In the same vein, the grammar on MLB.com does not always comply with my lofty standards. Take, for instance, the headline, "Roy Halladay won his first game of 2013 and the 200th of his storied career." To the baseball layman (why would he be on MLB.com?), this could mean that Halladay just pitched in his first game of 2013 and won it. Further, it could mean that this was the 200th game in which Halladay pitched, and he just happened to win it. Actually, Halladay has pitched in three games this season and has now pitched in 406 games in his career. He didn't win his first game of this year, because the Braves beat him up...

And how 'bout those Braves? An 11-1 start, winning 9 straight with a Major League-best 1.82 ERA and 20 homers (good for 2nd in the majors). If they can keep up this pace, I'll be able to withstand all the football posts and poor grammar MLB.com can possibly throw at me.

We believe,in this game, you can learn many professional knowledge of Cavity Medicine and experience how to be a real dentist.Have a good fun and a healthy teeth!

I fired up the install, not spending a second considering the ramifications of granting the game permission to snoop on my accounts, run at device startup, or know my precise location via GPS. Instead, I tried to think like the average consumer; I just wanted to drill on a tooth!

Upon loading the game, one is greeted with...an ad. That's OK, though - after all, it's a free app! Hmm, I'm not sure which option I want though. Apparently, clicking "invalid" means, "Why certainly, I'd love a new iPhone 5!" That's OK, I'm going to be a good sport and just close it out. Now, let's see what tools we have to use.

OK, so we've got a mallet to "insert an artificial tooth." That's one way to precisely position an implant around the maxillary sinus, I suppose. Then it looks like we've got an air/water tip which magically suctions as well, and a whole assortment of vague tools to repair "caries." Man, for a game that claims to be educational they're certainly assuming I have a pretty good dental foundation; I didn't think the ADA did a great job of getting the term "caries" out to the general public.

After each round, the option is given to rate the game. They obviously have a lot to be proud of, so why not? The games themselves are actually loads of fun. They last a few split seconds and consist of swiping the screen slightly; it's easy to see how far we've come since those primitive days of mindless mobile gaming from twenty years ago.

Closing the game after a successful, educational session leads you to...an ad. But that's OK, even though when you close it...

...it's not quite closed. At this point, if you can find the little white "back" button to get out of it, you're done playing the game. Now the program will almost certainly continue to silently run, harvesting your usage patterns and text messages and trips to the grocery store and the bank and the dentist....but I uninstalled it before I could confirm that.

Conclusion

Dentistry is a complex field, incorporating a variety of techniques and materials to address a wide range of issues, and encapsulating that into a 12 MB cellphone game isn't easy. Virtual Dentist Story delivers on (almost) everything it promises. The syntax of the game's title is even designed to temper expectations; it's claiming to be a story about a virtual dentist, and never a virtual story about a dentist. However, the game does claim to be "ell-designed after dental professional consulting," and, in my professional opinion, it's certainly ell-designed. And for that, and so many other reasons, I give it the best rating I've ever given in an Android app review: 0/5 stars.

And I'm just a little disappointed in mankind. Never, ever, download something like this...I did it so you wouldn't have to.

It's like they started out going for pure motivation and then the supervisor told them to speed up, so they just did...whatever. Since they went to all that trouble of telling my fortune, I wanted to show an actual photograph of the first place medallion I was awarded in the event of "whatever" earlier today:

And it will play Bioshock Infinite on "ultra" settings, which makes for a beautiful representation of the floating city of Columbia.

So far, so good.

Let that sink in for a minute. This is the picture Wal-Mart (or the manufacturer of the chair) staged in an attempt to sell us this chair. And I will say this: the guy looks genuinely comfortable and happy, so we should be able to overlook his dirty shoes and his excessive jewelry and his absolutely bizarre marionette-glove thing.

(The second picture on Wal-Mart's site tells the full tale, but I prefer the first one.)

So I took a picture of the moon a while back (just before it was completely full), and thought it was pretty neat looking. It wasn't neat enough to include in the nature gallery, so I figured I'd put it here and then come up with an accompanying post that mentioned the moon.

