In a release dated August 20, 2008, the United States Department of Treasury has released the following:

“The current crisis environment of world terrorism, massive debt, and general shittiness of economy has caused great concern in the Department of Treasury. As many of you are no doubt aware, we like to be simultaneously on the cusp of world events and digging into history which is why we commissioned the State Quarters, Sacagawea Dollar, the President Dollars, the First Spouse Coins, the Legacy of Great Eleanor Roosevelt Impersonators Coins, and also why we pawn off more recent events on the Franklin Mint and Liberia.  The U.S. Mint strives to provide the great American public a fantastic source of collectibles that have utterly no connection to Star Trek or George Lucas.  We feel that the Hojillion Dollar bank note will satisfy both collectors and consumers, especially at the gas pump.  Jesus Christ, I mean shit!  I drive a freaking hybrid and I PRINT MONEY FOR THE UNITED STATES and I still can’t afford to drive anywhere.  We hope that this new note will speed transactions everywhere, so that more people can fill up their tanks faster at the cheap place in town.”

*In all semi-seriousness, the upcoming coins are pretty darn sweet looking.  I have two of the new President dollars and none of the First Spouses.  I didn’t even know they were minting those, but I was going to insert a joke about them until I saw that they were real.  And yeah, I do actually collect coins.

Games Workshop, the maker of the Warhammer 40,000 and Warhammer tabletop wargames, has posted losses for the last year and did not issue a dividend this quarter. I play Warhammer 40K and have purchased many of the supplemental materials and games in that science-fiction universe and I am not at all surprised by this news. The prices on the product available has risen to exorbitant rates but the product itself has also vastly improved in the fifteen years I have been playing these games.

I wonder if they have finally priced themselves out of the market. This also explains why they are shutting down the lower profit margin aspects (Specialist Games and Black Industries) of the umbrella company. The funny thing is that their main product (minis) have been getting better and better. Miniature quality and variety has been improving consistently throughout my experience with the hobby, with the notable exception of the Dark Eldar. The printed matter is more durable and much better looking than it was when I started playing in 1993. The art and flavor of the universe continues to amaze. I wonder if they just over-bloated themselves or if they are losing actual sales revenue.

“…£192,000 loss, compared with a £127,000 profit in the same period of 2006.”

That sentence indicates two things: either they grew too big too fast, which I have no data on, or they lost sales. Given my bias about their price gouging style of raising prices every year, I am inclined to side with the fact that the hobby has simply gotten too expensive for most of their market. I wonder how much they have lost on Apocalypse alone. It would be refreshing to see former head of sales Mark Wells take the salesman stance and drop prices. I have worked in a variety of sales environments and competition generally means lower prices for the same quality item, except in health care apparently.

For a long time, Games Workshop was operating in an era of unprecedented monopoly-through-no-competition. There simply was no other game or game company like them in the world and there still isn’t. But now that there are miniature based games and companies flourishing (seemingly everywhere on the internet) for a fraction of the price of GW’s materials, there may be actual competition, not from a single corporate entity, from all of the smaller games like Infinity, Confrontation, Ragnarok, Hordes, War Machine, the various Clix games, and even video games.

Another aspect of this situation could be the fragile and crumbling economy of the United States. In the last ten years, the US has come to dominate the consumption of this hobby. In White Dwarf magazine’s US and UK edition, the editors have stated repeatedly (if I remember correctly) that the US is the largest market for their product. The US does host a growing number of Games Days and Grand Tournaments every year. Perhaps the money is being saved for slightly rainier days expected in the future. Perhaps Moms and Dads just aren’t willing to finance the ever-expanding defense budget of Altair 7 either, despite how much Planetary Inquisitor-Governer Kevin really wants a phalanx of Battle Tanks and Super Heavy Titan Walkers.

I wonder if anyone has done any market research to see how many new players have been recruited by the Dawn of War video game and its expansions or the various novels from the Black Library. I wonder if anyone has seriously considered lowering prices. Why would I buy a Super Heavy Baneblade Tank (literally a foot or so across) for $95 when I could purchase $95 worth of plasticard and bits and make two or even three scratchbuilt models?* My limited economics education did teach me about price elasticity. I wonder if the people in charge of Games Workshop would consider lowering prices on some of their basic model kits in reaction to the losses. Given the history of the company, I doubt it.

