Today is Free Comic Book Day.
So, don’t forget to look up your local participating comic book shop and drop in.
Category: Random Thoughts
The general category for posts on this blog.
The Real Harry Potter
Back in 1986, or it may have been 1987, I didn’t realize that a simple trip to the local video store was going to introduce me to one of the most widely known names in the world today. In fact, I didn’t even realize that such a momentous thing had occurred until my brother told me about the recent developments earlier this week.
You see… my brothers and I, as kids (who am I kidding? nothing has changed really as we grew up), liked to watch really awful movies. The Sci-Fi/Fantasy/Horror section of the video store was the best. And in 1986, a little movie called Troll was released. It is the story about a boy named Harry Potter (Junior, his father is also Harry Potter), who learns to use magic to fight a troll who is attempting to take over the world, or at least to turn it into a place full of magical creatures.
The only reason this has come up is that it seems the original writer and director of Troll, John Carl Buechler, wants to remake his film, with a larger budget (£20 million) and according to various sources Warner Bros. is trying to stop him from infringing on their copyright. The question is, can you copyright something you did not create first?
Its not as if this is some random director trying to make waves by making a film with a character named Harry Potter. This is a man wishing to remake a film he made 22 years ago and utilize the same character names he used 22 years ago, 4 years prior to the 1990 bolt of inspiration that J.K. Rowling claims began her endeavour of the now more well known use of the name.
As far as I know, Buechler has made no attempt to sue Ms. Rowling, to force her to change the name, nor to ask for any monetary compensation, he only claims that since he used the name first in a copyrighted work, but didn’t copyright the name specifically, it places the name “Harry Potter” in the public domain where anyone can use it.
Who is going to win? Personally, I feel that Buechler is right, at least in the case of his movie. He used the name first and should be allowed to continue to use the name in remakes of that work. But we’ll have to wait and see what the courts decide if Warner Bros. continues to head down that path.
All in all, it makes me paranoid about the things that I write. Now I’ll probably have to make sure I google every name I make up just to make sure that no one else made it up first.
Earth Day
Today is Earth Day.
So, being that that is what today is, I figured it was time for another edition of what I will from now on refer to as “Probably Not Saving The World!”
Previously on the blog, I’ve mentioned my efforts to reduce my junk mail. The first couple of steps I took helped, but it always seemed to be a momentary slackening of the flood, not a stoppage. Then I was pointed at GreenDimes. I signed up for their $20 premium package, and the junk mail has all but stopped. At this point, the only things I get that I consider junk are a few local items, which I can excuse because they are local advertisements of local businesses and not big chains. Its nice, and it makes me feel better about not wasting all that paper. With the GreenDimes service, you can even get the names of previous tenants dropped from lists, which is great since at this point nearly a third of my junk was for people who don’t live at my house.
We still keep up on the recycling, but even more so, I recently suffered through caffeine withdrawal in order to stop drinking Cokes, and have pulled way back on the number of canned and bottled beverages I drink. With a decent filter, tap water is just as good, if not better, than anything you can buy at the store. Plus, the more things you buy at the store (like sodas and bottled water) are more things that need to be trucked around the country. While I haven’t gone totally for “buying local”, I am trying to cut back on all the things I buy where I can.
Next up, we are looking to have an energy audit done on the house. That’s where someone comes and inspects the house to find all the places where you can improve efficiency, mostly for heating and air conditioning, to cut back on usage. As it is, we are trying to let the house stay cooler in the winter and a little warmer in the summer if we can stand it.
I’m really hoping that within the next five years I can get solar panels put on the house. You can even get money from the government to help with that, and get a tax write off.
So anyway… Happy Earth Day! Even if you don’t believe in “Global Warming”, garbage is still garbage, and less garbage is good.
Fool For A Day
In my opinion, there is comedy and there are April Fools’ jokes. Comedy comes in all forms, any day of the year. April Fools’ jokes come one day a year and the only good ones are immediate and physical, or slow gotchas. The immediate ones are like putting tape on the water fountain with a pinhole in it, or whoopee cushions. Timeless classics that make you want to punch someone in the face because the joke is retarded AND you fell for it like a giant dumb-ass. The slow gotchas are the best though… present something that is just bordering on too far, plausible but not totally probable, and once you’ve hooked them with enough detail and spin, shove it over the edge and make people feel silly for believing you.
