April 2010 Archives

The Jonah Hex trailer just showed up. I giggled. Mostly for good reasons.

That's an unrecognizable John Malkovich in the role of just about the only recurring villain Jonah Hex ever had, Quentin Turnbull. Massive movie-style restructuring here, pertaining to Hex's famous deformity. I suppose this version is more mass-palatable than "simultaneously cut and burned with a flaming tomahawk."

Whoa, WTF is this? He can puke ravens now? In the next shot he brings a dead guy back to life. Aw, major why-did-they-do-that moment.

Damn, he looks good. Josh Brolin's under-his-breath grunts are very Hex. So very Hex.

"Five coffins. Thinkin' you might need eight." I know you think that's a stupid Cliche Action Movie line, but that's totally something Jonah Hex would say in the comics. He's a smartass.

Oh right. She's in this.

Another grunt! More smartassery! Please let the movie be two hours of that.

He's in this?

OK, I want to see this.

When you're watching the movie and this giant boat first appears, try to forget that the trailer showed it blowing the fuck up.

WHAT THE HELL IS THIS. Did somebody accidentally splice in a clip from that old Tom Cruise Pretty, Pretty Vampires movie?

Yeah, yeah, romantic comedy banter. It's more likely that the movie is two hours of that.

Between all the awkward Megan Fox dialogue and mysterious leftover Ghost Rider footage, I see enough Classic Hex to get me in the door. As with most comics adaptations, Jonah Hex would be better served in an hour TV drama format, but I'll take this. Will buy on blu-ray.

Clark and I worked on this story last weekend. Take it away, Clark!

"Batman is finding out that the bad guys is gonna have an army."

"The bad guys are getting ready to find out what the good guys are doing."

"Superman was trying to get the bad guys so the other guys do not get hurt but he got frozen."

"They're getting ready to fly but they don't know the bad guys are too powerful."

"Batman put another costume as a joke to trick Mr. Freeze."

"But Krypto didn't know it was a joke."

"Batman took away the kryptonite so Superman wouldn't get sick and then die."

"Superman broke out of the frozen ice."

"Superman and Green Lantern catch the Joker."

"The bad guys are in jail so the good guys are happy they win the battle."

My favorite part is that Clark has already learned the first rule of DC event storylines: sideline the most powerful players for enhanced drama.

Somehow, this year's event has escaped my notice... but not any more! This Saturday - May 1 - your local comic book shop will be celebrating Free Comic Book Day. We will likely run a repeat of last year and go to our usual shop in the morning and the other shop on the other side of town in the evening. Everybody runs it in their own way, but generally we walk away with multiple free books, some sale-priced merchandise, and maybe a coupon for a future visit.

DC's entry this year is #0 of War of the Supermen. Last year, they used Free Comic Book Day to launch Blackest Night with a zero issue. 2010 brings the decidedly less-interesting Superman event. Poor Supes. What a horrid screaming Superman cover. Every now and then, DC gets it into their collective heads that having Superman look gastronomically pained makes him appear modern and edgy. I bailed out of the Superman titles many years ago, so I have no idea what the status quo is these days. And by "no idea," I mean I sort of know, purely by DCU osmosis.

DC is also doing another DC Kids Sampler with stories from four of their kids books: Batman: The Brave & The Bold, Tiny Titans, Billy Batson & the Magic of Shazam! and Super Friends.

Many of the FCBD offerings have become predictably boring: what do you know, another Bongo Comics featuring The Simpsons, Love and Capes again, Owly again, Sonic again. I can't ding Archie for having Archie again, because, well, that's all they produce.

Marvel is deep into Movie Promotion mode with a book featuring both Iron Man and Thor. Yay, Thor. People love Thor. When people name the top ten super-heroes that come to mind, Thor always comes up.

Around #58.

Seriously, who likes Thor?

Marvel has a second free book this year that features, you guessed it, Iron Man. It also has Nova in it, the guy with one of the worst costumes in comic book history. The villain(s) in this book are Red Ghost and the Super-Apes, a troupe that should always be mentioned whenever Marvel fans start getting on their high horse about how realistic and super-cool Marvel is when compared to silly, kid-friendly DC.

I'm a Super-Apes fan from way back when they did an issue of Amazing Spider-Man in the early '80s, so I'll be there.

The big non-comics grab this year is a War Machine HeroClix figure, which will go fast so plan to arrive early. Did anybody ever come up with simplified rules for HeroClix, because I would like to play it with Clark. I remember trying like hell to get into it, but the endless color coded abilities made it such a bear.

