Back when the Playstation 3 was in the works, I wrote a lot about Sony’s misguided strategy for the console. My doomsday scenarios haven’t come true, but the company is definitely struggling — losses are projected at $674 million this year after $2.6 billion in losses last year, according to BusinessWeek. (“The two worst-performing products: TVs and video games.”)
So it’s great to see Sony has more dynamite ideas up its corporate sleeve. Like building an iTunes-like service. Because everyone knows consumers are looking for yet another site where they can pay to download movies/shows, music, and books!
Surely Sony has some secret sauce that’ll make this service stand out from the zillions of other similar services, both living and dead. Take it away, BusinessWeek:
Sony will try to differentiate its service from iTunes. One example: Users will be able to upload videos shot on camcorders, save photos taken with digital cameras, and post other digital content to their personal online accounts. … At some point down the road, Sony would consider letting independent software developers create applications for the service, much the way Apple does for its iPhone.
[Slaps forehead as crickets chirp.]
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Categories: Business · Movies · Music · Pop Culture · media
Tagged: downloads, Sony
The internet is the best thing to happen to consumers in decades. Pick a product or service — cars, computers, TVs, cookware, homes, insurance — and chances are you can find tons of ratings, information, and deals to help make an informed decision and save money.
This makes it all the more frustrating when planning to buy one of the handful of products that has eluded internet-induced transparency. I discovered this several years ago when buying a mattress. The internet was largely useless against the industry’s bewildering “specs,” dizzying array of models (many of which are unique to a particular retailer), and creepy throwback salesmen who seemed even creepier because of the information asymmetry inherent to our encounters.
The same frustrations have come up in my recent search for luggage. Smart decisions are tough when facing units of measurement and materials that seem made up (“denier,” “Tricore ballistic nylon”); retailer-exclusive models (making comparison shopping harder); and a dearth of authoritative information (Consumer Reports’s website has a single, subscription-required ratings roundup).
Luggage goes on sale every other week, but as with everything else, holiday sales are usually some of the best of the year. I’ve spent some time scoping out Macy’s (in anticipation of a big sale today, Nov. 18) and other luggage sellers, and I think I’ve come up with a few good options. Of course, now I can’t decide which to get.
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Categories: Shopping
Tagged: Deals, luggage
This is going to sound ignorant, but until today my knowledge of bonsai trees was based entirely on The Karate Kid.
If I had to guess, I’d have said a bonsai tree was some dwarf species or a bush that looks like a tiny tree. A little kitschy, no big whoop. But today Melanie and I went to the National Arboretum’s Bonsai and Penjing Museum, and my ignorance was slightly diminished at the same time my mind was officially blown.
As any non-ignorant person (or Wikipedia reader) must have already known, bonsai (the Japanese term) or penjing (the Chinese term) refers to “the art of aesthetic miniaturization of trees, or of developing woody or semi-woody plants shaped as trees, by growing them in containers” (I would have used a more authoritative source’s definition, but I can’t find one on the American Bonsai Society’s website).
I guess the “semi-woody plants shaped as trees” part could be the “bush shaped like a tiny tree” that I had in mind. But most of the specimens at the Arboretum are literally miniature trees.
Walking through the exhibit is like walking through the forest sets of A Nightmare Before Christmas or Coraline. Except in this case, the trees aren’t painted models with popcorn for blossoms — they’re actually trees!
The other cool thing is that a bunch of the trees are 100 or more years old. One is from the mid 1600s! The age combined with the warped perspective makes the whole exhibit pretty dizzying.
Here are two examples from the Arboretum. But you don’t get the same vertiginous sense of scale unless you’re standing in front of them — or rather, over them.
Update: Here’s a photo that gives a better sense:
If you’re in the D.C. area and, like us, have overlooked the Arboretum because of all the higher-profile things to see in these parts, I highly recommend a visit. (The rest of the grounds are very pretty, too.)
Sidenote: Pat Morita was nominated for an Academy Award for playing Mr. Miyagi??? Wha?
Categories: Uncategorized
Tagged: activities, Nature, outings, sight-seeing, Washington D.C.
Anyone with a passing interest in capital punishment or notions of justice should tune in to the saga of Cameron Todd Willingham, a Texas man convicted in 1992 of murdering his three daughters by arson and executed in 2004. The New Yorker’s David Grann renewed attention to the case in September with a powerful, stomach-churning story detailing the flaws in the arson investigators’ evidence that led to the execution of a man who may have been innocent. (The Chicago Tribune was on the case first, in 2004.)
