My current favorite piece of gaming slang is “lasersharking.” “Hey, you know, that game concept would be better if the sharks had lasers on their head.” Lasersharking. Leave the poor concept alone; not all concepts need lasers to reach their full potential. Rifts is all lasersharking, all the way to the bottom turtle.
The Boston Globe bought (original) the Boston Dirt Dogs. I guess this means that there’s been a truce on one front in the sportswriters vs. fan site war.
If the Chalabi story is true, it’s an incredible intelligence coup for Iran. The short form is that Ahmad Chalabi may have been an Iranian agent for the past several years. If this turns out to be the case, then the information he passed the US — information which helped Bush make the case for war — was generated and shaped by Iranian intelligence needs. That’s an astoundingly impressive piece of work, which may in the end be ranked up there with Eli Cohen.
Since we decided to stop attacking Fallujah, it’s turned into a theocracy (original). This should come as no surprise to anyone. I don’t think that crushing the city would have been productive either; you’d have gotten entirely different problems. Maybe it’s worth allowing the city to become an independent state in order to minimize the risk of Sunni unrest. Mostly it shows how many unpalatable alternatives we have in Iraq.
Current Gmail users have a couple of invites to the beta to give away. This has resulted in many offers of firstborn. In order to organize these offers, a clever person invented gmail swap, where people can post offers and the lucky few with gmail invites can pick the cream of the crop. For the record, this one is the cream of the crop. But only if you’re an Asheron’s Call player who’s easily amused.
This is probably the final post on the draft rumors. First, I looked a little deeper into the way Congress.org works. The original draft rumor was a Soapbox Alert, not an Action Alert. Action Alerts are associated with the organization that produced them; Soapbox Alerts have no attribution. Turns out anyone can post a Soapbox Alert. Anyone at all. There’s no way to tell who posted it and there seems to be no filter before a Soapbox Alert hits the site. I.e., there is no more accountability behind the original rumor than there would be from a message board posting on some random message board. ...
I’d like to return, at this time, to President Bush’s UN address of September 12th, 2002. The conduct of the Iraqi regime is a threat to the authority of the United Nations, and a threat to peace. Iraq has answered a decade of U.N. demands with a decade of defiance. All the world now faces a test, and the United Nations a difficult and defining moment. Are Security Council resolutions to be honored and enforced, or cast aside without consequence? Will the United Nations serve the purpose of its founding, or will it be irrelevant? ...
Looking back on the Dean campaign, I was dead wrong about how effective the campaign was at turning online energy into real world results. Despite the number of people willing to go out and do things in the real world, Dean didn’t win. He did raise a whole lot of money, and blogs continue to prove effective as money-raising avenues. However, they do that by getting lots of Internet-savvy people to contribute. Even in fund-raising, nobody bridges the gap between the Internet and normal retail politics. ...
The Civil War did not end in 1865…. The Confederates went into hiding and in 1908 they used their boy Teddy Roosevelt to found the FBI - conFederate Bureau of Inquisition. You heard it here first. I collect kooks for the purposes of generating weird NPCs for games. Possibly I need a kook category.
[Update 2: the original article wasn’t ever removed. A bit of software I use killed the link; the one I have up now works.] Now Warren Ellis (original) is getting sucked in by the draft hysteria. Time to grind out a counter-meme. First off, the two bills in question are H.R. 163 and S. 89. The record shows that S. 89 was introduced on 1/7/2003 and was referred to the Committee on Armed Services the same day. H.R. 163 was also introduced (original) on 1/7/2003 and was referred to the Subcommittee on Total Force on 2/3/2003. There has been absolutely no action on either bill since they were referred to committee. ...