Haibane.info

Month: August 2008

  • Ranma returns

    via Ubu, a new Ranma short is in the making:

    The “It’s a Rumic World” exhibition of manga creator Rumiko Takahashi’s original artwork opened in Tokyo’s upper-class Ginza shopping district on Wednesday with both the previously announced special 30-minute Inuyasha anime short and a new Ranma ½ anime short. The Ranma ½ short adapts the Akumu! Shunminkō (Nightmare! The Incense of Spring Sleep) story from the manga. This is the first Ranma ½ animation produced in 12 years.

    I have a feeling that it’s going to be a “period” piece, occuring during the mainstream chronology rather than show us any evolution in Ranma and Akane’s relationship. kawaii-kune, indeed.

  • Calvin and Jobs

    Hobbes has been replaced by Steve Jobs:

    Brilliant. I especially love how Jobbes turns into a stuffed toy when the parents or others are around. The artwork is perfect, but the comic has a sharp edge, too:

    Calvin: Jeez! How come all your stuff so expensive, Jobs?
    Jobs: Well, Calvin, it’s carefully put together by some of the world’s most ingenious craftsmen!
    Calvin: Really? But isn’t it slapped together in China like just about everything else?
    Jobs: I was talking about our ads.

    Somehow I don’t think Bill Watterson is going to be as tolerant of this as Jim Davis was with Garfield Minus Garfield… speaking of the latter, travors just signed a book deal with Davis’ blessing.

  • LHC – It’s the end of the world as we know it

    These pictures of the Large Hadron Collider at CERN are awe-inspiring, but also make me a bit sad. It’s depressing to think that Big Science like this can’t be done in the US anymore. Or rather, won’t be done.

    these are just a few of the amazing photos available. For captions, and many more, check out the original link.

    I visited Fermilab as a kid and then actually worked on some hardware for an experiment there as a summer student in college at UW. I don’t know much about particle physics but I do know that every square foot of those massive, intricate assemblies is the product of some grad student’s or researcher’s life work. It’s humbling to think of the intellectual capital invested in this machine, built to answer what amount to such fundamental, even basic questions.

    I had a similar reaction when I visited the Saturn V on the grounds of the Johnson Space Center in Clear Lake, TX. That was once functioning hardware; had there been the money, it could have flown to the moon. Instead it rusts in a placid Texas field.

    It occurs to me that I’ve never seen the equal of these pictures of the LHC in any science fiction, on TV or film. Nothing in the imagination of our storytellers has equaled the sheer complexity and power of the simple photos here.

  • RSS-based comment moderation?

    I just left the following ticket on WordPress Trac, as a feature request:

    RSS feeds are already generated for posts and comments by default. What would be very helpful woudl be a dedicated RSS feed for comments in the moderation queue. This would permit efficient queue processing without having to log into the Dashboard.

    For added functionality, each item in the RSS feed could have unique URL hash address links for approve, reject, and spam, so that moderating directly from the RSS feed could be possible from within the feedreading application. the RSS feed would need to be password protected or made visible to any user level that the admin desires to set.

    (Trac Ticket #7452)

  • Scrab again: Wordscraper

    OK, forget what I just said. Scrabulous is back! Well sort of – Scrabulous v2.0 is rechristened Wordscraper, and boasts just enough design changes to throw a wrench in Hasbro’s case for infringement. Behold:

    Scrabulous 2.0: Wordscraper. Looks familiar... but not too familiar.
    Scrabulous 2.0: Wordscraper. Looks familiar… but not too familiar.

    The differentiation has both superficial (circular tiles, random/userdefined placement of the bonus squares) and game mechanical (tile point values, tile letter distribution) elements. Whether that’s enough to keep it alive from Hasbro’s lawyers is an open question. I love the fact that you can define your own board, however. My only gripe is that they didn’t save any games from Scrabulous, but I suppose that was necessary since doing so would require the “Scrabble classic” board, whose layout is probably part of Hasbro’s copyright. I’d like to have at least had the chance to restart games in progress, though.

    I guess the appeal of Scrabulous was indeed the wordplay and not any actual loyalty to Scrabble per se. It’s like you’ve driven a Ford Mustang all your life and then one day you try a Corvette – if you like Mustangs, then you won’t like the Corvette. If you like driving sports cars, though, then it doesn’t matter how you get your fix[1. I am sure that people who actually know something about cars, or mustangs or corvettes, are gasping in horror at the sacrilege of my analogy].

    So, lets scrape!