On Twitter, Interviews, And Shenanigans
So m'boy Brandon is being interviewed right now by TimesUnion.com about his Twitter novel. The interesting part about the interview is that it is taking place entirely through Twitter, and it may very well be the first Twitter interview ever. Why hasn't anyone used this format before?
It sucks.
Look, I love Twitter; I think it's a great platform, and I use it probably more than I should. However, the power of Twitter lies in snappy one-liners, status updates, amusing links, and connecting with strangers and MC Hammer... When it starts to be used for prolonged conversations, it's usefulness diminishes drastically, especially if you don't follow both parties. Then again, even when you do follow both parties, the conversation turns into more of a disjointed chatroom more than anything else.
Take, for instance, the page that TimesUnion.com recommends you go to so you can follow the interview; every other Tweet is a response to a Tweet that happened twelve Tweets ago, it seems. It's unorganized, and the flow leaves much to be desired, which is not very good for a Q&A session, you know?
To make matters worse, a majority of Twitter users get their updates via text message... Beyond the annoyance of your phone going off at least 30 times in the past hour (yes, I counted, and no, I only followed Brandon's side of the conversation), imagine if you didn't have an unlimited texting plan? The charges would add up, and quick. When trying to promote something, you should likely avoid inadvertently charging any of your audience for the privilege.
Was it worth a shot? Yes. Did it work? No. But, at least we now know that it doesn't work, so other people can avoid doing it in the future.
Unless MC Hammer wants to do it. Then, game freakin' on.
Prop 8: The Musical!
I hate videos made by celebrities that push any political agenda... Then again, it's usually 'cause they're never this funny or well made:
I Matter
MC Hammer follows me on Twitter.
If I wasn't awesome before, I sure as hell am now.
6 Ways Superman Could Beat Batman
I just finished reading ComicBookResources.com's 'Top 25 Comic Book Battles.' It was an interesting list, with a bunch of battles I fondly remember ('Avengers vs. Ultron' being one of my personal favorites) and a few I could do without ('Guy Gardner vs. Batman'... Am I the only one who hated the 'Bwa-Ha-Ha' Justice League?). However, the top choice, 'Batman vs. Superman' from The Dark Knight Returns, holds a special place in my heart as "The Stupid Fight That Ruined Everything."
See, I have no problem with the idea that Batman can beat Superman... but I can only accept that once. Superman, despite how most people write him, isn't some stupid tool that just flies around and does what anyone with 'authority' would tell him; he may not be as smart as Batman, perhaps, but he's not too far off. Not only that, Superman has proven himself quite a dick in the past, so he could do some underhanded things if need be.
In that spirit, I have compiled the greatest assemblage of shoddily made cartoons to demonstrate how Superman could beat Batman.
Superman Can Beat Batman With A Yacht
Look, Batman is a human, and a pounding with a good, old-fashioned yacht would leave him as nothing more than a pile of Bat-Jelly.
Superman Can Beat Batman With Psychological Warfare
Superman has displayed some weird powers in the past... Super-Hypnotism and Super-Ventriloquy, for example. Why can't he have Super-God You're A Lame-O powers? I mean, it's a power my mom, girlfriend, and just about every other girl I know has, so it couldn't be that tough for Superman to master.
Superman Can Beat Batman With Heat Vision From Space
Batman has kryptonite, right? Kryptonite can effect Superman when he's near by. So what's the Last Son of Krypton to do?
HEAT VISION FROM FREAKIN' SPACE. Done and done.
Superman Can Beat Batman With Irony
In The Dark Knight Returns, Batman has Green Arrow shoot a kryptonite arrow at Superman to distract him before Batman kicks Superman's ass. Let's say Superman isn't a moron and uses X-Ray vision to scan the scene before he goes to meet Batman... He'd see Green Arrow. He could disarm Green Arrow (heat vision from space, maybe?), snag the Robin Hood wannabe, and then throw him at Batman, creating a distraction of his own.
Superman Can Beat Batman With A Super-Speed TEMPLE OF DOOM Heart Rip-Out
Superman can run in, rip out Batman's heart, and run back, all before Batman knows what's going on. Seems fairly easy to me.
Last and most certainly least...
Superman Can Beat Batman With A Loogie To The Junk
It's a Super-Loogie! Get it?!
Back to me doing the work I need to get done for real people.
Vampires Sparkle In Sunshine: The TWILIGHT Book Review
As mentioned previously, I had to finish Stephenie Meyer's Twilight before my girlfriend needed it back so she could use it for an assignment in school. I finally got through it, and, as it is the literary sensation sweeping the nation, I figured I'd give some thoughts about it.
Am I Seriously Defending The 'World of Warcraft'?
