Entertainment

Xbox 360

Daniel

Xbox 360 with controller

Last night MTV aired its Xbox 360 special. There wasn’t a lot new regarding the Xbox itself — photos of the console and the controller have been on the Internet for a couple weeks. What caught my attention most was actual gameplay footage of Perfect Dark Zero. They even had a playable deathmatch level at the event. I look forward to playing Brown in some P Diddy Zero at some point in the future.

Now that the cat is officially out of the bag, websites of all parties involved have updated. MTV has its site. Xbox360.com has launched, and it has nice pseudo-3D views of the new system and the new, wireless controller. This article at Xbox.com caught my eye because it suggests that you’ll be able to plug your iPod into the Xbox 360’s USB 2.0 ports and listen to your music collection that way. That sounds like just about the best idea I’ve ever heard.

The 360’s hard drive appears to be removeable, meaning that it will likely be optional. If I could use my iPod in lieu of the Xbox-branded hard drive, I would almost certainly go that route. I read on one of the gaming sites that a third party — or Microsoft itself — could release a peripheral that you attach to the Xbox hard drive, turning it into a portable media player. Whatever works.

Xbox 360

With Teeth

Daniel

So there’s a new Nine Inch Nails album out.

Somehow, I didn’t know about it until after it was released. Usually I keep abreast of these things by checking out the NIN page and The NIN Hotline.

The album, With Teeth, was released May 3 (or maybe May 5), 2005. I checked nin.com and lo and behold, they started regular updates on May 5, 2004. I swear to god I checked that site May 4, 2004. Since then? Not so much.

I got the album in DualDisc format. I almost went with the standard CD version, but the DD version included a video on the DVD side. It also has a discography and the album in 2.0 and 5.1 DVD-Audio.

I haven’t even listened to the whole thing yet. As soon as I listen to it a couple times, I’ll post some sort of review. (Traditionally I don’t like NIN albums at first but then appreciate them more the more I listen.) The disc included no book insert. Kind of weird, kind of dumb. It did, however, include a picture of Trent Reznor. If memory serves, that’s a first since Pretty Hate Machine, and in both cases the picture is distorted. Interesting.

Oh, and it’s a single disc, not a double disc like The Fragile, so don’t worry about paying twenty four bucks this time around.

With Teeth

I Like Video Games

Daniel

This November, Microsoft will release the new Xbox.

This Thursday, MTV will air a half hour program to present the new Xbox to the public for the first time.

Look for the new Xbox to be smaller, silver, and offer an optional hard drive. Controllers will likely be wireless by default. I expect that Xbox 1 games will play on the new system, just like PS1 games play on the PS2.

The name of the new console almost certainly will be Xbox 360.

The PS3 won’t come out until 2006, probably May at the earliest.

The new Nintendo system? No one is sure yet.

As you might recall, the PS2 came out in fall 2000, and the Xbox and Gamecube came out in fall 2001. The PS2 got a lead that it never gave up in this generation of consoles. Microsoft is betting that the because of the head start, the last console war was effectively over before it started.

I Like Video Games

ESPN Gripe

Daniel1 Comment

Let me get this straight — as part of the Trifecta, Baseball Tonight gets twenty measley minutes … but Sportscenter gets ninety?

Regarding Sportscenter: First off, they throw in stuff like WNBA draft news to fill ninety minutes. Second, yesterday at 6 PM before the first commercial break, around 6:15, they previewed a story about the new Buffalo Bills quarterback, JP Losman. I wanted to see the story, but for all I knew, it was an hour away!

Regarding BBTN: I want the full hour. I want to see a multiple hit outline of every game that day. Both leagues, top to bottom. I want to see one or more of the following: Harold Reynolds, John Kruk, Peter Gammons, and Tim Kurkjian. And preferably Karl Ravich. Larry Bowa’s okay, but I really don’t want him unless he’s next to Kruk.

By the way — whatever happened to Dave “Soup” Campbell?

Regarding “The Trifecta:” I don’t care about Between the Lines. I don’t want it for twenty minutes, I don’t want it for sixty minutes, and I sure as hell don’t want it cutting into my BBTN. And I don’t even know what the last part of the Trifecta is. NBA 2Nite? Who cares. Give me the Rockies recap. And give me 6-10 Web Gems every night. Five isn’t enough, and everybody knows it.

ESPN Gripe

Spider-Man DVD

Daniel

In Summer 2003 I talked up a TV show: the CGI Spider-Man cartoon on MTV. It was hot. I loved it. It was cel-shaded. That means it looked like a traditional cartoon, but it was done with computers. The first time I saw that effect done on TV was the ship on Futurama. Nowadays you mostly see it in video games like Jet Set Future Radio on Xbox and The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker on Gamecube.

So anyway, sometime between Summer 2003 and … two days ago — let’s split the difference and call it Spring 2004 — I spotted a Spider-Man: The New Animated Series DVD at Wal-Mart. Only problem was, it contained only three episodes. I found another disc containing an additional three episodes. But I wanted the whole first season.

