Month: June 2002

Nickelodeon Should Be Ashamed

Glenn Reynolds pans the Hey, Arnold! movie,

But forget the lame plot. The animation sucked; the drawings all looked faintly blurry all the time. It wasn’t even up to Hanna-Barbera standards. And it wasn’t bad projection — the previews were sharp, and so were the titles. It was just crap.

That ain’t even the half of it.

I spent several years reviewing films and videos for the local Gannett paper and I thought I had seen some real dogs in my time, but this movie was so godawful retched that it defies all logic. I would rather be forced to watch The Punisher repeatedly than have to sit through Hey, Arnold! again.

And I’m a huge fan of the television show. My daughter and I were both anticipating this movie and I rearranged plans to take her to see this movie.

The animation was so bad it made me want to vomit. As Reynolds notes, the previews and other promotional materials gave the impression that the movie was going to be of professional quality (like the Rugrats movies have been) but instead Nickelodeon simply use their in-house facilities to do a 70 minute or so episode of the show and then printed that on film stock.

But what looks great on my 36 inch television looks like wretched crap on a movie screen. Didn’t they test screen this dog to anyone?

Reynolds also disses the plot, which was one long anti-gentrification screed. But more than just the plot, the movie lacked completely the quirky atmosphere that makes the television show so much fun. There is a lot of ambiguity in the characters and situations in the show (which is one of its strengths — it avoids the moral platitudes and mini-lectures that adults always want to insert into kids’ shows), so it was weird seeing this simplistic black-and-white morality tale. Much of the time the movie looked like what Hey, Arnold! might be if the idiots responsible for Fern Gully took over the show.

Nickelodeon should be ashamed of itself for unloading this piece of crap film on unsuspecting fans of the show.

Brian 1, Project Entropia 0

Back in September 2000, I posted an article wondering if the proposed online game Project Entropia was, in fact, just a scam.

And what do you know — Project Entropia now has potential serious legal problems including a raid by Swedish authorities who found game’s maker, Mind Ark, using hundreds of pirated software titles and at least one player who is convinced that the game is a scam.

The reason I was suspicious of Project Entropia was because it promised to allow players to make real money transactions in the game. Rather than using fake gold coins or some other pseudo-currency, characters in Project Entropia would use real money. I noted at the time that I thought this would run afoul of all sorts of money laundring problems.

I did back away from that early last year conceding that it might be able to survive in the same legal grey area that PayPal has. But details in a Wired story about the raid suggest that even if it’s not a scam, it’s not very careful with its players money. Exhibit A,

MindArk stoked these dreams by promising that a “dollar millionaire” would emerge from Entropia within a year of the game’s release.

But enthusiasm for the game has been hobbled, as a series of bugs wiped out some players’ inventories and deleted others’ long-assembled characters entirely. That’s a big deal in any game but an outright disaster in Entropia, where those hoards are paid for with actual cash.

“It seems more like a scam than anything,” Entropia player Joao Coelho wrote in an e-mail.

Another player, whose account mysteriously disappeared, added in a post to the Entropia message boards, “I’m going to be calling my credit card company to get my stolen money back.”

Scam or not, I doubt Mind Ark can pull off all of the things that would be needed to make a game like this succeed. There are just too many obstacles to overcome.

Source:

Pirate Cops Raid MS Gaming Foe. Noah Shachtman, Wired, June 28, 2002.

Panda Porn

Many male pandas in captivity are generally uninterested in mating and will often spurn advances from female pandas. What to do, then, to increase the population of these endangered animals? Panda porn!

When male pandas reach maturity, zoo officials are showing them videotapes of pandas mating.

(Don’t let Catharine MacKinnon find out — this is probably inherently oppressive to female pandas).

Freedom Force, Will Eisner, and Intellectual Property

There is a fascinating thread over at the official Freedom Force discussion board about intellectual property and computer game mods.

Freedom Force is the first real superhero game for the PC (and, soon, Macintosh), and one of the best games I have ever played. It is also very moddable, and there are thousands of skins available for pretty much any comic book superhero as well as some completely new missions and campaigns. One of my favorites, for example, is an ongoing mod that pits the Fantastic Four in various missions.

But, of course, none of the people making these skins or mods has any right to do so. The Fantastic Four are the property of Marvel and creating a mod involving them violates copyright and trademark laws. So far the companies aren’t complaining — but Will Eisner did.

One user made a skin of The Spirit and Eisner was apparently not happy about it because the version of The Spirit posted online carried a gun and Eisner has some problem with guns. So Eisner sent contacted the creator of the skin and asked him to take it down, which the author did.

Immediately, of course, some people started complaining about the evils of intellectual property, to which one observant person noted there was a whiff of hypocrisy in the air,

I’m broadly speaking against “intellectual property”, but I notice that this community has one set of morals regarding “warez scum” and another when it comes to copyright breach of comic characters.You can’t have it both ways, so either we start handing out cd keys ands iso files to all comers or we have to shut up about “bad form” and corporate greed when someone says “don’t skin my creation”.

The general response seems to be “modding is different than making warez” but most of the responses seem like they are rationalizing: What they do is warez, what we do is fair use.

I doubt Marvel, DC or other comic book companies will complain or send cease and desist order so long as their characters are not portrayed in ways inconsistent with their vision of said characters. Marvel, after all, tolerated and then licensed an X-Men Quake mod so it could be commercially released. But it would be nice if there were a way for companies to formally make such not-for-profit activities legal without diminishing their trademarks so that fans and modders could have clear cut guidelines of what they can and cannot do with stuff like this or fan fiction/films.

Iranian Women’s Weblogs

In the United States, stories about computers and women typically revolve around how the male-dominated computer culture devalues women’s unique way of knowing. But in Iran, women are turning to Internet web logs to talk openly about topics that otherwise might get a woman in trouble in that conservative Islamic country.

Weblogging in Iran apparently took off after Iranian journalist Hossein Derkhshan wrote a simple guide in Persian about how to create a weblog. Seven months later, there are more than 1,200 Persian weblogs according to the BBC, with many written by women.

The women post anonymously and can talk freely about sex and other topics without the fears of violating some cultural taboo. One female weblogger told The BBC,

Womnen in Iran cannot speak out frankly because of our Eastern culture and there are some taboos just for women, such as talking about sex or the right to choose your partner. I have the opportunity to talk about the things and share my experiences with others.

At least someone appreciates oppressive patriarchal technology.

Source:

Web gives a voice to Iranian women. Alfred Hermida, The BBC, June 17, 2002.