It’s that time, again—time to honor the “best” or perhaps the “most well-marketed to Academy voters” movies from the previous year with the 84th annual Academy Awards ceremony. Once again, Lyssa Spero (@CinemaGoddess on Twitter) and I (@trishalynn) will be your hosts for this live blog, with perhaps a few more of the GeekingOutAbout writers will be chiming in.
And now, let’s get on with the show! Continue reading “Live-blogging the Oscars 2012”
I know it’s been a while since I’ve written in this blog, and quite a lot has happened since the last time I was able to work on it. A few more responsibilities were added to my day job and while having the increased responsibility is awesome because it means my new employers trust me, it also means that I don’t have a lot of time to geek out over anything.
Saturdays are one of my days to relax, recuperate, and psych myself up for the work week to come. After wiping my FemShep original Mass Effect character in order to start a DudeShep run for the Commander Shepherd challenge, I got to Feros after surveying all the surveyable planets (and leveling up again) and decided that I’d take a break and perhaps pick it up tomorrow.
I also wanted to check and see if my friend Harris “Dr. Nerdlove” O’Malley had posted the article to which I contributed a bit of writing, and knowing how way leads on to way on the Internet, a review of his very popular article on why Twilight is a horrible example to draw upon for pictures of healthy relationships lead me down the rabbit hole onto a commenter’s blog entries about how she lost her faith in God…
…and reminded me of the Victoria Bitter/Jordan Wood fiasco. Continue reading “Trisha’s Take: How to apologize on the Internet”
There have been many great things to come out of the invention of Twitter, and one of those things is the fact that Joe and Jane Average Geek can have a closer relationship to the celebrities they admire. Of course, sometimes what happens as a result of those Twitter conversations occurs in a completely unpredictable way, and the result can be something rather spectacular.
Take screenwriter Josh A. Cagan (@joshacagan) for example. One minute, he’s noodling around on Twitter, the next he’s starting a friendship with Adam Savage from “Mythbusters,” after that comes an appearance at the inaugural w00tstock shows, and just recently, a script he sold last year was on the 2011 Hollywood Blacklist of the year’s “most liked” spec scripts.
But as Lowell Greenblatt and I found out during our interview with him, Cagan’s life and career has had its low points, too:
Continue reading “Geekly Speaking About interviews Josh A. Cagan”
Samsung Chromebook Series 5
Manufactured by Samsung
Operating System by Google
While you’re reading this, you are probably sitting at your computer desk, a half-finished drink at your side. Or maybe you’re in a car or on a bus or another wheeled vehicle, your smartphone or your tablet in one hand. And you’d think that was pretty amazing, right? Imagine how I feel as I type this, approximately 37,000 feet in the air somewhere over Wayne, South Dakota.
I’m able to perform what Stephen King called one of the best magic tricks in the world thanks to Virgin America and their partnership with Google and Gogo, wherein if you check out a Chromebook at a select airport and are going to another participating airport, you can use their in-flight wireless Internet for free while you test-drive their product. It’s an ingenious bit of marketing, mostly because everyone likes free Internet, right?
Hit the website above to look at the technical specs or even this Engadget review if you want to get down to the nitty gritty. What I’d like to talk about is how this mini-laptop or maxi-netbook feels to use on a plane and whether or not it’s worth it.
First off, I’m lucky to be sitting near the window with someone I know next to me because the only way I’m able to type as fast as I normally do without jamming my seatmate in the elbow is by putting the ‘book on one side of the fold-down tray. However this did also mean that my seatmate had to type on his full-sized laptop with his elbow in the air. I’m also having a problem with the size of the text on the screen in the Chrome browser. Even after I just changed the settings, only one of the tabs I had open had the font at a readable size; the rest were at their default. Changing the Search button into a Capslock button takes some fooling around with the settings, but its doable; meanwhile, there is no Delete or Home key.
We were asked not to look at streaming video on the flight, so I didn’t get a chance to test out how it felt watching a movie or some YouTube clips. However, I’m pleased to note that even with some pausing to eat a bit, I still have about 71% of a battery left and there’s perhaps an hour or two left in my flight to New York City.
The Bottom Line: If I had $500 to spend and I wanted something that was easy to carry around for casual browsing and long plane trips or subway trips, would I get a Chromebook? Probably not; having also played with a first-generation iPad while waiting for this very flight, I think I liked how easy it was to use and change its readability settings than this ‘book. But I’m sure that there’s someone else out there who’ll appreciate this machine.
