Anyone who knows me reasonably well knows I have something of a small obsession with Superman. In truth, it’s actually more than that…I genuinely believe in Superman. Not in the sense that I think if I fall out a window, he’s going to swoop in and catch me, of course, but I believe in Superman as an Icon, and I think that carries with it a great deal of meaning. Superman is the closest we have to an Odyseus. He is The Hero of a Thousand Faces, and the prototypical superhero. Everyone else, from Batman to Captain America, are merely tweaks on the same general idea. Which is why Superman has managed to be reimagined successfully with each generation (Smallville being merely the latest in a very long line of such transformations).

Why do I mention all of this? Because every bit of news I read about the upcoming Superman movie simply fills me with disgust. While supposedly the current script is better than this abysmal early draft, this latest bit of casting news hasn’t done a whole lot to inspire any confidence in me. I like Alias as much as the next guy, but frankly I’d be perfectly happy if J.J. Abrams would just stay the hell away from Superman.

The fact that it’s being planned as a trilogy suggests the kind of epic hubris that brought us Batman & Robin, and I would really rather not see Superman’s triumphant return to the big screen be rushed so Warner Bros. can cash in on the current superhero frenzy caused by the decent adaptations of Marvel’s major characters.

I saw Daredevil last weekend, and while it wasn’t exactly high art by any means, it was entertaining, and unlike any recent attempts at adapting DC heroes into movies, was clearly done with respect and admiration for the source material. I don’t want the new Superman movie to fail…I think there should be at least one new movie every ten years…but I’d rather not see one than have something that’s going to milk the franchise or something potentially disastrous like the Superman vs. Batman movie that was proposed.

For a few weeks now, Johnny Cash’s American
IV: The Man Comes Around has been
a jukebox favorite at the bar I frequent on a regular basis, particularly his
rendition of Nine Inch Nails’ "Hurt." Thanks to an
article at Slate, I stumbled
across the
music video for the song, and I was downright shocked at how good
it is.

I can’t remember the last music video I saw…it’s been at least a few years,
probably more than that. Although I must admit I’m very curious to see one
by The Strokes, since part of me is
dying to know what my
old college nemesis has been up to (that’s a story for another day).
Regardless, this is an unusually honest video, that takes a look back at his
career and shows him as he is now. He’s not in the best of health and it shows…but
what really makes this a powerful bit of cinema are the shots of his wife,
both now, as she watches him perform and in archived videos of their better
days. It’s really something, and apparently my
reaction is the same as “Hurt” composer Trent Reznor’s. Even if you couldn’t
care less about Johnny Cash (and shame on you if you don’t…you need to hang
out in more bars!), check it out. It’s definitely worth the four minutes it’ll
take you to watch.

As I was complaining to my landlady about the wonderful hole in my front door created by me during one of my finer moments in recent memory, I was told that my wife and I had until August 1st to leave our apartment, as she wanted to renovate the space and couldn’t do that while we were still living in it. Most likely she really just wants to charge a great deal more than we’re currently paying, as I’ve been in that space for about the better part of the last four years, and my rent really hasn’t gone up all that much (even when my wife moved in it only went up by $50). She then proceeded to rattle off a string of complaints which ranged from the absolutely ludicrous (blaming us for the shoddy workmanship that was done on the place well before we got here) to minor annoyances.

In truth, we have been casually looking for a new place to live for some time now. But as anyone who lives in NYC will tell you, these things aren’t exactly easy to do. But we had also planned on saving up our money and moving when we could actually buy a place, and those hopes are obviously dashed now.

Incredibly, necessity being the mother of invention — no wait, Frank Zappa was the mother of invention, wasn’t he? Of course, he’s also Sheik Yerbooti so clearly the man had some identity issues. But that’s beside the point, I think. The point is, that since we suddenly had a deadline, Heather and I were forced to zip out and accelerate our apartment hunt, and I’ll be danged if we didn’t manage to find ourselves a gem.

