| Friday, November 1, 2002 |
18:03 - Ooh, what a scary little monopoly!
http://money.cnn.com/2002/11/01/technology/microsoft_remedy/index.htm
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So the trial is pretty much finished, then. And, in a far cry from what happened in the good ol' days of Thomas Penfield Jackson (who scared the bejeezus out of Microsoft's lawyers when he interrupted their stream of let's-confuse-the-poor-grayheaded-fogey techno-gibberish with "Counsel, I know what a DLL is"), Judge Kollar-Kotelly (did her parents meet in the registration line at college or something?) has handed out a nice Halloween treat to the obviously harmless little software trust. This was a sentencing, following a conviction. And the sentence?
The approved settlement requires Microsoft to disclose some sensitive technology to its rivals months earlier than the company and the Justice Department had proposed.
That's how a convicted criminal monopoly is punished these days.
Just think, though-- if the states hadn't raised hell, Microsoft's punishment would have been that it would have to give away copies of Windows to schools. For free! Which is about what it costs them! They'd have been punished by being forced to extend their hegemony into the education market at a deep discount beyond what they normally would have had to spend.
Oooh. Thank you, sir, may I please have another?
This result, which pretty effectively throws aside all the states' objections, transmits a clear message: All clear, Bill. You're good to go.
Here's what has really gotten under my skin throughout this whole thing:
Microsoft said it was reviewing the decision.
"The issues in this case are significant, not only for Microsoft but for the industry and consumers," spokesman Vivek Varma said. "We are committed to resolving these issues in a constructive way so that we can focus on long-term growth and innovation for consumers."
Every time there's been some development, some settlement proposal, some advancement of language in the case, Microsoft has been reported to be reviewing the situation. A few days later, they'd invariably come back and say, "Hmm, nope, nope... I don't think this is going to work. See, your Honor, this proposed solution would result in harm to Microsoft, and we can't allow that."
Maybe I'm severely missing something here, but since when the hell does the defendant on trial get to have a say in what punishment is meted out to it? Why does Microsoft get to veto a ruling against it? Why does their opinion matter one miniscule buzzing fuck?
At least the charade is over. It was never the DoJ's goal to dispense any kind of actual justice, not the timely kind, not the kind that would have mattered. Microsoft is way too entrenched in the world's economy and governmental machines by now for anyone to seriously consider touching them with a ten-foot pole. Instead, the idea has been to conduct an insanely long, drawn-out, and ultimately ineffectual public spectacle so as to give the people some sense that something is being done... while the only intent behind it was simply to run out the clock until the original issues upon which the original case was founded are rendered moot by the implacable march of technology.
I'm sure most people don't even know what the original charges were. And when told that it was about Microsoft's embroidering Internet Explorer inextricably into Windows 98 and shouldering aside Netscape, they're caught by surprise. What's Internet Explorer? is the usual reaction. Windows without the built-in web browser? Unthinkable! Yeah, no kidding.
This was never one of Microsoft's more serious crimes, in any case. This was simply a convenient and visible prop to use in order to get the bread-and-circuses tour moving. It always rankled with me that this was the best anybody could do-- not Microsoft's purchasing of IE from Spyglass, with the promise that Spyglass would be reimbursed with a percentage of all sales proceeds (and the omission of Microsoft's intent to give it away free). Not the outright theft of software from STAC, a company whose crown-jewel software was made a part of DOS for years, illegally-- but Microsoft kept the complaint stalled in court for as long as it took for STAC to go bankrupt with legal fees, upon which the disputed software became Microsoft's as spoils of war. Not the criminal negligence in the design of software like IIS, Outlook, and Windows itself, which has resulted in untold damage to companies over the years who stood there while their IT infrastructures crumbled and their servers were breached and their internal networks were flooded with spam and viruses and their mail systems stood inoperative for months on end, secure and confident that they had made the right decision. Nobody ever got fired for buying Microsoft!
But it's all over now, and we know now what the plan was all along.
Keep everybody distracted-- fool 'em into thinking the right thing will be done-- for as long as the illusion can be sustained. And then it'll be too late.
UPDATE: Yeah.
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16:39 - The Thing That Should Not Be
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This, taken from the body of a bounced e-mail message, is just so fundamentally wrong:
+ADwAIQ-DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC +ACI--//W3C//DTD HTML 3.2//EN+ACIAPg- +ADw-HTML+AD4- +ADw-HEAD+AD4- +ADw-META HTTP-EQUIV+AD0AIg-Content-Type+ACI- CONTENT+AD0AIg-text/html+ADs- charset+AD0-utf-7+ACIAPg- +ADw-META NAME+AD0AIg-Generator+ACI- CONTENT+AD0AIg-MS Exchange Server version 6.0.6249.1+ACIAPg- +ADw-TITLE+AD4APA-/TITLE+AD4- +ADw-/HEAD+AD4- +ADw-BODY+AD4- +ADwAIQ--- Converted from text/plain format --+AD4- +ADw-BR+AD4- +ADw-P+AD4APA-FONT SIZE+AD0-2+AD4-Build of PolicyCenter pc1.3.0b24 completed for branch tag ps5+AF8-30.+ADw-BR+AD4- +ADw-BR+AD4- +ADw-BR+AD4- +ADw-/FONT+AD4- +ADw-/P+AD4- +ADw-/BODY+AD4- +ADw-/HTML+AD4-
(Emphasis mine.)
