Nuclearlounge.com

Rock Band: Beatles

So, just picked up Guitar Hero: World Tour about a week ago (Costco deal, $79.99.) Good game, really seems to build upon previous Guitar Hero releases. But man, got Rock Band 2 and The Beatles: Rock Band, and man, the polish in the UI and gameplay is just so much better than Guitar Hero, you can really tell that Harmonix has a ton more experience bringing these music titles to market. Luckily, my Guitar Hero instruments work with Rock Band…

Lifestream barfed

The Lifestream plugin just barfed on me, can’t really be bothered to debug right now, switching to a standard Twitter plugin for the sidebar.

Seattle Post Intelligencer goes online only.

Tuesday’s paper will the be last. This is sad for news in Seattle, and it is unfortunate for all those employed by the PI.

It is interesting, though, that just last week I got a call from the subscription department of the joint Seattle Times / PI asking me to subscribe for the full week (I only get Sundays). They asked if I wanted to receive either the Times or the PI, probably knowing full well that the PI wasn’t going to last another week as a print entity.

I hate these stupid solicitation calls, and usually I just tell the people that I am content to read the content online, for free. There are other reasons I’m not particularly fond of the Times, including their bizarre editorial stances on issues. But this time, the “Oh I read it online” got a response from the telemarketer — “Oh, you’re one of those online people,” clearly with disdain.

I’m not really sure how to react — there are a lot of us “online people,” that’s part of why subscriptions are down and you are losing money. (For other reasons, see advertising revue / Craigslist.) And if you don’t want me to read your articles online, how about you don’t put them there for free? I guess that’s the problem — newspapers can’t figure out how to deal with these “online people.”

Hyperthermia

Oh man, this is just a heartbreaking story. So many parents, for just a moment’s distraction, lose their children in a horrifying way. Certainly we’ve heard of the cases of the parents who wilfully neglect their children, but in this article we see the people who just forget.

I think we’d all like to think that this could never happen to us, that we are all different. But this section is striking:

The human brain, he says, is a magnificent but jury-rigged device in which newer and more sophisticated structures sit atop a junk heap of prototype brains still used by lower species. At the top of the device are the smartest and most nimble parts: the prefrontal cortex, which thinks and analyzes, and the hippocampus, which makes and holds on to our immediate memories. At the bottom is the basal ganglia, nearly identical to the brains of lizards, controlling voluntary but barely conscious actions.

Diamond says that in situations involving familiar, routine motor skills, the human animal presses the basal ganglia into service as a sort of auxiliary autopilot. When our prefrontal cortex and hippocampus are planning our day on the way to work, the ignorant but efficient basal ganglia is operating the car; that’s why you’ll sometimes find yourself having driven from point A to point B without a clear recollection of the route you took, the turns you made or the scenery you saw.

There’s a lot we don’t understand about our own brain, and I think confronted with the daily rituals we do without thinking, and all of the little things we forget or the things we misremember or the things that are so far gone from our memory that they don’t surface until some shocking reminder that the amazing thing is that this doesn’t happen more often.

I want to believe that I would be different.

There was an online chat at the Washington Post here about the article. Its worthwhile reading, a lot of interesting points are raised.

Kindle

I’ve been playing with a gen 1 Kindle, and so far it has increased the amount of reading I do, it just seems to make it more convenient.

One thing I would like, though, is the ability to see which books on my wishlist come in a Kindle version without having to click through on each book.

So this is how the current run of Legion of Super-Heroes ends.

From the NYCC.

What happened to the end of Shooter’s Legion of Super-Heroes? DiDio: We don’t cover that. It was a pseudonym at the author’s request. We cancelled the book, finished it and shoved it out the door. Thanks for asking that.

ThinkWeek

The anonymous advocate for a smaller, smarter Microsoft is taking a break. It seems unclear what direction Microsoft is going to take as it lays off workers in an attemp to refocus on its core business. Windows 7 looks like a step in the right direction after the Vista debacle, but the more interesting quote is this:

BillG is long gone. Within our leadership, there’s no one left who wants to read your ThinkWeek paper, so they’re killing that off. In our future, employee-led innovation, I guess, starts at Level 68.

I haven’t been at MS for quite a while, so I’m not sure how much of an impact Billg’s ThinkWeek had on the company, but without it, there certainly seems like there will be a leadership gap. Ballmer certainly won’t be a technological leader — he clearly doesn’t have the insights that Gates has had.

So MS kills ThinkWeek and loses a way for employees to get their ideas heard.

This year’s Best Picture nominees

Average Metacritic / Rotten Tomatoes ratings per year

It kind of felt like this year’s “Best Picture” nominees for the Academy Awards were kind of weak. While not scientific, I went through all of the nominees back to 2001 and charted the average review scores for those pictures. The data I used is here.

Metacritic and Rotten Tomatoes both have limitations as review score aggregators, but for general comparison purposes, I think this works okay. It definitely seems like this year’s nominees were worse than last year’s. Its interesting to see that “The Reader” was the lowest scoring movie of all the nominees going back to 2001, this probably had a lot to do with lowering the overall average, but having two films drop below 80% probably didn’t help either.

Incognito

Just read Incognito #1, and it was a pretty good read. It probably helps that I don’t have a lot of familiarity with Sleeper (only read through volume 1) and Criminal (nothing). I really like Sean Phillips’ art style, though — I also like to see how things are put together, so its also neat to see the sketch process on Sean’s blog.

2008′s List of Lists

This year’s list of year end reviews. Its always interesting to me to see people rank the best movies, music, books, etc. of a particular year. Less interesting are the “most popular” because it just seems like a raw count. But ranking the best books or whatever by how people feel about something is weird and squishy and subjective and its interesting to see the justifications behind the lists. I would have a hard time with this stuff — I couldn’t even tell you my favorite movie of all time without sitting and thinking for a while, and even then, I would have a bunch of caveats, and going from there to making a list just seems like an impossibility. I can’t get to that point, but other people can, so trying to dissect that mindset is interesting to me.