It's A Binary World 2.0

Category: Culture & Entertainment

  • Recettear – First Impressions

    It’s funny, growing up, I loved Square’s RPGs, but I really only played two of them – Chrono Trigger and Final Fantasy 6 (originally released as 3 in the US).  They just left THAT MUCH of an impression.  And not just on me, they profoundly affected Dan as well.  Alas, Nintendo losing the license to…

  • 80s Games vs Today’s Games

    During Giant Bomb’s Game of the Year deliberations, one of the panelists was talking about how the difference between Pacman and Pacman Championship Edition DX reflects the difference in video game design over the past thirty years.  The original Pacman is a stress-enducing game while Pacman CE DX is an empowering experience.  Pacman punishes you…

  • Terry Gilliam’s Brazil

    I recently saw Terry Gilliam’s Brazil after hearing discussion of the main character being a hacker as part of a recurring segment on The Command Line where the podcaster compares characters from literature and movies to hackers (in the original sense of the word).  Watching this 1985 movie in 2011 was a very interesting experience.…

  • Assassin’s Creed vs Assassin’s Creed II

    Because I rarely play games when they first come out, I had the occasion to play Assassin’s Creed and Assassin’s Creed II back-to-back.  As I’ve mentioned before ( near the end of the post ) getting to experience sequels one after another can yield some benefits over waiting years in between.  (Plus, in the case…

  • Review: Scott Pilgrim vs The World

    It took a bit of convincing from Dan, but eventually I read the Scott Pilgrim graphic novels.  I knew right away that this was a book written for people like me.  Just like Dr Horrible’s Sing-a-long Blog, people older or younger than me would never get the full appreciation of all the references.  I thoroughly hated the…

  • 2010 Game of the Year

    I played a lot of games this year.  Perhaps more than in any previous year since leaving high school.  Since I usually don’t buy games when they first come out, the winner will not necessarily be a game that came out this year.  I went to my raptr page and took a look at all…

  • Boxee: Further Impressions

    After writing my Boxee review based on my experience over the weekend, I tried to use it again Tuesday and Wednesday. There two shows that I watch Tues-Friday: The Daily Show and The Colbert Report. I’m not sure what API or screen scraping Boxee uses for these sites, but it needs to be improved. When…

  • Using Boxee for the First Time

    My wife enjoys watching TV a lot more than I do. I prefer interactive or creative pursuits like programming, photography, or video games. If, tomorrow, all the TV studios said we could no longer use the Internet to freely watch their programs (with ads, of course), I wouldn’t buy cable. Once I’d broken that shackle,…

  • Subtitle

    After this blog post it shouldn’t be a surprise that I was quite annoyed at the United Artists AFI edition of the movie, “Fiddler on the Roof”.  I was watching it for the third time a couple weeks ago and, as is our habit, I turned on subtitles.  Neither Danielle and I are deaf, but…

  • Participating in the 2010 NanoWrimo

    Since apparently I’m a crazy person who thinks he has so much free time, I’ve decided to participate in this year’s National Novel Writing Month.  The goal is to write a 50,000 word novel in one month.  Oh yeah, and I waited until 9 Nov to start.  I’d heard about it on NPR and on…

  • Civilized

    I was on the phone with my dad a couple weekends ago and he asked if I was playing Civilization 5.  He’d heard that Dan was playing it and was surprised that it was still around and Dan and I were still playing it.  I told him I was playing it and reminded him that…

  • Enabling Mediatomb on Fedora 13

    I have a HUGE music collection that I’ve taken the time to digitize, so it was bugging me that I couldn’t listen to it on my sound system on the first floor.  When I raised the volume on my computer speakers I just ended up hearing a ton of bass.  So I took a look…

  • Doctorow Review: Eastern Standard Tribe & A Place So Foreign and Eight More

    On my trip to the Grand Canyon I read Cory Doctorow’s second novel, Eastern Standard Tribe.  The book begins in media res with the main character informing us that he’s in an insane asylum and that he is deciding whether to give himself a lobotomy with a pencil.  We also quickly learn he believes himself…

  • Civilization V: The First Week

    To finish up talking about the game I left off in my last post, I won my first civ 5 game via conquest – a new one for me.  I usually turtle and do a culture victory or science victory.  It was only near the end of my time playing Civ IV that I started…

  • Guess What? Linux May Not Be for Everyone

    I feel like I may have covered bits of this here and there, but I couldn’t find it after a cursory check through my blog.  Fanaticism is fanaticism, whether it’s religious or technological it follows the same path.  Witness anyone who has just become an evangelical Christian (and it probably extends to other religions) as…