Poor Mojo's Newswire

The Cohen brothers ushered in the new era of digital color grading with their excellent 2000 film, "Oh Brother, Where Art Thou." This was the first feature film to be entirely scanned into a computer, a process known as "Digital Intermediary", or DI. Once inside the computer, the colorist now had unheard of control over every element of the image. Imagine tweaking an entire movie with the tools and precision that one has with their still images using Photoshop, and you get some idea of what power was unleashed. But was that power used for good... Nooooooooooooooo, or course it wasn't! . . . This screenshot from the excellent color theory and exploration site, kuler, shows what happens when you apply complementary color theory to flesh tones. You see, flesh tones exist mostly in the orange range and when you look to the opposite end of the color wheel from that, where does one land? Why looky here, we have our old friend Mr. Teal. And anyone who has ever taken color theory 101 knows that if you take two complementary colors and put them next to each other, they will "pop", and sometimes even vibrate. So, since people (flesh-tones) exist in almost every frame of every movie ever made, what could be better than applying complementary color theory to make people seem to "pop" from the background. I mean, people are really important, aren't they?

Barnes & Noble has just announced its intentions to open up a self-publishing portal this summer. We wouldn't say that the PubIt! name is the greatest of all time (for a variety of reasons, frankly), but the world's largest bookseller is hoping to expand its importance in the digital realm by giving wannabe authors the ability to upload and sell their material through B&N's website and eBookstore. Details on the compensation model (read: profit split) will be announced "in the coming weeks," but the real kicker here is this won't be limited to the Nook; pretty much any e-reader, tablet or PC will be able to tap in and make purchases, so the potential audience is quite large.

On Tuesday morning, an AT&T-funded front group, Americans for Prosperity, announced a $1.4 million advertising blitz to try to convince Americans that the FCC is plotting to "take over the Internet." Last week, the FCC simply proposed to "reclassify" aspects of broadband under Title II of the Telecommunications Act to better advance its goals of bridging the digital divide and safeguarding the free and open Internet. But AFP is spinning this into, laughably and somewhat ironically, a "government takeover." During yesterday's press conference, AFP trotted out Grover Norquist, the right-wing hit man perhaps best known for threatening to "drown the government in a bathtub," to put his stamp on their cause. Looks like they want to drown the Internet, too - along with our democracy.

Yesterday, we weren't sure if the list of Mac games in the Steam for Mac beta client was going to be available -- not to mention functional!-- for today's launch, but it appears our skepticism was misplaced. With the Steam for Mac service now live [DMG download] we were heartened to find that the list of 50 games, which you can read after the break, were still there and, even better, able to be downloaded! In this writer's case, games I had purchased on Steam for Windows previously (hello, The Dig!) downloaded just fine for me on Mac OS. Like we said yesterday, many of Valve's other games, including the Half-Life and Left 4 Dead series, while still promised for the Mac platform, are currently unavailable. We expect them to arrive in the subsequent weeks, as "additional collections of Mac titles will become available, each designed to highlight specific functionalities of Steam on the Mac." For now, you'll have to settle for Portal and Team Fortress 2 ... or one of the other 48 titles available today. (We've bolded some of our picks after the break.) First, a word of warning to would-be Mac gamers: You don't need to download every game right away. They're not going anywhere! Just take it easy, one game at a time, and soon enough playing "games" on your Mac will feel just right as rain.