Now, suppose my socks get repeatedly banned. Furthermore, suppose that someone demands that the evidence for them being my socks be posted. If that evidence gets posted publicly the end result is that I now know exactly what is getting my socks caught and how to avoid it in the future).
See, this is what I'd figure someone would say. This is what I'd like to focus on in my reply, rather than your other points (which isn't to say I agree with everything you posted... but... you know, walls of text and all that:))
While this seems like a good argument on the surface, examining it shows nothing but smoke and mirrors.
If a user is making shitty edits, they will get punished for those shitty edits. Whether or not they have made shitty edits in the past is irrelevant. If they don't get punished, then maybe the current mediation and ridiculously laborious, frustrating "dispute resolution" procedure need to be overhauled. It should have nothing to do with amateur applications of stylometry and/or psycholinguistics.
If User:Dirty_Vandal is making "innocent" edits under a sock puppet account to gain community trust, so what. Let this user make their positive contributions, and if/when they turn back to their evil evil ways, ban them. You're coming off as needlessly authoritarian, the sort who would gladly risk the banning of a good user who just happens to use edit summaries from the beginning just to suck yourself off for "PUNISHING THAT FOOLISH HEATHEN, LETTING HIM FEEL THE FUCKING FURY OF MY WIKIPOWER, HEH HEH HEH, HE NEVER SAW THAT COMING - I'M THE CHAMPION OF THE WORLD!" or whatever. I doubt that this is how you intend to come off, but it's definitely how it seems to this particular outsider.
It's a Wiki. No vandalism is irreversible. The world isn't going to end, Jimbo isn't going to be angry at you if five or six articles end up getting vandalized by a sockpuppet who made 500 "clean" edits to bolster credibility or get off the Newbie Contrib list or whatever.
If it takes so long to figure out whether edits are "bad" or not that you need idiotic short-cuts and secret mailing lists and silly shit you learned from CSI re-runs, then maybe you should re-direct your efforts into, I dunno, getting a fucking clue or something? Maybe actually researching the topic under attack so you can safely identify viewpoints x,y,z as definite minority viewpoints, and avoid giving WP:UNDUE to them in articles that come under attack? The whole ScienceApologist saga (only one chunk in a series of incidents involving ScienceApologist) should be utterly sickening to anybody actually concerned with the free spread of human knowledge, rather than status on a popular website.
But, no, you want a bunch of short-cuts that can make you feel like you're in some important game of cat-and-mouse. It's a fucking Wiki, not World War III.
To restate my basic point: If a vandal learns through on-site, open communication that he has been identified through stylometry, what the fuck does it change? Maybe instead of relying on all these short-cuts to get around the process when dealing with Scientology trolls and government clowns, you can find a way to make the process for dealing with these Astroturf uprisings quicker and less convoluted. As somebody who has ended up giving up on Wikipedia due to the ridiculous, month-long procedure that it takes to say "this user refuses to listen to reason and is destroying the quality of <article>", I certainly wouldn't mind this. Bad editors would still get punished, good editors wouldn't get caught in the cross-fire (did you know that my own username started off with edit summaries? Know why? No, it's not because I'm a returning vandal, it's because I I.P. edited for quite some time, and edit summaries are in my nature), and, as a bonus, you'd get a few extra "good" edits from vandal sockpuppets before they go rogue.
Building an encyclopedia, not playing Cops and Robbers. Right?
It seems an odd emphasis to call it a "secret" mailing list. It wasn't public, but does that make it sinister? Surely administrators are allowed to communicate with each other without making their emails public?
Jimbo Wales Slashdot sockpuppet found:)
One has to wonder just what is so vastly important and controversial that an administrator cannot communicate it on site for fear of the dreaded Vandals and Sockpuppets (they're everywhere oh god!!) - gasp - reading it.
Some Register journalists seem to have a grudge against Wikipedia and take every opportunity to run it down -- and if you think I'm a Wikipedian acolyte, I just casually, anonymously, edit articles as I come across errors. I've had a few busybodies revert my edits, declaring them "vandalism", so I'm aware that there are "injustices" done, but on the whole I think it works.
Maybe they see it for what it is? A vast collection of Pokemon trivia and amateur writing that is too self-conscious and self-important for its own good?
