Mike Flacy

I love infographics.  Part of the reason that I adore The Oatmeal’s comic style is that much of it is in infographic form.  Infographics are a brilliant way of communicating ideas and I envy the graphic designers that have the creativity to make them.  While the majority of infographics are created for fairly dry topics, there are a few designers applying this form of creation to more entertaining topics; many pop culture related.

Growing up, there were very few cartoons in the newspaper that I made sure to catch on a regular basis.  The only one that seems worth the time was The Far Side (created by Gary Larson).   Its twisted sense of humor was appealing and seemed miles above the other scribblings in the paper.  Fast forward 15 years and there are tons of web-comics populating the web; many of which inspired directly from the same type of humor from the Far Side.  Here are my top 4 picks:

I’ve heard numerous explanations on why the current season of Lost seems to be operating on two different timelines.  The most popular scenario seems to be that there are two distinct, separate timelines in play; one being the new 2004 timeline where the Losties landed safely in LAX and the other being the current 2007 Losties still fighting the good fight on the island.  The cause of these two distinct timelines was the H-bomb that was detonated at the end of season 5.

• 30 days ago, I was driving from South Carolina to Los Angeles without a full time job.
• 20 days ago, I was on my first interview at a social networking company in Westwood.
• 10 days ago, I was on my third callback interview with a tech company in El Segundo.
• 5 days ago, I had three different job offers in my lap.

I rarely post about politics, but something intriguing on the campaign front caught my eye today. A presidential candidate is advertising in Burnout Revenge. For those unfamiliar, Burnout Revenge is a car-racing video game owned by Electronic Arts.

- Caught this little indie flick with Morgan Freeman and Paz Vega (the female lead in Spanglish). What a quirky little movie!  Freeman plays an out of work character actor that’s dropped off in an predominantly Hispanic neighborhood to study a grocery store manager for a role in a movie.  He latches onto Paz Vega, the girl running the 10 items or less line.

The whole movie is nothing more than a conversation that continues for about 90 minutes.  Freeman and Vega play off each other in a very human manner.  There are nice bits of comedy interspersed in the film as well.

- The Google / United Airline debacle was an extremely interesting technology screw-up this week.  Basically a single person accessed an article, around 1:30 A.M. last Sunday, about United declaring bankruptcy in 2002.  Since it’s a low traffic time for accessing news, Google bounced it to the Popular Stories section on the main Google News page.  Bloomburg picked up the story as new and the ensuing financial panic caused shareholders to sell a billion dollars worth of stock.  The price on the stock dropped by 75% in a matter of hours.  Yay computers!

- If you haven’t seen it yet, watch the political opening for SNL this week.  The remainder of the show is complete drivel, but the Sarah Palin / Hillary Clinton skit is absolutely hilarious.  Tina Fey nails Palin’s look, mannerisms and accent.

I watched the first episode of Dexter season 3 this week.  It doesn’t air for another two weeks on Showtime.  No story spoilers from me, but I will say that the ending will leave your jaw on the floor.

I was studying Jimmy Smits character the entire episode.  He has an odd interest in Dexter that I’d imagine is going to leak over into Dexter’s favorite pastime.  I think they both have a thirst for justice and Smits is going to take part a killing somewhere along the way.

I really didn’t care for the new guy in the detective unit, but the girl in Internal Affairs has my interest peaked.  I like the direction that they are taking with Batista’s character as well.  It’s going to cause a rift with Laguerta down the line.

The spontaneity angle is extremely intriguing.  I’m wondering if Dexter will develop a need for spontaneity rather than his deliberate planning stages.  It makes for sloppy work, but he seemed to have gotten a thrill over the whole mess.  Anyway, the first episode catapults several story lines into play.  I can’t wait to see how Dex handles them.

• I enjoyed the premiere of The Shield’s final season this week.  It was a slow start considering the pacing of the previous episode, but it laid some brilliant groundwork for future story lines.  I’m thinking Shane lives, Ronnie goes off the deep end, Vic and Acevada take down the Mexican cartel in a very bloody fashion and Dutch finally goes to jail for strangling neighborhood cats.

