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I'm off-topic here, but how did this litany of offensive xenophobic caricatures get modded as "interesting"? It shouldn't even qualify as "funny".

The moderation of these comments is unusually poor (see various "troll" and "redundant" moderations elsewhere). What's going on?

And that's all I ever buy magazines for. There might on occasion be something interesting or informative to read in between the grimacing macho caricatures, the assertions that 1.8GHz is "low end", the boobie-drooling, the frag-chick of the month and the garish ads for games with way too many colons and dashes in the title, but there's more of that found online and in conversations with friends.

Granted, I'm not much of a gamer (wonder why?), so they're probably right in focusing on folks who're too busy actually playing the games to take a step back and look at games in a larger cultural/artistic context. Maybe sometimes all it'd take to endear me to a magazine would be a reviewer differentiating more strongly between "visually appealing" and "expensive-looking"--I've not played Doom 3 yet (hm, don't I have a demo somewhere?), but from the screenshots I can tell it's not gonna impress me much. There simply doesn't seem to be much in it that I'd actually want to look at expect to test-drive my Athlon and Geforce. But then, I still think some C64 games are beautiful, so maybe I just don't get it in this new world.

Or maybe it'd just take a New Wave of original games to breathe some life back into it? Are they all on the consoles now? Eye-Toy, Rez, ICO, Katamari Damacy... (okay, Sims. Cool concept. But I'm already failing to have a life of my own; not sure I want to play one out with dolls right now.)

When I first heard this idea, I was like, "duh!" Why haven't the powers that be done this yet? It's so obvious!

But then I thought about it a little bit. Remember, we're not making just one show -- we're making a whole series. The problem here is that while Klingons are among the most loved and explored (in terms of character qualities) non-human races in the Star Trek universe, they are still, at the base of it, very two dimensional.

Think about it. Ok, they value honour, war, and being barbaric. We know this about them. They kick ass and kill people with their hands or scary looking edged weapons when any pussy human would use a phaser. We know this, too. But haven't you noticed? Every klingon (and in fact every member of every non-human race in ST) is the same damn character. The exception is Worf. Worf was raised by humans, for one, and interacts with humans all the time, for another. Much of his apparent depth is as a result of his struggle to understand humans -- he serves to comment on our society from an outside, alien perspective.

Or take Spock, who's character was different from other Vulcans because he was half human and again, hung out on the Enterprise with Kirk. Other than that crazy Vulcan in Star Trek V, every damn vulcan has been exactly the same, too. Logic, etc.

This isn't so much the fault of ST. In sci-fi, alien species are normally a means by which the author explores certain aspects of our own culture. Ferengis represent our capitalistic profit motive, taken to an extreme, so that we can poke fun at it. Vulcans our rationality, again taken to an extreme, so we can poke fun at it. Klingons our war-mongering, pride-filled selves. All of these races are appealing because they represent, in a caricatured way, aspects of humanity.

Now, when you take the humans out of the picture, this one-sidedness becomes extremely apparent. I'm not saying that Klingons aren't rockingly cool -- they are -- but just that if all you had were Klingons, how would you distinguish them?

The writers would really have to explore Klingon culture to a much greater depth than they have. How would they create the necessary diversity without making Klingons seem like humans with battle armor and a ridged forehead? Think about it. Maybe I'm just not creative enough, but I don't see this formula working for more than a season, if even that.

It could make a cool miniseries, though.

why is there this surge in interest for pointless layers of abstraction on top of the code?

Because there are more things now that need to be coded than there are people with intelligence enough to code them in C, Fortran, or Ada. C or Ada for systems programming, Ada/Spark for proving code correctness, and Fortran 95 (surprisingly nice, if you've still got Fortran 66/77 tucked into your mind) for scientific coding.

If you're not smart enough to do it in C, do it in Python instead! Never mind that Python has become a bloated caricature of itself, and is completely unsuitable for most problems, use it anyway!

Not this liberal. Don't believe the caricatures of liberals that the right-wing talk-radio pundits paint.

I believe that Social Security should be a safety net of last resort to prevent old people and truly disabled from starving to death. It should not be any kind of comfortable retirement.

It was designed as a pay as you go system (most people think it was designed like an IRA or 401k - it's not - it was pyramid scheme to begin with). The only trouble was that, politically, old people vote, and they have voted that their benefits increase to where many of them get many many times more dollars out of the system than they ever put into the system by virtue of demographics.

The whole privatization of accounts is stupid IMHO. There already exist 401k and IRA options for tax-deferred retirement savings.

