Best Ad Copy for a videogame, ever.

Critics: Toned down ‘Manhunt 2′ still too violent

Child advocates are urging parents not to buy “Manhunt 2,” a video game whose characters kill and torture using implements ranging from glass and shovels to a fuse box and a toilet.

I like your ideas, and would like to subscribe to your newsletter.

Made for the Nintendo Wii,

So instead of hitting triangle-star-r1 in a Chocolate Frosted Sugar Bombs/Mountain Dew twitch fest, you actually beat fuckers to death with a shovel. I love you.

“There has been a reduction in the visual detail in some of the ‘execution kills,’ but in others they retain their original visceral and casually sadistic nature.”

“In my opinion, it’s the most senselessly violent and offensive thing I’ve ever watched,” said James Steyer,

In the meantime, let’s have a national debate about acceptable levels of casual sadism.

Steyer, who has not seen the version of the game being released this week, was talking about an unrated version that has been circulating free on the Internet since August.

Dude, wait, what? Why don’t I already own this? Anon fails.

That version contains more violence and sexually explicit content than the one being released commercially, including a scene where a man’s testicles are mutilated with a pliers.

Did I already make a torture joke? Shit. What’s Google have to say?

Results 1 - 10 of about 41,500 for testicles pliers .

Sounds about right.

“It’s disgusting,” Steyer said. “It’s so violent, it struck me personally as pornographic violence.”

Best kind, AMIRITE?

Similarly, the pliers-and-genitalia scene isn’t in the official version, but players may use pliers to torture.

Of course they can. (Results 1 - 10 of about 120,000 for pliers torture.)

Basically, this is the greatest game ever. I’m running out after work and getting this.

It’s the sort of thing that the LIBERAL MEDIA would say

UN nuclear chief attacks hostile US claims on Iran:

UN atomic watchdog chief Mohamed ElBaradei said Sunday he had no evidence that Iran is building nuclear weapons and accused US leaders of adding “fuel to the fire” with recent bellicose rhetoric.

This is the same shit they said about Iraq and its extensive WMDs, and clearly it was all liberal media lies.

*blank stare*

Weekend

Club Quarters DC was an excellent hotel, although somewhat overpriced. Small, clean, and neat, and in a fantastic location; but you’re paying a premium.

And lots of homeless people sleeping in the park across the street. I love our nation’s capital.

Butterfield 9 was fantastic (we were seated at the right-hand column in the home page picture). I noted that there was a fair amount of negative reviews of the place (esp. at washingtonpost.com, which seems almost impossible, given how good it was. Further proof of the Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory, with a side helping of YouTube Asshole Syndrome?

Eye Bar was … I dunno, hilarious? Massively pretentious; the club and the scene the singer is complaining about in “Paralyzer” (figuratively, not literally). Still, despite over-priced drinks and a DJ who was clearly a moron, it was some fan-fucking-tastic people-watching. But hey, they let us in at all, so clearly we’re young, attractive, and stylish, right?

“Planet Terror” was far more awesome than “Death Proof”.

Results of recent media testing

“Death Proof” sucked. It sucked long, and it sucked hard. It was a bunch of meaningless people sitting around talking about nothing. It had perhaps 60-90 seconds of genuine tension in the span of 90 minutes. 

 ”The Pirate Coast” was non-stop awesome. It is rare that a historical novel can be as gripping, fast-paced, and downright badass as the best modern fiction technothriller, but this was entirely the case.  Cannot recommend it highly enough.

“Charlie Wilson’s War” is a close runner up on awesome.  It’s a big … lengthy, and slow-paced at times, but still totally worth a read. (Or wait for the movie, which seems like it might be even more awesome by chopping out the slower parts and focusing on the cool parts?) 

Mozilla (Firefox) chrome and the White Line Of Annoyance

This is how Pinstripe (and several other themes) look on Mac OS X:

Pay close attention to the point where the window (as in “thing managed by Mac OS X”), specifically the title bar/window chrome, becomes the application (as in “thing managed by the application, specifically Firefox”).

Now this is how other themes look on Mac OS X:

Note the small line.

What the hell, man.

I’ve been fucking with userChrome.css and the theme for an hour, and I can’t make that line go away. From whence does it come? It’s not in the images, as near as I can tell.

Update: It seems the source of the line is browser.xml in the theme. I don’t really see much in the way of css differences, but a Mac-friendly theme has a far more complete browser.xml than “white-liners”.