We haven’t signed a lease yet, so nothing’s set in stone…but we’ve found a place that’s huge by Brooklyn standards, with two floors (!), six rooms, and enough space to hold all my books, dvds, game systems, computers, and most importantly, my entire comics collection (which is so large it requires a space of its own). Oh, and the cat. There should be room for the cat, too.

We’re going to be spending more a month in rent of course, but it’s not nearly as bad as it should be for a space this size. And I was able to talk the landlord down by $100, so it’s not as painful as we originally thought it would be. But no matter what, this means we’ll be moving away from our current subterranean apartment and into a brownstone that has actual windows, real ventilation, and good lord…sunlight! What a novelty.

It’s strange how a couple of days can change your outlook on things. Earlier this week we were fed up with our apartment, but planned on sticking with it until we could afford someplace better…then we were frustrated because we were being forced to vacate by August 1st, and now, well, now things are looking great. Go fig.

I swear, these are real:

THE 9500 SLAPS THAT PIG
DOWN, SAYS “GIMME MY’ MONEY BI-A-TCH!”

XTASY 9100 says: “BI-A-TCH!
GO MAKE ME A SAMWICH!!”

This morning I was awakened by my wife, who informed me that she was unable to open our front door. There are better ways to wake up of course, but fortunately my alarm had already gone off and I was enjoying my first of several ten minute delays before getting up.

Regardless, once my eyes adjusted to the light and my brain powered itself up again, I made my way to our front door and sure enough, it was frozen shut. This is one of the wonderful side effects of living in a basement, although the fact that the front hallway in our apartment has substantial water damage and there’s terrible drainage around there doesn’t exactly help either. For whatever reason, our metal frame had gotten itself stuck to our metal door.

So I began thumping against it, doing my best SWAT impersonation. After pounding on it for a few minutes, and trying everything from jiggling the key to furiously pounding on the frame, I didn’t manage to actually open the door, but I did succeed in putting my elbow through its plexiglass window. Oops.

For some reason this must have triggered the logic center of my brain, since it was only after this that I remembered that bastion of primative inteligence: The Lever. I went and pulled out a substantially lengthy metal screwdriver, and used it to pry open the door. Yay for evolution.

…of course, I’m still stuck with a freaking hole in my front door, but at least we’re not trapped inside. I’ll take my victories where I can.

From your friends at the Department of Homeland Security:

Have a nice day.

OBEY

Friday
evening, when I probably should have been relaxing after a week’s worth of
work, I undertook the rather stressful task of disassembling my beloved TiVo
and installing a new second hard drive and TurboNET ethernet adapter. While
the procedure wasn’t without its difficulties, I did finally get the deed
done and now I’ve got one really badass hacked TiVo to play with.

I didn’t just install Telnet, FTP and TiVoWeb,
I went for the whole hog, adding the
MfsStream module for extracting video
(I then use TY
Converter to make ‘em into MPEGs…it works great!), CptanPanic’s
great MovieSearch module (which makes browsing for movies really easy)
and I’ve even
got PHP running on this thing. So while I’ll never be able to play MP3s
or show photos on here like the Series2 boxes can do, I think I’ll be just
fine without them. Besides, who needs that, when I can burn as many episodes
of Futurama to DVD as I like?

Here’s a shot of my tricked-out TiVoWeb installation. Neat, huh?

You know, I really try my hardest not to be bitter about the propaganda-laden Department of Homeland Security, but then I stumble upon this site and I find myself shaking my head in disbelief.

It sounds insane, but Ready.gov is actually a site brought to you by our friends at the Ministry of Truth the Department of Homeland Security that seeks to educate american citizens on how to respond to a biological, chemical, or nuclear attack. The site offers “duck and cover” style instructions along with diagrams so silly looking I swear, I was sure the site had to have been made by The Modern Humorist.

I can’t make this stuff up:

Now let’s see…in the first image, our intrepid explorer is questioning whether or not he wants to eat the mysterious bio-contaminated fish. And in the second, he finds himself in a position where opening the door could subject him to dangerous radiation! What to do?

Eat the fish, open the door. You’re dead either way, dumbass. Just stay away from Texas. That’s apparently radioactive:

Some time ago, anticipating the release of Capcom vs. SNK 2 EO for Xbox (and more importantly, Xbox Live), I did a price search using Watson, and discovered that Dragon.ca was selling the game for about $10 less than anyone else.