The problem is that the tax revenue from Social Security will decrease relative to expenditures making our deficits look as bad as they really are. Our really deficits are masked because the excess of Social Security contributions buying up treasury bills is not counted the same as if the Asian central bankers buying T-bills. The trust fund in T-bills that social security owns really is fine till 2040. But politically, Congress knows that they'll have to start finding new revenue sources or cutting spending as the excess disappears entirely by 2018.

But if giving the Republicans a nonsensical red-herring private account (like going into fscking Iraq to look for al-Qaeda) and further deficits is the cost for providing true fiscally-prudent measures such as indexing benefit increases to prices instead of wages, then so be it.

Most of these following measures hurt me personally from a financial perspective but need to be done: Social security benefits should be means-tested. Also, there should be no $90K limit on taxable income for social security as there is now. And the retirement age should be raised. All of this is hard medicine that will offend one constituency or another, but are the measures that ought to be taken.

I want a true lasting safety net for Social Security that is fiscally prudent. We owe this much to future taxpayers.

The real problem is Medicare, which all the politicians are conveniently ignoring. And the real problem there is that 90% of an individual's Medicare costs are incurred in the last 6 months of life.

Inheritence taxes should be increased (preventing children of "noble birth" from benefitting unfairly and not having to compete like everyone else. Those inheritence taxes should go into paying end of life expenses from Medicare.

Finally, some fraction, progressively pegged to income, of medical expenses should always be paid by the recipient to encourage cost effective medical care. Also, more information about malpractice insurance costs, costs of added test for preventing malpractices suits, actual rankings of doctors including number of successful cases of malpractice (vs industry average) should be made available so people can make informed decisions about health care providers.

We all know of the KDE vs GNOME debate. There can't be a KDE announcment posted on OSNEWS without GNOME-fans spamming the thread with "konqueror is sooo cluttered I can't use it" kinda messages. Well, that's why you use GNOME, don't you, so why do you want KDE to be like GNOME if you already have something that satisfies you, and we, KDE users have something that satisfies us. That's what I usually think. I don't know about GNOME announcments for I don't read them. Maybe KDE users - well, lets call them for what they are: zealots - spam GNOME announments as well, I don't know. I don't say a KDE guy shouldn't comment in GNOME threads, or vice versa - it's just beating the same horse over and over again is not quite useful. WE LIKE FEATURES, and I don't feel like I can't use Konqi because there are 4 extra buttons on its toolbar compared to firefox.

Anyway, what prompted me to comment on this is that I thought that this is only a small but vocal minority of the overall user-base of GNOME. Afterall, projects with a significantly large userbase will have its share of zealots. But the very first link I clicked in this announcement begins with this (well, the first comments after the quotes):

I would argue it was already an in accurate caricature when it was written, but was spot on only a year or two before. When I first read that page, on balance, I thought it made it sound better to be a GNOME developer than a KDE developer. At least GNOME developers sounded creative and lively.

Today, I would argue that the caricatures are almost reversed. GNOME is a paragon of usable, restrained, unimaginative, corporate development. KDE is lively, nimble, cluttered, and a little crazy. What happened? How can we get the good aspects of "old GNOME" back without returning to diagramming in puddles of spilt beer, urine and vomit?

[RANT=OFF]

And let's not forget about all of those big hunky male characters in video games like:

The Doom Guy
Serious Sam
Duke Nukem ...

I've never heard another male video gamer complain `Duke's arms are too muscular!` or `Look at those pecs, they're unnatural!`.

They're charactures. It's like complaining that cartoon characters don't look like real people.

Well, actually, they are caricatures of what a man's fantasy man would look/act like. So they are still marketing toward male fantasy there. I don't know that anything is really wrong targeting men, but those are poor counterexamples.

The big problem with porn is that it is a caricature of the real thing - ie. sex with a live person. Porn is to sex as a roadrunner cartoon is to real life. Both exaggerate and distort; they don't represent or characterize.

Try turning on the news.

This has nothing to do with anything inherent in pornography, and everything to do with of what an entertainment industry (including news) consists. If this is a reason to discount pornography, then it is a reason to discount other forms of entertainment/news as well.

It's scary how activity of destroying life is more accepted that creating it

Problem is, porn doesn't create life. Sex does (well, sometimes). The sex depicted in porn doesn't seem to have creating life as an objective. The goal of porn is physical gratification, not life. Linking porn to creating life is disingenuous at best.

