Month: June 2007

  • iSuck

    Man, there’s been a nauseating level of hype around the iPhone today. (I didn’t include a link; if you want to read more about the iPhone, just check the entire internet). And all for what? It’s version 1.0 of an Apple device, which means that in around six months there’ll be the next “next big…

  • Thirty-Six

    They say the only thing worse than having a thirty-sixth birthday is not having a thirty-sixth birthday. I say the only thing worse is having a thirty-sixth birthday on a Wednesday. Nothing like having the long, slow march towards death kick off on the most boring day of the week. If I could comically throw…

  • A big-ass table

    This video from SarcasticGamer.com has already made the rounds in the real blogs, but it’s just too well-done not to pass on: You don’t have to have seen the original promotional video to be able to tell that they got the music and the intonation of the voice exactly right. Brilliant. And to prove this…

  • Mickey Shrugged

    This week Mac got me into a preview screening of Ratatouille. It’s really an outstanding movie. It’s gotten to where you just expect the highest level of quality from Pixar movies, and Ratatouille exceeds that. At the technical level, of course, it’s perfect — Pixar movies always have much, much more going on behind the…

  • Schrödinger’s Capo

    Well, that didn’t last. One week and seven episodes after I started watching The Sopranos, I found out how it ended. The culprit was Ron Moore’s “Battlestar Galactica” blog, of all things. Technically, it got ruined much earlier, several times over; I just hadn’t realized that when Yahoo News changed their big headline from “Will…

  • Take the cannoli, mang

    Tonight’s entry in the Movies Everybody Has Already Seen Except Me Marathon was the Brian DePalma classic Scarface. Now, I realize the movie is 24 years old, but I’ve got to throw myself on the mercy of the internets here, because I just don’t get it. I’ve been looking around for some kind of explanation,…

  • You’ve unlocked… Rosebud!

    When I started writing about storytelling in videogames almost a month ago, I’d intended to turn it into a series, with more arguments and maybe even some examples more concrete than “videogame stories should be good.” To keep things going, I’ll take some of the comments I’ve read about the topic online (in blogs, articles,…

  • Got myself a gun… about seven years late.

    Update: Hey, this post was rambling and non-sensical even for me. I’ll leave it as an example of what happens when you put stuff on the internets while tired. But here’s what I would’ve written had I been typing coherently last night: “The Sopranos” aired its series finale this week. In the seven years the…

  • Boom

    Apple’s Worldwide Developer Conference is going on this week, with Steve Jobs’ keynote this morning. Nothing particularly earth-shattering was announced, but the stuff they did show was cool enough. I was surprised by my own reaction to the new desktop demo. There’s nothing particularly compelling there, and the transparent menubar is unpleasantly Vista-like, but seeing…

  • Please wait while Windows calculates how it can suck even more.

    It should come as no surprise to anyone that I lasted about a nanosecond before I broke down and bought a new computer (cat does not come standard). (Actually, cat does not come, period). It’s way more computer than I need — it’s way more computer than most shuttle launches need — and it was…

  • Electronic F—wit Foundation

    It feels wrong, somehow, to find fault with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, because at least in principle, its existence is essential. The internet has gotten to be so ubiquitous so quickly, that we need an advocacy group to make sure that technology doesn’t outpace practical concerns like consumers’ rights. And we can’t leave it all…

  • Alas for you

    When I was in high school, the rival school from across town put on a production of Godspell that rocked my world. I loved the music, I loved the concept behind the show, I bought the soundtrack and memorized it. When I went to college in New York, I spent my dining hall money to…