The problem with that second form is that you are literally getting people’s hopes up and then crushing them with comedy. Strangely, people don’t like that. So, most people who pull April Fools’ pranks usually just start over the edge and try to be funny from the get go. While I don’t doubt that many people put a lot of effort into their creations for this particular day and I admit that many of them are in fact funny, the art of the April Fools’ con is lost to most.
Thanks to living in Atlanta for a number of years, I had the good fortune to experience some truly inspired April Fools’ pranks at the hands of the old 99x morning show. A few examples:
- Releasing information about a new theme park under construction in the Atlanta area called Magic Island, which was to be entirely underground.
- A control room mishap that resulted in accidentally giving out Leonardo DiCaprio’s home phone number.
- Firing one of the Morning X DJs because she wasn’t pretty enough to be on the new Web Cam that the station was setting up.
Each of these were well done because they did their homework… they got buy in from management, from sponsors, from actors, and they sold it to the audience, remaining in character even in the face of being called liars. The joke wasn’t dumped on you in the space of a few seconds, it was slowly built over the course of two or three hours, the kind of investment into a prank you just don’t see that often. Sadly, 99x is dead and the Morning X is long gone. But I’ll always have my memories…
Anyway, I’m not going to link to any particular site for jokes today, but over at April Fools’ Day On The Web they keep a running list of all the jokes that people report. Wikipedia will run a list also. Very few of them will really fool you, but some of them are funny.
Casserole
According to the definition:
cas·se·role: kas–uh-rohl
noun, verb, -roled, -rol·ing.
–noun
1. a baking dish of glass, pottery, etc., usually with a cover.
2. any food, usually a mixture, cooked in such a dish.
3. a small dish with a handle, used in chemical laboratories.
–verb (used with object)
4. to bake or cook (food) in a casserole.
the sentence “I casserole a casserole in this casserole.” would be valid. But trying saying it ten times fast…
Zed
When Big is Too Big
Yesterday, I rambled about my dislike of applications on social networking web sites. Today, I’m going to ramble about the other aspect I dislike about Internet community and social networking sites. They are just. so. big.
Back in the dayâ„¢, I played online games with, what I though was, a large group of people. There we literally dozens of us. Maybe hundreds. There were tons and tons of Quake players online, but, the community at large was segmented. Some people played Death Match, others played Capture The Flag, and then there were mods like Team Fortress. No part of it was really enormous, because even within segments, like Death Match for instance, there were further segments, built around servers and server groups, web sites, tournaments, geographical areas, etc. I can see this when I talk to people who knew of TF but didn’t play TF and I talk about us having year long tournament seasons with dozens of clans and alternates and all sorts of stuff. They just didn’t realize how big TF was… and I always thought DM was just scattered random chaos until they start waxing about the days of ranked tiers and what not. The same was true of EverQuest. While I was/am familiar with the players and guilds from my own server, outside a few standouts, the workings of other servers were non-existent. One day at work I found out a co-worker also played, but on another server. When I explained to him how “public” raiding worked, he was shocked, because his server had no public system, in fact it was a very tightly controlled tier system long before SOE ever considered making tiers. Today, I still hang out on a community board from my EQ server, and it consists of a few dozen or more regular posters with more infrequent posters and a bunch of lurkers who might post occasionally.
When I look at newer game communities, like the WoW official forums or places like Guild Cafe, I’m turned off. Being a dude with a regular job and other hobbies, I simply can’t keep up with a community of thousands, tens or even hundreds of thousands (or potentially millions in WoW’s case), posting with no restrictions. I log on one day, read some threads, post, and then leave. When I come back in a week, the conversation I was interested in is over, three days dead after getting four hundred posts and eventually being locked by a moderator, or simply faded away to page 47 (implying that 46 pages of posts have been made, not just since I’ve been there, but since the last time someone replied to the topic I was interested in). I lose pretty much all interest in the site. I can’t spend all day reading posts, and I certainly can’t spend all weekend catching up, so at best I’m tagging one thread in a hundred to participate in, and at a ratio like that I don’t feel like I’m a part of any community that may exist there.
