While attempting a classic middle-aged middle-class white person panic tale about how the Internet and smartphones are killing our kids’ brains, the documentary InRealLife manages to sprawl in every direction, like the Internet, without the ability to focus on anything, like our kids’ brains. Almost by accident, it includes some decent sound bites from some Internet luminaries, grazing interesting topics like privacy, advertising, etc. Hey, I guess if you fire off in every direction, you may very well hit something good.
In the bitterest of ironies, while leaving the TIFF screening of this film, I grazed a handrail with just enough force to destroy my pocketed iPhone. So I have been living the past couple days as this film would prefer, as a complete neanderthal. And it has been illuminating.
First off, WiFi becomes as water in a desert. This is apparently what it’s like at tech conferences when the cell towers get saturated and nobody can get on 3G. Thankfully, TIFF had free WiFi networks set up at the Lightbox and at Scotiabank, where it seemed the bulk of the screenings were.
But I think I use my phone for a lot more than that. I was going to walk home, but realized I was unwilling to walk for an hour without any music or podcasts to listen to. So I went to check when the next streetcar would be – d’oh! You realize how dependent you are on these things and no, InRealLife, it’s not all about porn and Facebook updates. I want to research something I saw in a film, make a note of a director. Take a picture! Coordinate dinner with my wife. Basically live my life in the way I normally do – the iPhone has a hand in almost everything.
I will say that without question I managed to be more present than I normally am. I observed things, eavesdropped. It probably made me more relaxed. But in no way would I suggest giving up your smart or even dumbphone. The monkey mind will look for distractions no matter what, and getting it to chill is about mental discipline and not about banning hardware. A smartphone diet or fast, though, like what I accidentally did, might show the kind of discipline you’re gonna need.
If you shy away from the Toronto International Film Festival because of the hype, buzz, red carpets, star wattage or any of that shit, I feel you. Or, the lines. The lines! Sometimes it seems TIFF isn’t really about films, it’s about lining up.
There is a lot more going on behind the flashbulbs though. Midnight Madness with its rowdy crowds. The dedicated Torontonians of every possible ethnicity who come out en masse to see the films from their country of origin. The film tourists who fly in from all over the US to spend a week in our city and see tons of films. It’s a good time, and I’ve had the week off from work, taking in a ton of stuff, so I feel I should get around to writing something up.
Here’s how I do TIFF. I get the daytime package, which lets you see anything that airs before 5:01pm for about half price. I use the amazing TIFFR to go through the catalogue and make my shortlist. I pick stuff that I don’t think is going to get a theatrical release any time soon. I do it solo style. I show up 15 minutes before the start of the films, which is after all the ticket holders have been seated but before the rush line has been let in. If you’re solo style, you’ll find a seat in between someone somewhere. You may have to sit near people, but hey, it’s TIFF – that will happen anyway.
(A note about the daytime package: last year it was nerfed so that you don’t get an advance ticket selection window, you pick after single tickets have gone on sale. When I realized this, I had already bought the package and I thought that would wreck everything – but I still got 19 of my 20 films. Keep in mind I chose a 9am screening of a film that retold the ravages of Pol Pot’s Cambodian regime using dioramas of clay figurines. If you’re going for more mainstream fare than I did, you may want the Flex Pack or something else.)
This year I went a little more obscure n’ arty than I normally would. My favourite festival sub-brands are Midnight Madness and Vanguard, which are the genre-iest – but the last times I did TIFF, I found a lot of the films reasonably accessible in the months that followed, whether on Blu-Ray or whatevs. This year, I confess that current events made me a lot more interested in the films of the Middle East than I normally would be. Also, the doc lineup seemed pretty strong.
I’m almost done now – two days left – and the fest started out weak but gained strength. The last two days were full of kickass. I think I’m going to write up individual films where I was really into them, and then do a list of stuff I don’t have too much to say about. Or maybe I’ll skip that part.
We is moved. Shouldn’t mean much to you now, Dear Reader, other than the site should feel a little snappier, no? All systems go except my cantankerous little javascript bookmarklet that I use to post links, which has broken inexplicably with the move. So, links may be light until that thing learns to play ball, goddammit.
