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The Joker is Batman's main nemesis. Why him? Why not some other villain?

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Lucas Arts craps out another one ... and gags the reviews? Low ... real low

An anonymous reader writes "George Lucas CGI "Clone Wars" movie has premiered to reviews ranging from MSNBC's "Ugly animation and an uninspired storyline drag down the film" to AintItCool's "I hated the film. HATED IT. REALLY HATED IT.". Critics have noted the animation style, music and slapstick humor had more than a passing similarity to Pixar's Toy Story, and wondered if the introduction of new action figures (sorry, characters) like Baby Jabba Hutt and Jabba the Hutt's Gay Uncle may have taken the franchise a bridge too far. Lucas responding by enforcing an embargo, forcing the reviews to be taken down. While sites like AintItCool.com responded, but by then it was just a little too late. Still the CGI eye candy will make it popular with kids. If the "Clone Wars" movie can't save the galaxy, can it at least save the franchise?"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Instead of watching this, I will go by the Clone Wars Vol 2 DVD

Harry Knowles, the founder of fan-driven movie site Ain't It Cool News, published an unabashedly negative review ("hated the score, the animation, the shots, the characters and most of all the retarded ******** idiot story") of the upcoming animated film Star Wars: The Clone Wars a few days ago. Over the weekend, Knowles's post was unpublished, as we now say. Another Ain't It Cool regular claims Lucasfilm got Knowles to yank the review — most likely by threatening to bar him from all future advance viewings:

Hi, Guys…
by TheRealMoriarty Aug 11th, 2008
04:25:38 AM
… to those asking, I’ll try a new tact in this thread. Harry took his CLONE WARS review down at the request of Lucasfilm, who have chosen to enforce an embargo on reviews on our site. There may, in fact, be other outlets who have reviews up currently. That is not something we can control. Harry will repost his same review when he is able to. I hope that explains it, but if you have further questions, I’ll try answer them. I’d really rather this talkback were about the great Bernie Brillstein, though.”

Here’s the original review:

“Harry hated THE CLONE WARS!

I’ve never hated a STAR WARS film before. I have weathered Jar Jar and any number of Ewoks. I survived Hayden and a wooden Portman. I even accepted Jake Lloyd. I handled all that because it felt like STAR WARS.

I can accept all of Lucas’ flaws, so long as at its heart it felt like Star Wars. I can deal with politics in Star Wars. I can deal with trade skirmishes in Star Wars. I can deal with musical numbers, breathing in the vacuum of space. Basically – so long as it feels like STAR WARS – I can watch any of it.

Was I looking forward to STAR WARS: THE CLONE WARS (2008)?

******** A!

I was dying. After Genndy’s CLONE WARS – I felt that perhaps Lucas “got it” – and that this new animated series was taking a lead from Tartakovsky’s brilliant assembly of pieces. Genndy’s CLONE WARS got STAR WARS better than anyone has got it since Lawrence Kasdan and Irvin Kershner. Genndy took designs and characters that folks were dissatisfied with and made them cool. He did this by using and adapting the themes created by John Williams, the wholly perfect entity involved with Star Wars along with… the sound effects of Ben Burtt. He understood speed and motion – not just with action, but in editing. He understood classic film composition and iconography. And he knows what BADASS is.

The folks behind this STAR WARS: THE CLONE WARS movie… you could tell, they looked at what Genndy did – but they didn’t understand any of it. There’s a ****load of battles and ***** going boom. There’s noise everywhere – fury everywhere… but none of it is directed. The music by Kevin Kiner is criminally bad. Why they didn’t employ Paul Dinletir and James Venable is beyond me. No, no – let’s hire the composer of WALKER, TEXAS RANGER. Ahem.

Now – I made excuses for this film as I was watching it. I don’t think you understand how much I love STAR WARS. Maybe you do, maybe you do too.

Before the movie started I was firing myself up to go out after the film and buy that new $200 Hasbro Millenium Falcon. I really wanted to go buy it, and I wanted this movie to empower my brain to go through with that. Instead, I found myself at home – putting on Genndy’s THE CLONE WARS – to try and rebuild my passion – so I can go get that new Falcon.

Instead – I’m thinking I’ll just be here at home enjoying this and that’ll be all I need.

Anyway – as I was watching the film, I was excusing the sloppy shots, the sloppy use of the Clone Troopers and Droids – undoing all the awesome work that Genndy had done – and the droids are silly again. The Clone Troopers are limp. And the Jedi – they’re at 25% power from the mind of Genndy. But I was accepting that. I figured that was Lucas dialing back so that the animated series wouldn’t overpower his features.

