Not only is it my birthday tomorrow, but it’s also the day the movie Doomsday opens. And it just so happens that Doomsday is the handle I used to use back when I played LAN games of Descent with my friends.

Coincidence?!

I just got back from a week in San Francisco, attending the 2008 Game Developers Conference. Our flight got back at 6am, so I’ve been sleeping most of the day, trying to recover. This was the first time I’ve been to SF for any significant amount of time, and last time I was here I didn’t get to see around the city that much. It’s a pretty amazing place - the streets and sidewalks are so wide, and everything seems so well maintained. Walking around Union Square, I saw all the fashions I see on TV and wonder “who would ever wear that?” Well, I guess the answer is “people who don’t live where it snows.” I can’t imagine how the average person lives in the city, since it’s so fucking expensive though.

Dear Apple Motherfuckers,

Why are you sending me an email telling me you’re now making a 32 gig iPod Touch? You know I bought a 16 gig Touch from you in November, as evidenced by you sending me the email to the account I used when I registered said 16 gig Touch.

Does this new one come with the twenty dollars in applications that you would like to charge me for, or are they free like they are for everyone who bought a 16 gig Touch after January first? Oh, I know the answer is “Nope, haw haw”, I was just fuming about it. What amazes me is not that you are constantly changing your product lines in a ways that generates a burning sensation in all your customer’s pants, it’s that I am always surprised by it.

Yours, Soapbox Preacher

PS: Please eat the poop from my butt. I can’t believe you got me twice on the same product! Jesus Christ!

I’ve been battling some sort of cold for the past week. I thought it was beaten on Thursday, but it seems to be back with a vengeance now. So I spent most of today sleeping and watching movies. I just finished Lost in Translation, which I only watched because I saw Bill Murray in Groundhog Day this morning. I think I like Lost In Translation because it’s just a movie about being. I also think I like it because it’s almost a love story, and there’s something refreshing about that compared to most of the romantic comedy pap that gets made. M and I saw “27 Dresses” earlier this week and it was pretty disappointing for something that should be much better, given the people involved.

No real time to make a post today, I was working late and then I finished my first inked comic in a really long time, so that took a while.

Instead, here’s the lazy bloggers approach to lack of original content: The embedded Youtube video. This one is Lykke Li’s first single “Little Bit”

This flash game has a pretty neat trick to it. You are presented with a series of levels, each of which has a variety of objects you can click on it. After a few seconds, your cursor dies and you start the game over again, but this time with the moves you did before playing again in real time. It’s like a co-op game you play by yourself!

Check it out!: Cursor*10

When I hooked up my camera to download the pictures of the Too Human magazine cover, I discovered a bunch of photos I hadn’t bothered to transfer yet. One of them was this:

This is the Burger King Bacon Double Homestyle Melt, probably the most vile hamburger I’ve ever tasted. It was so foul that it made me scour the house for my misplaced camera, so that I could take a picture and one day document this processed package of putrescence.

“Hey, Soapbox Preacher” you’re probably thinking, “how can you go wrong with the Melt? Aren’t you a big fan of bacon double cheeseburgers? I mean, aren’t you a fatty?” First off, shut up. Secondly, how can a melt go wrong? Read on!

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After a very generous week and a half off work, it’s back to business as usual. The nice thing is that I have a week and a half of podcasts to catch up on while I work. Today I listened to the latest GFW Radio (otherwise known as 97.5 The Brodeo). Of particular interest was the discussion on the extremely poor sales figures for PC titles Crysis (85k) and Unreal Tournament 3 (30k in November). Compare this with approximately 1.5 million copies of Call of Duty 4 sold in the same month for the Xbox 360 alone!

While I’ve only played UT3, the reviews of Crysis indicate that lack of quality is not really the cause of the poor sales of these two titles. I can only assume that the incredibly strong console lineup, combined with the lasting appeal of titles like Team Fortress 2 and World of Warcraft on the PC side of things had a crippling effect on them. There simply wasn’t time or money left in most gamer’s budgets for these two titles. I’m still working through the backlog of games released in November last year, although I did pick up Crysis today as it sounds like there is a lot of really interesting emergent gameplay in it. I have no idea when I’ll get around to playing it, however.

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