ugh.

stuffed.

good kind.

Korean Palace. I highly recommend ‘em if you’re in the mood for Korean BBQ. Also, I highly recommend OB beer to go with the meal. Very refreshing.

We went and saw Charlie and The Chocolate Factory yesterday. I won’t ruin it for anyone who hasn’t seen it, but I will say this: It was creepy, funny, wonderful and beautiful. In my book, it puts the old movie to shame.

Via Boing Boing:

Canada bans copying CDs to iPods: Cory Doctorow:
Michael Geist sez, “The Canadian Supreme Court today declined to hear a case involving the private copying levy and its application to the Apple iPod. While some are celebrating, the decision effectively renders copying CDs onto an iPod unlawful in Canada. I’ve posted an additional perspective that challenges the recording industry’s decision to welcome the decision. I argue that it signifies an escalation of its war against its own artists.”

[snip]

Link

Way to go, Canada. Good one.

Rockstar, we have to talk.

You know I like your games. Oni, Midnight Club, Max Payne, GTA, and more. Fun games. All very pretty. Mostly with good gameplay. Some of them even have actual stories. You know me, right? I’ve been a fan since before GTA was a household word. I played Grand Theft Auto ONE! Not many gamers can say that. We go way back.

But we need to talk about something important now…

I’m sure you know, there’s a sort of a war going on against video games. Of course you do, you get brought up a lot. You and I are supposed to be on the same side in this little struggle against censorship and blah, blah, blah. Right? We both want that, right?

Sure we do. But, see, man… you’re like that obnoxious friend that tags along with someone to a party. You get drunk and more obnoxious. The host and other party goers are unhappy, but since you’re friends with their friend they let it slide. That is, until you piss in the potted plants and molest the poodle. Now you’re kicked out and your friend has to apologize for you and might not get invited back themselves.

What I’m saying is… Put the goddamned poodle down. You’re going to ruin it for everyone.

Or to put it another way, if I were Tony Soprano, and you were one of my guys… you’d need to worry about getting clipped right about now, before becoming a bigger liability.

See, with this fucking “Hot Coffee” bullshit you’ve pulled you’ve seriously weakened our side of the argument. You do nothing but give ammunition to folks like Jack Thompson and Senator Clinton to use in their little crusades.

You have to treat the ESRB with some fucking respect and realize, it’s not a hurdle you have to get over to get a game out the door. It’s a TOOL for BOTH sides of this fight. You be honest with the ESRB and get the rating the game deserves, then you get to keep making cool games that are as edgy and provocative as ever. Parents get an honest and accurate tool to help them decide what games their kid should be allowed to play.

GTA:San Andreas should have had an “Adults Only” rating, not a “Mature” rating and you damned well know it. You also OUGHT to fucking know that an “Adults Only” rating won’t hinder your sales that much. You know there are plenty of people out there that will say, “Holy shit, that new Rockstar game got an AO rating! I gotta see this!” You know this.

So, anyways, straighten up, apologize and play fair. Then get back to work. Fight’s not over yet.

OH! And and another thing, stop blaming “Hackers” and “Modders” for this thing. It makes you look like a stupid liar, instead of just a liar.

PS: I blame Tycho’
s rant for getting my engines revved on this topic today.

Eric Rice of ericrice.com blogs from 30,000 feet on Boeing’s Connexion One flight, showing off airborne WiFi connectivity. Kinda cool. A sign of times to come? Well, maybe… but it would also add a new category of people you might not want to sit next to on an airplane: podcaster/audioblogger. ;) Bring yer headphones, for sure.

I absolutely love this guy’s work.

I saw it mentioned on Attack of the Show on G4 a few weeks ago and forgot to blog it. This guy takes (really) old portraits and, well, hacks them so that from certain angles, they look spooky. It’s really f’n cool. And creepy.

Less than two weeks till Vegas. And something called DefCon. Whatever that is.

We’ve got reservations at the Luxor, despite some friends warning us that they had a bad experience their last time. They said all the rooms they saw were trashed, etc. We’re giving the Luxor a shot, though, because we love it there so much. We’re a littled worried, though. I suppose we have reservations about our reservations. (Sorry!)

Anyways, let us know if you’re gonna be in town during the DefCon weekend. We’ll be there from Thursday night till Sunday Monday.

I’ve (only) recently discovered Digg. It’s a user contributed and modded news gateway site. (If that sounds like Slashdot, well, it’s because it’s LIKE Slashdot, but better.) Users submit the news stories and all of the readers decide to either digg it, or not. If more people digg a story, it floats to the top.

Additionally, you can see what stories other users have dugg, and if you have an account you can add your friends as, well, friends and compile all your friends stories into one feed. That’s right, feed.. as in RSS feed. In fact, you can get any user’s list of dugg stories as a feed. Pretty cool.

I’m xt0ph3r over there (r3v was too short) and if you wanted my feed, you’d hit this. If you sign up over there, and I don’t hate you for some reason, add me as a friend.

Additionally, there’s a DiggNation podcast (iTunes URL!). Really, that’s how I found out about the site. I heard Kevin Rose (of Systm, and formerly of Attack of the Show and Screensavers) on the TWiT podcast talking about it.

Go forth and digg it.

If World War Two had been an RTS game, it would have gone a little something like this. I seriously laughed my arse off. (To fully appreciate this, you probably need some experience with real time strategy games and at least a vague knowledge of how WW2 played out. I don’t guarantee any comedic value if you don’t meet the system requirements.)

(PS: 1. Because it’s on a forum, the link could go away someday. I’ve mirrored it here. 2. Also, I’d love to give credit to the original author, but who knows…)

Apple earns $320M on strong iPod, Mac sales (MacNN.com). (And via ZDNet.)