If you don't post for six months...

Does the blog begin to smell?

Jack Thompson is a Lawyer No More

http://www.joystiq.com/2008/09/25/jack-thompson-disbarred-in-florida/

Finally.

Jack Thompson is an anti-videogames activist, man of god, general kook and now a former attorney. Seriously, this guy is a joke, and the Florida bar association grew tired of his constant embarassments to his profession. Here is the laundry list of offenses taken from the official court order:


Among the extensive findings of fact presented in the report, the Court takes particular note of the following which occurred during the three-year period at issue in five counts in these cases: (1) respondent made false statements of material fact to courts and repeatedly violated a court order; (2) respondent communicated the subject of representation directly with clients of opposing counsel; (3) respondent engaged in prohibited ex parte communications; (4) respondent publicized and sent hundreds of pages of vitriolic and disparaging missives, letters, faxes, and press releases, to the affected individuals; (5) respondent targeted an individual who was not involved with respondent in any way, merely due to "the position [the individual] holds in state and national politics;" (6) respondent falsely, recklessly, and publicly accused a judge as being amenable to the "fixing" of cases; (7) respondent sent courts inappropriate and offensive sexual materials; (8) respondent falsely and publicly accused various attorneys and their clients of engaging in a conspiracy/enterprise involving "the criminal distribution of sexual materials to minors" and attempted to get prosecuting authorities to charge these attorneys and their clients for racketeering and extortion; (9) respondent harassed the former client of an attorney in an effort to get the client to use its influence to persuade the attorney to withdraw a defamation suit filed by the attorney against respondent; and (10) respondent retaliated against attorneys who filed Bar complaints against him for his unethical conduct by asserting to their clients, government officials, politicians, the media, female lawyers in their law firm, employees, personal friends, acquaintances, and their wives, that the attorneys were criminal pornographers who objectify women.

Spore

I think Spore will be good.

I will buy it.

These are my statements of the day.

Also,

VAGINA!

Chrome

Is the ballz.

That is all.

http://www.google.com/chrome

Remember?

Remember when I used to blog?

That was awesome.

Brief list of things I wanted to blog about recently but didn't:

• George Carlin dying
• finding a cockroach in my apartment
• the red sox limping to the all-star break
• producing my play
• my play opening
• not knowing if my play will be any good
• writing books for D&D 4th edition(which doesn't suck)
• rockaway beach
• rock band
• my nuts

That's all for now. Maybe more topics will come to me in three months and I can post again.

Don't blog, write.

Interesting commentary on not blogging if you are a "real" writer.

Just got this in an email from MSG. In the fine print below Skynyrd it says there will be surprise appearances by Rev Run and Peter Wolf.

How exactly does Rev Run fit into this american rock and roll theme?

And how is it a surprise if they are, in fact, advertising it?

Making fun of Christian scientists (not Scientists)

Halbert's Cubicle: An Ethical Dilemma

I got to this guys blog in a roundabout way, from a Slate piece claiming Gygax was a hack, to a rebuttal by Shamus, then a link by shamus to another rebuttal on Halbert's blog. A couple of posts down and I see this little bomb dropped.

I really don't get people who won't work with stem cells. It seems so arbitrary. Why is a bunch of cells more sacrosanct than, say, Germans in WWII? It was ok to kill them because they were killing Jews and taking over countries. But it's not ok to research POTENTIAL humans because of some ambiguous morality scheme dictated by old men in the Vatican. Wrong.

Of course, I've been antagonizing this guy in the comments, mostly because I haven't had a good blogfight in a while. But he and I are probably quite similar. He's a gamer, has a Christian background and hates mustard.*






*Disclaimer: I actually have no idea if he hates mustard.

Great Photo Blog

A Test Of Will: Midtown Mess

This guy takes great pictures all over the city. I like his one or two sentence commentary, because it's usually about the process of composing shots. Reminds me of Mr. Savage.

I picked this link because in the background you can see the building where I work. But the Space Invader photos are great too.

Vermont towns vote to arrest Bush and Cheney | U.S. | Reuters

Vermont towns vote to arrest Bush and Cheney U.S. Reuters

It's symbolic, but at least they have the right idea.

I'm not sure if everything that the Bush Administartion has done was wrong but I don't get how they seem to get a free pass, while we spent years debating blowjobs in the late 90s.

Tricking a country into war is surely worse than ejaculation is it not?

Photographic evidence that hippies exist in Providence

It was only a matter of time before Google's push to document every facet of our world on the web reached a personal level of contact. Every street and intersection of Providence was recently photographed and compiled on Google's street view. Mi hermano was web savvy enough to recognize his vehicle on the side of the road.

My brother's VW Bus.

They haven't shot most of Brooklyn and my apartment isn't in the database. But here's where I work. If you pan the view around you can see that my building is right across the street from Radio City.

I love this kind of thing. Can't wait till they add more cities and locations.

Is this peter dinklage?

I can't embed this so a link will suffice.

It sure fucking looks like a young Dink. I can't find anything verifying or denying that claim. I leave it for you to decide.

PS. The video is good if you've got 6 minutes to spare.

A long silence

And I still don't have anything blogworthy to say.

Let me just impart that I am slowly becoming acclimated to my life. I will still strive to do things of which I will be proud, but I will not be depressed or despondent if they don't work out.

We'll see how long this lasts...

Kindle the fire

I know I'm late to the blogparty, but this stuff gets on my nerves. I like the Kindle, amazon's new book reader. I think it's a step in the right direction. And by the right direction, I mean the kind of world where everyone is connected to the Intehweb via bionic implant, there's no money, and we're just a worp away from skiing on Centauri Prime for the weekend.

