Monday, September 15, 2008

Spore

Why I won't get bored with this game.  Meet Brian, the only one of my creations to get commented on my godamn myspore page which I just now realize existed.

BOOM goes Lehman

Lehman Bros.' holding company has filed for bankruptcy.

The whole street is on damage control lest they are crushed by the giant's corpse. Merrill Lynch is getting bailed by Bank of America, for one.

I am sooo glad I didn't have my shit together when I did those interviews last year.

Thursday, September 11, 2008

Googlebot pranks stock market

Notice anything funny about this chart?

At about 10:45AM on Monday Google listed an article about how UAL had just filed for bankruptcy. This news was automatically picked up by services that piggyback on Google and was propagated all over the web where it was then picked up by automated stock-trading systems. The stock price fell by 75% in a matter of minutes.

The thing is, the announcement was six years old. Google discovered a copy with no date on it, apparently because it appeared on some generic "recent popular links" list, and threw it into the news hopper anyway. Over a billion dollars of value temporarily disappeared before NASDAQ hit the emergency brake.

Google=the singularity

Saturday, September 6, 2008

Putin Saves TV Crew from Siberian Tiger

I was somewhat disappointed to find out that he had actually used a tranquilizer gun to do it. Perhaps it speaks to the man that I, and I'm sure many others, clicked on the link expecting him to have done it with his bare hands.

Then again, blasting a pouncing tiger when no one else even saw it coming is probably harder than point and click, in the first place.

Too bad he's got such a bad rep in this hemisphere, because, you know, it's his fault that that wonderfully weak, poor and corrupt plutocratic freedom-loving Russia of days yore has been replaced by a country that can do more than wank and cry when their interests are sliding down the shitter.

Friday, September 5, 2008

Will Wright's PEE: The Count Down


Spore's out in the wild in a little more than a day.  Gamespot has given it a rather underwhelming 8/10.  Gaming jesus it ain't, but I will probably end up shelling out some lunch money just to see what the fuss is about, that, and penis monsters.

Btw, the title refers to this Penny Arcade comic, which, quite frankly, is spot on.

I'm personally waiting on Fallout 3 and Fable 2, which will be the final catalyst for my acquisition of a 360.

Musical Tastes Reflect Personality?

Could one of you science types take a look at this? The fact that it ends up reading something like a horoscope seems invalid to me for some reason, but I do like the fact that Reggae and Indie are the only two musical tastes associated with the "not hard working" trait.

Oh wait, they spelled "not hard working" 3 different ways: as two separate words, a compound word, and hyphenated. You're special BBC!

Christ. The study also lost my respect when I realized they lumped rock and heavy metal together...

Food For Thought


Not meant to be taken very seriously
, obvii, but rather amusing nonetheless. For my fellows here, you may find the placement of the top three states particularly interesting.

Something else I noticed, is that most states seem to have an average below average IQ, which really doesn't make sense at all, unless you take into account population density.

Thursday, September 4, 2008

Shiny Poo

Some sketches are up of Apple's next outting of music players.

The key terms here seem to be "thicker" and "longer."

Plus I'm Hungry for BS

Every year, someone falls to their death at one of the few nice nature places in Illinois, called Starved Rock. I haven't been there in years, nor is it that beautiful , but our annual falltook place the other day, with fatal results.

And now the person's family is demanding that the state put up more signs saying "DON'T LEAVE THE PATH AND STAY AWAY FROM THE LEDGE BECAUSE YOU MIGHT FALL PRETTY DAMN FAR" and even erect barriers, blocking out any chance of an unobstructed view or the general enjoyment of nature. Do they need to put up the suicide guard fences along the Grand Canyon? Come on...

Elephant cured of addiction

I've always said that Elephants make terrible alcoholics since they always remember, they drink to forget pretty poorly.

Some assholes decided that heroin might be better for an elephant. With maybe 25,000 elephants left, this is tragic.