Category: Entertainment

I’ve changed my mind — I want one. When first the Playstation Portable was announced, I thought that handhelds were for teenagers, while adults did their geeky gaming in the privacy of their own homes with the curtains drawn. But as details of the PSP have steadily crept out, my interest has steadily increased.

The latest bit of info to be released indicates the PSP will indeed have internal WiFi to connect to Playstation (2? 3?) or PC and head-to-head gaming. It will also be more powerful than the current Playstation 2, though that’s on a “polygon for polygon” count, and polygon’s aren’t everything. But they’re a big part of it, if this video of a game called Death Jr. (a Tim Burton inspired platformer) is any indication.

The release of the PSP is still up in the air, but this recent news indicates that it’s not vaporware, and gives some credence to the expected March 2005 release date. Price, and other specs, are still unknown.

Check out this amusing little flash animation which has Gollum rapping about his travails in Middle Earth. Funny Stuff.

Brian Briggs over at BBspot has written a very thorough review of the current digital music store offerings, including iTunes Music Store, the “New” Napster, Musicmatch, Rhapsody, Wal-Mart, BuyMusic, and oldster EMusic. Though I’m still pretty fond of CDs, myself, this is just the sort of round-up that many music fans have been waiting for. (The site is currently encountering a bit of Slashdot effect, so be patient.)

Kazaa has struck a deal to distribute Hindi-language film Supari, which will be made available to Kazaa users for just $3. Soundtrack tunes cost about $1. The deal marks the first feature film distribution for Kazaa, and perhaps a turning point in the perception of P2P networks as inherently illegal. To bolster the positive image of P2P, Kazaa is taking out print ads touting the benefits of distributed file-sharing and the ways it can help industry.

This Sunday night, from 8 to11pm, the Discovery Channel is running Rocket Challenge, a marathon of three 1-hour shows devoted to amateur rocketry. From the previews, it looks like they at least did a great job filming lift-offs and in-flight camera sequences. I’ve been amazed that there haven’t been more of these rocketry shows on Discovery, TLC, etc. Hopefully, we can look forward to more in the future.

The rumors have been confirmed (by the man himself): Street Tech’s fave comics writer, Warren Ellis, confirmed today that the WB has bought the rights to his Global Frequency comic series. In Warren’s Bad Signal e-list, he writes:

I forget all the details and I’m freezing bloody cold in the pub, but as I remember the deal comes with a script commitment — my friend the screenwriter John Rogers is writing and developing — and I’m on as a consultant and producer. There will, of course, be necessary adaptations to the TV medium — that’s just the nature of the beast — but John is nailing the tone of the series admirably.

For those who aren’t familiar with GF, it’s a cool concept: a smart mob of far-flung agents are called, via cell phones, to do some piece of a secret agent job — it’s distributed crime fighting!

Vivendi Universal announced today that Half Life 2 won’t be released for the holidays ’03 ’cause a third of the source code had been stolen by hackers. Apparently a hacker managed to “introduce software” via the company’s email system that enabled the theft.

Two questions spring to mind: 1) Ah…no back-up copy? and 2) who the hell at a game company would be stupid enough to open an attached executable that could suck away part of such an important product’s source code? (assuming that’s what happened).

The chickens are coming home to roost as an alternative to RSS is being developed. I love this stuff.

Battle of the blog | CNET News.com:

“‘Dave Winer has done a tremendous amount of work on RSS and invented important parts of it and deserves a huge amount of credit for getting us as far as we have,’ Tim Bray, a member of the World Wide Web Consortium’s (W3C) influential Technical Architecture Group, wrote in a June 23 Web log entry. (Bray is also a co-creator of Extensible Markup Language (XML), a (W3C)-recommended language on which RSS is based.) ‘However, just looking around, I observe that there are many people and organizations who seem unable to maintain a good working relationship with Dave.’

The posting, which has served as a flashpoint for those on both sides of the controversy, has understandably drawn Winer’s wrath.

‘Why has my personality become the issue? They’re using that to try to get me to shut up,’ Winer said in an interview. ‘I think most people don’t have a difficult time working with me. It’s unfair. It’s untrue. And it’s unbecoming of someone of (Bray’s) stature to make statements like that. You can’t create things with flames–you can only tear things down with flames. If they want to create things, they can’t do it with the dislike of one person.'”

It’s a conspiiiiiiracy!!

Just a reminder that ST’s favorite show, Junkyard Mega-Wars is premiering its 11th season tonight (Wednesday) at 9:00 p.m. Eastern. Back with an all-new format and all-too-pretty new hosts (including an ex-Temptation Island contestant with apparently no mechanical chops) the show looks like it may have lost some of its original rough edges, which is what made it appealing in the first place. It could still be fun though, so tune in tonight and watch the teams take on their first challenge: snowmobiles!