I spend every day horrified at the knowledge that this book exists. Whoa, whoops! I’m late again! Movies Nope! TV Breaking Bad - The cold war between Walter and Skyler is tough to watch. I haven’t had much time to really progress, but I’m intrigued by the way this season is gonna end. Orange is the New Black - This show remains really awesome. Just excellent acting and stories. Worth checking out. ...
Travis Touchdown from No More Heroes Last week felt super long! Thank god it’s all over. At least I enjoyed myself plenty. Week two of the swimming experiment continued as well, reminding me of how woefully out of shape I am. Glad to have seen Kai again too. It’s a bummer that she no longer has work/business in Baltimore. Movies Prometheus - I went to see this with Ian last Monday. Despite what some critics might tell you, it’s not aggressively terrible. I think that my lack of prior Alien knowledge is what allows me to enjoy the movie so much. I came in with zero preconceptions and zero expectation and I left having seen the coolest surgical procedure ever and a pretty sweet squid vs. Engineer fight. This is not an A+, high-caliber piece of cinema, but it’s a fun summer film. Oh, before I forget, Michael Fassbender as David was INCREDIBLE. ...
[caption id="" align=“aligncenter” width=“337” caption=“Movies are back! (Photo courtesy adonismens)”] [/caption] My brief movie vacation wasn’t willingly imposed, guys. I was just waiting for Netflix to finally send one of the movies at the top of my queue to me. Let’s see if they can keep this up… Movies Our Idiot Brother - Paul Rudd was surprisingly good in this. This movie is not laugh out loud funny, but it’s pretty great in a low key laughs kind of way. Rudd’s three sisters, Emily Mortimer, Zooey Deschanel, and Elizabeth Banks, all play troubled/damaged women who could all use a little folksy advice from their too trusting, semi-naive brother. It’s better than it sounds plus it features Rashida Jones in dorky glasses playing a lesbian in a relationship with Zooey Deschanel. Pretty good stuff! Only nitpick is that Emily Mortimer’s American accent is a little thin. It wouldn’t make sense for her to be English, but it wasn’t as natural as it could be. ...
[caption id="" align=“aligncenter” width=“500” caption=“Happy Birthday Eric! (Photo courtesy djotaku)”] [/caption] It’s my brother’s birthday today so let’s celebrate by telling you everything I’ve been up to this past week. I didn’t say it would be a good celebration, guys. Movies No movies again! I want to get The Muppets in soon. Maybe when I go home for Christmas. ...
[caption id="" align=“aligncenter” width=“375” caption=“Super Potato in Akihabara”] [/caption] As is typical of me, I played a ton of video games this year. Here’s a listing of what I played along with a few short (or long) words on each game. For the most part, this list is restricted to games released in 2010 unless I did not play them until this year. It’s also mostly in chronological order, with some skips here and there. ...
This piece was conceived of as yet another Mesa Brothers Experiment (TM) through which we might examine the differing views and approaches we have/take on the same subject. See his take here. Is it just me getting old and grumpy or does everything seem to be getting dumbed down lately? Apple is trying to tell the world they can’t handle the software on their own devices, subtlety is all but gone in television and movies, and the most popular books in America are coming out of the Young Adult genre. There’s a whole political movement proudly proclaiming anti-intellectualism and pro-ignorance while the other side does its best to maintain power by stooping to the same lows because all of a sudden smart became the new evil in this country. ...
So I’ve been playing Civ V this week. It’s pretty awesome. Here’s what I think so far: - Unsurprisingly, I don’t miss religion in Civ. While it did legitimately affect the game in important ways that reflect how important religion is in real life, yadda yadda, it just dominated everything about a playthrough. I’m glad to be rid of it. - Now that units don’t stack and cities have offensive and defensive capabilities of their own, I’m going to have to change my early game build order. Do I really need to defend my cities as hard right away anymore? ...
Ryan and Vinny take a look at the recent history of the Civilization series and show a little bit of Civ V as well.
I want this so much I already pre-ordered it for its September release.