Yesterday our development held a multi-family yard sale. Rhonda was enjoying a day out in NYC, and Clark and I had no desire to spend the day herding a genuine yard sale. But we still had some stuff we wanted to offload, so we came up with a devious plan: dump it at the end of the driveway with FREE! signs on it. Then Clark and I would be free to roam the neighborhood and look for deals.

For years I have had a box of random Happy Meal toys, and other small objects, which have been earmarked for yard sale fodder. So that box went to the driveway as free gifts for kids. We had some other, more sizable items that we wanted to be free of, so I started shifting that junk around 9am. Invariably, everything I put out was spoken for even before I headed back to get my FREE! signs.

Mostly, this was stuff that we had inherited for free from other yard sales, so it's not like we turned a massive lifetime loss here.

When one woman found out that the junk was free, she could not believe it and gave me whatever she had left in her yard sale fund: $9. Victoire.

By lunchtime, all that was left was the rooted-through kids box and an old halogen lamp that we have been skittish about ever since word got out about those things being fire hazards. Plus, you have to buy those special stupid bulbs. I peeked outside a sort time later and the lamp was gone. Not long after that, the entire toy box vanished. (Rhonda and I both suspect that somebody grabbed that for their own yard sale as a Nickel Box, but whatever. Hopefully some family with a bunch of young kids took it.)

The important thing was that we cleared out some stuff we have been sitting on for a while.

On our trip through the local sales, we spent 50 cents on an LCD poker game. Clark wanted it because his grandparents have one at their house. It did not take long for him to grasp the basic gameplay: deal cards, hold any matches, re-deal and hope for a good hand.

We also bought one of the "Harold and the Purple Crayon" books for 50 cents, plus a giant Power Rangers battle tank (either from the Ninja Storm or Mystic Force eras) for $2. Clark has about a dozen Power Rangers figures and they all fit inside the tank like 1950s college students in a phone booth.

Later on, Clark and I went out shopping and found two amazing new entries in the Batman Imaginext line: the Green Lantern Jet and the Joker's Fun House. We used a TRU gift card on the jet and, for whatever reason, Target had the Fun House on sale for $5 off. This is a brilliant line of toys, and they are quite well-priced for what you get in terms of play value. Behind aimed at younger kids, the smaller figs allow for more outlandish accessories at the same price as the larger-sized lines that come with almost nothing. Getting green jets and penguins and freeze chambers as imaginative backup is simply more fun for Clark than getting one "bigger kid" figure that comes with a crappy trading card or a single snap-on weapon.

We had some fun this morning plotting out a Batman adventure, now that the bad guys have a headquarters of their own (the Fun House) to match the Batcave. Clark surprised me by wanting to make a movie out of it, so I took a bunch of pictures with the iPhone and then strung them together in an iPhoto slideshow. I'll be posting that story shortly.

Nixon's the One - Mono Puff (YouTube)
Cute mini-song from Flansburgh's beloved Mono Puff. Is there a video for "Unsupervised," 'cause that's my favorite.

Games Aren't Art, But These Aren't Games (McElroy Vs. The Internet)
A good outside-the-box take on Roger Ebert's games/art argument.

Dressing Up As Classic Disney Animators (Cartoon Brew)
OK, now that's a clever costume idea. Next year somebody will ruin it by going as Zombie Classic Disney Animators.

#doomtown (Twitter)
The hashtag #doomtown does not necessarily refer to the card game. I guess I should go with #deadlands.

A Video Game Death Made For Me (Kotaku)
Fascinating. A little too pen-and-paper RPG for me, but I'm sure I'd dig getting my hands on it.

Food for The Eagle (Boing Boing)
My man Molyneaux linked out to this speech by Adam Savage. Imagine that the MythBusters guys are atheists. WHODATHUNK.

Gizmodo and the Prototype iPhone (Daring Fireball)
I get that breaking tech news is what Gizmodo does, but publishing the dude's name was pretty icky.

Apple over Microsoft by a technical knock-out (Yahoo News)
Cringely says Apple is poised to be the new Microsoft.

When DJ Hero first came out, it was $120. And pretty much everybody said that was a nuts price. A lot has been said about the relative failure(s) of DJ Hero, Beatles Rock Band, Guitar Hero 5, Band Hero and LEGO Rock Band last fall... mostly ascribed to a general public disinterest with the genre. Which, on the face of it, strikes me as absurd. How did we all suddenly decide to stop enjoying music games? Will there come a day when we all stop buying shooters? Football games?

