You know, on first glance, I really thought this was some smart ass guy trying to show Blizzard that they’d found some technical coordinates glitch in-game for an item or person they were looking for, but then I realized I was wrong. No, this isn’t some technical dork with his gaming panties in a bunch, this is the most ingenious person I’ve ever seen getting the WoW tech support to DO HIS MATH HOMEWORK FOR HIM.
Now if only I were still in school.
Granted I never made it to math classes this high of a level, but who knows. Maybe I could have gotten someone at Blizzard to write my English papers. Or study for my art history exams. Or clean my room. Do you think I could get tech support to clean my room?!?!
If anything, this should make everyone feel a little better we pay $15 a month for WoW. Now we know we’ve all been missing out on the full potential of their services.
I won’t lie to you—when I first heard we were touring the “Microsoft Surface” area last Thursday, I assumed “Surface” meant…well, you know, surface! Like a tour of the campus. A surface tour. I know, it doesn’t make sense.
+10 blonde.
Thankfully I did some research before we arrived Thursday evening and I had come to the conclusion that we would be checking out a futuristic alienesque thingamabob. That you touch. Like…a giant iPad.
(Tara’s notes: But… it’s better than an iPad! It can actually see what you’re doing! Which means you can have awesome tags and codes on things that will make cool stuff happen. Here. Just take a look at the video.)
Seriously, gadgetry isn’t my thing. But by the time I left Microsoft that night, I had conceived a hundred different ways to sneak a Microsoft Surface unit in Tara’s car and into my apartment. Right now they are available for corporate use only, but MY hope for the near future is to see them in homes across this fantastic nation. A good starting point would be my living room. Just saying.
(Tara’s notes: Get ready to fight me for it, Britt. I’m serious.)
Sure, Surface easily proves its worth with corporatey-bullshit, but I was looking at Surface with one specific angle…gaming. The potential is there—and so are the ideas. I’m not sure what I can or can’t talk about, but if Surface becomes mainstream (and a few thousand dollars cheaper), I could see it possibly opening up a new branch of gaming. Nothing will ever replace a controller (sorry, Kinect) but the idea of four people playing on the same 40″ touch screen, interacting with and even FACING each other is just awesome. Think about it—how much FUN would it be to play Tower Defense on that thing while drunk with friends?!
I’d say it’s safe to expect that casual games will be the first to hit Surface, but I wouldn’t necessarily rule out the possibility of “hardcore” gaming experiences on the platform…OOH! Maybe Bioware will develop a “Control the Normandy” Mass Effect mini-game exclusively for Surface. You could play as Joker and dodge Reapers and shit.
(Tara’s notes: And don’t forget DnD! There was an AWESOME demo of that at PAX East last year. Think about this: Having a dynamic moving landscape for your characters. Putting your miniature down on the surface, and having your player’s stats and options show up. AWESOME. This is the FUTURE, guys!)
(Kristina’s notes: I wanna play too guys! I liked the ponies. You know, the ponies? Okay fine, I’ll stop trolling your posts.)
Due to some minor snafus and server issues today, we’ve had to quickly switch our site’s theme. It’s not perfect (or permanent!) and there are some major fixes I’ll be doing in the next couple days, but we have grand ideas. Don’t mind the mess!
We’ll let you know when the site’s shiny and new… be on the lookout for a new Zaxy logo, an About page (with pictures!) and other fun surprises. For now, feel free to subscribe to our RSS feed, and you won’t even notice that the site is different. :-)
If you have any questions or run across a bug of some sort, shoot me an email: tara@zaxy.com.
If you MUST have context, it looks like these photos/video were created by Dan Saelinger for the current issue of Fortune magazine. Apparently to get the right shot, 10 Xbox 360s and 8 Xbox controllers were destroyed. (gulp!)
Our friends at Parallels released a new video today: An Avatar/Eminem/PC/Mac Mashup of craziness.
And if you tweet out this message: “Watch the @ParallelsMac Avatar/Eminem spoof http://ow.ly/3lyNN #parallels” You’ll be entered in to win an iPad from Parallels!
Watch. Enjoy. Say “WTF?”. And then enter to win a free ipad. Not such a bad day, eh?
Our friends over at Accessory Geeks hooked up Zaxy with some early holiday gifts: their exclusive wood iPod Touch cases… engraved with our site! Freaking amazing.
Kristina shows you hers, compliments of blurry-photo-technology.
These cases look really nice, smell good, and the engraving feature is pretty ridiculously awesome.
And for those of us without iPhones or iPods, (cough, me, cough), they engrave their normal phone cases as well. Here’s me rocking one for my Samsung Vibrant:
I’m a huge klutz with my phone, and I haven’t damaged it yet since I’ve had this case on! (Knock on wood…)
If you need any accessories for your phone (or DS, or iPad, or Wii)… this is the place. They’ll keep you functional and looking good. And they’ve got geek in the name.
PLUS, they love you all. They sent us a wood case for a Nintendo DS Lite or DSI to give away to one of your lovely selves. Just respond to this post with your favorite product from their site. You have until 11:59pm on Sunday, December 12th to enter, which will give you a little less than a week to encourage your friends and family to enter for you as well. ;-)
I’ll randomly pick and announce the winner on Monday, December 13th.
EDIT: You now have until 1pm PST to enter the contest. I’ll be randomly picking the winner shortly after that!
ANOTHER EDIT: We have a winner! Check out this post to see if you won.
You better hope I don’t decide to keep it…
Find something from the site you love? Then make sure you use promo code ZAXY15 to get 15% off all products! (Excluding amplifiers)
The Etsy shop puts Toshiba hard drives into an old NES game. I don’t know why, but something about having the power of a 1TB hard drive in an old copy of Mario Bros just makes me thrilled. Who would have thought when we were first playing NES that we would have access to (or a need for) that much memory?
Prices range from $130 (for 500GB) to $180 (for 1TB). Yeah, you can find a hard drive for half that price on Amazon, but I can guarantee it won’t be as pretty or nostalgic.
Thanks to @andyfortson for finding. I may sometimes scare him with my Geek Speak, but he still finds me awesome stuff!
(EDIT: @Jorge_Z found instructions for you to make your own. If you do, send us some pics!)
When I was younger, I was never much for dolls. I liked dressing them up, but I could never find anything to do with them much past that point. When I got a little older, I found that our family computer was a much, much more enjoyable toy than any Barbie I ever owned.
But now, I can’t help but embrace the geek girl inside of me when I found you can now actually dress up your computer. In a sense. Now that’s a type of dress up I can really get behind.
There are multiple shops on etsy.com (including this one) that feature a whole plethora of ways to nerd up your macbook.
I spent the better part of my morning debating between Doctor Who, Futurama and Mario themed decals for my laptop, and those are just a few of the many categories I stumbled upon.
For the record, I ended up going with a Tyrannosaurus Rex.
