Movie Watch: Alice In Wonderland

Alice is interesting source material - the nonsensical landscape has been a Disney movie, a video game, a surrealistic stop-motion animation, 70's song and now Burton movie. The Burton movie takes a safer route than many adapations, relegating Alice to a now older (and hotter) role returning to Wonderland in what constitutes a semi-sequel to the original narrative, keeping some elements and replacing many, many others with a boilerplate Hollywood action plot.

There is a lot of compromise here. Fans of Carroll's work will both recognize and miss many of the elements, and probably cringe at some of the handling of some characters - especially Mad Hatter. Burton's style works well with many of visual aspects of the work: Chesire Cat and bringing many of the Jabberwocky material into line as well.

If it wasn't for the flair that Burton brings to the canvas, this would likely have been a disaster, with the Hollywood elements riding right over the literature ... but the combination of strong cinematics and acting make the movie highly enjoyable in the long run.

Recommend - though not terribly strongly. Serious fans of Carroll should be prepped for the handling, but anyone looking for a just a fun summer film can dig right in.

Fun Fact:"Jabberwocky" was meant by Carroll as a satire designed to show how not to write a poem. The poem has since transcended Carroll's purpose, becoming now the subject of serious study.

-- [Wikipedia]

2010 E3 Impressions

I'm not at E3, nor am I even remotely close enough to making a profit off of gaming in any sense to attend it anytime soon (nor do I figure The Girl would sign off on it as a holiday).

But I have Twitter, and opinions - and not afraid to use either. So, from what I can gather:

3DS
I think the main win here for the big N is that the 3DS appears, from all reports, to be everything Nintendo wants it to be. True 3D, no glasses, backwards compatible with DS but finally some real new tricks to give developers for 3DS only titles. As Nintendo themselves put it - this isn't just another rendition of the now what, four times redone DS? It's a new beast altogether, and whatever magic they put into the 3D screen sounds like it might pay off.

Wii
Wii-wise, there seemed to be some decent enthusiasm behind some of the new titles, but stance remains the same: the Wii's endurance is going to be tested in the next 12 months, as Kinect and Move hit the scene and now HD equipped casual gamers wonder about the only SD console remaining on the scene.

Kinect
Speaking of that though: Microsoft's big push, Kinect, sounds like it is going to run into early adoption problems with the $149 price tag. I honestly think this is mostly perception: it seems closer to the Wii's $199 price tag, and the Wii has better brand power at the moment. So there will be a lot of people doing the apples to oranges comparison and just deciding to get the Wii instead.

Fair? I'm not sure it is - but I think Microsoft will need to get some impressive software reviews out there to get away from it. A Halo-esque flagship title would go along way to making it distinct ... or perhaps a better way to put is a Wii Sports that in no way resembles Wii Sports.

Move
Sony's real advantage is position Move more like an accessory with a $99 bundle. How much of a difference in MSRP this is in reality when a second controller is what - another $49? And the MoveChuck is another $29? I think people who go to stores and buy the two products would quickly have similar totals.

Move sounds like it has the advantage of being more appropriate for compatibility with existing games, having those buttons and all. This could prove a serious boon to Sony in the long run. I may be more willing to pick up Move just to try Killzone 2 with the new controls - more so than I am just to replace my Wii Sports with an HD version.

3D Gaming
Sony made a big push on this and to be honest, I can only find it pretty bizarre. Prior to E3, Sony had started updated the PS3 software to handle 3DTV's. I jokingly sent the official PlayStation twitter the question if this was the kind of 3D that required $5 glasses or a $5,000 TV. This was their response:

3D TVs are starting to roll out now, they use "active shutter" glasses with embedded circuitry. In a year or two, most TV will be 3D & cheap

I'm assuming they mean "most" as in "most available". Let's not forget that HD only became truly commonplace (as in over 50% market) in the last year or so, something like half a decade after becoming commercially available. And if by "cheap" they mean "around the same cost as my current television" - then Sony's 3D revolution has already failed. I'm not about to replace my perfectly good TV for a single feature that only one thing attached to it would really offer.

Or to put it this way: I'm already doubtful paying the surcharge at the theater to see the 3D version is worth it, I'm not about to drop a grand to do it in my living room.

Nintendo seems to understand this: the 3DS is really the only part of the 3D platform I can get behind. It doesn't require glasses and I'm only replacing my already aging DS for less than a couple benjies.

Now, I've continually been asking why a new TV is even necessary - and even poked the Internet Bear a little about Sony showing the Killzone 3 demo on a 100 foot project screen (clearly not a 3DTV). It looks like an odd mosiac of technology limitations that actually makes this true, and I'll post a follow up on that later.

Valve on PlayStation 3
Hurrah!

So Why Does 3D Need A 3DTV?