I’m at the TIFF starting tomorrow, and may or may not write up the flicks I see there.
On another note, moving hosts indicates a rather sad end to my adventure with TextDrive. It’s been about a year since TextDrive was relaunched, and things haven’t worked out as planned. Communications from management were exciting but fitful, and support and uptime had huge holes as well. The home page promises paid plans with advanced features “returning Summer 2013”, a ship which, according to the date and the chill in the air, has sailed, with no word from the captain. I’ve left my other sites there for the time being, as I still hope against hope that the journey will resume, but The Robot is now safely ensconced at A Small Orange.
UPDATE Mar 4: Sadly, Textdrive is shutting down. And, this site is no longer at A Small Orange – now we are at Dreamhost. Could never get that javascript working at ASO despite there being nothing wrong with it, and they refused to help. Dreamhost is perfect so far.
As you maybe noticed, this site was down for about four days there. That’s not good, and it’s not the first time this year. So, I’m moving hosts. If things get weird over the next couple days, that’s why.
I haven’t been following the film industry much, so this is a really interesting take. First, on what ails Hollywood currently:
The shift started, Obst explains, when the bottom fell out of the massively lucrative DVD market less than a decade ago. In order to make up for all that lost revenue, the industry turned to booming foreign audiences—particularly those in China and Russia, where screens have proliferated and restrictions on Hollywood imports have greatly eased. Not long ago, foreign box office accounted for about 20 percent of a film’s gross; now it accounts for about 80 percent. (According to Obst, China will surpass America as Hollywood’s No. 1 market by 2020.) It hardly needs be said that movies with cultural specificity don’t translate well to non-English speakers. Accordingly, it’s now all spectacle, all the time.
The article points out this is merely the culmination of a shift that began in the late 70s. Also, Hollywood’s export-based model is not working out well for exhibitors in the US, who have seen their numbers drop. So they have been financing films themselves, such as The Grey, End of Watch and Soderbergh’s Side Effects, which have all done well.
In short, what we’re witnessing right now isn’t the end of original, adult movies; it’s the end of Hollywood’s corrupting influence on original, adult movies.
While I think great independent movies will continue to get made for many years, I think the budgets will continue to drop. And I wouldn’t be very optimistic about the future of theatrical exhibition. It’s such a crummy, expensive experience now, and the experience at home has gotten so good, that I doubt it will be more than a niche activity in a few years.
Remember the news that Google Reader was going to shut down? Well, the end is nigh. July 1 is the feed rapture. I went over some options in my previous post on the topic, but it’s worth checking in to see where everyone stands.
Feedly seems to be the majority choice, touting that “more than 3,000,000 Google Reader users have switched to feedly”. They just announced Feedly Cloud, which is “a fast and scalable infrastructure to seamlessly replace Google Reader”. The good news for Reeder users is that Reeder and feedly will soon work together. The bad news for some of us is: like google reader, feedly’s business model is not clear. In this interview, the CEO says:
Our business model has both short-term and longer-term revenue sources. Feedly revenue today is derived from user content discovery and product discovery. Additional revenue channels will be introduced over time.
So, who knows. It sounds vaguely suspicious, but I’m not great at parsing tech CEO-speak. It is interesting to note that Feedly already had 4 million users so the RSS market is at least 7 million strong – Google said it wasn’t worth it for them because it was only a million. YOULIE!!
Here are some other ones: NewsBlur, The Old Reader, Feed Wrangler, and FeedBin. Reeder supports FeedBin now and soon Feed Wrangler as well. Feedbin looks the prettiest to my eyes but I haven’t looked at these very hard – I’m going to give Fever another shot first, and if that doesn’t work, I may give these other options a better sizing up.
The games industry is stranger these days than I’ve ever seen it. At the root is technological change, as always: the kind of tech needed to present a passable modern game experience is now so cheap it shows up in phones, TVs, watches. The game console makers have tried to branch out and present their machines as “everything boxes” which mostly means they help you watch things. But the technology needed to watch things is even cheaper than that needed for games: witness the sub-$100 Roku and of course so-called smart TVs, which come with streaming and social apps built in.
