Oh look, it’s the nine hundredth ‘coming soon’ video for Duke Nukem Forever. Does anyone even remember they’re still working on it? Does anyone care?

Hiroo Onoda eventually surrendered. John Romero did not make us his bitch. We’ve moved on with our lives. It seems like the time for this game has passed, but nobody at 3D Realms wants to be the first one to say it.

Maybe it’s an elaborate performance art piece. It was never about the game. Rather, it’s holding a mirror up to the way that the media manufactures desire. They’re just trying to see how long they can keep it going and… anyway, here’s the trailer. The few gameplay shots look pretty good.

Here’s the ‘coming soon’ trailer from 2001. Those game play shots looked pretty good, too, for their time. Those of you who might not have been following the long, sad saga need to understand that this trailer was the for the same game. It was late in 2001, and it still hasn’t shipped.

“When it’s done”.

“All I did was trade lunchables”.

My OLPC is finally… umm, yes, of course I mean that *the kids’* OLPC is finally here.

I’ve been messing with it for about an hour, and I am deeply impressed. It’s smaller than I expected and the keyboard is a bit cramped for my big, sausage fingers (although they did put CTRL back next to “A”, where God intended it to be). Still, I’m typing this post on it and it’s not as difficult as I had expected.

Yes, this is clearly a 1.0 release. It’s a bit underpowered. The keyboard and mouse are difficult for adult hands. The software has a few rough edges. YouTube sends it to The Sad Place and makes Baby Santa cry.

What excites me most is that it comes with eToys installed. When Julianna ws younger, she and I made fun little gizmos with eToys on the PC. We only had one PC, though, and she couldn’t really use it without me to help. I can’t wait to see what the kids do with it on this device.

The OLPC may or may not change the world by itself, but something very much like it will: cheap, rugged, wifi enabled, and end user programmable. This is not a replacement for your laptop. I think of it as being closer to a chumby that you can program.

It was said of Lou Reed’s old band, The Velvet Underground, that only a few thousand people bought their albums but every one of them was inspired to start a band. The OLPC has that same feel. It feels like The Future.

All in all, I would not hesitate to buy another one for $200.

I absolutely do not understand the bizarre way this thing is being sold. They complain that they can’t bring the price down because they can’t get to scale, but they refuse to sell to people who want to buy them. It makes no sense to me.

I am really looking forward to the new J. J. Abams movie, Cloverfield. It’s his “American Godzilla”, and the idea of doing it all using home video is incredibly cool.

Check out the trailer.

This is basically the same trailer that they released a few months back, and have re-released monthly ever since. What’s really interesting is to watch the special effects getting better with each one. It’s the same shots, but stuff that used to look completely fake now looks completely real. Just amazing.

I have to admit that the collapsing building and dust cloud hit a bit of a nerve, but I’m probably just being over sensitive.

I can’t wait. Gonna sneak in a six of slusho.

The other day, Deana and I were sitting on the couch watching TV. The cat knocked a bunch of stuff off the dining room table, and tore through the room. Standard cat stuff. I laughed, but Deana missed the whole thing.

TiVo has trained me to handle that, though!

My first instinct was to grab for the remote and just rewind to show her what had happened. Umm… Doesn’t work on the cat. My hand was half way there before I realized what I was doing. D’oh! Stupid brain.

When I told Deana about this, she said that she sometimes imagines clicking on the laundry and just dragging it to the “Upstairs” folder. Way easier than carrying it.