Blizzard has just drop-kicked South Korea’s GDP into the toilet with its weekend announcement of StarCraft II.
(When I was at Blizzard, the company had sold enough copies of StarCraft in South Korea for one person in nine to own one, although many of those copies were for cybercafes. I can’t think of a game with comparable success in America.)
Not surprisingly, the StarCraft Battle Chest
, which includes StarCraft, the Brood War expansion (the team lead on that, incidentally, was Rob Pardo, who went on to lead Warcraft III and World of Warcraft) is back to #20 on the videogame sales chart at Amazon.com. Heck, I’m probably going to get it, since my complimentary copy that I got when I was hired there eventually found its way to my brother-in-law’s house, and has never been installed on my current computer.
So, about a year after I got my Treo 650, and mere weeks before I have a kid, Palm announces a new Treo, the 755p. It sounds like a pretty good phone, albeit an incremental upgrade other than a much-improved camera as compared to my current model.
Must. Be. Strong.
I read this article in the American Journalism Review a few weeks ago, and it’s kept me irritated ever since. At first, I wasn’t sure what bothered me about the twentysomethings working at the Charlotte Observer referring to the newspaper as a “dying industry.”
Finally, it hit me: No one in Charlotte was going to say “OK, I know all the news I’ll ever need to know, no more news for me.” Charlotteans still want to read news, but the newspaper industry doesn’t want to sell it to them except in one format they’ve been using for two centuries.
(more…)
As I mentioned the other day, at least two of my high school classmates are now lobbyists/think tank … thinkers. (I have no idea what the generic job description for a think tank would be.)
Jessica has, in fact, just gotten a piece published in the online version of The Nation:
There are many things I think women will come to regret, but not the ones Justice Kennedy fears. They will regret that their doctors are no longer allowed to use an abortion method that can reduce the risks of hemorrhaging, uterine perforation, infection and infertility; that women carrying malformed fetuses will no longer be able to have an abortion procedure that lets them hold their child and mourn it; that doctors will no longer feel free to develop new techniques that might be even safer for women; that doctors will have to modify the techniques that aren’t banned to ensure they won’t be prosecuted; that women whose health is endangered by new abortion restrictions will have to fight them on a case-by-case basis, when a remedy will likely come too late.
But most of all, I think women will regret that a paternalistic government has taken away their right to make their own decisions about their family composition and their medical care. Because ultimately, isn’t freedom the right to make decisions for yourself–good or bad? Wouldn’t you prefer to regret your own mistakes rather than those of the government?
See, when you’re a think tank deep thought-production specialist, they’re not paying you to write knock-knock jokes.
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