I would bet that this generation, the machines we have thought of as consoles (dedicated games hardware costing $300+) will be essentially core gamer boxes. Only the hardcore will spend money on something that plays games, when everything else already plays games. The casual players that fueled success in the previous generation will have no need to buy consoles this time around, and even the hardcore themselves will start to question their utility. As the years pass, the game abilities of non-consoles (multi-purpose devices like tablets, phones, TVs, streaming boxes, clothes? who knows!) will only grow, while the consoles stay the same for five to eight years at a time.
How do the major players stand now?
Nintendo is not doing well. I expect the 3DS will chug along, but the Wii U is confusing to non-gamers and unappealing to core gamers – sales will get even worse. Nintendo is like Keith Richards: they may last a bit longer, but it’s not gonna be pretty.
With the Xbox One’s price, used games fiasco, and creepy always-snitching Kinect, Microsoft basically chugged poison, tripped, fell into a hole filled with spikes, and set themselves on fire. The used games issue will scare away hardcore gamers, while the $500 price makes it pointless for casual or non-gamers, despite the heavy TV pitch.
Sony will do well. They kept the PS4 price down, made the thing easy to develop for, and lured indies as well as the AAA publishers. Plus – amazing that this is a bragging point and grounds to “win” E3 – you can play used games on it.
But as time passes the new players will make things even more interesting.
As I have written before, Apple could disrupt the games industry by doing barely anything: opening the AppleTV to third party apps, and maybe making a dedicated controller / new remote. Interestingly, word out of WWDC (probably muted because of non-disclosure agreements) is that they are working on a spec for game controllers. May be nothing, but it may be a huge deal.
The Ouya, an open $100 Android-based system, is already out, although it will probably struggle to attract developers. I know little of the Android games ecosystem, but from what I read on Pocket Tactics, it doesn’t sound that robust – and it presumably takes at least some extra work to make a stock touch-based Android game work a system with a tiny install base.
Valve’s still-mostly-theoretical Steam Box is another big question mark. It’s as open as the Ouya but would have access to everything in the Steam store, which means basically all PC games. The idea of playing PC games comfortably from my couch is very enticing to me. But the only example of one so far – there may be many different models made by different manufacturers – costs $1000, which isn’t going to set any markets on fire.
Another interesting idea? Sony touted new cloud gaming features coming to PS4, PS3 and Vita. But that technology isn’t limited by the capabilities of the hardware, since the processing is happening on a server, and only the video and user input is happening on the device. This means that Sony could equally bring cloud gaming to their line of TVs that isn’t doing that well. It’s probably unlikely unless they’re really backed against a wall, but it’s an interesting thought.
Read a couple great articles this weekend. In the Globe, How Brampton demonstrates the new vision of Canada argues essentially that Brampton today is your town tomorrow. It’s the first part in a series of articles about the city, which is now the country’s ninth-largest city, thanks to an influx of South Asian immigrants that have made visible minorities the majority. All sorts of things happen as a result, from the South Asian interest in hockey to the surprising density and resource-sharing that come from a different model of family tackling a low-density suburban sprawl.
Something that had been marinating in my Instapaper queue finally came out and got eaten: First Do No Harm, the engrossing, tragic story of a coroner’s inquest into prescription narcotic abuse in Ontario. While telling the story of two victims of the crisis, it mentions “a prescription narcotic–related death occurred almost every day in Ontario in 2008” and that the medical establishment is dangerously wrapped up in things. In fact, I learned a new word: iatrogenic, “induced by the words or actions of the physician”.
It’s on iOS. It’s a turn-based strategy game. With flying. From Civilization creator Sid Meier. Adding giant robots and hamburgers would be unnecessary at this point, as it’s already a must-buy for me. Er, if it wasn’t free… more on that later.
Ace Patrol is a hex-based strategy game of WWI dogfighting. You have a squad of four procedurally-generated pilots, and you play through a procedurally-generated campaign, adding maneuvers, bonuses and planes as you advance. It’s not the grim-swamp-of-death-and-malaise WWI that inspired the dadaists, it’s more the “spot-on flying, good chap” jaunty cap-and-scarf WWI of… other WWI games. The graphics are slick yet board game-ish, a bit of accessible 3D gloss on 2D gameplay, much like Civilization Revolution.
