BBC article. Official word from last.fm. As someone who’s got over four years of listening data on the site, it’s a reminder that there’s more than enough data on me out there to satisfy any marketer—including possibly the higher-ups at CBS, last.fm’s reassurances about maintaining privacy notwithstanding. Hopefully someone’s putting together the open-source alternative to last.fm should things go south quickly.

I was downtown to meet some old friends who are now interning at the Globe and Mail, and I didn’t bring a jacket with me because I am an idiot, so I thought “that Rosebuds/Land of Talk show I was thinking of going to is totally not happening now because it’s windy and I am cold.” So I walked over to Bathurst and took the streetcar up after 9pm, and then I passed Queen around 9:30pm and I thought, “man, it’s 9:30, and Land of Talk’s going onstage at the Horseshoe in like 10 minutes, and I’m so close to the Horseshoe, it would be such a shame for me not to go to the show when I’m this close and live sooo far away,” but it took about ten more minutes and three more stops for my head to send the message down to my feet, and I didn’t get off the streetcar until I was well past Dundas.

[insert twenty minutes of speedwalking]

I enter the Horseshoe, which is thankfully not sold out, and plunk down $12. Land of Talk have thankfully not started yet, though a woman that looks suspiciously like Elizabeth Powell is holding court at one of the merch tables. Someone’s family is here, because what middle-aged/elderly couple goes to see a rock show these days? Both my suspicions are confirmed when a) said woman walks into the side-stage area and b) motions to the guy with the older couple, who is in fact the new drummer, to get his ass in gear already, in a totally friendly and bemused manner. Three minutes later the bassist hops on stage and they just start playing while the crowd quickly files to the front of the stage. Welcome, Land of Talk.

It’s a short set because the band have one EP under their belts and not much else in the way of new songs. When they start the crowd is typical Toronto—one hand in pocket, other hand with pint, nodding to the beat and rocking back and forth slightly to the music. I did it too, I’m sorry. But as the set progresses everyone gets looser, so that by the end of the show we’re maybe nodding a bit more vigorously and maybe we have our hands out of our pockets, but we make up for our physical reticience by cheering loudly and heartily after every song.

Land of Talk have just returned from the UK, and they’re still breaking in their new drummer and probably used to a month’s worth of small crowds that maybe don’t know who they are. So when Elizabeth stepped to the mic and quietly murmured “the next song is Breaxxbaxx,” she probably didn’t expect the wild chorus of cheers from the left side of the stage. This would be a recurring theme throughout the night: Land of Talk continually ambushed by hearty cheers of appreciation. By the end of the show everyone’s all “WE LOVE YOU LAND OF TALK, PLAY AN ENCORE!” and Land of Talk’s all “oh-em-gee, this is awesome but we’re, like, the openers and we don’t even have any more songs, except this one that we haven’t played live before,” and then Elizabeth took a couple of minutes to tune her guitar while Chris cracked jokes about being horrible at filling time, and then they broke out the new song and the new song was all “I WILL BREAK YOUR EARS WITH AWESOMENESS!!!!!” and the audience was all “WE LOVE YOU LAND OF TALK!!!!” and Land of Talk was all “WE LOVE YOU TOO PLEASE STAY FOR THE ROSEBUDS!”

So I did what any sane person would do in my position. I, erm, left the Horseshoe and hopped on a streetcar so I wouldn’t have to take a $20 taxi ride home from Finch into the heart of York Region because the busses stop running after midnight. Sorry, Rosebuds. Perhaps some other time. As for Land of Talk, I’m glad you used your awesome psychic powers to convince me to come to your show even though I had decided not to before. Also, I still love Elizabeth Powell.

THE END.

Costco is recalling a line of punching bags with an unusual filling: used underwear. They’re so skeeved out by the bags full of smelly underwear that they’re sending out free shipping boxes AND a replacement punching bag from another company, presumably not filled with used underwear.

Seriously. Used underwear. The mind boggles.

HTPC junkies have been simultaneously looking forward to and dreading this day: the review embargo on CableCard media center PCs has been lifted.

What on earth is a CableCard? Back in the days before digital cable, getting your computer to display a TV signal was relatively straightforward. You either bought an ATI All-In-Wonder card, like I did (and never will again, no thanks to the continuing degradation of ATI’s drivers and MMC tuner software) or you got a regular video card and an add-on tuner card like a Hauppauge PVR-150. You took the coax cable running out of your wall, screwed it into the back of the tuner card, fired up the TV software, and voila—television in a window on your desktop! You could even do nifty things like timeshifting like a PVR and watching television as a translucent display on top of the OS. I could be watching full-screen TV while writing this post, if there was anything good on now.

Unfortunately, none of this is any good if you want to watch HDTV. Your computer can handle it, but because digital cable is so much better in picture quality, combining it with a computer means instant recipe for widespread piracy. At least, that’s the justification the cable providers give for encumbering their set-top digital cable boxes with DRM, turning off the Firewire ports so you can’t watch recorded shows off the hard drive on your computer, and all sorts of haberdashery to thwart anyone that’s even thinking of watching digital cable on their computer. Up until CableCare, your only real options were the following:
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We’re about a third of the way through series 11 of Britain’s second best car show, Fifth Gear, and it’s clear that the producers have taken some of the criticism of the last series to heart. Series 10 was the worst Fifth Gear stretch by a huge margin; the shift in location, the addition of more celebrity puff pieces, the restricted duties of regulars Jason Plato and Tiff Needell, and the addition of new host Tim Lovejoy all combined to make last season very, very difficult to watch. In its continuing attempts to cement a unique identity for itself in the shadow of the colossus that is BBC’s Top Gear, Fifth Gear had thrown away nearly everything that made the show decent and distinctive and replaced it with drivel like “Wreck My Ride,” a segment where they would tear a car apart in a “creative” fashion for no apparent reason.

