After fin­ish­ing Bioshock I thought there was a huge amount of back­story that had been hinted at, but remained untapped. To my incred­i­ble delight, the devel­op­ers agreed and set about mak­ing a sequel set some 10 years after the first game.

As if that wasn’t good enough Take 2 have announced that they’re releas­ing the game on my birth­day. I’m excited as hell, as you should be too.

It’s that time of the year again, when America’s tele­vi­sion sched­ule cranks up and bums hit seats — ready and wait­ing to see what gems of enter­tain­ment await. Yours TRULY has had a go at putting together a list.

Here’s last year’s list for comparison.

In com­pil­ing this year’s list I’ve found a few shows that I’d omit­ted from the pre­vi­ous year. Con­sider them added.

What stays

• 30 Rock - One of the few tele­vi­sions shows I can watch with Ange.
  
• Cal­i­for­ni­ca­tion - It’ll be inter­est­ing to see how Hank han­dles being a sin­gle father, espe­cially with a daugh­ter who is so close in per­son­al­ity and mannerisms.
• Doll­house - I come into the sec­ond sea­son being the only per­son in the world who hasn’t seen Epi­taph One (the “miss­ing” 13th episode).
• Entourage - Every­one watches this for Jeremy Piven’s Ari Gold. And the show run­ners are well aware of this.
• Robot Chicken - Bite-sized com­edy. I don’t mind the look of their new show, Titan Max­i­mum either.
• South Park - Con­sis­tently good.
• Super­nat­ural - I’m lov­ing the steady growth of mythol­ogy in Supernatural.
• The Daily Show - Not sure what this wasn’t on last year’s list. The Daily Show has been a dear friend to me for many years now.
• The Simp­sons - Well into it’s twi­light years now and not nearly as funny as it used to be. But it’s bet­ter than most television.
• True Blood - I was late to the party on this one. But I still man­aged to The sec­ond sea­son fin­ished last week, but I’d be remiss includ­ing it on the list.

What’s In

• Flash For­ward - I saw a pre­view for this show a while back, but the con­cept really stuck with me. Every­one in the world sud­denly flashes for­ward six months in the future for 2 min­utes. Then they deal with that info dump. Sounds promising.
• V - I remem­ber watch­ing the orig­i­nal and being freaked out by the lizards in human skin. Admit­tedly I was five or six years old at the time.

What’s Out

• Bat­tlestar Galac­tica — The only show in this list that got to bow out grace­fully. And what an end­ing!
  
• Heroes - I was ready to give up on Heroes after the second-to-last arc,Villains. But like an idiot I stuck through Fugi­tives hop­ing for a glim­mer of the great­ness that was sea­son one. It was not to be. Fare thee well, Heroes.
• House - It’s not that I hate House,  I’ve  sim­ply fallen too far behind to watch it on a reg­u­lar basis. One for the off-season I think.
• My Name is Earl - Lost track of the show’s “goal”. Got can­celed for it.
• Prison Break - Put on hia­tus, then can­celed. With story gaps filled by an insult­ing two hour long mini.
• Reaper - Taken before it’s time.
• Smal­l­ville - See Heroes above. If I have to force myself to watch tele­vi­sion then it’s not worth it.
• Ugly Betty - Same as House. Ange seems to be enjoy­ing it though.

A final tally of 11 shows ( plus one that has already fin­ished it’s sea­son). Even though I’ve trimmed the list this still seems to be a hell of a lot of tele­vi­sion. Chalk that up to shift­ing priorities.

And what bet­ter way to count down to the festivities:

Found at the LEGO Shop.

Today Thread­less announced a US$9 sale on all tshirts in their cat­a­logue. With just over a mil­lion fol­low­ers sud­denly hit­ting their web­site it quickly imploded. Vis­i­tors to the home­page got this message:

I have to say it’s one of the bet­ter “down for main­te­nance” mes­sages I’ve seen. It’s not the generic 401/501 error page. Thread­less had gone to the trou­ble of using exist­ing site ele­ments (the check­out trol­ley and type­face) to build this page. This  showed me that the prob­lem wasn’t overly crit­i­cal (the server infra­struc­ture wasn’t on fire) and that it was some­thing they could recover from.

The mes­sage is hon­est and apolo­getic. It reads like it was writ­ten by an actual human being.

While they worked on the prob­lems, Thread­less also kept their Twit­ter fol­low­ers up to date with infor­ma­tive, yet humor­ous mes­sages.

If all com­pa­nies were like that I think the world would be a far bet­ter place.

The Mechwarrior/Battletech fran­chise seemed to fade out right around the time Microsoft bought out FASA , so it’s nice to see it get look in by a new mob.

Whats peeked my inter­est  is that the movie above is being touted as in-game footage. If it is, it means I’ll be upgrading/buying a new com­puter before the launch date for sure. I’ll be damned if I’m play­ing a Mech­war­rior game on con­sole. Steel Bat­tal­ion not with­stand­ing, con­sole con­trollers are far too sim­plis­tic to accu­rately sim­u­late dri­ving giant mechan­i­cal robots across bomb strewen landscape.