But, hey, go on sharing your conspiracy bullshit. I'm sure life would be so much better if those goddamned reporters would just mind their own business. Just remember, no original research, k?
"I've never seen the Wikipedia community as angry as they are with this one," says Charles Ainsworth, a Japan-based editor who's contributed more feature articles to the site than all but six other writers.
Editor falsifying his entire life to give more weight to his editorial views? "Eh well he was protecting himself from stalkers".
Mods discussing mod stuff off-site (granted, completely counter to the notion of transparency that Wikis serve to enable)? "HOLY SHIT YOU HAVE UNLEASHED THE FUCKING FURY YOU ASSHOLES".
Strange group, this Wikipedia. I go there for information on my favorite Pokemon, but for anything serious, I'd much rather google <seriousthing> -wikipedia
Digg is horrible. If you go against groupthink, even if you have a well researched, verifiable point, you will get "dugg" down.
And in other news, a bear has been spotted defecating in a heavily wooded area, and the Pope has confirmed that, in fact, he remains a practicing Catholic.
Back on topic - regarding this FCC decision, who would a man write to? The FCC themselves? And what would he, the man writing, say? "I heard about this consolidation plan and don't like it one bit, no sir" has a nice ring to it, but I'm surprised this thread hasn't had more "open letters" posted to it.
Breeding ought to be a prerequisite to voting. No person without material social ties to the future of the civilization ought to be put in a position of power over it.
Yes, because the breeders in the American southeast definitely know what's best for our country, and are a lot better at making sound, rational decisions than those momentarily forsaking marriage and children in favor of finishing up with grad school.
Or, if dehabilitating bugs, memory leaks, awful zooming, and generally clunky UI aren't your thing, you can run Opera and have an up-to-date HOSTS file.
The rest can suck it, but I'm sticking with GameFAQs for the time being. Like it or not, I'd be hard-pressed to think of an alternative that's just as quick and easy.
In fact, I think I'll refresh it a few hundred times just to catch up on the latest exciting updates! Oooh, Cloud Strife versus Solid Snake, I wonder who will win!?
First, though, I think I'll customize my browsing experience a bit... wouldn't want them to profit off the clueless 16-year-olds generating their content, after all.;)
Not true. So long as a game is from a budget publisher, without an army of Marketing Executives (insert Bill Hicks routine), it can easily qualify as a 5, a 4, or even lower.
You also forgot to allow for the obligatory "let's lash out against a random licensed game, since it's an oft-unspoken truth that these games are dead to their major publishers once they hit the shelves", which usually occurs about bi-weekly, and is useful to the review sites when people question why the latest round of EA Sports games got the usual 90% - after all, if they dared to issue a 38% to American Idol presents Raven's Adventures in Spongebob Land, surely they cannot be corrupt!
while I don't always agree with him and his aisle-opposite at least they were/are consistent enough in their criticism that I can get a good idea of what my impressions of the movie in question will be.
Not to mention that Ebert actually discusses his reviews. Even back before the Web, he would take the time to respond to reader mail, and even published a little book devoted entirely to these responses. His responses were always thoughtful, no matter how niggling the quibble - and even when it came down to a matter of taste, he was still polite, and never resorted to empty-hearted "well, we'll agree to disagree" tripe. He didn't always change his opinion, of course, but he at least addressed whatever issues the reader had, and responded to them.
With videogames, if you dare to question a "critical pinpoint" of a review (i.e., a review of StarCraft that faults it for limiting the total units to 20, when the reviewer simply didn't know how to build farms or whatever), or ask why the latest Madden got a positive review when it's still full of the same shitty canned animations and half-assed features (such as a franchise mode where CPU teams never fire coaches, never purchase new stadiums, and never move from city to city - come on, if the Vikings are $5,000k in the red and haven't had a winning season in a decade, what the fuck), or simply inquire as to why an obvious bug of some sort wasn't at least mentioned in passing, you get met with one of three replies (in order of best-case to worst-case):
Silence. Your feedback is very important to us, so long as it's delivered in the form of a mob saying the exact same thing. Or, alternatively, the aforementioned empty-hearted, empty-headed, one liner "agree to disagree" tripe, which basically amounts to silence.
