Drag the viewfinder across the today’s satellite imagery of city and you’ll get that same area as it was in 1836. Notice how Battery Park and all the bridges are missing. Oh, and there’s a lo of land north of 14th Street.
via Daily Exhaust
I first played Street Fighter II at a Pizza place not too far from my middle school. I didn’t get the controls and ended up using the character Chun Li a lot since I could get her kick move to work enough to smash buttons and win half the time.
It wasn’t until Street Fighter II Turbo came out that someone taught me the “rules” as I call them. The rules weren’t just the moves but the moves in combination with blocking and counter attacks based on the strength and speed of the moves involved. Eventually, I got very good at it and only lost to the two people who played in tournaments.
It set off a a career of sorts for me. I kept playing 2D stye fighting games and mastered Mortal Kombat II, Killer Instinct, King of Fighters and the other SNK titles, and all of the SF2T variants like EX, Alpha, etc. If the random character selector picked, Kim Kaphwan, Ken, Ryu, or any of the Ryu variants it didn’t matter who I was up against.
I bought my Super Nintendo just to buy Street Fighter II Turbo. It was the only game I owned for a year since I bought the system. And I’d only play it with the Champion Joystick to get a pretty authentic arcade experience at home.
I eventually gave my SNES to a friend who’s unit was stolen from him and moved on to the Dreamcast and the PS2. But I never stopped playing Street Fighter. I even have the Street Fighter games on my iPhone and got my hands on an SNES to play the original 16-bit home version.
It’s hard to describe why it is I like the series so much but it’s stuck with me over the years. While I never got into the animated TV series or the live action movies, the original animated movie is one of my favorites and it always travels with me on my iPad.
I only got ten minutes into this documentary on Street Fighter called I Am Street Fighter before I wrote this. I’m not through the whole thing yet but I agree with everything that’s represented so far. The strategy or “rules,” the backgrounds, music, sound effects, and the character stories all make it special.
If you grew up in this dawn of fighting games and especially if you were a Street Fighter fan.
Oh, and something I learned from watching the documentary: combos were a bug, not a feature of the game.
Men across the country have begun to embrace the notion that stepping out of their day-to-day routines for a year is not only a fantasy worth fulfilling, but an essential part of their professional and personal growth. There's even a growing industry of life coaches, adventure schools, and financial planners all catering to the trend. Major companies, which in boom years offered sabbaticals to retain sought-after employees, are using minimally subsidized break periods as both a kind of temporary layoff during lean years and a way to keep top people during boom times. According to one survey, 18 percent of Generation X employees have either taken an extended break or have one planned in the future.
Although it's becoming more common, a year off is still definitely not for the timid. Men who have had the courage to take an extended break advise that it isn't an introspective retreat from the world. It's a complicated endeavor that, handled badly, can jeopardize your job and your relationships back home.
I've always wanted take extended time off from work. As a child, I thought about building grass bridges in Peru. Later, it was to explore the Galapagos. Now, I think I want to sail somewhere far away – but not the typical places – New York to Iceland or LA to the South Pole.
So now that it’s Labor Day in the US, two things are certain: Christmas decorations will be up by Tuesday and Starbucks will start serving their Pumpkin Spiced Latte. But the drink wasn’t considered a hit right away. It took some odd experiments to get it right:
To get the taste right, Starbucks developers a decade ago decked out their R&D lab with a ton of Thanksgiving flair, even though it was only spring. There were sweaters, Thanksgiving decorations, and, of course, a bunch of pumpkin pies – made from a variety of family recipes, and some store-bought. They nibbled and taste-tested their way through the pies, swigging the pumpkin filling down with espresso. They even poured espresso directly onto the pie,
via Boing Boing
See, if Steve Ballmer were the CEO, Apple would make more money, but they would slowly but surely become irrelevant. Just like Microsoft.