I can’t say that I’m too surprised (especially after their dismal showing at CES this year) but it appears that Toshiba is letting HD DVD go silently into the night.

The format wars have been huge news these past few years, and it feels odd to say that Blu-ray has really won. I’ve said time and time again that physical media is going to be obsolete in the very near future (in favor of HD downloads) but I’m a little shocked that Toshiba is giving up the ghost so soon. But with getting dumped by Netflix and Wal-mart, I suppose it truly was only a matter of time. For some reason, I always felt like I was in Camp HD DVD. It was totally arbitrary side-choosing, but maybe spurned on by the fact that I was raised a Red Sox fan, and thusly (until very recently) a glutton for punishment.

Well, HD DVD, it was a pretty good run. I enjoyed using my Xbox HD DVD drive, but I guess I’ll be getting more play from my PS3 now. I wonder how quickly HD DVD will leave the store walls and become eBay gold (lol). Will a whole subculture of HD DVD enthusiasts spring up? Fans that refuse to let go? How does Microsoft feel about this whole thing? Do they care? (Answer: No.)

So many questions! What do you think?

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Here are two Valentine’s Day videos that you might enjoy. I’m putting the Mahalo one in first because they surprised me with it today, and I’m still blushing…

And now this one… because it’s hilarious. I found it on Leah Culver’s Pownce page.

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Hooray! As much as I once loved my old design, it was begging for an update. Huge thanks to my friend Jesse Keyes (contact him for WP template design here) who listened to my whims, and put up with my incessant nitpicking. This design is much easier to read and navigate, and the code isn’t fraked from my constant adding and subtracting of widgets. Yes, it had become so bad that even trying to add an embedded video would cause the whole site to spiral into disaster. I’ll be more careful this time.

And to those of you who visit this site mid-transition, I’m sorry if you thought you were caught in some weird temporal vortex (the templates were switching around back and forth). There will be more coming soon to the site as well. I’ll be making a page of all my different projects, and adding to the pages that exist now. We’re also working on a cool header design, so keep an eye out for that one (if you’re not just reading from RSS, that is!).

One of my favorite new features are the Gravatars, which are the little icons in the comments section. It makes things a little more personal around here! Well, I hope you enjoy the new site. I’m very excited about it

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In case you missed it, Tom Merritt and I have started doing a Sword and Laser podcast every week. It’s just a quick rundown of some of the things that have happened in the latest book (Neuromancer) plus whatever other sci-fi/fantasy related stuff we’ve been checking out recently!

It’s pretty low-tech right now, but we hope to bring more audience discussion into it soon, by either using a TalkShoe talkcast or by using Yahoo! Live (which may have been the cause of the strange audio hissing from this week’s episode…). We even have some swag to give away on the next episode! If it sounds like something you’d enjoy, you can subscribe here.

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