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15:31 - W1ND0VVS 1Z TEH ST4ND4RD!!!!11``!`
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There I was, down to the wire today, finishing up the last piece of testing before beta-qualification was approved today: a suite of printing tests from part of the Web interface for our product, using IE. On Windows, naturally, because that's what we support.
I'm regressing something backward through the last few versions of our product. Print in the current version: click, dialog, whirr, go get the page from the printer. Print in the previous version: click, dialog, whirr, go get the page from the printer. Print in the version before that: click....
Uh, click....
Right-click?
Oh look, there's the dialog. I wait another few minutes. (Yes, minutes.) Finally, the little printer icon shows up in the systray. Huh. That's odd; the printer icon usually takes all of three seconds to show up. And I wait.
And I wait.
The printer comes to life, but no paper spews forth.
I try right-clicking on the little printer icon, to try to bring up the printing monitor window. "1 document(s) pending for briant," it tells me confidently. Good, I'm so glad Microsoft took the time to handle singular and plural so elegantly. Eventually the print queue comes up. It's empty. It remains empty for a good three minutes; finally (after going through "Connecting" and "Initializing" phases), my document appears in the queue.
"24 bytes/120.4M," it says.
I watch as the 120.4M number continues to climb... slowly, sloooowly. Not the "24 bytes" part, mind you, no-- the total size. Yeah, that really fills me with warm fuzzies.
(The fact that I'm printing out a simple one-screen Web page, and that it thinks that amounts to 120 megabytes, doesn't do my heart good either.)
Right-clicking works, though. So I hit "Cancel", and it deletes the document from the queue.
Well, that was pointless, I think. So just to be safe, and to see if it might help, I decide to log out and log back in.
"Start->Log off briant". Uh... huh. Windows stares back at me with the expression of a cow chewing its cud in the middle of the most placid set of train tracks in Kansas. Okay... "Start->Shut down". Nothing.
Ctrl+Alt+Delete. Aha! There's the six-button menu thingy. "Log off!" I tell it. And it does! Fancy that.
I log back in; everything seems peachy. I connect again to the site and print. Annnnd... the same thing happens again. I'm in one of those backwards-talking slow-motion dreams where everything's in reversed grayscale. Nothing I do makes a difference. I click on one thing, and a menu pops up somewhere else on the screen. ToolTips on the icons in the systray pop up behind the taskbar. (How helpful.) And no printout is forthcoming, even after a patient ten minutes of waiting.
Okay, okay... I know where this wind is blowing. Time for.... a reboot-to-the-head.
Ctrl+Alt+Delete (the "Shut Down" in the Start menu still doesn't work), and hit the Shut Down button. I select Restart. It goes black, whirrs, and beeps.
$%^#%. %^$&^ $%#)_%^&()* &*^&*^^& ^&$%$. <deep breath> ^&*)&&*( $%^$ $%W#$%@# ^&%&* ^***(&^ *(())+_%&%!!!!
Why in the donkey-humping fuck is this the unquestioned standard operating system in business today?
This is, if you recall, the same machine whose upgrade-to-Win2K procedure, which ended up costing me an entire week's worth of productivity, caused me to harangue the company into springing for a new iMac back in February. Since that time, I've been blissfully free of these kinds of nightmares of technology gone horribly wrong, except for those times when I'm obliged to test the functionality of something under Windows. Then I approach the machine with a chair in one hand and a whip in the other, and getthejobdoneasquicklyaspossible so I can leap back to safety without getting unduly injured or slimed.
Well, today it looks like its revenge is complete. But it couldn't stop me from finishing the test suite. With the help of others' Windows machines, I was able to sign off, and the release was certified; my computer appears to have been the only casualty thus far. I made it back to the ledge without getting dragged under.
Here's my desk today. I think this says it all:
One of these boxes is not like the other; one of these boxes just doesn't belong...
Hint: it's not the one that's working.
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| Thursday, October 31, 2002 |
16:54 - Now you're talkin'.
http://www.israelnationalnews.com/news.php3?id=32749
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Via LGF and InstaPundit.
According to the Moskovski Komsomol newspaper, Russian security forces have decided to bury the terrorists from last's week's hostage siege wrapped in pig's skin. The aim is to deter potential Islamic terrorists from future attacks.
