I stole this from the Guardian’s editorials. I’m not trying to be Mr. I-am-politically-active, but I found this to be very silly. I’ll bold the part that made me laugh. And reference the good lines with numbers incase people want to discuss this afterwards. I don’t know if this counts as a flame or nut. I feel nutty picking at each sentance, so I wont post my actual feelings about each number up here, except for 5 & 6. I laughed loudly at those. And #7 made cough and say ‘bullshit’ at the same time (like in Men in Tights).

Don’t let pie tossers roam our streets

   I am sitting here sipping upon my morning tea, and what do I see? Evan Brown – the man who, may I remind you, could have very well blinded Prime Minister Chretien by thrusting that whipped topping in the man’s face¹ -will be roaming around our streets again.

   What message does this send to our children? Suppose little Patrick² doesn’t like what his teacher put on his report card, or young Jonathan³ doesn’t want to wear the new sweater his father just bought him for Christmas. So what do they do, I ask? Why not lash out at their authority figures and cream them with a pie⁴? That is the message we have sent. Is this what we really want⁵? A generation of young, rebellious pie slingers?⁶

   
No, I am not saying that we should have thrown the book at him, or a pie at him (no pun intended⁷) but, hey, people, this is not civil. Pie tossing is wrong⁸ and Mr. Brown should have been ordered to issue a public apology to those he offended.⁹ Seriously, people, are you with me or against me? Who else wants an apology?

      That’s my two-cents worth.
      (name)

A couple of weeks before exams were finished, I treated myself to a little trip home from Sackville to eat food and sleep (I said I’d study too).

I stopped by silverorange to visit old war buddies, and Isaac showed me his marvelous new contraption; he showed me his GameCube¹.

It was smooth and amazingly great. I also hear it’s the least expensive of the competing game consoles. I played with one all weekend and I have determined my favorite feature.

Back in time, during my wide-eyed game programming days, I was destined to wrangle DirectX with Visual Basic and kick the QBasic habit (I wasn’t familiar with OOP back then, someday I’ll come back). Anyway, one feature I was rather excited about was DirectMusic. It would give realtime control over the block-rocking MIDI tracks to breathe life into the format. Nice ‘rasterized’ soundtracks were doing just fine, so it never really caught on. But, I really liked the idea. I think Half-Life attempted active music too, but didn’t realize it as well as SSX Tricky or Luigi’s Mansion did. They managed to have active on-the-fly mixed music in their own creative ways.

In SSX Tricky, (a physics-free snowboarding game), the beat would kick along and each slope would get its own tune. But when your magic tricky-meter would max out (allowing you to do insanely impossible and entertaining tricks) they would mix on some guy rapping “(rap-rapity?rap-rap-rap) It’s tricky! It’s tricky!”. And if you caught giant air off big jumps, the music strips right down to the beat. For a “I am holding my breath” type feel that can’t be beaten.

In Luigi’s Mansion, poor, frightened Luigi hums along to the music. Sometimes he whistles, sometimes he makes nervous noises to the tune. Depending on what room of the mansion you are in, different instruments play along, and they smoothly cut in new ones as you step from room to room. There is also a puzzle involving getting a bunch of stray instruments (a 3-headed saxophone being among them) to play themselves, to make an amusing arrangement of the classic Mario theme. Good stuff.

So my verdict is, buy GameCube, it’s great. I haven’t tried the other systems, so I’ll assume they’re horrible. I have never been so impressed by the audio in any game. EAX was cute, it fleshed out games and if you run a guitar through the filters you can have hours of fun. We’ve had voice snippets since SNES, since then it has all sounded the same to me. The threshold which seems to have been static CD tracks has been shattered! Long live active music²!

1. I am unsure about how to capitalize ‘gamecube’, on Nintendo’s site, they always used SMALLCAPS leaving me confused).
2. Is it still called that? Was it ever called that?

A new, easter-egg-esque, Google language is available! It is such great fun. Go play!

I am no longer embarrassed to admit that lately I have started watching Coronation Street. Why am I no longer afraid? It is because I have noticed that Thom Yorke (apparently) sneaks off tours, takes a stage name, and performs the role of Martin. This means Coronation Street is cool. Lets all watch it now and discuss it.

Some may have noticed that both AOV Matt and AOV Steve have been recognized. Some of you might be thinking, “AOV Rob hasn’t been recognized yet, what’s up with that? He must not be a genius at all.”

Well. I can explain. The thing is, both geniuses were recognized when they were twentysomethings. So, the reason I am not recognized has nothing to do with my lack of blinding genius. But my lack of being able to legally consume alcohol in Texas (or possibly my spelling).

So, it is still my goal to achieve public genius recognition (not so much for myself, as I am self motivated, but so the world will be able to share in the knowledge of my existence).

Stay tuned.

I’m not being angsty, I just noticed I was the last unrecognized genius and felt like my fly was down and that I had to make a ‘fly is down’ joke.

I caught him doing a little editorial talk the other day on his ‘big wham bam’. I enjoy hearing him speak because he is smarter than I am, and I feel like I’m learning.

It was about the WTC, and ‘evil’ and so on, it was a great piece. I couldn’t find the ‘evil’ editorial (ed-itorial, get it?) but a lot of them are all listed on his site. Good reads.

From Ed:

“On TV, these self-appointed members of the intelligentsia dress up their prejudice and bias as lofty, principled and evenhanded commentary. They’ll claim they’re just being objective. These critics may even seem well-intentioned… but, like a nice pair of legs, they eventually make an ass of themselves.”

I’m running IE6. I have a great little links bar on top with all my bookmarks. I enjoy this. However, IE6 has no idea what it’s doing. When I click on a favourite I have no clue where my link will appear.

Sometimes it’ll pop up a new window, sometimes it will take over some random window (like my Webmail…) and I can’t seem to find out where to fix it. Anybody else have this problem?

This happens to me all the time, I hope I’m not the only one.

I run Win2k and when I type sentances, I like to capitalize the first letter. I do this by holding shift then typing a letter. Sadly, I often start typing without thinking, so I’ll hold down shift, and muse my first word. Well, Win2k assumes I am crippled and can’t type properly and boinks up this fine message:

Boo!

I wasn’t sure what to expect from The Onion this week. Last week’s edition didn’t come out because of the WTC/Pentagon massacres.

The Onion did an entire edition about last week’s terrorism. I was amazed by how well they handled it. Two things in particular are God Angrily Clarifies ‘Don’t Kill’ Rule and then the Talking To Your Child About The WTC Attack sections.

The writers there are amazing.