This week in the print magazine I wrote a lengthy piece on Halo 3 and the Halo franchise in general. It’s written for the non-gamer, so readers of this blog probably won’t glean too much news from it. There’s virtually nothing in there about new features, or the new level editors, or anything like that. [...]

Last night I went to this nerdcore hip-hop show in Brooklyn. Nerdcore differs from conventional hip-hop in two ways: a) it’s about video games and computers and Star Wars and other nerdy stuff, and b) in place of hip-hop’s traditional boasting/self-aggrandizing rhetoric it substitutes weird self-deprecating/self-loathing rhetoric. It’s funny, but not so funny that it [...]

Maybe that’s unfair. It has earned $26.4 million in the U.S., according to IMDB. That’s against a budget of $65 million or so. Given foreign sales and DVD it’ll probably make some money, so I guess it’s unfair to say that it tanked. But I never thought that after three weeks it’d be down there [...]

Fascinating article in the LA Times — via Slashdot — about the discontinuation of AT&T’s dial-the-time service. Apparently it dawned on somebody that it’s now completely useless, since clocks are sprinkled into every imaginable gadget now like some kind of inexpensive digital condiment. But the original telephone-time-telling technology was clearly some kind of absolutely fantastic [...]

I didn’t go to PAX. You probably didn’t go to PAX. But there’s some amusing footage from Nerdstock up at Penny Arcade, including Jonathan Coulton singing “re: Your Brains” and the audio from Wil Wheaton’s keynote. I’m embedding below footage of the Minibosses doing what is actually a pretty wicked cover of the Halo theme, [...]

I always imagined my first robot would be something more along the lines of an Iron Giant scenario. But ya know, you go to war with the robot minion you have, that being, in my case, the Roomba.

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OK, I’m still not excited about the Speed Racer movie, but it’s getting harder to be all cool and jaded. This comes from an interview with Susan Sarandon, who I guess is playing Speed Racer’s mom. She’s talking about the newfangled camera the Wachowski brothers have:

Because if Jane were alive, she’d be splicin’ up a storm.