Angry Robot

The beloved hobbies of Google and Amazon

AppleTV: Apple’s half-billion dollar “hobby”

Sandy's Aftermath

There are some absolutely sensational images coming out of New York City.

There’s very little I can say that would do justice to the magnitude of this event and of the suffering caused by it, so let me move on to talk about the coverage. Things like this tend to make me a little news-obsessed, and they come up rarely enough, thankfully, that each time the way I approach it technologically tends to shift slightly.

First I went to the NYTimes iPad app, which was very good at providing the back story, as it were, and illustrating it with images. But it was not up to date. Then I went to Twitter, where the hashtag “#sandy” seemed to be the one to check. There were again amazing things – on-the-ground impressions, photos – but they were often obscured by tasteless jokes, retweets of tasteless jokes, attempts to tie the disaster to one political platform or another, and retweets of forged images of sharks in New Jersey. I briefly checked TV but we cancelled cable, and the few american channels we get now were either not covering the event live, or their signals were being interfered with by the hurricane. I briefly tussled with the CNN iPad app before realizing it was not gonna cough up a live feed and deleting it. “#SandyTO” on twitter, for the local Toronto touch, was a little better signal-to-noise wise, but not much.

There’s no magic bullet for coverage of things like this (are there any things like this?), but I wound up liking The Star’s live blog. Perhaps any good liveblog would do. It’s good to have editors to sort out the junk from the live-tweet firehose, but also to have more frequent updates than the NYTimes was capable of – although in their defense, their power was probably out! (And sharks were attacking them maybe?)

Hopefully the worst is now over but wow – what a terrible spectacle. Images of NYC flooding and/or going dark belong in Roland Emmerich and/or Batman movies, not in real life.

Evidence of Viking Outpost Found in Canada

those wacky Vikings

G4 Canceling X-Play, Attack of the Show. Gaming Programming Nixed

How a Videogame God Inspired a Twitter Doppelgänger — and Resurrected His Career

re @PeterMolydeux

A guide to Steve Reich's music

via

For app developers, iPad mini presents more opportunity than challenge | The Verge

my biggest reservation about it is that the non-retina screen will feel like a step back.

How He-Man was revived as a mobile gaming hero

Why did no one tell me there’s a He-Man game on iOS?! Also, Polygon just graduated from section on The Verge to full-on web site, and it is pretty.

Review: Microsoft Surface Tablet

It sounds pretty neat.

How George Cope had his bell rung

More on the rejected Astral purchase by Bell. I still think this will (eventually) go through.

Picnicface: Why are we laughing?I don’t know, but it sure beats crying

On the Canadian sketch troupe’s floundering career post TV show cancellation. Really too bad, these guys are talented.

Mapping The Entertainment Ecosystems of Apple, Microsoft, Google & Amazon

(Via”)

An economy awash in oil

Colby Cosh argues against Peak Oil

Bell’s Astral bid blocked by CRTC

Wow

“Binders Full of Women:” 2012 and the Image Macro Election

Saoirse

http://distilleryimage5.instagram.com/7c8de48617a311e283e622000a1fb86d_7.jpg

Holy Motors Film Review

Put it this way: Eva Mendes appears in the film as a model in a burqa singing a lullaby to a naked man sporting a full-on boner, after he munches on her hair… and that’s perhaps the least interesting moment in this visionary, jaw-dropping spectacle. It’s the kind of bugfuck cliff-dive that’ll still be celebrated decades after most of 2012’s prestige awards-bait has been forgotten.

Lance Armstrong: It's Not About the Bike

“Armstrong didn’t just dope: he was the king—better at doping than he was at pretending to win bicycle races through grit and determination.”

When the Most Personal Secrets Get Outed on Facebook

Facebook has this thing where someone else (has to be a friend) can add you to a group without your permission. They should really not do that.

The Selfish Meme

“humans may get a neurochemical reward from sharing information, and a significantly bigger reward from disclosing their own thoughts and feelings than from reporting someone else’s.” (via)

Wookiee Bellydance + Klingon Band (Song in Wookiee)

thanks Tara

The Wire: The Musical with Michael Kenneth Williams

elaborate! with Omar, Snoop, Bubbles et al

Daring Fireball: Kindle Paperwhite

Touch interface and the non-backlight lighting sound good. But I’ve always worried about the lack of dedicated page turn buttons on touch Kindles.

XCOM is a gamble on a hardcore genre, and there is more riding on its success than you think

Everything I’ve heard about this is good. Might be the first console game I buy in months.

Shocktoberfest