my.bicycle

I’m going dark for the next two weeks, for a trip to the USA. Blog postings may be substantially decreased during this time. If so, have fun in the archives. On the other hand, I may end up dregding through old Drafts, and posting in a flurry. I leave you with this thought: Have you ever noticed that Christopher Lambert and Ren Hoek have exactly the same voice? Ever notice that they never appear in public together? Hmmmm...?

I cannot possibly be the only one who wants see Steve Jackson Games’ Frag adapted as a videogame. Oh, the delicious irony...

Handmade masks , and not quite as outrageously expensive as one might find them at various faires.

This short film, Cathedral , looks intriguing. It apparently garnered an Academy nomination, but it has never even blitted on my radar. As gorgeous as the imagery is, the website is short on details and common (web) sense: the Press page is rendered as graphics, and has broken links to press materials, and appears to intentionally override the status-bar display of where a link will lead. </whine> Still, very pretty and I hope to see it somehow, someday. (via LiveJournal )

Blizzard’s World of Warcraft MMORPG has posted a proposed character name guideline , which has apparently caused both rejoicing and berserker behavior. If I’m playing and paying for it, I don’t want to break immersion by seeing the sultry drow before me is named "BRitNEYsPEaRzR0x0rz" or "Titfu©K3R" -- but I think this could be handled via a "Allow Lame Names" toggle in an Options menu, defaulted to “off.” Players who didn't conform to the rules could be seen as “Peon” by players who do not want to see exotic names. (via gamasutra )

At a pre-TGS announcement party, Sony finally showed off their new , long-rumored PS2 (apparently not “PStwo” as many have speculated). It has reduced the overall volume of the previous form factor by 75%. It has a built-in ethernet adaptor (and an analog modem in the North American version). Holy crap, Sony can make hardware sexy; I own a PSX , and I still want this new thing. If they ever make one in milk-white, like my PSX and iBook, I'm doomed.

How to Become an Obnoxious Internet Camwhore in Five Easy Steps (via bites the sun )

ComingSoon.net has a mess of clips for Shaun of the Dead , the British zombie comedy. I must see this movie soon.

The P2P telephony/voice-chat service, Skype , first came to my attention several months ago via a “What are those KaZaA madmen up to after causing the MPAA and RIAA collective bloodpressure to shoot through the roof?” article in MIT’s TechReview . However it didn’t get installed until today, because Skype has finally offered an OS X flavor!

As of 25 minutes ago, “it’s my birthday too, man.”</beatles> Begin with the doting.

I found this DPH entry quite funny: Watching Batmen practising their grimaces on the corner outside the hotel? Watching Stormtroopers spank scrawny girls in bad lingerie? Trying not to smack an in-character faux-Jack Sparrow in the face just on principle? Well, that's just a convention. But couldn't stop laughing when this was an apparently unrelated followup . (note that “mistersleepless” is the sparrowpuncher in question)

If you’re needing more reading material, Neil Gaiman’s Hugo-nominated, Lovecraftian, Sherlock Holmes short story, Study in Emerald and Vernor Vinge’s The Cookie Monster , and Charlie Stross’ Elector are available online for free. This seems like a good moment to reiterate my nearly unqualified love for Plucker , the Palm OS app that lets me synch pages and pages of web/text content to my handheld, for reading away from my desktop machines. Sadly, my cradle is at work, and I've not got the BlueTooth synch sussed out as yet, or they’d be on my T3 already.

Warren Ellis’ livejournal presence, “mistersleepless” has a post collecting all his SCREAM TALKING bits. For the few people who read this blog and don’t follow Ellis’ stuff, here is your chance to peruse some excellent, shocking short fiction. Especially the pig one .

These aren’t from the Tokyo Game Show , but since I will be attending on the Professional Day (Fri) and one of the Public Days (Sat) I thought I’d give you all an unpleasant taste of what I will be facing on the Public Day. The booth babes are very hot, but sometimes the cosplayers will cause an unpleasant double-take, like when one grabs a can of Coke, but forgets that you finished the Coke an hour ago, and refilled the can with water. It’s not so much that water is horrible, but it’s not Coke. Masamania has more here (Masamania, who is wild, was finally featured at Boingboing.net for this very page .)