I’ve ordered games from Dragon.ca before, and while they never arrived very quickly, I chalked that up to the fact that they were being shipped from the far off land of Canada (okay, so it’s a stretch, but bare with me here). So I placed my order. That was about a month ago.

Now as anyone who does this on a regular basis will tell you, the reason you pre-order something is so that when the item comes out you can sit back and relax, knowing that yours will be among the first to be shipped out and you’ll receive it shortly after retailers do. And yet…Capcom vs. SNK 2 has been out for weeks now, and I haven’t heard squat out of Dragon.ca.

So I decided to send them a nice letter, asking what was up with my order and when it would ship. I sent this in response to my original e-mailed invoice. And it was bounced.

Dragon.ca a few weeks back had a gala blow-out sale, where everything was 50% off. This brought their servers to a crawl, and as soon as it was over the site effectively shut down, directing all requests to this page. But, thinking myself very clever, I used Google’s cached version of their contact page to get a different address. It’s not listed there, but they use a standard mailto CGI script, and so if you look in the source code you’ll find this e-mail address. So I sent it to there.

And it was bounced.

By this point, I was getting a little annoyed, so I did a whois to get some more contact information. I pulled that up and called the number listed there, only to find out that they are no longer at that number. I did some hunting around and discovered that I’m not the only one wondering what’s going on here.

My latest attempt is to send several e-mails to the e-mail addresses listed in their whois information, as well as one to what I believe is their host. I’m not the kind of person to give up on something like this by any means. If I have to start hounding their host, backbone, and the Better Business Bureau. Actually, I think I’ll go ahead and file a complaint with the BBB anyway, just because they pissed me off.

I do a lot of buying online, and even with purchases through eBay I’ve never had anything this bad. My complaint isn’t even that my order hasn’t arrived yet, it’s just that I don’t have any way of knowing if it ever will. At this point I can walk a few blocks from my office and pick it up in person, so the sooner I can cancel this order the sooner I can get on with my online shoryuken.

Update: For those just coming in now from Google, there is a follow-up to this story here.

As the sidebar on the right there shows, I’m currently playing through Ensemble Studios’ Age of Mythology. It’s fun stuff, particularly for a mythology nut like I am. But as I’m playing it, I keep thinking about arguments I’ve heard lately that the real-time strategy genre is dead.

Their reasoning is sound: while other genres have flourished, or evolved in various directions, the core gameplay of RTS games hasn’t changed very much at all. And while there have been a few notable additions in some games, it does still come down to the same old strategy of collecting resources, building a huge army, and then unleashing it against your opponent. It’s been this way since Dune 2.

I don’t agree. I think there’s a lot of life in this genre, as games like Age of Mythology and WarCraft III both show. While they aren’t a whole lot different from games that came before, both games have evolved substantially over their earlier counterparts. And when it comes to single player campaigns, the difference is enormous.

As recently as a few years ago, it was commonplace for RTS campaigns to offer you a single short story, told from two or more points of view. This was great for WarCraft II, but it grew pretty stale over time. Age of Mythology and WarCraft III (and presumably C&C: Generals, although I haven’t tried that yet) show a new level of storytelling for the genre, in which each successive campaign builds on the same story. The perspective switches of course, but characters and storyline move from location to location. The result is an RTS that has as satisfying a story as most action games (better than some) and this may eventually move up to full RPG level. And the individual missions have gotten much, much better. Some of the more creative ones in both of these games require some real thinking, and resource collection takes a back seat to actual strategy.

I look at the evolution of the RTS as being the antithesis of the survival horror genre. There’s a group of games that despite several notable recent attempts (Eternal Darkness and Resident Evil 0 spring to mind) is still totally reliant on clunky controls and frustrating camera positioning. Which is a shame, because this was at one point a genre with a lot of promise.

So I heartily disagree with any RTS nay-sayers out there. Where you see yet another resource-fest, I see an evolving genre, which is striving ever closer to greatness.