Google have celebrated Roger Hargreaves 76th birthday with a whole stack of Mr. Men logos. As far as I can discern from the javascript there are 16 of them, after the cut. View full article »
Category: Art
*Post originally contained information on how to backup your comics, redacted at the request of Comixology’s CEO.*
Digital comics are a great thing, and I’m slowly amassing a reasonable library of them through the fantastic Comics.app (Comixology) on the iPhone/iPad. One thing concerns me though and almost holds me back from buying all the issues of Witchblade I want so I have the full collection. Seeing as I’m currently selling all my dead tree copies of the same I want to know that my digital comics are safe & not going to go anywhere. There’s no option on Comixology to view what you’ve purchased in the past and certainly no options to download CBR’s or similar of your purchases. As has just been pointed out to me by David Steinberger (Comixology CEO) they are indeed viewable on the web, here:
Comixology Online Comic Viewer – Account login required.
I swear that was white paging for me last night, which is why I decided to look into scripting an extraction process in the first place.
So the problem with digital distribution is that in a lot of cases you do not really own what you buy. What happens when digital distribution providers vanish? You are normally left with a purchase encumbered by DRM that you cannot read. Your investment wasted. This is a worrying development in consumers rights. If I purchase a comic/book/cd/game in a bricks and mortar store nobody can really take that away from me. I can scan it/copy it and keep it if I so wish and nobody is really going to know unless I start waving it around on the web. I can also loan the item itself to friends. They can enjoy that and go on to collect/purchase the item or recommend it to their friends leading to increased sales. Admittedly Kindle are doing this now and it’s a great thing, bringing some of the functionality of real books into the digital world.
What if I choose/amforced to abandon the provider… Say I no longer can use an iPhone/Android or have some argument with Amazon and refuse to use their services? I have made those purchases, not rented them. It’s not like deciding to avoid Waterstones or Sainsbury’s.
How do I take them with me? Well in many ways as it happens but with laws such as the DMCA and others it makes it potentially illegal to do so. Like so many strict interpretations of copyright law when handled by corporations they criminalise and therefore marginalise the very people who are the biggest fans. A recent example of this for me was the BBC’s showing of some of Bob Monkhouse archive. He was a huge huge fan of TV/Radio comedy and did everything he could to archive these for his personal use. It got him arrested, although charges were eventually dropped. Some TV shows now recognise this dichotomy, I believe Tru Blood is very lenient towards it’s fans use of it’s imagery. Other’s not so (*cough*Harry Potter*cough*). Another recent example I saw on 4chan’s /co/ board. Somebody had ripped and posted scans of an entire comic for others to read, effectively saying this is ace look look! The author of the comic noticed and joined in the thread, not to condemn but to encourage. Get out there, read my stuff, please buy my books. That’s to be applauded, it clearly worked for him and drove sales. Perhaps that only works for the smaller publishers… would it have worked to promote say, AP Comics Darkham Vale or Com.X’s Bazooka Jules, the first two issues said x/6 the 3rd said no such thing and turned out to be the last. Similar stories exist with Young Liars by David Lapham and other big names as well and that series was beguiling, confusing and excellent. It didn’t work for the piloted and then leaked TV version of Warren Ellis’ Global Frequency, mores the shame.
I for one am happy to get digital comic books to read for less than a 1/3 of the price UK stores tend to charge. It’ the price point digital distribution should be, significantly less than the corporeal version not some 10% tip of the hat. iBooks especially but Kindle and Waterstones etc. take note… your prices are a fucking joke, in some cases 50% plus (amazon) higher than you yourself sell the dead tree version. There is NO way a digital copy of a book should ever cost more than the dead tree version. Are they trying to protect their paper manufacturing arms? Perhaps publishers, in a vertical investment, have shares in managed forests, tree felling, pulping and paper producing industries and they think this protects their alternate revenue streams.
I’m not new to Kevin J. Anderson’s writing by any stretch but this is certainly the first novel of his that has left me in such an undecided state. I’m not a fan of his style but I did enjoy several of the Dune universe extensions he wrote with Frank Herbert’s son. What differs here is that this is something entirely of his own creation and something he obviously has a very clear vision of. The book itself has believable and likeable characters occupying a well thought out universe with a pretty damn good plot to tie it all together. It ends a bit abruptly but I find that entirely forgivable seeing as all seven books are out. It may feel derivative to someone who has read a lot of space opera with the usual diplomacy, suppressed peoples, mystical/religious cultures and of course impending doom but the book never felt too derivative in that respect.