I have to interject here. If you go to the archive page and read my 2003.07.25 23:34 post [UPDATE: link], you’ll see that I spoke about the show and actually said, “When they put out a DVD, I’m gonna snap it up.”

So I was at K-Mart two days ago and came across this. The whole first season, two disc set, audio commentary, special features, widescreen. I nearly soiled myself right there. $19.99. The three-episode discs were like eight bucks a pop. So I snatched it up. I give it five stars out of five.

Spider-Man DVD

Encore

Daniel

I picked up Encore, the new Eminem album, about two weeks ago. Before I give my thoughts on his fourth album, I want to point out that I was wary about it because I was disappointed with his third album, The Eminem Show. There were too many songs about Eminem exploring his inner feelings. I want to hear songs about drugs and Sonny Bono, not how Eminem’s daughter might have a hard time dealing with the deterioration of her parents’ relationship. Now there are two or three songs about Kim on the new album — that’s pushing it — and I’ll get to that. The last album also had D12 material. It sucked. And I didn’t really need to listen to Eminem singing. (He sang about his mom in one song. That was kind of a double whammy.)

The new album rocks. I’ve been listening to it a lot. It’s obviously better than the third album, better than The Slim Shady LP, and maybe — maybe — better than The Marshall Mathers LP. It has D12 songs, but they’re good. Eminem sings, but it’s okay. One song, Puke, is about Kim, but it’s my favorite song on the album, so it’s okay.

There are also some poo sounds. Watch out for that.

You can also get Encore in a Shady Collector Edition. I looked at it when I picked up my copy of the standard edition at FYE in the Arnot Mall, and it cost something like eight bucks more. On Amazon it’s twelve bucks extra. All you get is some photos. It’s a ripoff, so I passed on it.

Additionally … FYE had a three dollar rebate offer. I was going to send it in, but from what I could tell I had to cut the UPC symbol out of the CD art. It seems to me like that’s a way to deface the CD, thereby making it unreturnable … I think this is a ploy to prevent piracy. Maybe the FBI Anti-Piracy warning on the back of the album helped me reach that conclusion.

Encore

iPod Issues

Daniel

As most of you know, I purchased an iPod about four months ago. It comes with iTunes, which is free, and iTunes is the application you use to transfer songs to (but not from) your iPod. Under Apple’s EULA (and as physically restricted by iTunes), you can only use each iPod on one computer.

So that’s two strikes against Apple’s way of doing things.

For the past year, I’ve been spending most of my nights in scenic Coudersport, Pennsylvania because of work. My Dell is at home in Chipmonk. I have my work laptop with me in Coudersport. My iPod is associated with my Dell per Apple’s restrictions. I insist on using my iPod with whatever computer is nearby. To facilitate this, I downloaded a program called EphPod. I was happy with it. It allowed me to move songs from my work laptop to my iPod. But it wasn’t great. I felt that the user interface was confusing, and didn’t allow me to see what was going on or really take much control over the process. I was aware of another iPod utility that I had read about in the same place I read about EphPod — sites like iPodLounge.

So I downloaded the trial version of Anapod Explorer. It uses the Explorer interface, which assuages my gripes with EphPod. The full version, which costs $25, allows you to transfer songs from the iPod to your computer. And Red Chair Software encourages you to use your paid license on more than one computer. This solves my whole main-computer-there-work-computer-here issue.

So the only feature missing from Anapod Explorer is a ripper. Its support pages recommend Audiograbber, which is freeware. At this point, that’s a requirement. When you install it “out of the box,” it will only encode up to 56 Kbps. This is unacceptable. But Audiograbber’s download page contains links to some MP3 encoder .dlls which allow you to encode MP3s up to 320 Kbps.

I haven’t used Audiograbber to rip any CDs as I write this, but it looks robust enough, and if it’s got Red Chair Software’s endorsement, I’ll commit some time to it.

Interestingly, I went home this last weekend and had some trouble with iTunes. I connected the iPod to my Dell. I have the “start iTunes when iPod is connected” option turned off, but I opened iTunes to rip a CD. As soon as iTunes was up, it started to autosync the iPod. I stopped this as quickly as possible.

So I did the whole “safely remove hardware” to the i Pod and unplugged it, and sure enough songs that I copied to it with third party software were missing. I assumed that the files still existed on the iPod’s hard drive, and that iTunes had simply deleted their entries from the iPod’s database. So I used Anapod Explorer to “rebuild the database.” In other words, I told it to scan the iPod’s hard drive for songs that were not in the database, and then re-add them. It told me it found like 35 songs and I thought everything was great … but it found songs I don’t even recall changing.

This little episode inspired me to drop iTunes altogether, uncluding as a ripper. It’s why I got Audiograbber.

