I’ll assume at this point that you’ve already heard the worst news the comic industry has ever heard, in that Disney is buying Marvel. No, it isn’t a bad dream that you can wake up from, or one that can be retconned later when lazy writers feel like it. It’s unfortunately actually happening. While some friends of mine such as Matt Cuthbert of AL.com might lead you to believe that the deal is no reason to get your spandex in a wad, I’m here to tell you that this is most certainly is as bad as you could possibly imagine.
I’m willing to make a bold claim at this point. Marvel will lose all editorial control. The lawyers or paperwork may not say so at this time, but it will inevitably happen. Disney is going to see the superhero genre and comic medium as something that should inherently remain childish or juvenile, and ensure that it remains so. They’ll water it down for the masses and take every opportunity to tell you that this will be the way you’ll like it from now on. A lot of apologists such as Matt are talking this morning about how Disney does produce complex, unchanged, or mature content, as evidenced by movies produced by Pixar or Miramax. And again, I’m here to tell you that this isn’t the case.
Exhibit A: Pixar is not wholly unchanged by the Disney merger. While there’s a good deal of influence that John Lassater and Pixar have had over Disney, there’s also a degree of influence that Disney has had over Pixar. Up, for example, was never originally intended to be a 3D film. Sure, Pixar made it work. But being forced to toe the company line and support Disney 3D wasn’t planned. Also, there was once a point in time when Pixar execs famously supported the idea that “..we only do a sequel if we know that the story will work”. Now Toy Story 3, Monsters Inc. 2 and Cars 2 are in development. Which have been announced or rumored after the Disney deal. Coincidence? You tell me.
Exhibit B: Disney does enjoy a certain degree of pull over Miramax. You can Google this for yourself to find more examples, but I’ll give you two. One old and one recent. Back in 2004, Disney tried their darndest to disassociate Miramax from Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11. Or how about recently when they’ve apparently become unhappy with the content of Mike Judge’s ‘Extract’, and have made the decision to “dump” it on the guess it won’t perform well?
Just be aware at this point that things won’t be as rosy as many are predicting. At some point, something like The Punisher making a morally questionable kill is going to freak Disney out. They’ll put a member on the editorial board, and then it all goes downhill from there. Just remember that today is the day when 70 years of great comic entertainment died.
This past weekend, my iPod Touch went kaput. I was listening to some streaming audio, which suddenly started to sound very garbled. I took the iPod out of its case and found that the screen was just as garbled, displaying random dancing pixels. Thankfully, the guys at the Bridge Street Apple Store took pity on my out-of-warranty Touch and decided to go ahead and replace it. I was so glad that they did because I quickly realized that I really can’t go on without one of these things. When I thought it was gone for good, I was already trying to think of ways I could have it repaired or get a new one. I’ve grown so accustomed to how great the thing is, I couldn’t have done without it. That got me to thinking about the things I could do with and the apps I use on it that are irreplaceable…
MLB.tv is easily and by far my favorite app. It’s a bit pricier than most apps at ten bucks, but well worth it. I do get the expected baseball scores and stats, but I also get live audio, something MLB could (and does) charge far more than ten bucks for. I often spend an hour or so outside each day mowing grass or working on other things outside. I’d probably usually hate doing that sort of stuff, but I now really look forward to it because I can listen to Atlanta Braves games while I’m doing it over my WiFi connection. Plus when I come back in I can look at video of the big defensive plays or home runs, usually posted within minutes after it happens.
However, the biggest asset of this app is also its worst. You can view a few selected live games, but they are beholden to MLB’s completely idiotic blackout policy. So it’s really not worth bothering with because you likely won’t be able to see live games of your favorite team anyways.
Another favorite of mine is Free RSS, which you can easily understand from the name alone. It’s a simple, lightweight, no frills RSS reader. You can quickly view headlines and entire articles from your favorite sites, usually within just a minute or two. It’s also very good about finding feeds, even if you don’t know the specific RSS address. Just point it to your favorite sites and it does that for you. The only lacking part about this app is that it doesn’t have a universal “All Read” button that applies to all feeds.
I also really love mobile dedicated apps like Graffiti, Around Me, or BrightKite. If I’m out and about and can pick up a WiFi signal, I can quickly find out where stuff is at as well as what other visitors thought about them. There’s a trick to these sort of things though, and it’s just a simple matter of accurately gauging which one is the most popular. Graffiti is pretty much dead because it suffers from a lack of activity. Around Me is great in that it doesn’t rely on this activity, and BrightKite is the most useful app right now because it tends to be the most popular. BrightKite users themselves tend to leave little more useful info than their location, but it’s still fun.
