Tuesday, September 30, 2008

Holy fuck, someone's been chugging the stupid juice.

This is... it's just... I mean... wow. Just, wow, War, man, I mean, wow.

You know how when someone is doing something so poorly, fucking up so hard that you start to feel embarrassed for them? This is far beyond that. I can't wait to see Sarah Palin debate Joe Biden. If this vid is any example of Palin's "A-Game", this Thursday is going to be a shutout and an enacting if the Mercy Rule.




I can't tell if Couric feels bad for Palin or if it's more of a "why the fuck did they choose you and how come you're so fucking dumb?" look.


more...

Dragon Age: Origins developer walkthrough.

Oh... oh... oh... oh...

I love BioWare and I've been excited about Dragon Age ever since I first heard the idea being bandied about. The Jade Empire, Knights of The Old Republic, Mass Effect, Baldur's Gate, and Neverwinter Nights developer has yet to let me down with a single one of their titles. As an example of how much I've been following title, I have the original Dragon Age desktop wallpaper before they added the "Origins" subtitle about a year ago and, as a member of BioWare's BBS, have been following this game intently ever since it got its own forum.

Dragon Age: Origins looks as if it is shaping up to be the best RPG since Baldur's Gate II.

Anyways, after the jump are 4 vids of a developer walkthrough of Dragon Age: Orgins, and damn does it look awesome.




Part One: the very beginning.











Part Two: stead your steel, brave warrior.











Part Three: let's wreck some shit.











Part Four: seize the tower, seize the day.

more...

Friday, September 26, 2008

Ever wanted to see a Starcraft professional tourney?

They're usually in Korea. South Korea, of course. A North Korea tournament would suck. The championship would just boil down to some poor kid trying his damndest to make sure loses against Kim Jong Ill. Anyways, I browsed on over to Penny Arcade and read the mysterious first guest post, since PA boys are off on adventures for a while. Today's entry was by blogger Chris Remo, of Remowned. It was a good piece, about DRM, heard it before, but I think he represented the argument well.

Browsing over at Chris' blog I saw a post regarding something that I don't think I've ever seen. A Starcraft tournament. It's not because I hate Starcraft, I just never really got into it. It was good, fun, well made. I played it and then moved on. Now, I have seen other tournaments, such as the various Quake championships, and that shit bores me to death. I don't know if I could stand to watch a Starcraft championship in Korean, as that would probably just confuse the hell out of me. I haven't played the game in years and years, plus I don't think I ever played the expansion. Shame on me, I know.

What makes these competitive Starcraft videos nice is that they're in English. As Remo puts it:

I’ve watched replays of pro StarCraft matches before, and though I can appreciate the high level of play, simply by being aware of the ludicrous number of actions being performed per second, the appreciation was more borne out of novelty than of a genuine comprehension of what I was seeing. Hearing narration by somebody who is himself accomplished enough of a player that he can fill in those gaps for me actually makes it genuinely enjoyable. And when he gets excited, I know I’m supposed to be excited too. Somehow, this actually works.
- Source


Anyways, here's the one that I've watched so far, and he's right. There's some big moves in there, and when you hear the announcer genuinely surprised and hear the chatter and roar of the Koreans in the background, it delivers what competitive gaming is about so much better than even the best Championship Gaming Series
matches or any of the other Western league
championships.

more...

Free VoIP PC-to-landline calling.

I recently tried out a few different services, all free (of course), and found many of them to be quite lacking. VoIP, although a great idea, isn't quite there yet. There's often problems with delays and, to be honest, most headsets don't exactly have the greatest microphone quality. Many free VoIP services offer things like 30, 60, 90 minutes of use per week, unless you put a deposit in your account, then you get 120, 300, 360 minutes a week for free. Basically, you're paying to have a certain number of minutes per week. These plans can be great if you call places like China, Afghanistan, and the like on a regular basis. If you do, give Internetcalls.com a look.

However, for those of us that just want to call people in the USA and Canada, then iCall is the better bet, and best of all, completely free. Unfortunately, iCall is only supports Windows (Vista, XP, 2k) right now, but it does support the iPhone so an OS X client might not be too far off. (I sent them an email about an OS X client, I'll post when I get a response) Just about the only downside I can see to iCall is that the if you have a free account, a nag window in the client will pop up asking you to pay for the Pro service when you start the client and after you make a call. Just click "I'll upgrade later" and you're back to making more calls.

It shouls also be noted that like most VoIP services, iCall does NOT support emergency calls. If you need to call the fire dept or police, you'll have to use something else.

nothing after the jump




more...

