Marek

:eek::eek: @ video. (I'm still buying just Rock Band.)

So we actually ended up playing Earth Defence Force 2017. The first nine levels were nice but we were getting a bit bored with it, so we put the game aside for a long time. Then at the end of the last day of Spaff's visit we did the next levels and suddenly there were new environments and enemies and it was actually really awesome again. We then regretted not having played more.

Did you know the Mimic Octopus can pretend to be at least seventeen different sea creatures?

If you take a velvet glove approach with these sort of 'sensitivities', doesn't it just make the sensitivities even stronger instead of putting them behind us? If we're all really against racism then everyone should embrace giving both black and white people equal roles and equal meaning in our media. No more discrimination. Black men getting killed by a white man? So what. It doesn't mean anything special because in today's world, it shouldn't really be anything special. Pointing at RE5 and going 'but that's racist!' is, in itself, perhaps racist. Do as Stephen Colbert does: be colorblind.

No no no, you're missing the point. The most amazing thing about a Lego MMO is that it can show what User Generated Content really means. I'm very very excited about the potential of a Lego MMO (but also sad because it would be 100% my dream project to work on, and I'm not working on it).

Yeah sorry about that. I know it's retarded and I didn't use to do it, but it's unintentionally crept into my conciousness due to a friend of mine who, despite knowing some of these people personally, still refers to them by their last name-san.Just pretend I'm doing it ironically.

You can also take a bus which is 10 pounds if I recall correctly. Quite comfortable.

Pff. I have a photograph of his autograph!!! Also I touched him.

I saw this at Nordic Game. It is awesome. Kuono-san rules.

I saw this site before but for some reason it doesn't grab me as much as MST3K.

Yay politics. I was just watching some clips from the Daily Show and my mind is exploding for the thousandth time. Let's see: Hurricane Katrina Harriet E. Miers Dubai ports Cheney's hunting accident Intelligence fraud Guantanamo Bay torture WMD lies Jack Abramoff Lewis "Scooter" Libby Stolen election Plame Alberto R. Gonzales scandal Paul D. Wolfowitz scandal Medicare money scandal The senate computer theft scandal Cheney's secret Energy Task Force (and now his denial of being part of the executive branch) Government pulling a billion favors for Halliburton, Halliburton money disappearing in Iraq Iraq war (now longer than the US fight in WW2) Approval ratings below 50% for past 30 months A billion+ cases of government making contradictory statements to the public Not to mention scandals surrounding Republicans like Mark Foley and Tom DeLay Oh yeah I forgot Abu Ghraib And yes, I had to look half of those up because there's just too many scandals to remember. What the fuck is wrong with the USA? Why is the Bush administration still in power? Why is Bush not impeached or at the very least subject of some kind of massive congressional hearing? (Why am I posting this thread?) Even if America gets a good president in 2008, will he or she be able to fix a disfunctional cancerous system that is apparently unable to deal with a lying, incompetent and criminal government? It's hard to be optimistic. And it's pretty scary. And I don't want to say it, but is this thing going to blow up in everyone's faces eventually? Back to Jon Stewart.

Mmmmmm geothermal energy. CCP it is then!

Don't worry, the boss is paying.

Disclaimer: This is not some kind of official Idle Thumbs 'thing'. Thumb is dead. I just thought creating a Thumb group might be a fun way to experiment with a new online service. Okay, I made an Idle Thumbs page over at Ning. It's a startup by Marc Andreessen (who was the original guy behind Netscape and Mosaic). It allows you to set up your own social network really fast. It's different from MySpace, Facebook et al in that it's meant for smaller groups, and it allows anyone to create blog posts, a profile that's almost your own mini-website and even splinter off into smaller sub-groups. E.g. if you join Idle Thumbs but for some reason want to start a Mecha Goose fan club, you can do that within the Idle Thumbs group. Whatever. I'm just trying it out. Come join.

I read this more as an admission of guilt. EA is doing some interesting stuff these days to compensate. Army of Two, Spore, Spielberg IPs, Boogie, and stuff that hasn't yet been announced.

I don't have any first-hand (HAND!) experience with this phenomenon but I've certainly heard stories from UK devs that support my theory that some kind of epic shitfest epidemic has hit the UK games industry.

I am very proud that this came from the Utrecht School of the Arts (it's where I also got my game design degree). Also their course leader (at the time) is a colleague of mine, so this feels pretty close to home. I played this game and it's good!

Nachimir: you're right, a lot of businesses are already heading in the right direction. I regularly read TreeHugger.com where there's a lot of positive news about corporations 'going green'. I wonder if it's enough though. The American lifestyle needs to undergo a lot of changes, and resistance to such changes might just hold out too long without some kind of large federal effort. But yeah, maybe I'm underestimating the adaptability of the US through state-level change. Hopefully! I would cry tears of joy if just one state seceded from the union (peacefully of course). In an ideal world the United States would break up into countries right about now, with possibly an overarching open borders treaty and a basic monetary and trade union. Things would be a lot better.Also, if California were to split off from the US I would emigrate there instantly. SpiderMonkey: put me in the "that would be a good thing" camp. Although I do share concern about China. Economic projections for that country for some reason always assume that its growth will continue at its current rate for ever and ever and ever. Of course, it's going to curve off. But it does make you wonder about the possibility of China turning hostile in central Asia during the next few decades when it comes to securing oil.

Yeah, Keith Olbermann is amazing. It's a minor miracle that someone is able to do such op-eds on a US news network. Mel & Redwall: it must be terrible being in the middle of it. If I were in your shoes I wouldn't know what to do about it either. Protests don't seem to get picked up by the media, so you'd have to have a massive fuckoff protest to get noticed. That's really the only thing that might work. "Write your representative" is a joke. I really wonder how the USA will cope. It's stuck in two terrible wars, has massive debt to countries like China, has a rapidly devalueing currency and is apparently unable to deal with countries like Venezuela, Iran and increasingly Russia (who have oil, and oil prices are high, which means they can have big mouths). And those are just the things on the immediate agenda. A few years further down the line the US could get into a lot of trouble with its infrastructure, as the rest of the world is at least trying to adapt theirs towards inevitable oil scarcity and a need for renewable clean energy and sustainability in general. (I know some great stuff is happening in a few states, but it might be too little, too late). I'm really imagining civil unrest and/or economic collapse in the next decade (at best) regardless of who gets elected president. Am I a doomthinker or is this a realistic expectation? Anyway, maybe move to Sweden for a while and wait for all of this to blow over.

Listen. I'm not a nerd or anything.

Okay. Fine. "Comatose." Anyway yeah it's kinda like Yahoo groups, FaceBook and Wordpress merged into one.

Dan: Well... the US political system did work at some point, more or less. And I know it works, more or less, in my own country. Our Prime Minister could certainly survive one scandal, maybe a few if they're far enough apart, but if he'd be mismanaging the country to the extent that George Bush is mismanaging America, he'd be out a job LONG AGO, most certainly under serious investigation, and possibly heading for jail. The way this is going I'm afraid the expert ysbreker mentions will be right, except I don't think the USA will go there a lot sooner than 2050. Also, yes, Paris Hilton.

Err what part of my post above is idealistic?

GameSpot recently changed its rating system (and in my opinion for the better). Scores are now rounded off at .0 or .5. No more separate scores for graphics, gameplay, tilt, etc. Instead are the medals, which I think are infinitely more useful. See: http://www.gamespot.com/users/Jeff/show_blog_entry.php?topic_id=m-100-25043938

I agree!