All of the above means sales should be dismal. No one plays complicated games on a PC that they can swipe without even using a crack. And yet Sins of a Solar Empire beat Call of Duty 4 to take top spot on the PC sales charts last week. The game has sold over 100,000 copies in 23 days, a not-insignificant sum for an indie publisher like Stardock and an indie developer like the Vancouver-based Ironclad. In addition to besting Call of Duty 4 last week, Sins has outperformed highly anticipated PC games like Crysis and Unreal Tournament 3.

I bought a copy for myself based solely on a Joystiq preview a couple of days before release, and it’s the best impulse game purchase I’ve made in a very long time. I just didn’t realize so many people agreed with me.

I’m not alone in asking the question; shortly after the first Stewart and Colbert episodes on Monday, TVSquad wondered about the same thing. Who does the graphics? Who ties jokes to those graphics? Who picks out clips and decides they should be the target of ridicule? And in the case of all the talk shows returning without writers, not just Stewart and Colbert, who does the research and plans the questions for the guests? Some of these tasks seem distinctly writer-ish.

Some more insights into TheA Daily Show during the writers’ strike comes from an audience member who saw the taping of Monday’s episode. On the one hand, the description of how the first segment played out originally makes it clear Stewart’s ad-libbing. But then there was the question from the audience of how the show came together, and Stewart’s statement that “thoughts didn’t go through the fingertips”—in other words, an outline of the show but no script. Does writing cease to be writing if you make it sufficiently vague or don’t actually put it down on paper? When you’re not coming up with specific jokes, but you are sketching out topics to cover, is that planning or writing?

One thing’s for sure—by the time the writers’ strike is over, the average television viewer will probably have a much better idea of just what a writer does on a talk show, if only because these sorts of questions are going to keep coming up.

According to a Visa Canada survey, more than five million Canadians planned to hit the shops on Boxing Day. After electronics, the most sought after item was clothing.

(…)

However, the Visa survey also found the number of Canadians planning to make purchase on Wednesday was 17 per cent less than in 2006, and the lowest number since 2002. Those who do decide to hit the stores are expected to spend less too.

Prowling the RedFlagDeals forums this year reveals much the same story—disappointment at lacklustre sale prices, unstable online shopping experiences, and a growing distaste for huge lines and mob rule at store opening in order to claim hot items available in extremely limited quantities. When 500 people line up outside a store hoping for a crack at 20 HD DVD players, a lot of people are bound to go home disappointed. With the diehard bargain hunters realizing that many of the Boxing Day deals aren’t much better than sale prices from the rest of the year, it looks like for the person in the know there’s really not too much point to braving the crowds and the traffic.

That said, I did pounce on one Boxing Day deal, though it’s actually been available for a couple of days now and involved no lineups, limited quantities or even leaving the house. And assuming I never need to contact Dell’s horrific warranty service for repair, I imagine it really will feel like Christmas when I get my shiny new PS3 in the mail. RedFlagDeals strikes again!

One TV spot features an exploding gas canister that blows a construction worker off the side of a building. Another shows a young chef slipping on grease and dumping a vat of boiling water on herself, leaving her writhing on the kitchen floor while her skin peels off in bloody ribbons. The Workplace Safety and Insurance Board says they toned down the actress’s screams in editing because they worried they were too upsetting.

Metafilter has a thread on the subject, and I can’t even bring myself to read the whole thing, let alone actually watch the YouTube videos. Thanks, Ontario government, for giving me ample reason to avoid Canadian television altogether for about four months!

Unfortunately, the Zune doesn’t lock you into iTunes because it locks you into a Zune ecosystem instead: the new Zune desktop software, which you must use in order to sync all your music with your Zune. Worse, the third-party software situation is even worse than the already abysmal iPod situation, in that there is none. It’s Zune software or nothing.

This might’ve been okay if the Zune software was powerful and flexible enough to basically allow you to do whatever you liked with your music, the way you could if you could just dump music files on your Zune via the filesystem. Unfortunately, it appears the Zune software is even more crippled than iTunes. This, along with Microsoft’s continuing hatred of any country that isn’t the United States (any attempt to even purchase a Zune via the new Zune Originals site, for example, is met with a lovely ACCESS DENIED message in Canada—I guess Microsoft really doesn’t want Canadian money), means the Zune 80 is off my list of MP3 players to purchase as well.

Which leaves exactly ZERO MP3 players I’d be willing to buy. There has been a shocking lack of development in the hard drive MP3 player world; it’s as if every company has suddenly decided there’s no market for people who want to carry around their entire music collection—or at least a significant subset thereof—in their pockets any more. The only companies that even offer 80/160GB variants are Apple, Microsoft, and Archos, and the Archos 605 Wifi is out because its touchscreen interface fails an extremely basic test: how do I play all my songs in Shuffle Mode? I couldn’t figure this out after ten minutes of poking around in the music interface. No. No. No.