After a bottoming-out like that, nearly anything would be better, and this series began on a high note: Tim Lovejoy had left to work on other projects. Whether or not that’s a euphemism for “fired for being an uninteresting host who didn’t seem to care much about cars” is almost besides the point: Fifth Gear’s biggest mistake is gone. Unfortunately, the Ace Cafe is still around, but taking the co-host position beside Vicki Butler-Henderson is Tom Ford, the only person to emerge completely unscathed from the poor critical reception the show got. Routinely putting a fun, lighthearted and informative spin on his reviews, Ford was an obvious choice for more exposure, and now he has it.

But problems still linger, and the shock of seeing a decent Fifth Gear episode again has worn off. A couple of things the producers need to fix:

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This is the sound of South Korea shitting its collective pants. The other shoe has finally dropped, and Blizzard Entertainment—the company that brought you a little-known game called World of Warcraft—has announced what has to be the most perilous game sequel project ever conceived: Starcraft 2. When professional gaming tournaments started in the era of Quake so many years ago, most people dismissed it as a fad, or a misconceived business venture. By and large, the naysayers were right, but South Korea is perhaps biggest exception. Gaming is huge in South Korea, and no game bigger than the original Starcraft. Introduced in 1999, Blizzard quickly sold a million copies of the game in the country—that’s one copy for every 40 South Koreans. The game continues to sell eight years later, with a total South Korean install base of 3.5 million. Commercials feature Starcraft footage. Corporations sponsor Starcraft teams and championships. The game is immensely popular even today, and because of that support Blizzard has continued to release updates for the game—absolutely unheard of for an eight-year-old game designed to run on computers less powerful than some current cellphones.

Which is why the idea of a Starcraft 2 is so tantalizing, but also extremely dangerous. Not even the likes of Halo 3 have to deal with this much anticipation—we’re talking about a full tenth of the population of South Korea who’ve played this to this game for years, and undoubtedly craving a sequel for nearly a decade. When Starcraft 2 hits the streets in 2008, South Korea may very well declare an impromptu national holiday. Anticipation on this side of the pond is high too—it’s not for nothing that “zerging” has passed into the general gaming lexicon. Everyone’s waiting to see what Blizzard has in store for the franchise’s resurrection. Stay tuned.

It costs too much. The game library is pitiful. It’s hard to program for, rendering its technical superiority useless. As a home media player it’s pointless, even with a new media format. It’s “not the revolutionary device that Sony’s marketing department would have you believe.” No matter how you slice it, Sony’s got a flop on its hands. So says Salon on one of Sony’s biggest gaming ventures to date.

But they’re not talking about the Playstation 3. Salon’s talking about the PS2. That would be the same PS2 that went on to sell over 115 million units over seven years, dominate the video game industry, and push console games into the mainstream like never before.

Will the Playstation 3 be nearly as successful? With Microsoft and Nintendo presenting far more formidable competition than Sega did in 2000, probably not. But it is a bit eerie how similar the Salon column is to the many predictions and rants about the PS3’s imminent demise. Can’t count anyone out of the race yet.

After performing 140 total hours of community service, Peter Berdovsky and Sean Stevens are free from further prosecution in the debacle that was the Aqua Teen Hunger Force campaign/OMG BOMBZ overreaction. And still Boston officials continue to pretend as though they did everything right:

“Today’s hearing in Charlestown hopefully marks the conclusion of the fallout from Cartoon Network’s guerrilla marketing campaign,” Mayor Thomas M. Menino said in a statement. “I hope the message goes out to all guerrilla marketers who plan on doing business in Boston that we take the public safety of those who live and work here very seriously.”

The message is still clear: we were right to overreact, and everyone who thinks otherwise just isn’t vigilant enough. Well, Boston officials may take public safety “very seriously,” but that doesn’t mean I have to take Boston seriously ever again.

You are Kate, a mechanical engineer on a massive floating-city ship called the Queen of the World. The ship’s been attacked by a fanatical terrorist cult and is flooding rapidly. You have to get out of the ship, save whoever you can, and foil the terrorists still on board. Oh, and by the way, you’re afraid of water.

If the developers manage to pull off the vision, Hydrophobia could be fantastic. But with no track record in this genre and the unusual gameplay involved, that’s by no means certain. Still, with all the me-too games currently flooding the market, this has the makings of something refreshingly different. A game to pay attention to.

I wrote a somewhat lengthy review of Spiderman 2 a couple of years ago. I won’t need nearly so many words for Spiderman 3, nor will I even need my own. From an internet forum I frequent:

dude1: off to see the spiderman flick… OH BOY
dude2: because you just couldn’t give that money to a hobo and ask him to kick you really hard in the balls instead.

Spiderman 3: worse than paying a hobo to kick you really hard in the balls.

P.S. Sandman really needed a theme song for every time he appears as a giant cloud of sand. I suggest Darude’s “Sandstorm.” They could even make a sad version of “Sandstorm” for Sandman’s oh-so-tearful outro. It’d be exactly the same but its tempo would be cut in half for PATHOS.

Bonus points for telegraphing his appearance by having random passersby on the street make inane comments like “gee, it sure feels windy… I hope it doesn’t turn into a… SANDSTORM.” Or construction workers being all “Hey Bob, this 2×4 feels a bit rough, got any suggestions?” “Yeah, Randall, here, you can borrow my… SANDPAPER.” Or maybe a dad and son waiting at a bus stop, and the son asks, “hey dad, what colour is that car?” “Why son, I believe it’s… SANDSTONE.”