Category: everything

Black cat gets MBA degree from an online college. :devious: And not just any MBA, an executive MBA. Actually the so-called “college” is really a diploma mill. But who can resist a story that features a picture of the talented feline in question wearing a graduate’s cap and a deep, deep frown?

The cardinal rule to “licenses”, i.e. movies based on videogame/book franchises must be this: the movie must be incredibly terrible while bearing only a remote resemblance to the plot elements of the best-selling product it is defiling.

So we suffered from such celluloid sacrilege such as Wing Commander and two Tomb Raiders. Street Fighter: The Movie gets a special mention for a) introducing the stupendous invisible “Stealth Boat”, which in the movie is immediately detected and b) paradoxially having a game based on it. Like a speaker and mic caught in feedback, Street Fighter: The Movie Game magnified the movie’s crappiness to previously unknown heights.

Hollywood complains that it’s because games have no substance, all the while pummelling us with 5,000 comedy clones a year featuring a hard-boiled white cop and his wisecracking black sidekick.

You know why Lord of the Rings was so widely acclaimed? Yes, good acting and special effects were heavy contributors. But the main reason was it is the only creative property in all of geekdom that has remained faithful to the source material.

It looks like the Doom movie will offend the fickle fan and consumer. From DarkHorizons:

Screenwriter Dave Callahan claims “everyone was keen to keep the game’s atmosphere”, though there are some “minor” changes done to the film’s concept: The monsters have nothing to do with hell, the plot is not taking place on Mars and “space marines” are not well “space marines” as their outfits are more like SWAT team members.

Reminds me of an interview where someone asked Valve Software why there hasn’t been a movie based on Half-Life. The reason? All the scripts they saw just weren’t satisfactory for them. I wish others had this sort of integrity.

Wired Magazine remarks that branding isn’t what it used to be. Thanks to better informed buyers (yet another second-order effect thanks to the Internet), “brands have little or no value independent of what a company actually does”. Consumers will extoll or punish a brand for the quality of their current offerings, not out of blind devotion for what they supposedly stand for. (Outside of fanboyism, anyway.)

Cory Doctorow writes that trademarks became less for our benefit and more for brandishing, well, branding. Trademarks were initially intended to protect the consumer from counterfeit knockoffs, but are nowadays increasingly used by their owners as a legal weapon to crush competitors and consumer dissidence.

Hugh MacLeod remarks that “branding is dead” and that it is a “EGOlogy, not an ecology”. Godfrey Parkin retorts in the comments that it’s the fact it is an EGOlogy for the company, rather than catering to the consumer, that is the problem.

BBC Radio 4’s John Humphrys laments the mutilation of the English language into “management speak” filled with rhetoric and cliches. When this is perpetuated by the world’s political leaders, Humphrys asserts that their slick, hyperbolic way with words can have sinister implications:

Humphrys notes [British PM Tony Blair]’s apparent fear of verbs and mocks his speeches, which are peppered with verbless phrases like “new challenges, new ideas,” or “for our young people, a brighter future” and “the age of achievement, at home and abroad”.

By using this technique, Humphrys says, Blair is simply evading responsibility. “The point about verbs is that they commit the speaker,” he writes. “Verbs cement sentences to their meaning so it’s not surprising that politicians tend to mistrust them.”

Martin Geddes of Telepocalypse once wrote, “The words you use control the thoughts you have.” Personally, I’m trying to ban the words “productivize” and “incentivize” from my local workspace.

In Ontario, the dairy farmers have a little contest where if you buy a single-serving carton of milk that makes a moo-ing sound when you open it, you are eligible for a variety of prizes.

This week, fellow DSLR member donoreo was the lucky recipient of a mooing carton. And in typical Internet panache, documents his experience with pictures of the apparatus and even a digital recording of the moo.

Nick Denton asks, “And you thought the US was the land of consumer convenience?” According to this fascinating Globe and Mail article, there are 10 things the Chinese do well…very well. Here’s a taste:

By any standard you can think of — coverage, price, ubiquity — China’s cellphone practices beat ours. You can use them in elevators, subways and parking garages. They work in Tibet, at the Great Wall, in remotest rural China, which is more than you can say for Ontario cottage country.

My parents were presented with a similar kind of pleasant culture shiznit at a hotel in South Korea. Not only was the room so techno that you could control the blinds with a remote control, but the housekeeper cleverly noted the Wall Street Journal lying around that my mom brought from the plane, and automatically delivered a complimentary copy of the WSJ for the remainder of their stay.

There was also the time my dad was cajoled by a tailor in Hong Kong to buy a pair of dress pants for $10 Canadian. When my dad told the man he was flying out the next day, the tailor eagerly hemmed the pants and delivered them to my dad’s hotel room that very night.

One thing the Chinese aren’t good at: putting fires out.

“I find it truly stunning how many people can shrug off stuff like this, preferring instead a tiny, cramped cosmos just 6,000 years old, scheduled to end any-time-now in a scripted stage show. An ancient and immense and ongoing cosmos is so vastly more dramatic and worthy of a majestic Creator. Our brains, capable of exploring His universe, picking up His tools and doing His work, seem destined for much more than cowering in a corner, praying that some of our neighbors will go to hell…”

– Blogger David Brin, on self-righteous creationists

“See, the way it works is we dangle the carrot, then when a file-sharer reaches for it, we wiggle the stick so they know what we’re packing, We ask them, ‘Are you sure you want to do that? Didn’t you see the stick?’ And if they insist on going for the carrot, we beat them to death with the stick, you know, just until we can see a little brain through the skull. That’s why you need the stick and the carrot both. It’s really hard to kill someone with a carrot.”

– MPAA spokesman Dan Glickman, on his “holistic approach” at dealing with movie piracy.

“We are dancing the tango. When you are dancing the tango and your toe is stepped on, hurting your toe, you complain. If it is stepped on harder, you complain again. There’s a whole game, but we are prepared to continue dancing the tango.”

– Venezuelan Foreign Minister Jesus Perez being glib about the 2004 US election results

This article in the Toronto Star made me sad – in 90 days all Toronto restaurants cannot serve raw fish. It must come frozen.

As you all know, sushi, sashimi and Scandinavian cuisine often demands completely fresh, raw fish. Sushi chefs are saying freezing the fish will ruin their taste and turn their textures from buttery and firm to chewy and mushy.

Personally, I think that if raw fish is shipped and handled quickly and cleanly, there should be zero problems. One chef suspects that most food poisoning comes from bad hygiene by the cooks, not because of the general state of the goods.

First they came for the sunny-side eggs. Now it’s our sushi. What’s next, a law requiring bars to boil all their beer?

Update: My fellow members of the bourgeoisie have succeeded in getting health officials to reconsider, with some mulling a fish grading system, like what they have for meat. Let them eat maki!

“I remember saying things like, ‘Well, wait a minute. I just got out of the trash compactor. How come my hair’s all perfect?’ And Harrison (Ford) would go, ‘Hey kid … it ain’t that kind of movie.’ “

– Mark Hamill, aka Luke Skywalker, telling fans how he realized that scrutinizing Star Wars would be a futile gesture.

Silverlotus has been trying to offload a bunch of doodads and gear we have lying around on eBay recently, so I’ve begun to understand the thrill of wheeling and dealing there.. I still don’t understand why people snipe; there isn’t any real reason to since it’s a proxy bid system.

Weird Al Yankovic, in his hilarious song “eBay“, describes its thrift culture phenomenon perfectly as a “worldwide garage sale”. The song is sung to the melody of “I Want It That Way” by the thankfully defunct Backstreet Boys. Speaking of which, I got that single somewhere. Any bidders? 😉