I enjoyed the book and indeed want to know what happens both to some species and individual characters/relationships. I will without doubt read the next one in the series, although I probably won’t devote the same amount of time to absorbing each word like I normally would. So what has spurred me to write a review? Something has always niggled about Anderson’s writing and I’ve never been able to characterise why in the past, reading this novel solidified why. The main problem is two fold, repetition and repetition. Err.. sorry I meant repetition. Did I write that again? Maybe I thought you didn’t take it in properly in the preceding sentence. I understood very quickly that several things were true, the proud Ildiran Solar Navy was undefeatable for example. Or the Klikiss robots made some uneasy. Or that the Theron Green Priests could communicate instantly via Treelings and that they represented a huge knowledge base etc. etc. That’s fine but telling me the same thing over and over again every time they are mentioned or perform an action is unnecessary at least and at worst insulting. Each time the solar navy performs a manoeuvre or a general is mentioned you do not need to remind me how proud they are, normally using the same sentence structure/adjectives. Another issue is that the book rarely surprises as the author’s intentions are telegraphed too far in advance, this isn’t always related to the repetition but is certainly a bedfellow of it. Consequently you know many of the stories key moments chapters ahead of schedule and in some cases at the beginning of the book.
It’s a shame in a way as I can’t shake the feeling that with a better editor the story being told here would truly shine and deliver some genuine moments along the way. That’s not to say it doesn’t or cannot surprise but I get the feeling it could be so much more. I’m also not saying it wasn’t an enjoyable enough read. Perhaps that’s the highest compliment I can give it. I enjoyed the book enough that the problems it does have inspired me to complain about them. If the story and characters were not compelling I would simply dismiss it and move on.
A lot of it, possibly, can be attributed to the platform. On the PC I could, as far as possible, do things about the problems that vexed me. Although I never had a problem with slow down I did install a custom d3d dll which doubled my frame rate and got rid of most of the lag when going into VATS. I also installed a mod allowing ovens to be used to cook food, whether or not they worked was based on Luck. You could repair them with flamer fuel and a pilot light. I also only encountered 2 mission based bugs, both of which had work arounds on wikia.com.
In fable 3 though there is one bug and one feature which are greatly annoying and I am powerless to do anything about them.
- The frame rate is completely unpredictable with slow down at random times none of which seem to be related to the amount going on graphically. It drops to less than 10fps easily. It’s not a deal breaker as it doesn’t happen in combat but it’s incredibly irritating.
- More irritating than that is Jasper, it’s not his or John Cleese’s fault who is excellent. It’s rather the constant exhortation that there is something new in the sanctuary shop should I want to take a look. Every time I visit the sanctuary, which I need to do to change spells/weapons/clothes which is quite often. Shut UP! Stop telling me to buy the fucking DLC. I don’t want black dye! Lionhead, what the hell were you thinking? If people want the content, they will buy it. You have no need to ram it down our throats.
I’m also undecided on the quality of individual script dialogue. A lot of it this time seems to be self consciously poking fun at the nature of the game and games of it’s ilk in general. In the case of one quest with 3 wizards and rescuing a princess it’s obviously parody and very much part of the quest in that you are partaking in a table top rpg session. There it works well. In a quest I’ve just done involving Reaver it’s out of context, breaks immersion and smacks of laziness. I hope there is more of it but used well like the former example and not like the latter.
In more positive news, the game is excellent and a clear improvement on Fable 2. The combat is streamlined, I like the way the weapons change. In pretty much every key area that I’ve discovered so far the game is improved. I can’t comment on plot as I have not yet completed the game and it would be unfair to do so until I have.
So please Lionhead, sort out the frame rate and tone down the number of times Jasper tries to persuade me to visit the sanctuary shop. I’m not buying the DLC, in part because I already have most of it from codes provided with the pre-order (yet the game does not recognise this and would quite happily let me purchase them, which is appalling behaviour by MS Live/Lionhead whomever is responsible) and secondly I don’t accept that a few dyes are worth any MS Points at all.
So many changes have been made, which doesn’t always feel like you’re getting anywhere. I’ve made it so that Recipes sent in any form are transmitted as JPEG’s at 50% quality, it seems you can set the quality level of JPEG but not PNG. This should help mitigate the possibility of a recipe being 20-30MB of data if somebody decides to create one for a cooking lesson. E.g. lots of small steps, each one illustrated.
The iPhone application has been changed into a tabbar/navbar app allowing for a permanent and separate recipe view. This meant that a lot of iPad specific code was no longer specific and could be moved to the shared classes. It also acted as an impetus to solve some of the pettier iPad specific bugs relating to that view. I also decided to adopt the iPad unified view rather than the iPhone versions recipe summary/ingredient and method split.
Many things to fix still such as image zoom, pdf generation, preview images in emailed content, ingredient/step management, category combining, whole category emailing? etc.
It also heralded the first time I’ve used the app start to finish to write in a recipe then add photographs to the steps later on. It worked fine. I also used it to record recipes from Fallout New Vegas so I could scavenge the right stuff for them in my wasteland wanderings.
