I didn’t actually finish FF12, but given that I played like 60 or 70 hours, I figured I might as well mention it. It’s been a long time since I’ve played a proper RPG and I think the only thing that got me as far as I did in FF12 was the excellent gambit system. Such a stroke of genius to take the tedious and automatable process of random encounter battles and automate it with a programming-like metagame. One has fun programming and has fun watching their programs deal deftly with their foes, and it leaves both hands free for eating a sandwich! The stellar production values and decent writing no doubt helped as well.

This thing is so awesome! It’s a plugin for iTunes (a visualizer) that scans your music library and then looks for upcoming shows by anyone whose music you own. Within seconds of installing it, I found out about four great shows that I would have never thought to look for. I didn’t even have to tell it I was in San Francisco. It magically figured that out from my IP address. It would be even cooler if it just exported this data in iCal format so that I could integrate it with my regular calendar. Huge props to Jonathan for the pointer.