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Yup.

Go see the Honorable Richard J. Daley Plaza. That's where they've got that Picasso.

How can you make a space game and have people look at a tiny ship from a distance instead of placing people in the cockpit.

I like Small Gods. I've read a lot of them, but that's probably my favourite. Making Money is good too. Surprising amount of insight about how money works.

I don't know about planning games for Fri / Sat evenings -- playing Planetside is not what I like to do at those times Saturday afternoon or any time Sunday is best, although the L4D2 games have been on Sunday evenings (Wrestle, if you read this, I was planning to play with you yesterday, but you didn't appear online until I was already playing Planetside with the others!).

Up to 1024x768.

That's probably not new. But it's topical.

Just don't pay your rent. It'll be fine.

Okay, I see what you're getting at. Yet if there was no Doom, there would be something else. And even if he draws that parallel, it doesn't mean the idea would not have occurred to him if he hadn't played Doom. It shows that for him, murdering people is not essentially different to playing a violent game. That would have caused problems eventually even if all of our media was aimed at 8-year-olds and we refused to tell kids about violence in history and current events.

Definitely. I liked the film but they never did anything with that plot points. It's really odd. I also found the way things developed a bit difficult to believe. I really liked the performances, though.

I only read Moby Dick for the whale facts.

That's... Star Wars: Episode VII: Star Trek?

You must be confused. All that shows is that he played Doom. Or what is it supposed to prove?

I believe that's a false equivalence. I purposefully said that actual violence is a different phenomenon to point out that getting desensitized to fake violence does not mean you are desensitized to actual violence. They are qualitatively different things: actual violence is not simply 'more' compared to fake violence. An act of actual violence is a completely different decision to an act of play violence. If they are the same or of the same quality to someone, that points to an underlying condition. If someone does have such a condition and does play violent games, we cannot tell whether playing the games is keeping him from doing worse things or exacerbating the condition. There's no science to show either. For all we know, he could have spent the time torturing cats, which is not exactly unheard of. There's way too much violence in our media, but my opposition is mainly from the point of view or art. Millions of people see and perpetrate virtual acts of violence day in, day out, but there's no proof at all that any of them would be less shocked to see someone get shot in the face because of that media influence. Then there's presenting complex causes in such a simple manner that will make people think desensitization is one third of the problem when we don't know if it's at all. 'Desensitization' implies this person at some point was sensitized to actual violence, but what seems more likely is that this person never developed the empathy needed for that.

I don't doubt at all that playing violent video games desensitizes people to video game violence. But actual violence is a completely different phenomenon.

Of course I don't need to tell any of you this, but it's hardly surprising if someone who would shoot dead his entire family also enjoys playing violent games and watching violent movies. But that's hardly causation.

I wouldn't have bought one if it didn't have Bluray. I don't use it for anything else either, although that wasn't the plan.

You can say anything using that argument. Consoles will go the way of Napster. Or PCs will go the way of Amiga. Right now, the post will deliver to places that may never have broadband internet because so few people live there.

There are tons of people who are able to connect their consoles to the internet, but simply don't have the kind of bandwidth that is needed to download a movie or a game. And games are growing, possibly/probably/maybe faster than broadband is.

I just figured MS did the math and thought designing a Bluray peripheral wouldn't make them any money, since buying one from a customer's point of view wouldn't be much different from buying an actual Bluray player that did a better job of playing Blurays.

Mmmmm... Fisheye lenses.

Maybe it's done.

It would've been a big deal if Microsoft had made a Bluray add-on when the format war had just ended. Now it's just kind of obvious.