Turn your speakers down and try DHTML Lemmings, by crisp. [via Things]

World of Warcraft Keeps Growing, Even as Players Test Its Limits [NYT]:

[On Nov. 23,] Blizzard had arranged for producers and designers to sign copies of the game at midnight at a hangar-size Fry’s Electronics outlet in Fountain Valley, not far from Blizzard’s base in Irvine, 40 miles south of Los Angeles. The company had set up a similar signing for an earlier strategy game, Warcraft III, and about 700 people showed up. Planning optimistically, the company had about 2,500 copies of World of Warcraft on hand.

“So I planned to roll over there around 11 p.m., and as I tried to get off the freeway I look over and I see this gigantic, dark, surging mass around Fry’s, and I’m like, ‘What in the world is that?’ ” said Paul Sams, 34, Blizzard’s senior vice president for business operations. It turned out that the pulsing was more than 5,000 people.

“The cars were backed up on the off-ramp,” he said. “I parked like a mile away, and when I get there the line is looped around the building, and then looped around the parking lot. It was like a football tailgate, with the R.V.’s and barbecues in the lot and everything.”

By the end of that first day, about 240,000 copies of the game had sold across North America, Australia and New Zealand, the product’s initial markets. The game has now sold almost 700,000 copies in those markets, and at peak hours about 250,000 people from those areas are playing the game simultaneously.

Interesting, detailed article on the unexpected success of World of Warcraft. As the game was in beta last fall I recall coming across multiple references to the game’s addictive qualities in various locales.

One point the article does not address is what numbers the releasing company, Blizzard, was expecting to support. For instance, what are the numbers that the competition supports in EverQuest and EverQuest II? The underlying thrust of the article is simply that the success of the game caught the company by surprise. However, in order to really unravel the story behind the customer-support problems that unexpected growth has caused, it would be best to be able to report numbers.

That’s hard data to pry out of a company though, so I’m quibbling. The guy they quote in the excerpt above says they met their first year’s sales projections in less than a week. Elsewhere “two of five” community liasons are quoted. Five community liasons for over 250,000 subscribers. That seems a bit thin to me, but of course I haven’t the faintest idea what a best-practices number might be.

Anyway, interesting article. I wonder what Blizzard will do with all that money.

Apparently, even passive tech-no-geeks realize the genius of the minutemen. Ah, fuck. We really did lose something.

It seems I was not alone in my admiration for the Puppy Bowl, and the MeFi Jr. Detectives League is on the case, attempting to determine if the Puppy Bowl was a production from the same folks that memorably pitched “The Puppy Channel,” as heard on This American Life.

As I recently noted, we had the opportunity to see The Aviator last month, and I came away a bit let down overall. Despite my disappointment in the film, I was very interested in its’ subject. Since childhood, stories of Howard Hughes’ days as depicted in the film have fascinated and amused me. In part, of course, I was curious how it was that an accomplished, ambitious person could be responsible for not only breaking aviation speed records and founding an important aerospace contracting company and also for such things as Jane Russell’s bra, the largest airplane ever built until the advent of the 747 or the A101 (depending on how you count these things.). How could such an energetic and imaginative figure become the ghostlike reincarnation of Fu Manchu that I recall from my childhood, wizened and bearded, clutching Kleenex in the place of silks from atop his aerie in Las Vegas?

I was never able to connect the two, although I did go through a period of fascination with the reclusive, insane Hughes. Most recently I read Michael Drosnin’s Citizen Hughes, which came to me courtesy of devoted reader Alice Dee. It depicts, from what is apparently primary source material, an isolated and conniving man bent on affecting American politics though force of capital, solely out of self-interest and with no apparent sense of responsibility, morality, or community. It also depicts those around him working hard to slow or stop his more outrageous fever dreams. It’s fascinating, as a case study, and terrifying, if one considers the inherent opportunities available to capital on Hughes’ scale today, in the holographically fragmented and deregulated American political arena.

As alluded to in The Aviator, Hughes sought to “buy” a politician, in the person of Richard M. Nixon, via $100,000 given to the slush fund that led directly to Watergate. As recounted in Citizen Hughes, Hughes explicitly understood the donations as a purchase. For his part, Nixon appears to have expertly avoided promising the recluse anyhing in exchange for the money, and Hughes seems not to have been aware of the effect his money would eventually have on American politics.

As ususal, the Wikipedia has a fine biographical entry on the man, covering both parts of Hughes’ life (and it should be noted that contrary to the film, Hughes remained creatively active in business for at least a decade beyond the flight of the Spruce Goose). Rotten.com, of all places, also has an informative, brief overview. PBS took a look at the man as well.

