All you Wii (and/or Nintendo in general) apologists? Here's a homework exercise. Find me a store in the South Bay area that has a playable Wii kiosk. I'll give you a headstart, Best Buy and Target just have a DVD running with a fake Wii encased in plastic. Toys-R-Us didn't even bother with the fake Wii and just ran the DVD on a LCD monitor.See, I'm curious as to whether Karin will like the Wii, and I have my doubts about the whole crazy remote control thing. So I want to find a place where Karin and I can check out an actual Wii game. I ran across several PS3 demo kiosks today (but didn't care) and every place I went had a 360 kiosk of course. But nobody has playable Wii's. I guess if you're on the fence about the Wii then Nintendo just doesn't want your business :-) Oh and that DVD? It explains how you can put the remote on your head, or on your HIP in order to hula dance. If at this point your brain explodes as you cry "What game is THAT?" - well I can't help you. Apparently it's a game that you can only get if your Wii is secretly just a DVD player.The obvious gap here is that I didn't try a Gamestop or an Electronics Boutique. But my entire time in the industry I got pummeled over how the presence in a boutique store didn't matter - how it was all about Toys-R-Us and Wal-mart. So even if the gaming stores have a playable one I still mark it as a marketing failure. But I'll go check it out, so let me know if that's the trick.So far I've heard several confirmations of the Penny Arcade thesis: It's a great party game system but that's all it's good for. I know of one local couple where one person says it's great fun. It's SUCH fun that she's played it in the office but at home? Still haven't plugged the Wii in. Well I'm sold!

technorati tags:Nintendo, Wii, demo, kiosk

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Christmas is a conundrum for me. I hate the mall all the time, but I make a special point of avoiding it between Thanksgiving and Christmas. There's a lot about Christmas that I really, really love, but there's a lot that I truly effin' hate. And there's probably no better summation of that than Christmas music. You can't quite get in the holiday mood without it, but when it's bad it's so very, very bad. Even touch a store right now (even the grocery store) and you get cancer of the ear just from the saccharine pouring in from every speaker. What to do?

My iPod has 65 tracks in the "Holiday genre", and none of them give me that cavity-inducing sickly sweetness. Here's a playlist - if your holiday tunes are lacking give them a spin. If you've got your own favorite holiday album give it a shoutout down in the comments!

Barenaked Ladies - Barenaked for the Holidays (Amazon)

Dr. Demento - Dr. Demento Presents: Greatest Christmas Novelty CD (Amazon)

They Might Be Giants - Holidayland (Amazon)

Misc - Santastic Holiday Boots 4 Your Stockings (direct download)

Misc - 8 bits of Christmas (direct download)

The Waitresses - Christmas Wrapping (I just bought this individual track from iTunes.)

I don't claim these are the best holiday songs ever, these are just the ones that stay on my iPod from year to year. My "Actual Music" playlist omits the "Holiday" genre, so they rest idle until I marshall them for battle when the tree gets decorated the day after Thanksgiving. In particular I just ordered Sarah McLachlan's Wintersong (Amazon) and that will probably get added to the roster as this year's addition. But these are all worth listening to, and honestly? If you can listen to the 8 bits of Christmas and not smile? You can't be my friend anymore. For reals.

As for the grocery store? Hit it with your headphones on and good holiday music blazing. Maybe you'll lose some of that finer high-range hearing but at least you'll avoid the cancer of the ear . . . .

technorati tags:Christmas, holiday, music

Blogged with Flock

If menus are too antiquated for you, try something more avant-garde with cult favorite, Quicksilver (Mac only). With the “Social Bookmarks” plugin, your bookmarks and tags are just a few keystrokes away. Here’s how to set it up:

Easier access to del.icio.us bookmarks » LifeClever ;-)

This is awesome, very powerful. I find del.icio.us being called "social bookmarking" a bit misleading because I don't really give a damn about the social aspect. But taggable bookmarks are very powerful. I still wobble back and forth between Flock and Firefox as my default browser, but the primary draw to Flock is the fact that the antiquidated "Favorites" hierarchical list is replaced by del.icio.us. Got a link that is worth saving, and it is simultaneously an OS X tip, a Getting Things Done hack, and a software package? You can't file that in all three places in Firefox. But you can tag it with all three tags and store it in del.icio.us forever.

But now, it turns out you can access del.icio.us from Quicksilver. Perfection! Quicksilver is always running anyway, and that makes my del.icio.us tagged store operate just like a folder on my harddrive. Very cool. If you use a Mac, you should use Quicksilver. And if you're using del.icio.us and Quicksilver than this plugin turns them into delicious chocolate and peanut butter. Enjoy!

(If you're a Windows user the full article also has a suggested app for putting a del.icio.us menu in your system tray. Ho-hum, but better than nothing I suppose.)

technorati tags:OS_X, software, Quicksilver, Del.icio.us

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It's been two weeks since my last post. Shameful.

The funny thing is that there's a weird point where I have too much to talk about. When that happens I basically freeze up and post nothing. This is one of those times. So I'm posting a quick and dirty post - just to break the logjam.

I just watched the latest episode of The Show with Zefrank, and the ad at the end was a perfect storm of bloggable points. See, The Show always ends with a static ad image. On the one hand it pays the bills, and on the other hand it fetches the ad image from a remote server. This allows some accurate usage statistics - not just who downloaded it, but who watched to the end. Anyway, the last few days have been ads for Gametap. Today's ad featured Jade from Beyond Good and Evil (for old school HiddenJestering see my BGaE review here, apparently RIGHT after I converted to MovableType (going by sequence number - it's number 6!) For bonus points see Bwana carping about playing old games in the comments. Some things never change :-D)

So yeah anyway. Why is this a perfect storm of bloggable points? Well, we discussed Beyond Good and Evil on this very blog. And there was a lot of discussion about game rentals and whether it was destroying the industry - but some of it either happened in email, or on somebody else's blog - I can't find the origin point on the Snarking (neé Sniping) Post. See here, here, and me being fucking snarky here for some mainly comment-based dialog about game rentals and whether it is a true danger. I'm mostly a smart-ass about it, but there was some genuine good discussion about it, and in my opinion it holds up in review. At that second link you can actually see me reference the service that later became Gametap (or it was always Gametap and I didn't know the name then. Not sure which.) So anyhoo, it struck me when I saw a Gametap ad featuring Jade - here's the mythical other channel advertising how they have a game that should have done better than it did. Since I've contended all this time that the other channels are there and the publishers will find them as soon as they actually care (read they need the $$$), it was heartwarming to see that Gametap may actually be maturing into that channel.

technorati tags:gaming

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Is here. I'm not sure that I really have high hopes for the movie itself, but the trailer made me chuckle. (I saw it on Chris Roberson's site.)

technorati tags:simpsons, movie

Blogged with Flock