My earliest memory of 3D is watching the decidedly un-spooky yet relatively funny Three Stooges "Spooks", which had a wide variety of object on wires dangled in front of us.

And that was on our old, decidedly non-HD television. So when Sony starts beating the pulpit that you need a TV to experience games and movies off the PlayStation 3 in 3D ... should I believe it?

Well, like so many things in technology - the answer is: sorta. Let's go backwards from the new technology to the old Stooges technology.

Active Shutter Glasses
This is the 3D of choice for television providers. It works by having a signal sent to glasses which alternates the right and left lenses being closed at a very fast refresh rate. The advantage to this tech is that it doesn't put any filter between your eye and the screen, only alternates them - and hence you don't get the muted or distorted colors that other glasses provide.

It is also the technology which requires the most hardware. Since each frame is alternated, you halve your refresh rate. So if your isn't a 120hz television (and many HDTV's in the home today are not), you won't get the 60hz that most moviegoers are used to viewing. Also, something needs to send that signal to the glasses. In theory, you could have an add-on device if you television is 120hz or more ... but hardware providers are focusing on new sets, not add-ons.

However, the technology that is distinct 3D from HD isn't that expensive, so new 3D ready sets should resemble HD prices in the relatively near future.

Polarized Glasses
Also called "passive" glasses, polarized lenses are what cinemas like IMAX used, and I'm guessing what Sony must have used at E3 to show off Killzone 3. These glasses rely on having an image displayed with two different polarities, and quite like those old red and green glasses from the Stooge days ... only one lens allows one kind of polarity to pass.

Since each lens requires a polarized screen, colors are muted when using the passive glasses. However, the big reason you aren't using this at home is because it's suited for projection screens. Flatscreen TV's are already polarized to properly display their pixels and don't really have the capacity to split the views. Existing projection sets may also require additional

Whether games and movies could be made to send out a mode for projection TV's, though - I don't really know. But it doesn't sound like Sony has any plans to offer such a feature.

Anaglyph Glasses
These are the old school, two color, Stooge glasses. The advantage is that they work on nearly anything that can display more than two colors. The bad thing is that they are well known for all the problems 3D can have: ghosting, eye fatigue, washed out colors, etc. So I think there's an unspoken concept of the "new 3D" that they don't want to support the "old 3D".

So the big question is...
Would the availability of anaglyph, which has been used to bring 3D to your home as recently as Coraline, outweigh any of the problems traditionally associated with it? Anaglyph poses two problems for TV makers like Sony: it's a substandard experience and they don't sell any new TV's with it. So having software which supports both active shutter and anaglyph is a cost which would only reduce sales - potentially not the best business strategy.

So the answer might be: you could do anaglyph 3D gaming on your TV, but there's a chance it might make you want to vomit.

I can't feel like I'm missing much. I have yet to see 3D is use where it is really a game changer. Interesting, sure - but maybe by the time I'm ready to retire the not-so-old plasma ... we won't even be using googles anymore.

TV You Might Have Missed (or are missing, or are about to miss...)

Lost is gone. I've accepted the end, and I've dealt with the grief. I've moved on. Amazingly, the TV still works fine. Here's some shows that either just ended, or is ending:

Spartacus: Blood and Sand
When the first season of this show ended, I had the sudden realization of just how densely packed the narrative had turned out. This is Shakespeare meets soap opera - plenty of well written drama even in the middle of the blood and boobs. The acting is solid, the production is generally good when it doesn't imitate 300 too much. If you've dismissed this show because of the gratuitous use of nudity, you're missing out.

Though yes, there is plenty of nudity.

Justified
I've raved about this show before, but with the recent season finale - I can't help but recommend it again. It just feels like a good, gritty novel playing out on your TV and I'll say it again - Timothy Olyphant was genetically engineered by a secret government agency to play a cowboy. This was one of the most tightly produced first seasons I may have ever seen, the show just hits on all cylinders from the first scene of the first episode and rarely misses a beat until the conclusion.

Happy Town
Having nearly given up on high concept shows in general, I gave Happy Town a bit of suspicion ... though comparisons to the somewhat campy yet utterly fun Harper's Island helped make the case.

The show is good - it takes itself more seriously than Harper's ever did, but the core mystery is unique and engaging. The characters are strong and the writing doesn't try to follow the ensemble formula, but only focusing on characters as they are important to the current plot. Also, they aren't quite as paranoid as certain other shows about giving reveals to the viewer, and the story is an interesting combination of things you know and don't know, and what various characters know and don't know.

Sadly, Happy Town has already been cancelled. I'm hoping we get at least a full first season and something other than a complete cliffhanger - the show deserves it.