I guess it’s “People Who Are Wrong” day here on e! = A, ‘cause I just discovered another winner thanks to m’boy Brandon’s blog over at TimesUnion.com.
According to Katie Rossomano of DailyTitan.com, Blizzard Entertainment’s insanely popular “World Of Warcraft” (or WoW) is a sexist game that treats women like crap.
it’s no secret that I personally despise WoW, and constantly make fun of the tons of friends I have who play it, ranging from the innocent jab (“So, going out tonight, or sitting in your basement as per usual?”) to the downright nasty (“Does it bother you that your mother cries at night, thinking you’re sexually attracted to a virtual warlock named ‘N00bPwner’?”).
However, they’re my friends, and it’s my God-given right to mock them... it shows I care. Ms. Rossomano, on the other hand, doesn’t seem like she really played the game at all, or has friends who do, either, based on her article. Her complaints range from the fact that any female character you create is designed to look as “hot” as possible, encouraging sexism, the assumption that everyone is a guy, and, if a girl is playing, she must look like the love child of The Grimmace from McDonalds and one of the Garbage Pail Kids.
Where to begin?
Yes, you’re correct, female characters in video games are designed to appear “sexy,” just as male characters are designed to appear “muscular” and “handsome.” Let’s face it, none of the friends I have who play the game look like the massive he-men they have designed... these are “idealized” people, and you have the mass media to blame for pushing that “ideal.” Also, the idea that a 3-D model of a woman is going to encourage a sexist viewpoint is about as stupid as the idea that seeing a person do something “stereotypical” is going to make me a venom-spewing racist. It takes a lifetime to turn into that, and no video game is going to push you down a spiral of disgust and blind hatred, unless the game in question is “Pokemon: Silver.”
You discuss that it is assumed that female characters are actually being played by males, because, you suppose, that women are “incapable of learning and understanding a relatively complex video game,” ignoring the simple statistical fact that 84% of WoW players actually have a Y-Chromosome, and might not, in fact, have anything to do with a women’s inability to understand such a complex system as “click on an enemy, choose an attack, repeat.”
It is, sadly, the last part of your half-researched rant that is the most damning, where you flat-out state that if a women is (God forbid!) discovered in Azeroth, they are told that they are, quote, “fat, ugly, and acne-ridden.” To get to the bottom of this, I asked my friend Kraft, who has the distinct honor of being addicted to Warcraft like any regular person is addicted to breathing. The conversation, had moments ago:
Me: Hey, if you’re playing WoW with a group of you’ve never actually met before, and you find out one of them is an honest-to-God girl, how often do you hear someone say something like “you must be fat, ugly, and acne-ridden?”
Kraft: Not often. Usually she gets hit on.
Which leads me to my ultimate point; yes, you’ll find sexist people playing “World of Warcraft,” just like you’ll find racist people playing “Yahtzee!” However, just like in real life, you’ll find there’s a bunch more people who are just looking to get laid, and even more people who generally just don’t give a damn so long as you know what you’re doing and don’t prevent them from “pwning some n00bs,” or whatever the hell these loser friends of mine do. And, by condeming an entire game as a sexist experience, you’re no better than those who say stupid things like “girls can’t play games.”
But I suppose I shouldn't be too harsh... after all, "logic" and "self righteousness" don't often go together, as you so expertly demonstrated.
David Pogue And The FireWire Fail
I generally dislike most “popular” tech columnists that are out there; they range from the painfully boring (The Wall Street Journal’s Walt Mossberg) to the obscenely annoying (whoever is paying super-tool John C. Dvorak this week). However, there has been one tech columnist who I’ve always found amusing, informative, and generally awesome: The New York Times’ David Pogue. He seems to have the same weird sense of humor I do, and doesn’t spend all his time talking in “nerd,” which, as someone who also has to explain technical nonsense to people who’s eyes glaze over when you have to talk about something more complicated than Spider Solitaire, I can appreciate... it’s harder to do than you think, and I challenge you to do it sometime.
However, that being said, it is with a heavy heart that I must say the following sentence: David Pogue’s column today was full of crap.
Mr. Pogue reviewed the new MacBook today in his column, and he made mention of the good things about the unit: the sleek new style, the simultaneous lightness and sturdiness of the unibody aluminum enclosure, and the fact that the thing just looks freakin’ sweet. I kid you not when I say that my friends and I stood around one, drooling like a bunch of 12-year-old boys who just found a Victoria’s Secret catalog when we saw it; the thing is hot.
