The following is a transmission from a parallel Earth within the Multiverse where DC Universe Online has already been released:

DC Universe Online is a courageous breath of fresh air!  They have admirably risen to the challenge of building a game around iconic characters that players will NOT be allowed to control.  Yes, dear readers, they have done the seemingly impossible – they’ve built a game involving Batman where *I* don’t mind that I can’t BE Batman!

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Spoiler-free review:

Inception is a very good film. If you’re one of the handful of people who haven’t seen it yet, you should make time to do so. It’s well-acted, tightly-directed and provides a story that unfolds in a generally satisfying way. Its most successful moments are almost entirely visual and those portions of the film are truly unique and compelling and make it a worthy effort entirely on their own.

That being said, I found its core philosophical and narrative challenges to be rather uninspired and some of the story’s choices (particularly near the end) were disappointingly shallow. Inception is a movie defined by new vistas, but not new ideas.

In my view, it exists on the film spectrum occupied on one end by The Matrix and on the other by Dark City. In fact, it felt very much like a movie that has been written and re-written numerous times in the shadow of those earlier films. The result is a partial success – it is better than The Matrix and not as good as Dark City.

Spoilers follow from this point forward:

The upgrade to WP 3.0 borked a few things visually, so I’ve bumped over the new default layout for a bit. Please excuse the dust in the meantime.

UPDATE: All is now well.

Consider this your obligatory spoiler warning.  Proceed at your own risk.

I love Roger Ebert.  He is, in my view, not only the finest film critic of all time but also a tremendous social critic, political gad-fly and general Fan of Life Well-Lived whose stories and commentaries on everything from rice-cookers to Russ Meyer films utterly intrigue me.

I hold his opinions in high regard.  That is not to say that I AGREE with them all the time, but I find that he regularly displays an extremely difficult-to-balance mix of advocacy and objectivity in his writing.  Objectivity, contrary to the notions put forth by cable news outlets and the like, is NOT simply the act of “presenting both sides” or of creating a bullet list of positive and negative aspects of the thing being considered.  Objectivity allows you to (even DEMANDS that you) take a stand and defend your position, so long as you are willing to have your mind changed by a reasonable counter-argument.

I’m… working on stuff.  So the site may explode or look ridiculous for a while.

Sometimes – just SOMETIMES – I regret living in the post-Scientific Revolution era.  Sure, I like sanitation and the germ theory of disease and air planes and HDTV and all of that, but those goodies come at a price.  That price is the fact that we live in a world where we rarely accept things without evidence (except when it comes from talk radio or cable news).

The result?

You and I live in a world where we DON’T believe in lots of weird and wonderful things.

For example, we don’t believe that some lambs are the fruit of a magical super-plant.

No, really.

In an effort to figure out why cotton exists, medieval “scientists” decided that the best possible explanation was that a special kind of lamb sprouted from a plant and was connected to to that plant by an umbilical cord.  The Vegetable Lamb spent its life grazing about its host-plant and – once the plant died – the lamb died, leaving behind cotton.

THAT’s what science used to be like.  Totally insane, comic-book crazy explanations for EVERYTHING.

And I CHALLENGE you to tell me you’d rather live in a world where cotton comes from a stupid, boring little bush rather than from an insane plant/animal hybrid that exists in a legendary far-off land.