Mac OS X 10.7: What's Next for OS X?

Much like Apple itself, I write a bunch about iOS for this site, but not a ton about Mac OS X. That's for a reason, really; iOS is still a relatively new product, and Apple is still harvesting some low-hanging fruit and bringing major new features to it on a regular basis. Mac OS X, on the other hand, has been a reliable workhorse for most of the last decade, and major new features have been few and far between since the 10.4 release really finalized the then-fledgling OS in 2005.

For version 10.7 (codenamed Lion and due out at some point this summer), though, Apple has made a conscious effort to improve Mac OS X in meaningful ways, chiefly by tightening the integration between the solid Mac platform and the new-and-exciting-but-still-limited-in-some-frustrating-ways iOS platform. I'm here, as always, to tell you the features you need to get excited about, and why you should be excited about them.

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TV Review: Mildred Pierce, Parts I and II

At first, it seems like Todd Haynes' new adaptation of Mildred Pierce exists in a universe where no one has internal monologues, where characters either say exactly what they're thinking or have another character do it for them. It doesn't mean it's bad, per se, but it does mean it's the opposite of subtle.

Then again, this isn't a project that comes from subtle roots. The first adaptation of James M. Cain's novel was helmed by Warner Bros. go-to guy Michael Curtiz (Casablanca, White Christmas) and introduced a murder/thriller element to spice things up. Joan Crawford won an Oscar for her portrayal of the title character, but critics then and now saw the movie as being too histrionic for its own good.

Haynes' version tones things down, but what emerges doesn't seem much more realistic than its antecedent. Haynes, an auteur with a filmography that includes everything from New Queer touchstones to a music biopic that's half  8 1/2 and half Thirty Two Short Films about Glenn Gould, instead chooses to turn the petty struggles of single motherhood into high Hollywood melodrama.

The HBO miniseries opens with Mildred (Kate Winslet, dependably great) arguing with her husband Bert (Brían F. O'Byrne) in their comfortable middle-class Los Angeles home. The fight has the air of one that's come many times before, though Mildred's accusation of adultery seems like a recent addition. Winslet drains all of the camp and glamor from Crawford's portrayal and swaps it for a brittle nerviness. Bert leaves the house perhaps quicker than he should, but it's clear than Mildred doesn't make the place particularly easy to live in.

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Good TV: After Lately

It’s been a long time since I laughed hard at a scripted television show. The Office seems like it doesn’t know what to do with itself. Parks and Rec is consistently good, but its never been a gut-buster. I see glimmers of hope in a show like The Onion’s Sportsdome and I mourn the loss of Party Down, but current TV? It seems like all of my favorites are fading away. Maybe the storylines have all run their course, or maybe I’m just getting used to the dynamics of said shows and can’t get truly cracked up like a used to. Are my days of enjoying scripted comedy truly over? Have I lost my sense of humor? Is it me, not them? Well, no, of course not. Because After Lately - the new offshoot of Chelsea Lately - is f’ing hilarious.

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Revisiting the Simplicity of Baseball Cards

This Saturday, a very important announcement about the baseball season was made: The Chicago Cubs announced that youngster Andrew Cashner would be their 5th starter for the 2011 season, pushing veteran Carlos Silva off the 25-man roster. This is just one of the tidbits of information that flashes across the bottom of your screen while you watch Spring Training games on MLB Network. Why was I fixated on this one, then? It was because I recognized the name "Carlos Silva" from a 2011 Topps baseball card I had just opened.

That's right, at Spring Training this past weekend, I picked up a couple of packs of baseball cards, and I've been hooked ever since. Organizing them by collector's number, constructing fantasy depth charts on my table top, you name it, the whole nine yards. In fact, right before I heard the news, I had shifted Silva's card from my "good starters" pile to my "garbage starters" pile. And it looks like Cubs GM Jim Hendry's decision justified my classification.

Opening these few spring packs made me realize how much I missed baseball cards. I have binders full of the stuff at home, compiled between the years of 1989 and 2003, but once they're in the sleeves, you very rarely take them out and play with them like you do when you open a new pack. Part of the reason that baseball cards are so much fun is their permanence: they actually exist, cardboard and ink. Sure you can get stats and pictures of baseball players online, but it's very different from opening up a new pack of baseball cards. It's kind of like the difference between settling down with a cup of coffee and the print version of the New York Times, and paying a reasonable price for the New York Times' digital subscription.

So, has the death of print journalism coincided with the decline in popularity of baseball cards? I don't see how there possibly couldn't be a connection.

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Getting Distracted From Game Stories

On a recent episode of the gaming podcast Rebel FM, IGN editor Arthur Gies said, “I most gamers wouldn’t know a good story if it bit them in the ass.” He expressed his concerns cautiously at first, aware of the serious troll-baiting he was about to do. Instead of ushering in a new Age of Enlightenment, the Internet’s given us an Age of Entitlement. And few niche cultures wear their entitlement so proudly as gamers do.

Gies’s comments spawned from a discussion of Crysis 2’s story, which on the surface seems no more unique than any other shooters. Aliens are attacking. You better stop them. Despite the presence of these familiar tropes, Gies argued, the tertiary material (environmental items such as emails) fills in a picture well worth looking at.

There’s one problem: the material’s tertiary.

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A Decade of Dreck #49: The Hottie and the Nottie

Charge Shot!!! is celebrating the end of the decade in the most masochistic way we know how - by watching and writing about the 100 worst movies of the last ten years as defined by film review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes. Click here to see RT's complete list, click here for more information about the Decade of Dreck project, and click here to see all of the movies we've done so far. 

Millions of years from now, when alien archaeologists look upon the ruins of human civilization, they will marvel at had once been Paris Hilton and say "This is it: this is the high water mark. This is where the wave of the American Empire finally broke and rolled back."

It seems almost quaint to remember it now, but there was a time when Paris Hilton was an omnipresent, malicious force in American pop culture. You couldn't turn on a TV without her vacant, serial stare gazing back at you, probing your soul, revealing you for the fraud and hypocrite you are. I often wonder what the net gain/loss is of men who have been inspired by Paris Hilton to become anti-West guerrilla fighters in the undeveloped world. It must be pretty high; Lord knows I've contemplated taking up a Kalashnikov and burning her picture in effigy in my time. DOWN WITH THE GREAT SATAN!