Party Down
Available via Starz and Netflix Instant at the moment - this comedy from some of the people originally responsible for Veronica Mars is just over the top excellent. The second season is about to wrap and while we weren't sure where the misfit bunch of wanna-be writers and actors slumming it as caterers would go ... it has only gotten better since the first episode. The show has a low-budget, indie kind of feel - but the writing and acting are top notch. The only downsides of this show is the short length of the season.


What's the rest of the blogosphere watching?

Kate's Horse

At the end of Lost ...


..and it should be noted that when I say "end of Lost", I mean the final episode of the final season of the TV show and hence, everything in this post is nothing but a series of serious spoilers for anyone still planning on watching the show. So if you haven't seen the show to the end, I would go find a video about a cat playing piano or something.

Ahem.

At the end of Lost we discover that the Smoke Monster was a cigar ...

Ah. See? Big spoilers. Now go away.

Now let's see if I can do this in one grammatically correct sentence:

At the end of Lost, we discover that the Smoke Monster was in fact an entity transformed when his brother Jacob, protector of the island, tossed him into a well of mysterious light and that his (if in fact genderless amorphic beings can be called such) prime motivation was to kill Jacob and any candidates for Jacob's position as protector so that he (the Smoke Monster) could leave the island.

OK: here is my first piece of evidence that Lost failed as a show. I'm betting that if anyone just starting the show ignored all those warnings and just read that bit, they wouldn't make it past season three.

Why? Because of Kate's Horse. See, the sad thing is that even if it is nearly an accident of convenient writing, the fact that Smoke Monster can't directly kill the candidates but rather must trick them into killing each other or offing themselves is a neat premise. Kind of like Saw but with brains, which is something I wouldn't mind watching.

And this is the main conflict of season six - that the candidates must save the island before Smoke Monster figures out a clever way to end them.

So why is Kate's Horse a problem? Because it shows that this wasn't the main conflict of the show ... just season six. In fact, I don't think Lost ever really had central source of conflict - it was always just Man versus Crazy Shit The Writers Made Up. If we were to believe season six as the "reveal" of the show, then we would be able to look back at past seasons and see how it was all playing out.

But let's look at the Smoke Monster's victims have died: crushed in tree, chewed off arm, crushed in tree, crushed against tree, slammed into tree, buried alive, stabbed by Ben, slammed against floor, slammed against person, slammed against person, crushed by ceiling, slammed into cage, blown up, drowned, broken neck, shot, slit throat.

You'll notice a theme. A lot of slamming, and a few creative incidents like getting Nikki buried alive after biting her in the shape of the spider. Oh, that Medusa Spider was the Smoke Monster, confirmed by producers. You can hear the mechanical sound when they approach and (thankfully) setup Nikki and Pool Boy for their final scene.

So in other words - occasionally Smoke Monster stuck to the premise, but usually it just slammed things around. When it wasn't slamming things around, it would occasionally appear as Christian Shepherd.

Or Kate's Horse. Why would the form of Kate's Horse be useful to the goals of the Smoke Monster? Well, it wouldn't. But gee golly it was neat, wasn't it? Where did that horse come from?

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is how Lost was written. Just a series of distractions lumped in a row. So without any further adieu, my final final thoughts on the show:

It was a character driven show that ran out of character development
The first defense people give for Lost's feel good reunion of a finale is that Lost was, in fact, "all about the characters" and not really about the origins of smoke monsters or how the island does stuff or DHARMA or anything. Prior to the finale, the producers stated they would only answers questions about the show "the characters cared about". Which considering how bad these characters were at figuring out what was happening around them meant: not much.

The first three seasons of Lost had a consistent formula: character backstories interwoven with island mystery. It was getting pretty obvious by Season Three, though, that most of the relevant history of all the main characters - even the Tailies that had been added in Season Two, had been well illustrated. In Season Three, Lost fans suffered through two completely unnecessary characters: Nikki and Paulo, for more backstory fodder.

In Season Four - we start to get flashforwards and other twists on the backstories ... but they serve little in the way of adding to these characters. Actually, at this point most of the "off island" content actually serves the mystery plot. Who is the person in the coffin? Why does Jack want to return to the island and how will they get that done?

Truthfully, the characters of Lost work well as sketches and often in ways to offer up some brilliant dialogue ... but the note that the show ends on ... that love is what will get you to heaven ... is easily the weakest part. The motivations the characters have to fall for each other, with obvious exceptions like the Kwans, is often somewhat forced and probably best attributed to jungle fever as opposed to "the most important thing in their life".

Here's my proof on this: can anyone tell me why Kate loves Jack? What is it about him? They've already endured one failed relationship. She often acts closer to Sawyer than anyone else (particularly physically - the only steamy scenes we get with Kate are with Sawyer, not Jack). And Jack - oh, Jack. People - Jack is a complete loser. Every one of Jack's plans fails miserably throughout all six seasons and all the way up to the last episode. In fact, the only version of Jack which is isn't a loser is the one that wasn't even real. No, more likely Kate "loves" Jack because at the last minute the writers decide that love conquers all and Sawyer made a little more sense with Juliet.

