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Jim Henson’s Dharma Initiative Babies
You’d have to be pretty cynical, or have already given up on the series altogether, not to think that this week’s episode of “Lost” was pretty damn cool. The guys behind the show have admitted to being big fans of Stephen King, which probably explains why this couldn’t have been a better TV adaptation of…
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Uncanny Valley
In robotics (and increasingly used in talking about CGI), the term “Uncanny Valley” refers to the point at which the attempt to make an artificial character more human-like backfires, and the character becomes more repulsive and disturbing than realistic. Scott McCloud gives a simple, easily understandable explanation for why this happens in Understanding Comics: humans…
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The Blizzard Effect
Word on the street is that Blizzard is going to be announcing a Starcraft-themed massively multiplayer game at an upcoming event in South Korea. (For people who don’t know videogames, but are still reading this for some reason: Starcraft was a real-time strategy game released back in 1998. There was one expansion pack, but there’ve…
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And one more
There was one movie I forgot to mention in my last post, Hot Fuzz. And the fact that I was talking about every movie I’ve seen in the last three months and forgot to mention it, pretty much says it all. I’ve got to be one of the only internet nerds who wasn’t blown away…
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Catching Up
Crunch mode or no, Netflix still keeps taking my money, so I’ve got to stay on top of the latest in years-old movies I never got around to seeing while they were still relevant. And if you’re horrified at the thought that I’ve been watching movies and not putting my opinions of them up on…
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ktla and Sushi
I’ve been coming down to LA so often that I think I’ve finally reached an amicable relationship with the city. As a resident of San Francisco, I’m contractually obligated to hate LA, and I still do. But now that I’m not looking for the city to impress me anymore, and I’m just interested in the…
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Wood for Sheep
The Settlers of Catan is the game I’ve been most looking forward to on Xbox Live, and it was finally released today. I played two games against the AI, and I totally won both of them. My initial impression is that they did about as good a job of translating it to a console as…
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Week of Lies
In a two-weeks-late but no less well-intentioned gesture of appreciation to Kurt Vonnegut, I’m stealing an idea for another wildly popular (by me) theme week for this website. In the awesome book Galapagos (which is about natural selection), Vonnegut marked characters who were about to die with an asterisk after their name. Since I don’t…