It’s a fun, easy-to-pick-up game that nonetheless has a fair amount of complexity lurking petulantly under the surface. Depending on a few key variables (your altitude/speed, angle of approach, enemy’s angle and speed), your attack may do 4% damage, or 90%. Learning these variables is key, as is making use of anti-aircraft batteries, and clouds (which hide your position from the enemy). In general, the gameplay feels true to the real-life activity it is based on, while being abstracted enough to make it easy to get into, and with short enough feedback loops to make it compulsively playable.
On the downside, it’s marred by a far too cursory tutorial that hides the aforementioned complexity altogether. That’s all well and good until you get to later, harder missions where you start dying all the time and don’t know why. And dying: no pilot ever really dies (“well done, old chap!”), but depending on the circumstances of their would-be demise – injured, crashed, behind enemy lines or not – they are taken out of commission for anywhere from one to six stages. You can’t replace them – why not? Insurance reasons? Union rules? The fading morale of a populace drowning in death? Who knows, but every lost pilot means one less you can choose for your next mission. This can potentially be catastrophic as this game auto-saves and doesn’t let you try a level over again. You can free up all your pilots and have them ready to fly by paying $1. This isn’t the only IAP play, but it is the sleaziest. If it wasn’t an actual business model, it would seem like something that should be fixed in an update. Or at least you could respect the policy of risk-mitigation and pretend-human-life-valuation it would seem to endorse.
So that’s a bummer, but other than that, the IAP is quite reasonable. You unlock the full British campaign for $1, and $2 for the other nations piecemeal (France, Germany, US), or $4 for everyone. You can also buy “pilots” which are really packages of skins and skills tied to each nation. Note that the procedurally generated campaigns are different every time, so even paying just $1 for this game gives you a lot of potential gameplay. All in all, probably worth the pocket change you flip at it – just fly safe or you’ll wind up in a spot of bother, old chum.
… if you haven’t run into their paywall (what a pain in the ass). There’s one about changing TV viewing habits that probably isn’t news to you if you read this site regularly, but is still interesting to see fleshed out. And there is this article about the fight for mandatory carriage. TV channel owners want the CRTC to make a bunch of channels mandatory for cable distributors to carry in their basic cable package.
Subscriber growth has slowed but hasn’t yet gone negative, so cord cutting isn’t as rampant as one might think. But I’d wager that TV subscription prices are also going up, and that’s the issue with mandatory carriage. The BDUs (broadcast distribution units – Bell, Rogers, Shaw etc.) will want to pass any mandatory carriage costs on to their subscribers.
Let’s just say it. What everyone wants is a cheap, all-platform, on-demand net-TV package with a-la-carte channel add-ons. Make it $20-30 for the base, or free if you have cable already. Like Netflix, except with new shows. Simple.
(Aside: I love retired and “sunsetted”, but at some point could we also try “horse doctored”, “old dogged”, and “behind barned”?)
Perhaps there aren’t that many of us any more who rely on feeds. I understand the twitter and that other, blue-thumbed, oversharing service are often used to “curate” and “discover” links to web sites. But I’m guessing there are a few million of us diehards still, all thinking over our options right now.
Option one for me is to try using Fever again. Pluses: it syncs with Reeder, and I already bought it. Minuses: it’s probably not for you unless you’re in the habit of installing software on servers.
Option two appears to be Feedly, which has built a clone of the Google Reader API, which theoretically means that all the apps that used GReader as a back end could easily switch to Feedly. However: the developers of said apps would have to do that first. Also, Feedly looks like another free service with no apparent business model, which I’m guessing means ads or data mining at some point. That or a sudden shutdown.
There are some more options and thoughts here. I agree that it’s a good thing for the category; Google basically did a Microsoft Internet Explorer with the feed reading market, wrecking anyone’s chance of making money by being huge and free. Let’s hope that readers find new options and are willing to pay some money to create some sustainable businesses.
Anyway, given this news, I suggest we bloggists start to get worried about Feedburner, another critical piece of infrastructure that is free, niche, owned by Google, and hasn’t seen an update in ages.
