Hopefully Not Stupid

Why I read Metafilter, Part 2

2009-06-20T20:31:00.000-04:00

saulgoodman reminds us about why laws permitting abortion were passed in the first place. It wasn't that women didn't get abortions beforehand. It's that far too many did, and the results were horrific.

Annoying web ads 1

2009-06-11T02:36:00.000-04:00

Lately there's been something of an ad blitz among certain web properties that have become nearly unavoidable in internet advertising. As one of the few remaining Firefox users who doesn't just block the hell out of all of them, I figured I should note them for posterity before they vanish, unseen, unloved, to make way for whatever schlocky virtual product web marketers will try to convince us we need next.

1. CIVONY, now EVONY

An online flash game (I think), at first these annoying flash ads would try to put the imperative on the viewer (an annoying advertising technique that makes ads sound bossy) with text like "Save your queen NOW, My Lord!" Since then they seem to have mellowed a little, but only a little. Currently there's an ad in rotation that reads "SAVE YOUR LOVER! Play Now Free Forever."

The Pede says that it's a simulation game not dissimilar to Civilization, a fact that the original name played up; the "O" in CIVONY was a globe, which drew attention to the "CIV" part of the title in a way obviously engineered to make the game seem like a Firaxis product. Evidently Firaxis thought so too, for not long after the game was suddenly renamed to EVONY.

As for the game itself? I wouldn't know; I've never clicked through. Following flash ads is only slightly lower, in the great hierarchy of noob actions, than forwarding Obama fear screeds.

2. 1 rule to a thinner stomach: OBEY

Speaking of casting imperitives.... These extraordinarily domineering ads tell people to OBEY one (or sometimes two) rules in all-caps, and sometimes in red letters, while displaying before-and-after pictures of weight loss success stories. The before pictures are vaguely disgusting, but oddly, so are the after ones, which bring to mind surgery more than an attractive physique.

Why I read Metafilter, Part 2

2009-04-16T15:13:00.000-04:00

This thread is still on the front page over at MeFi. If you go through and read the comments, you'll learn about Al Jazerra and the relative lameness of U.S. cable news, about Overton windows, and the real reason (even greater than the math behind our two-party-oriented election process) that third parties haven't done well in the United States.

There are days when I feel reluctant to post on Metafilter because I feel overwhelmed by the general quality of the comments. But it's usually around that time that something bizarre and inexplicable makes the Blue, like the Japanese meme about anthropomorphizing WWII fighter jets as anime girls, and I feel qualified to post once again.

It also helps that they linked Peanuts Roasted to the front page recently. Yay!

Outrage of the Week

2009-04-09T18:06:00.000-04:00

It seems that the local library blocks access to Metafilter on its for-patron computers, because it is a "bulletin board." Thanks for the layer of plastic between me and the world, guys! Sheesh.

For the record, the system they use is "SmartFilter."

What I've been up to: @Play

2009-04-08T23:41:00.000-04:00

@Play is a series of columns on the site GameSetWatch dedicated to exploring the history and progress of roguelike computer games.

Roguelike means, literally, "like Rogue," one of the earliest dungeon-exploration computer games. Although the game dates to the earliest years of the 80's, there are still a number of things it does that are not equaled by almost any commercial computer roleplaying games. In particular, the game is always challenging, puts the player's character in great danger, consists of randomly-generated dungeon levels, and scrambles some aspects of the game world (the identities of the objects) so they must be rediscovered upon every play-though.

That last bit deserves further elaboration. If you drink an orange potion in Rogue and it turns out to heal you, then every other orange potion you drink in that game will turn out to be a healing potion. The game will even rename orange potions to "potion of healing" to help clarify the relationship between description and function. However there are also bad potions to discover, and some potions don't have so obvious an effect when drunk. Part of the process of successful Rogue play is to track down, through use of both each type of item and the limited number of "scrolls of identify" found in the game, what everything does. Yet, when the game is over, the next game everthing will be mixed up again, and all the items will have different functions.

Roguelike games are also notable because, unlike the great majority of CRPGs, exploration and combat take place in the same game mode. Taking a step or taking a swing both happen in the same screen; there is no separate battle scene. Running away is the simple act of walking in the opposite direction of your assailant, who may then decide to use his turn to follow.