I never bothered coming up with anything to say about the moon. So this was going to be the accompanying post.

But sometimes stream-of-consciousness writing can direct the mind, and then I remembered that I really enjoyed the movie Moon. It's an obscure, atypical sci-fi picture starring Sam Rockwell and the voice of Kevin Spacey. The film is well directed and acted, and it ran the gamut from humorous to thought-provoking to suspenseful to melancholic. It's probably not for everyone though, and some might find its pacing tedious.

But if you were alone on the moon, a little tedium would be expected. Just look at that thing. It makes me wonder how different it will be when all the thriving moon colonies are in full-swing within the next five years.

If this is true, then what a slap in the face it is to Lance Armstrong, Tiger Woods, and Roger Clemens* in their heretofore unheard of zeal for tarnishing their images, and corrupting the fragile minds of idolizing children. Having said that, I always knew a man with bionic legs should not be allowed to compete in the Olympics against those with the limitations of flesh and bone. The fact that such augmented racers are now 100% more prone to murders is just icing on the cake.

Of course, if Pistorius had been in the NFL (or, perhaps, the NBA) this murder charge would seem much more commonplace, but it certainly is out of the norm for competitive running. Unless we're about to witness a new breed of amphetamine-fed, deer antler spray-using, semi-robotic murderous speedster, in which case we're all doomed.

* The difference is that these guys were really good at what they did.

Disclosure: I am a Chelsea fan.

Having said that, I cannot stop laughing at the face this ball boy makes as he rolls in apparent "agony" after being mildly kicked in the ribs by Chelsea's Eden Hazard. The situation in a nutshell: Chelsea's down by two goals in the semifinal of a cup match with fifteen minutes left, the ball goes out of play, and Hazard wants to restart play quickly but the ball boy intentionally falls on the ball and won't hand it over. So Hazard does the most logical thing and tries to pop the ball out with a swift kick, and he accidentally (and slightly) connects with the boy's ribs.

Hazard was red carded after the fact, and pundits are acting like he egregiously assaulted an innocent little boy out of cold-blooded malice. In fact, it is obvious that all Hazard was trying to do was get the ball back in play; the lack of malevolence in Hazard's actions is just as evident as the blatant malevolence in the boy's. I fully believe the boy deserved every bit of the unintentional kick for clearly delaying the game for the benefit of the home team. The fact that the boy then rolled around in his finest Luis Suarez impression whilst grimacing and appealing for the call is icing on the cake. And that face he made!

Justice. Particularly when it is considered (an afterthought, or not at all, by many) that before the game the boy posted to his Twitter account: "The king of all ball boys is back making his final appearance #needed #for #timewasting." Self-professed twerpism. Also, the ball "boy" is 17 years old; Hazard recently turned 22, so this is not the "30 year old assaults a 4 year old" scandal the headlines make it out to be.

Not that any of that really matters. Look at that face!

tyrannosaur render, from flicker

Kotaku wants a dinosaur game. I don't blame them; we need a good one.

Jurassic Park brought dinosaurs mainstream, and as a child I could appreciate the influx of realistic, lifelike dinosaur toys it brought to the market. Before Jurassic Park, dinosaur toys were bulky, cartoony approximations that had no paleontological authenticity; they did little to spur the imagination. Similarly, Jurassic Park ushered in an era of dinosaurs in video games, but most of those were pretty terrible (as Kotaku asserted).  They fail to mention a couple of dinosaur games I would have, including Dino Crisis (I'm currently playing Dino Crisis 2 on the Vita, and it's okay), Jurassic Park II: The Chaos Continues on SNES (one of the most difficult games I've ever played in my life), Dinosaur Safari on PC (a modern remake of this would be excellent), and Jurassic Park: Operation Genesis (a decent-enough park building sim). There was also Turok, a series that was never as good as it could have been (although I loved me some Turok 2 back in the day). There are some good games here, but not great ones. What we need is an open-world dinosaur adventure game; one that doesn't suck.

