Awesome - so those Koolout sessions I've been trying to track down for a decade aren't "lost" or "missing", they're conceptual.

(grump)

Antinous - Agreed. We should also be sure to wave our credentials at them... oh, wait.

It's water. Water! WATER!! Like they'd say "water ice" when they meant "ice of some sort"...

Geez, you auger ONE probe into the ground ten years ago, and they take away your "Rocket Scientist" badge forever.

here;

http://science.nasa.gov/headlines/y2002/28may_marsice.htm

NASA says "water" a few more times. From the Latin, meaning, "fucking water."

To paraphrase the In Living Color sketch;

"Seeeeen iiiit!"

http://tinyurl.com/4lrmvr

And that's from '89 - they sold empty cardboard novelty cans in '84 for the first Ghostbusters movie.

@Mint

No, but C13v31@nd $t33m3r and drty snchz are still fine.

Several years ago I got to work on a game for Disney. They are very, very, very careful - as a policy - about any online interaction that can allow use of bad words or facilitate real-world interaction between children and their predators. The process of working with Disney was exceptionally smooth - some of the most fun I've had making games - but these rules were a little restrictive. For example;

- In a game populated with nothing but sailing ships, we had to fight for every instance a voice actor said "ship", because recording was being done by the Disney studio that handles consumer products, and an 8-bit voice chip in an action figure makes "ship" sound like "shit."

- The fine old-timey word Regina caused a fluster that ended in it being pronounced "Reh-geen-ah"

- Players couldn't talk to one another without exchanging a friend code via the real world (or at least, some method Disney wasn't responsible for.) Until then, there was a drop down menu of "Arr" "Ahoy" "Help!" etc. Automatic messages.

These are kind of detriments to game design, but then Disney doesn't want to have its name and "fugitive child molester" end up in the same article one day.

A recent Wired* had an article about this very ship, or more specifically the special consulting firm that was called in to salvage the operation. As I recall, a man died attempting to retrieve the cars, so instead of whinging about how the cars should or should not have been used, let's consider for a moment that the title to the post should read;

"Mazda destroys 4,703 shiny new cars worth $100 million and one man's life."

(*I'm surprised nobody read it - it was only a month back. Or does everyone just buy it for the wired/tired/expired?)

Error - I read an interview (or maybe heard it when they were interviewed by the CBC) that said it was because the band was essentially a mix of two bands, the original Feisty, and another Vancouver band, The Mean Reds (not to be confused with the other, more recent band by the same name), so they decided to rename.

Jeff - mc chris gives away his first album free online, and it's been working out for him. Besides, they said it's a celebratory thing. It's their party, and all that...

ITH - The EP pre-dates Queens of the Stoneage by one year, proving that great minds think alike, or that graphic artists as a similarly lazy lot.

It's 1998 now - you spotted a temp typo (no prize to you.) For anyone interested, the two tracks from the better than chocolate soundtrack were Fantastic and Night. They're all great, but I love Hungry the most, I think.

XOPL, You saw the car above, from the GBFans.com link - the car was with Vivendi staff in MN for some sort of meeting with Best Buy head offices.

http://protoncharging.com/gb/category/ectomobile/

The similarly restored Ecto-1a remains unseen, as yet.

Fantastic - I've been pondering building one for awhile, but this breaks it down to a nice, easy level (other's I'd looked into were much bigger and more complicated.)

With a couple extra steps about making a copy of his tiki (one that he could put a few strategic holes in - assuming he wasn't willing to put holes in the original to begin with), and the plastic copy would be spot on (no sense bogging down the video with that though.)

I remember someone had a massive how-to on how they made their own storm trooper outfits with a home made rig like this - must be ten years now. Ten years is too long to wait. I'm going to have to try this, asap.

"I want to play a massively multiplayer persistent FPS, sort of like a giant Battlefield, where we fight for the world's resources on a 1:1 scale."

I've played it - it's called Real Life. Got bored of it when everyone on my team insisted on being a sniper or stealing all the jeeps when I need to get to work on time.

Still, it's truly the most massive of the massively multiplayer games. And the mini-games - like eating pizza or riding a Razor scooter - are fun. If they'd just nerf the multinational CEO player class, I might think about getting back into it.

And oh yeah! WTF is up with that monthly fee!? Outrageous!

You're half right.

@#26 "But crops take a long time to grow and in the meantime, people starve."

I have a modest proposal.

Heeeere's the breakdown, according to thepigsite.com (an UK based international swine industry newsite - who knew?)

http://www.thepigsite.com/swinenews/17549/futures-markets-suggest-higher-hog-prices-by-summer

US market (apparently - UK pig dude ought to know, I guess) has large supply of pigs, drives price down to 97$ per pig. Feeding the pig, plus overhead (farm mortgage, employees, etc.) puts the cost nearer to 160$ a pig. That means Canadian farms are frak'd. So, rather than let the Canadian swine farms suffer a major collapse (and have to buy bacons from the US - might have gone for it, had you paid for the damn trees, by the way) Government buys-out the industry.

The Canadian government is buying out the industry at $333 a head (that's 173$ profit, for those who don't have their calculator out) , with the hope that farmers can trek along until raising pigs is profitable again, and in return, the pigs are going to be used for making pet foods, food bank stock, etc. (hey, there's a bunch more jobs saved!) Old news - happens all the time. Happens for farmers growing corn and it happened just the other week for a US bank.

