Rock and Roll Pet Store (YouTube) Found! I've been looking for this Nickelodeon interstitial for years!
STEVE BISSETTE, PART 1: TO "1963" AND BEYOND (Comic Book Resources) 1963 is about the only comic Image ever produced that I enjoyed, so it is fascinating to hear what blew up behind the scenes. My local shop has random issues of 1963 in the quarter bin.
I found this "Adventures with the DC Super Heroes" magazine as I was going through some boxes of old mags. It's from 2000 and was produced as a free giveaway if you bought two gallons of milk. Inside, among all the typical kids mag mazes and dorky articles, is two pages of terribly unfunny comic strips. Well, unfunny in the way that 90% of all newspaper comic strips are unfunny. I don't blame writer Chris Duffy and artist John Dulaney. Much.
Am I supposed to be paying for this service? Is that why it suddenly stopped working several months ago?
Back up. For years, I've been using IGN's database to track the entirety of my video game collection. Actually, it's about to be a decade... I created my IGN account in 2001. And it's always been a pageview sink, because it takes a stupid amount of clicks to get stuff added. Plus over the years it has had a rocky relationship with Safari and other Mac browsers. But the upshot is that I get neat little factoids like this:
Some time ago, IGN actually tried to cut down on the click-click-click by adding a popup management box to every searchable object in their database. When signed in, you're supposed to be able to click "add to collection" and then you're done. Except that it doesn't work, and hasn't for months. When you hit that radio button, your browser just does nothing.
Just got around to reading a weird interview with Josh Brolin in the July issue of Wizard. This was the issue I picked up for free at Comic Con Philly. I don't know if Brolin is always this candid in his interviews, but now that I've read a few with him about hex, it seems clear that he was really concerned about this picture.
When Wizard asks "how do you see this character," Brolin says "I'm not sure what my take is on him. It changes all the time."
That's, like, the first part of the printed interview. Sets an odd tone.
Wizard asks him how he feels about the film's forced switch to a PG-13 rating... which I guess was early enough in production that they had to do it for real, and not just by editing out the gory bits. IE: the gory bits were never even shot, so there's little hope for adding them all back in for a massive R-rated home video release. Do people still say "home video"?
Anyway, Brolin admits "I was really angry, very angry." But then he straightens up to the company line that it's "a way better decision," because they have to be more creative with how they mask the violence. Sort of Hitchcockian, I presume. Although I'm sure any film class would string me up for mentioning Alfred Hitchcock in a riff about Jonah Hex.
I finished Red Dead Redemption over a week ago, but did not rush to weblog it as I did with ModNation Racers. Partly that's because I think MNR is getting a bad rap re: load times. I have a stack of games I'm working through at the moment, and ModNation's loading is not so wide of the mark that it's a defensible opinion to avoid playing the game because you think the loads take too long. Come on. LEGO Harry Potter takes forever to get started. If you use the warping campsites in Red Dead Redemption you get to enjoy plenty of load screens. I put in Uncharted 2 last weekend after months of not playing it and I had to wait for 90 minutes of multiplayer updates! 90 minutes?!?! Let's get pissed about that, not about 30 seconds of waiting for a race to start in ModNation.
But the main reason I've been quiet about Red Dead Redemption is that I've been letting the game sink in. RDR has a beautiful ending. A beautiful, tragic ending. I had it spoiled for me thanks to a writer that really ought to know better, so I don't want to wreck it for you... but I needed to stay away from the game for a bit after finishing it.
Reasons Why This Is Bad, Even If You're Not a Troll (MetaFilter via Penny Arcade) Great comments about Blizzard's (now defunct) plan to add real names to World of WarCraft forum posts... particularly the parts about what female and minority gamers have to put up with online. Someday somebody is going to figure out how to beat the piss out of someone online, and we can put a stop to all the racist, homophobic, obnoxious assholes out there wrecking online gaming.
I found this "Adventures with the DC Super Heroes" magazine as I was going through some boxes of old mags. It's from 2000 and was produced as a free giveaway if you bought two gallons of milk. Inside, among all the typical kids mag mazes and dorky articles, is two pages of terribly unfunny comic strips. Well, unfunny in the way that 90% of all newspaper comic strips are unfunny. I don't blame writer Chris Duffy and artist Joe Staton. Much.
I did not realize I was that close to the full 100.
The Rockstar Social Club makes it extremely handy to figure out what I'm missing on that 100%, by way of a very hip almost-an-infographic display. See below.
As you can see, I played it straight, as far as Honor and Fame were concerned. Aside from the advantage of almost never being run around the map chased by stupid sheriffs, I discovered that NPCs might have rewards for me, just because I was so nice. A nun randomly - like, in the street randomly - gave me a rosary charm that purports to reduce enemy accuracy.
My entire crime count consists of one assault, one law officer assault, two law officer murders (I thought they were enemies!), one horse theft (I got on the wrong horse!), one abduction, and two robberies (I think opening up drawers in a hotel room that doesn't belong to you counts as a robbery.)
That multiplayer stat is off. I don't think the Social Club is properly tracking RDR multiplayer.
Here's a checklist card for the Summer 1992 Marvel crossover, Infinity War.