No, I think it is more a combination of the massive price tags of the peripheral kits (which become steadily less surmountable once the fad value wears off), a sense that the new games really were not substantially different than the editions from two years ago, and consumer confusion about what was compatible with what and which version they should get. You can see where those games knew the snorepocalypse was coming and tried to brace for it. DJ Hero brought an entirely new piece of hardware. LEGO Rock Band was super cute. Beatles Rock Band had the single biggest music act ever.

Band Hero and GH5 had... well, they had a handful of incremental tweaks that nobody outside of the industry could possibly have noticed. I'm not trying to slam the Hero series again (well, not much); if Beatles Rock Band had been Anybody Else Rock Band it would have sucked just as hard. I'm gazing into the future at Green Day Rock Band right now.

But it can't be as easy as "Yeah, the public just hates music games now!" Although we did all stop buying point-and-click adventure games once upon a time, so I guess massive genre disinterest is possible.

Anyway, last week Toys R Us knocked DJ Hero down to $50. The thing has been stuck at $100 for some time. This is inventory clearance, baby. TRU cannot have all those unsold DJ Hero boxes gumming up the backroom shelves. So I thought about it. I asked around. I read some reviews. Historically, if I'm at the "research" phase, it's likely that the purchase is a done deal.

It is, unsurprisingly, a new way to play Rock Band. Which is fine. The game flies in on a huge disadvantage simply because most people have no idea how to hold a turntable. We can all play air guitar, but aside from some gestures we learned from a ten year old Saturday Night Live sketch, mixmastery is largely foreign to most of us.

I did not own a single notion of how DJ Hero was actually played, as far as the hardware was concerned. This was all new to me. You have three buttons on the platter, you have a crossfader which is nothing at all like an actual crossfader as my career has experienced me, a little turny knob and a special mega-button that activates DJ Hero's version of Star Power / Overdrive. I am impressed that the device easily adapts to left-handed gamers by detaching the wing and shifting it to the other side.

The skill comes in as you simultaneously manage three buttons plus scratching plus rewinding on one hand, and the zig-zag crossfader plus the effects dial on the other. On medium, I can reliably hit 4 stars. I find that I tend to lose my combo multiplier (and thus the chance of for sure getting 5 stars) because I'll start scratching half a second too late.

There is a ton of songs on the disc, which is cool. They're all mash-ups, which I guess is a thing. Most of them are pretty amazing, actually. Though I have to wonder why so many groups are deadset to do a mashup with The Jackson 5's "I Want You Back." It's on there four times. The DLC is sparse, in Activision's We're Not Really Trying standard. Which is fine, because I had no intention of buying any.

So... I'm glad I picked it up, even if it becomes yet another peripheral that never gets used again. And even if I could have walked out of the store with an entirely brand new game for the same price. It would be wonderful if Rock Band 3 slipped in some kind of crazy DJ Hero- compatible mode, but I seriously doubt that would happen.

Dude. Was behind you today and snapped this pic:

There's the "Terrorist Hunting Permit."

The Confederate flag. Sure, that's cool.

And the huge rubber testicles dangling from the trailer hitch. Oh! I see, you're owning the "big truck as penis replacement" thing, Yankee Doodle-style.

The bumper sticker that says "My other car is a bulldozer."

As if the heap of absurd aftermarket add-ons wasn't enough.

I'm guessing we wouldn't get along.

I have identified multiple board game elements that just irritate the piss out of me. Some are minor quirks that occasionally appear in manageable forms, but others are just obnoxious in every possible setting. Here's the rundown, although I feel like I have plenty more to add.

When everybody has to reach for something. Ugh. So now the game is all about who has the fastest arm? Now you've got crafty players trying to secure the grab for themselves by leading the play. Generally, there's some sort of punishment for the one sap who was left out of the Physical Challenge. The Games Workshop board game Squelch has this... and even though Squelch is most likely a kids' game, I remove that rule for when Clark and I play.

When you have a say a word to indicate something. Really? Your game is so weak that you have to arbitrarily add a magic spoken word angle? It's like when they took the hands out of soccer. Here's how you know this sort of thing is crap: you can stop doing it and nobody cares. The classic offender in this category is Uno. If your opponents are not aware that you're down to one card, it should not be your imperative to inform them.

When your opponents have to judge you. This is all kinds of bad. You can rotate the judging all you like think you're creating fairness, but when humans have to judge other humans without strictly delineated controls they will resort to favoritism, vengeance and cheap jokes every single time. Apples to Apples, Nanofictionary, Scattergories... all less actual games and more party time killers.

When everyone has to sit in a circle and look at each other. Yeah, I'll be over here looking at the TV.

When the design is all abstract shapes. It may look all simple and classic, but I just see a company that couldn't afford a graphic artist.