Sorry about that. Anyway, it's one thing when our worthless celebrities impose themselves on us with shitty reality shows, the media equivalent of worthless celebrities, but for some goddamn reason they always imagine they have some modicum of talent that needs to be shared with the world and decide to act in shitty films. The eternal monument to Paris Hilton's dream of being an actress is an unholy hellspawn called The Hottie and the Nottie, and I have seen it.

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Thoughts of an Aspiring Music Snob: Week 100 - Weezer

Chris is trying to compensate for his lack of musical knowledge by immersing himself in one new artist each week. At the end of the week, he will write up a brief summary of his opinions. You can read about the origin and parameters of this project here.

I know a lot of Weezer fans, so I had a pretty good grasp of the band's whole meta-narrative before I even started my listening this week. I had watched in confusion as, with each successive Weezer album, I saw my friends complain about how terrible Weezer had been for the past ten years before running out to buy it. It seemed like a strange form of sonic flagellation, atoning for one's enjoyment of the band's nineties material by enduring the half dozen mediocrities that followed.

So I guess the ending to the Weezer story had already been spoiled for me. Because of this, I ended up spending a large amount of time with the well-lauded Blue Album and Pinkerton, while continually procrastinating when it came to listening to the rest of their output. By the time the weekend rolled around, and I had the prospect of listening to six Weezer albums that had been described to me as anywhere from middling to blatantly offensive. 

The result was not as bad as I had been led to believe - but, as I said, the ending had been spoiled and my expectations for this material had been lowered well before I had ever listened to Weezer at all. I went through several albums that could be described as firmly mediocre. The great disappointment is not that these were insufferably bad, but just that they were so bland. 

21st-century Weezer reminds me a lot of 21st-century George Lucas. Both figures are decades past their creative prime, but have somehow convinced themselves that they're still relevant. Both figures keep making art that contains glimmers of interesting ideas buried beneath a lot of embarrassingly childish drivel. Both figures have transformed from countercultural icons to commercial entities obsessed with marketing and branding. Both manage to piss off a lot of nerds who complain that their childhood has been ruined. 

I don't think I'll ever be able to join the Weezer club, and start bitching about how many years I've been waiting for another good album to emerge. But the cult of Weezer fascinates me. I don't think I've ever come across an unapologetic Weezer fan - even the appreciation of their biggest supporters comes clouded with a tinge of embarrassment. And, in many ways, I find the conflict of the divided Weezer fan more interesting than a lot of the band's actual music. 

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Saturday Morning TV: What Should Brett Favre Do?

What should I do? Should I watch this video again? Should I watch the original Lebron James ad? Maybe I should just hop on Google…

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Opting Out of Opting Out: The Latest Round in the Google Books Saga

There's a lot of long-running legal cases currently trickling through our judicial system. The recent health care law gets the most press, but there's also the possibility of an AT&T and T-Mobile merger, which would have to be approved by the federal government. 

Google Books isn't as politically volatile as health care, nor is it as sexy as smart phones and data networks. But the recent opinion delivered by district court judge Denny Chin is perhaps just as important in the long-term. Nominally, the ruling is about Google's desire to create an all-inclusive digital library. But the conversation also touches on the United States' arcane copyright law, the supposed "freedom" of information, and the implications of a commercial company pursuing a supposedly humanitarian project. 

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Religion in Jason Rohrer’s Chain World

Every year, the best and brightest minds in game development convene in San Francisco for the Game Developer’s Conference. The GDC is an opportunity for studios to shill, speakers to speak, and for developers to share ideas on how to, well, develop.

Arguably the biggest game of GDC 2010 – despite it still technically being in beta – was Minecraft. It won the Seamus McNally Grand Prize at the Independent Games Festival. Everyone on the floor tweeted sightings of Minecraft’s creator Notch.

Given its popularity within the development community, it’s fitting that the annual development competition was won with a Minecraft mod. The year’s theme was “Bigger Than Jesus.” Jason Rohrer, the man behind Sleep is Death and Passage, beat out the likes of John Romero and Jenova Chen with Chain World.

Can a game be a religion? Can it at the very least imitate one? What happens when its followers abuse or misinterpret its precepts? These questions surround Rohrer’s “game.”

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Surprise! Duke Nukem Forever Delayed

As if the whole “Slap the Babe” multiplayer nonsense weren’t enough, Gearbox Studios has announced a delay for its forthcoming revival of the previously unshippable Duke Nukem Forever.

Duke Nukem Forever – the albatross that miniaturized 3D Realms with a shrink ray, ate it, then pooped it into an interactive digital toilet – was picked up by Gearbox in September of last year. CEO Randy Pitchford seemed like the midwife to finally bring this beast into the world, given his love for and attachment to the franchise.

It seems that Duke, like some sort of stubborn womb-loving infant, will not be born without a fight. Pitchford announced today, with some modicum of humor (see below), that Duke Nukem Forever will miss its May 3 release date and arrive in the States on June 14.

I’ll believe it when I see it.

If I see it.

[via VG Tribune]

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The AT&T/T-Mobile Buyout: Whoever Wins, We Lose

Nestled in between New York Times headlines about Libya and Japan (Donate!) this weekend, so small you'd almost miss it, was an unrelated story: AT&T announced its intentions to buy T-Mobile for an estimated $39 billion.

This buyout, if it gets past government regulators, would make AT&T the country's largest wireless provider by a fair margin, and would shrink the number of companies with serious national coverage to just three: AT&T, Verizon, and an increasingly tiny-looking Sprint. Most other wireless providers are regional at best, and they're so far outgunned by the larger companies that they can't hope to compete on the national stage.

I've got plenty of opinions on both Libya and Japan, but as we're not a "new millennium humanitarian crisis" blog, I'll have to content myself with writing about the lesser of these three stories.

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Art House in the Middle of the Street #8: Grand Illusion

There's no grand philosophical project behind Charge Shot!!!'s new feature. Jordasch's mom got him Janus Films' absolutely untouchable Essential Art House box set, and he's going to watch the whole thing. It's a behemoth set, collecting 50 films released since 1956 by one of the first distributors to bring honest-to-goodness world cinema to U.S. shores. The films contained in the collection serve as a crash course in world cinema, encompassing everything from major works of the French New Wave and the Italian Neorealist period to films from lesser-known corners of the filmmaking world, including Brazil and Poland. The collection is 50 discs, weighs 16 pounds, it's dark, and we're wearing sunglasses. Hit it.