The writers became pathological about not revealing anything
If the crown jewels of the show was the characters, as the producers like to say, then why was it that the writers went so far out of their way to only offer explanations about the island in short discrete bursts, usually during season opener and closers? By the end of the show, the cast includes two characters - Ben and Juliet - who once were part of The Others, the mysterious antagonistic group for most of the first half of the show. Ben was the leader of The Others, and nobody ever bothers to ask to get even basic answers from them like who they are and what they want, except to get inanely vague answers like "We're the good guys."

Bizarre examples from the show: Sawyer at one point has Karl, a refugee from The Others with certainly no love for Ben at gunpoint. Instead of bringing him back to camp, he tells him to run off. When Sayid, our stalwart interrogator/torturer asks why - Sawyer doesn't really have an answer. Locke at one point inexplicably destroys an entire DHARMA building, despite the building having tons of documentation and apparently access to the outside world.

Or my favorite: Man In Black had a name, people. It was Samuel all along. The point of making it such a secret? They just wanted to give the audience one more thing to guess about. Anyone looking for deeper meaning in the absence of his name will come up empty handed.

Much like everything else about the show.

The finale capped off six seasons' of inconsistent, convenient writing
Even a defender of the show recently admitted the Smoke Monster started off as a mindless beast, to some kind of calculating security system, to an actual man - and it is not an easy or smooth transition if you go back through episodes. It has the appearance until about Season Five that they are simply revealing new aspects of the creature, but the revelation that it is Jacob's brother and the rules that go along with it breaks that trend and any sense of cohesion that was being setup in the first half of the show. The Smoke Monster can't hurt the Losties? He is stuck in Locke's form? If you were to re-watch the show from the beginning now, what used to be a great and original threat is now shrouded with questions like, "doesn't Jacob control this thing with his rules anyway?".

And in the finale the show can't even follow the same concepts it had outlined episodes ago ... even within the same season, Jack's interaction with the Magic Light Cave is completely different from Jacob's in Across The Sea. For some time the show makes a big deal about details, lists and rules - but by the end credits of the finale it is hard to find any that the show itself decided were worth paying any attention.

There was an underscored theme of Season Six: why ask questions?

The big questions that fell off the table after Season Three are numerous. The sickness, a massive portion of the island events early in the show, is never really explained despite having Doctor Juliet join the cast. One might be lead to think that pregnancy and children are very important to some deeper mythology of the show, but one would be wrong. One would be simply thinking too much.

It would work better as a dream
Why is Kate's Horse in the jungle? There is no reason plausible based on the events of the show. What happened, happened - and it apparently always about faith and not reason.

The only way to reconcile six season's worth of dropped plot concepts is to accept that normal logic just does not apply. This is why I think so many people mistook Jack's final scene as an indication that they were dead all along - it makes the cognitive dissonance required to watch the show beginning to end so much easier. As Neil Gaiman might say, sometimes dream logic is the only way to tell the story.

And here is why I am so disappointed in Lost: they couldn't even give us that much. They couldn't even give us a cliche excuse of an explanation but instead pulled a mass cop out and went for the heartstrings. And then acted as if the show was never really about the mysteries of the island in the first place.

Meh. Lost, we had some good times - but I wish I had broken up with you seasons ago. Now I get to listen to The Girl brag about how right she was about the show until the end of time.

So, you know, thanks for that.

The Great AT&T iPad Security Breach

Sweet Jeebus.

Then we began poring through the 114,067 entries and were stunned at the names we found. The iPad 3G, released less than two months ago, has clearly been snapped up by an elite array of early adopters.

Within the military, we saw several devices registered to the domain of DARPA, the advanced research division of the Department of Defense, along with the major service branches. To wit: One affected individual was William Eldredge, who "commands the largest operational B-1 [strategic bomber] group in the U.S. Air Force."

-- Apple's Worst Security Breach: 114,000 iPad Owners Exposed [Gawker]

So, here's the short version: AT&T had an open web service for an AJAX process which would deliver a valid email address if you gave it a valid ICC-ID. And ICC-ID is what phone SIMs, like the one in the iPad, use to identify the unique device (and hence, user).

Note that this was an open web service. So anyone on the net could hit it. Anyone was free to keep trying ICC-ID's until they get an email back. ICC-ID's aren't particularly secure, Gawker points out that they show up on Flickr as part of photo tags.

According to Gawker, AT&T has not informed users of the presumably now fixed breach and it isn't clear if they've contact Apple.

