"I have always loved longitude. I love latitude; it's in the stars. But longitude, it's about time...... time and clocks have always been a fascination for me." -- Nancy Pelosi

"You get the most bang for your buck with food stamps." -- Nancy Pelosi

"Every month that we don't have an economic recovery package 500 million people lose their jobs." -- Nancy Pelosi

"It's hard to talk when you're tea-bagging." -- Anderson Cooper

"Did he (Anderson Cooper) just come out?" -- Greg Gutfeld

"This is about hating a black man in the White House, straight up." -- Janeane Garofalo

"The first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy. I mean, that's a storybook, man." -- Joe Biden

"Happy Cinco de Cuatro" -- Barack Obama

"I want to emphasize that the President has not seen the questions ahead of time." -- Valerie Jarrett, turned into an unwitting liar at Obama's stacked "town hall" on healthcare.

"They're carrying swastikas and symbols like that to a town meeting on health care." -- Nancy Pelosi

"A wise and frugal government which shall restrain men from injuring one another, which shall leave them free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned. This is the sum of good government." -- Thomas Jefferson

"UPS and FedEx are doing just fine. It's the post office that's always having problems." -- Barack Obama, making a terrible case for government-run healthcare during one of his suck-face town halls.

"There is something about August going into September where everybody in Washington gets all wee weed up!" -- Barack Obama, who can't, for the life of him, get it through his thick dome that his policies are unpopular.

"And the white polluters and the white environmentalists are essentially steering poison into the people-of-color communities, because they don't have a racial justice frame." -- Van Jones, Obama's "green jobs" czar.

"You've never seen a Columbine done by a black child. Never. They always say, 'We can't believe it happened here. We can't believe it's these suburban white kids.' It's only them. Now, a black kid might shoot another black kid. He's not going to shoot up the whole school." -- Van Jones

"Mao (Tse Tung) is one of the two people that I turn to most." -- Anita Dunn, White House Communications Director

"We kind of agree with Mao that power comes largely from the barrel of a gun." -- Ron Bloom, Obama's Manufacturing Czar

"But what we will do is, we'll have the negotiations televised on C-SPAN, so that people can see who is making arguments on behalf of the drug companies or the insurance companies. And so, that approach, I think is what is going to allow people to stay involved in the process." -- Barack Obama, lying about how "transparent" he'd be with the health care debate.

"The system worked." -- Obama's Homeland Security Head Janet Napolitano on the Christmas day terror plot that was thwarted by passengers dogpiling a terrorist with explosives in his underwear during a commercial flight.

"Light-skinned, and with no negro dialect." -- Democratic Senator Harry Reid, talking about candidate Obama in 2008, before making a statement in 2009 comparing opponents of ObamaCare to slave owners.

"A few years ago, this guy would've been getting us coffee." -- Bill Clinton regarding Barack Obama.

"We can absorb a terrorist attack." -- Barack Obama, proving that a "child of the world" sees things through a lens that completely neglects the best interests of Americans. What kind of man thinks it would be possible to "absorb" thousands of lost lives and irrepairable damage to the economy?

"The early returns and overwhelming number of Democrats who are coming out -- we're on pace to maintain a majority in the House of Representatives." -- Nancy Pelosi, just hours before getting ****ing PWNED.

"Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose." -- Steve Jobs

• 10Jun 13

  Someone Saved Gaming Tonight

  Seriously, no one was more disappointed in Sony than I was when they announced the price of the PS3 in 2006. Yet, here we are, seven years later, and tonight they saved our hobby. 

  Time heals all wounds and all that, but seriously, each and every one of you reading this knows the place Microsoft wants to take this hobby is bad, potentially calamitous. Whatever your silly allegiances may be, be thankful someone stepped up and did the right thing tonight. I know I am.

  • Posted Jun 10, 2013 9:27 pm GMT
  • Tag
  • Print
  • Email
  • Facebook
  • Digg
• 16Apr 13

  Tough Love

  I've always been an outspoken advocate for this hobby. God help the person who blamed society's ills on gaming within my earshot. The person who blames games for everything and sees them as a corruptible influence on kids found no friend or safe quarters with me. I defended the hobby because I knew I was right. I know that in my gut. In my heart. But I also defended it because I loved it. I loved it for all the reasons anyone loves anything. I loved it for all the times it transported me from my boring, mundane (sometimes painful) world to another that I could've only dreamed of taking part in. I loved it because as I grew, it grew with me -- like any great love does. From days as a wide-eyed kid with my Atari, to adoloscence with my Nintendo consoles, to Adulthood  and Sony, the industry aged with me and yet still somehow remained relevant. Over the last few years, however, a dark spot has formed on my love for the hobby, and I fear it will turn malignant if it isn't cut out. 

  It's not the games themselves -- I still love sitting down with a game just as much as I did back when I first stuck Defender in my 2600. And I think by and large game developers are just as creative and amazing as they've ever been. I don't think I could ever stop loving this hobby, as I have loved it longer than any other thing in my life. I hear musicians talk about how music made them feel the first time they heard their favorite band, and that's how gaming makes me feel. I hear people talk about the sense of accomplishment and satisfaction they get from climbing a difficult mountain or getting an A in Calculus, and that's how I feel about gaming. Of the problems I am about to speak, love and admiration for the hobby aren't among them. 

