:(

Arthur C. Clarke died at age 90 in Sri Lanka.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/7304004.stm

 

New Nine Inch Nails Album!

I saw this posted over at digg.

http://ghosts.nin.com/

There’s over two hours of music and it’s all instrumental. $0 for the first 9 tracks, $5 for the full downloadable version, $10 for a 2 CD set + the downloadable version, $75(!) for the deluxe version that comes with too much for me to list here (I’m lazy), and a $300(!!) version that comes with everything in the deluxe version plus a vinyl copy and some artwork. Artwork as in actual prints, not the stuff that comes with a normal CD.

Oh, and it’s all released under a Creative Commons Atrribution Non-Commercial Share Alike license.

I’m trying to get a copy, but the site is getting hammered.

 

Will Wright’s Spore Demonstration at NASA

Will Wright (designer of The Sims) gave a demonstration of Spore’s space exploration phase at NASA Ames Research Center. The footage of the game is really neat, but there’s not a lot that hasn’t been seen elsewhere already. More interesting to me was the Q&A session at the end of the clip, where he discusses design decisions, exporting creatures to a 3D printer, and balancing realism with making the game fun to play.

The video is also up at Gametrailers.com.

 

EA wants to buy Take-Two (plus, I’m trying out the ScribeFire plug-in for Firefox).

EA’s Proposal To Acquire Take-Two Interactive Software

EA wants to buy Take-Two Interactive, who publish the Grand Theft Auto games. Bioshock, Civilization, a bunch of sports games, and is set to publish Duke Nukem Forever (who am I kidding? This is never coming out). This seems like a reaction to Activision’s purchase of Vivendi/Blizzard and would give EA a nice stable of games to counter ActBlizz’s World of Warcraft and Guitar Hero games. This also follows EA’s purchases of Bioware and Pandemic, two studios that are responsible for some of my favorite games.

(I’m mostly posting this uninteresting piece of brain-drool to try out the ScribeFire plug-in for Firefox. Seems pretty neat.)

 

Italian Spiderman

 

I shouldn’t be laughing at this…

…but I found this link posted on Digg and can’t stop:  http://robotmantheblog.com/2006/10/25/so-i-guess-i-got-kicked-off-another-my-little-pony-forum/.

Choice quotes:

“..your picture of Stalin riding Year3 Limited Edition Starflower inside a German concentration camp was both upsetting and historically inaccurate.”

“The first generation of MLP’s were made by Hasbro, not the Khmer Rouge. And Hasbro hasn’t made toys out of human skulls since the 1960’s.”

 

The Whisperer in Darkness

It seems that H.P. Lovecraft’s stories are one of those things where you either love it or you hate it, with little middle ground in between. I happen to love his stories, which is why I got excited when I ran across the news that The Whisperer in Darkness is being adapted as a period piece movie by The H.P Lovecraft Historical Society. I also realized that I haven’t seen their first movie adaptation, The Call of Cthulhu, which is a silent film. I need to correct that mistake.

The Whisperer in Darkness trailer on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wQkos7WTHjg

The Call of Cthulhu trailer on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rqV5gu_Xs4Q

 

Twitter

I’ve decided to try out Twitter.com, which is kind of like a mini-blog. Each entry has to be 140 characters or less in length and can be accessed through an Atom feed. I’ve put up a widget that will display my twitter posts on the sidebar.

 

Radiohead and Saul Williams

I’ve picked up the new Radiohead and Saul Williams albums and I’m enjoying the hell out of both of them (yes, I paid for both of them). I would have probably bought both of them out of principle anyway, but thankfully they’re both really good. For anyone (amongst the two of you that read this blog) that doesn’t know, Radiohead and Saul Williams both decided to not deal with the major labels for their latest albums and only sell them online.

Here’s the link to the download page for the Saul Williams album, “The Inevitable Rise and Liberation of NiggyTardust!”: http://niggytardust.com/saulwilliams/download

Here’s the link to the website for the new Radiohead album, “In Rainbows”: http://www.inrainbows.com/

The Radiohead site seems to be having issues.

 

Hooray for good games.

Yes, I’m a nerd. I don’t care.

It was announced yesterday that the new Super Smash Brothers game is going to have a level editor. A level editor, along with the ability to save replays, take screenshots, and play online means that I must own this game (even though I completely suck at the Smash Bros. games). I still need to get Zack and Wiki, Metroid Prime 3, and Super Mario Galaxy when it comes out. This year is turning out to be really freaking good for games.

I picked up Ratchet and Clank Future: Tools of Destruction on Saturday and am finding it hard to put down so I can get some sleep. The graphics are really freaking good, there’s a ton of stuff to do in the game, and there’s explosions. Lots of them. Some of them are gooey. Between this and Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune, it seems like the PS3 game library might be getting a good kick in the pants just in time for Christmas. Which Sony’s game division seems to need, considering they posted a $845 million loss for Q2.

I’m afraid to play my 360 after reanimating it from its untimely RRoD. This is bad, because Mass Effect comes out next month and I really want to play it (I even pre-ordered it). Plus, what’s the point of owning a games console if you never play games on it? But I’m afraid, however irrationally, that it’s living on borrowed time and by playing games on it I’m using that time up. Maybe I’ll throw in skate. tomorrow and prove to myself that it’s fine, hopefully getting some funny videos of my skater racking himself in the nuts in the process.