Stubbs BBQ: Before

My friend Joe Salama is writing a book titled The Paleo Miracle, editing together stories of people who have lost weight by following a more natural diet and lifestyle. I am contributing one of those stories and sharing it here by permission, although I am not strictly speaking following the orthodox version of the Paleolithic diet. In fact, I usually roll my eyes at the mention of something that sounds like a fad diet. However, it seemed that I blindly stumbled into much of the Paleo concept when implementing my own custom plan. Sure, successful health programs have obvious common factors, of eating less and exercising regularly, but the way to get there seems to be what separates what works from what doesn’t. By rolling my own, I managed to lose 45 pounds in 4 months. I sometimes discuss this in conversation, but since it’s appearing in print soon anyway, it’s about time I share with you, dear reader, the story of what I cheekily call The Moledina Regimen.

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Last Friday, a determined crew of eight SoMoFoNauts descended into Prometheus. Not everyone came back. At least not from the medical scene. But before I get to that, I should state at the outset that this is not a review of the film. If it were, I would give it a 7 out of 10. After all the build up on this blog, you might think this is a low score. Relative to expectations, it really is a low score. There was certainly a lot to like, such as the overall look of the film, the lush moodiness, it really is a Ridley Scott science fiction film. That previously mentioned medical scene did indeed meet the bar established by Alien for one total freakout moment. But it failed the Alien bar too. First off, there is no breakout stunning alien design, that matches the genius of H.R. Giger. Instead we get some large pale worms, and a pale amorphous tentacled beast. Which are very boring and generic. But more damning was the overload of cliché twists and unanswered questions, for which I blame the film’s co-writer and Lost co-creator Damon Lindelof.

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Most wrap-ups of E3 look at the show in terms of whether it was successful as intended or not. And on that score, it seems both the press and the folks I hung out with at the show felt it was adequate as expected. The ESA was distracted by its own battle with LA, whose sports construction will cut the LA Convention Center in half, as reported by John Gaudiosi in Forbes. Personally, I think the show was a success as intended, for the simple fact that I’m set on buying at least two games, The Last of Us from Naughty Dog, which is a post-post-apocalyptic mature action adventure in the style of Uncharted, and Star Wars 1313 from LucasArts, which is a long time ago in a galaxy far far away mature action adventure in the style of Uncharted. But at SoMoFos, we’re concerned with a slightly different question. Is E3 finally social? We provided some guidelines on the show, and then spent the week at E3, and our conclusion is: sort of. I realize that’s kind of a cop-out of an answer, but alas the situation on the ground isn’t cut and dried. Let’s break this down like a proper postmortem, as would appear is such fine publications as Game Developer magazine, and call out three things that went right and three things that went wrong.

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I had threatened to liveblog E3, but luckily I remembered how crazy that is to actually do. Kudos to actual journalists who do this, but then again, that’s their day job. Shawn and I are in an entirely different boat as BD guys, trying to earn a margin in the big bad world. But, that’s enough with the excuses, here instead is a summary of what I’ve seen and experienced so far.

I’m writing from the GREE booth, on my MacBook Air, connected to my iPad 3′s Verizon LTE hotspot. Everybody else here in the staff room is struggling trying to log onto the A for effort WiFi at the booth, but of course, no dice. I am magnanimously sharing my hotspot with Sho, just to keep the GREE marketing machine alive. See, $210M well-spent.

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While I don’t watch television, I do love catching up on great shows I don’t see in their broadcast run. I was recently pointed at BBC’s Sherlock, a modern retelling of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s character Sherlock Holmes. While only three episodes appear per season, and only the first of two seasons is on Netflix, they are 90 minutes an episode. The long episodes and the short season has the effect of completely throwing you off from the conventional story arcs of television and film, and makes the experience of the show refreshingly novel-like. The show is brilliant, thoroughly engrossing. But this article isn’t about Sherlock, it’s about Joss Whedon’s all too brief science fiction show, Firefly.

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