When you have to sing, or otherwise perform in front of a group. You know what? Not everybody is comfortable being the center of attention. It's one thing to be the singer in Rock Band, where everybody is watching the loud game and focused on their own note highways, but it is something else when you're expected to break into song in a quiet sunroom and everyone is staring at you. I removed the singing cards from Monty Python Fluxx on these grounds.

Kind of a big deal in 1993. While this pin was free, if you bought the Collector's Edition of the book you got a black armband. Dark!

Even companies outside the Big Two jumped on the silly pressed tin bandwagon. Twelve years later, the Ultraverse line is noted for, um, almost nothing. That one TV series and something that Norm Breyfogle did besides Batman, I suppose.

That's Kyle Rayner's GL symbol, so I'm pegging this pin circa 1994 when he received his ring. Probably a bit later, however.

Seeing where the Green Lantern Corps is today - riding the wave of one of the most successful event storylines in recent history - it sure does seem odd to look back at the Kyle years. DC had to jettison a lot of GLC staples in order to deliver a book focused on the Earth-bound "last Green Lantern."

Zero Hour. That whole event has more or less been way outmoded in the DCU. 1994. The biggest deal of Zero Hour was the return of the JSA as active players.

The date on the pin says 1995, which I think was around the time of the John Byrne run? You kinda can't trust the copyright dates on these things.

The '90s are usually slammed for the rise of gritty anti-hero "mature" comics, plus the proliferation of asscrap pin-up artists who never learned the basics of layout or anatomy, but Marvel vs DC (1996) was a fun book.

1997, for the launch of the new Grant Morrison/Howard Porter JLA series. I remember just getting weary thinking about this book every month, with the endlessly massive story arcs with planet-shattering effects. Although it was nice to have a few years where the League didn't disband every other month. The JLA just can't seem to find a nice middle ground, because when DC switches back to second tier team members with less-expansive storylines, it gets all inconsistent and eye-rollingly quaint.

What a weird event! DC had success with the #0 issues that went along with Zero Hour, so Marvel did a bunch of #-1 Flashback issues in 1997. Yes, negative one. The idea was that these books were stories of Marvel heroes before they became heroes. So it's the FF on the day before the space flight. Or Peter Parker getting sand kicked in his face and then going home to watch General Hospital.

Stan Lee received an adorable ringmaster character for the Flashback books, and that was the best part.

Yes, I have more pins to come.

Frogger intro 1983 (YouTube)
Yes, there was a cartoon where classic video game Frogger was turned into the name of a frog who was a reporter and whose theme song sounded like Old Tyme Radio. WTF.

GayGamer Week In Review - Week Of 4/05/2010 (GayGamer)
This article carries a very unpleasant image of a knitted Pikachu hoodie.

Spelunking Through 'Heavy Rain's' plot holes [Spoilers] (Kotaku)
A few Heavy Rain plot questions. The final rumination hits upon a point I tried to make on the Aeropause Heavy Rain podcast, related to the continuity dangers of making players unknowingly control the killer.

The gospel according to Geoff (CBR)
Smart look at the end of Blackest Night. I completely agree: Blackest Night ended, unlike a lot of event storylines.

The Voyage of the Lost Pokéwalker (Bulbanews)
My man Stephen sent this one to me... a True Life Adventure of a Pokewalker lost on public transit.

Master WarioWare: D.I.Y., Make Us a Game, Win a HUGE Prize (Kotaku)
Check out my competition in this WarioWare contest! In a week or two, they will open it up for a public vote. YOU KNOW WHAT TO DO.

Who is the Biggest Fat Princess Fan? (PlayStation Blog)
I should enter this contest too. Or just Clark.

I spent about four-and-a-half hours in WarioWare DIY tonight, and I can't believe my DSi battery held out.

Good ol' Kotaku is holding a WarioWare DIY contest with a very nice prize package, so I was inspired to put together an entry. The only rule for submission is that the minigame has to include the word "Kotaku." Easy enough.

What dragged out the creation time was that I needed to learn how to pull off a randomizer, a function which is not entirely obvious inside the DIY programming. I caught a tip online that said to go through the game's Dojo lessons, because a few lessons at the very end cover the randomization technique. Of course, I had only barely worked through the Dojo, so I put an hour or so into rolling through twenty Dojo lessons until I got to the randomy ones.

I'll shorten it for you: you have to create a two part trigger where you sort of create a paradox. You instruct an object to act at a specific time, but attach to that a second restriction where the object must act during a range of time. In effect, the object will then only act when both of those triggers are true. So if it is told to go at time-unit 3.1, and then also told to go randomly during a range of 3.1 to 4.1, then the object will only go when the random selection on the second half matches the specific time in the first half.

