SELECT * FROM Shane

In 2007, the hotly anticipated Star Wars video game The Force Unleashed debuted its epic trailer at that year’s E3 convention. This trailer’s most notable feature was the amazing and dramatic footage of an anonymous Force-wielding character bringing a huge Star Destroyer crashing to the ground using only the Force.

It definitely impressed me, and I made a mental note that I was going to play this game.

I recently had a chance to play a version of this game that included this mission (previously, I had played the Wii version, which was cool because you got to wave the wand like a lightsaber and things like Force Push actually required a push action, but the Star Destroyer battle was omitted), and found myself immediately in two minds about it.

While I don’t think this battle was the unmitigated disaster that so many people on the internet seem to have written it off as, it wasn’t the jaw-dropping teeth-clenching awe-inspiring life-defining battle it had been built up as. Here are a few reasons why.

Read more »

So, it’s January 29, and only four days until Katie’s due date. Which means that the baby could be here any day now.

I have already posted about my anxieties about the upcoming birth and aftermath, and have been writing pretty extensively about my excitement in the baby’s diary, which will be gifted to her when she can read. So I won’t go into any of that here. Instead, I have decided to post a picture that shows Katie at 39 1/2 weeks, absolutely glowing.

Read more »

As the New Year broke, I found a news article that offered some insight into what this decade would have to offer. And guess what: it was more of the same. The latest example of misdirected political correctness is the republication of Joseph Conrad’s 1897 novel The Nigger of the Narcissus as The N-word of the Narcissus.

I’m not kidding. This is true. There’s a news article about it and everything.

Read more »

Last week, a job ad appeared on SEEK for a Biotic-Powered Super-Soldier. It was, of course, an ad for the upcoming PC and XBox 360 game Mass Effect 2.

After a bit of thought, and after perusing the Terms Of Use on the SEEK website, I find myself wondering whether it was right (or even legal) for this ad to have been posted.

No one could claim that advertising is a morally (or even legally) upright field. In fact, there’s no one who wouldn’t actually laugh at that suggestion. But this ad for Mass Effect 2 has gotten me thinking all over again about advertising, and how it really has infiltrated every aspect of our lives.

Read more »

Tomorrow, Katie will be 37 weeks pregnant. Anywhere between 37 and 41 weeks is considered full term, which means that our baby could be born at pretty much any time now. Which means I am about to become a dad.

And while I wouldn’t have it any other way, I find that – just as with anything important – I’m worrying a lot about the future.

Read more »