Fanboys. Most often encountered when "feedback" is posted through a bulletin board. MADDEN RULEZ SON AND F**K ALL HATAZ U HAVE NO TASTE MAYBE U OUGHTA PLAY BARBIE INSTEAD HEHEHEHEHE "CHAMP". Even in email, though, you can get a similar response - "ah, you must be a 2K Sports fan. Sorry about the exclusive license, champ". Fuck you, fuck your condescending bullshit sarcasm, and fuck the buggy half-assed 2K Sports franchise while you're at it.
Finally, and most unsettling: "They're just videogames, dude. Chill out! LOL". Yes, they're just videogames. Yes, I just took fifteen minutes out of my day to present my thoughts in a form vaguely approaching that of an essay. So. Fucking. What. Does Peter King say this when someone responds to an article he wrote on a college football team? Did Ann Landers ever say "it's just a stupid advice column, lol"? This whole attitude is that of a butt-hurt emotional child, deflecting criticism that he (or sh... ahahaha no, it's always "he") is too sensitive to handle with a hipster ad hominem.
I have encountered the occasional exception to these rules, I'll admit - but such exceptions are still just that: exceptions.
Just because they're videogames doesn't mean you can't pause to take them seriously enough to write a thoughtful, educated review. I doubt that Peter King believes that the whole world revolves around whether or not the second string quarterback for some random D-IAA team will suit up for a game against their bitter cross-town rivals, but at least he can report on it with some semblance of poise and dignity. Maybe I'm in the minority here, but I find the whole brand of pseudo-hipster heavy-handed self-consciously ironic name-dropping that passes for videogame "culture" (or "geek chic") to be incredibly tiresome. It's great in small doses, sure - lord knows I managed a bit of it earlier in this very paragraph - but man oh man, moderation, please. I guess it's possible to outgrow the hilarity of 4chan memes and Seanbaby jokes while still not outgrowing videogames - whoulda thought?
Anyway, what seems to separate videogame, er, "journalists" from critic
Yes but ultimately noone will fault you for being positive on a preview for a bad game
The main reason why I never read previews is exactly this. Fault me for being an idealistic hippie if you will, but I cannot stomach sifting through two pages of mindless, blithering garbage about "Acclaim Signature Presentations Presents Super John Romero's Adaptation of Peter Jackson's King Kong: 2X Turbo" and how "exciting" the game looks. Either report openly about what's going on, report on what - if anything - is new and innovative and potentially earth-shattering about this exciting 3D action platformer, or don't call it journalism.
Print magazines are the worst. If a magazine is 100 pages long, 40 of those pages will be advertisements, 40 pages will be advertisements masked as previews or interviews (game "journalists" make Larry King interviews seem like hardball), 10 pages will be wacky and hee-larious videogame humor or useless opinion pieces from the same douchebags who spent 10 pages sucking off the latest uninspired bomb, 5 pages will be codes and tips (seriously - what the fuck), and all of 5 pages will be devoted to reviews.
Anyway, point being that there is a market for gaming journalism that's just that - journalism. Journalism that doesn't rely on exclusives, and which therefore may end up publishing the occasional incorrect rumor - but journalism, as opposed to glorified marketing. Lord knows I'd love to tap this market, but I really rely on the winds to get my thoughts into words.:-\
Republican, Democrat, some people take politics far too seriously.
If I walk into a bar run by the Hell's Angels and start babbling about how all bikers ride motorcycles to compensate for their small penises, that's not going to go over too well. Likewise, if I'm at a classic car show and informing people about how cars are for morons who are too chicken to feel the air on their helmets, I'm not going to win over any friends.
It's not "censorship of political opinions". It's called, "if you're the holder of a tiny minority in a group, and the situation is not life threateningly urgent, and nobody's directly inquired about your personal opinion, shut the fuck up". I don't care that the Democrats want to turn this nation into a Harrison Bergeron-esque dystopian welfare state. I don't care that Bush lied and people died. Either fall back to typical small-talk, or hush up. Pi Sigma Alpha doesn't want you around, neither do we.
In a video released today, Osama Bin Laden, leader of the Al-Qaeda terrorist organization, declared responsibility for the bucket brigade attack that left three dead, fifty-seven dehydrated, and hundreds of millions of satellites disoriented.
"The imperialist Western heathens launch their metallic eye to watch the honorable Allah undress", Bin Laden says in the video. "As Muslims, we must show the world that we will not tolerate this, or any other, act of Western aggression."
