For instance, how better to end the Aliens versus Predator debate than a giant infographic explaining how each species would fare over a few days of fighting.  The designer is Stephen Taubman, who is a self-declared Aliens fanboy.  Not only is how bloodshed plays out accurately depicted, he even includes handy tips for humans in case you come into contact with an Alien or Predator.  ;)

Painstakingly created for music lovers, this metro map design covers eight different different genres of rock spread over the decades.  Each line is in chronologically order and intersects at points where the genres collide.  The artist, Alberto Antoniazzi, is a graphic artist specializing in logos, t-shirt designs and other illustrations.  Click Below for the Full Resolution:

Check out a little nod to all the Saved by the Bell fans out there.  Do you recall Jessie Spano’s terrifying plummet into the harsh, painful world of caffeine addiction?  ;)  Nathaniel James does.  This hilarious infographic details the caffeine intake of Ms. Spano as the episode progresses.

Last but not least, take a look at this amazing infographic that explains the physics behind an unintentionally hilarious scene in an absolutely horrific movie, Mega Shark vs. Giant Octopus.  The designer, again Stephen Taubman, detailed exactly how a massive 240 foot shark would be able to get enough speed up to launch itself in the air  and destroy an entire passenger jet.  Wow…

The Oatmeal

The Oatmeal is a relatively new member of the web-comic community.  While some of the jokes can be a bit too obvious, the comedic nature of the illustrations are purposely crazy and captures the artist’s silly sense of humor.  (Link)

Amazing Super Powers

Amazing Super Powers (created by Wes & Tony) is a hilarious, twisted web-comic that occasionally borders on the insane.  The comic stays very fresh, but occasionally uses a few recurring characters to reward consistent readers. (Link)

Perry Bible Fellowship

Unfortunately somewhat defunct, the crazed cartoons of Nicholas Gurewitch live on in an archive on his website.  While his starting cartoons are light on the illustration quality, his work increases rapidly in quality and imaginative flair.  Unicorn Power!!!  (Link)

Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal

Finally, Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal is probably the least attractive of this group of cartoons, but doesn’t disappoint with its own level of twisted humor.   It’s an excellent resource for morbid, geeky and occasionally inappropriate humor.  (Link)

Enjoy!  I know that I do.  :)

Drawing by a Crazy Person ;)

It’s my contention that we are watching different sections of the same exact timeline.  Let me try to hurt your brain:  Everything that’s happened after the original plane crash can’t be changed.  It’s happened.  Done.  What we are watching this season (during the everyone-is-safe 2004 timeline) is the result of what’s going to happen by the end of this season.  I believe that the H-bomb (at the end of season 5) didn’t cause the island to sink to the bottom of the ocean in 1977.  But the island will sink to the bottom of the ocean before the season is over, BECAUSE the 2007 time traveling Losties will do something to destroy the island.  They may have to take down Essu (The Fake Locke) to do it, but it’s going to happen.  It’s their destiny to save the 2004 versions of themselves from the fate of sinking into the ocean.

The show is offering a bit of misdirection right now to accomplish that, but I think that is Jacob’s end goal; to break the cycle.  When Juliet died during the first episode of the season, I believe her consciousness linked up to the 2007 version of herself (similar to what was happening to Desmond in season 4).  If that’s the case, we will see (alternate-2004) Sawyer asking Juliet out for coffee sometime after he steps off flight 815 in Los Angeles.

• 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.

Today, I finished my first week at a job I absolutely adore.  My co-workers are fantastic, my boss is extremely savvy, the company culture is awesome and the work is refreshingly challenging.  It’s the type of job that I’ve always wanted, but never been able to find on the East Coast.  So how does one manage to pull this off in an economy supposedly headed for a recession?

There’s one simple rule to always keep in mind before attempting this type of transition.  Stay positive, no matter what happens! Opportunities will always come your way and you will be able to see them with a positive attitude.  Seems like new-age mumbo jumbo, I know.  I never really understood that mantra until recently.

Before moving, research the area you want to live in.  That includes the type of job you are going after, the size of the city you desire, the cost of living, the weather, the nightlife, etc…  Research it for weeks, perhaps months.  Call anyone that you know in the city to get personal opinions about the best areas to live.  Start building a network of friends through Facebook or another social network.  Post questions at the City-Data forums to get ridiculously detailed answers from locals.

Build up a sizable pile of cash before leaving your current part-time or full-time job; 3 to 6 months of living expenses.  If you have a hard time doing that, redefine what it means to sustain yourself.  Can you live on Ramen noodles or Mac & Cheese for a couple months?  Can you live with a couple roommates in a shoddy apartment for a month or two?  Plan out exactly how long your savings can last before you have to take a job that you may dislike.

If you are moving to a city like San Fransisco, Chicago or NYC, ditch the car if you own one.  Public transportation is obviously more efficient.  If you are moving to a city like Los Angeles, Seattle or Miami, you need reliable transportation.  I’m not saying that a bicycle is out of the question, but you really need a car for interviews in large, spread-out cities.  Figure out the logistics of driving the entire way versus flying.  Flying may be faster, but you can take vastly more belongings by driving.  Plus the road trip is a fantastic memory that you will relish forever.

