trying to play FarCry from my home machine. 350: what the hell is up with that?
  
• Thoracic Cavity Storage T-Shirt
  
• These Nike boots, which are not made for walking.
  
• Missile Balloons
  

My favorite Japanese singer, Hikaru Utada, has just released her first international album, called Exodus. It appears that she is going to just go with the name “Utada” in western territories. With the number of copy-protected CDs I've seen on the shelves lately, I was extra-stunned to see that this was just a normal CD, and the record company had seen fit to outfit the jewel case with an additional, high-quality board, extra-glossy jacket, a booklet of all the English-only lyrics rendered into Japanese, in addition to the booklet in the jewelcase. While thinking that I had briefly been transported to a magical land where the record company recognizes that treating me like a customer is good, and treating me like a criminal is bad, I didn't even look at the price tag as I brought it up to the counter. Like any other Japanese release, it was expensive: ¥3000. It’s worth it.

Charmingly dark ragdolls. (via DPH)

Fri Sep 10, 6:28 PM ET | SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Having sex with corpses is now officially illegal in California after Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger signed a bill barring necrophilia, a spokeswoman says.

The new legislation marks the culmination of a two-year drive to outlaw necrophilia in the state and will help prosecutors who have been stymied by the lack of an official ban on the practice, according to experts.

“Nobody knows the full extent of the problem. ... But a handful of instances over the past decade is frequent enough to have a bill concerning it,” said Tyler Ochoa, a professor at Santa Clara University School of Law who has studied California cases involving allegations of necrophilia.

“Prosecutors didn’t have anything to charge these people with other than breaking and entering. But if they worked in a mortuary in the first place, prosecutors couldn't even charge them with that,” Ochoa said on Friday.

The state’s first attempt to outlaw necrophilia, in response to a case of a man charged with having sex with the corpse of a 4-year-old girl in Southern California, stalled last year in a legislative committee.

Lawmakers revived the bill this year after an unsuccessful prosecution of a man found in a San Francisco funeral home drunk and passed out on top of an elderly woman’s corpse.

The new law makes sex with a corpse a felony punishable by up to eight years in prison. (via jwz's LJ)

It has been posited that we only laugh at misfortune. I would further state that misfortune that has been preceded by an overconfidently misplaced “watch this” wink is doubly funny. Let the kung-fu commence.

I’ve just uninstalled FarCry without completing it. The portion of it I played was excellent, and when it ran, it was fine on my mid-range PC. But I got one-two-punched, and that’s my limit.

Since the beginning, I have been a fan of PC games -- even when my “PC” was an Apple //e, and the game was Zork or Karateka. When other people got into their Famicom and Genesis consoles, those platforms seemed simplistic and childish in comparison to the devastating power of my 64kRAM machine with all the buttons anyone could want on a keyboard. Jump forward a little further, and actual IBM PC type games continued to trounce console games, first with adventure games, then with higher resolution graphics, improved sound, online play, 3D visuals -- the PC had always seemed to be the obvious place to be for the best experience.

When I left my beloved Mac environment and bought a Windows PC for the purpose of maintaining seamless compatibility with my work environment, a wide range of PC games opened up; this was just prior to the Playstation revolution, and PC games were at their peak. A huge volume of games, varying widely in quality not just of gameplay and graphics, but in engineering and ease-of-access were suddenly waiting to be played. I enjoyed installing and playing and uninstalling a number of current and classic games under Windows 95, and nothing ever cropped up needing special attention.

One day, after having the computer over a year, I tried to install Halflife. After the game had installed itself and, if I recall correctly, the then-current DirectX suite, it told me that my hardware drivers for my graphic card were not current, and needed to be updated. It provided a URL, at which I found a link to my card manufacturer’s site, where I then was able to download new drivers (over 14.4k dialup). I’d never touched ANY of my machine’s hardware drivers previously, and had the jitters as it installed, and I waited for it to reboot, thinking it was going to give me a screen of static crap. When it rebooted without incident I literally breathed a sigh of relief. The game ran fine, I played it all the way through, fastidiously avoiding installation of any additional patches or drivers.

Cut forward to FarCry: The copy protection on the game was incompatible with both of my internal DVD drives, so I had to install it via a USB 1.1 connected external CD-R/RW drive. This game comes on either 4 or 5 discs, so this took over a ½-an-hour to install. The 10 or so hours of gameplay I had were excellent. I wanted to try the online component, so I installed the 1.1 patch and went through the registration at the Ubisoft site, entered my CD-KEY before being able to access the server browser, and rolled around for awhile. Everyone was jumpy-popping-vibrating in place in-game, and it was hard to get a draw on them. When the 1.2 patch came out after significant delays, I installed it immediately. A couple of days later, that patch was recalled. I hadn’t saved the 1.1 patch when the 1.2 patch was released, and strangely so had a number of download sites; they simply offered NO patch, rather than the older 1.1 patch. The official recommendation was to roll back to 1.1, which I assume means to install 1.1 over 1.2, and hope that it takes hold.

