While Teemu and I are slaughtering our fair share of zombies (technically ‘infected’) in Left 4 Dead, another eagerly anticipated zombie game gets released today… Plants vs. Zombies. This is the latest from PopCap (so it promises to be just as addictive as Peggle) and there’s been a lot of buzz, thanks largely to a brilliant teaser music video. In an interview with the game designer, he mentions that the zombie dance moves in the video are modelled after none other than the legendary Åke Blomqvist instructional disco video that went viral a while back. Check it out.

I made reference in my previous post to my New York cocktail discovery, the Sazerac. Legend has it that it is one of the oldest cocktails around, although the date of its origin is somewhat disputed. That doesn’t change the fact that it is one of the finest, most complex, yet well-balanced drinks I’ve sipped. The Sazerac is as much about the lore of its once-lost ingredients (like real rye whiskey, genuine absinthe, and Peychaud’s bitters) as its taste. Its method of preparation is also something of an artform, best exemplified here by Chris McMillian of New Orlean’s Ritz-Carlton Hotel.
Read more »

We’re just back from New York, and the Flickr set is now up. Thanks to my old camera crapping out on me I’m now the proud owner of a Sony 200. So the first few photos are when the I could get the CCD in the old Canon point-and-shoot to work.

Our trip was full of great sights, shopping, food and drink - much downtime was spent at the Campbell Apartment sipping Manhattans and my new fave, Sazeracs. We also happened to be there at the same time as Marc and Eva, so we had fun hanging out with them, including a dinner with Pere and Isabel in Williamsburg. Foodwise, we gorged ourselves on everything from a cool little Phillipino cafe (Bayan), and a very nice Korean/Japanese place (Busan) that had just opened around the corner from our hotel (Apparently it’s so new that they don’t even have a web listing anywhere! How can I promote them if they don’t have a web address?).

Music recommendation services like Last.fm do a fairly good job of picking music based on your listening habits, and comparing those sets with similar users. Frustrated with trying to figure out what to rent from the local video store, I looked into similar service for movies. I started out back at IMDB.com, which is ok if you really only want a homogenized general rating of a film. Basically, a high rating will ensure a movie’s general public appeal, but not necessarily whether I would personally like it. Like musical tastes, our tastes in movies is a pretty subjective and personal thing. Last.fm’s approach of just mindlessly processing consumption habits (number of times listened to), isn’t likely to work for movies. A movie lasts a fair bit longer than a song, so I’m unlikely to watch 2001: A Space Oddessy over and over enough to automatically rank it as a favourite film. Similarly, I might have seen Anchor Man based on a friend’s recommendation and really disliked it, which would mean I’ve seen it almost as many times as Dancer in the Dark, one of my favourite films (if only because its content is so heartwrenching to watch).
Read more »

Over the years, I’ve toyed around with Painter, ever since it was made by Fractal Design (now developed by Corel), at a few different periods. Its completely different than Photoshop, as it is made to replicate the experience of natural tools and media. Really, it is only worthwhile when combined with a drawing tablet from Wacom. Even though I’m not much of an artist, I find that I can get pretty attractive and interesting results by combining some of Painter’s best ‘cheater’ functions (like cloning colours from a source photo) and my own amateurish brushstrokes with the tablet. For example, I painted this chipmunk from a photo I took of our little visitor on a hike in Whistler a few years back.

Well, more like, “Stuff American middle-class liberal hipster white people like”, but the blog (and now book) Stuff White People Like is often scarily acccurate when it comes to pegging the narrow conformity of their (our?) tastes:
Vegan/Vegetarianism, Apple Products, Microbreweries, Not having a TV, Bottles of Water, Outdoor Performance Clothes, Religions their parents don’t belong to.

So many of these are attempts to take the high moral ground (to “do the right thing” while establishing your own superiority) without any of the real effort involved in taking real action. Though, as the entries come from multiple submitters, the quality (and humour) is a bit uneven with some pretty poor or bordering on offensive.

Reading it, I’m equal-parts affirmed and embarrassed in how dead-on many of these are. Affirmed, in recognizing common contempt for many of these traits I recognize in others, and embarassed at the sheer number that apply to me. The full list currently has 120 entries of ’stuff’. Do the test (my white friends): how many apply to you?

Merry Christmas and happy holidays everyone. It has become a bit of my annual tradition to post a playlist of my favourite new music of the year, and this year shall be no exception. I still can’t shake the feeling that this year wasn’t quite as good as the year before, or the year before that, but maybe its just that this music is still too fresh to have fully penetrated into my consciousness. I’m also feeling more and more that the hipster music ‘blogosphere’ is almost as narrow in its scope as the major labels, top 40 radio, and MTV. Hopefully, my music tastes haven’t entirely been shaped by the likes of Pitchfork, Stereogum, and Elbo.ws.

Thus, I give you Mixmas 2008, my own ‘Top 40′ of 2008, in something resembling a particular order. A few things I discovered is that MGMT are better when remixed, Stereolab can still release music as good as anything they’ve done before, and that the best indie tunes evoke misty windswept seascapes (see Shearwater and Okkervil River). An additional note, for those of you prone to misheard lyrics, is that the screeching falsetto chorus in Jaguar Love’s “My Organ Sounds Like…” is actually “and everything it hurts” not “and I’ve got fingerholes” (although it would be so much better that way).

The whole list can be found at FIQL.

Perusing the info on the new Pitchfork 500 book, I noticed a reference to sidebars that included ‘Yacht Rock‘. Whatever could the musical genre of ‘Yacht Rock’ be, and how had I missed this seemingly essential cult reference. Peeling off the layers of the Yacht Rock oevre (the smoooooothest sounds of late 70s soft rock) revealed the golden nugget of the Yacht Rock series on Channel101. The homemade show is features a ‘bad on purpose’ style, but its lowbrow humour reveals some amazing interweaved connections between Yacht Rockers like Kenny Loggins, Michael McDonald, Christopher Cross and Hall & Oates. Truly inspired. Now excuse me, while I get back to my smooth tunes.

It looks like I’m not the only one combining an interest in music and cooking. I give you… Cooking With Coolio on My Damn Channel. Featuring mood music, disco balls, dancers/ho’s and recipes such as Soul Rolls and Swashbucklin’ Shrimp, how has this priceless piece of entertainment passed me by until now? My favourite touch is Coolio’s eschewing standard cooking measures in favour of ‘half a dime bag of Seasoning Salt’.

There may be an imaginary division between the personalities of Mac people and PC people in this world. There may be a similar division between iTunes people and eMusic people. I’m an eMusic person. iTunes of course is the dominant online music download store, and though I haven’t checked numbers, I’m sure it handily beats eMusic’s total downloads several times over. While iTunes has a slick interface, big marketing bucks, the big artists and the big labels, eMusic has so much more for the true music collector. While it doesn’t have the major labels, or many of the mainstream big artists (though there are some exceptions like The White Stripes), it does feature a very wide variety of indie labels and emerging artists. Read more »