Grann reported that a Texas commision investigating allegations of forensic misconduct is nearing completion of one of its first case reviews — on Willingham. But at the end of September, Texas Gov. Rick Perry replaced three commission members, including the chairman, who says Perry’s lawyers had pressured him about the case. The new chairman then canceled a hearing that would have included testimony from a fire scientist whose report for the commission concluded, according to Grann, “that investigators in the Willingham case had no scientific basis for claiming that the fire was arson, ignored evidence that contradicted their theory … relied on discredited folklore, and failed to eliminate potential accidental or alternative causes of the fire.”
Perry has already played a major role in the case. He was governor in 2004, when another fire expert concluded the arson evidence used against Willingham was “junk science.” Perry and the state board that reviews clemency applications both apparently ignored that expert’s last-minute report, and Willingham was executed. On Tuesday, the Houston Chronicle and parent company Hearst Newspapers sued Perry “to force the release of a clemency report Perry received before denying a stay of execution” to Willingham.
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Categories: Politics
Tagged: Capital punishment, justice, law
Kate Harding has a terrific post in Salon pushing back against the dominant framing of the Roman Polanski arrest. Rather than first thinking of Polanski as a brilliant, persecuted director, she says, we should start here: “Roman Polanski raped a child.” Then he pleaded guilty, and fled the country before sentencing.
(Other good reading in this vein: Harding’s follow-up in Jezebel recounting the depressingly long list of Hollywood types who support Polanski. And Bill Wyman’s pushback against obseqious coverage of a 2008 documentary about the Polanski case.)
But something else in the Polanski tale keeps catching my eye. From the CNN report on Polanski’s arrest:
Polanski was accused of plying a 13-year-old girl with champagne and a sliver of a quaalude tablet and performing various sex acts, including intercourse, with her during a photo shoot at actor Jack Nicholson’s house. He was 43 at the time.
Nicholson was not at home, but his girlfriend at the time, actress Anjelica Huston, was.
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Categories: Pop Culture
September 22, 2009 · 9 Comments
Hey, remember when John Edwards was running for president, and his wife’s cancer returned? And then he was caught having had an affair, and he lied about not having an affair? But then he had to admit that he did have an affair, but he denied that the child of the woman he had an affair with was his, but nobody believed him because he’s a liar who cheated on his wife who had cancer? And then he stopped running for president because nobody wants a president who cheats on his wife who had cancer and lies about it? Remember that? Yeah, this guy:
Mr. Edwards is moving toward an abrupt reversal in his public posture; associates said in interviews that he is considering declaring that he is the father of Ms. Hunter’s 19-month-old daughter, something that he once flatly asserted in a television interview was not possible. Friends and other associates of Mr. Edwards and his wife of 32 years, Elizabeth, say she has resisted the idea of her husband’s claiming paternity. Mrs. Edwards, who is battling cancer, “has yet to be brought around,” said one family friend.
Way to take responsibility after lying to the world, John Edwards! Especially now that nobody in America wants to ever hear your name again! Oh, also there’s this:
[P]eople who know Ms. Hunter said she was planning to move with her daughter, Frances, from New Jersey to North Carolina in coming months.
Those are going to be some fun Christmas dinners with the whole fam!
It’s not really fair to say that one case of adultery is worse than another. But in a recent Atlantic essay, Caitlin Flanagan put what Edwards did in perspective to devastating effect.
Writing about Helen Gurley Brown, Elizabeth Edwards, and infidelity, Flanagan first recounts the funeral of a teenage boy who died in a car crash — the same way the Edwardses’ son Wade died in 1996. Then she pivots to what John Edwards’s infidelity means in such a context:
Things fell apart when they tried to spade in the earth, and there was screaming and titanic grief, and you were in the position of watching someone being forced—physically forced—to bear the unbearable. At last it was done, and the family stumbled back up the hill to the air-conditioned cars with the liveried drivers, and the mother collapsed into one car, and the door was shut solidly behind her, sealing her into her shadowed madness.
“You are so hot,” Rielle Hunter said to John Edwards 10 years after he and his wife buried their first boy, and after they had started a new family, and after they had given their all to a presidential campaign—with the personal losses and long separations that come with it—and after Elizabeth had been diagnosed with cancer and undergone a disfiguring surgery and chemotherapy and lost her hair and been handed a recalculated set of odds about her life expectancy with two very small children who needed their mother.
What a creep.
Categories: Politics
Tagged: Caitlin Flanagan, infidelity, John Edwards
When was the last time you played pinball?
