Angry Robot

Been digging through some classic Mr Show bits of late, and this is one of them.

Spelling is important

Why I Quit Instagram

“And so I quit Instagram on principle. Because I’m tired of contributing to the commodification of my own existence. I’m not a pork belly, or a barrel of oil. I’m tired of clicking on agree, when I vehemently oppose. I’m tired of saying yes, when I want to say no.” (via)

‘Challenge’ proposal would see amateur teams vie for Stanley Cup

what a bizarre but great proposal. Here’s the website.

New Feed, Robot Robot, and My Daughter's Site

Site news time!

Item the first: I have been wanting to do this for some time and only recently figured out how to do it. I’ve fixed the RSS feed so that the links’ links are links. I.e., when you click an item in the RSS feed and it’s a link rather than a blog post, it will take you to the external page rather than the link’s Angry Robot permalink page. I just tripled your productivity! If I’m posting on average three times a day, and you consider reading the internet productive… actually if anything, I’ve probably damaged your productivity.

If this doesn’t seem like a big deal, please ignore! It’s just one of those things that should work a certain way and I’ve never been able to do it right because I’m a half-assed web nerd at best.

Whether this is working RIGHT NOW in your RSS reader depends on what feed URL you are using. If you don’t know, you should use this one: Angry Robot Canonical RSS Feed. The Feedburner address should theoretically still work OK, for as long as Feedburner is still around, which may not be that long.

Thanks to Ram for the help with that.

Item the second: apparently some of you philistines prefer to get your Web Site Blog New Posting News Item Posts inserted into your Twitter, whatever that is. So use this! Angry Robot Blog Twitter Account. This faithful parrot-bot will tweet the shit out of whatever gets posted here, proper-style.

UPDATE The Twitter bot is already all mixed up and is posting bad links. I’ll look into it but in the meantime, don’t expect too much from the poor bastard.

Item the third: because I love my faithful readers too much to smother you in a constant stream of baby pictures, my lady and I have vowed to only post them in a dedicated spot (no, not landfill). That place is here. Follow that.

OK let me sneak in one pic then:

The Basement

“Somewhere in Portland, there’s a very old building, and that very old building has a very, very old basement. An incredible basement, a video-game-level basement, a set-decorator’s dream basement.”

On Douchebags [PDF]

I’ve been uncharacteristically curious about what a hipster actually is and this 2009 essay does as good a job as I have yet seen in defining something more nebulous than most things (cf. hipster relativity).

  <blockquote>        <p>I would argue that hipsterism is  a natural and inevitable <br /> backlash against the universalizing forces of capitalism and, <br /> more specifically, advertising. The work of the market is to <br /> widen, to broaden, to debase; to make a product available <br /> (and appealing) to as many people as possible. The hipster is <br /> the latest iteration of a long intellectual tradition which seeks <br /> always to sharpen, to restrict, and to heighten, and which in the <br /> process, invariably fetishes the obscure, the enigmatic, and the <br /> absurd.</p>   </blockquote>

The 25 Funniest AutoCorrects Of 2012

pretty goddamn funny. I’m sure some are fake (especially those with moms), but it doesn’t wreck the joke. Thanks Y!

The best films of 2012 – The A.V. Club

I’ve only seen six of these. Sigh – I miss seeing movies.

“Zero Dark Thirty:” Perception, reality, perception again, and “the art defense”

counterpoint to the Greenwald take on Zero Dark Thirty I posted earlier.

Buffeted by the Web, but Now Riding It

On Brian Lam’s site Wirecutter, which I like. It doesn’t go after page view-based ad money but relies on Amazon affiliate lucre, which makes sense for a product recommendation site.

Explore

New to me. “A discovery engine for meaningful knowledge, fueled by cross-disciplinary curiosity.”

