I’m watching the special sneak preview on AMC’s new series Rubicon, and I have to say, I’m liking it a good bit.
New Show
by John Cole| 64 Comments
This post is in: Popular Culture, Television
by John Cole| 64 Comments
This post is in: Popular Culture, Television
I’m watching the special sneak preview on AMC’s new series Rubicon, and I have to say, I’m liking it a good bit.
This post is in: Media, Popular Culture, Science & Technology, Daydream Believers
I was not aware that the genre already needed saving, but Annalee Newitz at io9 explains how “Neal Stephenson and Friends Fight for the Future of EBooks with The Mongoliad“:
While the publishing industry fights to survive, a group of scifi writers and software developers have struck out on their own. Led by Neal Stephenson, author of Cryptonomicon, the group built an ebook that could make reading truly interactive.
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The project was born out of swordfighting. Stephenson, an avid swordfighter, practices this martial art with a small group in Seattle which includes software developer Jeremy Bornstein and others. Over time, and after a lot of input from martial arts experts, Stephenson realized that the descriptions of swordfighting in his novels would have been much better if they’d been shaped by knowledge contributed by people reading the books. And so the idea for a collectively written novel was born. With the help of authors Greg Bear, Nicole Galland, and Mark Teppo, along with Bornstein and others, Stephenson began to outline a book called The Mongoliad – a medieval adventure full of swordfighting and mysticism.
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The team formed a small company called Subutai, and here’s what they have to say about their first book:
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[The Mongoliad is] about a time when Europe thought that the Mongol Horde was about to destroy their world, and the exploits of a small band of mystics and warriors as they attempt to turn the tide of history.
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And though I keep calling it a “book,” The Mongoliad is actually an app written for mobile devices (currently iPhone and iPad)…
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While Stephenson, Bear, and others worked on the text, Bornstein developed the app backend, focusing on collaborative software. The group dubbed the result the “personal ubiquitous literature platform,” or PULP.
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Though interactive novels have had snippets of movies and images in them since the mid-1990s, PULP is what makes The Mongoliad stand out as a possible way forward for post-print publishing. PULP makes this book into something that’s truly the product of our collective imaginations. When you’re reading a chapter of the book, you always have the option to pull up a an interactive discussion window and leave a note or enter a discussion about the book. You can write your own additional storyline. Or add to the pedia to explain more about the historical setting. You can also rate every aspect of the book, rating any page on a scale of one to five stars.
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Subutai is devoted to selling this book without DRM. You’ll get it in an app store, and you’ll pay what Bornstein calls “a relatively low price” for it as a six-month service, where you get new content every week. At the end of those six months you can renew for “a lower price.” Bornstein hinted that the book will eventually contain “a few games too.”
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“This is our solution to the ebook question,” Bornstein adds. “You have to think of something else to do to get around copying. So you make it a service that people want to belong to and contribute to. So there are artistic and economic reasons for making it a service. [On the artistic side,] having the reader feedback we’ll get good information about how the historical period worked.”
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Stephenson, Bear, and the writers have about three months worth of text written so far. Some is edited, and some isn’t. Once the book launches and people start contributing, Bornstein says, “We’ll be willing to revise up to and after the publication. We’re taking audience feedback really seriously – if people point out problems with fights we’ll change it.”
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Ready to download The Mongoliad and get medieval? Subutai plans to launch before the end of the year. Sign up for updates on the project via their official website.
I wrote some fanfic back before that was even a legitimate word, but I’ve never been a gamer, or gone further into medieval re-enactment than hanging around with hardcore SCAdians. Nor does The Mongoliad reference a history I’ve got much interest in — I didn’t even remember that Subutai was the son of Genghis Khan who almost succeeded in conquering Europe. But the Spousal Unit, who’s been an FRP geek since that involved hex paper and 12-sided dice and knows much more about military and Asian history, has already signed up for Subutai notifications even though we don’t own an iPhone much less an iPad.
This post is in: Popular Culture, Clown Shoes
An Arab-American was crowned Miss USA last night, leading to the inevitable freakout. My favorite to date:
They are all attractive, but this surprising frequency of Muslims winning beauty pageants makes me suspect an odd form of affirmative action.