But people just can't get behind this little device. It's being smeared all over the place as a worthless replacement for everyone's favorite technology from 1455, the fucking book. I know the device isn't perfect, the DRM is too draconian and the price isn't exactly right ($400 for the kindle plus $10/book) but now it seems to be the fashionable thing to pile hate on Jeff Bezos, Amazon, Jews and anyone trying to make an electronic reading device.

This one guy even implies that the kindle will create a fascist world as depicted in Orwell's 1984. And the stupid thing is, over 200 commenters seem to AGREE WITH HIM. Here is my hastily written response comment.

I fail to see how citing literary sources alongside pretty standard contract language is supposed to argue anything. I think if you looked at every T.O.S. you’ve ever agreed to without reading, you’d be surprised as to how much “control” you had just signed away. The language is there to protect the company, not to harm the customers.

Should the Kindle be DRM free? Probably, but then no one will get paid for all of the R&D and risk-taking they are now making. I think the high price of ebooks and DRM are here for the early adoption phase. Both will fade with time, a la Itunes.

Should Amazon collect general usage information like every tech company (including Apple, Microsoft, you cell phone, your tivo)? Yes. Of course they should. No amount of doomsaying and conspiracy theorizing will make this research turn our society into Orwell’s 1984. How can so many intellectuals be afraid of market research? Are surveys on the streets of NY an invasion of privacy? Yes. Does that mean every member of Greenpeace is actually a fascist? Yes, but not because they are gathering information.

I don’t think the Kindle will replace books, nor is that its purpose. I think Amazon is working towards a viable alternative to lugging that backbreaking Complete Works of Shakespeare your grandmother bought you and you’ve never been able to get around to reading around on a crowded mass transit system. And that’s something even crotchety old anti-progress pseudo-intellectual bloggers can get behind.

Jack Thompson is out again

Seriously, this guy is just blog fodder at this point.

Jack Thompson, the game-hatin' attorney from Florida, is up to his old antics again. He has filed a suit against BestBuy, the ESRB and anyone else he can think of for allegedly selling M rated video games to minors. Gamepolitics and Law of the Game are running the stories.

The funny thing is, Mr. Jack Thompson Esquire is just internet savvy enough to find these blogs AND ACTUALLY COMMENT IN THEM. I'm sorry, but if you want to be taken seriously as a lawyer, would you engage in trolling the comments on blogs written about your pending cases? Neither would I.

Check them out for yourself but here are some quotes from jack thompson, dickface-at-law.

"Pretty simple stuff, really, if your brain has not been fried by games."

"It's a shame you all don't know what you're talking about."

"It's called democracy, gamer nerds. Deal with it. And grow up."

"Sorry to embarrass you, but the Kaplan Foundation funds NIMF. NIMF is a grantee of the Foundation not a grantor. Are you on drugs?"

"Secondly, I am an activist against the sale of violent, mature-rated games to anyone under 17. You didn’t know that? I think you need a brain scan." [emphasis mine, i love how he baits gamers and then says shit like this next one]

"Correction, please:

I am not a “game-hatin’ attorney.”

As I repeatedly tell audiences, video games are reflective of a neutral technology. All technology is neutral. You can electrify or incinerate a city with nuclear fission. It depends what you do with technology.

Virtual reality is one of the most powerful teaching modalities ever devised. It can teach for good or for ill. Not sure why GP can’t grasp that."

If that were the case then why does he constantly refer to gamers as stupid nerds engaging in a masturbatory activity of which a 30 year old should be ashamed?

The Pride of the Red Sox

I can't think of a more fitting way to celebrate winning the ALCS after trailing 3-1. Ok, maybe using the trophy as some kind of torture dildo ala Se7en on a very willing Tina Cervasio. Maybe that'd be better than dousing the American League trophy with Bud Light while wearing goggles and chomping on cigar in the center of Fenway Park. Maybe, but probably not.

I love this guy and I love this team.

Oh and...

These stupid cats make me laugh everytime.

A man with too many mistresses

I've been playing LOTRO this week. (That's Lord of the Rings Online for you uncouth bastards.)

It was suggested that I get more of a working knowledge of the game, as it's a slight possibility that I could work for the company. (more on that later) LOTRO is definitely fun, it steals some of the best things from WOW. And with patch 2.3, it seems WOW is stealing some UI elements from LOTRO, like the minimap tracking trainers, merchants, etc.

But the question is, what do I do with 2 MMOs? They are huge timesinks already. Will it be possible to juggle two of them and a wife, a full time job and a failing writing career? Will I go insane?

Perhaps I already am...

To the woman...

An open letter to the woman on the L train whose breasts were smashed against my back this morning--

I'm sorry that I had to push my way onto your car. I'm sorry that the only means of conveyance to Manhattan from Williamsburg has become a crowded mess of livestock, braying and mooing to get on board the oh so scant few trains which deign to take us to our meaningless careers. I'm sorry about all that.

But at least we got to share a special moment. Remember when I looked behind me to be certain that yes indeed, that soft insistent pressure on my shoulder blade was actually your right breast. And remember after I confirmed that fact, I looked into your green eyes as if to say, "Huh, isn't New York crazy?" in order to disarm the tension such close proximity can evoke? And remember the look of utter disdain and hatred you gave me in return?

I do. I'll remember it forever.

Also, your tits. I won't forget them.

You had a great rack.

A guy on my basketball team did this to his finger

CHECK IT