Ryan Collins

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Tag: diehard

  • Interactive fiction and more – This Geek in Review for 21 December 2018

    Interactive fiction and more – This Geek in Review for 21 December 2018

    A huge genre of videogames in the 80s and early 90s was the text adventure. Because there were memory and graphic limits on the machines available at the time, the interactive text adventures took a page out of books, and used words to describe the world in the game. These were more than just books, you would have to interact with the objects and characters in the game. It’s kind of like the Choose your own adventure books, but with a lot more interaction. Although text adventures are not commericially viable anymore, they are still being created. A new one called Cragne Manor’ has been released, the culmination of TK of people who worked on the game.

    Infocom was huge in the interactive text adventure world, but that didn’t stop other companies from also being successful. Leisure Suit Larry started out as a more adult text adventure, one where your goal was to be… shall I say, “successful” with three of the women in the game. One of the programmers found his backup copy of the source code to some of the Leisure Suit Larry games and attempted to auction it off. Companies don’t really like that, and unfortunately, the auction has been pulled.

    Final proof that Die Hard is a Christmas movie

    What do you need to go with that ugly Christmas sweater? What about some ugly Christmas shoes

    Fortnite, from Epic Games, is a cultural phenomenom, and that in and of itself invites lawsuits. In the game, players can buy emotes, which are dancing that the player’s character can perform during the game. Epic Games is now being sued by Rapper 2 Milly for stealing his dance. Donald Faison, Turk from the TV show Scrubs is also ticked. The default emote in Fortnite is one that he created. Even the Carlton isn’t safe. No one know where this will end up since short dance steps and moves are not copyrightable.

    Did you feel an earthquake last week because Microsoft confirmed that its Edge browser is going to be based on Chromium. Every browser has an engine underneath that powers it. This engine interprets the code for a website, and then displays the website. Just as there is more than one way to skin a cat, there is more than one way to display a website. In the beginning we had Netscape Navigator, and currently we have Chromium, Gecko, EdgeHTML, and Webkit. Chromium is the most popular, used by Google’s Chrome, Vivaldi, Opera, and a host of other browsers. Gecko is used by Mozilla’s Firefox. Microsoft currently used EdgeHTML with their edge browser, and Apple uses Webkit in the Safari browser on macOS and iOS. Techies are concerned that we are entering an online world of Chromium.

    Buffy Summers’ birthday is coming up on January 19th, which prompted the question, How much time do I need to watch the entire Buffy series? Well, like all things on the internet there is a site for that. BingeClock will let you know how long it will take you to watch that TV series that you just haven’t had time to get around to watching.

    KFC has some of the most ingenius marketing ads. Whether it is using their Twitter account or sending chicken in to space, KFC is always looking for something that makes them stand out. The newest? A Fire Log that smells like KFC.

    Finally, in the I didn’t know this was a problem category we come to K-Swiss selling shoes for E-Sports gamers. Is foot temperature really an issue?

  • Yes Virginia, Die Hard is a Christmas movie – This Geek in Review for 14 Dec 2018

    Yes Virginia, Die Hard is a Christmas movie – This Geek in Review for 14 Dec 2018

    The nets are raging this week over whether or not Die Hard is a Christmas movie. Maybe people raged every year and I didn’t know. Anyway, is Die Hard a Christmas movie? Of course, someone had to survey people on this question, and the results overwhelmingly say that Die Hard is not a Christmas movie. Those people are wrong, and to prove it, we go to see what Christmas movies people stream and search for this time of year. A big thank you to the people in Washington, Missouri, Wisconsin, and Virginia, you are correct. For giggles, you can read Roger Ebert’s Die Hard review from 1988 and make your own Die Hard Christmas tree ornament.

    Finally, the definitive proof that Die Hard is a Christmas movie:

    Seeing Tom Cruise in a public service announcement seems uncharacteristic for him, and I’m sure he’s tilting at windmills. People still record vertical video and force quit their apps on the iPhone even though the first makes for a crappy viewing experience and there is overwhelming evidence against the second. I’m sure motion smoothing on TVs will be this century’s blinking 12:00.

    Copyrights and the public domain

    Back in the late 90s, half of a dynamic singing duo from the 70s was elected to Congress. Sonny Bono, from Sonny and Cher. While Cher became pretty famous, Sonny became a forgotten politician. His time in Congress was short lived after he died in a freak skiing accident. To honor him, a copyright extension bill that was making its way through Congress was renamed the Sonny Bono Copyright Act. The law extended copyrights for another 20 years, depriving us of works entering the public domain. Which means no works in 20 years has entered the public domain. The extension runs out on January 25, 2019, so the Creative Commons is having a party. 

    Scifi

    Better Worlds looks like it’s going to be some awesome science fiction come the new year.

    The 80s

    Apparently, Chubby Checkers wasn’t afraid of attaching his name to anything, including singing a song for Dig Dug. Luckily, the recording has been found and uploaded to SoundCloud.

    Betamaxmas is pure gold and awesomeness.

    Now this is what I call a throwback:

    And, in case you forgot about one of the first computerized fitness trainers, Puma is rereleasing its classic 1986 RS – Computer running shoe.

    The Bumblebee trailer looks amazing, showing the live action Transformer movie we’ve wanted since the 1986 The Transformers: The Movie. The fact that it takes place in 1987 is icing on the cake. I am pumped.

    Not the 80s, but still awesome.

    Still awesome

    Via Reddit