It's A Binary World 2.0

Category: Culture & Entertainment

  • How Video Games Grew Up When I Wasn’t Looking

    There was a time when I loved video games.  I subscribed to EGM and EGM2.  I trolled the nascent World Wide Web looking for video game news.  I read IGN religiously.  The most powerful systems out there were the Nintendo 64 and the Playstation.  Then I discovered girls and dropped the subscriptions.  Most of the…

  • Podcasts I’m Listening to 2011

    It’s been a little over a year, so I wanted to make a new, updated list of the podcasts I’m currently listening to.  For shows I covered before, I’m just going to copy the description over, verbatim. Science The Naked Scientists – This has nothing to do with nudity.  It’s a British thing, like The…

  • Review: Dracula

    Dracula by Bram Stoker My rating: 4 of 5 stars this review originally appeared on Good Reads Dracula is, like Frankenstein, a book that has influenced so much of our pop culture that we don’t even question that we know the facts of the book without having even read it. Before having read Dracula, I’d…

  • Review: The Map of Time

    The Map of Time: A Novel by Félix J. Palma My rating: 3 of 5 stars disclaimer: I won this book from Good Reads First Reads contest This review originally appeared on the Good Reads website Unsurprising for a novel about time travel, the contents of the book are not strictly chronological. Do not despair,…

  • IAMDONALD Tour

    Monday night, as I walked to the Ram’s Head Live concert venue, I had no idea what to expect. Earlier in the year Daniel had retweeted some strange, witty tweets from some dude named Childish Gambino. Based on the name I thought it was some weird Italian joke tweet account. Then, a few months later,…

  • April Video Games

    Final Fantasy X (36 hrs) – I started playing this game again to get away from computer games.  It was hurting my back to sit at the computer.  I could just stand in the guest room, where the PS2 is. I hadn’t played for months or maybe even a year, but I hadn’t gone that…

  • Portal 2 Review and Analysis

    If I have to sum up Portal 2 in one word: brilliant!  I really enjoyed the first Portal a lot.  The sense of not knowing what’s going on and GLaDOS’ obvious demented nature made for a dark video game the likes of which I’d never experienced.  It was an artform as much as any other…

  • Last.fm Listening Habits 2011 Q1

    I wanted to take a look at my music listening habits quarterly to see how each quarter’s stats stack up against the final numbers at the end of the year.  I started off the year listening to some of the new artists I’d bought, then just switched to random listens for the rest of the…

  • March Video Games

    Civ 5 (70 hrs) – In March I fired up Civilization V for the first time since 16 Nov 2010.  What was the catalyst?  My wife asking what happened to all the enthusiasm for the game when it first came out.  Well, as I’ve mentioned before, right after I got the game I played it…

  • Gaming in February

    Again, just a small blog post to document the video games I played with throughout the year to make it easier to do a recap at the end of the year. Assassin’s Creed II (30 min) – I booted this sucker up to get some of the easy trophies I’d missed while playing the game…

  • Inherent Racism in Spanish Music

    I was born and raised in the USA, so I am not sure if it’s fair to call these songs racist, I think that racism requires malicious intent.  And, given that the US has a different and unique relationship with its non-caucasian descendants than Latin America, I’m not sure there’s the same level of maliciousness…

  • Greed Corp

    This game that’s been capturing nearly all my free time in February was an impulse buy.  At $10 I might have passed it up, but in a midweek sale it was $5 and I decided it looked interesting enough to pick up.  This is a great example of what I spoke about here with respect…

  • Gaming in January

    This is just a mini blog post I’m going to try and remember to do monthly to keep track of the games I played to make it easier to tally up for the end of the year “Games of 2011” blog post. Assassin’s Creed II – 27 hours Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood – 25 hrs blogged…

  • Finishing Assassin’s Creed 2 and Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood

      Back at the beginning of January, I compared the first and second installments in the Assassin’s Creed main line of games. A couple weeks ago I finished up Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood, a continuation of Desmond and Ezio’s stories. I don’t have too much more to add to what I wrote about the second game…

  • The Secret of Monkey Island: Special Edition

    As with my discussion of Recettear, playing The Secret of Monkey Island involved revisiting a gaming genre from my past.  Unlike Recettear, TSoMI is not a parodic look back at an old genre, it is an original game from that time period.  TSoMI is an adventure game, a genre that is pretty much only kept…