Reivews
9 Podcasts for 2009
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Although these all like to the iTunes Store, they shouldn’t be hard at all to find them on other Podcasting services by entering the same name.
Scene Unseen Movie Reviews is a new podcast that offers a unique spin on the movie review process. The catch? Every week one of our reviews sees a new release… the other does not. Also featured - “Letterboxing” banter, DVD picks and special guest appearances from professionals in the film industry.
Vancouver’s top comedy podcast? Hosted by Graham Clark and Dave Shmka, with weekly guests. Hilarious weekly guests? Yup.
EPIC FU is what happens when tech and culture get it on. It’s your weekly geek-out to the coolest art, tech, and music from the online and offline world. Subscribe to get a fresh new episode each week!
Mars Hill Church: Mark Driscoll -
Mars Hill Church in Seattle lives, breathes and is generally OCD about Jesus. Pastor Mark Driscoll is the lead preaching pastor for Mars Hill and regularly distribures video content via this channel, including sermons, event teaching and the occasional one-off video created for our internet audience. You can find more content like this by visiting our web site at www.marshillchurch.org
By Tech Fans, For Tech Fan! Product reviews, tech tips, viewer questions, gaming and great guests, all brought to you by Robert Heron and the DL.TV crew. We go live every Thursday, then we encode and make available for download.
Diggnation is a weekly tech/ web culture show based on the top digg.com social bookmarking news stories.
The Totally Rad Show is the summer blockbuster of geek news shows. Every week, hosts Alex Albrecht, Dan Trachtenberg and Jeff Cannata rip into the world of movies, video games, tv, comics, and more and pull out what’s rad.
Embrace digital technology. Join the Tekzilla cew and make your tech work better for you. Or you can go live in the woods with an axe. Every Saturday, Patrick Norton and Veronica Belont deliver product reviews, computer help, tech tips on everything from Ipod to camcorders, HD to the Internet, plus do it yourself projects.
The Hour with George Stroumboulopolous
Want a different look at the news? Watch to The Hour. The Hour isnt your average newscast, its more lik hanging out with someone whos really interested in the world. The Hour - a current affairs show hosted by George Stroumnoulopoulos. Watch new video clipos every weekday.
Tweetree Houses, galore!
TinyURL'd
I often brag of my vast and lazy intelligence - I get great ideas, and it automatically makes someone else make it. For a while now I had a great idea for a threaded Twitter client and, unfortunately, missed the Quotably boat. Well, in a reply to my last post, I was given a link to Tweetree.com by a good friend of mine, Niha Tiwari.
Twitter is a much-needed Twit-threader. I really have no idea why Twitter doesn’t have this built in already; it really does help follow one’s own conversation, as opposed to ctrl+clicking every in reply to… link. Better even so, it embeds images from sites like TwitPic amd videos from YouTube, a la Power Twitter on Firefox, as seen below.
Also, unlike FriendFeed, Tweetree lets you post from the page into your Twitter page, as well as reply into the respective Tweeters.
Tweetree, TwitPic, Firefox (Mac/ PC/ Linux), Power Twitter (Firefox)
The wake of Oblivion’s Fallout…
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I have only spent about 5ish hours on my Fallout 3 copy, a combination of school and my brother playing it as well have encumbered my playingability. But shit-damn, its amazing, and it looks fantastic.
Now, by no means am I saying this is the most attractive and graphically insane game ever, Gears of War would be a good comparison as it shares the same gritty theme as Fallout. But Gears is no where as utterly massive as Fallout 3, it has been heralded as being thrice the size of the already-way-too-big game Oblivion. Part of the beauty of this game is, as was the case with their previous blockbuster Oblivion, how damn big it is. You can spend hours and hours just… traveling around this post-Apocalyptic USA, offing Ghouls and retarded Fire Ants and never find an invisible wall. And this is why the Fast Run feature (also from Oblivion; takes you to any city you have been to before). I know this because I am currently lost.
I find that non-linear games, in too many a case, turn very linear when you start playing. I mean, wasn’t that a huge selling point of the GTA games? For whatever reason, my friends and I ended up doing the same stuff. What I really like about Fallout is that although my brother and I are at the same level, our games are entirely different. However as reviews have said, its missing a lot of the gritty stuff from Fallout 1 and Fallout 2, and I haven’t seen any Molotov’s yet, wtf@that.