Then they introduced Baby Jabba aka Rotta the Huttlet aka Stinky. At the point of this character’s introduction – it officially became, the worst character in the history of STAR WARS. If you hate George Lucas cutsiepoo bull**** – oooooooh boy. You’re gonna have a field day of venting and hatred directed at this unbelievably ****ing awful little ****.

Oh – but wait… Little Stinky the Hutt isn’t the worst character in the history of STAR WARS… because Stinky got introduced earlier in the film. As much as I hated lil Stinky… I was weathering Stinky. I seriously was. But later there was a character of such immense **** – offensively bad. The character was so bad, so incredibly awful – that it was a slap to the face. It woke me out of my ****-accepting stupor and made me angry. SUDDENLY my “inner fanboy rage” was awoken.

As I watched this terrifyingly awful character named Ziro the Hutt. A seemingly female Hutt – with tattoos and make-up that sounds like a racist take on a Black New Orleans Crack-Dealing Whore. Because this Hutt speaks ENGLISH – and it is many times worse than I’m actually describing. This character was actually too much for me. So bad that every flaw I was looking past, was now a road sign to inadequacy and mediocrity. All of a sudden my brain realized that Asajj Ventress’ voice no longer was acceptable – and sure enough – the amazing Grey DeLisle, who originally voiced the character back in 2003 – had been replaced by a Nika Futterman – and that voice was missed. The character didn’t have that snarling menace anymore.

I realized that nothing in this animated film felt right. I felt time expanding. It seemed that the film was dragging – nevermind that lots of **** was firing all over the place – and stuff was going boom and things were being revealed. I just didn’t care because this wasn’t what I wanted.

I hated the score, the animation, the shots, the characters and most of all the retarded ******** idiot story.

I hated the film. HATED IT. REALLY HATED IT.

Does this mean the whole Star Wars Animated Series is doomed? No – but it isn’t a good sign. So much of this is awful because of the Hutt plotlines and character. I also feel that Dave Filoni must be a hack. His work here is sloppy – and depending on writers and directing talent – individual episodes may be better. This film was several episodes all strung together – my prayer is that the individual episodes will be both great and awful – and we’ll discover which talents are responsible for each.

That said – the audience did have light applause. My father liked it. My sister felt too much was going on. Me nephew really liked it. That said – Yoko was complaining right along with me. She thought it was **** too. I know Moriarty liked it. Wonder what Quint and Massawyrm thought.

****. I hated a STAR WARS. That ****ing sucks.”

Well this is just perfect. At the exact moment Li Ning was rounding the lip of the Bird's Nest during the amazing torch-lighting climax, someone snapped this photo of our good friend the BSOD nestled amongst the Nest's steel twigs. Perhaps an Opening Cermonies IT dude spit out his coffee on the machines in the server room when Li took to the sky? Another question is what a projection screen is doing inside the Nest at that location, but I think the better question is what wasn't going on inside the Nest's roof—did you see that thing during the ceremonies? Lights! Fireworks! LED screens! Everything! Anyway, if only one image of this perfectness existed we'd be skeptical, but thankfully, someone has grabbed more from a different angle that pretty much seal the deal.

UPDATE: And it's been confirmed on the NBC broadcast by commenter cirby on his DVR. Fo' real!

Click for high-res:

Ouch! More super-zoomed images for error message decoding here:
[Powerapple Forum (Chinese, original pic), and Rivercool (alternate angle pics) via Dvorak - props to Dvorak commenter Improbus for "Olympic Fail"]

Read more pan-Gawker coverage of the 2008 Olympic Games.

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BOOOOO!!!!

Nick Saber, president of CrossTech Media, came back from lunch on Monday and tried to log on to his Gmail account. Instead of his email, he got this message:

Sorry, your account has been disabled. [?]

When he emailed Google's customer support, he got the following:

Thank you for your report. We’ve completed our investigation. Because our investigation was inconclusive, we are unable to return your account at this time. At Google we take the privacy and security of our users very seriously. For this reason, we’re unable to reveal any further information about this account.

Chris Brogan reports:

Suddenly, Nick can’t access his Gmail account, can’t open Google Talk (our office IM app), can’t open Picasa where his family pictures are, can’t use his Google Docs, and oh by the way, he paid for additional storage. So, this is a paying customer with no access to the Google empire.

When Google Owns You (Chris Brogan)

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That is the cutest dark lord of the sith EVER!