This Seminar about Long-Term Thinking is worth listening to. It’s from Elaine Pagels, who has written books about the Book of Revelation and the Gnostic gospels.
“The Book of Revelation is war literature,” Pagels explained. John of Patmos was a war refugee, writing sixty years after the death of Jesus and twenty years after 60,000 Roman troops crushed the Jewish rebellion in Judea and destroyed Jerusalem.
Jesus had prophesied the destruction of Jerusalem, so its occurrence was not just a horror to early Christians, although it most certainly was that. It also presented the possibility that if he had been right about that, perhaps his other prophecies would also come true. Maybe he was coming back, and if so… well, cue hallucinatory revenge fantasy.
Pagels also talks a bit about the apocryphal gospels, a subject I love. In super short form, the New Testament originally had many more books in it, such as the Gospel of Thomas and the Gospel of Mary Magdalene. The early Church, starting with Athanasius the Bishop of Alexandria in 367 began to canonize the New Testament, excluding such works. Perhaps not entirely by coincidence, the excluded books often painted a different picture of Jesus than what has become common today. The Gospel of Mary quotes Jesus as saying, “Do not lay down any rules beyond what I appointed you, and do not give a law like the lawgiver lest you be constrained by it.” In the Gospel of Thomas, he says “That (resurrection) which you are awaiting has (already) come, but you do not recognize it.” He presents spiritual awakening as an interior and personal journey, one not requiring a bureaucracy of church representatives.
Anyway, it’s a good listen, and a glance into a fascinating world.
The idea of a camera that is always ready to take a photo of exactly what you are looking at seems so powerful to me, with the capacity to change the way we think about photography and videography.
And it’s not hard to take that a step further and imagine an always on camera that has a buffer of the last few minutes — with a single action you mark that frame of time to review later and it’s saved.
That’s the key, there. Saying “OK Glass, take a picture” is too clunky. But if I tapped on my watch whenever I wanted to save something that happened in the last five minutes, I could see that working. Google Glass right now is a bizarre thing, a step towards making computers less visible that actually makes them more so.
Interesting to think of photography as one of those jobs that humans just won’t do in the future. We’ll only “curate” machine photography, and even that I expect will be increasingly automated. “Save any footage of my baby laughing, and in a month, edit it together and post it to whatever hideous Mega-Facebook all the cyborgs are using.”
Here, I fixed a bunch more stuff. The search page looks a lot better now. Also, you can get at the search fast from the menu because I’m hot shit with gratuitous jQuery effects? I guess?
Of course, in the process I broke a bunch of things, so the site currently looks like ass on the iPhone, and presumably other hand-portable general purpose computing devices. I’ll try and patch things up and get this boat out in the open seas again, promise.
Also, I totally promise to post something other than lame site news things like this. While I was testing the search I typed a lot of random things into my own search box and found some real gems like this, from Iraq War times, and this bit of snark. Man. Remember when this site was good. I can’t even think of a joke to go out on, that’s how bad this shit is now.
A year ago I made a resolution to finally learn some programming, and a week later I heard about Code Year. It seemed perfect, so I signed up and right now I stand at 89% complete, which is pretty good in my books considering in 2012 I also worked a full time job, a freelance job, and produced 30 minutes of films and one daughter.
I find my own lack of programming knowledge glaring. I was good at math. I have always been good with computers. I used to make HyperCard stacks as a kid, and further back one of my earliest brushes with video games was coding my own on the ZX-81 (the only way to play a game on that thing). For the past couple decades I’ve been fascinated by the web, and I know CSS and HTML, but never made the jump to Javascript or PHP or what have you. So close, but so far.
Codecademy isn’t without its flaws. The lessons are submitted by users, which is to say not made by professionals. Some are great, others broken, impassable without getting some help on the forums. But it’s free and the format is excellent – both the interface and the idea of weekly lessons for a year. I kept chipping away. In the fall my still-rudimentary Javascript knowledge really helped me fix something on my site that had been bugging me for a long time.
I’m trying to finish the Code Year track – hopefully it will turn out to be Code Fourteen Months. Not as catchy, sure. But I also will go on to do the Ruby course, and we’ll see what else. I am enjoying it, and it feels right, and I foresee a lifetime of side-tinkering with tiny, half-broken scripts.