Got it?

Yeah, a built-in RANDOM function would have been easier.

So what I did was create a situation where the minigame chooses randomly between one of three options: "Wii is best," "PS3 is best" and "360 is best." Then you have to tap the matching icons (angry fanboys illustrated as console controllers) based on that random draw. The instruction for the game is "Pander." I hope Crecente takes that in good humor.

Not sure why I did not give Crecente a nose.

That's my third DIY game... here's my second, based on Fatal Frame:

I wasted a lot of effort on something you can't even detect. I wanted to have the ghost be able to float under the camera frame... like in the actual game. So the camera part is actually multiple sprites sitting in a layer over the ghost (which sits over the background.) In the end, the ghost rarely floats behind that camera frame, so it was a bit pointless for me to build it that way. I had to use every single allotted point to do that trick, which left me no room for any additional sparkle.

Here's some recent life photos of note:

That's Clark at the Toys R Us launch of Pokemon HeartGold/SoulSilver. The Nintendo rep was handing out balloons, stickers, coloring sheets, and cool Pikachu paper hats. We lost the balloon by the time we got to the action figure aisle.

You might recall the rare Two-Face Imaginext figure we found at Target. Just this week we found another new release, a new Riddler set.

Last fall Toys R Us had a Riddler exclusive, as seen on the left. The new Riddler, on the right, has an actual sculpted head, so he matches the rest of the Batman guys and does not look like a melon-headed doofus.

Once again I would like to thank Toyfare Magazine for not bothering to cover this line. This is why I stopped getting Toyfare. I have better luck finding new toys by stumbling through Target.

Incidentally, we have still never seen Two-Face again at retail.

A plug-and-play Sega Menacer, complete with all the shitty games that came on the original 6-in-1 Menacer Genesis cartridge. This is the first p-n-p release I can think of that, effectively, only emulates a single game. I guess they couldn't spring for the licensing fee to toss that horrible Menacer Terminator game in there.

Found in the toy box at one of our local credit unions. A Happy Meal Baloo and a cereal box Gadget.

Weep not for Chilly Willy, friends. He still gets work.

I found this rather fascinating. The interior box for DJ Hero has a thin slot in the bottom, covered with a plastic labia kind of thing. This has to be a cool assembly line trick, allowing insertion of the game box after the turntable has been packed.

More items that were unearthed during our basement renovation: a lifetime of free comics promo pins!

I have a couple of these. They're dated 1978 and I got them when a local department store had a dude in a Spider-Man suit show up for some sale event. I was, like, four or five. Somewhere there's a picture of me and Spidey, but that's one item that has not showed up during the cleanup.

Not sure where this came from, but I know DC used that horrible, horrible slogan immediately post-Crisis in the mid-1980s. You can see it on original issues of Watchmen, for example. It was a direct response to the idea that DC was the kiddie superhero company, a generalization spawned thanks to the 1960s Batman TV series and the 1970s Super Friends cartoon... and then repeated by Marvel zombies for twenty years after that.

This was given out when DC re-launched Green Lantern in 1990, with a gray-streaked Hal Jordan returning to the DCU after a "long" hermitage.

I know I picked up this undated pin at the same time as the GL pin above, so I presume it was to promote the new Hawkworld series that also started in 1990.

I'm going to date this freebie circa 1991, because I remember wearing it in high school. For several years afterward, I would wear this pin around Christmas. Sometimes on a Santa hat of my own.

DC went through a phase where they did a bunch of these cheap pressed tin things, which of course are not really pins. I never figured out how they expected you to wear something like this. Folded over your shirt collar? Or hanging out of a pocket?

Anyway, this one promoted the third Robin miniseries (1992). This was a big deal at the time because the two previous Robin minis (featuring then-new Tim Drake in the suit) were huge thanks to a nasty money-bilking arrangement of alternate covers. This series, subtitled "Cry of the Huntress," had lenticular cover inserts. Whoo-ee.

Man, I completely forgot that Lobo had his own ongoing series in 1992.

Fairly obvious launch slogan for DC's Milestone line, circa 1993.

This Ghost Rider pin is dated 1993, which would have been a few years after the Dan Ketch reboot series started. Man, we all thought that title was hot shit back then. Today, all I can remember from it is that Danny turned into Ghost Rider by touching his bike's magic gas cap.

More to come, you love it.

Toy Mappy Maze (YouTube)
Well here's a Mappy toy I want.

The Pokemon Effect (Awkward Zombie)
This comic is pretty much dead-on for how ALL of Nintendo's properties are treated by gamers. Some just get to that Stage Three later than others.

