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

Tag: geek.culture

  • Gaming’s Bigger Picture: Correcting Tim Buckey

    I may not be the biggest fan of Tim Buckey’s opinions or comic, but there are so many things wrong in his latest post lambasting the “sense of entitlement” among gamers that I was compelled to respond. I can always rely on Tim to roll out some of the most rampant industry fallacies, so deconstructing…

  • Ad Blocking Is Here to Stay

    This has been discussed at some length before, but with yet another one of my favorite websites featuring a columnist adding their voice to the fracas, I thought it was worth revisiting. Like Ars Technica before him, Louis Lazaris of Smashing Magazine chastises folks who aren’t keen on including ads in their web browsing experience,…

  • Reconstruction

    Now that the social purge is complete, I’ve begun adding people back to my Facebook friends list. In addition to grumbling about Facebook’s cluttered, opaque interface (remember when we all joined it because it was so much simpler and cleaner than MySpace?), I’m placing new friends into category lists as I go along. Because friends…

  • Social Purge

    I have been threatening to clear my Facebook account for a while now, and with the EFF’s latest revelations of how the site attempts to “zucker” private information from its unsuspecting users, today seemed like as good a time as any. And so it is done: zero friends. This has certainly been a long time…

  • Our Collective Ophitoxaemia

    Even as content industries, patent trolls, and cretins shamelessly abuse their monopoly privileges, some of their behavior filters down to creators with even less to gain from such behavior. The false concepts of idea “ownership” and permission culture are a flesh-melting venom chewing away at our creative body. One of the most egregious examples is…

  • iShenanigans

    There’s been quite the foofaraw surrounding the leak of the latest iPhone prototype (Spoiler: one of the employees left it at a bar, a guy found it, Gizmodo bought it from him and posted a teardown). It’s the expected incremental upgrade scheduled for release this summer that continues the process of making the iPhone more…

  • A Perceptual Error

    A while back the leasing office started advertising a “breakfast on the go” event for this week. It sounded great and the time included when I normally leave for work; unlike most events, I planned to avail myself of it (this was assisted by the placement of the ad above my mailbox). The night before…

  • RAS Syndrome

    Redundant Acronym Syndrome syndrome: people incur it all the time. They say an acronym but repeat the final word as well: DVD disc, ATM machine, ISBN number. Were the acronym to be fully expanded, they’re duplicating that final word and saying “digital versatile disc disc.” This used to aggravate me immensely, but the other day…