There's a $300 Billion (with a b) farm bill in front of Congress right now, which will do much the same thing. And it's not the first one.

http://www.csmonitor.com/2008/0416/p03s01-usec.html

So, what is this all about, this post/thread? Nothing in this story seems to be exceptional, relatively speaking. Except that it's two big numbers and people have been asked to opine on them out of context, so the reactions seem to be mostly about hating buy-outs and hating killing pigs, when this isn't a terribly big example of either.

"I think Rockstar has done an exceptionally thoughtful job in recognizing potential political backlash in this game."

It wasn't quite as thoughtful in the first year of development, I assure you. Then the Hot Coffee debacle dropped and things got way more thoughtful at Rockstar very very quickly.

Wait, wait, wait...

So a cake will NOT fall if a menstruating woman bakes it?

It's like I've been lied to all my life. Plus this totally screws my calculations on national annual cake production. Dammit.

Does The Oldest Joke In The Marvel Universe qualify as deft lampooning, or just lampooning?

Actually, "Hulk______!" is probably the oldest joke in the Marvel universe, but X-men back from the dead jokes are a close second.

What's with the recent interest in the sex trade lately? In a matter of weeks, it seems like it's been higher profile than before (though, I could be imagining it.) There are the posts here, all the coverage of Diablo Cody and her old blog, and local Vancouver publication (and Tower Records standard until Tower folded) Cinema Sewer just published a zine following the life and times of a prostitute. Just FYI, the link, it's NSFW. OK? XOXO

"There was another similar project a few years ago, too; a game company published a sci-fi tabletop RPG based on a Blakes-7-like show that never existed. Does anyone remember the name of that?"

I suspect you're thinking of Spaceship Zero, published by Green Ronin, since I had a similar thought. Awesome premise (experimental starship drive reboots the universe, only this time fishmen conquer Earth), awesome widgets (storing people as powder, zap guns, super-intelligent animals, and getting play as a robot), and better yet there was a soundtrack (which completely rocks.)

http://www.spaceshipzero.com

(website for band of soundtrack, two of whom co-created the RPG)

http://www.thickets.net/

Do-It-Yourself-Choose-Your-Own-Adventures for the win!

I couldn't remember what that British Truth in Advertising reminded me of. Then I remembered this Canadian short called Truth in Advertising - if I recall correctly, it was made as mid-award show bumpers for the Canadian ad association (the official name of which escapes me.)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j50Xd40EfJg

Pick your own fav.

I had a late night ponder about this new Taser system awhile back, and had many of the same concerns as above.

Since then, police use of Tasers were involved in the death of a lost visitor at the Vancouver International Airport (my home town - for perspective, it's not a huge airport. There's not reason that man shouldn't have been helped prior to calling the police, and the police shouldn't have opted to use a Taser) and British police used a Taser on a man in a diabetic coma.

The problem with Taser systems is that they are currently regarded as convenient, and convenience just leads to trouble. Instead of "Can we get a translator?" or "Bring in the bomb squad", in these situations the police opted for the quick, easy, magic no-kill gun.

Personally I'm of the opinion that Tasers can kill, but while everyone argues that one out, I'd like to posit that they make police sloppy. And that always ends in trouble (as we've been seeing a lot lately.) Trouble puts more distance between police and the community, which leads to more situations where a very human (meaning grumpy, tired, lazy, confused, whatever) cop has to make a call about using a Taser.

Repeat.

The rehash amounts to more of the opening of the game - using Slimer and the Library Ghost from the first movie as a natural tutorial, while getting a lot of fanboy action points out of the way very early.

Speaking of fanboy, I'm keeping track of all new info at my site, for anyone interested.

"Ghostbusters is a Sony property, so you can guess what platform this will be on."

PS3, PS2, Xbox 360, PC, Wii, and Nintendo DS. The Wii and PS2 versions will be very different both in look and gameplay (in an attempt to create a less "realistic", family friendly game. No word on what the DS game will be like.

I'd like to invite you all to my website - there are a lot more details there, if you'd care to know more.

I'd like to give a hear hear to Dave's comment - I just found their new album and back catalog on itunes (which is handy, as I've lost my disc.) If you think the picture here is cool, you should try listening to the new one. Rock + Lovercraft = awesome.

The surprise to me isn't that Fry is blogging about smartphones, but that he doesn't do this type of thing more often - he's a self-confessed Mac hound, for starters, so I'd imagine the iPhone is what got this particular piece rolling.

If you like this article, you should try and find his BBC radio segments on things like gibberish - honest to gosh, an oral essay on talking nonsense. Awesome.

I've been thinking about this a lot since the first post on character ice-cream pops was posted - thinking back to my own childhood when you couldn't stick two gumballs onto the approximation of a face period, let alone inaccurately, anything that came out of an ice-cream truck and wasn't a sphere on a cone was FANTASTIC.

It was initially kind of interesting to ponder the manufacturing and marketing of character ice-cream, but it's kind of turned into "ha ha, lookit the stupid ice-cream. they suck."

I know there's a cynical sort of fun in critiquing these frozen treats, but since I'm sure kids will still eat it and enjoy it, it's not as much fun anymore. I'm getting that same feeling I used to get watching adult fanboys fight for a Power of the Force Boba Fett at Toys R Us, and realizing that toy wasn't ever going to be touched by a child.

I'll third that - it was mildly amusing at first. Then kind of annoying. Then pretty much a continuing kick in the nuts to anyone that reads a comic title with capes in it. And now, finally, it's just disrespecting THE ultimate comic hero (see how I did that without using s-u-p-e-r-h-e-r-o-e-s and thus providing an opportunity to use "underwear perverts" yet again?)

Next it will be, like, zen or something.

"canine IED"

Improvised Excrement Deposit?
Intended Elimination Dump?