I don't know if anybody else played through Star Wars: The Force Unleashed. Of those who did, I don't know how many of you had trouble killing Darth Maul.

Of course it wasn't really Darth Maul, since Darth Maul got cut in half by Ewan McGregor in Episode 1. It was this droid called Proxy that holographically turns itself into various people as a communications tool. (A little technological innovation we didn't see in the movies.) Anyhoo, at some point Proxy turns himself into Darth Maul and you have to kill him.

I found this very difficult.

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-- io9 says that Variety says that the Clone Wars TV show might actually not suck. For your consideration, here's a clip of Yoda breaking some robots:

-- It's only peripherally nerdy, but I was beguiled by the trailer for The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, which images a fantastical world in which Brad Pitt ages backwards. As opposed to our world, where he does not age at all. They seem to be playing the same twinkly magic music they use for Harry Potter trailers in the background. Somebody somewhere needs to compose some new twinkly magic music.

-- If anybody knows what Time's "Invention of the Year" should be, they should tell me.

-- Here's a first look at Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland, which establishes that Alice is a girl and wears clothes.

-- Feature Request of the Day. I'm a heavy tabbed browsing guy. I'm just saying, I like to keep a lot of tabs open. Here's a challenge for anyone who does development for Chrome or Firefox or IE: figure out a way for me to quickly locate whatever tab it is that is running an ad that's playing annoying music, so I don't have to hunt through them to find it. I feel like I've spent years of my life doing that. Make it blink or something. Anything.

Buying books online is easy, right? Just point and click and get and read. Right? Wrong.

Like everything else in the world, online book buying is fraught with staggering ethical and moral consequences. Okay, it's no abortion, but when you buy a book online, there is a teeny, tiny moral choice involved. But unlike euthanasia, it's kind of fun to think about.

The sticky question is this: when you buy a book online, you must ask yourself, "Who needs the money more -- the author or the bookstore?"

Authors deserve to be paid for their work, but America's independent bookstores are dying. When you buy a NEW book on Amazon, a royalty is paid to the author, and the rest of the money goes to the publisher and Amazon. When you buy a USED copy from a network of independent book sellers, like Alibris or AbeBooks or even Amazon Marketplace, the store gets (almost) all the money -- and the author gets nothing.

Who needs the money more, the the dusty old store or the dusty old writer? Here's some examples from books I've just read:

EXAMPLE 1) Born Standing Up: A Comic's Life by Steve Martin. No, Steve Martin does not need money. As detailed in Born Standing Up, Steve Martin made millions as a comedian performing stadium tours in the 1970s, not even taking into account the money brought in later by his many hit film roles (and, it is possible some of these were taken only for the money).

Buy Born Standing Up from Alibris. The independent bookstore needs the money more than Steve Martin.

EXAMPLE 2) The Abstinence Teacher by Tom Perotta. Tom Perotta is a successful writer, several of whose books (Election, Little Children) have been made into movies. But in these illiterate times, working name fiction writers need all the money they can get.

Buy The Abstinence Teacher from Amazon.

EXAMPLE 3) The Man in the High Castle by Philip K. Dick. Who knows? Dick is dead. His heirs, if they are the ones who own his publishing rights, would get his money. But how well do his books sell? Maybe the Long Tail is making them super-rich. But it's doubtful.

Better be to safe and buy The Man in the High Castle from Amazon.

EXAMPLE 4) Candide by Voltaire. This book is in the pubic domain, (from what I can tell from Wikipedia-ing "public domain.") Anyone can publish it, and Voltaire gets zero.

Give your Candide dollars to AbeBooks. They need it.

Sometimes, neither side wins. A writer I know, Sarah Shun-lien Bynum (Ms. Hempel Chronicles), was at a reading when a fan handed her a copy of her book to sign that was STOLEN FROM THE LIBRARY. In that case, the author, the small bookstore, the online sales monolith and the America's library system all got royally (and royalty) screwed.

So, do you think a writer is rich enough to take away his (or his estate's) well-deserved royalties in order to support America's worthy-but-beleaguered independent bookstores instead? Really, you can't know the answer to that question. Maybe Steve Martin lives in a cabin and gives every penny to Meals on Wheels, and maybe Tom Perotta lives in a gold castle on a hill of diamonds eating ruby cereal.

But who are we to judge how they spend their money anyway? The little guy with a buck to spend who wants to feel just a tiny taste of power -- that's who. Come on, isn't it a little fun to dick Michael Crichton out of 35 cents?

I read pretty slowly. That's partly because I am literally a slow reader: for some reason inputting text through my eyes is just not a rapid process. But it's also because I'm Time's book reviewer, so I have to burn through a couple of books a week as part of my job (which is basically the greatest job in the world), so if I'm reading something just for fun it tends to get back-burnered all the time, till I can no longer remember what it was about in the first place.

