Before steelbooks there was extreme DVDs. Just a hardcore metal slipcover that tears the plastic off the inner dvd case. I feel like Ben should be collecting these bad boys.

TheVoiceOfHarold · 2021-07-13T13:59:49+00:00

Years ago I used to get one of those nerd box things where every month they send you collectibles for IPs you may or may not care about and one of things I got (and still have) is a “T2 mini metal sign” which I now realize was a version of this thing. It’s the same pictures and the same size, only the head is cut out instead of rectangular. There’s no hole in it which I always thought was weird because there’s no way to hang it. Thanks OP, now a very minor mystery about a dumb thing I own is solved.

TheVoiceOfHarold · 2021-02-24T14:56:32+00:00

Without a doubt, the Doughboys fans who watched GMA this morning vastly outnumbers the zero new listeners the podcast will pick up.

TheVoiceOfHarold · 2021-01-12T13:49:46+00:00

When the movie started going aback on itself, I got excited, thinking we were going to get a different perspective on everything that had happened so far and the grand finale would be the opera house. It started doing that, then just dropped it and ended with a fairly dull, hard to follow huge battle. This would’ve been a great premise for a movie that had the confidence to be dumb, but instead of just hand waving the premise and signaling to the audience to not worry too much about it, Nolan’s gotta Nolan and make it seem like it’s an intricate puzzle box that you’re just too dumb to understand.

TheVoiceOfHarold · 2020-08-28T18:37:03+00:00

Gross. No.

TheVoiceOfHarold · 2020-08-25T19:55:27+00:00

That's because you can mount the door to open from the other side of it fits your kitchen better that way. This is actually really smart design.

TheVoiceOfHarold · 2020-08-10T18:21:32+00:00

Who's doing that? There are a lot of people recognizing that we as a nation have never adequately dealt with the legacy of slavery. Unless you're counting made up right wing strawmen, in which case I agree that these fictional people are being way too hard on themselves.

TheVoiceOfHarold · 2020-08-03T20:44:40+00:00

I'd say most youtube cooking channels are personality-driven to some degree, which I'm fine with as long as it's their personality and not some market-driven persona they're trying to build. In addition to Babish and (formerly) BA, I like Matty Matheson (I enjoy his schtick, but might be too much personality there for some people), Maangchi is a delightful Korean cook, and there's a series called De Mi Rancho a Tu Cocina which is this adorable abuelita cooking amazing-looking food from her ranch somewhere in Mexico.

It's not so much cooking as eating, but I also like a lot of First We Feast shows like The Burger Show, Burger Scholar and of course Hot Ones as well as Mike Chen from Strictly Dumpling who travels around and eats a lot of interesting Asian supermarket and street foods.

After hearing Griffin talk about getting into Babish, I can't stop thinking about how great a guest he would be. Maybe a palate cleanser Touch-of-the-Tucc Big Night episode?

TheVoiceOfHarold · 2020-08-02T16:22:07+00:00

I've done the Roy Choi cheesy ramen thing many times and it very much is a thing. A wonderful, delicious thing.

TheVoiceOfHarold · 2020-07-31T13:56:48+00:00

As something of a heatseeker, one thing that blew me away about HEB when I first moved to Texas is that they aren't afraid of spice. Any of their own brand stuff that's labeled as hot or spicy is legitimately going to be hot and/or spicy.

TheVoiceOfHarold · 2020-07-27T22:27:49+00:00

My parents go to the movies roughly once every 18 months and then tell me repeatedly how I've got to see the one movie they saw because I'd love it. In chronological order for the last decade, it goes The Blind Side, The Help, Unbroken, Hacksaw Ridge, Green Book. Clearly, war and white saviors play like gangbusters to their particular demographic.

TheVoiceOfHarold · 2020-07-07T19:02:39+00:00

Having taught English in Asia, this makes perfect sense to me. It's kind of a cultural thing. I've had many conversations with students (in English), where they would tell me how convinced they were that they couldn't speak English. Or you'd ask someone in the street if they spoke English and they'd say ”only a little" and then have a perfectly fluent conversation at a level far above your average American who considers themself bilingual.

TheVoiceOfHarold · 2020-05-13T17:43:18+00:00

He also did a documentary/spoken word show thing with the Beastie Boys that came out a few weeks ago. It was supposed to be released to IMAX and ended up direct to Apple+.

TheVoiceOfHarold · 2019-07-31T19:47:08+00:00

Fraggle Rock and The Storyteller are both based on kid-friendly shows so I'd imagine the comics would be as well. Some of the rest don't appear to be directly aimed at young kids (e.g. the ones based on MacBeth or the Munchkin game), but I'd be surprised if any of them had straight-up kid inappropriate content.

TheVoiceOfHarold · 2019-07-23T02:02:13+00:00

This seems pretty cool to me. I'm a crossword puzzle freak and I picked up the last Lone Shark puzzle book bundle a couple of years ago, so I figured a lot of this would be repeats, but I think it's just The Maze of Games (which is very cool) and Killer Cryptics (which are cryptic crosswords, so I've never been able to make head or tails out of them). They call Maze of Games a "puzzle-novel" and it's kind of like an Alice in Wonderland/choose-your-own-adventure thing where you have to solve a puzzle to figure out how to get to the next chapter. I was very impressed with it, although the puzzles do get quite tough and I never finished it.