Street Fighter IV keeps looking better.



If you want to DL the HD version (it's 107MB) you can do so here.

nothing after the jump




more...

Thursday, September 25, 2008

Play Fallout for free.

What more can I say? Fallout. Free. Gametap. Okay, that last bit does kind of suck. Fallout 2 has been added to Gametap's roster of Subscriber Only games, so if you have a mambership or are planning on getting one, you can play Fallout 2. If you've never played Fallout, I highly recommend you do so. That way you can finally understand why so many Fallout fans were pissed at the direction that Bethesda (of Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion fame) took with Fallout 3. Though, Fallout 3 looks pretty sweet in its own right.

*note* Gametap isn't loading for me. It's quite possible that the news of Fallout and Fallout 2 being added crashed their server, so be patient. Good things come to those that wait.

nothing after the jump




more...

Gamers = Bigot's Barrel?

Quit possibly. One only has to spend a little time playing online to realize the gaming community is rife with slurs and hatespeech. Play a really popular game online like Gears of War or Halo 3 and you're sure to be verbally assaulted by a 10 year old screaming profanity and sexual/ethnic slurs within the hour.

Anyways, an interesting video about the site Gaygamers.net. The first few seconds can be pretty shocking, as it is a montage of slurs and genuine hatred. For example, one of the clips has a gamer saying, "I wanna hang you because you're gay. It's not nice, but it's true," so be warned.




nothing after the jump




more...

Wednesday, September 24, 2008

Fastest contradiction? 7 minutes 35 seconds for Palin.

You might have seen the "Generic Off" Daily Show segment where Palin starts off by saying the government needs to implement a complete overhaul of our financial sector and then immediately follows up with a pledge to keep government out of "private sector progress." (@ 3:00 in the vid) I don't know how the fuck Palin thinks you can have massive oversight and regulation and still keep government out of private sector business. Then again, this is the same woman that has no problem repeating the same bold-faced lie over and over again with the utmost conviction and perky "aw shucks!" smile.



If you thought it might have been taken out of context, don't worry. It wasn't, despite what many in the realms of conservative punditry may claim. Here's the full speech in Golden, Co on September 15th, 2008 (you have no idea how painful it was to listen to this dotting moron), where the Daily Show quotes were pulled from. (@ 1:50, @ 9:25)




I really am convinced that McCain Palin could win. When/if that happens November 4th... well, it was nice knowing everyone, I think I'll just take me a good, long dirtnap.


nothing after the jump



more...

Mario'll fuck you up.

Saw this over at Kotaku. This is what the Super Mario Bros. movie should have been.



BRAWL - Episode 1 : Twilight Ruin from There Will Be BRAWL on Vimeo.


If you liked the vid as much as I did, then you're in luck! This is being done, similar to Felicia Day's The Guild, as a web-based episodic series. You can visit the official site of the series, There Will Be Brawl.


nothing after the jump



more...

Tuesday, September 23, 2008

Is Vista really that bad?

No.

Newsweek is running a piece about how the market has been slow to take the plunge for Vista. Which is true, but no more so than with XP. However, the article doesn't address any of the real reasons for Vista's slow adoption rate and instead throws around a bunch of market speculator bullshit. Hint: It's not that Vista is unstable and businesses are afraid to use it, it's because it would most likely require they get an entire fleet of new computers with much better hardware to meet the increased demands of Vista.

This type of crap really annoys the fuck out of me. If you want to bash Vista, there's plenty of viable reasons to do so (increased required specs, nonsensical changes to core features ("add/remove programs" is now just "programs" and causes a lot of confusion for new users)) So, let me address this horrendously, maddeningly bullshit article.

Last year I was meeting with the CEO of a PC company who offered to give me a demo of his company's gorgeous new top-of- the-line notebook, a machine that cost several thousand dollars and came loaded with Windows Vista, the latest version of Microsoft's operating system. He flipped open the laptop, pressed the power button, and … nothing. We waited. And waited. It was excruciating. He tried control-alt-delete. He tried holding down the power button. Finally he removed the battery and snapped it back into place. The machine started up—slowly—while the CEO sat there fuming. Speaking in a carefully measured tone, he acknowledged that he had been less than pleased with Vista, and confided that he'd visited Microsoft's headquarters in Redmond, Wash., to express this displeasure in person. I would not have wanted to be across the table from him at that meeting.