Friend of this blog, m. christian , has an interview promoting The Bachelor Machine , his excellent collection of science-fiction-themed erotica up at Suicide Girls . Though the SG interview page is safe for work, SG is a an adult site. If you wander off the interview page and find girlies, don’t come complaining to me: you’ve been warned.

BBC link . Just bookmarking for now. (via whumpdotcom )

The Lone Gunmen had a plot about the US government planning to crash airliners into the World Trade Center ? Good grief. (thanks, KD )

If you’ve got a QuickTime movie that you only want to listen to (like, say, a music video), you can add it to your iTunes Library by dragging the file to it. Then to save space, you can right-click on the file and Convert to AAC , which will save a new file that contains only the sound.

Wikalong is a wiki that embeds itself in the Mozilla Firefox browser sidebar. Use it to make a running wiki-commentary of the web, or see what others have said about sites. My favorite mail program, Mozilla Thunderbird , has implemented RSS reading in a recent nightly build. Sam-I-Am, I don't know why this isn't being implemented in Firefox instead; mail application to read a stream of articles that most commonly reference web pages? While I know that RSS can be used for just about anything (e.g.: easily tracking the latest BitTorrents), but in general doesn’t this seem more web-centric than mail-centric? (via waxy and del.icio.us/revgeorge )

Holy crap: a pop ditty inspired by The Silence of the Lambs , Greenskeepers’ “Lotion” is creepily delicious. ( .mov ) (Insert witty, Anthony Hopkins’ voiced cleverness here.) (via waxy )

If you watch Rejected ( .wmv ), don’t drool. It’s hypnotic. Details about it are at Bitter Films , where the artiste describes his experience with Big Business . (via tokyopia forums )

Fictionwise is giving away 18 non-encrypted e-books for free . On a side note, they usually have the Hugo Award nominees for short fiction available just before and a just a bit after the awards are given. Update: They’ve just offered a second wave of free ebooks .

Thought I posted this before, but I guess I did it at futurismic . Here's a simple-as-it-gets Engadget tutorial on how to disable auto-run . Auto-run is the little feature on machines running Windows OS that can automatically open a CD's Setup application, or detect that an audio-CD has been inserted and run the default player (or maybe run a cutesy-Flash application on enhanced audio CDs), and it can also be used to run copy protection software on a PC without the user consenting to it . This is clearly malware , since it is not only not requested as an install by the user, and limits the ways the media can be used. There are also cases where it has flonked a machine's operating ability, and not just Celine Dion killing Macs, either. These are cases where we are thinking we're buying an audio-CD, but we aren't . Engadget encourages everyone to kill auto-run. It may make iTunes a little bit less handy (auto-checks for new CDs, and CDDB tracklistings must be manua...

Here are a bunch of books that US residents can’t download , thanks to the fuckuppery surrounding the Public Domain . Remember: no fair peeking!

TargetAlert is an extension for the Firefox web browser that provides visual cues for the destinations of hyperlinks. If a hyperlink points to a something that is not a web page, then TargetAlert will try to append an icon to the hyperlink that represents its destination. (via waxy )

Nevermind me, I'm just bookmarking two Gamespot articles: one where Kasavin was right-on and another where he makes a lot of wrong-headed assumptions then presents them as fact to an audience of consumers and that may not know better. How to Shoot Yourself in the Foot (Sept 9 entry): Recently covered in Penny-Arcade as well , the whole sales and marketing fiasco coming this holiday season by having too many good games go on sale at once, all competing for the same money. Let me give you a very specific example of what I'm talking about. Take Tuesday, September 21 (which is just one moment in time during a season that will be filled with many other such moments in time). On this day, the following PC real-time strategy games will be released: Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War; Rome: Total War; and Kohan II: Kings of War. The Dating Game : Why games should only ever ship on time, and "when it's done" is no longer acceptable. As a game player, I demand to know, as ear...