The big problem with porn is that it is a caricature of the real thing - ie. sex with a live person. Porn is to sex as a roadrunner cartoon is to real life. Both exaggerate and distort; they don't represent or characterize.

I'm curious though. What's his background that earned him the spot on a show like Crossfire? He had to have done something that made him in the spotlight in some way before that I would assume?

Because he wears a bow tie? Let's not pretend that CNN is somehow objective in the arena of politics - this is the network that initially reported the Sandy Berger story leaving out the bit about him stuffing the papers in his pants and socks.

Tucker Carlson is the caricature of an American conservative and that suited CNN just well. They like having a "dope" in that chair just fine.

That's not to say he doesn't hold his positions honestly and dearly, but he represents one view held by a very narrow crosssection of Americans. If you're arguing for the "other side" it's a nice position to argue against and it's useful to pretend that Carlson's positions represent 52% of the citizenry.

While Stewart was largely grandstanding he has a good point - Crossfire is about people representing a narrow crossection of Democrats trading jabs with people representing a narrow crosssection of Republicans. It's political theatre, not serious policy debate.

Now the question is will it be replaced with meaningful policy debate and analysis or more Ricky-Lake-style news? And if John Stewart winds up with the spot there's gonna be hell to pay.

I stated my opinion about socialism, and it's based on the bad experiences from the past.

In future perhaps you should avoid preceding your opinions with the word "Fact." Logic is logic whether applied mathematically or to real world situations. It is about using a reasoned progression based upon measured criteria. Given A and B we can deduce C. Assertions without facts, or without directly related causation are not logical. It seems to me that reasoned discourse and logic should be formally taught everywhere, as I find it lacking most everywhere.

Well, I could just stop picking sides, but I don't like to. Picking no sides is always easier.

I disagree. Picking sides (in terms of right, left, democrat, republican, etc as I used it above) is easy when you just follow the party line. Making your own choices about things, and making an informed decision is much harder than listening to Rush Limbaugh for debating points.

I don't know if "caricature" is a common word in USA

the word 'caricature' is fairly common in American English, although it is usually used in terms of a drawing or a grotesque exaggeration.

I can understand being disenchanted with many of the regimes that have claimed to be socialist, but socialism is such a broad concept that it is practiced to some degree almost everywhere. Oppression and totalitarianism are also present in some degree almost everywhere. Try not to let a bunch of power hungry thugs turn you off on the basic idea of sharing resources and sharing work equitably.

What kind of failure in reasoning does it take to make an assertion like "Socialism will never work" and try to claim it as a fact? Have you ever read anything about logic or reasoning? A prediction cannot, by definition, be a fact. Citing previous examples of something not working is not a valid argument as to why something cannot work in the future.
That's called empiric reasoning. Your meaning of logic is mostly mathematical, mechanical. Real-World logic is quite different.
I stated my opinion about socialism, and it's based on the bad experiences from the past.

In 1200 AD someone may have said, "humans will never fly. people have tried for years to invent flying machines and all failed. Most of them seriously injured themselves. It is a fact that flying machines can never work. "
Maybe he did help humans fly, in his own way. Maybe he showed the fundamental flaws of the machines of his time. I don't know if he did. Maybe he just helped inventors shift their views.

Why don't you stop picking sides
Well, I could just stop picking sides, but I don't like to. Picking no sides is always easier.

or trying to attack others who believe differently than you
Like I said before, some of my arguments were just caricatures (sorry, I don't know if "caricature" is a common word in USA, here in Brazil we use "caricatura" a lot)

and try to look at some of the problems in the world and try to help solve them.
What if I do so? Maybe you don't know me so much

Bickering will get you exactly nowhere.
I know bickering will not get me anywhere ;)

It's not 1930 anymore. The USA Communist party is dead. I'm pretty far to the left (I didn't like Kerry because I think he's to far to the right) but I'm glad the USSR fell. Same goes for just about every other leftist I've talked to about this. The Soviet Union was an authoratarian empire, good riddence.

You are glad USSR fell. Most leftists are. The question is: didn't they support USSR? Yes, they did. They knew what was going on, but they supported USSR back then. Why? Because it was against USA. Quite simple.
Fact: Socialism will never work. In fact, every single comunist regime was extremely elitist. "What, elitist?" You ask. Yes, elitist. All the population was poor, the food was scarse. Oh, except for the government, of course.

Newsflash. Michael Moore is just a fat guy who made a movie. Get over it.
Michael Moore made a movie, exactly. It was pure fiction. However, some people do "find" some "truth" in his movie(s), which is pretty amazing.

