Really, I have nothing to say. No clever, snarky remarks on my part are appropriate here. Just read.

more...

Author Naomi Wolf talks about how modern America is slipping rapidly towards fascism. Now, before anyone invokes Godwin's Law, watch the video and read more about it. Naomi Wolf makes some very valid points, and the comparisons are apt.

more...

Okay, so you probably have to know a little bit about the Half Life games to get this, but once you do, damn, this is funny shit.

I guess someone called into Coast to Coast AM pretending to be Gordon Freeman from HL, and well, hilarity ensues:

more...

Anyone who's been watching my last.fm entries for the last little while will likely see that I've been listening to a lot of music by Akira Yamoaka. Well, if you were to track Yamoakasan's entries on my most listened to artists chart over the last 6 months you would have noticed that he went from somewhere in the teens up to number two (as of this writing), and is currently threatening to overtake Daft Punk as the single artist I listen to the most. Needless to say, I think I'm hooked.

So who is Akira Yamoaka, what kind of music does he make, and why am I so keen to his music? Read on for more...

more...

I just read an excellent post over at Bad Astronomy.

The post is titled Is science faith based?, followed immediately by the answer "No.". Which is wonderful, really it is :-)

Of course, Phil Plait (author of the post) does go a bit further in qualifying this. And it's an excellent and important read for anyone on either side of the issue.

He points out that the site Answers In Genesis states the following incorrect assertion that science is based on a faith in "unprovable" axioms:

Much of the problem stems from the different starting points of our divergence with Darwinists. Everyone, scientist or not, must start their quests for knowledge with some unprovable axiom—some a priori belief on which they sort through experience and deduce other truths. This starting point, whatever it is, can only be accepted by faith; eventually, in each belief system, there must be some unprovable, presupposed foundation for reasoning (since an infinite regression is impossible).

He then summarizes exactly what science is about on a very core and fundamental level, using it as an example of how flawed the central assumption that science is somehow faith based is amongst fundamentalists:

The scientific method makes one assumption, and one assumption only: the Universe obeys a set of rules. That’s it. There is one corollary, and that is that if the Universe follows these rules, then those rules can be deduced by observing the way Universe behaves. This follows naturally; if it obeys the rules, then the rules must be revealed by that behavior.

This, really, is such a beautiful way to explain all of science in a concise and accessible way, and I really do love it.

Anyway... I strongly recommend reading the entire post. In this day and age, when intellectualism is constantly under attack, posts like this are so very important.

more...

Well, the MoinMoin powered wiki that was running the Swarm website was being spammed into oblivion (yes it had the anti-spam page updated regularly, it didn't help shit), so I've moved it to its new home over at Wikia. I know a lot of the content is gone, I still have it and intend to move it over. But I would like to plead for some help on getting the wiki going from those people who know what Swarm is. Basically, I'm entirely too interested in coding the damned thing and writing up documentation seems overly difficult to me right now.

I mean, it's hard to really explain something when "Distributed Issue Tracking" seems to more than suffice.

Anyway, hack at the wiki, help out if you can, and I'll continue to plug away at the code and try to get a working 'proof of concept' done as quickly as possible :-)

more...

I'm feeling especially disappointed in my generation.

I've been discovering lately that many people I've known in the past, people who are roughly my age, are using MySpace. Not just using, actually, but getting into it. Making big, idiotic MySpace profiles, staying online for hours and hours, posting bullshit and idiotic threads on each other's profiles, posting stupid and annoying images and videos, and generally just shaming every person aged 30 or older.

Here's the deal, MySpace is lame. It's insanely lame. Everyone who uses it is a lame poser wannabe. They all fall into one of four categories:

• Stupid teens wiling away the hours between school, minimum wage jobs at Wendy's, and incessantly text messaging friends with incomprehensible strings like "ZOMG WTF KTHX BAI".


• Stupid twenty-somethings desperately trying to hold onto their pathetic teen years because being a serious adult is too scary.


• Persons thirty-plus who are going through some sort of mid-life crisis and are even more desperate to reclaim their pathetic teen years than the twenty-somethings.


• Pedobear

If you use MySpace, you are one of the above. If you are my age, or older, you fall into the third category, which, really, is the most pathetic one to reside in. Hell, I'd rather be Pedobear than a member of the third category. Seriously, people who remember the Iran-Iraq Contras and are using MySpace are sad, pathetic excuses for humanity. They should be ashamed and what they do should be a criminal offense.

