This was the best excuse they could come up with?

Shame on you, DC. [Link]

So why didn’t the originally solicited story appear in this week’s issue ofSuperman? Over at Comics Alliance, Chris Sims builds a convincing case for it being the result of an overly cautious DC nervous about featuring a Muslim American superhero after the “Superman renounces his US citizenship” fiasco that followed Action Comics #900:

As much as I don’t buy the “it doesn’t work with Grounded” explanation, it’s far easier to believe that after Nightrunner and Action #900, DC didn’t want the hassle of dealing with an anchor leading off the news with “Superman renounced his American citizenship — and you won’t believe his new terrorist sidekick!” Not that Sharif is actually a terrorist, but the accurate description doesn’t spike ratings.

Not so, claims Bleeding Cool’s Rich Johnston, who has a much, much more surreal take on events:

[T]he story content change in Superman 712 has nothing whatsoever to do with the appearance of Sharif.And everything to do with the story starting with Superman rescuing a kitten out of a tree. Like in the Superman movie.And this caused considerable problems with certain DC executives. They thought it was too sweet, too innocent, too anodyne, and not the kind of Superman stories they wanted to tell. The kitten up a tree image symbolised for them what was wrong with the Superman books. It became totemic in the office, standing for far more than it could possibly symbolise. It had to go.

That the book also has a lead Islamic superhero character, the kind of thing that does get the attention they like, seems to have passed them by.

I have to admit, as much as I normally give the benefit of the doubt to DC on matters like this – Ineptitude and lack of awareness generally seem more likely to me than malicious intent when it comes to complete PR nightmares, I tend to find – there’s something that just doesn’t ring true in the slightest about Rich’s version of events

Diappointingly Lame

The Wired iPad app. [Link]

Using a Microsoft-like facility for descriptive yet forgettable product names, its “Digital Viewer technology” creates “a digital magazine format” made up of pictures. Twice I asked publicist Russell Brady how this output differs from exporting a PNG from Acrobat, and twice Brady refused to answer. (He didn’t ignore the question. He just didn’t answer it.)

If you want to “publish” a “magazine” as an “app” consisting solely of flat image files, you can already do that quite handily right now with a copy of Acrobat. It won’t have Wired’s cachet, but as we’ve seen, the magazine of the digital revolution does everything wrong when it tries to visually express itself in digital form. Whatever Wired does online and on the iPad, you should do the opposite. Wired.app proves that even a smart magazine with a crackerjack designer has yet to come to grips with what a “digital magazine” really is.

It looks pretty, but you can't search, select or use accessibility features. Lame.

Avatar: Political Screed?

Left and Right appear to agree.

Left: [Link]

The political import of Avatar -- and there's no waving this aspect away because it's right in your face start to finish, and especially in the third act -- is ardently left. It is pro-indigenous native, anti-corporate, anti-imperialist, anti-U.S. Iraq War effort, anti-U.S.-in-Afghanistan (and anti-troop-surge-in-that-country, or strongly against the thinking of President Barack Obama and Gen.Stanley McChrystal), anti-rightie, anti-Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld, etc.

Yes, it's very teenaged adolescent in its super-imaginative wacko visions and exuberant energy levels, but politically it's pure Che Guevara (more theMotorcycle Diaries or Che-in-Cuba version than Che in Bolivia), Naom Chomsky, Hugo Chavez, Howard Zinn, Gore Vidal, Oliver Stone, etc. Cameron is an earth-hugging lefty from way back (the flagrant despise-the-arrogant-rich current in Titanic being but one example) so this should come as no surprise to anyone. I for one am cheered and heartened.

If Sarah Palin sees Avatar and then sits down and actually thinks about what it's saying (which is always a dicey proposition, I admit), she'll hate this movie. Because Avatar hates her and her kind. Some righties will pretend to like it ("great popcorn flick! took my kids!"), but they'd have to be in major denial mode not to recognize that Avatar is much more MSNBC than Fox News. It really spits on the Fox News philosophy/worldview. If Cameron had for some inane reason put a Fox News-type character in the film, he/she would end up with a Na'vi arrow through his/her chest, trust me.