Shahidi (Jihad martyrs) believe by their nefarious acts that they ascend immediately to heaven. Using their beliefs against them, wrapping their corpses in 'unclean' pigskin prevents them from entering heaven for eternity.
At least some people understand the kind of playing field on which we're tussling. We would do well to learn from this example, particularly if the reaction is something new, something other than the age-old and feckless cycle of diplomacy from the civilized and shrieks of holy rage from the zealous. These two kinds of reactions feed off each other, because they're so mutually alien. But to fight zealotry on its own terms... now that's a novel idea.
UPDATE: Aziz has some clarifications. Well, drat.
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10:47 - Electronics Recycling Porn
http://www.foxelectronics.com/webcam.htm
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Boy-- they have everything on the Web these days.
Fox Electronics, a Bay Area company specializing in the scrapping, recycling, refurbishment, and destruction of random electronic whatever-the-hell, has live webcams of its operations.
I saw this on a truck on the freeway the other day: LIVE WEBCAMS. I was sure it couldn't possibly mean what it seemed to mean. Half the truck's signage was about an electronics reclamation facility; the rest said LIVE WEBCAMS. It was like someone had just bought the truck and had only half-finished repainting the trailer walls; they still betrayed evidence of the truck's former life as... a conveyance for door-to-door Swedish masseuse delivery or something.
But no, it's actually just what it says. Live webcams... of the conveyor belts, assembly lines, warehouses, and shredder machines.
I sure hope they've registered with the proper rating agencies; I can't be held responsible for any damage to young sensibilities caused by following the link.
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| Wednesday, October 30, 2002 |
01:22 - Ingenious Spam of the Day
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I growl and I begrudge, but I have to admit that the following piece of spam is a work of evil art:
That's right... whatever spam-generating program does this, it goes out and crawls the web, finds random websites with e-mail addresses on them (like, oh, for instance, http://www.grotto11.com/Extensions.html), HTML-renders each such page, captures it into an image, composites it into a mosaic of other images so it appears to be displayed on a laptop screen, and then mails the composited shebang out to the owner of the website in question.
Ingenious. Masterful. Admirable in its simplicity and the elegance of its execution.
Why the hell aren't these efficacious people blessed with a sense of ethics and decency? Why can't they put their talents to some honorable use?
Ah well. They did use a TiBook.
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17:21 - Paying for entertainment
http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=1781196896
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Here is what has got to be the most oddball thing I've ever seen on eBay-- that doesn't, I should clarify, involve vast amounts of money or pranks or gods selling the Earth to other gods or whatever.
Go check it out-- for a laugh, or to enjoy the involved and entertaining story, or (hey!) to bid on the item in question. 'Tis the season, after all. And while you're at it, ponder the asking price, the bids (which currently hover around $5), and the idea that whether you even receive the item or not, you've paid for the story-- and you know, I'll pay five bucks for a story.
You can create a story and sell it online. But the RIAA doesn't want you selling your music there.
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13:30 - Well, there's a "Switch" for ya...
http://news.com.com/2100-1040-963901.html?tag=fd_top
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Remember when the iPod was first introduced-- how many people said it would never sell?
Then, when it sold really really really well (to Mac users and to on-the-edge Wintel users who were swayed via the iPod toward buying a Mac, or who were willing to put up with third-party software), some people said they still didn't consider it worthwhile unless there was a native Windows version?
Then, when Apple brought out a native Windows version, (a few) people still said it wouldn't sell purely because of the Apple name?
Well, apparently those voices are being drowned out by a clamor from Dell customers who want to by iPods with their Dell boxes, instead of the Archos and Creative MP3 players that Dell already carries.
So Dell is now going to be featuring the iPod on its own online storefront.
"Yep, Dell is reselling iPods," Apple said in a statement provided to CNET News.com. "We are delighted to offer our 5GB, 10GB and 20GB iPods for Windows through Dell's direct retail channel. iPod has been a big success to date, and we would like to make it even bigger."
Apparently the draw of Dell's online store for Apple and the lure of the iPod for Dell were enough to convince the bitter rivals to set aside their differences. The two companies compete especially hard in the education market, where Dell has moved ahead of the Mac maker to become the largest seller of computer gear to schools.
That's exactly what Apple needs. Whoever at Apple had the idea to do a killer-app-of-MP3-players, something that would outshine every competitor in every regard and become universally desirable to the entire spectrum of technology users, deserves some kind of medal. The iPod will make Apple a huge pile of money in the long run-- but more important still is the credibility boost that it gives the Apple logo.
One of the biggest problems Apple faces is in selling products to people who may have tried a Mac once, like back in the System 6 days or something (or perhaps an old Mac IIsi puttering in a friend's back room, while Pentium IIs were churning happily away in the front), and come away from the experience with a bad impression of Apple's engineering. "It was so slow," people commonly say. "And I couldn't figure out how to do anything-- there was no Start menu. What was I supposed to click on?" Over and over I've heard this story-- an unsupervised session with an ancient Mac led to a bad first impression, one that stuck with the person forever, cemented by the familiarity with which he returned to Windows.