Why all the hate on MySpace suddenly? Well, my wife and I were sitting around after a long day of adult work, watching a little bit of television (I do this thing where I switch between The Daily Show and Countdown with Keith Olbermann... I know, it's strange) when we stumbled upon my ex-wife's MySpace page. Now, normally I have nice things to say about my ex-, but looking at her page all I can think is: "What. The. Fuck."

Cass, you're 37 and you have an image on your MySpace page like you're heading to a rave. You have horny 16 year old boys leaving messages on your page like you're going to be their Mrs. Robinson. And you have hearts... oodles and oodles of hearts... all over your page. Listen, I understand the big four-oh is looming on the horizon, and I know it's scary... but hell, woman! At least try to approach it with some dignity!

more...

This book contains book items I am working on. They shouldn't be considered ready for primetime yet.

/node/134
/node/145

more...

I've been crazy busy lately, and haven't had much of a chance to get on here and make posts (ranting ones or otherwise :-) but today I had one of those "Wow, I'm lucky to be alive and living in such times" moments (these moments are increasingly frequent as I'm getting older) as I was using Fluxbox.

For those who don't know, I've been using Fluxbox as my primary window manager for at least five years now. I originally tried it out simply because someone suggested I take a look at it. I had tried Blackbox previously and hadn't been too impressed with it, however Fluxbox's window tabbing was such a radical rethinking of the desktop meme that it hooked me almost instantly.

Fluxbox received a lot of good press around the time I tried it out, and many would consider that time its heyday. While mentions of Fluxbox online seems to have faded over the years, I personally know it's used a lot by many people (over half of my friends online use it exclusively). Because of this, I feel it's high time to mention it online again- To thank the Fluxbox dev team for their years of excellent work and to try and proselytize for it a teensy bit.

more...

Read about it here.

And now, I'm gonna go rest... phew, this was a long and arduous process.

more...

So I've been replaying the F.E.A.R. games lately, and I've been musing as to why I like them as much as I do. I mean, in my Video Game Awards for 2007 I had F.E.A.R. Files in the honorable mentions page. But really, they have a lot of flaws, so why do I like them so much?

For those who don't know, F.E.A.R. was developed by Monolith, whose pedigree includes such classics as Condemned, Tron 2.0 and the legendary No One Lives Forever. F.E.A.R. has two expansions: Extraction Point, which takes place immediately after the first game ends and has the same characters, and Perseus Mandate, which follows a new team in events parallel to the original game as well as Extraction Point.

F.E.A.R. is a very by-the-book FPS with a survival horror theme to it. The levels tend to be rather linear, very rarely do you really have much freedom in how you can accomplish any goal. The series' gameplay can accurately be described as "Go from point A to point B killing all the enemies in your path, rinse, repeat". Furthermore, the graphic engine (Lithtech) hasn't aged as well as many of its contemporaries. This means that, graphically, the games tend to be rather blasé with boxy environments filled with hard-edged objects. This is made worse by the fact that most of the series (F.E.A.R. and Perseus Mandate) takes place in office buildings and warehouses.

The series has one major gimmick to it, the ability to slow time, but this isn't wholly original (we've seen it in games since Max Payne). Otherwise, the gunplay tends to be pedestrian and there's little in terms of modern FPS elements to be found in the games.

So what makes them so damned compelling?

more...

A friend of mine (and former coworker from Progeny) has been without full-time work since Progeny went under (I know that includes many former coworkers from Progeny :-( ). He's scraped by with a few contracts here and there, but nothing that would be considered full-time employment.

Anyway, he recently was offered a job (finally) and will be going down to his future employer's offices later today to sign some paperwork. This is a very good thing since he's also someone who has been without heat this winter (his furnace broke down a while ago).

Well, the funny bit is that I guess he was re-reading his resume/cover-letter that got him this job, and he found the following passage from the cover letter that he somehow missed upon submission:

....I'm interested in any opportunities that are available with $OTHER_EMPLOYER...

I personally think this may have helped get him the job. If I was reviewing resumes and I saw that I'd immediately be impressed that this person strives for efficiency because they actually attempted to script their resume/cover-letter process :-)

more...

So apparently Republican Presidential hopeful Mike Huckabee thinks that it's time to amend the constitution to adhere to what he calls "God's standards". Sound too radical? Can't believe it? Well, hear for yourselves:

If you recall, I have already pointed out that the US wasn't formed as a Christian nation. It's really not something that is debatable, if you simply research and read you'll find it out for yourself.