• Finding a new place to live on Craigslist has been disappointing to say the least.  Trying to make a long distance connection with a potential roommate is somewhat dampened by the anonymity of the Internet. Ugh…

• I had some of the worst sushi in my life today.  Japanese marinated mushrooms might sound tasty, but the ones I ate were the consistency of rubber and completely flavorless.  Yelp is going to get a mouthful of unhappy words from me this week.

• True Blood on HBO was an offbeat show.  It reminded me the feeling I got when watching Carnivale for the first time.  The oddball choice of setting in the deep south is strangely interesting.  I doubt it will make it past a couple seasons though.  Entourage was excellent as usual.  Eric looks a bit like a clone of Ari though.

• I’m really crossing my fingers for iPhone’s 2.1 firmware this week.  It’s rumored to be coming out with the new version of iTunes on the 9th.  I’d love to see turn-by-turn GPS implemented, but any other super secret iPhone powers will be welcome.

• My favorite Hulu video of the week: Taco bed!

Here’s a little blast from the past:

A couple years ago, I took a trip to NYC on my birthday to visit my sister. She moved to the city to begin a modeling career while I was in college and was working at Nobu on 57th at the time. She wanted to show me a good time and decided to take me to a place called Bungalow 8 down on 27th. I, being an oblivious kid from SC, had no idea what this place was all about. It’s fairly hideous in daylight:

It was an exclusive, ridiculously tiny, celeb-happy club that people literally had to purchase alcohol for an entire table. Her friend Matt got us right into the club and somehow we hooked up with someone that had purchased a table. We sat down and basically got to drink Grey Goose Vodka for free the entire night. I got a peek at the bill at the end of the night and it was somewhere in the $3000 to $4000 range!

So we are drinking and having a great time. The music is pumping so loud that I can barely hear my sister or Matt. Matt wants to get a picture of both of us in the club and I give him my camera. He takes a couple shots, but was rudely interrupted by a very large man telling him to stop taking pictures. I was wondering why he was being so confrontational about it.

Thankfully Matt slipped the camera back to me before anything happened to it. I asked Matt what had happened and he said that the big guy was Lindsey Lohan’s bodyguard. He didn’t want us taking pictures of her. We had no idea at the time, but I caught a glimpse of her in the photo later on. (It’s the one in my Flickr stream where I look like a complete drunken buffoon.)

The truly hilarious point in the night was when Matt screamed at me over the loud music something to the effect of “Why would we want a picture of drunken Lohan anyway?” He probably should have looked over his shoulder though. She was standing right beside us at that point and gave him a nasty look. I recall we left soon after.

I found Dan Hsu’s blog today.  It’s about his experiences as a gaming journalist at EGM.   Check out all three parts if you are interested in how advertising and pr folks influence coverage of the industry.

I was inspired to write a smidgen of a blog post about my limited experience with public relations influence over how games are reviewed.  VGT is a small fish compared to sites like IGN, Gamespot, and 1up, but our reviews warrant the same critical value on sites like Gamerankings and Metacritic.

In late April, I got an invite to a media event in San Diego for the Bourne Conspiracy game.  This entailed a $475 plane ticket, two night stay in the Hard Rock Hotel ($450), transportation to the event / airport and a party hosted by the development team with a open bar that dished out endless mojitos all night.

There were about twelve writers from other “small fish” sites that made the trip as well.  I wouldn’t be shocked if Sierra or High Moon Studios dished out $15,000 over the 3 days.  We got a brief tour of the studios and shuffled into the a couple rooms to get some hands on time with the game.

After the day trip, we were given some swag and shuffled back on the transport bus.  The group was told that we couldn’t report on anything that happened that day until after the game was released.  Our entire experience had essentially been embargoed until a point in time when a preview wouldn’t be newsworthy.  As I drifted off to sleep in my comfy Hard Rock Hotel king sized bed that night, I pondered what their actual intention was.

They wanted to dilute the overall review average by befriending the press that doesn’t get invited to these events.  I ended up giving the game 3.5 out of 5 stars, but the majority of the people at that event scored it 80% or higher.  I admit that I actually felt guilty about scoring the game on the lower end and pushed publication of the review for a couple weeks.

I certainly don’t regret going on this press junket.  It’s the type of event that the IGN’s of the world frequent constantly.  I met a couple cool writers and really appreciated the entertaining weekend trip, despite the plane ride.  It was also an enlightening look at how schmoozing can heavily influence the review process.  And somewhat disconcerting.