  However, you can still love something and not like what it's doing. That sums up very much how I feel about where things are going. I see developers shutting doors even after making a game that sells a million copies. Back in the day, they would have been heroes of industry. I hear publishers mentioniong that a game has failed to meet expectations after it sells nearly three and a half million copies in a month, and I wonder who these people are and where they got their expectations from. I see publishers abusing the loyalty of gamers by asking them to buy unreleased, unaccounted for content for nearly half the cost of the game itself, even before it has been released. I have watched the two main players in the industry make proclamations of "10 Year Cycles" all the while refusing to lower the price of overpriced, ancient hardware that is only months away from being replaced. And I have also watched the industry attempt to explain away the sales numbers that have fallen each month for hardware and software. Whether due to bluster or plain self-delusion, they believe that they don't have a problem.

  But they do. They really do. 

  New rumors of consoles requiring that there be a constant internet connection have surfaced and not been squashed. The insistence on pairing the precision control of a controller with an imprecise motion control mechanism looks set to continue. A recent interview with DICE revealed that one of the companies (Microsoft I would presume) has been trying to bribe them to include Kinect controls in their games. What better illustration of a problem is there than a company trying (and feeling compelled) to bribe game developers to include support for a device that just doesn't work? Sales numbers are going down because the companies have kept the prices so high that the $129 market (which is quite large, by the way) has never turned up to support this generation. Further, people like myself have found their love for the hobby tested by all the microtransactions and season pass asshattery. Can anyone make a compelling case for why you should buy a game on launch day anymore when you can wait a couple of months and pay one third the price and get a bunch of additional content? I tried, and I couldn't. If you can, enlighten me. I'd love to hear it.

  Which brings me to the crux of this post: the industry has done the impossible. It has found the place where my disdain for how it is being run has exceeded my love of it, and the last thing I can do -- the only thing I can do to show it how much I love it is to stop supporting its bad habits. My love is about to grow tough. Where it was once unconditional, it will now be very conditional. The relationship is about to become very lopsided in my favor for a change, and brother, that's going to feel pretty good. I have realized that I am strong and that this hobby needs me more than I need it. I purchased over two hundred retail titles this generation, and roughly half that number of downloadable games. Believe you me, I hold the cookies in this relationship, and if I don't start seeing more respect, that money is going to go elsewhere. 

  So from now on, I will abide by this simple set of rules:

  I will no longer buy games at launch unless the publisher publicly and openly states that there will be no plans for Day One DLC and/or Season Passes. If a game includes those items, I will wait until it is either bargain bin priced ($15 or less sounds about right) where I can buy the extra content for less than the amount they would have gotten from me initially, or until a "Game of the Year" version gets released at a discounted price and with all the additional content. 

  I will no longer support any system that emphasizes motion controls. I believe the Wii was a cancer on this hobby largely because it flagrantly disregarded the fact that controls are the single most important aspect to a game. I believe Microsoft has, sadly, gone in the same direction. There is a lot of money in pocket and I want to spend it -- all you have to do is give me what I want. The first and best way to be guaranteed not to get it? By shoving a control mechanism on me that doesn't work.

  I will not support any company that demands I connect to the internet to use their device. I am the master of my time. I will be goddamned if anyone is going to tell me how to use it, especially a device that I've paid hundreds of dollars for. 

  I will not support any company that implements measures to block used games or intends to tie software to one console. I think it's safe to see why this is such a bad idea after a generation where the North American industry leader had a failure rate of double digits. But it's not just that -- it again goes back to trying to tell me how I can use a device I bought legally. If I want to loan a game to a friend or family member (or conversely, borrow one of theirs), then I should be free to do that. Other industries do just fine with used markets existing, and in many ways, view that as a means of gaining a lifetime customer. Gaming can too. 

  I will buy the machine that least resembles a media center and most resembles a game console. This should be self-explanatory, but I don't need Netflix on my console. I have a myriad of other devices for that. And think about that for a minute -- why would a game console manufacturer include all kinds of options that encourage the player to not buy and play games? I want a game console, because that will be the developer's console. 

  In closing, I'm not doing this to be a prick. I'm not doing it to make a point. I'm doing it out of love. I feel I owe it to this hobby to not take part in a lot of the dark habits it has taken up. If my money goes towards the good side of gaming (and perhaps other like-minded people too), then perhaps it's not too late to save it. And if it is, at least I can say that I tried. I am afraid of where things are headed. The dark signs are everywhere. Something has to change. We have to go back to the basics of what worked, and let history be our guide. 

  • Posted Apr 16, 2013 8:13 pm GMT
  • Tag
  • Print
  • Email
  • Facebook
  • Digg
• 3Nov 12

  Mother of Slain SEAL: I Believe That Obama Murdered My Son

  http://www.utsandiego.com/news/2012/nov/02/tp-families-differ-on-us-response/

  Hyperbolic? Yes.

  Is Obama a lying scumbag who hasn't been forthcoming about what happened? Yes.

  • Posted Nov 3, 2012 5:01 pm GMT
  • Tag
  • Print
  • Email
  • Facebook
  • Digg

See Previous Blog Posts »