Just as bad is the general tendency to lock people into software ecosystems that don’t meet people’s needs. The Zune software issue isn’t great, but it’s a hundred times worse because without substantial third-party or open source efforts to make software that can crack the Zune’s lockout, the Zune software is the only game in town. In other words, the deficiencies of the desktop software effectively become the deficiencies of the device itself. iTunes is more functional, but because of the nanny state it practically imposes on your music library, it’s equally untenable. And with Apple’s recent move to include a device hash specifically designed to lock the iPod to iTunes, third-party software suffered a setback. Though OSS projects like gtkpod cracked the new hash in a matter of days, the symbolic gesture isn’t lost on them. The makers of Amarok, another Linux iPod manager, basically said the only way to keep your device free of lockouts is to stop buying iPods.

I can see why you’d want to include your own software with your music player. From a new user standpoint it makes perfect sense; why tell people to move all their files using Explorer when having an all-in-one solution makes it easier for the novice to get started on moving music to their shiny new toy? What I don’t understand is why the major DAP manufacturers then take the extra step of locking out other software, so that the novice-user solution becomes the only solution. I’m not afraid of modifying my own ID3 tags; indeed, I prefer to do it that way so I don’t have to screw around with my computer’s music library just so all my singles are marked properly on my MP3 player as having no album. I’m not afraid of moving files by myself via Explorer. And even if you aren’t like me and you are afraid of doing all that on your lonesome, it’s not hard to look at software like Amarok and Sharepod and wonder if third-party developers can’t come up with solutions more palatable than iTunes of the Zune software.

To make an analogy to the web, it’d be as though Bill Gates or Steve Jobs said, “we’ve included this great web browser for you in Windows/OS X, and you cannot use any others.” Legions of Firefox users would then be stuck with Safari—or even worse, Internet Explorer 6. I rather like Firefox, thanks. I’d like to be able to manage my music the way I like as well, and the first company that makes an 80GB player that lets me do so will get my hard-earned money.

About the obsessives part: AVS Forum has shut down one of its subforums until further notice. It turns out the HD DVD and Blu-Ray forums were seeing more than their fair share of fanboyism run rampant:

We have seen members attacking other members not only in debate, which is the right way, but with physical threats that have involved police and possible legal action.

Threats of physical violence, all because some people don’t like your choice of HD format. I eagerly await the Apple-Microsoft wars of 2016.

We turned up in Bristol and started unloading only to find the venue locked. We went around the front and found the whole place shut down and a notice announcing the rest of their tour was cancelled due to ‘band illness’. No one had bothered to tell us anything. The only reason we were on this fucking tour was that band. They were all amazing shows, we might have broken even, we might have got some new fans and then they come along and cancel. They’ve never bothered to contact us. They’re not that popular with us right now.

Lizzie Powell of Land of Talk, who was understandably a bit miffed after the Decemberists cancelled the European tour Land of Talk was supposed to support. Thankfully the band is safe and sound back in North America, where at least they have a tour and venues to play. The interview is a bit of a downer—Lizzie’s pessimistic about the value of music, the band gets ticketed in London for setting up a recording session in a park near Buckingham Palace, and, oh yeah, the Decemberists split town without telling anyone and the band was out the cost of assorted transportation and accomodation expenses. Add that to having their original drummer leave the band earlier this year (and as Chromewave mentions, having their gear stolen after returning from the UK), and you start to wonder how many awful twists of fate the band can take before—well, I dare not say.

But if the unthinkable does happen one of these days, I’ll know who to blame. I’ll organize a show with the Decemberists, and then leave them stranded. In the middle of the Sahara fucking dessert.

Anyways, it turns out that because I got the Wii version, and because people have long ago figured out how to connect the Wiimote to a Bluetooth-equipped PC, it means I can connect my Wii guitar to my computer and play Frets on Fire. The day after the game came out, someone had already put together a GlovePIE script for the guitar. This is great except Frets on Fire comes with just three songs. But I didn’t hook up my guitar just to play songs on my computer. Oh no. I hooked up my guitar so I could make songs on my computer. Fake songs. Or rather, fake frets to real songs that I didn’t originally write.

Basically I have become a pretend Harmonix/Neversoft song developer for the weekend. And it’s strange the things you learn about music when you have to line up brightly coloured dots to the beat that correspond to buttons people are supposed to press in order to pretend they’re playing guitar. Perhaps the most frustrating thing, one that’s given me a new fondness for metronomes, is that some bands can’t seem to keep a steady beat. Be Your Own Pet is an awesome band, but holy crap does the bpm change with practically every measure of “Ouch!”

Why does this matter? Because generally games like Frets on Fire and Guitar Hero tend to assume that time signatures and tempos don’t change very much, if at all, during a song. It’s a very digital way of looking at things—everything in regular intervals, no divergence—but it doesn’t exactly reflect reality very well, especially with the smaller bands whose songs I most desperately want to play. So, if you’re an indie band who wants desperately to have a song featured in the next Guitar Hero or Rock Band game, here’s a tip: buy a metronome and use it.