Convenience, thy name is dot-cee-bee-arr!
In case you're in the dark, allow me to explain. A .cbr file is a zipped collection of images most often used to distribute comic books via the 'net. It's a pretty simple and elegant solution -- assuming you can find a reader program that makes you happy.
Since I'm on a Mac (OS X Snow Leopard, to be precise), my options are a bit slim. Normally this works out pretty well because it means less crap to sift through, but in this case it means we have two viable contenders, neither of whom has a huge advantage over the other.
Can you see how that might piss me off?
FFview and Jomic seem like the two most popular open source options, but neither is perfect. FFview is fast, looks good, scales well and loads very quickly, but it seems scattered. Almost like the developers couldn't bring themselves to ever cut any features, so they just kept stacking shit on top of other shit. It may have originally been smooth and intuitive, but it's far from that point now.
Jomic, on the other hand, runs a bit slower (which isn't even noticeable on my MacBook Pro), but is almost as elegant as Apple's own software solutions. I would use Jomic exclusively, but the program crashes far too often, and seemingly for no logical reason.
Thus, I come to you, dear reader: Is there a better open source option out there for me? Don't make me attempt to build my own. There's no telling what sort of limbs I might lose playing with the dark magic of coding.
Oh, and to make this a bit more interesting, if any of you find me a .cbr reader that I adopt as my new standard, you will win something. I can't explicitly state what it is at the moment (officially it doesn't yet exist), but know that winning will make you the envy of all your friends.
With my attention span again reminding me that I can't focus on anything for more than half a second while sober, I've started yet another creative project, an attempt at blogging my playthrough of Dragon Quest V: Hand of the Heavenly Bride from a first-person perspective.
You can find that here: Three women, a panther and me
Odds are I'll be updating that blog more often than that one -- assuming I don't totally fuck up the crucial "write about DQ5 while playing it" concept -- so please do check it as often as your F5 key will allow.
At the very least it will give you a new perspective on one of the best roleplaying game stories ever written.
Plus, I'm not getting paid, so my ego could really use a bit of propping up on this one.
If you really loved me you'd do it.
Tonight I conducted an experiment.
It seems to me that with Twitter being the latest vehicle for the extrapolation of information, a little bit of misinformation (particularly "tragic" misinformation) can become widely believed almost instantly.
Two points:
- While there is such a Twitter account as @importantnews, they said no such thing about Mr. Danson.
- As far as I know, Ted Danson is alive and well.
No, I'm not concerned, nor would I be if Ted had died. He was great on Cheers, but it's not like he's my uncle or anything.
Though it did entertain me to see just how gullible the masses are and how easily manipulated Twitter really is. I'm smiling; what more do you want?
(This originally started out as a review of the Xbox 360's Batman: Arkham Asylum. Then, well ... it changed. Consider this a look at how games journalism works at 5:47AM.)
Have you ever seen one of those Discovery Channel documentaries on how amazing the jaguar is?
It’s a big cat, yeah, and has all the grace, sharp teeth and innate evil that comes along with that species, but more impressive is just how amazing this animal is at killing shit. Have you seen this thing? It’s insane! Here’s a 350lb animal that thinks simply killing huge herbivores is pussy shit. While those lazy-assed lions hunt in packs to take down some malnourished wildebeests (who probably would have died of dysentery anyway), the jaguar is busy biting airplanes in half and dragging boats around with its dick.
I'm single again.
I think I'm done dating. Forever.
That's neither hyperbole or whiny teen angst; Instead it's a melancholy commentary on my own personal definition of "forever."
Maybe I'll update this with a longer explanation later on, but for the moment I'm going to take some dilaudid and stop thinking about it.
Best Fwends are some sort of chiptunes/pop-punk conglomerate from Texas made up of two dudes, some machines, and an iPod. They were recently signed to Moshi Moshi, and none of the 34 (!) songs on their first LP, Alphabetically Arranged, is over two minutes. Brilliant. In their own words:
Anthony was borrowing a 4 track from our friend and we were bored at his house. The first Best Fwends 4-tracks were born, using a toys r us keyboard, a guitar effects processor, and our annoying voices. We punished those songs for being bad and have locked them away for now... They were improv chipmunk-voice noise jams, I believe. We thought they were cute and fun so we continued recording track after track of retarded/ridiculous sleep-deprived delirious noise for several months afterwards (using gameboys, live drums, cookie monster vocals, flutes, etc!) on the side, anthony was making total club bumpin dance tracks. While listening to them one day dustin had a funny vision. he was all like, "DUDE! we could SING on top of those you know?! and uhh, record guitar and keyboards on top of them?! and before you know it, We were in our underwear in our friends' basements, yelling through megaphones at unsuspecting teenagers and forcing them to dance and give us money.
now, we seek to travel the world with our obnoxious noise, sleeping in people's living rooms and on their couches."
