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Stories Behind Songs
Dorian Lynskey, writing for The Guardian, on The Pogues’s “Fairytale of New York.”
Chris Willman, writing for Entertainment Weekly, on the differences between versions of “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas.” Personal I use the Judy Garland version.
Ashley Fetters, writing for The Atlantic, on Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah” and its many versions. While this one isn’t a Christmas song, it’s always been on my Christmas playlist anyway. Not quite sure why.
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Anil Dash runs down many of the ways parts of the Web have gotten worse in the Facebook/Twitter era.
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A Few Notes on iTunes 11
The scroll bars don’t expand when you mouse over them like default Mountain Lion ones normally do.
AirPlay activity doesn’t keep the computer awake. I’ve had the computer fall asleep while playing music to an Apple TV and while an Apple TV played a TV show from it. (In that case, though, it did properly sync my progress, so when I started it up from iCloud on the Apple TV it resumed right where I’d left off.)
There’s no option to tell iTunes to just never download copies of a TV show or a movie. With the small amount of storage on my SSD, I really just want to stream video every single time. I’ve turned off the option to have it automatically fetch downloads, but I’m pretty sure the files will still be sitting in the download queue and will snow up on my computer eventually. Worse, with all the otherwise nice iCloud support, it’s hard to see which files are actually saved locally and can be deleted.
The general message seems to be that we shouldn’t worry about what files are on our machines and which are in iCloud, but that doesn’t match the reality of current SSD storage sizes. iOS automatically manages storage for music, deleting songs for you and redownloading them as needed. It’s be nice if the Mac could do that, but on the other hand there are copies of songs that iTunes Match screws up (it doesn’t have some of The Beatles’s mono tracks, for example, and tries to substitute stereo versions). I need to keep those local while most other files could be left to the cloud most of the time. Seems like all the devices could do some sort of Bonjour detection to grab a local copy where available and save on bandwidth.
Conversely, there are some movies we watch over and over. It seems wasteful to stream a new copy every time, but at this point it’s just way more convenient.
I really like how the expanded album view picks colors from the cover to show the track listing.
It’s neat that TV shows from iCloud are shown in the shows listing, but you can’t edit their metadata. Futurama airs its episodes out of order and I’d like to be able to fix that for when I watch the season again. Likewise I’d like to insert the Doctor Who prologue mini episodes in situ rather than have them tacked on at the end, but I’m stuck with iCloud’s ordering.
I haven’t tested how podcasts work. Progress syncing would be very welcome so I can start a podcast on the road and finish it at home.
I already love the Up Next feature.
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Christmas Playlist 2012
I’ve been very carefully building a Christmas playlist for the past few years. I only add one song a year, and I only listen to the songs on the list between Thanksgiving and the Epiphany. There are now twelve songs on the list.
- “The Fairytale of New York” by The Pogues
- “Hallelujah” by Jeff Buckley
- “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas” by Judy Garland
- “Happy Xmas (War is Over)” by John Lennon
- “White Christmas” by Bing Crosby
- “Let It Snow! Let It Snow! Let It Snow!” by Dean Martin
- “The Christmas Song” by Nat “King” Cole
- New “What Christmas Means to Me” by Stevie Wonder
- “Here Comes Santa Claus” by Elvis Presely
- “Baby It’s Cold Outside” by Ella Fitzgerald & Louis Jordan
- “Peace On Earth/Little Drummer Boy” by David Bowie & Bing Crosby a
- “Merry Xmas Everybody” by Slade
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Review: Iron Man #1 - Comic Book Resources
The widescreen panels Land so readily deploys are given appropriate purpose, containing panoramas and cinematic action, rather than close-ups and talking heads. Land still produces stiff-postured figures and difficult-to-recognize characters, but it’s safe to say there are better storytelling fundamentals on display than in much of his usual work.
Damning with the faintest of praise. “Other than his stiff figures, lack of facility with acting, and inability to draw characters in a recognizable form, his art in this book is way better than it usually is.”
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Optimism in Science Fiction
(Note: I’m going to have to spoil important stuff about Looper here.)