But if Apple can slip a little something into everybody's pocket-- a piece of genuinely good technology that nobody can find immediate fault with, that works really well and instantly demonstrates its usefulness and value... they've won an immense hearts-and-minds victory. A spin of the dial will attenuate to nothing the endless chorus of sneers: "All Apple products are crap!" and "Macs are little candy-colored toy computers with tiny screens!" and "Macs can't be networked!" and "Can Macs do color yet?" Instead, people will associate the name Apple with good, useful products, and maybe-- just maybe-- be willing to try a modern Mac and see what the experience of using iTunes or making movies or working without a Registry or filename extensions can be like.
"We don't consider Apple a competitor across the full range of products," said Dell spokeswoman Mary Fad. "Maybe it would be odd if we had iMacs on the store (Web site)."
I must say, this does improve my opinion of Dell significantly.
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| Tuesday, October 29, 2002 |
19:37 - At least they're not calling it a "Blogged Filesystem"...
http://thinksecret.com/news/macosx10221.html
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I'm a bit late in getting to this one (the trailing bits of AR and the release cycle I'm in continue to prevent me from keeping up with the news); but it's still worth reporting.
There was some skepticism a couple of weeks ago when news was first broken that 10.2.2 would include a journaled version of HFS+. Daring Fireball, in particular, expressed doubts that it could be done-- and still remained skeptical several days later after being mailed by various people that such layering was indeed possible (for instance, in Linux's Ext3FS). His conclusion was that while it may be possible, it isn't likely that Apple would have it ready in time for 10.2.2.
Well, if this screenshot found at Think Secret is any indication, I'd say it's fairly certain:
Which is good for all involved. Hey, it's been said that if you keep wary and skeptical throughout life, all your surprises will be pleasant ones. Here's to pessimism! ;)
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10:52 - Even the BMW stayed in the lines...
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10:03 - ...And they are illiterate
http://www.mikesilverman.com/2002_10_27_log_archive.html#85611407
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However moronic the far Left might appear to be, the far Right continues to have them beat six ways from Sunday. Even the worst of the Idiotarians, it must be said, generally exhibits a functional grasp of spelling, grammar, and logic.
Go see Mike Silverman's site for an example of the kind of thing he gets to put up with, and why it deserves no response more direct or serious than posting the whole thing for us all to see and point at and go Ha-ha!
Is it just me, or does it seem possible to write a Random Bigot Generator program for a website-- along the same lines as that Shakespearean Insult Generator thing? You specify a length and a level of vitriol, and it crams together a set of randomly selected clichés like "God made Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve" and mails it to the selected target? It shouldn't be too difficult-- and I have to imagine it's already been done, 'cause I don't know if much else can explain the lack of imagination or originality in these kinds of e-mails.
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| Monday, October 28, 2002 |
19:57 - "Because of me, they now have a warning!"
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Something I've been having to remind myself of lately is that whenever you see any disclaimer or warning on any ad anywhere on TV, in print, or anywhere, there is a lawsuit behind it. Or at least a complaint.
As my boss mentioned in passing, one of the best classic disclaimers he's seen is to pregnant women: Refrain from sexual intercourse after the water has broken. I mean, do people really have to be told these things? What, is the guy sitting there lecherously rubbing his chin, grunting, "Well, hmm-- just how frequent are those contractions, honey?"
It was with such things in my mind that I saw an ad come on TV for one of the new Transformers, which contained a disclaimer that for some odd reason I can't remember being a part of Transformers ads back in the heyday of the 80s. It said: Actual transformation time may vary.
...In other words, my brain was startled to realize, some oh-so-caring parent watched one of these ads with its trick time-lapse cappuccino-laced kid converting Optimus Prime from a truck into a command base in less than four seconds, bought it for her son, and then was confronted with the kid complaining that he couldn't transform it as fast as the kid on TV could. And (now this is the part that really gets to me) the parent, secure in her child's purity of heart and righteous indignation at the blatant false advertising of the uncaring corporation, complained to the company and got them to put up a disclaimer so future hapless moms wouldn't be entrapped so cruelly when their own time of trial came.
(Yes, I know this is all based on assumption. But if the story behind this particular case is off-base, I'd love to hear the true details. If they're in any way significantly different from what I'm guessing, I'll be very relieved indeed.)