Right: [Link]

Within 15 minutes, the “liberal tell” spoils every story beat of Sully’s character arc. He’s as dull a protagonist as you’ll ever see. Sigourney Weaver plays a gruff-talking, cigarette smoking scientist with … wait for it, wait for it … a heart of gold. Giovanni Ribisi’s sweaty weasel of a corporate executive never moves beyond that and Col. Quaritch is all ‘roid rage, no humanity and his Big Speech about the necessity of “a pre-emptive attack to fight terror with terror” was as surprising as Cameron‘s use of a military “shock and awe” campaign to level the Na’Vi’s precious “Home Tree” as a tacky metaphor for the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center.

Oh yeah, he went there…

In supporting roles, Michelle Rodriguez and Joel Moore bring a whole lot more to their underwritten roles than the film deserves — you’d like to spend more time with them — but it’s always back to the film’s dullest characters: the one-dimensional Na’vi. You would think that with 15 years and a half-billion dollars, Cameron could come up an alien species that doesn’t drip with every Indian and African sacred-cow cliché imaginable.  These are creatures who worship the Great Mother Eywa, have a sacred relationship with the earth, shoot bow and arrows, ride horse-like animals, whoop it up in battle, and talk like this: “It has only happened five times since the time of the first songs of our ancestors.”

The Na’vi also apologize to animals after killing but before butchering them. So I guess that’s okay. Maybe if Quaritch had gotten on the loudspeaker and spoken a little mumbo-jumbo before dropping a daisy cutter on Home Tree all would be forgiven.

On top of that, the Na’vi are an awfully stupid species. After years of dealing with the “Sky People,” for some reason they still haven’t figured out that arrows are useless against giant military aircraft. And is it okay to mention how hard it is to keep track of who’s who, because the Na’vi, uhm … all look alike? Twice I was sure Sully’s avatar had been killed. Twice I was disappointed.

I don't know if I'm going to go see it. Spectacle doesn't impress me as much as it used to and I find the assumptions in the story to be annoying:

• Military=BAD
• Industry&Commerce=BAD
• Science=Can be convinced to be good
• Primitive Natives=Much more noble than you are and much wiser because they are primitive

Feh.

The problem with licensing e-books instead of owning them

You can get this: [Link]

This morning, hundreds of Amazon Kindle owners awoke to discover that books by a certain famous author had mysteriously disappeared from their e-book readers. These were books that they had bought and paid for—thought they owned.
 But no, apparently the publisher changed its mind about offering an electronic edition, and apparently Amazon, whose business lives and dies by publisher happiness, caved. It electronically deleted all books by this author from people’s Kindles and credited their accounts for the price.

The irony is the books were 1984 and Animal Farm. Double plus ungood.

Did they think no one would notice?

Microsoft shades the truth on browser comparison chart. [Link]

Internet Explorer 8 is by far the best browser Microsoft's ever released, but most of our readers are happily using a better alternative like Firefox or Chrome. Microsoft's not happy about this, so they've created an absurd piece of propaganda to win you back.

This browser comparison chart pits IE8 against Firefox and Chrome and puts IE8 on top time after time, but in very dubious categories. Each row comes with its own ridiculous set of comments justifying the seemingly meaningless checkmarks, like this note on customizability:

Sure, Firefox may win in sheer number of add-ons, but many of the customizations you'd want to download for Firefox are already a part of Internet Explorer 8 – right out of the box.

Lame.

Sci Fi Channel changes name to typo

Ugh. It seems they would prefer if they had a completely different demographic. [Link]

During its fourth-quarter earnings call, parent General Electric said Sci Fi racked up a double-digit increase in operating earnings despite the beginnings of the recession.

Nevertheless, there was always a sneaking suspicion that the name was holding the network back.

“The name Sci Fi has been associated with geeks and dysfunctional, antisocial boys in their basements with video games and stuff like that, as opposed to the general public and the female audience in particular,” said TV historian Tim Brooks, who helped launch Sci Fi Channel when he worked at USA Network.

Mr. Brooks said that when people who say they don’t like science fiction enjoy a film like “Star Wars,” they don’t think it’s science fiction; they think it’s a good movie.

