American-style zoning has contributed greatly to the climate crisis and quality-of-life crisis in our country.

Oh that’s a quaint village...until it gets totally destroyed a few moments later. 14yo me didn’t get it all at the time, but I loved that game. The battle system. The music. The settings. The constant nihilism. I got onto the second disc before one of my little brothers got a hold of my memory card...never had the…

Yeah, I would love to see what Kojima would do if he had a chance to remake 3 & 4. A director's cut in which he uses modern hardware to produce the games he wanted to make but couldn't. The first two games just need a new coat of paint; changing the perspective and gameplay of those games just wouldn't work. 

The last console generation, with their woeful netbook-class CPUs, and, thus, less demanding PC specs, made PC gaming quite cheap and sustainable until the pandemic and a new, exponentially more powerful generation of consoles hit. Folks like me, who have gotten long legs out of cards such as my 970, were suddenly…

The Steam Deck has impressed me so much that I think that it won’t be long before we have AMD APUs that are competitive options for mainstream gamers. Perhaps Nvidia sees the writing on the wall in the sub-$500 market and is waiting to see what AMD does on the APU front and how readily the Intel cards are accepted.

Have you tried Cheddar’s Monte Cristo? It was a franchise chain but was recently acquired by Darden, so I expect Cheddar’s to be ubiquitous nationwide at some point. The Monte Cristo isn’t my thing, but it was a very popular item when I served there  

Considering the mass adoption of smart phones, and their becoming a necessity for having even the lowest-tier service job, I think we are well on our way to the dystopic vision. Eventually, we will be largely economically stratified by the technology we can afford and have access to. My students are already doing…

The self-order kiosks have been a massive failure. I don't think McD's will be automating the kitchen any time soon. 

Having recently gotten a Steam Deck, I jumped back into the game before the anime, as the experience on my desktop with a GTX 970 was less than ideal. The genius efficiency of the Steam Deck’s RDNA2 core and hardware-level FSR makes for a really smooth experience.

That Franz Ferdinand album blew my mind in 2004; I was up late at my now-wife’s house and saw the video for “Take Me Out” on MTV. I was already dabbling in an interest in post-punk-adjacent bands like early U2, REM, and Television. After Franz Ferdinand, that interest became an obsession, and I went backwards to bands…

No 4.0, no go. My first car was a ‘96 barebones 4-door with the I6. What an engine! When I got to college (2003), a few of my friends were surprised that it was so easy to spin out on rocks, sand, or gravel. They weren’t used to having so much torque on their rear wheels. Between me and my brother, we pushed that one…

Are you saying there might be a Gargoyles crossover with The Hunchback of Notre Dame? Hmmm... 

SMB 2-2 for me. Growing up, I was obsessed with swimming underwater, and, if I could make it to the 1-2 warp zone and spend time in 2-2, I was usually satisfied with my play session. When I was little, seeing the next stage is what kept me playing, so I didn't care if I was good at Mario or not, I just wanted to see…

Yes, a fairly deep U2 cut. “Pop” is a cruelly dismissed album, with the exception of “Miami” and “The Playboy Mansion,” a pair of songs which cannot be rated low enough. On the other hand, “Gone” and “Last Day on Earth” are two of U2's absolute best tunes, and “If You Wear that Velvet Dress” is the closest U2 ever got…

I’ve been singing the praises of the Steam Controller for about five years now, and I look forward to using the next generation of its tech. With any flight game (excluding detailed sims like DCS or IL-2), one of my favorite genres, I’ve been able to remap the keys to control more like Ace Combat, which is very…

I was an English major for undergrad and did a huge chunk of an M.A. in English Lit; I was lucky that the majority of my research involved reading literary criticism, written by academics who had both extensively studied composition and actively taught it. When I did research in classes outside of the department,…

Every year, HD competes with BMW for the absolute bottom of Consumer Reports’ motorcycle reliability ratings, but, year in and out, both brands also compete for the top spot in owner satisfaction. I guess riding a Yamaha is far less satisfying to some than taking an HD or BMW to the shop and talking about how awesome…

My first ride was a red, basic package (manual locks and windows, am/fm) ‘96 Cherokee with the mighty 4.0 under the hood. I bought it in 2001 with 120,000 miles, and, between me and my brothers, we put another 150,000+, with it finally needing too much maintenance for my dad to justify holding on to it. He sold it to…

Inspired to download and finally finish Automata. It’s easy to forget how slick the game is when you haven’t played in a while.

Very true. I wasn't a 64 owner, and I never could along too well with Goldeneye, so I did enjoy the XBLA release simply because I finally got to see the whole game. It was very easy, but I also enjoyed myself.