| Chuck vs. Stagnation |
[Feb. 9th, 2010|09:38 pm] |
There's a perfect line from the Sepinwall interview that sums up my problem with this season of Chuck. Josh Schwartz says, "[We] came up with a big, game-changing - I know you hate that term, it'll be your version of shipper - finale last year, that could have been, I think, more potentially alienating to the fans than, I think, an episode or two of more romantic angst."
They ended season two in a way that should have set a new tone, but because it might have alienated fans, they're recycling the first two seasons over and over again. Shaw is Bryce 3.0, where as Beefcake was Bryce 2.0. Hannah is Lou 3.0, where as Jill was Lou 2.0. Morgan's having his third mid-season identity crisis, and Ellie is (once again) freaking out because she doesn't know something about Chuck (ala "vs. Sizzling Shrimp" and "vs. Tom Sawyer").
I'm not a television producer, so maybe "stick with what you know" is how you keep a show going. However, as someone who enjoyed the build up of last season to that "game-changing" finale, I'm let down that we're back to the same old game as before. |
|
|
| Sikuli |
[Feb. 9th, 2010|06:39 pm] |
When some spambot decides to run Sikuli inside a bunch of EC2, Rackspace Cloud, and Windows Azure systems, wikis are going to be well and truly fucked.
What are you going to do, ban the User-Agent for every known browser? I don't think so. |
|
|
| Twilio |
[Feb. 9th, 2010|05:13 pm] |
Just signed up for my Twilio account, and in doing so discovered that Twilio is an SMS gateway as well as voice.
Oh, man, oh, man. This is kind of awesome. I've wanted an affordable SMS gateway since forever.
The fun I will have, let me tell you what.
I've got too much to do to start digging through the docs today, but I'm setting aside next week. Hee! |
|
|
| GAAH |
[Feb. 8th, 2010|07:33 pm] |
We still have two more episodes of Chuck with Kristin Kreuk.
How many brunettes must we endure? Every season Chuck dates a brunette (S1, Lou; S2, wossername; S3, whatever), and every season they break up. This is the very definition of insanity. |
|
|
| I have...a hypothesis. |
[Feb. 6th, 2010|08:51 pm] |
Before going any further, you have to know what Rampancy is. That article is the best definition, but in essence it's when an AI kind of evolves from an artificial intelligence into a self-aware being. The term originates from the Marathon games, but HALO adopted it for its own.
Here's my hypothesis: I think, from a purely meta-fictional standpoint...not character development, but the underlying editorialness that governs fictional universes...Barbara "Oracle" Gordon has reached the mythical Metastability phase of rampancy. Here's an abbreviated time-line of what I think happened:
1. The Killing Joke is when Alan Moore and his editors took a snapshot of Barbara Gordon, and let her run, not in parallel, but under different conditions than others. Conditions that wouldn't let her state revert backwards, before the injury.
2. During subsequent comics and retcons, she went through the first stage of rampancy: melancholy. This time is covered in various stories that show her being depressed right after her paralysis.
3. After melancholy, during her time with the Suicide Squad, she went through the second stage: anger. Anger is demonstrated just by her general attitude at the time, when she took on a slightly harder edge, trained to use a gun, etc.
4. After anger, during the mid-to-late 90's she went through the final stage: jealousy. Most of this was directed toward Huntress, jealousy over her sleeping with Dick and wearing the Batgirl costume during No Man's Land.
5. The final stage, and current state, is metastability. Metastability would explain why she continues to eschew technological repairs to her spine, as the character (an object within the DCU system, not so much the character as a person) has reached a level of stability that few other characters have ever reached. As of this time, Barbara's stability as a character in the longest running major change of any character in the DCU, a record which I believe was previously held by Barry Allen's death.
This is just a hypothesis. I could have just spent too much time listening to The Cole Protocols this weekend. |
|
|
| Things I want to see. |
[Feb. 4th, 2010|03:17 pm] |
I'd like to see the Leverage team take down Power Girl.
The story is that some family member of the guy who killed in issue #5 approaches the team for help. "Jimmy, he wasn't no saint. He dealt a weed and X, I won't lie to you. But what they did, brushing his murder under the rug like it was nothing, that ain't right. Did you know, Mr. Ford, that Atom guy, they got him to save the Joker from some kind of tumor. The Joker. But they act like Jimmy never existed."
Then there's the setup, where Hardison gives the rundown on Starrware. Startup company, bleeding capital, ties to the JSA, etc. Then Eliot asks, "I don't know. How do you take down a Kryptonian?" To which Nate replies, "The same way we take down all these guys, take away their power. Okay, team, let's go steal the sun."
I haven't worked out all the details, but the endgame is that Hardison reprograms the portable sun Starrware was working on in, ah, issue #6 (I think) to emit red solar radiation, and they depower Kara long enough to get her to confess to helping the Space Girls Gone Wild get off Scott free. |
|
|
| Alternate ending |
[Feb. 3rd, 2010|10:46 pm] |
Doctor Developer collapsed to the floor. He heard Prometheus walking, circling him, no doubt out of arms' length.
