The App Hole: Something Trivial

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One of my greatest talents is my ability to retain useless information. State capitals. Stanley Cup champions. Complete discographies of classic rock bands. The rules of curling. I soaked up trivia like a sponge. I’m not sure what the trigger was that set me down that path. As a kid, my favorite game shows were ones that tested facts, The Joker’s Wild and Card Sharks especially. My dad used to bring home yearly editions of The World Almanac and Book of Facts and I’d read them cover to cover. I spent hours playing the same tapes of 2XL over and

Thank You

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I don’t know if you heard, but we’ve been working on this Kickstarter thing and it got funded yesterday afternoon. We are currently celebrating, sleeping and celebrating sleep – something we’ve not had a lot of recently – but we will be back next week with the great stories you’ve come to expect. I formally thanked the Internet on Wednesday when we raised our goal, and I reprinted it yesterday when the campaign closed. That stands as a good representation of how I feel about the Kickstarter and its success, but I wanted to take this opportunity to thank some

Five Life Lessons from Twitch Plays Pokémon

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Playing Twitch Plays Pokémon isn’t exactly fun. It’s exasperating. It’s boring. It’s spectacularly repetitive. Participating for a few days – or even a few minutes – is enough to make you want to punch a Caterpie. That’s because in Twitch Plays Pokémon, simple tasks become grueling challenges. You know exactly what to do, but still you go backwards. You walk in circles. You get stuck – sometimes for days. Thousands of people worked in unison to play Twitch Plays Pokémon, which let viewers participate in a game of Pokémon Red – the original role-playing classic for Nintendo’s Game Boy –

Why Garrus is the Real Hero of Mass Effect

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Garrus Vakarian is the Mass Effect series. All right, that’s a strong statement, and obviously not literal. So to put it another way: more than any single component of Mass Effect, Garrus embodies the tone, theme and characterization of the series. Garrus is one of two characters who’s a full party member in all three Mass Effect games, alongside Tali. (Unless, of course, you let him die in Mass Effect 2 and import that save into Mass Effect 3. It’s also apparently possible to reject him if you time things right in Mass Effect 1, but I’ve never even seen