Haibane.info

Month: July 2008

  • scrabble fabulous

    It was inevitable that Scrabulous would get yanked off of Facebook eventually, so I didn’t even rouse myself to note the fact of it when it happened a couple of days ago. I admit that I was rather peeved at Hasbro, mainly because I was doing rather well on the games I had in progress – including a bingo I had spent over a month nurturing towards revelation. Still, I don’t exactly have any loyalty to the brother Ajarwal, who were making a comfortable $25k a month for their (obvious) copyright violation (moral soapbox: when I violate copyright, I don’t profit off it!). So, I figured I’d give the Official Scrabble App a try. Here’s a screenshot of my game in progress:

    the official app
    the official app

    Overall, it’s a slick application, with everything that Scrabulous had except for support of the alternate dictionaries and Challenge mode. I did prefer Scarb’s less-flair aesthetic, it was a cleaner looking app, this one goes for a lot of the 3D tile effect which makes the screen look too busy. The focus should be on the grid, not the tiles or the players etc.

    Also somewhat irritating is the fact that the game is segmented so that only US/Canada players can play each other, and international players can only play themselves, with no crossover. This may be due to some licensing thing but it really is a drag. I don’t know if its a limitation most people will chafe under, but it’s something that does affect me, and feels really arbitrary. This sort of limitation is why sometimes it’s better to go the unofficial route.

    Anyway, if you need a fix of Scrabble, you can still get one, and that’s what matters. I do wish they’d tone down the interface a bit though. They should hire these two brothers in India I know about who have some experience in that regard…

  • Sarah Connor Chronicles

    Is anyone watching this show? From this interview at ComicCon it looks like it might be as interesting as Smallville. I’ve no idea whether its the same continuity as the movies or the new movie coming out or not. Still, Summer Glau kicking butt is pretty appealing. And the evolution of John Connor also will be something to see – I am reminded of Smallville.

  • The problem with Web2.0

    I intended to write a blog post on this topic, but ended up using Powerpoint oto t organize my thoughts, and then realized that the resulting slideshow mace the post somewhat superfluous. It is a rumination on the problem with web2.0 today (information overload), some solutions, and speculation about where we go from here:

    The Problem With Web2.0

  • Witch Mountain returns

    One of my favorite movies from childhood was Return to Witch Mountain, about two orphans (brother and sister) who seek to discover the source of their magical powers. Hmm. Guess I was into mahou shoujo early on, it seems. At any rate, Disney is doing a remake, which usually elicits a yawn (if not horror). What caught my attention though was that the girl is being played by AnnaSophia Robb, and the Bad Guy by Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson. I was utterly enchanted with Robb’s performance in Terabithia and Johnson is just a genius of screen presence. Even if they butcher the basic plot, it’s still going to be worth watching.

  • live-action Bebop

    Just saw this at AICN:

    IF Magazine has learned that producer Erwin Stoff is developing an adaptation of one of America’s favorite anime series…. Cowboy Bebop.

    “I’m developing COWBOY BEBOP for Fox, but doing it as a live-action film, so I’m working on that at the moment,” Stoff tells iF. “I’m really excited to be working on it, and it’s in the really early stages. We just signed it the other day.”

    “I have such an enormous admiration for its creators, that our first and foremost concern is going to be a real degree of faithfulness to the tone of the movie, to the mix of genres, and so on and so forth,” he says. “When I met with them in Japan, one of the first things that I brought up was the experience that we had on A SCANNER DARKLY, and how hard we worked to remain faithful to Philip K. Dick, and that was our big concern here.”

    America’s favorite anime series? I thought that was DragonBall Z… which also is getting the live action treatment, as I noted before. Of course there’s also that live-action Robotech coming up, too.

    I’ll get really excited when they start casting for live-action Haibane Renmei. Others may be waiting for live-action Najica Blitz Tactics. To each his own…

    Just curious, though. Suppose they were to do a live-action Haibane. Who’d you want to see playing Reki and Rakka?

  • whale otaku rejoice

    Given that otaku tend to be an obsessive bunch by definition, I find this rather convenient: an actual white whale.