I saw Looper last week and found something in it I think might be a trend: a degree of optimism in science fiction. Looper and Doctor Who especially put forth an idea that what’s going to save the world is not heroes but regular people being good. Being their best.
Quick, brutal summary of some elements of Looper: in the future there’s a super bad mobster guy called The Rainmaker. Old Joe (Bruce Willis) goes back in time with a list of kids who might grow up to be The Rainmaker, planning to kill them. Events progress to a point where Young Joe (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) finds out who the kid is and decides to protect him. To the film’s credit, Old Joe is in lots of ways the villain but he’s given a very credible motivation, but of course we sympathize with Young Joe since he’s a) our PoV character and b) protecting a small child’s life from a killer from the future and we can’t not root for that guy since we’ve all seen the Terminator movies. Once the story has all been laid out on the table, there’s a scene where the boy’s mother proposes that he doesn’t have to grow up into a monster. She can raise him to be good. The film ends on the hopeful note that, with the intervention of Young Joe to prevent some stuff from happening, the boy will indeed grow up to be a good kid.
There’s a similar scene in the Doctor Who episode “The Hungry Earth”. There’s a hostage crisis (involving a hot reptile chick, naturally). The Doctor has a plan, but it depends on the people involved doing their part. He gives this speech:
You have to be the best of humanity. […] We return our hostage, they return theirs. Nobody gets harmed. We can land this together. If you are the best you can be. You are decent, brilliant people. Nobody dies today.
The episode “Midnight”, among others, has a similar message. Victory doesn’t depend on the hero doing something cool. It depends on everyone playing a part and being their best. Any one of them can screw it up, but if they all rise above it, it’ll come out alright.
Here’s a scene from Casanova (“Avaritia” no. 3):
The setup there is that Luther (the blonde guy) is destined to become the story’s villain Newman Xeno (more time travel-y stuff: lots of Luthers in lots of other universes have all turned into Xeno). Casanova has saved this one and tried to keep him on the light side. He sends him off, hoping he’ll choose to be better than all the other versions of himself have (though in this case it maybe doesn’t turn out so well). I see in that panel the same optimism as in Looper and Doctor Who. Other recent comics have tread similar ground. Uncanny X-Force has Evan, a kid Apocalypse. All-Star Superman is all about how Superman’s real power is his ability to inspire people to be their best (perhaps even Lex Luthor). So inspiriting, in fact, that it has led people in real life away from committing suicide.
What I see in all these stories from the past few years is a turn toward hope. Bruce Willis traditionally plays the gun-toting action hero. Here he’s the villain while Joseph Gordon-Levitt is the hero via self-sacrifice. Picture Luke Skywalker throwing down his lightsaber to stop the Emperor. I’ll go ahead and speculate on why we’re seeing this in sci-fi right now. September 11 reminded us how dangerous the world can be. The shooting in Aurora, CO did it again. Anyone, at any time, can open fire in a public space and kill innocent people. There’s nothing we can do about it, except to live our lives as we always do and hope that no one in the grocery store has a bomb. These stories are telling us that there’s a better way: hope. There’s a place for action movie heroics, but that’s not how the future gets redeemed. We can sit at home afraid to go out, and walk in zigzags on public streets terrified of snipers when we do, or we can hope. If I refuse to be terrorized and live my life being good, maybe others will, too. If I teach my children to try to be their best, maybe the next generation will see a little less random violence.
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EXCLUSIVE: Gillen & McKelvie Assemble New Volume of “Young Avengers” - Comic Book Resources
So many things in this interview might just as well be a personal invitation to me to read this series.
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Assorted iPhone 5/iOS 6 Notes
After five or six days with my iPhone 5, here are a few observations:
- Siri pronounces my surname correctly out of the box (it’s “ee-Lee”)
- My 2011 Toyota Camry has a USB plug for iPhone integration. Everything works just as before with the new Lightning cable.
- Turn-by-turn navigation will pipe in if you’re playing music over Bluetooth or the Lightning connection. It will not interrupt the radio or the CD player in my limited testing. I need to play with that. Do you have to turn Bluetooth off to get it to talk to you if you’re listening to the radio?