From a security point of view, this could be worse. There's no passwords involved, though emails could be considered usernames in some situations. ICC-ID's themselves are relatively benign - though I don't think I want a black hat hacker having both my email address and device ID. It is a nightmare for a portal where people trust their private data though, and a real red flag for the kind of protocols and practices AT&T has in place. I've always thought their site was somewhat miserable, this is beyond bad.

Thoughts On HTML5

My current project has dragged me through the rails of HTML5, with the luxury that we're targeting WebKit (Chrome specifically) alone. So I can conveniently ignore a lot of the current disadvantages of working with HTML5, or rather the main one - that 90% of the web has no idea what the hell it is - and focus on the positive.

Since Apple declared that HTML5 would destroy all plugins, there has been rather sudden amount of marketing and attention to the specification. Some of this may be good, as most web specs don't get decent advertising ... but marketing can control the message, and messaging can impact how developers tackle new technologies.

Which can be dangerous. For one things, HTML5 is not all about plugins. Here's a few notes I've had since working with HTML5.

Flash and HTML5 can (and will) co-exist
Steve Jobs would like to have people think that HTML5 and Flash are some kind of binary decision. What HTML5 is providing in terms of audio and video is a rather logical and much needed update to the way web pages handle assets. Since the web was young, the image tag has been foremost in people's minds and has been slowly appended to include rather advanced features. All the while video and audio were relegated to various kinds of plugins.

Take Timex as an example. They have their Flash lead banner, with rich interactivity and animation, and they have a simpler HTML item scroll beneath it. It's actually a very good use of both Flash and dynamic HTML.

Could the canvas tag be made to replicate the Flash banner's smooth animation and interaction? Perhaps, but unlikely. And the reason why Flash is going to be around for some time is that the pipeline to create that animation? That's all Adobe. From Photoshop to Flash Studio - developer use Adobe products to create these kinds of products.

Or in other words: HTML5 probably won't be a complete replacement for everything Flash does a) performance for the canvas tag is increased, b) the complexity of dealing with SVG is decreased, and (or essentially) c) until Adobe designs the toolset to to make HTML5 as powerful as Flash.

And these thing may never happen. Which is fine - plugins have existed to give browsers functionality they wouldn't normally have. HTML5 gives web developers more options, but that doesn't mean we need to start taking any away.

To truly sum it up: Flash is not the blink tag.

HTML5 extends the browser
If we can ignore the fact that you'll be able to sometimes embed videos without Flash, there's a larger picture about the new features. If anything, it seems that the real goal of the HTML5 seems to be about extending the reach of the browser to your desktop and the world around you. With an offline database, geolocation, web workers and web sockets HTML5 browsers are poised to be able to offer new capabilities to enhance the things people do today in the social networking world.

Theoretical example: Twitter could have a whole new concept of local trends. Background processing could localize tweets only within a 50 mile radius of your current location and provide a list of current hash tags. Or why not 50 feet? See what trends are occuring in your coffee shop, not your entire city. Meanwhile your offline storage is tracking tweets you've replied to and retweeted - essentially creating a potential recommendation list for future browsing.

HTML5 extends the concept of a website
When I first encounted the concept of offline web applications I dismissed it as merely a more intelligent cache scheme - which isn't necessarily a bad thing, but not really a wonderful thing.

The more I tinkered with it - the more I realized, though, that works in a very subtle way with the rest of HTML5 to blur the notion of a website and an application. If you go to ebay.com right now, you are very clearly going to a website. More than likely anything you haven't recently viewed will be downloaded for the browser to render, the same with everything else on the rest of the website.

Browsing as normal, right? OK - now think of ebay.com as just the place you go to get the initial download of ebay's web application. As you browse, ebay's manifest is storing all the important assets you need to use ebay on your drive. Not in a transitional sense, but a rather permanent one. You'll use this version of ebay's website - online or offline - until you intentionally remove it or ebay updates the manifest.

First you'll notice everything is faster, because fewer assets need to be loaded per page load. Also, any mobile functionality could be automatically provided to you. Static information about your account, etc., could be stored in the database. You really only need to call out to the server for search results and to get the latest update on that bid you've made.

The bottom line: if ebay were to deliver a desktop application for you to use, it would probably look a lot like this. And you didn't have to do anything to install it but browse to ebay.com, and to load it again - just return to ebay.com ... even if you aren't online. Looking for the details on that gizmo you bid on last week? Just go to ebay.com, head to your account and pull it up. Ebay's server won't need to be hit once.

HTML5 is very suitable to tablets
A large screen on a mobile device? With GPS? Yeah, trust me - people haven't even scratched the surface of how functional web apps can be on tablets.