The V.A.T.S. system (aiming at specific parts of a target) is awesome, when I first saw the video on IGN, I thought it was a really cheap way to do FPS, but they didnt mention the AP in that video. It is kinda how I feel about, in Tales of Vesperia, where you can skip the post-battle dance or setting your entire team to AI - its a fast and simple way to take out the random flying bugs or dogs that chase you around without feeling ‘cheaty’
Its Oblivion II with pretty good FPS to it, just-as-bad jumping and some really annoying glitches and, most of all, a great long-range system. When I played Oblivion as someone other than a Mage, my brother was surprised, and as was Oblivion just had a horrible FPS system. Especially for an RPG/ Adventure type game, the FPS system is spot-on.
Sometimes my right stick wont work, or my right buttons wont work, or I cant get out of 3rd person. Be that as it may, as glitchy as I do find it, the saving works around that pretty well. I am not saying it is perfect, and I am not saying a save-anywhere save system should be used in the stead of glitches, but considering the grandiose world this game presents, and how much of it works flawlessly, and how much damn fun it is, I shall excuse these glitches. For the most part, they do not interfere with the actual experience, and so far they have all shown up after Auto-saves. But can you imagine the elephantine task of debugging a world that would take the better half of your wifes entire pregnancy to walk through? And I mean straight, no pee breaks no nothin’.
And there are far too many good games coming out now, I have yet to get far in ToV, then Fable II is being gotten soon, and THEN the new Portal game (XBA) and Web of Shadows. My 360 is becoming a strain on my attention receptacles, it is not fair.
In my closing, this is a damn solid video game. I recommend you getting it ASAP.
"Soon I Will Be Invincible" by Austin Grossman
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The thing with authors, they can get really damn good before their first published novel. In retrospect, I feel bad for waiting the months I did for Austin Grossman’s debut novel, “Soon I Will Be Invincible” to come on paperback. It is the first novel in a while (and I read a lot of novel), that I read through as frivolously as I did with this one.
A few years ago I actually had a girl in my bedroom. There were 20 seconds spent between the time she entered my room and the time she, on her exit, called my a bloody nerd. I really like superheroes, and I really like books, and I really like having 30+ posters and 200+ holes in my drywall - a portion of my posters are used to cover up the holes from other posters. Naturally, my friend at the bookstore (Black Bond Books) recommended this to me. Naturally, I bought it.
It took me 2.5 chapters to notice the two different icons rotating through alternating chapters. The ray gun denotes a point-of-view from the hilariously-stereotypical villain, Dr. Impossible; wherein, the eyeball denotes the cyborg-heroine Fatale. It is a really well done use of two different point-of-views, their connection is not mysterious at all, a la Lost, but are very nicely placed.
Soon I Will Be Invincible doesn’t so much play with the clichés of superhero comics as bathe in their pulpy froth.
— Austin American-Statesman
I have tried my own, but this quote really does describe this novel to a tee. I described this book to a friend as a well written B-movie in superhero form. They aren’t pulling any a Deadpool here and talking to the reader, but the characters acknowledge and sometimes argue about their character cliches, even while being interrupted mid-evil-scheme monologue. It is almost Heroes-esque, in the sense that we see more of these lives and the group dynamics than we would in a regular comic.
Take an example from CoreFire, the main super-hero in the book is an all-American, straight A student who got his power saving his writer girlfriend. His myriad of powers are listed in Wikipedia by a link to Superman’s powers; invulnerable, superstrong, superfast, he can fly and he possesses Heat- and X-Ray vision. Wherein Mr. Mystic, the resident magician, also found his powers on a trip to Tibet, a la Dr. Strange. By far, Doctor Impossible was my favorite character in the story, as it just brought a hilarious side to supervillainy.
The novel is a homage to comic books, featuring a mad genius supervillain, Doctor Impossible, who suffers from “Malign Hypercognition Disorder” (”evil genius” syndrome).
— http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Austin_Grossman
But it was during a discussion with a friend regarding the odds of Peter Petrelli regaining his body, I think I got the idea down. Stories are nothing to do with the beginning or the end. In the case of Peter, the idea is not just that he gets out, it is how. In the case of The (New) Champions, it was not a story of a bunch of archetypal meta-humans and superpowers, it was the personality behind them. As is the case with this genre in general, a good comic is not about the power in itself, but the power is used to add a more grandiose quality to the telling.
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