You haven't read anything by Chomsky, have you. I've read a couple of his books, he references everything. If you want to argue that his socialist beleifs are wrong fine, but just making stuff up and dropping his name is so David Horowitz.
Well, I read one of his books. It was like this : "Vatican helped the Nazis, X was paid by Y" etc. Many, many, many of them with no references at all. I wouldn't even need to refute his "facts". Of course I don't COMPLETELY disagree with him, I'm not the kind of pro-USA-all-the-way guy.

It's worth noting that all his critics rely on personal attacks and alleged sympathies for communists or fascists, but never question the facts he cites. I don't agree with some of his politics, but factually speaking he is pretty reliable.
Not that reliable. His arguments are pure hate against USA. The facts he cites don't sum up to his defense of communist regimes.

Instead of responding to this imaginary leftist in your head, maybe you should try engaging one of us in serious discussion.
The "imaginary leftist" was only a joke, a "caricature".

Extreme generalizations you say? My bad.

Problem is, he wasn't making an extreme generalization about PC users. He was saying that we always see that type of comment in response to anything about the cost of using a Mac. So the only generalization was that such comments appear, and yes, he did caricature those comments for humorous effect. But what you wrote is not analogous.

It's almost noon, so it's time for my martini to warm me up for my Candle Artists Against War group trip to the Morrisey concert. Ta!

If you read the posts that precede my post, you will see that I'm not parroting or over-simplifying. Their views are overly simplistic.

You have not said anything that contradicts the main point of what I said. So I suggest you go back and reread what I wrote. You are reading something into the post that I did not put there. This "misinterpretation" on your part "proves" my point that people just don't put in the time and effort necessary to understand what is being said.

A couple of clarifications might help. We apparently have different interpretations of subjective and, presumably, objective. When you say, "'Interpretation is very subjective' is proven by your misinterpreting", I'm not sure whether you mean by subjective that two people can have different interpretations or that the possibiliy of error make something subjective. In either case you are wrong. Two people can have different interpretations because they have different grounds upon which they make an interpretation. So there is nothing essentially subjective about it, other than the fact that it is done by a "subject". As to the possibility of error, an interpretation can be correct but false, that is it follows all appropriate formal rules and is objectively correct but ends up being wrong. It happens all the time. The possibility of error is not essential to subjectivity or objectivity.

My analogy between art and a person was meant to indicate the ethical responsiblity we have to an artist at least to attempt to understand what he is trying to convey. Of course, it may be that he or she is not trying to convey anything. It was not meant to indicate that we don't misunderstand each other in conversations.

One point where we do disagree is on the possibility or impossibility of arriving at an author's intention. I don't have the time or inclination to argue my point. It would need to be a monograph. We'll have to agree to disagree.

You seem to think I'm harkening back to a "scientific" approach to literary interpretation that began back in the nineteenth with philology and continued into the early twentieth century as "linguistics". The over-riding belief was that a certain method could be followed that would produce an objective result. Anything considered objective was also considered true, a rather bad interpretation of objective, but there you have it. This is not what I'm advocating.

I am advocating a scientific/evidence based approach, but one that is defined by falsifiability, rather than formal rules that could be applied to a text to produce the author's intention which would then be assumed to be the only proper interpretation.

You know the "hilarious" thing about your response is that you do to my post exactly what you accuse me of doing to the other people's posts, that is grossly simplifying and caricaturing my position. You'd be surprised how often that happens. It's an obnoxious tendency that most people are not even aware that they do. You might want to keep an eye open for it in the future when you try to "flame" someone else.

I was tempted not to even bother responding, but your misinterpretations of subjectivity and consequently objectivity are so common that I felt I needed to say something about it even if nobody else besides you reads it. You should read some philosophy, especially something written after, say, 1930.

Your logic regarding mythologies or traditional literature is correct; these should not be a reinterpretation of these stories using concepts we derive from mixed ethnicity modern democratic nation states. Point taken. But it's not applicable. Le Guin's work is NOT constrained by history. She is purposely imagining a future where Western white male dominance no longer exists. It's a fantasy, and the reason for the fantasy is something more like Martin Luther King's "I have a dream" than Beowulf. Any interpretation of the work without consideration of such a prominent detail like the skin or ethnicity of characters that differs greatly from other works in the fantasy/sci-fi genre is if not mistaken, at the very least highly incomplete.

