Jim Reviews: Video Games, Making Money, Websites, Books, Politics, and more!

This is a great book that I would’ve never heard of if it weren’t for my English professor this semester.  I was in a class called “Ghosts of Our Ecological Past”, taught by Christine Battista at Binghamton University.  It was without a doubt the most interesting class that I’ve taken.  The main theme behind the course was radical ecology and it’s three branches: ecofeminism, social ecology, and deep ecology.  I would be more than happy to go in depth on each branch in via comments if anyone would like to have a conversation on the subject.   Oryx and Crake is about a post modern world where corporations have caused an apocolyptic event.

I’m not your typical college liberal, yet I am certainly against transnationals.  Small corporations that are set up simply as a way to gather additional startup funds etc. I have no problems with; companies such as Dow Chemicals and Monsanto are another thing.  This book is great for anyone that likes environmentalism, anti-corporatism, science fiction, or  futuristic types of novels.  It is written in a way that jumps between time periods while slowly working towards the central problem and the storylines begin to come together.  I originally got into the book expecting to read it as if it were a textbook but I quickly realized it was a very entertaining novel.  As a voracious reader I would rate this book 10/10, an absolute must read.  I am amazed that this book did not receive more publicity when it was written based on the quality of the novel.  Get it here: Oryx and Crake;.

The latest in EA’s Command and Conquer series is here, and for those that don’t have it yet you are missing out.  I pre-ordered it 3 months in advance to make sure that I would have it once it comes out.  It completed my collection of every single C&C game and while there have been a few failures on the part of EA *cough*, C&C generals, overall I’ve loved the series and I’ve spent thousands of hours playing these games (yes, yes, I know…).  The first game in the series was the one that drew me in, but my first true experience of a great RTS (Real Time Strategy) was Command and Conquer: Tiberian Sun.  Red Alert was the favorite my friends back in elementary school when I first started playing these but I was always a fan of more complex gameplay.  One of the best things I’ve encountered on the internet thus far is a deal from Amazon, $28 for the entire first decade of games (with free shipping), for your convienience I found a link for you: Command and Conquer: The First Decade.

What is it about Command and Conquer 3 that I am such a fanatic about? It brings back the old memories of the original games (arguable the best despite their graphics) while encorporating in new features for online play such as battlecasts where you can watch live battles others are having via the main site and also the fact that the graphcis are simply amazing for an RTS. Sometimes when I am bored and don’t really want a challenge I’ll go against an easy computer and simply blast them to pieces with the GDI Ion Cannon, a staple from the series. I was originally worried that the Nod Vs. GDI storyline would be messed up by the addition of a third competitor, the Scrin. To my surprise the game actually managed to mesh the story line in very well and maintained a very nice campaign mode as well as a great online multiplayer and skirmish mode.

I’d give this game a 9 out of 10, with my only issue being the clearly defined roles of each team as Nod will dominate anyone in a rushing match, GDI is well balanced, and Scrin will win battles over an extended period of time. I would definitely buy this game if I hadn’t already bought it. Check it out here: Command and Conquer 3: Tiberium Wars.

Originally this post was going to be about Guitar Hero 3, but I figure that one can wait a few days.  Today’s review is of the browser that I use for everything, Mozilla’s Firefox browser.  It’s relatively safe to assume that since you are looking at a blog that I made a couple days ago, you probably got here via some sort of social bookmarking site (thanks to those that have bookmarked me, I truly appreciate it).  Firefox is great for sites such as StumbleUpon as you can simply add the toolbar to your browser and click the SU button whenever you get bored.  I have my browser set up currently so that I have the Google Toolbar taking up the left half of a bar, with the StumbleUpon bar to the right and directly beneath I can create new tabs so that I don’t clutter up the bottom of my explorer bar with new windows; considering that I am currently running Vista, that could be catastrophic. 

 The Google Toolbar is great because I have yet to see a pop-up get through it, of course there will still be pop-under advertising but there is no real way to get rid of that since it is embedded into a websites code.  It also allows me to check the PageRank of websites so that I know how long they’ve been around, how popular, they are, etc.  I just found out yesterday that my first site ever has a PR of 3, which is quite an accomplishment considering that I wasn’t expecting to get above PR 2 for another 3 months.  I also use it to keep track of my bookmarks since it allows me to jump computers with it, I own 2 desktop and 2 laptops and it is simply inconvienient to have to add a bookmark 4 times to make sure that it will be there when I need it.

What is the most important thing about Firefox with the Google Toolbar and Stumbleupon Toolbar?  It is free.  I would still be using the broken Internet Explorer browser from Microsoft if it weren’t for the fact that all this stuff is either open source or free downloads.  The browser itself is open source, the toolbars are both owned by corporations but they are distributed free.  One of my favorite features of Firefox is the download manager that comes with it, I consider it to be far more secure than the connection from IE.  Since it is open source, it is constantly being developed and updated and there are plugins/widgets for everything you could ever want to do. 

If you’d like to try it out for yourself I’ve stuck a download link in the banner above.

I figure that it would only be suitable for me to review the site that gave inspiration to this blog first.  Squidoo is an article platform that handles all of the technical aspects of creating blog posts for you.  Each Squidoo “lens” is simply a single page that serves as a gatekeeper of information for a given topic.  Squidoo allows readers to get a general summary of a given topic (unless it is a very detailed lens).  The lenses are put into a pre-made template that gives you many different widgets to work with to make a good looking page, my blogroll links to a few of the Squidoo’s that I have made in the past.

Right about now you are probably thinking…. ok great.. why is it in Making Money?  Squidoo is a co-op, it is set up so that the content creator (the lensmaster), the company, and charity all earn money.  50% of profits go straight to the lensmaster, 5% go to charity, and 45% go to the company, or if you wish 55% goes to charity and 45% goes to the company.  You can choose what your payout threshold will be, from $1 to $1 million it is all fair game. 

The two sources of revenue are the Google AdSense ad’s displayed around the site and various referral companies; usually Amazon is the most utilized for each of the lenses.  The profits from AdSense are distributed amongst the lensmaster based on Squidoo’s “Lensrank” algorithm, which is based off ratings, traffic, click through rates, and many other factors.  The earnings from Amazon, Ebay, etc. are split 50/50 directly with the owner of the lens.

Since this is my first real blog post, I figured I’ll do a favor for the future lensmasters out there.  Below is a banner that you can sign up from, and if (and only if) you sign up using this banner you will receive a $5 bonus upon making your first $15.  If you sign up directly from the site or elsewhere, it will not be applied to your account.  So enjoy, leave me some comments so I can test out the system

Hello world!  As a computer science major at Binghamton University I feel that the only way to kick off my blog would be to write a simple Hello World.  I still need to figure out what exactly I need to do to use WordPress in the long run but for now I can tell you what Jim Reviews is all about.  Jim Reviews will be an unbiased source of information where every new blog post will be a review of something, whether it is Guitar Hero III or Hillary Clinton all topics are on the table and ready to be prasied or torn asunder.  Thanks for visiting, I’ll make sure to get some solid content soon