Podcast for 02.09.09 | Hot Nude Splinter

EDF! EDF! Fantastic game although I don't know how you're playing through it solo, Ryan. John and I have beaten it on Easy, Normal, and Hard. Hardest is a pain in the ass. The difficulty jump from Hard to Hardest is greater than Normal to Hard.

I liked your discussion about the Kindle and ebooks versus regular books. It made me want to rant and spew venom and all that good stuff.

I cannot wait until the day that books (and for Jesus Christ's sake, newspapers) are obsolete. I remember when I was in 7th grade, well before anyone had heard of the World Wide Web, I ranted about how horrible newspapers were; the form factor sucks. They're giant and bulky, fall apart easily and are impossible to put back together. They're hideous. I begged loudly and obnoxiously for a better system, and the world delivered in the form of web sites.

I similarly rant about books. I hate hate HATE having to hold a book open for prolonged periods of time while trying to get into a comfortable position. Does this not phase anyone else? Am I the only one?? The problem is magnified when you're reading a programming book or something else that's big and bulky.

I'm sorry, but I wouldn't brag about having an entire room's shelf full of books; I'd be embarrassed about that when I know I could store that entire wall in a tiny device. Good riddance to paper.

The same goes for video games and movies. I am sick of having physical media around everywhere. Yes, lots of us have that appeal-to-tradition warm and fuzzy feeling from holding a shiny box in our hand, but I fully realize that that's something that we like simply because we're used to it, and it'll be replaced by something else when we stop stubbornly clinging to the old way.

How ridiculous is it that we drive to a store, look at shelves full of boxes, pick the box we want, purchase it, drive home, then open the box and use the media, then put the box on our shelf as if it somehow has value beyond the content it contains? We should have ended this a decade ago, it's ridiculous. Just say no to needless boxes.

D:

Download link is borked.

Now I kind of regret giving away all my TMNT stuff. I even had all their original weapons, 'cept Mike's Nunchuku broke (cheep design). But they went to poor kids, so I'm over it.

I also had Battle-cat from He-Man. Actually, I didn't even like He-Man all that much, I just wanted Battle-Cat.

I wouldn't lump every single anime/ Japanese RPG into all the bad stereotypes you gave them, but yeah, it's true for a lot of them. I've been playing through the game Eternal Sonata recently, and while I've enjoyed it a lot, I think it suffers from the sort of melodrama you were pointing out. The 10 minute long death scene with Claves was ridiculous! It'd have a much stronger story if they took that sort of thing out.

With all the Apple II love out there, you guys might enjoy this link: an online archive of Apple II and IIGS disks with browser-embedded emulator.

www.virtualapple.org

Loved this week's podcast. The Deadwood comment in relation to Coraline made me blow a gasket driving home...lol.

And Jinny's voice is fine to me. Not sure why on the poll people thought it was "grating".

On TMNT, I never was a huge fan. Didn't have any action figures of those but did play the arcade game alot and checked out the original comic right when it was getting popular. Wow the comic was definitely different! All my buddies were into the comic back then. Donatello was my favorite and I always played him in the arcade game.

Yeah, the download link is indeed broken.

Perhaps Furniss was just filtering out the people who can't capture .mp3s from a stream. He was exposing us to the high handed enemy, the gom jabbar. I just ran a content snatcher and got it anyway.

But come on Furniss, you code websites for a living. For shame.

Also, I'm not annoyed by Jinny's voice. It doesn't seem particularly grating to me. Seems to be a pretty standard asian girl voice.

Was Qais allowed to take the survey? That might explain the "grating" comment. ;)

Speaking of which, where has he been?

Mike V. - Well it all comes down to a matter of opinion I suppose. While you may claim that reading books is unwieldy, which I can understand as most programming books I have seen are at least 24" x 36" and weigh 120 lbs (seriously, what's up with that), I find the idea of having to constantly scroll through a narrow column of barely legible text to be equally absurd. I have also never developed a headache from looking at the printed word for long periods of time.

However, I completely understand the stubborn resistance to locomotion and using my limbs. Indeed, I look forward to the day when you and I, indeed, ALL mankind can order things off the internet using only small movements of our tongues. That's why I'm so jealous of quadriplegics. I mean, seriously, they have nothing to complain about; they're living the fucking dream.

Are you serious..?

It is all clear to me now: penguin fois gras.

Download link is still borked.