*In all fairness, that sentence is totally unproven but I would be willing to try it out. There are numerous fan-made pdf templates for making your own scratch built baneblade and I could be convinced to find the time in February to try it. At the moment, I do not have the finances to spend on such a project.

So the great and shadowy domain of the interwebs decided to digest my last two posts in a manner that prevents anyone from reading them.  Even the cached versions appear to have, erm, disappeared.

Let me recap briefly: Macitajs on Acid blah blah wall of sound blah blah are the Lithuanian Insane Clown Posse/Man Man lovechild blah blah look at me, I’m a music nerd.   Plastic People of the Universe deserve your respect blah blah Dr. Teeth and the Electric Mayhem blah blah The Unbearable Lightness of Being blah blah crazy amazing sound blah blah don’t miss them.  More info.

I will endeavour to recreate the post as best I can as soon as I can.   Right now, I am working on a post about Rosetta Stoned, Sontiago and Gabe FM, Dilly Dilly, and Birds and Batteries at the Velvet Lounge last night.  I will even have shitty camera phone pictures.

Better late than never, I hope. Allow me to review a show I attended last week (02.20.07) : Grizzly Bear, Papercuts, and Foreign Born.

Foreign Born are out of LA and it was hard not to be continuously aware of it. They had a decent sound but it was amazingly produced for the first band. They sounded somewhat like The Killers or, as I put it, a wussier Arcade Fire. (side note: I am now informed that the new Arcade Fire may be edging perilously closer to sounding like The Killers) At any rate they were decent but did not strike me as being terribly memorable. None of their songs managed to pull me in and the relatively constant tempo would dull my awareness of them. By far their best song was the last one where they doubled the number of people on stage and added more percussion and a small harp.
Final evaluation: I would not pay to see them but I wouldn’t be surprised to hear them on Live 105.

Papercuts are a San Francisco product. They were recently written up by the SF Weekly in a solid review and I agree with its sentiments overall. If you have to use one made up musical adjective to describe them it would be that they are Dylan-esque. The lead singer seems to playing to his own musical vision; whenever he is not singing he turns away from the audience to immerse himself in the sound. The other aspect that I found very interesting is that I thought the music had an almost “raspy” quality to it that I thought came from the keyboards more than the vocals. Papercuts are definitely a band that is doing its own thing and doing it well.
Final Evaluation: I would probably not pay to see them – but purely for stylistic reasons.

Grizzly Bear are from Brooklyn. They were the headliners for the show and play much smoother style of rock’n’roll. The lead singer has a very melodic voice for indie rock and uses it well. They alternated from these almost ‘drone’ pieces to songs that were a little more up-tempo. I definitely liked the up-tempo ones better and, I confess, almost fell asleep through part of the final sequence that they had. They had a pretty low-key drummer for most of their songs and I thought that was one of the more usual components for a lot of their songs. It is nice, and a little challenging, to get out there without the constant thud of the bass drum and it definitely helped bring out their unique timbre. I hadn’t really heard much of their stuff previously and I think I would be curious to do it again now that I am a more informed listener.

Final evaluation: I would pay to see them again ($8) but not enough based on their current popularity.

My GF, knowing that I’m a fan of the Audioslave, sent me an article today about Tom Morello’s new self-titled acoustic album he’s putting out under his solo name: The Nightwatchman. In it Morello talks about how he is kind of going the Bob Dylan route but backwards.

It’s pretty interesting. I’d heard about his Nightwatchman act back during the 2004 campaign some. It sounds interesting and now that he’s got an actual album coming out I’ll probably have to give it a listen (maybe better than Frank Black’s acoustic album?).

However, the thing that they mentioned in it that I had not heard is that Rage Against the Machine is reuniting for a single show at Coachella this year. RATM!!! I was this close to seeing them perform live back in the day (the tour they were supposed to do with the Beastie Boys back in like 2000 I think) but then Mike D or someone was in a motorcycle accident and they canceled the thing.

Now, all I have to do is fly my ass out to Coachella, find a hotel, and buy a ridiculously overpriced ticket and I’d get to see RATM like I’d always wanted to.

I sincerely hope that somehow out of this a permanent RATM reunion happens. Even if you didn’t agree with the politics in their music, you have to admit that they actually had a voice, and in the current political climate, it’s a voice that I think would resonate with the kids and at least get them more interested in these political issues. Or at least those who remember Rage and how they used to stand and try to fight for things they cared about.

