In an amazing display of honor and integrity possibly extinct amongst American businesses, Toyota Motor Corp. CEO and President Akio Toyoda declined to accept an award from the Japanese Government for the Prius model’s energy efficiency. The Prius was one of 3 products selected this year to receive the Grand Prize for Energy Efficiency and Ecological Quality from Japan’s Trade Minister.
Referring to the recent voluntary recall of 437,000 Prius for possible brake problems, Toyota spokesman Paul Nolasco said, “We declined to accept the award because we thought it was not appropriate.” Toyota made the decision to recall the Prius amongst the recent recall of a total of 8.5 million other Toyota autos after receiving only 200 complaints total in both the U.S. and Japan of the hybrid experiencing a braking delay in very specific cold weather conditions over very bumpy roads.
Plan and simple, Champions Online lost its hold on me. I continued to dive into the game, move around the world, soak up the atmosphere, read about its future and most importantly, evaluate the content beyond my reach. What I definitively learned, and I hope my review hinted at, is that the game lacks legs. The atmosphere has always been incredibly disjointed thanks to the instancing of most zones. Even though all of the settings make sense in the universe, they lack a cohesive flow. And the multitude of characters aren’t employed effectively either. Because of these continued slip-ups through the middle to later levels, Champions Online gets boiled down to its diverse arcade-y combat. In essence, it becomes a soulless experience.
When I tore Star Trek Online a new a-hole for the very same reasons, I was once again called every name in the book and, like Champions Online, it will take a few months before I am once again proven correct. I’m trying to save you people money, I swear. I die a little inside every time I hear someone has foolishly purchased a lifetime subscription.
A compilation of the worst Batman villains has been posted and it is sure to spark debate. The Joker coming in at #5? Mr. Zsasz at #1?
The Joker:
This guy is only #5 out of respect for all the good Joker stories that there have been. Unfortunately, most all of those stories were published before 1988, which is coincidentally around the time The Killing Joke was published. It’s not like the Joker was a harmlessly comical jackanape before the late 80s, but man, turning him into a quasi-genocidal embodiment of mass murder and psychological torture as a way of life really stretches credulity, and that’s saying something in the context of a book predicated on a mentally ill billionaire dressing like a bat in order to beat up criminals with the putative support of local law enforcement. I had even forgotten, until Tucker reminded me, the bit in Joker’s Last Laugh where – having almost destroyed the entire planet by drugging a whole bunch of deadly super-villains with Joker toxin and trying to kill the President of the United States – the Joker is once again saved by the Dark Knight performing CPR after Nightwing almost beats him to death. Seriously: the character has become so perversely demonic that keeping him alive in-story warps and distorts every other character and plot element around him. The Batman – and half-a-dozen other heroes – have saved his life so many times, it’s stupid. And sad. Still: we’ll always have “The Laughing Fish,” and he was good on Batman: The Animated Series.
I mean, seriously, heroes don’t want to kill villains, even the worst villains, because that would prove that “we’re no better than them!” Does that mean a cop who fires his gun is no better than the bank robber firing at the cop? Really? I’d like to see you explain that to the local police union. The answer to this question is simple: don’t turn every villain into a mass-murderer and we can go back to not caring if the Justice League forgets to read Felix Faust his Miranda rights.
Kim Stanley Robinson, one of the greats in contemporary science-fiction writing, notable for his Red Mars trilogy, recently gave a talk at Duke University about Science, Religion and Ideology….you know, light topics. It’s a fascinating lecture by a cunning mind, full of insight and portent..and now it’s is available for those of us who don’t attend Duke University:
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