I don’t understand how people are supposed to navigate the Android handset market. How do you know which AnDroidMaxxRAZRLTE900 you’re supposed to get?
Follow along, friends.
Those are your options. Not this.
I dislike the phrase, “the sky is the limit” because it isn’t. We should have stopped using it when the Soviets successfully put Sputnik in orbit. For a while, it legitimately was the limit. Now we have Voyager 1 more than 11 billion miles from the Sun on the edge of interstellar space.
There’s a story making its rounds about Amazon’s new app that lets you scan bar codes in stores. Amazon had a promotion that let users take a percentage off their purchase if they went to a store and scanned an item. Apparently, because this happened on the Internet it’s evil in comparison to my going into two brick-and-mortar stores and purchasing the cheaper product using a coupon.
The problem, which this story alludes to, is books as a product and books as culture. I frame this debate on the Internet vs. brick-and-mortar as two people fighting over the right to sell something with one person trying to piggy back on the idea that they’re a cultural guard and that if they should fail, we’ll lose a part of who we are. Any guesses about who is on which side?
I’m supposed to divorce myself from the reality of book stores and think of them on a higher level.
No.
Books are packaged, promoted and sold as a mass-market item. Book signings and book tours are press and marketing. We’re kidding ourselves if we think John Q. Local isn’t tracking traffic and conversion in his book store at signing events. He wants you in the door so he can sell something else. If not, the signing would have been someplace that fit more than 10 people.
Industrial design is art, but no one (well, there are probably a few) is complaining that Jony Ive isn’t signing iPads at Grand Central. Fashion is art, but I’m not upset that Simon Kneen isn’t signing my Banana Republic sweater.
I completely agree that books are works of art to celebrate. I just think cramped, musty book stores are an insulting place to celebrate them. Don’t get on your high horse and chastise me as a “scorched-earth capitalist” over your lack of a business model.
If you want to support literacy and books in your community, volunteer in schools or attend a book festival.
If you’ve been on the Internet these last few months you’ll have heard that Netflix raised its prices. Then, in a move that can only be described as insane Netflix decided to split their streaming and DVD services into two companies.
To teach Netflix a lesson, customers began to cancel their subscription so they could go nowhere else and get a better deal. Netflix announced today they’d keep their services together after all. Critics don’t seem satisfied.
Since Oct. 1 I’ve had two movies sent to my house that would have cost $10 at Blockbuster. And I’ve streamed 10-15 TV episodes from seasons I would have otherwise had to buy for more than $50.
Is it time for Reed Hasting’s to go? Is Netflix over?
No. Calm the fuck down. It costs $16 for both services.
Here’s to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The round pegs in the square holes. The ones who see things differently. They’re not fond of rules. And they have no respect for the status quo. You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them. About the only thing you can’t do is ignore them. Because they change things. They push the human race forward. And while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius. Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who do.
It’s messages like this one that foment my anger toward politicians. Senator Tea Party didn’t support realistic debt ceiling plans by his Republican colleagues or President Obama and in subsequent tweets said we should privatize Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac after complaining about a failed liberal spending experiment.
Facts are, of course, not on his side. President Obama has created significantly less new spending than President Bush and privatization hasn’t worked in the past. We are now also aware that the downgrade occurred specifically because he and his Tea Party colleagues were unwilling to work with others. He also said we must pass Cut, Cap and Balance because it would have prevented a downgrade and would help us in the future, despite the fact that, again, the S&P said that’s a bad idea.
Raising taxes as part of a solution is naturally off the table, because that’s a job killer. I’d like some evidence that lower taxes encourage the wealthy to create jobs. I’ve never seen any.
I always seem to leave my house when it’s pouring. It thundered for four hours today and did nothing until I left for the evening.
Rumors of my robotic origin should be dispelled by these images from my human youth.
The last first person shooter I played was Goldeneye 007 for the Nintendo 64. It displayed these breathtaking 1997 graphics.