I don’t really know any music of any genre well enough to give an honest critique. I don’t feel the same about movies. I watch movies and I care about them enough to refuse to liek them simply on the basis of “I was entertained” or “Shit done gets blowed up good.” Some might call me snobby, even boorish, but I don’t care. Inspired by the posts on 3 Bulls about Pitchfork’s Year End Crap Fest, I will now take the Netflix Critic’s Picks to task. Unfortunately, I can’t link to the page without siging in and there is no way in hell I am showing you the tremendous amount of soft core porn in my queue or my credit card information.

Snakes on a Plane: I freaking love going to see Uwe Boll movies. I love watching phoned-in-by-the-assistant-personal-assistant-to-Mr./Mrs. acting. I love poorly conceived conceit pieces. I love shitty horrible movies, I will pay money to see them in a theater. My most prized posession is a copy of Demon Wind, a movie that I alone have been able to watch all the way through. Not once, but twice. I say all this and then say to you, I have not yet seen Snakes on a Plane. I like that they bumped it up to an R rating, probably the only movie outside of the Valley that understands that boobies are pretty and nice to look at, but I still have not seen it. Thus, it must suck at even being entertaining in the bad movie way.

An Inconvenient Truth: I am scared shitless by this movie and have yet to see it. I am already convinced due to the stuff I have read about the problem.

Hollywoodland: Hollywood sure loves to make movies about itself and for the life of me, I don’t understand why anyone watches them. These movies justify the massive narcissism that most actors and actresses exude. I don’t care about their private lives unless they are lurid and fucked up and well acted, like the movie about John Holmes or Walk the Line. Chaplin was ok, but who cares? So he slept with lots of women and had an awesome life, so what? If my life were like that, I would be telling lots of people too, but I wouldn’t expect them to care. Also, the director’s last name is Coulter, so he reminds me of mAnne Coulter and thus, is hideous by association. I hope he doesn’t have a complex about that already.

The Last Kiss: This movie is the epitome of formula. Also, your mother would love it. Let’s all get mopey and weepy and reinforce the general feeling of helplessness by which the current generation of morons (ages 25-33) already feels crippled. Please see my review of Zack Braff’s next few movies.

The Night Listener: Maybe this is good, but given the other movies so far on this list, I can’t trust it.

Jackass: Number Two: Yawn. This should have been titled “Too Hot for America’s Funniest Home Videos.”

Scoop: Not even Her Royal Boobness is enough to make me see this.

Accepted: Justin Long, you try my patience. I know you have to pay the bills and all, but please stick to the beauty of Galaxy Quest or Idiocracy.

Gosford Park: This one is in my queue. I am giving it a shot.

Calendar Girls: Helen Mirren is hot and maybe someday, she’ll say the same about me.

I don’t even want to touch the Top 100. The venom within me would boil your blood from the heat emanating from my fiery rage and other cliched sayings would vomit forth upon the page as I described that epic list of mediocrity.

Recently, while out on the quest for San Francisco’s best hamburger, I stumbled upon one of the niftier street art installations I’ve seen. These were both on MUNI poles and over 10 ft. off the ground.

The only thing I have to add is, “Er, your buttocks are so square and small it barely reads as a moon.”

We have an exciting, breaking update. Bloggers conquer news media. Everyone complains bloggers just comment on news and never do anything on their own. Now, you can examine, in all its glory, what happens when a blogger tries to actually report the [entertainment?] news.

UPDATE: WRN exclusive! We have word that The great and powerful Chuckles may be appearing on radio shows across the country. Stay tuned for more information and/or misinformation as the situation develops.
Tucker Carlson Tucker Carlson Tucker Carlson Tucker Carlson Tucker Carlson Tucker Carlson Tucker Carlson Tucker Carlson Tucker Carlson Tucker Carlson Tucker Carlson Tucker Carlson Tucker Carlson Tucker Carlson Tucker Carlson Tucker Carlson Tucker Carlson Tucker Carlson Tucker Carlson Tucker Carlson Tucker Carlson

[Sorry about all the posts, but when it rains, it pours!]
While I still have yet to beat Guitar Hero II on expert—hey, I have movies and TiVo to watch—it turns out that there will be yet ANOTHER Guitar Hero game coming out if this joystiq post is to be believed. And in just a couple months no less.