Stock up some technology before you make the trip; a laptop, a smart-phone and a GPS unit specifically.  Turn-by-turn directions from a cheap GPS unit is INVALUABLE in a new city.  A smart-phone, like an iPhone / Blackberry, is going to be very helpful when it comes to keep track of contacts / email.  A laptop is vital for a mobile online job search when you arrive in the city.

If you don’t know anyone personally in the city, hit up Craigslist and start perusing the listings.  Search by the areas of the city that you know to be safer.  Use Walkscore.com to identify the listings with nearby stores.  Look for situations that don’t require a lease signing.  There are plenty of these in the temp housing section of CL.   You could also try marketing yourself as a potential roommate in the Housing Wanted section.  It’s a great way to land leads for roommates that haven’t even listed their place yet.

Be aware that you may have to end up living with a bad roommate for a month or two.  If that person has to find a potential roommate that’s 2,500 miles away, odds are that everyone else has turned them down.  Try to set up multiple appointments to look at places when you arrive.  Target furnished places without a lease.  Odds are that you will want to move after making friends in the city.

Before driving / flying across the country, go dish out the best $20 that you will ever spend and pick up Guerrilla Marketing for Job Hunters.  You may not use any of the alternative techniques in the book, but it will put you into the mindset of an aggressive job search.  Read it from cover to cover.  Every single iota of advice in that book is utterly brilliant.

So you’ve arrived in the city and need to start looking for a job.  Grab that laptop and hit the streets.  I typically spent a couple hours in the Coffee Bean (local coffee chain) and the rest of the day in a branch of the public library using the free wi-fi.  It’s a perfect place to work diligently in peace and quiet.  Dress for an interview every day of the week.  I was called to a few same-day interviews, some within a couple hours of the call.

As far as my job search went, I only targeted jobs that I knew would interest and challenge me.  I made small alterations in my resume to cater it to the job in question.  I sent detailed cover letters within my email message and included a letter of recommendation with each query.  I probably sent out my resume 30 times over the first two weeks and landed an opening phone interview 15% of the time.  I skipped all the major job sites like Monster and Careerbuilder.  I actually only used Craigslist and local company sites that listed jobs.

Some people hate going on an interview.  I’ve come to relish it.  I’ve been on so many in the past month that I feel like a professional interviewer.  The key to being successful in an interview is asking questions.  That’s it.  That’s the big secret.  Do you still have to be savvy? Yes.  Do you still need to relate your experience to the job in question? Yes.  But asking questions is your chance to shift the balance of power and grill the interviewer.  Don’t wait for them to ask “Well, do you have any questions for me?“.  Just fire away whenever the topic strikes.  Find a question that they can’t answer and they will remember you.  Go to Barnes & Noble and read a book listing interview questions if you can’t come up with anything.

Following up after the interview with a thank you is key.  I’m old school.  I like the hand-written note.  I interviewed with nearly all tech companies.  I’m sure a thank you email through have sufficed, but I’m also of the opinion that my note would stick out over other candidate’s emails.  It’s more personal and certainly more time consuming than tapping a few buttons on the keyboard.  Mail them out within 24 hours of your interview, no exceptions.

Finally, try to stay patient during downtime.  It’s easy to let the mind worry about the future after several interviews.  Offers take time to put together.  Keep plugging away at sending out the resumes and wait for the offers to come in.  If you nailed the interview and followed up with enthusiastic interest, it doesn’t matter if you aren’t the perfect fit based on experience.  When you get an offer from one company, let the other companies considering you know immediately.  It will speed things along in the process.  Be gracious

So that’s pretty much the truncated version of the past 30 days.  Life is good and it’s getting better every day.  Now I just need to take some surfing lessons.

Electronic Arts sells ad space on digital billboards within the game. When gamers hop online to play a little Burnout Revenge on the Xbox 360, they will see advertisements that have been digitally uploaded to the tracks. It’s a relatively new form of advertising and brand new to the campaign front. Pop it in today and you will see an advert for Barack Obama’s campaign.

Putting all political-position squabbling aside, it’s obvious to see that one campaign understands how to incorporate new forms of advertising to reach voters. And I’m not talking about the youth vote that gets tossed in Obama’s corner all the time. The new average age of video gamers is now 35. We are getting older every year and still playing video games. This form of advertising reaches a much wider audience than people think.

Where does that put McCain or the people advising his campaign advertisement spending? Why isn’t his team investing in new forms of media to reach the same demographic? He admitted in an interview last year that he doesn’t use a computer or email. And that’s completely understandable. He’s from a generation that simply didn’t use computers and his war injury precludes him from typing.

Let’s say for a moment that I completely agree with McCain on all issues. (I don’t, nor do I with Obama.) Putting issues like Net Neutrality aside, rapid changes in computer technology already influence an incredible amount of policy decisions. How in the world do I plausibly vote for someone that doesn’t integrate computer technology into his daily life? I use a computer every single day of my life. It’s integral to my job, my livelihood, my social network. It’s the same for millions of Americans. Why shouldn’t we expect the same of the next President of the United States?

I want a President that uses iChat, Skype and Google Talk to stay in touch with Senators and Congressmen. I want a President that’s got world leaders connected via LinkedIn. I want a President that uploads Flickr pictures from the iPhone and posts updates about his / her day on Twitter. I want a President that publishes Youtube videos about what’s going on with policy decisions. I want a President that answers a few topical questions via a weekly podcast that gets fed out to iTunes.

All political positions aside, I want a President that gets it.

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 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!

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 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 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 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 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.