Guess what I forgot?

I forgot that my laptop has a broken wireless card and can’t access the internet! I couldn’t blog for the extent of my Christmas vacation! So, sorry about that. On the plus side, I did see Avatar and I will have a post up about that tomorrow. Stay tuned!

Not The Last Airbender one.

When I first saw the movie “The Last Airbender” which is the live-action version of the award-winning Nickelodeon animated series, I was wondering why they didn’t call it Avatar: The Last Airbender, which is the proper title. I quickly learned that this was because they already had an Avatar movie. At first, I was a bit peeved that some elf-like things that look like the Zora from Zelda had forced a movie I was looking forward to (hey, Nick’s Avatar is awesome even if it is a kids show) to alter it’s name. However, after watching a few trailers, I noticed that this new Avatar looked pretty awesome too. Some sort of fusion between sci-fi and fantasy. Needless to say I’m pretty psyched to see it, so watch for my review which will be coming out whenever I’m able to get to a theater. Hopefully it’ll be up in a few days.

Steam Cloud makes gaming a bit clearer.

It’s always a pain playing a game on a friend’s computer. There’s always the one guy who has inverted controls so up is down, or a PC gamer who set “c” as crouch instead of shift. You can either struggle to get used to your friends play style, or switch back the the default controls you spent so long editing the buttons to avoid. Fortunately, Valve has found a way to fix this dilemma.

In comes Steam Cloud, Valve’s newest little trick on their Steam gaming platform. As long as your friend has Steam installed on their computer, you can simply log into your account and Steam Cloud saves all your key bindings, controls, and other preferences along with the rest of your account information. Any change in the game options will be transferred between computers. Valve’s tradition of innovation and customer convenience lives on.

Sagan Sings…sort of.

Anyone who likes rap, knows someone who likes rap, or has heard that “I’m on a boat” song probably knows about T-Pain. He’s become popular because of his unique use of pitch correction, a digital process which allows singers to use programs like Auto-Tune to correct any mistakes they may have made by changing the note of a sound. This can be used to create flawless vocals on an album, add a unique sound to your voice like T-Pain, or to make a song from basically anything.

My favorite use of this technology so far is the Symphony of Science. This music project describes itself as “a musical project by John Boswell designed to deliver scientific knowledge and philosophy in musical form.” Boswell takes clips from scientific movies, such as Carl Sagan’s “Cosmos” or speeches given by Richard Dawkins (even Bill Nye the Science Guy makes an appearance) and uses pitch correction to make awesome songs and music videos. Check it out, download the songs, put them on your iPod, whatever. Definitely my cup of boiled Camellia sinensis.