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Jan 15

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BlogFox Braindump!

I don’t have a lot of insightful, funny, lengthy stuff to post, but rather a bunch of odds and ends that don’t lend themselves to lengthy discourse… hence – fear my braindump:

Jan 12

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2008 – A year in funnybooks

*May not be representative of most comics retailers

I actually discovered the group blog The Savage Critics because of Brian Hibbs interesting column Tilting at Windmills. There are all kinds of good blogs from the “through-the-looking-glass” world of comic-book retail – but Brian has a penchant for distilling all kinds of nit-picky retail data into a comprehensible fashion. He recently posted two quick lists of his store’s 2008 top-sellers (one for “books” and one for “comics” (“books” primarily refers to trade paperbacks and other collections not, say, prose – and “comics” refers to single-issue “floppies”… more or less).

Something fascinating struck me from Brian’s posts though. Digging through his “books” lists, I own (in some format or another) over 52% of the top 100 items from the “books” list… yet over on the “comics” list, I own less than 16% (and if you remove “DC Universe Zero” and “Trinity #1” (which I got for free from my local shop), and a couple “Astonishing X-Men” (which I bought by mistake, although ended up enjoying) that’s less than 10% I actually intentionally shelled out money for.
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Jan 8

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Watchmen Updates – What’s that on the Horizon?

no, no metaphors here

Is it a settlement? No. Not quite. Lots of good updates on Watchmen lawsuit happenings over at Film Esq. – my favourite lawblog du jour.

The Coles notes is that everyone who prophesied a quick settlement after the Dec 24th order (cough, cough) may want to take a mulligan. Fox appears to be going for the jugular looking for the court to grant their permanent injunction before any discussion of how many zeros they would like on their publishers-clearing-house-sized novelty cheque. So much so that they’ve waived their injunctive claims on any other aspect of this case (I have no idea if they had anything of value there anyway… but lawyers tend not to jettison any potential avenue of attack unless they smell blood in the water… you only need so many butter-knives to compliment your fully gassed-up chainsaw).

On the other side of the coin, I’m not entirely sure what Warner’s is thinking, or doing, since I haven’t seen any of their recent documents. But since I read judge Feess Dec 24th order, I’m still a little fuzzy on their master strategy anyway unless it involved filling up a pool with gold coins Scrooge-McDuck-style, and the putting said pool on the back of a gold truck and driving the whole shooting match over to Fox with a nice gift basket.

And maybe cushioning the basket with some nice decorative grasses.

And wads and wads of bills.

Rodney Perkins is doing a fantastic job of breaking down the (still somewhat perplexing) shenanigans in far more detail, and unlike me, I bet he doesn’t accidentally wring up accidental $10 charges every time he uses PACER:

Jan 7

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iTunes DRM Free

Yo ho ho. (Ba-DUM!)

So I get horibly sick for a few days and go and miss the, likely final, MacWorld Keynote. No offence Phil, but it just would have felt wrong without Steve anyway.

Others will cover the keynote and other show highlights better elsewhere – but I just wanted to take a moment to talk about the (nice) announcement of Apple dropping all DRM from iTunes by March 2009.

I was going to write up a little “what’s the deal” faq, but Macworld has done it better than I could and in far more depth.

The only point I have to add to this discussion is that I get a little frustrated when I read coverage that insinuates that Apple was the major roadblock to removing DRM on iTunes, because if anything they are the major reason that DRM-free music exists at all. Read more

Jan 7

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Happy New (Glurk)!

boxie2009

I decided to mix up festivities this year by apparently toasting in the new year with a large glass of influenza virus. In retrospect, I think I can see why “champagne” is probably the more traditional medium, as “general discomfort” really doesn’t do justice to the past few days.

I have trouble reading when I’m sick, but managed to squeeze some of my “unexpected bonus vacation” time to read through several collected Scary-Go-Round volumes I received over the holidays. Like clockwork, I’ve been rewarded for my diligence by John Allison turning his laser sharp pen to five brilliant panels which sum up the entirety of Canadian politics.

  • Cons: Allison may be in the back pocket of the monarchy – trying to reassert it’s colonial grasp
  • Pros: Heroic send-off for Stéphane Dion, Allison manages to avoid using (then subsequently having to define) the term prorogue.

Jan 2

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Happy New FUTURE!

I had new-years news all lined up, but I’m still ironing some kinks out of the new design (now with unnerving levels of GIANT FLOATING HEAD) – so I’ll be breif instead:

Happiest of New Years to everyone who joined me here since the sites relaunch last Spring, and remember – it may not be perfect, we may have a lot of work to do yet, but every once in a while it’s good to sit back and take a moment to give thanks that we’re lucky enough to be living IN THE FUTURE!

(Century 21 Calling, and other marvels of futurisim can be found at the always-awesome Prelinger Archives)

Dec 31

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the Torontoist is dead – No, wait, no it’s not.

This sucks. I had pre-written a great pair of thematic “out with the old, in with the new” posts to celebrate the new year, one of which has now pretty much invalidated itself over the time I was out of town for the holidays, as it turns out the patient being eulogized isn’t actually deceased. Regardless, let’s ring out / ring in the new year by mourning/celebrating the departure/return of everyone’s favourite big-smoke-centric-blog the Torontoist!
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Dec 30

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Seriously, Who’s Watching the Watchmen Lawsuit?

You've come a long way, baby

Dear Fox,
Eat All the Dicks
– Daniel O’Brien

Like lots of other bloggers, I was shocked to come out of my post-Christmas turkey induced coma to the news, broken by Michael Sieply in the New York Times, that Twentieth Century Fox has succeeded in at least some of their lawsuit against Warner Brothers relating to “Watchmen” – a ruling which now puts the proposed March 7th release of the film in jeopardy.

Now at midnight all the agents and the superhuman crew come out and round up everyone that knows more than they do.
– Bob Dylan

Like lots of comic fans, my initial reaction was annoyance – I’m a tremendous fan of Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons original work, and have been looking forward to the film with equal parts anticipation and dread. My bio notes that I’ve been hired three times to write about comic books for very disparate magazines (all three of which stopped publishing before my first columns ever saw print). It’s a testament to the depth and breadth of “Watchmen” that I was able to reference it in all three of my initial columns despite the very different audiences and focus of each. It’s one of my “hook” books to introduce adult readers to comics when they ask me to “recommend something” (although I do occasionally suggest that on first reading one can skip the supplementary text-pieces, and “tales from the black freighter” sub-plot – both of which have caused friends of mine to “stall” and not finish the book).

My frustration quickly turned from Fox to the larger press given that since Justice Feess dropped his December 24th surprise order no one was actually reporting on what the case was about, except in vague banalities like “contract dispute”. For copyright and computer law I’ve been a little bit spoiled by resources like Groklaw – wherein within moments of legal documents being available they have been widely made available and dissected into plain English by eagle-eyed legal beagles. Eaglebegles. Leaglebles.

I can’t offer that, but since no one else seemed to be looking into this, I spent yesterday morning digging through the Byzantine labyrinth of PACER (the US courts electric document filing system) to bring (hopefully) a little meat to this discussion.
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