I had a bunch of Cokes with dinner, so I wound up wide-awake at 11pm last night. Played some more Crysis 2, and this morning I’m a tired, half-unconscious mess. Here’s the run-down.
Video Games
Bullet Points: Crysis 2, Part 3
Internet
There’s a huge cavern complex and his head fell off.
That can be my next tweet! is a site that will predict what your (or anyone’s) next twitter entry will be. Here are some of my results:
“I’ve done zero journalism, just the class not finished and other obstacles, climbed ropes…”
“Cut The Death! will be entirely new. Games thing has been playing Cut The Dwarf.”
“TWICE. Huh. I could tell me, and endless yelling, for more old copy of it for Sam Worthington, who will!”
“Okay, think Minecraft update is very slow, but slow-motion thug-kicking.”
“Anyone played it here: My FC2 buddy had set the works for geriatric kobalds.”
“Finally ran into learning something about nothing but you can shoot up your pocket is getting prettier!”
“There’s a huge cavern complex and his head fell off.”
“FNV: Sort of people’s heads to feel left out. Don’t Tell Mom The Dwarf. I’ll have 45 cents.”
“A Connecticut Yankee In A BABY’S ROOM, MASON! WHAT DID THE CANDLESTICK! AND COLONEL MUSTARD IS THE STUDY.”
Definitely sounds like my work.
Video Games
Bullet Points: Crysis 2, Part 2
Picking up where I left off: there’s an alien virus in Manhattan, which somehow causes aliens to invade, and there’s a bunch of enemy soldiers, and I still don’t really get the plot because I was too busy kicking things to pay attention.
Reading the Wikipedia page helps a little. The enemy soldiers are military contractors who want to kill me because they think I’m Prophet, who they were trying to kill because he was infected with the alien virus. So, it’s just a wacky case of mistaken identity that could be cleared up by me telling everyone that I’m not Prophet. Or, you know, I could just keep killing them. I think I’ll do that!
Television | Video Games
Tuesday Night Menu
Video Games
Portal 2:Â Nope, it’s not out yet, but it is currently available for pre-loading off Steam, which I’m excited about, which is a little weird. All it really means is that I can download some chunks of it but can’t play it for another week or so. But still, the idea of that game-y goodness slowly leaking into my computer, and just knowing it’s waiting there, is a nice warm feeling. It’s like owning a gun and knowing that you can kill someone if you want.
I’ve been on a complete Portal 2 info blackout for a couple months. Valve do great promotion work for their games, but with all the videos and ads and mysterious puzzles they’ve been releasing lately, I don’t want to have seen 95% of the game before I get to play it. I won’t even visit the link I just linked.
Video Games
Bullet Points: Crysis 2, Part 1
Video game reviews are tricky for non-professional (or, in my case, unprofessional) game writers. Unlike career game journalists, the hobby gamer doesn’t get an early look at most games. We have to buy them ourselves, which can get expensive. And, when a game contains ten or twenty or more hours of playtime, it may take us weeks to play through them, trying to find time to play among our other obligations, such as our real paying jobs and visits to our parole officers. Even if we do finish a game in a timely manner, there are already dozens of reviews already online, rendering our thoughts a bit moot.
There’s also the fact that I don’t finish playing every game, or even most games, I buy. Sometimes they’re just not fun, sometimes they’re too hard, and sometimes they start out okay but get boring. Should I even be reviewing a game that I’ve only played partially, weeks after it’s been released?
DVD | Television | Video Games
Monday Night Menu
Quick recap of Sunday night’s entertainment:
We watched episode 2 of The Killing. With an entire season devoted to one case, the information is coming in at a leisurely trickle, which is good, though I admit I’m already impatient for more. I sort of wish we’d missed the season, waited until it was out on DVD, and rented it so we could consume it big, multi-episode gulps (The Wire was much more satisfying that way). Still, it’s very good, and it’s devoting a lot of time to the family of the deceased and how they’re trying to cope, which is both painful to watch and extremely rare for television to show. Generally, the only time you see the reaction of the family of a murder victim is when they’re informed of the murder, and they cry a little, and they mention “She used to hang out with this kid down the street” and then the investigation shifts away from them, until maybe you see them in the courtroom at the end.
Internet
From “Beautiful Screaming Lady” to “Cat In Danger”
This is a neat Flickr series showing some of the differences between the 1963 version of Richard Scarry’s “Best Word Book Ever” and the 1991 edition.
If you look through the images, you’ll see some forward progress: Dad has been added into the kitchen along with Mom, there are more female animals sharing jobs with the males, and all of the stereotypical Native American references have been removed.
For further reading, here’s a nice analysis of Scarry’s “What Do People Do All Day?” I loved these books as a kid.
Television
Sunday Night Menu (TV)
The Killing: The excellent two-hour premiere is airing again, followed by a new episode in this season-long murder mystery, featuring a teenager killed in the woods near Seattle and the two detectives who are tasked with solving the crime. The show has its share of cliches: one detective is weary and seasoned and a day from transferring to another city, the other is a rookie, formerly a vice cop, and has questionable methods. Still, it all works and it’s a breath of fresh air when compared to most murder-of-the-week shows. In other words, it’s closer to The Wire than CSI. (AMC)
Internet | Movies | Netflix | Television
Stream Cuisine: The Best Stuff on Netflix Instant
Netflix, I’m convinced, is the greatest invention of all time. It took a tedious, nigh-impossible chore — going to a video store, picking out a movie, coming home, watching it, and then going back to the store to return it — and made it as easy as ticking a box on the internet and opening and closing an envelope.
Naturally, opening and closing that envelope become too much goddamn work, so Netflix quickly reinvented the greatest invention of all time, and came up with Netflix Instant, which lets you strean movies and TV shows on your PC and TV just moments after you decide you want to watch them.
The catalog of streaming entertainment isn’t entirely fantastic, but it’s constantly growing and changing, so from time to time I’ll post about the better stuff I’m watching, so you can watch it (in the U.S., at least) if you haven’t already.
Television
Coming Up: Coupons. Now: Coupons. Previously: Coupons.
I want to talk about my unabashed love for the television show Extreme Couponing (actually, I sort of don’t because I’m horribly embarrassed about it) but first I need to talk about my unrestrained hatred for the annoying habit some TV shows have of constantly showing you what is coming up next before they go to the commercial break, then showing you the thing they’ve told you is coming up, and then recapping that same exact thing again after the next commercial break.
This practice means you see certain moments of the show three times. With commercials, a half-hour show is only 22 minutes long, so if you’re repeating half the scenes three times, you might want to consider that you don’t have quite enough content for a show. Or, maybe it’s that the producers don’t think we can manage to pay attention through a two minute commercial break. Thanks for the vote of confidence.