Many an hour has been wittled away in front of a monitor playing video games. Indie games hold a special place in my heart. These are the games that don't get shelf space at Best Buy because they don't have the backing of a major studio. But none the less, they often better than the big studio games. Here's a list of 50 really good indie games. Some of my favorites that I've played: Darwinia (Made by the same guys who gave us the great hacker game Uplink and Defcon). Gish is an awesome platformer with unique gameplay. N has cost hours of productivity at work (Sorry boss). Tumiki Fighters is neat because it allows you to attach your defeated enemies to yourself and use their weapons. And Truck Dismount was a hit at the office for a few weeks. One of my favorite indie games that wasn't in the list is Hammerfall. Still version 0.2, but the game takes place in a beautiful steampunk universe and has some of the coolest gameplay I've seen. Play on Awesome kids! Just don't get caught at work.
Grettings from Commissioner Cool. Mayor Awesome has hired me to be in charge of the Department of Education here in Awesome Town. Summer is just about half over and kids will soon be getting Back to School. We encourage youngsters and adults alike to read a mother fucking book. R-E-A-D-A-B-O-O-K! is the name of our new educational video that we found on YouTube and totally ganked as our own. Hey I've only been on the job for like a day. What the heck do you expect? Just watch the video:
Dang, is it Friday already? Citizens of Awesoem Town know what that means. Time for another Critical Metrics Jukebox pick. This week it's Feist with her track "My Moon My Man." This song has been featured in commercials left and right. It's catchy and really shows off Feist's musical style. And on a personal note, I would mind taking it slow with Feist if I had half a chance. Rolling Stone says it best:
“Leslie Feist croons over bouncy piano on this seductive single from her third solo album. It's official: Feist is the most sultry and effortlessly cool Canadian person ever. Move over, Bryan Adams. ”
Good Firday to you all. This just in from the Awesome Town Juke Box over at Critical Metrics : Midlake's Roscoe. A great indie band from Texas, they've been infesting my playlist for weeks. Often times, I can't drive home from work without blasting this track out of the badass sound system in my Ford Focus. Check out their website here.
It's Friday kids so it's time for another Critical Metrics track.
Sebastien Tellier's track La Ritournelle is a gorgeous masterpiece of downtempo beats and airy vocals. I featured it in one of my rock climbing videos because of this (I'm the handsome one with the glasses). Sebastien's Frenchiness come out in all the right ways. A love song that only the French can come up with.
“A quite staggeringly beautiful piece of music; one to file in the "Unfinished Sympathy"/"Clubbed to Death" bracket. Beardy Frenchman Tellier has created a minor masterpiece--all piano riffs, violin sweeps and crisp drums, eventually culminating in a distinctive, very Gallic vocal snatch. One of the finest downtempo cuts for quite some time.”
Back again with our Friday feature Critical Metrics track. This week it's Poni Hoax's Budapest. This is one of those songs that I play over and over while hacking away at work. I mostly play it over and over because I can't get four minutes uninterruped and I need to hear this song all the way through. Incredibly sophisticated lyrics and tumbing bass makes this track great for coding or driving. AP's review sums it up best:
“Built on a pulsing electronic bass line and moved along by an increasingly dramatic arrangement, "Budapest" sounds like an entire spy thriller condensed into one five minute dance floor epic, with its swelling electronic strings and crashing guitars amping up the dramatic tension, and the distinct, urgent voice of guest vocalist Olga Kouklaki providing an additional jolt of eroticism and exoticism.”
An awesome addition to the discerning bachelor's playlist. Check out their MySpace page for more.
So we were kicking aound Awesome HQ, slamming Old Style and playing Pachinko when it hit me: We need a weekly music column. I've been tooling around Critical Metrics for a few weeks now and it's pretty much directed my music purchases eversince. These guys that run the site are playlist savants. Anytime I throw a party, I can just load up their top 100 songs and I can rest assured that all the ladies will want to get down. Awww yeah. So every Friday morning we'll link to our favorite tracks featured on Critical Metrics. Kicking off the series is CSS with Alala. Check out the song from Critical Metrics here. And below is the music video which pretty much sums up my thoughts on High School prom.
