The USS Quad Damage

Apparently Warner Bros is up in arm about an Indian film with a character called Hari Putter and have taken court action against the producers of the film.

Hari Putter however has no magical powers and there is no magic alternate world in the movie.

Meanwhile there is a 1986 film called Troll which has a boy character called Harry Potter whom actually discovers he has magical powers and enters an alternate magical world to fight monsters.

Perhaps Warner Bros would like to sue the producers of that film for coming up with the character over a decade before that anoying female british writer plagiarized it.

If you look at the world’s flags, there are some pretty awesome ones out there. Due to the heavy contrast and bold colours, flags can be the most striking depiction of a country.

Australia’s nation colours, everyone in Australia agrees, are shithouse. Green and gold were never really meant to be put together, and yet we’ve got to sneak them into our olympic uniforms. See if you can spot them in this year’s olympics. owever, I really like them. We’ve built such a sporting name of ourselves with those colours, they mean something now, and they didn’t before. They feel like our culture, our heritage, like our gaudy high school uniforms. The more I look at those colours the more they look like home.

However, when confronted with the flags of all the nations, Australia’s flag… didn’t really seem like it represented our nation like the others. Look at Nepal’s flag. This flag was the one which pretty much made me feel a little bit bad about ours. Not only is it the only non-rectangular flag in the world, you could actually begin to see Nepal behind this flag. It’s got that punch which makes people think twice.

When reading the Wikipedia entry for the Flag of Australia I realised I wasn’t the only one who thought that our flag looked a little un-representative. The whole British emblem on the top left alongside the 800 other countries with almost the exact same flag makes it feel like “well, Britain’s the important part”.

Take a look for a moment at the Australian Aboriginal Flag, but try and forget all the Aboriginal context that’s associated with it. Imagine the person you respect most has come up with this flag idea and it looks like that flag. OKOK, not quite like that flag, with the Red and Yellow bits matching the colour scheme of the Vietnam flag. Well.. maybe brighter yellow, but you get the idea. It’s dark and the Sun’s just coming up, and the earth is red. Is that not more like home, in your heart?

The PETA or the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals usually use either famour celebrities or naked women to attract attention to what ever rediculous message they are trying to peddle to the public.

Now however they have found a new tactic. Claim to want to do something so stupidly outrageous it gets news coverage.

Such as wanting to advertise on the USA/Mexico border wall warning mexicans against the perils of eating meat.

Or saying they want to buy a Sea World, release all the animals and replace them with virtual reality exibits.

Perhaps they could buy old naval sub marines to sink fishing or whaling ships on the high seas.

Or buy the Statue of Liberty and convert it into a giant I’d rather go naked than wear fur advertisement.

Why stop there. Why not claim they want to buy the moon, build a moon base and send the worlds animals there so that they may be safe from humans.

I mean it’s not like they are actually going to do it and the more rediculous the better the media story. Thus some journo will report on it because it is apparently news worthy.

We were playing Cod4 yesterday, and there was a player on the other team named "Elmo". This wasn’t strange in itself. Lots of people have unexpected avatars in a game. Elmo was very good, consistently being on the top of the team’s leaderboard. The only surprise there is that he wasn’t clearly part of some clan (Clan {SeS} perhaps?). At the end of the game he said something not immediately shocking, but it was something which grew to bother me:

Elmo: The only person who did well was Elmo.

Initially, that sounds like hubris. Initially, I thought he was joking—pretending to be someone else praising Elmo’s skill. It took a few seconds to realise that he was speaking about himself in the third person. Still hubris, but now as some sort of monarch. It took a little while to register who the avatar was in real life.

Elmo is a character from Sesame Street who talks about himself in the third person. Elmo, the player, was in effect pretending to be Elmo from sesame street. It was like some sort of twisted role playing. He clearly wasn’t a serious role player, because the very idea of Elmo (effectively a cartoon character) in a serious, war setting, is preposterous. In addition, he ripped off a character from a TV show rather than creating his own. However, he clearly saw more to it than just a name, and felt the need to adopt the persona of Elmo. In effect, he was pretending to be Elmo the player, rather than Elmo the character in the game.

So, my question is, why aren’t there any female models in COD4?

What ever happened to the almost nightly reporting of record petrol and oil prices?

Earlier today I read this article called Pregnant? Forget about a new job and saw that you could leave a comment.

So I did.

I asked if it was safe to assume that the person in the story, Simone Giblin, was applying for full time jobs. Given that she made a point of saying that if she was hired by someone she would be very grateful and would want to return to work part time after she’s had her baby.

Nice of her huh?

Except ofcourse makes the whole story not about some pregnant person being turned down from jobs because she’s pregnant but instead a story about someone wanting part time work and being turned down from full time positions.

Anyway I reread the article and noticed that there is now no option to comment on the story.

A little while ago, "Penny Arcade Adventures: On the Rain-slick Precipice of Darkness – Episode 1" (hereafter RSPD) was released. Considering the game comes from those who write a webcomic about games, not to mention, folks who are regularly critical of… regular games… the game was hotly anticipated, and many were keen to have their own say about it.

I played RSPD shortly after it came out, and wrote down some impressions. Here they are, now that everyone already knows what the game is like:

The very first thing that hits you about the game is that Tycho and Gabe were somehow involved in it’s creation (I am the best reviewer evar). You really notice everything from the game mechanics, art style, and writing are in a style that they display on their webcomic and in their "news". Every object you interact with is individually narrated. Every trash-can, each pointless door, every retarded cat has paragraphs written about how it’s not really important, and how that it doesn’t impact your life. Unfortunately, these trashcans occasionally contain items which you find useful, so you have to interact with them all. Seriously, after like the fifth time, it’s no longer funny. After the twentieth, it’s infuriating hearing about the life story of a trashcan. I understand that they were trying to be ironic, but it started to remind me less of Tycho and more of Jane Austen.

There were far too many garbage cans and crates. Garbage cans and crates are well known "cut-and-paste" level elements, so I can see that they’re being ironic here as well, but it stil makes the game seem dull and repetetive, even though each of them look slightly different, and have slightly different narration. The whole thing seems as though a whole cavalcade of art  and text vomited onto the screen.

The game itself is practically final fantasy, with a little bit of quick-time events. It’s not a bad game, but it tries too hard to not try too hard…