In the end, its all a question of scope… how wide does a community cast its net? If you go too wide, you will end up alienating people who might be valuable members but do not have enough time to be fully involved and encouraging people who might be less valuable yet have ample time to participate everywhere. Go too narrow and your community will die on the vine, or at best be little more than a place where your tiny group of dedicated members can hang out, which in most cases isn’t going to be enough to run a business off of unless that business is small or the price is high.
Currently, I think most, if not all, of the social networking sites are going too wide without enough tools for the users to both segregate themselves and to find the segregated communities in which they belong or wish to belong. In addition, they all seem to be reinventing the wheel in everything they do. The message board functions of most social networking sites are like stepping into the stone age when compared to the robust readily available software solutions on the market. You’d think Facebook or MySpace might consider investing in one of those.
Perhaps in a future post, I might wax poetic about what I would do if I were to invent a social networking site.
The Handcart We Are Rapidly Pushing to Hell…
… is filled with social site web apps.
Look! One of my friends has installed SuperFunAwesomeWall! To read the cool stuff they have written I need to install it! But wait! Another friend has installed AwesomeFunSuperWall, which is not the same application… and, uh, a third friend installed FunSuperAwesomeWall… and another FunAwesomeSuperWall… okay, what the hell… And I’ve been bitten by a vampire, and a werewolf, and a zombie, and a dog, and I’m in bat country.  I’ve been asked to join an entourage, a pimp squad, and a sports team, no less than three movie applications, and some trivia.  I’ve been Poked, SuperPoked, MegaPoked, SexyPoked, and CanadianPoked, could someone please stop with all the damn poking? I’ve had myself compared to other people in every possible way, and I now know which superhero (Marvel and DC), L Word character, Simpson, Lost castaway, Friend, drunk, color, type of Irish Republican, chocolate, Spice Girl, assassin, and dead Russian author I am. Among a great many other things, and while all those things might be true, one thing I can say with absolute certainty that I am is someone who has almost entirely stopped logging in to Facebook.
About the only time I go there anymore is when I get an email that someone new has requested to link up, or on the odd occasion that I remember I have an account and decide I want to check and see if any more people I forgot I used to know have appeared. The sad thing about most of those apps, besides the fact that they are horribly repetitive, is that most of them are crap. Seriously, and annoying to boot.
Perhaps its just me… maybe I just don’t get it… but there really doesn’t seem to be much “social” is all these social networking sites. In fact, the social aspects of direct messaging and message boards seem to be the hardest parts of the sites to find or use as they are drowned out by ads and apps. One day, I was logged into Facebook using my Heroespowers to try to gain another level when I asked myself, “Why? Why the fuck am I doing this?” So I tried to dig through the app to find the community, the social part that should exist beyond spamming all my friends with useless power messages and invitations to install the app and join the spam, and I couldn’t find any. I searched all my Walls (I had 3 installed in addition to the default one) and the only messages I found were the equivalent of chain letters. I removed a good 90% of the apps I had installed (I’m a sucker for trivia) and sent out a couple of messages to some friends. After a few days I realized that using Facebook for anything social beyond finding people to begin with was pointless. Once we found each other and exchanged contact info, dropping “back” to email or AIM was so much easier than using Facebook. And more reliable too.
“Why have Facebook email me every time I get a new message when I can just have people email me directly?” I found myself wondering. I suppose if I were famous, I could use sites like Facebook to have a “public” face that people could talk to while hiding my “true” email address. But I’m not, and everyone I currently talk to I feel safe giving my real email address to.
Of course, I realize that my gripes with these sites are largely about the efforts they have chosen to make in regards to traffic and ad revenue. These aren’t pay sites, after all. But then again, I’d say that overall their efforts are failing. When was the last time you clicked an ad on Facebook or MySpace or some other social network site? Just this instant I logged in to Facebook and the ads presented to me as I navigated ignoring all the random spam messages were for AllPosters.com, some weight loss thing, a local college bar, a website to find out who’s searching for me on the Internet, and upromise. The one thing all five of those have in common is that they are things I wouldn’t click on. Only one had any interest to me (AllPosers.com) but I already know about the site, have it book marked, and use it every now and then. However, had it been some game advertisements, TV shows, movies, or something of that nature, I might have clicked on it. The one thing all of these social networking sites suck at is directing the proper ads to the proper people. They need a control panel where I can choose to get video game ads but not weight loss ads, to get TV shows but not college loans.
