Haibane.info

Author: fledgling otaku

  • why so serious?

    Dark Knight was a triumph. We haven’t seen any movies in the theater since the baby was born but we made a major effort for this one, and it was worth it. It was a brilliant, layered, intelligent, and genuinely original interpretation of the Batman mythos, which paid due homage to the best of Batman in print but also broke new ground. For example, the Trinity of Dent, Batman and Gordon was perfect – three men with the same aim, to save a city they love, each bound by their own constraints and rules but acknowledging that together they have genuinely transformative power. That’s straight out of the best of the graphic novels like The Long Halloween.

    However, the concept of Wayne Enterprises as an active partner in Batman’s strategy was also fresh. In most tellings, Bruce Wayne’s playboy image serves to distract people from his identity alone, but here it’s essential to distract people from the more critical question of where the Batman gets his stuff. With Lucius Fox as CEO, and Wayne the frivolous trust fund brat who snores trough critical board meetings, connecting the dots is truly beyond the realm of even informed speculation, as the blackmail scene with Coleman Reese and Fox amply demonstrates.

    The best part of course was Heath Ledger’s Joker. In a nod to Ledger’s most famous recent film role, Joker tells Batman, “you complete me” – but the meaning of that statement is perhaps better told here than even in Miller’s graphic novel The Dark Knight Returns. The novel edge of Joker as anarchist rather than just evil for its own sake, a man driven to watch the world burn, seems more fitting, and more menacing. The Joker believes that the veneer of civilization is superficial and that at the heart of things, the world is as morally empty as he is – he fancies himself the only one willing to rip the facade off and embrace the true nature underneath. From his perspective, everyone else is lying and he is the truth-teller.

    These movies have totally erased the nonsensical Tim Burton versions that were as cartoonish in their own way as Adam West’s portrayal. Brian Tiemann says this better than I; for me, this IS the Batman movie franchise, not a reboot like the Bond films with Daniel Craig.

    The question though of course is, what next. I can’t discuss that without straying from Vagueland to Spoiler Field, so follow me after the jump… (more…)

  • um.

    I think this is a stunt, but considering it’s Scarlett Johannsen, maybe it isn’t. Regardless, I don’t think I’m gonna get permission to enter the contest.

    Of course, the disclaimer at the bottom could be interpreted several ways…

  • 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!

  • 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