    A new white humpback has been sighted off Byron Bay on the east coast of Australia.

    The newcomer, which was filmed by a television news helicopter, has excited marine scientists who think it may be related to Migaloo – to date, the only known all-white humpback whale.

    migaloo

    Melville is surely grinning in his grave.

  • Ponyo preview

    via Don. It looks like a cross between Totoro and Spirited Away.

  • I am the Wumpus

    I just came across the Tales of the Rampant Coyote blog, written by Jay Barnson, an old-school gamer since the Ultima days. One of his posts really caught my eye, a description of the old game for the Commodore 64 called, “Hunt The Wumpus”. I LOVED that game. In essence, it was a logical puzzle. I’ll let the Coyote explain:

    You started in a room in the cave complex of twenty rooms, each room connected to three others. In two rooms, there were bottomless pits. If you moved into those rooms, you lost the game. In two rooms, there were “Superbats” that would pick you up and drop you in a random room if you moved into them. And then there was the Wumpus.

    You were armed with a few arrows that could shoot through five rooms (changing course as they flew). If they went through your own room (since they could circle around, in theory), you shot yourself and the game was over. If they went into the Wumpus’s room, they killed the wumpus and you won. Otherwise – if you missed the Wumpus OR walked into the Wumpus’s room, he’d get up and move (or stay in the same room). If he ended up in the same room as you, he’d eat you and you lost the game. You could also lose the game if you ran out of arrows.

    You could hear the bats if you were next to a superbat room. You could feel a draft if you were next to a bottomless pit room. And you could spell the Wumpus if you were in a room next to him. So the game was basically a randomly changing logic puzzle where you’d try and triangulate the positions of your goal and the threats.

    Oh, yeah. And it had no graphics at all. You had to draw yourself trying to figure out the topography of the map.

    good times, especially when you got eaten by the Wumpus, because the entire screen would fill with blood (ie, the screen wiped solid red, which was about the limit of computer graphics at the time). It was a frustrating game, but it was great.

  • New Internet Addictions

    just discovered this via about a dozen separate internet vectors. Now I feel like watching Firefly – all of it – again.

    Shamus puts it best:

    What I really wish is that Joss Whedon would make another show. And that Nathan Fillion would be in it. And I wish it would be about something cool. Like superheroes. No! Supervillains! Like, a comedy. A musical comedy maybe. With Neil Patrick Harris. And since I don’t have cable TV, it would be cool if they made the show and then just put it up online. Wouldn’t that be awesome?

    Yes. It would be fully and unwaveringly awesome.

    It should also be noted that the lovely, talented Felicia Day, whom I’d never heard of before today, is not just the love interest for the mighty NPH in Dr. Horrible but also the writer for The Guild, which will appeal to you if you appreciate gamer humor, or even if you don’t:

  • unchi! (うんち)

    In Dennou Coil, Kyoko (age 3) has a penchant for running about, pointing at things, and exclaiming, “unchi!” (poop):

    dennou coil 2

    This is fairly accurate as far as a characterization of 3-year old humor goes. By that logic, the Himeji City Museum of Literature, in Himeji, Japan (near Osaka) was until May of this year the funniest place in the universe. This is because the museum, inexplicably, had an exhibit devoted to poop:

    translation:

    Everybody come and play! Come and look! We have poop books!

    Rabbit: It’s poop time!

    Gorilla: Come and see my poop too!

    Elephant: Animal poop is here yo!

    See it. Touch it! Smell it! Explore!

    Can you guess what animals made this poop? (3 pictures)

    Himeji Museum Of Literature, Special Exhibit. April 1st-May 18th

    Head over to thomas’s post at Babelhut and see for yourself. It is in fact not only exactly what it seems to be, but in fact even more so than you think it would be. Fear the Japanese, indeed. Though it must be admitted that were this exhibit to come to any children’s museum in the United States, it would make more money than the mind can comfortably comprehend.

    (It should be noted that I have blogged about poop before. I also have on occasion been fascinated with toilets. Insert bad joke about straining too hard here…)