Jean Renoir's Grand Illusion has the distinction of being the first film to be confiscated by Nazi propaganda  minister Joseph Goebbels following Germany's invasion of France in World War II. It's a testament both to the incisiveness of the film's message and the subtlety of Goebbels' sensibilities as a censor that he declared Grand Illusion "Cinematic Public Enemy No. 1." Grand Illusion is certainly an indictment of the creeping fascistic tendencies in 1930s Europe, but it's not simple polemic. Powell and Pressburger's anti-Nazi 49th Parallel traffics in simple stereotypes in order to communicate the clearest message possible: Nazi punks fuck off. (They'd show off their subtler side with the multifaceted portrayal of a blustery Major General in 1943's The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp.)

Grand Illusion never settles for something so simple. It's an anti-war film, yes, and it has few kind things to say about the reconstituted aristocracy of fascism, but it never harangues. It's a film that hardly ever raises its voice. But what it whispers about the futility of war and its social, philosophical, and racial underpinnings has reverberated through our discussions of the same since its release more than eighty years ago.

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Track Obsession: “Jesus Fever” by Kurt Vile

When I like a song, I really like it. Sometimes songs really lodge themselves into my head. I know there's no escaping the melody or interesting lyrics, and so I usually give up trying to shake the song and submerge myself. I listen to it day and night. I work out to it. I walk my dog to it. I do the dishes while it pipes out of my iPod. In short: I get obsessed. Isn’t there just something completely overpowering about a perfect song? You know what I'm talking about. I'm talking about the type of song that makes you want to run as fast as you can for no reason. It's not too long, not too short, a perfect hook, chorus, etc. You’ll have to excuse me, I’m not a musician, and Chris is really better suited to this kind of thing. I’m just a guy who sometimes freaks out over a song. And right now I’m freaking out over the song “Jesus Fever” off of Kurt Vile’s new album Smoke Ring For My Halo.

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Fear and Loathing at Spring Training '11

When I imagine a journalist going into the field for a long and immersive trip, my mind always calls up images of Hunter S. Thompson lugging his huge typewriter along with him and setting it up in a dark corner of his hotel room during any rare quiet moment of his travels. Well, if I had to bring a typewriter with me on my trip to Phoenix to cover a long weekend of Spring Training Baseball, it would probably end up broken, succumbing to the same fate as my computer, whose hard drive unexpectedly and inexplicably crashed the night before we left. So now I'm out here in the blazing Arizona desert with nought but a notepad and my smartphone with which to document my adventures.

The baseball journalistic aspects of my trip (stories about all four games my colleague and I were scheduled to watch and how the individual performances of each player and team fit into the Grand Outlook of the Season as a Whole) were set to appear on my other blog, thoughtsaboutbaseball.blogspot.com, so I won't bore you with the technical stuff here. Thankfully I had signed up for Twitter just mere hours before my computer died, so I was still able to live-tweet some of my more colorful observations. You can follow my travels at @Hunter_S_Batman.

It's hard to focus on this tiny screen long enough to write even this brief post, even after today's baseball action is over; I'd much rather be poring over my scoresheet or analyzing some projected lineups. Maybe things would be different if I had a working computer, even though I previously wrote an entire full-length post using only my Android phone. The amount of information necessary to process before the start of a baseball season requires the computing power, speed, and convenience of a full O.S. - but then again a computer might have just provided me with more potential for distraction.

So I hope you'll forgive ne if I put my smartphone away in favor of my glove, cap, and Matt Kemp autographed baseball. I'm sure I'll find it more fun to welcome in the spring by hanging out in the sun than straining my eyes at this tiny little touchscreen in a dirty old hotel.room. I promise I'll be back with you once everything settles down.

Published with Blogger-droid v1.6.7

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The Butterfly Effect of the NFL Lockout

Is football too big to fail? It’s long since surpassed the baseball as America’s national pastime. Last fall, a regular season football game between the New Orleans Saints and the Pittsburgh Steelers beat Game Four of the World Series in overnight ratings. Though folks like Seth Everett (formerly of ESPN’s Baseball Today podcast) will tell you that baseball is best judged by local not national ratings, you simply can’t deny football’s dominance when it’s beating out the championships of other sports.

Football may not be so dominant this year, however.

The NFL recently instituted a lockout after the league and players failed to see eye to eye on a new collective bargaining agreement. If this were a sports blog, I’d delve into why the owners and players disagree ($$$, the proposed addition of two regular season games, $$$, etc.), but we’re not so I won’t.

I’ll just boil it down: if the two sides can’t reach an agreement, there won’t be football this year!

And it isn’t just the millionaire players and owners who’ll feel its absence.

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A Decade of Dreck #48: The Cookout

Charge Shot!!! is celebrating the end of the decade in the most masochistic way we know how - by watching and writing about the 100 worst movies of the last ten years as defined by film review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes. Click here to see RT's complete list, click here for more information about the Decade of Dreck project, and click here to see all of the movies we've done so far. 

When young men grow up, they are forced to leave behind the homesteads of their families and journey off into the world to seek their fortune. The story is as old as humanity itself. But when a boy becomes a man, must he leave the traditions of his fathers behind? Can he return to the farm now that he has seen Pair-ee?

This age-old story is ripe for feel-good cinematic exploitation. I'm sure it's been done before a gazillion times, but after watching The Cookout, my brain is so fried (from both the sheer inanity of this movie as well as all the pork-fried goodness on screen, expertly filmed at a near-pornographic level of mouth-watering deliciousness) that I can't recall one for the life of me.

Todd Andersen is the star player for the Rutgers men's basketball team and a hometown hero in his native New Jersey. When he gets selected as the Nets' first round draft pick (much to evil mastermind Mark Cuban's chagrin) he celebrates by blowing his newfound wealth on cars, a ritzy house, and gifts for his money-grubbing girlfriend. His manager insists that he secure a lucrative endorsement deal in order to keep himself in the black, while his parents decide to throw a cookout at the new house to do the same.

(Explanation: "In the black" is an economic term referring to the state of earning more money than is spent. The joke I made plays on this turn of phrase by implying that Todd's parents wish for him to stay true to his lower-middle class African-American roots, or "stay black". Thank you for your time. This joke wasn't that funny, now that I think about it.)