Anyway, I've found these games fascinating, far and away above other types of computer game, ever since the day I found an old floppy-disk version of PC Rogue on an uncle's 8086. Although the game is aging, it is still one of the more interesting roguelikes. Seeing more play these days, though, is Angband (which emphasizes the turn-based tactical play), Dungeon Crawl (which has a fine game balance), ADOM (a very harsh game with tons of things to do and mysteries to solve), and of course the venerable Nethack, possibly the deepest computer game ever made.

(Notice that I do not mention as essential to roguelike gaming that the game present its game world in ASCII characters. All the games listed above, to some degree, do this. But more and more often, some do not.)

Why I read Metafilter, Part 1

2009-03-31T17:53:00.000-04:00

In the comments to the post on Miss Universe visiting Guantanamo Bay (itself rather a bizarre story), user "The Whelk" wrote:

What universe is she queen of again?

The Miss Universe Organization producers of the Miss UNIVERSE®, MISS USA® and MISS TEEN USA® Pageants is a Donald J. Trump and NBC Universal joint venture.

Oh yes, I remember the Trump Pocket Universe. I was traveling from the Realm Of Seven Delights And Also Chocolate to the Base Material Plane. To avoid the Negative Energy Sphere I had to transfer at Trump InterDimensional.

The Pocket Universe revealed itself as a vast black marble lobby, limitless in reflective luster. Massive gold columns vanished into the unseen ceiling, making sad show of the feeble decorate plants cowering at their feet. In the center of the lobby was a pool and in the center of the pool was a girl.

She was encased in a crystal box and set upon shimmering silver silk pillows. She was young and beautiful, dolled up in a diamond necklace and crown, with a golden chain wrapped round her delicate ankle. It was cold in the lobby, cold and quiet, but she did not notice me. She was staring into the space between the columns, the place where the black marble blurredi, reflecting nothing.

Her gaze made me feel exposed and ashamed. I turned away to complete my next Material Jump. I thought the chain was cruel, seeing as she was already caged, but the crown seemed the worst of all. What use was finery in a such an airless space? What was she Queen of? This empty pocket? This tomb? I thought it was very sad. Then I completed my jump and I did not think about it anymore.

Awesome.

So, what has been going on?

2009-03-31T16:11:00.001-04:00

- Since I last posted here, I started a column for GameSetWatch called @Play, which people seem to like.
- I started another column more recently, Pixel Journeys, which is a little more fulfilling but rather harder to do.
- I've written a few Game Design Essentials articles for Gamasutra, which seem to take exponentially more effort each one I write. The last one though, on Atari Games, turned out really well. But I think I need to scale back my expectations.

- I've started a blog on Peanuts strips, going through them from the early days and pointing out cool strips. I first read Peanuts around the age of nine, from library books found in school and from a collection an uncle had. I've been kind of hooked on Peanuts since then. It's so far been unexpectedly easy to do posts for that, so I've got a good backlog of them built up.

I've decided to revive this blog due to the realization that I've been sharing a lot of things in Google Reader, things that are worth blog posts of their own, but without a blog to post them too they just sort of sit there in the list, unread. I've got a good backlog of those built up too, so maybe this'll be sustainable over time.

Stand by....

2009-03-30T05:16:00.002-04:00

Blog to revive shortly. In meantime, check out AWESOME NEW TITLE LOGO IMAGE PICTURE GRAPHIC THING.

Wikipedia: Lightsaber Combat Techniques

2007-04-11T13:44:00.000-04:00

Wikipedia's page on lightsaber combat styles is almost enough to make one forget how poorly thought-out the prequel Star Wars movies are.

Almost.

New York Press > Defective by Design: How Sphere came to be made

2007-03-26T05:48:00.000-04:00

From the New York Press some years ago, written by Matt Zoller Seitz, brought to light by Matthew Baldwin: a remarkably negative review of Sphere.

Washington Post > Metafilter: "My National Security Letter"

2007-03-23T23:47:00.000-04:00

An anonymous owner of a small ISP spills the beans at the Washington Post talking about the National Security Letter he received, which forbids him from telling anyone, not only about aid he was forced to render to the FBI, but that he was forbidden even from saying that he had gotten the gag order.