For the same reason man enjoys hiking and trekking into the wilderness, exploring the unknown and experiencing breathtaking and unusual sights, man has created the idea of open-world video games. These offer a semblance of wonder and empowerment, to a far lesser degree than reality. But if the "highs" are less "high," the "lows" of experiencing these worlds virtually are also less "low." One need not be concerned for his physical safety, even if he can suspend disbelief and wrap himself into the game world. He also need not worry about baser needs, as these games rarely see the player seeking shelter or relieving himself of waste or needing to eat.

And another benefit is that we can make game worlds that contain dinosaurs. And lots of them. And you can hunt them or flee from them or be them, or anything imaginable. And it can be fun.

Jurassic Park IV is slated to be released in June of 2014, despite having no cast or director. I have guarded anticipation. Even if Spielberg is involved in a large capacity, it could be as ridiculous as the last Indiana Jones movie. And there were rumors of JP4 involving man-dino hybrids, which could do battle for one of the worst film concepts (and likely executions) of all time. But with a new Jurassic Park means we may see a good new dinosaur game, and that's enough for me.

"I used to be with it! Then they changed what 'it' was. Now what I'm with isn't 'it,' and what's 'it' seems weird and scary to me. It'll happen to you!" - Abe Simpson

I truly have become an old fogy.

I never thought I'd become that guy who clings to old technology claiming it as superior to what's new; I've often embraced the evolution of technology in general. But as I write this on my Windows XP-powered subnotebook computer, I'm thinking about the new trend that's developing.

I hate Windows 8. I was one of the early adopters of Windows Vista, and I enjoyed it. Then I hopped on Windows 7 and found it even better. But my time spent with the Windows 8 preview and now, to a lesser extent, the released version of Windows 8 has been unnecessarily frustrating. Yes, it's probably faster, and there have been some thoughtful under-the-hood changes, but the only overt changes I see are those designed with tablets in mind that translate into a more vexing experience for traditional PC users (or anyone without a touchscreen). We've got charms popping up and no clear pattern of navigation and it takes way too long to find out where to just shut down the PC. Where's the control panel? Where's the universal search? Oh it's all there somewhere, but you've got to dig for it. Windows 7 was, and is, a much more pleasing experience for me.

And now I'm thinking of other manifestations of this pattern. I had a hard-drive based MP3 player (from Archos) before the iPod was in full-swing, and I had Pocket PCs with color screens when everyone was still using monochrome Palm Pilots.  But now I listen to most of my music from a 32 GB microSD card on my DROID 3, despite the increasing prevalence of cloud player options; there's just a reassurance I get from having everything stored locally, not subject to the whims (or ownership) of any other entity/service that might go down or be inaccessible when the zombie apocalypse finally occurs. And I'm sure you noticed that DROID 3 reference; I haven't been upgrading phones on a bimonthly basis since I'm locked into a Verizon contract, and that means I've missed out on great Android OS revisions and apps. Granted, that's a separate issue - I'd upgrade if it were reasonable to do so, so that doesn't really fall into the fogy category. But I am clinging to a device with physical buttons as long as I can, because I enjoy gaming and don't trust on-screen keyboards and joysticks. So there's a fogy knock, one might say.

So why am I still using this Fujitsu ultraportable laptop when there are so many viable new ultrabooks and tablets and convertibles? Well, because I paid good money for this and it still runs. Now there's the Surface Pro and the Razer Edge gaming tablet on the horizon, and some well-made Lenovo devices that deserve attention, but I'm still running a Pentium M and 1 GB of RAM. I could blame the economy, but it's still fogy-ish.

There's a slew of other tech trends I've eschewed too: I still hate Facebook, and Twitter (and #hashtagging), and Instagram, and Battlefield 3, and the annual Call of Duty iterations, and electronic music, and online leagues/playing cards in FIFA, and the trend toward using real names online instead of anonymous handles (Covert, anyone?). Taken as a whole, it's hard to deny my fogy-status, but perhaps it's just something I'll have to come to terms with. Why should I compromise my astute taste just to stay abreast of the latest trends? Not all change is for the best, anyway - remember when "Made in USA" indicated a quality product?

Neither do I, but I'm told there was a time that was true.