Hate it, or "Love" this guilty pleasure
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"Love and Other Disasters"  is no "Breakfast at Tiffany's," and Brittany Murphy -- hard to  imagine that this needs to be said -- is no Audrey Hepburn. The  romantic comedy is piled high with irritants and  superficialities, and finds too many occasions to let you know  how clever it thinks it is.
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I look at Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas about the same way I might view gorgeous graffiti painted on my front door. No matter how artistic this game might be, I do not welcome it.
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A TIME critic's take on the cantankerous director of MASH and other sprawling social comedies
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The temptation is overwhelming. Go ahead, admit it. You&#39;re fighting it as you read this. You are thinking this series is over.
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Mike Elgan reports on a device that lets you rat out fellow movie-goers for being annoying.
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If you're a regular user of Twitter you're probably quite familiar with this image.  They've tried lots of variants, making it funny, or cute, with pictures of LOL Cats, doing cute things with screw drivers, but the pictures aren't funny for long, the more you see them, the more tiresome they get. Then I had an idea they could be used for a good cause.  Yeah that does it!
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There's been a mostly fantastic discussion about fair use in this neighborhood for the last few days.  It started when a photograph of Lane Hartwell's was used in a video spoof of the Billy Joel song "We Didn't Start the Fire."  The first I heard of this was in a Twitter post of hers where she said she was turning off access to her entire Flickr collection because this picture was used without permission. A series of communications with the people who did the video resulted in the video being taken down. Later Mike Arrington, who is a lawyer, wrote a piece saying she didn't have right on her side, and that the video's use of her picture was probably fair use. I found Mike's piece compelling. Others took offense. It thought it was a useful part of the discussion. I understand Ms Hartwell's point of view. I hate it when people copy a whole post of mine and paste it into theirs. But then I grab bits of images and put them on my blog and people rarely complain. The blogosphere is built on being loose about copyright and fair use.  I'm doing a deal with a content company and all these issues are coming up. We haven't been able to write a contract that covers all the things they want covered and make it possible for me to do what I need to do, and they want my product to work. It's a real mess we're in. Bloggers are supposed to be radicals when it comes to fair use and copyright, but that generalization doesn't work with many creative people. Hartwell's position in some ways is like the RIAA or MPAA, who bloggers often dismiss as clueless. How can we have it both ways? How can some defend her position yet not defend the entertainment industry? There's a lot to discuss here, and a lot of the discussion on the blogs has been informative and respectful. Not all of it, but to an unusually high degree.  So, I am interested in doing an in person "flash conference" on the subject of fair use in a few weeks. I'd say next week if it weren't Christmas. Most conferences are so boring. I want to do a conf on a hot subject when it's still hot in the blogosphere. This may be a good subject for such a quickly organized conference. What do you think of the flash conference idea for this??
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If everyone loves a winner, does that mean everyone hates a loser? Not necessarily.
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Everyone loves a winner. Does that mean everyone hates a loser?
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Tycho:  In case you are wondering, cats apparently need regular maintenance, like cars.  And, like an oil change, this juicing process can be done (I'm told) at home, preferably with the curtains drawn and a couple inches of sawdust laid down.  That's right: you can wring out your own cat's asshole.  This is the kind of helpful information you can expect when you visit Penny Arcade.  Don't everybody run home at once.    I've been playing a lot of Prism on the DS, even though the Zelda cartridge seems to squeal as I remove it.  I understand there's some kind of Ghost Ship?  I forget all of my cares, and also the cares of Princess Zelda, once those beams begin to refract.    They've ginned up some ridonculous crap about light eating space monsters to support their gameplay, which is very solid, and requires no extraterrestrial photophiles.  It's a puzzle game.  When I put pieces of a puzzle together, I never think about how alone each piece must feel, longing only to congregate with similarly knobbed partial images.  So, discard that.  Discard also the truly nasty presentation, no doubt a result of hard time done in already the Mobile and PC Casual markets.  Part these imperfections like tall savannah grass, and gaze into the game's rich core:  the creation of sometimes very complex circuits.     Inside each puzzle grid, the player is given some combination of Light Emitting Entities, Reflective Mirrors, Splitters, or Prisms.  You must jigger the aforementioned until light of the correct colors is distributed to targets around the edge of the field.  That's it, and the fun comes from how complicated this process can become.  There are quite a few cooperative puzzles as well - where each player has access to half the grid, and they must work together to route everything.  If you try this mode - and I request that you do so, as you only need one (1) cartridge and a willing accomplice - I recommend that you each turn your DS sideways, so that the UI is along the bottom.  That will make it so that "left" and "right" and "up" and "down" all mean the same thing to each of you.  Trust me, you want this.  The game is hard enough without the horror of fully relative terms.    Prism actually taught me something fairly significant about why I play games, and I think it's because the gameplay is so clean and the presentation so spartan that I could pick up on it.  I like games that generate communication.  This is why team-based shooters, roleplaying games, and tactical games are my delight - every one of these entails a suite of custom language to describe it, they require constant dialogue, and, most importantly, all other things being equal these games can be won by the efficient use of language.  Working out puzzles together in Prism has a strong logic component, but in large part the challenge was communicating ethereal notions succinctly.    I suppose this is also why I torment you here, thrice weekly: even when playing a game by myself, I am harvesting the experience so that it may be reconstituted here.  So, thank you for reading.  You dignify my leisure hours.          The Playstation 3 in the office has been more than acceptable for playing the sometimes short, often bad games that have arrived on it - but this holiday, with the titles to prove out the claim, I had to "get mine" in the bawdy parlance of the young.  What tipped my hand wasn't the four hundred dollar system on offer, rather, it was the three hundred and seventy nine dollar model.  These are probably mostly a mail order proposition, but any of those rare twenty gig models the platform launched with got bumped down by the new price.  It's inexpensive by PS3 standards, but it's positively cheap for a Blu-Ray device.  Now fully franchised, flexing all the rich benefits of Sony citizenship, you may expect me to be even more brutal in my critique.
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Steven Soderbergh's latest film is the ultimate guilty pleasure.
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Sure, it's old and revered -- but it's also critically flawed. Consider ignoring it.
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F-bombs away! Fans of open-mic celebrity blunders rejoice!â¦
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From ringtones to bloglets to short-blast video games, today's amusements comes in bite-size morsels. A tasty Wired magazine report on instant entertainment.
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Horror movies have a right to be tacky. Good taste really shouldn&#39;t cross anybody&#39;s mind while determining the swift arc of an ax or a cool trajectory for blood to spray. But if you&#39;re looking for ...
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Tycho:  I watched this video myself on Friday, and then watched it again, and then watched it a third time when Khoo came in - providing commentary throughout, which I'm almost certain was unwelcome.  I urge you not to watch the embedded, nasty  version over at GameVideos, but to take advantage of their "Download" or "Watch Larger Version" options.  This way, you can obsess as I have - pausing on each screen of the character generator or battle interface, drinking deep of their  forbidden texts.  (CW)TB
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Isn't it "funny" how something can "really annoy" you for ages and then you discover via "the Internet" that the same thing "really annoys" thousands of "other people," too?