And just so it doesn’t seem like I’m picking on Facebook, I have a MySpace account as well that I use a little more often (its not too horrible at browsing and finding new musical insterests). Recently that launched their application platform, and its largely full of the same crap as Facebook, with, in my opinion, the only exception being the MetaChat application launched by the people of MetaPlace. It is fairly nifty, except… its also fairly useless. Sure, I can now put a chat room on my profile page, but how often do I hang out on my own profile page? How often do people visit my profile page? Do I even really want to chat with the random people who cross my profile? Everyone I want to chat with, I tend to give them my email address, or my AIM account and we chat elsewhere.
Tomorrow… more on social networking and Internet communities…
Stuff White People Like
This is a pretty funny site. And being that I am, in fact, a white person, I decided to go on a journey of self discovery and find out exactly how “white” I am by comparing to their list from 1 to 90 (the latest at the time of writing).
- Coffee – No, I hate coffee in pretty much all its forms.
- Religions their parents don’t belong to – I suppose this could be correct since I don’t ascribe to any religion currently and my parents did, even if they hadn’t gone to church in nearly twenty years.
- Film Festivals – Okay, I do like film festivals, but I think its important to note that I hate most independent films.
- Assists – Not much of a sports guy, so I have no opinion on assists.
- Farmer’s Markets – Nope. Not a big Farmer’s Market guy.
- Organic Food – Nah… processed food is A-okay with me.
- Diversity – Ehh… not so much.
- Barack Obama – While I would choose Mr. Obama over Mrs. Clinton if those were my choices, I’m currently supporting McCain for President, so, this one doesn’t apply to me.
- Making you feel bad about not going outside – I’m a computer geek… outside? Why?
- Wes Anderson Movies – I have watched, and not really enjoyed, most of his films. I don’t really get it.
- Asian Girls – Not entirely my cup of tea… wait, does saying “not my cup of tea” make me “white”?
- Non-Profit Organizations – Not I.
- Tea – Shit. Although, I really only drink tea at Chinese restaurants, which I go to maybe once a year, and sometimes at family dinners, because my parents are from the South and Sweet Iced Tea is required at the table.
- Having Black Friends – I currently have no black friends, only a couple black friends of friends, this isn’t because I avoid black people, but instead because my life just doesn’t happen to have any black people in it, and I don’t feel any need to seek out black people specifically so I can befriend them.
- Yoga – No.
- Gifted Children – If I ever decide to have children, I’ll be happy if my kid only eats the FDA daily recommended amounts of paste.
- Hating their Parents – I can’t really say I ever hated my parents. I mean, I did move out of the house at 18, but that was more because I wanted to have more sex than I was able to sneak past them, not because of any dislike of them.
- Awareness – Largely, I am aware of only that I could be doing more, none of which involves making other people aware.
- Traveling – I apparently missed my requisite trip to Europe. 🙁
- Being an expert on YOUR culture – While I will admit to trying (in vain) to learn Spanish and Japanese, I really haven’t spent much time worrying about learning other people’s cultures.
- Writers Workshops – Okay, fine, yes, I have gone to a Writer’s Workshop, but in my defense (I hope) it was only 2 days and at Dragon*Con. No, I guess that really didn’t help.
- Having Two Last Names – I am not particularly fond of people who do this.
- Microbreweries – Not so big on the beers, I like liquor.
- Wine – People, white people, keep insisting I try wines. Haven’t liked one yet.
- David Sedaris – Who?
- Manhattan (now Brooklyn too!) – I have so little interest in New York that I almost didn’t write this sentence.
- Marathons – “Do you run?” “Only when chased.” And that pretty much sums up my interest in marathons.
