I want to talk about public broadcasting for a moment. My desire to address this topic arises from the hullabaloo stemming from a comment during the recent presidential debate. In short, candidate Romney made plain his intention to eliminate the PBS subsidy as part of a broader plan to cut wasteful expenditure. His comment was cavalier and the reasoning was questionable. Given the state of political discourse, I wouldn’t expect much more, but this was a bit much even for me.

Let’s start with a basic proposition: public education is not an extravagance.

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It’s been a big year. I’ve got a minion on the way and I made the transition from a pure business type into a blended creative role. After a number of long conversations and a pep talk from my CEO, I moved in to the lead role for PlayMesh’s frontline game, Valor. The role is varied and challenging – it sits at the cross-section of game design, producing, community, marketing, and creatives.

I normally shied away from creative pursuits professionally. Not sure why. Probably a mix of insecurity and a desire to buy a house one day. But here I am, working on a major evolution to Valor. An enormous component of that effort has been game design related, a task that has occupied night and day for the better part of the last few months. One thing I’ve noticed during the journey: game design is all about consequences.

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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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Oh SoMoFos, how I’ve missed thee. I think Jamil did a pretty accurate job of summing up the shenanigans that have gone down in the interim. I’ll layer a bit more on top of it. Things are a-changin’ on my side and the industry is getting more interesting by the minute. Let’s do a quick update.

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Man oh man. This question has been coming up with incredible frequency over the last year. I’ve probably had the debate 8-9 times since GDC, and I still haven’t fully formed my opinion on the subject. There’s certainly some indications that gamers love mobile, and some pretty depressing indications that people aren’t buying as many traditional games as they used to, but does correlation equal causation?

Is mobile another platform or THE platform for hardcore gaming?

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Devotees of this blog (thanks mom!) will know of my suspicions regarding the inevitability of the zombie apocalypse. Naturally, I’m drawn to games that might provide me with the competitive edge when it comes to the dark times ahead. But I’ve been disappointed in the offerings on tap – they’re just too forgiving. I mean, it’s great that Fallout is comfortable with the idea that people are chilling and trading bottlecaps to each other after the nuclear war, but I’m thinking it’s more likely that people will just spend most of their time slaughtering everything that moves. I need to be prepared. But where to look?

DayZ. That’s where.

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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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