The Long Road

Archives: December 2004

Monday, December 20, 2004

Damn you spammers! It seems like it's time to "upgrade" my spam filter, seeing as certain spammers have gotten wise to my ways. Some of these spam comments are so hard to screen, there're even some that are "on topic" and it's not until you see the link in their name that you realize it's spam.

How am I supposed to screen out a comment like this:

"The truth is that capitalism has not only multiplied population figures, but at the same time, improved the people's standard of living in an unprecedented way. Neither economic thinking nor historical experience suggest that any other social system could be as beneficial to the masses as capitalism."

Impossible!

Whoever invented spam is a diabolical genius.

Why don't others blogs suffer from the same abuse? Methinks they are better protected somehow...

Here are some numbers. Since implementing my spam filter on Nov 22, I've blocked 1 243 spam comments, and 35 have slipped by, about 14 of which were today.

I actually didn't know it was 1 243 spam comments until I did the count just now. That is a HUGE number. It would be absolutely crippling if I had to go around deleting 45 comments a day.

Check out this excerpt of the last 28 days site usage to see how much spam was actually attempted. Also check out how spam really looks, it is obnoxiously oversized and coloured for your reading pleasure.

In a related story, I should also sue.

Whaaaa...about 15 spam comments were attempted in the time it took me to write this.

Posted by Rayne @ 03:12 PM EST [Link] [11 comments]

Tuesday, December 14, 2004

Anything that can be digitized can be copied and distributed over the internet. That is the current and future reality that content providers are fighting against. Digital content on demand is the way of the future but there is no way to control distribution short of tracking all activity of every computer connected to the net.

Like legislation against consensual sodomy in certain states, laws that govern the distribution of TV, movies, music, and books over the net are morally outdated. Policing these activities is costly, time consuming, and creates resentment in public opinion. Fighting against this movement is awfully shortsighted; decrying its immorality is a meaningless exercise in futility. Clearly, there is a market for downloadable content; instead of trying to stifle this new channel, content providers should embrace it and find a way to make profit from it.

In parts of Europe, drugs and prostitution are legalized, controlled, and heavily taxed. This plays a large part in keeping drugs and prostitutes off the streets. The solution to digital piracy is similar. Content providers should make electronic copies of their products available at the same time as they are through traditional means. With a framework like Bittorent, bandwidth and server costs for the content provider would be kept at a minimum.

Imagine you’ve just heard of the best show to have ever been aired on television, Lost. It is eleven episodes in and going on a 3 week hiatus. ABC would have to air it 4 times a week over the next month for newcomers to be all caught up before the show’s return. Such an aggressive broadcasting schedule would not work over the holidays. So imagine that instead of relying on ABC’s incomplete rerun schedule, all you have to do is get onto ABC’s website where they’ve seeded all 11 current episodes in different formats and qualities allowing you to catch up on the series at your leisure and at the time of your choosing; and when January 5th comes along, you can watch episode 12 along with the rest of North America and not be lost during watercooler conversations the next day. Imagine being able to do that from anywhere in the world; that is the future.

The linchpin in this plan is to charge the hell out of consumer internet access. The majority of high bandwidth users are not using it legitimately. Like the Canadian levy on blank CDs and DVDs, the new costs to consumer bandwidth would go towards studios, and publishers. This also meshes with the drive from MS and Sony to provide all-in-one set top boxes.

Implementation of this plan would be a little difficult though. The internet is worldwide, so there has to be agreement between all service providers and network operators everywhere, and a model for profit sharing has to be worked out for content providers. I think the initial effort would be worth it – global, superior quality content on demand. The internet is the future of all content and has been for years, the sooner we all learn to accept it, the sooner it’ll get here.

Posted by Rayne @ 02:07 AM EST [Link] [13 comments]

Saturday, December 11, 2004

Two comic shops really stand out so far in my time in Toronto. First is The Beguiling. I was interested in checking this place out because the director of Immortel did a signing there in October so I decided it was probably a pretty nice place. I discovered a few weeks later that it was actually a very reknown comic book shop, even outside of Canada. When I got there, I could definately see why.

