A REAL 360 DRM fix is incoming

Yay!
There have been some high profile complaints on the web about how difficult it is to transfer things like XBLA game licenses to replacement 360s in the wake of an under warranty hardware failure. Would these changes to DRM policy address these issues, letting people who have experienced such failure re-license their purchases on their new Xbox so they don't have to be connected to Live to play? Are there any other sorts of changes to DRM policy being made here that would affect the end-user experience? Yes, this new tool will officially launch next month on Xbox.com and will allow you to be able to consolidate these licenses onto one box so you can access things like Xbox LIVE Arcade games and TV show you have downloaded even if you are not online. Because this involved allowing users to re-download licenses for content that belongs to our partners it has taken some time to work out the agreements with them to allow this, but we have heard the concerns from folks about DRM and are happy to announce that everything is nearly in place to roll this out in June.
From an interview with Marc Whitten - Xbox Live General Manager It also notes they are going to start "delisting" Live Arcade titles, they upped the size limit for XBLA titles, and there is no spring Dashboard update this year.
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Sippin' Safari

Book review time! Today I pulled a non-fiction work from the pile: Sippin' Safari by Jeff Berry (who is perhaps better known as Beachbum Berry). This particular book is a history of tiki, focusing in large part on interviews with many of the original bartenders of the first tiki bars. What people may or may not realize is that this is a good time for such things. Tiki culture is really quite synthetic and American - it has some very loose underpinnings from Pacific and Polynesian cultures but the truth of the matter is that it was pretty much manufactured in post-war America. It was a pretty cutthroat sort of thing at first and recipes were guarded pretty jealously, and that means the original recipes for many things are in danger of being lost. Or at least they were, until Berry did serious research and produced this book. I realize discussing "serious research" and "tiki bars" seems sort of ridiculous but anthropology is anthropology when you stop and think about it. I liked the book a lot, but what you're going to get out of it is directly proportional to how much interest you have in tiki. There are recipes in here that look interesting, but a lot require hard-to-acquire ingredients. The book also has a section on where to find them (and Berry's web page updates that), but expect some work to make any of these. Also, many of these old-school drinks require pre-made mixes, syrups, or "batters" of butter and honey, so that requires a bit more set-up. (Having said that, I could support some research if people wanted to come over and try a few of these before I add them to the tiki party rotation. Speaking of which, how did it get to be May already. Wasn't it just Christmas?) It's sort of silly to talk about "authentic" tiki since tiki itself is so patently and proudly fake. Having said that, it's still refreshing to see where it all came from, and to have a deep archive of recipes from a time when "tiki drink" didn't mean "rum with enough sticky sickly-sweet syrup added so you can't taste the alcohol". I think if the thought of a spot of tiki anthropology intrigues you then you would enjoy this book. If you're just looking for an intriguing zombie recipe you'll probably have better luck with a different book. If you want a few zombie recipes along with tracing the history of the drink and figuring out how it changed as Trader Vic and Don the Beachcomber and the others cloned or stole it, then this is exactly the ticket.
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Couple of worthwhile videos

First off: a new Flight of the Conchords video for the song Ladies of the World The guys sing in 70's roller-skating regalia. Don't miss it. (via Chris Roberson) The second one is somebody with a lot of free time. They filled wine bottles to play the Super Mario theme music when struck, then drove past the bottles with a RC car. Really well done. I can't remember where I saw this, I think it was somebody on Twitter.
Mario Theme Played with RC Car and Bottles
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GTA IV

