The Power of Mints

I was out Christmas shopping yesterday and because I live in New York but am originally from France, I was looking for gift ideas for friends and family from the other side of the pond in tourists stores on Times Square when I stumbled on this:

My first question was what is it doing in this store? Do they think that some random tourist is going to walk in and say "Hey, nothing says New York City like a box of Nintendo Power Mints!" and second why would Nintendo even license such a product?

Anyway, I love them but it seems so improbable and made for such a tiny niche market, you can't help but wondering.

The NES pad is just a regular mint not even that strong and the blue Shroom contains blue raspberry sours but not that sour either.

What are they smoking?

Don't get me wrong, I like nerdy news just like the next nerd but that's not what I go to CNN.com for. So imagine my surprise when this made the headline for a good couple of hours today:

Commodore 64? To quote Jimmy Kimmel "How is this news?" Wasn't there anything else going on? Any update on the bombing in Paris yesterday? The CIA destroying tapes of interrogations back in '05?

That's when I directed my attention to to the "latest news" section on the right hand side.

Clinton dumps Celine for Big Head Todd? Video
Bio-fuels send German beer prices rising Video
Ideal stocking stuffer: rhino poop
Freud hanging from building spurs 911 calls Video

And lets not forget "Canoe Man reportedly tried to buy Catamaran". What's next? "Hang glider Man tried to buy 747"?

What the hell is going on over there?

I don't believe in online tests

But I'll make an exception with "the blog readability test". I'm awesome!

1000 points in 2 minutes

Some video game publishers still don't understand the concept of achievements on the 360 as brilliantly demonstrated by THQ with "Avatar The Last Airbender, The Burning Earth". The game might have been panned by most reviewers, it's a hit in rentals and to be totally honest it's in my Gamefly queue.

These are few of my favourite things

The next 48 hours at work are going to suck ass and a bunch of people will think I'm an asshole, a douche bag, the devil's spawn, you name it.

Commuting home, I felt the doom and gloom setting down as I was selecting all the sad songs on my iPod. I decided to turn it off and finished chapter 7 of Alamut. I was briefly transported to 11th century Persia and it helped me forget my impending problems. Which brought the question: what makes me happy?

This definitely help make my day today. I played it 3 times so far and it made me laugh out loud every single time.

I especially felt vindicated on that one because I received my first sells call on my cell yesterday and I naively thought it was one space where I still had some privacy. I guess not.

I've had a few Orange Grand-Marnier now (2/3 orange juice, 1/3 Grand Marnier) and I'm watching The Thing in HD on my XBox 360, blogging on my laptop and checking message boards.

You know what? It's turning into one fine evening.

Curse you 2K!

How many times do I have to finish Bioshock? I already completed the game 4 times to get 49 achievements out of 50. Now 2K released a patch on XBox live fixing the widescreen issues. I didn't think it was much of a problem but looking at the screen grabs i's worth playing a couple of levels.


The patch comes also with a bunch of new features:

● Sonic Boom: Hurls creatures and objects back with a blast of force
● EVE saver: Enables Plasmids to use less
● EVE Vending Expert: Reduces prices in the vending machines
● Machine Buster: Increases the amount of damage players deal to cameras, bots and turrets

They've also added a 51st achievement for beating the game on hard without dying.

*sigh* Thank you 2K