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…
June, 2002
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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…
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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…
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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…
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No point in adding to the litany of comments on both sides about the Pledge of Allegiance except to note that when immigrants become naturalized citizens, the ceremony involves saying the Pledge of Allegiance (the “under God” version) as well as the Naturalization Oath of Allegiance which ends, “so help me God.”
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Reuters’ coverage of Salon.Com’s demise offers a spin that I suspect will be typical with such stories — this is proof that premium subscription services and ad revenue are inherently flawed models for Internet businesses. The author of the article focuses exclusively on revenues, never thinking to ask just how the hell Salon.Com had expenses…
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Here’s an interesting SEC analysis of Salon.Com. Some highlights: Salon has incurred significant net losses and negative cash flows from operations since its inception. As of March 31, 2002, Salon had an accumulated deficit of $76.6 million. These losses have been funded primarily through the issuance of preferred stock and Salon’s initial public offering of…
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Ars Technica has a silly rant about the cost of computer games. People often write me with their worries about the state of the gaming industry. No topic is more prevalent than how expensive the hobby has become over the last decade. Jason D. wrote to me last week and had this to say: “Can…
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Celestia is the successor to the excellent OpenUniverse program. Celestia bills itself as, a free real-time space simulation that lets you experience our universe in three dimensions. Unlike most planetarium software, Celestia doesn’t confine you to the surface of the Earth. You can travel throughout the solar system, to any of over 100,000 stars, or…
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Cory Doctorow wrote an interesting article for O’Reilly.Net on why he blogs which pretty much mirrors my own reasons — as a knowledge management tool to keep track of things he runs across. Doctorow writes, Blogging gave my knowledge-grazing direction and reward. Writing a blog entry about a useful link and/or interesting subject forces me…