Reading List
The most recent articles from a list of feeds I subscribe to.
Disney’s big bets on the metaverse and AI slop aren’t going so well
How to get the Frozen Anguish in Crimson Desert
Crimson Desert interactive maps
‘A List of Chain Restaurants Whose Names Contain Unusual Structures’
When I first read this post from my friend Paul Kafasis last week — a One Foot Tsunami instant classic — I was hoping that I could think of an example that he missed. I can’t say I did.
The closest, though, is ShowBiz Pizza Place, a 1980s archrival to Chuck E. Cheese. (Instead of a pizza-cooking rat, ShowBiz had Billy Bob, a pizza-cooking hillbilly bear.) Place is an unusual noun to put in a restaurant name, but it isn’t a structure, so it doesn’t belong on Kafasis’s list. But what brings it to mind is that growing up, we had a ShowBiz Pizza Place near our mall, and I loved going there because it was a damn good arcade (and the pizza, I thought at the time, was pretty good — cut into small squares, not slices). They had the sit-down version of Star Wars, the best way to play the best coin-op game in history. (Two tokens to play that one, of course.) They had the sit-down version of Spy Hunter, too. Anyway, generally we all just referred to the joint as “ShowBiz”, but one thing that drove me nuts is that a few of my friends, when referring to it by its full name, called it ShowBiz Pizza Palace. It was like hearing someone call an iPod Touch an “iTouch”. And while I loved the place, trust me, it was not palatial — unless you’re familiar with palaces that are really dark and seedy, and had ball pits where bad things happened.
Nintendo says new first-party games exclusive to Switch 2 will have different prices for physical and digital versions in the US, beginning in May (Andy Robinson/Video Games Chronicle)
Andy Robinson / Video Games Chronicle:
Nintendo says new first-party games exclusive to Switch 2 will have different prices for physical and digital versions in the US, beginning in May — Nintendo of America has announced that, beginning in May, it will introduce differing pricing for physical and digital versions of its Switch 2 games.