Noise cancelling headphones (and I have a pretty good pair) actually making flying WORSE, IMHO. They cancel out the engine noise and allow you to hear every inane conversation, screaming kid, and tubercular passenger coughing up a lung with crystal clarity. That's the OPPOSITE of what I need on a flight.

I'm a fairly frequent flier, and I think everybody's life would be improved by a bit more enforced "shut up and read a book" time and a bit less Facebook time. Also, whose brilliant idea was it to allow cell phone use during taxi to the gate after landing, so every flight ends with a dozen iterations of the "NO, WE JUST LANDED! WE'RE NOT EVEN TO THE GATE YET!" conversation?

I have a giant comic collection going back over 30 years, and I've missed about 5 football games total (home and away) for my alma mater in the last 14 years or so. What does that make me?

JRjr

I find as I get older that I don't have as much time to play games at a sitting, and I often go weeks or months between sessions with a game. I find that I spend a LOT more time and money on something like Rock Band, where I can play for as long as I want, quit, and come back later and resume with no problem. But I do still enjoy games like Oblivion, it's just that I only really play it for a week or two a year when I know I don't have much going on and have time to refamiliarize myself with the story and the controls and such. I've found in the last few years that some of the games I enjoyed the most were ruined by overcomplication. Take Burnout, the racing game, as an example - Takedown and Revenge were great games. Closed course racing, lots of fast, furious fun. Then came Paradise, and they made it into an "open world" game where instead of just driving the course and racing, you had to start trying to read a map and find your way around during the race. More freedom, less fun. The same thing happened after the first couple SSX (snowboarding) games - the third one tried to be a sandbox game, and it lost its focus on the stuff that was fun - the racing. JRjr

The trade paperback (which collects the 12 issues of the original 1986 miniseries) has sold someting like 1,000,000 copies just since the trailer came out, and has been the best selling trade paperback every month since it was released. It won a Hugo Award and has been named to several "best novels of the 20th century" (not just comics, actual novels) kinds of lists. And it's written by a European (Alan Moore, from the UK).

If you've never heard of it, your part of Europe might be under a rock. :-)

JRjr

Yeah, Stunts was the first thing that came to my mind when I saw this article. When I was in college in the early 90s, we had a few Stunts competitions on my dorm hall. First we built the fastest track possible, and took turns shaving hundredths of seconds off of each other's times. Then we optimized that track for causing massive wrecks, and took turns seeing who could cause the longest crash animation (often several minutes long, with the car flying thousands of feet in the air). Good times.

JRjr