Why your DNA is a goldmine for marketers

I thought this didn’t have anything to do with my type of marketing until this sentence: “The study also found that “likings for specific products seemed to be genetically related: chocolate, mustard, hybrid cars, science-fiction movies and jazz.”” So now I know how to sell ‘Space Dijon Meets the Chocolatier from Electronia: The Bebop Experience’.

The Web We Lost – Anil Dash

Amen.

I love you, dad

Minecraft creator Notch talks about his father

Toddler Leaders Call For Increased Duck Visibility

Alan Sepinwall on the origins of 'Lost'

The development process had been tumultuous and rushed. It had cost more than any TV pilot had before. And it was, to everyone’s surprise, worth every penny and bit of stress, because it was great.

Bungie co-founder Alex Seropian is developing a 1st person sci-fi shooter for iOS, called Morning Star

“Our totally unreasonable goal is to completely change the expectations core gamers have for their mobile games”

Zero Dark Thirty: new torture-glorifying film wins raves

Bigelow’s latest contains a scene where a waterboarded prisoner gives up crucial bin Laden info, which didn’t happen. Shame. (thanks, Y!)

24 hours of discomfort, comedy, and discomfort-comedy with Tim Heidecker of The Comedy

Weird AV Club feature where they get someone to pretend-program a day-long movie marathon. Interesting though, if you’re a Tim & Eric fan, and especially so if you’ve seen “The Comedy”, which I recommend.

The New Console Wars

Interesting article on International Hobo, The Console Wars are Over

The notion of a Console War depends upon the need for dedicated devices that directly compete for the same pool of money. But it’s already the case that the only part of the home consoles that is unique to them is the controller, which is the cheapest part of the whole deal. Ship a Smart TV with a twin sticks gamepad and a one month trial of a cloud gaming service and see what happens… Even if no-one tries to bite that apple, the idea that Apple isn’t already taking a bite out of the console market is absurd.

Bateman rightly points out that “The Console Wars” are a construct. I’m not sure they were created on purpose by the industry, or whether they were a byproduct of how journalism covers business and tech. But I share his sense of their impending demise as Apple’s forces pour over the battlefield, to continue a metaphor well past its point of usefulness.

I wrote earlier in Portagame that iOS and to a lesser extent Android would destroy the market for portable game systems, and I think what I wrote there holds true (the 3DS is selling ok, but the Vita is in trouble). Bateman points out that the iPad alone is likely damaging the home console market:

Nintendo’s Wii – putatively the winner of the last round of the Console Wars – sold 97 million units over 6 years. Apple’s iPad has sold 84 million units in just 2.5 years, and about three quarters of those people use their iPad to play games.

But what would happen if Apple actually tried to dominate the consoles? I don’t mean building by dedicated games hardware, but making a generalized computing device for big-screen, living room use that just so happens to play games too.

Nintendo has just shipped its new console, WiiU. Sony and Microsoft have yet to announce their new hardware, but smart money is on fall 2013. The games industry tends to pre-announce far in advance, so such consoles would likely be announced at E3 in June 2013.

Even if all Apple did was open the current AppleTV up to third party developers, they could take the wind out of an entire industry. If they changed the hardware model (an actual TV set, or a dedicated controller of some kind), things would go even further. Whatever it is, they would announce it, and start shipping it, sometime between E3 and the ship date of the new Sony and Microsoft consoles. Invite a couple big developers on stage – Rockstar and Square Enix, say (who already both release their games on iOS), or Epic (what did happen to Infinity Blade: Dungeons, anyway?) – you know the drill.

Rumours have it that Microsoft will release 2 next-gen Xbox models, and one will be a cheap model dedicated to video streaming and casual games. That sounds like an AppleTV competitor all right, so perhaps they see this coming. The war continues in a whole new form.

The ‘Mad Men’ Economic Miracle

on the business model of cable TV

Baldur's Gate for iPad is here

very excited to try this game

Why Liability Is Limited: A Primer on New Copyright Damages as File Sharing Lawsuits Head To Canada

they are definitely suing people but probably for a lot less than you might think.

The Insourcing Boom

via