Write a stern letter to the Caliph demanding recompense

Can someone please explain this to me? Please? In your explanation please include material as to why this isn’t complete and total dumbfuckery.

Near as I can tell, it goes like this:

1. Ottoman Empire kills Armenians. Lots and lots of Armenians.
2. Ottoman Empire falls, Ataturk founds the modern secular nation of Turkey, its founding principles entirely opposite from the Ottoman Empire.
3. 70-something years later, we decide to call the Turks assholes for what the Ottomans did, esp. considering there’s probably no one alive (or, very very few at any rate) who committed the crimes, or shit, even witnessed them. Ostensibly this is acceptable because, an Ottoman (as in “citizen of the Ottoman Empire”) was/is a Turk (as in “ethnically of or related to the peoples that live in and around the modern nation of Turkey”).

Am I close? Boner’s right: let the historians debate the label, leave shit from 70 years ago (and OF ANOTHER GOVERNMENT ENTIRELY) out of today’s foreign policy decisions.

You WILL RESPECT my AUTHORITAH!

Right now work is severely hit-and-miss. A particular customer is causing a series of problems.

Generally, they’re demanding more of me than I feel is right. Put another way, I am held to be their bitch.

There is a long, dreary backstory that I will omit. Suffice it to say, we cannot truly rein them in without becoming aggressively hostile; which we’ve already started planning, but these things take time.

This comes down to ego, though. They are crossing a line, to be sure; but that line is created and maintained entirely by my planet-sized ego. I know it unfair (foolish, immature, stupid, whatever) to bitch about moan about being forced, at times, to do things generally held to be beneath you, at your job; but at the same time, there’s a fuckin’ limit.

They are a very large customer upon whose monthly income we depend, so it’s hard to say “GFY” (where by “hard” I mean “impossible in a practical sense, and stupid in any sense”). We have customers we would fire, save for our own laziness; we can’t afford to let these guys go.

So I continue to be treated like a fucking intern, on call to serve my master. The daily laundry-list of menial intern jobs grows. (It should be noted: they had us hire them an intern, who they then ‘fired’ - by which I mean, broke their contractual obligation - so that I would be responsible for these tasks).

Most annoying is we just don’t know how to effectively cope. We’re a small company; putting my kneepads on daily for these guys is bad in the sense it only helps today and not next year, which is how small companies stay small.

Camping, Trout Pond WV

Set here. Trout Pond makes Bull Run Regional Park look like the back-country. The bathrooms are immaculate; the sites are immaculate; the trails are wide open, clean, and easily navigable. I cannot recommend this enough for those looking to have a camping experience that also has nice flush toilets.

We’re probably going on one more trip, assuming our lovely global-warming fall stays as nice as it is.

It was enlightening, as well, to ascend through the mountain road to the park/campground and see what parts of West Virginia are becoming. You’ll have a plot of land with a dilapidated, crumbling house, someone clearly in the grip of stereotypical WV poverty. Up the road a quarter mile is someone’s weekend get-away house, immaculately manicured property, just-detailed SUV in the paved driveway, $1000 grill out front, satellite dish, freshly scrubbed Mom and Dad and Susie and Billy having breakfast on the porch.

Along the trail we found expended shotgun shells; I’m guessing there’s enough poverty that in the lean times, people hunt along these public trails (esp. when the parks/campgrounds are closed to the public).

Why can’t something be perfect?

Lately I’ve been in a mode wherein I dabble with various technologies. One of them I’ve been using more heavily is Komodo IDE, which I like a lot, but also, makes me fuckin’ mental.

It is not perfect, though, which makes me insane, because it seems like often the most trivial things inhibit perfection. To wit:

• it lacks the ability to use PHP as a shell for any reason, esp. my custom compiled-with-readline PHP, which is more than adequate for simple tests and so on. But I can’t tell it to open a shell.
• For that matter, I can’t open /bin/bash either, which is odd since 2/3 of the platforms it runs on have that very program.

Its documentation seems to have been written for an audience that is entirely familiar with the product, too; often I’m sitting, bewildered, wondering what the hell the docs are talking about and trying to figure out why nothing in my macro works.  Enough forum and web searches and I discover I’m barking up the wrong tree, led astray by unclear docs. Yay?

Don’t get me wrong, I like Komodo a LOT: if you’re going to go cross-platform IDE, which means “slow, non-native, weird” I’d rather have Mozilla than Java, and it’s written in and around languages that interest me (esp. JavaScript). But sometimes products miss features in such a was as to make me insane.