The Kids Are All Right (Daring Fireball)
"Today, you open the hood of your car and you see a big sealed block and a basin for the windshield washer fluid. You can buy a new car, drive it for years, and never once open the hood yourself. That's the iPad."

Gizmodo posted a very hipster review.

Bruce Lee remembered for more than his movies (Yahoo News)
I'm eagerly anticipating the day Clark becomes "Enter the Dragon"-appropriate.

Love of the Pixel Leads to Endearing Game With a Twist (Kotaku)
See, if you're going to expect me to pay attention to your retro-themed old school NES-style game, you're going to need to be clever about it like this guy.

Pook-A-Looz give classic Disney characters a quirky new look (Jim Hill Media)
Doesn't anybody remember the abandoned Disney Cuties line? These Pook-A-Looz are basically Cuties without a mouth.

Professor Layton Movie Getting Western Release (Kotaku)
YES. Was this part of Nintendo's animated movie initiative that they kicked off a few years ago? When's that Animal Crossing movie getting a western release?

Murdoch rips competitors for bias even as more Fox critics emerge on the right (Yahoo News)
David Frum: "What that means is that Fox, like Limbaugh, has an interest in pushing the Republicans to the margins, making people angry."

If you've ever tried to hold a conversation with a frothing mad Fox News fan, you know Frum is right.

Here's a legal way to print money: change the font (Yahoo News)
Stupid opener: You can save $20 a year by changing your font! But some valid thought later on about font sizes and line widths. But who here really believes Microsoft has a "typography group"?

I guess Baum wanted to write books outside of Oz, but he was cursed by the franchise's success. By 1914, a new Oz release must have been like a new Harry Potter book. After several forwards of Baum swearing that Oz is dead and buried, in books 8 through 10 we see him come to grips with his Oz-centric fate by trying some new takes on his formula.

Tik-Tok of Oz (1914)

Meet Betsy Bobbin, who is totally just Dorothy again, except that Baum doesn't feel like writing her this time. There's a bit of self-plagiarizing at work, as Betsy arrives in Oz via shipwreck (as Dorothy did, once upon a time) and Betsy comes across plant people who must be picked when they are ripe (as Dorothy did, once upon a time.) And just as Betsy equals Dorothy, her companion Hank the Mule is more or less a Jim the Cab Horse clone.

This book also insists on calling the Shaggy Man simply "Shaggy," as if that is his given name.

The big event in this one is wicked old Ruggedo getting kicked out of the Nome club, and his maligned major domo Kaliko inherits the throne. As far as Ozian fan service is concerned, this volume marks the revelation that Toto can talk, and has been able to since the moment he set foot in Oz. His first printed words are "All right, here I go!"

The Scarecrow of Oz (1915)

Meet Trot, who is totally Dorothy again. Trot comes to Oz via a sea cave, and, in the Baum tradition, has a grandfatherly old companion... a sailor named Cap'n Bill. One of Baum's things is to take his young leads and pair them up with creepy elderly people. In fact, as I'm reading this hundred-year-old books, it strikes me that there are a lot of passages that would be awfully funny if scanned in and taken out of context. Most of these situations revolve around the word "queer."

Now that we have these two books with non-Dorothy Dorothy girls, we start to see a new focus on Ozma as the ultimate dictatorial deus ex machina. She has banned all magic in Oz (except when practiced by her or her trusted lieutenants Glinda and the Wizard... although in later books we'll see Polychrome perform magic). Ozma can see anything she wants by spying with her Magic Picture. Glinda is informed of everything that happens in Oz via her Book of Records. Baum goes on at length about how everybody loves Ozma and everybody loves their job and everybody loves her chosen favorites. It starts to get really dangerous-sounding. You can see the seeds that Gregory Maguire seized on for his Wicked series.

It would not be a stretch to claim that Baum foresaw both television and the internet in his description of Ozma and Glinda's magical artifacts. The picture above shows Ozma, Betsy and Dorothy watching the Magic Picture and deciding at what point they will interfere with Trot's drama.

Anyway, "Scarecrow" ends up in one of Oz's overlooked corners (Jinxland) where nobody gives a crap about Ozma and her rules, which makes for more interesting story-telling. Oz-as-Utopia is pretty boring, basically one giant comfortable tea party for Ozma's monarchy. Naturally, Ozma (and Dorothy and Betsy) are revealed to be watching Trot's adventure, and they swing in at the very end to rescue Trot and company and shut down the rebellious Jinxlanders.

Rinkitink in Oz (1916)

This is a weird, not the least reason being that almost none of the book takes place in Oz. So the title is a misnomer. I would not be surprised to hear that Baum had this plot sketched out as one of his non-Oz books, but low sales figures encouraged him to paste some Oz into it.