If you’re at all interested in learning to code, I’d say give it a shot.
Item the first: I have been wanting to do this for some time and only recently figured out how to do it. I’ve fixed the RSS feed so that the links’ links are links. I.e., when you click an item in the RSS feed and it’s a link rather than a blog post, it will take you to the external page rather than the link’s Angry Robot permalink page. I just tripled your productivity! If I’m posting on average three times a day, and you consider reading the internet productive… actually if anything, I’ve probably damaged your productivity.
If this doesn’t seem like a big deal, please ignore! It’s just one of those things that should work a certain way and I’ve never been able to do it right because I’m a half-assed web nerd at best.
Whether this is working RIGHTNOW in your RSS reader depends on what feed URL you are using. If you don’t know, you should use this one: Angry Robot Canonical RSS Feed. The Feedburner address should theoretically still work OK, for as long as Feedburner is still around, which may not be that long.
Item the second: apparently some of you philistines prefer to get your Web Site Blog New Posting News Item Posts inserted into your Twitter, whatever that is. So use this! Angry Robot Blog Twitter Account. This faithful parrot-bot will tweet the shit out of whatever gets posted here, proper-style.
UPDATE The Twitter bot is already all mixed up and is posting bad links. I’ll look into it but in the meantime, don’t expect too much from the poor bastard.
Item the third: because I love my faithful readers too much to smother you in a constant stream of baby pictures, my lady and I have vowed to only post them in a dedicated spot (no, not landfill). That place is here. Follow that.
The notion of a Console War depends upon the need for dedicated devices that directly compete for the same pool of money. But it’s already the case that the only part of the home consoles that is unique to them is the controller, which is the cheapest part of the whole deal. Ship a Smart TV with a twin sticks gamepad and a one month trial of a cloud gaming service and see what happens… Even if no-one tries to bite that apple, the idea that Apple isn’t already taking a bite out of the console market is absurd.
Bateman rightly points out that “The Console Wars” are a construct. I’m not sure they were created on purpose by the industry, or whether they were a byproduct of how journalism covers business and tech. But I share his sense of their impending demise as Apple’s forces pour over the battlefield, to continue a metaphor well past its point of usefulness.
I wrote earlier in Portagame that iOS and to a lesser extent Android would destroy the market for portable game systems, and I think what I wrote there holds true (the 3DS is selling ok, but the Vita is in trouble). Bateman points out that the iPad alone is likely damaging the home console market:
Nintendo’s Wii – putatively the winner of the last round of the Console Wars – sold 97 million units over 6 years. Apple’s iPad has sold 84 million units in just 2.5 years, and about three quarters of those people use their iPad to play games.
But what would happen if Apple actually tried to dominate the consoles? I don’t mean building by dedicated games hardware, but making a generalized computing device for big-screen, living room use that just so happens to play games too.
Nintendo has just shipped its new console, WiiU. Sony and Microsoft have yet to announce their new hardware, but smart money is on fall 2013. The games industry tends to pre-announce far in advance, so such consoles would likely be announced at E3 in June 2013.
Even if all Apple did was open the current AppleTV up to third party developers, they could take the wind out of an entire industry. If they changed the hardware model (an actual TV set, or a dedicated controller of some kind), things would go even further. Whatever it is, they would announce it, and start shipping it, sometime between E3 and the ship date of the new Sony and Microsoft consoles. Invite a couple big developers on stage – Rockstar and Square Enix, say (who already both release their games on iOS), or Epic (what did happen to Infinity Blade: Dungeons, anyway?) – you know the drill.
Rumours have it that Microsoft will release 2 next-gen Xbox models, and one will be a cheap model dedicated to video streaming and casual games. That sounds like an AppleTV competitor all right, so perhaps they see this coming. The war continues in a whole new form.
Devastated by mental illness / the loss of a loved one / a traumatic accident / the war in Iraq, protagonist(s) discovers / must overcome their fear of / must learn to accept: a teenage call girl / life in the circus / a long-lost family member / bike couriers.
