Sorry, what??
IGN’s review of Halo 3
Natalie Portman: “If we fuck, I’m going to feel like shit tomorrow.”
Jason Schwartzman: “That’s ok with me.”
Wes Anderson’s new short film is out, available free on iTunes. Go download it now.
Jezebel.com is a website for girls. But I read it anyway, because it’s hilarious. Case in point, today’s post asking for readers to submit examples of stupidly drunken text messages.
A few of my favorites:
“why can’t we just hook up every two weeks like normal people” - Commenter LE_AD
“For the record, it’s not that I am not attracted to you, it’s just I know too much about how you are. Kind of like knowing how sausage is made.” - Commenter SHEHATESME
And from SWEATERVEST: “i may be drubnk, buy i toltay want do i wiht youp”
I was going to add some of the ones you assholes sent me this weekend, but I decided against it. For now.
Per Gizmodo:
“For sure, a ultra-thin MacBook touch running Leopard on Intel’s just announced ultra-low power Core processors, along with solid state storage and WiMax support, doesn’t sound bad to me. Actually, it sounds just perfect.”
I shit you not. There is a service out of the UK that promises, for a small fee, to find a royal title for you. Options include Lord of the Manor of XYZ English Country Town and other “titles of royal descent,” meaning titles that were once held by a British Monarch.
There are so many cool-sounding British towns on GoogleMaps - how could I decide? I could be the Lord of Little Brington! Or maybe the Baron of Cottesbrooke.
This would be, of course, third on my wish-list, after the a yacht and a house on The World Dubai.
Courtesy UrbanDaddy
Because girls from Jersey wear them? In seafoam?
“Frankly, I don’t know if Microsoft would even be in the game business today if it weren’t for Halo.” - says Andy McNamara, editor in chief of the magazine Game Informer, on the eve of the launch of Halo 3, the largest video game release in history.
Interesting. Microsoft would have probably entered the game business without Halo, but I know for a fact that the Xbox would have failed had it not been for that game. Not many people remember Bungie, the small software studio that had published the Marathon series of first-person shooters for the Macintosh in the mid-1990s, but I do.
Both Marathon 1 & 2 were amazing, boasting an incredibly sophisticated and manipulatable physics engine, along with top-shelf graphics (see above, and remember this is 1993) and revolutionary multi-player functionality.
Bungie was a Mac software company, and in an era of MacOS struggling to maintain relevance, Bungie was the one place Apple could point and say, “See? We have games on the Mac.” Both the Marathon and Myth series were released for Mac first, and Bungie had promised to never release a game for the PC before the Mac. They were my heroes.
In the late 1990’s rumors began to surface about Bungie’s newest project. It was going to change the way people played first-person-shooters. It would have the most amazing graphics and most advanced physics engine ever. It was called Halo. And it would be released for the Mac and PC simultaneously.
Steve Jobs made this announcement at the E3 expo in 1999. It was a call to arms for Mac enthusiasts. This was important because rival Microsoft had recently announced a plan to enter the video-game industry through the development of a console - what would later become Xbox.
Then, a year later, Bungie, the small edgy independent software development studio whose games I had grown up playing, announced it would be acquired by Microsoft. What consolation could they give me?
I found my answer in an interview with Bungie founder Alexander Seropian: “Obviously we have a lot of experience with the Mac. A lot of our fans are Mac fans, and those people are very important to us. We’re still going to be making the decisions on what projects we do and for what platforms. But we’re also going to be looking at those decisions from the perspective of our areas of expertise and what’s best for the game. So I don’t really know.”
Halo was released as the flagship game for the Xbox in 2001; both were instant successes. Two years later Bungie released Halo for the PC. And finally, in December 2003, Halo finally came to the Mac. It was everything - and nothing - that they had promised.
List of types of sites blocked at my workplace.
Abused Drugs
Adult Material
Freeware and Software Download
Gambling
Hacking
Illegal or Questionable
Instant Messaging
Internet Communication
Keyloggers
Malicious Web Sites
Military & Extremist
Peer-to-Peer File Sharing
Personal Network Storage and Backup
Phishing & Other Frauds
Proxy Avoidance
Racism & Hate
Spyware
Tasteless
URL Translation Sites
Violence
Web Chat
Web-based Email
Girl: Do you want this?
Boy: Yea.
Girl: Do you really want this?
Boy: Yea.
Girl: Then you better fucking earn it.
” —Working notes; I’m leaning towards “Women Come First” for a title.This is for the people who tried to mock me this weekend.
“Remember when your ex-boyfriend insisted that he had to use Magnums because regular condoms “just don’t fit right”? Well, turns out maybe he wasn’t lying — condoms are not “one size fits all”. [Science Daily]”
Via Jezebel.com
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Holy shit. WTF is wrong with these people. 3,000 years ago the Romans made it policy that any nation adhering to the practice of human sacrifice would have its traditions and religion ended by gladius romanus. I say it’s time to bring Caesar out of retirement.
