9/14/2008 - HALF BLOOD PRINCE DELAYED

I'm not a huge Harry Potter fan, but I did enjoy reading the last two books. J. K. Rowling is truly a creative genius and I'd put her up there with Stan Lee in that category. I'm not a huge fan of the movies too, but I would like to see how the last two books are going to translate to screen. The sixth book, "Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince", was supposed to come out this November, just a couple of months away.

Even though the movie would have been finished by that time, Warner Bros. decided to piss off millions of fans and delayed the release date to next July! That's a full eight month delay! If I were a woman, I could gestate a baby in that time! Warner Bros. even admitted that they made this delay purely for financial reasons -- that the movie would do better during the summer as opposed to November. You may fault them for being greedy, but they do have some chutzpah in admitting it. The fan outcry to this move was pretty vocal, as you can imagine. Just hours after the announcement, videos like this one started to show up on YouTube:

9/13/2008 - Ode To Joy

I was perhaps too young to understand the social satire that was contained in The Muppet Show back in the 70's/80's. I thought it was just a mature version of Sesame Street. I did enjoy the slapstick comedy, though, and my favorite character was definitely Beaker, the hapless assistant of Dr. Bunsen. He can only say "Meep" with a high-pitched voice, and he's always getting into trouble:

9/10/2008 - Ikaruga - 1 Player - 2 Player game (2 videos)

The videogame Ikaruga was recently put on a Top 10 list of the most difficult videogames of all time. Ikaruga is one of those 2-D shooters that tests your skills in dodging onscreen bullets. Not just a small number of bullets like Neo dodged in the Matrix... no, you have to dodge hundreds if not thousands of bullets to get through the level. Playing as one player in the game is hard enough, but can you imagine if you had to play as two players by yourself? You'd almost need a split personality to independently control two joysticks at a time. I thought that the perfect round of "Through the Fire and Flames" of Guitar Hero was the most impressive feat of gaming I've seen. I was wrong:

9/8/2008 - "I Am Rich" Guided Tour

I admit it, I'm kind of a cheapskate when it comes to software. Nearly all my programs on my laptop are free and I haven't paid for any of the programs on my iPod touch. It would take a very special program that I really need in order for me to justify its purchase. Yeah, I'll probably end up getting a unit conversion program for 99-cents, but I doubt I would ever buy a game for $10. So I had to laugh when I heard about a program for the iPhone/iPod touch that was merely a statement of how wealthy the owner was. It's a $1000 program that is nothing more than a picture of a ruby. I've heard that there were actually 6 purchases of this program before Apple yanked it from the App Store. Of course, I was curious as to what this program actually looked like and the "secret message" contained within it... so I found it on YouTube:

9/6/2008 - Star Trek vs. Star Wars

Believe it or not, not all geeks are created equal. There is no clearer illustration of this expression than the dichotomy between Star Trek and Star Wars fans. Star Trek appeals more to the fan of traditional science fiction. With more talk and less action, it has always been more of a thinking man's show. Constrained by a TV budget, there was always a limit in the number of scope of action sequences show in an episode. On the other hand, the Star Wars movies would have unlimited budgets after the first one in 1977. Having more of an action/fantasy element, Star Wars has a wider appeal, although the more hardcore fans are more cultish in nature. Although George Lucas tried to shoehorn in a more scientific explanation for "The Force", longtime fans pretty much rejected it in favor of the previous magical or even religious connotation. The Star Trek/Wars camps are naturally at odds with each other and one side often treats the other with derision or disrespect. The two sides may never fully come together, but I'm sure fans of both will appreciate this next video:

9/5/2008 - Lame Video Game Endings

When you complete a video game, especially a hard one, you expect to be rewarded with a decent ending. You want a kind of ending that makes you say to yourself that it was all worth it -- the bottomless pits, the cheap deaths, the game-overs and the continues. Sometimes countless hours of playing result in nothing more than frustration. If you are able to overcome those obstacles only to get some congratulatory text that has misprints, then it makes you feel like your time has been wasted. Not all great games have great endings, however. Super Mario Bros. had a pretty lame ending compared to today's standards, but you forgive it because the game itself is so great and you understand the limits of the programming back then. Now with full-motion video CGI cutscenes and loads of disc space, there is no excuse. I wouldn't go overboard like the Metal Gear Solid games, but something around 10 minutes would probably be enough. And it has to be epic!

It's sort of gamble to get a game and not know whether or not it has a good ending. No video game magazine would publish game endings, after all. So it's a great public service that this series of videos feature notoriously lame video game endings. The fact that some of these games are very bad only makes you more glad you've already seen their endings first, instead of torturing yourself by playing through the games only to be disappointed.

9/3/2008 - Poor man's "Liquid Nitrogen"

Being a science nerd back in the day, I really wanted to get my hands on some liquid nitrogen. For something to be that cold and yet remain liquid is pretty awesome (I would have said "cool" but that would be a pretty bad pun). I would have so much fun doing the standard freezing of flowers and rubber balls and then shattering them on the floor. My fascination with liquid nitrogen was only heightened with the movie Terminator 2. Anybody who has seen the climax of that movie would know what I'm talking about ("Hasta la vista, baby!"). Sadly, liquid nitrogen would be out of the reach of my high school's budget and it was something we couldn't play, er, experiment with. It's too bad that we didn't have YouTube back then, otherwise we could learn from this video here:



This is something I'm actually tempted to try. Now all I have to do is find some dry ice...