Category: Entertainment

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At the market today, we discovered that you can buy a bag of Chaos. Not only that, but you can buy a bag of wheat-free Chaos.

Bag of Chaos

In actuality it’s a brand of chips from the makers of Pirate’s Booty, but the name reminded us both of a time we and a bunch of friends started coming up with lists of product names based on abstract concepts. It started with a pun, “Diet Spite,” and eventually filled an entire sheet of paper. I think Jason ended up with the sheet, and may even have HTMLized it, but from there it fades into legend.

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The member benefits section in the latest Golden Key newsletter features an announcement of a business partnership. Take a look at the first paragraph and see if you can figure out what the company does:

Owens Corning is a company with an unwavering commitment to delivering solutions, transforming markets and enhancing lives. It’s who we are. It’s why we are here. We do it by fully engaging our employees in support of growing our customer’s businesses. And when we do, we grow ours as well.

The second paragraph explains that they manufacture building supplies and provide construction services. The third contains a brief summary of the company’s history.

Now, tell me, what that hell is the point of the first paragraph? As best as I can tell its purpose is to make readers tune out before they actually get to the informative stuff.

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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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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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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!”

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Well, now that people have successfully gotten Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas reclassified as Adult (18+) instead of Mature (17+)—since we all know that sex scenes that you can only get at by hacking the game are far more damaging to 17-year-olds than interactive sequences in which they shoot people, commit carjacking, and run over prostitutes—they’re going after The Sims 2.

Yep. The Sims.

Apparently you can modify the game so that the sims appear nude. OMGSEX!

Jeff Brown, vice president of corporate communications at EA, in response to the accusations, told GameSpot, “This is nonsense. We’ve reviewed 100 percent of the content. There is no content inappropriate for a teen audience. Players never see a nude sim. If someone with an extreme amount of expertise and time were to remove the pixels, they would see that the sims have no genitals. They appear like Ken and Barbie.”

Thompson doesn’t buy it. “The sex and the nudity are in the game. That’s the point. The blur is an admission that even the ‘Ken and Barbie’ features should not be displayed. The blur can be disarmed. This is no different than what is in San Andreas, although worse.”

Yes, he actually said that The Sims is worse than Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas.

What is wrong with these people?

First they came for the violent games…

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