It’s hard not to root for any western games, and hope they get a foothold in the Japanese market. GTA3 and GTA: Vice City aside, the Japanese market is not friendly to yoh-gei (western games). So it always evokes curiousity about sales figures when something like Majesco’s Bloodrayne (1, not 2) ships here two years after its western release, and charges full price for the PS2 version and typically high for the PC version (¥7140 and ¥8329, respectively). Maybe they'll time the sequel to come out with the movie here?

MTV2’s Video Mods , music videos as performed by videogame characters, are viewable online . I’m a fan of Evanescence and of Bloodrayne’s half-vampire chica in hip-cut leather, and the lyrics seem apt for the media and venue: Just what we all need More lies about a world that Never was and never will be However, the Tribes: Vengeance interpretation of Von Bondies C’Mon C’Mon is the most impressive of the lot, both for maintaining the feel of the videogame at its roots, as well as expanding, rather than emulating, the music video format.

Upcoming movie from Dave McKean , Neil Gaiman , and The Jim Henson Company : Mirrormask . Some wonderful pictures of Gaiman-esque imagery as filtered through McKean are available at Smoking Life . Anyone have further details?

I was really worried about Resident Evil: Apocalypse ’s 24% on rottentomatoes.com , until I saw that the original only scored 35% . Which means I will probably be happy to go and see it, if all I want is Milla firing guns at zombies. Which I do. Oh, how I do. The MPAA warning is enough of a review for me: NON-STOP VIOLENCE, LANGUAGE, AND SOME NUDITY Anyone else want to make Resident Evel with me? It would be a fan movie about an indestructible zombie motorcycle rider with a penchant for flashy jumpsuits. Update: Milla Jovovich released a alternative-folksy-pop The Divine Comedy in 1994, “(i)nspired by a love of "elves and magic trees", Milla penned the lyrics at 15, recorded it when she was 16, and released it when she was 18(...)” Like many people, I was stunned at its quality, and have long hoped for a follow-up album. In an MTV interview regarding Resident Evil: Apocalypse , they asked about her music; she revealed that her personal site has downloads of de...

Patriotism means to stand by the country. It does not mean to stand by the President or any other public official. - President Theodore Roosevelt The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary. - H.L. Mencken Richard Forno 's Weapons of Mass Delusion: America's Real National Emergency is available as a free PDF . (via cryptome )

If you want the old Doom game with the new graphics , try Doom Classic (via waxy )

Space Invader wall stickers glowing, groping, luminescent pillow with wi-fi Adhesive mounted 5" CD/DVD hubs (for bookmounting, etc.); I don't think I want a T-Shirt that boldly states 5" though, and I suspex that this would be a better DIY project than to spend that much money on them (4 pack for US$17?!). Better pingtimes when trying to play FarCry from my home machine. 350: what the hell is up with that? Thoracic Cavity Storage T-Shirt These Nike boots , which are not made for walking. Missile Balloons

My favorite Japanese singer, Hikaru Utada , has just released her first international album, called Exodus . It appears that she is going to just go with the name “ Utada ” in western territories. With the number of copy-protected CDs I've seen on the shelves lately, I was extra-stunned to see that this was just a normal CD, and the record company had seen fit to outfit the jewel case with an additional, high-quality board, extra-glossy jacket, a booklet of all the English-only lyrics rendered into Japanese, in addition to the booklet in the jewelcase. While thinking that I had briefly been transported to a magical land where the record company recognizes that treating me like a customer is good , and treating me like a criminal is bad , I didn't even look at the price tag as I brought it up to the counter. Like any other Japanese release, it was expensive: ¥3000. It’s worth it.

Charmingly dark ragdolls . (via DPH )

Fri Sep 10, 6:28 PM ET | SAN FRANCISCO ( Reuters ) - Having sex with corpses is now officially illegal in California after Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger signed a bill barring necrophilia, a spokeswoman says. The new legislation marks the culmination of a two-year drive to outlaw necrophilia in the state and will help prosecutors who have been stymied by the lack of an official ban on the practice, according to experts. “Nobody knows the full extent of the problem. ... But a handful of instances over the past decade is frequent enough to have a bill concerning it,” said Tyler Ochoa, a professor at Santa Clara University School of Law who has studied California cases involving allegations of necrophilia. “Prosecutors didn’t have anything to charge these people with other than breaking and entering. But if they worked in a mortuary in the first place, prosecutors couldn't even charge them with that,” Ochoa said on Friday. The state’s first a...

