Perhaps you’ve heard of it?
My GTA4 review is now live over at Green Pixels. Spoiler alert: It’s really good. Oh, you don’t think so? Well, why don’t you drop a note in the review’s comments to that effect.
New How-To: Roll Your Own GarageBand Loops
Got a new How-To up over at Mac|Life, regarding GarageBand loops and the creation thereof. Hope you find it useful. Comments off here, please comment there!
More of the Ol’ Ultraviolence
[originally published in The Official U.S. PlayStation Magazine, Issue #105, June 2006]
Last month I touched on the enormous (and heated, and probably eternal) debate about the significance of violence in videogames. It’s not an easy argument to resolve; on one side you have gamers and game makers defending their hobbies and livelihoods, if not their very identities. On the other are a group of concerned citizens honestly believing — however erroneously — that they are protecting the innocent from nefarious forces.
You know what I do for a living, so you can probably guess which side I come down on. I know — from longtime, extensive, personal experience — that videogames do not turn otherwise conscientious, reasonably well-adjusted individuals into slavering, murderous social deviants. It just doesn’t happen. If it did, you and I and just about everyone we know would be in jail.
Furthermore, we can be reasonably assured that the vast majority of the slavering, murderous social deviants of history had very little exposure to videogames. Linear time’s a bitch, baby.
So why all the hubbub? Continue reading “More of the Ol’ Ultraviolence”
And Now, a Story
Back in the day, when my dad was still working funerals regularly, occasionally they would get a family from Brecksville who wanted to have the funeral mass at St. Basil the Great.
Originally, this church was right next to Bosa’s Donuts, right down on 82, just east of Brecksville Rd. (It’s since moved to a newer, bigger location.) Occasionally, after setting everything up for the funeral, the gentlemen would duck out for a quick cup of coffee and a donut at Bosa’s.
One day, my dad and two employees headed over to refresh themselves. They all sat down at the counter, and the young, adorably cute waitress came up to take their orders.
“What will it be today, guys?” she asks.
“Hmm,” says the one employee. “I’ll take a cup of coffee, but I’m not really feeling like a donut today. What else do you have?”
“Well, we’ve got bagels, English muffins, and toast.”
“What kind of toast?”
“White, wheat, rye, raisin…”
“Oh, raisin toast. That sounds great. I haven’t had raisin toast since I don’t know when. I’ll take that.”
So this cute waitress turns to Employee Number Two. “How about you, honey?”
“You know,” he says, “raisin toast actually sounds really good. I’ll have that too.”
So this adorable waitress turns to my dad. “And what about you, sweetie? Is yours raisin too?”
And my dad, without skipping a beat, says, “No, but it’s quivering a little.”
Taking Back the News
Let me ask you a question: When was the last time you saw something positive on the news? And I mean something genuinely positive — not “Muffy the Wonder Pony Turns 100” or some other treacly crap. When was the last time you saw a true story of courage, or nobility, or kindness…or at least one that wasn’t blatantly sensationalist and opportunistic?
Yeah, me either.
That wouldn’t bother me so much if I weren’t confronted by ordinary goodness every single day. I look at CNN or Yahoo News or the local paper and I think, “The real world isn’t like that. Things are not this bad. They just aren’t.”
Do bad things happen in the world? Yes, of course. Sure they do. They happen all the time. But they aren’t the only thing happening, and they aren’t even the most common thing. Humans are, by and large, good people. The problem is, our brain is wired in such a way that only the exceptions stand out. Which means that only the exceptions are “newsworthy.” Continue reading “Taking Back the News”