As I mentioned, I don't buy the amusement park-one-of-every-color-it's-a-small-world super safe view of multiculturalism. I think there's something extraordinarily darkly subversive about this view of the world, which is entailed by your statement that you don't ever notice the skin tones of characters. Sure, we want to all live in harmony together. I'll buy that. But to reduce the real, virile, living breathing cultural and ethnic communities to flat two dimensional smiley singing dancing caricatures, that's racism too. Colin Powell was asked once something like "So color doesn't matter to you?" and his quick retort was "Doesn't matter to who?". Ethnicity matters and to not recognize it is as insulting as to mischaracterize it as deviant or inferior or to make it out to be some kind of strait jacket the way stereotypes do.

This is also the difference between the official model of multiculturalism of Canada and the United States. Canada envisions a mixed bag of communities that can preserve their specific ethnicities living together in liberal democracy without rolling over differences as in the "melting pot" of the United States (I don't mean that this actually happens in practice in the United States nor that it should).

One last point. I really take offense at the "I have a friend that is x and he or she thinks y so y is okay" model of argumentation. Just as there is the difference between authorial intent and actual thematics, there is a difference between someone being of x race and doing or thinking y and whether that y is racist or not. Blacks in America after did all sorts of ridiculous caricatures of themselves as clown sort of performers--this absolutely does not legitimize what they were doing. It is not a big leap to think that even people of degraded x race may buy into the racism. That was the argument behind why schools should be integrated in the US since it was shown that black children were buying into the myth that they were intrinsically inferior and that they needed to be shown by society that they were every bit as capable as white students. I'm not necessarily taking issue with your Maori friend's comment, but as I said, I find that line of argumentation quite distasteful.

Long response, hope you can find some things that you agree with.

Completely agree. I couldn't understand why everyone was raving about these movies. And it's got nothing to do with being a Tolkien 'purist' or any such nonsense, because I think that, for example, the amplification of Arwen's character was an improvement. But almost all the other changes were to the detriment of the characters involved, notably towards the end of the story, when Faramir and Denethor were turned into one-dimensional and unbelievable caricatures.

So, while it's not as Truly Perfect as the Apple True Believers will try and tell you, it is a damn fine system.

I'm not trying to be a dickhead here, and I'm not objecting to anything you wrote, but I have a general observation.

It occurs to me that this True Believer stuff is an overblown perception. I know a lot of people like me, who love OS X, but not a single one of them is without some complaints about it. I sure don't know of anyone who says it's perfect. Apple users tend to get pretty devoted and enthusiastic, but I think the caricature of the Apple True Believer/Zealot/Mindless Fanboi is a bit more than is actually the case.

Just for one thing I dislike about OS X: Lack of thumbnail view in finder windows. You have to go to column view and click images one at a time to see their previews. Annoying.

[What follows is one man's quick summary of the history of Fodor's modularity thesis and much else.]

I would distingush between the modularity of Fodor (1983) and the neuroscience notion of localism.

Fodor's was a specific thesis about the modularity of sensory/perceptual systems, but also more "central" systems, such as the parsing module. It made specific claims about what it means to be a module, including information encapsulation and penetrability. These were strong claims, which is of course a good thing. They were central to the early 1980s milieu, a time in which cognitive science meant cognitive psychology, computer science, and linguistics, and did not yet include cognitive neuropsychology and cognitive neuroscience. Modularists like Pylyshyn offered tortured arguments against the penetrability of visual perception, trying to sweep under the rug well-known bi-stable illusions such as the Necker cube, the duck-rabbitt, the young-old woman, and faces-vases. Extreme arguments were also offered up by psycholinguists who wanted to equate Chomsky's "language organ" and "language acquisition device" with modules.

The truth is that Fodor's modularity generated very little, if any, new empirical insight, although it spurred a number of theoretical debates.

The late 1980s brought a turn from the mind and to the brain.

The connectionist approach emerged rapidly, and a caricature of the symbolic approach was set up as a foil. Fodor defended his brand of symbolic cognition against the connectionist, rather poorly. His talk of the combinatorial power of symbolic systems, which reflected his intellectual roots in logic and linguistics, was ignored not just by the connectionists, but more importantly by the symbolicists as well -- folks like Newell who actually built computational models of cognition, and understood symbolic systems from the richer, more dynamic perspective offered by computer science.

