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Do they really need to know this?
I’m not often annoyed enough with mainstream news organizations to make a big deal out of it. Plenty of stuff they do annoys me, but I rarely get so charged up that I blog about it. Recently they stoked my fire when discussing the attempted terrorism on Times Square. Take, for example the following excerpt…
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Censor Thyself or Be Blown to Bits
In the beginning I was not a huge fan of South Park. Of course, I never gave it a chance, but it didn’t give me a reason. It was, as the creators admitted in a recent Fresh Air interview, exceptionally crude both in its jokes and its scatological humor. I heard that basically it was…
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Peter and the Wolf at the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra
Danielle and I recently went to see “Peter and the Wolf” at the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra. Danielle and I both grew up watching the Disney animated adaption of “Peter and the Wolf” and we loved the idea of being able to listen to the music as performed by the BSO. I don’t care how amazing…
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Why I don’t Care if Free TV Disappears from the Net
When I flew to Tampa last week, there was a magazine cover that claimed the days of free professional content over the Internet were over. The cable companies had a way, it claimed, to control the programs available and keep us paying >$100/month for cable. I didn’t read the article, but I have a guess…
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Review: Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland
I’m a big Tim Burton fan and I also tend to like his casting of Johnny Depp. But I’m no fanboy: I found Tim Burton’s take on Charlie and the Chocolate Factory to be worse than the original Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory. The first thing I have to get off my chest and…
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Podcasts I’m Listening To
I’ve been listening to podcasts for about two years now. I got into it because I love listening to some NPR programs, but they are always on when I’m at work or asleep on the weekends. Eventually, I heard on NPR that they have podcasts of various shows. I checked it out right away because…
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Sid Meier’s Civilization IV: Colonization
Do not be fooled by the Civ IV part of the title to the updated to the classic Colonization. You do so at your own peril; well, your colony’s peril. Colonization is primarily a game of economics while Civilization is primarily a game of domination. In Civ you work the tiles around your city and…
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Who do I need to slap upside the head?
Every once in a while, while reading Wikipedia to try and figure out why some show from my childhood isn’t available on DVD, I read that music rights are holding back the DVD. I understand that these shows were created back before DVDs and, therefore, some kind of weird legal loophole is keeping the tv…
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A Review of New Super Mario Brothers Wii
This is a game I have been waiting for ever since I played New Super Mario Brothers on my borrowed Nintendo DS. This is the purity of Mario. Screw all this 3D stuff. Yeah, it rocks to have a 3D space to run around in, but that’s not Mario. Mario is a side scroller and…
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New Revenue Models
While listening to The Command Line Podcast a few weeks ago, they started talking about how digital distribution allows for innovations in publishing. I don’t remember what they mentioned exactly, but the prior link should take you to the show notes. The talk started a series of synapses firing in my grey matter culminating in…
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Tetris: An Introspective Review
Tetris is the first video game I was unable to shut off on command. Players of Sid Meier’s Civilization are familiar with the problem of “one more turn”, similar to the bookworm’s “one more page”. Tetris was my first “one more turn” game. I first played Tetris when I was five or six and received…
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The End of Braid Part 1 of ?
warning: The following contains many spoilers about Braid. I, personally, feel that your enjoyment of the game will be greatly reduced by reading this ahead of time. You have been warned! I finished Braid last night. I did cheat a little. Of the 60 possible puzzle pieces, I used a walkthrough to get about 10…
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First Look Review: Braid
That a game like Braid can exist is a statement on where video games are as an art form with a well-established history and canon. To make a parallel in the paint world: without a long canon of traditional paintings of tables with fruit and bread, people wouldn’t have really understood the “parody” or “remix”…
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Final Fantasy IX Completed
I finally finished Final Fantasy IX. Took me a little over 30 hours. I didn’t do all the side quests, but that’s more of Dan’s thing. The characters I played with the most ended up at about level 52 – if that tells you anything. Except for a little bit when I was trying to…
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Final Fantasy 9: First Impressions
After playing Final Fantasy 9 for a few days, here are my first impressions. the graphics are a little distracting – it’s kinda like an uncanny valley thing. It’s not quite as nice as the new stuff, but better than the SNES graphics. But there are a lot of closeups because it was state of…