“We spent a lot of time in the ’90s trying to distance the network from science fiction, which is largely why it’s called Sci Fi,” Mr. Brooks said. “It’s somewhat cooler and better than the name ‘Science Fiction.’ But even the name Sci Fi is limiting.”

Mr. Howe said going to Syfy will make a difference.

A difference because SyFy is trademarkable and Sci-Fi is not.

As long as they continue to have and promote wrestling, bad monster movies with worse CHI, and, well science fiction they will continue to have the same demographic.

Independent Media?

Sit. Roll over. Heel. [Link]

Remember how upset the left-wing blogosophere got when they “exposed” then-White House correspondent Jeff Gannon as a “shill” for a conservative website/news agency? They were upset because this supposedly closeted gay man was excessively deferential when asking questions during White House press briefings.

They just didn’t like he like he tossed softballs at the president. As if no reporters were asking tough questions of the president and his team.

With the election of Barack Obama, it seems the press has become a corps of Jeff Gannons. The president-elect’s news conferences have become “scripted” affairs:

Can We Panic Now?

This just seems like a really bad idea. [Link]

The lucky Douglas Adams resurrector will be Eoin Colfer, author of the Artemis Fowl novels, which I haven't read but which sound extremely "cheeky" and nowhere near as subversive as the original HG2G series was. Colfer's novel, ...And Another Thing, is due out in October 2009, and sounds as though it'll include Arthur Dent, Zaphod Beeblebrox and Marvin the Paranoid Android, among all the other fave characters. Given that the article announcing this new piece of Hitchhiker's tie-in merchandise mentions that Adams regretted not ending the saga on a more "upbeat" note, I'm guessing you can expect a bright happy ending. And Colfer says he wants to capture Adams' style while adding some of his own voice.

You can't go home again, doubly so if it wasn't even your home.

It's still fan fiction even if you run the show

J.K Rowling almost appeared on Doctor Who. [Link]

If Doctor Who's head writer Russell T. Davies had had his way, the next episode of the time-travel action-comedy would have starred Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling. Not only that, but Rowling would have dragged David Tennant's Doctor into the Potter universe.

Doctor Who Harry Potter crossover fic. There are not words.

Visual Studio and Tab Idiocy

I am in the process of moving from Delphi 7 to Visual Studio 2005 as my main developer environment at work. Overall, it has been a good experience. Visual Studio works pretty well except for one thing that drives me nuts. The Tab control in Visual Studio.

In Delphi, Ctrl+Tab moves to the next tab on the right from the current one. Shit+Ctrl+Tab moves to the previous tab on the left of the current one. Simple, easy and used by many other applications, like Firefox and IE. In Visual Studio, it displays a popup dialog showing all tabs. The order it displays them in has nothing to do with the actual order of the tabs. The order it uses is the current file and the last active, then apparently it picks randomly. How did this get chosen as an improvement? At what point did this seem like a good idea? Do people only switch between two documents at once ever? Is this some kind of social engineering designed to push programmers to only ever have two tabs open at once?

An example. Here is Visual Studio loaded up with a project. There are six tabs open and the first one is selected.



If I hit Ctrl+Tab where do you think I will go? Nope. Here.



If you hit Ctrl+Tab repeatedly, it jumps you around all over, but if you wait a few seconds, and Ctrl+Tab once, it alternates between the current and previous tabs even though conceptually, It should be progressing. If I click on the tabs, the Ctrl+Tab order gets set for a while, but doesn't stay. Why is this a feature and not a bug? Why does no one else find this behavior wrong?

Am I just crazy?

Lame

The Death Race remake will not have pedestrians getting mowed down for points. [Link]

The new Death Race movie can throw as many weapons-packed cars at us as it wants, but it still won't be half as entertaining now that they've done away with earning points for mowing down pedestrians. This remake of 70s classic Death Race 2000 is directed by Paul W.S. Anderson (Resident Evil, Alien vs. Predator) so there will be explosions, car flippery, and bad dialogue. But it still won't pack any of the kick of the original.

Why even remake it?