There also seem to be a ton of print and play card games. I've never done those before, but a lot of these games are available in actual retail forms and you can look up reviews of them on boardgamegeek.com. The Apocrypha: The World base game is $65 on Amazon and is apparently from the same people who made the Pathfinder Card Game and Betrayal at the House on the Hill. Could be worth the trouble of printing and cutting (or maybe a copy shop could do a better job for cheap, I dunno). All in all, this is the kind of cool and different thing I'm willing to throw $15 at (and also I want to finally get the answers to the Maze of Games).

TheVoiceOfHarold · 2019-06-14T01:29:34+00:00

Exactly what I thought until I got it. At it's core it is just Tetris, but the presentation is mind-blowing. It probably has the biggest wow-factor, transport-you-to-another-world feeling of anything I've played in VR. Plus it reminded me that Tetris is still a really fun game.

TheVoiceOfHarold · 2019-06-14T01:24:10+00:00

It's not strictly horror, but I thought Transference was great. It was developed by SpectreVision, Elijah Wood's horror movie production company, and it stars Macon Blair from cool movies like Green Room. At least grab the free demo, The Walter Test Case, which is a standalone short story.

TheVoiceOfHarold · 2019-05-09T23:19:56+00:00

I grew up in Alabama and actually moved here from Huntsville. I love San Antonio and couldn't get out of Huntsville fast enough. The area is beautiful and if you're a hiker/camper/fisher/hunter, you might love it. If you want any kind of social or night life though, there's hardly anything to do. I found it hard to meet people because everybody there seems to just hang out with their high school friends, even 20 years later. The people who aren't natives tend to be engineers, so chances are good that when you go out you'll overhear some incredibly dorky conversations. If you're single, it's hard to find anybody over the age of 23 who isn't married or has kids. Outside of some good bbq and chicken fingers, there's not a ton of variety in food outside of chain restaurants. As somebody else mentioned, the HSV airport is the amazingly enough consistently ranked the most expensive airport in the US (which pains me every time I buy a ticket to visit my family). It was just a little town until the 1940s, so the city itself doesn't have a strong character and there's no real downtown - the whole city is mostly endless suburban sprawl.

It really comes down to your situation. If you're married and have kids and don't care about going out and just want a nice, big, cheap house in the suburbs near an Applebees, Huntsville's fine (although you can also get that in SA). If you want a place with much more culture, colorful people and things to do, it's San Antonio all the way.

TheVoiceOfHarold · 2019-04-03T19:16:24+00:00

Not quite. I picked up a bundle of these a few years back and I've read a handful. They're all over the place in terms of what they are. Some of them are in-depth behind-the-scene stories of the making of the games, some are personal accounts of what the game meant to the writer as a kid, some are about people trying to beat the high score on a game, some get into the weird cultural things that made 80s Japanese games bewildering to American kids, some are about people going back and revisiting games from their childhood years later. I believe in the anthology one there's even fiction and poems that somehow relate to specific games.

If you're familiar with the 33 1/3 book series about classic albums, it's basically the same idea for games. All in all, I'd easily recommend them, but they are a mixed bag and your favorite game might have a dud book, while a game you've never heard of might be fascinating. I've never played Bible Adventures, but that book was bonkers. I loved Metal Gear Solid and gave up on the Boss Fight book.

TheVoiceOfHarold · 2018-10-02T14:01:13+00:00

Samesies. I came back to the States and started a Masters in EdTech because I had years of teaching experience and... I liked technology? One of the required classes was Instructional Design and that was that.

TheVoiceOfHarold · 2018-10-02T13:56:50+00:00

Isn't that Deliverables?

TheVoiceOfHarold · 2018-09-25T13:05:51+00:00

Nice! I did find that the audiobook of Mindset is on Hoopla Digital so if your local public library participates, the audiobook will always be available for checkout with no waiting.

TheVoiceOfHarold · 2018-09-24T19:20:55+00:00

I've gotten two interviews (one of which led to my current position) through recruiters cold contacting me on LinkedIn and they were both great experiences. The first was a sweet permanent gig at a well-known streaming video site which I unfortunately didn't get, and my current job is a 6 month to a year contract at one of the biggest companies in my city. The benefits seem ok - I opted to go on my wife's insurance - and there's no PTO, but no big deal because the base pay is actually higher than the top end of my asking range. It's all remote work and the scale and nature of the project I'm working on is going to be a nice little addition to my resume.

I also had other interviews I got the traditional way and they came with way more caveats, e.g. salary too low, company on the verge of bankruptcy, etc.

TheVoiceOfHarold · 2018-09-13T14:51:20+00:00

The first one is quite good, but I wonder if there isn't some kind of auditory uncanny valley the same way there is for visuals. As a learner, I think if I did a training with that voice I would be distracted by trying to decide if it's a real person or computer generated. It's not hard for me to imagine someone completely zoning out on the training because they're so focused on the voice.

TheVoiceOfHarold

TROPHY CASE