Bent Corner

As if I wasn’t already looking forward to the summer.

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The Daily Show and The Colbert Report look to be returning with new episodes after the first of the year. From the LA Times:

Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert joined their late-night comrades Thursday in announcing that they would reluctantly return to the air next month without their writers.

After a previously scheduled two-week hiatus, “The Daily Show With Jon Stewart” and “The Colbert Report” will resume production Jan. 7, Comedy Central said in a statement released late Thursday afternoon.

Stewert and Colbert are members of the WGA. Both of them will in effect be writing their own material for the respective shows. Doesn’t this mean that they are scabs? It certainly seems that way to me. They as members of the WGA will go on to enjoy any advancements the WGA secures as a result of this strike. It just seems unethical for them to cross the picket line now and go back to making new episodes.

I’m not going to pretend that I agree with this strike. I think most of what they are fighting for is silly and not important. With that said, if you are a member of the WGA, you ought to respect your own union and your fellow union members. You ought to be respecting your own strike.

As far as I can tell, both Stewart and Colbert are scabs.

Writer: Jeph Loeb
Pencils: Joe Madureira
Colorist: Chris Lichtner

I really got my money’s worth with this book. Usually I only read a comic once. With this book, I read it twice. Not because I enjoyed it so much that I had to experience the joy one more time. No, I read it again because I didn’t understand what happened.

The art was nice looking, but I couldn’t really figure out what what transpiring from one panel to the next. The colors were extremely dark. I thought the story was going to include Venom and Magneto. They were on the cover. I don’t remember seeing them in the book. Then again, it was kind of dark in there.

I did enjoy the part were Captain America told Wanda the Scarlet Witch that she needed to show less skin when she went out in public. I didn’t like the part that showed Wanda and Pietro in a romantic relationship. With each other. They are brother and sister. That’s creepy and disgusting even for mutants.

John Donahoe, a muckety-muck over at Ebay, wants to do a major overhaul to the site so that it can shed the fleamarket stink eBay has developed lately.

I wish him the best of luck with that.

EBay used to be a great place to go to find stuff. It used to be a place where people went to unload their stuff to other people that wanted their stuff. Stuff was always sold in the timed auction format. You knew exactly how long something would remain up for auction. You could bid on stuff you wanted and then wait to see if you were the high bidder. It was actually a lot of fun.

Something happened to eBay a long the way. It became less of an auction site and more of a place for professional junk peddlers to sell their crap. They don’t use the auction format. They list things using a set sale price.

In other words, a fleamarket.

If John Donahoe truly wants to clear the fleamarket stink from eBay, he will find a way to clear the merchants and their eBay storefronts from the site. Return it to the timed auction format where regular people go to bid on stuff from other regular people.

Like I stated earlier, I wish him the best of luck with that.

I recently upgraded my cellphone to a Motorola RAZR. Not only is it the best cell phone I’ve ever owned, it does all sorts of neat stuff such as playing an MP3 file as a ringtone. I’ve been using the generic ringtones because I haven’t had a way of transfering an MP3 file to my phone. That was until this past weekend. I purchased a software package that allows me to transfer picture files to use as wallpaper and MP3 files to use as ringtones. It came bundled with a USB cable along with adapters for most cellphones.The software allows you to edit down a sound file to a more manageable size. I made a 20 second MP3 of the hook from BLACK HOLE SUN by Soundgarden and it turned out great. After that turned out so swimmingly, I decided I would try something else. I decided to convert over PUNKROCKER by Teadybears. It features Iggy Pop doing the vocals. It was used recently in a car commercial. I don’t remember which. I had purchased the song on iTunes. Every time the commercial would play, I would end up playing the song in my head. It’s a cool song.

When I tried to convert the file over to an MP3, iTunes informed me that I was not allowed because it protected.

I paid for this song. I can play it on my PC. I can play it on my iPod. I just can’t play 25 seconds of it on my phone.

Digital Rights Management (DRM) is a blight on civilized society. It’s an unnecessary obsticle getting between me and the music I paid for. If I want to hear, “well I’m a punkrocker, yes I am” every time my phone rings, I have to burn the song to a disc and then import the one-song disc back over as an MP3. What a waste of my time. And to think this is what I get for actually paying for the song instead of jumping on The Pirate Bay and downloading it.

Thanks. Thanks a lot.

Recently actors from the hit NBC television show Heroes picketed outside Universal Studios. Not the part that is a cheesy amusement park with the fake looking giant shark, but the part that is the actual movie studio. Someone from Comic Book Resources was on hand and was able to write about it.

Greg Grunberg, the actor that plays Parkman on Heroes said something interesting. This from the CBR article:

Grunberg characterized the AMPTP’s position on the issues “ridiculous.” “When a musician puts out a record that becomes a CD and then becomes an online digital download, they still make the same amount of money,” Grunberg said. “Why isn’t the same true for a writer?”

This is something I’ve heard said before. B.J. Novak, actor and writer for The Office said something quite similar in the YouTube video I linked to earlier.

It’s not true. The writers have been getting residuals on iTunes downloads all along. When the consumer pays for a download, the writers get their residual just like they would if the consumer paid for a DVD instead of a download.

