I’m happy to report that two of my favorite people around were married yesterday! Peter Rojas and Jill Fehrenbacher (he of Engadget and RCRD LBL fame, she’s the creator of Inhabitat) tied the knot during a ceremony in the Presidio. It was a beautiful wedding, and they couldn’t be more perfect for one another. Congratulations! Ryan has pictures of the wedding on his Flickr page.

Photo credit: Scott Beale / Laughing Squid

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So, this announcement is coming sooner than I expected, but a little birdie was set loose into the blogosphere today, so here we are! It’s true, I’m leaving CNET to work full-time for Mahalo, producing a daily video show. My plan was to let everyone know on Monday on BOL, but I guess a blog entry from E3 works too

Leaving CNET is going to be bittersweet; it’s been a fantastic three years, and I’ve worked with some amazing people. When I first joined the company, as an audio producer (intern!), I never thought that things would progress the way they did. But then I had to go and open my big mouth on Buzz Out Loud, and they never got me to shut it again. Tom Merritt and Molly Wood are two of the smartest (and most awesome) people I know, and leaving Buzz is going to be the hardest part. Maybe they’ll have me on as a guest sometime!

I also had my first experience in front of the camera at CNET (I believe it was an Insider Secret called “Mastering Google Calendar”), which was weird for me, in the sense that I was always behind the scenes. But technology videos have always come pretty easily for me: take the things I love talking about, and try to lay them out in a manner that’s entertaining and accessible. That’s what I’ll be doing at Mahalo, too, except now I’ll have the freedom to talk about anything! Tech? Sure. Pop culture? Heck yeah. How to find cult science fiction novels in your city? Yeah, I might do that.

Well, there will be more information coming in the next couple of weeks. My last day at CNET is the 20th of July. Thanks to everyone for your continued support. I’m really excited about the new changes, and I’ll hope you’ll check out the new show!

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Casey and Rudy of Galacticast are up to their old tricks again, this time with a new show called A Comicbook Orange. It’s in partnership with Pulp Secret (the “world’s first comic book network”) and the first episode (seen below) went up today!

The last comic books I bought were free, so hopefully this will encourage me to pick up some more!

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Usually I ignore crazy people. But when someone uses a tragedy like Virginia Tech to stand on their soapbox and start accusing video games of being the cause of violence in this country, it makes me sick. In the past, he claimed that a shooter in a previous instance trained on Grand Theft Auto before committing a school massacre. Does this man ever even look at video games? When he went on his tirade about the game Bully on G4, he admitted to never having even SEEN the game! Is there any rational thought to these blanket statements that he makes, every single time a something like this happens? I’m sorry, I must have missed the “school shooting simulation,” first-person perspective level in GTA3.

You know what? My last sentence was even too vague. I don’t care if there was an Army-approved, super-realistic shooting simulation available. Unless someone is PREDISPOSED to violence of this level, absolutely no amount of video game playing is going to make them kill someone. None. I don’t care how many scientific studies this man thinks there are to back his claims. A normal human being will not turn into a maladjusted killer because they played too much Counterstrike. He also says that the “common denominator” in these school shootings is that the killers “trained” on “mass-murder games.” Oh, teenagers were playing video games? That is shocking, absolutely shocking.

And as a matter of fact, there is no record that Seung-Hui Cho at Virginia Tech even played video games. I’m in no way making light of these recent events at all, I’m just so thoroughly disgusted that this man continues to be invited by the media to spout his ignorant, misleading, and incorrect statements to the world. Mr. Thompson, please take some time to re-evaluate what it is you’re doing, and come up with a better, more productive way to help the American family.

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