Muslim leaders remain divided on the issue. While Abdul Ackman Ackgrab Ackmeer Ackbeer Ackbar publically decried "any and all acts of violence in the honorable Muslim community", some, such as Abdul Rohammed Ackgrab Ackmeer Ackbar Abdul-Paula-Ackman, took a more neutral stance, saying under conditions of anonymity that "America cannot deny" the impact the hundreds of satellites had upon "the honorable Muslim community", and cited a Koran verse that, loosely translated, declares "none shall be higher than Supreme Allah". When asked about the potentially harmful effects of all that out-of-control metal pummeling the Earth, Mr. Abdul-Paula-Ackman had nothing coherant to say, though seemed generally ambivilant.
Small groups of Earnest Student Democrats have already formed in support of what they label the "honorable savages of the Middle East", and were seen against a police barricade decrying Israel, chanting "NO WAR FOR SALT".
Several despotic Palestine hoodlums could not be reached for comment.
Hooray, 14 dreary, watered-down, condescending children's movies to look forward to! Hu-fucking-zah! Willy Deppa and the Gratutious Edginess Factory just wasn't edutainment enough! Who needs new ideas, anyway - children and families alike love recycled shit!
Please, if any major film producers are reading this message - could you guys desecrate Alice in Wonderland next? It could really benefit from being "hipped up" for a contemporary audience (I'm thinking Raven as Alice), and since test audiences are likely to be confused or irritated by all those puns, it'd probably be best to cut them all out. Oh, and I'm thinking Linkin Park for the Very Happy Unbirthday number.
Okay, good point - it was late, and I'm only about half-coherant when fully rested anyway.
Regardless, I think pretty much any real estate agent is guaranteed to be at least a little bit sleazy, by the very nature of their profession. So, it's still a stupid reason to end up in Atlanta.
Hah, as author of the GP, I must admit I was fully expecting -1, Redundant - that's what Fucking Obvious is all about:)
Still, it's something that bears repeating, I think. Generally, I hate redundancy, but we can get 1000 nerds in the same thread (well, okay, more like five nerds with ninety accounts each making two posts - whatever) all saying how much DRM sucks - and I think this guy is about as cool as 0.01 DRM Suck Unit is sucky, so, hey, redundant (and this, possibly off-topic), but me too.
No joke, I really wish I could give that guy a hug. Just a simple, ecstatic, no-sexual-intent bear hug. America needs more like him - he seems like the rare justice who might even make sense of the new-fangled internet tube thing.
Though, since he's a justice and it is politics, I guess I'd settle for buying him a beer. Or two beers. Really nice beers, too, maybe one of those eastern European deals with the chocolate and nutmeg in it. Whatever tickled his fancy.
There I was, in the real estate office. Before me lay the rap sheets of two houses. The one, oh Christ it was magnificent. The other was none too shabby, but the first one, twas a bargin, in a beautiful, civilized neighborhood, with more bathrooms than I could count on one hand, an indoor, full size pool, and--
That's when I noticed that my apparent "dream house" was painted blue. And that... that started the spark of a flashback in the very center of my consciousness. Joey Harkinson loved his blue house. He was also the biggest bully in 6th grade, bar none. No matter what you had, Joey had something better. Even the bacteria in Joey's asshole was better than the bacteria in your asshole. Oh God. Memories of all the horrible names he used to call me flooded my mind, and his house - his blue house... his blue house...
THAT, my friends, is why I chose to live in this lovely two bedroom, one and a half bath puke-green colored hut in the ass end of Atlanta. Never mind the drive-bys. Never mind the neighbors blasting rap music and hollering about Michael Vick at all hours of the night. Never mind that it was more expensive than that other house - at least people who lived in puke green houses never made fun of me >: (
And how do you expect to defend the honor of your chosen operating system by being a whiny bitch?
Really, if I had to choose between AssholeOS and WhinybitchSD, with the knowledge that I'd end up being surrounded by either assholes or whiny bitches as a result of my choice, I'd be installing AssholeOS in a heartbeat.
Oh hell yes. I did, my brother did, and we ended up convincing the parents to do so as well. 95 was archaic and byzantine, 98 was pretty good, but ME was an absolute fucking mess in so many ways. Formerly stable programs started lagging (when they weren't crashing randomly), and the desktop was a chaotically unpredictable disaster (to the point where I was sure I had to have somehow been on the receiving end of my first virus since the DOS days - nope). Oh, and while all versions of Windows in those days would start lagging like fuck after a few hours' uptime, ME seemed even worse in that regard.
