After I posted how much purchasing a console and ALL the sets for LEGO Dimensions on Facebook, my buddy asked “Yes, but how many hours of entertainment will it provide? If you completely neglect all of your responsibilities and assign a ridiculously high value to recreation, it’ll pay itself off in days”

My response: That’s how I typically do my calculations. My typical “entertainment” value is the movie: $15/100 minutes or ~$9.00 per hour. That’s easily “worth it” to me, because I have no problem dropping that $$ for a movie. At that level, for the...
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TL; DR: Interesting, thought-provoking, philosophically deep. Worth a watch

So, for reasons unknown, I feel like I really don’t like Jared Leto. I have no idea why. I mean, I really like many of his movies (or, perhaps more accurately, movies he’s been in): Requiem for a Dream, Girl, Interrupted, Fight Club (not very memorable, sure), Lord of War, plus some others. But man, I just can’t shake the feeling that I don’t like him.

I mean, doesn’t he just look punchable?

But, once again, I’m impressed with his...
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TL;DR: Absolutely amazing game (as is Dead Space)… but certainly not for everyone.

So, I just finished Dead Space 2, the second installment in the space horror shooter series, and boy, do I hate this series. Okay, that’s a lie. I hate this series like people hate horror films, which basically leads to the cliched “I love hating this game”.

The series is told from the point of view of Isaac, a maintenance engineer sent to repair the communications on a mining ship, the Ichimura. Upon arrival, it is clear that something horrible has occurred; in...
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Man, this is the first sentence into this post, and I already hate myself. I don’t wanna write a post on Breaking Bad; it’ll be just too band-wagony for me. I created the title, that’s enough, right? Can I stop now?

How about now? I waited like 10 minutes before writing this line…

Will you get to work?

Okay, FINE. We’re gonna do this. The real title should be “Why I Should Eat My Hat About Breaking Bad But Was Right About Hating It”. I’ve avoided the Breaking Bad hype the entire...
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TL;DR: Riveting without a plot and stunningly beautiful

If you’ve ever seen a film that has amazing cinematography with a less-than-stellar story and were still glad you saw the movie, then Baraka is for you. It ramps the story down to… oh, about 0 and the cinematography up to 11. It’s made simply for the gorgeousness of the world and is completely successful at it.

I’ve seen this several times and have been mesmerized by it every time; it’s one of the few movies I absolutely had to buy on Blu-Ray because of the sheer...
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TL;DR: Man, I really wish they made more movies like this. Amazing!

First off, I wanna say this: virtually every synopsis of this movie that I’ve read has said something about a plot twist. Don’t go into this expecting a plot twist. Well, at least how we typically expect plot twists to be. The Usual Suspects (hey, another Kevin Spacey movie)… that has a plot twist. This movie just has a very interesting plot.

That said, man, what a great movie Moon was! I had heard good things about it from… somewhere… and said...
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TL; DR: Read this. Like today. Or listen to it. Whatever. It’s amazing.

So, lemme get this out of the way: I’m developing a real thing for Neal Stephenson. After Snow Crash I was certainly intrigued; it’s a good book. Then Cryptomonicon. Quite different by all means, but still right up my interest alley. It almost seems like he’s writing specifically for me, and I don’t even know it. And then, of course, just look at the guy:

Epic, right? He’s either the most intelligent person you’ve ever met, or he’s a complete wack-job.

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So, I almost didn’t get a post in today because I was trying to hurry a treat for y’all. However, I decided to not rush so much and to instead give you a review of one of the movies I watched while I was working on the treat: Synecdoche, New York.

First off, the pronunciation of the city is kinda like a trick question: if you know, you know, else you’re gonna have a bad time. Of course, a quick Google search will reveal that this is a part of the trick. See,...
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TL;DR: Awesome. Read it.

For my next installment in the reviews series, I listened to William Gibson’s debut novel Neuromancer from 1984, narrated by Robertson Dean. Now, I’ve been listening to audio books and podcasts for some time, trying to alleviate the boredom of commuting from San Jose to San Francisco (and, previously, from Fairfield to Sacramento) while making up for lost reading time, and it’s not frequently that I come across a presentation as good as this one!

I’m sure that people have done some comparisons, at least in the feel of...
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TL;DR: Read it if you like Bill Bryson or history or languages.

Since I obviously have amazing opinions and taste, and since most people aren’t afforded easy access to them, I figured I’d kick off a new feature on i-josh.com: reviews! This is where I consume some piece of pop culture - a book, a movie, perhaps a video game, maybe some music - and then I tell you exactly what I think about it. C’mon, you know how reviews work. The main difference between all other reviews and my reviews is that I’ll be accurate and honest! I’ll also...
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