The trailer for the movie The Notorious Bettie Page is up at Apple’s site, and I’m intrigued. Here are the reasons I plan on seeing this movie:

• I don’t really know anything about Bettie Page, and I’ve heard the movie isn’t just a boring biopic.
• Come on, look at her!
• All accounts say Gretchen Mol does a great job.
• The trailer makes it look like they do a lot of neat stuff with editing and compositing and such; hopefully it won’t be another one of those bait-and-switch deals where the trailer’s cool but the movie’s dull.
• I’m interested to see what the movie does with it. I Shot Andy Warhol was dull and fairly forgettable, but to its credit it wasn’t sentimental or predictable. Well, except that I could tell going in that it involved Andy Warhol getting shot.

If I’m going to be seeing it, I’d better get myself a wallet chain and some pomade to fit in with the crowd. It’ll be useful in case I want to go to another Reverend Horton Heat concert, too.

The Wondercon is next weekend! How exciting is that?!?

Come on! We can see clips from the new Superman movie! And Frank Miller! And Kevin Smith! And there’s going to be “exclusive Star Wars programming,” which as far as I can make out from the website means that Lucas Licensing is going to be recruiting.

I’m going — getting the three-day pass, even — but I’m troubled by my own lack of enthusiasm. This is the kind of thing that would get me visibly excited in the past. Now I’m still every bit the nerd that I was when I wrote gushing fan letters about Sandman to Neil Gaiman with my GEnie account, but I’m having trouble seeing the Wondercon as anything more than something inevitable that I’m going to go to and is going to be crowded and filled with people dressed up as stormtroopers and anime characters and my feet are going to hurt.

I’m old, but I’m not that old. It’s way too early for me to be getting jaded. I do want to see if I can get Mike Mignola to sign one of my copies of Hellboy or The Amazing Screw-On Head. So maybe I can work up some excitement by digging through my protective plastic bags to find just the right comic for him to sign.

Another mark in the “Blizzard is evil” column: their “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” handling of a guild in World of Warcraft that advertised itself as “GLBT-friendly.” In brief, when a player sent a message over general chat recruiting people into her “GLBT-friendly but not GLBT-only” guild, she was given a citation for violating the game’s policy on sexual harassment.

The policy, at least its online version, is on this page and only disallows language that “insultingly refers to any aspect of sexual orientation.” But apparently (in case there is another policy/agreement document somewhere less accessible), the policy is that you can’t mention it at all.

The responses from Blizzard game managers in that article are worded about as poorly as they possibly could’ve been — if they’d been outright offensive, then at least it would’ve been taking a stand one way or the other. What they did instead was try to make it sound as if they were looking out for the members of the guild and pre-emptively preventing harassment. Which is self-serving, chicken-shit behavior that in a lot of ways is even more offensive.

Advertising a guild as gay-friendly would invite its members to harassment? I hate to break it to you, Blizzard, but it’s an online role-playing game. Heavily populated by adolescents and shut-ins who never developed past adolescence. You’ve already got harassment. It’s built-in. Some of these people must have “omg ur so GAY!” and “Alliance fags!” on macro.

Now, you’d have to pathetically thin-skinned to get upset by that, but that’s not the point. The point is that for Blizzard to claim that the real world and game world are completely separate, and that it’s not mentioned at all, isn’t even disingenuous — it’s outright denial.

And it’s perfectly reasonable for somebody to want to reinforce an environment where you can just be comfortable knowing that if you mention your gayness or lack thereof, you won’t get dogpiled for it. The examples usually brought up are just saying stuff like, “I have to go AFK to pick up my boyfriend” when you have to leave in the middle of something. Hell, I’ve run into that when I’ve been playing and there’s downtime, and other people mention their relation to each other. I’ve seen female players say, “so-and-so is my husband” and a conversation starts about how it’s nice to see couples playing together.

I’ve been in situations where I started to type that I was playing with my boyfriend, but just didn’t bother because it would be too much of a hassle to explain. That’s not flaunting your deviant lifestyle to anyone, it’s just being able to talk without having to be constantly paranoid about saying The Wrong Thing.

So it would seem a pretty clear-cut case to me, but then the article goes on to mention two guilds called “Stonewall Champions” and “The Spreading Taint.” Great job, guys. Nothing like playing a MMORPG to make you feel that you’re constantly surrounded by morons, the shallowest dregs of humanity.

