Quick Hitts

The only thing more annoying than listening to old people bitch about how the past was so much better is catching yourself doing the same thing.  “Today’s music sucks and they don’t make movies like they used to and people are so much nastier now and kids dress like slobs and waaaaaa….
There are quite a [...]

It starts with an eight year old assassinating the president of the United States.  Then 7 men are kidnapped from various places in the country and brought to a secret underground facility.  They discover they all have the same name, and the same face.
Then it gets weird.
J. C. Hutchen’s 7th Son was the first podicobook [...]

I’ve never paid full price for a computer game.  I’m one of the guys who waits until a game has been out for a while and is available for half price or less. Still, I’m one of your customers who buys instead of bootlegs, and I have several suggestions for removing some of [...]

Just for fun let’s take a brief break from snarky rants.
Jem Moore is the best hammered dulcimer player in the US, which is about a profitable as you might imagine.  (He makes his living as a pilot.)   If you search his name on You Tube you’ll find lots of people playing his compositions – badly, [...]

Two days later and we’re still be bombarded by stories about Michael Jackson.  I grew up listening to the Jackson 5, loved Off the Wall and Thriller, but enough already. 
Jackson was raised a Jehovah’s Witness, and was still one when he did the Thriller video, which is why he prefaced it with the disclaimer:  [...]

Blood Witness is finished! I just released the final episode.
Man, this was an intensive project. Each episode took about five hours of work: An hour to record, 3-4 hours to edit, 15 minutes of post processing, 20-30 minutes of mixing, and another half hour to tag the MP3 files, upload them, update the XML for [...]

Although Ms Dumbass’s opinion is ignorant, all the controversy around this is a good example of the left getting way out of line with Custom Manufactured Outrage.  First they create the monster.  Then the faithful grab pitchforks to storm the castle, inspired by their own smug righteous indignation.
The whole thing was a setup from the [...]

Don’t make the mistake of re-reading the book before seeing the movie. You’ll get too distracted by the things added and removed from the flick. I would have enjoyed it more if I went in with only a vague memory of the book.
I was hoping for a great movie. Instead, I got [...]

I just did an interview about Blood Witness on the Not About Religion blog.  Check it out. 

In 2006 there was only one podcast award.  It allowed anyone to vote on their favorite shows, once a day, for a month.  This guaranteed only the most popular shows with the biggest audiences could win.  I wanted an award with a different model, one that would give excellent but obscure shows a realistic chance [...]

I wanted to read a novel about a Jehovah’s Witness becoming a vampire.  JW’s are adverse to any kind of blood ingestion, so he’d have some trouble with that.  On the other hand, they believe Christ died on a stake, not a cross, so crucifixes wouldn’t bother him.   It would be even more interesting [...]

Last summer two of the best parties at DragonCon were thrown by Podiobooks.com, one on Friday night, one on Saturday. It featured an open bar (donations accepted). At one point Scott Sigler was behind the bar and he poured me a beer. I said, “Someday when you’re a bestselling New York Times [...]

Last week Donald Westlake, America’s best novelist, died at the age of 75.
His 100+ novels, all written on manual typewriters, covered different genres. Sometimes he used different writing styles. He wrote some fantasy and science fiction, but many of his books fell into two categories: small time crooks tangling with big [...]

I visited the Discover site to see the outakes and extras for Mythbusters.  Most were only a few minutes long, but every one started with a 30 second commercial that couldn’t be bypassed.  I watched a couple of clips, and left, never to return.
I’m seeing this more and more on video sites.  First it was [...]

I’ve been watching Heroes since the first episode, more or less enjoying it, but I don’t know how much longer I’ll bother. The most recent episode, a two-parter, really jumped the shark.
The show has been an interesting rip off of X-Men, but has had problems from the beginning. They introduced so many characters [...]

I deal with Christmas differently than most atheists.
I celebrate it. I put up lights and a tree and give gifts and say “Merry Christmas” and mean it. I’ve played Santa Claus on several occasions, with the full costume, enjoyed it, and will probably do it again.
Devout Christians rail against how secular the holiday [...]

I’ve subscribed to Wired for years. At a buck an issue, it makes for good bathroom reading. If it goes up to a buck and a quarter, though, I’ll let my subscription lapse.
You can study good design by A) studying good design and learning from it and B) studying really bad design and [...]

I’m working on a project that needs some into, outro, and background music. I’d like to use music that sounds like music from the late 80’s: Bands like Ah Ha, Supertramp, The Eurymithics and maybe a hair band or two. Since this will be distributed as a podcast, it has to have a [...]

I’ve always loved explosions. Some of my fondest childhood memories involve blowing things up, sometimes with commercial fireworks, sometimes with homemade fireworks, sometimes just by misusing common devices and/or chemicals. (Back then, there were real chemicals in chemistry sets.) If you’re a male you know exactly what I’m talking about.
Back when I [...]

A friend, who has one of the funniest blogs on the internet, sent me a link to a story about PETA that was too disgusting to even consider writing about. So I considered it. And he considered it. We wrote back and forth about how disgusting it was. It was like a contest between adolescent [...]