We’re only days removed from the excitement of the season opener in Australia but it’s time to gear up for the second round of the 2013 Formula One World Championship. This time, it’s the Malaysia Grand Prix from the Sepang International Circuit. More often than not, the Malaysian round of the championship features heavy rain but will the forecast favour the Mercedes which is quite happy in the rain or the dry Tilke circuit loving Red Bulls?
Well, I haven’t heard many good things about yesterday’s gaming column about how gamers rights are virtually non-existent. I’ve heard that I’m a bit of a whiner for thinking that gamers deserve to be treated like everyone else and trying to keep people from being hosed by terrible games. Like I said yesterday, that’s the sort of in-fighting that will hurt us all in the long-run.
Anyway, one thing I won’t get complaints about is featuring Kim Cloutier.
The legendary free weekly newspaper The Boston Phoenix is closing its doors. File this one under why we can’t have nice things. (Gawker)
It’s not just small local papers that might be on the way out. It seems as though local TV newscasts could soon follow in their print brethren’s footsteps. (New York Times)
The two Steubenville football players charged with rape were convicted. While most people weren’t exactly sympathetic to those guys, CNN treated them like victims. (BuzzFeed)
In the last couple of months, we’ve had some very bad experiences as a gaming community. There was the abysmal Aliens: Colonial Marines that left gamers and fans of the Aliens franchise dissatisfied at best and angry at worst. The SimCity launch was a disaster of the highest proportion. It was probably worse than the Diablo III launch since EA and Maxis couldn’t be bothered to plan for a worst case scenario that we all saw coming. While, not a major issue, Tomb Raider had some serious issues on certain NVIDIA graphics cards.
The problem is that, unlike customers of most products, you have virtually no rights as a customer of the video games industry. Have you ever read the terms of service that you agreed to for digital distributors like Steam and Origin? If you have, you should ask yourself why you would ever buy a game from these people.
The first race of the season is always an interesting one. Teams are coming to grip with new tyres, figuring out how their cars work best and where they stand in the field this year. Some teams struggle when unloading to start the season, others have it well under control.
This year, it was the Lotus team that had it figured out when the lights went out for the first time this season. While Red Bull had dominated practice and qualifying, their pace didn’t seem to translate to the race. It was Kimi Raikkonen who was the only driver to really make a two-stop race work en route to opening the season with a win.
It’s the end of a long week of writing. From Monday to Friday, we posted over 9,000 words. Doing a thorough week of blogging is a bit tiring so I’ll apologize in advance if next week is a bit quieter. However, we have the F1 race recap (assuming that it didn’t get rained out overnight while I was asleep) and a new gaming column coming up this week. I’m hoping to get a review for The Showdown Effect done this week too.
Right, you’re not here to hear me ramble on about blog stuff. Since Jackie didn’t feature her yesterday, here’s Olivia Wilde.
What is the Republicans’ game with the sequester? They’re actually looking to cut any specific thing. They just want cuts, wherever they may come from. (Think Progress)
Watch out, celebrity tweeters. The Federal Trade Commission is thinking about cracking down on paid ads that you post on Twitter. (Wall Street Journal)
Cardinal Bergoglio came from absolutely nowhere to become Pope Francis. After Cardinal Ratzinger won the Papacy as the favourite the last time out, you’d be forgiven if you thought that the favourite winning was the norm. However, it’s really the exception and long shots winning are the norm. (FiveThirtyEight)
Sorry about the delay on last week’s Entertainment Link-Off. Somehow pressing the ‘publish’ button doesn’t necessarily translate to actually publishing the post onto The Lowdown page. Technology is rather puzzling sometimes. Anyway, it’s Saturday, so it’s time for the ELO again. Let’s start this all off with Gillian Jacobs. You can catch her in The Incredible Burt Wonderstone this weekend, but to get your weekly fix, just watch Community on NBC every Friday. Word has it, the latest episode saw quite a dip in the ratings.
After the jump, Veronica Mars is back, other shows are looking to return via viewer funding, new look at Kick Ass 2 and Dora the Explorer live action joke trailer is actually turning into a real online miniseries. Continue reading
Inspired by the Globe and Mail’s caption writing person, we waste our time writing funny picture captions for some of the more interesting photos we come across when blogging. So here are some of the best pictures from the past week with a funny (-ish) caption. Continue reading
It’s time for the final part of our 2013 Formula One World Championship season preview. Having gone through the new rules, new drivers and team previews for the season, it’s time to put it all together in our predicted results for the upcoming season.
As always, what we’ve seen so far isn’t exactly a complete picture of the upcoming season. The drivers, team bosses and pundits all say that we won’t know who has the best car until a couple of races into the season. But based on what we do know so far, we do have a slightly educated idea as to who will be quick this year. Continue reading
On Friday, I’ll be posting my predictions for the 2013 World Drivers’ and World Constructors’ Championships. Today, however, we have a look ahead to the season thanks to our friends at MoneySupermarket.
The crew at MoneySupermarket reached out to a number of prominent Formula One bloggers, including yours truly, for their predictions for the upcoming F1 season. The experts give you their picks for the two World Champions, the most improved drivers and teams, the winners of the battles between teammates and what will be the biggest news story of the season. Continue reading
It’s time to start another Formula One season which means that it’s time for the return of our Formula One Power Rankings. Before every round, we rank all 22 drivers on the grid based on who we expect to be quick at the upcoming race. Sometimes it’s based on momentum. Sometimes it’s based on past results at the circuit. However, it’s always about who will be fast.
The Lowdown 