“The SF bits are not really SF, they’re fantasy papered-over with a bit of technospeak. Despite this there are endless, meaningless, tedious infodumps. What could possibly be the point of an infodump about a nonsensical and arbitrary system of magic? And what’s the deal with all the chicks being desperately thirsty for the protagonist’s cock? It’s like something out of an extremely bad harem anime, yet it doesn’t appear to be ironic.”

— Fantastic Anachronism reviews Murakami

Useful information...


View from the wing provides a handy piece of information (via Marginal Revolution):

Regardless of what you pay and what fare class you’re booking in, your travel on United between San Francisco and Nagoya, Japan is going to have almost no effect whatsoever on United’s decision-making. They’ve got a very large contract with Toyota and they fill up their 747 with cargo and the flight goes out with very low load factors yet is still profitable for them to operate. That’s why the single easiest flight in the entire United system on which to score an international premium class award ticket on is San Francisco- Nagoya...

More Spore


I couldn’t resist linking to this one. Eeeeeevil.

Queen's Blade: The Solo Game


ANN says Queen’s Blade TV anime series. I expect well-rounded character designs with paper-thin personalities, bound together by fate in a by-the-numbers plot.

One in every crowd...


A short visit to Sporepedia.

The creator: 500000753443 Lrg

The artist: 500000752060 Lrg

The specialist: 500000751545 Lrg

One in every crowd:

more...

Expect to see a lot of these...


Today was the public pre-release of the Spore Creature Creator. Lots of people are going to be making critters and posting pictures and videos of them.

Here’s my only contribution for the foreseeable future:

sample Spore creature

And here’s the video, which works in some video players, but not others. (Quicktime with assorted plugins, but not Quicktime as a browser plugin, for some reason; also, no VLC)

I like the way that the children are chibified.

[Update: the web site claims 71,860 creatures uploaded in the last 24 hours. Oh, yeah, you’ll be seeing a lot of these.]

This is wrong tour


Never use this.

Step 1: Take the train to Akihabara on a Sunday. Step 2: Pay an American cosplayer $50 for a tour. Step 3: Profit?

At least they advertise it correctly: anyone on this tour will indeed be called “otaku” by the natives…

Ooma goes retail!


We’ve been taking it slow, but we’ve finally got a retail trial running. If you’re in the Los Angeles area, you can finally see our product before buying one, at Best Buy.

"Now throw the switch and let us begin the battle for the planet."
--- The Brain

On Piracy


Back in March, Shamus Young suggested practical ways software vendors can deal with piracy. Step number 5 was “clean house”: as with movies, most of the widely-traded pirated copies of games come from insiders, not retail customers who’ve disabled DRM on their copy and uploaded it.

Supporting evidence for this claim? I just saw the official honest-to-prepress PDF file for the just-released 4th Edition Dungeons and Dragons Player’s Handbook. I’m sure WotC will sell plenty of copies of the book, but I’m also sure a lot of people will be downloading this PDF version for free.

[Update: heh; some downloaders have outed themselves by posting rules complaints and questions based on the PDFs, which apparently are not identical to the printed books. The files that leaked out were not the “gold masters”, as it were.]

“Need a clue, take a clue,
 got a clue, leave a clue”