Monday, May 15, 2006

Rove: Trying to be a game-changer


In this 5/16/06 op-ed piece in the Washington Post, writer E.J. Dionne Jr. says you can tell by the way Rove lies that BushCo is running scared. Not in so many words. But the writer prints a few of Rove's choice Republican lies and handily and in plain language rips the lies to shreds.

The title of the piece is Rove vs. Reality. More like BushCo vs. reality. Rumsfeld teetering on the brink, Rove likely to get charged in the Plame leak, DeLay over the brink, the Ambramoff corruption scandal on and on.

What next?

Next it's going to be envirionmental crimes- see the story re: the closing of EPA libraries here in the Washington Post.

Meanwhile here in Tucson the biggest environmental crime to hit the news is the reclassification of the Pygmy Owl as not endangered, so that thousands upon thousands of acres of unspoiled Sonoran Desert can now be bladed and graded and replaced with shitty cookie-cutter houses. There are only 12 of these owls left in the Tucson area. Hopefully the lawsuit filed by the Center for Biological Diversity and the Defenders of Wildlife will succeed. Of course there's no mention of protecting this desert for what it is. Details are here in the Star.

Saturday, May 13, 2006

Following orders like we always do


Link to a machinima where the characters in a game start wondering what the hell they are doing there. "Why are we doing this?"

Yes I read about it on Boing Boing. As I try to always tell people, if you're not reading Boing Boing, then you should be.

Machinima I first understood when I attended a lecture by a Stanford librarian who was cataloging and constructing an online archive of such things as well as studying the sociological side of in-game communities. People manipulate computer games to turn the audio/visual output into a story, that's what machinima is. The Wikipedia article in the link above is really quite good.

Boing Boing today also had another machinima post. Here is the link.

And here is a link to a machinima "talk show" done from within a game called Halo.

Also see machinima.com for more.