So, the laptop refused to boot until after the CEO had removed and then reinserted the battery? That has NOTHING to do with Vista. Vista doesn't control your fucking battery's power at boot. That is handled by the BIOS. The only power management Vista will do is energy saving, such as powering down the HDD or turning off if left running idle for too long.

Wouldn't want to be across the table during that meeting? I sure would. I would love to inform the CEO that his laptop failures are 100% on his side. It's either the BIOS or a design flaw that is preventing the battery from making a good connection.

If Vista is taking a long time to load up, then your laptop sucks. Maybe it loads so slow because you, like all computer dealers, skimp hard on the RAM which is Vista's Achilles's Heel. Vista isn't really a laptop kind of OS anyways, it requires far too much power to be used reliably on a laptop and I would think this guy would know that. I guess not. My computer is far from cutting edge and I load from cold boot probably right under a minute. If your computers are taking a really, really long time to load Vista then it is obviously because you are not satisfactorily meeting the system requirements. Most likely they are trying to skate by using minimum requirements. I say this all the time with Dell. Like my mom's computer which Dell shipped preinstalled with XP and, get this, 256MB of RAM.

Now, XP's sys reqs are as follows:
Minimum - 233MHz CPU, 64MB RAM
Recommended - 300MHz CPU, 128MB RAM

No one in their right mind would run XP with 128MB RAM and especially not 64MB! The rule of thumb is that you want 256MB RAM minimum and at least over 512MB if you want your system to run anywhere near halfway decent. You use cheap, shitty, weak parts, you get a cheap, shitty, weak experience.

"Nobody here looks at Vista as a fiasco," says Brad Brooks, a Microsoft marketing vice president. If that's true, and nobody at Microsoft thinks Vista has been a public-relations nightmare, then the company is in trouble. Vista first shipped in January 2007, after several delays, and immediately had problems. It was sluggish. It had trouble going to sleep and waking up. It wouldn't work with some printers and accessories. Users launched a massive online petition begging Microsoft not to discontinue its old operating system, XP, which is stable, fast and, after six years of patches, pretty reliable. Many consumers like me, who'd bought new PCs loaded with Vista, reloaded them with XP.


Stability issues for an OS at launch? My goodness! What a shock! Why, that would never happen to Apple. Like when I put a fresh install of Panther on my G4; it ran great except for when it froze every 15-20 minutes, Safari crashed the system, programs would begin to load and then randomly close, iTunes caused a 16-bit color reset, and there was a host of other issues. Even Leopard got a lot of flack for being rife with bugs and horrendous instability for some users. Know what fixed my Panther problem? I updated to 10.4.9. Patches are released for a reason. Vista is very stable and runs very well as long as you have the hardware to properly run it.

Printers and accessories not working has nothing to do with Vista's stability. It has to do with driver developers being inept dumbfucks and either not caring to develop drivers at or near Vista's launch, or they released shoddy half-assed drivers. The person to blame for that is the hardware manufacturer, not MS.

Microsoft seems to be getting the message. Working in collaboration with its PC-maker partners, it says it has ironed out the glitches. It has embarked on a $300 million advertising blitz aimed at rehabbing Vista's reputation. But that too has gotten off to a rocky start. Microsoft teamed Jerry Seinfeld with Bill Gates in ads, and then, after two weeks, announced there would be no more Seinfeld. Microsoft says this was the plan all along. More likely, it was reacting to the fact that the quirky ads made no sense. Also, hiring a TV star from the 1990s only added to the impression that Microsoft is stuck in a time warp, at a time when Apple is seen as the king of cool and is gaining market share.


So what if the ads didn't make much sense? And they made perfect sense if you actually paid attention to the media campaign. (the idea was Bill Gates would be give Jerry special signals when Jerry said something on the right track to a big, secret, upcoming MS release) I hated the ads. I thought they came off as creepy, not funny or even quirky, just creepy and uncomfortable to watch.

It's important to point out that the struggle to get Vista on its feet hasn't hurt Microsoft financially. In fact, Windows revenue grew 13 percent to $17 billion last fiscal year (a record year for Microsoft), even after the company cut prices on Vista to spur demand. Microsoft says it has sold more than 180 million copies of Vista, which is in line with the adoption rate of Windows XP, and Brooks says 89 percent of users surveyed claim to be satisfied or very satisfied. To drive home that point, Microsoft has launched ads around what it calls the "Mojave experiment," where it grabs people who hold a low opinion of Vista and shows them a new operating system called "Mojave." When the subjects rave about Mojave, Microsoft springs the trick: it's actually Vista.