But, will his eccentric family drive mainstream success away? Will success spoil Todd Andersen? All these questions and more will be answered in THE COOKOUT!

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Thoughts of an Aspiring Music Snob: Week 99 - Dr. John

Chris is trying to compensate for his lack of musical knowledge by immersing himself in one new artist each week. At the end of the week, he will write up a brief summary of his opinions. You can read about the origin and parameters of this project here.

(I'm returning late from a vacation, so I'm going to mix-up the usual format and instead address a question I occupied myself with during a lengthy car ride. We'll return next week to your regularly scheduled programming. In the meantime, please pardon my complete and utter exhaustion and any typos that occur as a result). 

I took a trip to New Orleans this weekend, and I was confronted with the age-old conundrum of tourism - visit the popular spots, those places that everyone associates with the city? Or go off the beaten path and discover some interesting, though not necessarily iconic, hidden treasures? Popular tourist spots are often tacky, presenting a caricature of the most popular stereotypes of the locale. But these are also the places that enter the public consciousness as cultural emblems.

Because of my trip this week, I chose to listen to Dr. John, who is one of New Orleans' most well-known musical figures. But I also found the same dilemma in listening to his music. Should I listen to his "touristy" music, the kitschy albums filled with bayou sound effects and references to voodoo witch doctors? Or should I listen to the "real" music of New Orleans, in which Dr. John covers old Louisiana blues standards from the 1950s?

The choice between the two came down to the two albums I had time to listen to this week. Gris-Gris (1968) is perhaps best described as psychedelic swamp rock. It was Dr. John's first solo album, and combines his rasping blues voice with some intricately arranged songs filled not only with wailing brass and plinking pianos, but also eerie drones, voodoo chanting, bongos, flutes and mandolins.

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After the Jump: You Just Got Zuned!

Subscribe to the podcast via the feed, find us in the iTunes store!

Andrew is out gallivanting on a well-deserved vacation, so I take the reins on this week’s podcast. Don’t worry, I’m not alone. Alex Boivin rejoins us along with the newest member of our team, Giaco Furino.

We run a little long, but there was a lot to talk about! Stories include the New York Times paywall, Boivin’s bookstore duties, robots of the gambling and tweeting varieties, the Zune, DC Comics, Dragon Age II.

And because we’re great guys, we also help a listener with her mayonnaise problems.

Thanks for listening, and we’ll see you next week!

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Sunday Reading: The Final Fantasy VII Letters

Talking about old videogames can be problematic. The industry’s rapid technological advances often make maintaining retain proper perspective difficult. Since many of us played games in our childhood, our fond memories of certain titles are often wrapped up in nostalgia completely unrelated to the game itself.

Writing for Paste, Kirk Hamilton and Leigh Alexander grapple with nostalgia in The Final Fantasy VII Letters. Discussions of Square’s revered Playstation RPG regularly spiral into needless Aeris-mourning and debating the merits of full-motion video (FMV) cutscenes. Hamilton is only just now playing the game for the first time (it’s available for download on the Playstation Network), and Alexander considers it one of her favorite games of all time (she too recently replayed the game on PSP). Their letter exchange will attempt to address the game’s context as well as its lasting legacy.

Why is it so highly regarded? Is our praise rose-colored or does the game still hold up?

The feature is only two letters in and I’m already hooked. Alexander introduces the experiment and extols the design of Midgar before Hamilton even starts his playthrough. “It was very different for its time, agree?” asks Alexander. I agree. FFVII did away with kings and queens, princes and princesses. Its opening gambit pit you against a corporation. That was new for a genre whose two biggest franchises had the words “fantasy” and “dragon” in their titles.

Hamilton’s response comes about six hours into his playthrough. He’s digging Midgar for its gritty aesthetic and for the uniqueness of the design:

“What's more, all of the backdrops appear to be unique, which is refreshing after going through the constantly recycled 3D assets of today's games. I can't interact with the items in the restaurant in Wall Market, but they are unique and inform the world. I can pick up one of a billion identical loaves of bread in The Elder Scrolls: Oblivion, but who the hell cares?”

That’s the best defense of FFVII’s style I’ve read yet. Be sure to follow this feature. I know I will.

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Saturday Morning TV: Rebecca Black’s “Friday”

Because I have NO qualms guiding your eyes to a flaming car wreck…

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Why Didn't Mars Need Moms?

I take a petty, completely unearned pleasure in big-budget movies that flop horribly. Not only do these productions make for INTERESTING STUDIES in ARTISTIC HUBRIS and CREATIVE RESTRAINT, they also signal to me that Americans have not completely fallen free to the cogwork of the modern marketing machine. Sometimes when I look at figures (such as the fact that Transformers 2 made over $400 million domestically), I'm convinced that Americans are nothing but brainwashed lemmings who automatically go see whatever dross Hollywood executives shovel in front of their faces. But major flops indicate that we retain a modicum of good taste; you can't force us to watch something that looks like complete crap!

So the recent failure of Mars Needs Moms makes for an interesting case study in modern films. The Robert Zemeckis (Back to the Future, Forrest Gump) helmed film crashed hard over the weekend, only netting $6.9 million in sales on a $150 million dollar budget. In a world where the opening weekend usually accounts for the bulk of a film's profits, this is a very poor sign indeed for Zemeckis, and Walt Disney Studios. Disney has canceled Zemeckis' next project, a CGI-tinged remake of Yellow Submarine, and Zemeckis has reportedly retreated to Montana to find himself or something like that. 

What went wrong? The movie is based on a popular children's book, which means a built-in audience. How did this go horribly wrong when Gnomeo and Juliet topped the box office just a few weeks ago? Well, the interesting thing about Mars Needs Moms is that it's impossible to pinpoint what, exactly, tripped it up. In fact, there's a number of intersecting possibilities, which can also be read as a microcosmic warning for the future of the film industry. What are the possible reasons? Read on after the jump to find out!

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The Torchlight Grind – A Talk With Max Schaefer

Last Friday, I had the pleasure of chatting with Max Schaefer, CEO of Runic Games.

Runic is the developer behind Torchlight, the loot-driven action RPG that stormed the PC community in late 2009. It followed Valve’s Steam platform to the Mac and came to Xbox Live Arcade just last week as part of Microsoft’s House Party promotion.