What I want to know is, why couldn't this parent trust in her own ability to handle the kid's complaints herself? How is this any different from the Santa Claus situation? Yes, Dear, I'll get that letter in the mail to the North Pole right away! You'd think this would be an ideal time for her to impress upon the kid some concept of what reasonable humans should expect from reasonable companies selling reasonable products: Sometimes, Junior, we can't believe what we see on TV. Or at the very least: Yes, Dear, I'll handle that mean old toy company for you. Don't worry about a thing! I'll make sure they don't mislead any more innocent families like us! ... on the full understanding that the kid's enjoyment of the toy in its own right would outlast his attention span for frustration at the transformation speed, and with no actual intent to follow through on an endeavor that's both Quixotic and moronic. Wouldn't you?
And to think I thought it was bad when Barbie doll ads started foraying into CG animation, and they had to start peppering them with Dolls do not move by themselves...
UPDATE: Wouldn't I know it-- Hiker has the whole scoop on this. Ask him, and he'll also expound on the horrors of he current crop of Happy Meal Transformers-- robots in primary colors with big chunky parts, designed for kids of choking-hazard age-- as well as "Transformers Go-Bots", a name which strikes me in my sojourning-from-the-80s ignorance as a juxtaposition of concepts so cataclysmic as to risk creating an antimatter explosion merely by my typing them together. Oh, the things I've been missing out on...
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19:49 - Cartoon Network, how do I love thee...
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Sunday nights are the highlight of my week. The "Adult Swim" lineup, particularly on Sunday when they trot out all the wacky and subversive stuff made by people who go through life with a constant giggle, is just so jam-packed with material I never thought I'd see on TV again that it completely restores my faith in The System to provide a conscientious palliative to discerning viewers. They know it isn't kids watching cartoons at midnight on Sunday; it's sarcastic twentysomethings would would rather watch anime with boobs or twisted neo-nostalgic romps that give new life to ill-begotten 1970s superheroes or the knife-edge artistry of Samurai Jack. It feels like someone who knows exactly what I want to watch is holding the levers on Moltar's control station and diverting a personalized stream of soma into my TV. It's never been better than this.
Freaky! Outtie! FREAKY! OUTTIE! FREAKY! OUTTIE! ...Ahem. Sorry; got carried away there.
And what should they report to be showing next Sunday night? Why, "Rejected", by Don Hertzfeldt, of all things. Yes, that bizarre, jiggly little five-minute doodle that you may have seen in godawful low-res WMV format floating around the net. I haven't been able to find a decent version of it, so the WMV is all I have. But Cartoon Network will be showing it next Sunday night. The preview ad, showing the guy with the not-so-silly hat, being beaten to death by the guys with the silly hats under the SILLY HATS ONLY sign, in glorious full resolution, made me break down and weep openly.
I'll be recording it this time, and making a decently-sized QuickTime out of it for future enjoyment on the plane or wherever I might happen to be when I'm in desperate need of a giggle.
And by the way, if you'll permit me to yank the stick hard-a-port for a bit: What the hell is it with QuickTime that makes people shun and hate it so much? I mean, when it has the following things going for it:
• The player application isn't the least bit gaudy-- no embedded ads, no freaky trippy color scheme, no large bulbous ameoboid shape with randomly ovoid buttons. Just the obvious controls, thank you very much.
• QuickTime is the only player that lets you copy a still frame from a playing movie and paste it using the Clipboard into another application. I mean, what the hell? How can people stand to use Real and WMP when they don't even deign to provide this basic functionality?
• Live back-and-forth scrubbing through any movie type, including (in QT6) live MPEG-4 streams. Real still doesn't let you do live scrubbing, and WMP's scrub bar is shoddy at best (it loses video sync if you move the window around).
• And for the content creators, some pretty damn fine codecs. Sorensen 3 isn't open, but it's the equal of DiVX;-) LOLOLOL OMG J00 GET DA 1 WIZ BRITN3Y SP34ARz NAKED B00B!!1!!``` any day of the week, and it also uses MPEG-4 natively, and is the flagship platform for that codec. Yet people still stick to Real and Windows Media, for reasons that are unclear to me. C'mon, guys, $30 gets you a complete content creation suite, and the broadcaster is free. And cross-platform.
And there's plenty more stuff about it that's subjective. Whether on Windows or the Mac, QuickTime just makes me feel like I'm a lot more in control of what I'm watching. As far as downsides go, though, this bullet point seems to trump all foregoing line-items:
• It's made by Apple.
Shock and horror! Can't have that!
Now that QuickTime has been largely crowded out in the Internet data pool by MPEGs and WMVs/AVIs (and even .MSWMM files, from Windows Movie Maker, which WMP can't read, for God's sake), I'm forced to conclude that for no good reason at all, we're now going to be forced to live with video-handling systems that are far, far less controllable and integrated into everything than what we could have had.
Ah well. At the very least I'll be using it for my own content creation and personal re-encoding purposes. It works bloody well, and I can copy a frame out of an existing movie and copy it into Preview so I can save a thumbnail JPEG for it anywhere I choose.