Gag orders are a thing that makes me particularly angry. I do not believe someone will be able to convince me that they are not fundamentally against free speech, but these letters are far worse than even usual. Remember back when the Patriot Act was being renewed, how one of the statistics the proponents of the renewal was particularly fond of siting was that there had been little documented abuse of the act? Well of course it wasn't documented, because the people who were in a position to tell us about the abuse were forbidden from talking about it!

Ever day that goes by, it is becoming harder to act civil around those people who continue to support these kinds of monstrous offenses against reason. There is a line beyond which abysmally bad politics begins to intrude upon the personal.

This... I mean... ugh.

Metafilter: Codex Seraphinianus

2007-03-22T16:26:00.000-04:00

There was a Metafilter thread a few days ago pointing to a Flickr consisting of scans from the 'Codex Seraphinianus', which may be the strangest book ever written. It's not in any known language, but one invented by its author/illustrator, Italian architect Luigi Serafini. (Or not: some suspect that it's just gibberish.)

It's unquestionable, however, that the illustrations have a striking, whimsical power.

slacktivist: Gaming the Stats

2007-03-22T16:20:00.000-04:00

Fred Clark is right on the money, as usual, with "Gaming the Stats" over at his (surprisingly?) liberal media politics pro-religion blog slacktivist. This time out, he discusses metrics used to measure performance in organizations, all organizations private and public, becoming more important than the things they measure.

We've all seen this lots of times. I like to call it "assigning to the name the importance of the original" when I'm feeling obtuse. It is the part of the corrosion at the heart of our culture: that the work we do is less important than the personal status that we gain.

Let's try this again

2007-03-22T16:19:00.001-04:00

Blogging to resume momentarily I think, although the form may be a bit shorter than in the past.

Windows Vista: which version is right for you, and which other version will you end up with?

2006-03-08T11:22:00.000-05:00

I am a member of that "Exploring Windows" list Microsoft maintains in order to advertise at clueless computer users. (This can readily be deduced by looking at the content of the list.) I'm a member because I haven't gotten around to unsubscribe.

But then, why would I unsubscribe, when periodically I get a message like this?

The message says....

Which version of Windows Vista is right for you?

Hoo boy.

It only became known that there were going to be multiple versions less than a month ago, and already they're pushing out marketing messages to the clueless legions. I'm by no means a Microsoft fan, but this business over Vista strikes me as startlingly awful. But for those reasons, continue reading.

People use computers for an unimaginable variety of work and leisure activities. To fit this wide range of uses, Windows Vista will be broadly available in five versions (http://go.microsoft.com/?linkid=4628420):

Of course they use computers for lots of things, that's why they're called general-purpose computing machines. To offer customized versions of Windows for each use isn't empowering, at best it's stingy since they don't want to give away all features for one purchase price, and means they'll end up selling extra copies, as users buy weaker versions, find out there's features in the more costly versions they need/really want, and have to schlepp back out to the software store to shell out again. "What's that?" the clerk will say, "You want to return an old software purchase? MWA-ha-ha! Guards, seize him!"

I cannot rightfully imagine why Microsoft would do something like this if they were not expecting at least a sizable number of computer users to do something like that.

For Home:
Windows Vista Home Premium (http://go.microsoft.com/?linkid=4628421): Goes beyond basic tasks and helps you get more done around the house while more fully enjoying your digital entertainment.

The middle-ground. People with prior Microsoft experience (like those screwed by the Home/Professional difference) will probably default to this. According to their site (at the very URL listed above), this will be the cheapest version that actually includes their new Aero interface. It also has the options for making your own DVDs (DRM permitting) and it "provides new ways for you to enjoy your music, photos, and DVD movies", assuming the RIAA, MPAA and I assume professional photographers of America allow it.

Windows Vista Ultimate : Includes the full set of business, mobility, and home entertainment features for those who use their PCs at work, at home, and on the road.

Will probably contain some gaming acceleration tweaks that games will quickly come to rely upon. Will have the fewest crippled features.

Windows Vista Home Basic : Increases reliability, security, and ease of use for entry-level computers and basic tasks such as writing e-mail and surfing the Web.