I discovered TweetDeck yesterday.  The design is ridiculously productive, yet the web keyword feature can easily suck away hours of your life.  I watched the iPhone feed and started firing off helpful replies incessantly.  The outcome is another handful of Twitter followers.  It’s a fantastic tool to find Twitter users with similar interests.  It’s not bad for local connections, but Twinkle is still the king in that respect.

I also came across two moderately funny web items today. The first is Where is Bob? It’s supposedly the tale of a absentee IT manager.  It’s likely a viral marketing campaign of some sort as the writing is a bit too good and the stories are just slightly outlandish.  It’s still worth looking at for a laugh.

The second is a Hulu video of a short comedy called The Line. It’s about a group of crazy fanboys that sit in a line 11 days before some sci-fi movie opens.  There are a couple guys from SNL in the mix.  Jason Sudeikis is particularly funny as the movie theater operator.

I’ve been listening to Chopin all day for some reason.  Dead Polish piano players seem to increase my productivity on the writing front.

Just wanted to give a quick shout-out to the makers of Braid.  The art direction is utterly amazing as you can see above.  A couple drawbacks are that it’s too short and costs too much ($15) on XBLA.  It would have been priced appropriately at $10.

I did the freak-out dance today in public when a bee landed on my arm outside a local coffee joint.  It’s not the manliest of movements.  It’s like the spider web freak-out dance but with more frantic running.  I stepped on a bee when I was about seven and I’ve been deathly afraid of them ever since.

I saw a man pushing a baby stroller with a toddler down the road today with his left hand and carrying a running weed trimmer in his right hand. He was either nuts or some sort of Nanny / Landscaper hybrid. Crazy or not, I drove away blissfully indifferent of the Cabbage Patch Kidnapper.

I tend to embrace my apathy. It’s especially fun to invoke during conversations. I’ve noticed that people automatically assume that you are of a differing opinion when clamming up; political and religious conversations in particular. For instance some liberal co-workers at my previous job thought I was a staunch conservative; all from adopting an apathetic stance. Truthfully I’m probably somewhere in the middle, but I don’t see the point in talking about something that I’d have to pretend I had the ability to change.

That’s the real beauty of apathy.  I don’t have to lie to myself about how much I should care about matters of supposed importance.  I get to focus on stuff that’s important to my little egocentric mind instead; work and play perhaps.  Everything else gets deleted from my brain after conversations end.  But on to more social topics…

I added a LinkedIn profile recently for networking purposes.  Seeing how my previous jobs weren’t exactly tech-related, I couldn’t beef up my contact list.  I strapped on my creativity hat and sent a mass-mailing to VGT contacts about adding me.  It will help me keep track of their job-hopping movements anyway.  I got about 60% to add me.  Not too shabby!

I also got in on the Ping.fm beta finally.  For those that don’t know, Ping.fm allows you to send the same status up to mutliple accounts.  For instance, I have it setup to send my status update to Twitter, Myspace, Facebook and LinkedIn.  It works with tons of other services as well (FriendFeed, Xanga, Livejournal, Blogger, WordPress, Pownce, etc…).  I have a beta code if anyone wants to sign up.

I’ve may have fallen into a Mobius Strip of writing endlessly until it’s time to sleep again.  I’m content to repeat that cycle over and over while my bank account gleefully greets the array of dead presidents being added every day.  The lucrative lifestyle makes me want to move again, perhaps up north for a few months.

I’ve been receiving an inordinate amount of Facebook friend requests lately; many from complete strangers.  No matter how many times I passively hit Ignore, they keep firing pleas at me.  Facebook desperately needs to add more options for my possible response.  Speaking of Facebook, the new look absolutely stinks.  It’s slow to load and I have to browse those stupid tabs to read someone’s page.

I’ve been playing around with the Flip Mino for a week now.  The video and sound quality is really excellent for the size of the camera.  It’s about the height of my iPhone, but skinnier in width.  I wish I had the camera when my sister and I filmed our Rock Band session a couple weeks ago.  Unfortunately Mikey and Gerbil broke up after our three day World Tour in Rome, London and Paris.

Here is a quick preview of my most recent Twitter application addiction. It’s a GPS aware app for the iPhone.