But, y'know, every time you write 34 songs, there are, inevitably, going to be some flops. For every charming, addictive, brilliant pice of sonic noise Best Fwends, there tend to be two or three that either forgettable or grating. So, here is my version of a sleeker, svelter, and sexier Alphabetically Arranged. Enjoy.
Here's the tracklist:
- 02 Adultnap
- 05 Cloud of Hope (f. The Death Set)
- 08 Days Seem Shorter
- 10 Dream Off
- 11 Dump in the Dark
- 13 Get Away from Me
- 16 House Ghost
- 19 Little Robo Wan
- 25 Sing to Live
- 26 Skate or Live
- 30 Aaww-some (Johnny Siera Remix)
P.S. -- I forgot to add a song called "Zwzzt," but here's a link to the song.
One of the most interesting (at least, on the domestic side) by products of the civil unrest in Iran has been, of course, the way mainstream media outlets like CNN and BBC have responded to and reported on it -- that is to say, with varying levels of success.
BoingBoing's Xeni Jardin seems to think that we're getting the short end of some sort of journalistic stick, explaining that "[...] cable news networks seem to be having a grand time pointing to random Facebook and MySpace status updates, for lack of better understanding of Iranian online culture," before linking people to a reading list compiled by Iranian-American journalist Cyrus Farivar.
Farivar's list is fine, and includes some of the sites I've been using to keep up ... except that it contains several links to Twitter feeds, Time, Wired, and HuffingtonPost. The very types of sites Jardin was railing on in her previous post.
So, because Facebook and MySpace are the laughing stocks of web-savy e-hipsters, Twitter, Flickr, and tumblr blogs represent a "better understanding of Iranian online culture?" I hate to break it to you, Xeni, but Facebook status updates are every bit as valid as Twitter feeds (because they're the same goddamned thing), and making some arbitrary distinction -- because one is cool and the other isn't -- isn't fair or even logical. Either there's a social media revolution going on or there isn't -- I think there is, and it certainly isn't confined to @persiankiwi.
My larger point, however, is that mainstream media's appropriation and utilization of Facebook and MySpace is a positive thing. In an industry that so often thumbs its nose (as Jardin does towards Facebook) at any non-traditional news source -- and even, according to Anil Dash, people who don't speak Standard English -- media's willingness to take social media into account is a step forward.
[image via Boston.com; pithy title courtesy of Cadence Weapon]
Point 1: I'm an atheist.
Point 2: The universe -- reality -- serves no purpose except to exist. We're all collections of molecules and organized energy randomly, chaotically smashed together by chance.
Point 3: This shit is really fucking depressing.
This is how I came to the idea that religion was not the stupid institution to be rebelled against and endlessly mocked of my childhood, but the important, crucial guiding figure in the lives of billions of people that it truly is. Most people simply can't -- or won't -- face up to the reality of existence, because the reality of existence is a great reason to eat a gun.
Or, more specifically, it offers no reasons not to. When you're down, when your girlfriend has left you for some other dude, or you can't pay your rent, there really is no valid, overarching, eternal reason not to cut your own head off to escape from the crushing ennui of life.
On the other hand you have these pleasant stories about some magical sky wizard and a bearded guy in robes who loves everyone and wants everyone to be happy. They tell you there's a very good reason to keep on keepin' on: Because life is precious and helping others is important and everything is interconnected and important.
They make for nice stories, but then reality crashes the party with its reason and logic and math and the ideas behind the entire thing fall apart.
It's sad.
In a case of historical irony, the baby boomer generation that the Ayatollah Khomeini bred to fight Iraq in the eighties are the very same young adults that are now trying to topple the government he estrablished during the Iranian Revolution.
According to this Slate piece, 60% of Iranians are under thirty (which explains their effective and compelling use of social networking sites like Twitter, Flickr, and YouTube) and are becoming increasingly moderate.
At GDC earlier this year, to absolutely no fanfare, Square Enix announced Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles: My Life as a Darklord. During E3, they released a trailer, to equally little fanfare, even though the WiiWare title will be out later this month. It's the lastest in the Crystal Chronicles series,
In a market flooded with knockoff tower defense games and Final Fantasy spin-offs with ridiculously long titles, it's hard to care about a game that combines both. Especially when the entire gimmick (you're evil instead of good) was already fleshed out by games like Codemasters' Overlord.
Nevertheless, I really like the character designs, even if the whole I'm-an-evil-harlequin-bitch vibe is neutered by all the kawaii.
[Via SiliconEra]