The version that will be bundled with low-end computers. That's the rub, the true implications of this plan. That copy of Windows you get with one of those $500 machines at Wal-Mart, you may not realize, actually accounts for a sizable percentage of the cost of that machine. It'll lower the cost of the initial package, but to do the things you really want with the machine, you'll end up having to shell out for the big thing anyway. That's called a hidden cost folks, and by paying it, you'll ultimately be shelling out for Windows twice, once for the basic version and one for the super deluxe XTREEM version. Those who won't will be reduced to second-class citizens.

Anyone want to place any bets as to whether the next version of Windows will go back to offering one Home and one Business version, and in the ad copy for it brag about how simple it is Microsoft is making it for customers?

Video Games: Amazing Ouendan skills

2006-03-05T22:10:00.000-05:00

My last post, which was meant to be a criticism of cell phone calling plans and ended up looking like an advertisement for them, has made me a little wary of Google's Blog Comments plugin for Blogger, but I'm giving it another try.

Osu! Tatakae! Ouendan! is an insanely catchy music game for the DS from Japan that we just *might* someday get a US release of. In it, the players must tap numbered circles on the touch screen in order in the rhythm of a song. Word is the game is incredibly demanding, as the linked-to video should indicate.It's also one of the cooler pieces of game music I've heard. Why don't we get things this cool in the US? Sure there's Katamari, but beyond that it seems like an unending stream of sports games and (ugh) Tom Clancy.

See more at Silicon Era....

Families talk free and get up to 5 free Samsung x495 phones

2006-02-16T00:51:00.000-05:00

Ah, long time no see guys....

Here , T-Mobile hawks their "unlimited messaging for families plan," illustrating once more the reason why I have no cell phone or text messenger or service like that: they're all priced at extortionate rates, with the only exceptions being plans that all seem to carry some hidden "gotcha" designed to screw you over if you fail to invoke the proper incantations.

And whose idea was it anyway, to charge for sending per text message, anyway? How much money does it really cost them to ship a few bites of ASCII wirelesly? Would they charge 12.5% more to send an eighth bit?

Artwork: Movie Club flyer

2005-08-31T17:55:00.000-04:00

Something I've done to promote a film club we're starting here at GSU. Used Corel Painter's charcoal tools to both create the black background and the white foreground elements. The eraser tool created the solid-edged fingers in front of the projector. I used CorelDraw to produce guidelines to help me keep the perspective straight.

The expression on the guy's face I think works really well, though it reminds me uncomfortably of the kid from Paranoia Agent, or maybe an over-mischevious Ernie.

Artwork from Super Mario Strikers

2005-08-18T23:04:00.000-04:00

Funky, graffitiesque artwork of the Mario characters for an upcoming Mario soccer game. Including the coolest official corporate illustrations of both Mario and Wario in a long while, as well as the hottest drawing of Peach ever.

Planet GameCube Game Art: Super Mario Strikers

My response to a Johnny Isakson form letter about the flag-burning amendment

2005-06-24T01:36:00.000-04:00

Johnny Isakson, one of my state's two senators, has a form on hisa website that, if filled out, eventually results in a response to someone at "senator@isakson.senate.gov", although that address doesn't work for replies. It's probably written by staffers, and may even be a form letter (although I've gotten two responses now with moderately different content), but that doesn't stop me from wanting to respond to the message.

I really hate getting automated, or employee-sourced, message in response to my concerns, especially when the person I'm writing to is a co-sponsor of something so wrong-headed as the flag burning amendment.

Since my response to his message bounced, because I spent so long writing it and don't want it to vanish into the ether, and to serve as a record of the reasoning being used in favor of that damnable amendment, I'm going to post my response here. I doubt he'll ever see it, but maybe it won't go to waste this way.

> The American flag is a national treasure, and is one of our
> greatest symbols of nationhood and national unity.

I have no idea if a straight response this way will actually get read
by anyone, but it seems a lot less annoying (for myself and whoever
reads these things) to try to do a straight reply instead of
continuing to direct my responses through the web form and breaking up
the conversation, while also losing track of my own messages.