When I saw XP for the first time at a friend's house, I took a few minutes to mock the "prettyification" of the taskbar, but made mental note to consider an upgrade. Once I did, I was amazed at how stable shit was. It took a year before my first blue-screen (and that was hardware related). Now that I've upgraded my machine, I can run 24/7 for two months without real slow-down (with lots of lovely CPU hogging aps going in and out).
Upgrading from 3.1 to 95? Kinda required after a certain point. 95 to 98? Pretty good. 98 to ME? Stupid. ME to XP? Sublime. XP to Vista? From all that I've gathered, it seems like it'd be even worse than 98 to ME. No thanks!
For more info on Vista's idiotic approach to DRM, I heartily recommend this writeup. Anyone who hasn't yet read it is doing themselves a grave disservice.
Slashdot Mirror
Some did. Others flooded his talk page with e-huggles. My favorite is "the sky cries for you".
I said "A vast collection of Pokemon trivia and amateur writing".
The science articles, which are either jargon-laden to the point of incomprehensibility, or completely condescending, definitely fit under the latter category.
See, this is what I'd figure someone would say. This is what I'd like to focus on in my reply, rather than your other points (which isn't to say I agree with everything you posted... but... you know, walls of text and all that
While this seems like a good argument on the surface, examining it shows nothing but smoke and mirrors.
If a user is making shitty edits, they will get punished for those shitty edits. Whether or not they have made shitty edits in the past is irrelevant. If they don't get punished, then maybe the current mediation and ridiculously laborious, frustrating "dispute resolution" procedure need to be overhauled. It should have nothing to do with amateur applications of stylometry and/or psycholinguistics.
If User:Dirty_Vandal is making "innocent" edits under a sock puppet account to gain community trust, so what. Let this user make their positive contributions, and if/when they turn back to their evil evil ways, ban them. You're coming off as needlessly authoritarian, the sort who would gladly risk the banning of a good user who just happens to use edit summaries from the beginning just to suck yourself off for "PUNISHING THAT FOOLISH HEATHEN, LETTING HIM FEEL THE FUCKING FURY OF MY WIKIPOWER, HEH HEH HEH, HE NEVER SAW THAT COMING - I'M THE CHAMPION OF THE WORLD!" or whatever. I doubt that this is how you intend to come off, but it's definitely how it seems to this particular outsider.
It's a Wiki. No vandalism is irreversible. The world isn't going to end, Jimbo isn't going to be angry at you if five or six articles end up getting vandalized by a sockpuppet who made 500 "clean" edits to bolster credibility or get off the Newbie Contrib list or whatever.
If it takes so long to figure out whether edits are "bad" or not that you need idiotic short-cuts and secret mailing lists and silly shit you learned from CSI re-runs, then maybe you should re-direct your efforts into, I dunno, getting a fucking clue or something? Maybe actually researching the topic under attack so you can safely identify viewpoints x,y,z as definite minority viewpoints, and avoid giving WP:UNDUE to them in articles that come under attack? The whole ScienceApologist saga (only one chunk in a series of incidents involving ScienceApologist) should be utterly sickening to anybody actually concerned with the free spread of human knowledge, rather than status on a popular website.
But, no, you want a bunch of short-cuts that can make you feel like you're in some important game of cat-and-mouse. It's a fucking Wiki, not World War III.
To restate my basic point: If a vandal learns through on-site, open communication that he has been identified through stylometry, what the fuck does it change? Maybe instead of relying on all these short-cuts to get around the process when dealing with Scientology trolls and government clowns, you can find a way to make the process for dealing with these Astroturf uprisings quicker and less convoluted. As somebody who has ended up giving up on Wikipedia due to the ridiculous, month-long procedure that it takes to say "this user refuses to listen to reason and is destroying the quality of <article>", I certainly wouldn't mind this. Bad editors would still get punished, good editors wouldn't get caught in the cross-fire (did you know that my own username started off with edit summaries? Know why? No, it's not because I'm a returning vandal, it's because I I.P. edited for quite some time, and edit summaries are in my nature), and, as a bonus, you'd get a few extra "good" edits from vandal sockpuppets before they go rogue.