Nearly 14 years later I decided to give the genre another try. I brought no preconceptions to the table except the romanticized view of my childhood devotion to Goldeneye. I purchased Bad Company 2 on Steam and installed on my multicore, dual Nvidia GeForce GTX 260 Windows 7 machine without a problem.
The campaign starts in a boat headed to a World War II-era jungle with several compatriots on a secret mission to rescue a scientist. This mission serves as a tutorial and backstory for the campaign set in the Cold War era.
The UI is similar to Goldeneye. It only shows your ammo count, minimap and damage is displayed by dirt and blood around the screen edge.
At the conclusion of the backstory you find yourself in a frozen world with three new compatriots who accompany you throughout the rest of the campaign. They provide no real support except witty banter and wildly missing NPCs while firing.
The environments give the feeling of vast snow-covered mountain ranges, massive burning cities or densely forested jungles, all while following a very linear and defined path. Most everything is destructible, lending a nice degree of realistic physics to the game. If you hide behind a wall, NPCs will launch RPGs or throw grenades at it to damage and ultimately destroy your cover.
The sound for weapons, grenades and other elements in the game is very well done. A grenade going off near you, on the other side of that wall, say, instantly brightens your display, mutes all other sound and makes you feel as though there’s a ringing in your ear before slowly fading the action back in. Snow cracks beneath your feet as you run from the pop of bullets hitting the ground behind you.
The characters are fantastically stereotypical. “Fuck,” “mother fucker,” “shit,” and aren’t Dallas Cowboy’s cheerleaders hot. Sarge, the reluctant leader whose real name is irrelevant and never spoken as well as I can remember, gives the orders at the beginning of each mission and at checkpoints as the missions progress.
Sarge is front left, General What's-his-name is front right
I can’t remember the general’s name, frankly, I don’t know if they said it. It doesn’t matter. You’ll only see him again at the end of the campaign. His orders of being unorthodox and lethal are vague but exciting, right? They’ll appeal to my primal male instinct of wanting to kill.
The lethal part is easy. It’s physically impossible to run out of ammo. There are magical crates every few feet that have ammo and every gun you’ve encountered, or you could just pick up a gun from one of the bad guys. It’s probably worth mentioning at this point that there are no women in the game except the often fantasized cheerleaders.
From here on out your mission is to do something about a secret technology. For that you’ll need the help of the NSA—no, CIA—hell, what does it matter, cheerleader boy—aka, George Gordon Haggard, Jr.—is going to call him a spook the whole time while lamenting his how-did-we-end-up-here plight after just leaving the general’s office excited to be in special forces.
Not to miss out on any stereotyping opportunity, there’s a hippie.
He sounds like a hippie, man, and is a pacifist. Oh, don’t worry, the red-blooded, steak-eating, Cowboy-loving Texan lets the liberal have it. Ghost Rider here only pilots helicopters and will move you across South America as you complete your missions.
Naturally, the CIA agent is the prisoner of a bald, nondescript characterization of a Soviet-era Russian commander. You’ll chase this guy across South America in pursuit of the CIA agent and his all-valuable knowledge of the secret technology.
Haggard dispenses his share of munitions information along with the occasional reference to the finer points of Texan women. Again, he and all the other characters provide no useful assistance to you. Terrance Sweetwater is the anxious nerd in the group. He wears glasses, because, obviously, nerds wear glasses. Sweetwater provides snide remarks and generally bickers in a playful way with Haggard about the absurd danger of an off-the-cuff idea they came up with to resolve their situation. A guys-we’re-in-combat-not-a-locker-room reprimand swiftly follows from Sarge who immediately orders you to go do what they just said. Don’t worry. It’ll be absurdly easy. Your name is Preston Marlowe, by the way.
The voice acting on each character fits with what you’ve always perceived for that stereotype. Haggard is loud and boisterous with a Texas accent. Sweetwater is an often-nasally sounding smartass. Sarge has a wise, deep voice commensurate with his years of experience and service, a point he never lets you forget. Ghost Rider sounds like he’s from the California coast. You sound like a midwestern, nondescript male.