It is my considered opinion that ultimately, while flags have
important symbolic value, they are, in the end, symbols, and that
those who are popularly described as "dying for the flag" are more
accurately dying for the nation for which it stands. But the nation
is not the flag; the logical error committed there, frequently
committed these days, is taking the representation of a thing as the
thing itself.

> I believe desecrating
> the flag dishonors the sacrifices of those who served this Nation and
> continue to defend us all.

The word "descrating" is a loaded term, and has meant different things
throughout history. Did you know that there's already laws on the
books meant to protect the flag? They forbid using it as, for
example, part of an article of clothing. It dates back to a time when
people were concerned about commercial exploitaton of the flag -- a
cause I could get behind, considering how much false patriotism
centers around prominent flag display.

But I consider passing spurious amendments to "protect" a symbol to
be, at best, misguided. You cannot harm a symbol by doing anything to
one representation of it -- there will always be more flags. You can
harm that symbol, however, by harming the thing it represents -- and
one of the most powerful things we have in the U.S. is freedom of
speech. While I would never burn a flag myself, as the cliche goes, I
would do everything in my power to protect someone else's right to do
so.

The whole flag burning amendment issue strikes me as nothing more as a
political fad, seriously harmful to freedom of speech, brought to the
service of empty patroitism.

> While the Supreme Court says protestors have the
> right to burn the flag, the Constitution says we have the right to amend it,
> and we must now do so to protect the flag.

The Consitution says you have, not the right (as congressmen you don't
have the right to do any damn thing, your post is in service to your
constituency and grants you *no* rights), but the duty to amend it
when the need arises. But there is hardly such a need at this moment
-- the figure being bandied about is that a grand total of ONE flag
burning incident occured in the United States last year. To sponsor a
Constitutional amendment to fix a problem that doesn't exist in order
to bring the power of the U.S. Government to bear against a
questionable issue -- honestly, the situation seems, how should I put
this... Schaivo-esque?

I do appreciate the personalized responses, even if they are, at best,
written by staffers. (But then again, you do have a job to do.) I get
the feeling that neither of us is going to convince the other here, so
I'll merely thank you for your time, and get down to the business of
spreading the word about your co-sponsorship of this lamentable
amendment.

Random Ideas, 6/16

2005-06-16T20:38:00.000-04:00

1. Take the music to the song "Hotel California." Put it into a blank video file. Then splice into that file appropriate scenes from the movie Manos: The Hands of Fate, so as to make a music video for the song. Post it somewhere on the web. Watch the fun.

2. Also a video idea. Intercut between highlights (more likely, lowlights) from the
current session of Congress and President Bush press conferences (Schrivo, estate tax repeal, the Flag Burning amendment current winding its way through Congress), and scenes from a really over-the-top hillbilly gathering, complete with cousins kissing, pickup trucks tearing up dirt roads, unlovely people in deteriorating overalls with vehicles devoted to dead people & peeing Calvin decals, et cetera. Overlay the whole thing with "Arkansas Traveller" and "Turkey in the Straw."

3. Go to www.yakov.com and see aging, one-joke funnyman Yakov Smirnov try to ply his two-decade-old wares in Branson, Missouri, making his apparently prodigious living these days confirming the misbegotten beliefs of superiority held by the more rural, more regrettable portions of our nation. Try to make fun of it but quit halfway through when overcome by feeling of profound ennui, mixed with longstanding, now confirmed suspecion that one is merely raging against the ever-deepening tide of stupidity infesting the United States, then collapse weeping, spending night curled up inside bottle of cheap liquor. Later, try to get a description of the whole process published on McSweeney's.

If I had the money to run a television ad campaign...

2005-05-11T16:08:00.000-04:00

I previously posted as a Slashdot comment. It was too much work for Slashdot alone. The story linked to this very insightful Grimwell Online article, concerned the excitement that game companies are feeling over the prospect of selling extra game content.

That's right. You've bought their $50 (likely, soon to be $60) game, you're playing along, and you're sort of bitterly enjoying it in that uniquely modern-video-game-experience way, but then you read that the kind of extra feature that you use to need to press Up Up Down Down Left Right Left Right for, now you have to pay additional bucks to get.

Yeah, that's a winning business model.