Building an encyclopedia, not playing Cops and Robbers. Right?
Jimbo Wales Slashdot sockpuppet found
One has to wonder just what is so vastly important and controversial that an administrator cannot communicate it on site for fear of the dreaded Vandals and Sockpuppets (they're everywhere oh god!!) - gasp - reading it.
Maybe they see it for what it is? A vast collection of Pokemon trivia and amateur writing that is too self-conscious and self-important for its own good?
But, hey, go on sharing your conspiracy bullshit. I'm sure life would be so much better if those goddamned reporters would just mind their own business. Just remember, no original research, k?
Editor falsifying his entire life to give more weight to his editorial views? "Eh well he was protecting himself from stalkers".
Mods discussing mod stuff off-site (granted, completely counter to the notion of transparency that Wikis serve to enable)? "HOLY SHIT YOU HAVE UNLEASHED THE FUCKING FURY YOU ASSHOLES".
Strange group, this Wikipedia. I go there for information on my favorite Pokemon, but for anything serious, I'd much rather google <seriousthing> -wikipedia
And in other news, a bear has been spotted defecating in a heavily wooded area, and the Pope has confirmed that, in fact, he remains a practicing Catholic.
Back on topic - regarding this FCC decision, who would a man write to? The FCC themselves? And what would he, the man writing, say? "I heard about this consolidation plan and don't like it one bit, no sir" has a nice ring to it, but I'm surprised this thread hasn't had more "open letters" posted to it.
Yes, because the breeders in the American southeast definitely know what's best for our country, and are a lot better at making sound, rational decisions than those momentarily forsaking marriage and children in favor of finishing up with grad school.
Yeah, fuck GameSpot, I'm switching to GameRankings!
...er... wait a minute...
Or, if dehabilitating bugs, memory leaks, awful zooming, and generally clunky UI aren't your thing, you can run Opera and have an up-to-date HOSTS file.
The rest can suck it, but I'm sticking with GameFAQs for the time being. Like it or not, I'd be hard-pressed to think of an alternative that's just as quick and easy.
;)
In fact, I think I'll refresh it a few hundred times just to catch up on the latest exciting updates! Oooh, Cloud Strife versus Solid Snake, I wonder who will win!?
First, though, I think I'll customize my browsing experience a bit... wouldn't want them to profit off the clueless 16-year-olds generating their content, after all.
Not true. So long as a game is from a budget publisher, without an army of Marketing Executives (insert Bill Hicks routine), it can easily qualify as a 5, a 4, or even lower.
You also forgot to allow for the obligatory "let's lash out against a random licensed game, since it's an oft-unspoken truth that these games are dead to their major publishers once they hit the shelves", which usually occurs about bi-weekly, and is useful to the review sites when people question why the latest round of EA Sports games got the usual 90% - after all, if they dared to issue a 38% to American Idol presents Raven's Adventures in Spongebob Land, surely they cannot be corrupt!
Not to mention that Ebert actually discusses his reviews. Even back before the Web, he would take the time to respond to reader mail, and even published a little book devoted entirely to these responses. His responses were always thoughtful, no matter how niggling the quibble - and even when it came down to a matter of taste, he was still polite, and never resorted to empty-hearted "well, we'll agree to disagree" tripe. He didn't always change his opinion, of course, but he at least addressed whatever issues the reader had, and responded to them.
With videogames, if you dare to question a "critical pinpoint" of a review (i.e., a review of StarCraft that faults it for limiting the total units to 20, when the reviewer simply didn't know how to build farms or whatever), or ask why the latest Madden got a positive review when it's still full of the same shitty canned animations and half-assed features (such as a franchise mode where CPU teams never fire coaches, never purchase new stadiums, and never move from city to city - come on, if the Vikings are $5,000k in the red and haven't had a winning season in a decade, what the fuck), or simply inquire as to why an obvious bug of some sort wasn't at least mentioned in passing, you get met with one of three replies (in order of best-case to worst-case):
I have encountered the occasional exception to these rules, I'll admit - but such exceptions are still just that: exceptions.
