Simpsons on Inside the Actors Studio

The cast of the Simpsons (voiceactors) was on inside the actors studio awhile back. Some of these are definitely worth seeing, check out the whole episode if you see its on.

Homer:






Burns And Smithers

Defense Grid

So Ive been playing Defense Grid: The Awakening for quite awhile now and I have to say it is a great game. Ive been playing Tower Defense games for a long time and this is quite honesly one of if not the best I have ever seen.

For those of you who dont know. Tower Defense games basically revolving around enemies of some kind following a path from a start to a finish point. Along this route you place towers in strategic locations to kill them before the can make it through. It sounds simple to learn, and it is, but figuring out which combination of towers works the best can make this very difficult to master. Well worth the $20 it costs via steam.

Are chief officers in corporations some kind of aristocracy?

A quote from CNNMoney.com:

OfficeMax Inc. (OMX) named the former financial chief of Circuit City Stores Inc. (CCTYQ) as its chief financial officer as the No. 3 office-supply retailer looks to turn around its struggling operations.

Along with the rest of the retail sector, OfficeMax saw sales drop last year amid weaker consumer spending. In the past two months, the company has announced job cuts, suspended its dividend, and said it doesn't expect net new retail- store growth in 2009 and will delay its store-remodeling program until economic conditions improved.

I seriously wish I was in the room when this interview took place. Heres how it must have went:

Interviewer: So as you may have heard, Officemax is struggling in light of weak consumer spending and we are looking to turn things around. What do you feel makes you qualified for this position?

Bruce H. Besanko: Well, I was the Financial Chief of Circuit City Stores Inc.

Interviewer: How are they doing now?

Bruce H. Besanko: Bankrupt and being liquidated.

Interviwer: And you were the Financial Chief?

Bruce H. Besanko: Yes

Interviewer: Excellent, well have our secretary give you a lapdance before you leave.

I mean seriously, it amazes me how heads of corporations can fail miserably and yet be offered a similar job somewhere else. Its like at a certain level they just get passed around.I mean you will never see the following:

Interviewer: So your applying to be Chief safety officer?

Guy: yes

Interviewer: And have you held as similar poistion before?

Guy: yes, I was head of propane safety at Falk

Interviewer: Excellent, well have our secretary give you a lapdance before you leave.

Click here to see why that works.

By the way, that plan Circuit City had involving laying off their experienced salespeople in exhange for lower paid new people worked great. Way to not use performace to determine who should stay or go, Morons.

President Obama

Our new president has apparently hit the ground running. He has just authorized changes to http://www.whitehouse.gov/ in accordance with his plans to add transparency to government. He apparently wanted to add aesthetic appeal at the same time, as the new site is way better than the old one.

Oops, Belkin Got busted

Apparently, some business development guy named Michael Bayard over at Belkin got caught offering people in India 65 cents to write a positive review of products on Amazon and Newegg. Belkin issued the following statement after word got out:

Belkin has always held itself to the highest standards of corporate ethics and its employees to the highest standards of personal integrity. Similarly, we support our online user community in discussion and reviews of our products, whether the commentary is good or bad. So, it was with great surprise and dismay when we discovered that one of our employees may have posted a number of queries on the Amazon Mechanical Turk website inviting users to post positive reviews of Belkin products in exchange for payment.

Belkin does not participate in, nor does it endorse, unethical practices like this. We know that people look to online user reviews for unbiased opinions from fellow users and instances like this challenge the implicit trust that is placed in this interaction. We regard our responsibility to our user community as sacred, and we are extremely sorry that this happened.

Call me a skeptic, but I have a hard time believing that some junior level manager would on his own personally fund this little venture, I mean how is he profiting from it? I never liked Belkin routers anyway, I use linksys.

Anyway, in the interest of holding people accountable, and for my own amusement, a thumbnail of his linkedin profile is on the top of this post. Feel free to click on it.

Mafia 2!

It has just been confirmed that Mafia 2 is in development. For those of you that sadly missed out on the first game, Mafia is a action game from a 3rd person view that lets you play the role of a 20's/30/s style gangster. It is quite simply the best Mafia inspired game ever.

Thankfully, the same developer. Though some may notice the developer is now listed as 2k Czech rather than Illusion Softworks, fear not, as take two acquired illusion a couple years back and changed the name. I assume this is because they kept forgetting where the company is located, as 2k Czech is a stupid name.

Anyway, here is their website:

http://www.mafia2game.com/home.html

Children of the Nile

In other news, Tilted Mill just released a demo for Children of the Nile, enhanced edition. For those of you that haven't played it, which is most of you, Children of The Nile is a real time civilization builder based in ancient Egypt. Released in November of 2004, it uses the Empire Earth engine quite well and in my opinion creating one of the best looking civ games to date. Some of the features are:

• Individual AI, based on human nature, creating a real connection to life-like people
  
• Immersive 3d engine
  
• The (Nile) river is modeled in three dimensions to represent annual inundation and retreat of flood waters
  

What really impressed me was Tilted Mill purchasing the license back from the publisher, balancing and adding in bug fixes, then releasing the enhanced edition patch for free to people that owned the game. Definitely worth 19.99 through steam

A moment for a Non Game Statement

First off, I really don't like Dick Cheney. I think he is an ass. I bring this up because he has given an interview recently where he suggested that president elect Obama should not change the Bush Administration's terrorist interrogation policies. Here is a quote:

"It would be a tragedy if they threw over those policies simply because they had campaigned against them," Cheney said in an interview with CBS Radio's Mark Knoller. "I think they need to proceed very cautiously before they begin to change the policies that are in place. They need to know what they're doing."

Or another grand statement:

"He was rather critical during the campaign of some of the policies we pursued, for example, in terms of terrorist surveillance or interrogation of terrorist prisoners," Cheney said.

Yeah, see how many times you can say the word terrorist in order to justify it. Too bad that during all those times you said the word terrorist in order to justify something you never stopped and actually defined the word in such a way as to not include everyone.

douche bag

Dawn of War 2

Relic released their requirements for their upcoming strategy game dawn of war 2. I played the original series, if you like real time strategy it is quite good.

Minimum Requirements
* Windows XP SP2 or Windows Vista SP1
* P4 3.2 GHz (single core) or any Dual Core processor
* 1 GB RAM (XP), 1.5 GB RAM (Vista)
* A 128MB Video Card (Shader Model 3) - Nvidia GeForce 6600 GT / ATI X1600, or equivalent
* 5.5 GB of Hard Drive space

Recommended
* Windows XP SP2 or Windows Vista SP1
* AMD Athlon 64×2 4400+ or any Intel Core 2 Duo
* 2 GB RAM (XP and Vista)
* A 256MB Video Card (Shader Model 3) - Nvidia GeForce 7800 GT / ATI X1900, or equivalent
* 5.5 GB of Hard Drive space

More Unheard of indie game goodness

The Independent Games Festival awarded a grand prize called Crayon Physics developed by some guy named Petri Purh. Apparently you try to get a 2D ball on screen to move from one point to another, using crayon-like shapes with a mouse or via a stylus. The game shows some pretty sweet physics animation.

Right now its 14.95, otherwise bigdownloads has a early prototype for free

Crayon Physics website





Crayon Physics Deluxe from Petri Purho on Vimeo.