Think about it: Back in the old days, strategy guides were completely optional things. Now, there are games where the guide is almost necessary to play (often because of lackluster manuals). How long before games are designed around the need to buy extra content just to play them well? Keep in mind that there are games out now that are almost impossible even without the ability to buy powerups to make it playable.

Is gaming full of empty promises? Are game companies acting like rampaging lucre-beasts? Will people buy access to fairly gimmicky and short-lived bit-content, like "tricked out vehicles" to make friends drool while they watch them play some racing game? (That's paraphrasing, fairly maliciously, the quote from the Grimwell article from some X-Box exec, excited about his new, precious revenue source.)

I don't think it'll last, and I'd accelerate the process if I could. If I had the money, I'd love to produce this commercial and see if I could get it inserted into network news broadcasts. I kind of doubt I could, for the same reason Adbusters has problems getting their own spots aired.

Gen Y Slacker Type #1: "Dude! Take a look at this new game! If I press this button, the guy does a backflip and slices through that monster like a buzzsaw!"

Gen Y Slacker Type #2: "That's nice, but-"

#1: "Oh, and when I win the game, it opens up an entirely new character who can play the game in, uh, a slightly different way!"

#2: "Interesting, except-"

#1: "Oh, and look at that other character, check out the polygons on her, huh? On that... fake girl, heh heh... heh..."

#2: "But why not-"

#1: "And I've collected everything I can collect, and I've found the secret double-plus-good ending, and I've max'd out everyone's stats, and I can play as the bad guy, and everything's unlocked... and I've... but... uh."

#2: "And you're now feeling kind of empty from the whole experience, right?"

#1: "Hm, now that you mention it, yeah."

#2: "Yeah. Here, take a look at this pamphlet. It should help to put the situation into better perspective."
(Hands over a pamphlet entitled: "Why You're Feeling Empty: A short essay on the meaninglessness of arbitrary accomplishment.")

- LATER -

#1: "Wow, that handout you gave me was right on the money! I've thrown away my game systems and got started doing something useful!"

#2: "Just like I did a month ago. What are you doing?"

#1: "Writing Sonic the Hedgehog super hot triple-X hentai fanfiction!"

#2: "Just like I started doing a month ago. Hmm...."

This is why I think that the success of video games is short-lived. As companies are producing strings of games that are successively less unique and fun, playing through them feels more and more like work, work with a very insubstantial reward at the end.

Once a majority of players have made that connection, everything falls apart. Again.

("And it's about time," sez Cranky Kong.)

Found on Slashdot: The Submarine

2005-04-21T16:59:00.000-04:00

Link: http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html

This strikes me as incredibly on target. It talks about the ascendancy of PR departments and how reporters allow them to practically write the news for them.

That by itself is foreboding enough. Now replace the word "PR departments" with "White House press releases."

Is the lack of mainstream media criticism of the Bush presidency's incredibly revisionist approach to the executive branch beginning to make sense now? The problem with the mainstream media isn't liberalism, it's laziness.

Web Funny. Funny, huh huh huh.

2005-03-21T10:42:00.000-05:00

I don't laugh at an awful lot on the web, anymore, 'cept maybe Fafblog, but then today I find not one but two hie-larious sites.

Okay, I found one of them linked to from Fafblog, but I still claim credit for it! It's Topic Drift, and as I said in a Fafblog comment, it's like someone overdosed on the literary works of Woody Allen and turned into one, Flaming Carrot-style. And that's a good thing, fokes.

The other thing is called somehow The Squooshy Pineapple, an' it was found on Memepool, and it's even more much funnier than rind of bacon. (Grammar flaws in previous sentence intentional, do not write me.) It's a picture of wire service photographs with joke captions - except unlike the many contest sites that work along that tired premise, these are actually good. Of special note today is the picture of Pseudomilly Brock and her dog, "Hungula." Warning: do not view while enjoying a beverage or else risk turning your drink into Nostril Cola.

Loonatics?! Also, WB's update track record

2005-02-17T17:00:00.000-05:00

Q: How stupid are Warner Bros. executives?

A: This stupid:

(Picture scavanged off of Michael Barrier's blog.)