- Apple’s Maps doesn’t know about the New Jersey-style turn lane by my house. It sends people down a few blocks and tells them to U-turn.
- Siri pronounces my surname correctly out of the box (it’s “ee-Lee”)
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A Conversation With Randall Munroe, the Creator of XKCD
After the giant scroll comic, I really want to go back and read the whole set of archives.
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Editing Photos on an iPhone: Camera Roll vs. Photo Stream
Short version: when cropping photos on your phone (or iPad), do so from the Photo Stream, not the Camera Roll.
Before iCloud, whenever you took photos on an iPhone they were saved to the Camera Roll. This mimics the pre-digital idea that you’d take a roll of film to the photo mart and have it developed. You’d plug your iPhone into your computer, it’d suck (develop) all the photos off the Camera Roll, add them to your Library, and clear the Camera Roll. Now, with iCloud, many people rarely if ever sync their iPhones to their computers, so they end up with Camera Rolls with hundreds of photos in them. And each photo in the Camera Roll also appears in the Photo Stream.
Over the weekend we ran into a problem where we’d cropped some photos but those changes disappeared once the photos were synced to our Mac.
Here’s what seems to happen:
When you take a photo on your phone, it uploads a copy of that photo to your Photo Stream. That copy will then be later pulled down by iPhoto to your Mac and is visible on whatever other devices you have iCloud set up on. If you edit/crop a photo in your Photo Stream, it’ll save your changes as a new file to your Camera Roll, which gets uploaded back to the Photo Stream. (You thus end up with both the original and cropped photos in your Photo Stream.)
If you edit a photo in your Camera Roll, however, it saves the changes in place, but if it’s already uploaded that file to your Photo Stream, it doesn’t replace the copy there with the one with your edits. If you then plug your phone into your computer, it sees the copy in the Photo Stream, sees that it has the same file name as the one in your Camera Roll, and thinks it already has that photo, so if those photos are deleted from the Camera Roll, the edited versions go, too.
So, the best way to make changes to a photo from an iPhone/iPad is to do so from the Photo Stream.
Also photos only get pushed up to the Photo Stream when you’re on wifi, so if you’re out somewhere you can crop from the Camera Roll safely since there won’t be a copy in the Photo Stream to play with yet.
I think the Camera Roll as a concept is probably outdated in light of iCloud. The proper behavior should probably be that once a copy of the photo is uploaded to iCloud, it should be removed from the Camera Roll (Apple could even add a silly animation that shows the photo being developed like the shredded cards in Passbook!). This way the Camera Roll would only ever show photos that have not yet been moved to a computer or uploaded to iCloud.
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Using AirPlay to Play Music on an Apple TV Connected by Ethernet
There’s a long-running issue that I’ve encountered when trying to play music on my Apple TV. I have the music on my Mac in iTunes and I want to play it using AirPlay on my Apple TV which is hooked up by ethernet. Often when picking the AirPlay menu in iTunes I’ll get a box saying something like “Connecting to Apple TV,” but it never connects. This piece on TUAW suggests the issue involves IPv6 but the instructions on their fix seem outdated post-Mountain Lion.
Today I was talking to Apple support about an unrelated issue and then asked them about this. Their suggestion sounds dumb but worked: turn off (unplug) the Apple TV, wait two minutes, plug in the ethernet cord, plug in the Apple TV. Now I can AirPlay just fine, for the moment at least.
The issue apparently is that the Apple TV doesn’t switch ports as gracefully as the Mac does, so it’ll get confused sometimes if it sees a wireless network but also has an ethernet cord plugged in.
Update: Well, it worked for a while but now the “Connecting…” popup stays there again and doesn’t resolve.
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Mark Waid's 4 Panels That Never Work
I’m not usually a fan of The Gutters-I think the jokes are usually too easy and not nearly as clever/biting as they think they are-but I like this one by Mark Waid, especially the second panel: Mark Waid’s 4 Panels That Never Work.