Ha! That is a major problem with most Vista criticism. It is typically levied by people who have never used Vista or have no understanding as to who's fault some issues really are. (printer driver problems, for example, being MS's fault when they're actually the hardware manufacturer's)

Vista truly is a wonderful, refreshing step up from XP. After I installed Vista, I downloaded the just updated release of Comodo Firewall 3 and found it to run extremely slow. It ran slow in XP, too, but it ran much, much slower on Vista. So, I said "fuck it! and reinstalled XP after only having Vista on my HDD for less than 24 hours. 2 hours after going back to XP I couldn't take how much less user-friendly XP was. I reinstalled Vista and found a better firewall solution.

What I find interesting is this one paragraph negates his entire piece. "People don't like Vista." "Vista has the same adoption rate as XP." "MS should be worried that Vista isn't selling well." "Vista has given increased revenue for the Windows." "Vista runs like shit according to some moron CEO that doesn't even know that his power supply boot operations aren't controlled by the OS." "89% of users report being satisfied with Vista." What the fuck is this piece? Why is this guy a tech writer, let alone a reporter? He obviously doesn't know shit about computers if he thinks it's actually Vista's fault for printers not working. Hint: take a look at the drivers which were done by the printer manufacturers, not MS.

Yet the fact that Microsoft has to run ads like that speaks to the kind of perception problems Vista has had. Why advertise at all, when almost everyone who buys a PC today will get Vista on it, whether they like it or not? For one thing, big corporations—Microsoft's bread and butter—have been slow to migrate from XP to Vista and need to be convinced that it's now safe to make the move. It's the same with smaller customers like Mouli Ramani, vice president of business development at Lilliputian Systems, a tech company in Wilmington, Mass. He's sticking with XP because he knows it won't conk out on him. "I'm not willing to risk my career on Vista," he says.


Vista isn't having any worse of "perception problems" than XP did when it launched. People shat all over their, now beloved, Windows XP. People were saying to screw XP, they'd never adopt and there was no reason to stop using Win98. Why advertise at all? Because not everyone buys a new PC every year and there are still a lot of Vista capable computers that could be running Vista, and thusly having a much better and easier experience. Lilliputian Systems is a hardcore experimental tech design company. Why the fuck would they even need Windows for anything other than normal desk clerks? They should be running *Nix to free up more system resources, not XP and certainly not Vista. They're sticking with XP because, I can bet you, the software needed to perform many of the testing operations, calculations, etc. is not available for Vista. I would also be willing to bet that much of that software is special coded by either in-house programing dept. or is contracted out.

Meanwhile, Apple's Mac computers, which run Apple's OS X operating system instead of Windows, have been gaining share, reaching 11 percent of the U.S. consumer market, according to researcher NPD. That's a small slice compared with Microsoft, whose software runs on 90 percent of the world's PCs. But Apple users tend to be the kind of people marketers refer to as "influencers" or "tech elites," the in-the-know folks who adopt the coolest new technology and set trends. Apple's highly effective "I'm a Mac" ads have done a great job of positioning Apple as the machine for hipsters, and Windows-based PCs as the choice for dorks. Remember how AOL used to be cool, but then became the service used only by people who didn't know any better? Microsoft is heading down that path. "You fly business class today, and it's nothing but Macs," says one former Microsoft executive, who's now carrying a Mac himself, albeit with Vista loaded on it.


Wrong. Macs, being now Intel-based, can also run XP via Boot Camp. Vista can be installed on a fresh Mac, sans Boot Camp or OS X install, and will boot just fine. How? Why? Because there is absolutely nothing different between the hardware of a PC and of a Mac. Sort of. The chief difference, and why most OSX86 folks need these hacked kexts, is because a lot of PCs today, just like for many years, boot via BIOS setups. Macs boot via EFI. However, many PC motherboards are now starting to use EFI boot up. Vista can be booted either using BIOS or EFI. Ergo, Vista can be installed on a Mac instead of and without ever having to install OS X or mess with Boot Camp.

Firstly, AOL was NEVER cool. Secondly, you contradict yourself. You say that Mac users are regarded as "tech elites", cool tech people that actually don't know anything about tech, but think they're really cool anyways. Then you warn that MS needs to worry or else they'll be ssen, like AOL, od no longer being cool. MS and Windows was never, has never, and I don't think ever was or will be considered "cool." Lastly, if trying to be cool means they're "elite" tech people, then keep them the fuck away from my computer. I enjoy my "tech elites" to actually be elite about their tech, not about posturing and keeping up with the Jones'.