It took me less than six hours to complete the campaign. Normal should be called auto mode. Hard is presumably difficult in that it hopefully has consequences for running low on ammo. I’d replay it, but the dialog and plot are so painfully boring and uninteresting that I wasn’t even upset at the stupid ending. I half expected Haggard to ride a bull into the sunset with a bikini-clad woman on his knee.
Most of the missions have special guns to collect or other objectives that unlock achievements. I didn’t bother getting them all because who fucking cares?
This game isn’t about single player. This game is multiplayer. And that, I can’t stop playing.
New characters start off as a private with a basic set of gear that can put you at a disadvantage because with the game being so mature, most other players are going to have better weapons. Try and find a noob server to play on and you’ll be fine.
On the PC, 32 players compete on a myriad of maps with objectives ranging from capture-the-flag style play to a rush game where you destroy objectives. Running low on ammo does have consequences in multiplayer and forces the player to think strategically about how he or she plays their class.
Players may choose from four classes: assault, medic, engineer and recon. Each class has skills that help other players, which in turn boosts your score and thus encourages and rewards team work as a game mechanic. Those extra skills also provide more than one way to play Battlefield. The assault class can drop ammo around the battlefield, engineers can repair vehicles and medics can heal allies. As you gain points from kills, assisting and winning games you advance in rank which unlocks more weapons and gear.
Text chat is available, as are a number of pre-scripted voice commands that squadrons can use to organize, alert other players of nearby enemies and attack or defend with.
A 14-year vacation from the genre allowed time for a lot to happen. In this case the graphics, sound, physics and scale improved dramatically. The core experience of the genre I remembered as a child has stayed basically the same. Maybe that’s why I can’t stop playing.
I overheard my building manager talking to a prospective tenant while showing the first floor apartment last week. “The guy in the second floor unit is pushing 30, works for SCAD and has a girlfriend.”
I get that he was probably trying to make me sound older and less likely to throw loud parties to this 30-something gray Chevy sedan driver, but I don’t think the extra five years were necessary. I just finished Harry Potter. I know I’m old. Thanks for kicking me while I’m down.
The end of July marks the one year anniversary of being on my own. I think about this a lot. While we’re growing up we hear about the “real world” all the time. We hear about it so much that we develop anxiety about it. Chapters are closing and opening. You’re cut off. Shit gets real.
After a year on my own I can say with absolute certainty that this is all nonsense. Perhaps the transition was easier for me because I’ve obsessed about adulthood and wondering when Congress would get their act together since the 9th grade.
As I jogged up the back stairs that day from dumping a bag of plastics in the recycling bin I thought about the dishes in the sink and my run-ins with them as a child. I hated doing the dishes. There were always so many. They were always so disgusting. The secret, I’ve learned, is a dishwasher. You should probably invest in one, mom. Then all you have to wash by hand is the greasy frying pan the circa 1991 dishwasher can’t handle.
Washing the dishes is now a part of my routine. I wash the clothes. I sweep the floor—rarely—let’s be honest. I take out the trash. I water plants. The unavoidable fact that you’ll one day be an adult is seemingly always surrounded by the idea that all you do is work and toil over broken pipes under the sink. Over dishes. Over laundry. Over the car. Over the neighbors. Have you seen the neighbors?
Science tells me that because I’m self-aware, my voice changed, I have hair on my face, and I have fully reasoned self-preservation skills, that I’m an adult. Society tells me that because I pay taxes, I can vote, I have an understanding that we’re all in this together, and I can eviscerate your undisturbed happiness with sarcasm, that I’m an adult.
Reality tells me that I was routinely and mercilessly lied to as a child. Adults promised me that “you’ll understand when you’re older” and “grown ups don’t act like that.” I’m older. I still don’t understand. And, grown ups most certainly act like that. I might have grown out of the clothes I wore at seven, but I still call small, inanimate objects “sons of bitches” like I did with my LEGOS. And I still play with LEGOS.
