Fellow Exhauster Bryan reviewed The Dark Knight Rises over at his site, Missile Test, and he didn’t pull punches:

Bane, in short, is a joke. A third-tier Batman villain artificially elevated to prominence like a newcomer in the WWE whom Vince McMahon decided to give some juice because Smackdown was lagging in ratings. Bane is a failed experiment, a tawdry diversion from what can make the comics great. Featuring Bane as the villain in The Dark Knight Rises is a disappointment. It was a choice that was intriguing only in its ability to challenge Nolan as a storyteller. Elevating a character lacking in depth and sincerity to such a degree while requiring he carry the final act of the greatest superhero trilogy of all time is ambitious, indeed.

Was Nolan up to the task? Could he take such dreck and make it compelling through sheer will and talent?

It’s an interesting and very educational review. Bryan not only delves into Batman comic book history, but also pivots it into a review of the campy Batman movie from 1966:

Recently, Grant Morrison, the great comics writer, watched all the Batman films, and a good deal of the television series. In a short blurb about the 1966 film, he pointed out that it was the type of movie that children love, adolescents loathe, and adults find hilarious. I agree.

Per Bryan’s recommendation, I loaded up Batman: Year One onto my iPad and it’s pretty great.

From the BBC:

Late Beastie Boys member Adam Yauch has used his will to stop people from using his music or image in advertising.

Surprised by this move? If you’re a real Beasties fan you shouldn’t be. I’d like to point you to some lyrics from ‘Putting Shame In Your Game’ off of 1998’s album, Hello Nasty:
Don’t grease my palm with your filthy cash
Multinationals spreading like a rash
I might stick around or I might be a fad
But I won’t sell my songs for no TV ad
One of reasons the Beasties have been one of my favorite bands since I was a kid. Well played, Adam. Rest in peace.

John Gruber summarizing the App.net thing:

In a nut, App.net is a startup aiming to build a rival platform to Twitter, “where users and developers come first, not advertisers.” How? By generating revenue from users instead of from advertisers. They’re not using Kickstarter but they’ve built their own Kickstarter-like system.

Like Gruber, I respect what the people at App.net are doing but it’s not going to work, even if they do reach their funding goal.
The reason? App.net’s service is not a verb. I’m not saying every online service has to be a verb, but ‘googling’ and ‘tweeting’ have a tremendous amount of momentum with regular, non-nerdy, non-developer people. You might say, “Facebook isn’ a verb and look how big they are.” Sure, but they own ‘Like’ and before that they owned ‘Poke’.
There’s nothing I can see with App.net the general public can get behind. Even with all the negative moves Twitter is making with how it’s handling third-party developers, Twitter isn’t broken (yet).

From Marcelo Somers (via Jim Dalrymple)

Our job as independent writers isn’t to be first or even to get the most pageviews. It’s to answer the question of “so what?”. Taken as a whole, our sites should tell a unique story that no one else can, with storylines that develop over time that help bring order to the chaos of what we cover.

This is exactly what goes through my head when I post to Daily Exhaust.
There’s many times the link I want to link to and quote is already linked to and quoted by John Gruber, Jim Dalrymple, Shawn Blanc, Jason Kottke, Ben Brooks or someone I found on Techmeme. If I don’t have a unique perspective to the link in question, I usually won’t link to it. I don’t want to be the noise in the conversation.
I try to do the same with the images I post. While it’s tempting to get caught up in the whatever’s popular on Tumblr at the moment, I try to post my own designs, photography and scans.
Writing original content and posting original imagery makes me a source, not just just another reblogger of other peoples’ stuff. Sure it’s more work, but it’s worth it.

The Atlantic: By the Next Olympics, Athletes May Be Getting Routine Gene Doping Tests
I say we do what they proposed in an old SNL skit from the 90’s and just let athletes take anything they want.

The Link Between Quietness And Productivity

Being quiet means you think before you speak. Quiet people are usually thoughtful thinkers. They think things through before making a statement. Something you probably wish many of your workers would do before taking up your valuable time.

Batman: Dark Knightfall – a short stop-motion film made entirely with action figures.
Sound silly? Go check it out.

via Instagram

“…and this transformation is going to make some people uneasy. People from the PC world, like you and me. It’s going to make us uneasy because the PC has taken us a long ways. It’s brilliant. And we like to talk about the post-PC era but when it really started to happen I think it’s uncomfortable for a lot of people because it’s change and a lot of vested interested are going to change and it’s going to be different.”

—Steve Jobs, D8 Conference

While we’re on the topic of theft from my last post, below are the words of T.S. Elliot on the measure of a poet:

One of the surest tests [of the superiority or inferiority of a poet] is the way in which a poet borrows. Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different. The good poet welds his theft into a whole of feeling which is unique, utterly different than that from which it is torn; the bad poet throws it into something which has no cohesion. A good poet will usually borrow from authors remote in time, or alien in language, or diverse in interest.

This can be just as easily applied to any act of creation–be it gadget, painting, poem, building, vehicle or song.
The quote above is also the one everyone mis-attributes to Picasso.

From the current Apple vs Samsung proceedings earlier today, here’s part of an email thread between managers at Samsung circa 2007, after the original iPhone launched (via Apple Insider):

All this time we’ve been paying all our attention to Nokia, and concentrated our efforts on things like Folder, Bar, Slide, yet when our [product] is compared to the unexpected competitor Apple’s iPhone, the difference is truly that of Heaven and Earth. It’s a crisis of design.

I believe it was T.S. Elliot who said, “Immature poets imitate, mature poets steal and then there’s that shit Samsung pulls.”