Month: December 2014

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Wednesday Link-Off: 2014 in Review

anna-kendrick-unicef14-01Hello and welcome to the annual year-in-review linkdump on The Lowdown. Oddly enough, there weren’t many good recap posts that I found this year. 

And, as always, the year-in-review linkdump also coincides with naming our woman of the year. Using the scientific analysis criteria of the blog’s traffic, posts, comments and so on, our 2014 woman of the year is Anna Kendrick.

A lot of people had bad 2014s but few were worse than Barack Obama’s. (Washington Post)

There were new scandals every day of the year as people got outraged over something and took to social media to share their outrage. (Slate)

It wasn’t just in Washington that people had bad years. Some folks in Toronto had bad years too. (Torontoist)

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Fails of the Year 2014

Usually, when we do our fails posts, it’s the best fails we’ve found from the last short stretch of time. This week, we have some compilations of the best fails from the past twelve months in the Fails of the Year.

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The Best of Honest Trailers

It’s been a while since we’ve done a best of the interweb post so I thought that I’d make up for it today. If you’re a fan of movies or frequently watch YouTube, you know the work of Honest Trailers. We’ve featured them on the blog more than a few times over the last few years.  So today, the Best of the Interweb gives Honest Trailers with their own post. It’s the ten best episodes of Honest Trailers based on the number of YouTube likes they’ve received.

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Sunday Link-Off: You Survived Christmas

kate-bock-maxim14-02We’ve gotten through Christmas, more or less, and have survived, again, more or less. Christmas survival is made a lot easier thanks to alcohol. It sure helps with putting up with relatives. Anyway, this is our second-to-last set of links of the year. We’ll be saving the year-in-review links for the December 31st links so it’s steady as she goes for today’s post.

So it’s time for the post-Christmas slash pre-New Year’s links. Here’s Canadian model Kate Bock.

A Syrian boy was stuck between a rock and hard place in dealing with ISIS so he volunteered to become a suicide bomber and surrendered himself to security forces to protect his family. (New York Times)

The Beer Store has managed to dodge any public pressure stemming from the revelations about how their monopoly is hurting the consumer. That’s probably because of the power of their lobbying efforts. (Toronto Star)

There is a conflict brewing in the city of New York between the NYPD, the mayor and the people of the city. (Talking Points Memo)

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Entertainment Link-Off: Holiday Season

evangeline lilly esquireIt’s been a slow week in the world of entertainment as Christmas break is in full gear! Anyway, you should be busy at the cinemas as there are plenty of flicks to check out! Evangeline Lilly once again appears in the final installment of The Hobbit films. So let’s kick it all off with her.

After the jump, the list of overpaid actors, Star Trek is getting fast and furious, Playstation got some issues and Dr. Evil schools everyone on how to run a proper evil organization. Continue reading →

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How Much Does Aerith’s House Cost? (Infographic)

Digging through The Lowdown Blog inbox introduces all sorts of great things sent to us that we didn’t have time to include on the blog during the year. One such interesting post idea came to us from our friends at Movoto.

As they are wont to do, they did one of their trademark real estate valuations on a video game property. One of the valuations that I thought was the most interesting is for one of the greatest games of all-time. The team at Movoto asked how much would Aerith’s house cost you could buy that cute little house in the dirty slums of Midgar. Their handy infographic tells us the answer.

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Happy Life Day!

We have a little tradition on The Lowdown Blog. Every Christmas we show a Christmas movie on the blog. Everyone has the day off so we’re going to relax too.

One of the great debates at Christmas is how bad A Christmas Story is. It’s not helped by the 24-hour marathons on TBS. But we’re not going to show A Christmas Story today. We’ve got something worse. It’s time for the Star Wars Holiday Special. As bad as A Christmas Story is, it’s shown on TV every year. The Star Wars Holiday Special isn’t.

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Wednesday Link-Off: Merry Christmas (Eve)

nina-agdal-leonisa14-27Sometimes being a game reviewer is a thankless job. Right now I’m playing an indie game that I was actually looking forward to and finding out all sorts of issues like controls and AI lunacy that make the game’s boss fights border on the impossible. 

Anyway, twas the morn before Christmas and all through the blog,
Steve was setting up a rhyme that was a proper log.

That was a shit joke because that my attempts at poetry often end very, very badly. So let’s just skip my bad attempts at utilizing the English language. It’s time for the links. Here’s Nina Agdal.

Bad news! New Canadian digital piracy laws come into effect on January 2nd. Get your downloading done now. Then get that anonymous torrent downloading thing. Tribler? Something like that. (Vice)

After eight days of deliberations, the jury in the Luka Magnotta trial found him guilty of the first-degree murder of Jun Lin. (CBC News)

Sam Biddle, who discovered the original infamous tweet, details his first face-to-face meeting with Justine Sacco, the woman who rose to Twitter infamy when tweeting an AIDS “joke” before getting on a flight. (Gawker)

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Christmas Fails of the Week

Every so often, we take a look at the most epic fails from the week that was. Since Christmas is in a couple of days, I thought that it would be appropriate to drop the usual fails and go with a special Christmas Fails of the Week. This week, we have five pictures and videos that we think are the most epic Christmas fails of the week.

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Worst of Music Retrospective: United States of Pop 2014

While this year was a quiet one for Worst of Music posts on the blog (the only one was Avril Lavigne’s Hello Kitty), that doesn’t mean that there wasn’t a whole pile of bad music this year.

Since most of the internet has gone into year-in-review mode, I thought that we’d do our usual retrospective of the worst music of 2014. But why do I have to do anything when I can use DJ Earworm’s annual mashup of 25 of the top pop hits of the year to recap the year in bad music.

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