Why do people still buy records? For one thing, some people think they sound better in the analog format. I personally do, and continue to buy records, both old and new. I originally started buying them for the covers, hoping to put a few good ones up in the house, and it turned into listening to them again just to see what they were like. What I found was that I sat and listened to the album. It wasn’t just popping in a CD on the way to work, this was an experience. Listening to the album, I found myself studying the liner notes and paying attention to the album more than if I had listened to it while commuting. Having something in your hand that felt like you bought something special on it reminded me why I had a love of music in the first place.

If you have a local record store in your area, drop by and pick up a record or two, or just see what’s been released lately. My store has used albums which I love to go through. There are a ton of gems in there which I was damn happy to find. Some of them have gone on my walls, some I still listen to regularly. If you’ve never listened to an album but love music, go down to your local store and see if there’s a turntable with headphones you can listen to.

Record Store Day Home Page

Our interview with the owners of Bananas, the largest record store in the world.

From basementvinyl.com: Record Store Day 2010 new releases

From my blog at geekistry.com: Life, at 33-1/3 RPM

© June Sixth Productions for Geekistry: It's all geek to us, 2010. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: compact disc, delomni, Music, no8track4u, non-traditional geek, record store day, records, Vinyl

© June Sixth Productions for Geekistry: It's all geek to us, 2010. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: arcade, arkanoid, atari, classic, commodore, delomni, donkey kong, frogger, non-traditional geek, onemoreprod, patrick jean, pixels, space invaders, tetris

As arcades gave way to home consoles, they started to close up shop, but the nostalgia of playing those games lived on in emulators for the PC, Mac, Playstation, and Dreamcast. Today, you can find most popular arcade games on the Playstation 3 or Xbox Live. However, nothing compares to the feel of the original controls in your hand. Oh, sure, you can play Tron on your PC using MAME, but having the stick and the knob can’t be matched by a keyboard and mouse no matter how hard you try.

A few years back, I decided to get an arcade machine for the house. It took a long time to determine which one I wanted because the premise of an arcade machine had one major flaw: you could never really beat the game no matter what you bought. It would be purely for entertainment and nostalgia. Picking the right game took time for me to think about what games I was good at, and which I’d enjoy over time.

There were games that were my favorite but I sucked horribly at. Sinistar was one of them. I loved that game to pieces (no pun intended), but I never got past wave two. Tempest was good but I wasn’t very good at that either. Gyruss was one of my favorite games, and I think the best I did was get to Mars, but I found that game to be too repetitious. Once you knew the patterns, it was easy. Marble Madness was an awesome game, but way too short. I think it was six levels, and then you’re done. I beat the game before so I didn’t think I’d get much fun out of a game I could win. The list went on and on: Centipede, Star Wars (my #1 choice, but very expensive), Donkey Kong, Star Trek, Space War, Dig Dug, Mr. Do!, Space Invaders, the list goes on and on.

I eventually decided on Tron because of its unique gameplay, design, and cabinet. I found a guy in Keansburg who was selling one for $400 and I jumped on getting a friend with a truck to go down there and get it. We agreed on a price, and set a date to pick it up. After getting there, the guy jacked the price up to $700, claiming that other people were interested in it. The machine wasn’t even in that good of shape. The speaker was shot, the screen had burn-in, and the stickers on the cabinet were peeling. The game itself played fine, but this wasn’t a $700 machine.

So I went home instead, putting the money back in the bank and thought that having an arcade machine may not be the best idea. They need maintenance, and some work on it may be beyond the scope of something I could handle such as replacing the screen.

Today, you can build a cabinet or buy one premade, and run the MAME emulator on a low-end PC. I may do that myself since maintenance on it is trivial, and the screen today can simply be an LCD monitor.

So what would be your desert island arcade machine?

A Tron arcade machine

© June Sixth Productions for Geekistry: It's all geek to us, 2010. | Permalink | One comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: aracde, delomni, desert island, donkey kon, emulator, gyruss, marble madness, non-traditional geek, sinistar, space invaders, tron

Unfortunately, the laws of time and space don’t apply to Lost, despite the magic that happens on that show. In reality, the Earth still needs to rotate once every day, and that means we still have time zones to contend with when watching television. Whether it’s Jack Shephard or Jack Bauer, eventually someone’s going to spoil your favorite show if you’re not watching it as it’s premiering. For American television shows, if you’re not on the east coast, chances are you’re going to have to either avoid social networks altogether, or try to train yourself to not read anything from your east coast friends. It’s especially hard on west coast Americans and people in other countries that might not get the show for hours or days later.

Twitter and other social media tools don’t have the code in place to help you mute what people are saying until the time in which you watch the show, and no third party apps can help either. People are trying to hashtag #lost and #24 responsibly, but sometimes something slips through and you wind up reading a reaction such as “yeah, when ____ fell through the ____ and ____…”, you feel that you’ve been beaten by the Time Zone Monster.

One solution is to shut down your social media networks altogether. It’s not the best solution, especially when you’re very busy and can’t watch your DVR for a few days. or you need to use social media because you’re commuting or in a position where it’s your only entertainment, but shutting down the only way to guarantee that you won’t see anything. That is, unless someone gets a text message spoiler to your phone.

Solutions for social media apps can be done, but nobody has implemented them yet. Listed below are some suggestions for third party app writers.

It would be nice if you could mute by time zone somehow. I don’t know any Twitter clients that can do this, and I’m sure Facebook can’t. You could tell your client to “mute everything east of me until 11pm PST” which would probably clear most of your spoiler traffic since everyone in your time zone and west can’t watch it, unless they react to something seen from someone they follow in the east of your location. It’s not foolproof, but it could help.

Twitter's time zone setting

With the current Twitter tools, the only other way to avoid spoilers would be to hashtag responsibly. With all the disruptive ads on shows nowadays, perhaps studios can put what they want the hashtag to be in the bottom of the screen as the show starts. This won’t prevent people from using improper hashtags like #lsot or #omgdidyouseelost, but it can help as well.

One suggestion which I think would work out well, but may be difficult to implement, would be to set up channels. With channels, all your Lost updates can go in the Lost channel, your 24 updates go in the 24 channel, and your updates about whether or not Jeff Probst is wearing short sleeves can go in the Survivor channel. It would take some time for users to set up, but in the long run, not only would it prevent spoilers, but it would lessen the noise to the people that are not interested in the show.

The last suggestion would be to have a word filter. In fact, these filters could be conjured up by the studios themselves. Or, better yet, put all the tweets that match your filter into their own column for viewing later. This way, if the words or phrases “Jack”, “Kate”, “Island”, Smoke Monster”, or “guyliner” come into your feed, they can be filtered into a column you can read later.

Simple astronomy won’t prevent time zones from happening, and people in those time zones want a fair chance to get home at a reasonable, comfortable time to watch their show (8pm ET would be 5pm PT, just as people are leaving work), A pie in the sky solution, the only solution left which people may or may not adapt to, is if the studios broadcast the show at the same time across the country, and let the DVRs play it back when the viewers want. I don’t think this would be popular with advertisers that don’t want you skipping their commercials, so the west coast viewers would be the worst offenders and the ad revenue would take a serious hit. If there could be an unobtrusive way for the ads to get through without compromising the viewing experience, perhaps that solution could work someday.

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Post tags: 24, american idol, delomni, Facebook, lost, non-traditional geek, spoilers, starman, Television, time zone, tv, Twitter