From Elec­tronic Gam­ing Monthly:

Your aver­age gamer these days is in his late 20s, young enough to still find new ways to destroy brain cells, old enough to worry about bills and 401ks, and wise enough to rem­i­nisce about the good ol’ days of videogames. But was the age of Pong, Atari, Mat­tel hand­held foot­ball, and Don­key Kong really all that great, or are we just blinded by fuzzy, warm nostalgia?

That’s the ques­tion we asked and answered back in the Novem­ber issue of EGM, in which we rounded up nine chil­dren of the PlaySta­tion gen­er­a­tion ages 9 to 12 and forced them to play a vari­ety of titles from the late’70s to the mid-‘80s. Now read what the lit­tle scamps had to say, plus check their com­ments on a bonus game Super Mario Bros that got cut from the EGM arti­cle. If you grew up with these clas­sics, pre­pare to feel very old.

http://www.egmmag.com/article2/0,4364,1338730,00.asp 

John Martz of robotjohnny.com posted an intrigu­ing arti­cle the other day in regards to graphic design­ers and artists in gen­eral being replaced by soft­ware. It’s a heated debate amongst the graphic design com­mu­nity espe­cially con­sid­er­ing the major­ity of artists believe com­put­ers sim­ply could never replace an artist. It’s evi­dent that a com­puter can how­ever repli­cate the works of Picasso and Van Gogh but only based on a set of instruc­tions (or algo­rithms) that tell the com­puter to repro­duce the artwork.

My com­ment in response to his arti­cle summed up my thoughts;

“As a graphic designer and car­toon­ist I am wary of these “solu­tions”. First of all, a com­puter sim­ply can­not replace a designer or artist for that matter.

When I vis­ited the Getty Museum in Los Ange­les, CA the paint­ings show­cased there by artists like Picasso and Van Gogh exuded human cre­ation. I sim­ply can­not see a com­puter being able to recre­ate (or repro­duce) those works with­out human intervention.

Sure, a com­puter can scan in a draw­ing and ran­domly apply algo­rithms to repli­cate the look of brush­strokes, but the essense of any art piece is that of the artist himself.

Granted, I’m not against uti­liz­ing the com­puter to aide in your art but the com­puter as the sole cre­ator of mas­ter­pieces, art­work and graphic design? Never.

In a way this relates to Dis­ney fir­ing a good por­tion of their 2D artists to replace with 3D CGI. Noth­ing spells doom than a world with­out the inter­ven­tion of humans. I’m envi­sion­ing a Ter­mi­na­tor uni­verse and that’s scary.” 

In my mind, I envi­sion spam­mers as the “badguys”. They lurk in the shad­ows behind dump­sters and in alley­ways. Their leader who prob­a­bly resem­bles a cross between Martha Stew­art and Jonathan Win­ters stands before them shout­ing her (or it’s) plans for world­wide spam dom­i­na­tion. Her fol­low­ers cringe as her words spread across the room like mildew. Evil music spins in the back­ground on an old record player while they all shout in uni­son, “Destroy. Anni­hi­late. Crip­ple communication.”

And some­where across the city stand­ing proudly on a statue is Jay Allen (the Spam­i­na­tor), the new kind of super­hero. A man who fights back against spam, push­ing it aside and clear­ing the way for communication.

After suf­fer­ing the headache of receiv­ing over a hun­dred var­i­ous spam com­ments last week I believe I’ve found my fix. Uti­liz­ing Jay Allen’s excel­lent MT-Blacklist fil­ter I’ve suc­cess­fully imple­mented it into this site.

This means another road­block for all of you vicious spam­mers who find it appro­pri­ate to leave bland com­ments like:

“Nice site.“
“Good site.“
“I like your arti­cle.“
“Will you marry me?”

The dark­ness sub­sides (for now). 

“Sci­en­tists in North Car­olina have built a brain implant that lets mon­keys con­trol a robotic arm with their thoughts, mark­ing the first time that men­tal inten­tions have been har­nessed to move a mechan­i­cal object.