"Rinkitink" takes place mostly on some islands several countries separated from Oz proper. In fact, we get a new, zoomed-out map to locate the island of Pingaree and its surroundings. Interestingly, while the new map includes Oz, it shows the now-familiar Oz countries reversed west to east. Screwy.

This book is actually quite a weighty adventure, and Clark really liked it even though most of his Oz favorites were nowhere to be seen. The lead this time is a young boy, Prince Inga, although he is saddled with another weird old man as his partner, King Rinkitink. Inga suffers some high drama right out of the gate, as a brutish race demolishes his home and kidnaps everyone on the island, including Inga's parents. This situation is easier for Clark to grasp than the usual Oz style of Child X wandering aimlessly and ending up living in the Emerald City. Inga also gets superpowers of a sort in the form of three hidden magic pearls, and Clark dug that secret power angle.

The Nomes return in "Rinkitink." Although chronologically the king is now Kaliko, he acts like an ass just as Ruggedo did.

The Lost Princess of Oz (1917)

After three books of mostly new characters, Baum returns to form in this book. We're back in Oz, now aflame with the population of the entire series to date. Baum, obviously aware that he wrote Betsy and Trot identically to Dorothy in their solo adventures, now invents simple personality traits to help us tell them apart. Betsy is suddenly the shy one, and Trot will be referred to as "Tiny Trot."

Very intriguing story this time... particularly if you enjoy, as I do, investigating the totalitarian nature of Ozma's regime. Everybody in Oz wakes up one morning to find Ozma missing, along with all of the famous magical instruments. The Magic Picture, the Book of Records, the Wizard's bag, etc. Ozma's entire power base is gone.

So just about everybody gets involved in the hunt for Ozma. The Patchwork Girl, the Woozy, Button-Bright (who keeps getting older and smarter, although he still wanders off and gets lost), etc. Even the Cowardly Lion returns, despite Baum's habit of regularly sidelining the Lion as he does with most of his Animal characters. In short, "Lost Princess" is a mega team-up. In comics terms, this would be the Summer Event.

We also get some new additions: Cayke the Cookie Cook, the Frogman, and the Lavender Bear (plus his fortune-telling robotic Pink Bear.) The villain this time out is Ugu the Shoemaker, who gets slapped down into hard reform at the end.

Only three books left in Baum's original run! We're actually on book #13 at the moment. I'll tease my upcoming coverage of book #12 by saying that it contains perhaps the single weirdest event in the entire published history of Oz.

In celebration of today's minor kerfluffle over Scrabble rulings, I present the following horrible photograph:

I believe this was taken in 1990 or 1992. It is the final board of a Scrabble game between me and my aunt Lila. Who knows why we played Scrabble; I do not recall ever thinking much of it. I mean, I didn't learn to really hate Scrabble until I saw Mike play it in college, and this predates that by about four years.

Anyway, this is a fairly legendary Scrabble game, because on my very first draw I had almost all the letters required to spell the non-word "holodeck." So I kept passing until I could play the word, knowing I would get the 50 point bonus for using all my tiles. I am told that this is an illegal play, but at the time I honestly was unaware.
Looks to me like I had a blank and was waiting for my aunt to play a word that had a C or K in it. How clever that one of us pluralized it in a later play. Bet that was me.

Obviously at some point the value of all that passing (and not scoring points) is going to be surpassed by all the points your opponent is tallying with uncontested plays. But as you can see by the final score, I brought home a win, 281 to 209. Lila did not challenge the word "holodeck."

And in the grand amateur Scrabble tradition, there's like a hundred two-letter words on the board.

I bet somewhere out there is a special Star Trek Edition Scrabble that comes with a stupid Klingon dictionary and I look like a precog.

And it's all about the hardware.

Marvel has a new app on the equally new iPad that is effectively an iTunes for comics, with over 500 books individually selling for $2 each.

To date, I've ignored comics readers on PSP and iPhone because who the hell wants to read comics on a three inch screen? And I can't get into reading them on a regular computer monitor because the format is all wrong. But a 9-inch iPad in portrait orientation? Now you're approximating the classic experience while upgrading the tech for modern times.

Part of the issue is that you read comics differently than almost any other printed periodical media. When you read a magazine, you're lucky to read a third of it. Most of it you just flip through. Same with newspapers, although then you read maybe an eighth of it. This is why that kind of content has exploded on the internet, because that's how we read online: we skim and we skip.

