Better Living Through Introspection

If the playing conditions are so bad, Tom Glavine can come and stand guard behind one of my M-240B machine guns and see what the price of his freedom really is.

Soldiers in Asia to baseball players: get real

After my post the other day on Halo 2, I’ve had several people ask me why Halo was so awesome. Aki Järvinen over at Game Studies has a well-formed response:

Even though a ludologist deserves a slap in the face every time s/he compares a game to a movie, I cannot help myself: Halo is to the First Person Shooter what Terminator 2: Judgment Day was to the special effects action movie. Halo, like T2, does everything a little bit better than its predecessors. It makes every explosion a bit more convincing, each combat more engaging, hitting the FPS genre with a “new high”.

Read the complete article on gamestudies.org.

(For the record, the first thing that invariably comes out of my mouth is indeed “well, it’s like a movie…”)

So I had an unexpected few hours (okay, a couple of days) free time smack me upside the head out of nowhere, so I completed the Life in the District redesign that I’ve been planning on getting around to since…um…June.

Cleaned up some of the content, moved a few things around, added some new features (and some annoying “under construction” pages that may or may not entice my reading public to contribute [hint, hint]), and generally made things look much better than before. So check it out when you get a second. Or two.

And in case I don’t check in later, enjoy your Labor Day weekend. Football’s back, baby!

I’d be an idiot to still be amazed by what people do with their free time, but I have to tell you…it still is amazing what you can find out there. Even better is when it’s amusing to boot. To whit, cockeyed.com’s “How Much Is Inside?”

I recommend starting with “How Much Is Inside A Million Dollars.” I was laughing hysterically (albeit quietly to myself).

Addendum
Oh my god. And while you’re at it, check out How Much Is Inside Magic Shell?:

“Developed in the 1960s through a collaborative effort between the U.S. Army and Industrial Light and Magic, magic shell was designed to be a bulletproof camouflage coating for armored vehicles. After botched field trials in Cambodia and Syria, the delicious butterscotch coating was tried on a Swedish LVKV9 deep in the frozen Siberian tundra. One of the servicemen got some magic shell fragments on his tongue, and the rest is history!”

Link Notice
There seems to be an issue with the above links right now. Thankfully, there’s a mirror site for cockeyed at: cockeyed.deadtrout.com. Cheers to Geoff for bringing the issue to our attention.