In conclusion, while iTunes is convenient because it includes a ripper, burning software, a utility to download music (for 99 cents a song), and software to update the iPod, it isn’t quite feature-rich enough, it’s too restrictive, and it breaks cahnges you make with other software. So iTunes can F off.

iPod Issues

Multiple Topics

Daniel

So I just looked at some real old Historical Context entries that are sitting at the really old site. I can’t get over how … good … they are. They’re short and there are multiple entries per day. I talk about drinking coffee, waking up early, and studying for exams.

Nowadays my entries seem more like articles. Well, they are more like articles. I plan them at least a few minutes in advance, sometimes a few days in advance. They’re longer. They’re … less personal? Is that possible?

The Olympics are on. I’d say the best web site to read about the Olympics is NBC’s page. It’s so strange … the Internet allows us to take in information as it occurs; Yet I personally avoid pages like ESPN.com and CNN.com because I don’t want to read the results of Olympic events before I see them on TV. During the next Olympics or even the 2012 games, Americans may be allowed to view on-demand clips of event finals before they are shown on NBC. But when you’re at work, you might not want to spend two hours or even five minutes streaming that race to your computer.

This really brings up several interesting conflagrations: Sports as both news and entertainment, and the damned frustration that no matter where on earth the Olympics are held, the time of day is inconvenient for somebody.

First, sports. When it’s news, we want to find out about it immediately. Whether it’s a political election or a major event in a war or the latest on a hurricane, we don’t want to wait to see it on TV; we want the results right now, even if it means that we have to read them.

On the other hand, when it’s entertainment, we want to see it with our own eyes. If your friend tells you how The Village ends, you’ll poke their eyes out. You’ll record tonight’s episode of 24, but again, you don’t want to know the surprise ending in advance. The same applies to books, whatever.

And then you’ve got sports, which are mostly entertainment, but are covered more or less as news. Some people will record their alma mater’s bowl game and refuse to read or hear anything about it until they sit down and watch the tape themselves. But then some people will get on the Internet and watch the box score numbers update live. Here there is a distinction based on the importance of that day’s match. But I think a lot ties into personal preference. Personally, I would rather watch a gamecast of the numbers of the Yankees in the playoffs than record the game and watch it later.

The importance of the event relates directly to the Olympics. Also, the Olympics serve as the ultimate example of why you might want to watch an event later than read about it live. If it’s a baseball game, you might miss the broadcast of the game that is played while you’re at work, but hey — you can catch a game this weekend or next weekend or even Wednesday night. You might not see another World Series game until next year. Or another bowl game. And the Olympics … you won’t see them for another four years.

So Olympics seem to be more like entertainment than other sports, but in a kind of backwards way. Just like you wouldn’t want to read ahead of time that Rachel and Ross got back together, you might not want to read ahead that Paul Hamm won the individual all-around gymnastics gold medal. One is weekly fiction, the other is quadrennial nonfiction. Well, sports, anyway.

Oh … was I going to say something about how someone, somewhere is screwed because the Olympics are held just far enough away from their timezone? I don’t think any additional commentary is needed on that one.

Multiple Topics

Brian Lewis

Daniel

You know what really scares me sometimes? Just how similar to Brian Lewis I really am. For the last year or so I’ve read pretty much nothing but classics and the occasional new Michael Crichton book. Brian Lewis’s favorite books? All classics. Son of a bitch. Now I’ll probably have to read Lewis’s favorites just so I can tell him that they’re not all that good.

Oh, and Lewis doesn’t like Bush, either. Gotta give him credit on that one, even if I’m not sure that W. will be the worst President ever.

When the hell is Donald Rumsfeld gonna resign?

Brian Lewis

Update

Daniel

I haven’t posted in a month. I started a post a few weeks ago, but decided to can it. It was about the RIAA’s amnesty letter … what a bunch of BS. In that killed post I was actually going to drop an f-bomb. It’s just totally ridiculous. Anyway …

The Bills are outstanding so far. Go Buffalo! The Dolphins are actually favored for the Sunday night game. It’s hard to believe, seeing as how the Bills wiped the floor with the Patriots and the Jaguars. But I’ll admit — it’s still too early in the season to tell who’s really good, whether teams have just played against stinkers, etc, etc. But I think the fact that the Bills have put up 30+ in both games says a lot. They also shut out New England and allowed 17 against Jacksonville … and that 17 should be 10 or even 3. Jacksonville’s last touchdown was against Buffalo’s second string defense, and their first touchdown came after Buffalo blew a fake punt (the only real complaint of the season). So … I’m looking for Buffalo to beat Miami 27 – 10.

What else … Summer 2003 is wrapping up and I’m still in Allegany. Dear Mr. Bush … I don’t need a tax cut – I need a job. You know, there might be something to the whole idea that the economy was good when Clinton was President because of things Reagan and Bush enacted, and the economy slowed because of things Clinton enacted … but there is a serious trend over the last century showing that when a Democrat is in office, things tend to be good. Demand side economics? Socio-economic debate, anyone?

Update