Everyone in business class is using a Mac? Whoopee doo! Good, they should be. These are the dumbshit assfuckers that riddle their PCs with viruses and then infect thousands of others because they are incompetent with a computer. It only makes sense that they'd be suing a dumbed-down OS. I like OS X. It's sleek and easy to use, but if you know your way around a computer, OS X can be annoyingly restrictive, has minimal 3rd party software support, and only a small fraction of that minimal software is actually worth paying for.

Yet another challenge for Microsoft comes from PC makers themselves, who are sending mixed messages about Vista. HP insists it is committed to Vista, but also touts the fact that its engineers have created little Linux-based software modules so that HP customers can perform basic tasks, like checking e-mail and playing DVDs, without booting Vista at all. HP calls this "innovating on top of Vista," though "sidestepping" might be a more accurate description. At Lenovo, a team of engineers has been working with Microsoft for the past year to improve Vista. And Lenovo loads Vista on machines it sells to customers. For its own use, however, Lenovo still runs Windows XP as its corporate standard. Make of that what you will.
- Source


HP sucks shit. They build horrible computers with shitty hardware configurations that are notorious for all sorts of problems. A Linux-based "module" to check email and browse the web? Why not just fucking install Fedora? I'm sure an OS designed by HP works incredibly well, considering how well most of their other shit works. No one buys HP for anything anymore. Not even printers, which used to be HP's bread-and-butter. Nowadays Canon is leading in that field by leaps and bounds. (I thoroughly love my mom's Canon PIXMA (at least I think it's a PIXMA) great printjobs, does photo printing very well, excellent color reproduction, easy to use, quiet, it's just been a really great printer for the price)

Another company hasn't updated to Vista? Wow, how unsurprising. Again, unless there was some specific feature or reason to upgrade, I wouldn't do so as a business. If you're handling a shit-ton of spreadsheets, Aero-Glass doesn't help worth a damn. Vista is, in itself, not enough of a functional improvement to validate most businesses spedning the money to purchase license keys for their computers and possibly having to buy whole new computers just to put this OS on. If I was managing, let's say a college campus administration, I would upgrade to Vista because of the increased usability, but that's only if we were to get new computers anyways. Why only if getting new computers? Because, unless you are running Home Basic Edition (if you buy Home Basic you're an idiot. stay with XP), you should have at least 2GB of DDR2 RAM. You can "get by" with 1GB, but you can also "get by" with 512MB in XP but it won't be pretty.

In short: Why in the shit is this guy a tech writer? This story is full of holes, delivers no real substance whatsoever, and makes some seriously idiotic and baseless assumptions (namely that people don't like Vista, it isn't selling well, etc). The entire premise of the article is even admittedly contradicted when one looks at the data for Vista's rate of acceptance and sales.

Some might view this as me shitting on the Mac. I do love Macs and wish mine hadn't been fried by that fucking power outage. I'm actually ordering new parts to whip up a Hackintosh. (I'll be damned if I'm gonna pay Apple prices for the same hardware that I can get and put together myself for much, much cheaper. I'll buy a copy of Leopard, but I will not buy their ridiculously overpriced hardware) Macs have several advantages over Windows, namely that it is so locked and dumbed down. It's harder for these knuckleheads to seriously fuck up their computer when they're using the "training wheels OS." It has native Post Script support which makes print jobs faster and has native PDF support. There's also a lot of things I don't like. Such as OS X profiting from ripping off OpenGL and giving nothing back. Requiring users to pay for updates that really should be free (10.6 should be free. users should be expected to have to purchase a whole new OS version 1 year after the last one) and the mash of other BS micro-transactions that Apple uses to suck every last dollar from you. (no free video editor? no free fully functional video player? (no fullscreen or playlists unless you buy. i recommend nasty letters to Apple and using Video LAN) no rudimentary draw/photo editing program? the word processor is fucking joke)

So, is everything peachy about Vista? No. There are too many versions (Home Basic should not exist) and the price of Home Premium is too high and Ultimate does not have enough features to fully justify it's price. Either get some sys specs or GTFO. 2GB DDR2 RAM is a MUST! You can run Vista with a Pentium 4 HT, but I wouldn't bother as you'll have bottleneck issues. Get a Core2Duo or GTFO. Inconsistent treatment of shortcuts in the menus. Sometmes I will have 2 listings for Desktop due to 1 of them being a default that cannot be changed. However, I must have the other self-put Desktop shortcut because the default doesn't show on all of the menus. Bizarre name and format changes to crucial places, namely Control Panel and My Network that aren't really that helpful. I liked the old My Network better. It was sleeker, more minimal yet had a lot of functionality, and was simple to navigate. The new My Network reminds more of Apple's atrocious design to their various system settings utilities.