Max Schaefer founded Blizzard North and co-founded Flagship Studios and Runic Games. His resume includes Diablo, Diablo II, Warcraft III: Reign of Chaos, and Hellgate: London.

Schaefer and I discuss everything Torchlight – the XBLA port, the sequel, the MMO – as well as the history of loot and what it’s like competing against a behemoth of a former employer. Read on after the jump.

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New York Times To Roll Out Digital Subscriptions

Get out your credit cards, New York Times fans, it’s time to pay up.

Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger, Jr. announced in a letter on the paper’s homepage that a digital subscription model would be introduced on March 28 for United States readers. Canada received what amounts to a paid beta today, which will “enable us to fine-tune the customer experience before our global launch,” says Sulzberger.

After the plan launches, you will be allowed to read 20 articles a month for free. If you’d like to read more than one article every day and a half, you will need to sign up for a digital subscription. The subscription tiers are broken down by device: $3.75 per week for Web and smartphones, $5 per week for Web and tablets, or $8.75 per week for access to everything.

Those already paying for the Times to arrive on your doorstep on the pressed flesh of trees will pay no extra cost to reread their favorite articles on any device of their choosing. For comparison’s sake, the current cost of a daily home delivery subscription is $14.80 a week (in my area, anyway), though they are currently running a 50% 12-week deal.

The very notion of a paywall sends chills up the spines of Internet users accustomed to getting content for free. But as PC World’s Jared Newman points out, the Times is charging for the delivery method more than the content. Any story you come to through social media channels such as Facebook or Twitter will not count against your 20-stories-per-month limit. Certain search engines will have daily limits on traffic, but the Times content will not be edited. The company rightly recognizes that word of mouth is an amazing advertising tool and isn’t willing to squash it.

Will you be subscribing? Or will you be relying on Twitter feeds and Facebook friends? Sound off in the comments below.

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iOS 4.3 Review

Sup dudes.

I'm on my way to New Orleans later today, so no time for a big post about Mario or Internet Explorer or whatever - I'm taking the lazy man's way out and linking to another something I wrote over at Anandtech last week - a review of iOS 4.3, the latest incremental update to Apple's phone and tablet operating system from last summer.

I've previously reviewed the major iOS 4 versions for this site - 4.0, 4.1, 4.2, and ancillary pieces about travelling with my iPhone and the Verizon version of Apple's handset.

iOS 4.3 brings a few nifty improvements, most prominent among them increased browsing speed in Safari, but it's not available for everyone. iOS 4 originally cut off owners of the original iPhone and first-generation iPod Touch from receiving updates, and iOS 4.3 adds the iPhone 3G and second-generation iPod Touch to that list.

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Album Review: The Strokes - "Angles"

The Strokes have always been a nostalgia act. Problem is, now they're a nostalgia act for themselves. When the Stroke debuted in early 2001, they sounded like they'd stepped directly out of a time machine bound from the late 60s, when proto-punk acts like Television, the Velvet Underground, and Richard Hell were (not) ruling the airwaves. Frontman Julian Casablancas' songs were always more tuneful than those of his musical forefathers, but they surely shared the same DNA: clipped guitars, tinny drums, those mumble-sung vocals.

But unlike those that came before, the Strokes got big. Really fucking big. I distinctly remember seeing the video for "Last Nite" so many times on MTV (!!!) that I can still remember how many times Fab Moretti hits his drum mic before he knocks it over (3). NME and the rest of the histrionic British music press helped the album rocket to number 2 in the U.K. and number 33 in the States. What was intended as an invocation of good times three decades past became a soundtrack for a new generation's adolescence. The band followed the album up with Room on Fire, a similar-sounding but nonetheless very good record, in 2003.

And then things got weird.

First Impressions of Earth was at best a slight evolution in the Strokes' sound, at worst a muddled, schizophrenic mess, but mostly just weird. Angles takes one more step into crazytown.

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Charge Shot!!! In Depth: Nicktoon Housing

Think back to the cartoons of your childhood. Where does your favorite character live? If you grew up in the early nineties the answer to that question may bring more than nostalgia; it may bring unease. Craig’s recent post on Nickelodeon’s plans to re-air some of their classics got me thinking about my favorite childhood cartoons. I was always deeply affected by the bizarre home life of my favorite characters. Every show seemed to feature likable protagonists in unconventional homes. The strangeness of the housing situations of the early Nicktoons (and some shows on the outer rim of that programming chunk) speak to an immensity of creativity and a willingness to experiment that was hitherto unheard of in television. If we dig a bit deeper into the original lineup, we can see the progression and eventual decline of nonconformist and nontraditional housing in cartoons!

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(SPOILER ALERT) Battle: Los Angeles 1, Aliens 0

You know how the start of some movies can provoke an emotional reaction from the audience just because the curtain opens? Justin Bieber has such power, seemingly over the whole nation. But the subject matter of other movies are localized enough so as to appeal to a particular portion of the population. Battle: Los Angeles is one such movie - after the cold open, depicting various bytes of newscasts reporting on the brutal alien invasion juxtaposed with images of surfers by the Santa Monica Pier and the Downtown skyline getting blasted by extra-terrestrial artillery, our native Los Angelino audience burst into applause.

The applause didn't continue throughout, however. The movie was entertaining enough, but the audience was quickly disenchanted as we quickly lost any visible landmarks that would identify the movie's location as LA. Nondescript streets, abandoned buildings, big explosions that could have occurred anywhere - I guess the filmmakers didn't care much about exploiting the locale after they drew the west coast-based audience into the theaters.

But despite all that, Battle: Los Angeles proved a perfectly serviceable alien invasion mindless action military thriller, perfect for just sitting back, shutting your brain off (except for the part that thinks of snide, rifftrax-esque comments), and enjoying a couple hours of easy entertainment. Plus, seeing as aliens are all the rage these days, it's always interesting to compare and contrast the different filmic interpretations.

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Ding Dong! The Zune is Dead

That’s right, Microsoft is axing its Zune music and video player. Bloomberg reported yesterday that Microsoft has no plans to introduce new versions of the device due to lack of demand.

Microsoft released the Zune in 2006, attempting to claim a share of the mp3 player market with its song-sharing features and non-click wheel interface. Unfortunately, everyone was too busy buying iPods to care. Microsoft tried again in 2009 with the Zune HD, which was generally well-received but failed to compete successfully with the iPod Touch.

