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Last year, a pilot was made for a TV show based on Warren Ellis’ Global Frequency, a series of one-shot stories about a worldwide organization of on-call specialists who take down threats to humanity. JMS would have been involved if it had been picked up. It didn’t make it to the air, though it was shopped around. And a few months ago, the pilot was leaked onto the internet, becoming wildly popular. This morning, Ellis posted the following remark in his email newsletter, Bad Signal:

It’s my current understanding that the bittorrenting of GLOBAL FREQUENCY has rendered it as dead as dead can get as a TV series. It seems that people in high places did not take kindly to the leak. I have no further details, so don’t ask.

Nice going, guys.

Sure, you can put the immediate blame on the suits who didn’t like being proved wrong about the show’s appeal… but it also reminds me of when the creators of Battlestar Galactica practically begged their fans to wait a few weeks and watch it on TV instead of downloading it off the net so that they’d get high enough ratings to be renewed.

For now, the only way to get Global Frequency remains the original, collected into two volumes: Planet Ablaze and Detonation Radio.

2026 Update: everyone’s phones are better than the Global Frequency phones were at the time, no TV or movie adaptation ever materialized beyond the pilot, and the comic is out of print (probably due to Ellis turning out to be a serial (and parallel) harasser). Barnes & Noble has an ebook edition for Nook, though.

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NASA Returns to Flight as Discovery Reaches Orbit.

Rather than getting my hopes up, I’ve been taking an “I’ll believe it when I see it” approach to this. And now, we’re finally back in space!

Here’s hoping the shuttle will be able to tide us over until the next-generation ship is ready. IMO we should have had another type of launch vehicle five years ago at the latest. That way Columbia never would have gone up, or if it had, we could have kept the newer fleet flying and just grounded the shuttles.

On a more personal note, I’m reminded of the time I went to see a shuttle landing. My mom took me and my brother out of school for a day, and we drove up with a family friend to Edwards Air Force Base where we set up camp with a zillion other people on the dry lake bed. We slept in the car, and the next morning everyone tried to get as close as possible to the chain link fence that marked the edge of the public viewing area.

Somewhere in a closet, I’ve still got a roll of slides from that landing. Of course, they had us so far away from the runway that I could barely catch the shuttle with a telephoto lens. I made an 8×10 print of the best slide in my grandfather’s home photo lab, and the shuttle was barely 1½ inches. [Update: I finally scanned the photos.]

And the shuttle that I watched land? It was Discovery, and it was the first flight since the Challenger disaster.

Now if someone can just convince NASA to give Hubble its 120-zillion mile checkup instead of just throwing it away…

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If you have a website, you’ve probably seen link swap spam. People running link farms search for a keyword or phrase, then fire off a zillion emails to the contact addresses about how they’ve looked at the site, their site is clearly relevant to yours, they’ve already linked to you and they want you to link back to their site.

All this without bothering to actually look at the sites in the search results.

For example: last Saturday I posted picture of the marquee in front of San Diego’s Ghirardelli Chocolate shop. By Monday someone had asked me to link to their website about chocolate, because our sites were clearly related.

Today I got one that trips the irony-meter. I’ve made four posts over the past year about targeted—or mistargeted—advertising. Just four. This morning I received three copies (one to my webmaster address and one to each DNS contact) of this message:

Hello,
I have found your website hyperborea.org by searching Google for “targeted advertising”. I think our websites has a similar theme, so I have already added your link to my website.

Continue reading →

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Whenever I see this sign, I always think of the story about P.T. Barnum trying to get his visitors out of an exhibit so that new customers could come in. He eventually put up a sign saying “This way to the egress,” figuring most people wouldn’t know the word just meant “exit.” According to the legend, it worked.

Freeway sign: Egress

Now, given that every other freeway sign I’ve seen says “exit,” I have to wonder why they phrased this one the way they did. My best guess is that it’s because it’s marking an exit from the carpool lane (it’s on the Santa Ana Freeway, heading north between the 55 and 22) instead of an exit to surface streets or directly to another freeway—but even that doesn’t make sense, because every place where you’re allowed to leave a carpool lane is marked as “exit!”

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The drawback of cellular phone technology is that you need to have transmitters everywhere. In a big city you can probably mount them on buildings, but in the suburbs, you just have to put up towers like you do for power lines and land-line phones. Every once in a while, someone decides to pretty things up a bit.

Cleverly disguised cellular phone tower

I’ve been meaning to catch a picture of this one for weeks, but I’ve just never been on the right stretch of freeway with a camera before. Katie almost caught it last week on the way back from San Diego, but the lighting conditions were poor and the picture came out way too grainy.

It’s not a bad approximation of a palm tree, but it’s too straight and the fronds are too regular. Still, if most people are only going to see it from their cars, it’s enough to blend in.

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When DC Comics first announced the quartet of miniseries leading up to Infinite Crisis, I figured I’d take a look at Day of Vengeance (the magic corner of the DCU) and maybe Rann/Thanagar War (the Sci-Fi corner), and that was it. Countdown to Infinite Crisis got me excited about The OMAC Project, though, so I figured I’d pick up the first issue of each mini and see what I thought.

At first I found OMAC and Rann/Thanagar the most interesting, and Day of Vengeance just enough to get me to try issue 2. Villains United didn’t impress me at all.

After three issues of each (plus Day of Vengeance #4 out this week), my impressions have more or less reversed. On a whim I picked up Villains United #2 and enjoyed it much more. OMAC and Rann/Thanagar are both bogged down, and Day of Vengeance reminds me a lot of March of the Wooden Soldiers (my least favorite Fables arc): some nice moments, but a bit slow and not particularly exciting.

Right now, I could probably leave OMAC and Day of Vengeance, and the only things keeping me on board Rann/Thanagar War are the L.E.G.I.O.N cameos and trying to figure out what’s going on with Blackfire. Part of the problem is that none of them seem to be six issues worth of story. Sure, there’s a cliffhanger at the end of each issue, but they just still feel padded.

Well, we know DC is planning for big changes in the Crisis’ wake. I can only hope they have good reasons for what they end up doing, rather than just doing something like “Let’s kill off the Flash and Supergirl again because we did it 20 years ago!”