- Every time I decide to give Macs a chance, I see the price tag. $2799 for a laptop you can get for over $1000 less. But wait, it has a really long-lasting battery!!

- Mark Teixeira might look like a retard, but he’s one of the more articulate baseball players I’ve ever heard. That’ll teach me not to judge a book by its cover.

- Nobody cares about 24 anymore, right? Ok, just checking.

- I can’t classify myself as an e-stalker anymore after seeing this thread. I would need to create my own 2 GB folder of Veronica Belmont pictures. Jesus Christ.

- GTA IV seems to have a reserved spot on every “Games of the Year” top 10 list, and it makes me nauseous. What a turd. Yes, turd. It doesn’t even deserve a curse word.

- I would sleep so much more if dreams were more vivid and easily remembered. You know you would too. Unless you’re one of those strange happy people.

- Microsoft is releasing a public beta of Windows 7 this Friday. I recommend downloading it, as from impressions it is basically a surprisingly stable Vista SP2. I wouldn’t doubt the stability. They don’t want to frustrate any more people into buying overpriced Apple products.

- The next person who says Zach Snyder is a talented director is getting a punch in the balls. He just took the comic book frames from 300 and strung them together in slow-motion. Even if Watchmen turns out good, I still won’t be impressed until he makes his second film not ripped from the pages of a graphic novel.

- Playing Civilization IV to Command and Conquer music is a transcendent experience.

- Best part about driving in the snow is creating your own lanes since you can’t see any. “Oh, that was the shoulder? I thought it was the lane everyone was afraid of driving in!”

- Anecdotal evidence from my office Yankee Swap/White Elephant: White people like the book “Stuff White People Like”. This is very unexpected.

- Speed Racer is a more entertaining movie than The Dark Knight, at least in the sense that you can’t help having a smile on your face the entire time. If you can’t enjoy it, you have no soul. Or you suffer from epilepsy.

- I missed my chance to take my e-stalking to its logical conclusion and meet Veronica Belmont at the Engadget Reader Meetup in NYC last night. Probably for the best, as I would have pulled a Borat and attempted to kidnap her in a burlap sack.

- It’s nice to see New York be the only city take part in this year’s baseball offseason. Oh wait, I forgot the Phillies signed Raul Ibanez. Quality pickup there.

Courtesy of the NeoGAF MLB Offseason Thread

- The Bill James’ Historical Baseball Abstract should be every baseball lover’s Bible. Only this book is based on historical and statistical evidence.

- I would go into work an hour early every day if a few of us set up a game of Axis & Allies. No I wouldn’t.

- Jimmy Smits : Dexter :: Forest Whittaker : The Shield. If you don’t understand the analogy, you need to watch both shows ASAP. Your obsolete SAT test section score depends on it.

- Why are Citi Field’s seats dark green? Why is pretty much the entire stadium green? Are the Mets planning a uniform style change?

- Amazon Marketplace is vastly superior to eBay if you have stuff you just want to get rid of as painlessly as possible, i.e. GTA4.

If you haven’t heard of Qore, it’s a new gaming show that will be available only on PSN, and a subscription to it will include exclusive content like themes, demos, and betas. And it’s hosted by Veronica Belmont. Here’s a link about it. The fact that it’s hosted by her and I still think it’s garbage should be a warning sign.

It’s $2.99 a show or $24.99 for a year (13 episodes) subscription. Yes, it’s not really that much, but this is only the first step. Yes, it’s half the price of a year subscription to Xbox Live, but the latter is REQUIRED for a 360 owner to play online. You can already play PS3 games online for free. 360 owners are powerless once they own the console. Live is what makes the 360 worth it, but I always hoped free online on the PS3 would help drive the price down, or make MS truly pump up the features of Live somehow (dedicated servers anyone?). Unfortunately, PSN and PS3 haven’t exactly lit up the gaming world, and MS is able to get away with charging $50 a year because Live is vastly superior.

If you subscribe to Qore, you are throwing away your free online forever. Sony will make sure to come up with more online features to put a price tag on. It’s DLC all over again. The only DLC I bought was the COD4 map pack, and I wholeheartedly regret it. Especially now that PC gamers are getting them for free. Learn from my mistake. Do not spend money on Qore. There is plenty of videogame-related content on the internet readily available for free. You can live without those demos and betas. Tell Sony to shove their sly scheme up their ass. All console gamers would reap the benefits. Except Wii-only owners. But they don’t count anyway.

(I should get paid for this type of pimpage.)

Fuck MySpace. I’m back on Facebook for the fifth time. I fill my Twitter profile with inane quips, observations, and rants. I post awesome stuff in my Pownce profile. My Muse obsession is well-documented on my Last.fm profile. I’ve had a Digg profile for a while, and I’m starting to utilize that again. I’ve uploaded three badass concerts on Stage6 (but one has since been taken down — actually, the whole site has been taken down for a while due to some hackers). I even got an invite to Hulu, a totally legal TV show streaming site that is still in beta form. Once I FINALLY setup my own webspace, I’ll be sure to embed some of my favorite shows and clips.

I’m also on two forums, and would be on three if a certain online buddy weren’t a fellow poor college student. Instead of buying me the Something Awful subscription he promised, he spends money on food — what a friend he is. And of course, there’s this little piece of internet, along with the one I carved out a few years ago. Google CajoleJuice. Go ahead. Do it. My blog being the first Google result parallels a similar fact that almost led to possible disaster a few years ago. This time around, I’m a little more amused and content. While you’re at it, Google Anti-Christ Tom Brady. The power of Digg. Although, it didn’t seem to work for the follow-up post this year. All I have left is to buy a webcam so I create a channel on Yahoo! Live and stream myself over the web. Oh wait, I’m not an attention-whoring teenage girl.

I don’t even quite know what I hoped to achieve with this post, but I hate wasting possible posts that I already wrote up. I truly believe everyone should sign up on Pownce as soon as possible, solely due to the file sharing capabilities. You can’t see it, but I uploaded a bunch of music. At the time, I didn’t realize just how worthless an effort that was. I knew you needed to be friends on Pownce to be able to see each other’s files, but I didn’t know you needed to be friends BEFORE the file was uploaded. So yeah, that was a waste. And now that my goddamn Photobucket account has exceeded its bandwidth and the site TrialPay is currently fisting my asshole while I wait for them to upgrade me to Pro, pretty much the only thing on my public profile is this:

Don’t let that give you a bad impression of Pownce. It’s like Twitter on steroids, even though there’s a good chance no one reading this knows what Twitter is. Let’s just say that Pownce is much more useful, and less annoying, than Facebook. It rocks. It’s almost like a mini-blogger. So sign up and friend me, so we can start posting music for each other. Or humorous links for each other. All that crap.

I must embarrassing admit that I found a couple of these sites through the e-stalking of Veronica Belmont. I saw how many sites she was on, and consequently had to join them and friend her. But the awesome side-effect was finding a great site like Pownce. Twitter is fairly dumb fun as well. As for Hulu, I knew about it for a while, but you need an invite to register. The person that first informed me of it sent me an invite last night. If you want an invite, just let me know. I only have 10, so first-come, first-served (as if 10 people will even read this). I’ll be pimping it in the weeks to come, as it inevitably creeps closer to public launch. Hmm, I wonder if Veronica needs an invite…

I doubt it.