An impressive Japanese Rube Goldberg machine

Ever since Chunk did the truffle shuffle I've liked Rube Goldberg machines. There's just something satisfying about watching them do their thing, physics in action and all that jazz. This one popped up on my tweet feed yesterday and hoooo baby is it good. The thing they do with the flipping whiteboard might as well be considered magic. If they did this 100 years ago I'm positive they would have been burned at the stake.

Overwatch: Rise and Shine

Two Overwatch shorts in as many days? It's Christmas in August. Speaking of Christmas, it's getting pretty close to Christmas time.

Yeah, I know I sound like an insane person. But a large part of my job consists of projecting estimated sales 3-4 months in advance and guess what's 3-4 months from now? Plus the other day at Costco they were already selling Halloween costumes. Crazy huh? Pretty soon we're going to have two shopping seasons. Christmas and January.

I'm pretty pumped for Christmas. This will probably be the first year my daughter gets it 100% and the last year my son is still going to believe in Santa. I've already heard some kids he knows talking shit about the jolly guy so I wouldn't be surprised if actually had issues this year.

Where was I going with this? Oh yeah, this Overwatch short is pretty cool. Like I said yesterday Blizzard put so much work into the history and background of these characters. It's pretty amazing. I can't think of another first person shooter that cares about the characters as much as Overwatch does. Sure some shooters build these really incredible worlds but more often than not they don't put half as much thought into the characters than inhabit it. You can take the main characters from Gears of War, Halo, Call of Duty, Battlefield and they're completely interchangeable. They're not so much as characters but a projection of what the developers think is hero wish fulfillment.

Of course well developed characters doesn't keep me from wanting to smash my keyboard in every time Hanzo hits me with a scatter arrow from across the map. Stupid Hanzo.

Junkertown: "The Plan"

Blizzard announced a new map for Overwatch yesterday. As per their usual they did it with some flair. Over the last year a few people have asked me what I like so much about Overwatch and I'd say the biggest reason is that the game has TONS of personality. There are plenty of great FPS out there but short of Boarderlands I can't think of a game with such interesting and fun characters.

I mean I've been playing Halo for 15 years and I can tell you maybe 2 things about Master Chief. I've been playing Overwatch for just over a year and I can tell you a ton about all 25 playable heroes. Sure, a game has to be fun to play. That's like rule one about making video games. But if you can make the game fun to play AND have a bunch of fun, interesting, diverse characters? That's where you really strike gold.

Speak RX-1

The President's a Moron

Man if you missed the presidents 15 minute press conference on "infrastructure improvements" yesterday you should really check it out. Odds are you've probably been bombarded with quotes from it already but in my humble opinion you really need to watch the whole thing.

The immediate takeaway is that he talk like a child who forgot to study for a book report. For someone who has the best words he sure hooks onto one small phrase and repeats it into the ground. I lost count at the number of times he says he wanted to get the whole story before making a statement. It's especially stupid when you remember he did put out a statement immediately after the events in Charlottesville and it was intentionally garbage. If you take him at his own word he didn't wait to get all the facts to lay blame on "both sides" of the protest there.

It's just all so amazing. Yesterday the president went on national tv and said that there were lots of fine folks on the alt-right side of the protest. I guess they just happened upon the protest being held by nazis and white supremacists by accident? Anyway, I haven't gotten a chance to watch it yet but I've heard this documentary on Charlottesville put together by Vice is pretty much required viewing. I'm going to check it out on my lunch break, for some reason I doubt I'll be less outraged after watching it.



The Amazing thing is this won't hurt the president at all. The odds were pretty good he wasn't getting re-ellected in 2020 anyway and there's zero chance a republican controlled congress is going to impeach him over been too casual with supporting racists. Half of those guys in congress owe their jobs to racists, they're not about to bit the hand that feeds them now. They'll just make some statements for a couple weeks and boom, tax cuts for the rich next month. Ugh, this country is so depressing.

Don't Worry Son...

First Look of Josh Brolin as Cable

A couple hours ago Fox (by way of Ryan Reynolds) released the first couple pictures of Josh Brolin as Deadpool's # frenemy Cable. For those not completely in the know Cable is one of the X-men. He's a mutant from the future sent back in time to stop Apocalypse before his rise to power, kind of like if the Terminator was a good guy. At this point he's probably the most popular/well know mutant to not have appeared in any movie yet. Dude was super popular in the 90s, so much so that he's what a lot of people think of when they think of terrible comics from the 90s. It's too bad, when Cable came out he was different an interesting, it's not Cable's fault that he was so popular they tried giving guns and leather jackets to the Avengers in an attempt to look cool and hip.

But back to the point, Josh Brolin looks really cool here. So much of what Cable is about is just in the way he looks. I mean you don't need to know a thing about him and just by looking at this you can tell he's some sort of grizzled war vet, with cybernetic parts, the glowing eye hints at some mutant powers to come. Here's hoping Deadpool 2 is just as good if not better than the first one. It feels like Fox is just starting to really get a hang of what to do with the X-men, it would be too bad if they took took a set back all of the sudden.

Old Links

Atari’s new Ataribox console will be like an NES Classic. As much fun as it it to imagine an Atari revival this thing looks like it's going to be a huge failure. There are already a half dozen different Atari retro consoles on the market and it's not like anyone is dying to play Yar's Revenge again. Don't get me wrong, I loved my 2600 when I had it but Atari games aren't that fun to play these days. I'll play combat or boxing for a few minutes but that's about it. This thing has Ouya written all over it.

By the by, I know all these links are super old but I bookmarked them and never got around to using them last month. I'd like to say that this month I won't be just as busy and will have more time to blog but that's a total lie. I'll probably be lucky if I get to 10 posts this month.

Frank Darabont's Furious Emails to His Walking Dead Coworkers: 'Fuck You All'. The e-mails they have published here are pretty funny. It's obvious at the time Darabont was writing them he either thought he was getting fired or really wanted to get fired. It's amazing to think looking back on it now that Season 2 was pretty much DOA due to AMC's insistence on cutting the show's budget in half. Now a days its the biggest thing on TV. The showrunners could probably get an old space shuttle if they wanted to do a couple zombies in space episodes.

Star Wars' Firing Reveals a Disturbance in the Franchise. Lots of people wrote about this but the Hollywood Reporter probably had the best breakdown of the exact reasons Lord and Miller were fired from Han Solo. It's pretty interesting stuff and goes to show you Disney is not messing around with the Star Wars franchise. That's probably a good or bad thing depending on your point of view. We're probably never going to see a director go completely off the rails and turn in a crap movie but on the other hand there's no room for a real talented auteur to come in and carve out a piece of lore for him or herself.

Japan’s Most Ridiculous Wrestling Promotion Hits Somewhere Near The Big Time. DDT-Pro Wrestling is crazy pants. Like they have some ultra serious looking matches with some of the hottest young talent around and then they'll follow it up by putting a title on a table. Like literally a figuratively, the table's the champ now. I wish I could justify spending the cash on their subscription service but I'm already spending too much on other stuff every month. In the meantime I'll just have to keep following them on twitter, which is still pretty fun.