Bonnie sez, "When you’re at San Diego Comic-Con, it’s nearly impossible to walk more than a few feet and not run into a fan in costume. Every year the convention center is flooded with various versions of superheroes, video game characters, horror film icons, pirates, steampunk kids, vampires, werewolves, manga and anime favorites, food mascots and of course lots and lots of Star Wars characters. Even though it seemed the Joker costumes dominated the con, the 501st and Rebel Legion were out in full force, as were fans dressed as Yoda, Darth Vader, Chewbacca, Princess Leia, Jedi and even a couple of TIE Fighters. Here’s a recap of some of the best costumes we spotted." Comic-Con: Best Star Wars Costumes (Thanks, Bonnie!)

We're not sure if this is painful, or exciting, or both, but MissRFTC tweets, "I am totally serious. My Ob/Gyn was IN my vagina and an earthquake started rattling the room!" See, this just exemplifies the awesome power of Twitter, for capturing special moments like this in tasty bite-size form. (LAist)

Merlin Mann:

Some days, the web feels like 5 people trying to make something; 5k people turning it into a list; and 500MM people saying, "FAIL."

(link)

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great fucking headline

A lot of readers sent me this New York Times story last week: My Son, the Blogger: An M.D. Trades Medicine for Apple Rumors. It's a profile on blogger Arnold Kim, who runs the Apple-centric gossip/news site MacRumors.com. The blog started as a hobby eight years ago, but became so lucrative and successful—it now attracts more than 4.4 million visitors a month—he quit his day job practicing

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for you iPhone owners

iPhone/iPod touch only: The Google Mobile app has a hidden secret that can save tons of time looking up web pages on your iPhone: an undocumented shortcut that performs Google site searches. Let's say, for example, you want to read our original post on the Google Mobile iPhone app. Just fire up Google Mobile on your iPhone or iPod touch and start typing in Lifehacker until the Lifehacker homepage shows up in the search results. Then just touch and hold down on that result for a second or so, until the selection flashes. You'll notice that the search box now lists lifehacker.com in a small blue box.

Now all subsequent text you search will perform a Google site search (which you can do from a regular Google search box by typing site:lifehacker.com 'search terms'). This trick works for any web site, meaning you can skip loading a web site in Safari if you just want to use its search box; use the Google Mobile app's site search trick for much quicker results. For more Google Mobile for iPhone tricks, check out how to use Google Mobile for quick local lookups.

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maybe one of my favorite photos ever

mikeynoogiee posted a photo:

emily made all of alex's food extra special.

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yeah, seriously, this should have been banned BEFORE talking on the phone without a headset

Legislatures in at least 14 states are considering restrictions on drivers tapping out text messages. Four states already have bans.

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Not sure if this is a great idea

thisgirlangie posted a photo:

Seriously?

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It blows ... I hope it gets better, but I'm not optimistic ... open source has generally been abysmal at UI

Filed under: cellphones hacks, news

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gross

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ugh ... babies always kind of creep me out

Maybe we're not the only ones that think some babies are creepy. For the creepy baby in your life, Cracked has assembled a list of 20 creepy baby products. The really creepy part is that all of these products are real and can be purchased online. Check out some of our favorites, inside...

Graphics and descriptions courtesy of Cracked.

20. Zaky Infant Pillow

18. Swimming Neck Ring

10. Metallica Lullabies

9. Manual Snot Sucker

8. Her First Heels

For the full list of 20 creepy baby items, check out Cracked's full article.

20 Baby Products Great For Traumatizing Infants [Cracked]

iPhone 2.0 tip. If you tap-then-hold an image in Safari, an option pops up for you to save the image. Nice way to get new wallpaper or photos for your contacts.

(link)

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A clever trick ... nice one

Vote McCain in 2008! writes "McCain's campaign is doing everything it can to erase Obama's online advantage, this time they ambushed Obama by detecting edits to his website when he updated some of his policy positions. This isn't the first time the Republicans have shown up the Democrats with their web savvy — you may remember the previous reports about the Republican Web 2.0 Consultants and their online campaigning game. This just proves that old Republicans can learn new tricks." Assuming the spider adheres to robots.txt, this is clever and well done.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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TMZ does something that doesn't set humanity back by 20 years ... and it's funny

It's been proven that people tend to look like their dogs, but startling new findings reveal a freakish resemblance between Hollywood celebrities and Sesame Street puppets.

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Ugh this is fucking GROSS!

bigplrbear writes "I found an interesting article revealing the many places that Microsoft products reside, and what they're used for, ranging from elevators to ticket scanners." From the article: "Thanks to VMWare Windows is spreading throughout the datacenter. And, of course, there is only one operating system to use if you are dependent on Microsoft apps like Outlook, Word, and Excel. While I have joined the chorus of security folks who rail against the Microsoft Monoculture I still cannot believe some of the uses for Windows. Some of them are just downright silly, some you may claim are criminally negligent." Note: I'm making no claim of criminal negligence!

Read more of this story at Slashdot.