Your Local News Affiliate is rarely a bastion of reasoned discourse, exposés on "the dangers of improper lettuce washing" related by manicured corpses really are the norm. We couldn't resist this bit over at Kotaku, though: St. Paul's Fox 9 dropped the science on the PlayStation "Pornable" and its ability to condense erotic materials out of thin air, in much the way a cold glass of lemonade sweats on a warm afternoon.

Before I was an Internet demagogue, I worked in Libraries and Public Schools servicing educational technology, and I have to say that there are many stories here, for example: how his school's unregulated, unfiltered wireless network gave this young man a ticket to a Virtual Amsterdam of red-bathed adult delights. There's a podcast for today's strip where we go over all this stuff in greater detail, but if a gaming platform hadn't been involved, this would be a "boys will be boys" story, and as such would never see broadcast.

I wonder precisely what age it is that you forget what it is like to be a young man. As recall, this kind of activity could accurately be called de rigeur -  we simply brought this sort of thing in magazine form. There is the idea that if something is displayed by means of phosphors or shown on an LCD that there is some spiritual distinction between those materials and ones that have been printed out, that we as a society must come to terms with it.  A kid was looking at naughty bits while he was at school, that's it.  We don't need to recalibrate our fucking society.  No doubt his appetite for the medium will be curbed by the seizure of his PSP.

I was (as were many others) in the grip of Oblivion for a very long time, until I ran across a bug that broke the quest I was on. It is a quest where you follow a woman into a vineyard, and the moment she began to rake the game would crash. "Yard-work" has ever been a source of unease, but to watch it rend a world like that has put me off the practice altogether.

I didn't know if it was the new RAM I'd put in, or the new card, but after exhaustive testing (I performed no actual tests) the game just ceased to be a focus. Once I began to associate the loading of the game with a rational process instead of an intuitive one, the heart of the simulation disappeared. The patch actually resolved this very singular issue, it wasn't the machine, but as I said by then something intangible was gone.

Let me tell you, though, if there was ever a mod that would get me "back in," as I believe is the parlance...

(CW)TB out.

be an autobeat ally

There’s a new Blamimation available over at PvP. I’m constantly amazed that Scott and Kris are able to put out these Blamimations for free. I mean I don’t have any hard numbers but if I had to guess I’d say each of these episodes probably cost somewhere in the neighborhood of ten to three-hundred grand to produce. I mean think about it, you’ve got animators, voice talent, musicians, producers, catering service, animal trainers, lawyers, gardeners, clowns, scuba divers and so on, it all adds up. If I were them I’d save this kind of premium content for some sort of pay service.

-Gabe out

ClancyCon is like a convention inside a convention, a LAN party that moves around the country with the World Series of Videogames. If you were planning on attending it, they're actually giving away the shirt for free. You can get any information you might require here.

(CW)TB