In my case, this meant finding one of the sites that still had the 1.1 patch, installing it, and booting the game only to find that all of my Save Game files would no longer load. Then I tried multiplayer, where it loaded, but dropped me back to desktop after the level-loading-bar had reached completion. I didn’t feel like re-installing it via the external CD-R drive again, freeing up the precious 1/8 of my HDD at home, only to fill it up again with a game that I would need to re-play for several hours just to catch up to where I’d left off. To me, right now, this defines the world of PC gaming. There are two games in every instance, one where the consumer plays the game that they bought, and a meta-game where the consumer tries to figure out how to play the game they bought, based on troubles with the software itself or the OS or the hardware.

Then there’s console gaming. Plug the console into a TV, drop in a disc, and in a couple of minutes the game is in play. Saving consists of files on a Memory Card (or HDD with X-Box), and the only way to screw them up is to do something the game tells you not to do; contrast this with my lost games due to doing that which was recommended. If I could get used to playing FPS’s with a game controller instead of a mouse, I’d be in pig heaven.

This is the way that entertainment should work.

Meet Katherine Harris, source of highly questionable partisan behavior leading to the the results in the Florida election. (thanks, justine)

Inside the Monkeysphere (thanks, mckenzee)

When I moved back to the US from Japan in 1994, there were some changes in consumer goods that made me think I was in some Sliders episode rather than my birth-country on Earth Prime. The first thing I noticed was the VHS tapes all had a white-text-on-black-screen warning stating:

This film has been modified from its original version. It has been formatted to fit this screen.

When I asked several friends about it, they claimed that it had always been in place, and that I had simply never noticed it before. I’m still curious about when the mandatory labeling started, though I’m well-versed in what the meaning of it.

Next, there was a quirky little game called Magic: The Gathering, which should have been called Crack: The Addictioning. I bought a Starter Pack of Revised Edition, and was quickly hooked. However I think it was with Fallen Empires that I noticed a strange, rounded “CE” on the back of the cards. I’d seen a lot of weird little corporate runes before, but not this one. My first thought was that it was for “chaotic evil,” but it appeared on non-fantasy-game-themed items as well. Now I see them all over the place: monitors, computers, media... It turns out it’s just another form of certification, like ISO or UL or what-have-you, but for the European market.

Upstart publisher/developer Perpetual is making a Star Trek: The Next Generation-era online RPG. (FAQ)For this I bring the enthusiastic exclamation “schwing” out of retirement:
Schwing.

Labels: games

I've just read two disparate works of “youth literature.” Ostensibly this is what the “young people” of “today” are reading. The level of intellect involved with reading each, as well as the targeted age group provided such dissonance, I am inclined to review both of them simultaneously to cast each of them into relief against the other. First, I read "Fearless" by Francine Pascal. Someone said it was good, and I was in a rush to get an Amazon order muled over for me by a friend, so in it went. I guess if I’d known that the same author had provided the unending drama of Sweet Valley High, the quality level of Fearless would have been a mite less surprising.

The main character, Gaia, is a high school student who has an absentee father, a dead mother, and lives with her Dad's brother and his shrill wife. She is bad at making friends, since she is as surly as any other high school student who is not running for student government; this should make her stand out, but it seems a cheap nod to endear itself any pre-college student who might be antisocial enough to read instead of watching Beverly Hills, 90210. This is doubly ironic, as the whole of the book reads more or less like a novelization of evening dramas featuring pretty people. The only point of departure in theme from said TV programming, is that Gaia has no sense of fear. For whatever reason, she is physically incapable of feeling fear. Additionally, she has been trained in Batman-style multitude of martial arts to be a grade-A asskicker. So it's basically 90210-meets-Buffy.

There is some coarse language that doesn't fit with the rest of the presentation. Fearless isn’t bad, it’s just confusingly targeted if the author wants parents to feel comfortable with what their elementary or junior high school student children are reading. It’s also a little too obviously structured to be endlessly extruded youth lit product. I’ll not be picking up sequels, since the characters are unlikely to advance over the course of a few dozen books.

