With the rise of the graphics processor and 3-D graphics, PC games became an arms race to make the most technologically impressive, most accurate depiction of reality, and shoehorn a game into it. Memory banks became large enough for massive, wide-open levels, and so free-roaming gameplay was born. GPUs became capable of colored lighting, and, for a while, games had floating crystals that emitted light everywhere. Then developers were able to make things shine and glisten in light, but instead of keeping this to wet floors and gooey blob monsters, it was put on everything, even human beings, which made them look like sweaty plastic action figures. The technology was there and it needed to be used. To look back on a lot of these games is embarrassing, now that “realistic” has been redefined seven times since.

“Serenity” was definitely an enjoyable film for the most part, but it was the “big damned action film” rather than the slow-burning stew of the series, where the stories were allowed to take their time and the relationships were allowed to simmer. Unfortunately, I just don’t think audiences have the attention span for that sort of thing anymore, which makes me miss the show even more, since we probably won’t see anything like it again.

That last part is especially hard to stomach. I’ve been realizing more and more over the years that I’m just not the target demographic for any of the entertainment industries now, if I ever was. When everything you love gets canceled and everything you hate gets renewed (whether we’re talking drama, comedy, whatever), it can make you feel like you’re alone in a crowd after awhile. I pretty much just watch tv made for “other people” these days, but I felt like Firefly was made especially for me.

It makes no sense, it’s ridiculous. There’s a thunder god, there’s a green “Id” giant rage monster, there’s Captain America from the ‘40s, there’s Tony Stark who definitely doesn’t get along with anybody. Ultimately these people don’t belong together and the whole movie is about finding yourself from community. And finding that you not only belong together but you need each other, very much. Obviously this will be expressed through punching but it will be the heart of the film.

Scout gets a banana.
Heavy gets a 16 ton weight.
Demoman gets black knights sword
Soldier gets a Norwegian phrase book
Medic gets a hovercraft full of eels
Engineer gets the Spanish inquisition
Pyro gets an arguement
Sniper gets the funniest joke in the world.
And the spy?
He gets something completely different.

I’m interested in how we even come to understand and use language in the first place.

Isn’t it kind of a bootstrap operation?

Every word has to be defined with other words, which are often defined with the first word we are defining and so on. Go get a dictionary and check the words used to define a word and follow these around for a while and you will see what I mean.

In most horror movies there are scenes that take you out of the movie; things you just don’t believe or are flat-out ridiculous or cheesy. Not so in Alien; the movie’s immaculate reality is utterly untarnished…you believe it from beginning to end because the performances, pacing, sets and special effects all combine to create a believable atmosphere of growing terror.

This might sound a little melodramatic, but Windows 7 not having a browser in Europe, and non-Europeans having to specifically “opt-in” to having a browser, is going to be studied in the future. I think it is one of the most significant things to happen this decade. We are now officially on a slippery slope.

First and foremost, how’s some family going to feel when they buy a computer and want to go onto the internet, but they’re going to have to pop down to the newsagents to buy a magazine with a DVD just to get a browser. You can’t download Firefox or Chrome if you don’t have Internet Explorer first to go find them. Those “Media Centre” stupid things that Dell hocks will be pretty useless without having a browser to begin with. How can you spend all that money on a new computer and not have a goddamned browser?

But at the time of Terminator Salvation, apparently all the machines have figured out is how to pick people up and throw them against things, which is lucky for John Connor, who can just yelp in pain and then run off to hide over and over and over again.