What disappointed both Mr. Pogue and my friends was the removal of the FireWire port on the MacBook, a jack that had been a staple of Apple products for years. FireWire is an insanely useful connection, which allows for a range of things like importing of video from a MiniDV camcorder to your computer’s hard drive with lightning speed to allowing for diagnostics to be run on a Mac from another Mac (or a FireWire hard drive with OS X installed on it), making Mac repair a bit easier. It’s a great port with a lot of utility, and there’s a great number of people who can’t understand why Steve Jobs would take it away.
The answer is simple: the fact that I had to take a paragraph to explain FireWire, and why it’s useful, proves that the target audience of the MacBook wouldn’t even notice it was missing.
The MacBook is the “gateway drug” into all things OS X. If you’re going to be doing video editing, you’re likely going to get a MacBook Pro; if you either want to look trendy, not have Vista, and/or have some weird obsession with Justin “I’m A Mac” Long, you’re buying a MacBook. These are not people who are going to lament the fact that they now can’t transfer their family movies to their hard drive for editing and burning to DVD; hell, most of them don’t even realize that’s an option. The MacBook is there to lure people away from the $699 HP laptop that they might have bought (which, coincidentally, also doesn’t have a FireWire port!).
Mr. Pogue didn’t look at the MacBook from the perspective of who it’s aimed at, which is why I say he’s wrong today. However, I’ll also up the ante by pointing out that he missed the biggest complaint I’ve yet to hear from anyone with “power” in the tech world: the glaring lack of a simple memory card reader on either the MacBook or the MacBook Pro. There isn’t a metaphor appropriate enough to describe the wide gap between people who use their computer for video editing and people who use their computer to store, edit, and share digital photographs, and the fact that I had to buy a third-party card reader for my stupidly expensive MacBook Pro, while the same person who bought the $699 HP has one built in, drives me insane.
I wish I could claim credit for this observation; sadly, all credit must go to my friend Dave, who is closer to a “real” computer user than Mr. Pogue or I could ever hope to be. I was out to lunch with him, talking about how awesome the new MacBooks and MacBook Pros looked, but how disappointed I was about how FireWire was now going the way of my other favorite obsolete ports, a list I will have to remember never to share if I don’t wanna seem like the biggest nerd ever. I rambled on about how I was pretty pleased about the new trackpad, and the fact that El Jobso had finally picked up that people wouldn’t use a battery meter that was on the bottom of a computer, and that I was pumped that he wisely moved it to the side where it could be used easily. Dave’s response was simple:
“I’ve had my MacBook since April, and I never knew there was a battery meter on the bottom of my computer, and I have never had the urge to use the thing. It’s pointless; if I wanna know how much power I have left, I’ll turn on my computer like a normal person. However, you know what I would have put on the side where a row of five stupid LEDs are? I slot where I could stick my damn SD card from my camera so I don’t have to carry around either my external card reader or a spare USB cable! IS THAT SO MUCH TO ASK?!”
As I mentioned before, both Mr. Pogue and I are often required to explain technology to people who either don’t want to understand it or are afraid of it, and that can sometimes lead you to think that although you’re a total gearhead, you can still see new products from a standard users point of view. Clearly, that’s not the case.
I just happened to notice it first. Therefore, on the internet, I win.
They Dropped Seinfeld For This…?
Discovered via Wired, a new ad promoting Microsoft's Professional Developer Conference, where Windows 7, the successor to Vista, will be shown for the first time.
This bit would have been funnier if it was about two minutes shorter. Sitting through the nearly four minute running time is torture, but I'll let you see for yourself.
I'm so sorry.
Spider-Man And His New Amazing Friend… Part 2!
Just when you thought the soul-selling that is Stephen Colbert's team-up with Spider-Man in Amazing Spider-Man #573 couldn't get any lamer:
Alternate Cover To AMAZING SPIDER-MAN #573
Oy.
Spider-Man And His New Amazing Friend
I just got a press release from Marvel Comics that announces what could be the lamest team-up ever that will occur in Amazing Spider-Man #573:
Art from AMAZING SPIDER-MAN #573
From the press release:
Marvel is proud to reveal that Spider-Man and acclaimed television personality Stephen Colbert will join forces in an all new eight-page story featured in the extra-sized Amazing Spider-Man #573! Acclaimed writer Mark Waid and fan favorite artist Patrick Olliffe present Stephen Colbert, a candidate for the US Presidency in the Marvel Universe, teaming up with Marvel’s most iconic crime fighter. What could bring these two together? And what will it mean for both their futures? This issue also features a special Colbert variant by Marvel EiC and industry superstar Joe Quesada!
Don’t miss out on Stephen Colbert’s first full Marvel Universe appearance—in continuity!—and the team up that’ll have everyone buzzing! It’s the extra-sized Amazing Spider-Man #573—and no comic book fan can afford to miss it!
This has 'seriously bad idea' written all over it, creatively. Financially? Marvel can start printing the money now, I figure.