The tech­nol­ogy could some­day allow peo­ple with par­a­lyz­ing spinal cord injuries to oper­ate machines or tools with their thoughts as nat­u­rally as oth­ers today do with their hands. It might even allow some par­a­lyzed peo­ple to move their own arms or legs again, by trans­mit­ting the brain’s direc­tions not to a machine but directly to the mus­cles in those latent limbs.“
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Sev­eral months ago kartooner.com fea­tured an arti­cle in regards to Homer Simp­sons’ email address. Appar­ently dur­ing an episode of the Simp­sons his email address was revealed as chunkylover53@aol.com. After the episode was aired thou­sands of Simp­sons fans sent mes­sages to “Homer’s email” in hopes of receiv­ing witty reponses.

As an exten­sion or update to that orig­i­nal arti­cle, it appears that Homer Simp­son him­self (chunkylover53@aol.com) has left a sin­gle com­ment in regards to the sev­eral com­ments left for him;

“You’re all nuts.”

This is his­tory in the mak­ing folks. 

The trailer for Tim Burton’s newest film, Big Fish, has been released on the Internet.

The film, due for release Jan­u­ary 24^th 2004 stars Ewan McGre­gor and Billy Crudup and is about a man who learns more about the life of his dying father through the elab­o­rate sto­ries that emerge.

http://tinyurl.com/qhno 

Newly appointed Cal­i­for­nia Sen­a­tor, Arnold Schwarzeneg­ger grubs on some In-n-Out with a dumb­founded look on his face. I won­der what he’s thinking?

“You can tell a lot about a per­son from the hob­bies they choose, espe­cially if it requires them to be tied to a bath­tub full of hot dogs with a panel of judges and a proc­tol­o­gist with a tape mea­sure watch­ing. But enough about coin col­lect­ing. We’ve con­tacted renowned experts on geeks, as well as many actual geeks, to com­pile this list of the dorki­est things you can do with your time.

Each activ­ity will be ranked on both how badly it humil­i­ates the par­tic­i­pant and how neg­a­tively it affects his or her sex life. These are not rough esti­mates. These are sci­en­tific facts based on the research done by cap­tive super­ge­niuses work­ing in con­trolled con­di­tions with test mice and test mice dressed like tiny wizards.”

Read Dork­storm: The Anni­hi­la­tion: http://www.thewavemag.com/pagegen.php?pagename=article&articleid=24184 

As you’ve prob­a­bly heard by now, Ahnuld (Arnold Schwarzeneg­ger) is now deemed the offi­cial Gov­er­na­tor of California.

His agenda includes the following:

1. Seek and destroy any­body who opposes him.
2. Clean up the mess left behind by Davis, the white-haired weasel.
3. Finally get his hands on that punk kid, John Con­nor.
4. Appoint Danny Devito as his right hand (lit­tle) man.

No more Mr. Nice Guy. 

From The Straight Dope:

“Q: Why does my com­puter key­board have this “Scroll Lock” key that seems to serve no pur­pose what­so­ever? In 15 years I don’t remem­ber ever push­ing that but­ton. I’m almost scared to touch it –Insane­grey, Lawrence, KS

A: …the main intent of the Scroll Lock key was to allow scrolling of screen text up, down and pre­sum­ably side­ways using the arrow keys in the days before large dis­plays and graph­i­cal scroll bars. You can see where this might have been handy in the DOS era, when screen out­put typ­i­cally was lim­ited to 80 char­ac­ters wide by 25 rows deep. For some types of pro­grams, spread­sheets being the obvi­ous exam­ple, it’s still handy now. In Microsoft Excel, Scroll Lock allows you to scroll a spread­sheet with the arrow keys with­out mov­ing the active cell pointer from the cur­rently high­lighted cell. In Quat­tro Pro, another spread­sheet pro­gram, Scroll Lock works in a sim­i­lar man­ner, although in con­trast to Excel it’s not pos­si­ble to scroll the active cell pointer com­pletely off the screen.“
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