- Not having a TV – Not only do I have a TV, I have 4, and 1 is actually a PC with 6 tuners so I can record everything and watch it later.
- 80s Night – This is really unfair, because being born in ’74, the 80’s are a huge part of my development as a human being. So, I guess they get me on this one.
- Wrigley Field – If I was in Chicago, and I got tickets, I’d go, but more because about the only way I can stand watching baseball is at the field with a couple of beers and a footlong hotdog.
- Snowboarding – Have I ever mentioned how much I am not a fan of cold?
- Vegan/Vegetarianism – I am a card carrying member of PETA… People for the Eating of Tasty Animals.
- Marijuana – The only time I ever got high was during the 8th grade when my parents let my older brother and I go to see David Bowie on his Glass Spider tour. Shortly after the concert began a haze rose from the crowd, the air was filled with the smell of a wet down jacket and I got a headache.
- Architecture – Got me on another one, I do like architecture, however there isn’t any particular style or era that I like, I just don’t like when strip malls are built looking like bland boxes. I would prefer they all put at least a little effort into it.
- The Daily Show/Colbert Report – I have been told I would love these shows if I watched them, but as of yet I haven’t bothered watching.
- Breakfast Places – Breakfast is my least favorite meal of the day, largely because every breakfast place known to man seems to insist that eggs are required and I hate eggs. Then they go and make me order a side of bacon, a side of ham, a side of sausages, a side of toast, a side of hashbrowns… it seems my penalty for disliking eggs is that my breakfast is going to cost $47.83.
- Renovations – *sigh* I am renovating a house, but only because I bought a foreclosure and the previous owner took everything not nailed down (and some things that were, if you’ve ever seen the Richard Pryor movie Moving you know what I mean), and they had horrible taste (every room in the house is a shade of brown).
- Arrested Development – Still have not seen it, but I’ll be sure to add it to my Netflix queue.
- Netflix – Fuck. Although, allow me to reiterate how much I dislike most independent films… and foreign films.
- Apple Products – I’m just going to say that I simply do not have enough time or diskspace to explain to the lengths that I loathe Apple Products.
- Indie Music – I like music, pretty much any kind except hardcore gangsta rap (all the bitches and hoes and drugs and guns and that stuff, just does not strike a chord with me), so I suppose I like indie music, but I don’t believe it is to the degree intended here.
- Sushi – Hate.
- Plays – I like the idea of plays, its the execution of most of them that I dislike.
- Public Radio – Talk radio, I am certain, is one of the signs of the Apocalypse.
- Asian Fusion Food – No.
- The Sunday New York Times – I don’t read any newspapers anymore.
- Arts Degrees – Bachelor’s in Computer Science.
- Whole Foods and Grocery Co-ops – I do shop at one of those membership store, but its a warehouse style shop and I go there because it allows me to buy the crap I eat in bulk and save money. Why pay $9 at the regular store for a small box of Stoffer’s French Bread Pizzas when I can go to BJ’s and get the giant box with four times the pizzas for $12?
- Vintage – Not really.
- Irony – I do, indeed, love me some irony, but not really in the fashion they describe it here.
- Living by the Water – Guilty. I do want to live on a beach.
- Sarah Silverman – She’s funny sometimes. And sometimes not.
- Dogs – Much better than cats.
- Kitchen Gadgets – I buy the gadgets not for me but for my wife.
- Apologies – I apologize alot, but then, I am a chronic procrastinator, so I often have things to apologize for.
- Lawyers – I respect the need for there to be people who spend the time to understand the nuances of law, but most lawyers are scum.
- Juno – I loved this movie.
- Japan -Â I do want to go to Japan someday, but I really hate anime.
- Natural Medicine – While I’m all for exploring natural solutions for things, I fully believe in the pharmaceutical industry’s ability to cure diseases.
- Toyota Prius – I do want a hybrid, but less for the environmental impact than for the savings in gas.
- Bicycles – I do like bicycles, although I have not owned one since mine was stolen almost 15 years ago. If I ever bought another one, I could not see myself spending more than $200 on one, so no specialty bikes for me.
- Knowing What’s Best for Poor People – I care, somewhat, about poor people, but I care more about not becoming a poor person.