The Beguiling is in a gutted 2 floor house. Upstairs is the "mainstream" floor. Tons of DC, Marvel and all the small publishers, and a wall of trade paperbacks. A whole wall! And on the opposite wall was manga. Tons and tons of manga. The selection was pretty dazzling, but not anything I couldn't get through MileHigh at super low prices.

Vastly more interesting than the mainstream room was the downstairs. It was filled with really obscure indy titles, art books, comic related literature, a crime section, and most amazingly of all, European comics. I have never been to a shop that stocks European comics, Beguiling has thousands of them. European, especially French, comics are something that I've been wanting to get into for a long time. French "albums" (think of those TinTin or Asterix books you can get at the library) are these beautiful giant hardcovers with thick, glossy paper; American and Japanese comics are ghetto productions in comparison. Not to mention that the French also happen to tell non-superhero stories. If they were less expensive and I could get entire stories in a single album, I think I would have spent hundreds there no problem.

Something else I really appreaciated about the place is that it didn't do the AD&D/Warhammer thing that always attracts tons of running, screaming children. This was almost strictly a comicbook/manga affair.

The store really felt "high brow", sorta like the Generation X of comics; it establishes comics as a valid, aristic subculture instead of a rampant, fanboy-infested medium. Though you can go there to just buy X-Men comics, you probably would feel a little guilty not picking up something like the latest issue of My Monkey's Name is Jennifer.

The other shop that's made an impression on me is 1 000 000 Comics on Yonge Street. Though it has tons of space and a huge selection of mainstream books, the store has insanely inflated prices and is totally feeding the speculator mentality that nearly destroyed the Comcis scene in the 90s. All their comics are marked with drivel like "First Printing!!", "Complete Set!!!", "Turner Cover!!!!", "OMG!! Wolverine!!!!", "THIS BOOK WILL PUT YOUR GREAT GRANDCHILDREN THROUGH COLLEGE!!!!!".

Anyways, I really don't think that's how a comic shop should operate. Gauging consumers and pandering to speculators only leads to trouble.

Posted by Rayne @ 04:29 PM EST [Link] [2 comments]

Tuesday, December 7, 2004

Waiting Time is the free time between things I plan on doing. I’ve gotten to the point where anything at least semi-productive that I want/need to do has to be scheduled in advance so that I can dedicate myself entirely to it for a given amount of time or until some set goal.

Say there’s a meeting at 2, and I’m at lunch until 1, during that one hour I could whip out some code and try to fix a bug or write a new function or something. The problem ends up being that I can’t half-commit myself to working on something in “waiting time” cuz I’ll eventually have to drop everything I’m doing and head off. It always takes a while to “switch gear” into what I’m doing and feel like I can’t take dedicate limited time to it. I hate spending time building a mindset to work on something specific that won’t get done in the allotted time.

The worse thing about Waiting Time is that I’ll start doing something unproductive instead like reading the newsarama forums or some random web browsing and it eventually starts creeping in to the time that I was supposed to actually do something with. I’ll often come home from work and finish dinner by 8 and plan on hitting the gym at 9:30 but then it ends up being something like 10:30 before I leave the apartment, the time in-between having been spent on something completely unproductive.

This is a problem I’m trying to fix; too much time ends up being wasted in my life. I feel like it’s really limiting me in what and how much I can accomplish in a day. I need to be able to do things in smaller chunks of time, need a lot of little things to work on, or change this “do it all at once” mentality (which I actually like).

Posted by Rayne @ 07:11 PM EST [Link] [7 comments]

Friday, December 3, 2004

Some of you may remember The Thundercats. A cartoon back in the 80s about anthropomorphic felines and their struggles against Mumm-ra, a living mummy, and his hoard of Mutants. It was a fun and innocent cartoon, but 4th fiddle to Transformers, G.I. Joe, and He-Man.

About three years ago, there was a nostalgia boom in comics spearheaded by Dreamwave's excellent Transformer comics. Thundercats was picked up and many comics were published by DC. Most of the comics were pretty straightforward, telling some origin stories or more Thundercat adventures. And then they published Thundercats: The Return.

