Every Single Article Written by N - All 1343
My Greatest Wish For 2012: The Kardashians Disappear
There’s an incredible irony here: by simply acknowledging that they exist, I’m perpetuating their existence. Just like The Game, once you realize it exists, you’ve lost. Still, I can’t help but make this my favorite wish of 2012: that their appeal and popularity will simply evaporate. While the modern example of the celebrity that exists because they’re a celebrity is decades old, think back to the Gabor sisters, it doesn’t necessitate their viability. The Kardashians, as Barbara Walters put it, have no actual talent. They don’t actually do anything. They simply exist. Perhaps if they were developing software, creating some kind of new art, or producing some other meaningful benefit to mankind, that’d be great, but as it stands, their lack of productivity means that it won’t be long until they’ve faded off the radar like Paris Hilton did several years ago. Unfortunately, the media enjoys giving them attention because the effect reciprocates: people watch (or read) about them and need an outlet by which to do so. Who knows how this chicken-and-egg story got started, but now that it’s in place, one will fail the other and they’ll fall into obscurity.
So, enjoy it while you can, Miss Kardashians. And Kris Humphries, let’s face it, you deserved everything that came with your botched marriage. What were you expecting, really?
Ron Paul For President, Because Why Not?
(DISCLAIMER: This is not an endorsement of Ron Paul for President by FleshEatingZipper.)
Next year we all roll into the voting booths to mark our ballots for the middle-of-the-road Presidential candidate that will hopefully fulfill the most of their promises, but in reality, will hopefully just disappoint us the least. As a conservative, Libertarian-leaning voter, there was no possible way I could’ve possibly won. And while the Obama hype machine won over hearts in minds in a relative landslide (two points in either direction of split-even is basically a political earthquake), he’s disappointed his own party by not fulfilling the obligations he was elected on (which is fine by me), making the hype machine that got him elected look more superficial than ever before. “Oh, it’s a difficult time,” my butt. W. Bush did a lot of crazy stuff in a post-9/11 world, but he was committed to action, however controversial. Obama is just sitting there moaning about GOP resistance when his party had been in charge of the White House and Congress and accomplished little anyway.
The only hope against the continuing mediocrity of Obama’s administration? The crazy Ron Paul, of course.
‘Grand Theft Auto III’ for Android – Game Review
It doesn’t feel like it’s been just over a decade since Grand Theft Auto III landed on the PlayStation 2 and went on to be the watershed game for 3D sandbox titles, make Rockstar hundreds of millions of dollars, and blah blah blah. Now that they’ve added support for PowerVR-enabled phones, I’m now finally able to get my hands on this former juggernaut. Like literally, my thumbs are touching the game itself. So how does it fare in its transition to mobile? Read on…
Verizon: Your Wireless Network Needs To Be Online In Order For Us To Use It
When lunch time came around, it was super thrilling to get to reel out my phone and catch up on e-mails, read my TweetDeck stream, check my Facebook notifications, etc. The problem is that my connection was so intermittent that I couldn’t accomplish hardly any of that. And it wasn’t just me, either, it was thousands of Verizon Wireless customers nationwide. Being a recent convert from Sprint for obvious reasons, I was already disappointed by the lowly 1.2Mbps average downloads I was getting in areas around town flush with LTE, but my signal shows single bar-to-double bar reception all the time, regularly flipping between 3G CDMA and 4G LTE modes. (In fact, attempting a SpeedTest right now resulted in such a downgrade in speeds.) Verizon is the nation’s largest carrier with the largest fourth-generation network, based on LTE, designed to give mobile users crazy speeds (apparently 10x my rates in urban areas) at the expense of some battery. Well, consider my battery safe because I’m not getting lightning bolts or conjured Viking gods out of my connection.
