Since Stephen Colbert took over The Late Show, we’ve been recording it on our DVR to watch in the morning. Unfortunately, that means that we missed most of Thursday’s show because of football, so I only caught part of his segment with PewDiePie on YouTube: Age-wise, I’m firmly Generation X. I was born in 1970, which…
The MMORPG I play (sort-of, for now, that’s one of my alts above), ArcheAge, is offline for a couple days while they perform server balancing. If all goes well, on Saturday the game will return and I’ll log on to find my avatars moved to a new server with approximately double the population of the old…
I’m wallowing in self-pity and struggling with exhaustion after my first attempt to sleep in my normal bed (instead of a bed moved from our guest room to the dining room). So, while I take a nap, enjoy this strange little film. Hat tip to io9. Blank Bodies is NSFW for nudity and violence. It’s essentially…
I have a bunch of small commentaries floating around in my brain and one massive post underway, so I think it’s time for a roundup. First though, a film. Anomaly takes place in the 1960s and is hard to explain. There’s a near-miss comet, an astronaut, a scientist, and the women they love. The pace drags a…
When I came across this TED talk from Chip Kidd today, I thought about how it relates to my recent post about ebooks. You see, much of Kidd’s talk is about designing book covers. He discusses how he came up with the concept for the cover of Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki by Haruki Murakami, a book that I…
World of Tanks is a hugely successful massively multiplayer online game. I rarely see it mentioned in the gaming media, but since my husband is an avid player, I hear about it all the time. He sent me a link to the video below. Even if World of Tanks isn’t your jam, this 15 minute “Developer…
Wouldn’t you know it: just after I posted about ArcheAge last week, praising the female plate armor for not being revealing, I got the next set as a quest reward and presto! Metal bustier (with leather and chain mail hot pants and metal garters). I suppose I should be happy that the metal armor doesn’t…
I have three Mars-related clips to share today. The first is a short animated film about a geologist studying Mars before it is terraformed. The second is the new trailer for The Martian, which, in my household, invoked finger-crossing and the ritual chant of “please don’t suck! please don’t suck!” The third film, from earlier this…
The main character of this short is the final survivor of his kind in the war between humans and robots. The film is nicely shot and touching, but I’m including it mainly because of the last line of voiceover. How soon could that be true for both sides in the battle? Will it ever be?…
While I’m working on a detailed essay about online identity, I’ll move up my usual Wednesday video post. John Oliver did a long segment on government surveillance on his HBO show last night. There are some slow bits, but stick with it, and the Snowden guest segment is very good. It’s sad that government surveillance has to be simplified down…