BIOSHOCK INFINITE coming in 2012

I was going to write a review of BioShock 2 months ago but never got around to it for various reasons. One of them being that I wanted to play it again to properly absorb it all. Personally, I loved BioShock 2. Even with a few issues (I had hoped to be able to explore around Rapture more) I thought it was a superb follow-up to 2007's BioShock: a title that is on my short list of greatest video games ever.

Well today, like a bolt out of the blue, Ken Levine - the guy who created BioShock in the first place (but didn't work on the sequel) - and his Irrational Games announced that BioShock Infinite will be landing in 2012.

Here's the trailer. And I have to ask: "What. The. %@&#?!?"

HOW does the BioShock saga go from being set in Rapture, a city on the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean in 1968, to a city floating at 30,000 feet... in 1912?!?

"Okay Chris, take deep breaths. Remember: Ken Levine is back at the helm of a BioShock game. Trust him."

I am completely wog-boggled by the direction that BioShock is taking. And at the same time, more intrigued by an upcoming video game than I can remember being in quite awhile.

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Remember my post last week about solar flares and earthquakes?

Here's the link if you wanna look at it. It was about the massive discharge of highly-energized particles that the Sun threw out at the Earth early last week. As a result there were some astonishingly brilliant aurora reported at the northern latitudes.

Well anyway, in my post I wondered aloud if there might be any earthquake activity that would happen as a result, 'cuz I've noticing for the past few years that whenever this planet gets hit by particles from a solar flare that it seems to agitate the inner workins enough to cause pretty good rumblin' soon afterward.

I wrote that last Monday, August 2nd. Today, August 12th, there have been two earthquakes reported in the past several hours. A 6.0 quake hitting the island nation of Vanuatu and then a short while ago a 6.9 quake striking just over a hundred miles away from Quito in Ecuador. No reports of injuries from either earthquake.

Not adding any further commentary. Just wanted to pass along the information for anyone interested in such things.

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What I've come to realize about denominations in Christianity

There is no such thing as "denominations". Christ is not divided.

There is, however, a great many perspectives of Christ, Who is too magnificent for any one person or group of people to fully comprehend.

As it should be.

Who is another or others then, to tell me - or anyone else for that matter - that my perspective of Christ, as one of His followers, is the wrong one?

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Slow day today...

And since it's been asked for by a number of you, here once again is a photo of my ravishingly beautiful and sweet cousin Lauryn! As an added bonus, you also get to see my equally beautiful and sweet cousin Karissa, who just got married this summer!

Thank you ladies. You have contributed some much-needed loveliness to this site :-)

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Thoughtcrime: Music festival organizer PRE-sues bootleggers

If you're going to attend the Mile High Music Festival this weekend in Denver, don't even think about bootlegging the music. Merely considering the notion means you've already been sued by event producer AEG Live. The company has filed a trademark infringement lawsuit against "John Does 1-100, Jane Does 1-100, and XYZ Company" for illegal bootlegging... which hasn't even been committed yet. Since nobody exists (yet) to contest the lawsuit, it moves ahead in court. It also means that AEG Live can get "law enforcement involved by using the lawsuit to ask the court to order US Marshalls, local and state police and even off-duty officers to go ahead and seize and impound the bootlegged material."

Techdirt has more about this legally ridiculous situation, including the full text of the filed lawsuit.

(How soon will it be before we start seeing companies like Viacom using this sort of tactic against YouTube users? Can't help but wonder about that. 'Course, I of all people have more than enough reason to wonder...)

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BACK TO THE FUTURE timeline chart... and two graphs that (might) help ya understand INCEPTION!

A substantial majority of my two or three regular readers (yeah looking at you Ed and Eric) are hardcore fans of Back to the Future and its two sequels. Well, all that mucking around with history can be a pain to keep up with for some people, so a smart dude named Sean Mort has put together a terrific timeline chart of the Back to the Future saga, taking into account the events of all eight different timelines! Seriously, I had no idea there were so many until I saw how Sean put it all into proper perspective. I'm gonna print this out to have handy when the Blu-ray set comes out in a few months.

And with Inception still going strong at the box office, plenty of people might still be trying to figure out its labyrinthine structure. Cinema Blend has put together a great illustrated guide to the five levels of Inception's plot. And an artist calling himself "dehas" has come through with an Escher-esque "Inception Infographic" that has already become widely popular as a reference guide to the movie. Check 'em out... but do beware of spoilers if you ain't seen the movie yet.

(Same goes for that Back to the Future chart... but if you haven't seen those movies yet, what the heck is wrong with you?!?)

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Color photographs of the Great Depression

How easy it is to think of eras gone by as being more drab and subdued than our own time. Especially the Great Depression: I think imagining it as being all black and white must be the "default" setting in the minds of many.

And then photos like this of a grocery store in Washington D.C., taken in 1941, show us otherwise...

Between 1939 and 1943 the Farm Security Administration and the Office of War Information made some of the only known full-color photographs of small-town life during the Great Depression and early years of World War II. These became part of a Library of Congress exhibit in 2006 called Bound for Glory: America in Color. And now the Denver Post has made them available online. Some of the photographs are curiously sweet. Others are especially haunting. And each of them brings to stark crisp life a forgotten facet of the way we used to be, once upon a time...

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