Anathem Book Trailer

I didn't even know this kind of thing existed, but this was a promotional trailer released for Neal Stephenson's Anathem:


The World of Anathem

Diamond Age Miniseries

This is one of those bits of information that's so old, it's new to me. George Clooney's production company is working on several things with SciFi Channel, including a Diamond Age miniseries. Diamond Age being a novel from Neal "Snow Crash" Stephenson. That was announced in 2007, and apparently development got wrangled up in the writer's strike, but production continues.

We're about finished with the Anathem audiobook here at the Cathode Cave, so it couldn't come any quicker.

Lost News Clippings: Natal, Pachter, and Digital TV

Posting is going to be slow for a couple weeks, peeps, thanks in large part to a heavy workload. I have a few emails I need to catch up, but I thought I'd catch up on some news stories of late.

The news mill has pretty much announced and denounced that Microsoft is issuing a new 360 to coincide with the Natal launch next year. I'm siding with the latter, as the former feels like a) pretty high noise to signal interference that stemmed from an excitable quote about how big the Natal launch will be and b) the real launch is still a bit too far away to know how big the Natal launch will be. Big, I'm sure, but there's a lot of factors involved and I don't really know why Microsoft would be doing anything other than a bundle for the new product. Redmond is going to have enough work on Natal adoption itself, they don't need to compile that with new console hardware as well.

Pachter hit the news again, with both decrying and then apologizing about decrying Sony's PSP Go price. I'm rather with Pachter here, I think the Go pricing is a bit odd. Sure, they're going up against the iPhone - but why go up against the iPhone if you don't need to do so, especially with the 3GS just being announced. Hopefully Sony is trying to balance out some PS3 losses and has done some decent math. Honestly, they could make $99 and they still wouldn't have convinced me to get one. My DS is gathering enough dust as it is.

And I don't think any link is necessary here - digital TV took over analog this weekend in the much reported and recently delayed rollout which kills the analog signal for more bandwidth for digital providers. I can't really complain, we've had cable for years and anything we would get over the air would be digital at this point as well, but I do still remember watching the Dukes Of Hazzard in my brother's room on a tiny black and white set. So let's hope it goes quietly into the night.

Game Play: Boom Blox

Boom Blox is one of those games that will remind you why you got a Wii. You could sparsely describe it as "Jenga with bombs", but that simplifies a deceptively complex gameplay structure which include several mechanics revolving around the basic theme of "fun with physics".

Players can take turns tackling the blocks, depending on the subgame you'll pull, throw, explode or shoot at the things in an attempt to score as many points as possible - and each of those actions have variations of their own like bowling balls and water hoses. With others, you can either cooperatively try and take down structures or go head to head for the most points.

There's very little flaw in the game. I'm not a huge fan of the shooting aspects of it, since it seems a bit like a cheap light gun game to me, but nearly everything else about it plays great and makes for an excellent multiplayer experience as well.

Highly recommended.