Sky High in the Video Game Industry

Sorry to be so tardy in my weekend post, but I had a long night and wasn't able to start working on this post until around midnight because I had to handle things for my move to Austin this Saturday. The title of the post is another lame attempt to connect two topics. I saw Sky High today with my little cousin (who I've been babysitting all weekend) and it was better than I thought it would be. The PG rating was only warranted for the love storylines and so have no fear bringing a kid along because it's very child-oriented with themes of friendship and heroism as well as a fun story. There was corny stuff here and there but it was easily bearable and surprisingly enjoyable to watch. It wasn't as good as The Incredibles of course but I give it a B- anyway. There were clearly underdevelopments and ambiguities in certain characters as well as a couple of minor plotholes. Gamesutra has a pretty cool article about big guys in the video game industry reminiscing about their first jobs. It's a great read for those of you interested in making video games someday. I hope to someday have a story like those to tell, but I doubt it'll be in games because despite the optimism of those tales it's quite hard to get a decently paying job in making games. Still, they're cool to read.

I'm going to start out the nerd news by continuing the video game topic. A new psychological study has determined that violent video games actually make their players more aggressive. My stance is that it probably does do that in some capacity, but that has to be offset by good child-rearing. A popular blogger, Mark Cuban, has made the bold claim that Blogger contains the most splogs, or spam loaded blogs. Google has added a feature to prevent spam comments, but they haven't made very many strides in removing splogs. Hopefully change will come soon. Those crafty Japanese have created an automatic door that conforms to the shape of your body to reduce the amount of outside pollens and such that come inside and the amount of a/c that goes out. Anyone else noticing the trend of indie music coming to the forefront? Namely, it's making a big wave on the Internet and is understandably eager to keep this territory free from proprietary music (i.e. big labels' pollution). Lastly, it looks like big-screen tvs are on a steady decline in prices, which means that more people like you and me can afford them! They're still pricey, but becoming more affordable for the middle class.

The movie news is extremely thin, which is good because I've been distracted several times during this post and I'm now ready to sleep. The 40-Year-Old Virgin reigned supreme at the box office with $20.6 million, which is weaker than I had expected but it was enough for it to take the lead at least and hopefully word of mouth will follow (ala Wedding Crashers). Red Eye, another big opener, managed to get second place with just over $16 million. I was impressed that Wedding Crashers and March of the Penguins held on to 4th place after so long. We now know that Christopher Nolan's next projects are The Exec and The Prestige, likely in that order but no relation to each other except that they're both written by his brother, Jonathan Nolan. It'll be tough to follow up Batman Begins, but if anyone can do it it's him. Lastly, we have a candid picture of Woody Allen on the set of his next project, which is currently still quite elusive but hopefully will be good.

Now for some Unconscious Mutterings to close it up:

I say ... and you think ... ?

1. Fan::Heat
   
2. Scum::Bag
   
3. Lily::Flowers
   
4. Humid::Houston
   
5. Ghetto::Lauryn Hill (it reminds me of a song of hers)
   
6. Remember me?::Eminem (again, there's a song relation)
   
7. Polished::Brass
   
8. Compose::Letter
   
9. Squish::Gooey
   
10. Future::Tomorrow