The Chrome Web Store Gets It
When I saw Google announce the Chrome Store during I/O this year, it became apparent that their strategy around Chrome and Chrome OS is a tightly woven web. Google is clearly going to be championing this kind of development and providing a marketplace around it. Interesting that Apple is doing a lot of podium pounding about HTML5 and yet web apps are still treated like second rate citizens when it comes to the iPhone OS. Installation is a bit of a mystery to most users, with no real indication of the difference between a bookmark and a web app, and management is limited to mostly just deleting. Chrome, Chrome Store and Chrome OS will probably provide users with a fully functional interface to find, purchase, install and maintain web apps in much of they way they deal with desktop apps today.

So it will be interesting, as HTML5 continues to mature and feature adoption increases. It's not a small change to web standards, or more specfically - web features ... and it certainly isn't all about plugins. To think of HTML5 as the replacement to Flash is narrowing the concept down to a point where it just isn't useful.

Things You Didn't Know About Empire Strikes Back

Luke's fight with Fake "Force cave" Vader is actually a fight with a Celestial Vader! In the original story, the swamp and the cave disappear, and Luke and Vader lightsaber it out in deep space. Vader even grabs a handful of stars to show how powerful the Dark Side can be. (That scene was apparently sponsored by LSD.)

-- 100 Things You Didn't Know About The Empire Strikes Back [movies.ign.com]

There's some interesting production notes, but the first part is all about the differences between Leigh Brackett's original script and the edits Kasdan made. Brackett's draft is often credited for giving Empire the punch that nearly everything else Star Wars lacks. Interesting to me is that Empire has the lowest body count of any of the movies and yet is the clearly the darkest and grittiest of the bunch.

For Sunday: Deep Hole Dive

As usual, for no particular reason:

For Apple, Web Standards Equals Safari Only

Apple's campaign to push HTML5 as the alternative to plug ins has taken a very odd turn. They've added a page to Apple.com to demo HTML5 with this particular twist:

You need to use Safari to access the demos.

Now, I'm browsing in the latest version of Chrome - which also uses WebKit for rendering and JavaScript. I'm sure there is a fork in the road from the Chromium project but they should be extremely close when it comes to features and standards.

And Apple won't even let me use that.

Instead of championing the supposedly future thinking open development that Jobs insists is superior to the "old ways" - the page highlights exactly what is wrong with the stance Apple has taken. First, net users have never really cared if a feature set is blessed by some committee - they want things to work in the browser of their choice. Second, Apple's concern for the use of these standards is directed in one direction: users of Safari ... and in reality, users of Mobile Safari.

Together and you can see that this is actually the same strategy Apple took with the cross-compilation issue. They're not concerned with creating content consumable across the net - if they did then they wouldn't block this demo down to Safari and conversely, developers would not need to worry about an iPad version of their website. No, they are concerned with content which falls under the umbrella of Apple software.

Game Play: 3D Dot Game Heroes

3D Dot Game Heroes is essentially a love song to any gamer old enough to have played nearly any 2D Zelda game ever made. As a Zelda clone, it is such a spot on implementation of the game mechanics which worked so well for these games that it is truly impressive.

Somewhat because of this - this will be a pretty short review. If you loved these games and have a PS3, you certainly owe it to yourself to pick up a copy. However, even as brilliant of homage as the game is - an in no small part due to the incredible sense of humor that the game manages, starting from the very premise of the art style being that the king declares nobody cares about 2D games anymore - it is also burdened with the fact that it is a spot on implementation of the game mechanics, with very little twist applied. So fans who love this genre will be all too familiar with what's going on.

So in other words, it's pretty brilliant while at the same time not the deepest gameplay you've ever met. For the price point, under $40, it is probably about right. I would put it in the safely, though not highly, recommend category.

Even A Lost Writer Can't Really Explain Lost

I swear, almost *this* close to never talking about the damn show again - but this was too much to pass up. Apparently someone stating that they worked on the show as a writer posted to a forum and sure enough, it has been making the rounds.

And for people like me still trying to figure out just how far Lost got from actually explaining anything, it is wildly unsatisfying as an explanation.

Here's a big chunk:

Thus began Jacob's plan to bring candidates to the Island to do the one thing he couldn't do. Kill the MIB. He had a huge list of candidates that spanned generations. Yet everytime he brought people there, the MIB corrupted them and caused them to kill one another. That was until Richard came along and helped Jacob understand that if he didn't take a more active role, then his plan would never work.

Enter Dharma -- which I'm not sure why John is having such a hard time grasping. Dharma, like the countless scores of people that were brought to the island before, were brought there by Jacob as part of his plan to kill the MIB. However, the MIB was aware of this plan and interferred by "corrupting" Ben. Making Ben believe he was doing the work of Jacob when in reality he was doing the work of the MIB. This carried over into all of Ben's "off-island" activities. He was the leader. He spoke for Jacob as far as they were concerned. So the "Others" killed Dharma and later were actively trying to kill Jack, Kate, Sawyer, Hurley and all the candidates because that's what the MIB wanted. And what he couldn't do for himself.