See? Vista isn't perfect, but itsn't anywhere near as bad as many of the dipshits, such as the quoted author, make it out to be. Shoddy drivers and all of that was a problem. Assholes who know nothing about computers blamed Vista and MS when anyone and everyone that knows anything about computers knew that the real fault were the driver manufacturers. If you're an XP user and you have the sys specs to move to Vista, I would seriously recommend it. If for nothing else than the ease of the Search Bar in the Start menu. The Aero Glass is pretty, Dreamscenes (available in Ultimate only) is hella cool and really adds a nice new element for the home user. Even if you're a Mac user and you get your hands on a copy of Vista Premium or better, give it a try via Boot Camp.


more...

Monday, September 22, 2008

Richard Dawkins at Randolph Macon

What it says. This is 2 parts. The 1st part is roughly 30 minutes and comprises of Richard Dawkins' selective readings from his book, The God Delusion. The 2nd is slightly aover an hour and is a Q&A session.

Vids after the jump.






Part 1 - Selective readings.
























Part 2 - Q&A



* Okay, so I just finished watching the Q&A. There's a lot of people pushing religion, including an annoyingly boring group of Liberty University students who are asking incredibly dumb and nonsensical questions either in an attempt to rob Dawkins of time discussing real issues or perhaps in hopes that they will somehow stump him. Some of the questions are embarrassingly idiotic, such as the "critical thinking and evolution" [paraphrase] question @ 26:00. I would love to ask Dawkins of his views on cybernetic implants, from RFID IDs to actual neural and optical implants and if such self-created manipulation somewhat constituted a form of evolution, obviously not on a genetic level.

There is also the cheeky dismissal at the end where Dawkins' advises any Liberty U students to leave the school if, in fact, they do have a dinosaur fossil on display that is claimed to be only 3,000 years old.






more...

Oh, YouTube... you make me feel smart.

I've said before that I think of YouTube as the cesspool of the internet. It's where the worst shitheads that partly reside in cyberspace congregate to publish their collective ignorance and bigotry. I'm not talking about the vids, but the masses of comments that make you want to bash your face against a large rock. Yes, there is the occasional thought-provoking comment, but you mostly just find, "u r teh ghey" or some derivative. At least 4Chan can be creative with their hate postings.

Through a series of winding videos of interest I saw a response video from, possibly one of the best usernames on YouTube, C0ct0pus. It seems that C0ct0pus is no stranger to controversy. He's a YouTuber, dammit! He speaks his mind, dammit! Even if being a YouTuber does sound like some kind of weird German sex fetish...

Anyways, I took a quick cursory glance at the comments and I suddenly spied this precious gem from C0ct0pus:

how about i look up your mom's giant cunt?
- Source


And with that, I nominate C0ct0pus be the face, the emblem, of YouTube. The poster child, if you will. His scruffy appearance, his crazy, glaring eyes, his brilliant mastery of prose... It just screams "I AM YOUTUBE!" And really, the quote's only any good if it's got the pic, and the pic's only good if you got the quote. It might be offensive, crude, and profane, but "how about i look up your mom's giant cunt" really should become YouTube's new slogan.


nothing after the jump



more...

Friday, September 19, 2008

360 Avatar creation demo.

Just what the headline says.

<a href="http://video.msn.com/?mkt=en-US&playlist=videoByUuids:uuids:af0e0dcd-5cff-43a2-bd32-4841fe6a89d1&showPlaylist=true&from=msnvideo" target="_new" title="Avatars in the new Xbox experience">Video: Avatars in the new Xbox experience</a>
^ Watch the vid and see how easy and how many options you have to create your own unique avatar for the 360.

The 360 update will be coming sometime this fall.

nothing after the jump




more...

Anonymous enturbulates theater goers.

Oh, poor, poor Katie Holmes. Granted, she's rich, attractive, and probably has a pretty comfy life with Tomcat Cruise-control. However, that life also includes $cientology, so it can't be that great.

Katie Holmes knows how to draw a crowd — including anti-Scientology demonstrators.

Nearly 100 people lined up outside the Gerald Schoenfeld Theatre Thursday night an hour before Holmes acted on Broadway for the first time in a preview performance for “All My Sons.”