Urrg. Sorry. Just one too many WMVs getting uploaded into the art archive, which I can't play back accurately or copy a frame out of. But that's the Way of the Future! Get with the program, Brian!
Sheesh.
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| Sunday, October 27, 2002 |
20:59 - Ow... I hurt...
http://216.136.200.194/auction/Oct/200210263376895213102630.jpg
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I'm not at all sure what the context of this is-- all I was sent was the URL. But regardless, a hearty belly laugh to whoever is responsible.
I know it's easy to want to mock the wannabe terrorist guys who have popped up in the past year, from Richard Reid to John Mohammed. But... they kinda seem to be setting themselves up for it, don't they? Not exactly XXX-style supersoldiers, are they?
UPDATE: Here's the context.
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05:02 - Superman gets the coolest cartoons
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For animation fans, one of the best pieces of classical revelry in the art for its own sake-- much more so than the self-conscious Warner stuff of the era, which is valuable for entirely different reasons-- is the wartime Superman series by Dave Fleischer.
Fleischer's early Popeye cartoons (which Cartoon Network trots out with nostalgic glee every Sunday night, accompanied by informative and often snidely geeky commentary by the narrator) are themselves immensely good fun; the color Paramount Popeyes are episodic nonsense in the vein of modern Saturday-morning dreck, but the Fleischer stuff was art. Deliciously quirky (and very human) animation and engaging original music accompanied lavish background art and very clever songs to create a tapestry with rhythm, art with a beat. I love it when the "I'll do anything that you do" episode comes on, or the classically giggle-inducing "Goonland" one, or the lavish "Sindbad the Sailor" featurette with the full-multiplane backgrounds, or the "Beware of Barnacle Bill" one with its delicious song-and-dance complete with sneering volta at the end: Just like you just did to that poor Barnacle Bill the Sailor! The love for the craft that is evident in these shows raises them to a level of enjoyability well beyond what was evident in animation through the "Golden Age" of the 50s, the experimental floundering of the 60s, the dark, dark Scooby-Doo-dominated valley of the 70s, and the directionless 80s. It wasn't until the animation industry was kick-started in the 90s by The Simpsons, Ren & Stimpy, Animaniacs, and (yes) even Beavis & Butt-head that TV animation started being respectable again, drawing out of the woodwork the fans of the medium who were no longer ashamed to say they grew up watching The Superfriends. And it raised to power giants like Genndy Tartakovsky and Jhonen Vasquez, for which I'll forever be grateful.
But anyway-- I was talking about Superman, wasn't I?
Right: They just showed a set of the old 40s shorts tonight, the usual all-too-brief list of outings that survives the era (the one with the giant gorilla is in pretty sorry shape). If you aren't familiar with these, you really ought to track them down and give them a look: they're astonishingly well animated, with every frame lovingly detailed, and cels painted with the same depth as the backgrounds on which they were placed-- an extremely expensive process indeed, and the reason why the shorts bankrupted the Fleischer studio and forced them to give the Popeye property over to Paramount afterwards (much to the series' detriment). But the quality they paid for is up on the screen.
Watch these shorts for the visual language in which the plot points are conveyed: the transmitter on the volcano failing to transmit its SOS message because the line has been severed. The Moderne-as-hell levers and dials on the machine the Mad Scientist has aimed at the city's bridge, as he cranks up the dial. Superman's quick but human leaps down the staircase to safety as the observatory collapses around him. The postures of the flying robots as they snap to attention. The frame-for-frame correctness of the silhouette on the wall each time Clark Kent slips aside to don his costume.
If there's any one filmmaking nit I would pick with the series, it's that all too often, there's far too much good animation and even dialogue that's tucked away into a too-long fadeout at the end of a scene. Modern shows, when they do a fade-to-black, make sure to have the on-screen characters at rest, in a static position, and finished with all their dialogue and useful facial expressions before the fade begins. But in the "mad scientist" episode, for instance, Clark's wink to the audience at the end (and that bright, conspiratorial grin that belies the starkness of his usual facial construction) are all but lost in the ponderous gradient.
But no matter. This stuff is gold, and we're unlikely to see anything with its depth of production quality in anything short of feature films again. Sure, modern TV looks better still than the Superman shorts-- but they benefit from computer coloring/modeling and cartoony senses of timing, both of which allow animators to create stuff that represents a lot less pain and effort than ever before for the sake of something so fleeting as a seven-minute short.
Fast-forward to 1996 or so, when the new post-Bruce-Timm Superman series appears. This stuff follows the success of Batman: The Animated Series, which made waves (and rightly so) with its innovative use of black-paper backgrounds, nostalgic Golden Age of Comics art style, and unflinching willingness to tackle big issues with real adult characters. (I love that Mad Hatter episode, with the little Carroll lines tossed in willy-nilly, almost offhand in their appropriateness to each scene.) But Superman, which now shows after the anime chunk on Saturday's "Adult Swim" lineup, is bigger and jollier, more smirky and fun. And yet it has moments of great, honest beauty.
