invicticide

I’m really not a fan of poetry, but this bit by Tim Minchin is nevertheless incredible. Aside from the fact that the poetry itself is actually appealing, rather than insufferable, this develops into such a perfect expression of what’s so amazing about life that I can’t very well imagine it can be topped.
I attended my niece’s baby blessing a little under a year ago, out of [willing] obligation to my family, despite the fact that I’m an atheist and wouldn’t otherwise attend religious services. It was an LDS service, and before we got to the blessing itself, I had to sit through some woman’s “testimony” about how “sad” she is that people like me will, apparently, never experience the vast expanse of happiness and wonder in life, because of our refusal to accept God.
If only I could’ve channeled Tim Minchin just then!
But I know what I can say now. The world is full of wonder. I don’t need to add God to the mix to make it palatable.

Posted in Religion

I’ve played EVE Online on-and-off (currently off) for a little over three years. The promise of that game is ever-awesome, but as time goes on I find myself more and more critical of its execution. One day I’ll write up a detailed design analysis of that game’s successes and failures — it’s a pretty unique case study among MMOs — but for today, I want to share this fan-made video that embodies everything that I wish EVE could be:

The beginning is a little slow and the narration could be better, but the production value is top-notch, in many places rivaling CCP’s own famously-good trailers. But once the fleet battle gets underway, the awesome ratchets up to 11.
Maybe Black Prophecy will capitalize on this particular fantasy, where EVE has failed to do so? One can hope!
Posted in Video Games

Here is a trailer for upcoming space-MMO Black Prophecy. It has the best voice-over EVER.

It’s also a very good-looking game, but it’s the voice-over that sold me. Seriously:

Posted in Video Games

Creationists sometimes suggest that evolution is just another religion (and a false one, at that). This very cool video, found on Effect Measure this morning, shows how creationist beliefs are actually the product of evolution, and challenges theists to explain that paradox:

Posted in Religion

I normally like CNN. They’re reasonably well-balanced between the left and the right; they’re not quite as agreeable to my heathen liberal self as Daily Kos, both neither are they as batshit insane as FOX News. But today, trumpeting the headline Clinton’s mockery of Obama proves true, I have to wonder which of us has gone off the deep end.
For a candidate who won the White House on a mantle of bringing the country’s two political parties together, Washington could not be more divided on Obama’s initial weeks in the Oval Office and the policies he has put in place.
That pretty much sums up the article: Obama promised bipartisanship, and we ain’t got none of that. What a dirty, lying bastard he is. Et cetera.
There’s just one problem: the lack of bipartisanship isn’t because the Obama Administration hasn’t been trying. It’s because Republicans keep spitting in his face. Case in point: they got $288 billion in tax cuts for the stimulus bill, and still voted against it. Twice. In Republican land, bipartisanship means, “Do exactly what the Republicans want.”
Dana Houle at Daily Kos put it quite nicely with respect to Judd Gregg’s voluntary withdrawal of his nomination for Secretary of Commerce:
Bipartisanship can only work when both parties put the national interest before everything.  All but a few of the Republicans in Congress put their party before the good of the nation.
Of course, both sides disagree about what “the good of the nation” actually entails. But the Republicans are the party that’s now trying to sell the idea that the New Deal actually caused the Great Depression, instead of fixing it. They are the party that insists that deregulation is the way to fix the economy, despite the fact that rampant deregulation is exactly what put us in this mess in the first place. They are a party that fielded as their 2008 vice-presidential candidate a woman so woefully unprepared for the job that she made a mock...

This speaks for itself:

SOMEBODY FUND THESE PEOPLE.
Posted in Video Games

The most interesting thing about this:

…is the fact that all the people in it look pretty damn normal. Quite the opposite of what homophobic legislators and activists would have you believe: there’s not a single society-destroying, child-corrupting homosexual orgy in the lot. Just happy partners, supportive friends, and loving families.
Now, is that really so dissimilar from the American dream?
Posted in Politics

Considering that Chrono Trigger is my favorite game of all-time, I found this particularly riotous.

Posted in Video Games

I’m a little late on the uptake on this, what with the Global Gam Jam being, y’know, over and everything. But I just watched Kyle Gabler’s keynote address from the beginning of the jam, and thought it was worth sharing because, frankly, pretty much everything he says is as applicable to big-budget commercial game development as it is to a 48-hour rapid-development event.

(Browse the Global Game Jam entries here.)
Posted in Game Design

I was listening to Sense.FM and this track came on. Holy shit.

Consider my mood lifted.
Posted in Music, Politics

This is not new, but I just discovered it for the first time:

And to think, they really can’t figure out why atheists call religion “irrational”.
(By the way, it’s actually easier to open a banana from the bottom; that whole “tab on the top” thing is totally misleading. So much for “intelligent” design, I guess.)
Posted in Religion

No, it’s not that I have reservations about Obama. This will not be like the (thankfully gone) long eight years of the Bush “administration”.
Our source of infinite irritation and fatigue, I suspect, will be the asinine right-wing corner of the media, manufacturing doom-and-gloom and “I told you so!” stories about every little thing Obama does. Especially when those things are actually good for us.
Here’s a Daily Show clip about just such efforts. Pay special attention to the montage of Fox “News” reports near the beginning, and extra-special attention to Rush Limbaugh’s oh-so-progressive comments near the end:

Now, I recognize that the Daily Show is as liberal-biased as Fox is conservative. I fully understand that these clips have been edited together and commented upon specifically for the purpose of lampooning Fox “News” and the views they espouse. Nevertheless, these are authentic statements by real people, captured and preserved on film:
(Some Fox “News” correspondents):
“Barack Obama does not have his hand on the Bible!”
“Is he really President?”
Oh my sweet tap-dancing Jesus. First he wasn’t President because Roberts flubbed the oath, and now he’s not President because there’s not a fucking Bible present in the do-over? What are we supposed to do, reverse the outcome and put McCain in the White House? ‘Cause as I recall, it wasn’t exactly a close election.
For the record, neither Theodore Roosevelt nor John Quincy Adams were sworn in on a Bible. And Obama was initially sworn in with one, just not on the do-over. And it’s an empty gesture anyway: Bush was sworn in with a Bible, but are you really going to assert — particularly in retrospect — that God blessed that “administration”?
More to the point: why was a do-over even necessary in the first place? Because wingnuts like these might’ve thrown a fit otherwise? Such childish be...