I’d assume that once they got most of the stuff for GH2 done, they said, “This version is perfect, lets just cover more songs and create new venues/skins and watch the money roll in.”

This time we’re are going to be lucky enough to get Guitar Hero: 1980’s Edition and it will be coming out in “3-4 months.” Perhaps the same time the Xbox 360 version of Guitar Hero II is released (which looks amazing by the way and is rumored to have an extra plug on the guitar for a potential distortion pedal attachment).

There isn’t any information available yet about the possible track list. I’d assume that as more of these come out, they’ll start having the same track on multiple games. Heck, I wish they had all the tracks from GH1 on GH2, there are so many good ones there.

While I don’t own an Xbox 360 (and really am leaning towards just getting a PS3 whenever I get an HDTV) I am definitely drawn to the hotness of the game in high res and the possibility of downloading additional songs.

Really, I’m just hoping that I don’t need to buy all new guitar controllers if I get the PS3. Some kind of adapter would be fine for me.

In a recent Dinosaur Comic, T-Rex put forth a theory that basically stated the conundrical nature of zombie infections. Essentially, as he states it, zombies really want to EAT you. And when they catch you they will try to devour you entire body (ignoring bones I suppose) and are particularly enticed by your brain.

The problem with that is that if they do eat their victims brain, there is no way that the victim would become a zombie. It’s an established fact that zombie infection is centered in the brain, thus the only way additional zombies are created are by being bitten but not killed and keeping their brain intact. Also, zombies are reliant on existing muscle tissue and structure, so if someone was even partially eaten there is a great chance that it would at least partially immobilize them. Still this sets the requirement for the zombie population to expand, zombies must be ineffective hunters.

That poses more problems though. By being ineffective hunters, it makes it much less likely for someone to be bitten by a zombie without first spotting it. In this case, after an initial outbreak (being caught of guard and not understanding the nature of the infection), it would probably not be that difficult to eventually exterminate the ineffective zombies.

If they were effective, you would only have a couple zombies who killed lots of people but the infection would not spread rapidly enough to lead to zombie apocalypse.

Anders Sandberg further addresses this issue with his post Zombie Evolutionary Epidemiology. This article basically addresses the evolution of the zombie ‘virus.’ First, he says, T-Rex is setting black and white (effective/ineffective) cases for the zombie. Sandberg argues that even an ineffective zombie can occasionally be effective and even an effective zombie can occasionally be ineffective, thus you can’t create absolutes like T-Rex does.

Second, he posits that there may be evolutionary pressure on the zombies, consequently making certain qualities of the virus heritable. He reasons:
Assuming zombieness is in some sense heritable (why not? nothing about zombies makes sense anyway), there would be an evolution towards reduced virulence (i.e. biting, not killing as often).

Assuming zombieness is in some sense heritable …, there would be an evolution towards reduced virulence (i.e. biting, not killing as often). This is just as how many non-vector transmitted diseases evolve towards more benign forms where the host is not killed (diseases transmitted by vectors on the other hand have a weaker incentive to become less virulent). So the initial zombies would evolve towards an optimal speed to injure enough people to keep the spreading high, but not be too efficient.

He then models how he thinks either population would fare (effective vs. ineffective). The graph below is also from his article.

This model basically says ineffective zombies start out at near zero and effective zombies at nearly one. Zombie efficiency is essentially the likelyhood that a person will be attacked in such a way that it prevents them from becoming a zombie. For this model Sandberg assumed that each ‘child’ zombie would have a normally distributed change with standard deviation 0.1 efficiency from its ‘parent.’

As you can see from the graph, both populations tend toward a 50% effective rate. It’s difficult to tell from the second graph which population is which but either way, humanity is totally screwed.

There is further supposition about how the zombie population may change in response to the availability of its prey. It becomes a question about the evolutionary benefits of shuffling vs. fast zombies. It’s in this area that I think the analysis gets a little bogged down. I kind of get the feeling that he’s saying that fast zombies are more effective than shambling zombies. I’m not sure this is the case (certainly in zombie movies, they both seem equally effective).

Either way it was an interesting article and definitely worth checking out if you’re a fan of zombies.

Thanks to Chuckles for the Zombie Survival Guide for helping me to think about the zombie menace in more scientific terms.