Tuesday Amazon deals: 24, Wii games, GPS, GTA4, More!

I'm not really in a mood to link to EA stuff (given their sexual harassment history), but if you want their games as a part of the 17 days of Video Games deal, you can probably find it pretty easily.

As for other deals:

The Deal of the Day is the complete 24 for $139.99 (60% off). That's just over $15 a season (and you get that one TV movie, too).

The Video Game Deal of the Day is Grand Theft Auto IV for $13.99 (30% off) for Xbox or PS3.

Other today-only deals include the TomTom XXL 550T 5-inch GPS with lifetime traffic for $99.99 (56% off), and a third-gen 32GB iPod Touch for $239.99 (20% off), with a free TomTom GPS kit and a Speck Pixelskin case thrown in for free.

Lightning Deals today will include Heavy Rain, God of War, Flight of the Conchords, Boy Meets World, Heroscape, Lego, and lots more.

Metroid: Other M for the Wii is $19.99 (60% off). There's also a Wii deal in which you can buy any two from a select group of games (including Kirby's Epic Yarn, Donkey Kong Country Returns, Epic Mickey, Rock Band 3, and others, most of which are already discounted) and get a $20 credit.

Finally, the Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer DVD game is $6.35 (68% off).

Stephenson (untintentionally) on Steampunk

Neal Stephenson's In the Beginning. . . Was the Command Line is not exactly his greatest work (and has aged poorly since it was released in 1999), often coming across at times as a giant "get off my lawn" rant.

But it's still well-written, because it's by Stephenson. And I love this bit:

If the VCR had been invented a hundred years ago, it would have come with a thumbwheel to adjust the tracking and a gearshift to change between forward and reverse, and a big cast-iron handle to load or eject the cassettes. It would have had a big analog clock on the front of it, and you would have set the time by moving the hands around on the dial.

Because that's how the best steampunk works, aesthetically -- it's not just something with cool gears attached; it's something designed to work with the user interfaces people of the time would have expected.

Bwahahaha!

I've already noted that the folks at Fringe are very aware of how bad their timeslot shift is. Here's their latest promo: