Watching today's coverage of Microsoft's E3 press conference on G4, and of course the very first game they demoed was Fallout 3 - holy frelling hell does that game look amazing! Washington D.C. has never looked better (all nuke-a-fried :-p ), and Resident Evil 5's online co-op look sweet, but the thing that's made me happiest so far is that Netflix is coming to the 360 - just as I was about to drop a 'Benj' on the Roku Netflix Player!

Oh yeah - Avatars? Lame.

So you've been hanging out smoking racks of ribs all day and playing poker all night, and it's now 1 AM - what's next? Burgers on the BBQ of course!

Damn, that was one tasty Saturday! :-p

Gateword reports:

With great sadness we must report that veteran actor Don S. Davis passed away on June 29, 2008. He was 65 years old.

Don co-starred on Stargate SG-1 for the show's first seven years, helping to launch the enduring science fiction franchise. Davis played Major General George Hammond, base commander and a father figure to many of the show's characters.

~~~

Born August 4, 1942 in Aurora, Missouri and raised there, Don received a Bachelor of Science degree with a double major in theater and art from Southwest Missouri State College in 1965. He then served three years on active duty in the United States Army, entering as a Second Lieutenant. He rose to the rank of Captain and was stationed in Korea before completing his required tour of active duty.

Upon leaving the army, Don began working toward a Master's degree in theater at Southern Illinois University, in Carbondale, Illinois, and received his Master's degree in 1970. He taught at the University of British Columbia for a decade before returning to SIU to complete his coursework for a PhD in theater, receiving the degree in 1982.

Don's list of film and television credits is lengthy, dating back to 1982. He met Stargate co-star Richard Dean Anderson on the set of MacGyver, where Don worked as a stunt double for actor Dana Elcar.

Godspeed General [Hammond of Texas]


2 weeks in a row we've lost good ones, I am not looking forward to next week....

Diablo III is Official!!!!

YES! YES! YES! YES! YES! YES! YES! YES! YES! YES! YES! YES! YES! YES! YES! YES! YES! YES! YES! YES! YES! YES! YES! YES! YES! YES! YES! YES! YES! YES! YES! YES! YES! YES! YES! YES! YES! YES! YES! YES! YES! YES! YES! YES! YES! YES! YES! YES! YES! YES! YES! YES! YES! YES! YES! YES! YES! YES! YES! YES! YES! YES! YES! YES! YES! YES! YES! YES!


Man, what an exciting year for video games. Not only is Fallout 3 finally coming out (after moving to a new house and being completely remade from scratch), but the next installment of my most favorite game ever was officially announced today (well, yesterday technically).

Fallout 1 & 2 were arguably the most influential RPG games ever, and Bethesda has quite a reputation to live up to after acquiring the franchise's license - but Diablo is by the one video game company that actually has the golden touch when it comes to quality games and customer support. Blizzard even just reset the Online Ladder in Diablo 2 a few weeks ago - they've been supporting the game for 8 years, and it's still free to play online! There are tons of demo video over on the official Diablo III site - awesome 3D isometric view that you can zoom in and out of (similar to Dungeon siege), with kick-ass graphics and awesome effects.

Man, I can't wait to play a Witch Doctor! I'm hoping that since I was part of the early and later Diablo II L.O.D beta testing that I have a slight edge in getting into the beta for this - nothing better than playing a game you love months before most other people :p (and I still play the game to this day - and have several licenses for it!)

George Carlin mourned as a counterculture hero

LOS ANGELES (AP) — Acerbic standup comedian and satirist George Carlin, whose staunch defense of free speech in his most famous routine "Seven Words You Can Never Say On Television" led to a key Supreme Court ruling on obscenity, has died.

Carlin, who had a history of heart trouble, went into St. John's Health Center in Santa Monica on Sunday afternoon complaining of chest pain and died later that evening, said his publicist, Jeff Abraham. He had performed as recently as last weekend at the Orleans Casino and Hotel in Las Vegas. He was 71.

