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Blackout Week Continues
RedCard writes "Back in April of 1999, Wired magazine published an issue featuring a black-on-black cover with the title Lights Out. In it, they detailed what could've happened had the Y2K bug not fizzled. There's the cover story detailing the Y2K worries, a guide to the biggest blackouts of all time (before last week, that is), survival stories from New Zealand, and finally a look at the myth of order - how our power system is as chaotic as any complex software system. By the way, whatever happened to those backups put in place for Y2K that were supposed to prevent one grid from taking out a zillion others? Where'd my tax money go? Enjoy!" Dennis Kucinich has also written an informative piece about the energy utility that seems to have been responsible for the recent blackout.
You. You out there, who snickered at me and my other almost-30 friends who just spent four consecutive hours discussing video games, nearly coming to blows and shedding the occasional tear. You need to understand us, because video gamers are the future. Gaming is now a 23.2 Zillion dollar industry in the United States alone; it is the next big thing, ready to change the culture in ways everyone but the Japanese will consider bad.
Us game fans believe in our games and we rush to defend our favorite console in the way that we could never defend, say, our country or our women. Visit a video game message board and you'll find verbal warfare, Nintendo owners vs. X-Box owners vs. Playstation 2 owners. Accusations of sexual deviance are their bombs, typographical errors their bullets. You likely do not feel the need to man the ramparts for your favorite play or novel or film, but those works of art don't belong to you; they belong wholly to the writer. You're just a spectator. With a video game, I control the main character, I become the author of the adventure.
If I don't direct Mario to jump on the walking mushroom, the mushroom will roam on to kill again. I'm there, in the room, when Zelda's adventurer Link slays evil overlord Gannon, or when Madden's Defensive End Jerome Lincoln sacks evil QB Rich Gannon. When the Dead or Alive girls are playing bikini volleyball, I'm there, on the beach, pleasuring myself behind a tree.
Sad? Maybe.
When historians 500 years from now look back on the Great Video Game Console Wars of the early 21st Century, who will they say came out the victor?
Nintendo
Almost certainly it will be the Nintendo Gamecube, considering that by the year 2503 the definition of the word "victor" has changed drastically thanks to the actions of incompetent Canadian Empire General Leonard Victor in World War 6. In the 2205 Battle of Fatrock Mountain, Victor's nine armored divisions will be defeated by a lone space marine armed only with a pistol and a case of combat stimpacks.
And so it went with the Gamecube. One does not plan to fail, but rather fails to plan, and just as General Victor botched his battle planning with poor placement of his spawning points and a foolishly littering of his battlefield with Space Marine weapon upgrades, so Nintendo is now paying for its early decisions with a full production halt on its little machine.
What Went Wrong:
No form of entertainment, no matter how enjoyable, will succeed if the average modern male is embarrassed to be caught doing it by his peers. For example, Pixar's CGI cartoons succeed massively with non-child audiences for a very important reason: they took out the musical song-and-dance numbers that threatened the sexuality of previous feature-length cartoon viewers.
A 20 year-old male will watch a story about a cartoon fish if it's funny and he has his girlfriend with him as a gaydar shield. He will not be caught dead watching a cartoon fish if he and his cartoon friends frequently and spontaneously break into song about how wonderful life is under the sea, even if said male works as an oceanographer and agrees wholeheartedly with the assertions contained therein. It has nothing to do with the quality of entertainment; it has everything to do with how foolish one feels doing it.
It's a very simple equation; if it makes us look gay or like our sexual maturity was stunted at age 10, we won't do it. Flopping around on a swingset may still be a lot of fun at my age, but I'll never know. A purse is a handy thing to have, I'm sure, but for me that will always be a hypothetical.
A little, toyish purple game console with a lunch pail handle on back, with cartoonish games about a cartoon Peter Pan-esque Link who saves a cartoon princess and a cartoon plumber who collects little bits of smiley-face sunshine to save the sad, sad smiley-face sunshineless town, might be a lot of fun. Only those of us who are very secure in our manhood will ever know.
Why Nintendo doesn't get t
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If you wan't linux to succeed on the desktop, you will help try the beta of gnome 2.4 "with new panel framework
how is this a troll? it's an honest criticism of slashdot's most idiotic editor.
i love how slashdot can dish it, but can't take it themselves when the eyes are on them. talk about hypocrites.
i'm offtopic and i know it, but why, considering your .sig, do you link to a site that won't render using (Mozilla/5.0 ...) as a user agent? or is it that your .sig is not in jest?
man i could really go for some pizza about now, anyone wanna go twosies?
Comment: Yes I realise the username 'fuckfuck101' makes me sound intelligent, no you cannot buy it from me.
This black on black voilence is terrible. /. /.
Anyway, I'm really feeling lonely here on
So few people, so few comments. It's so quiet and civilized. There must be a lof of loud, geeky americans sitting in the dark thinking about
"I used to have that really cool,funny sig
You may be tempted to take Dennis Kucinich at face value, but as someone who has lived in Cleveland for 20 years, take it from me: he's an also-ran with zero credibility.
Here is my response on the blog:
"More ego-stroking on the part of Dennis Kucinich. This guy occaisionally serves a useful purpose in Ohio politics by either raising pragmatic arguments against stupid right-wing politics; or, more often, lending credence to moderate and conservative viewpoints by being so off his rocker, people assume he's a nutter.
The facts he presents are incomplete and one-sided, and his implication that the blackout occurred because of high debt on the part of First Energy, which in turn has been caused by nuke plants and de-regulation, is nothing more than leftist spin."
Bloody mods with no sense of humour. Or should that be "humor"?
Money for nothing, pix for free
Are you unemployed?
You spend the most AMAZING amount of time on Slashdot.
That was classic intercourse!