The past sixty seconds had been an experience in the limits of how much pain one body could feel. There was no doubt in Doctor Developer's mind that Prometheus could have snapped his neck in the first five seconds of their combat. There was never any doubt in his mind that Prometheus wouldn't.
"Six thousand combatants in here," Prometheus tapped his helmet, "And even without this I could kick your ass. What made you think you could ever take me in a fight? That's so stupid, man."
Doctor Developer coughed and forced himself up onto his hands and knees. He shook his head. "Never thought I could beat you in a fight," he said. He coughed again, smiling as he finished. He lifted one hand off the floor, and leaned back on his knees. "Figured I could lure you into a trap, though."
Doctor Developer held up his right hand, letting his coat sleeve fall down his arm to reveal he was holding Prometheus' Ghost Zone key. Prometheus lunged toward Doctor Developer, but it was too late, he stumbled across empty floor where his opponent previously knelt.
"Son of a bitch!" Prometheus screamed.
"Hello?" a voice spoke. Prometheus head snapped up. It was Doctor Developer. "If you're hearing this, Prometheus, is means I just teleported away with your key. It also means the explosives planted all around this building have just been primed. You have thirty seconds before this building collapses on top of you."
The floor beneath Prometheus began to rumble.
"Maybe less," Doctor Developer's voice admitted before the recording cut off. I refuse to respect any villain who thinks you can restrain an Amazon by pinning them to a plasma screen. That's just sad, man. |
|
|
| I'm confused. |
[Feb. 3rd, 2010|05:01 pm] |
Iron Man 2 Game, blah blah blah,That was the major point hammered home by Brink, that this is "a unique story in the movie universe." This isn't an adaptation of Iron Man 2 the movie. The story is co-written by comic scribe Matt Fraction, who teamed up with a group of writers from SEGA. Brink said this worked out great, with Fraction keeping them in touch with who Tony Stark is. "Matt Fraction was one of the easiest writers to work with," Brink said, "he really knows Iron Man and helped us capture the character."
The gameplay changed considerably from the first game to this sequel, also with the goal of making the player feel more like Iron Man. Flight, hovering, shooting, and melee have all been redone entirely. Hovering is now automatic, shooting has a great auto-lock that is enabled and disable with a single click. Flight is tuned to a person-sized object and the way they would manuever, rather than flying like an extremely small plane. I'm confused here. How could an Iron Man game stay true to the Iron Man that Matt Fraction "really knows" when the later version makes handling the armor easier? Didn't we learn from "Most Wanted" that subsequent, more advanced armors are harder to fly because they have fewer automated systems then older, more primitive models. I mean, this article seems to imply that the developers learned from the first game and then used that to make the next game easier for players to handle. That's just not the Tony Stark way.
I'm beginning to question everything I know now. |
|
|
| Hip hop, money shot |
[Feb. 2nd, 2010|03:22 pm] |
HipHop: What you need to know is the best post I've seen that explains how HipHop for PHP works. But here's the money shot for the post:Once compiled, HipHop provides its own web server (a CLI interface is also available). It does not use (or require) Apache or any other server. Of course, this doesn’t preclude you from running one or more HipHop projects against separate ports on the same machine and then use Apache (or Squid, or any other server) to reverse proxy to them. Read that again and let it sink in for a second.
HipHop, essentially, compiles PHP programs down to their own web serving programs. You can now write web daemons in pure PHP. This means PHP just stepped up and said, "Hey, I can make use of multi-core processors too." You can now develop message-passing systems in PHP that will scale, unless I'm way off base, like Erlang programs.
I dare say, the game just changed for PHP.
EDIT: Others disagree. |
|
|
| FutureNews |
[Feb. 2nd, 2010|12:45 pm] |
(Ganked from SquidLord.)
I finally got the FutureNews app to compile to Linux, so running it for long periods of time is a lot easier. According to the uptime pings being sent back, it looks like the system stays up for about five years without a reboot. That's kind of cool. I'm looking forward to a FutureNews appliance one day, that'll have a very tight kernel and run indefinitely. Or maybe some kind of parallel, 4-D network, where news gets aggregated backwards, so you're not capped by the run time of your app, start-to-finish. Oh, well.
Anyway, I found this interesting tidbit from around 2015. Seems like there's some good news, bad news, good news, and strangely morbid news. The good news is, by 2015 we have a national health care plan and everyone has insurance. The bad news, much like our neighbors to the north, while the system chugs along, it still encourages those who can afford it to vacation in places where you can still get private medical care.
The other good news is that the Haiti relief efforts paid off, it's a thriving vacation spot for the wealthy. The strangely morbid news is that tourism is only it's second largest industry; Haiti's largest industry seems to be organ exports.
I think I'm going to stop playing with the FutureNews app. |
|
|
| It's finally happened. |
[Feb. 2nd, 2010|10:01 am] |
New DC Animated Series: Young Justice League
With a new decade comes new nostalgia. I'm not worried. Peter David will probably write for it, Dwayne MacDuffie will be the story editor, they'll call Superboy "Conner," and I won't give a damn.
Frankly, I'm looking forward to Generator Rex more than anything. It actually looks like a cartoonified version of Enginehead. |
|
|
![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small}
jarodrussell's journal