Mind you, so does everyone else. But I need something to make you click and come to shey.net. Please don’t hate me.

At any rate, David Pogue and Walt Mossberg have both done video reviews of the new iPhone. The Pogue review is exceptionally good — I can’t understand why it’s only been viewed a couple hundred times on YouTube, but that may be a very short-term thing.

I can’t help but notice all the smudges on the screen, which I’ve imagined will be the main drawback of an iPhone — people like me who aren’t at peace with the fact that we are greasy animals will be carrying around little bottles of cleaner and chamois cloths and maniacally cleaning these things. The other drawback Pogue mentions in the best and most straightforward quote from his review: “you can get online in a wireless wifi hotspot, which is fast and satisfying, or via AT&T’s cellular internet network, which is slow and horrible.” My current phone has 3G and a very decent web browser, and I’ve adapted pretty well to doing most everything I need to with it.

On that note, despite having bought nearly every major Mac product of the past few years as soon as they came out — the Newton, the iMac, the original iPod, every Powerbook / MacBook since the G3, the Apple TV, even the Cube (boy, did I love the Cube) — I’m going to be sitting this one out for a little while. Why? I can’t bear right now the compromises I know will come of this being a first generation product. Despite the beauty of the interface and OS, it’s just bound to have some major limitations that are going to become apparent to me in the first few days of heavy use, and I just can’t bear to think of the iPhone as anything less than perfect. I’d rather wait a little longer until it truly is perfect, like my beloved iPod and Nano both are (in my opinion).

That doesn’t mean I won’t drool and make smudges all over my business partner Emil’s iPhone, as I’m sure he’ll get one this week.

Here’s Mossberg’s review. It’s great, also — I just don’t have much more to say.

Considering my past experience, this is somewhat embarrassing to admit, but I haven’t gotten a text message since June 16th. So if anyone reading this has tried to text me, and I haven’t replied, it’s not because I’m a jerk, although that may be the case — I just literally am not getting SMS messages. Apparently, they’re getting eaten somewhere between “The New AT&T” and my phone. Two fruitless thirty-plus minute troubleshooting calls with their customer service have gone nowhere — the only thing I know is that it started happening when my phone’s network stopped reading “Cingular” and started reading “AT&T,” and that one of the technicians made an obscure reference to the point that I was an AT&T Wireless customer who switched to Cingular, and some of those customers (read: the longest and supposedly most loyal) are getting the shaft.

If there’s any bright side to this, the whole experience has made me a lot less likely to stand in line for an iPhone. But at this point, I’m forced to declare SMS Chapter 11 while I seek reparation for the problem. If you’ve sent me a message, I probably won’t be able to return it. Please go ahead and give me a call instead.

OK, I’ve completely stopped blogging, I think. But we’ve watched this at least four times tonight, from Flight of the Conchords…

(cross-posted from the NNN Blog)

A Comicbook Orange is a comic book review show on Pulp Secret by our friends Casey McKinnon and Rudy Jahchan (Galacticast), which I blogged about the other day. Feedback on the first episode so far has been great, and Rudy and Casey have been really building some great word of mouth — you can join an official Facebook group, find A Comicbook Orange on MySpace, and they’ve even built a cool site for the show where people can submit their own reviews.

Check it out below, and if you’re looking for more good comics to read, let us know what you’d like to see more of on A Comicbook Orange.

On a side note, this is also the first time we’ve put out an episode in a widescreen ratio — if you try to view the show fullscreen on the site, or download the iTunes-compatible file, you’ll see what we mean. It’s the little things that sometimes get us pumped.

Gawker’s new site Jezebel is pretty bad-ass, with perhaps the most bad-ass thing about it (besides its color scheme, which is a lot like this site’s) being that it shows the number of views for each article right on the index page. I wonder if that includes RSS views.

From their manifesto:

To put it simply, Jezebel is a blog for women that will attempt to take all the essentially meaningless but sweet stuff directed our way and give it a little more meaning, while taking more the serious stuff and making it more fun, or more personal, or at the very least the subject of our highly sophisticated brand of sex joke. Basically, we wanted to make the sort of women’s magazine we’d want to read, a magazine that would never actually see glossy paper because big-name advertisers and the publishers who kowtow to them don’t much like it when you point out the vulgarity of a $2000 handbag.

Jeff Jarvis has a good writeup today.

Recently, my tumblelog got a lot more interesting to me than this one, so much so that I’ve thought several times about switching over altogether, like some of my friends have.

A tumblelog’s a more informal, scrapbook-style blog for sharing things, without all the social anxiety — and my friends at Davidville have invented a wonderfully elegant and intuitive platform at Tumblr to let you get your own in minutes. Please feel free to check it out.

Smith Mag is currently putting out another online graphic novel (after last year’s astounding Shooting War) called A.D., dealing with the survivors of Katrina and its aftermath. It’s a must-read, and Ana from Pulp Secret went down to talk to everyone involved — here’s the video.

Fred Seibert, one of my partners at Next New, let a pretty amazing thing slip the other day — that over at his other company, Frederator Studios, he’s making the new Castlevania movie with none other than Warren Ellis and James Jean.

The funny part was how I found out: in one of our regular, free-wheeling meetings where we talk about creative, I was showing him the mini-social network recently set up on Ning for members of Ellis’ message board, The Engine, as an example of an easy way to create basic community features around a show (which, by the way, our friends at JETSET just did) and Fred did a bit of a double take, and said, “Warren Ellis? I’m making a movie with him!”

Apparently Fred had no idea I’m a fan of Ellis’ writing and part of the loose (and large) community of people whom he’s pulled together on places like The Engine and the Bad Signal mailing list. And it wasn’t until Fred blogged about it tonight that I checked out the Castlevania production blog Ellis is writing and saw that James freaking Jean is providing art direction. This is the sort of thing I could completely geek out over, despite the fact that I missed Castlevania as a game growing up — hopefully, by knowing Fred, I’ll get a peek at the process every once in a while.

I’ve been a big fan of Jonathan Mann’s videos at GameJew since my friend and co-worker Scott Moschella first showed them to me a few months ago. Jonathan usually does these inventive, totally original videos and songs mostly about video games, but yesterday decided to cover a peaceful immigration reform rally in Los Angeles, and when things turned unbelievably bad, with the police firing rubber bullets into the crowd and chasing them block to block through the city, Jonathan and the person filming with him stuck around and kept the video rolling. What they put together is a damning indictment of a dark direction we’re increasingly going in the United States — it’s breaking my heart, and we need to put a stop to this now.

I haven’t had a response to a videoblog post like this since, well, another of Jonathan’s videos, though that was a very different reaction. Think citizen journalism can’t help keep the fourth estate alive? Watch this. Embedded below, and I hope to see this everywhere — across big media and small — tomorrow.

For more, check out LAist, which is updating pretty regularly on the issue at this point.

Update: some pretty incredible video from LA’s Fox11 is up on YouTube, where Fox reporters with press credentials actually get knocked down by police batons, but what’s really depressing are the comments, both on YouTube and Jonathan’s site. Outright racist, horrible stuff in there. Are we doomed? I think we may be. Jonathan responds.

A little while back, I wrote about Nathan Fox here, and was super-pleased to get a nice note from him about it. We had a nice back and forth over email which led to him getting interviewed on the Pulp Secret Report today, but even better for me, he sent me this super cool self-portrait via email. I hope he doesn’t mind me posting it (I think fatherhood suits him, personally). 3D glasses not included.

Be sure to check out Nathan’s work on DMZ#18, on newsstands now at your friendly neighborhood comics shop. And check out the interview on Pulp Secret, embedded below.