Dharma was originally brought in to be good. But was turned bad by MIB's corruption and eventually destroyed by his pawn Ben. Now, was Dharma only brought there to help Jack and the other Canditates on their overall quest to kill Smokey? Or did Jacob have another list of Canidates from the Dharma group that we were never aware of? That's a question that is purposley not answered because whatever answer the writers came up with would be worse than the one you come up with for yourself. Still ... Dharma's purpose is not "pointless" or even vague. Hell, it's pretty blantent.

Someone From Bad Robot's Take

I almost believe this is someone from Bad Robot because that's the kind of "of course it makes sense!" bullshit I expect it would take to sleep at night after writing for Lost. Let's quickly tick off some of the things wrong with all of that:

If Jacob has really been trying for centuries to kill MIB and this is how things turn out ... then Jacob is officially the only character on the show who is a bigger loser than Jack. The worst part of Richard's flashback was the revelation that these two have probably thought of nothing better than having others run at them with knives for decades.

So for the explanation of why DHARMA is even on the island to be "Jacob brought them there to kill MIB" ... well, that's the most over engineered failure in the history of attempted murders. Time Travel! Polar Bears! But, in the end all DHARMA and The Others figure out about their target is that it doesn't like sound waves.

So Ben was tricked by MIB and Richard was ... wait, no - Richard had a direct line to Jacob. That's clearly laid out in Richard's flashback. And we have no reason to think that MIB could pose as Jacob, or any explanation as to why Jacob couldn't pose as himself. AND The Others were clearly not actively trying to kill the Lostaways as they could have offed the whole bunch of them several times during the first couple of season. Tom Friendly could have easily killed Jack, Sawyer and Locke personally in one scene during Season Two.

Gah. And even more annoying is how much this dovetails back into the first two seasons when Lost was like, you know, good. Now, this might be just another rabid Lost fan, or maybe the guy who got coffee or something. I'd rather believe that, because if this was someone actually involved in writing the show then I've been closely following the events of a show from writers who can't really grasp cause and effect.

However, if anyone thought that the producers were to leave the finale as final middle finger to Lost fans, be warned: they apparently saved over ten minutes of material showing Ben and Hurly as protectors of the island.

Course, in order to see it - you have to buy the DVD.

Somehow, I don't see that happening. Anyway, I have a rough of a post on final thoughts on the show. I may or may not post it. Starting to feel like the guy still at the scene of a crime when even the cops have gone home.

Apple to Pull "Widgety" Apps

Apple can't even be nice to Apple fans anymore:

In late April, an unnamed Australian — one of a small team of cross-platform developers known as Shifty Jelly — made a point of telling the world that the Apple App Store is a mighty wonderful place. "I love the app store and the amazing hassle-free distribution it provides and I only really have a few niggling concerns with how Apple has dealt with us, as developers," he wrote in a blog post entitled "Sorry Media, But Apple Isn’t Evil."

But little more than a month later, this outspoken Aussie has accused himself of talking nonsense after the Jobsian cult said it was booting his company's photo-centric iPad application, My Frame, from the App Store. "A month ago I wrote a blog post about how Apple were not actually evil, because I was getting sick of all the media hype and bashing that was going on," he now says. "Little did I know that a month later that blog post would come back and smack me in the face."

-- Steve Jobs beheads iPad apps for acting like desktops

This really is the evil part of the App Store. This app violates no terms of service, appears to be pretty well done, and was getting popular. So why would Apple ban it? The common wisdom, and about the only thing that makes any sense, is that Apple wants to reserve the idea of a widget based desktop to ... Apple. So this is not an app that can do any harm to you, or your phone, or anything - but it may do harm to Apple at some point in the future.

So gone it goes. This isn't just developer unfriendly, this is outright hostile. You might have a good idea, and a good execution - but if it gets too close to competing with Apple, you've just wasted all of your developer money.

Apparently the developer emailed Steve Jobs to see WTF. Jobs responded with:

We are not allowing apps that create their own desktops. Sorry.

Sent from my iPad

Anyone else find the "Sent from my iPad" particularly annoying in that setting?

How Lost Should Have Ended

Failed animated GIF load - so here's the link to the Daily What ... via @kiyote23.

Lost: A Few Points Of Clarification

Spoilers, obviously.

I promise, only a couple more posts on Lost and then I'll never speak of the show again. This one, one more - then I'm done.

However, in the muddled writing which was the finale there has been a whole new brand of confusion. Since I've been faithfully tracking the show since the first episode (and blogging about since around the third season) - let's nail down some of the few things the writers/producers actually did tell us.