Blizzard and its supporters can back-pedal as much as they like, claiming that it’s for the player’s own good and it’s part of the stated policy and that whether a player’s gay or straight doesn’t make any difference at all. It’s just a game, right? Yeah, of course it’s just a game, but their response is nothing more than doing what people have been doing for way too long about this stupid issue — shutting their eyes, putting their fingers in their ears, and just hoping it would go away. And now, no matter how it plays out, it’s going to be portrayed as a bunch of whiners asking for special treatment so they can “flaunt their sexuality” in front of everyone.

It’s enough to make me want to quit the game entirely, except I just got these boots that give +10 to my agility and they’re simply fabulous.

Today there’s an SFist post about Google China and how it, apparently, proves that Google has gone from being hero to millions to as corrupt and evil a mega-corporation as :spit: Disney! Ah well, I hope I’ll be able to sleep at night knowing that every web search I do makes me complicit in tyranny.

Since I still don’t have a “links” section working, let’s spin the big wheel of Thursday topics I could talk about to pad out the rest of this post:

• The inner workings of JavaScript
• This totally awesome review of James Frey’s A Million Little Pieces
• Realizing I’m more conservative than pretty much everyone I know on the Left Coast
• The Onion has a podcast now
• I watched “Saturday Night Live” for the first time in a long time just for Drew Barrymore’s appearance, and was surprised at just how god-awfully devoid of humor the show’s gotten
• Mac got me hooked on tangerines, clementines to be specific. Forgive me they are delicious so sweet and so cold.
• Speaking of cold, it sure is cold outside! Like, all the time!
• I like art blogs.

We have a winner!

My favorite blog of the moment is called Drawn! The Illustration Blog, because it’s all over the place. I would’ve expected that art-viewable-on-the-internets would consist of about a million webcomics and then the occasional portfolio, but this one shows how much creativity and variety there is out there.

The coolest bit, to me, is how frequently you’ll see people in the visual arts who’re willing to show you how it’s done. Like Olduvai George’s step-by-step demonstration of how he draws a mammoth. There’s still no chance of most of us making something like this painting (yeah, it’s a painting; I would’ve sworn it was an Ansel Adams photograph), but it takes a little bit of the mystery out of it.

Sugar Frosted Goodness is like an artists’ jam session. I’ve been trying to follow the work of this guy, Drew Weing (from Savannah!) ever since he did an Achewood guest comic, and his latest stuff just looks great. The “Copper” tutorial is another step-by-step demonstration, this one of a webcomic. Plan 59 (formerly Ephemera Now) collects “commercial art of mid-century America,” and I’m still trying to decide which ones I want to buy and hang up over my couch.

And of course there’s Illustration Friday, which Jeff contributes to. He wins because of this drawing of Solomon Grundy.

According to USA Today, the scarcity of Xbox 360s will likely continue through Spring, just in time for the release of the Playstation 3.

Fine, then, Microsoft! I don’t want your damn computer box anyhow! I’d pretty much resigned myself to getting one, since I’ve got more discretionary income than common sense or time. I end up buying videogames I never actually play and feel a void in my soul if I don’t have The Latest Thing. It’s not so much I wanted an Xbox, I just didn’t want to not have one.

So I’d been saying that it’s inevitable I’d get one, and as soon as it’s possible to just walk into a Best Buy and pick one up without pre-ordering or tackling some overprivileged child to the ground, I’d do it. But every week of super-exclusivity is another week for me to ask myself whether I really want to get one.

The only game I’m interested in is Oblivion, and that’s coming out for the PC as well. The only other reason to get one would’ve been to replace the 10-year-old DVD player I’m using now, but it still works like a champ, and the PS3 is going to be better anyway.

So it seems to me that the analysis in that article is actually correct — having an Xbox 360 shortage was good for the initial launch, because it drummed up demand. But how many of us are going to be patient enough to keep up the demand once they get the supply in place? I’m thinking I’m better off not having another time-waster in the house.

Today (or I guess, yesterday) was the first day in a long while I’ve made real tangible progress with my work, instead of just doing research or clerical and maintenance work. So instead of downloading and installing and re-installing and reading documentation and uninstalling and re-re-installing, I actually wrote a good bit of code.

About 12 hours’ worth of code, by my calculations.

Now, while I’m pleased that I actually have something to show for my work, it would’ve been nice to see some daylight today other than the bits and flashes I got while out smoking. This was pretty much my M.O. at my previous jobs, too — long periods of brainwork (which looked to the casual and ignorant observer like inactivity) followed by a consolidated way-too-long chunk of work time that actually gets results.