The Zune brand, however, is still alive and vaguely kicking. Microsoft rolled the Zune software into its Windows Phone 7, and “Zune” remains the name of Microsoft’s music/video marketplace on the Xbox 360. The company said in an email statement to Bloomberg, “Our long-term strategy focuses on the strength of the entire Zune ecosystem across Microsoft platforms.”

Does anyone else find the phrase “Zune ecosystem” amusing?

If you’re one of the five people who own a Zune, you needn’t worry. Microsoft will continue to support and sell its current devices – that is, until it comes up with another nonsense-named device to replace the Windows Phone 7.

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The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly – Media Responses to the Japan Earthquake

It’s been difficult to sift through all of the news coming out of Japan, especially as more news arrives every minute. Conflict reports on nuclear facilities are nonetheless troubling. Videos of the wreckage and photos of struggling survivors take your breath away.

Now scientists are saying the 8.9 magnitude quake moved Eastern Japan moved Japan 13 feet closer to the United States and shortened Earth’s day by about 1.6 microseconds. That doesn’t even sound like it should be possible, let alone something that massive quakes have done before.

Even tougher to follow has been the rush of news in the tech and entertainment world as companies react to crisis. A lot of trivial, some of it heartwarming, the Internet’s been abuzz with news of everything from cancellations to missing persons reports.

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A Decade of Dreck #47: New Best Friend

Charge Shot!!! is celebrating the end of the decade in the most masochistic way we know how - by watching and writing about the 100 worst movies of the last ten years as defined by film review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes. Click here to see RT's complete list, click here for more information about the Decade of Dreck project, and click here to see all of the movies we've done so far. 

As we've been discussing quite a bit on the blog this past week, 90's nostalgia is so in right now. Part of the fun about the Decade of Dreck project is the opportunity to revisit the earliest days of the Twenty-First Century and see and remember just what they were like.

If 2002's New Best Friend is any indication, those days were really shitty. Everything about this one seems like shallow calculation on the part of those responsible for the film's existence. Characters act like reheated ideas of what college kids are like; there isn't an ounce of anything real to be had.

Which, you would figure, wouldn't be that huge of a problem for a cheesy whodunnit set at an elite university but because it doesn't bother to do anything but go through the motions of producing whitebread coed debauchery, New Best Friend becomes a grueling exercise in schlock.

Troubled college girl from the Wrong Side Of The Tracks Alicia Campbell ODs on coke and winds up in a coma. Rookie sheriff Taye Diggs begins investigating what he believes to be an attempted murder, and all of Alicia's social circle is suspect.  What he discovers is a sordid web of "sexy" backstabbing and intrigue among rich college kids that really says nothing new about rich kids, college kids, or copious amounts of pure, pharmaceutical grade cocaine.

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Thoughts of an Aspiring Music Snob: Week 98 - Iggy Pop and the Stooges

Chris is trying to compensate for his lack of musical knowledge by immersing himself in one new artist each week. At the end of the week, he will write up a brief summary of his opinions. You can read about the origin and parameters of this project here.

Sometimes I get annoyed with my self-imposed one-act-a-week deadline. It often causes me to rush too quickly through groups that have multiple albums worth spending a lot of time on. However, there are also some benefits to doing things this way, and one of them is that I get a very good sense about how a band evolved over time. As I cruise through the week going back and forth between early and late material, the contrasts and changes are always fun to consider. 

Such was the case this week; I selected Iggy Pop, but decided to cram his work with the Stooges into this post as well. Perhaps this is squeezing too much interesting music into a short amount of time, but it also highlighted the sheer difference between the Stooges' material and Pop's solo work, produced with David Bowie in Berlin. The Stooges revel in their rebellion, committing themselves to a project of "Search and Destroy." Their music is raw, wild, a whirlwind set to annihilate everything in sight. 

Pop's solo work on Lust for Life and The Idiot, made after a spiral into terrible drug dependency, contains little of the youthful iconoclasm that marked the Stooges' work. The music sounds like the work of a man who is a little older, a little wiser, a little more appreciative of life. It's not that the music is necessarily restrained, but there's no longer a sense that Pop is engaging in physical and musical self-mutilation. The decadence has become refined, leisurely, a bit more grown-up. 

Lyrically, perhaps there's not that great of a difference between Pop's "Search and Destroy" mission in 1973, and his "Lust for Life" four years later. But musically, the two songs are worlds apart, the first willfully destructive while the second sounds almost life-affirming. Yet both songs clearly came from the same artist - it's not as if Iggy Pop lost something in those four years of drug-addled depression. But something has changed, the music has shifted, and it's a very interesting thing to see the reflections of the old Iggy Pop in his newer music. 

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After the Jump: Jon Heder Hater

Subscribe to the podcast via the feed, or find us in the iTunes store!


The one, the only Alexander W. Boivin joins us this week (the week of his birthday, no less!) to talk about all kinds of crazy crap, including Jon Heder, Paul Rudd,  Spider Man: Turn Off The Dark, Cap'n Crunch, Nickelodeon, social networking, and more!


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Sunday Reading: Poking the Trolls

Have you heard of The Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory? It’s a real thing. Jerks, halfwits, and annoying adolescents prove it everyday. And thanks to the erosion of Internet anonymity, sites finally have the means to combat the trolls.

On this week’s podcast, we briefly discuss the ramifications of TechCrunch’s decision to switch to a Facebook-based comment system. Readers must now log into Facebook to post comments. TechCrunch claims that, despite early negative reactions, the switch has been well-received. The overall number of posts is down, but they’re generally more thoughtful than the trash that used to litter the boards.

TechCrunch did note an odd side effect: “whereas trollish garbage used to infest the comment section, now we’re seeing almost the opposite. Many people are now leaving comments that gush about the subject of the article in an overly sycophantic way.” It’s almost as if, now that their posts are public, people don’t want to look like dicks.

In response to TechCrunch’s switch, Slate’s Farhad Manjoo argued in favor of Facebook comments, invoking the Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory by name. While Manjoo recognizes that not every Internet act should be made public – you should be able to keep the more embarrassing items in your Netflix queue private – he believes that comments aren’t public enough:

“But posting a comment is a public act. You're responding to an author who made his identity known, and your purpose, in posting the comment, is to inform the world of your point of view. If you want to do something so public, you are naturally ceding some measure of your privacy. If you're not happy with that trade, don't take part—keep your views to yourself.”