First, and very important:

No, they were not all dead from the beginning
Two things are causing this confusion: the first is the timing of Christian's speech to Jack within the last ten minutes of the entire series (hence giving the audience not a lot of time to process) and the images ABC added (apparently not the producers) to the end credits of the plane wreckage.

Proof: Christian actually says so during his speech and even indicates that what happened on the island was "the most important thing" in their lives. The producers have confirmed this (and that the end images weren't their idea).

But yes, the "flash sideways" wasn't "real"...
A lot of people simply call it "purgatory" but, that doesn't seem accurate to me. There's some Buddhist notions here about transcending but not having reach full enlightment which is closer, I think. I don't see these sould being tested or cleansed ... LA X wasn't about being tried or anything - just making your connecting flight to "heaven" once you find your soulmate (groan).

What I find really odd about this one is that some people seemed to enjoy the finale because they thought this was true. Which I can get - there would be a certain comfort in thinking that all six seasons were just, say, the imagination of a dying man in a bamboo forest ... because it would allow for essentially any contradiction on the planet thanks to dream / death logic. But no, that's not what happened here.

Ajira Did Not Crash After Frank's Takeoff
This is just more confusion over ABC's end credit scenes. Those images were just filler, not part of the real narrative. Frank, Sawyer, Kate and Miles get to do non island things for a while.

The Smoke Monster Can Become More Than Dead People
I don't know why this has kept coming up recently - I think because the whole Church/Purgatory thing and when I post my final complaint about the show I'll bring this up more - but the writers and producers have used Old Smokey to make all kinds of appearances. I guess "Kate's Horse" was technically dead at the time she met it - and I'm 99% sure the horse was Smokey. Smokey certainly took the form of the spiders that (thankfully) bit Nikki. So what form Smokey can and can't take is really, really not well defined. But don't assume because, say, Walt showed up as an apparition somewhere that it wasn't Smokey (course, I wouldn't assume it was either).

Another likely candidate (sorry) is Dave, Hurley's imaginary friend. Interestingly, if Dave is Smokey then it is also a really early example of Smokey trying to off a candidate while still obeying the rules (something Smokey proved really bad at - but more on that later). Course, Dave is also confusing once we learn Hurley can see dead people - so maybe Dave was dead all along (sigh).

Short version: the only consistent "rule" is that the Smoke Monster can take the form of things it reads from other people minds (and/or dead people). Or short, short version - it can become things integral to The Island, but apparently not the living.

Walt, Michael, Eko, etc., aren't in the church because...
Because they're not dead? Except that Christian states there is no "now". Hurley and Ben are at LA X at the same time as the Kwans, despite apparently having gone off and had merry offscreen adventures together (groan).

Look, I have a lot of problems with the church and I did actually think the lack of black people seemed like pretty stupid oversight ... but Ben and Ana Lucia do give the writers a decent out here. Just because people have arrived at LA X, having died whenever, doesn't mean they're ready to "let go" and move on.

Actually, I think Ben, Eko, Michael and Walt were left out also in part because they didn't fit well into the "find love" mechanic they had set up to be "awakened" (groan). The producers say the actor who played Walt has grown so much that he woudn't have been recognized, which I don't entirely buy into. However, getting actors on contract for a highly touted finale might be a different story in general.

Regardless, we can probably assume that these characters are bouncing around LA X somewhere offscreen though. Don't get me wrong - I think the fact that Walt dropped so completely off the narrative radar is bullhockey. But that's for another post.

Lost has always been mostly about the characters
So prior to the finale, Damon and Carlton said that they were going to be answering the questions "important to the characters" - and that is when we should have known we were in trouble. These characters have been almost pathological in their inability to communicate reasonably. Let's not forget that Juliet was one of The Others and we still have little idea why The Others actually did anything. Sawyer at one point had Karl, also an Other, at gunpoint ... and simply let him go.

It's true - the characters were always an important aspect of the show. The flashbacks, their lives before the island, their interactions on the island - all very, very important.

Lost, however, did not get a third season because of character development. Lost got past two seasons because thousands of rabid fans were recording the show, going over every detail and then swarming forums en masse to detail how it proved or disproved theories about the show. When people like Javi did live chats with fans, they rarely discussed if Kate liked Sawyer more than Jack - they wanted to know about the mechanics at work when came to the mysteries of The Island.

Or maybe more to the point, if Lost has always been about the characters - we can't forget that The Island was one of the more important characters of the show. It's the character everyone fell for and wanted to know more about. Jack was, quite honestly, a pretty lousy lead in a lot of different ways - but The Island was always a star.

OK, so like I said ... one more to go. I'm just so annoyed with people asking inane questions like "what was inconsistent" or "what kind of answers did you really want" ... I mean, really - I'm beginning to think that the majority of the people left for the finale were people who stopped really tracking the show years ago.