Matter, Energy, and Life of Michaela A. Castello.

Tag: geek.culture

  • Meet Summer and Zoe

    Even though I’ve been building computers since somewhere around Windows 95, Tess was my first torrid affair. In 2005’s nether summer between high school and college, Jason and I researched components, ordered them from Newegg, and built cutting-edge sister machines. Between her hardware and my Windows customizations, Tess was the hottest computer in Erickson West, if…

  • Here’s the Windup

    We’ve got our second test on Monday, so this week I’ve been more and more occupied with studying and preparing for that. In other words, I’m going to be less busy starting this coming Tuesday. Last week our good friend Kyle (formerly of this now-defunct blog, currently with no internet home sans Facebook) made good…

  • Lego’s Lost Trademark Case Is a Good Thing

    My love of Lego goes back nearly as far as I can remember—Lego sets were some of the first things I saved money to buy, and one of my brother’s early sentences was him asking me to “pay dupo” with him. I’ve spent years on staff at one of the biggest Lego community websites around.…

  • Quitting: Ensuring Everybody That Matters Loses

    Game modding communities thrive on the free exchange of knowledge that ranges from the developers adopting a mod-friendly attitude to the hobbyists who share their work and knowledge with comrades. The community thrives on clever innovation, on people picking up a project where others have left off, and on learning by imitation. Yet interestingly, the…

  • Buying Elsewhere Is Not Cheating

    Ignorant corporate executive Cory Ledesma thinks buying games used somehow cheats developers (read: his company, THQ), so he doesn’t have any problem with tying a game’s online multiplayer  mode to a one-time-use code. This is the kind of ridiculous decision one can expect from the knee-jerk fiscal entitlement mentality everybody making things seems to have…

  • On the Consumption of Content

    Now that we have internet access and are pretty much unpacked, I’ve been slowly trying to catch up on the internet. I’ve collected RSS feeds in Google Reader to the point that I can’t get through them all on a regular day, so several weeks of backlog probably means I’m going to give up and…

  • Three-D, Leave Me Be

    I made it through the first half of the year without seeing a single movie in the theater. It wasn’t a goal or anything, I just didn’t find anything compelling enough to make me spend the time and money. In the past two weeks I’ve seen as many in-theater movies, and nearly every trailer concluded…

  • A Nascent Medium

    I saw this article a couple of days ago; the criticism of Hollywood’s treatment of race in the universally-panned Avatar: The Last Airbender (and throughout history) is well-done and thought-provoking. One comment the author makes in passing got me thinking in an entirely new direction: storytelling in video games. In talking about the recent Prince…