Manjoo’s writing as, well, a writer on the Internet. People from other corners of the Internet are less willing to intertwine their physical and digital lives. Leading up to last year’s release of Starcraft II, Blizzard Entertainment added a Facebook-enabled Real ID system to its Battle.net forums. A portion of the community went ballistic. Three days later, Blizzard canceled their Real ID plans.

Some gamers simply wanted their privacy. Others – members of gaming minorities (defined by race, gender, and/or sexual orientation) – preferred the anonymity because misogyny, racism, and homophobia remain disgusting trademarks of the online gaming community. These problems will not go away easily (as unfortunate as that is), and many felt that the Real ID authentication would make it worse in the short run.

Whether we like it or not, we’re moving out of the Era of Anonymity. Thanks to social media services like Facebook and LinkedIn, people are taking more responsibility for their digital actions. Hopefully the fuckwads will, too.

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Saturday Morning TV: Rocko’s Modern BJ

In response to yesterday’s post on Nickelodeon, Giaco shared this with the staff. Everything’s kosher until Heffer gets starry-eyed and starts grinning like a satisfied co-ed. This was shown on daytime television to children, people!

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My Children Will Watch The Simpsons...And Here's Why

Television has long been the most ephemeral of genres. Movies, books, even albums are often described as "timeless," and many of them find large audiences decades after their initial creation. Not so with television, which is usually consumed and disposed of carelessly. In fact, until the advent of DVD box sets in the past decade, it was pretty much impossible to systematically watch a television show no longer in production. You could catch a few episodes of the most famous shows in syndication or on Nick at Nite, but the vast number of programs slipped through the cracks. 

One might wonder if there's not a reason for this. Television episodes generally have a shorter script-to-screen time, and can afford to be a little more current, often making passing references to current pop culture that movies (with longer production schedules and international distribution) cannot. Television is primarily concerned with drawing in viewers now, not selling books or videos down the road, and thus shows tend to be more situated in a specific time period. 

But now that pretty much any piece of crap ever aired is available on DVD at your local Target for twenty-five bucks, it's worth asking if these shows are going to be holding up in ten or twenty years. Matt Zoller-Seitz, the television writer for Salon, argues that some of the best shows are already going stale. In an article entitled, "Will Future Generations Understand The Simpsons?" (well worth reading), he argues that the overabundance of hyper-specific pop culture gags made by our current crop of television shows is going to date them into irrelevance far more quickly than their earlier counterparts. 

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Nickelodeon Banks Late-Night On Your 90s Nostalgia

In case you missed it on your social media feeds yesterday, allow me to inform you that this fall Nickelodeon will revive much of its 90s programming in a late-night block dubbed “The ‘90s Are All That.”

Entertainment Weekly broke the story with comments from senior VP and general manager of TeenNick Keith Dawkins. “At the time, we were completely devoted to that audience ages 9, 10, and 11. It was ground-breaking and for the young viewers, a powerful and pivotal time in their lives. Those kids who are now 22, 23 and 24 want to bring that back.”

Hey, I’m 24! I’m one of those kids! I spent a good portion of my pre-adolescence watching Nickelodeon. The combination of charming animation and kid-friendly live-action all fell under an offbeat umbrella that spoke to an age group still willing to embark on flights of fancy despite being increasingly aware of the looming “real world.”

In fitting with my generation’s freakish dependence on our inner children, I couldn’t be more excited.

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Taymor To Step Back From Spider-Man, Spidey To Soldier On

Dust off your Schadenfreude, more changes are coming to Spider-Man: Turn Off The Dark. Broadway’s very own Titanic has hit another iceberg: the removal of director Julie Taymor and yet another postponement.

Taymor, the award-winning director of Disney’s stage adaptation of The Lion King, will remain on the creative team despite losing the director gig, the Associated Press reports. The producers’ statement said that Taymor’s schedule post-March 15 (the most recent scheduled opening date) would prevent her from working “the 24/7 necessary to make the changes in the production in order to be ready for our opening.” She’s still getting credit for it; they’re just letting someone else have a go at directing the spectacle.

The new team will include Philip William McKinley, Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa, Paul Bogaev, and Peter Hylenski. McKinley (“The Boy from Oz,” “The Night of the Hunter”) will take over for Taymor. Aguirre-Sacasa will assist in rewrites, hopefully leveraging some of his experience writing for Marvel Comics. Bogaev and Hylenski will serve as musical consultants – further proof that Bono and The Edge need some fresh ears trained on their material.

A lot of people are working very hard to keep this show alive. Perhaps too hard. Were it not for the money at stake, I imagine most of the showrunners would’ve walked way ages ago.

Why else would they perform a complete talent transfusion on a show our own Boivin wrote called the Four Loko fever dream of a sleep-deprived English/Psychology double-major?

[via the Associated Press]

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When Good Gameplay Carries a Subpar Game

So lately I've been playing Dragon Quest VI.

For longtime readers of our humble blog, this shouldn't be surprising - after all, I've reviewed three other Dragon Quest games for this site. For this particular game, though, I didn't want to run a traditional review, mostly because I couldn't think of another 600-800 words to say about yet another Dragon Quest game. It's Dragon Quest. You have hit points, you wander the globe killing monsters, it is at once one of Japan's most popular and most conservative game series. There is not much to say that hasn't been said.

The thing about Dragon Quest VI is that it's one of my less favorite games in the series. I know that this may be akin to preferring brown M&Ms to tan M&Ms, but it's true - each DQ game after the first has a point at which you're given some means of conveyance, usually a boat, and in opening up the world for you it makes the game more non-linear and sometimes less story-driven. The best of the games maintain their impetus through this stage, but in VI this moment comes really early and it sort of sucks all the momentum out of the game.

Despite that, I'm still playing and enjoying the game, and this got me thinking - what happens when, especially in a long-running series, fun gameplay concepts or fundamentals help make up for the fact that a game just isn't that great?

