Here’s some comedy for you as we head into the holiday weekend - a photoshop contest showing superheroes at their day jobs… enjoy!

Mike Carey, whom we’ve posted about once or twice, is taking an unusual twist from his DC exclusivity and the metamythological Lucifer to write Ultimate Elektra (a 5-part miniseries) for Marvel Comics, and the linked article hints of an ongoing series.

Elektra was written as such a compelling character while in the gifted hands of Frank Miller, but has been trivialized into a meaningless “female ninja showing a lot of skin” by lesser writers. I have a lot of respect for Carey and his work on Lucifer - he took the seeds of a character planted by a master like Gaiman and did the unthinkable… he made the character better. Here’s to hoping that lightning strikes twice and he can do the same with Miller’s creation.

Posted here mostly for my own benefit, UT2004 downloads that need to be snagged:

• UT2004 v3204 patch for Win32

• Epic Onslaught Bonus Map Pack
• UT2004 Community Bonus Pack

Does the world really need a David Hasselhoff rap album? More to the point, can the world withstand a David Hasselhoff rap album?

Haven’t we had enough of TV stars making notoriously bad albums (even if they are huge in Germany)?

A fairly busy schedule today (not to mention general laziness) prevents me from checking to see if I’ve posted about Gaper’s Block before, but it’s a weblog focused on all things Chicago. I bring this to your attention because now we also have Chicagoist, which (at first glance) seems to have a refreshingly less “hipper-than-thou” attitude than the aforementioned and appears to be a close relative of the New York equivalent, Gothamist. Gothamist is, in turn, a lot more satisfying than the “was that two parts snarky and one part ironic, or the other way ’round?” online scene ‘zine for NYC, Gawker.

I think I’ll try keeping Chicagoist on the list of occasional reads until I can form a more complete opinion, but I’m hopeful that it’ll be good.

In response to Six Apart’s challenge regarding how people use Moveable Type and why the licensing doesn’t work for them, I’ve rethought my previous post a bit, specifically the call for unlimited users/weblogs at the lowest price point, which was a bit unfair and not really what I want anyway.

First, though, an answer to the question at hand:
The way that I use Moveable Type is to power a primary personal, non-commercial weblog (this one) with 2 authors and a second personal, non-commercial weblog with 1 author. The second weblog (which is inactive and likely to be decomissioned) is at a completely different URL using a completely separate installation of MT. I had also been playing around with the idea for a group (non-commercial) weblog for members an online gaming group - this would probably have 4-12 active authors and probably many more defined but not active. Given the new licensing structure, I wouldn’t do this within MT but probably a free/open-source tool or another commercial tool without author limits.

As I mentioned in my previous post, for my level of usage, I’d expect to pay around US$50 for a license. Stupid Evil Bastard agrees in his excellent post on the current MT3.0 licensing issues in which he explains the rationale for that price-point.

My feeling is that the restriction on authors is much more of a problem for people than the restrictions on weblogs (especially using 6A’s new definition of weblog). For whatever reason, the fact that extrasonic would qualify for a free MT3.0 license if it weren’t for the fact that my wife and I are defined as separate authors is irksome to me. Again - I don’t expect the move to MT3.0 to be free for me, but for my MT3.0 price to go from free with one author to US$70 now (and US$100 soon) just to add a single author seems a bit outrageous. And for the personal grouplog with 4-12 authors I’d been planning? Forget about it - it’d cost me US$150 now (or US$190 soon). There’s no way that a non-commercial site for a gaming group to share links and short posts about games is worth that much to me.

Well, everyone’s heard the news - there will be a cost associated with certain versions of Moveable Type 3.0.

There’s been a lot of uproar over this, and tubedogg at Gamewhore has some good thoughts (and some good links to other people’s good thoughts) about the problems with the new licensing scheme for Moveable Type.

There’s been a lot of debate about this, but my feelings can be summed up prettty succinctly:

• Six Apart have every right to charge for new versions of their software, for premium features, and for support.

• I would have been happy to pay a reasonable (i.e. less than US$50) price for v3.0 of Moveable Type provided that I could use it in exactly the same way I’m using v2.6x. Specifically: no commercial use, no premium features, no support from Six Apart, unlimited authors, unlimited blogs.
• The US$100 cost to upgrade to v3.0 just so my wife and I can continue to be separate authors on our weblog is prohibitive, and I won’t be paying it. I’ll stay on MT v2.6x until I can find a suitable replacement.
• To encourage users to take advantage of features in your free software, only to use the degree to which users have exploited those same features as the basis for your new pricing scheme is shady at best. That strategy gives me the whole “the first one’s free” crack-dealer vibe and makes me disinclined to want to do business with people who pursue it.

Anyhow, those are my $0.02.

A Polish-Egyptian archaeology team claim to have found the Library of Alexandria, one of the seven wonders of the ancient world. Unfortunately, it does appear as though it was mostly destroyed before being lost to the sands (as predicted).

Desiree pointed me to this article in the Chicago Tribune (free registration required) explaining how Japanese PM Koizumi had to reprimand some of the junior lawmakers in his party for reading comics and sending instant messages during legislative sessions, which struck me as very funny for some reason.

The terrible weather in this part of the world made listening to my XMRadio on the way to work this morning impossible.

So I dug around in my glovebox, found a very old cassette, threw it in and chanced upon on of my all-time favorite songs. It got me thinking about favorite songs and I thought I might jumpstart our poor little blog with a listing of what I believe are my top 5. Feel free to join me.

(These are in no order, but I will start with the song I heard this morning)

Washing of the Water - Peter Gabriel
I Burn For You - The Police
Radio Radio - Elvis Costello
Now My Heart is Full - Morrissey
The Obvious Child (or maybe Diamonds on the Soles of Her Shoes, or maybe I Know What I Know) - Paul Simon

Ok, maybe five was too few. I missed Vincent by Don Mclean, Find the River by REM, Satellite by DMB, Too Pieces by Yaz, and many others. Ah well, I tried.