I've had it a week, I suppose I should write down something about GTA IV. The capsule review is that I've played it quite a bit and enjoyed almost all of it. The car physics are improved but still feel good for driving about - not realistic but enjoyable. The new aiming and combat controls make gun battles fun now. They've lost the goofy RPG elements of San Andreas. It's still recognizably GTA, it's still awesome. We've been waiting a long time for more GTA (the last "real" installment was San Andreas in 2004, and there were two PSP titles but the last of those came out in 2006), and the magic is still there. Having said all that there is of course a "But". While combat has vastly improved and lots of little things have been improved (you can now retry a failed mission almost immediately for example), oddly it's lost some of the GTA-ness. There are more radio stations (too many really), but the distinctive DJ's are gone. Fiddling with the radio isn't as fun as all three of the PS2-era titles were. The city is prettier and bigger, but it also seems emptier. I've got three islands unlocked now and the population seems very homogeneous. I miss having the gang-controlled sections and the almost cartoonlike "this is the Mafia section of town, over there are the triads" and so forth. Everything is more realistic, but the draw of GTA wasn't realism, it was a particularly stylized world. You don't hop in a cab to run cab missions, or grab in a cop car to run vigilante missions. You can call somebody on the phone and do a cab mission, but the Crazy Taxi mode where you tried to deliver more and more passengers against a timer is gone. You can steal a cop car, then hack the in-car computer and get a vigilante mission, but it's just another mission, not a unique little mini-game. Similarly, there's no strange garage with a big list of vehicles requested. There's a character that wants cars and he'll send you email telling you to get him a particular vehicle, but again it's just a normal mission. Go get this particular car at this street and bring it here. The spontaneity of being on a mission, seeing a car you needed and jacking it and then trying to hang onto it while doing something else is now gone. Perhaps more realistic, but it is definitely less charming and idiosyncratic. There are no ringing pay-phones with crazy little side missions. I haven't found any vehicles that have secret hidden missions where you drive explosive toy trucks around. Everything is now get text message/phone call/email, set waypoint, drive there, grab whatever you need and rinse/repeat. The new multiplayer is fantastic. We played a few deathmatches, a couple of races, and spent most of an evening playing the "Cops and Crooks" mode. In one of the races I got my car flipped almost immediately and ended up in a fire truck. Ridiculous but then it was pretty easy to just crunch a sports car of another racer. There were a lot of "Wow that was super-cool" moments in the multiplayer. In Cops and Crooks I (as a cop) stumbled across the crooks' getaway boat and stole it. We had a great time fooling around with it until I accidentally flipped it on a sweet jump. And that counted as a win since I destroyed the getaway vehicle! All of my complaints are still pretty nit-picky overall. It's a great game so far. I hope they bring the series back to more of the exaggerated gang action of GTA III or Vice City, but I imagine I'll spend a happy amount of time in Liberty City yet.
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Why I don't like Lost's "flashforwards"

Ever since I saw the season three finale I'd been saying that I didn't like the Lost new "flash-forwards". Of course, after the finale I wasn't sure where they were going with the idea so I cut them some slack. Then we had that first batch of S04 episodes and the writers' strike and I didn't like them but I couldn't quite put my finger on why until last week. Now I should be clear, this is not "I think Lost is falling apart" just a "I wish they weren't doing this". Warning: the rest of this post will contain spoilers about Lost season 4 up through episode 10, titled "Something Nice Back Home". What I really don't like about them is that building the chronology in my head is detracting from watching the episodes. When the episode started my first thought was "Is this a flashback or a flashforward?" Then we see Kate. OK, now we know it's a flashforward, but we don't know where it fits with the other events we've seen in flashforwards. I spent the rest of the episode mainly focused on that question. I think they answered it fairly clearly right at the end, but I would have rather watched the show for it was instead of working on timeline theories in my head. The episode that was the worst for this in my mind was Ji Yeon. In that episode a Sun flashforward was combined with a Jin flashback. I realize this was on purpose to attempt to confuse the audience, but early in there was a scene where Jin is attempting to buy a stuffed panda and the shopkeeper tries to sell Jin a dragon instead since it's the year of the Dragon. I thought about it said, "Wait that doesn't sound right". Eventually I paused the show, went to my computer and Googled the Chinese Zodiac which confirmed Jin's story was taking place in 2000. Now there's an argument that it's cool that I was so invested in the show, but I would counter-argue that I'd rather watch the show without having to fact check obscure items. "Something Nice Back Home" did something similar with baseballs scores in the newspaper but I didn't bother to try to figure out what time window was represented there. The flashbacks have never had this problem. I don't recall worrying whether a given flashback occurred before or after another one. Usually it never mattered and if it did I think the order is made clear early on. But the flashforwards have always had this element of playing with the audience and making the viewers not trust what we're seeing. There are other aspects of the flashforwards I don't like as well. The coy way everyone talks around "them" is just annoying. It sounds artificial and the only purpose of the construct is so that the characters can have a conversation that the viewers can't completely follow. All in all, I still really enjoy watching Lost and it's not a matter of me thinking the show is falling apart or anything. There's just a major difference between the way the flashbacks and the flashforwards work and I find it distracting. I have some hopes that the flashforwards we've seen so far are in fact just to the end of season 4, and that something else screwy will happen in the S04 finale. I'm sure there will still be flashforwards in seasons 5 and 6 but I'm hoping the writers won't play with identifying the chronology proper as a puzzle element.
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