05.22.08

Irony Man

Posted in Coding, Gaming, Movies, Rants at 5:33 pm

So… Went to see Iron Man with the sibling over the birthday weekend. It wasn’t quite what I was expecting.

Yeah, yeah, I know, not funny, but I’m not at all sorry. Anyway, many reviews to this point have made a point of highlighting Downey’s performance as Tony Stark, and all things considered I thought he freaking nailed it. The events that made him Iron Man changed him, on some level– he understands the importance of not fostering war, and so on– but he’s still Tony Stark, and having him do a complete 180 into Boy Scout-like territory wouldn’t do justice to the character or to the narrative. He matures without a character revolution– or more specifically, he undergoes a revolutionary change that leaves his superficial character traits untouched. He can remain his usual snotty self and still be trying to save the world.

Now, the other good thing that the flick had going for it was that it wasn’t trying to bog itself down with all of the baggage that Iron Man has in the comics right now. I’m really not a fan of the Civil War storyline, mostly because I think it’s too politically charged (comics can talk about politics, I’m okay with that, but you don’t kill off Captain America to make a point about patriotism), so rebooting the Iron Man character is about the best way to do it. The fact that Tony doesn’t have very many high-profile villains to his name also helped, because the flick had much more freedom to establish Tony as a character and Iron Man as a hero. The scene in the Afghan village only solidified this.

Overall, while I’m not nearly as much of a comics nerd as some folks, I can appreciate a good movie as much as anyone, and Iron Man was a good movie. If the Hulk is half as good as this– and it has Ed Norton, of course it will be good– this is gonna be a pretty awesome summer for hero films. Indiana Jones is next on my list to see, probably this weekend if I’m done with Beyond Good & Evil early enough.

In the interim between writing the above discussion of Iron Man and the retooling I did of it here at lunch, something else has started to bug me, and I feel it ought to take precedence over movie discussions. Most of you know that the little scrolling thingy at the top of the blog front page is powered, normally, by Twitter. I was introduced to Twitter through one or more podcasts that I listened to, and found it to be a pretty clever tool. Twitter’s primary function is as a micro-blogging tool; you’re given 140 characters to describe what you’re doing or where you are. It feels almost like a haiku, actually; you have a very small space to work in yet complete freedom within that space. Needless to say, I love the concept. I’ve even used it to somewhat great effect here on this ol’ blog.

Twitter’s implementation, however– and this is being nice about it– sucks.

Now, I’ll be completely honest in that my utilization of Twitter is not exactly what the developers intended. I imagine that the Twitter team felt it would be a slower-paced version of instant messaging; more akin to passing notes around class than a live conversation. To some degree, then, my use– posting thoughts without devoting the amount of time it would take to make a full post on the blog– could be considered a case of “you’re doing it wrong”. I’m fine with that. The problem is, however, that my “wrong” use of Twitter stays perfectly within the provided capabilities of the service. I’m not hacking anything, haven’t made any bizarre customizations, and nothing I’m doing is anything someone else couldn’t do. It’s the intent I’m conveying that seems different from other Twitterkin. That’s not my complaint.

My big complaint, in all honesty, is the same complaint I had that forced me to move from Blogger/WordPress.com to a custom tool back in 2005, and then back to WordPress in ‘06. I did not want my ability to work on my site to be reliant on an external application which fails repeatedly and inconveniently. Yesterday’s post exemplifies the fact that Twitter’s instability is causing problems for me. Therefore, I’m thinking about a way to do more or less the exact same thing as Twitter… but just for my site. I don’t want to knock the efforts of the Twitter team, but the constant downtime and slow access of the web client are more than a little irritating.

To that end, I’m thinking maybe I could create a small Windows or OS X client to carry around (ultimately creating an iPhone/iPod Touch version as well). I’m actually leaning towards creating an AIR-based client to start with, as that would easily let me prototype what I want the actual client to look like. And, you know, use it before I do the native clients. We shall see, of course. I imagine I’ll have a web-based mockup available soon.

Catch you folks tomorrow.

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