The next children’s book finished was Phillip Pullman’s Golden Compass -- or Northern Lights if referring to the UK edition; apparently book publishers like to sow confusion through needless changes in title. It is the first in a trilogy called His Dark Materials.

The "His Dark Materials" trilogy, of which this it the first book, has been compared to the Harry Potter books, both of which have won awards for children's fiction. It's a comparison that doesn’t stand up to scrutiny. Whilst both series could be classified as older children's fantasy, and both have been commercially successful, that's where the similarities end. Pullman takes us into much less familiar territory where the boundaries between good and evil are far less obvious. (NY Book Review)

There is also a play based on the works running in the UK right now. Do not doubt that I would give someone else’s left nut to attend a showing.

The Golden Compass was a real page-turner, very engrossing, and deeply touching. Lyra is a young girl who is studying at Oxford. She is an orphan, a tomboy, and very curious about the world around her. She has a familiar, a dæmon in the book’s vernacular, as all humans do; these creatures always stay near their companion human. The book has magic and sentient non-human creatures, but other than that I am unable to find another book on which to rest a comfortable comparison. As warm and easy a read as Harry Potter was, the drama and intrigue in that series simply pales in comparison to The Golden Compass. I look forward to reading the remaining two books in the series with great interest.

Plans are in the works to voltron together TiVO and Netflix, so subscribers will be able to download movies directly to their TiVO hard disk, rather than wait for them in the mail. (via engadget)

The Sony PSX is being price-slashed throughout Japan -- about two months after I bought mine. I bought the silver 5100 model, and am very happy with it, but I'd be even happier if it had cost about US$150 less than I paid. One wonders how Sony will position this for its eventual non-Japanese release, as it has been plagued by poor public-image and bad marketing, which have resulted in poor sales, since its introduction in the latter half of 2003.

Gabe (take the quiz)
Jesus fuck, thank god that's over. your score is 46
Avid Penny Arcade fan, obsessive gamer and able to kick Tycho's ass! On top of that you can handle DivX !!! Be proud of yourself, you've earned it. Now go out their and kick those babies asses all over!

3D Realms’ Duke Nukem Forever: A Timeline (via Fort90)

Major releases in prominent game series since first DNF press release on April 25, 1997:

• Grand Theft Auto 1, 2, London, III, Vice City, likely San Andreas
• Fallout, Fallout 2, All eight (to my knowledge) Infinity Engine games and expansions, and three Baldur's Gate console spinoffs
• Final Fantasies VII, VIII, IX, X, X-2 XI, Tactics, Tactics Advance, Crystal Chronicles, Origins, Anthology, Chronicles and the Ergheiz & two Mysterious Dungeon spinoffs
• Legend of Zelda: Four Swords, Wind Waker, Ocarina of Time, Majora's Mask, Link's Awakening DX, Link to the Past GBA, Legend of Zelda GBA, Oracle of Seasons, Oracle of Ages
• Unreal, Return to wherever the **** that was, Unreal Tournament, UT2k3, UT2k4 and at least 4 games off the top of my head that use its engine
• Quakes 2 and 3, and God knows how many games used those two engines
• Thief 1, 2, 3
• The Sims and all seven expansions
• Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 1, 2, 2x, 3, 4, Underground
• Madden NFL '98, FIFA '98, NBA '98 and NHL '98 for the Super Nintendo, and NHL '98 for both the SNES and Genesis
• Might & Magic VI, VII, VIII and IX
• With the exception of Meridian 59, every MMORPG apart from MUDs (I may be off here; at any rate UO was released five months after DNF was announced)
• Romance of the Three Kingdoms VI, VII, VIII, IX, Dynasty Warriors 1-4 (and 2 expansions), Samurai Warriors, Kessen 1 & 2, Dynasty Tactics 1 & 2, Mystic Heroes
• Every Dance Dance Revolution game
• Every single Pokémon game released in the US
• Every Deer Hunter game
• Chessmaster 5500, 6000, 7000, 8000, 9000 with 10th edition out in two months, just on the PC
• Twenty (to my knowledge) Mega Man titles, for GBC, GBA, GC and N64, not including direct ports
• Thirty (to my knowledge) Star Wars titles, again not including direct ports
  
• And something new! Working Designs is famous for taking absolutely forever to release a product. Since the announcement of Duke Nukem Forever, WD has released Albert Oddesy, Magic Knight Rayearth, Sega Ages (maybe), Raystorm, Elemental Gearbolt, Lunar: Silver Star Story, Sillhouette Mirage, Lunar 2: Eternal Blue, Alundra, Arc the Lad Collection, Raycrisis, ThunderForce V, Vanguard Bandits, Silpheed and Gungriffon Blaze, with Growlanser Generations out in two months. Working Designs CEO Victor Ireland has made approximately 3,710 Usenet posts since the announcement of Duke Nukem Forever.

