This is one o the most moving speeches I’ve ever seen and probably one of the most moving of my generation.
Yes, we can.
I just saw this from the Obama campaign email newsletter:
—-
Here are a few details about our victory in South Carolina. According to the official results and CNN exit polls, Barack won:
The clear lesson from South Carolina is that voters are ready to bring this country together and solve the problems that matter to ordinary Americans.
We’ve been cranking through the movies lately! Here’s the quick and dirty review:
Mr. Brooks - Creeeee-py. Seriously disturbing, but held your attention very well. Kevin Costner does a good job as a normal guy serial killer. Seriously, you could almost see yourself in his shoes… wow.
3:10 to Yuma - while a bit far fetched in many places, including the ending, it was a great movie. Very engaging, very edge-of-your-seat. Ben Foster was absolutely amazing. Hell, I want another movie with him as the main character!!
The Adventures of Young Indiana Jones (Disc 1) - I was really looking forward to this disc arriving from NetFlix until I read that rather than creating a set of the TV shows, as they originally aired in the original order, Lucas made some changes. Apparently they took two episodes and mashed them up together on the disc, removing the corresponding voice over. This was strange and idiotic… I really can’t understand why they would have done this. The show was great, but I wanted to see the ORIGINAL show, not this modification. When young Indy goes from having left the US for the Middle East in the first “half” of the “movie” and ends speaking fluent Arabic, it’s hard to buy. Otherwise, not a bad show. Certainly not great, but certainly fun.
Live Free Die Hard - Train. Wreck. Despite a decent start (including several of the most amazing action movie special FX I’ve ever seen put to film), it turns bad. Fast. Skip this one. There’s not Die Hard left in this dead franchise.
The Kingdom - Surprisingly good! I’d heard mixed reviews, but it was surprising how much I liked it! Very good plot balance, some great action, some humorous moments, and more.
Eastern Promises - Either this was a brilliant movie that needs multiple viewings to fully understand or it sucked ass. I can’t figure out which one yet.
Last night’s premiere of the Sarah Conner Chronicles was pretty good. Not great, but holds serious potential if they keep getting better. Here’s my beefs:
I loves me some Terminator story though, so keep it coming Fox!
Holy mother of pearl… I’m a book reading machine! Since I left for Tulsa for Christmas, I’ve started and finished three, yes 3 books! Here’s the quickie reviews:
Death Star - Star Wars nerdy goodness. I’m a sucker for “the rest of the story” books that give details that the “core” story doesn’t touch on. In this case, how the Death Star was actually built and the problems associated.
Lisbon Crossing - The second book by Tom Gabbay. His first, The Berlin Conspiracy was good but this one was great. A fantastic story, wonderful pacing, and historically fun. Sure, the core story was a bit preposterous at times, but it was a good ride.
My Father’s Secret War - A memoir of the emotional journey of a writer/reporter to uncover her father’s WWII history. It was not at all what I expected, but it was very, very good!
“Bush said Iran funds terrorist extremists, undermines peace in Lebanon, sends arms to the Taliban, seeks to intimidate its neighbors with alarming rhetoric, defies the United Nations and destabilizes the entire region by refusing to be open about its nuclear program.”
Let’s be honest for a second… couldn’t we make comparisons to the US?
“WASHINGTON — Blackwater Worldwide repaired and repainted its trucks immediately after a deadly September shooting in Baghdad, making it difficult to determine whether enemy gunfire provoked the attack, according to people familiar with the government’s investigation of the incident.”
This is your outsourced Army, folks. Representing all that is America, unfortunately…
In tonight’s debate, Hillary Clinton got all fired up when defending Bill Clinton’s record and pointed out that Bill, her husband, balanced the budget.
Barack Obama is an absolute brilliant communicator, as I’ve pointed out before. He shows his amazing style in his response to Hillary’s point. He basically says (paraphrasing) “I agree that President Clinton did an incredible thing when he balanced the budget, he did a great thing”…or something to that point.
“If Clinton also loses New Hampshire to Obama, Penn’s future with the campaign may well be in jeopardy, strategists say. But that may be wishful thinking on their part. For one thing, there is no obvious candidate to replace him. Hillary’s advisers and Bill’s have never gotten along — and she has been particularly suspicious of his team. “Who they both trust — that’s a very small group,” says one longtime aide. “She is going to be very, very resistant to all of the white boys coming back.”
Great. So Clinton vs. Clinton is a potential White House couple? That’s fantastic.
Remember when the blog/twittersphere went bonkers over the sexism of digatechgirl.com, where you voted on who was the hottest girl in tech?
So why does Wired get to get away with doing the same exact thing?
I find it hard to believe, but for probably the first time in my life, and after having played…hell… 100+? PC video games over the years. See, I just don’t have the patience (willpower?) in me to play a 12 hour game. About 5-6 hours into it, I’m ready to try something else. Call of Duty was right about 5-6 hours of game play in the singleplayer mode and, despite complaints from many critics that this is a rip off, I’m fine with it. Granted, I’m not sure how I’d feel about it if the multiplayer didn’t rock.
Generally the CoD4 story was fun and helped the story along. The auto-saves are done at smart points that are fairly frequent. I played on the “normal” difficulty level and was surprised how little I really had to repeat levels. It was almost a bit TOO easy, but it was nice that the game designers didn’t try to make the game last longer by making unenjoyable complexity on levels. Don’t get me wrong, it wasn’t a cake walk, but it was fun difficult, not “my god I just want to look up the solution to this level online so I can move on” frustration.
And holy mother of god is this game beautiful. Seriously, it’s amazing and I’m only using DirectX 9… I can’t imagine if I had DX10 video cards in my rig. Faces don’t look real, but certainly bette than we’ve seen in 99% of the games that came before it.
The multiplayer is extremely well balanced, with several elements that make it one of the best FPS multiplayer experiences yet. Namely:
And lastly, I have to say a few words about the overall stability of the game. You see, I’ve been playing Battlefield 2 or Battlefield 2142 as my primary gaming activity for several years now. While great games, they leave something signficant to be desired in the core “how it works on your computer” realm. For instance, if you have your computer hooked up to a KVM switch and have to switch mid-game, BF2 and BF2142 would never give you the mouse back. You’d have basically restart the computer. Or if you left those games running and walked away, you’d more often than not come back to a crashed game. With even the newer BF2142, I’d have to restart the computer before playing each and every time or face potential problems trying to get into the game. And don’t get me started on how long it takes for either one of those games to actually startup…
Not so with CoD4 - initial load times were lightining fast, and after the first load they don’t make you sit through the fancy “this is the company that made this game” screens. (That’s fairly amazing, and a first as far as I can remember) The KVM switch worked fine, and often I’d pause the singleplayer game returning hours later to jump in where I left off.
To be fair,some (but not all by any stretch) may be attributed to XP vs. Vista. Maybe Vista does have some redeeming qualities after all. But probably not.