- Expensive Sandwiches – Wheat bread, meat slices, mustard, maybe occasionally throw in some lettuce or a tomato, or some pickles. What I make at home often is so much better than what a restaurant will make.
- Recycling – I do recycle, but I also work on reducing the amount of garbage I produce as well.
- Co-Ed Sports – Again, computer geek… outside?
- Divorce – Divorce sucks.
- Standing Still at Concerts – I am confused by this one, do people who are not “white” go to concerts and ballroom dance? I don’t stand “still” at concerts, I do move around to the music and what not, but it never occurred to me to break out the foxtrot or boxstep.
- Michel Gondry – He does some interesting stuff, but I wouldn’t exactly say that I love him.
- Mos Def – I do like Mos Def.
- Difficult Breakups – I don’t believe I’ve had a difficult break up yet. Relationships just sort of end, and that’s it.
- Being the only white person around – Can’t say as I have ever sought this situation out.
- Study Abroad – Might have been nice.
- Gentrification – I suppose it is a thing that I like, because I would rather see inner city areas looking good than to see them looking like crap.
- Oscar Parties – I have gone to Oscar parties, but thus far, much like our State of the Union parties, they are more about hanging out and drinking than the program on the TV.
- Threatening to Move to Canada – Hell no. Did I mention that I don’t like cold? or hockey? or French?
- Bottles of Water – I don’t buy bottles of water unless I have to, but I do buy bottle of orange juice which I keep and reuse as water bottles.
- Musical Comedy – Yeah, I admit, I do find it entertaining.
- Multilingual Children – I want to be multilingual myself, and looking to the future, being multilingual is probably going to be advantageous.
- Modern Furniture – No.
- The Idea of Soccer – Not much into any sports. Computer geek.
- Graduate School – I wouldn’t mind going back to school and studying stuff, but I really don’t have an interest in grad school.
- Hating Corporations – I don’t hate all corporations, however I do dislike the disassociation of responsibility of people who work for them, the “I just do my job, and I had no part in the overall heartless money grubbing of this company” defense. There is much more to it than that, but not for here, not now.
- Bad Memories of High School – I don’t really have bad memories, or good memories. High school was neither the best nor worst years of my life.
- T-Shirts – While I do like T-Shirts with cool stuff on them, and I do wear T-Shirts whenever I can get away with it, but it doesn’t really go beyond that.
- The Wire – I do want to see it… Netflix.
- Shorts – Did I mention how much I hate the cold?
- Outdoor Performance Clothes – I do not believe I own any Outdoor Performance Clothes.
- Having Gay Friends – Much like the black friends up at number 14, its not something I seek out, if it happens, then it happens.
- St. Patrick’s Day – Yeah, well, I do like this particular holiday.
- Dinner Parties – I’ve had people over for dinner, but not by choice. My wife is “whiter” than I am apparently.
So, that’s it. Assuming this website is discussing a particular variant of “white”, largely registered Democrats and yuppies, it appears that I am not very “white” after all. Well, now I’ve got to go figure out how to waste the rest of my day.
Enjoy!
Hey You!
Yeah… you, the guy who just quit out of our Burnout Paradise Freeburn. Look, I know you want to get all 350 of the Freeburn Challenges completed, we all do, but some of us don’t quit just because the guy in charge picked a challenge we’ve done before. Hang around and chat and have some fun instead of being the assbag everyone is now calling you because you quit.
You do realize that we talk about you when you leave, right?
Yeah, and some of us even rate you poorly on Xbox Live. Ever wondered why your carefully crafted star rating is suddenly plummeting? Yeah, that’d be us.
If we confronted you, you might try some excuse like, “I had to take a break from gaming” but we know you’d be lying, because, Xbox Live lets you see all the people you’ve recently played with on your friends list, so we can see that you dropped our game, without a word I might add, and hopped in to another game, because the list shows that not only are you playing Burnout Paradise still, but you are Freeburning (and it even gives us an option to join the session you are in, not that we would, because you are probably just going to leave again).
So, next time, how about not being a cock and sticking around to play. You might even try asking the host to pick particular challenges. You never know, he might listen.