Since the first time I watched Koopsikeva's seminal anime music video "Waking Hour" (which tells you quite a lot about me right away), I've been in love with the music of an artist named Vienna Teng. A one-time Cisco software engineer, she decided to write, sing, and play the piano instead, and the result is four albums filled with emotion, beautiful stories, and melodies that I'm not ashamed to whistle in public. I've heard the sound described as "pop folk," but I have no idea. It's hard for me to recommend any of her four albums over the others, but Inland Territory is the most recent, the most polished, and from the very first song Vienna's voice sounds gorgeous.

I have played more Super Smash Bros. Brawl than any other game in my short existence, and it's not because I want to be particularly good. My housemates and I have regularly played Brawl for the last four and a half years because of all the crazy random Rube Goldberg / Incredible Machine-like shit the game does. When I casually knock my buddy into a pinball bumper that sends them flying into an armed proximity mine that explodes them into the path of a rolling barrel which knocks them into a spiky sea urchin which just so happens to put them a prime position for another player to smash them into the sky... and the game just randomly happens to spawn a Bob-omb which spontaneously explodes sending a deadly flaming soccer ball to combo them on the way up... the resulting uproar of laughter in the room just leaves me in awe.

After Le Femme Nikita, but before The Fifth Element, director Luc Besson made a marvelous film about a hitman with a heart and a smart little girl who falls in love with him. Come to see Jean Reno play the professional killer, but stay for Natalie Portman's very first on-screen role, not to mention a brilliant Gary Oldman as a truly stomach-churning villain — practically unrecognizable as the man who plays Commissioner Gordon in the recent Batman films. Just make sure you watch the international version: US audiences were originally given The Professional, which cuts crucial character development scenes that were deemed too uncomfortable to watch.

As a PC reviewer, I install Windows on a lot of computers, and I reformat my own desktop fairly regularly too. That's a lot easier when I can reinstall my most-used programs and plug-ins with a single installation file that I can customize from a single website. A friend pointed me to Ninite a couple years back, and I was surprised to find most of my favorite freeware was already there, and most of the apps I didn't already know were pretty high-quality too. Now, I install Chrome, Firefox, Skype, Pidgin, VLC, Audacity, QuickTime, Flash, Java, Silverlight, Irfanview, OpenOffice, Foxit Reader, Dropbox, Evernote, Steam, WinDirStat, WinRAR, and Notepad++ in a snap. Then it's just a matter of setting up Google Chrome Sync to get my bookmarks and extensions, Dropbox to get my files, Steam to get my games (along with local backups), and Evernote for my documents. Practically painless reformat.

I understand that this clip is from an Indian action film called Singham, about a police inspector who fights corruption. I haven't seen it yet. Any time I need a reminder of what "badass" means, though, I turn to this GIF.