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Art House in the Middle of the Street #7: Fires on the Plain

There's no grand philosophical project behind Charge Shot!!!'s new feature. Jordasch's mom got him Janus Films' absolutely untouchable Essential Art House box set, and he's going to watch the whole thing. It's a behemoth set, collecting 50 films released since 1956 by one of the first distributors to bring honest-to-goodness world cinema to U.S. shores. The films contained in the collection serve as a crash course in world cinema, encompassing everything from major works of the French New Wave and the Italian Neorealist period to films from lesser-known corners of the filmmaking world, including Brazil and Poland. The collection is 50 discs, weighs 16 pounds, it's dark, and we're wearing sunglasses. Hit it.

It's a testament to the mundanity of a movie's bleakness that you practically hunger for (no pun intended) the moment when the characters resort to cannibalism. I've seen bleak war movies (Apocalypse Now, The Hurt Locker), and I've seen dull ones (The Thin Red Line), but I don't think I've ever seen one that's both.

Of course, I'm (sorta) kidding about the cannibalism thing, but Kon Ichikawa's World War II film Fires on the Plain was certainly something of a grind. The film opens with a bang, or at least a smack. The smacker, in this case, is a haggard Japanese captain who's taking a tubercular soldier named Tamura (Eiji Funakoshi) to task for failing to stay in a military hospital where he was sent to be treated. The company, his captain explains, barely has enough food for the healthy soldiers, and one who can't share in the work can't expect to share the supplies. The Japanese Imperial Army forces in the Philippines have been routed by the Americans, cut off from their supply trains and forced to live off the land. So the captain gives Tamura an order: try to get yourself back into the military hospital. And if that doesn't work? Use that grenade I gave you, and blow yourself up.

What a fun movie night I've got ahead of me.

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Lost Bet: Justin Bieber in 3D

Let me set the scene for you. I’m watching the Oscars with a group of friends. I’ve got my Oscar picks loaded up on Slate.com. The winners of categories on which I guessed incorrectly stream past my eyes. I’m not only bored to tears, I'm also filled with a sinking dread. See, my fellow Charge Shot!!! writers and I made a bet of sorts: the person with the highest score for their Oscar picks got to force the person with the lowest score to watch and review a cruddy movie for the site. As my picks kept backfiring my chances of escaping this atrocity dwindled more and more. Finally, when all was said and done, the highest score went to Chris with a resounding 20 points, and (as evidenced by this post) the lowest score went to me, with a soul-crushing -4. Yikes.

 

And what did the gracious winner make me watch? Me, the new guy? The guy who doesn’t mind bad movies but would really rather not pay much to see one? Justin Bieber: Never Say Never. Okay, ouch. And what did the local theater show? Why, only the 3D version, of course! And who’s little sister made him drag her along to the show!? Have you guessed yet?!?!

 

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Books to Movies: The Chronic... cles of Narnia

Last holiday season, I gave myself a little project, for my personal edification and enjoyment: I would read all seven books in C.S. Lewis's Chronicles of Narnia series. I've been a lifelong fan of Lord of the Rings, and you can re-read the trilogy only so many times per year, so I figured I'd branch out. The Narnia books are quick and easy to get through, but time has been a premium for me lately, so I've only been able to read up through the third book: The Voyage of the Dawn Treader. Which is significant, because that was the third and latest Narnia movie to hit theaters.

The next step in the movie franchise is unclear. Will the fourth film in the series be The Silver Chair (the fourth book published) or The Magician's Nephew (the last book published, but the first in the chronology of Narnian myths)? SPOILER ALERT: All the familiar actors have been phased out of the story, so there's no concern with aging, as there was with Harry Potter. No one on imdb or Wikipedia has the answer, so I'm assuming the question doesn't yet exist.

My question is: How can any film studio worth its salt let this opportunity for a potential seven film series, with the stories already written and a fanbase already determined, pass them by? It would be embarrassing for everyone involved if they had to cut the project short 3/7ths of the way to the finish line. And in this age where everything's a franchise and new ideas for films are all but extinct, how can they not get to seven movies? But just how viable is a (SPOILER ALERT AGAIN) Jesus allegory in a time where the most talked-about movies (Social Network, King's Speech, The Fighter, 127 Hours) are based on recent, true stories rather than myths? That's part of what I aim to find out with this project.

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Turning Off Audiosurf Radio

In December of 2008, I launched a regular feature for a fledgling gaming blog: This Week On Audiosurf Radio. My then-newfound affection for an excellent indie music game inspired me to play the game on a weekly basis, sampling the free tracks offered by the game’s developers. No one else is writing about this, I thought. So why don’t I?

Charge Shot!!!’s first regular feature somehow survived the site’s various iterations. The reliability of content made it easy to keep trucking ahead, even as site branched out to encompass the rest of pop culture. Audiosurf Dylan Fitterer and his wife Lebeth – who curates the music for Radio – were also kind enough to embrace my weekly ramblings, giving us homepage billing in the game’s startup screen.

Unfortunately, all good things must come to an end. This Week on Audiosurf Radio is hereby retired.

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A Decade of Dreck #46: Broken Bridges

Charge Shot!!! is celebrating the end of the decade in the most masochistic way we know how - by watching and writing about the 100 worst movies of the last ten years as defined by film review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes. Click here to see RT's complete list, click here for more information about the Decade of Dreck project, and click here to see all of the movies we've done so far. 

This is it, folks! We've officially entered into "worse than Gigli" territory!

This movie disappointed me for a number of reasons, not the least of which was the fact that it was not an action thriller starring Jeff and Beau Bridges as hitmen who are also brothers and who have, unbeknownst to them, been hired to kill each other by their own father (played via archival footage by Lloyd Bridges). Now isn't that a movie that would score at least above 8% on Rotten Tomatoes?

I don't not like country music, but it has been one of those genres that has been hard for me to penetrate for reasons demographic and otherwise. It's sort of like hip hop: I love the Wu-Tang Clan, the Notorious B.I.G., Kanye West, and a handful of others, but I've never been able to embrace the genre as a whole because at the end of the day I'm still a rich white kid from suburban Minneapolis. The same goes for country: I'm too self-conscious to not feel like a poseur. That being said, I loved Crazy Heart last year (Jeff Bridges references, you can't avoid them; I just got Jeff'd again!) and I do think there is something great and pure and universal that can come from a good country song.

Brought to us by those wonderful folks at Country Music Television, Broken Bridges is the cinematic equivalent of the opposite of what I just described. Which makes sense because it stars Toby Keith as...Toby Keith?

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