I’ve never judged a pageant, but I think she qualifies without any affirmative action:
I mean, good lord. She’s gorgeous. That’s affirmative action in beauty?
(Via)
by John Cole| 47 Comments
This post is in: Activist Judges!, Movies, Politics, Popular Culture, The Dirty F-ing Hippies Were Right
I wish actual personhood had the same kind of rights and protections that corporate personhood had:
On Thursday, Judge Lewis A. Kaplan of United States District Court in Manhattan said that Joe Berlinger, the director of “Crude,” would have to turn over more than 600 hours of footage from that documentary. The film chronicles the Ecuadorians who sued Texaco (now owned by Chevron) saying an oil field contaminated their water. Chevron said that Mr. Berlinger’s footage could be helpful as it seeks to have the litigation dismissed and pursues an international treaty arbitration related to the lawsuit.
In a telephone interview on Thursday night, Mr. Moore, whose films include “Bowling for Columbine” and “Capitalism: A Love Story,” said that he had never heard of such a ruling.
“If this isn’t overturned, it would make a lot of documentary filmmakers afraid,” Mr. Moore said. “People are going to have to start getting rid of all their extra footage now, right?”
Should the decision of Judge Kaplan be upheld and a subpoena be served for Mr. Berlinger’s footage, Mr. Moore said, “The chilling effect of this is, someone like me, if something like this is upheld, the next whistleblower at the next corporation is going to think twice about showing me some documents if that information has to be turned over to the corporation that they’re working for.”
This seems kind of crazy to me.
by $8 blue check mistermix| 227 Comments
This post is in: Popular Culture, Science & Technology
Apple keeps a very close eye on its app store, and it rejects anything “controversial” or “pornographic”. For example, it banned a cartoonist Mark Fiore’s app, and reversed that decision only after Fiore won a Pulitzer. And it recently banned a bunch of “overt sexual content” from second-tier publishers, while retaining apps from Playboy and Sports Illustrated.
Here are Steve Job’s latest remarks on the controversy:
Fiore’s app will be in the store shortly. That was a mistake. However, we do believe we have a moral responsibility to keep porn off the iPhone. Folks who want porn can buy and [sic] Android phone.
“You know, there’s a porn store for Android,” Jobs said. “You can download nothing but porn. You can download porn, your kids can download porn. That’s a place we don’t want to go, so we’re not going to go there.”
It’s funny and telling that someone who clearly thinks that he’s the coolest guy around can still mouth bullshit like “moral responsibility” 15 years after the Internet transformed the way we look at porn. And it’s also telling that Google, the maker of Android, keeps a much looser rein on the apps used by its phone.
Apple’s moral responsibility is to make good hardware and software. I want to use my their products to control my life, not the other way around. If Steve Jobs is really concerned about kids downloading porn, he needs to remove Safari from every device he builds.
Steve Jobs Comes Out of the Calvinist ClosetPost + Comments (227)
by John Cole| 91 Comments
This post is in: Food, Popular Culture, General Stupidity
This is just what we needed:
Last August, we wrote about the “Double Down,” a mysteriously tempting (and potentialy lethal) new food item being tested by KFC. For those coming late to the story, it’s bacon and cheese sandwiched between two pieces of fried chicken. And now, many months later, I’ll finally be able to get my hands on one.
KFC announced the decision to go live with the Double Down yesterday, but we weren’t sure they weren’t playing a April Fools gag. But no, they truly are going nationwide with the delicacy on April 12.
This is excellent news for… cardiologists.
This post is in: Movies, Open Threads, Popular Culture
It’s worth the effort to see How to Train Your Dragon in 3D (or, if you’re lucky like me, IMAX 3D). If you’re any kind of an animation fan, you’ll enjoy it — it’s a step up for directors Dean DeBlois and Chris Sanders (cool interview for the completists among us), whose last picture was Lilo and Stitch (which I adored). I think Dragon has a stronger story line than UP (which was, in my eyes, just okay), and better character development than Avatar (not that difficult, admittedly). The flight scenes are beautiful, the fight scenes are properly hectic, and the hero(es) suffer genuine consequences for the choices they make. (There’s at least one Bambi’s-mom-level cute-character-in-peril scene that might be too scary for really young children, but things work out okay in the end.)
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Even the Rotten Tomato reviewers liked Dragon…
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