If you’re a normal person — i.e. you don’t make pilgrimages to arcade “museums”, like I do — I’d guess a decade or more. Where would you even find one to play? The only place I know of in D.C. that has pinball is the Black Cat (Attack From Mars and Spider-Man, I believe).
I thought about pinball’s physical disappearance as I watched Tilt: The Battle to Save Pinball the other night. The 2006 documentary charts the inexorable decline of Williams’ pinball division, as the pre-eminent pinball maker of the ’80s and ’90s tried to “reinvent” pinball at the turn of the millennium.
While Tilt studiously avoids positing a direct cause for Williams’ demise, its subtext is pinball’s cultural disappearance. After all, Williams wouldn’t have needed to make pinball relevant again if it were still part of the culture. But it’s hard for something to stay culturally relevant when people rarely encounter it.
Pinball didn’t reach the brink of extinction — Stern is the only manufacturer left — because people lost interest, but because people forgot pinball even existed. And for this we can’t blame Williams’ doomed-from-the-start Pinball 2000 initiative, Jar-Jar Binks (who played a role in said doomed initiative), or simple disinterest and flipper fatigue. Rather, pinball disappeared from the American cultural map because the one place where most people encountered pinball — the arcade — disappeared, rendered irrelevant by the home-video-game boom heralded by the first Playstation.
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Categories: Video games
Tagged: arcades, pinball, Playstation, Tilt
The idea of journalists, particularly editors, as curators has gained traction as forward-thinking news organizations realize the value of being a trusted filter for readers. (Though there are definitely detractors.) And while more news orgs still need to get comfortable aggregating content produced elsewhere, I think we’ve been missing a big part of the curation discussion: the growing importance of journalists as curators of their own newsroom’s content.
I’ve been thinking about this since reading (*cough* back in the spring *cough*) Martin Langeveld’s vision of how content will flow in future newsrooms, and Matt Thompson’s imagining the difficulties of implementing the alternative workflows such “content cascades” will require.
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Categories: Journalism
Tagged: Content Cascade, Curating, News
The “church” of Scientology reached a strange kind of mainstream success this decade. Sure, Tom Cruise’s summer of 2005 and indoctrination video might have raised some eyebrows. But Scientology’s reputation seems to have become “the wacky-but-harmless religion that Tom Cruise and John Travolta belong to.”
I’d chalk that up to a few factors: Star power and obsequious entertainment media. American culture’s general shift toward multiculturalism and, for the enlightened majority post-9/11, religious tolerance. A shrug-your-shoulders, post-modern “Scientology is no more bizarre than other religions” attitude among potential cynics. And, of course, the fruits of the group’s notoriously litigious/personally invasive stance toward pretty much anyone who had anything bad to say about Scientology in the ’80s and ’90s.
The St. Petersburg Times’ recent expose, on Scientology’s staff culture of intimidation and abuse allegedly driven by leader David Miscavige, won’t change all that. But if Scientology’s fortunes and reputation decline in the coming years, the paper’s stories recounting defectors’ accusations should mark a turning point.
The group had one possible strategy for persuasively rebutting the Times stories: deny everything. Instead, the hapless response turned into a classic emperor-has-no-clothes moment — the ostensibly matured Scientology revealed (or re-revealed) as a pitiful personality cult that no one should even consider taking seriously again.
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Categories: Uncategorized
One mark of Michael Jackson’s cultural impact is the strain his death put on the Internet. Another is the number of appreciations, tributes, and responses that have been written about him in the past three days (and the range of people writing those pieces). Here’s a roundup of the best I’ve read so far.
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Categories: Music · Pop Culture
I’ve been waiting for a decade for someone to write this story, and finally Andrew Curry did it for Wired: how Settlers of Catan and its German brethren revived the moribund and sorry (make that Sorry!) state of board games.
Curry nails why American board games are so lame — “either predictable fluff aimed at kids or competitive, hyperintellectual pastimes for eggheads” — and why Settlers is so engaging: players are involved even when it’s not their turn; trading makes the game social, which makes it more fun; the board is always different; there are several possible routes to victory.
He also provides some tidbits that turn this into a plausible trend piece:
Last year, Settlers doubled its sales on this side of the Atlantic, moving 200,000 copies in the US and Canada—almost unheard-of performance for a new strategy game with nothing but word-of-mouth marketing. It has become the first German-style title to make the leap from game-geek specialty stores to major retailers like Barnes & Noble and Toys “R” Us.
But I’d quibble with one thing: Settlers of Catan isn’t actually perfect.
