Radio Active #75: Under the Geek Tree

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Radio Active PodcastIn Radio Active #75 I look back on the holidays and talk about the presents I found under the Geek Tree this year, geek out with some gaming on the Xbox 360 and Wii, check out a tool for porting Unix utilities to the Mac, contemplate some retro-future t-shirts.

Finally, I review the H.P. Lovecraft Historical Society’s most excellent A Very Scary Solstice Christmas album, which is filled with 25 seasonal songs dedicated to the horror of the Cthulhu Mythos.

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Show Notes

  • Nuketown News
    • Under the Geek Tree…
      • Lots and lots of books
        • Star Wars Omnibus: Tales of the Jedi Vol. 1
        • The New Space Opera
        • The Space Opera Renaissance
        • The Last Colony by John Scalzi
      • Games!
        • Arkham Horror (the world’s most complex … and coolest … video game)
        • Civilization IV: Warlords
        • MarioKart DS
        • Travel chess set
      • DVDs
        • Alias, Season 1
    • Gaming Life: Left 4 Dead, Tomb Raider, Warlords, Gears of War 2, Wii
      • Left 4 Dead:
        • Multplayer zombie mayhem. Try to survive the undead apocoylpse with four friends online. It’s a one note game, but man, what a note!
        • Rating: A-
        • Read the review on SCIFI.com
      • Tomb Raider
        • The relaunch of the Tomb Raider franchise continues. Running, jumping and problem solving; if you like these things, you’ll like the game … but beware of wonky cameras.
        • Rating: B
        • Read the review on SCIFI.com
      • Gears of War 2
        • Traded in a couple of games to finally get Gears of War 2. Underwhelmed by the story so far, but as always co-opt rocks.
      • Civ IV: Warlords
        • Civ IV gets some new game mechanics, including the ability to acquire vassal states (instead of destryoing an enemy or signing a peace treaty with them, you can now force them to do your bidding) and warlord units (which can serve as generals for your units and build military-enhancing city improvements.
      • Wii
        • Animal Crossing for the Wii: Same game, slightly tweeked
        • Wii Sports: Still the system’s killer app.
        • Contemplating renting Wii version of Force Unleashed; had a blast playing it at my brother-in-laws … but can I stand missing the gamer points on the Xbox?
  • Promo: Accidental Survivors Shoutout
  • Netheads
    • MacPorts
      • Easy (relatively) open source unix ports for Mac OS X.
      • From the site “The MacPorts Project is an open-source community initiative to design an easy-to-use system for compiling, installing, and upgrading either command-line, X11 or Aqua based open-source software on the Mac OS X operating system.
      • Practical use case: I needed ImageMagick command line tools to serve as an image toolk kit for a local Drupal install on my Mac. Mac ports made the process painless!
      • http://www.macports.org
    • Retropolis Transit Authority T-Shirts
  • Promo: RPG Podcasts
  • Music Review: A Very Scary Solstice
    • A Christmas album by the H.P. Lovecraft Historical Society that replaces traditional christmas song lyrics with ones inspired by the weird horror of the Cthulhu Mythos.
    • My favorite songs:
      • “The Carol of the Olde Ones”
      • “It’s Beginning to Look a Lot Like Fishmen”
      • “I Saw Mommy Kissing Yog-Sothoth”
      • “I’m Dreaming of a Dead City”
      • “Little Rare Book Room”
      • “The Shoggoth Song”
    • http://www.cthulhulives.org/Solstice/
  • Promo: Canon Puncture
  • Outro

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