Moments before the curtain went up, Holmes’ husband — and Hollywood’s most famous Scientologist — Tom Cruise entered the theater, where he mingled and shook hands with some other theatergoers who took photos and clapped. He then hugged Dustin Hoffman, who was sitting a couple rows away, which drew another cheer inside the theater.

Amid the hubbub, it took awhile for people to take their seats.

Melissa Doyle tried to ignore the ruckus. She said she took her spot in line early, and saw Holmes rush into the theater wearing skinny jeans, a black blazer and oversized sunglasses.

“I love Katie Holmes,” the 27-year-old New Yorker said. “I think she’s a great actress and right now, I really love her for her fashion, her style! I think she really kind of differentiates herself among young Hollywood. Plus, she’s a mom — and I just think she’s a really good role model.”

Meanwhile, 27-year-old Alistair Savides, visiting from St. Louis, said he wasn’t there to see Holmes. He said he’s a fan of Arthur Miller’s drama, which first played on Broadway in 1947.

“I don’t really care about who’s performing as long as they’re good at what they do and it’s a good play,” Savides said.

- Source


Well, that's good. Because it might irk some that Homes is now part of a "religion" that is notorious for it's harassment of detractors. Harassment that went as far, in one well known case, as blackmail and trying to frame a known author for a crime she didn't commit. There's also the wonderful little escapade where $cientologists infiltrated the IRS, destroyed documents and copied others during their "Operation: Snow White." The "church" has said that is all in the past, and the "church" has reformed its ways and dropped its "Fair Game" policy. I dunno, some recent vids of $cientologist harassers convinces me otherwise.



^ Another videeo: $cientologists trying to quell local news story.

more...

It's okay to solicit sex from minors.

Former congressman Mark Foley (not Matt Foley, who, as we all know, lives in a van down by the river), the one that got caught sending sexually explicit text messages to underage congressional aides, will most likely not get a single charge levied against him. WHAT!? IF this was anyone else, they'd be down in the butt-fuck bucket (jail). Luckily, Foley was able to keep investigators from at least some of the damning evidence by denying them access to his congressional computers.

Former U.S. Rep. Mark Foley isn't expected to face charges after a lengthy investigation into his lurid messages to underage congressional pages, two federal law enforcement officials told The Associated Press on Thursday.

The officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the case, said the results of a state investigation would be announced Friday.

They said neither state nor federal charges were expected, although an FBI investigation has not been closed yet.

Foley resigned in 2006 after being confronted with the e-mails and instant messages he sent to male pages. He has since been under investigation by the Florida Department of Law Enforcement and the FBI.

Foley's attorney, David Roth, has acknowledged that Foley sent the messages to the teenagers, but has maintained that the Florida Republican never had inappropriate contact with minors. Roth had no immediate comment on the pending announcement.

[...]

Florida authorities had said their investigation was hampered because neither Foley nor the House would let its investigators examine his congressional computers.

In a letter to the FDLE obtained by The Associated Press, House Deputy General Counsel Kerry Kircher wrote that because the data "may contain legislative information that is constitutionally privileged ... and because Mr. Foley has not waived that privilege ... we cannot simply give you access."

The Florida agency had been working with the FBI and Foley's attorneys to gain access to information on the computers. Foley's attorneys have declined to comment throughout the investigation.

Foley himself was the only person who could release the computers for review, but he had refused. It was not immediately clear what information from the computers investigators had been able to review — if any — before concluding their investigation.

House officials said they did not find any sexually explicit photos in a review of some e-mails Foley sent and received through his congressional account, but the e-mails did not include all of Foley's communications.

Some may have been deleted from the main congressional computer server but would likely still have been accessible from an examination of the actual computer hard drives.

- Source

more...

Gates and Seinfeld commercials are no more.

Not that it's a bad thing. The commercials made no damn sense, weren't funny, and just made me kind of uncomfortable. Fortunately, I won't have to sit through them anymore. They're being taken off the air.

TV viewers can return to their favorite programs without fear of seeing Bill Gates shaking his tushie now that Microsoft Corp. has retired a bizarre two-week-old ad campaign featuring the software giant's chairman with comedian Jerry Seinfeld.
- Source


Personally, I think Penny Arcade summed up the ads the best:



more...

No clean water? Meet the Slingshot.

People are freaking out about not enough clean drinking water.

One sixth of the world's population does not have access to clean drinking water. More than 2 million people, most of them children, die each year from water-borne diseases.
People in India, where millions don't have access to clean drinking water, fill buckets from a supply pipeline.

People in India, where millions don't have access to clean drinking water, fill buckets from a supply pipeline.