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Categories: Pop Culture
January 23, 2009 · 1 Comment
Great post by Kevin Kelly on why the future of entertainment (and more!) will involve renting rather than owning, but having access to anything at any time.
This is key: “The chief holdup to full-scale conversion from ownership to omni-access is the issue of modification and control. In traditional property regimes only owners have the right to modify or control the use of the property. The right of modification is not transferred in rental, leasing, or licensing agreements.”
We have yet to deal with the legal (and cultural) ramifications of an entertainment world where everything is pure information rather than a physical object, and where you pay to access the information but not to own it. Those ramifications deserve an article or book of their own.
Categories: Internet · Movies · Music · Pop Culture · Technology
Tagged: consumer products, copyright law, entertainment, ownership, Personal technology, Pop Culture, renting, Technology & Science
I’m a crazy Indian food fan, so it wasn’t hard picking a restaurant for a special dual-birthday dinner.
Rasika was one of the top 7 picks in Washington Post food critic Tom Sietsema’s 2008 Dining Guide, and it was the second-highest-ranked Indian restaurant (41st overall) on Washingtonian’s 2008 Top 100. And while I’d eat Udupi Palace’s lunch buffet for every meal if I could, I’d never been to a “modern” Indian restaurant.
Sitting at home with a full tummy (and with a bagful of leftovers in the fridge), I’m glad we went. But I’m also disappointed. For all the hype about Rasika’s innovative flair, the ostensible centerpieces of our meal consisted of the usual curry suspects available at any Indian restaurant.
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Categories: Food
This deserves an essay-length post, but for now video game fans should check out this excerpt from Nathan Rabin’s latest My Year of Flops entry at The Onion A.V. Club. It’s about Delgo, a fiasco of an animated movie, but perfectly describes why most video game stories are terrible.
Delgo immediately digs itself into a huge hole with an incredibly confusing, convoluted opening explosion of exposition via voiceover narration from Sally Kellerman outlining a fantasy realm staggering in its pointless complexity. You see, once upon a time in a land called Jhamora there lived a bunch of slithery lizard-people known as the Lokni. A loss of natural resources forced a bunch of dragonfly-looking motherfuckers known as the Nohrin to settle on Jhamora with the permission of the Lokni. Alas, Sedessa (voiced by Anne Bancroft), the power-mad sister of Nohrin king King Zahn (voiced by Louis Gossett Jr., the young people’s favorite) decides to terrorize the Lokni out of a sense of racial superiority. In the process she and her goons murder the father (Burt Reynolds) of the titular young Lokni boy-lizard (voiced by Freddie Prinze Jr.). Meanwhile, Sedessa is stripped of her wings and banished from the kingdom of the Nhorin as punishment for her brutality. Fifteen years later, Sedessa forms a strategic alliance with a race of ogre people and conspires with one General Raius to exacerbate tensions between the Lokni and Nhorin people so war will break out and she can seize power.
Does that make any fucking sense at all? Incidentally, all of this unfolds in the five minutes of exposition that opens the film. I was immediately lost. I found myself thinking, “Why am I expected to care about this?” and “Am I going to be tested on this?” instead of waiting breathlessly to find out what happened next. Before the action had even started I was hopelessly confused. …
Movies like Dragon Wars, Wing Commander and Delgo err in thinking that sci-fi audiences embrace movies like Lord Of The Rings, Star Wars and The Matrix because they have elaborate, involved mythologies, not despite then.
The Lord Of The Rings of the world suck audiences into their fantastical worlds with engaging characters, non-stop spectacle and compelling storylines, then get them to care about their mythologies. Delgo, on the other hand, assumes that the battle is won before it’s even begun and that audiences will give a mad-ass fuck about the complicated interrelationship between the Lokni and the Nohrin races because the film’s mythology was cobbled together from bits and pieces of The Dark Crystal, Lord Of The Rings and Star Wars.
I can’t begin to list the number of video games that make this mistake. Even critically acclaimed or otherwise interesting games, like Okami and Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, stunt themselves with this nonsense.
I stopped wanting to explore Oblivion’s world and backstory, for example, as soon as I came across gobbledygook like: “The Khajiit began the fight in an unusual way by sending tree-cutting teams of Cathay-raht and the fearsome Senche-raht or ‘Battlecats’ into the outskirts of Valenwood’s forests.”
In light of Rabin’s great column, I’ll be interested to try out some of the winners of the Interactive Fiction Competition that Chris Dahlen notes in another A.V. Club piece.
Categories: Video games