But perhaps the best function of my iPod Touch is its ability to gill in the gaps that I’ve not anticipated. Unless AT&T has some reason to intervene, there typically is an app for that. Even if I don’t know I need an app, I can quickly find it when that need arises through the App Store. This has applied so many times in the past, from uses like a way to manage my Netflix list (PhoneFlix is my favorite) to looking at XBox Live accounts (1337pwn). But the best medium for this is through games. All of the consoles have game stores nowadays, but it usually involves a cumbersome process of entering account or credit card information. With the App Store, you do that only once. And when you want a new game, you can find it and have it installed in a minute or two with only a few button presses.
This isn’t to say the process or the App Store is perfect. If you’ve followed the news at all, you know that Apple and AT&T have really cracked down on they will and will not permit you to do with your own device lately. They could find out that if enough tire of this, enough will jump ship to other platforms. But hopefully that will just encourage competition and make the OS even better than it already is.
Around two months ago, I stood on a scale and saw that I was around 185 pounds. Let me say that I do realize that this would be a respectable weight for a six foot guy at my age, but the consideration is rarely made that a fair percentage of that weight should be made in muscle, not fat. In my case I had been spending too much time sitting in cars, offices, and living room couches, so you can assume what made up my weight. After being just a little bit embarrassed while shirtless on a beach trip, I realized that it was finally time for a lifestyle change. My metabolism isn’t what it was when I was 17 and it was time to start making up for it.
Last night, Wii Fit was happy to inform me that I’m now at around 173. Over a ten pound loss in two months! Plus, I feel like I have more engergy lately and my shirtless reflection in the mirror is looking a lot better lately. Honestly, I made very few changes. I know they’ll not work for everyone, and I’m in no way any kind of expert on this subject, but I thought I’d share the small number of things I did consciously change that seem to have helped.
One Hour of Activity – For the past month or so, I’ve set a goal to spend at least one hour a day outside doing something. I tend to stay outside during the warmer months, so this wasn’t a big problem. While I do try to take a walk or a bike ride a number of days out of the week, I’m not always doing something extremely strenuous. Sometimes it’s just washing the car or watering the plants. Using a push mower to cut grass comes into play a few days out of the week, I’m sure that doesn’t hurt either. And after spending eight hours of the day in front of a computer monitor, it feels good to actually be doing something. It feels good to be moving around and I always find that I end up spending more time outside and having fun doing it.
Working Out – Ever since high school, I’ve made a habit of doing a few push ups and sit ups most days out of the week. But it wasn’t until recently that I realized that what I was doing what essentially pointless. I never pushed myself and became complacent. But recently, I’ve changed my habits a bit. At least four days out of the week, I’ll simply keep doing those kinds of things until I feel like I simply can’t do it anymore. No particular numerical goal in mind, just a goal of pushing myself further each time. And every time I do it, I’m able to do more and I feel less sore.
Eating Right - I know. These things sound self explanatory and are always the things you hear all the time on the subject. But this is the perfect example of taking the time to think more about your goals and sticking to it. You always think to yourself that you should eat healthier, but for me, it wasn’t until I actively involved myself into a specific goal of doing it that I noticed the effects. And it doesn’t have to be big things either. I stopped putting a lot of butter on things, I switched to Diet Coke (which tastes exactly the same as regular Coke eventually), I started eating healthier lunches, I cut out constant snacking. Just small stuff like that. And I still eat at Burger King and have junk food, just far more rarely. A burger or piece of cake every day will make you chunky, but not once a week.
The Small Things – Again, this seems pretty obvious. But when you add them up in your mind throughout the day, it makes a difference. Always take the stairs instead of the elevator or park your car farther away in the parking lot, for example. I could list a ton of different things like this because there are a million little things you can do throughout the day that add up. You’ll know what they are when you see them.
Like I said earlier, these sort of things probably aren’t going to work for everyone. But again, I’m nothing resembling an expert on this so they could for all I know. But I do know they’re working pretty well for me, and that the main thing has been keeping to it.
After years of waiting for the chance, I was finally able to see Fanboys this past weekend via Netflix. If you’ve not followed the history of the movie, it might not be immediately clear why there had been so much anticipation for it by myself and some of my peers. You can see its Wiki entry for more gossip, but basically the movie had been torn apart by vicious studio heads who wanted an entirely different film after they saw a nearly finished cut. Fanboys essentially deals with a group of Star Wars fans in late 1998 who are determined to break into Skywalker Ranch so that one of their friends who is dying of cancer can see The Phantom Menace before he passes. The movie is essentially still that, but it unfortunately is a hollow shell of what it could have been.
I certainly get the feeling that it could have been much more than what this shallow description paints it as, but Fanboys is essentially Kevin Smith Lite. It’s a toned down combination of Clerks and Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back, however it’s clearly more tailored for Star Wars geeks than it is for geeks at large like Smith’s movies are. Being able to still clearly remember the run up to Episode I (before we all actually saw it), I can say that the feeling of giddy uncontrollable excitement that it conveys is eerily accurate. Having only experienced the original trilogy and its culture secondhand for so many years left a void in that community that was only going to be filled by a new movie. That period of early late ‘98 and early ‘99 was such a cool one, and I’m thrilled that Fanboys has been able to so accurately bottle it and put it in the time capsule of this movie for years to come.