Water-related problems aren't restricted to the developing world. A harmful pesticide, banned by many European countries, remains widely used in the United States, where it runs into rivers and streams.

And one expert estimates California's water supply will run out in 20 years.

These sobering statistics come from "FLOW," a new documentary film about the world's dwindling water supply. The filmmakers and their sources argue a combination of factors, including drought and skyrocketing demand, have created a looming global crisis that threatens the long-term survival of the human race.

- Source


Sound scary? How will we fix it? Is the Earth doomed? It's called the Slingshot, fucking look it up you twats.


^ Dean Kamen on the Colbert Report.

more...

Strong economic indicators.

So, Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck and many other conservative pundits have said the economy is strong, it's fine, we're not in a recession. McCain has said the same thing. Although he then said exactly the opposite 3 hours later.

Personally, I don't care about one solid quarter of downturn growth for it to technically be a recession or for whatever BS the pundits have to roll out. When you have people living in shanty towns, a hark back to the Hoover administration and it's infamous Hoovertowns, things are not exactly going well. Not to mention the numerous banks, insurers, etc failing across the nation.

A few tents cropped up hard by the railroad tracks, pitched by men left with nowhere to go once the emergency winter shelter closed for the summer.

Then others appeared -- people who had lost their jobs to the ailing economy, or newcomers who had moved to Reno for work and discovered no one was hiring.

Within weeks, more than 150 people were living in tents big and small, barely a foot apart in a patch of dirt slated to be a parking lot for a campus of shelters Reno is building for its homeless population. Like many other cities, Reno has found itself with a "tent city" -- an encampment of people who had nowhere else to go.



Nearly 61 percent of local and state homeless coalitions say they've experienced a rise in homelessness since the foreclosure crisis began in 2007, according to a report by the National Coalition for the Homeless. The group says the problem has worsened since the report's release in April, with foreclosures mounting, gas and food prices rising and the job market tightening.

[...]

The relatively tony city of Santa Barbara, California, has given over a parking lot to people who sleep in cars and vans. The city of Fresno, California, is trying to manage several proliferating tent cities, including an encampment where people have made shelters out of scrap wood.

[...]

The Department of Housing and Urban Development recently reported a 12 percent drop in homelessness nationally in two years, from about 754,000 in January 2005 to 666,000 in January 2007. But the 2007 numbers omitted people who previously had been considered homeless -- such as those staying with relatives or friends or living in campgrounds or motel rooms for more than a week.

In addition, the housing and economic crisis began soon after HUD's most recent data was compiled.

"The data predates the housing crisis," said Brian Sullivan, a spokesman for HUD. "From the headlines, it might appear that the report is about yesterday. How is the housing situation affecting homelessness? That's a great question. We're still trying to get to that."

[...]

In Reno, officials decided to let the tent city be because shelters were already filled.

Officials don't know how many homeless people are in Reno. "But we do know that the soup kitchens are serving hundreds more meals a day and that we have more people who are homeless than we can remember," said Jodi Royal-Goodwin, the city's redevelopment agency director.

Those in the tents have to register and are monitored weekly to see what progress they are making in finding jobs or real housing. They are provided times to take showers in the shelter, and told where to go for food and meals.

Sylvia Flynn, 51, came from northern California but lost a job almost immediately and then her apartment.

Since the cheapest motels here charge upward of $200 a week, Flynn ended up at the Reno women's shelter, which has only 20 beds and a two-week limit on stays.

Out of a dozen people interviewed in the tent city, six had come to Reno from California or elsewhere over the last year, hoping for casino jobs.

"I figured this would be a great place for a job," said Max Perez, a 19-year-old from Iowa. He couldn't find one and ended up taking showers at the men's shelter and sleeping in a pup tent barely big enough to cover his body.

The casinos are actually starting to lay off employees.

"Sometimes I think we need to put out an ad: 'No, we don't have any more jobs than you do,"' Royal-Goodwin said.

The city will shut down the tent city as soon as early October because the tents sit on what will be a parking lot for a complex of shelters and services for homeless people. The complex will include a men's shelter, a women's shelter, a family shelter and a resource center.

Reno officials aren't sure whether the construction will eliminate the need for the tent city. The demand, they say, keeps growing.

- Source


more...

Tuesday, September 16, 2008

Sing-a-long with GLaDOS!

Ever wondered what some of the lines to Portal's end song, Still Alive are? Well, now you can find out with this fun little sing-a-long.


Portal - Still Alive typography from Trickster on Vimeo.


nothing after the jump




more...