There's some ugly drama surrounding the collapse of 38 Studios. That has caused baseball's Curt Schilling to walk away from video games and publicly state that it will end up costing him his fortune. Everyone is in a very bad position right now. 38 Studio's top creditor is the state of Rhode Island. Aside from some stranger assets, there is a partially finished MMO called Project Copernicus as well as the source code and artwork for Kingdoms of Amular. So why doesn't Rhode Island seize this source code and artwork? They could auction it or, better yet, give it to the people who paid for it.

Now we all know this isn't going to happen. The source code will be shelved and it is unlikely it ever contribute to society ever again. The people who coded it have been fired and have moved on to the next thing in their lives while the bankruptcy proceedings play out in the news. But if I fail to repay a loan on a car, repossession services come to take the car. If a studio gets $75 million from a state to make a video game, where are the state's repo men to reclaim the video game?

The current situation is unavoidably bad for everyone involved. Schilling is blaming the governor, developers are moving for the second time in two years, gamers are missing out on the sequel to Amular and money is missing everywhere. But most notably each resident of Rhode Island has paid $75 to the video game industry and will likely never see it returned to their pockets. A coworker who thoroughly enjoys the game said that it's RI's fault for investing in such a fickle and risky industry. Maybe he's right? But the game is reasonably entertaining.

So what could a state do with source code and artwork? The obvious thought would be to auction it off and recoup losses. But what company wants to buy up those assets for more than a pittance compared to the loan? The game didn't sell as well as they thought it would, your developers would have to learn thousands of lines of new code, the artists that could expand the art in the same style are thrown to the wind and there's already a polished title out there. To me, the obvious solution would be to instead package Amular and Copernicus (at least the PC versions) as learning software for high schools and universities in RI. Art students could work on reskinning it, developers could work on just getting it built and Rhode Island would at least be able to show its residents something for which they had paid.

Furthermore if RI really wanted to recoup its losses, they could likely make several million back with a Kickstarter project to open source everything from 38 Studios. The only people who might not like this idea are those in the games industry who claim the MMO and RPG markets are already thoroughly saturated. Perhaps the current publisher and those with distribution contracts of Amular would object. But those executives have already taken the citizens of RI and Curt Schilling for a ride so why should RI care? The only downside would be a massive influx of Amular clones on the PSN, XBLA and PC fronts. But this is an opportunity for gamers, Rhode Islanders and open source in general to expand and set precedence that when a company folds all that hard work and late nights with Mountain Dew and pizza should not be wasted and shelved.

You can tell me that this will never happen -- not with Amular, Copernicus or any of the thousands of titles from failed development studios -- because you're right. It hasn't ever happened and it most likely will not. But Rhode Islanders paid for these titles and the repo men should arrive and bring that back for Rhode Island to decide what to do with it. At least those that have paid for it should be able to decide if what their hard earned money paid for should sit collecting dust or live in immortality.

Hey! I am a finalist in the National Science Foundation's Visualization Challenge: Check it out and vote: Metabolomic Retina The full list of entries is here.

Every generation needs an intellectual hero... Ours was Steven P. Jobs

New JonesBlog update. STS-135 Landing photos and my visit to Kennedy Space Center

A Photographic Study of The Fly with anatomical details and discussion of potential applications in unmanned aerial vehicles here.

I was reading a journal by Shadow Wrought re: hitting the max number of friends, and having to delete old friends to make room for new ones.

In some respects, I do this in real life too. But that's beside the point and is best left for a different journal entry.

So anyway, I decided to take a look at my friends, fans, foes, and freaks lists and see if I could identify any of the people listed, if I could recall _anything_ about them. I think I hit around 80% on my friends and foes and freaks lists, and maybe 20% on my fans list. I'm not sure if that says something about me, or even if it says anything at all.

But every once in a while when I look at my fans list, I'm haunted by a single fan -- ^Z. There in my fans list -- the very last fan -- I see that his or her last journal was in the very early morning on Sept 11, 2001.

I worked in downtown Manhattan at the time, and lived across the river in Hoboken. I lost several acquaintances on that day, and one close friend. Was ^Z one of them*? Was ^Z some other person who lost their life that day? Or perhaps someone who gained some perspective, and realized slashdot is insignificant to them in the grand scheme of things?

Every time I look at my fans list, I'm reminded of that day and the people whose lives were lost. And I wonder how that day changed America, made us a nation of line-toers and protofascists, instead of making us celebrate and honor our freedoms even more. Was it a failure of our leadership? A failure of our modern culture?

And then, today, for the first time, I actually clicked on ^Z's profile, and I see that he or she kept on posting until sometime in 2009, and I realize I'm a sentimental, navel-gazing, analytical fool who lets himself get swept up in revery based on a false premise.

*Probably not, since he journaled in a different alphabet than the one I use.

New JonesBlog update. Lockheed Martin C-5M Super Galaxy

There's a new site called Phygg.com that is a cross between the arxiv physics feed and Digg.com in that you can read papers up for prepublication and then vote them up or down. I think this poses an interesting new step in peer review and academic journals in that it gives the public a chance to participate in reading and voting on papers. From there, the journals can separate the wheat from the chaff. While it's not exactly innovative (digg + arxiv = phygg), it'll be interesting to see if people take to it and how good the general public will be at reading lengthy physics papers. MIT's Tech Review has a short blog on the launching.