Do normal people grow out of their college work schedule, or am I doomed to cram sessions for the rest of my life?

(Incidentally, my friend and once-again-coworker Chris reminded me the other day about my last project at LucasArts, which was a total failure of a scripting language that was supposed to be a combination of lua and C++. Turns out that JavaScript is exactly what I was trying to make, but I didn’t know that at the time. My version was still a failure, but it’s nice to see that I was on kind of the right track at least.)

One of the sites I’ve been reading a lot lately (other than the java online documentation) is Lifehacker. It’s a blog that’s filled with tips and recommendations that will supposedly make your life more organized. For me, though, it always ends up taking up more of my time. They’ll recommend some huge time-saving new application, like Path Finder or Quicksilver or Yojimbo. I’ll download it and install it. I’ll try it out, add my stuff to it, get a feel for how it works.

I’ll invariably fail, and go back to doing things “the old way.” But not just the old way, I’ll go back all the while knowing I could be doing things more efficiently. So every one is like an added weight.

I think what I really need is a true personal organizer — not some PDA or desktop widget or does-everything organizer app, but a real organizer. Somebody who’s really on top of things and can make sense of the 48 hours worth of stuff I want to do in the 12 or so hours I’m actually awake each day. Somebody who’ll pay my bills, get caught up on my e-mails and personal obligations, point me to the internet stuff I’m actually interested in and filter out the rest, who’ll teach me how to play the banjo and speak Japanese and draw, all while I’m playing World of Warcraft or getting caught up with my Netflix queue.

ASIMO, I’m waiting for you, buddy.

I don’t like real-time strategy games. You’d think I could just accept that and move on, but they keep putting in stuff that makes me think I’m going to like them. This one lets you build things! You like that SimCity game, don’t you, Chuck? This one has samurai; who doesn’t like samurai? This one has “an RPG-like campaign mode.” You like RPGs! Buy it now!

Sometimes when I’m weak all they’ve got to do is advertise elves and dwarves and shit. I don’t even like elves or dwarves as a rule. Who would?

The most insidious way to trick me into liking an RTS, though, is to put a bunch of AT-ATs and AT-STs and speeder bikes and rebel transports into it. Star Wars: Empire at War does that, which is why it’s evil. The game demoes very, very well. After watching the tutorial, I was already hooked. Hooked and disturbed, because I don’t like the thought of living in a world where LucasArts is making good games again.

Once I got past the tutorial and into the game part of the demo, the universe settled back into its recognizable form. Bad-ass spaceships aside (and none of that Naboo shit, either — this is a real Star Wars game), it’s still an RTS and I still don’t get the appeal.

It could be just because I suck at them; I’m not exactly Sun Tzu when it comes to strategy. Hell, I’m not even Sonny Bono when it comes to strategy. I’m not even Chastity Bono when it comes to strategy. I don’t even know what I’m talking about anymore. What’s happening? Since when did I start writing a weblog? Are you there, internets? It’s me, Margaret.

So yeah, anyway. I get easily distracted and don’t do good with the strategy games. Put a whole bunch of soldiers and tanks and a selection rectangle in front of me and all of a sudden I’m like the eople who say, “You work in videogames? I played Tetris!”

So Empire at War looks bad-ass and is tempting and all, but seeing as how I can’t win the demo, it’s probably not the game for me. I just hope I can keep that in mind the next time I’m in the game-buying place and I see the spaceships on the box and my eyes glaze over and my hand goes to my wallet. Every time I think of the unused copies of Warcraft 3 and Starcraft and Warcraft 2 and Rise of Nations it just bears out my secret shame. I don’t like real-time strategy games.

When Robert Iger showed up at that Apple announcement last year to bring “Lost” and “Desperate Housewives” to the iPod, people were saying it showed that Steve Jobs and Disney were close pals now that Michael Eisner was gone. Maybe there was something to that, because Disney finally bought Pixar.

I guess things were going in that direction for a while, so it was inevitable. I couldn’t be less of an insider as far as the film/animation studio business goes, but at least from a surface assessment (Disney animation needs more innovation, Pixar animation needs more market profile) it makes sense. I also like seeing press releases that mention billions of dollars of stock transitions and “imagination” and “dreams” and “the child in everyone” all on the same page.

I didn’t notice any mention of whether they’re going to keep the Pixar brand name. If nothing else, it’ll reduce some of their ad text, so for parades and rides and such they can finally stop saying, “A Walt Disney Animation Production of a Pixar Studios Film Monsters, Inc.“