(The title is a reference to legendary artist Wally Wood’s “22 Panels That Always Work.“)
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How To Talk To Your Kids About Hush
Apparently Hush is in the new Lego Batman game. “Hush” was a 12-issue storyline that started in Batman 608 (which I realize I know without having to look it up) written by Jeph Loeb with art by Jim Lee. It’s a great example of how poorly-developed the critical faculties of the average comic book reader are. (Which can be similarly said of the film-going audience vis-à-vis the success of Michael Bay’s Transformers movies.) Lee’s art is what you’d expect, but overall the story is just very, very overrated. It frequently shows up on “best of” lists alongside “Year One” and “The Dark Knight Returns.” In general the storyline marks the end of the very good Rucka/Brubaker era that started with the end of “No Man’s Land,” and included all the Gotham Central and Catwoman stuff. “Hush” stands there as a perfect example of why you should always be willing to just ignore parts of a company’s publishing line and seek out the good stuff, wherever it is. The story isn’t bad really, just forgettable aside from the Jim Lee art.
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Roger Ebert on Sight & Sound's List
Sight & Sound has published the 2012 version of its lists of the ten greatest movies of all time, which it revises every decade after polling directors and critics. In April Roger Ebert wrote about the list and listed his choices. The results are out and Ebert has “A few calm words”” about what did and didn’t make the cut. (He prints the lists at the bottom of the piece.) I like this bit:
For years people have been telling me they just don’t see what’s so great about ‘Citizen Kane.’” Now they tell me they just don’t see what’s so great about “Vertigo.” My answer will remain the same: “You’re insufficiently evolved as a moviegoer.” Or, more simply, “You’re wrong.”
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Amazon Instant Video app for iPad hits the App Store with offline viewing and Prime streaming
Even as NBC restricts access to Olympic streams to cable-only subscribers, Apple adds Hulu to Apple TV and now Amazon lets you watch its Prime Video on the iPad.
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Vince Gilligan: I’ve never Googled “Breaking Bad”
Fantastic interview by Erik Nelson with showrunner Vince Gilligan about Breaking Bad. I love how he talks about the way in which they make it up as they go along, building on what they have and trying to send the show in the right direction.
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NBC Announces “Transition” to “Broader” Sitcoms
A friend once asked me if I thought Community were the best sitcom on TV. I said I thought it might be the last sitcom. Not that there won’t be new sitcoms, but I think Community is sort of the summation of the format, like had drawn the last card in the sitcom’s deck and was able to play with the whole format. Traditional sitcoms like Modern Family and How I Met Your Mother are still on and are quite good, but this James Poniewozik piece says we’ve probably seen the last of innovative snappy Arrested Development successors for a little while.
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I stopped reading Buzzfeed and haven’t missed it, but I wound up there today and found this gem.
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Renee Montoya (Not) in the New 52
“The few conversations I’ve had with DC folk over the past year made it very clear they had no interest in seeing Renee continue, either as the Question or not.”
Renee Montoya was created for Batman: The Animated Series to be a uniformed officer who works with Detective Harvey Bullock. Her role expanded a bit in the series and then she, along with Harley Quinn, made the move into the comics. Alan Grant wrote her first comics appearance in Batman 475, but it’s Greg Rucka who did the best and most character-defining work on her. As far as I know it was Rucka who decided to make her gay. He wrote her in the “No Man’s Land” crossover, then used her frequently in Detective Comics, she became one of the main characters of Gotham Central and later 52, where she took over the identity of The Question.
In an early issue of Batwoman in DC’s “New 52” universe, Montoya appeared on a wall of a GCPD. Speculation was the wall was meant to be a memorial wall for fallen police officers. Superhero universes being what they are, her death could of course have been faked, but Rucka’s statements make it seem that no one has any plans for her in the near-term.
I wonder if DC has plans for The Question in general. Montoya could potentially return to being a cop, possibly never having been The Question in the new universe, but that would probably be seen as a step back for the character. There’s even a similar character playing that role in Gail Simone’s Batgirl. The Question’s purpose is to be an odd conspiracy theory guy. Think Fox Mulder as a superhero. Is that character relevant right now, in 2012? I’m not so sure. Probably less so even in the New 52, which has less room for legacy characters.
Still, Montoya is/was a great character, and I have a nice set of hardcovers that Single Bound Studios made me containing her entire Rucka-written career sitting on my shelves, waiting for a re-read.
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