There's a neat site for Google Chrome users that shows how artists will be able to liberate themselves from Flash and use HTML5 when the standard is finalized and browser independent (if ever that happens). If you're bored and have five minutes and have speakers/headphones, I hope your childhood address shows enough up on here to make it worth your while. My parent's farmhouse had nothing but my hometown had a couple images that brought me back.

Of course prior to this we would have to use flash to enjoy the Aracade Fire's sites.

Hope someone else enjoys this as much as I do.

Tonight on Comedy Central, the first two episodes of the sixth season of Futurama were shown. It's been highly anticipated on Slashdot and as a fan I was satisfied with the return to television. I really liked the first episode and found the second episode mediocre.

*Spoiler Alert*

The first episode, Rebirth, had a lot of elements that Futurama episodes of yore contained that made me love it: social commentary, extrapolation of current technology into future technology, apparent deaths, sci-fi twists and a bit of character development. The trivial elements are certainly present like Fry's homeresque stupidity and cheap jokes but that's not something that distinguishes Futurama from other comedies. I think that the professor's quirky inventions and old age behavior remain strong in this series and for some reason never loses its humor with me. The professor can (and often does) invent anything that is necessary for the plot as well as sending the crew anywhere in the universe to deliver a package. Rebirth has a lot of those classic elements when the professor plays god with bringing the crew back to life as well as going to the cyclophage habitat planet to sacrifice Leela. If this sort of predictable formula annoys your or bores you, Futurama probably got old a while ago but for me the high quality of animation, music and voice acting really make willing to belly up for every contrived new world that is conjured. Rebirth also addresses Fry and Leela's loneliness and isolation but has a cheap cop out (the ones in love turn out to be robots) at the end to avoid any permanent character development at the end.

Episode Two, In-a-Gadda-Da-Leela, was less satisfactory for me because it dealt with an old card: Leela engaging in coitus with the Zapper (and his insecurities). While some parts made me smile, it just wasn't as funny or memorable as the older episodes. Some parts had their moments (Obi Wan Kenobi GPS with a different voice saying the wild cards was a favorite) but the overall story and plot didn't really pass muster for me. I enjoyed the cheesy black and white "The Transcredible Exploits of Zap Brannigan" (reminded me of many MST3K episodes) and of course you have to love Zap heavy episodes with his ill formed sentences and logic. But aside from that, we get a cookie cutter invention from the professor and nothing too impressive with the explanation and resolution of the V-Giny death sphere. I think a lot more could have been done with that.

All in all, not bad. I was hoping for more secondary characters that I've loved from the first four episodes like Roberto or Scruffy. These secondary recurring characters have always been a favorite of mine and a strength of the show. I guess I can't expect them to put one in every episode but I was disappointed there weren't a whole lot from the movies and none from these two episodes. Definitely worth my time to watch and for those of you outside the United States, you can find torrents out there online by searching for Futurama S06E01 and S06E02. I hope they make it all the way through this sixth season and I also hope Comedy Central ponies up for a lot more after that. If there's one show with usable potential, it's Futurama and its endless possibilities. I mean with the amount of money being dumped on other crappy shows, you'd think a fraction of that could be afforded for a show with a highly devoted following. Then again Firefly is long gone.

New JonesBlog update. Louisville, Kentucky

We are starting out on a new collaboration on retinal research. Fun stuff.

Jonesblog has finally made the transition to modern underpinnings. It is now running on Wordpress... Huzzah.

Pudge has apparently been cured of last-post-itis, at least temporarily.

I stated that Pudge claims someone is lying because he disagrees with them on a matter of opinion. He, of course, claimed I was lying, and that he does no such thing -- multiple times. I then trapped him in his lie by providing incontrovertible evidence that he does, in fact, do what I claim he did.

Here's the post where it happened.

I'm waiting on a response from him (of course, he claimed he wouldn't respond to any more posts of mine because I was lying -- let's see if he changes his tune because I proved that I was telling the truth).

And Pudge, if you happen to read this journal entry, please go ahead and comment freely. Feel free to crapflood it if you like, since you have no forced waiting periods on posts. Unlike those who are afraid of having their lies and inconsistencies pointed out, I let my foes and freaks post in my journal. I'm curious to see how you might try to explain the fact that you indeed falsely accused me of lying, and lied yourself in the process.

New JonesBlog update. Experiments
 

Well, it's happened again. I let myself get caught up in another "debate" with someone who has last-word-itis.

This time, it was Pudge. I've got to remember to stop reading his comments... they're infuriating, because he sometimes make good points, but tends to imply or assume invalid statements to lead to his insight. And heaven forbid that you call him out on his assumptions, or you'll spend the better part of two days' free time going back and forth while he makes sure that he can out-endure you for last post status (if you have the last post, apparently you win the discussion!).

Well, now I've finally gotten around to marking him as a foe, so I'll have a nice clear visual reminder not to get involved in a time-wasting discussion with him.

It just bothers me that, as a slashdot editor, he's got some additional weight to what he says... he gets upmodded a lot for very questionable posts. And if you disagree with him, it tends to be an automatic down-mod (not sure how that happens, I know a lot of the fundie capitalists/anarchists on slashdot have mod points, too), no matter how well-written or polite the response is.

But, no matter... maybe if I find myself in another discussion with him, I'll troll him with facts and just take satisfaction in his apoplexy.