Last week they showed the "Apokolips... Now!" duet, the two-parter in which Superman leads the defense of the Earth against Darkseid... except in the end, it isn't him who leads the resistance, but the gruff Dan Turpin-- sort of the Detective Bullock of the Superman world, except that he uses his big bushy eyebrows for a determined, no-nonsense good when it comes down to brass tacks, instead of bitterly getting in the hero's way. He's a recurring character for the first two seasons. And then, in "Apokolips... Now!", he incites the people of Metropolis to defend their planet, even with Superman displayed in front of them, helpless and bound. Turpin frees Superman with a spear to the manacles, and a deus ex machina in the form of forces from New Genesis appears in order to force Darkseid back from his conquest. As Darkseid retreats, Turpin taunts him, getting in that one last barb. And Darkseid turns, scowls, and with a gesture strikes Turpin dead.
Cut to the funeral, in which the eulogy is being read and sung... in Hebrew. Which makes a startled kind of sense, considering the deeply Jewish conception of Superman in the first place. But I was quite surprised, and pleasantly so, to see the show's producers take such an active and sincere role in paying homage to that. Just as one of the Batman episodes consisted of three featurettes done in the respective styles of the 50s pulp stuff (the ones with the BIFF! POW! SOK! and all that), Frank Miller's tank-like black-on-red, and another style that I can't recall at the moment: these guys know and love their stuff, and it shows.
Superman stands by Turpin's gravestone, and says over it: "Earth didn't need a super man. Just a brave one."
From TV Tome:
NOTE: This episode is dedicated to the memory of Jack Kirby (1917-1994). The dedication appears at the end of the episode and reads as follows: "This episode is dedicated to the memory of Jack Kirby/ Long Live The King". Jack Kirby was one of the most influential and respected illustrator and creator of comic books. Amoung the characters he created or co-created are Captain America, The Fantastic Four, The X-Men, The Incredible Hulk, Boy Commandos, Challengers of the Unknown, The New Gods, Kamandi, Darkseid, Sgt. Fury and His Howling Commandos, Captain Victory, The Silver Surfer, The Mighty Thor and many others.
* Continuing character Dan Turpin dies in this episode. His gravestone reads "Daniel Turpin/ Earth's Greatest/ Hero".
That visual has stuck with me all week, and I've been trying to figure out how to approach it. Now that I've seen afresh the original material as well as the modern incarnation, and been able to appreciate how much love went into each one respectively, it does me good to realize that Golden Ages do cycle back around so we can enjoy them again.
Lileks said at one point that while most of the world probably thinks Americans relate best to Superman, we probably actually find Spider-man-- with his smirky smartass teenager humor and his do-the-right-thing-because-that's-what-good-people-do mentality-- to be a better fit for us. I think there's a lot to be said for that. I do feel it's probably true; we certainly don't individually feel like a bunch of Colossi striding the earth, knocking down evil with a single blow of our jutting lantern-like chins. But Superman is a paragon of something else to us: not something to aspire to, but a personification in human form of moral rightness and strength, something free of religious affiliation but unambiguous in what it stands for. It's a rock upon which the waves can dash themselves in vain. It's the prototypical Superhero, the concept that The Right Thing will be done, in the long run-- taking, if necessary, the metaphorical form of a punch in the mouth. It's a way of reducing Roosevelt and Hitler to political cartoons, caricature heads on Mr. Universe bodies, putting them in the ring and sounding the bell, and watching the inevitable result ensue.
Superheroes of this model are deeply ingrained into our consciousness by now, and they're one of the first metaphors that leaps to mind in a time of crisis, when we need to reduce the world to a context our minds can manage. And now that metaphor has some very real people, lives, stories, and national identities tied up into it. It keeps reinventing itself, and just as with the Santa Claus lexicon, it survives on self-referential nostalgia as much as on new angles on new material.
How lucky we are that in this day and age, we have Justice League instead of The Superfriends.
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| Saturday, October 26, 2002 |
23:24 - Ach-bar
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Just watching tonight's "History of Britain" episode on the History channel over burgers... it was the one that centered around Bonny Prince Charlie, the Jacobites, and the end of the Scottish warrior tradition at the hands of the British army in the mid-18th century.
It was the usual battles-and-dates-and-all-that-rot for most of the sequence. But the final few minutes were extremely eye-opening. After the Prince was exiled, the British government went about destroying Scottish nationalist culture. They forbade Scots from wearing tartans and clan colors, and from creating nationalistic art (such as portraits of the Prince-- an example of which, created after the ban, was painted in such a way that it was unrecognizable as art unless you viewed it reflected in a candlestick-- ingenious). Scottish warriors were given the opportunity to enlist in the British army and fight for the Empire.