Thundercats: The Return began with Lion-O, the Thundercat leader, going into the Book of Omens to train for a few years; the book is a time warp though, years for Lion-O would only translate into weeks, or days for the outside world. Things go horribly wrong as Mumm-Ra casts a spell on the Book of Omens and causes time to elapse for Lion-O at the same speed as it does for the outside world. Leaderless for many years, the Thundercats eventually succumb to Mumm-Ra who takes over the world and enslaves them all.

So after this long-winded set-up, we come to what I actually want to talk about. Lion-O comes back to find his people suffering under Mumm-Ra. Willykit, a Thunder Kitten when we last saw her, is now all grown-up, sexed-up and serves as Mumm-Ra's CONCUBINE! Cheetara, the only female ThunderCat, is living bound as a prisoner of The Mutants (anthropomorphic Vulture, Monkey, Jackal, and generic Amphibian) and it's heavily implied that she is raped by the Mutants on a daily basis.

Now, I'm no prude, but it seems in extremely bad taste to take these characters that were innocent fond childhood memories and raping them. Any character getting raped is disturbing, but it's way over the line when it involves the Thundercats. It's so outrageous to put these characters in a story that they weren't meant for, and it most certainly does not help that the artist still tries to keep the girls looking sexy in their predicament. The contrast is just ridiculously jarring and downright innapropriate.

I'm certain that rape is a hugely traumatic event that someone would never really get over, to have these two go through it for a period of many years with a living mummy and a gang of mutants just does irreperable damage to the characters. I'm all for darker stories and forward movement of plot and characters but this was a terrible miscalculation on the part of everyone involved, they could have easily told more mature Thundercat stories, but raping the characters was not the way to go. Something like Thundercats: The Return should remain purely in the realm of erotic fan fiction.

Posted by Rayne @ 02:55 PM EST [Link] [5 comments]

Wednesday, December 1, 2004

I went to see Polar Express 3D at the IMAX last night, not so much to see the movie as to see the 3D. It was a pretty good experience. I read somewhere that the movie was made with 3D in mind from the get go and it really shows. A lot of scenes look like they were made especially to be experienced in 3D. 3D generally gives you feeling of more depth to the screen, like you're looking through a window instead of a flat screen, but where the effect is most effective when something reaches out of the screen. Those shots are really nice and are so convincing that you feel like you could reach out and touch whatever you're seeing.

The 3D experience isn't totally flawless though. For the most part, it's that "faux 3D" you get when there are multiple layers of scrolling animation in a game or cartoon (and/or anime for some of you), it's also a bit like seeing a magic eye 3D image. The image layering is also a bit off, you can sometimes see double images that are supposed to be converged.

The CG in this movie is pretty spectacular. The humans are probably the best ever rendered in a movie, even better than Aki from Final Fantasy. The hair on the characters is also worth mentioning; in FF only Aki had all of her hair strands individually rendered, this movie looks like it had each hair strand on each character individually rendered, these people look so real sometimes it makes you wonder "why bother with CG?".

As for the movie itself, it tries really hard. When it wants to excite you it'll go on a 30 minute action sequence; when it has a tender moment, it'll milk every second it possibly can from it. It's pretty transparent in the feelings it's trying to evoke and it tries really, really, really hard to perpetuate the lie we tell to all young and impressionable members of our society - that Santa Claus really is real. When the big man finally shows up, he is the most f'ing scary character ever put on screen. The guy is freaky looking (I wish I could find a picture). Anyways, the movie's not really for me but worth seeing for it's technical achievements, especially in 3D.

Totally random thought that you should probably ignore: Three characters played by Tom Hanks - Santa, The Conductor, and the Bum are metaphorical representations of the christian Holy Trinity.

The only other 3D movie I've seen was T2: 3D at Universal Studios a long time ago and that was quite a bit better in that there was a lot more "reaching out" by what was on screen. James Cameron's next movie, Aliens of the Deep, will also be in 3D. Unfortunately, I won't be in Toronto when it comes out in January.

Posted by Rayne @ 01:36 PM EST [Link] [5 comments]

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