Comics (and novels) are a different beast. You have to pay attention to everything. Every word, every picture, every page. On a landscape monitor, it is simply uncomfortable to read a comic or a novel. Your posture sucks. Your attention is poorly focused. It is inconvenient to zoom in or flip pages. At least a pictureless novel can wordwrap the text to fill your screen; the artwork of a comic book is sized for a vertical window... either too large for your monitor or too zoomed in.

Of course, the sizing is a remnant of the physical, published comic book. Comics made for the web have figured out what Scott McCloud pointed out a decade ago... that there is no canvas restriction. But the nearly hundred-year-old comics business is still beholden to that format, so there's millions of back issues that deserve a proper presentation in the digital format. Even if, and this is unlikely in the immediate future, comics go 100% digital and can break out of the 6 inch by 10 inch ratio.

So that portable, holdable, cuddleable iPad can replicate the reading experience better than anything else to date. I can sit on the couch and read a comic just as always, but now with some serious technological benefits.

Such as: No torn, bent or misprinted pages. Multimedia enhancements (and I don't mean cheesy voiceover or sound effects, I mean creator commentary and/or connections to discussion pages and fan communities). No advertising.

And most attractive of all: no storage problems, coupled with the ability to have any book I want, able to be accessed at moment's notice, all on one device.

I lost track of the actual size of my comics collection many years ago. I know I have about 25 longboxes, but another couple of non-standard boxes beyond that. Plus shelves worth of graphic novels and trade paperbacks and manga. How incredibly appealing is the notion of having all of that in digital form, instantly accessible on one device, no matter where I am. "Hey, I want to see that bit in Civil War where the Punisher shows up with Spider-Man's beaten body... here it is." Instead of taking up several hundred pounds on planet Earth and a chunk of my life the size of four refrigerators... I'd have an iPad.

Naturally, most of my collection would never ever get a digital release. Space Ark? Critters? Oz Squad? The Cereal Killings? Not on your life. And, of course, previously owning the meatspace version does not automatically get you the digital version. The music industry was blindsided by that when iTunes debuted, and every other media has been careful to sidestep that pothole.

But going forward? Hoo, I think I would dig it. Comics are, what, $3 to $4 these days? $2 an issue strikes me as high, given what you lose, but that's still a discount. I'd probably focus on my less-important reads to start, some archival stuff, and I'd pick up some virtual trades.

I'd need DC to seriously step up. They have a digital comics initiative of bubkis.

The downsides. I'm not overly worried about a dead iPad (or whatever) and thus losing purchased books, because I would expect to be able to re-download the files. Also, I'd hope to be able to burn my own backups, like music in iTunes.

There's the format issue... if I use the Marvel Comics app, that likely means I need to have that app for life. These files are probably not readable in any other application. So what happens if Marvel stops supporting the app? Or "upgrades" to a new version that is incompatible with the old files?

I'd lose the weekly trips to the Comic Store, which is a huge deal... because then I'm putting local people out of work. Maybe there's a compromise possible where you buy the physical book, but it comes with a download code to get the virtual version?

It would be a major paradigm shift to have my Fantastic Four collection suddenly STOP and go digital. Moving over would almost be a betrayal of what has gone before. But just as I no longer buy actual CDs, and I no longer buy print photographs, it seems like it is inevitable that one day I'll no longer buy physical comics. Now that the hardware is finally moving toward making the experience pleasurable and not a poor cousin.

Kids Sing Portal "Still Alive" (YouTube)
Awwwww... how cool. The drumbeats kill me.

Minotaurus from LEGO Games: A new way to play! (LEGO)
Kotaku pointed this out; LEGO is venturing into the board game business, with a series of intriguing-looking board games that you build yourself. No idea how this "Minotaurus" plays, but the pirate game looks a lot like Master Mind.

I am a trifle concerned about the "buildable" die... is it properly balanced? But it would be interesting to see a LEGO board game develop that is expandable with smaller, optional, collectible sets.

Land Peel Floor Mat Gallery (Gizmodo)
A floor that unfolds to create tables and seats.

Red Dead Redemption Preview: I'm A No Good Dirty Horse Murderer (Kotaku)
This is completely how I will NOT play Red Dead Redemption.

An Urban Legend: Swan and Dolphin Reversed? (Yesterland)
Great anecdotes about the Swan and Dolphin down at Epcot.

Would you like a girl or a boy toy? (Brainy Gamer)
Abbot held a short social experiment. When McDonald's had a choice between iCarly and Star Wars kids meals, he told the counterkid to give him "the one that's more fun" and every time he got Star Wars. "Girl" toys suck, says America.

Why Internet connections are fastest in South Korea (CNN)
4X the speed at half the cost.