Regarding Hell’s Angels, the WWI air combat pic that opens The Aviator, I was surprised to find scant airplane-geek commentary on the film. I’ve read copious online commentary on other films from the interwar era, which often is devoted to a painstaking analysis of which planes seen onscreen are the genuine artice and which are creatively redressed ringers. After the war, large quantities of American-made airplanes were made available as surplus for cheap, while production halted altogether for the German planes. Thus in these films it’s much more common for German planes to be redressed US-made planes, a phenomenon which is glancingly referred to in the term “Wichita Fokker,” a nickname for a postwar Travelair. This Travelair shared a number of design features with the Fokker D-VII and was used extensively as an on-camera double, including, according to this list, on Hell’s Angels. This article covers some of the backgound on the stunt-flyer industry of the time.

TCM recently screened the film; unfortunately I missed it.

Looking at the other fascinating planes seen onscreen, it’s clearly the H-1 that has the best screen presence in The Aviator. In 1995, Smithsonian magazine took a look at the plane, which is on display at the National Air and Space Museum in Washington, DC. There was at least one flying replica of the silver beauty, built by Jim Wright of Cottage Grove, Oregon. The plane set a world speed record in 2002. On August 4, 2003, the plane was destroyed and the builder killed when he attempted an emergency landing at Yellowstone National Park on his way back home from an airshow in Oshkosh, Wisconsin. Wright’s plane had been scouted for use in The Aviator, and my impression is that had it not been destroyed, it would have appeared in the film.

According to this radio-controlled flight forum, the planes seen onscreen are both a full-scale shooting prop and a flying radio-controlled model. The same forum states that the Spruce Goose seen in flight was a model that was flown in Long Beach harbor. I’m uncertain about this, as I felt that the Goose’s flight sequences were among the problematic uses of CGI in the film. Specifically, the behavior of the water under the taxi-ing hull is what keyed my attention. I freely admit that I could be wrong about this.

There certainly are large, flying radio-controlled models of the H-4; but for whatever reason, on this day my Google-fu fails to expose their linktraces.

Finally, Northwesterners, you should know that the airplane, which long languished at Long Beach harbor before Oregon, where it is the centerpiece of the Evergeen Aviation Museum, at the southern end of the wine-making Wilamette Valley in McMinnville. This summer, there are plans afoot to combine another Oscar-favorite’s subject, wine-tasting, with a visit to the big bird.

The Puppy Bowl joins the Glutton Bowl as my favorite improbable tv show ever. Bowl Cam!

Build Your Own DIY LCD Video Projector, from Lumenlab, via Manuel. My buddy Karel has been tinkering with this for a couple of months, but I don’t think he has these instructions.

Whatever was screwing up Safari’s ability to load many websites seems largely abated. Viv was noting it too on her machine, but she largely uses IE still, so it’s possible that there was something affecting my ISP’s pipes. At any rate, even while the slowdown was in effect, Firefox was able to successfully load even the most problematic web pages.

Following Tom’s suggestion, I downloaded the G4-optimized version of Firefox, and don’t regret it. It’s clearly faster and more reliable at page renders than Safari, and thus far I haven’t experienced the teeth-gnashing large-cache slowdown problem that happens when Safari is used for more than about 8 hours.

However, an oddity in the application is driving me batty – although no extensions are reported as being installed, and I have been unable to find comprehensive documentation, it appears that mouse gestures are built in to the version of the browser I’m using. This is interesting and nice and all, but

• I’m using a laptop with Sidetrack experimentally installed
• the apparent lack of documentation makes the gestures undiscoverable

Taken together that means that as I attempt to use the trackpad to do one thing or another, in resposnse to apparently random input, the browser jumps back one or two pages in the cache or forward to uncertainly trageted pages. It’s easy enough to correct, but when you’re filling out a text-form field and you leap back a page or two it’s highly disconcerting.

I will likely disable Sidetrack for a day or so to see if that enables me to isolate the gestures. Additionally, I really need to read the developer notes on the G4 builds.

The Google search ‘gmail “Your session has expired. Please sign in again.” ‘ reveals that a number of folks have experienced a broken cookie problem with Firefox 1.0 and gmail, but no evidence of it affecting Safari users.

Sadly, that means I am up a creek. Maybe Firefox has gotten speedier than the last time I used it.

UPDATE: It’s fixed itself, it seems. I’m still gonna check out Firefox again, as suggested by Mr. Harpel.

When the Sous-Chef Is an Inkjet:

But the sushi made by Mr. Cantu, the 28-year-old executive chef at Moto in Chicago, often contains no fish. It is prepared on a Canon i560 inkjet printer rather than a cutting board. He prints images of maki on pieces of edible paper made of soybeans and cornstarch, using organic, food-based inks of his own concoction.

All of which would be fine with me, if the accompanying pictures of the ‘sushi’ didn’t make it clear that this stuff is butt-ugly. The items shown feature tiny, icon-sized pictured of sushi, rather than being crafted to resemble sushi itself. The food looks like bits of color-xeroxed menu.

After all, it’s not hard to find a more elegant approach.