It was every Hollywood jerk’s worst nightmare: not getting to stand on stage and be handed a statue. Food poisoning had laid me low, and I was going to miss getting my Spike TV Video Game Award. Or was I? Hell no. Boot and rally, as people I hated in college used to say.
I unsteadily made my way to the Video Game Awards, armed with …
In my many years as a writer for The Simpsons, I’ve been nominated for my share of Hollywood honors. So I know well the heart-pounding unease of sitting in the cold audience of an award show, waiting for my category to be announced. That’s why winning my first Spike TV Video Game Award was so memorable. Because instead of sitting …
I feel the need to say that I’ve been listening to a lot of Schäffer the Darklord lately. Billyuns and billyuns of years ago I saw him live at a nerdcore show, and blogged about it, and then more or less forgot about him till his CD Mark of the Beast found its way, by divine means, into my hard drive. And you know what? It’s pretty …
Time.com has posted my top 10 video games of the year and my top 10 graphic novels of the year. Take a spin through them. There may be no better time this year to call me an idiot! Though there have been some pretty good ones. And the year ain’t over yet.
What did I leave off? As far as the video games go, I note that there’s no …
Right here. If that music doesn’t give you a massive nostalgia seizure, check your internal hard drive.
I’m not saying this is going to be a good movie. But it does look like the best possible Speed Racer movie you could make.
It’s here. Scroll down for the high-def version.
Prince Caspian is, of course, a very weird book, since it starts a millennium after the last book ends, so the first thing the Pevensies have to deal with is that everybody they knew and loved in Narnia is dead. Except Aslan — maybe that’s the point? But you can imagine how pissed his …
If Ayn Rand liked children’s toys, which she most certainly did not, she would have loved Legos. And if the shovel-faced founder of Objectivism liked amusement parks, which she totally didn’t, she would have adored Legoland. After all, the Atlas Shrugged-y motto of Danish Lego creator Ole Kirk Christiansen was “only the best is good …
Last night Warner Brothers decided to screen the first six minutes of The Dark Knight, a.k.a. Batman Two (but not Batman Returns). For some reason — basically because it would be cool — director Christopher Nolan shot the first six minutes of the movie in a fancy IMAX format. Then he showed them to a bunch of dorks and journalists …
There was nothing wrong. I was deeply, deeply immersed in The Orange Box. There’s something about the quality of the light in Half-Life 2 that just sucks me in — that bleak, wintry illumination washing over a defeated, depopulated, picked-over Earth with its tumble-down, head-crab-infested farmhouses. And the audio: sometimes I reload …
My brain is experiencing another spike of interest in Jonathan Coulton, the nerd-singer-songwriter responsible for, among other things, “Code Monkey” (about office misery) and “re: Your Brains” (about office workers-turned-zombies). The video embedded below plays as the closing credits of Portal, and even though I’ve never played the …
Okay, I think I have a story here. A news story. Real journalism, not just jokes about what religions superheroes are.*
Here’s the scoop: a bunch of my Hollywood jerk friends have gotten calls from DirectTV offering free High Definition upgrades for their satellite TV receivers. But when the DirectTV guy installs the upgraded HD …
There’s a short piece in this week’s Time in which I chat with Philip Pullman. It’s here.
I don’t know if it comes across in the article — which I wish were longer and better — what a warm, intelligent presence Pullman is. He focuses this very appealing, avuncular, charming beam of interest at you while you’re talking. He takes what …