If you do not recall this one, it was the middle leg of the Infinity "trilogy," following up the nifty Infinity Gauntlet crossover (which itself continued on the oft-overlooked, super-cool miniseries, Thanos Quest). Both Infinity War and Infinity Crusade (part three) sucked.
"I can't get myself worked up about the antenna issue. I'm simply not seeing the widespread user complaints that I normally associate with a functional defect in a product. Nobody understands if it's a design problem, a firmware issue, or just the same articulation of the old problem that all iPhones experience with AT&T coverage in spotty areas. I certainly don't think it's a big enough issue to forego all of the iPhone 4's advantages."
Apple silent after Consumer Reports critique (Yahoo News) I like how this article begins as an iPhone slam piece ("People buy iPhones for emotional reasons, not because they're the best phones.") and then goes into how great the iPhone is ("It outperformed every other smart phone on the market in other regards.")
I found this "Adventures with the DC Super Heroes" magazine as I was going through some boxes of old mags. It's from 2000 and was produced as a free giveaway if you bought two gallons of milk. Inside, among all the typical kids mag mazes and dorky articles, is two pages of terribly unfunny comic strips. Well, unfunny in the way that 90% of all newspaper comic strips are unfunny. I don't blame writer Chris Duffy and artist Joe Staton. Much.
That's five of six. Looks like Ronald McDonald to me.
I was led to this conclusion thanks to the somewhat odd contents of the first Marvel costume DLC pack (first of four, at $6 apiece), which contained Dr. Octopus, Iron Man, Mystique, The Thing and Daredevil.
And I'm already fatally close to being exactly correct. The second pack (coming next week) will contain Spider-Man (big name), Human Torch (FF), Elektra (female AND villain), Ghost Rider (bonus) and Thor (dillweed).
While going through another box of old papers and whatnot, I found this:
I think this was photocopied out of an old issue of The Duelist. The ad was for a comics/card store called Iguana's Comic Book Cafe out of Iowa City (which apparently closed in 2003). $30 got you any five items on the list. What was great about this was that 1996 was right after Magic's ascendancy. We had plenty of Fourth Edition and Ice Age, but the early stuff was tough to find and harder to afford. So $6 for ten Antiquities commons sounded pretty amazing.
Mostly. I mean, we had some basement leaks patched earlier this year as part of the room renovation and there is now some new dampness in different spots during massive rainshowers as the water finds alternate ways to flow, but nothing serious yet. Nothing a giant concrete patio in the backyard won't fix.
But while I can't go 100% on that claim, I can point to two other success stories. First, the cat dish:
That's our new water-pumping cat hydrator, a Cat-It Fresh & Clear.
Just started a game with Chad, like my second game ever of Words With Friends (my username is jfourhman). And I get handed a seven-letter word on the first play. And it's not even some stupid non-word, it's an actual word that normal people know.
Mario Kart Wii Grand Prix Race Pinball (YouTube) Irritation. This is obviously a Screwball Scramble kind of game, where you slam buttons to indirectly manipulate a marble through the obstacle course. Kotaku posted this video, but called it a board game, so all the message board dopes neglected to watch the video and assumed it was a Fireball Island kind of game where marbles are rolled down tracks and perhaps knock pawns around. Although definitely a game and sort of board-ish, I'd call it a toy, not a board game.
I found this "Adventures with the DC Super Heroes" magazine as I was going through some boxes of old mags. It's from 2000 and was produced as a free giveaway if you bought two gallons of milk. Inside, among all the typical kids mag mazes and dorky articles, is two pages of terribly unfunny comic strips. Well, unfunny in the way that 90% of all newspaper comic strips are unfunny. I don't blame writer Chris Duffy and artist Joe Staton. Much.
I was up late last night playing The Saboteur. Again. I had to put it away to devote a month+ to the mighty superiority of Red Dead Redemption, but it's back on top of the pile.
I'm kind of past the fun part of the game and more into the I swore to myself I would Platinum this part. As far as the storyline goes, I'm at the bit where the Parisian resistance hideouts start getting compromised, and the Kesslers have been abducted, again. I've spent so many hours pursuing sidebar goals that I could not even toss out a guess as to how close this is to the end. The game calls it Act III. Sounds final.
I just felt like I couldn't play anything else until I got Le Saboteur finished.
And besides, last night I ran into Chitty Chitty Bang Bang.
I was out running off a Nazi alarm, when suddenly a car started flying through the air above me. The Nazis inside were still shooting, but they kept on flying into the No Man's Land section of the map.
Not really a trailer, though. This six minute movie has got to be the game's actual opening cinematic.
Sony revealed a teaser trailer just ahead of this one that left a lot of questions in the air... one of them being the location. This extended edition makes it clear: Metropolis.
Quote Of The Day - Ben Stein (Joe. My. God.) This is the kind of thing Old School Republicans say to each other in comfort. Of course the only reason people are poor is because they're lazy. I guess Ben Stein has always been an elitist asshole.
Just got around to reading a weird interview with Josh Brolin in the July issue of Wizard. This was the issue I picked up for free at Comic Con Philly. I don't know if Brolin is always this candid in his interviews, but now that I've read a few with him about hex, it seems clear that he was really concerned about this picture.
I did not realize I was that close to the full 100.
