BlackBerry Go Bye-Bye

I post this solely because a fair number of my Hollywood friends get their entire diet of tech news from my blog. Ah, the joy of being the designated geek.

Via Defamer, we are reminded that the providers of BlackBerry service in North America (based out of Ottawa, of all places) are involved in a very messy patent suit, and may have to shut down the service very, very soon. For those of you in the real world, this may seem like a minor inconvenience. But you don't understand: in Hollywood, the BlackBerry is the primary instrument through which suit-humans manage to avoid giving their full attention to anything they happen to be engaged in at the time, thereby insuring that at no point they are gazing full-on into the abyss of the futility of their existence.

Defamer mentions the irony that an industry threatened by runaway production to Canada may soon be coincidentally crippled by a software company in Canada. To which I reply: "Yeah, you keep on thinking it's a coincidence. Keep on thinking it until Phase IV is complete..."

Ocean by Ellis

"... flying spaceships really fast. Smacking the bad guys about. This is what it's all about."

Quick reminder -- Warren Ellis' OCEAN is out in trade paperback. Progenitor races, weapons inspectors as heroes, and zero-g gunfights against corporate hacks driven mad by their faulty greed-ware.

This is one of my favorite things the mad pub-crawling bastard has done in, well, ever. In particular I have a massive art-crush on Chris Sprouse and Karl Story. Sprouse doesn't get fancy with the panel layouts, he just draws the hell out of them. Apparently the team went back and fixed a couple unclear panels, added some dialogue so the trade would read a little cleaner. That's value-added, folks.

4GM Gets a Three-Fingered Salute

Congratulations to young Master Buckley over at Ctrl+Alt+Del for the birth of his animated series, available monthly from his website. I have no idea what insane business-model he's going to develop in order to pull it off, but I like his moxie!

And, to be blunt, I just like typing "moxie".

"Some Stuff About Victory from My Dreambook"

I ordinarily don't grift whole posts, but Wonkette nailed it so perfectly, I don't want to risk anyone missing the link. To be clear, this entire post is hers, without permission.

The President's Evolving Vision

May 2003:

October 2005:
Today: Wonkette: At a speech next month, the President hopes to announce he's been "brainstorming" about victory in Iraq.

Where Anime Gets it Right

Via BoingBoing, an article from Fortune Magazine about how not treating the audience like the enemy may somehow be -- wait for it -- more profitable. From the article:

Anime and manga firms have taken on forms very different from Hollywood studios or publishing houses. They more closely resemble the constantly updating startups of Silicon Valley. Their ethos is to get the product out to the right people -- whether it's on a DVD or over a mobile phone or downloadable -- and see what happens. If it succeeds, milk it; if not, try something different. And if the fans are into file sharing (which they are), keep the lawyers leashed and find a way to make piracy work for you.

(...)Female fans now make up about half the attendees at the conferences. Responding to the interest, CosmoGirl last summer began running its own manga strip on the back page of every issue. 'We started hearing girls say their favorite books and favorite things to read were manga,' says Ann Shoket, the magazine's executive editor. 'The girls have drawn their own manga for us. Not just one weird girl -- a lot of girls.')

Maintenance

At some point this week, we'll be switching to Feedburner for the RSS rather than the pure XML that Blogger pukes up. Just a heads up for the feed subscribers.

The article on action scenes is coming -- I can't do a big post, thought, without first giving Ross Richie the pages I owe him. So blame him.

Giffen, the Chatty Cathy

Giffen talks to Newsarama about BB here. I'd do such interviews, but I'm too busy desperately replotting the drunken half-pages he sends me where the new BB fights Lobo in a Japanese schoolgirl costume. He's mad, I tell you. MAD!