Just because they're videogames doesn't mean you can't pause to take them seriously enough to write a thoughtful, educated review. I doubt that Peter King believes that the whole world revolves around whether or not the second string quarterback for some random D-IAA team will suit up for a game against their bitter cross-town rivals, but at least he can report on it with some semblance of poise and dignity. Maybe I'm in the minority here, but I find the whole brand of pseudo-hipster heavy-handed self-consciously ironic name-dropping that passes for videogame "culture" (or "geek chic") to be incredibly tiresome. It's great in small doses, sure - lord knows I managed a bit of it earlier in this very paragraph - but man oh man, moderation, please. I guess it's possible to outgrow the hilarity of 4chan memes and Seanbaby jokes while still not outgrowing videogames - whoulda thought?
Anyway, what seems to separate videogame, er, "journalists" from critic
The main reason why I never read previews is exactly this. Fault me for being an idealistic hippie if you will, but I cannot stomach sifting through two pages of mindless, blithering garbage about "Acclaim Signature Presentations Presents Super John Romero's Adaptation of Peter Jackson's King Kong: 2X Turbo" and how "exciting" the game looks. Either report openly about what's going on, report on what - if anything - is new and innovative and potentially earth-shattering about this exciting 3D action platformer, or don't call it journalism.
Print magazines are the worst. If a magazine is 100 pages long, 40 of those pages will be advertisements, 40 pages will be advertisements masked as previews or interviews (game "journalists" make Larry King interviews seem like hardball), 10 pages will be wacky and hee-larious videogame humor or useless opinion pieces from the same douchebags who spent 10 pages sucking off the latest uninspired bomb, 5 pages will be codes and tips (seriously - what the fuck), and all of 5 pages will be devoted to reviews.
Anyway, point being that there is a market for gaming journalism that's just that - journalism. Journalism that doesn't rely on exclusives, and which therefore may end up publishing the occasional incorrect rumor - but journalism, as opposed to glorified marketing. Lord knows I'd love to tap this market, but I really rely on the winds to get my thoughts into words.
Er, forgive me, that should say "if you're the holder of a tiny minority opinion in a group". But that should be obvious, no?
Republican, Democrat, some people take politics far too seriously.
If I walk into a bar run by the Hell's Angels and start babbling about how all bikers ride motorcycles to compensate for their small penises, that's not going to go over too well. Likewise, if I'm at a classic car show and informing people about how cars are for morons who are too chicken to feel the air on their helmets, I'm not going to win over any friends.
It's not "censorship of political opinions". It's called, "if you're the holder of a tiny minority in a group, and the situation is not life threateningly urgent, and nobody's directly inquired about your personal opinion, shut the fuck up". I don't care that the Democrats want to turn this nation into a Harrison Bergeron-esque dystopian welfare state. I don't care that Bush lied and people died. Either fall back to typical small-talk, or hush up. Pi Sigma Alpha doesn't want you around, neither do we.
SALAR DE UYUNI, Bolivia -
In a video released today, Osama Bin Laden, leader of the Al-Qaeda terrorist organization, declared responsibility for the bucket brigade attack that left three dead, fifty-seven dehydrated, and hundreds of millions of satellites disoriented.
"The imperialist Western heathens launch their metallic eye to watch the honorable Allah undress", Bin Laden says in the video. "As Muslims, we must show the world that we will not tolerate this, or any other, act of Western aggression."
Muslim leaders remain divided on the issue. While Abdul Ackman Ackgrab Ackmeer Ackbeer Ackbar publically decried "any and all acts of violence in the honorable Muslim community", some, such as Abdul Rohammed Ackgrab Ackmeer Ackbar Abdul-Paula-Ackman, took a more neutral stance, saying under conditions of anonymity that "America cannot deny" the impact the hundreds of satellites had upon "the honorable Muslim community", and cited a Koran verse that, loosely translated, declares "none shall be higher than Supreme Allah". When asked about the potentially harmful effects of all that out-of-control metal pummeling the Earth, Mr. Abdul-Paula-Ackman had nothing coherant to say, though seemed generally ambivilant.
Small groups of Earnest Student Democrats have already formed in support of what they label the "honorable savages of the Middle East", and were seen against a police barricade decrying Israel, chanting "NO WAR FOR SALT".
Several despotic Palestine hoodlums could not be reached for comment.
--in between trying to outlaw homosexuality and persecute Mexican immigrants, of course.
Freedom and justice for all, so long as all are white and Christian.