Via NYTimes.com
Today I got into work at 6:35 (as opposed to 8:45am yesterday, when I slept through my alarm).
Regular day: breakfast of yogurt and granola at 7:30, market opens at 9:30; lunch of Pret a Manger chicken caesar salad at 12:00; market closes at 4:00pm
Dinner with specialty sales guy from London - teammate and I meet him at his hotel uptown. 1 drink while we wait, 1 drink when he joins us; dinner isn’t extravagant… steak, salad, bottle of wine, but quite good
Salesguy says goodnight after dinner (he’s jetlagged); teammate goes home to change before going out - bowling?; I… go back to the office to listen to a conference call starting at 9:30am Hong Kong time (9:30pm our time).
There are maybe 2 people across the world listening to this call. I am one of them. I care about this call only from the perspective that it could affect one of my companies. I ask if it will affect that company. It won’t. Ah.
On the taxi ride home, I call music friend girl to see if we’re still going out tomorrow (and maybe if she wants to meet up tonight). Voicemail. Damn. I wasn’t prepared. Leave a shitty message. Call family friend girl. Shit, wait. I emailed her earlier in the day and she didn’t email me back. Don’t want to appear desperate. Hang up.
Home. Bed looks amazing, but I need to do laundry, and, besides, Rosh Hashanah is tomorrow - I can sleep in! Start laundry. What now? I need to kill time before it goes in the dryer. TV, dark chocolate covered pretzels, and Coors Light. Fin.
HBO’s new series debuted tonight, and it may set a new standard for putting raw human experience on display. The characters are rich, and even if the stories are fucked up, they’re framed in the context of normalcy, which means I don’t have any problem believing them. These stories could (and do, I’m sure) take place every night in millions of homes.
It is not a show to watch with a group of friends, or a first, second or twentieth date. This show is meant for couples, and I think it’s going to be a hit. By the time this series ends (after who knows how many seasons), I think there will be a difference between couples who watched and those who didn’t. At the least, there will be a shared connection and understanding between friends, coworkers, and even casual acquaintances, when it comes up in conversation.
Tell Me You Love Me
9:00pm, Sundays on HBO
I was reading the Gizmodo liveblog of today’s Apple event and saw the “unconfirmed” report that someone had just gotten an iPhone for the reduced price (before Jobs announced it) and the “oh shit” lightbulb went off in my head.
Since this price cut applies to existing inventory, the revenue impact flows straight to margins, which means this might be the first quarter where Apple mgmt guides margins down and they actually go down. We’ll see if the Street is OK with that (Oh, AAPL was down $7.40/share, or $6.4 billion from the start of Jobs’ presentation to the end of the day).
The other thing that occurred to me is that there’s nothing left for Apple to announce. Apple is supposedly a $120bn “three-legged stool.” Music, computer, phone… it’s a metaphor. Anyway. We just got new iMacs on August 7th. The iPhone came out June 29th, so that’s still new even by Apple standards. And new iPods today. What? Laptops? The consumer MacBook was updated back in mid-May and the Pro in early June.
The only thing left is a potential new product. And the one that I consider most plausible (and that could sustain the company’s hype-built valuation) is a truly innovative ultra-portable. There are tons of fake renderings out there, but none have really seemed truly groundbreaking. Some features that would (I think) be necessary: Multi-touch widescreen display (think of it as a giant iPhone-like computer, potentially without a keyboard); built-in EvDO wireless that would allow constant internet access (3G Wireless would be a somewhat decent substitute); solid-state hard disk (for battery life and stability); 8+ hours of battery life (in addition to solid-state memory, it would also have to sacrifice any kind of optical media to achieve this).
If such a product is in development, it would need to be launched at the MacWorld Expo in January, and for a product launch this big, it would mean we would start getting reliable rumors/chatter in the late October/early November timeframe. Between now and then, there is only Earnings on October 17th (first report of iPhone sales) to support the stock. And if there’s no evidence of a big announcement in January… there may be a long and painful road ahead of us. It’s OK, though, because Steve got KT Tunstall (who rocks) to play at the end of the show.
Disclosure: While I am a Research Analyst, I do not cover Apple. These opinions are my own. I own an underweight position in AAPL.
I saw Spring Awakening last week. Still digesting a bit, but it was worth every bit of the hype.
Music was amazing. Duncan Sheik composed the score, and the music was performed by a band rather than an orchestra, which sat on the back of the stage, in full view, rather than in the pit.
The Who’s Tommy was the Rock-opera of my youth, and SA should have been the same for my adolescence. Better late than never, though.
That’s right. I liked Broadway musicals as a child. If you’ve got something to say you can go choke on tofu and die.
