I've always liked the kind of manliness that Esquire tries to evoke. The Esquire man wants to read advice about cufflinks, politeness, and how to order fancy drinks. Yet video games are now well established as a common domain of men -- not boys -- and it still isn't clear how an Esquire man would play them, or comment on them.

Lately I have been doing some research on online video distribution. Every day this topic is getting more mainstream, but I still avoid describing myself as a "YouTube researcher." If I did, I'm sure the first image to come to mind would probably be me closely studying a laughing baby (below; 98 million views on YouTube to date) or maybe the Evolution of Dance (131 million views). It's not that Media Studies has ever been held in particularly high regard as an important subject (though the cinema people keep trying), but when writing about online video there's an even greater presumption of frivolousness.

The newest system update for the XBox 360 now includes a number of social networking and Internet applications, including Facebook, twitter, last.fm, and Zune (Microsoft's attempt to compete with the iTunes store). For me, the integration of these services feels like a kind of weird collision of different neighborhoods and cultures.

As a coach and teacher I am asked several times a week, "How do I get from here to where I want to be?" My answer is always the same. First answer this, how did you get where you are now? Your thoughts, beliefs, feelings and actions got you exactly where you are and those will get you anywhere else you want to be.

Alice Walker writes in her collection We Are the Ones We Have Been Waiting For about keeping her mind empty and uncluttered with the ideas of others so that her own thoughts, her own words have space to grow. A nice concept, particularly for one given to meditation, yoga, and other woowoo pursuits. But that ain't how I roll.

The Howling tells the story of newswoman Karen White who is sent to a rehabilitation center known as The Colony after a bizarre and near fatal encounter with a serial killer. But the other inhabitants of this rehabilitation center may not be who they seem.

Finding intermittent bugs in a large code base is notoriously difficult. The Los Angeles Times is now running an Op-Ed article by David M. Cummings, which makes much the same point. Mr. Cummings worked for nine years as a consultant to NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and worked on developing the software for the Mars Pathfinder spacecraft, and he has a total of more than three decades of experience in developing systems to be used in other complex devices: "As anyone with experience in embedded systems will tell you, there are nasty software bugs that can be extremely difficult to reproduce in a laboratory test environment."

According to a recent article in The New York Times, unmanned surveillance drones are currently collecting more video intelligence than analysts are able to handle. The volume of footage taken from last year's surveillance efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan nearly triple what it was only a few years ago–a grand total of roughly 24 years' worth of footage, if watched without break.

The Vampire's Assistant tells the story of Darren Shan, a normal teenage boy, who does everything that his parents tell him to do. However, Darren is about to become a vampire's assistant after visiting a freak show that has come to town.

More commonly known as Cinderella, Aschenputtel is much more than a fairy godmother and glass slippers. There was a rich man whose wife lay sick, and when she felt her end drawing near she told their daughter to be good and pious and that God would always take care of her. She promised to always be with her and that she would look down upon her from heaven. And then she closed her eyes and passed away.

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