And how did the Scots react to this heavy-handed and stifling treatment? Why, by changing the world, that's how. The Scottish warriors underwent a sudden change-- and transformed themselves into great academics and revolutionary thinkers. We got David Hume's philosophy. We got William Adam's architecture, which helped usher in the dignified austerity of classical forms. And we got Adam Smith's invisible hand-- a distinctly non-spiritual idea that uplifted personal accomplishment and innovation above the "romantic self-destruction" that Scotland had been indulging until their tartans were stripped from them. It's to this revolution that we owe everything we have in the modern world, from a government in which church is separated from state to an economic system where genius, like that of the post-warrior-culture Scotland, is rewarded.
It wasn't much of a stretch, but I couldn't help but consider these lessons as an example of what might become of the Muslim world in the aftermath of a firm and heavy takedown of Islamic fundamentalist nationalism. If Muslims long for the age when they led the world in innovation and genius, maybe they've got an opportunity coming up.
I know this is just another iteration of the "It worked in Japan" theory as propounded by Den Beste, among others; but it seemed just too clear an example to skip, and one that I don't think I've seen cited in among the invocation of Japan and Germany as examples of post-destruction-by-America success stories.
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| Friday, October 25, 2002 |
21:22 - Hey, c'mere-- wanna see a Michael Moore takedown?
http://www.rachellucas.com/archives/000102.html
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A really good one, too. I hadn't heard much about the man outside a Lileks screed and some gushing from various acolytes of his at work over Bowling for Columbine, but the letter that gets Fisked all to hell here by Rachel Lucas so richly deserves it.
Maybe because it manages to cover so many angles of the leftist landscape today, and is antibodied so efficiently by so much ready-to-hand reason and fact. Whatever the reason, I greatly enjoyed it.
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20:56 - Albus Saavik
http://www.cnn.com/2002/SHOWBIZ/Movies/10/25/harris.obit/index.html
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Hmm. It seems Richard Harris, aka (among many other things) Dumbledore, has died. That's gonna suck...
It hasn't been a very cheerful news day, has it?
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14:49 - Makes me wanna buy more hard drives
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Kris' new G4 tower arrived today. After the usual crowd of gawkers stopped draping themselves over it, as they'd done the other day with his new Cinema Display, like a bunch of marionette spiders dangled by a puppeteer, we took a closer look at the hard drive carriers. I'd thought the (single) carrier in my old 450 was well designed; but whatever else one might say about this current form factor (does anybody know what the real code name for this iteration is? I'm sure it can't be "Wind Tunnel"), it's one of their better designs.
Both carriers have space for two disks. The main carrier, on the ATA-100 bus, is vertically positioned against the inner wall; it's not screwed down (though there's a hole for a screw if you choose to put one in). Instead, there's a white clip that you can pull back with a finger, and lift the carrier up and out:
 
The carrier has extra screws in it for the second disk, if and when you install one. To reinstall the carrier, just snap it back into place.
Then there's the second carrier, on the ATA-66 bus. The connector cables are positioned right where you would need them to go, and the carrier (which is the same unit as the primary one) is mounted horizontally below the optical drives. It too has a white finger clip, and slides out from a couple of rail tabs that hold it in place (you have to slide it back in along the tabs). The screw hole on this one which corresponds to the one on the primary carrier would be unreachable except by a trained rat; so there's a second screw lug which you can reach, on the left.
These may not be the fastest disk buses on the planet, but the machine itself is certainly expansion-friendly. More so than any Mac in recent memory, I believe.
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13:46 - Non-Joke
http://www.bayarea.com/mld/mercurynews/news/4365595.htm
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Regarding the Moscow theater hostage situation:
The rebels have killed one hostage, a 20-year-old woman, and her body was dragged from the theater Thursday, wrapped in a black blanket. A spokesman for the Federal Security Service said she had been shot through the chest and her fingers were broken. A radio report said a female rebel killed her after she refused to stop talking on her cell phone.
This would be the perfect setup for an extremely tasteless joke, if I were willing to make it. But I'm not, so I won't.
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09:49 - It takes Porsche...
http://www.cnet.com/techtrends/0-6014-7-20573465.html
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Porsche Design GmbH has been responsible for a lot of funky niche products over the years-- bicycles, coffee makers, that sort of thing. They all look good, I'll give 'em that.
Now they've done a TiBook-alike. It matches the PowerBook in just about every dimension and spec, right down to the slot-loading drive and the positioning of the power button, and I have to admit it looks pretty good indeed. The sound system sounds quite cool to boot.
Of course, the TiBook design is approaching its third birthday; when it rolls around in a couple of months, it'll be right about ripe for an overhaul. These designs tend to last about three years. I'm not at all sure what direction they'll go in next. (That's part of the fun.)
But in the meantime-- nice work, Best Buy.
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Brian Tiemann