"He was a genius and I will miss him dearly," Jack Burns, who was the other half of a comedy duo with Carlin in the early 1960s, told The Associated Press.

Carlin's jokes constantly breached the accepted boundaries of comedy and language, particularly with his routine on the "Seven Words" — all of which are taboo on broadcast TV and radio to this day.

When he uttered all seven at a show in Milwaukee in 1972, he was arrested on charges of disturbing the peace, freed on $150 bail and exonerated when a Wisconsin judge dismissed the case, saying it was indecent but citing free speech and the lack of any disturbance.

When the words were later played on a New York radio station, they resulted in a 1978 Supreme Court ruling upholding the government's authority to sanction stations for broadcasting offensive language during hours when children might be listening.

"So my name is a footnote in American legal history, which I'm perversely kind of proud of," he told The Associated Press earlier this year.

Man, if this country needs anything these days, it's more George Carlin. From Baseball Vs. Football to making up product names that you'll never get out of your head (Sprunt!), he definitely had an eye for pointing out the ludicrousness of the "ordinary". He'll be missed by many.

Well their shitty excuse for cable boxes do at least. Their internet service is nearly unbeatable in this country, but the more than a decade old technology they push as a cutting edge DVR is horrible crap. Yes, the picture quality if far superior with the box than without it, but they're already overloaded and forcing the move to SDV without having the capacity to expand and it's choking the quality out of the service in a hurry.

Cablevision flipped SciFi over to SDV (Switched Digital Video) early this morning, and I ended up recording nearly 12 hours of a black screen saying the channel is no longer available without a digital box. So I reset the tuner in my DVDR, and sure enough it's not available on QAM. Dammit. So I'm getting the Scientific Atlanta 8300HD DVR through my landlord, and I'm gonna have to give him the extra $20 a month with my rent. At least I'll have a DVR capable of recording in HD for when I get my new TV in a few months (of course my bed broke and now I need to replace that before getting the TV...)

And I was looking forward to watching 8 hours of Dark Angel when I got home today...

Rock pioneer Bo Diddley dies at age 79

JACKSONVILLE, Fla. (AP) — Bo Diddley, a founding father of rock 'n' roll whose distinctive "shave and a haircut, two bits" rhythm and innovative guitar effects inspired legions of other musicians, died Monday after months of ill health. He was 79.

Diddley died of heart failure at his home in Archer, Fla., spokeswoman Susan Clary said. He had suffered a heart attack in August, three months after suffering a stroke while touring in Iowa. Doctors said the stroke affected his ability to speak, and he had returned to Florida to continue rehabilitation.

~~~

Diddley, like other artists of his generations, was paid a flat fee for his recordings and said he received no royalty payments on record sales. He also said he was never paid for many of his performances.

"I am owed. I've never got paid," he said. "A dude with a pencil is worse than a cat with a machine gun."

In the early 1950s, Diddley said, disc jockeys called his type of music, "Jungle Music." It was Cleveland disc jockey Alan Freed who is credited with inventing the term "rock 'n' roll."

Diddley said Freed was talking about him, when he introduced him, saying, "Here is a man with an original sound, who is going to rock and roll you right out of your seat."

Diddley won attention from a new generation in 1989 when he took part in the "Bo Knows" ad campaign for Nike, built around football and baseball star Bo Jackson. Commenting on Jackson's guitar skills, Diddley turned to the camera and said, "He don't know Diddley."

"I never could figure out what it had to do with shoes, but it worked," Diddley said. "I got into a lot of new front rooms on the tube."

I put my Air Conditioner in! :-)

Soundwave (And Megan Fox?) To Appear In “Transformers 2″!

G.I. Joe might be looking like it's shaping up to be a failure of Matrix 3 proportions, but at least Hollywood's getting it right with ideas for Transformers 2.