The Disney Corporation has found yet another way for Big Content to treat its paying customers as potential criminals: hiring security guards to use metal detectors and night vision goggles to spot members of the cinema audience who might be taping the movie. I’m sure that people do tape films, and that other people do watch them, and that some of those viewers of second/third/fourth generation copies fail to show up at the cinema to pay their dues to the Disney Corporation. I’m also pretty sure that if I find myself waiting in line twice as long because some usher has to check me over with a metal detector, then go through a metal detector again after my PDA sets it off first time round and I have to explain that no, it isn’t a digital camera (and woe betide me if I’d bought a Zire 71, which has a still camera built in, instead of a Tungsten T), I’m going to be visiting the cinema a lot less frequently.

I have a horrible feeling that the only bar to Disney insisting that cinema patrons are strip-searched on entry is that the cinema chains would balk at the prospect of losing a couple of screenings per day to the time spent strip-searching customers.

Online game Shadowbane was hacked this week. In a big way:

The population of an entire Shadowbane town was forcibly moved to the bottom of the sea, where they drowned. City guards turned feral and attacked town residents. Mobs of never-before-seen superpowerful creatures, seemingly spontaneously spawned from the ether, began to prowl the streets unchecked, killing characters in the most painful way possible.

It sounds like life in Sunnydale during an average Buffy season closer, when the Big Bad lets loose. Except in this case the mess was cleaned up by the system administrators, who reset the game to its pre-crisis position, rather than the Scooby Gang kicking evil butt.

Jo Walton finds sustenance in every word she types.

[Via Electrolite]

Having attended a science fiction convention with a considerable emphasis on costumes, Danny O’Brien notes the importance of being true to your inner geek.

I was tempted, as is my wont, to quote an excerpt, but you really should read the whole thing. It’s not the sort of tale that lends itself to being mined for a one-liner.

Especially recommended if, like me, you’re sometimes inclined to be a tad half-hearted in your geekery.

Further to yesterday’s comment on the prospect of a stage musical of The Lord of the Rings, I see that Max has come up with an all-too-perfect piece of casting. What the show really needs - nay, deserves - is Troy McClure!

John Hargrave’s Credit Card Prank demonstrates just how little attention shop assistants and checkout operators pay to the signature on the credit card receipt they’ve just asked you to sign.

Next time I bought something that required a signature, I considered just creating a rectangle of solid black. Then I thought a grid might be weirder:

[Photo of receipt showing a hand-drawn grid where a signature should be]

Only the most Matrix-obsessed fanboy would actually use a grid for his signature, but the chick at the Cheesecake Factory didn’t look twice. I mean, I didn’t even have on a trenchcoat.

That was one of Hargrave’s earlier efforts:as the week progressed he got sillier and sillier: hieroglyphics, writing “I stole this card”, you name it, he tried it. It’s a funny piece, until you consider what it implies about the fate of your credit card balance should your card end up in the wrong hands.

[Via Krisalis]

In the midst of some (spoiler-filled for UK terrestrial TV viewers) comments on recent developments in the Buffyverse, this remark from Joss Whedon casts Cordelia Chase’s character arc in Buffy and Angel in a whole new light:

I once said that I finally got to tell the story of Buffy that I tried to tell in the movie, and I did it with Cordelia. Which was the story of someone who was completely ditzy and self-involved becoming kind of heroic. But the way the series was different from the movie was that I didn’t know where you go from there.

I don’t think the correlation is quite as neat as all that, since part of Buffy’s burden from day one was that she had to deal with being a superhero. Cordelia’s first few years were essentially a story about a perfectly normal young woman living in a very strange town and falling in with some odd friends, and it was only halfway through her story that she got some powers of her own to deal with. Which is not to say that Cordelia-as-movie-Buffy isn’t an interesting way to think about the character’s development.

Just think, in a parallel universe where Sarah Michelle Gellar got the part she originally auditioned for, it’d be her performance as Cordelia Chase we’d be talking about now. But then, in that universe we might not have had Alyson Hannigan as Willow, and that would have been a terrible pity…

[Via Dark Horizons News - see entry for Tuesday 27 May 2003]

Grant “New X-Men” Morrison has his suspicions about some of the world’s more prominent celebrities:

Are These Suspicious Celebrities Secretly Mutants Too?

Justin Timberlake

“Definitely a pure mutation - and he’s trying to push his powers in a more evil direction. I think they inject all of those Disney kids, like Britney, with something when they’re young. One minute, they’re singing about mice, and the next, they’re riding motorcycles and fisting each other.”

[…]

Kylie Minogue

“Tricky, but she’s more of an android, like on Star Trek. They look perfect, but they’ve got strange plastic skin, and if you scratch them, a clear liquid flows out. She can be used for good or evil - like the bomb.”