Soulwax’ new album Any Minute Now is released on a copy-protected CD. Soulwax got its start as 2 Many DJ’s, a clubmixing, bastard-popping, mashup crew who created new songs using other people’s music as a foundation. O, irony! Though I’d love to have the new album, I bought a non-CP’d album of 2 Many DJ’s previous mixes instead (as heard on radio soulwax pt. 2, which is really good) , which will actually rip to iTunes, and it won’t kill my Mac.

By doing this, I am merely one hit on a statistic that says, “yeah, these guys are good,” but does not support copy-protection of CDs. I can't believe Soulwax thought it was a good idea to CP their record; it doesn't piss me off so much as shake my head in disbelief. What does make me angry is the RIAA claiming that CD sales have dropped 7% (arguable) and then go on to blame it on CD-copying and ’net piracy. Personally I refuse to buy any CD that I can't back up (we have a lot of scratched-up CD-R's, thanks to my five-year-old’s filing system) include in my iTunes library and listen to with the rest of my music.

To the RIAA: Don't offer damaged goods, then complain if no-one buys them.

Update: Several good ideas for record labels to address their problems (not just piracy, not just sales).

Labels: music

For anyone worried about me and my family in Japan, though the quakes were quite large and nearby, we weren't hurt and our stuff wasn't broken. Google news turned up several pages with contradictory numbers, but this one seems to have the numbers I feel most closely describe what happened. It felt like a 7+ (Richter) for the first one, nearly a 7 for the second at midnight, and a third at 06:00 that woke only me, and was likely barely a 3. The tidal waves were reportedly quite small. For tidal waves, that is.

Next up: Godzilla. (Not the Gibsonian one)

Delicious Library for Mac OS X will allow users to track their collection of books and DVDs and such. Manually inputting all the records for books and DVDs can be a real drag, so users can use their iSight camera to read the UPC barcode, which will do a net-lookup and identify the media. Smooth.

What the hell is a Lehtileikkeleet? Who was crazy enough to make a Lego version? (via jwz LJ)

I just knew George W. and crew were only goofing off, but I never expected to have overwhelming photographic evidence!

Enjoy some downloadable MP3s and Quicktime videos from plus/minus. This is for everyone, but especially for Sturgill, who I believe is currently existing somewhere web-inconvenient. Hint for the iTunes users: adding a QT movie to your Library, then converting it to AAC will give you just the sound layer of any QT video. Neat. Oh. (via KD)

I’ve been given five more Gmail invites. Leave a comment if you want one, though requests with good reasons included will have priority over simple “gimme’s.”

I was terrified when Bush declared war, not on a foreign nation, but on a concept: terrorism. How can any nation hope to win a war waged against an idea? “The war is not meant to be won. It is meant to be continuous.” (Bonus points for anyone who can tell me from whence the quote comes. It was used to finish Fahrenheit 911, and it is generally attributed to Orwell, but I can't find it in the searchable text of 1984.)

For anyone who argues that there are only two options, fight terrorism or pretend everything will be okay, I offer an alternative expense-sheet for how the money that has already been spent on pre-emptively invading Iraq to find weapons that didn't exist could have been better spent to actually protect Americans.

New iMac: all the guts are right behind the flatscreen; no more half-dome. As usual, the US$1299 price point is just enough to get me to push the BUY NOW button to see what the specs are, and I find that I really want the high-end model of this “low end” machine. At an Osaka store I recently saw the previous model 20" iMac and was stunned into immobility at its complete beauty. I’m almost afraid to see one of these new ones anywhere. My wife would say, “That's how the getcha!”

Mutual understanding is a fundamental part of our life. The WomenDay (former SexDay) program will shelter your relationships from any gaps. This information is for men only: Sometimes we can`t understand our wives or girlfriends. What is the reason? We would hate to clash with them because of simple misunderstanding of some primitive things. The WomenDay program is designed to give you an extra chance to learn the state of things of your second half. At least you will be able to forecast the most favorable days to settle some important questions with your wife. Perhaps you`ve decided that your family became too big? Undoubtedly, it is fine, but this process could be controlled! Just enter a couple of introductory parameters into the WomenDay program and you can plan your sexual life with great reliability.
WomenDay v.1.2

AVG (via paul boutin)

Update: El Otro Miguel says, “I reccommend AntiVir, from http://www.free-av.com/”