Shop Talk: Overwhelming Undersharing
The New York Times published an article last week called T.M.I? Not for Sites Focused on Sharing. In it, Brad Stone wrote about the growing number of sites that allow you to share absolutely everything online, from your location (Foursquare and Twitter), to purchases you’ve made (Blippy and Swipely) to the number of push ups you’ve done (iPhone app Skimble). The underlying message of the piece was cautionary, discussing the possibilities of identity and financial theft, and when Blippy announced early this week that Google had crawled and saved users’ transaction data (including airline confirmation numbers and parts of credit... read more
Start Press: In Your Game We Play
In the Old Testament book of Sega Genesis, you can read about the first game Adam and Eve played together in the Garden of Eden. Before the Apple IIe. Before LuCiFeR666 tricked Eve into downloading a virus-infected copy of Resistance: Fall of Man. Before the curse descended and 8-bit Nintendo cartridges had to be mouth-blown like harmonicas. Before the sinister Red Ring of Death. Before Cliff Bleszinski dyed his hair streaky blond for the first ill-advised time. Before Adam and Eve were ordered to go play outside the garden.... read more
Listen Up: My Month of Rap, Pt. 1
I don't know very much about rap, and I am not totally sure that I actually like it... read more
The Booky Man: Just say Dr. No
It’s hard to faithfully recall today, even with the shock and shock waves since 9/11, the constant fatalism and paranoia that hung like a pall over America during that long strange trip last century called the Cold War.... read more
Start Press: Lookie Here!
My apartment is relatively compact, meaning the kitchen, dining room, living room and study all occupy the same room. What this means is, I don’t have the luxury of a basement “man cave” where I can stash all my videogame consoles and musical instruments. What this means is, my wife frequently finds herself in the room with me while I’m playing videogames. And that probably wouldn’t be such a bad thing—it’s easy enough to plug in headphones, which provide a better sound experience anyway—but I have this one compulsion that drives her crazy.... read more
High Definition: Fall 2010 TV Pilots That Might Not Suck
Keeping an eye on the TV pilots in development for the major broadcast networks is a little like the baseball draft. You can get excited about that lanky lefthander with the 96-mile-an-hour fastball, but there’s no guarantee that he’s ever going to even play for your major league team. Still, there’s no real harm in getting a little excited about the possibilities of TV shows which sound more original than they probably are—even though they’ll probably get beat out by a remake of Hawaii Five-O, another procedural spin-off (this time, from Criminal Minds) and the third Christian Slater vehicle in... read more
Listen Up: Stumble Culture, Hype Machines and How Paste Rolls
Maybe you know Christopher R. Weingarten from... read more
Start Press: The Daily Grind
During my childhood gaming years, I spent an inordinate amount of time marching my poor avatar in circles. He’s just lucky he wasn’t self-aware, that stocky knight draped in plate armor, walking the same tedious circuit for hours beneath the heat of a sun that no one had programmed to set.... read more
Shop Talk: Sleigh Bells' Good Bad Music
Last year, Wired editor Robert Capps wrote an article called The Good Enough Revolution in which he argued that your average tech consumer now prefers cheap, simple, sharable products over "quality" gadgets—Google Docs to feature-laden software, easy-to-use video cameras to hi-def camcorders, MP3s to CDs. He cited a study in which Stanford professor Jonathan Berger asked his students each year over six years to rate the musical medium they preferred; as the aughts progressed, an increasing number of them preferred MP3s. Capps suggested that, with music in particular, we not only prefer the ease of the digital format, but we... read more
Listen Up: The Inimitable Joys of Driving Alone
Cars are kind of killing the world... read more
The Booky Man: Neil Gaiman, Comicus Maximus
I remember a day. I used to run with a dollar bill up to Mr. Branton’s store in Dothan, Alabama, back in a pure and innocent time. I was in a hurry to buy the latest comics the first of every month. Doctor Strange. Captain America. The Incredible Hulk. Enemy Ace. At 12 cents each, I could buy eight of them … and I would read The Fantastic Four, my favorite, cover-to-cover before I got home.... read more
Start Press: 'Roid Rage
Early last week I found myself suddenly, utterly engrossed in a Seattle locksmith's quest to topple the world-record high score in arcade classic Asteroids. The score to beat, set in 1982 by Scott Safran, stood at the confounding perch of 41,336,440 points. Safran’s high score had proved to be one of the most stubbornly enduring high scores in retro-gaming’s history, largely due to the unthinkable stretch of playtime required to accomplish the feat—not hours, but days. While learning to guide your tiny spaceship deftly around splintered, drifting asteroid shards can be effectively mastered without a Sysiphian expenditure of effort, the... read more
High Definition: Treme Hits the Right Notes
Before the flood, I’d only spent a day in New Orleans. My friend Stephanie was working with Desire Street Ministries, and she showed me where she lived and worked in the 8th and 9th Wards. It was the best and worst of America in one place. It was the week of Mardi Gras, and I saw communities readying their immaculate floats among the stark poverty of the city’s toughest neighborhoods. The grandness of the funeral processions was only matched by their sobering frequency, as the children she worked with grew accustomed to sounds of gunfire at a young age.... read more
Listen Up: Out of Office Auto-Reply
... read more
The Booky Man: Fishing for Trout Fishing in America
Remember the 1960s?... read more
Listen Up: Slow Club's Long-Distance Love Song
They sing a lot of love songs but not to one another... read more
The Booky Man: Breaking news from Washington
This week (April 3) is the birthday of a writer you don’t hear mentioned much in these post-modern, metafictive, solipsistic literary times.... read more
Start Press: Color Me Impressed
I’ve just finished playing through Ratchet & Clank Future: A Crack In Time. And, if you’ll permit me a brief spasm of tongue-lolling, googly-eyed hyperbole, I found it to be one of the most enjoyable, seamlessly constructed, well-written, gorgeously rendered videogames I’ve played in my life. Seriously. Holy crap. Knowing I’d be writing about it for this column, I set about mulling over what I enjoyed most so I could focus on that particular aspect. Would it be the gleefully oddball weapon design? (Someone at Insomniac deserves a raise for coming up with the funny-looking, blowfishy alien that you coax... read more
High Definition: The Pacific
I’ll occasionally tear up in movies, but I cried like a baby in Saving Private Ryan. My wife’s Grandpa Wigton flew bombers in Europe during World II but was called home after his two brothers died in combat. I was completely alone in the theater, catching a mid-week matinee. I paced the floor in front of the screen in the tenser parts of the movie, but the scene that knocked me out was just after one of the most brutal accounts of war I’d ever witnessed: the opening battle on the beaches of Normandy. The film cut to a non-descript... read more
Listen Up: Jesus Does Acid, God Finds Rock 'n' Roll (Or, the Unlikely Convergence of John Prine and Jeffrey Lewis)
Funny things happen when you drive 120 miles on a Friday night with a sinus infection that isn't quite fully under control... read more
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