Open2Discussion

Well, it's time to open another chapter in my life. I've officially entered what's most likely the later half of my life.  I know people talk about 40 being the so-called "hill" and that you're on your way out when you get to be that old... but I think living till I'm 80 would definitely be blind optimism.  I've got a family history that reads like a cardiologist's nightmare (or wet dream).  The family history's also got about 9 different types of cancer, and several other wonderful medical conditions that could end my life sooner than the average life expectancy of 75 or whatever it is now.  Not only that, but I had to begin taking blood pressure medicine about 3 months ago - apparently high blood pressure also runs in the family, and can be a serious problem if not managed.  Yeah, I'm doomed. In reality which we're all slaves to, death is inevitable.  We can't run away from it, we can try to hide the slow progression to our end,...

I've been seeing more and more online celebrities talking and writing about playing real RPGs (Role Playing Games - the kind with dice and paper, not some MMORPGOMGLOLZBBQ).  They're also taking part in some new and exciting forms of nerd-tainment.  Scott Kurtz has been twittering updates of his RPG campaign and uploading shots of his game boards and dice.  He even went so far as to write in a D&D (that's Dungeons and Dragons) story line into his web comic - PvP .  Wil Weaton is playing a geek in his appearance on the show Leverage , and even Nathan Fillion (star of Firefly and Dr. Horrible's Sing Along Blog ) got to be the voice actor for the main character in the upcoming game Halo 3: ODST .  It seems more and more famous people are starting to move their campaigns and careers towards a techno-centric style and it's working really well for those willing to embrace their inner geek. It's been several years since my friends and I rolled up some charact...

So I had decided I could not post anymore during the Stanley Cup Finals. It was too nerve racking. I found myself making up superstitions during the games. I can't have anything with a Penguin on it in my viscinity. I'm not allowed to watch the game. I'm not allowed to look at the stanley cup. Basically I went batshit-insane. But it worked. Youngest captain to lift the cup. First Russian to win the Conne Smythe. Every single gut-wrenching, heart attack-inducing moment was glorified by the last 6 seconds of game 7. Call it the Immaculate Rejection. a long, long weekend later I still can't believe it. Our boys won. Fluery, Staal, Talbot, Malkin, Crosby--those young superstars that we have for years that maybe needed one more season to mature--don't need to prove anything else. They've done it: they have rings, now. As I was pondering the enormity of what happened on friday, I realized: Guerin and his 18 kids get to play with the Cup this summer. As does Gonchar an...

This week Apple held the WWDC conference that so many bloggers have been excited about for weeks. Apple changed the lineup for their core hardware laptops and did some deep price discounts to make some of the new and older but refreshed models look more appealing. It's working. One of the big sticking points that Microsoft and PC makers have had in their marketing is the price point of Apple - the so-called "Apple Tax." One of the bigger problems with considering a Mac vs. a Dell or other brand of Windows PC is generally how much more expensive a Mac is than say an entry level desktop or laptop. That point that Microsoft has tried to make so clear is becoming less powerful now. The prices of the MacBook Pro line dropped significantly, and they revamped one of their staple MacBook models (the 13") into a top-end machine with the same power and specs (including firewire) as the high-end models. At $1200 it's hard not to pull the trigger on such a cool little ...

omg...denmark got pwned @ teh end & evry1 dies! kekekeke! >_< lulz! I'm sure I got some of that wrong, but then, what is wrong in that kind of shorthand? Now, before you click away to a different blog muttering under your breath about another English degree snob complaining about grammar on the internet, let me assure you this is not that post. I merely wanted to make an illustration, and I'll follow it up with a "sentence" I typed yesterday: /23 01 090523 127.58 /clt req bkdat to ab 090517 and cwe 090523 to 090606 for part /wks pended for mon A prize to anyone who can accurately translate that into human. Shorthand is great. It allows us to communicate complex ideas with minimal effort and to disseminate those ideas to an audience wider than most common people could dream of even a decade or two ago. Personally, I haven't jumped on the Twitter bandwagon, though I've known of it for a while, and even told some of my tech-savvy ...

I was completely prepared to write a long educational story about the history of communication, why our methods are changing so often, and go on and on about how cool it was to write letters instead of sending a text or email... I'm not going to do any of those things. The more I think about how much about communication methods have changed - in my lifetime - the more it doesn't make much sense to dwell on it.  The way people exchange ideas changes all the time.  Mr. Misanthropology wrote about the death of things .  Most adults - even young ones are so easy to spout clichés about why they don't want things to change... but it's inevitable.  I most certainly miss the simpler times in my life - the naivety of youth and all that.  But if I dwell on it, dissect it, and try to understand it, I'm really just wasting my time.  I'm not learning anything by wishing I could go back and change things. I like to think that my life is good.  The fact that I'm...

Sometimes I feel like I'm living my life on a pop-culture tape delay. This started early in life with my parents' restrictions on what was available for consumption. For nebulous reasons that both they and I can laugh about now, I was not allowed to watch (and to this day have never seen an episode of) The Smurfs among others. I knew what Smurfs were; I could even identify a few of them by sight (Father Smurf, Smurfette , Gargamel ), but I was struck to ashamed silence whenever a discussion of Smurfs or The Dukes of Hazard (Daisy was deemed too overtly sexual for my young eyes) came up among my early grade school classmates. Of course, everyone has this experience as a kid. There was always something that each child's parents forbade which others of their peers were allowed. Often, the selection of the forbidden seems arbitrary. Consequently, I plan to forbid my own potential future child from reading the funny pages from whatever analog of newspapers exists in the futur...

There will be nothing revolutionary here. I am not different or unique--no special voice emanating from the bowels of the internet. What I am is grumpy, sarcastic, and belligerent. I'll talk about whatever I deem fit, or unfit, and you'll either pay attention, or you won't. I know two things: entertainment technology and hockey. You'll be hearing about them alot. Now that the introductions are out of the way, let's start today's post, entitled: Why E3 Still Sucks If you didn't know, E3, or the Electronic Entertainment Expo , started today. For years, E3 has been the place where gamers learn about all of the upcoming IPs that will steal their hard-won holiday and birthday money in the coming months. It's where itinerant gamers first learned about the Xbox, the Halo, the Rock Band, and what hot women cosplayers --I mean booth babes --do. In the past years, e3 has gone from being a spectacle worthy of the most debauched Las Vegas adult video convention ...

Doug's recent post about cable television got me to thinking about the other things on their way out the door over the course of my lifetime. The standard ones have been written about ad-blow-chunks-ium (the death of the American newspaper, Main Street USA, personal interaction), so I won't waste my time or anyone else's. I've started to notice in my personal reflections that I'm falling for that cliche of age in thinking that things used to be better than they are now. Of course the problem is that things weren't actually better, I was just used to them. I call customer service now, and talking to a voice recognition computer or the guy who just barely passed his English competency exam and I wonder what happened to customer service. But customer service always sucked...almost everywhere. Customer service reps never understood the problem...even if they understood the words coming out of my mouth. Back in 2000, I spoke to an American customer service rep, and t...