If you've played Bioshock, you've played System Shock.

For media works, the reason is often related to intellectual property in some manner or another. You can make colorable arguments that off-shore buying does deprive creators of their due worth. They're not strong arguments, but they're not laughable. The notion for other goods is frequently flipped - people are less…

It was conceived as a knockoff of Friends...except that Steven Moffat is a genius, deserves beautification, and made it awesome .

You won't fry the motherboard, but it won't do any good.

There's some loaded language in both of those examples. A phrase like "I'm not interested in dating right now" comes off as a challenge, especially with the qualifier (not now), the sort of basic rebuff that - whether we like it or not - is part of the custom of asking someone out. (Also, he was probably crazy to…

Insiders know he's already the true victor, regardless of whom these TV producers nominate.

Not all food cooks to single-serving portions.

I always assumed it was partways a test. The natural instinct is to balk and say "what the hell is that? That's what I'm paying a weeks salary for? It doesn't even look like food!" A truly cultured person, however, has been trained to smile, and forward complements to the chef on his creative application of foamed…

This is one of the weirdnesses of having a long running series that's continuous, but has a gap. Somewhere in the midst of things, this notion of Doctor as the poster child for Technical Pacifist came about. I remember having it myself. But on renewed watching of the older shows, it just doesn't stand up. There are…

In all brutal honesty, that's not very fair to the other party.

You have to start with an even more basic question: why do you want a girlfriend? The answer to that vastly changes the answer to the other.

We have a particular set of gender coding, at least in the U.S., that men are shallow and women aren't. This stereotype is utterly false, and I firmly believe that each sex is just about as interested in the superficial, or in the consequential, as the other is.

Disclose. If life were a sitcom, you'd come up with funny ways to hide it for weeks on end, but it isn't and you're not. What you don't want is to have someone feel hurt by the fact you were hiding it. That's actually worse than having someone run away screaming.

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When the Worlds of Ultima show up, then we'll talk.

I'll do you one better. You know summer has reached an all-time low when you find yourself making yourself and all your friends in The Sims, then have the sim that stands in for you get bored.

It's not necessarily an advantage. They're thinking about you, rather than just your words. But more importantly, they're not necessarily there to have a serious conversation.

To actually answer your question, though, it's a little like asking "what is a party?" Sure, we all know the series of the components to what makes something "a party," but the party only exists through the congress of the factors. We think of the internet like a thing, but it's really much more like an ongoing event.

Facebook is not designed for discussion. I mean like on a technological or interface level. It seems like it ought to be, simply because any one post has a high visibility from a large number of people. But the format is simply not conducive to anything particularly cohesive and conversational. I mean, there's a like…

I ran out of inexpensive things to fail at, so I went to law school.