I think we’ve all done this before.

It wasn’t up there for long, to their credit, and I don’t actually care, but this is a really hilarious screen shot to me. Probably only to me, since I can more or less imagine what was going through this poor bastard’s head when he did it.

On the plus side, there are four awesome football games this weekend. Hell yeah.

- I finally got around to playing Bioshock, and I’m positively embarrassed that it took me this long. Zero Punctuation pretty well nailed it - it’s essentially a steampunk System Shock 2 that’s been dumbed down for the console crowd, but don’t let what it isn’t distract you from what it is. Which is a brilliantly executed FPS-RPG with beautiful graphics, jaw-droppingly brilliant art direction, and a good, well-written, story. I would say that BioShock is an over-hyped disappointment that still succeeds on  some levels and is still worth playing, but while accurate, that really doesn’t do it justice. It’s absolutely amazing, and the fact that it could’ve, and was advertised as being, even more so, shouldn’t distract you from this.

I’m also happy that I sprung for an 8800GT, because it runs this sucker at max settings at 12×10 without aa hint of slowdown. Totally worth having to re-route half my cabling just to fit the stupid thing in my case.

- 8 Diagrams,  the new album from the Wu Tang Clan. I haven’t heard the whole thing yet, but on first listen, this is pretty awesome so far. It’s exactly what you’d expect from the Wu Tang Clan, which is not to say that it sounds like a re-hash of 36 Chambers. RZA managed to still sound like the RZA without getting stale. I’ve heard the album is hit and miss overall, but so far there have been 2 “meh” songs - full review pending further listening.

- Finally, and most awesomely, Becki officially graduated college today. Woo hoo! We’re all very happy for her, and I managed to take 25 pictures of her walking across the stage. The whole ceremony yielded exactly 150 shots, so those are going to take a bit of time to sort and toss and flickr.

That’s about it for 2008 so far - 2007 mostly came up Aces for me,  so it’s going to be a hard act to follow.

Because I’m a dork, I’ve been spending tonight, like many nights, watching educational television. Sometimes I wish I’d been a scientist instead of a nerd, and as such I watch far too many documentaries.  It says something, that Discovery was my favorite TV channel growing up.

Anyway, pathetic dork retrospective aside, I’ve been noticing Discovery and TLC moving pretty far from their roots, with Discovery being the American Monster Chopper House CSI channel, and TLC being the “decorate someone’s house when they’re not around” channel. Even Science, which I still like for the simple fact that it’s the Science Channel - it says science right in the name! - is getting a little dumbed down.

Partly, I think it’s because I’ve seen so many of these shows, and that, at the risk of sounding arrogant, I expect a higher level of information. It’s probably a stretch to think a TV network, even a niche cable one, could cater to an audience expecting my desired level of detail, and actually get enough viewers to pay the bills.

Net Geo comes close. Discovery isn’t even trying.

I watched a couple of shows on National Geographic earlier, including one really interesting one about a fossilized Hadrosaur that still had it’s muscles and organs intact. It was exactly the kind of show that I inexplicably love - dry and in-depth, and it didn’t make any claims or try to make the subject seem any more exciting that it already was. There wasn’t a wise-cracking host, or a Nu-Rock soundtrack, and no part of this made me think it was entertainment. It was entertaining, but not entertainment, and that’s the difference between Discovery and Nat Geo.

Discovery, which I’m watching now because it isn’t totally without merit, and the def is very, very, high, is very much the opposite. I suppose I can’t fault them, since I do actually like some of their shows, but I’m glad Nat Geo is around as a counterpoint. Discovery (and Science, and History, for that matter), seem to enjoy measuring objects in terms of football fields, Empire State Buildings, and trips around the equator, and if they can’t describe something as being the “biggest/highest/most expensive/most extreme in the world”, it’s just not worth describing. It drives me nuts sometimes. I don’t want dumbed-down, accessible docu-tainment. I want boring, hard facts about things, because science and engineering and outer space are impressive enough without having to be eXXXXtreeeeeme.

Anyway, the tl;dr version is that you should start watching the National Geographic Channel. It’s awesome, and it does come in HD.

The guy from “Built it Bigger” really reminds me of my friend Mikey, actually. He’s always so concerned.

In the interest of cutting to the chase: I bought a high-def TV.

I actually got it last Friday, which is the first time I’ve gone out on “Black Friday” and tried to get a good deal on stuff. It’s a 32″ 720p no-name LCD, normally $750, marked down to $600 for the day.

I didn’t have to wake up early and fight crowds or anything, either. I strolled into the Columbia Best Buy at about noon, didn’t have a problem finding parking, and there was a pile of TVs sitting there waiting for me. The other ones I was looking at were a 37″ version of the same one I got, for an extra hundo, and a 32″ Sony Bravia for an extra hundo on top of that. I’m a tightwad, which ruled out the Bravia, and having set the thing up, the 37″ wouldn’t actually have fit on my coffee table without banging into the bookshelves. I think I did alright.

The cable here is in Becki’s name, so I had to make her call and get the Hi-Def hooked up, which Comcast was only able to do today, so this is the first time I’ve actually been able to sit down and watch proper HD on it, though the Wii looks pretty good, even at 480i.

Holy crap this is so much def.

I know it’s not the highest - my old roommate Chris and my friend Rob both have HD projectors on a 100+” screen, and several people I know have bigger, better TVs - including my Dad, who has two.

Still, this is a lot of def. It is almost too much def, if such a thing were possible.

A dude gets his brain punched out.

Five stars.