It has been posited that we only laugh at misfortune. I would further state that misfortune that has been preceded by an overconfidently misplaced “watch this” wink is doubly funny. Let the kung-fu commence .

I’ve just uninstalled FarCry without completing it. The portion of it I played was excellent, and when it ran, it was fine on my mid-range PC. But I got one-two-punched, and that’s my limit. Since the beginning, I have been a fan of PC games -- even when my “PC” was an Apple //e, and the game was Zork or Karateka . When other people got into their Famicom and Genesis consoles, those platforms seemed simplistic and childish in comparison to the devastating power of my 64kRAM machine with all the buttons anyone could want on a keyboard. Jump forward a little further, and actual IBM PC type games continued to trounce console games, first with adventure games, then with higher resolution graphics, improved sound, online play, 3D visuals -- the PC had always seemed to be the obvious place to be for the best experience. When I left my beloved Mac environment and bought a Windows PC for the purpose of maintaining seamless compatibility with my work environment,...

Meet Katherine Harris , source of highly questionable partisan behavior leading to the the results in the Florida election. (thanks, justine )

Inside the Monkeysphere (thanks, mckenzee )

When I moved back to the US from Japan in 1994, there were some changes in consumer goods that made me think I was in some Sliders episode rather than my birth-country on Earth Prime. The first thing I noticed was the VHS tapes all had a white-text-on-black-screen warning stating: This film has been modified from its original version. It has been formatted to fit this screen. When I asked several friends about it, they claimed that it had always been in place, and that I had simply never noticed it before. I’m still curious about when the mandatory labeling started, though I’m well-versed in what the meaning of it . Next, there was a quirky little game called Magic: The Gathering , which should have been called Crack: The Addictioning . I bought a Starter Pack of Revised Edition, and was quickly hooked. However I think it was with Fallen Empires that I noticed a strange, rounded “CE” on the back of the cards. I’d seen a lot of weird little corporate ru...

Upstart publisher/developer Perpetual is making a Star Trek: The Next Generation -era online RPG . ( FAQ )For this I bring the enthusiastic exclamation “schwing” out of retirement: Schwing.

I've just read two disparate works of “youth literature.” Ostensibly this is what the “young people” of “today” are reading. The level of intellect involved with reading each, as well as the targeted age group provided such dissonance, I am inclined to review both of them simultaneously to cast each of them into relief against the other. First, I read " Fearless " by Francine Pascal . Someone said it was good, and I was in a rush to get an Amazon order muled over for me by a friend, so in it went. I guess if I’d known that the same author had provided the unending drama of Sweet Valley High , the quality level of Fearless would have been a mite less surprising. The main character, Gaia, is a high school student who has an absentee father, a dead mother, and lives with her Dad's brother and his shrill wife. She is bad at making friends, since she is as surly as any other high school student who is not running for student government; this sho...

Plans are in the works to voltron together TiVO and Netflix , so subscribers will be able to download movies directly to their TiVO hard disk, rather than wait for them in the mail. (via engadget )

The Sony PSX is being price-slashed throughout Japan -- about two months after I bought mine. I bought the silver 5100 model, and am very happy with it, but I'd be even happier if it had cost about US$150 less than I paid. One wonders how Sony will position this for its eventual non-Japanese release, as it has been plagued by poor public-image and bad marketing, which have resulted in poor sales, since its introduction in the latter half of 2003.

Gabe ( take the quiz ) Jesus fuck, thank god that's over. your score is 46 Avid Penny Arcade fan, obsessive gamer and able to kick Tycho's ass! On top of that you can handle DivX !!! Be proud of yourself, you've earned it. Now go out their and kick those babies asses all over!

