The New Microsoft Logo: Explicit Huey and the News Reference?

Well it's kind of funny on a few different levels. I could make a joke about the Samsung lawsuit also, if it was necessary. I don't think it's entirely necessary. I guess, though, what they are saying is that it's hip to be square. Or maybe they're just futureproofing the brand. It's tough to say, at this distance, what any of this really means. It could be a meaningless change, and it could be the herald of some insane twist ending so devious that it drove its author insane and hid itself in a dusty pile of manuscripts, waiting for a foolish hack's sweaty fingers.

The real issue isn't whether or not rounded edges are completely illegal, but rather what exactly a non-curved surface means for the consumer. Will it entail a less-flexible Microsoft Windows? Will tiling finally wear out its welcome?

Is this a sign that yupsters are on the make? Is the 99% going to have to deal with the fallout? Is the 100% going to have to? Where do I send strongly-worded letters about this? Why is my local mailbox welded shut?

No, this can't be so drastic. But my eyes can't be lying to me. This isn't anything like Morrowind to Oblivion in terms of regression, but it makes me wonder if I shouldn't switch to... but wait. Apple's undergone its brand shift already, and it's planning something as well. Macintosh and Microsoft. It's the ongoing browser crisis all over again, which makes Microsoft Chrome; Apple Firefox. Except Apple is a more yupster brand than Microsoft, anyway, so really nothing makes sense at all. I only hope they do a commercial with the proper mainstream pop rock song accompanying shots of stressed office workers, pale and/or fat kids, and septuagenarians holding conference calls on Win8 phones.

Well I for one don't care so much. Things will be alright even if the vistas are grimmer than the early-adopters and hype-men would like. I think Win7 is where it's at, and I'm happy to square about that. As long as it can run Age of Empires 2, an operating system is pretty good. Anyways, anyone who knows anything knows which was the best logo and is still puzzled, like me, about the incomprehensible loss of that incredible relic. Rest in peace,

2010 Retrospective, pt.5: Winner among the Free Games

I've spent more money on computer games than I should have. I've probably spent more money on just about every other thing, but unlike food or drink, computer games can be ridiculously disappointing. This is because most developers don't really care, because everyone who likes a game will buy the sequel to that game, just like with the movies. Look at Doom 3, or the movie they made about the Doom series. Nobody understands gamers, but everyone is looking to make fast money on the computer game upsurge. Since girls started fearlessly admitting that they do in fact exist in online gaming worlds, even stone-cold businesswomen with snake eyes have been getting in on the feast, and you better believe their parasitic-yuppie husbands do the coding.

So the analogy that works best is that the computer gaming industry is more or less like Hollywood, if Hollywood forced you to buy special equipment to watch their movies optimally, and if they left all the bad scenes and failed sequences in. Greed, illusion, nonsense et cetera. Computer game critics are regularly paid off to provide beaming reviews, and the ones who aren't tame, if they exist, are held under the radar by the invisible hand*. No wonder gaming took so long to catch on.

Now if games you pay to play are like Hollywood, free online games must be like TV commercials, right? Surprisingly, there are free games available on websites that do not cost money and are probably more enjoyable than many retail games.

Free games have always existed. Up until 1648, if you had the right friends and lived in a city, chances were you could play chess mostly for free. Then card games exploded. Then board games, and finally table-top pencil and paper games emerging around the same time as the first video games. Time went on.

To be honest I can't be bothered with the history of games, and I made it all up within reasonable parameters. At some point between 1995 and the wide-spread adoption of the internet, shareware games went extinct. The free-online game was in its larval stage in those years, but in the last 16 years it has grown up with all kinds of misspelling, uninspired sequels, and borderline plagiarism.

I was introduced to the tower-defence-genre game Cursed Treasure in the closing days of 2010, and I finished it before 2011 with time to spare. It is hosted on www.towerdefence.net, along with any other TD-variant you could wish to find. I was addicted pretty much instantly, because tower defence games are addictive, especially if they are designed well.

Despite the goofy music and sound effects (which I now have a sort of Pavlovian approval of) the game epitomized what is best about free gaming. It is relatively simple, it is clean and well designed, and it is fun to play. Lots of online flash games that you can play at no charge can do one or the other of the above things, but almost none of them are presented so well that they actually redeem the format.

The gameplay is engaging and deceptively simple, and the addition of skill-trees and XP are not original, but nowhere else have they worked so well. Your towers shoot monsters, dead monsters drop gold, your towers level up, and then you upgrade them so they can kill more monsters. You also have mana that you use for various helpful spells. At the end of the round, you may level up and assign skill points to make your towers and spells better. It sounds easy. To the right person anything seems easy. This is why you must play the game.

Several of the levels, and especially the second-last one, are devilishly hard to beat and require tactical thinking and good use of material. Unfortunately, the game is not completist friendly – perfect scores on all maps require grinding and luck, but the possibility exists for those who want to try. There are only two or three levels which are really hard to complete perfectly, though, and most people don't care about that. So, audience of one bot, spread the word about a game that might be better than Desktop Tower Defence, but also entirely different.

2010 Retrospective, pt. 1: Seanbaby vs. The Internet

I've been thinking, now that it's December and I don't know if I'll even attempt to travel for the season, that I might as well think back on the year that has almost passed, and bring up some of my favorite moments, or outstanding creations, people, or anything you can stick a noun to that have actually impressed me, and not just the talking heads who make trends and kings.

Most of the time when I read things on the internet I think, "Shit, even I could do better than this." and it really makes me a bit sorrowful to know that someone got paid to write something so flat and unconvincing. Granted, a lot of the time I look back on things I've written and think similar things, except that I know nobody else will write about them. When I read good things on the internet I take note, because I'm A) trying desperately not to be ignorant, and B) not afraid of becoming an hack. Grammar before assonance, folks.

For years now there has been one internet comedy writer who has not changed his approach, his perspective, his looks, or his medium – and we should all give him a television series so that he breaks down and turns into an unfunny hack. This man is responsible for more than 33 percent of the internet's funny quotient. YouTube is afraid of him, toys inexplicably melt and explode when he approaches, and whenever he posts on cracked.com hundreds of people tell him that he is right, his lines are infinitely quotable, and "Good Work!". He will be the first president of America to disarm opponents with snappy one liners and irrefutable logic instead of multilateral embargoes and cooperation.

As far as internet comedy writer metaphors go, most writers are a bunch of kindergarteners, and Seanbaby gets held back in K every year, because the administration doesn't know what do with him, and he keeps making better jokes to kill the time, because nobody around him even understands how to be consistently funny or what consistent even means. If you compare how long he has been funny (since the days of Old Man Murray, which is something knowable only to actual nerds) to how long he has been writing on the internet, you realize that he is the veteran of internet comedy writing, and either his approach was always good or he buried all of his failed attempts in the 90's as if they were Atari cartridges in the 80's.

For a long time ('04-'10) I didn't even know that Cracked.com existed, but a friend recently told me that Seanbaby was writing there, and I took a few hours off to read everything they had. I laughed, on average, twice an article. And I don't mean half-assed laughing: no chuckling, but the stuff you feel in your abdomen. Since then I've been reading Cracked.com mostly for Seanbaby's articles, and you can do the comparison yourself. I mean no disrespect but almost everyone who is trying to be outright funny on the internet looks like a shoddy '80's joke told by a teenager compared to Seanbaby.

Description fails me, but I encourage you to look up one of the only funny people on the internet. I try to be amusing, but I understand that I am as dry as sawdust, and dumb, and don't use interesting photos or graphical elements. I don't do those things out of respect to Seanbaby, because I'd have to follow his lead and risk his displeasure.