The Photographer’s Best Accessory For 2012: A 1.8 Gigapixel Helicopter
Forget the storm of quadrocopters that’s brewing on the horizon, the United States Army is deploying three Boeing ARGUS helicopters that feature 1.8 Gigapixel (as in, 1,800,000,000 pixels per image) cameras. Yeah, sure, there are battlefield applications, like being able to keep track of over 60 targets at once, or take photos from over 20,000 feet, but let’s think about this a little bit: what would you do with a 1.8 Gigapixel camera on wings? Let’s count the ways:
Windows Phone Marketplace Hits 50,000 Apps, I Still Don’t Have One
I apologize in advance for the incredible tease: we don’t have an application on the way. So a little over nine months after we reported Windows Phone’s Marketplace hitting 10,000 apps, Microsoft reports that they’ve quintupled that amount. While my feelings for the platform have softened in the face of aggressive competition and a better supported, multi-platform music service, I’d still own one as a second phone around the same time that my pimp cane and solid gold gloves arrive. Unfortunately, Microsoft still has a long way to go to convince people that the iOS and Android libraries (which are roughly ten times larger) are worth a pass and provide more games worthy of making this the portable Xbox they never made. Aside from the other issues that they have with Windows Phone, Microsoft also has to work harder to make third-party apps work better on the OS, which shouldn’t be an issue considering the hardware is virtually identical across the board. Still, as Mango allows more developers the ability to put more glanceable information on the Start screen (through Live Tiles), it hints at something so much greater than they’ve done so far.
All the best to ya Microsoft, maybe when you stop restricting the hardware so much, I’ll dive in!
‘Dead Space’ For Android – Game Review
I’ve been on the rampage trying to find games to load up on my phone. Tiny Tower came first, but with Joshua Topolsky jabbering on about Dead Space for Android, I decided I should give it a shot. I’ve always been interested in the franchise, but aside from 45 minutes with the original game after a Steam sale, I haven’t put any time into it at all, which is something I feel guilty about because it looks like a genuinely great sci-fi series from one of the gaming industry’s most unoriginal companies. The game’s format on mobile doesn’t lend to much psychological tension, but it’s a solid shooter that’s worth your money.
Is Pitchfork’s Childish Gambino Review Ironic Or Clueless?
Between Ian Cohen’s rabble on Donald Glover’s latest musical odyssey (you know, the black guy from Community) and a bout of indigestion, I lost a lot of sleep this morning. Yeah, I realize Pitchfork’s scribble came out some time ago and I don’t know how I missed it because I knew it’d be some arbitrary score removed from the zeitgeist. I was right. We gave the album a 10 out of 10 and while it’s not a perfect disc, it’s got catchy, fun songs and it serves well, as our review mentions, as a gateway to other rap. Looking over to Metacritic’s handful of scores, Pitchfork stands alone at a lowly 1.6, so either reviewer Ian Cohen is completely right, or he’s simply an Armond White for music. Read the rest of this article…
From Star Wars: The Old Republic To EVE Online – Keeping MMOs In The “Friend Zone”
In my mind, 30-day trials for massive multiplayer games are perfect. It gives me a lot of the time I need to get into a game, plum its depths, and then formulate a reason to never play it again. Why? Because MMOs can easily sponge up every moment I have available. If I fall in love with one, we have to be together forever. The best solution is to keep these games at a distance, and refuse the will to commit to them. Afraid to commit to an MMO? You’re not the only one.
2011 In Movies: The Best, The Worst, And The Meh
I can’t count how many times I wanted to go out and see Dylan Dog: Dead of Night, even as it’s readily available on Netflix now, just to see how truly awful it was. On the flip side, I’d also really like to see Brandon Routh start to take hold as an actor, but it just doesn’t look like that’s gonna happen. Dylan Dog serves as sort of a template for the year as far as movies go, in which the lowest lows were probably just as appetizing (on an ironic basis) as the best films, of which the weren’t many. At a glance, we knew we were getting another Pirates film, another Harry Potter, another Twilight, and another Transformers flick, all of which were known quantities, which lights the problem: there was a complete lack of surprise in 2011. So how did this year’s movies fare, so far as the ones that I caught? Let’s give it a look…