A surfeit of Pumkin/Apple provided by my sister and the garden trees respectively prompted a baking of Pumpkin Pie, Apple Pie and Blackberry and Apple Pie. Lamb and Pumpkin Tagine was also cooked. Sadly time got the better of me and a lot of the pumpkin has since decided that it’s cellulose based cell walls are not, anymore. Shame, I was hoping to make a pumpkin chutney.
I guess there must be a fuckton of starcraft players out there with macs. Hopefully not the same specs or macs though.
Interestingly I have experienced both of the issues this apparently fixes.
Two little icons…..
Camera Icon
Text Icon
Good day. Silly exc_bad_access bug resolved. A macro in gdb to print the retainCount (mentioned in a previously posted link) is indeed very handy. Spamming this through the code was also useful:
NSLog(@"%@ <nameoffunction>",self); <--- (or with another %@ and adding parameters)
where nameoffunction and the code itself was in things like dealloc, viewWillAppear, viewDidLoad etc. Thus when it crashed and I could see the memory address as it would be somewhere in the debug console, this along with breakpoints at the aforementioned retainCount macro (or just typing print (int)[object retainCount] ) helped greatly.
Also interesting how sometimes the retain count is not what I thought it should be. For example a custom table cell is deallocated. This table cell was created the normal way with dequeueReusableCellWithIdentifier and then had a property set to an object. So something like:
CustomTableCell *cell = [self.tableView dequeueReusableCellWithIdentifier:@"CustomTableCell"]; cell.anObject = (AnObject *)newObject;Where newObject was obtained from Core Data with the fetchedResultsController returning a MSManagedObject. In this case you just cast it to the type of object you want, as above. You see I would have thought that my newObject/anObject had a retainCount of 2 so when it’s deallocating the custom cell having deallocated the tableView it was in I should do this:
-(void)dealloc { [anObject release]; [super release]; }however checking the retain count for the object showed it to already be 0 at that point. The retain count never went above 1, e.g. the initial creation of it inside the table view. Once the superfluous release was commented out the problem went away and there are still no memory links, so it’s definitely not a case of fixing a problem by creating another.
On the opposite side of the coin if I create a view it’s retain count is 1. If I assign that view to a view controller I would expect it to be 2. Commonly once it’s assigned you can release it to return the retainCount to 1. However it isn’t the case. When the object is pushed to a controller the retain count went up to 5 and then dropped to 4 when release later on. Something like (pseudo code ish as I’m sans mac right now):
NewViewController *newView = [[NewViewController alloc] initWithNibName:@"NewView"]; newView.anObject = (AnObject *)newObject; [self.navigationController pushNewViewController:newView animated:YES];I assume the retain count for the view increases as things are assigned to it’s member properties.
Anyway the app at this stage is now, to the best of my knowledge, bug free. That leaves me open to implement the final view needed; and also the most bitchy complicated dynamic one.
On another note I’m a complete Dragon Age whore. I am intrigued by the warning on the just released golem DLC which essentially says “This is fucking hard”. I hope so as the rest of it, although fun, has been piss easy.
Two days chasing down a bug and the first thing to enter my mind is “I squished a bug”. Yeah I own the album and the song was stuck in my head. So……
“I Squished a Bug” an ode to GDB, sung to the tune of “I Kissed a Girl” by Katy Perry
This was never the way I planned,
not my intention.
I got so brave,
drink in hand.
Lost my debugger
Its not what, I’m used to.
Just wanna try you on.
I’m curi-ous for you,
caught my attention.
I squished a bug and I liked it,
the trace of it’s memory was cryptic.
I squished a bug just to fry it,
I hope the maintainer don’t fight it.
It felt so wrong,
it felt so right.
Don’t mean it’s released tonight.
I squished a bug and I liked it.
(I liked it)
No, I dont even know your frame,
it doesn’t matter.
Your my initial save,
just out of alpha.
It’s not what good code does.
Not how it should behave.
My head gets, so confused.
Hard to assay.
I squished a bug and I liked it,
the trace of it’s memory was cryptic.
I squished a bug just to fry it,
I hope the maintainer don’t fight it.
It felt so wrong,
it felt so right.
Don’t mean it’s released tonight.
I squished a bug and I liked it.
(I liked it)
You are so hackable.
Soft shell, bad bits, so flipable
Hard to resist,
so stackable.
Too good to deny it.
Ain’t no big deal,
it’s innocent.
I squished a bug and I liked it,
the trace of it’s memory was cryptic.
I squished a bug just to fry it,
I hope the maintainer don’t fight it.
It felt so wrong,
it felt so right.
Don’t mean it’s released tonight.
I squished a bug and I liked it.
(I liked it)
This is awesome, an american reporter (I think) who worked in Japan for years covering the tokyo underground managed to persuade 3 real Yakuza to play Sega’s awesome Yakuza 3. The first 2 were good and the fourth is very good. The third has recently come out in the west. I’ve been playing it, it’s ace. 
It’s surprising and witty.
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