Hooray, 14 dreary, watered-down, condescending children's movies to look forward to! Hu-fucking-zah! Willy Deppa and the Gratutious Edginess Factory just wasn't edutainment enough! Who needs new ideas, anyway - children and families alike love recycled shit!
Please, if any major film producers are reading this message - could you guys desecrate Alice in Wonderland next? It could really benefit from being "hipped up" for a contemporary audience (I'm thinking Raven as Alice), and since test audiences are likely to be confused or irritated by all those puns, it'd probably be best to cut them all out. Oh, and I'm thinking Linkin Park for the Very Happy Unbirthday number.
Okay, good point - it was late, and I'm only about half-coherant when fully rested anyway.
Regardless, I think pretty much any real estate agent is guaranteed to be at least a little bit sleazy, by the very nature of their profession. So, it's still a stupid reason to end up in Atlanta.
Hah, as author of the GP, I must admit I was fully expecting -1, Redundant - that's what Fucking Obvious is all about :)
Still, it's something that bears repeating, I think. Generally, I hate redundancy, but we can get 1000 nerds in the same thread (well, okay, more like five nerds with ninety accounts each making two posts - whatever) all saying how much DRM sucks - and I think this guy is about as cool as 0.01 DRM Suck Unit is sucky, so, hey, redundant (and this, possibly off-topic), but me too.
No joke, I really wish I could give that guy a hug. Just a simple, ecstatic, no-sexual-intent bear hug. America needs more like him - he seems like the rare justice who might even make sense of the new-fangled internet tube thing.
Though, since he's a justice and it is politics, I guess I'd settle for buying him a beer. Or two beers. Really nice beers, too, maybe one of those eastern European deals with the chocolate and nutmeg in it. Whatever tickled his fancy.
There I was, in the real estate office. Before me lay the rap sheets of two houses. The one, oh Christ it was magnificent. The other was none too shabby, but the first one, twas a bargin, in a beautiful, civilized neighborhood, with more bathrooms than I could count on one hand, an indoor, full size pool, and--
That's when I noticed that my apparent "dream house" was painted blue. And that... that started the spark of a flashback in the very center of my consciousness. Joey Harkinson loved his blue house. He was also the biggest bully in 6th grade, bar none. No matter what you had, Joey had something better. Even the bacteria in Joey's asshole was better than the bacteria in your asshole. Oh God. Memories of all the horrible names he used to call me flooded my mind, and his house - his blue house... his blue house...
THAT, my friends, is why I chose to live in this lovely two bedroom, one and a half bath puke-green colored hut in the ass end of Atlanta. Never mind the drive-bys. Never mind the neighbors blasting rap music and hollering about Michael Vick at all hours of the night. Never mind that it was more expensive than that other house - at least people who lived in puke green houses never made fun of me >: (
And how do you expect to defend the honor of your chosen operating system by being a whiny bitch?
Really, if I had to choose between AssholeOS and WhinybitchSD, with the knowledge that I'd end up being surrounded by either assholes or whiny bitches as a result of my choice, I'd be installing AssholeOS in a heartbeat.
Oh hell yes. I did, my brother did, and we ended up convincing the parents to do so as well. 95 was archaic and byzantine, 98 was pretty good, but ME was an absolute fucking mess in so many ways. Formerly stable programs started lagging (when they weren't crashing randomly), and the desktop was a chaotically unpredictable disaster (to the point where I was sure I had to have somehow been on the receiving end of my first virus since the DOS days - nope). Oh, and while all versions of Windows in those days would start lagging like fuck after a few hours' uptime, ME seemed even worse in that regard.
When I saw XP for the first time at a friend's house, I took a few minutes to mock the "prettyification" of the taskbar, but made mental note to consider an upgrade. Once I did, I was amazed at how stable shit was. It took a year before my first blue-screen (and that was hardware related). Now that I've upgraded my machine, I can run 24/7 for two months without real slow-down (with lots of lovely CPU hogging aps going in and out).
Upgrading from 3.1 to 95? Kinda required after a certain point. 95 to 98? Pretty good. 98 to ME? Stupid. ME to XP? Sublime. XP to Vista? From all that I've gathered, it seems like it'd be even worse than 98 to ME. No thanks!
For more info on Vista's idiotic approach to DRM, I heartily recommend this writeup. Anyone who hasn't yet read it is doing themselves a grave disservice.