It’s the end of another calendar year, and I thought it was the perfect opportunity for me to start working on the podcasts again, starting with some episodes that slipped through the cracks. This was recorded towards the end of May and marked the anniversary of this site being up; hence, the name of the episode.
There’s not much more I can say about this, so let’s get to the show notes, hmm?
And that’s another episode in the can! Next up will hopefully be more interviews from the New York Comic Con as well as a special interview that we’re recording this week on Wednesday. If you have any feedback or questions about anything we talked about, please let us know in the comments.
In the ongoing debate on whether or not video games can be art, one of the lynchpins is that art is supposed to have or reflect a statement about the world, pose questions about it, and elicit reactions to it. There are major releases like Heavy Rain which embody this type of marriage between video game, philosophy, and art, but that doesn’t mean that an indie developer can’t join in the fun as well.
Alexei Andreev of Bent Spoon Games is one such developer who over 11 months, starting last January conceptualized and released his very first game called Girl with a Heart Of. As noted in the press release, Andreev hopes that with his game, he can get people to think about what it means to be human and whether or not you can transcend it. It has a lofty goal, but we here at Geeking Out About wanted to see if he was able to achieve it. With review copies in hand, co-editor Jill Pullara and staff writer Jonathan Cherlin journeyed along with main character Raven to the city of Underfoot, and here’s what they had to say (with many spoilers) about the game:
Continue reading “Geekly Speaking About… “Girl with a Heart Of””
Due to having gotten hired full-time by the place I’d been temping for all summer, I was only able to go to the New York Comic Con for two days instead of four this year. As a result, I had to carefully pick and choose which panels I attended, making sure that nothing overlapped too much and that I had ample time to get from one panel room to the next before the official start time.
The very first panel I attended on Saturday was for Womanthology, a highly successful Kickstarter-funded project whose aim is to bring more attention to writers and artists who want to create comics by pairing up new and unproven talent with other creators who have already been working in the industry. The unique part about this project is that all of the creators involved are female.
I’m pleased that I was able to get in to see this panel, and when you listen to the audio, you may understand why as well. Show notes after the jump:
Continue reading “Geekly Speaking About Presents… The Womanthology Panel at NYCC 2011″
Once again, Geeking Out About was at the New York Comic Con, which was held at the Javits Center in New York City. Our review of the show will be uploaded later, but for now I’d like to present to you some highlights from how I spent my Saturday and Sunday. Complete information and links can be found below:
Continue reading “Geekly Speaking About… “Voices from New York Comic Con” Part 1″
If you’ve been listening to our “Geekly Speaking About…” podcasts, you’ve probably heard co-editor Jillian Pullara and me talking about Commander Shepard from the Mass Effect series of games from Bioware. While she’s mostly played the PC game version and I rocked the Xbox 360 version, we both have a similar sensibility towards the main character in that we think she totally kicks ass. Lowell Greenblatt also loves playing Commander Shepard and thinks that he’s got a real compelling story to tell.
But the problem between us is that our Commander Shepards are different genders. And that got us to thinking: Could playing the character in the Bioware game as the opposite of your preferred gender change your perception of the game?
Reference links and show notes, after the jump:
Continue reading “Geekly Speaking About… “The Commander Shepard Challenge””
[Editor’s Note: Many thanks to Lauren at Kid Champ for letting me borrow her “Thundertome” idea for this review series. – TL]
When I first got my Android-enabled phone, I searched for something to read on it during a long 45 minute subway commute. A Google search for “free ebooks” took me to Google Books and their app, and I downloaded two books by Jane Austen, one I’d never read before (Sense and Sensibility), and one I’ve read so very many times over the years: Pride and Prejudice.
The first time I read Pride and Prejudice was outside of a school context, and while the text was somewhat unwieldy to me, I really loved the story of these two mismatched lovers who have to get over themselves before they can really appreciate each other and fall in love. Over the years, I’ve read the book hundreds of times, and I was looking forward to reading it all over again. As I turned the pages on the touch screen with my thumbs, the finer details of the story sunk deeper into my brain and I began to gain a new appreciation for the story. Which, of course, lead to my next thought: How can I read more? Continue reading “Two Books Enter: An Assembly Such as This versus A Wife for Mr. Darcy“