Another development, and here I join my rambling to your argument, was the rise of cognitive neuropsychology and then cognitive neuroscience. Neuropsychology was the trailblazer here. It introduced cognitive scientists to arguments about the neural localization of function and promoted (double) dissociations as the royal road. Although this seemed on the surface to have something to do with modularity, in fact it was rooted in decades old debates internal to the neuro community (e.g., Lashley). Localism does not equal modularity! It is hard to convey how much effort was spent fractionating seemingly simple cognitive processes, such as lexical access, into dozens of distinct boxes (boxology does not equal modularity either!), each distinction made on the basis of one or more dissociative patient pairs. By the early 1990s, these efforts collapsed under their own weight, and what looked like backdoor evidence for modularity at the brain level disappeared.

The rise of cognitive neuroscience, especially neuroimaging, during the 1990s and now in the current decade, tells a similar story. Image subtractions initially lead people to localist claims about the localization of cognitive functions: the FFA, the place, area, etc. (These are not Fodorian modules, mind you. Not even the most simplistic neuroimager uses the terms "information encapsulation" and "cognitive penetrability", at least in polite company.) The next round of studies suggest a more complex picture, and eventually people give up and acknowledgge that the action is in the collaborative processing of a number of areas -- the large-scale cortical network. See for example Mesulam (1990) and his intellectual predecessor Luria (1966).

Of course, this story does not hold for primary sensory cortex, which has been known to be highly localized for a half-century now (Hubel, Wiesel, Lettvin, etc.). But then, this was (1) known when Fodor published "The Modularity of Mind" and (2) was never described using Fodor's terms and criteria except perhaps by those in his immediate circle. This is where I urge you to read the f

Welcome, and thank you for visiting. If you are here in search of the original "EA_spouse" article, you can find that here. The following is my update as of 12/15/2004.

So much has happened in the past month, I find it difficult to grasp. One essay written months ago set off a powderkeg of response, not just from the game industry but from the entire software development community. Truly, the power of the Internet is astounding, and all other things aside, we live in a positive age when so much information can be shared so easily and quickly.

The thing that lifted this up into public view, though, was not my essay so much as the response to it, so I will keep this brief. I have left the original essay and comments intact, and you can find them below. To supplement the original essay, I have organized my own comments and links to others' commentary into a FAQ. I have also put together a press page that links to all of the news stories related to this blog.

I am pleased and a little flabbergasted to announce that "EA: The Human Story" was nominated for Joel Spolsky's Best Software Essays of 2004. More details on this as they come.

I also would like to announce the initial inception of Gamewatch.org -- don't visit it yet, there's still nothing there. =) But there will be. It is my intent to start a non-corporate-sponsored watchdog organization specifically devoted to monitoring quality of life in the game industry. As much as I would like to extend this to the entire software industry, games are what I know, and where I need to stay right now. However, this project will be as open-source as I can possibly make it. All code written for the maintenance of the site will be available to the public, and all financial information for the organization (which will be a volunteer one) will likewise be made public. While GameWatch will occasionally run articles, its primary purpose will be to provide a reporting site where employees from any company in the industry can come to share their experiences. Our goal is to hold up and reward those companies that operate ethically, the better to ensure that top talent can seek out employment where they will be respected and best provided with the resources to do their jobs, namely family time, sleep, and sanity. Employees will be able to post anonymously or publically, as they so choose, and will also be offered an in-between option to register with the site but have only their testimonial posted, not their name or contact information. Registered testimonials will be given a greater weight than anonymous ones, but both options will be available. We will also provide forums for advice and discussion for all game industry affiliates, including existing employees, veterans, and aspiring students.

If you are interested in helping out with Gamewatch, please contact me with 'Gamewatch.org' or similar in your subject line. In particular, I would also like to announce a logo contest for Gamewatch. Simply, I'm looking for a one or two-color vector graphic (black with single-color highlighting, or simply black and white), approximately 200x200 pixels, on the GameWatch theme -- a couple of ideas we've tossed around are a caricature of an English Bulldog or Doberman Pinscher with a controller in its mouth, or some variant on an actual wristwatch theme, but do not by any means feel restricted by these suggestions. I will accept entries at ea_spouse@hotmail.com for one month, until January 15, 2005, and then a winner will be selected. I will pay the winner $20.00 -- $25.00 if the entry is provided in a standardized vector graphic format (Adobe Illustrator .ai, for instance). It isn't much, but it's what I've got -- and the artist will of course be credited on the GameWatch website.

For those interested in discussing Gamewatch.org as a concept and in its details, I have added a page here for that purpose.

All of this aside, the most important thing I have to say is -- thank you, to everyone who has visited this page, and especially t