[…]

[I wonder how many extra search engine hits this site is going to get because of the combination of the words “Justin”, “Kylie”, “Britney” and “fisting” on the one page?]

[Via linkmachinego]

Coming soon to the London stage: The Lord of the Rings: The Musical.

Presumably they won’t leave Tom Bombadil out of this version.

James Lileks is feeling let down by his evening’s video viewing:

Years ago I caught the end of a sci-fi horror movie on TV, and I was riveted - it seemed as if the producers had hired every single actor in Hollywood and paid them fifty bucks to play dead. I’d never seen so many dead people. They were heaped in the subway, piled on the street, strewn in the churches. Big thick heaps of pockmarked, sallow-faced, zombified dead people. A cast of thousands! I never quite figured out what the movie was about, only that the final apocalyptic scene was like nothing I’d seen. And it had spaceships, too. I’d never caught the entire movie, so when I saw it at the video store this weekend I thought hey, this should be good!

Then the credits start to roll, and you see the words “Based on the books ‘The Space Vampires’” and you think perhaps I have overmisunderestimated this one. The movie was ‘Lifeforce,’ and I have a crick in my neck from ducking the chunks it blew. Everybody in the movie was miscast, except for the woman who spent the entire film walking around naked, and for Patrick Stewart. You can’t miscast him, because he always plays Patrick Stewart. The credits should just be honest, and say:

Prof. Patrick Stewart . . . Patrick Stewart

I remember Lifeforce very well indeed. On the plus side … well, the lead actress spends pretty much the entire film walking round stark naked, so for slightly more than half of the potential audience the evening’s viewing can’t be counted a total loss right there. At any rate, until you take into account the number of brain cells you’ll kill off trying to make sense of the plot. Even good actors like Frank Finlay and Peter Firth were unable to do more than try not to look embarrassed on camera - and, no doubt, ponder how best to take revenge on their agents for getting them into this mess.

Lileks goes on to have a little fun imagining the meeting where the space vampires devised their cunning plan for taking over the world.

Space Vampire #1: “So when the astronauts come, we will spring from our suspended animation, feast on their delicious life force, assume their forms, strap protective armor around our most vulnerable spot, and return to earth to spread the contagion.”

Space Vampire #2: “I have a better idea. Let’s send Bob down here in human female form. Naked. He’ll probably end up in some heavily guarded military facility, but if he escapes they’ll all be like, whoa, a naked human female, and he can walk right out.”

Olya’s eye to the london sky is a striking night-time view of the London Eye.

It’s the contrast between the various reflections of lights on the river and the overwhelmingly reddish tint to the clouds in the evening sky that makes the picture for me. Well, that and the bloody great Ferris Wheel in the foreground.

Cool Antarctica was created by a member of an Australian expedition which spent 2002 in that part of the world. There’s a fair amount of information about the local wildlife, as well as the history of the various early exploratory expeditions. However, the best part of the site is the photographs. In particular, this shot:

+100°C water meets -32°C air

A fun thing to do in extreme cold is to throw hot water into the air. Take a flask and fill it with boiling water to warm it up, pour this away and fill it again. Take the full flask outside, take a cup of this hot water and throw it all up into the air. As the +100°C water meets the cold (in this case -32°C) air, it instantly vapourizes. Most of it is turned into a cloud of steam that drifts gently away and some of the droplets that stay together are instantly turned into small pieces of ice that can be seen streaking down towards the bottom left in this photograph.

It’s very weird to throw water into the air but none of it ever actually landing. Also seen in this picture is a solar halo around the sun formed by the ice crystals in the air.

[Via The Internet Scout Report]

Other People’s Stories does exactly what it says on the tin: it’s a repository of tales, some of which may well be a tad on the tall side. To quote from the site’s About page:

Every story on OPS is a story a contributor heard from someone else. These stories have been overheard and misheard, told and re-told and sometimes refined over time. They do not shy from hearsay, gossip, myth or guys we knew in high school. OPS is dedicated to the time-honored tradition of stealing other people’s material and we therefore recognize our debt to those from whom we’ve stolen and acknowledge that these stories do not belong to us.

I didn’t have time to read more than a sample of the stories, but I particularly enjoyed Three Stories Girls Told Me by John Hodgman.

[Via MetaFilter]

FARK’s Rejected Google Holiday Logos contest is a hoot. My favourites are miles behind in the voting: Salvador Dali Day has attracted just 113 votes as of the time of writing, whereas Return of the King Day can only scrape up a mere 79 votes.

[Edited to add a link to FARK, rather than back to this page. Thanks to Zed for pointing out my omission.]

[Via Amygdala]