Here in Awesome Town, one of our community outreach programs deals specifically with home decor. We don't mess around with "Window Treatments" or frickin' teddy bears. No. When we want to decorate our homes we go all out. We say, "Damn that big wall needs something on it. I don't want a tiny little poster or Bob Marley smoking a joint. I graduated college for Christ's sake. I want a HUGE poster of Bob Marley smoking a joint. Heck to the yeah!." Well thankfully theres a piece of software that'll help us fully realize our wall-sized ambitions; enter the Rasterbator. Rasterbator will take an image and munge it for your printer so you can print out Gigantor sized images from your printer. A nice hack if you ask me. and if there's anything that Awesome Town appreciates, it's a nice hack.
Alright kids it's mother fuckin' business time. I've been away from the blog for far too long and way too much has happened. All of which will be elaborated upon in further posts. I got too busy being a bureaucrat and running Awesome town. We've added a few new employees to the administration most notable Commissioner Cool:
That's her in Awesome Town's armory. We don't fuck around in Awesome town (Click for a bigger picture).
But now it's business time and you know what business time means in Awesome town. That's right baby, two minutes in heaven is better than one minute in heaven:
Now I'm a big fan of air guitar. I've been known to use air guitar in regular conversation as a way to express agreement or more succinctly:" "Job well done on that presentation Homie, let us snag a beer and hit on that cute bartender that told me to fuck off that one time last week." Air guitar is a good way to introduce one's self to let the other person know just how awesome you are: "Hi, my name is Mayor Awesome. Dee duh deedle dee!" I guess it only makes sense that this form of self expression grow into other interests, such as sex. Lord knows it's been a while for the Mayor. I might just start taking up air sex:
In this clip from Tokyo Eye, otaky Patrick macias educates us about robot-mania in Japan:
I'm a big fan of building my own Gundam robots (Lotsa good pics there). I've got three done so far. But building my own robot would be way awesomer. And of course, <cliche>I for one welcome our robot overlords </cliche>
Some Americans are truly... American. Mayor Awesome salutes Elton and Betty White.
In the early 1980's, Betty was a more or less normal, married secretary in her late 50's/early 60's at a Little Rock law firm (allegedly working with Hillary Clinton) with a slight psychiatric problem for which she took medication. At some point, though, she stopped taking her medication and experienced a psychic and sexual renaissance of grandiose proportions: out with the husband and respectable job, in with the matching hot pink hair-do and spandex pants.
Elton, meanwhile, was a much younger (30 years younger, to be exact!) man renowned in Little Rock for his phenomenal basketball skills until the day he claims someone "put something in his drink." Elton met Betty in a homeless shelter, and it was love at first sight. The two were married and became notable Little Rock eccentrics, playing music all around town while sometimes delivering newspapers on the side. Elton ran for a seat in Congress, while Betty challenged Bill Clinton in an Arkansas gubernatorial race with the sole platform of lowering the age of consent to 14.
Makibishi is a neat little point and click game I stumbled upon. Basicly you click around and try to find "Dummy Dolls." The comic style is great and the parallax scrolling takes me back. Check it out.
I'll admit I don't believe in any higher power than the Flying Spaghetti Monster. I don't like to debate weather your God did this or my God did that. But here is a quote from a creationis that is pretty bone-headded if you ask me.
From Cosmic Variance here's one of the best creationist quotes ever. It's so good I had to share it:
One of the most basic laws in the universe is the Second Law of Thermodynamics. This states that as time goes by, entropy in an environment will increase. Evolution argues differently against a law that is accepted EVERYWHERE BY EVERYONE. Evolution says that we started out simple, and over time became more complex. That just isn’t possible: UNLESS there is a giant outside source of energy supplying the Earth with huge amounts of energy. If there were such a source, scientists would certainly know about it.
You should be laughing quite hard right now. I know I was. The funny thing is that this person is exactly right about his science. Life on Earth couldn't function without some giant influx of energy. We'd die a cold, lonely death without it (just like the universe will eventually). But we fortunately do have energy coming in, and us scientists do indeed know about it (as does everyone else on the planet).