But the real danger of many Christian conservatives like Huckabee is that they don't care. To them, it doesn't matter that the US was formed to be a nation where religious freedom was fundamental. It doesn't matter to them that there are many people who don't believe what they do. They don't want us to be a nation of many peoples and philosophies united together. Hell, the actual teachings of Christ, you know the ones about love, tolerance, acceptance, and not judging others because we're imperfect ourselves, these things don't matter to them either.

To these modern Christian conservatives it's their way, or nothing. There is no debate, no discussion, and absolutely no compromise.

We are entering very frightening times to be alive and living in America. The current power the US Government poses to covertly engage in domestic surveillance, arrest and detain without warrant, judge or jury, and harshly silence with newly created laws meant to limit free speech, is undeniably Orwellian in scope. Add to this mix the virtual powder-keg that is the growing divide between fundamentalists and the rest of us and it's obvious we need to do everything within our powers to keep people like Huckabee out of the White House.

more...

Considering the strange results last night in NH, the following is very timely...

more...

more...

I know in my Sam's Video Game Awards '07 I gave the 360 props for a solid year in 2007. While I'm not about to recant that, I am about to revise that...

See, the 360's solid year in 2007 apparently got Microsoft a lot of success. So much in fact that they apparently sold more 360s and Live accounts this last holiday season than their Live service can handle. The end result is that connection issues have plagued Live for the last two weeks or so, and it's become nigh impossible to actually enjoy an online game on the 360.

Marc Whitten, Xbox Live general manager, acknowledged the issue here, saying:

As a result of this massive increase in usage we know that some of you experienced intermittent Xbox LIVE issues over the holiday break. While the service was not completely offline at any given time, we are disappointed in our performance.

"Some" of us are experiencing problems? Not as near as I can tell. Of the twenty or so people on my friend list and the thirty or so people I know who aren't every last one has experienced major problems in the last two weeks. From the complaints I've seen online, I'd wager that there hasn't been a single Live user in the last two weeks who hasn't had problems. Long story short, Marc, me thinks you're downplaying how big of a problem this is....

more...

2007 was a great year to be a gamer. In fact, it may have been the greatest year ever as we've managed to have hit after hit after hit.

But, in this sea of stellar titles, what games stand out from the rest? Well, I have the answers to that question as well as many others in this year's Sam's Video Game Awards.

Read on for the full poop...

more...

Happy Holidays, Merry Christmas, etc. and so on.

Okay, so technically it's 12:37am on the 26th (local time), but I'm still awake from the 25th so we'll count it.

Anyway, I do hope everyone is having a pleasant holiday. Personally, mine was very good. My wife and I decided to open gifts the night before (since she didn't really have much time off), which was a lot of fun. Understand, I'm not someone who particularly likes the ritual of wrapping presents just to hide them from the other person with the intent of surprising them. I actually dislike being surprised and don't see the point in withholding a gift from someone for a period of time when they could be enjoying the gift instead. I'm not against giving the gifts, in fact I like that aspect of it. I just think the ritual of withholding the gift is really a self-serving pretext (which is why people view the act as a competition instead of an act of love) and, thus, I don't see the motivation for doing it. So, usually my wife and I just give gifts leading up to the actual Christmas ritual, saving a few select ones to satisfy said ritual for my wife's benefit.

If you think that makes me some sort of Scrooge or killjoy, well, at least I'm not blindly following an idiotic ritual for the ritual's sake...

At any rate, my wife and I have enjoyed our holidays. She returns to work tomorrow (rats) and I have a bit more time off (time I likely won't take because I do have so much to get done).

more...

I just read an article over at WebMD which kind of infuriated me. So, I thought I'd share.

The article was 11 "Don't tell the wife" secrets all men keep. The title alone should have been enough to keep me away. "All men"? Seems like a gross over generalization to me. This seems to imply that all men are married and heterosexual.

But I clicked on and read the article anyway. I don't know what I was expecting... maybe I thought it would be filled with clever little commentary on some of the stereotypical things men are supposed to do (like leave the toilet seat up or something). Silly fucking me.

Let's look at this list of 11 things all men don't tell their wives...

more...

Finally, let's take a look at the games for 2008 that I'm looking forward to,

more...