But I've been reading Anathem anyway, because I can't put it down, and holy crap it just got good. I wasn't going to blog about it anymore, because it's super-boring for those who aren't reading the book, which is probably most of you. But I was reading it on the subway this morning and the top of my head practically blew off. So I have to say something about it.

Massive spoilers, through the end of Part Five, follow:

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One can only imagine the intense nerdiness of the video footage that is even now pouring into Joss Whedon's inbox, now that he's accepting applications for the Evil League of Evil. He'll need welding goggles or a pinhole camera or something. You know, like when you're observing an eclipse. Anyway.

Or actually it looks like you have to post the video publicly, so we'll all get a look-see. Here are the application guidelines:

* It should be no more than three minutes in length.
* There should be little to no swearing.
* Dialogue, logos, and music must be original.
* Songs are not required (singing is a bonus).
* You must be evil -- it's a plus to have a name.
* Your video application should be posted to YouTube or Vimeo.
* Email us a link to the video, with your contact information.4
* October 11 is the last day to submit.

"Let the games begin."

Yesterday I got an advance copy of LucasArts' Fracture in the mail, so I've been deforming terrain like a mother. But embargoes are very chic at the moment, and LucasArts has embargoed reviews of the game till October. So that's all I can say.

In other news, Bungie has released a teaser-thing for a new Halo-related project. The teaser-thing is called "Keep It Clean." Here it is:

Everybody seems to think this is Bungie's way of announcing a new single-player Halo 3 campaign, probably dropping January. Which is good news for me, because that's mostly how I roll in Halo: singly.

In other news, this image came to me via io9. It's cool:

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A Canadian comic book writer named Matt Shepherd put this little masterpiece together. The funnest way to experience it is to skip the text into, then scan down the photo captions until you figure out the bit.

Happy dorking!

I'm fresh off the Webcast for the Googlephone. (There's an on-demand version here for real die-hard fans of grainy video of pasty white dudes.) Cue Darth Vader sound sample: impressive.

The form factor isn't in the same universe as the iPhone's, which when you really think about it is still pretty breathtaking. And I'll be curious about how that slider hardware wears over time. And there are some bars that the iPhone has set that just cannot be unset. 3G data. A pinchable touchscreen.

But there's a lot to like here. Google street view, with real GPS and a built-in compass. The $179 base price tag. The chicklet keyboard (I still haven't gotten up to speed on the iPhone's glass keyboard). A good summary of basic features is here.

I'm not really clear on what kind of a business proposition Android is for Google, but given Google's willingness to put their OS on any hardware whatsoever, Jobs has gotta be wondering if he's looking at Windows all over again. I picture him like Sarah Connor in Terminator 2: It's happening again ...

A lot will depend on whether app developers embrace the platform. Basically I'm waiting for somebody to install Android on an iPhone. Hackers of the world, how long must I wait? A No-Prize to the first person who can send me a screenshot! (Failing that I would also accept a decent Photoshopped fake.)

Tasting notes are what they give you while you're drinking fancy wines and acting like you can tell them apart. I actually do this quite a bit, because I enjoy it and because I like pretending I'm the fat guy in Sideways.

I'm currently in possession of the two new iPods, the new Nano and the new Touch. Here are a few tasting notes. From one who has tasted them all.

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Yes, Eoin Colfer is going to write a 6th Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy book. Adams' widow hand-picked him, apparently. He's best known as the author of the Artemis Fowl books, which I've never read, so I can't do much to handicap the odds of his work being any odd. "For years I have been finishing this incredible story in my head and now I have the opportunity to do it in the real world," Colfer says. "It is a gift from the gods. So, thank you Thor and Odin."

Sounds Adamsian enough. Colfer makes a much longer statement here, at the BBC website.

I know for an absolute fact that I read Mostly Harmless, the last Hitchhiker book that Adams wrote himself, but I have no memory of it whatsoever. Apparently it ends on something of a bleak note, which a sixth volume would presumably mitigate. Personally I'm of the opinion that this kind of franchise extension isn't always a bad thing, and anyway, worst case, it can't besmirch the greatness of the originals. (Not everybody feels this way. A big-time fantasy writer once told me that he never writes down any of his plans for future books in his series, in case some hack gets hired to finish them after he dies.) Now that it's been a radio play, a book, a TV show and a movie, I think the Hitchhiker's universe has shown it can take some mucking around with and keep on giving.

Though I'd be surprised if Colfer can top the ending of So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish, which felt absolutely definitive to me. Maybe Adams should have left it at that.