I’m not sure if this misinformation is perpetrated on purpose or if it’s simply a case of the people involved not understanding the specifics. Most people that read about the strike or watch YouTube videos about the strike know about iTunes. Most of them have probably purchased media from iTunes. I’m sure it resonates with these people when they hear that writers don’t get paid from iTunes downloads they have paid for.

That doesn’t make it true.

Mike Huckabee last month in a post-debate interview:

I’m as strong on terror as anybody. In fact I think I’m stronger than most people because I truly understand the nature of the war that we are in with Islamofascism. These are people that want to kill us. It’s a theocratic war. And I don’t know if anybody fully understands that. I’m the only guy on that stage with a theology degree. I think I understand it really well.”

Mike Huckabee after being outed as a liar by the conservative blog Powerline:

I have a bachelor of arts in religion and a minor in communications in my undergraduate work. And then I have 46 hours on a master’s degree at Southwestern Theology Seminary. So, my degree as a theological degree is at the college level and then 46 hours toward a masters — three years of study of New Testament Greek, and then the rest of it, all in Seminary was theological studies, but my degree was actually in religion.

I’m not surprised that Huckabee was only lying when he claimed to have a theology degree. I remember when he said it and I remember thinking that it was an interesting aspect of Huckabee that set him apart from any other candidate. Most politicians are former lawyers. I was reminded of the fact that Huckabee held a theology degree when he made the derogatory comment about the Mormon faith. I thought it was strange that someone with a theology degree would be so ignorant about a major American religion.

Huckabee’s ignorance now makes more sense. He was lying about the theology degree.

I read an article in the LA Times that since Nintendo can’t make enough Wii game consoles to satisfy consumer demand, they will do the next best thing - they will begin selling rain checks. They are calling them “Wii Certificates”. Nintendo hopes to squash criticism and stop prospective customers from defecting over to one of the rival game systems.

We’ve been thinking about getting a Wii. They look like a lot of fun and they don’t cost nearly as much as Sony’s Playstation 3 or Microsoft’s XBox 360. Plus with a Wii, it only comes one way. The XBox 360 and the Playstation 3 both come in different models and editions. It’s confusing. I’ve never really understood the difference between the different versions. For instance, the XBox 360 comes in a special Halo 3 edition except it doesn’t even come with the Halo 3 game.

The Wii only comes one way.

I’ve looked for them every time I go to a retail store that sells them. Though I always see enough Playstation 3 and XBox 360 consoles to choke a goat, I’ve never seen a Wii. They’ve been out a year now and I still haven’t seen one for sale.

Todd Allen of Comic Book Resources interviews lawyer Darren S. Cahr (AKA Super Lawyer) concerning the intricacies involved with trademark and copyright laws and how they pertain to the use of BitTorrent technology to share comic books. Marvel and DC have recently begun taking steps to stop BitTorrent sites from sharing comic book scans.

From the Comic Book Resources article:

The question is, if you own a physical copy of the comic, is it still illegal to download a digital copy?

“Yes,” says our Super Lawyer, “just as if you own a copy of a comic book you can’t simply take another copy of the same issue from a store. At least that is the position of the publishing and music industries.”

So the touted Super Lawyer is equating downloading a digital copy of a comic you already legally own to going into a store and stealing a physical issue. The big difference is that when you steal a physical comic, that result for the store is one less copy to sell. That is something that doesn’t happen when you download a digital copy of a comic. Another difference is that a digital scan of a comic is not the same thing as a physical paper comic. One is made of ones and zeros and must be viewed on a computer. The other is printed on paper and involves ink and some staples.

A physical comic and a digital copy of a comic are different from one another. They are not the same thing. Even someone who is not a Super Lawyer can easily tell the difference between the two.

I’m not sure why someone would even want two physical copies of a comic, but I can see why someone would want the physical version and a digital version of the same comic.

Also from the article:

Is it really a good idea to go after some of your more regular customers? This is slippery slope on both sides. On the other hand, there’s something the torrent crowd needs to accept, that they’ve been screaming to the hills about, and that’s the cease and desist letter. Did it occur to anyone that someone like Marvel has to send those letters to maintain their trademarks?

Describing the BitTorrent “crowd” reacting to the cease and desist letter as “screaming to the hills” isn’t really necessary or productive. It’s comes across as unnecessarily snarky. Both sides should be able to discuss this issue without resorting to making insulting remarks about the other side.

When will Marvel and DC send similar cease and desist letters to artists that sketch comic book characters for money? There are artists making money sketching characters they don’t own the rights to. If Marvel and DC are going to go after those that infringe on their intellectual properties, they ought to be consistent. People are making a nice profit infringing on Marvel and DC intellectual properties. It’s not the BitTorrent crowd.

One annoying aspect of the article is the author evidently felt the need to dumb everything down so we comic book nerds could understand the concepts involved. He referred to the BitTorrent controversy as “Secret Torrent Download Crisis Wars”. He also tries to describe the lawyer as some sort of legal “Super Hero” when it comes to the subject of intellectual property and the law.

Who is Allen writing this article for, 12 year olds?