The Lone Ranger: Hollywood wants the western back. Badly. They were one of the big tickets for decades, and names like Eastwood and Wayne still linger in the cultural consciousness. They don't need fifty foot robots, or giant space cruisers, or enormous special effects budgets, but they're still full of good 'ol fashioned gunplay and man-on-man violence.

A decently written and produced Lone Ranger could introduce a new generation to the character, in the same way that superhero movies wag the slowly collapsing comic book industry and (re)introduce people to characters like Superman, or Tony Stark.

No. No, it wouldn't. Remember: you're trying to sell a movie to the general public. The general public has no need, nor desire to remember which of the Houses and Clans is which, how a PPC is different from an ER Large Laser, or any of the other bits of minutiate that fanboys baste themselves in. Miss a beat, or cut a corner, and those same fans will scream and throw poop like enraged monkeys.

It's not like Lord of the Rings, or Game of Thrones, where virtually everyone in the western hemisphere has either read it, or knows someone who has. Geek properties like Battletech are a tiny niche, spread out over dozens of borderline pulp paperbacks and fluff from scads of rulebooks and boxes. They simply aren't worth the effort for J. Q. Public to immerse themselves in.

More likely they'll come to the conclusion that someone was playing silly buggers, due to the lack of non-structural detritus, middens, or other forms of human leavings.

Because you know, I could give a shit about spammers. It's the otherwise legitimate companies that drag their feet taking me off mailing lists I never signed up for, or make it an ordeal to find the unsubscribe information on their page or in the e-mail-- in the latter case, that shit sometimes doesn't even show up in the plaintext version.

Christ on a crutch. Just today, I got an e-mail from OnLive because some bot or idiot used one of my addresses to sign up with. I went to their opt-out page, and among other things was given the option to reroute their fucking newsletter to someone else's inbox without verification. In retrospect, I should have looked one of their executive e-mail addresses up and given it that.

They're probably trying to fold it into google+, like everything else.

He hasn't been forced out because they know he's learned to wield two chairs, Florentine style.

It sounds to me like Dropbox is hitting a subscriber wall, and they're desperate for anything that will make them look attractive to the money people again.

Personally, I'm never dealing with these dumbfucks again. This is the company that turned passwords off for every goddamn client and 'box' in their hands for several hours before the blunder was caught. I'm not going to trust them with my goddamn grocery lists.

Everything to do with Tim Schafer being constitutionally incapable of reining himself in. And you know, that's fine when you've got a publisher holding the purse strings, and ultimately able to put their foot down when things get out of hand, especially when it results in titles like Psychonauts and the other amazing adventure stories he's helmed. It's a lot less okay when you can't go to the publisher and ask for another million bucks to see things through.

Actually, there is a problem with goals here-- specifically, that there wasn't one set in the first place. The Doublefine Kickstarter was an experiment that asked for money to finance the creation of a game, and a documentary film of the whole thing. Nobody knew what it was at first, certainly nobody expected it to get out of hand, and then Tim decided to make something Totally Amazingly New and proceeded to torpedo the budget.

What he has now is a fantastic idea, but it's the kind of fantastic idea that wants a whole lot more money than the KS brought in, because it's going to require a lot of artists working their hands down to the wrists.

I'd make a LifeLock joke, but apparently they're based out of Arizona.

Yeah, that really isn't going to work. I mean, the only things that will be said to the screen will be a variety of invitations to sexual acts or to vacate.

So the headline says 'force', but the summary says listeners have to rest their head against whatever is broadcasting the signal. Do they equip seats with oversized obstetrics foreceps? Does a man in jackboots march up and down the aisle, threatening people who do not keep their heads against the walls and windows?

And as for bone conduction, has anyone seriously looked into this? I mean, seriously-seriously, because this tech came and went with mood rings, because at best the sound is muddier than a stereotypical airport PA system.

I read this 'stream of consciousness review' by Tom Scioli, and I'm intrigued enough to watch it on a cheap day now. To his mind at least, it's loaded with unspoken references to the weirder elements of Superman's canon and earlier films, and visual homages to Heavy Metal magazine and artists like MÅ"bius.

You first. A few good zaps should cure that blazing case of sociopathy right up.

...was forced multimedia. You could pick up and plug in virtually any other Atari game (Star Raiders and its keypad accessory aside), and understand what you were doing inside of a minute. ET required you to read the manual, a feat for some players, doubly so if it had fallen behind the TV, in order to decipher the pictograms that appeared at the top of the screen and the behavior of the 'enemies'.

Its integration with the actual story was pretty lackluster too, like a five year old relating the film to a distracted parent, who went on to explain it to a coder in a foreign language.

Yes, comics, because their value is based on the same principle of rarity and condition. A '38 Superman comic is valuable for the same reason that a new-in-box copy of Radiant Silvergun is: there weren't a lot of copies made, many have physically deteriorated (so your well-loved copy of Super Mario: My Uncle Who Works For Nintendo edition is worth squat too) and many more have simply ceased to exist.

Compare that with an industry that's gone on to consider sales in less than the millions of copies to be failures. Rarity simply isn't an issue, whether it's console games or comics since the early Nineties-- going back to the Superman example, there may only be a few hundred copies of the one that made the news earlier, but they overprinted the Death of Superman (polybagged at the factory, packed with a black mourner's armband) by a massive degree for the sheer number of idiots who thought they'd make a killing on speculation when it eventually became rare.