July 2012
2 posts
11 tags
Diablo 3 account hackers and blaming the victim
In college I had a roommate who made poor life decisions as a matter of course. I’ll call him Vandal. A Spaniard by heritage, Vandal paid significantly less tuition than his fellow US-born, Euro-descent compatriots, having gotten away with checking the Hispanic minority box on his entrance application.
Vandal’s personal hygiene recalls that of a chimpanzee held in captive isolation at an Uzbek...
12 tags
Sony meets Gaikai: Has Gaikai inadvertently built...
Uh oh! Time to dust off my newsman fedora! This morning, Sony announced plans to purchase on-demand game-streaming service Gaikai for about $380 million. That’s a whole lotta chedda’, and the implications for this one are pretty exciting. I mean, has Gaikai been building the backbone of the PlayStation 4 out in the open, underneath all of our noses? In my defense, I have a very large nose, but all...
June 2012
3 posts
11 tags
The Secret World is doomed. DOOOOOOMED!
Just to get this out of the way first: Should you find yourself in or about Mendocino—say, with the wife on your birthday—do yourself a favor and take a drive down the Comptche-Ukiah Rd. It’s a not-too-windy 40-mile stretch that takes you past some cranky old towns that by all rights shouldn’t have made it to the 20th century, as well as sweeping vistas of the serene surreal Anderson...
Does a website need a website?
Readers, there comes a time when a man is sitting at his Ikea desk and a temporal vortex comes along and… Oh, I’m sorry, what’s that? I already went to the temporal vortex well? Huh. Two weeks ago. I’ll be damned. I’m suddenly flashing to that T.C. Boyle short story “The Lie,” in which a guy claims that his baby has become tremendously sick, and then eventually dies, so that he can continue...
10 tags
Diablo 3 makes an appearance
I’ll not lie: For the past couple of weeks, I’ve been caught in a temporal vortex. It came on quite suddenly, without the motion blur and solar flare that one might expect from a rift in space-time. I simply sat down at my (ingenious, incidentally) VIKA AMON and then was consumed by a not there-ness. This is to say, I took a vacation in order to look for a real job. Dear reader, my shit? It...
May 2012
6 posts
Pardon the break in service
Pardon the break in service. For the past week or so, I’ve been submerged in Avid Media Composer. I want to say its keyframes have laved against my sensibilities with the same cool, calming touch of the Caribbean as it washes up on Cancun following a summer squall. But that would be absurdly overwrought. And untrue besides.
Fact: AVC costs around 75 percent less than, as far as I’m concerned, the...
The Engine
Little known fact: I crashed my first PC when I was 13 years old, after getting into my head that Windows 95 was evil and needed to be vanquished. The fear, the panic, the dread, all the consternation I felt as a child after having destroying something tremendously expensive, it all comes flooding back to me when I hit any kind of technological road bump. Today’s pothole: multimedia horsepower....
In which the author course corrects
Irony is a word whose meaning constantly eludes me. Am I using it correctly here? It’s ironic that a post I had intended to title “Stick to the plan! Stick to the plan!” is the post in which I’ll be wildly deviating from the plan. I feel like Alanis Morissette in that one song she has. Is it irony, or is it coincidence? Hard to say.
Here’s the thing I’ve learned about documenting one’s travails:...
8 tags
Gaze into the Brand Eye of Sauron
Think of it, perhaps, this way. You have a mind to swipe a batch of kittens and train them to be apostles for Ramtha’s School of Enlightenment. Now, these kittens are highly skilled at being cute. Indeed, they’ve been being cute for years, and largely that experience is wholly applicable to your transcendental aspirations. However, for these kittens to be truly accomplished apostles, they need to...
9 tags
Quick, someone find me a For Dummies guide!
3/21, 3:46p Preliminary plan: You and I playing online game, with podcast style commentary
3/21, 3:47p All gameplay footage, us voiceover
3/21, 3:48p Can possibly work contacts to get industry people to join us
3/21, 3:54p Scratch that, definitely find devs to join us
3/21, 3:55p Start indie, build from there
3/21, 4:03p This is happening
3/22, 10:26a Derp?
The thing about a muse is...
Let's get to it
There can come a time in a young man’s life when he wonders why he hasn’t been using his talents to create something meaningful and that has value. Something that resonates within the collective consciousness of those like himself. I come from the world of Big Gaming Press. It’s been around for some time; you know it as GameSpot, IGN, Game Informer, Kotaku, Joystiq, and the like. After years...