Aside from that, the rest of the movie is a passable road trip comedy. If you are in on the inside jokes that most of the geek community will understand, you’ll be laughing throughout. Some of the bits work better than others that seem awkward, but it’s still a pretty funny ride. Again, much of the comedy and introspective bits seem like what a PG-13 Kevin Smith would produce, but that in no way means that it doesn’t produce a good movie. He obviously approves, as he and Jay both make show up for a pretty funny cameo. Perhaps it means that this script would have worked far better in his hands, but I suppose we’ll never know.
Unfortunately though, the movie is absolutely destroyed for everyone else. It’s a fun road trip movie with callbacks that will be warmly received by it’s target audience, but I can’t imagine this being that much of a memorable movie for just about anyone else. The sad part about this is that it clearly could have been. The character that eventually passes has a great line of dialogue in the last ten minutes explaining that the ride was never about seeing Episode I itself. A point that unfortunately seems to have been completely lost on the idiotic corporate twats that ruined what could have been a movie with unimaginable heart.
There are many, many scenes where it’s so clear that lines or entire conversations are being cut out. One of them so tackily edited that the sick character falling out of a van was supposed reason enough for him to visit the hospital as opposed to his terminal cancer. By the time he is the only one of the group able to see Episode I early, it’s easy to forget why he’s the only one able to do so. The ending scene is finally and fleetingly able to deal with his death, but it’s hardly touched upon. This completely leaves the thesis of the movie trashed, and you feel cheated knowing that you didn’t see the movie as the original writer and director intended.
I still recommend this movie, but only with the caveat that you watch it with an open mind. Just remember it isn’t entirely the movie that the writer / director intended. Perhaps even consider it a rough cut, as I remain optimistic that a Director’s Cut will some day surface. I know that’s when I’ll buy the DVD, not a second sooner.
I’ve been watching some of the Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3) coverage this past week, and while a lot of it has me excited for what’s to come in the near and distant future, there’s been one aspect of one of my favorite genres of games that has had me just a little bit disappointed. I love the fact that there’s going to be a Beatles Rock Band game, but other than that, I’ve seen really very little that has me excited for music games. I’ve really gotten into these kinds of games over the past few years, mostly for the fresh and new experience that they provide in taking games beyond just the screen and allowing you to have a lot more physical and musical fun with your friends. But it is admittedly getting a bit stale lately and I think it’s time for Harmonix and Neversoft, the companies that make the most popular ones, to venture out with something new.
Even with the new Beatles game, the structure is basically the same. Each person plays an instrument or sings. You can have a number of people sing in melody with the Beatles songs, but that’s really all that is truly new. I find it a shame that so many homes now have closets full of fake plastic instruments, but these companies are having a hard time finding out new ways to utilize them. The next Guitar Hero is taking some small steps by making the game a virtual DJ that anyone can jump in and play with at any time during a party, but I still sort of feel like this isn’t pushing any new concept far enough. Without forcing more expensive and otherwise useless peripherals on customers, where else can they take this?
I’ve been thinking about this for a few weeks now, and I think I have a concept that I would push at a meeting if I were working at Harmonix or Neversoft. One of the most fun aspects of any of these music games is that it recreates a live performance. Harmonix realized this and created the Rock Band Stage Kit which gives it even more of that vibe. But one of the things that these games is sorely missing is the opportunity to be spontaneous or creative. At a live performance, you’re likely to hear alternate versions of your favorite songs with extended instrumentals or lyrics. With Rock Band or Guitar Hero, you’re stuck with the rigid track as it appeared on an album. Sure, both let you randomly mash buttons during solos of the developers choosing, but you aren’t really creating anything truly unique by doing that.
Why not give players more flexibility? Give them extended periods of their choosing where they are free to create new drumbeats, bass lines, or guitar solos. Even go so far as encouraging it by giving extra points for doing so. Guitar Hero has a studio feature where you can create songs, why not have a similar option where you are free to remix your favorite existing tracks? Or how about at the very least creating freestyle sections inbetween songs where players are free to create their own melodies before the next song begins? I think however that the idea that would be the easiest to implement would be for modifying songs while you play them. Allow the player to play a song acoustically or to change the rhythm if they’d like. A unique function of a live performance is when a band creates a version of a song that you would only hear live, I think it’s silly for any music game to not consider this.
I think the main thing that discourages me is that these music games are doing exactly the thing that a musical experience shouldn’t do, they’re severely limiting creativity instead of actively encouraging it. A lot of kids are moving on from Guitar Hero to play a real guitar, but it’s not because they are encouraged to do so by the game. It’s because they’ve become bored with what little the game has to offer. I think it’s great that these kinds of games are helping to encourage future musicians, but I think there’s far more those games can do in terms of bridging the gap between fake and real instruments.
