Tag Archives: Facebook

Moving on Up

I’m moving my hosting from WordPress.com to MediaTemple in the next 24 to 48 hours. The site should remain up but I won’t be doing my daily posts until things are settled out with the move.

Expect theme and feature changes and improvements. By hosting it myself there are all sorts of plugins that I can add: like Facebook comments! There may be some (hopefully) brief wonkiness as I add them though, or the occasional broken feature on the site that was supported by some WordPress.com feature that I have to replace.

Thanks for your patience.

Goodreads

In my latest move to further build up my social online presence I’ve moved onto goodreads.com. You can find my new profile here. It’s also installed permanently on the righthand sidebar via the  icon.

Those of you who use goodreads, link to my profile and friend me. If you read and haven’t signed up for it, you might want to. Basically it’s Facebook for books. You can easily find rate and review books and then share them with your friends. I posted up about 50 book reviews (mined from this blog) and rated another 70+. Of course I’ve read over 10,000 novels so I’m not about to go back and do them all, but I’ll add them as I see them.

As an author, Goodreads is supposedly a great place to market your books, which is my nefarious ulterior motive in joining yet another social network. Muhaha!

For my book reviews, click here.

For my posts on writing, click here.

All Your Base Are Belong to Us

Title: All Your Base Are Belong to Us

Author: Harold Goldberg

Genre: Video Game History

Length: 306 pages

Read: April 5, 2011

Summary: All the good stories!

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This new addition to the field of video game histories is a whirlwind tour of the medium from the 70s blips and blobs to the Facebook games of today, with everything in the middle included. Given the herculean task of covering 45+ years of gaming history in a completely serial fashion would probably result in about 4,000 pages, Goldberg has wisely chosen to snapshot pivotal stories. He seizes on some of the most important games, and even more importantly, the zany cast of creatives who made them.

My personal favorite is Chapter 8, “The Playstation’s Crash” featuring none other than that lovable Bandicoot, myself, Jason, Mark Cerny and various other friends. This chapter covers loosely the same subject matter that Jason and I detail in our lengthy series of Crash blogs (found here). It’s even 98% accurate! 🙂 If you enjoyed our Crash posts, I highly recommend you check out this book, as it includes not only some extra insights there, but 18 other chapters about other vitally important games or moments in gaming history.

These include old Atari, the great 80s crash, Mario, Tetris, EA, Adventure Games, Sierra Online, EverQuest, WOW, Bioshock, Rockstar, Bejeweled, and more. All are very entertaining, and focus heavily on the personalities behind the scenes — and boy, are there personalities in this business! In many ways this reminds me of Hackers, which is dated, but was one of my favorite books on the 80s computer revolution.

So click, buy, and enjoy!

For my series on Making Crash Bandicoot, CLICK HERE.