The picture shows the redesign of Bugs Bunny into yet another of those ill-advised spin-offs WB tends to make every few years, seeking to reimagine and modernize the classic Warner Bros. characters.

I don't have a scanner handy, but right in front of me is a picture in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution which provides pictures of the updates of Wile E. Coyote, the Tazmanian Devil, Daffy Duck and the Road Runner (and also Space Jam-introduced wannabe Lola Bunny), and except for the TD it's almost impossible to tell them apart. Don't they see this is going to tank SO BAD. Does the process of getting an MBA just drain all appreciation for wit and humor from your brain? There have got to be people in the pipeline making this show who can see this, why aren't they speaking up?

Even more indicative of a fundamental disconnect with reality by these people -- the thinking that informes the update to the classic characters is based on the fact that the Duck Dodgers series on Cartoon Network fizzled quickly, and the Looney Tunes: Back In Action movie lost $79 million dollars. Of course, the possibility that both of these implementations were lacking entirely the charm and cleverness of the original shorts, which were made on the cheap and yet are even now regarded as among the best cartoons ever made, that never occurs to the clueless folks now regrettably in charge of what is potentially animation's greatest property.

This strikes me as a good opportunity to go over the various recent attempts to update the classic Warner Bros. characters, and how they have, each, failed to recapture the spirit of the original.

(These are rated on a scale of one to ten anvils.)

TAZ-MANIA
Rating: Three anvils.

Some of the episodes of this show were actually good, but for every Bull and Axel cartoon (the best thing about the series) there was a so-so showing. The Taz character just didn't work that well as a teenager in a sorta-suburban setting. Also, the show was very... talky. Imagine what a cartoon with the Tazmanian Devil in it that could be regarded as talky would be like. That image is largely accurate. However, it must be said the animation was rather good.

TINY TOON ADVENTURES
Rating: Two anvils.

The first of the Stephen Spielberg-branded cartoons, even though he really didn't have a lot to do with them. Once in a while there was a good episode (the They Might Be Giants music videos are classics), but overall this show was way too pleased with itself. There are still people today who will swear up and down that it was brilliant, but they're still laboring the spell of childhood nostalgia. (The only reason people went to see Episode II, in my opinion.)

ANIMANIACS
Rating: Five anvils.

Once in a while this was brilliant, like with the oft-rerun Nations of the World song, or the "I'm Mad" theatrical short they put at the beginning of WB's otherwise-forgotten Thumbelina cartoon. Of the various cartoon shorts showcased in this show, the Warner Bros. were often very good, all these: Mindy and Buttons and Rita and Runt, were awful, but Slappy Squirrel was often surprisingly clever. Anything they showed that had the slighest hint of historical content tended to be crappy. This show, of course, was where Pinky and the Brain got its start, seguing smoothly into...

PINKY AND THE BRAIN
Rating: Six anvils.

Pinky and the Brain was often great (perhaps the greatest premise ever shown on Saturday morning), but also (somehow) suffered from Animaniacs' historical cartoon malaise. The better ones tended to be those that showed up earlier in the run, but there were excellent cartoons throughout its run. (Especially "Mouse of La Mancha", brilliant writing on that one.) This remains the high point of WB Animation's latter-day, non-Batman output.

TWEETY AND SYLVESTER MYSTERIES
Rating: One anvil.

Whoever came up with the idea for this should have been derided, but whoever decided to make it should have been shot.

BABY LOONEY TUNES
Rating: One anvil.

Jim Henson's Bugs Bunny Babies!

FREAKAZOID!
Rating: Six anvils.

Stands alongside PatB as the highlights of the age. Some of these cartoons push the "classic updates" premise of this post, but Freakzoid, despite being an obsensible superhero cartoon, was actually a clever parody of them. I don't include Road Rovers here because it was too far over the line into action cartoons (and sucked anyway). Freakazoid wasn't as good as the Tick, but then, what is? Also note that the Earthworm Jim cartoon was just as good, and also aired on Kids WB at about this time, but is largely forgotten today except as a videogame character.

DUCK DODGERS
Rating: Three anvils.

In this one they went back to trying up update classic characters and what do you know? They failed miserably. Their including things like a Green Lantern crossover cartoon prove that the creators of this show have absolutely no idea what made the classic characters great.