Posts tagged “video games”

• You would think that a prosthetic leg with a Willie Nelson sticker would be hard to miss, or at the very least hard to forget about and leave behind.
• The shortest possible game of Monopoly requires only four turns, nine rolls of the dice, and twenty-one seconds.
• Fuck Yeah Cats! is cute. But FUCK YEAH SHARKS is cool.
• “The economic slave never realizes he is kept in a cage going round and round basically nowhere with millions of others,” said the totalitarian Buddhist who beat SimCity3000.
• I have got to agree that putting an awesome costume on your observatory is the greatest astronomy-related college prank ever.
• Web developers should always be mindful of the commander’s intent.
• It looks like the AT&T tethering plan for the new iPhone is going to suck and be absurdly expensive. I’m shocked. Shocked.
• And, finally, I love this quote from an article about the murder of porn actor Tom Dong: “That’s why I have a gun in my office. Weird things happen all the time. We’re in the Valley.”

• If you like our football team, you’ll love our chem labs full of Asian students!
• People sometimes ask me why I never wanted to be a bullfighter. It’s simple, really. I tremendously dislike getting gored through the throat with a horn.
• I am ashamed to admit that I knew only four of these 10 Facts Every Westerner Should Know about the Middle East.
• Just when you thought it was safe to go back in the water: Invisible Sharks!
• Dedicated games should review this handy guide to Pac-Man ghosts.
• @BPGlobalPR is some seriously black humor.

• Fun With Secret Questions & Answers
• CrabRevenge.com: “Yes we sell pubic lice and yes we are proud of it.”
• Life is beautiful.
• The Boston Globe has the best coverage (as usual) of an extraordinary event. This time The Big Picture details the oil spill.
• If you are in any way involved with building things on the web, you should read A Brief History of Markup.
• Looking for literary superheroes? Behold the awesome power of Charlotte, Emily, and Anne!
• Have you ever wondered if there is video of an enormously pregnant woman and her skinny friend doing a very disturbing dance to the theme song from Law & Order: SVU? You’re in luck!
• Bonus: The 50 Worst Video Game Names Ever

• Bacon and Games is a new blog for video game developers. It’s full of great articles on how to make games better (and not only by adding bacon). See also: Bacon floss
• The Alot is better than you at everything.
• The Dunning-Kruger effect is a cognitive bias in which “people reach erroneous conclusions and make unfortunate choices but their incompetence robs them of the metacognitive ability to realize it”.
• It really bothers me when people argue that marijuana is a completely harmless drug. It’s not.
• “Hokey religions and ancient weapons are no match for a good blaster at your side, kid.” That’s usually the first thing I think when someone explains to me (yet another) brilliant idea for a website. My first question is always, and I mean always, “How are you going to make money?” Eyeballs don’t pay the bills.
• I suppose on some level it’s pretty cool that Microsoft has created a FixItCenter website that lets you troubleshoot and resolve problems with Windows. My opinion, though, is that it sure would be much better for their image if they’d simply sell a product that didn’t constantly require fixing.
• If you’re a gambler, check out the odds on Tebow.

• Drop everything and go watch Teenage Zombies right now.
• The Green Day rock opera album American Idiot is now a Broadway show.
• After a grueling 58 hours of continuous play, John McAllister of Seattle, Washington officially became the best Asteroids player on the planet.
• I also spend a fair amount of my life trying to determine what went wrong, so I can appreciate a stroke of luck.
• Well this is pretty crazy: There are a bunch of functioning oil wells hidden around Los Angeles. The first one they feature is about two miles from my house; it’s covered by giant paintings of flowers right next to a high school football field. (I always thought it was some funky art project!)
• A few drinks and a little idle curiosity have led to the discovery of a hidden chapel under a family home.
• This is what I keep wondering about Dancing with the Stars: “Oh you mean world champions like Jerry Rice and Emmitt Smith and Ocho Cinco, who make millions because of their brilliant hand-eye coordination and ability to move in a rhythm with exact timing and precision? How will that translate to dancing?”
• It has a double penis, is as long as a tall human, and lives in a heavily populated area of the Philippines. Yet somehow the giant lizard Varanus bitatawa has gone undetected by science until now.
• I’ve been skeptical of solar power for a long time. There are simply too many cloudy days. (Not here in LA, but certainly in Florida.) But I’ve always been a fan of wind. [ed: I have since changed my stance! Solar power is awesome!]
• The reason why Apple is going to win — again — with the iPad, is because the overwhelming majority of people don’t care about Flash, software, files, directories, RAM, or whether their machine has a CD-ROM drive. They just want stuff that works.

I think I will stab myself in the stomach with a fork if one more person sends me a stray chicken or cat or whatever it is that people keep sending me; but it’s worth reading this seriously fascinating psychological analysis of why people play that annoying game.

• Runmeter (iTunes) looks to be a very slick iPhone app for tracking runs. I can’t run the LA Marathon this year because it conflicts with Kelly’s bachelor party in Las Vegas, but I’ll probably grab this for training for the 2011 race.
• Speaking of iPhone apps: The guys at AppAdvice really are on the ball. So far it’s the best blog I’ve found for discovering new apps. They write terrific reviews and always find the gems hidden in the glut of the tens of thousands of applications and games currently available in the iTunes store.
• I have become completely addicted to Ikariam, a web-based Civilization-style game. It’s free to play, though I guarantee if you start you’ll quickly get hooked and want to pay for the premium features. (I’m on the Ny shard if you decide to give it a try and want to look for me.)
• If you’ve been thinking about building a laptop-controlled robot made with LEGOs that can solve a Rubik’s Cube in 12 seconds, just give up. It’s already been done.
• Kottke.org has a cool post with video showing a slew of television shows that you probably never would have guessed were shot on a green screen. Did you know that The Mentalist (allegedly set in Sacramento), Monk (allegedly set in San Francisco), and CSI: Miami (allegedly set in Miami) are all mostly filmed here in Los Angeles?
• Have you subscribed to The Impossible Cool yet? Once or twice each week this blog posts a fantastic (and rarely-seen) photo of a cultural icon. Check out this killer image of Sean Connery. See also: Iconic Photos