Author: Chuck

  • Oh yeah? Your MOM compromised national security for political retribution!


    I hope everybody had a great fourth of July! I did. It’s a great opportunity to blow stuff up in celebration of what is ostensibly a democracy! “Ostensibly,” of course, because our president has apparently given up even trying to make it seem like there’s a functional system of checks and balances still in place.…

  • For the Overlord!


    I hadn’t heard anything about the game Overlord until its demo was released on Xbox Live a while ago. Now that’s how you do a game release: under-hyped to the point of obscurity, then a wide-release demo that builds buzz, and the full release a month later. The game itself (I’m playing the Xbox 360…

  • “It Just Works”


    This is going to be the last I’ll talk about the iPhone on here, at least until the next major software upgrade. Frankly, at this point, talking about it anymore would be just like, well, cuddling. My buying advice, for what it’s worth: if you don’t already have one, don’t buy one. You’ve already survived…

  • 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…