Is Halo 3 a Geopolitical Allegory?

Just so that somebody has said it somewhere: The Halo franchise is the story of a Western-style human civilization locked in a conflict with an enemy chiefly characterized by its zealous and inflexible religious beliefs and its hatred and contempt for said Western-style human civilization. The Covenant have subsequently suffered an …

Bad Blogger, No More Halo 3

Yeah, bit of a light posting period just now. Sorry about that. Should be back to normal soon. If you were me, would you be blogging right now?

I have been playing a good deal of Halo 3. I’m going through on Heroic, which I’m finding to be challenging, in a good way. It’s not clear to me that there’s ever going to be more Halo

Halo 3: This Is What You Get

That is, this is what you get if you participate in the whole-hog, journalistically-ethically-murky Halo 3 promotional swagstorm. This morning I received this mailing from Microsoft in a box large enough to hold a small human body, or maybe a grunt:

(Sorry for the lame cell-cam photography — the colors came out weirdly saturated.) I …

Prince Caspian Revealed

I am androgynous and unthreatening, hear me roar:

I hope this Ben Barnes isn’t some kind of fantasy movie Jonah, being as how we last saw him in Stardust. Or more to the point, we didn’t see him.

Can Anybody Take Down Microsoft Office? Probably, Yeah

I spent my high school years composing bad short stories in PFS Write. The first two years of college were lost to a monstrous Smith Corona typewriter/word processor hybrid. I finally got a Mac Classic in my junior year, and since then I have never been tempted to stray from the happy prison of Microsoft Word. I think of it as one of the …

Cast Away: Star Trek and Harry Potter

I’m always fascinating by random casting tidbits. I had a brief stint writing Time’s celebrity news page, and I always tried to make my editor run casting rumors that were unfounded and uninteresting and probably legally actionable. Now that I have a blog I can record the following:

Zoe Saldana, who seems to occasionally spell her …

Robert Jordan, 1948-2007

Robert Jordan has died.

I’ve poked fun at Jordan in the past on this blog, but now seems a good time to own up to the pleasure his pages have given me. Because I did read the first 8 books of The Wheel of Time, and for a reason: there are lots of good things in them. He hit on a genuinely smart and original magic system — I was really …

Are These the Top 5 Cars Invented This Year?

I’m hip-deep in inventions that need to be sorted-through for the Best Inventions issue. So I figured I’d post a few and wait for comments, thus harnessing the awesome power of user-generated content.

I usually have a lot of trouble with the cars category, mainly because I know crap about cars. What can I say, I live in New York, we …

The Best Inventions of 2007

Every year I’m called upon to help pull together a list of the best inventions of the year for Time. This is partly because advertisers like to advertise opposite happy uplifting technology coverage. But it’s also hella interesting.

Lot of good stuff happened in green and ultra-low-cost technology this year. And of course we’ll have to …

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