3D Realms ’ Duke Nukem Forever: A Timeline (via Fort90 ) Major releases in prominent game series since first DNF press release on April 25, 1997: Grand Theft Auto 1, 2, London, III, Vice City, likely San Andreas Fallout, Fallout 2, All eight (to my knowledge) Infinity Engine games and expansions, and three Baldur's Gate console spinoffs Final Fantasies VII, VIII, IX, X, X-2 XI, Tactics, Tactics Advance, Crystal Chronicles, Origins, Anthology, Chronicles and the Ergheiz & two Mysterious Dungeon spinoffs Legend of Zelda: Four Swords, Wind Waker, Ocarina of Time, Majora's Mask, Link's Awakening DX, Link to the Past GBA, Legend of Zelda GBA, Oracle of Seasons, Oracle of Ages Unreal, Return to wherever the **** that was, Unreal Tournament, UT2k3, UT2k4 and at least 4 games off the top of my head that use its engine Quakes 2 and 3, and God knows how many games used those two engines Thief 1, 2, 3 The Sims and all seven expansions Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 1, 2, 2x, 3, 4...

Soulwax ’ new album Any Minute Now is released on a copy-protected CD . Soulwax got its start as 2 Many DJ’s , a clubmixing, bastard-popping, mashup crew who created new songs using other people’s music as a foundation. O, irony! Though I’d love to have the new album, I bought a non-CP’d album of 2 Many DJ’s previous mixes instead ( as heard on radio soulwax pt. 2 , which is really good) , which will actually rip to iTunes, and it won’t kill my Mac . By doing this, I am merely one hit on a statistic that says, “yeah, these guys are good,” but does not support copy-protection of CDs. I can't believe Soulwax thought it was a good idea to CP their record; it doesn't piss me off so much as shake my head in disbelief. What does make me angry is the RIAA claiming that CD sales have dropped 7% (arguable) and then go on to blame it on CD-copying and ’net piracy. Personally I refuse to buy any CD that I can't back up (we have a lot...

For anyone worried about me and my family in Japan, though the quakes were quite large and nearby, we weren't hurt and our stuff wasn't broken. Google news turned up several pages with contradictory numbers, but this one seems to have the numbers I feel most closely describe what happened. It felt like a 7+ (Richter) for the first one, nearly a 7 for the second at midnight, and a third at 06:00 that woke only me, and was likely barely a 3. The tidal waves were reportedly quite small. For tidal waves, that is. Next up: Godzilla. (Not the Gibsonian one)

Delicious Library for Mac OS X will allow users to track their collection of books and DVDs and such. Manually inputting all the records for books and DVDs can be a real drag, so users can use their iSight camera to read the UPC barcode , which will do a net-lookup and identify the media. Smooth.

What the hell is a Lehtileikkeleet ? Who was crazy enough to make a Lego version ? (via jwz LJ )

I just knew George W. and crew were only goofing off, but I never expected to have overwhelming photographic evidence !

Enjoy some downloadable MP3s and Quicktime videos from plus/minus . This is for everyone, but especially for Sturgill, who I believe is currently existing somewhere web-inconvenient. Hint for the iTunes users: adding a QT movie to your Library, then converting it to AAC will give you just the sound layer of any QT video. Neat. Oh. (via KD )

I’ve been given five more Gmail invites. Leave a comment if you want one, though requests with good reasons included will have priority over simple “gimme’s.”

I was terrified when Bush declared war, not on a foreign nation, but on a concept: terrorism. How can any nation hope to win a war waged against an idea? “ The war is not meant to be won. It is meant to be continuous .” (Bonus points for anyone who can tell me from whence the quote comes. It was used to finish Fahrenheit 911 , and it is generally attributed to Orwell, but I can't find it in the searchable text of 1984 .) For anyone who argues that there are only two options, fight terrorism or pretend everything will be okay, I offer an alternative expense-sheet for how the money that has already been spent on pre-emptively invading Iraq to find weapons that didn't exist could have been better spent to actually protect Americans.

New iMac : all the guts are right behind the flatscreen; no more half-dome. As usual, the US$1299 price point is just enough to get me to push the BUY NOW button to see what the specs are, and I find that I really want the high-end model of this “low end” machine. At an Osaka store I recently saw the previous model 20" iMac and was stunned into immobility at its complete beauty. I’m almost afraid to see one of these new ones anywhere. My wife would say, “That's how the getcha!”

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AVG (via paul boutin ) Update: El Otro Miguel says, “I reccommend AntiVir , from http://www.free-av.com/ ”