Remember Dr. Evangelos Michelakis and the Albertan cure for cancer? Y just sent me the following from 2007-ish:
So the generic drug dichloroacetate, or DCA, cures cancer in mice, but no pharmaceutical company will fund clinical trials because they can’t patent it and thereby make the kind of money off it they are accustomed to.
What’s happening now? This article wonders that, and concludes the drug is
Stalled, due to lack of interest, according to Dr. Michelakis. “We have not initiated another clinical trial with DCA in cancer,” he told me in an email this week, “It was my hope that other centres, independent of us, will be inspired to do similar trials, but I have not seen any signs that this is the case.”
However, commenter FlyingSnow points out there is an “ongoing” trial at the UofA (I fear this is the same study that the Albertan town funded – it has been ongoing since 2007), and another ongoing trial in Florida. Not being familiar with clinical trials, drug testing, or anything medical at all really, I’m not in a position to judge whether this means the drug is any more likely a) to ever be released or b) to actually work.
But man, it’s like hearing they had developed flying cars but weren’t going to make them because Detroit wasn’t interested. YOUBASTARDS!!! Oh, wait.
The flying car is being tested, and should be ready in 2013 at a cost of $279,000.
Wouldn’t it be amazing if the cure for cancer happened in our lifetimes – that seems like a perfectly normal thing to think, and it would be. But then, there is no “We beat AIDS” day. It may not be cured exactly, but it is a hell of a lot better than in the 80s, and we only barely register it.
Let’s try and remember to be excited about these things when they happen, even if the flying car is way overpriced, and even if the cure only kinda works on most but not all cancers. Let’s be amazed at the future, especially when it becomes the present.
This is no top-ten-listmaking best-show-of-the-ages type show, but it’s a hell of a lot of pulpy, batshit-insane fun.
Run by Ryan Murphy and Brad Falchuk, the writers who brought you Glee and Nip & Tuck, the first season followed a down-on-their luck yuppie family as they moved into a haunted house and suffered the consequences. The second season kept a handful of actors (Jessica Lange, Zacchary Quinto, Evan Peters) but threw out everything else, including the setting and period. Now it’s “American Horror Story Asylum”, and is set in a mental asylum in the 60s. Well, I suppose it kept its general pastiche approach. We are four episodes in and already we’ve had: an exorcism, zombies, a sadistic Nazi doctor, an alien abduction, a masked serial killer, and copycat masked serial killers. To mention the number of naked asses and whippings just seems like overkill at this point.
It’s essentially Twin Peaks as directed by Russ Meyer. The editing is furious and fearless, the characters are sex-crazed and violent, and the writing wouldn’t know subtlety if it bit it on the ass. You should be enjoying it.
There are some absolutely sensational images coming out of New York City.
There’s very little I can say that would do justice to the magnitude of this event and of the suffering caused by it, so let me move on to talk about the coverage. Things like this tend to make me a little news-obsessed, and they come up rarely enough, thankfully, that each time the way I approach it technologically tends to shift slightly.
First I went to the NYTimes iPad app, which was very good at providing the back story, as it were, and illustrating it with images. But it was not up to date. Then I went to Twitter, where the hashtag “#sandy” seemed to be the one to check. There were again amazing things – on-the-ground impressions, photos – but they were often obscured by tasteless jokes, retweets of tasteless jokes, attempts to tie the disaster to one political platform or another, and retweets of forged images of sharks in New Jersey. I briefly checked TV but we cancelled cable, and the few american channels we get now were either not covering the event live, or their signals were being interfered with by the hurricane. I briefly tussled with the CNN iPad app before realizing it was not gonna cough up a live feed and deleting it. “#SandyTO” on twitter, for the local Toronto touch, was a little better signal-to-noise wise, but not much.
There’s no magic bullet for coverage of things like this (are there any things like this?), but I wound up liking The Star’s live blog. Perhaps any good liveblog would do. It’s good to have editors to sort out the junk from the live-tweet firehose, but also to have more frequent updates than the NYTimes was capable of – although in their defense, their power was probably out! (And sharks were attacking them maybe?)
Hopefully the worst is now over but wow – what a terrible spectacle. Images of NYC flooding and/or going dark belong in Roland Emmerich and/or Batman movies, not in real life.
