Earlier in this forum, I dumped on the general state of the shiny useless portable gaming device market. Against my better judgement, I picked up a PSP and Madden 06 anyway, on the theory that I could return them if they did in fact meet expectations and sort of suck.
I’m happy to report here that I must apologize to the consumer society, and that the PSP and Madden are generally better than I expected them to be.
One of the items in last Friday’s snarky list of one-liners was: ‘”Fair Trade” coffee means that I pay more for the coffee beans, but then to make up for it they taste like crap.’ This (partly) inspired fair-trade coffee fan Green LA Girl (there’s only one?) to write a couple of articles on fair trade vs. taste, including an interesting conversation with a company that buys a lot of fair trade coffee, but has not bothered to seek certification themselves.
The summary of the point of view of the coffee company was essentially “the desire for fair trade does not trump our duty to provide quality coffee.” I thought it was an interesting read, and I wanted to elaborate on this a little.
“Fair trade” coffee is doomed, as long as the business model is for it to be marketed directly at the individual coffee buyer.
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Bags are a problem.
The modern dork has a lot of crap to carry around and protect on a daily basis. You have your laptop, cell phone, big camera, small camera, maybe a lens, a flash, Gameboy, PSP, sunglasses, various papers, wallet and lots of small things that you don’t really want in your pockets, but which you don’t really want to leave at home either.
The ideal bag does not exist. The ideal bag carries all of the above in a space no larger than the inside of your pants pocket. Therefore, life is reduced to finding the optimal approximation of this ideal.
They had tomatillos at the farmer’s market this weekend.
Tomatillos means salsa. So here you go.
If only all my problems tasted this good.
I love Taleggio cheese, but here’s my problem.
You want your Taleggio to be good and stinky, which means the paper on it should be soaked through and impossible to remove. But if the paper is impossible to remove, then you don’t get to eat the rind. And I like eating the rind.
It’s a conundrum. Am I the only person with this problem?
Perhaps I’m just being prissy. Maybe I should just use this as an excuse to eat more epoisses.
For Friday, it’s a miscellaneous grab bag of opinions that will get you in trouble if you say them out loud in the wrong crowds.
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I have a birthday coming up (no, I will not tell you when). And, I thought I had perfect timing. It’s been a good nine months to a year since both the DS and the PSP launched, surely by now there would be something shiny enough to warrant a purchase. And yet it is not the case.
I have a sort of a hate/hate relationship with my local supermarket. The Giant Eagle closest to my house has this annoying habit: they figure out the products that I am buying, and then stop carrying them.
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One of the banes of the modern “information age” is that one can easily find oneself reading someone else’s misguided and obviously illogical view of important matters. When this happens to me, I don’t think too hard about it. If they disagree with me, they must be stupid.
This is especially true in the area of gaming. I have only recently become morbidly obsessed with games, and as such I represent what the long term gamer hates most: the guy who likes mostly Halo and Madden. Where others see a depressing lack of innovation and risk-taking, I see a stunning series of games that have fabulous production values and excellently refined gameplay. To me, the current generation of console is the peak of the industry. It is the ultimate fruition of what so many people have been working so hard for so long to achieve: a gaming industry that is solidly in the mainstream with broad appeal across populations with diverse interests.
Here’s another entry in the “I play games that are 3 years old because I’m a cheapskate” series.
I’ve tried to describe my experiences playing Silent Hill 3 a few times now. Each time, I sort of trail off and fail. This is, interestingly, not unlike my experiences trying to get into the game. Somehow, it fails to grab me in the way the first two games in the series did. Why is this?
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